Tag: US military

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.

How would you like to be the Company Commander for the unit this guy belonged to and got the phone call from authorities about what this guy did?  The most frustrating part of the article is that the shooter says his military training took over to explain what he did.  I’m not sure where shooting people driving by in a truck and holding a gun to a woman’s head was part of military training?  I hope he enjoys the corrective training he is going to receive in a federal penitentiary:

A special operations soldier accused of shooting a man in Tillicum on Thursday was trying to take the man’s truck and apparently failed at other carjackings after the shooting, according to charging papers.

Pierce County prosecutors said Monday they believe the man who was shot is in critical condition, in a medically induced coma, and they were not sure of his prognosis.

Spc. Jesse Suhanec, 22, of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, is charged with first- and second-degree assault, three counts of attempted first-degree robbery and one count of attempted first-degree burglary.

Suhanec is based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

He pleaded not guilty Monday, and Court Commissioner Meagan Foley set bail at $1 million. Court records did not list an attorney for Suhanec.

According to charging papers:

The 30-year-old victim was on his way to discuss a parenting plan with his ex-wife when she heard multiple gunshots near her house about 10:10 a.m.

The man was shot the 15100 block of Grant Avenue Southwest and drove to a nearby fast-food restaurant, where he sounded the horn of the truck.

Two soldiers found him with gunshot wounds to his head and shoulders. At the hospital, doctors took out one bullet and left others as they treated him.

Meanwhile, Suhanec, who had checked out a van from his military unit, left the vehicle behind and headed down the street from the shooting.

He put a gun to a woman’s head in her driveway and said he’d kill her if she didn’t give him her car keys. [News Tribune]

You can read the rest at the link, but it only gets worse.

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.

So basically when it was all said and done Lieutenant General Franklin who was forced to retire because of this was actually right:

An Air Force sexual assault case that spanned two investigations, a lieutenant general’s forced retirement and a finding of unlawful command influence ended after more than three years Wednesday with the acquittal of Airman 1st Class Brandon T. Wright.

A military jury made up of officers and enlisted personnel — six men and one woman — found Wright not guilty at Joint Base Andrews, Md., after three hours of deliberation.

The accuser’s former Special Victims’ Counsel said the verdict, although disappointing, was not a complete loss.

“I’m disappointed that the panel did not convict him; however, I am happy that the Air Force finally took the case seriously, as it should have from the start, and my former client received the day in court that she deserved,” Maribel Jarzabek said. “I think the fact that the jury deliberated for three hours and asked to see some of the evidence showed that this wasn’t the slam-dunk case that Gen. (Craig) Franklin and others predicted it would be.”

Wright was accused of raping a staff sergeant in her apartment near Aviano Air Base, Italy, after a night of drinking and socializing in 2012.

Wright’s defense, which focused its closing argument on the prosecution’s burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and what the defense lawyers characterized as inconsistencies in the woman’s statements over the past three-plus years, hailed the verdict.

Maj. Jacob Ramer and Cpt. Patrick Hughes said in a statement that “panel member(s) understood the importance of their role and gave their full attention to resolving the question before them.”

They also said that Wright’s unit had been “monumental in… helping him through the most difficult time of his young life.”

Wright did not testify.

After an Article 32 preliminary hearing in the case, then-Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, concurring with the hearing officer’s and legal adviser’s advice, dismissed the case in 2013.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but you have to like the spin the prosecution is coming up with.  What is the purpose then of an Article 32 if someone who accuses someone of a crime deserve to have their day in court like the prosecution claims?  Lt. Gen. Franklin has now been vindicated that this case did not have enough evidence to get a conviction.  Also if anything deliberating only three hours shows how weak of a case this was. Even more troubling about this case is that it was so weak despite having the entire Air Force legal community trying to get a conviction to include using unlawful command influence:

An Air Force judge has ruled that the service’s top legal officer committed unlawful command influence in a sexual assault case, partly for political motives. Nonetheless, the case will proceed to court-martial.

Lt. Col. Joshua Kastenberg, in a July 30 ruling in response to a defense motion to dismiss the case against Airman 1st Class Brandon T. Wright, found that Lt. Gen. Richard Harding, formerly the Air Force Judge Advocate General, had improperly influenced the case or had given the appearance of doing so.

