Reading Colonel Douglas MacGregor's recent book "Transformation under fire" it became clear to me why the current minority of caring military reformers have not fixed the U.S. military to achieve the required excellence to pre-emptively strike at America's enemies before they can 9/11 attack our homeland as President Bush has wisely set as a national goal nor prevail with few casualties on today's non-linear battlefield best described by Martin Van Crevald who says the human vs. human fight is the "4th Generation of Warfare" (4GW).
U.S. Army on course to wheeled computer self-destruction
With 500 dead and over 2,000 wounded from Iraq, Congress is questioning the size of America's Army necessary on-the-ground to meet demands in Iraq/Afghanistan that Bush administration "neocon hawks" in DoD infatuated with computer-directed aircraft firepower have dismissed. Nevermind that the entire invasion of Iraq almost failed when marines-in-trucks were stopped short of Baghdad when air strikes failed to root out the enemy hidden in urban cover; and it was the Army's 3rd Infantry Division mechanized in tracked armored vehicles that was able to shrug off enemy fires and collapse the enemy center-of-gravity in Baghdad. However, its the QUALITY of the rest of the Army in wheeled trucks that is causing needless deaths/maimings in the on-going reconstruction vs. insurgency fight in Iraq. In fact, the U.S. Army is disobeying President Bush's orders to give troops what they need to survive/win In Iraq/Afghanistan.
The Commander-In-Chief (CIC) of the U.S. Armed Forces is the elected President of the United States. President Bush said publicly that he would insure every servicemen gets what he needs to win the war on terrorism. Yet as Saddam capture euphoria wanes and daily casualties mount in Iraq, its evident that our men DO NOT have what they need. Further investigation shows that our men have requested both light tanks and armored personnel carriers that are available in storage yet officials at Army HQs HAVE DENIED THEM what they need to survive and win in DIRECT DISOBEDIENCE of the CIC's orders because they are TRACKED and not wheeled to go along with current Army official's fad for rubber-tired trucks/armored cars with computers that have clearly failed to get the job done in Iraq and are killing/maiming our men from enemy Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG), Improvised Explosive Device (IED) land mine attacks and accidents due to their unwieldy designs when loaded with supplies and make-shift armored "bird cages". Nevermind that the Army has computers in tracks and could put them in enough tracks to fully protect nearly ALL its Soldiers in Iraq. More troubling is these officials have also lied to Congress and the American people by falsely portraying that all they can do is up-armor existing wheeled trucks--after Congress gives them $239 million more dollars and then 2 years from now our troops might be slightly better protected via the $250,000 each HMMWV trucks that are still vulnerable to RPGs and land mines. Our men don't need half-solutions, too late. The Army also dangles before Congress already failed-in-Iraq Canadian-made Stryker wheeled armored cars at $3 million dollars each that also cannot protect our troops from RPGs/IEDs, so our men wisely avoid riding in them if they can ride in anything else. The current Army "vision" of getting by on allegedly cheaper-to-operate wheeled trucks/armored cars exalting the "Third Wave" of human civilization via the mental gymnastics of a computer network has failed miserably in Iraq where the PHYSICAL "Second Wave", "Industrial Age" reality still reigns supreme as enemy RPGs, land mines/roadside bombs kill and maims our Soldiers each day shamefully obvious before the entire world that threatens a collapse of public support for the war and Bush Administration re-election in November. Rather then admit their wheeled computer fantasy has failed, Army officials have repeatedly denied our Soldiers even a handful of the tracked AFVs sitting in storage that will fully protect them and take the fight to the enemy anywhere he is hiding off the roads and trails that are strewn with mines, IEDs and thugs with AK47s and RPGs lying in ambush because the relatively few tracks that are in Iraq have been highly successful and more over there would be public/congressional relations "curtains" for their wheeled trucks/armored cars.
* XVIII Airborne Corps' request for the four 17-ton M8 Armored 105mm Gun System (AGS) light tanks the Army has bought with tax payer dollars that are kept in storage to provide instant firepower and show-of-force to prevail/prevent firefights in the narrow streets of Iraq without needing the constant and dangerous refueling the heavy 70-ton M1 tanks require (which light units don't have, anyway) DENIED
* A company commander's request for just a handful of the thousands of war stock M113 Gavin light tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) DENIED
* Reserve truck company that fabricated their armor plates in accordance with the Army's own self-help doctrine in FM 55-30 Appendix O DENIED
* Requests for RPG applique' armor that many of the world's M113 Gavins use like the Israeli Defense Force (they don't lose a man every day like we are in Iraq) DENIED
* Thousands of Army Reservists and National Guardsmen are at war without flak jackets with plates to stop AK47 assault rifle bullets; requests for vests with plates DENIED until an outcry from Congress made the Army hurry up
Colonel Douglas MacGregor's recent appearance on the Lehrer News Hour [www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june04/army_1-13.html#] calling for a reorganized Army is not just a "nice-to-have"; the failure of our Army to have robust and self-sufficient units like he proposes is costing us lives in Iraq. Too many Army officials want computer mental gymnastics to relive WWII and have forgotten the physical world we live in; computer graphics have painted a mythical arena where wheeled trucks and armored cars can shuttle men and supplies forward to "the edge" of a linear battlefield much like Belton Cooper describes took place in WWII Europe in his book, Deathtraps. Cooper explains how allied air supremeacy was so great that trucks were driven end-to-end for miles with their headlights on to get superior numbers and mass on the enemy to overwhelm him. When its pointed out today that the 8-wheeled Stryker armored car is extremely vulnerable to RPGs, the computer-crazy Army officials excuse this fatal flaw away by declaring "its not a combat vehicle, it will just shuttle men to the forward edge of the battlefield".
This is not 1944, its 2004.
What "forward edge" of the battlefield are Army officials talking about?
Then there is the real, non-linear battlefield taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. Army does not have 100 Divisions to fully control large areas and clear out all enemies to make "safe", "rear" areas for an underclass of support troops to do the dirty work for the upper social class of combat arms Soldiers on the "front lines". The Army has just 10 active-duty divisions, spread thinly around the world in Korea, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Kuwait and Iraq yet is commanded by thousands of people in several layers of bureaucracy yet wonders why simple things like enough body armor reaches the troops. In still-not-pacified Iraq/Afghanistan, the enemy is all around, can attack in any direction at any time---there are no "front" lines for Army troops to ride up to on the cheap in rubber-tired trucks, dismount and fight the enemy less-than-"even" M16 vs. AK47/RPG/IED but hope to overwhelm him by superior numbers and "information" about the enemy's location and condition. The Army in love with computer mental gymnastics espoused by Alvin and Heidi Tofffler, has forgotten there is a huge difference between knowing and being able to physically DO something about it. Steering firepower by mouse-clicks has not worked to control ground or people--and you would think that the Army doing the actual physical ground maneuver would know this better than anyone else in DoD.
Army Soldiers have not forgotten this: they are being killed/maimed in the un or weakly-armored wheeled vehicles that are traveling in predictable, linear paths along roads/trails that are not safe and clear of the enemy.
Where is the Can-Do of the WWII Generation?
Non-linear warfare requires vehicles that can go anywhere not be restricted to linear roads/trails. Cooper warns us repeatedly that the Army's M4 Sherman 33-ton medium tanks needed wider tracks in order to go cross-country at will to out-maneuver the Germans. Even in WWII, the so-called "rear" areas populated by rubber-tired trucks moving along roads/trails were pummeled with enemy artillery fire which shredded and burned their tires. Cooper doesn't even refer to wheeled vehicles as combat vehicles. Yet today's Army officials are crazy about putting the ENTIRE ARMY ON RUBBER-TIRED WHEELS steered around a make-believe linear battlefield that exists only in their minds and computer screens. If wheeled vehicles didn't physically work in WWII, why are we trying in the even-more lethal 21st century send them with our men inside into "near" combat areas? What do we do when the enemy does not conform to our computer-generated "lines" and "areas" and attacks the not-ready-for-combat wheeled vehicles with our men packed inside?
A road-bound wheeled Army will get out-flanked encircled and pulverized against a ruthless naton-state enemy like Red China or North Korea who can travel cross-country at-will just like during the 1950-53 Korean war. Even digital aircraft bombing will not save a physically immobile, inflexible, wheeled Army in the soft, wet soils of the far east. General Ridgway's warning from back then that the Army was reluctant to stray from roads and radio contact for fire support rings true today. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or the more the Army "transforms" itself the more it stays screwed up.
Cooper describes how welders worked around-the-clock in 30 days to add armor patches around the ammunition holding areas of an entire armored division's 232 x M4 Sherman tanks when it was discovered they were vulnerable to enemy gunfire. Today, Army Soldiers are dying and being maimed in wheeled vehicles and all the Army says it can do is two years from now "up-armor" 3-ton HMMWV into 6-ton HMMWV trucks and buy Canadian Stryker armored cars from the factory at great cost that will NEVER be RPG-resistant and cannot even go cross-country without getting stuck. If the 2-inch thick Sherman tanks of WWII were "deathtraps", what's the Army doing buying 1/2" thin skinned wheeled vehicles for today's many times more lethal non-linear battlefield? In stark contrast, the Army today owns over 13,000 M113 Gavin 11-ton light tracked armored fighting vehicles with 1.5 to 1.75 inch thick armored walls, with most sitting in storage while Army Soldiers are driving around Iraq in the thin-skinned wheeled vehicles getting blown up, shot-up and incinerated. Only the Army's heavy divisions have M1 Abrams heavy, M2 Bradley medium and M113 Gavin light tracks; not the light divisions that have NO ARMORED VEHICLES AT ALL and could really use light tracks to compliment their light operations. But the Army refuses to take even a few hundred M113 Gavins and quickly add RPG-resistant side, underbelly landmine, and upper gunshield armor as Belton Cooper's generation would have done if they had these vehicles available in great numbers to adapt and overcome the enemy. Sadly, "The Greatest Generation" is not on watch today.
Why?
Because current Army officials have "other plans" for its future; a plan where weak people ride in weak vehicles in a make-believe linear battlefield that does not exist except in the linear, inflexible, bureaucratic minds of several layers of bureaucracy commanded by senior Army officials who do not have to get real results in reality but can "spin" and "sound bite" lies to Congress and the American people through their Public Affairs Officers (PAOs). Any investigative reporter who exposes this is shunned by the Army and is not given "access" to Army sources to write stories to stay employed. Those that write according to the Army "party line" get invited to Iraq/Afghanistan adventures to play Army Soldier and be shills courtesy of tax payer dollars. "Embed" is IN BED with the Army. Buying new wheeled vehicles means easy power, prestige and money for the Army and defense contractors who will hire the Army officials after they leave the service. Never mind that if the Army upgraded its light tracked M113 Gavin AFVs, for the same money that only buys a handful of armored car brigades it could TRANSFORM THE ENTIRE ARMY to new capabilities, gaining the respect of Congress, the American people, our Soldiers and sending a message to our enemies that America's Army is ready to fight.
The Army is wrong and needs to be reformed to fight non-linear warfare
The non-linear battlefield requires strong people in strong vehicles. The days of an upper class "fighting" Army and a lower class "Support" Army commanded by vast staff bureaucracies in some sort of rear area are over. Army Chief of Staff General Schoomaker has said:
"This is a game of wits and will. You've got to be learning and adapting constantly to survive."
