Category: US Military

This author makes a good point that the Pentagon has a creditability problem in regards to complaining about unscrupulous lenders praying on military servicemembers:

Would an E-6 careerist nearing retirement accept a $30,000 car loan if forced to pay back a total of $390,000 in principal and interest?
Would an E-7 accept a $30,000 loan to make a down payment on a home or to wipe out credit card debt if the lifetime cost of that decision were $386,000 in lost retired pay?
The answer to both questions, regrettably, is: You bet.
Hundreds of career servicemembers every month make a comparable choice while in their 15th year of service. That’s when, in return for an immediate cash bonus of $30,000, they make an irrevocable decision to opt out of “High-3” retirement and accept the less generous “Redux” plan.
The loan shark here is the federal government, the same Congress and Department of Defense that like to get tough with payday lenders outside of military bases who prey on young or naïve enlisted members. Meanwhile, they offer their own rotten deal, which every year gets a little worse, say economists at the defense think tank CNA. (Stars and Stripes)

You can read more at the link.

I guess joining the military is another one of those jobs that Americans supposedly won’t do:

A small number of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally will have an opportunity to join the military for the first time in decades under a new Defense Department policy unveiled Thursday.

The new rules will expand an existing program allowing recruiters to target foreign nationals with high-demand skills, mostly rare foreign language expertise or specialized health care training.

For the first time, the program — known as Military Accessions Vital to National Interest, or MAVNI — will be open to immigrants without a proper visa if they came to the U.S. with their parents before age 16. More specifically, they must be approved under a 2012 Obama administration policy known as Deferred Action for Child Arrivals, or DACA.

The new DoD policy may be the first phase of a broader governmentwide effort to ease pressure on immigrants and create new paths to citizenship. President Obama, frustrated with the failure of Congress to pass any substantial immigration reform, has vowed to aggressively use his presidential authority to change the way immigration policies are carried out. (Military Times)

You can read more at the link, but I am sure this is just a coincidence that this was announced shortly before an election.

Space: The Final Missile Defense Frontier? http://t.co/m4V9ndlcc4

— The Diplomat (@Diplomat_APAC) September 20, 2014

Odierno must get frustrated by members of Congress complaining to him about Army cuts when they are the ones responsible for it:

Fiscal 2016 is the breaking point,” Odierno said, warning it would bring “a significant degradation of readiness.”
Complicating matters is an unusual burden on Army headquarters units, Odierno said. Each one has been cut by about 25 percent, and yet he is sending them to Iraq, to Europe and to Africa to help with coordinating the Ebola response, as well as maintaining the normal rotations in Afghanistan and South Korea.
Enough is enough, he said, and the Army’s tasks aren’t going to get any easier. “I’m not seeing, in ‘16, peace breaking out all over the world.”
Defense advocates on Capitol Hill hope voices like Odierno’s, as well as the enduring crises in Europe and the Middle East, put sequestration back on Congress’ priority list. The world has shown that it’s too dangerous for Congress to permit sequestration to return, as it would under current law, hawks argue. (Politico)

You can read more at the link, but I agree with Odierno that the government needs to figure out a security strategy for the military then properly fund and resource the military to carry out.

That is what one former General thinks:

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Sept. 11, 2014) — As football season kicks off, the public is focusing on favorite teams and athletes and making predictions. That same focus needs to be on “our Soldier-athletes,” perhaps even more so, said Lt. Gen. Robert B. Brown, commander, Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Brown spoke at the Association of the United States Army’s Institute of Land Warfare Medical Forum, Wednesday.

Before kicking off his discussion on “The Soldier Athlete,” Brown walked around the audience of mostly Soldiers and former Soldiers, asking them to describe traits of good athletes. “Leadership,” “disciplined,” “talented,” “teamwork,” “commitment,” “hard work,” “determination,” “competitiveness,” “physically fit,” and “resilient” were some of the attributes given.

Then, Brown asked the same question about Soldiers. The similarities of their answers were striking.

Brown has some insights into soldiering and athletics. He was the number two basketball recruit from Michigan, playing for Coach Mike Krzyewski at the U.S. Military Academy. He was commissioned in 1981, and went infantry.

“We need to be more proactive in the way we treat Soldiers,” he said. In many ways, Soldiers have to deal with situations more difficult than athletes, particularly on the battlefield, but also at home station.

The battlefield of the future will be even more confused and chaotic than ever before, and a mature, well-trained Soldier who is adaptive and quick-thinking will be required.

Who could have imagined just a few months ago that a civilian airline would be shot out of the sky, the barbarism of ISIS and the situation in Ukraine?” he asked. The only predictable thing is that the future will be even more confused and chaotic, he said.

In Brown’s early career, he said the “fog of war was not having enough information. Now, the fog of war is too much information — in overwhelming amounts.” Soldiers will need to process that information much more rapidly than ever before and to do that will require a lot of realistic training. What is certain is that “the enemy will adapt” and they won’t play by the same rules and moral values. [Army.mil]

You can read more at the link.

