Category: US Military

I would not be surprised if in the next few years garrison commanders don’t start implementing this on their installations with or without a state law in effect:

Beginning New Year’s Day, military installations throughout Hawaii will prohibit anyone under age 21 from buying or using tobacco.

The new rules by the Navy, Marines, Army and Air Force coincide with a similar measure passed by the Hawaii legislature in June that takes effect Friday.

Hawaii is the first state to institute an under-21 ban on tobacco sales and possession, which also includes so-called e-cigarettes, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. More than 100 U.S. municipalities have raised the minimum age for tobacco sales to 21, with California considering a state-wide ban.

Military installations don’t always follow state law on such matters. Even though Washington and Colorado have legalized recreational use of marijuana, servicemembers are not allowed to use the drug in those states.

The Navy’s ban does not apply to personnel or transactions while aboard U.S. naval vessels because they fall under federal laws. Tobacco is sold aboard some ships. The Navy banned smoking in submarines at the end of 2010, but talk last year of a fleet-wide ban met resistance from some members of Congress.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.

This really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that has been following this issue, it has been pretty clear this was going to happen for quite some time.  So now when is the physical fitness test going to be equal as well?:

Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Thursday opened all military jobs to women, a historic step that removed the final barriers to women in ground combat and special operations positions despite opposition from the Marine Corps that sought to keep all-male units on the frontlines.

“Everyone who is able and willing to serve their country, who can meet the standards should have the full and equal opportunity to do so,” Carter said during a news conference at the Pentagon. “The important factor in making my decision was to have access to every American who can add strength to the force. Now more than ever we cannot afford to have barriers limiting our access of talent.”

Carter gave the service chiefs 30 days to provide a detailed plan for integrating women into positions now closed. All jobs must be available for qualified women by April 1, he said.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

It is was only a matter of time before Powerpoint made its way into tactical vehicles and it appears some of the higher level command Strykers will be the first vehicles outfitted with a Powerpoint capability.  So how long before this spreads to other vehicles?

The Stryker, an eight-wheeled armored vehicle used almost exclusively by the U.S. Army, has had a tumultuous history. But now, according to an Army release, it might have found a new calling as a specially outfitted command vehicle that will give troops inside unprecedented communications capabilities.

Fielded in the early 2000s, the Stryker first saw combat in Iraq and had to be modified after its armor was deemed too thin for some of the lower-tech weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, employed by Iraqi insurgents. Strykers are light armored vehicles and sort-of in between for military transportation: Not quite a tank, and not quite a truck, they are often used to move troops quickly with sufficient defensive armament. Traditionally the Stryker is mounted with either a heavy machine gun, a cannon or sometimes even a 105mm howitzer.

The Army’s Mobile Tactical Communications Network to Enable Mission Command on the Move, which goes by the much shorter acronym MCOTM, is testing a Stryker that replaces its main armament with something much more sinister: PowerPoint.  [Washington Post]

You can read the rest at the link.

Here is the latest controversy on the religious freedom front:

A sign outside an Army training center at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, that featured a knight with crosses on his breastplate and shield was taken down Monday afternoon, hours after the head of a religious-freedom advocacy group called for the image’s removal.

The image represented the “Fighting Knights” of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 8th Special Troops Battalion. Members of the unit recently transformed an unused motor pool area into a warrior training center, 8th Theater Sustainment Command spokeswoman Sgt. 1st Class Mary Ferguson told Army Times. A news release detailing the offerings of the center went out Friday at Army.mil and other locations and included an image of the sign.

The knight with red crosses is “not an approved logo,” Ferguson said. She said she wasn’t sure how long the sign had been up or who approved the design, noting that the center had opened recently. A photo of the sign hosted by the U.S. Pacific Command website is dated Oct. 23.  [Army Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but if the cross was whited out is having a knight as a logo still approved or are knights now officially politically incorrect?

By the way Army Times if you wondered where the image came from just do a Google image search for the word knight and the knight on the board is one of the top search results from this webpage.

This seems a pretty bold and sweeping statement from someone who has never served in the military.  Until one of these critics advocates for equal physical fitness standards between male and female soldiers their criticism of bias against females has little creditability.  I don’t think there is a more fair organization for women and minorities than the US military:

Corporate America and the military are sexist and show racial bias, a leading businesswoman told cadets Friday at the Air Force Academy.

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of the book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” told a crowd of nearly 3,000 cadets that society tells women they are less competent and capable. She described the military as one of “the worst” organizations for bias during a 30-minute speech.

“Women and minorities face barriers white men don’t face,” she said.

Sandberg has become a leading figure of modern feminism with arguments that women should fill half of corporate boardroom seats and men should do half the stay-at-home child rearing. Detractors have said that Sandberg’s Lean In pitch shatters traditional gender roles driven by biology and that her perspective is one borne of privilege, as a wealthy technology entrepreneur.  [The Gazette]

You can read the rest at the link.

This report from the American Psychological Association I take with a bit of skepticism just like I do all the other so called surveys done on military sexual assault.  Just like prior surveys this one also uses the vague term “Unwanted Sexual Contact”.  I have had women grab my butt in the bar before so does that make me a victim of sexual assault that was unreported?  There is a big different between rape and someone grabbing your butt in the bar, but these surveys tend to equate the two which inflates the number.  This survey is no different:

A study has found that up to 15 times more men in the military are being raped by other man than is being reported by the Pentagon.

The report, released by the American Psychological Association on Tuesday, is based on the responses of 180 anonymous combat veterans.

It says the under-reporting is largely due to the stigma associated with sexual assaults and is the reason that the true extent of male-on-male sexual crimes is so vastly underestimated.

The Washington Times reported that most recent Pentagon sexual assault report, conducted by The Rand Corp last year, found that around 12,000 men said they had been sexually assaulted.