General Schoomaker has directed every Soldier be a rifleman, a combatant to not be victims like the Pvt Jessica Lynch convoy that was ambushed in Iraq. But he must go farther than this and actually adapt the Army to the actual non-linear battlefield we are in (not the linear fantasy we want) and provide every Soldier a vehicle suitable for non-linear battle---you cannot walk everwhere--you will need a motor vehicle and with an enemy that can attack in any direction at any time this means tracks not trucks. We have the 13,000+ M113 tracks to do this, we just need the will to face real non-linear reality and to do it as the WWII generation would if they were in our shoes today. The can-do IDF has up-armored their M113 Gavins and they don't lose a man a day in combat operations like we are.
Tracked vehicles are non-linear combat vehicles because their tracks enable them to go off roads/trails, cross-country for two-dimensional maneuver. The best non-linear combat vehicle for the walking infantry is a LIGHT tracked AFV like the 11-ton M113 Gavin because it can go anywhere the infantry can, so it has more firepower from the vehicle, staying power supplies of ammunition, food and water than can be carried on a Soldier's back. Instead of fighting enemies at a disadvantage, its our men behind M113 armored gunshields firing Heavy Machine Gun-Disposible Rockets-M16s vs. the enemy on foot with AK47s/RPGs/IEDs. When our infantry dismounts, it has more ammunition because the M113 Gavin is nearby not left far away at a road/trail junction as a wheeled vehicle should be. Enemy fires at its tracks will not mobility kill the M113 as it would shred and set fire to the wheeled vehicle's rubber tires.
Light tracked AFVs due to their compact size and light weight can be flown by fixed-wing aircraft (dropped by cargo parachutes) and helicopters into blocking positions anywhere on the non-linear battlefield to capture/kill Saddams and Bin Ladens before they escape a 2D maneuver force coming at them on the ground. These 3D air-maneuvers are not possible in overweight 19-21 Stryker and the planned 23-ton
The Army's current officials opposes strong people in strong tracked vehicles because these would be units that would not be on a "short leash" to several layers of higher headquarters to micromanage but could take computer awareness and ACT ON IT because they would have the physical means to do so. On the fluid, rapidly changing, non-linear battlefield this is what our Army needs to get the Bin Ladens and get the Saddams earlier so we don't suffer daily casualties in a plodding, predictable linear campaign (easily resisted by the enemy) to hunt them down after they went into hiding. 4GW futurist Bill Lind describes the linear mindset as "2nd Generation Warfare":
By William S. Lind
The favorite buzzword in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon is "transformation," and for the most part it means nothing more than winning through superior technology, an old but highly profitable delusion (see Martin van Creveld's Technology and War). It is geared almost entirely to fighting other states, which is to say jousting contests, and has little relevance to war with non-state entities, which is where real war is headed.
So long as it keeps all the contractors happy (and it does), Washington is content with it.
But the U.S. Army seems to be looking for something more. I was recently invited to join a daylong session of the Army's "Transformation" task force dealing with force structure, and I left with the feeling that the Soldiers in the group were striving for real reform (the contractors were another matter).
It has been widely reported that the Army intends to replace the division with the brigade as its basic "building block," as advocated in Col. Doug Macgregor's Breaking the Phalanx. In itself, this is a positive change. Most armies went to brigades or smaller divisions long ago.
The problem is that change may be good but insufficient: the French Army's development of armored forces in the 1930s is an example. Is what the Army is defining as "transformation" sufficient change to meet the Fourth Generation of modern war, or at least bring it from the Second Generation (firepower/attrition warfare) into the Third (maneuver warfare)? The answer is at best unclear.
Two subsidiary questions might help answer that large question: How far does the Army's proposed "transformation" move it toward being able to engage non-state opponents effectively, and if all the proposed reforms were already in place, how much difference would they make in the two wars the Army is now fighting, in Iraq and in Afghanistan?
From what I saw in my day with the force structure task force, the answers are a) not very far and b) not very much. That does not bode well in terms of answering the larger question. In my opinion, far more radical change is required than merely substituting brigades for divisions as the basic building block.
Here are two concrete examples: If "transformation" truly means moving the U.S. Army from the Second to the Third Generation, headquarters above the brigade level would become both fewer and smaller. Will that happen?
Another example: A Third Generation military understands John Boyd's point that implicit communications are faster and more reliable than explicit communications. Yet the Army (and the other services) continues to spend billions making communications explicit, computerizing anything and everything to the point where commanders drown in "information." When Boyd asked German Generals Balck and von Mellinthin how computers would have affected their ability to fightmaneuver warfare, they said, "We couldn't have done it."
Small staffs and a small officer corps above the company grades, not vast information flows, are the key to communications for a Third Generation army.
What seems to be emerging from the Army's "transformation" process is a hybrid of the Second and Third Generations. The concepts, some of them anyway, are Third Generation. But the Army's structure will remain Second Generation. Hybridsare dangerous, because their internal contradictions can become vast friction generators, and Clausewitz tells us where that canlead.[EDITOR: I fear this more than anything. We would not be able to fight a nation state nor an insurgency. We have created the little bdes which are missing much of the firepower and sustainment as the old bde structure. This means operations will have to be conducted with even more support from the division. At the same time we are creating even more levels of centralization through increased C2.]
The key issue is not the Army's force structure, but its culture. Does it remain Second Generation, focused inward on process, prizing obedience above initiative and depending on imposed discipline? Or does it transition to the Third Generation, focusing outward on the enemy, the situation and the result the situation requires, prizing initiative over obedience and depending on self-discipline?
A Third Generation culture will eventually fix a Second Generation force structure, but no force structure can help a Second Generation military culture.
At the end of the day, my impression was that the big, green Army dinosaur has gotten its head up out of the swamp (apologies to you Ranger types, but from my vantage point it appears to be an herbivore).
The question is whether it can evolve fast enough to match the speed of change in war itself. If not, it will join the rest of its kind in the coming mass extinction of Second Generation armies, and of the states they defend.
Actions that deny our Soldiers the tools they need to win and survive speak louder than words and promises of inadequate wheeled solutions later (or most probably never). The disconnect between senior officer fantasies to make names for themselves as warfare "visionaries" with actual battlefield reality needs resulting in not protecting our Soldiers adequately in Iraq via the wheeled computer fantasy is the cause for the recent rise in Soldier suicides in Iraq and the flood of Soldiers refusing to stay in the Army after they meet initial service obligations even though they are officers with the rank of Captain. The U.S. Army LTG Maude report from 2002 shows the following trends:
"Baby-Boomer" generation LTCs and Colonels are declining to take commands in the politically correct, stay-in-your-lane and now die-in-a-truck Army:
The reasons are that being in the Army has become intolerable; where you cannot get what needs to be done, speak the truth to be true candid warfighting professionals. You have to say/think whatever the boss wants even if its stupid, BS and will get the men killed. If you are a good little co-dependant boy/girl, you will get your turn to be the boss and order people around doing your stupid things to their deaths. Many of today's Captains, sons/daughters from broken, single parent homes---the refugees from the drug-crazed "baby boomers" are seeing the Army is not the warm, accepting family they had hoped for, realizing there is no "pot of gold" at the end of the career "rainbow" (a chance to be in power and really change things for the better) are not even waiting around for 20-year retirements. They are leaving A-S-A-P.
Soldiers are not re-enlisting despite $10,000 bonuses. America's less financially privileged youth are steering away from military service.
Top Stories - USATODAY.com
Army's new battle: Signing up Soldiers
Wed Jan 21, 7:28 AM ET
By Charisse Jones, USA TODAY Staff Sgt. Katrese Clayton stands in front of the New York City College of Technology, her smile as gleaming as her medals. But for every person who stops to chat with the Army recruiter, at least two pretend not to hear her say hello.
"I still speak," says Clayton, 24, of Brooklyn. "I smile. But inside I'm like, 'Oh. They don't like us.' You just get used to it after a while."
Nothing keeps Clayton and other recruiters from scouting for would-be Soldiers. Not the winter chill. Not the holidays. Not the war in Iraq (news - web sites), for the pressure to replenish the ranks of the U.S. Army never ends. (Audio: Clayton discusses the recruiting process)
Roughly 7,000 Army recruiters scour the country by passing out flyers, visiting campuses and walking neighborhood streets to persuade young men and women to join the nation's largest military branch, which has more than 710,000 active and reserve Soldiers. The U.S. presence in Iraq is causing parents and potential recruits to ask more questions about their fate if they sign up.
"Everyday someone's dying," says Staff Sgt. LaVone Anderson, 33, commander of the Times Plaza Army Recruiting Station in Brooklyn. "It hit us close to home because on Nov. 5, someone in our company died over there. ... The fact is, we're at war. And the fact is, people aren't willing to join like they used to be."
Recruiters spend seven weeks at Fort Jackson in Columbia, S.C., to learn how to sell the Army. They tout its training, the chance for travel and its generous financial package for college.
Straight to college
In the past, the Army focused on recruiting teenagers graduating from high school. But with more than 60% of high school seniors in the 1990s planning to go straight to college, recruiters have become more aggressive in courting those who are college age.
"What we know is lots of those people start college but don't complete it because they're not ready maturity-wise, or don't have the finances. And the Army can offer them both," says Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox in Kentucky.
Despite the incentives, officials estimate it takes 120 to 150 contacts to get one person to enlist. And the small recruiting stations dotting the country are on the front line.
Times Plaza in Brooklyn is one of 42 stations in New York City's battalion. Its six recruiters and station commander compete for candidates with the marine and Navy centers recruiting next door. Its monthly goal is seven enlistees and three in the Army Reserve.
"You've got 40% of the battle licked if you can just get them in here," says Staff Sgt. Laurence Colley, 35, a recruiter. "The other 40(%) is qualifying them, and the 20(%) is making them commit."
Anderson, the Times Plaza commander, says it is harder to get young people to see the opportunities the Army can provide when they are barraged with daily death tolls from Iraq.
But the battalion commander, Lt. Col. John Gillette, says, "Concern about being a casualty, that happens just as much when we're not at war as when we are."He says recruiters note that a person could be killed by a criminal or a drunken driver. Plus, it takes at least six months before an enlistee could be in a unit and possibly sent overseas.
When Clayton pitches the Army, she focuses on perks rather than patriotism. She knows firsthand that incentives such as free health coverage, a housing allowance and money for college are what ultimately compel many young people to join the military.
"I never thought about the Army until I couldn't pay for school," Clayton says. She was in her first year at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey when an Army recruiter left a business card at her home. "I wasn't thinking about any war. I was thinking I need help. I was struggling." She enlisted Feb. 5, 1998.
Getting people to show up
Clayton sees the Army as a steppingstone rather than a career, a chance to save money and push closer to her dream of becoming a lawyer. But after being tapped as a recruiter 18 months ago, her days now are consumed with finding new Soldiers. Clayton and the other recruiters in her station spend hours on the telephone and go to schools or community centers to line up their mandatory two appointments a day with potential recruits.
"When you make an appointment, you have to interview them in 48 hours," Clayton explains. Any longer, and the belief is "it's too much time for them to think."
But getting people to show up is a challenge. Two days before Christmas, one man scheduled to talk to Clayton never arrived. Another prospect, who had gotten help from a recruiter to apply for a Social Security (news - web sites) card, was dodging calls. And until recruits go off to basic training, they are free to change their minds.
On a mild afternoon, Clayton set up a table in front of the New York City College of Technology, one of 20 schools that her station targets. She put out brochures, key chains and bumper stickers that say "An Army of One."
"They'll ask about the war," she says. "I tell them I can't guarantee they won't go over there." But for at least two young men, the chance to fight against terrorism drew them to Clayton's table.
"I always wanted to join the military," says Kenneth Sessoms, 19, a college freshman. Now, the war "makes you want to fight for your country."
