This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Military issues

  • Then who was it?

    Fox News is reporting that the president has been avoiding questions on the Benghazi raid and recent reports that the White House denied fire support for troops in contact at the consulate which resulted in the deaths of four Americans;

    The president said neither yes or no Friday when asked pointedly whether the Americans under attack in Benghazi, Libya, were denied requests for help during the attack.

    Fox News has learned from sources on the ground during the Sept. 11 attacks that the CIA chain of command twice told agency operatives to “stand down.”

    “The election has nothing to do with the four brave Americans getting killed and us wanting to find out exactly what happened,” the president said first in a TV interview with an NBC affiliate in Colorado.

    When asked again, Obama said, “The minute I found out what was going on, I gave three very clear directives — Number 1, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to,” the president said in a TV interviews with an NBC affiliate in Colorado.

    But in the vacuum of non-answers from the President, the White House’s National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor recently told the folks at Yahoo News that “Neither the president nor anyone in the White House denied any requests for assistance in Benghazi” which still doesn’t answer the question. Since the Defense Department and the CIA have both told the media that neither of them denied fire support for the embattled Americans in the consulate, then who was it? It only leaves the State Department without a denial.

    Our new buddy, William Kristol at the Weekly Standard claims that only the White House could have made the decision to intercede, so someone isn’t being forthcoming with the American people who are clamoring for answers. COB6, a long-experienced special warfare officer, himself, agrees;

    Only two places could have called off the attack at that point; the WH situation command (based on POTUS direction) or AFRICOM commander based on information directly from the target area.

    If the AC130 never left Sigonella (as Penetta says) that means that the Predator that was filming the whole thing was armed.

    If that SEAL was actively “painting” a target; something was on station to engage! And the decision to stand down goes directly to POTUS!

    From the Fox News link;

    Obama also said in the TV interview, as he said previously said, the administration is going to “investigate what happened to make sure it never happens again” and find out who was involved in the attack so they can be brought to justice.

    Yeah, at this point, I think the only way we’re going to make sure that it doesn’t happen again is to remove everyone who was involved in the decision-making process in this instance come election day. Since the president is so adamant about NOT making this an election issue, it only makes me want to make it MORE of an election day issue. That might be the only way to get any straight answers out of this White House.

    There’s a rumor flying around the internet today that General Carter F. Ham, the Africom commander is being fired because he tried to send reinforcements to Benghazi to relieve the defenders of the consulate. While it’s true that his successor has been named (General Rodriguez was announced as replacement on Oct. 18), I’m not sure why Ham is leaving the post, so it appears to be just speculation at this point. Probably another issue that won’t be resolved until we change teams in the White House.

  • Absentee ballots lost in plane crash?

    Yeah, that’s an excuse that I’d use if I was worried about the absentee ballots going against me in an upcoming election. Stars & Stripes link;

    A top official in the Federal Voting Assistance Program this week notified election officials across the nation that a transport plane crashed at Shindad Air Base on Oct. 19.

    The crash resulted in the destruction of 4,700 pounds of mail inbound to troops serving in the area.

    Federal officials in their email to state election offices said they did not know if any ballots were destroyed. They also said the lost mail was limited to one zip code.

    I can find little about any crash at Shindad Air Base but it looks like there were no casualties, which seems odd. I’m just saying in light of the cover up at Benghazi, this one is small potatoes.

    If anyone out there has more information on the crash (apparently, almost all of the articles in Google are only related to the ballots), I’d welcome it, if just to mollify the voices in my head.

  • Time to end the ban on women in combat?

    In the Daily Beast, Megan H. MacKenzie writes that integrating women into combat is the same thing as the Army’s desegregation in 1948, when they, in my opinion, corrected a wrong and allowed Black soldiers into white units. Somehow, Mackenzie thinks this is just a natural extension of social justice. She cites the instances that women have been awarded Silver Star Medals as some sort of justification for this.

    She runs through a litany of the weakest arguments against allowing women in combat, like destroying unit cohesion, and that women distract men. then something about “feminizing” combat units. I’ve never put much stock in those arguments – I’m pretty sure that soldiers under fire can keep it in their pants, and I don’t believe the canard about unnecessarily putting their lives at risk to rescue a woman who might be injured more than they would for another man.

    And unless she means “feminizing” combat units to mean a lowering of standards, I’m not worried that guys will start wearing cologne and products under their K-pots.

    But what she fails to address is that women are normally weaker than men…that’s not me talking – it’s science. But that doesn’t stop her from making social judgements in regards to men.

    In her analysis of gender integration in the military, Erin Solaro, a researcher and journalist who was embedded with combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, pointed out that male bonding often depended on the exclusion or denigration of women and concluded that “cohesion is not the same as combat effectiveness, and indeed can undercut it.

    “Male bonding” has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. MacKenzie thinks this is a social issue and not a national security issue. But somehow, MacKenzie acts like we’re trying to exclude women from our little club of infantrymen.

