Archive for the 'Department of Defense' Category

Red State:

The authors [at Breaking Defense dot com] go on to propose a solution. The USAF should create a major incentive program that would keep those majors and lieutenant colonels in the Air Force and available for flight duty if needed.

I think the authors aren’t looking at the real problem. If a lack of incentives were the problem, the officers they are trying to retain would never have made it to this point in their Air Force career. The problem is that mid-career aviators have been told that they aren’t wanted. By told, I don’t mean it has been hinted at; I mean they have seen it in writing from the three-star general who runs Air Force recruiting. This is from Major General Ed Thoma, USAF recruiting poohbah, in October 2020.

Red State citing Breaking Defense:

We simply can no longer afford for significant segments of our society to be underrepresented in our U.S. Air Force or our newest branch, the U.S. Space Force.

To be clear, the Air and Space Forces are not setting quotas based on race or gender. We will, however, focus intensely and concentrate our efforts in traditionally underserved communities. It wouldn’t be legal or productive to hold recruiters accountable for bringing in a certain number of recruits from various demographic groups. But if we see that we’re not hitting recruiting targets that mirror the qualified population in those categories, we will adjust to concentrate on areas where we can get a more representative balance in our applicant pool. To use a fishing analogy, recruiters must not only cast a wide net but ensure we are spending time in the right fishing holes.

And by measuring those targets, we’ll employ the old management axiom that what gets measured gets done. And we’ll get it done.

While we are meeting or exceeding nearly all demographic targets in our enlisted ranks, inside our cockpits is where we have the greatest disparities and opportunities for improvement. In all, 86 percent of our aviators are white males. Less than 3 percent of our fighter pilots are females. This is why we established a detachment within Air Force recruiting two years ago charged with improving diversity for those who wear flight suits. The mission of Detachment 1 is to bring a singular focus to recruiting qualified women and minorities who have not always felt they belonged.

So, the Air Force doesn’t have quotas, just demographic targets. Well, that’s different.

Red State again:

The USAF has responded to the challenge by eliminating prior flight training as a “plus” on pilot selection. They found that such training favored applicants who could afford private flight lessons. It has also announced that it intends to reduce the number of white officers from 80% to 67.5%.

The article gets even worse from there. Read it all.

Also: Twilio announces 11% of employees will lose jobs in ‘Anti-Racist’ layoffs

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson announced in a message to all employees that 11% of its workforce would be laid off, stating that they made the layoffs through an “Anti-Racist” and “Anti-Oppression” lens.

The San Francisco-based corporate communications company CEO said in the message to employees that the layoffs are “wise and necessary.”

“I’m not going to sugarcoat things. A layoff is the last thing we want to do, but I believe it’s wise and necessary. Twilio has grown at an astonishing rate over the past couple years. It was too fast, and without enough focus on our most important company priorities. I take responsibility for those decisions, as well as the difficult decision to do this layoff,” Lawson said.

Lawson said that company officials examined which roles were most aligned with its four priorities, but said that the layoffs were carried out through an anti-racism lens.

“As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company,” Lawson wrote. “Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

H/T Instapundit

The silly and trivial Mark Esper offers solutions.

The fact is the pool of Americans aged 17-24 who are qualified and interested in serving continues to shrink. When I was secretary of the Army in 2018, 71% of these 34 million young people could not meet the military’s entry requirements due mostly to obesity, drug use, physical and mental health problems, and criminal misconduct. Four years later, that number is even higher. Further, of the 23% eligible to serve today, another 10% don’t meet the military’s academic standards. Worse, of the 3.5 million young Americans remaining, only 9% (~320,000) have a proclivity to serve. A nation of 332 million people should do better than that.

It’s even worse than that.  Readiness is at an all-time low, and the existing enlistment mostly treats the military as a jobs program.

Then he gives his solution.

The scope and scale of these trends are beyond the ability of the Pentagon to remedy. There are actions the services can and are taking, but these only address the problem at the margins. Because the ability of the military to defend the country depends directly on a sizable force of top-notch volunteers, this is a national challenge that must be addressed at the highest levels.