Turning a life around
Back at the station, Emanuel Wilson, 22, of Brooklyn, says he was trained as a chef in the Job Corps but couldn't find a job. He was preparing to take the military's aptitude exam and physical to enlist in the Army Reserve. Wilson says he peddled drugs as a teenager and fears dead-end jobs could drive him back into that world.
He's not worried about war. "God's not going to put me in a position I'm not supposed to be in," he says. "So if I'm supposed to go to war and die, then that's it."
Colley, the recruiter, emphasizes that not just anybody can join the Army: "That's a big misperception people have, that the Army will take anybody. That you don't need an education."
Colley, 35, has been in the Army 16 years and volunteered to be a recruiter. "I wanted to try to be a direct link to a lot of kids not going in the right direction."
He remembers the sergeant who recruited him. "I'd laugh at him, hang up on him," says Colley, who was headed to college in West Virginia. But Colley dropped out his freshman year after he was injured and couldn't play football. "I went straight back to that same recruiter who used to call me. And he laughed. He said, 'Oh you want to talk now?' "
Now Colley has picked up the sergeant's baton.
"I'm proud of being a Soldier, a recruiter," he says. "I'm proud of the United States military. I just wish everybody else was."
Carlton Meyer brings out some unpleasant truths about our AVF and how it hinders combat power:
"I did some quick research/math
Total military pay costs rose $5.2 billion for FY2004. (this does not
include reservists and stop loss who are paid from supplemental accounts)
So if pay were frozen, and using CBO's estimate that the annual cost for
each active duty body is $99,000, we could have added 52,000 troops to the
force instead.
So would the AUSA propose something responsible and unselfish, that pay be
frozen for one year in order to add 52,000 Soldiers to the active force?
Even though this means the average E-7 will take a small pay cut and only
make 90% more than the average American?
One of the first things FDR did when he expanded the Army in the 1930s was
to cut pay by 25%. I doubt any President has the balls to do that now.
Few people know that our active force of 1.4 million today costs more than
the 2.1 million man force of 1983, in real terms (inflation adjusted). So
why do lobbyists continue to push this low pay myth. I sent a few
questions to AUSA www.ausa.org.
If anyone is a member, they might want to lead the unselfish cause of
freezing military pay for a couple years to expand the force. At the very
least the AUSA shouldn't be spreading "pay gap" lies. Here is what I sent
yesterday; no response.
-------------------------------------------------
I am doing some research on military compensation and learned that the
average American earns $32,240 a year.
Since the average American worker is around 40 years of age, I seek to
compare this with a 40-year old enlisted Soldier, which I would think is
an E-7 with 21 years of service. According to defenselink.mil, total
military compensation for such a Soldier is $59,956.
But then I read that one of the AUSA goals is
(1) Eliminate the "pay gap" by 2006, make pay commensurate with level of
responsibility and maintain comparability in the out years.
So I am confused about this "pay gap". Can you refer me to the person who
knows about this at AUSA?
Thank You,
Carlton Meyer
"Clinton increased defense spending.
Read this:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/8/korb-l.html
If anyone wants to argue for spending more on our military, such plans
should include a proposed tax increase. Unfortunately, there are many
nuts out there who think that cutting taxes increases tax revenues. If
that's the case, just eliminate the income tax.
One problem is that many years of big military pay increases are eating
up funds for training and procurement. Military pay has gone up 16% the
past five years in real terms; e.g. adjusting for inflation.
An E-7 with 21 years in is around 40 years old, and makes twice as much
as the average 40-year old American! I'll write about that soon since most
people are shocked to hear that fact. The average 40 year old officer
(a LTC) makes 50% more than Americans with advanced degrees (e.g. master's)."
Carlton
Notice how the Army will bribe you to be a weak, co-dependant for cannon-fodder and refuses to use any of these funds to get us the TANKS we need to save our lives (be it M8 AGS Buford light tanks or upgraded M113 Gavins) and accomplish the mission. I also blame this on the liberal, anti-war politicians who want to SPEND ON DoD and bribing the AVF which also brings in votes to stay elected and is a way to keep the military they hate screwed up and impotent and make it appear they are "pro-defense", when they actually are not.
Wed Jan 28, 6:32 PM ET Add U.S. National - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Strained by operations in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites), the U.S. Army will boost its forces by 30,000 through emergency authority it expects to last four years, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker told Congress on Wednesday.
But Schoomaker, testifying to the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, rejected calls from lawmakers for a permanent increase in forces, saying it would undermine efforts to streamline and modernize the Army.
"Right now, I've been given the authority by the secretary of defense to grow the Army by 30,000 people ... under emergency powers," Schoomaker said. He said the authority from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was to last for four years.
The Army is already about 11,000 Soldiers over the 482,000 troop limit authorized by Congress under the emergency provision the Pentagon (news - web sites) invoked, largely through "stop-loss" orders that block Soldiers from leaving or retiring and through re-enlistment incentives.
Schoomaker told reporters after the hearing the Army would move quickly to add nearly 20,000 more forces, saying, "We want to achieve it as quickly as we can."
He said money for the additional troops would come from the $87 billion emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan Congress passed in November.
Schoomaker said he wanted the additional troops to be incorporated into the Army's efforts to transform itself into a lighter, more mobile force for post-Cold War conflicts.
He rejected mounting demands from Republicans and Democrats in Congress to raise the Army's authorized troop levels, which he said would force the Army to expand permanently before it had made needed structural and operating changes.
"What I stress again is we should not make a commitment for a permanent end-strength (troop) increase at this time," Schoomaker said. He said that would result in the kind of bloated, poorly trained force that plagued the Army in the 1970s.
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat, said the Pentagon seemed to be ducking its obvious need for more manpower in order to save money for the Bush administration's priorities, such as developing a missile defense system.
"We cannot put the strain on our military and on our American people just because we insist ideologically to keep the budget the way it is," Tauscher said.
She is pushing legislation to increase the size of the Army, Air Force and marine corps for five years at an estimated cost of up to $4 billion.
I say keep your @#@#$%^ bribe money, no tank-you! They could keep ALL of my pay if they would instead supply us the light tracked AFVs we need to kick the enemy's ass instead of the other way around. We don't need more cannon-fodder, we need TRACKED ARMORED VEHICLES FOR ALL ARMY TROOPS IN HARM'S WAY NOW. Quality not quantity.
Since if you are DEAD you cannot spend any bonuses, can you?
Many are chosing DEATH rather than stay in the corrupt Army: this is the fault of Army officials not being and acting like leaders
U.S. Soldiers' Suicide Rate Is Up in Iraq
14 minutes ago
By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - U.S. Soldiers in Iraq (news - web sites) are killing themselves at a high rate despite the work of special teams sent to help troops deal with combat stress, the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s top doctor said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, about 2,500 Soldiers who have returned from the war on terrorism are having to wait for medical care at bases in the United States, said Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. The problem of troops on "medical extension" is likely to get worse as the Pentagon rotates hundreds of thousands of troops into and out of Iraq this spring, he said. Both situations illustrate the stresses placed on the troops and the military's health system by the war in Iraq. Suicide has become such a pressing issue that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several Soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning home from the war. Winkenwerder said the military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army Soldiers, he said. That's a suicide rate for Soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said. In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 10.9 per 100,000. The overall suicide rate nationwide during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites). By contrast, two U.S. military personnel killed themselves during the 1991 Persian Gulf War (news - web sites), although that conflict only lasted about a month. The Army recorded 102 suicides during 1991 for a rate of 14.4 per 100,000. The Army's highest suicide rate in recent years came in 1993, when the rate was 15.7 per 100,000.
The marine corps has the military's highest suicide rate. Last year the marines' rate was 12.6 per 100,000. During 1993, the marines' rate was 20.9 per 100,000. The military investigates every death and some of those probes may be incomplete, meaning the actual suicide rate could be even higher, Winkenwerder said. He said health officials haven't identified any common threads among the confirmed suicides. "We don't see any trend there that tells us that there's more we might be doing," Winkenwerder told a breakfast meeting of Pentagon reporters. The military has nine combat stress teams in Iraq to help treat troops' mental health problems, and each division has a psychiatrist, psychologist and social worker, Winkenwerder said. Of more than 10,000 troops medically evacuated from Iraq, between 300 and 400 were sent outside the country for treatment of mental health problems, he said. The military prefers to treat mental health problems such as depression by keeping troops in their regular duties while they get counseling and possibly medication, Winkenwerder said. Less than one percent of the troops in Iraq are treated for mental issues during an average week, he said. Winkenwerder said he had no specifics on the number of Soldiers being treated for battlefield stress, although the military is focused on treating that problem. "We believe they are being identified, they are being supported," Winkenwerder said. The military also is working to solve the issue of Soldiers awaiting non-emergency medical care. Since November, about 1,900 of 4,400 waiting for medical care have been treated, Winkenwerder said. But the military expects more problems when tens of thousands of troops are rotated in and out of Iraq this spring, Winkenwerder said. Many of those troops leaving Iraq may have to wait at various bases in the United States for medical treatment such as physical therapy for injuries, he said.
The Army is working to sign contracts with civilian medical providers and bringing in more staff from the Navy, Air Force and Department of Veterans Affairs (news - web sites) to help, Winkenwerder said. Another source of the problem has been a large number of National Guard and reserve troops activated for duty in Iraq who have to be treated for underlying health problems, Winkenwerder said. The Army is working to solve that problem by screening those reservists at their home bases, rather than later.
This is Army leadership failure: by not properly placing troops in light
tracked armored fighting vehicles even though thousands of M113 Gavins are in
storage, we are condemning our troops to preventable deaths/maimings, and some are committing suicide and deserting rather than return to Iraq. Their
vulnerability in wheeled trucks results in them blindly returning fire, harming the morality of what they are trying to do in Iraq. The reason of course is DoD and the Army right now is run by Tofflerian, narcissistic egomaniacs who think we are in a "Third Wave" of warfare where all we need to do is mentally steer firepower and cheaply mop-up with troops in trucks. That computers and troops-in-trucks has miserably failed against physical bombs and RPGs in non-linear battlefield Iraq because we are actually in Martin Van Crevald's 4th Generation of War (4GW) has not dawned on DoD and the Army which are quick to "spin" events by cherry-picking tidbits of information that furthers their agenda.
Someone needs to do a story on why the Bush Administration is having our
troops ride around in vulnerable HMMWV wheeled trucks that when attacked they have to blindly return fire and kill innocent civilians when we have enough M113
Gavin light tracked armored vehicles to put every Soldiers inside so if a bomb
goes off he is protected and does not have to lash out with spray 'n pray.
Details:
www.geocities.com/paratroop2000/armoredhmmwvsstrykersfail.htm
If we used M113 Gavin light tracked AFVs as the minimum transportation
standard in Iraq we would have less Soldiers and civilians killed and less morale, suicide problems.
www.efamilyportal.com/brian/Iraq/172.html
Doubts when duty calls
While most Soldiers on leave return refreshed, some Soldiers on leave worry
about what to expect when they head back to Iraq.
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer
Army Spc. Willie Turner III, 21, of St. Petersburg, returned from Iraq on
crutches.
When the 5-ton M923 truck he was traveling in was bombed Oct. 17, Turner
suffered a fractured foot, a broken nose and and an injured back. About 30 minutes
after the explosion, a medic took this picture.