I definitely agree with the information overload, but as far as training soldiers as elite athletes I would just be happy if the Army became committed to keeping soldiers healthy.

It looks like next year there is going to be more attempts to reduce servicemember benefits if another round of sequestration is not repealed in 2016:

An already tough fiscal environment prompting proposed benefit cuts would get far worse if Congress does not repeal another round of sequestration in 2016, a top U.S. Defense Department official warned military spouses and civilians at town meetings here.

“If not, everything is on the table,” said Jessica Wright, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The uncertainty means it will be difficult to predict funding for child care, family services, traumatic brain injury and other benefits, she said.

Wright is one of a number of DOD officials who have warned of impending cuts that they say will cut the size of the armed forces and take money from necessary equipment upgrades, placing readiness and national security at risk.

In fact, Wright said, the Pentagon’s proposed 2015 budget represents an attempt to reduce benefits to spend the savings on readiness. The budget includes a reduction in the housing allowance, a 1 percent military pay raise, massive cuts to commissary subsidies and potentially increased medical fees. “Quality of life is higher,” she said. “Quality of service is on the skids.”

A proposed change in commissary funding, which the Pentagon says would reduce the savings on groceries from 30 percent to 10 percent of the cost compared with groceries bought on the economy, has proved highly unpopular.

“Why did we want to do that?” she said. “None of us wants to send a servicemember into combat unprepared.’’ [Stars & Stripes]

You have to love how all the cuts are justified by the language of “readiness”.  What does bloated, over budget acquisition programs have to do with readiness?  Likely what is going on is that the Pentagon is using benefit cuts as leverage to get Congress to repeal the sequestration cuts.

It will be interesting to see who is going to get deployed to do this mission, but this shows the US government must be very concerned that the ebola outbreak could get much worse to deploy this many personnel to try and stop its spread:

Amid criticism that the U.S. has not done enough to block the spread of the Ebola virus across West Africa, President Barack Obama will announce a “significantly ramped up” campaign Tuesday that relies heavily on the U.S. military, senior administration officials said.

The Defense Department will work with local governments to plan and build 17 new Ebola treatment units, for a total of 1,700 new beds, while military medical staff will begin training a target of 500 health care providers per week in care and prevention of the lethal virus, an official said.

The scaled-up effort, along with current programs, will be run through a U.S. joint command center to be set up in Monrovia, Liberia, the country facing the most troubling transmission rate, officials said.

Pentagon officials expected the command center to eventually oversee about 3,000 military personnel on the ground handling logistics, engineering, distribution of supplies, and coordination with other government agencies and international organizations, one official said.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

Here we go again with the unemployment rate of young veterans in the United States:

Democrats and Republicans rarely agree on anything in the nation’s capital, but there’s a growing bipartisan sense on Capitol Hill that the private sector will have to do much more to help Congress ease chronically high unemployment among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In August, President Barack Obama called on the nation’s businesses to hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans by the end of 2013, a challenge that Microsoft answered with a pledge to train 10,000 of them.
Now, as part of his $447 billion jobs package, Obama wants Congress to approve a plan that would provide businesses a tax credit of $2,400 to $9,600 for each veteran they hire, depending on whether they’re disabled and how long they’ve been unemployed.
One million veterans already are unemployed and more than a million are expected to leave the military by 2016. Julius Clemente, a 33-year-old Iraq veteran from Kirkland, Wash., told a congressional panel Thursday that there will be “systematic chaos” if more of them can’t find jobs or get help going to college. [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but I find it amazing when a veteran says they need help going to college. The Army has so many programs in place most notably the very generous GI Bill that help veterans do just that.
I have said this before, employers have to hire people that meet the skill set that they need and veterans need to make themselves competitive with other applicants before getting out of the military. That is why I have always advocated for Soldiers to take college classes while serving. The Army has gone to great length to make college classes available to its Soldiers. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan you can see Soldiers attending classes. So if someone exits the service without at least an Associates Degree, that is their own fault. Additionally if they don’t use their GI Bill benefits after they get out to get a degree in something employable than that is there own fault as well. I have seen this to often as well that someone gets a degree in liberal arts or underwater basketweaving and they can’t understand why they can’t find a job.
The second issue I see with Soldiers exiting the service is that they often go back to their home towns even though that may not be the best place for them to find a job. Many of the skill sets learned by Soldiers are more in demand in areas around military bases. Military bases hire many contractors with the vast majority of the contractors being prior service military. Depending on one’s education level and time in service a government position working for the military may even be possible. Then you add in the fact that many private defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon also have offices located around military bases that also hire many prior service military members. Soldiers going back to their hometown after completing military service cuts off these job opportunities for them. At the same time while in the military servicemembers need to network with people that can help them land one of these jobs. Who you know can be just as important as what you know.
In my opinion veterans should not feel entitled to a high paying job after they leave the service, they need to make themselves competitive applicants which military service should be something to enhance their resume over other applicants and not be the only thing on it.

Well, does anyone want to start speculating what this battalion commander was relieved for?