    She goes on and on about desegregation, as if it is an important part her proof. It’s not.

    Just as when African Americans were fully integrated into the military and DADT was repealed, lifting the combat ban on women would not threaten national security or the cohesiveness of military units; rather, it would bring formal policies in line with current practices and allow the armed forces to overcome their misogynistic past. In a modern military, women should have the right to fight.

    “Current policies” in the non-military world are out of step with the realities of combat. It really is about carrying a wounded 200-pound M60 gunner out of the line of fire. It’s not about calibrating the military to social norms.

    And all of this idiot blather about having to integrate women into the combat units fails to address the one point that is most important – how will the integration of women into combat make the military better defenders of our nation? If they can’t answer that simple question, why are we even having this discussion?

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

  • Pregnancy in the military

    Two articles in the Stars & Stripes today about women who are/were preggers. The first is about a woman who gave birth while she was deployed to Afghanistan. Apparently, she was given a pregnancy test thirty days before er deployment that came up negative. And she didn’t know she was pregnant until she went into labor;

    Both mother and child, a boy, were immediately redeployed to Germany and are healthy, according to USAREUR spokesman Joe Garvey, who declined to name the soldier. The mother is assigned to the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, a helicopter unit based near Ansbach, that deployed units across Afghanistan this spring.

    The second article is about a woman, before she was commissioned, discovered she was pregnant, but chose to hide it from her PMS. But now the Air Force has decided to boot her, because they don’t allow single parents on duty in their first term. From CNN;

    Thirteen weeks into her pregnancy, she was sworn in by her father as a second lieutenant and started making plans to go to Virginia to begin her military service. Nearly six months into her pregnancy, she said, she told her new commanders that she was going to have a child, and they told her they didn’t think it would be a problem.

    But they were wrong. Citing a contract she signed in 2007 when she enrolled in ROTC at age 18, the Air Force said she committed a fraud by not reporting a change in her medical condition, as indicated in the contract.

    The Air Force ejected her, noting in its ruling, “It is not the responsibility of the staff to constantly remind you of the terms of your contract.”

    It further stated that her file contained eight forms in which she was briefed on the medical change reporting requirement. Edmonds said no one ever brought the issue up during her subsequent counseling sessions while she was enrolled at Marquette.

    I remember when I used to be a TAC NCO at Fort Bragg’s ROTC Advance Camp, they’d test women before their time at camp began and inevitably, one would pop positive on the test. And that would end their career in the military before it began. I also had females who worked for me at an HHC in Fort Drum who were single parents before they enlisted, but they gave custody to their parents for their first enlistment to qualify for service.

    Of course, CNN is taking the side of social justice in their article, but the military is not the civilian world, as evidenced by the mother who gave birth in a war zone. How much did that baby cost the taxpayers, what with a flight to Germany? And someone needs to do that mother’s job now that she gone.

  • The camel’s nose

    Since I get in trouble every time I write about this, I’ll do it again. It seems that there’s a new executive director of OutServe-SLDN, the lead lobbying group for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and he/she says the battle isn’t over yet. From Stars & Stripes;

    “There is a tremendous amount of inequality still,” said [Allyson] Robinson, a 1994 West Point graduate and longtime rights advocate. “We have (the Defense of Marriage Act). We have families of military gays and lesbians not able to access basic support and benefits. The reason we’re still fighting on these issues, even after repeal, is because we have not yet achieved our mission.”

    […]

    Robinson, who commanded Patriot missile units in Germany and Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, served five years in the Army and lived for 30 years as a man before transitioning to a transgender woman. She also worked as a Christian minister, and admits that her personal life has confused and alienated some colleagues.

    While gay and lesbian troops can now serve openly in the military without fear of dismissal, transgender individuals — troops with “gender identity disorder,” under Defense Department regulations — are still banned.

    So, we were told before the repeal that Don’t Ask, Don’t tell was standing in the way of gays serving their country, because that was all they wanted to do, but they couldn’t honestly because they had to hide their gayness. OK, so now that particular barrier to service has been removed,, the bar for the rest of us has been moved. It’s not about selfless service at all but, it’s about benefits. So instead of being honest in the first place, the Gay movement is just changing the definition of selfless service to mean selfish service. Not, what can I do for my country, but rather what can the government give me.

    Like most Americans, I wasn’t opposed to gays serving openly in the military, but I suspected that there was a wider agenda at work here. It’s not about service at all but rather about encoding acceptance of a deviant lifestyle in our system of laws. But, it’s like the Iraq Veterans Against the War turning suddenly on the war in Afghanistan after the war in Iraq was ended – no the gay organizations have to shift their fire to another goal so they can continue to survive even though their initial goal has been reached.