This means the White House and Congress must work together to reverse the underlying trends. They could begin by standing up a bipartisan commission of esteemed leaders, much like President Richard Nixon did in 1969 when he decided to end conscription. This time, rather than creating the AVF, the new panel’s mission would be to save it. As such, commissioners must focus on the key issues: increasing the pool of young people qualified to serve and raising their interest in doing so.

For reasons that also extend beyond the military’s needs, the commission should look at ways to improve the health and fitness of America’s youth, review and update eligibility requirements, expand JROTC nationally, create new ways for civilians to interact with their military brethren, eliminate misconceptions about military life, and ensure recruiters unfettered access to high schools across America. Meanwhile, the Pentagon must steer away from lowering standards, reducing the size of the military, or creating hollow combat formations. We must field the force we need to win our nation’s wars, not take shortcuts.

Get a commission.  Make a law.  Engage in talky talk.  Make people believe lies about the situation.  Convince them of things that aren’t true.

Nothing at all about a woke military, gender neutral pronouns, women in combat, and nothing about discipline.

Nothing about letting the Marines do what Marines do – sending recruits or boots to the “room of pain” if they screw up.  The focus is on exoskeletal machines to assist in carrying heavy loads, giving them better weapons, manufacturing drones for stand-off warfare, and making sure transgender celebrations are had by all at the Pentagon.  Nothing at all about the fact that the generals want to train the military to fight Americans.

So the beat goes on, and the military continues to decline because no patriot wants to join a force that kills Americans.

So sad that anyone would float stupid ideas like Esper did.

Source.

These are tough times for military recruiting. Almost across the board, the armed forces are experiencing large shortfalls in enlistments this year — a deficit of thousands of entry-level troops that is on pace to be worse than any since just after the Vietnam War. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons with too few people to function.

But longer-term demographic trends are also taking a toll. Less than a quarter of young American adults are physically fit to enlist and have no disqualifying criminal record, a proportion that has shrunk steadily in recent years. And shifting attitudes toward military service mean that now only about one in 10 young people say they would even consider it.

To try to counter those forces, the military has pushed enlistment bonuses as high as $50,000, and is offering “quick ship” cash of up to $35,000 for certain recruits who can leave for basic training in 30 days. To broaden the recruiting pool, the service branches have loosened their restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards. In June, the Army even briefly dropped its requirement for a high school diploma, before deciding that was a bad move and rescinding the change.

The Army is the largest of the armed forces, and the recruiting shortfall is hitting it the hardest. As of late June, it had recruited only about 40 percent of the roughly 57,000 new soldiers it wants to put in boots by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Even with that much cash, there’s still a shortfall of recruits, and the ones they’re getting stand a larger chance of being subpar.

But they’re being dishonest about why.  This does a better job of explaining it.

Imagine you are an eighteen-year-old, white, Christian male in Georgia with a family history of military service. As you progressed through your teen years, you watched Confederate statues being torn down and military bases being renamed, endless media and elitist demonization of your culture as racist and deplorable and backwards, and military and civilian leadership that thinks diversity and inclusion (i.e. fewer white men) is best thing since sliced bread. Would you volunteer? Identity politics works both ways. Trash my tribe and I won’t associate with you, let alone risk my life. It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that those expressing a “great deal of trust and confidence in the military” dropped from 70 percent in 2018 to 45 percent today.

The long-term health of the all-volunteer force that began in 1973 now appears to be in serious jeopardy. The general public’s declining connection and trust in the nation and its institutions paired with the elites’ incessant culture war targeting the very Americans who traditionally served in the highest numbers spells trouble.

Combine this with some 60,000 enlisted men and officers who don’t want to take the debilitating jab, who may soon be fired, and it all makes for a terrible situation of the U.S. military.

This is basically very easy to understand.  Patriots don’t want to serve in a woke military.  The woke don’t want to serve in a patriotic military where instead of job training they may get sent to fight in whatever latest foreign misadventure the rulers see fit.