ST. PETERSBURG - His mother mailed disposable cameras to him in Iraq and told
him to snap pictures of everything. But she didn't imagine this. Inside her
house in St. Petersburg, Army Spc. Willie Turner III pulls out photos of his
personal journey of war. He shows them to visitors. One shows a 5-ton M923 truck
with flat tires, its body misshapen by an Iraqi bomb blast. Another shows a
victim of that blast: Turner himself. In it, he wears a bandage around his head
and a smile that seems out of place. All this, he said, explains why he
doesn't want to get back on that truck. "I won't be out on the road again. I can't
do it. It's crazy," he said. Turner, 21, a graduate of Lakewood High School,
was home last week on emergency leave after the death of his father. Thousands
more Soldiers are flying back from Iraq to the United States for the largest
military leave program since the Vietnam War. They are enjoying whirlwind
vacations designed to boost military morale in hometowns from Tampa to Tacoma. But
the number of Soldiers coming home presents the military with a new challenge:
What if some of them don't want to return to duty?
* * *
One month ago today, on Oct. 17, Turner sat on the passenger seat of a truck
while another Soldiers drove. A third Soldiers sat atop the truck behind a
.50-caliber machine gun. Turner said the silent prayer he repeats on most days in
Iraq: Please, God, let me make it back today. Their mission was to drive in a
convoy from Tikrit to Kirkuk in northern Iraq. The mission of the Soldiers on
Turner's truck was to bring back another truck that had been disabled by what
the Army calls an "Improvised Explosive Device" - in other words, a bomb.
These are common enough that Soldiers sometimes keep sandbags on the floors of
their vehicles in case someone detonates one underneath, he said. Turner got
nervous when he learned his truck would bring up the rear of the convoy. He said
Iraqi fighters often attack the last truck. "I was wondering if we were going
to get home safe," Turner said. "I was kind of dozing off, and I just leaned
over to look out the side and it was like a big bomb. Next thing I knew, I saw
the sandbags on the floor coming up to my face. Flames started coming up." He
woke up on the ground, thinking only a second or two had passed. When he saw an
M-16 rifle on the ground next to him, he lurched forward to grab it, ready to
fire back at the Iraqis. But the weapon belonged to a medic who had been
assisting him for five or 10 minutes, while he was unconscious. The blast -
another bomb, he said - had thrown him and the other two Soldiers from the truck. He
felt blood running out of his nose and pain in his back and right foot.
Deafened from the blast, he couldn't hear his sergeant talking. The Soldiers on top
of the truck was hurt the worst and had to be hospitalized, he said.
Afterward, Turner got a few days' respite and was told he would be put on a list for
"rest and recuperation" leave in Italy. Many Soldiers who are serving for a full
year in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries are eligible for a 15-day R&R
leave. Some go to Europe; others come to the United States. The number of
Soldiers coming back to the United States was as high as 479 per day earlier this
month, according to U.S. Central Command. But the promise of leave did not
end Turner's troubles. On Oct. 23, six days after the bomb blast, his father,
Willie L. Turner Jr., died of heart disease. Turner had known his father was
sick and had wanted to return home earlier. "I was crazy when they told me," he
said. "I cried. My first sergeant calmed me down." He flew into Tampa a few
days later, after being granted emergency leave. He attended his father's funeral
Nov. 3. Wanting to get the most out of his leave, he tried to put his grief
aside and visit friends, spend time with his mother and stepfather, eat fast
food, play PlayStation 2 games. He said he still aches. To meet a recent
visitor, he walked into the driveway with help from a cane. He can walk without it,
he said, but his foot gets too painful and he needs to sit down. But he said a
military doctor who examined his foot couldn't find anything wrong with it.
All this time in St. Petersburg, Turner had a thought in the back of his mind:
His orders said to go back to Iraq; he didn't want to. In interviews last week,
Turner sounded of two minds about returning to Kirkuk to resume duty as a
truck driver for the 501st Forward Support Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
He said that, in many ways, he enjoys military life: "It's better than the
civilian life. There's more disciplined people. Everything is organized. It's
what you make of it." At one point, he said, "I'll just do what I'm told." But
then he said he wouldn't. He said that if ordered to resume duty on the truck
traveling through Iraq, "I would have to refuse, and if there are any types of
consequences for it, I'll have to take them. I'd still be living, I'd have my
health." He said he hoped to be reassigned to Italy but could see himself
returning to Iraq. But if told to ride out on a similar mission, he said, "That's
a life and death situation. ... I won't give them another chance to kill me.
It's just lucky I lived through that. I believe that was a sign. Why risk my
life again?" Military officials could not be reached Friday for comment about
Turner. Turner said Wednesday that he will be flying first to Italy, a plan
approved by his sergeant, who also is there on leave. Turner expected to return to
Iraq but said the sergeant was going to inquire about transferring Turner to
Italy. He flew out from Tampa International Airport on Thursday, not knowing
where he will end up.
* * *
The military is aware that when Soldiers return on leave, it can create not
only joyous reunions but wrenching good-byes. "We know we're going to have
crying family members clinging to Soldiers at the airport," Pentagon spokesman Joe
Burgas recently told the Los Angeles Times. "We know we're going to have
people who don't make it back on time, maybe people who don't make it back at all.
But most Soldiers are going to say, "I've got buddies over there, and they
are dependent on me coming back."' In a highly publicized case, a 30-year-old
Colorado woman who is a National Guard medic refused to return to Iraq after an
emergency leave she received because of a custody battle over her children.
Spc. Simone Holcomb, 30, was later reassigned to Fort Carson in Colorado, but
faced the spectre of a court-martial until Friday, when the Army said she will
not face criminal charges or disciplinary discharge. But the vast majority of
Soldiers return as ordered. That includes Spc. Willie Todd Harris, 30, of the
3rd Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard -
even though he knows the dangers of war. In Iraq, Harris and Mark Ballou, 24, of
Valrico, were standing guard outside a bank when an Iraqi with a 9mm handgun
began firing. A bullet struck Ballou in the neck. Harris said a bullet struck
him on his flak jacket. "I just came out with a pretty nasty bruise and a cut
on my chest," said Harris, who normally works as an officer at Gulf
Correctional Institution in north Florida. Harris fired back and killed the Iraqi. On a
two-week leave in late October and early this month, Harris enjoyed grilling
outdoors, sipping a few cold beers and spending time with his wife, Nancy, and
his daughters: Hailey, 10, Katelyn, 7, and Taylor, 5. He said he has been
surprised by news coverage of the war, which he says doesn't show some of the good
things he sees in Iraq: Americans rebuilding the infrastructure and Iraqis
greeting him and his fellow Soldiers warmly in the streets. Harris spoke to a
reporter by telephone from his home Nov. 6, a few days before he was set to
return to Baghdad. His thoughts about returning to the war zone? "It's going to be
hard. I'm not looking forward to it," he said. But he didn't have any doubts
that he would. "We'll go back and get this thing finished. We're just trying
to do the right thing and (return) home in a good mode," he said. Neida
Castillo of Tallahassee said good-bye to her husband, Renaldo, on Oct. 31, after a
two-week leave. She said the visit was good; she and her husband even made a
spur-of-the-moment decision to fly to Colorado Springs for a five-day vacation
within a vacation. Saying goodbye again was hard, Castillo said, but they were
ready for it. "He knew he had to go back," she said, "so he was prepared to go
back."
NUVO Indianapolis: Some Soldiers Would Rather Desert Than Return to Iraq
A new underground railroad: Some Soldierss would rather desert than return to
Iraq
By Becky Oberg
www.refuseandresist.org/war/art.php?aid=1126
Service members know the consequences of going absent without leave
(unauthorized absence in the Navy) - a maximum penalty of five years confinement,
forfeiture of all pay and allowances and a dishonorable discharge. The maximum
penalty for desertion in a time of war is death.
"If everything else fails, people should desert, just as George W. Bush did
during the Vietnam War." -Carl Rising-Moore Yet some military personnel are
going AWOL or deserting to avoid returning to Iraq.
"I definitely don't want to go back there," a Florida National Guardsman
told CBS News. "I think most people - if not all people who are there - don't
want to be there."
That Guardsman missed his flight back to Iraq on Oct. 18. According to the
Washington Post, the Soldiers has not returned to duty and may be on the run.
According to Natalie Granger of the Army Public Affairs Office, 3,800 Soldierss
deserted in 2002. Three thousand two hundred fifty-five were returned to
military control. In 2001, 5,065 deserted and 4,966 were returned.
"This is something that we have to deal with regularly," Granger said.
Granger said she could not say whether the Army would execute a deserter
today as each case is judged on an individual basis. "Obviously it's an option,"
she said.
Army spokesman Joe Burlas said the Army would probably not pursue execution.
He said the last execution for desertion was during World War II. "[The
penalty for desertion is] basically five years confinement if there's an intent to
avoid hazardous duty," he said.
The GI Rights Hotline, a national Soldiers' support service, told the New
York Post that they've received more than 100 calls inquiring about the penalties
associated for going AWOL. Some of the calls have come from Soldiers home on
leave, others have come from Soldiers in the war zone. Some callers have said
they will not return to Iraq.
The consequences of this action can be harsh. In a recent case, Marine
Stephen Funk was acquitted of desertion but convicted of unauthorized absence,
according to occupationwatch.org. Funk, a conscientious objector, was sentenced to
six months in the Camp Lejeune brig (military prison), reduction in rank to
private, forfeiture of two-thirds pay for six months and a bad-conduct
discharge.
The penalty is harsher for desertion. After a service member is AWOL for more
than 30 days, he or she is dropped from the rolls and administratively
classified as a deserter.
When a Soldiers is classified as a deserter, a federal arrest warrant is
issued. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies may apprehend the
deserter. The next of kin is contacted by letter after 10 days and asked to urge the
member to return voluntarily to military control.
Harboring a deserter is illegal. According to Claudia Cummings, public
affairs officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Indianapolis, the maximum penalty
is three years in a federal prison.
Some people, however, think it is worth the risk.
"When I hear about these women and men that would kill themselves to escape,
my duty as a veteran and a loyal American is to fight my government in
whatever nonviolent manner is appropriate," Carl Rising-Moore said in an e-mail to
anti-war activists in Indianapolis.
According to USA Today, 11 Soldiers and three marines have killed themselves
in the past seven months in Iraq. Several other deaths are being investigated
as suicides. In addition, the Army has sent 478 Soldiers home from Iraq for
mental health reasons.
Rising-Moore, an Army veteran, served during the Vietnam War. While he
volunteered for duty in Vietnam, he was stationed stateside. When he was discharged,
he was supportive of people who were fleeing to Canada to avoid serving. He
said the current Iraq situation is similar to Vietnam.
"If everything else fails, people should desert, just as George W. Bush did
during the Vietnam War," he said.
There is a gap in Bush's military service record from May 1972 to October
1973. Critics have charged he deserted.
Rising-Moore said people all over the country are willing to harbor deserters
and help them escape to Canada.
"The Canadian people are up for the task," Rising-Moore said.
Under Canadian law, political asylum cases are handled on a case-by-case
basis by an immigration officer at the border. Canada follows the United Nations
guidelines on granting political asylum.
Rising-Moore also said Sweden and Norway might grant political asylum to
deserters.
Some countries definitely will not.
"There is no way they can come to Switzerland," said a spokesperson from the
Consulate of Switzerland in Indianapolis. "We are a neutral country. We
don't get involved in the affairs of other peoples."
Rising-Moore is currently in Canada to gather support for what he called the
"Freedom Underground." He will visit all the major cities, including
Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and Ottawa.
