Category: US Military

If I am reading this right, after April 12th any transgender person that wants to serve in the US military will need to serve in their biological gender and stop taking hormones:

The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar transgender troops and military recruits from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender.
The memo outlining the new policy was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, and it comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle. It falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Donald Trump. But it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and can’t or won’t serve in their birth gender.
The order says the military services must implement the new policy in 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. And it allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis.

Under the new rules, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who has signed an enlistment contract by April 12 may continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

But after April 12, no one with gender dysphoria who is taking hormones or has transitioned to another gender will be allowed to enlist. And any currently serving troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria after April 12 will have to serve in their birth gender and will be barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link, but of course the usual people are complaining this is discriminatory. Of course this is discriminatory because the Army discriminates all the time such as not allowing handicapped or obese people to join. This is less a discrimination issue, but more of one where DOD leadership has decided that the medical issues involved with transgender personnel is not worth the trouble of accommodating.

It is looking like things are moving closer to women having to register for the draft:

A federal judge has ruled that a men-only draft is unconstitutional, but he stopped short of ordering the Selective Service System to register women for military service.
The Houston judge sided with a San Diego men’s advocacy group that challenged the government’s practice of having only men sign up for the draft, citing sex discrimination in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
“This case balances on the tension between the constitutionally enshrined power of Congress to raise armies and the constitutional mandate that no person be denied the equal protection of the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gray Miller of the Southern District of Texas.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Here we go again with the media advocating for the MAVNI program:

Over the course of 12 months, the U.S. Army discharged more than 500 immigrant enlistees who were recruited across the globe for their language or medical skills and promised a fast track to citizenship in exchange for their service, The Associated Press has found.

The decade-old Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest recruiting program was put on hold in 2016 amid concerns that immigrant recruits were not being screened sufficiently. The Army began booting out those enlistees last year without explanation .

The AP has interviewed more than a dozen recruits from countries such as Brazil, Pakistan, Iran, China and Mongolia who all said they were devastated by their unexpected discharges or canceled contracts.

Until now, it’s been unclear how many were discharged and for what reason because the Army has refused to discuss specific cases. But the Army’s own list, submitted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month, says 502 service members who enlisted under MAVNI were discharged between July 2017 and July 2018.

The list, which was unsealed this week after a request from the AP, offers “refuse to enlist” as the reason for expelling two-thirds of the recruits. That is the reason given for 35 percent of enlistee discharges Army-wide, according to a research study posted on a Defense Department website.

But at least one recruit whose paperwork said he was being discharged from the program for that reason said it was not accurate.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but according to documents most of these MAVNI recruits ended up refusing to enlist.  Plus I like how the Associated Press reporters did not mention in the article the espionage threat potential from these recruits.  Just last month a Chinese agent who was a MAVNI recruit was arrested:

The complaint charges Ji with one count of knowingly acting in the United States as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General.  He will make an initial court appearance today at 5:00 p.m. EDT (4:00 p.m. CDT) before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael T. Mason in Courtroom 2266 of the Everett M. Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago.

According to the complaint, Ji was born in China and arrived in the United States in 2013 on an F1 Visa, for the purpose of studying electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.  In 2016, Ji enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves as an E4 Specialist under the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program, which authorizes the U.S. Armed Forces to recruit certain legal aliens whose skills are considered vital to the national interest.  In his application to participate in the MAVNI program, Ji specifically denied having had contact with a foreign government within the past seven years, the complaint states.  In a subsequent interview with a U.S. Army officer, Ji again failed to disclose his relationship and contacts with the intelligence officer, the charge alleges.  [Department of Justice]

Via a reader tip comes news of another example of how Asian-Americans continue to grow in importance in American society:

The growth of the Asian-American community since the turn of the century has been reflected in all professional and social areas of life in the U.S., not least the armed forces.

In recent years, Americans of Asian background have been signing up for the military in growing numbers, and, in 2016, they were 28% more likely to be among the officer ranks than they were 12 years earlier.

The change was more pronounced in certain branches of the military than others. The number of Asian-American officers in the army, for example, grew by 41%. That compares with growth of just 4% for ethnic minorities overall and a 3.1% decline among African Americans.  [Nikkei Asian Review]

You can read more at the link.

This cost savings number is a drop in the bucket compared to rest of the Pentagon’s budget:

The United States’ annual August military drills with South Korea canceled last month by order of President Donald Trump as his administration negotiates a halt to North Korea’s nuclear program would have cost the Pentagon about $14 million, according to defense officials.

Pentagon officials were unable last month to provide a cost-savings estimate for canceling the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise. After Trump met with the North’s leader Kim Jong Un on June 12, the president announced he would halt all joint “war games” with South Korea so long as North Korea was negotiating in good faith.

