{"id":57851,"date":"2015-01-24T14:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-01-24T19:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=57851"},"modified":"2015-01-26T17:26:04","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T22:26:04","slug":"scott-beauchamps-abolish-service-academies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=57851","title":{"rendered":"Scott Beauchamp; abolish service academies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you remember Scott Beauchamps? I do. He was a mealy-mouthed little private who made up stories about his fellow soldiers<\/a> back seven or eight years ago in the early days of this blog. The stories he created went across the country’s media. Mostly because they were total bullshit. <\/p>\n

Not only were the stories bullshit, they were demeaning to the troops. Stories about them clowning around with pieces of human skulls on their heads, luring dogs in close to their vehicles so they could crush the beasts. Picking on a disfigured female contractor. It turns out that he’d written these stories before he even left Kuwait for Iraq. The New Republic pulled the stories down.<\/p>\n

Now, for some stupid reason, the Washington Post<\/a> thinks he’s rehabilitated enough to publish his opinion piece on whether or not the Pentagon should abolish the service academies. Whether he is for or against that process, I’d still be writing this. Not only is he a proven liar, he was a private soldier who doesn’t even understand the word “leader”, let alone the commissioning process.<\/p>\n

No evidence shows that officers who attended civilian colleges, or any one of the U.S. Senior Military Colleges such as the Citadel, are lesser leaders than their service-academy colleagues. Tom Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning defense journalist, put it succinctly: \u201cAfter covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I\u2019ve concluded that graduates of the service academies don\u2019t stand out compared to other officers.\u201d After all, perhaps the most preeminent Army leader in recent times, Colin Powell, is a product of the ROTC, not West Point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, good a private who quotes another fellow who has never served on matters that will never affect either of them.<\/p>\n

As an enlisted Army infantryman, I served under platoon leaders who attended both West Point and ROTC. All were competent and professional. But the best graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara. What made him singular was his bravery and his resourcefulness. He was willing, in small ways, to deviate from standard operating procedure when the situation called for it. He also connected to the enlisted guys in an extraordinary way. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well the worst company commander I ever had was a graduate of the University of California, Scott. He was so bad that we (the platoon leaders and platoon sergeants) had a plan for taking the company away from him if he started getting people killed in combat. Luckily, that never came to pass because COB6, one of the platoon leaders, refused an order to drive his platoon into the friendly tank fire that had just knocked out an entire platoon of a sister company. So, obviously, Scott, m’boy, there are exceptions to every rule. Beauchamp goes on to quote Gore Vidal and Davy Crockett to support his argument against the service academies.<\/p>\n

All I need to consider is the past 240 years of military history and ask “Why are we in such a hurry to change things have proven so successful for so long?” And, oh, “Who the hell are you anyway?” Given his history in the world of journalism, he clearly doesn’t have the best interests of the soldiers or our national defense in his heart when he writes, so why is anyone giving him a podium? <\/p>\n

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you remember Scott Beauchamps? I do. He was a mealy-mouthed little private who made up … Scott Beauchamp; abolish service academies<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/57852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}