Rising-Moore said some people think he has gone over the top, but he believes
the Nuremberg principle applies. According to the Nuremberg principle,
individuals have a responsibility to choose to follow the higher moral code when it
conflicts with laws and orders.
"I would hope the American people would stand up against this fascist regime
of George W. Bush, the un-elected military dictator of the United States of
America," he said.
"It is better to go through the proper channels to leave the military, but if
one is willing to die rather than go through the process, than I recommend
that they leave right away," Rising-Moore wrote in e-mail communication. "I
reiterate that a better solution to this option is to become a war resister
within the military and tell your commanding officer that you do not wish to kill
any more. It may take a few months, but eventually they will let you out. You
may wish to also refuse to be assigned to Iraq because even if you are in a
noncombatant role, you are still supporting this illegal and immoral war."
Rising-Moore said that two weeks ago, 30 military personnel refused to report
for duty in Iraq.
Just deserts... • In 1971, Abbie Hoffman described how to desert in Steal
This Book. Hoffman recommended Sweden and Canada.
• According to its government Web page, Canada received between 30,000 and
40,000 deserters and draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. Many went to Toronto,
which still has a heavy American presence.
• According to the History Channel, the last execution for desertion was in
1945, when Army Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot by a firing squad.
• The Army's Deserter Information Point (USADIP) is in Indianapolis. USADIP
is the Army's information control center for absentees and deserters.
No War on the World | R&R! Main Page
Join Refuse & Resist!
www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/8195587.htm
Posted on Tue, Mar. 16, 2004
Miami Soldiers resists: 'This war is evil'
A Florida National Guard Soldier from Miami who served six months in Iraq
refuses to return and seeks conscientious objector status.
BY FRANK DAVIES
fdavies@herald.com
SHERBORN, Mass. - A Miami Soldier who served six months in Iraq and then
refused to return after a leave said Monday ''I can no longer be an instrument of
violence,'' and turned himself in to military authorities.
Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, a National Guard infantryman for five years after
three years of active Army duty, explained his decision to seek conscientious
objector status at an event organized by peace activists.
''I am not against the military. The military has been my family,'' said
Mejia, 28. ``My commanders are not evil but this war is evil. I did not sign up
for the military to go halfway around the world to be an instrument of
oppression.''
Then, joined by family, supporters and his lawyers, he walked to the gates of
Hanscom Air Force Base outside Boston. Activists cheered him as heavily armed
Soldiers took Mejia inside.
Although he surrendered in Massachusetts, ''the military honored my
integrity,'' Mejia said, allowing him to return to his unit.
Mejia arrived at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport just after
10 p.m. Monday and was immediately surrounded by several reporters and
photojournalists.
Asked about his decision not to return to Iraq, Mejia responded ``I don't
think we're fighting terror in Iraq. I think we're fighting for oil.''
Flanked by his mother and aunt, Mejia said he would turn himself in to his
unit in North Miami, Charlie Company of the 124th Battalion, at 10 a.m. today.
Monday night, his plans were simple: `I'm just going to take a hot shower,
get some dinner.''
A spokesman for the Florida National Guard, Lt. Co. Ron Tittle, said late
Monday no decision had been made yet whether to charge Mejia.
''We're glad he turned himself in,'' Tittle said, adding that Army officials
at Fort Stewart, Ga., and the Pentagon would decide how to handle the case.
Mejia, who grew up in Nicaragua, moved to Miami as a teenager with his
mother, Maritza Castillo, and became a permanent resident.
He was studying psychology at the University of Miami.
Both parents strongly oppose the Iraq war. His father, Carlos Mejia Godoy, is
a prominent songwriter, performer and activist in Managua. He was a cultural
ambassador for the Sandinista government who denounced U.S. intervention in
Nicaragua.
''I did not want him to go to Iraq,'' Castillo said. ``But this is his
decision today, his conscience.''
The Soldier's lawyers, Louis Font and Tod Ensign, said Mejia could be a
''test case'' of Iraqi war policy, because they know of no other resisters who
served in Iraq, refused to return and then turned themselves in. Font will seek an
administrative discharge for Mejia, based on his applying for conscientious
objector status.
Font said he was relieved the Army decided against pre-trial confinement for
Mejia while officials study the case.
Mejia said his decision was ''a very personal one,'' after experiencing six
months of guerrilla warfare in the Sunni triangle of Iraq, where resistance to
U.S. occupation has been the most fierce.
He recalled several ambushes in which other Soldiers were wounded, the ''bad
guys'' got away and ''innocent Iraqis'' were killed in crossfires.
''At the time, you are doing your job and you go with the flow,'' Mejia said.
``But you see people dying every day. I can't tell you there was one day I
woke up and said I am against the war.''
''I don't think it is a moral war,'' he added later.
During a two-week leave in October, Mejia decided not to return to Iraq.
In the next few months he spent most of his time in New York, ''living like a
criminal,'' wondering if military police would come for him.
Surrounded by peace activists, Mejia explained how he reached his decision
after serving eight years in the military:
``I signed up because I wanted to be part of this nation, and the military
was at the very heart of the United States. I was very young (19), and was just
starting to form my identity, values and principles.''
Mejia also criticized the Iraq invasion as ``a war for oil, based on lies --
lies about weapons of mass destruction, and connections between Saddam Hussein
and al Qaeda.''
This week marks the first anniversary of the start of the war, and Mejia's
news conference was one of several events clearly designed for political impact.
Mejia was joined by Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, who said
the Soldier's ''courageous stand'' was in the tradition of St. Francis of Assisi.
A group called Military Families Speak Out, which opposes the war and claims
1,300 participants, helped organize the event and staged vigils Monday outside
the White House and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where hundreds of those
wounded in Iraq have been treated.
Herald staff writers Phil Long, Elaine de Valle and Hannah Sampson and
researcher Elisabeth Donovan contributed to this report.
Badges? We don't need no stinkin, weak, co-dependant HOOAH! badges! Or do we?
You might ask why does the majority of the Army silently go along with riding vulnerable wheeled trucks to their deaths and maimings in Iraq? You could say they have to follow orders. Or they do not know that better light tracked M113 Gavins are available. But the main mechanism the Army uses to controls its people and has them go along with its wheeled vehicle BS is secular humanism. If Soldiers "behave" and don't complain to get better tracked AFV parameters that would save lives and do the mission better, they will get their HOOAH! badge egobiscuits which will validate them and give them self-esteem. Nevermind that by definition SELF-esteem should come from an inner knowledge of your own uniqueness not conditional on any kind of human external aproval. Here are some female Army combat medics celebrating for surviving Iraq and getting their ego badges.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?g=events/iraq/082701iraqplane&a=&tmpl=sl&ns=&l=1&e=256&a=&t=&prev=255
U.S. Army medics cheers after being awarded the Combat Medical Badges to deserving Soldiers during an award ceremony at the 501st Forward Support Battalion located at the Olympic Stadium in Baghdad, Monday March 22 2004. Unlike the Combat Infantry Badge, this award can only be awarded to U.S. Army Medics serving in a danger zone while providing medical aid in support of U.S. Army operations. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
However, if you strip away the vain glory and badge-seeking, the Soldiers in Iraq don't care about whose "vision of warfare" gets the limelight, they want WHAT WORKS and will kill the enemy and get them home alive to their families with all their limbs intact. Up-armoring sides, underbelly and providing gunshields on the Army's M113 Gavins light tracked AFVs would cost a mere $78K each and for less than $500K would make them hybrid-electric silent and stealthy to sneak up on hiding enemies TODAY instead of waiting 10 years from now for a mythical $10 million each, Future Combat System (FCS). Hybrid-Electric M113 Gavins would have all the electrical power Soldiers could ever need to run all the computers and electronic gadgets the Army is so infatuated with. In a matter of month's the Army's 4 light divisions without ANY armored vehicles that are getting clobbered all over the world in HMMWV trucks could be have ALL of their men moved around the battlefield under armor but alert and ready to return fire behind gunshields without getting bogged down in vehicle care; each infantry battalion's Delta Weapons Companies who now own/operate dangerously vulnerable HMMWV trucks would instead use up-armored M113 Gavins to give their Alpha, Bravo and Charlie rifle company brethren transportation as needed. Army light units "transformed" with light tracked AFV capabilities could range out by aircraft and their own superior x-country mobility, armored protection and on-hand firepower anywhere in the world with weeks of supplies to flush out enemy terrorists hiding in remote areas. We could throw a cordon around wherever the Bin Ladens are hiding and stay there "tightening the noose" until he appears dead-or-alive.
Its time President Bush checks up on his Army and orders it to do the right thing and supplies its Soldiers IMMEDIATELY the light tracked AFVs sitting now unused with the exrat armor, gunshields. Those that disobey his direct orders should be fired and replaced with someone who will do what it takes to win and save our troops, hubris be damned. If Bush doesn't do this HE IS GOING TO GET FIRED IN NOVEMBER by the American people (hastened perhaps by a smart Democratic candidate who picks up on this issue) once the preventable casualties caused by Army negligence rises to over 1000 dead and 4000 wounded if current rates stay the same or get worse.
He is botching Iraq where our troops are dying each day due to Army incomptence which has us driving around in trucks when we should be in armored tracks.
Maybe Kerry will appoint a SECDef who isn't obsessed with aircraft firepower, maybe not.
What have we got to lose?
We know what 4 more years of Tofflerian/RMA hubris will likely bring us.
http://www.yahoo.com/s/151221
U.S. National - Reuters
Newsweek National Poll Puts Kerry Over Bush
Sun Jan 25, 2:59 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new national poll by Newsweek magazine showed on Sunday the surging Democratic Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) of Massachusetts topping President Bush (news - web sites) in an election matchup.
The poll, conducted Jan. 22-23, showed Kerry commanding 30 percent of support from registered Democrats, up from 11 percent two weeks ago. And for first time in the poll's history a Democrat enjoyed a marginal advantage over Bush, with Kerry garnering a 3-point lead over the president, Newsweek said. Forty-nine percent of registered voters chose Kerry, compared to 46 percent favoring Bush. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news - web sites), the Democratic front-runner until his dismal third-place showing in last week's Iowa caucuses, saw his support among registered and likely Democratic voters cut in half, to 12 percent. That put Dean in a three-way tie for second place in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary with retired Gen. Wesley Clark (news - web sites), 12 percent, and U.S. Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites) of North Carolina, with 13 percent. Bush saw his approval rating drop among registered voters to 50 percent versus 44 percent who disapprove, despite his having delivered a State of the Union address last Tuesday. And more people said they were dissatisfied, 52 percent, than satisfied, 43 percent, with the way things were going in the United States, the poll said. The Princeton Survey Research Associates poll interviewed 1,006 adults by telephone. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Do the Democrats appreciate ARMY GROUND MANEUVER better than Bush's aircraft firepower-obsessed Rumsfeld-led DoD?
Looks like a certain Democratic Senator from New York is serving as an advocate for our ideas and joining "Hanoi John" Kerry in arguing for increasing Army personnel strengh. We agree with her comments about how a volunteer army makes it easier for our policymakers to send troops to die in no-win wars overseas, but disagree with her proposition that higher troop levels are needed in Afghanistan or Iraq; what we need is better QUALITY by supplying them light tracked AFVs. Could it be that the Democraps have become stronger supporters of and advocates for the Army than the Bush DoD?? The answer to that question we fear may be yes...
Hillary: Volunteer Army Is Inadequate
Sen. Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that the U.S.'s All-Volunteer Army isn't producing enough recruits to meet current demands in Iraq and Afghanistan, adding that the current system encourages leaders to make reckless troop deployments.