The definition of sexual assault means they had been raped, experienced unwanted sexual contact or someone had attempted to commit those crimes.

Of that number, around a third – 3,850 reported rape or ‘penetrative’ assaults.

But the APA said: ‘Rates of military sexual trauma among men who served in the military may be as much as 15 times higher than has been previously reported, largely because of barriers associated with stigma, beliefs in myths about male rape and feelings of helplessness.’   [The Daily Mail via reader tip]

You can read the rest at the link.

Here is a pretty cool story about a US Marine who was seriously injured in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan and before having her leg amputated decided to walk across the UK with Prince Harry cheering her on:

But among the small group of warriors drawing breath at the special reception laid on for them, none should feel more proud than Kirstie Ennis, an Afghan veteran like Harry, and the sole woman to take part in the 72-day expedition.

She is lucky to be alive. Surgeons have practically rebuilt her in the course of 38 separate operations. She has somehow covered the extraordinary distance on a leg so damaged and painful that her medical team insists it should be amputated – and it will be removed once today’s final agonising mission is complete.
It is just three years since the slender blonde was told she would never walk again. In fact, so exemplary is Kirstie’s determination that she and the Prince have forged a remarkable bond in the past few weeks, when Harry joined 24-year-old Kirstie and the other walkers on their journey.  [Daily Mail]

You can read the rest at the link, but I wish Kirstie all the best as she continues her recovery from her injuries

The Atlantic has a long article published about how the United States has become a Chickenhawk Nation.  The author believes the American public doesn’t mind going to war as long as it doesn’t involve them.  He believes this mentality is what is allowing the endless warfare we find ourselves currently in to continue:

Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”

Moulton told me, as did many others with Iraq-era military experience, that if more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq at all. Because he felt strongly enough about that failure of elite accountability, Moulton decided while in Iraq to get involved in politics after he left the military. “I actually remember the moment,” Moulton told me. “It was after a difficult day in Najaf in 2004. A young marine in my platoon said, ‘Sir, you should run for Congress someday. So this shit doesn’t happen again.’ ” In January, Moulton takes office as a freshman Democratic representative from Massachusetts’s Sixth District, north of Boston.

What Moulton described was desire for a kind of accountability. It is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. Hillary Clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, since that is what gave the barely known Barack Obama an opening to run against her in 2008. George W. Bush, who, like most ex-presidents, has grown more popular the longer he’s been out of office, would perhaps be playing a more visible role in public and political life if not for the overhang of Iraq. But those two are the exceptions. Most other public figures, from Dick Cheney and Colin Powell on down, have put Iraq behind them. In part this is because of the Obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But such willed amnesia would have been harder if more Americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. For our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. This is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists.

Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.

Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war.  [The Atlantic]

You can read the whole article at the link, but I think the author is correct that if the kids of the elite in this country had to face being drafted we probably would not be in as many conflicts as we are now.  With that said I do not agree with his viewpoint that the US military has been defeated by less foes.  The US military did not make the strategy to invade Iraq, politicians did.  When invading Iraq the military was not sourced for a long term occupation once again because of political considerations.  When General Shinseki spoke up about this he was strongly rebuked by the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  Also the US military did not make the decision to withdraw from Iraq which led to the current ISIS occupation, politicians did and now the US military is back trying to put a band-aid on a poor strategic decision.

The bottomline is that the US military is only as good as the strategy they are given by the political leadership to execute.

The Economist has an article published that discusses why the US military has had a hard time recruiting and how military generals have too much power:

Seasonal factors, including a strengthening labour market and negative media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have widened the gulf. So have the dismal standards of education and physical fitness that prevail in modern American society. At a time of post-war introspection, these factors raise two big questions. The first concerns America’s ability to hold to account a military sector its leaders feel bound to applaud, but no longer competent to criticise. Andrew Bacevich, a former army officer, academic and longstanding critic of what he terms the militarism of American society, derides that support as “superficial and fraudulent”. Sanctified by politicians and the public, he argues, the army’s top brass have been given too much power and too little scrutiny, with the recent disastrous campaigns, and similarly profligate appropriations, the almost inevitable result. The second question raised by the civil-military disconnect is similarly fundamental: it concerns America’s future ability to mobilise for war.  [The Economist]

You can read the rest at the link, but according to one military official the amount of obese potential recruits is the biggest recruiting challenge currently.  As far as the military brass having too much power, I would also disagree with this, they are executing the strategy given to them from the White House.  If strategy is flawed the military campaign will be flawed as well.  As far appropriations Congress is just as much to blame as the military brass who help keep flawed acquisitions programs going because of the jobs they provide in their district.

Here is the latest reason that US servicemembers and their DoD civilian counterparts are at threat of not receiving a paycheck next month:

Congress was poised Tuesday to send an annual defense policy bill to President Barack Obama, setting up a showdown that could leave the Department of Defense without a budget and hundreds of thousands of federal employees facing furloughs.

Obama will have until Halloween to decide whether to make good on his repeated threats to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which lays out military pay and benefits. This year, the bill also includes an historic reform of the 20-year pension system, hikes in Tricare fees, protections for the A-10 Thunderbolt II and a review of troops carrying personal guns on bases.

A veto could throw the whole defense budget into uncertainty, with Congress scrambling to come up with a new plan by Dec. 11 when the current temporary budget expires. The DOD said troops would not receive paychecks and about 400,000 civilians would be furloughed if defense spending is not resolved by then.

Republicans rallied Tuesday in an effort to paint Obama and his veto threat as an obstacle to defense priorities despite increasingly threats around the world.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but I would be surprised if some last minute deal isn’t worked out because it would seem to be political suicide for anyone that allows this happen.