It’s all very logical and predictable and by design.

Military.com.

Some 40,000 National Guard and 22,000 Reserve soldiers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 are no longer allowed to participate in their military duties, also effectively cutting them off from some of their military benefits, Army officials announced Friday.

“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” an Army spokesperson said in a statement.

At this point even semi-literate people know what’s happening and what has occurred.  Steve Kirsch observes that:

1. a 6.6% rate of heart injury (>10M Americans)
2. 2.7% are unable to work after being vaccinated (>5M Americans),
3. 6.3% had to be hospitalized (>10M Americans)
4. you were more likely to die from COVID if you’ve taken the vaccine.
5. Almost as many (77.4%) households lost someone from the vaccines as from COVID. If you believe that 1M people in the US have died from COVID, then this survey indicates that ~750,000 people died from the vaccine (10.18/13.15*1M) with a 95% confidence of at least 600,000 deaths.

Dr. David Martin thinks this is only the beginning.

Dr. David Martin has a deep medical science and investment resume. Dr Martin also runs a company (M·CAM International) that finances cutting edge innovation worldwide.  He is also one of the key people seeking justice in lawsuits suing medical companies and the federal government involved in delivering the so-called vaccines for CV19.  In simple terms, according to Dr. Martin, the CV19 vaccines are “bioweapons.”  Big Pharma and the government knew it and also knew it would cause massive deaths and permanent injuries.  Dr. Martin says, “It’s going to get much worse. . . . It is not a Corona virus vaccine.  It is a spike protein instruction to make the human body produce a toxin. . . . The fact of the matter is the injections are an act of bioweapons and bioterrorism.  They are not a public health measure.  The facts are very simple.  This was premeditated. . . . This was a campaign of domestic terror to get the public to accept the universal vaccine platform using a known biological weapon.  That is their own words and not my interpretation.”

How many will die from the CV19 bioweapons?  Dr. Martin says, “By their own estimate, they are looking for 700 million people globally, and that would put the U.S. participation in that of the injected population as 75 million to 100 million people. . . . There are a lot of reasons why they hope it will be between now and 2028 because there is this tiny little glitch of the illiquidity of the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs.  So, the fewer recipients of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the better.  Not surprisingly, the recommendation was people over the age of 65 were the first ones to get injected.”

Dr. Martin thinks the catastrophic effects of the CV19 injections will hit the medical industry soon.  Dr. Martin explains, “The dirty secret is . . . there are a lot of pilots having micro vascular and clotting problems, and that keeps them out of the cockpit, which is a good place to not have them if they are going to throw a clot for a stroke or a heart attack.  The problem is we are going to see that exact same phenomenon in the healthcare industry and at a much larger scale.  So, we now have, along with the actual problem . . . of people getting sick and people dying, we actually have that targeting the healthcare industry writ large.  Which means we are going to have nurses and doctors who are going to be among the sick and dead.  That also means the sick and the dying are also not going to get care.”

The full interview can be found here.

I hope and pray that this is all wrong.  I fear that it is not, and I know men and women who have suffered from the shots.  And they sure are going to an awful lot of trouble to convince people that health problems like heart disease, arrythmia, and all sorts of killer diseases are part of every day life and caused by hot nights, solar flares, gardening, and a host of other activities in which men and women have been engaged for millennia.

In the mean time, there are ~60,000 Marines, Soldiers, Airmen and Sailors who apparently won’t be on this list of sufferers.

News.

A blue-ribbon commission has recommended new names for nine Army bases named after Confederate leaders, including Fort Bragg, which will be recommended to be renamed Fort Liberty, the panel disclosed Tuesday.

The panel has recommended that another eight Army bases be renamed for a diverse group of individuals with ties to the Army.

ABC News was first to report the full list of recommended names by the Congressional Naming Commission created by Congress to suggest name changes by 2023 for U.S. military installations named after Confederate generals and leaders.