In a speech to the Brookings Institution, the former first lady complained that an all-volunteer force makes it "easy for decision-makers just to try to keep it out of sight and out of mind."
Mrs. Clinton said that the current system for fulfilling troop levels "raises serious questions in a democracy, both [about] how we define ourselves [and] what the real risks politically and militarily of taking action might be," according to quotes picked up by MSNBC.com.
Though the top Democrat never explicitly recommended returning to a military draft, she said something must be done to boost troop levels in both Afghanistan and Iraq because they were inadequate.
Noting that she visited U.S. troops in both theaters last year, Clinton said, "Off the record, they'll tell you they don't have enough and have never had enough."
"We have fewer troops in Afghanistan than we had law enforcement [officers] at the Olympics in Salt Lake City," she complained.
Clinton called for a vigorous election-year debate about the future size and composition of the U.S. armed forces.
Its time the American Congress assert civilian control over the military and get involved with the future direction of its Army. It must not stand on the sidelines as our Army self-destructs in an ill-conceived all-wheeled vehicle make-over. Congress should direct the Army to upgrade its M113 Gavins with the computers they crave, but with actual physical superiority features like RPG-resistant armor, band-tracks, hybrid-electric drive for 600 mile range and stealth operation, so that THE ENTIRE ARMY IS TRANSFORMED IMMEDIATELY as the WWII generation would, we are talking days and weeks here not months and years. America's Army is at war now and it needs more upgraded M113 Gavin light tracked AFVs in the non-linear fight not trucks. Congress should begin by creating units along Colonel MacGregor's designs and get rid of staff bureaucracies so they are manned by Soldiers not paper-pushers.
Active Duty Army Alienating the Iraqi People
Adding to the debacle in Iraq is the 20-something active duty Army inwardly focused on their own garrison harassment games have no desire to empower Iraqi civilian life to develop--these folks have noidea what civilian life is all about. They wake up each day and have everything decided for them and provided for them. They disrespect and harass their own people of lesser rank. Is it a surprise then that the active-duty Army has no interest in winning the hearts and minds of Iraqi civilians in order to win an insurgency? What the active duty weak co-dependant egotists want is to kick down doors playing mini-Delta Force for badges and glory. Rebuilding and guarding Iraqi civilian infrastructure is not macho and sexy.
The situation in Iraq is so bleak that we don't have time to remold the active Army. We should remove most of the active duty Army out of Iraq and replace them with more mature, adult 30-something Army National Guard and Reservists who are more inclined to listen and act on the Iraqi people's inputs as they patrol on foot with vehicles following in trace. The Reservists might not be as sports PT fit as the active duty 20-somethings but if their maturity results in no bullets firing or bombs exploding in the first place, this is more important than a slightly better APFT score which will not save anyone when a bomb blast goes off sending consussion, heat and fragments at several thousand feet per second. The active duty Army is not suitable for stability and support operations (SASOs) after a war. From now on only reserve units should handle SASOs until we can start completely over with an adult military culture and rebuild the active duty Army from scratch.
But be advised, the Army Reserves and Guard still have the same co-dependant disrespect people culture like the active Army, they are just LESS intense about it.
Army Reserve Chief LTG Helmly is correct in wanting to rebuild his reserve units with a new culture with regional focus that is optimized for today's non-linear battlefields.
Head of Army Reserve plans big changes
Wed Jan 21, 7:28 AM ET
By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
The commander of the U.S. Army Reserve said Tuesday that he plans to make sweeping changes to the way that Reserve Soldiers are recruited, managed and mobilized for duty.
In a meeting with reporters that was by Pentagon (news - web sites) standards extraordinarily candid, Lt. Gen. James Helmly said the Army Reserve has botched recent troop call-ups, failed to adapt its culture to the post-Sept. 11 world and has sometimes treated its Soldiers with less respect than they deserve.
Helmly, who commands the 205,000-member Army Reserve, talked about how he plans to fix the problems:
• Army Reserve recruiters will be candid with civilians they are recruiting and will tell them that if they enlist, they probably will be called up for active duty at least once in a span of four to five years.
• Beginning next year, the Army Reserve will close an unspecified number of its 2,091 units because it cannot fill all of them. Helmly said the Army Reserve force structure was designed in an era when having the maximum number of units, even if they couldn't all be fully manned, was accepted policy.
• The Army Reserve is crafting a deployment schedule similar to one used by the Air Force to give troops months or even years of advance notice for lengthy call-ups.
• Helmly said he has instructed commanders to do whatever it takes to get the right equipment to soldiers headed overseas. He cited one case of officers who purchased large quantities of sports bras and underwear at a local department store for female troops headed to Iraq (news - web sites).
The changes come as National Guard and Reserve troops - most of whom are part-time Soldiers - face unusual stresses.
This spring, the Pentagon plans to rotate about 39,000 Guard and Reserve troops into Iraq, where part-time troops will make up nearly 40% of the 105,000 U.S. troops there by May.
The total number of Army Reserve and Army National Guard troops on active duty is just more than 163,000, Helmly said.
Together, the Army Guard and Reserve have about 550,000 troops.
Helmly spoke about how Army Reserve commanders failed to give advance notice to thousands of reservists called up for the war in Iraq. About 10,000 Army Reserve troops, he said, were given five days notice before being ordered to active duty.
An additional 8,000, he said, mobilized for active-duty service and never deployed.
By way of explaining how the Army Reserve has not done a good job of making Soldiers feel "wanted and respected," Helmly said he recently discovered that commanders had failed to promote 13,000 privates who were eligible for higher rank.
"We have not applied positive leadership in how we treat people," he said. "We're not going to run this like a doggone flesh farm."
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:VJXkT-cV6kcJ:www.mindef.gov.sg/safti/pointer/back/journals/2004/Vol30_2/10.htm+u.s.+military+incompetence&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
BOOK REVIEW:
Incompetence, as defined in Dr Dixon's book, refers to the chronic inability to do a particular job or activity successfully. Incompetence may be due to a lack of adequate training, skill, aptitude or experience.
Incompetence can be found in any industry, field or discipline. But incompetence in war takes on a significance far greater than in any other field.
Because the conduct of war involves vast sums of money, the application of a massive amount of destructive power, and the fact that millions of lives are at stake, a study of military incompetence is directly relevant and important to all persons involved in the field.
This book examines the issue in three parts. Part One presents examples of incompetence in British military history over the past hundred years, from the Crimean War to the Allied defeat at Arnhem , during Operation Market Garden. Although the study of military incompetence is universally relevant, the inclusion of the loss of Singapore lends this book some welcomed local relevance. Parts Two and Three examine the common features of military incompetence and seek to find the origins of this incompetence from a psychological point of view.
The Nature of Incompetence
Dr Dixon raises many instances and examples from British military history, from both great wars and small actions. Through all these wars, he picks out some common characteristics of military incompetence, for example:
• A fundamental conservatism and clinging to outworn tradition, as well as an inability to profit from past experience.
• A tendency to reject, suppress or ignore information which is unpalatable or conflicts with pre-conceptions.
• A tendency to under-estimate the enemy and over-estimate the capabilities of one' s own side.
• An undue readiness to find scapegoats and suppress news about military setbacks.
• A predilection for frontal assaults and the belief in brute force rather than the use of surprises or ruses.
• Indecisiveness and a general abdication from the role of a leader.
• A failure to exploit a situation due to the lack of aggressiveness.
There are obviously other reasons for failure in war, such as the lack of training, technological inferiority, the lack of proper intelligence equipment, failure of logistical support, ineffective flow of information and communication as well as the destruction of morale. However, those factors are external to the leader, whereas military incompetence is an inherent fault in military leadership. All else being equal, a well-equipped, well-trained fighting force will be made ineffective by the presence of an incompetent leader, and no amount of military intelligence, regardless of how accurate and timely it is, will be used effectively by an incompetent general. Therefore it is clear that a military leader is one of the most important force multipliers of any military organisation.
Intellectual Ability or the Lack Thereof
Dr Dixon examines in the subsequent chapters the possible causes of military incompetence. He examines, firstly, the premise that incompetent generals are also those lacking in intellectual ability. This was true for the British Army, up to the early years of the 20 th Century, due to three main reasons:
Firstly, the officers of the Army were selected primarily for their position in a higher class in society, on the virtue of the importance and social status of their fathers, and other social connections. These people were sometimes wholly inadequate for their job, and some displayed mediocre intellectual ability at best.
Secondly, the examinations for entry and graduation from Staff College and the Royal Military College were not wholly relevant to what was actually required for competent generalship, and could be passed with flying colours simply by memorisation of answers and learning by rote. This meant that officers with poor intellectual ability were not filtered out by the system.
Finally, in such military training establishments, prowess in games, muscle and masculinity then constituted the main criteria by which a man was judged, and anti-intellectualism was prevalent in the armed services.
Dr Dixon then examines the pro-position that military incompetence, manifested in the phenomenon of incredibly poor decision-making, was a direct result of poor intellectual ability. However, he could draw no direct link between decision-making and intellectual ability, and therefore rejected the suggestion that military incompetence is a result of poor intellectual ability.
This review agrees with Dr Dixon. Intellectual ability is best suited to an intellectual profession. Furthermore, I believe that intellectual ability and innate intelligence are not directly related, and that a person can be highly intelligent, inventive and cunning without being intellectually gifted.
There are lessons here to be found from Dr Dixon's argument. Firstly, we have to ensure that officers are chosen based on their own merit, and not due to their relationship with any class in society, hereditary reasons or because of race or religion.
Also, training in a military institution must prepare officers professionally for the task they will perform. In addition, examinations must test the officer candidate adequately. Those who set examinations must be clear on what qualities they are supposed to examine, and be clear on the distinction between memory and ability.
Finally, any officer candidate must not be hindered in his recruitment or professional advancement based on academic qualifications obtained outside the military establishment. Nonetheless, the premise that a highly educated person makes for a more capable officer is questionable. Instead, an officer should be chosen and promoted based on his performance.
The Organisation as the Source of Incompetence
Dr Dixon goes on to postulate that it is the military organisation that contains the potential to create incompetent leadership or to promote incompetent persons to positions of great power and responsibility. He lists several characteristics and values which the military holds in high esteem and strives to achieve, as well as their negative consequences. Among these are:
• Uniformity, to the extent of oppressive conformity and the crushing of individual thoughts and the devaluation of initiative.
• Hierarchy and the importance of proper authority, to the extent of a fear to report bad news to superiors, the rejection of suggestions or corrections from the lower ranks, and hostility towards those of lower rank who initiate action without permission, however effective or necessary the action was.
• A love of regularity and regimentation and an inability to think outside of drill.
• The fact that ambitious and achievement-oriented officers are highly esteemed and respected in the military, so much so that self-serving and vainglorious officers are sometimes promoted to high leadership, with disastrous consequences.
The factors listed above correlate to the nature of incompetence as previously listed. However, the values which can so easily lead to generation of incompetent leadership and organisations are also crucial to the success of any conventional armed forces. The learning point here is that a balanced application of these values is required. As with all methods to achieve military readiness, these methods must be applied with their objective in mind, and not be applied for their own sake. The objective here, as in all military forces, is the efficiency and effectiveness of the military.
For example, drill is a vital part of military training. Drill trains the military operator to carry out military action fast, efficiently and without error. However, drill when taken to its extreme, robs the military of flexibility and wastes time. A love of drill hinders the development of novel fighting techniques and prevents the adaptation of military forces to new fighting environments. A striking example of this can be found in the Boer War, where British forces were so steeped in drill that they did not evolve a new process of attack which could counter the Boer's novel idea of using trenches as cover. For the British, massed formations and open frontal assaults were the drill, which proved especially costly against the Boer ' s use of cover and concealment.