On Wednesday, Army Col. Rob Manning, the Pentagon spokesman who provided the $14 million figure for the suspended military drill, did not have a breakdown explaining how defense officials arrived at that cost. Manning also did not have an estimate for cost savings for additional joint exercises in South Korea that could be canceled in the future.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

For those that haven’t heard, Defense Secretary James Mattis during the Change of Command ceremony renamed Pacific Command to “Indo-Pacific Command” in response to Chinese militarism in the region.  I am just wondering what do we call PACOM now?  iPAC?  It makes it sound like a tech company.

Anyway with Admiral Harris now moving on from PACOM he will hopefully soon get confirmed to take over the Ambassador position in South Korea.

I was never a fan of allowing foreigners into the military and now it seems this program has become more trouble than it is worth:

Their brains, specialized talents and home country made them sought-after assets for the U.S. military.

Now these ambitious, well-educated Army recruits are finding themselves sidelined and under suspicion, many stalled wherever they were when the rules changed in late 2016. For some, that means being stuck under the restrictive rules of basic training or Army job specialty training in essential lockdown with few privileges, little to do and, as foreigners pending permanent immigration status, uncertainty about their futures.

Since 2009, the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program has attracted 10,000 foreign-born recruits with language and medical skills to fill a recruitment and talent gap in the Army. In exchange, these mostly 30-somethings were offered the promise of professional advancement and a fast track to citizenship. But that stalled after the Department of Defense determined in September 2016 that MAVNIs posed “counterintelligence and security risks” (further detailed in a May 2017 memo) and instituted lengthy security screenings for every recruit in the program.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read much more at the link, but the way I look at it is if the military cannot recruit its own citizens to defend it than maybe the country is no longer worth defending.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out:

President Donald Trump, who repeatedly insisted during the 2016 campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall along the southern border, is privately pushing the U.S. military to fund construction of his signature project.

Trump has told advisers that he was spurned in a large spending bill last week when lawmakers appropriated only $1.6 billion for the border wall. He has suggested to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and congressional leaders that the Pentagon could fund the sprawling project, citing a “national security” risk.

After floating the notion to several advisers last week, Trump told House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that the military should pay for the wall, according to three people familiar with the meeting last Wednesday in the White House residence. Ryan offered little reaction to the idea, these people said, but senior Capitol Hill officials later said it was an unlikely prospect.

Trump’s pursuit of defense dollars to finance the U.S.-Mexico border wall underscores his determination to fulfill a campaign promise and build the barrier despite resistance in the Republican-led Congress. The administration’s last-minute negotiations with lawmakers to secure billions more for the wall failed, and Trump grudgingly signed the spending bill Friday after a short-lived veto threat.  [Chicago Tribune]

You can read more at the link.

Here is what the PACOM commander says Kim Jong-un will do if the US military pulls out of Korea:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would do a “victory dance” if the United States pulled its troops from South Korea, a top U.S. military commander said Thursday.

Adm. Harry Harris, chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, was offering his assessment of how Kim would respond in the event the U.S. succumbed to the North’s longstanding demand to remove its 28,000 troops from the South.  [Yonhap]

I think it depends on the context of the pull out.  If the US unilaterally pulls out of the US-ROK alliance due to a split with the South Korean government, Kim Jong-un would of course do a “victory dance”.

However, if the US pulls out after an intrusive international inspection program verifies the end of their nuclear program, reduction in forces along the DMZ, elimination of ICBMs, and other measures then he likely would not.  We will see what the upcoming talks lead.  It should be another interesting year for those of us who follow events on the Korean peninsula.

As is often the case, in an effort to save money increased costs were pushed on to servicemembers and their families:

The Defense Commissary Agency has saved tens of millions of dollars shipping produce to the Pacific since 2015. However, a recent inspector general report says the agency failed to provide effective oversight of its new contracts, leaving customers paying significantly more for fresh fruits and vegetables.

In the past, DeCA subsidized contractors’ produce shipments to commissaries in Japan and South Korea, costing the agency about $114.6 million from 2013 to 2015, the IG report said. When contracts were renegotiated in 2015, DeCA stopped paying for shipping, instead aiming to purchase more locally grown produce and having suppliers foot those costs.

Since then, DeCA has saved about $38 million per year.

After the deal was made, prices for fresh produce climbed at Pacific commissaries, according to the report. Between November 2015 and April 2017, customers in mainland Japan paid 20.9 percent more for produce. Over the same period, Okinawa customers saw an increase of 23.6 percent while those in South Korea paid 31.5 percent more.

The report’s findings were based on a review of prices for 239 unique fresh produce items in mainland Japan, 237 on Okinawa and 231 in South Korea.

The 2015 contract’s aim was to keep the quality and cost of produce on base comparable to what they were before the contract, but the IG report says those expectations were not met. It blamed DeCA for the price hike, saying the agency’s “market research did not adequately evaluate the feasibility of obtaining fresh produce items from in-country for DeCA commissaries in the Pacific theater.”  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.