While Fort Bragg is the only base suggested as being renamed after a concept the other suggestions for the other eight Army bases include a diverse group of individuals with ties to Army history.

If approved, the nine bases will include the first to be ever named for women or African Americans, a National Guard facility in Puerto Rico already had the distinction of being the first ever named for a Latino.

The other bases to be renamed are Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Rucker in Alabama, Fort Polk in Louisiana, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia and Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia.

The panel has recommended that Fort Hood, Texas, be renamed after Richard E. Cavazos, the first Latino to reach the rank of a four-star general in the Army.

Fort Gordon, Georgia, will be renamed after Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Army general who led all allied forces in Europe during World War II and later became president.

Fort Lee, Virginia, will be named after two individuals: Arthur Gregg, a former three-star general involved in logistics — the only living individual for whom a base will be named — and Charity Adams, the first African-American woman to be an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Good Lord.

I ask again, if you’re still in the U.S. military, why?

Seen at The Gun Feed, this analysis by Daniel Greenfield.

By the time Barack Obama left office, every branch of the military was smaller than it had been on September 11. But the change in size concealed the true impact of America’s most left-wing president in undermining our national security and weakening us in the face of our enemies.

“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” Obama famously boasted. He used the pen to unleash a blizzard of executive orders and memorandums. Some led to outraged protests, but some of his most devastating penned assaults on our nation’s military flew under the radar.

One of those took place during the end of his last year in office. His memorandum, “Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce”, created the woke military of the Biden administration by putting identity politics, diversity quotas, and political indoctrination at the heart of the military’s mission.

Obama had always resented the military. Even former General McChrystal, an Obama loyalist fired for describing his boss a little too aptly in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter, described him as “uncomfortable and intimidated” by generals. But Obama’s parting shot at the military cut the generals down to size by transforming them into community organizers.

His order redefined diversity as the military’s “greatest asset” and reinvented national security as a system for maximizing employment diversity by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and every identity politics metric, but not the military metrics that truly mattered, readiness, competence, and a willingness to wage war in defense of the homeland.

Along with transforming the military into another quota-based federal employment agency in which skills and capability mattered much less than being a disabled transgender Eskimo, the order also demanded that national security agencies should make “implicit or unconscious bias” training mandatory for “senior leadership and management positions”. Divisions that didn’t earn sufficiently high IQ (Inclusion Quotient) scores would also be hit with bias training.

Implicit bias training is a form of political indoctrination which asserts that all white people are racist. Its sessions force participants into accepting its radical racial worldview or be treated as obstacles to the new organizational mission. Implicit bias training has succeeded in forcing out talented executives from corporations and officers from the military, replacing them with political activists and bootlickers cowardly enough to repeat Marxist dogma for the sake of their careers.

Obama’s memorandum led to the expansion of implicit bias within the military such as Army Secretary Eric Fanning’s infamous Directive 2017-06 ordering mandatory implicit bias training for “soldiers and employees in senior leadership and management positions” that was protested by chaplains for infringing on religious freedom. While the Trump administration later ordered a ban on such abusive training in the military, by then Obama’s order had long since been circulating in its cultural and organizational bloodstream, and was quickly restarted by Biden.

Biden’s first executive orders not only rescinded the ban, but doubled down on making the military more woke, more racist towards white Americans, and more incapable than ever. The new equity push went even further by attributing any failure to meet racial, gender, and other identity politics quotas to the grand hoax of “systemic racism” –a practice outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meeting these quotas became the foremost task of senior leadership.

[ … ]

By Obama’s second term, male Army ROTC cadets were being forced to march in women’s high heels. The humiliating woke rituals, whose purpose is not the stated one of inclusion, but of exclusion, of demeaning and destroying the morale of the traditional fighting man, continue to hollow out the military readiness of armed services waging a culture war against themselves.

Obama’s purge ousted 197 flag officers in five years.  And there is also this.  “Gen. Carter Ham [was] was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.”

I always knew that, and I’m certain that General Ham was forced to sign an NDA in order to retain retirement benefits.