    Maybe accepting gays in the military hasn’t disrupted the good order and discipline like many expected, but who can deny with a straight face that accepting trans-gendered people into the military wouldn’t have an adverse effect? The myriad adjustments to the physical presence of transgendered people would be just the tip of the iceberg. And who wants to sit through the resulting power point presentation?

  • Stingers in Syria

    Stars & Stripes is reporting that the Russians claim that Syrian rebels have an unknown number of Stinger missiles.

    Gen. Nikolai Makarov, the chief of the military’s General Staff, didn’t say how many such missiles the rebels had and who supplied them. Makarov said Wednesday in remarks carried by Russian news agencies that some of the weapons could have been delivered by commercial airlines, but he didn’t elaborate.

    However, according to Reuters, the Pentagon is denying that the missiles were supplied by the US;

    U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday he had no knowledge of the United States supplying Stinger missiles to Syrian rebel forces, after Moscow said the rebels had acquired the U.S.-made surface-to-air missiles.

    […]

    A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the United States was unable to confirm that the rebels had acquired U.S. Stingers.

    I’m guessing that most likely culprit is our NATO ally, Turkey, which has been known to be supplying the Syrians rebels with arms. So, I’m sure some rocket scientist troll will claim that the Stingers are left over from when we armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, but that’s not possible. Any missiles we gave them and that we weren’t able to buy back after the Soviets left have degraded beyond any serviceable use by now.

    Of course, there are more than 29 nations that field Stingers, so who knows, but since the Russians are pretty mad at the Turks for downing their illegal weapons resupply to the Syrian government a week or so ago, I’m guessing that they’re blowing the whistle on Turkey to even the score.

  • “What Did the President Know, and When Did He Know It?”

    Regarding the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, thanks to Reuters and CBS we now know.

    The President knew – or should have known – that it wasn’t mob violence inspired by a film roughly 2 hours and 32 minutes after the attack had begun.  That’s when the Executive Office of the President was notified that an Islamic fundamentalist group had claimed responsibility.

    And he also knew – or should have known – about 30 minutes after the beginning of the attack that US personnel were under fire and might need help.  It was another 6 1/2 hours before the two US personnel killed defending the “safe house” in Benghazi were killed.

    Officials in the Executive Office of the President were advised at 4:05PM  EDT on 11 September 2012 that the US mission in Benghazi was under attack.  That was 20-30 minutes after the attack had begun.  And the EOP was advised 2 hours and 2 minutes later – at 6:07PM – that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility.

    One of the addresses at the EOP to which these alerts were sent was reportedly the one for the White House Situation Room.

    By the next morning, per Reuters there were also indications that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was involved as well.  And the next morning, the CIA station chief in Libya  reported that the attacks appeared to have been deliberate and carried out by Islamic militants vice a spontaneous mob action.

    CBS News had made copies of redacted e-mails documenting the initial reports referenced above.  They can be viewed here.

    “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”  Regarding the Benghazi attack, he knew – or should have known – everything of significance by the next morning.  Yet for over a week his Administration flat-out lied to the American public about what had happened and why.

    My leg’s wet.  And it isn’t raining today.

  • Should veterans endorse candidates Part II

    Chief Tango sends us a link to the Military Times which has become nothing more than a mouthpiece of the Democrat Party in the closing weeks of the election. Anyway they report that the Romney campaign announced a list of flag officers who have said that they support Romney. VTWoody sent us the link to the list, which he says seems a bit like overkill. And it does…I didn’t bother to count them.

    But the Military Times goes out to find someone who will criticize the officers for their support, they turn to the previously mentioned Center for New American Security;

    The Center for New American Security conducted a survey and found that Romney’s level of support remained unchanged when respondents were told that “most members of the military and veterans” support him.

    According to the study, the opposite was true for Obama, whose support ticked up significantly when a different group of respondents were told that “most members of the military and veterans” support Obama.

    The study’s authors say this is probably because many voters already associate the military with Republicans.

    “Since voters might already expect veterans to support the GOP candidate, Republicans may not benefit much by the additional endorsement,” the study concluded.

    Make up your mind, is it that our credibility is eroding, or because we’re doing what everyone expects? Dinguses.

    And then a parting shot, after quoting Dempsey once again;

    Some experts worry that senior officer endorsements threaten to politicize the military.

    “There has been a lot of talk in the national security community about [how] this harms the reputation of the military as the neutral servant of the state,” said Richard Kohn, who teaches military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    “It also sends a very partisan message to the active-duty force that it is OK to be partisan.”

    It is OK to be partisan while you’re on active duty, douche-nozzle. These peckerwoods, including Dempsey have scared the active duty force away from voting with their incessant blather about being non-partisan. Gee, I wonder why. Where were they when Jon Soltz, Wesley Clark and Paul Rieckhoff were endorsing candidates?

    And the Military Times machine wasn’t critical at all when they wrote this article when a purported former Army Ranger who supports Obama this year spoke at the Democrat convention asking for active duty support for Obama.