Incompetence Today
These four factors are less prevalent in modern fighting forces. [Choong is "wong" here] By and large, modern militaries understand the importance of flexibility, initiative and feedback, vital especially to situations where communications are unreliable and information is of questionable accuracy. Additionally, the years of rapid technological change after WWII highlighted the importance of innovation, technology and ability to adapt to rapidly changing situations.
It is a pity that this book (published in 1976) is unable to include the Vietnam War, which is arguably a good example of military incompetence by an advanced nation, or the Gulf War, which is commonly acknowledged to be a " textbook " campaign, an example of how to conduct a war successfully. A survey of global events in the past three decades suggests that incompetent leadership has, by and large, become a less significant problem than it used to be a hundred or even fifty years ago. After the Vietnam war, it seems to this reviewer that administrative incompetence and strategic in-competence have become the leading problems, taking the place of the incompetence of tactical or theatre leadership.
Administrative incompetence refers to the inability of an organisation as a whole to adapt to change and innovation as well as the inability of an organisation to learn from past mistakes. This bureaucratic inefficiency is not caused by any one person, but by organisational culture as a whole. Organisations, like physical masses, possess a kind of inertia that resists change, and it takes a great force to effect significant change. One solution to this is to put in place mechanisms whereby change can be implemented. This has to take place at many levels, from the ground up, as well as from the top down. This reviewer feels that this is one manifestation of incompetence which deserves greater exploration.
Another form of incompetence raised in the book is strategic incompetence. This refers to incompetence at levels beyond the military, occurring when the decisions made in deploying or withdrawing the use of military force. Often this incompetence takes place at the political and national level. Some examples are:
• Sending a military force to a situation without a clear mission or objective.
• Sending a military force into a situation without the legal ability to defend itself or the mandate to fulfill its role effectively.
• Leaving a military force in a situation where it becomes progressively more committed, to the point where it is unable to withdraw safely, or when resources and lives have to be continually poured into a situation with no clear end.
• The lack of political will to sustain losses, or an unrealistic political definition of "acceptable losses".
• Withdrawing a military force before the successful completion of objectives.
Recent notable example like the Somali "mission creep" debacle and the US War in Iraq (OIF) readily come to mind.
Conclusion
Today, with realistic and effective training, innovative use of new doctrines and technology, effective feedback as well as the understanding and effective use of military intelligence, incompetence on a personal and tactical scale can be eliminated. However, the malaise of incompetence in this era arises more from organisational inefficiency and ineffective political direction which can be important topics for another book.
This book is available in the SAFTI MI Library.
RHIP: American Military Cultural "Fuzzy Math" The Civilian Glass ceiling = the military glass wall of inaction Its a common term in civilian life that artificial prejudices exist that block worthy people from advancement to top leadership position. This "glass ceiling" is why America is in such moral, economic and military peril. However, in the military there are many good people who selflessly do not want to advance vertically, THEY JUST WANT TO GET THE JOB DONE AND WIN. They want military excellence to do this, a horizontal motion. However, there is a "glass wall" of inaction in the U.S. military that unfortunately runs by the same me-first, narcissistic vertical rank careerism as civilian society. In an excellent human organization improvements are constantly enacted as problems are courageously and candidly brought up and analyzed. This Teddy Roosevelt-like progressive action represents humans at their best or a "100%" or simply 100 for short. Action = 100 However, in the U.S. military the entire focus is self-centered and competitive instead of selfless and team co-operative. Working Formula: Idea's merit X author's rank = whether action takes place So you have a great idea, say up-armor M113 Gavin light tracks which we have thousands of inexpensively with multiple armor layers to get everyone in the Army out of rubber-tired trucks and into platforms that will fully protect them on the Non-Linear-Battlefield where the enemy can attack in any direction at any time. On a scale of 1-10 its a 9. But you are only an E4 Corporal. The snobby military culture does the following with you and your idea: 9 X 5 = 45 Sorry! That's not a 100% perfect solution for us (you are an unwashed stay in your social caste place!) However, if you have a very bad idea like instead of up-armoring the tracks we have to get a force-wide transformation into war-winning capabilities you instead want to buy expensive thinly armored trucks for a handful of brigades ie; LAV-IIIs without an autocannon turret but packed with micro-managing "mother may, I?" mental gadgets (Stryker) To be charitable, the idea is a 0. The 0 X 10 = 100 Rule But lo and behold, an Army 4-star General like Keane, Shinseki or Schoomaker (0-10) want to do it. After they retire they can work for GDLS, run for Congress and/or get rich; so its a "10" for the corrupt Army General, not real world Army reality or our Soldiers. Plug in the numbers. Bad Idea X General's Want it = Should not happen 0 X 10 = 0 Notice its still a ZERO, a failure---a bad idea---regardless of the author's rank. That's REALITY. But this is the American narcissistic egomaniac, existentialist military where the boss (dictator) is always right, not reality. Re-do your math. Bad Idea X But Generals Want It = We do it 0 X 10 = 100 = Stryker Brigades In fact, the General/Admiral Formula is actually as follows: General Officer Formula ____________(fill-in-the-blank; anything the brass wants) X 10 = what we are going to waste $ on and do Never mind, that when actually put the bad ideas/equipment into reality, 0 X 10 still equals ZERO and fails constantly in tests and operational use. The 0 X 10 = 100 Rule is still in effect. As long as the 10s want something that is a (0) zero its a perfect "100", facts, destroyed lives and dead bodies be damned. Defeat in war can always be blamed on the civilian leadership. Get more Rank? Disappointed, but not disillusioned-----you look at yourself and decide to act on the advice your parents, teachers and coaches told you growing up that if you work hard, have good ideas and succeed you will be promoted and get rank. E = 0 So you start reading everything you can about your organization, volunteer for extra duty, study your profession, better yourself and you gain experience and then stripes. Then, when you plug in your new E5 Sergeant's rank into the equation you think: 9 x 5 = 45....wow I'm almost halfway there.....I only need some people to side with me and gain 55 more points and my improvement will be enacted! WRONG! You quickly learn as an enlistedman you are a blue-collar, worker-bee underclass, unwashed lesser life form than the officer class which runs the U.S. military. E5 doesn't mean squat to them, nor does E6, E7 or E8 or E9. If you get those higher enlisted rank numbers they want you to brow beat lower ranks about petty BS like haircuts, carrying your rucksack with only one strap etc., the big issues and ideas are for the higher life forms to decide. In actuality, in the U.S. military, E = 0. So any idea you propose is seen as follows: 9 X 0 = 0 Sure there are other powerful snobberies in effect like "Light" versus "Heavy" and "Ranger" versus "Non-Ranger" and "Airborne" versus "Leg" or "marine" versus anyone else. Any of these snobberies can turn one or both sides of an action equation to 0. However, rank is the central U.S. military snobbery which other snobberies flow out from. Dejected, but not down, you decide to go to college, get your degree, go to OCS and become an officer so your ideas can get enacted. Don't let him get enough rank! Now as an officer with enlisted experience and lots of good, sound "8" and "9" ideas you would think the following would occur: 9 X 1 = 9...not much but a little bit of success. Its something. However, you are surrounded by officers who have 0 ideas and want nothing to happen to change the status quo for the better (0 as end result). Unless what you want to do is completely in your sphere of responsibility so its not noticed and cannot be vetoed by them (small changes), the following formula takes effect: 9 X 1 = 0 DO NOT CHANGE THE STATUS QUO LIEUTENANT! The working junior officer formula is: Anything you want to do as long as its a 0 X 1 = 0 If you are a good little LT we will promote you and even make you a CPT. Where you will be sent to Iraq and die as a good little co-dependant in a HMMWV truck with inadequate slapped-on armor (Ernie Blanco) or get shot in the head while in a Bradley turret because the Army spends money on Stryker trucks not shields (Chris Cash). If however, you refuse to change your behavior to non-status quo threatening 0s, and still hold out for your hopes for a better military with your 8s and 9s, the status quo Zeros surrounding you will make sure you never get enough rank to get the required 100. Maverick, Moral Reformer X His Rank The Result 9 X 4 = 2d ACR defeats Twalkana Division in Desert Storm despite timid Generals only wanting to scare them away 9 X 5 = 4th Cavalry beats OPFOR at NTC 9 X 6 = Writes book to totally reform/fix the Army WARNING ! DANGER! We must not let him proceed to General Officer's rank! If he does he could quickly go from 0-7 to 0-10 and get his way! Make him retire! RESULT: Colonel Douglas Macgregor (Retired). Perfecting your Ideas? Still not defeated, you think maybe if your ideas were absolutely air-tight in every possible way, all the details perfected they would be so strong they'd have to be enacted. You write books, you design and test actual equipment. You make web pages. You write articles for military journals. You discover old Bradley armor skirts can be cut and applied to M113 Gavins to give them spaced armor at less than 10K per vehicle NOW in a matter of weeks to save lives and win battles in Iraq. Your idea as a "10" A 2LT agrees with you: 10 X 1 = 10 = Sorry, No Action A 1LT agrees with you: 10 X 2 = 20 = Sorry, No Action A CPT agrees with you: 10 X 3 = 30 = Sorry, No Action And so on...you get the idea. Unless the Army's 3 and 4 star generals fully embrace your big idea changes they will always fall short of the 100 mark and not be done. Stacking the deck for victory The horror story described unless corrected will have horrible endings as Vietnam and Iraq prove. The solution here is to REJECT THE CORRUPT AUTHORITARIAN AMERICAN MILITARY FORMULA THAT REFUSES TO BE BASED ON REALITY AND WHAT WORKS BEST REGARDLESS OF THE MESSENGER'S RANK/SOCIAL CLASS POSITION. Its called FREEDOM. Its what America is all about--the best ideas winning when presented on the market place of ideas. But the American military is a corrupt yes-man dictatorship. What are we doing trying to defend FREEDOM with dictatorship? Are we surprised its not working in Afghanistan/Iraq? The BEST WAY TO DEFEND FREEDOM IS WITH FREEDOM. We need a new formula where if an idea is shown to have 7, 8 , 9 and 10 merits it gets done. PERIOD. The people who have the POWER to do this is CONGRESS. If they decide something will be done it gets done regardless of what the 0-10s want. Formula For Military Excellence and National Survival 10 X 100 (Congress) = 1,000 = ACTION Thus, what the reformers must do is serve long enough in the military to realize it lives in a corrupt glass house with glass barriers to military excellence, then go straight to Congress with perfected fixes and have them force them upon the corrupt military, shattering their glass house and forcing them to live again in the same reality we all actually live in on planet earth.
Cause/Effect Logic would dictate Non-Linear Warfare Requires a tracked, armored Army of strong, mature adults, why is it not happening?