One such instance, the judge ruled, was recommending that Wright’s case be transferred to another court-martial convening authority for a do-over after the first convening authority, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, dismissed the case in the summer of 2013. Franklin’s dismissal came after an Article 32 investigative hearing at Aviano Air Base, Italy.

Such transfers are almost unheard of. It happened in the Wright case, Kastenberg’s ruling says, in part because Harding was worried that “the failure to have charges preferred against SrA Wright would enable Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to gain needed votes on a pending bill to remove commanders from the court-martial process.”

The ruling took Harding to task for supposedly telling Col. Joseph Bialke, Franklin’s legal adviser, that sexual assault cases, absent “smoking gun” evidence about an alleged victim’s credibility, should be sent to court-martial. In so doing, Kastenberg wrote, Harding improperly attempted to shape Bialke’s future legal advice. Katsenberg ruled that the forced retirements of Bialke and Franklin after their handling of the Wright case created an appearance of unlawful command influence.  [Stars & Stripes]

All this case has likely done is force other convening authorities to send flimsy sexual assault cases to trial to protect their careers after seeing what happened to Lt. Gen. Franklin.

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.

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.

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.

One retired Army general is claiming everything is bigger in Texas to include the waistlines of its kids:

The average of Texas young adults ineligible to serve their county is higher than the national average, a report states.

Retired Army Brigadier General Joe E. Ramirez Jr., also Commandant of Texas A&M University’s Corps of Cadets, said the leading reason behind ineligibility is applicants are overweight and generally unhealthy.

In Texas, 73 percent of young adults can’t serve. The national average is about 30 percent.

“It’s been a problem for a while,” he said. “Our country is getting bigger and that concerns a lot of us.”

As part of a statewide speaking tour, Ramirez visited Flour Bluff and West Oso high schools this week to discuss obesity’s impact on the military and ways to improve children’s health in the state. He used talking points from a report by the nonprofit Mission: Readiness titled “Too Fat, Frail and Out-of-Breath to Fight.”  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but that is pretty amazing statistic if true.

The University of Phoenix has long had low education outcomes for its graduates and is currently under investigation by the FCC, but what appears to have finally gotten the university on the bad side of the US military is its use of “challenge coins”:

The Pentagon temporarily has barred the University of Phoenix from recruiting students at U.S. military bases and will not let new active-duty troops receive tuition assistance for the for-profit giant’s courses.

The move is another blow to the University of Phoenix, which said it is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and California Attorney General Kamala Harris related to recruitment of members of the U.S. military and the California National Guard.

Apollo Education Group, the university’s parent, said the Defense Department notified it of the move this week.

The university’s participation in the department’s tuition-assistance program has been placed on probation in part because of the FTC and California investigations, the filing said.

Military members who are enrolled in university courses can continue to receive tuition assistance, but new enrollees or transfers will not be allowed, the filing said.  [Stars & Stripes]

Here is the part about the challenge coins:

But the Apollo Group filing said another reason cited by the Defense Department in its letter was the university’s sponsorship of “various events at military installations” without the proper approval and the distribution of so-called “challenge coins” without approval to use trademarks.

Challenge coins are small coins popular in the military as signs of membership in service branches and are given to promote morale. They have emblems of military service branches.

Apollo said the university “immediately discontinued the use of challenge coins” in July after the Defense Department raised objections. And Apollo said it has discussed the issue of approval for events at military bases with the Defense Department and noted all previous events had been approved by base officials.

You can read the rest at the link, but the University of Phoenix is far from the only for profit school that makes a lot of money off of federal and US military dollars with little education outcomes for its students.

As we have seen in the past in South Korea, the anti-US activists like to use the environmental card to bash the US military with.  The Japanese government is getting out in front of this issue by getting this agreement in place that allows them to have personnel on US military bases to monitor environmental issues:

The U.S. and Japan signed an accord Monday that will permit Japanese access to U.S. military facilities in Japan for environmental surveys.

The agreement – signed at the Pentagon by U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida – supplements the long-standing Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement that allows the United States to maintain military bases in Japan. While this does not officially amend the SOFA, it is the first such bilateral supplement to the agreement since its implementation in 1960, according to a defense official who was speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.