There are 3 major reasons:
1. There are larger issues at work here and everyone involved must answer to their own failings
2. The reformers haven't dug deep enough into the problem to provide a comprehensive answer
3. Reformers have not fought hard enough for their ideas
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1. There are larger issues at work here and everyone involved must answer to their own failings
The government a nation gets is a reflection of its people (a). The military (c) is a part of that government (b). If the military is bad, the government is bad. If the government is bad, the people are bad. If you asked the average American if his military was good, he'd say it was great. So would the government and the military. The only veto here is REALITY--the truth apparent to anyone objective is that the U.S. military and government and people of 2004 are all bad. This is a troubling reality we cannot assume goes un-noticed by our enemies and friends alike. Consider that the 270+ million population United States of America loses about 50,000 people killed in car accidents each year and has no public outrage let alone take action to build a high speed train system, having over 500 U.S. Army Soldiers die and over 2,000 wounded and maimed in Iraq go un-noticed is predictable. President Bush is to blame for not declaring war on September 12, 2001 and letting the American consumers go back to peacetime business-as-usual as a few All Volunteer Force (AVF) co-dependants bore the brunt of the fighting and dying in Afghanistan/Iraq. As long as its not their son/daughter dying or being maimed, the "Baby Boomers" (kids spoiled by the over-achieving WWII "Greatest Generation") running America couldn't care less; they crassly remark about how the co-dependants "knew what they were getting themselves into" etc. to earn their military self-worth and college monies. The military's incompetence that caused these preventable casualties is covered up by focusing in on the true courage and patriotism of the men/women of the AVF unable to save themselves from the jam they are in. I was always troubled by the saying; "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"...I had thought it was denouncing true patriotism. Now I understand what the saying means. Patriotism of true heroes can be manipulated as a "smoke screen" to cover-up corruption of those who are scoundrels.
So enter the minority of military reformers who see much of this and want to fix the military.
The problem here is that most are jumping all the way to "c" without fixing "a" and "b".
Bad A + Bad B = Bad C
Somehow reformers want the following to happen:
Bad A + Bad B = Good C (?)
Quick Survey Explanation
If you want to get down to details, the American people today are not actively involved in their government as they were pre-1963; small, secret elites of various types handle national affairs. This condition creates a generalized ignorance of military affairs. Next, the government, does not execute actual civilian oversight of the military, because elected officials are drawn from the ignorant populace and have no clue how the military is screwing up let alone how to fix it which often requires opposing the allegedly "expert" generals. At one time Congress was populated by veterans, this sadly is no longer the case. Its simple cause/effect, sowing/reaping taking place here.
The memoryhole web site explains how we have created a generation of weak compliant "sheeple":
www.thememoryhole.org/edu/school-mission.htm
It's no secret that the U.S. educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's school kids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the U.S. on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system-overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why?
Because they were designed to.
How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing. Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools-the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system. In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:
"Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."
In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly-the future Dean of Education at Stanford-wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board-which funded the creation of numerous public schools-issued a statement which read in part:
"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:
"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:
"The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population-mainly the children of the captains of industry and government-to rise to the level where they could continue running things. This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:
"I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world...that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."
www.johntaylorgatto.com
John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You can order it from Gatto's Website, which also contains the first half of the book online for free. The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent book Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).
So who is "minding the store"?
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and military today itself is composed of essentially volunteers from the generally militarily ignorant and compliant populace; the fact that they are volunteers to possibly die in war also puts their basic character in question; and begs the question of why they alone are minding the nation's defenses? What's in it for them? Weak co-dependancy is the relationship created when people join the SERVICE to be served; to desperately get things for themselves from the military; be it ego, self-validation, money, power over others and social status. A Vietnam combat veteran expounds on why the Army doesn't stay on target with its own technotactical "moral compass"--it simply doesn't fight wars often enough---so in actuality its service members are not at constant risk of death and can turn the military into a weak co-dependant's paradise of time wasting and inbred harassment games. The DoD/military without the full, direct participation of all of its populace/government, and without the constant pressures of war has drifted into a government-subsidized "lifestyle" with its own absurd elitist peacetime agendas that are not directly relevant to actual warfighting. If we don't dismantle the peacetime garrison DoD/military culture, even when we really indeed are at war as we are now, the people in charge defending the fatally flawed "status quo" will continue to "spin" (lie) about DoD/military failings to prevent the common sense, problem/solution "reality check" from taking place. The recent announcement that a majority of U.S. troops will leave Iraq by next June gives the status quo defenders the excuse they need to deny any significant, adaptive reforms because they can say the war time pressures will soon be gone; a crass and cowardly BS excuse that if allowed to take effect will condemn hundreds of our troops to needless death/maimings for the next several months. An Army Vietnam Combat veteran writes:
That means that we have had three times as much effort in developing inertia towards a garrison mentality. Even now, the garrison does not recognize that we are at war. After all, the troops are going to a "rotation in Iraq." It's like another SFOR/KFOR rotation from the Cleveland Accords.
I was once telling a fellow CAS3 instructor about my failings as a garrison
trooper and how I knew I could lead troops in combat, but that I couldn't
make it in garrison. I said it was a good thing that I got out in 1970
because I would have been rifted along with all of the other 'Combat
Commanders.' His comment and he was not being snide or derisive but simply realistic, was 'the Army can make combat commanders at a dime a dozen, but they value the garrison commander higher.'
This, I am afraid is true.
The Army exists to maintain its existence, and then to fight the country's wars. If the Army didn't exist, it couldn't fight. This is the lesson of the Marshall Transformation. Between WWI and WWII, the Army almost ceased to exist, and that's when the Army's battlecry, much like Israel's became, 'Never again.'"
So despite the Army's pre-occupation with garrison games, the reformers....somehow along the way stumbled onto truths that a nation needs an effective military BEFORE THERE IS A WAR and seeing the state of things decide they want to fix it---but without addressing problems A and B. To say problems A and B are "in the realm of politics not germane to the military reformer" is the knee-jerk reply and invalid. All fields of life are inter-connected. As I was reading MacGregor's book, I asked myself; "Let's say for a second tomorrow I wiggled my nose and everything MacGregor wanted came true as he wanted it?" For the sake of seeing a larger truth, let's assume his reforms are the good situation we want the "Good C" end-state to be.
This would be the situation:
Despite Bad A + Bad B = we get a Good C [Does not compute]
If possible, what the reformers would be doing is giving the American people and their government a good military they don't deserve. Instead of alerting them that they themselves are bad and needing change themselves, we would be propping up their bad behavior with an artificially created, short-term good result. In the long run, we would actually be hindering their life's character development by not having them face the penalty for their own chosen ignorance which is military failures in war.
So for reason #1 alone I don't think the military reformers have been getting divine help because they currently leave the American people and their government "off-the-hook" of causation blame in their reform calculations. There is a reason we are alive here on earth; there are even larger issues at work here than even the very tragic lives being destroyed by military incompetence which are the symptoms not the disease. God has given us this difficult situation to solve completely, we must stamp out both the disease and their horrific symptoms. A difficult task, indeed, but one we must do. Highly regarded military sociologist, Charlie Moskos writes that America's military is less effective because the full representation of America's society is NOT involved in America's common defense:
Our Will To Fight Depends On Who Is Willing To Die
By Charles Moskos
The flag-draped coffins coming back from Afghanistan raise again the question of our country's resolve to wage a war with mounting casualties. So far casualties have not dented our determination to continue the war on terrorism. But what if we suffer greater losses on future battlefields such as Iraq or the Philippines? The record of the 1990s indicates that our national leaders might be so worried, rightly or wrongly, about public reaction that in certain situations they might put casualty avoidance over mission accomplishment.
This was not always the case. During the Vietnam War casualties mounted into the tens of thousands before what could be considered an anti-war movement evolved and our national leaders began to contemplate an exit strategy. Indeed, America's lower threshold for casualties first appeared long after the Vietnam War ended. A pivotal event was the turn-around in Somalia following the October 1993 deaths of 18 American Soldiers in the "Black Hawk Down" firefight in Mogadishu. A similar landmark was the abrupt American evacuation from Beirut following the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks.
But why has the threshold of casualty acceptance changed? Certainly the small number of combat losses in recent military operations contributes to the lower tolerance for casualties. The invasions of Grenada and Panama were over within a matter of days and incurred just 18 and 23 American deaths, respectively. Even with over a half-million troops in place during the Gulf War, almost miraculously, we suffered only 148 combat dead. In the 1994 Haiti intervention only one American Soldier was killed by hostile fire. No American Soldier has been killed in the now five-year-long peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.
Most remarkably, no American casualties were suffered in the 1999 war over Kosovo. And even in Afghanistan, the low number of American dead has given us what must be a first in war coverage -- personalized stories on each of the casualties.
The increasing reluctance to accept casualties indicates that something has fundamentally changed in American society. One school of thought holds that a declining birth rate and resultant smaller families makes the loss of children in war fighting much more traumatic than in an era with large families. This explanation has a certain surface plausibility, but what are we to make of the fact that the birth rate in the United States is higher than in the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic willingness to suffer -- as well as cause -- casualties has become legendary?
The most frequently voiced explanation of casualty acceptance is that the public will not accept combat deaths unless the national interest -- sometimes the adjective "vital" is interjected -- is clearly at stake. On this point commentators are virtually unanimous. Intervening in a civil war in Lebanon or in clan warfare in Somalia did not meet the criterion of national interest. Hence, our quick departure once the going got tough.
From economic and strategic viewpoints, the Gulf War more easily fit, though not perfectly, into the framework of American national interest. The Gulf War, however, was not a true test of the national interest theory because we have little idea how Americans would have reacted had the combat deaths been in the thousands rather than in the low hundreds. In any event, there surely can be no gainsaying that the defeat and capture of al Qaeda's terrorists is a war of necessity.
But all of this is wide of the mark. The answer to the question of what are national interests is not found in the cause itself, but in who is willing to die for that cause. Only when the privileged classes perform military service does the country define the cause as worth young people's blood. Only when elite youth are on the firing line do war losses become more acceptable. This explains the seeming paradox of why we have a lower acceptance of combat casualties with a volunteer military than we had with a draft army.
History in this century supports the argument that casualty acceptance correlates wit
The Army's "Transformation"
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20040121/ts_usatoday/armysnewbattlesigningupsoldiers
Dear Mr. Loper,
Carlton continues:
U.S. Army Plans Four-Year Boost of 30,000 Forces
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=1&u=/ap/20040114/ap_on_re_mi_ea/military_suicides
Unprotected troops in Iraq committing suicide and deserting
Sat, November 15, 2003
www.nuvo.net/archive/2003/11/05/a_new_underground_railroad.html
305 Madison Ave., Suite 1166
New York, NY 10165
Phone: (212) 713-5657
email: info@refuseandresist.org
Bush is indeed in trouble.
Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004 6:21 p.m. EST
If we truly value our Soldiers (that's with a capital "S") as "men and women of the year" we would get them what they need pronto.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20040121/ts_usatoday/headofarmyreserveplansbigchanges
Military Incomptence is not a new disease; Dixon backs up everything I said. I'm going to get the book to see what fixes he proposes. Choong is full of shit pooh-poohing that we do not have military incompetence today with our "modern" armies. These "modern" militaries are still completely composed of fallen human nature human beings and subject to the same corruptions of the past.
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon
Reviewed by CPT Adrian Choong
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
"Early in my military career, when I was a CPT (A 1LT with 24 months service), I got out of the Army because I thought that the Army would never be what I wanted it to be. Later, when I graduated to the level of understanding about the Army, I learned, realized, absorbed, whatever, that the Army was going to be what it took for the Army to survive. It's as if the Army is a giant organism, and it feeds itself to live. If you take all the years of organizational existence of the Army (216), and divide by the numbers of years that we have actually been mobilized to war (1776 - 8, 1812 - 2, 1836 -1, 1861 - 4, 1898 - 2, 1917 - 2, 1941 -4, 1951 -2, 1961 -14, 1991 -1, 2001 ~ ?) I come up with 40. Now there could be more, if you count the Indian Wars and other skirmishes and things, but not more than 50. So what do you come up with? 50/216 or less than 25% of the time.
Wall Street Journal
March 20, 2002