But here’s the problem with all of that.  Who followed Obama in the Oval office and issued ridiculous Tweets into the wee hours of the morning rather than studying the CVs and resumes of the people around him, and the history of this purge and how to reverse its effects in the military?

Who wore his ego and feelings on his shoulders rather than hid his true intent (like Obama) while acting under cover to effect proper change back to a more effective and less woke military?

If you cannot recall the name of the president after Obama, perform a Google search.  Why should he be given a second chance to screw up his four years as badly as he did the first go-around?

Obama had the guts to fire 197 flag officers to effect his vision.  Trump issued some Tweets and disbanded the Integrity in Election Commission he formed himself.  Who was more effective?

Military Times.

Back in 2016, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had warned that the Army needed to be ready to fight in megacities. But training still falls at mostly the squad, platoon and sometimes company level.

I missed this when it came out.  So what on earth persuaded the man to believe that the U.S. military is capable of logistically supporting and sustaining operations across the pond in “megacities?”  We couldn’t even do it in Afghanistan.  A few trucks blown up at the Torkham Crossing would shut down supply lines to Afghanistan for days.

Wait.  What group of megacities is he talking about?

The Federalist.

Four military officers who describe themselves as “researchers” at the Army’s highly respected Cyber Institute have published an article that adds to the growing concern about the ongoing politicization of the military. Published by the military’s National Defense University (NDU), their article purports to analyze the dangers of misinformation and disinformation and to advise the Biden administration about how to counter it.

The article’s authors all are military officers and at least two are professors at West Point. They say their article “is written in response to the Capitol insurrection.”

[ … ]

The Cyber Center authors’ thesis is that the “insurrection” at the Capitol building on Jan. 6 was a mortal danger to the country that was caused by disinformation, namely the idea that the 2020 presidential election was rigged or stolen. The “insurrection” spawned by this alleged disinformation then becomes the justification for the authors’ proposed government censorship (although they eschew the term) of free speech.

Uh huh.

What happened that ridiculous day wasn’t an insurrection.  They will witness an insurrection if they attempt to confiscate firearms.

I have a suggestion.  Perhaps these “professors” could focus on fire and maneuver warfare and go get a combat action ribbon (or whatever the Army calls that).  Otherwise, they’re just wasting time.

As for the Marine Corps, what was once a respected institution now allows females into the infantry officer’s course at Quantico, and also allows females into the infantry battalions.

This piece at business insider discusses the U.S. Marines versus the Royal Marines, and why the USMC lost in mock battles recently to the Royal Marines.

They lost because they no longer know who they are.  They began to change right before my youngest son got out (which was the reason for his having left), and he never looked back.  Today they don’t know whether they are “Soldiers of the Sea,” an Expeditionary Fighting Force, cyber warriors, or what.

They got too heavy, and experimented with the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, an idiotic idea if I’ve ever heard one.  I recommended at the time (beginning more than a decade ago) that the Marine Corps scale down the size of the force, focus more on pay, retention, specialized training, and air and sea insertion for special operations.

They have too many stupid people in the USMC today, and thus none of that advice obtained.  So any comparison between the USMC and Royal Marines suffers from the USMC not knowing who they are or want to be, wanting to be too big and too heavy, treating its Marines like crap, being [stupidly] proud of the fact that they get the short end of the stick on training dollars from the DoD, and recruiting the wrong sort of people.

Among the “wrong sort of people” are females who believe they can do anything a male can do.

As for USMA at West Point, they were lost a very long time ago.  If I were hiring today, I wouldn’t be any more impressed at a degree from the USMA than my local 2-year community college.

Via Ammoland, this report.

The Biden administration is rolling out a new initiative aimed at reducing suicides by gun and combating the significant increases in suicides by members of the military and veterans.

The White House is announcing the new plan on Tuesday, which officials say is an unprecedented focus by the federal government on reducing the risk of suicide through awareness and training campaigns and new regulations to increase the availability of gun storage products.

The plan calls for federal agencies, including the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and the Department of Transportation’s emergency medical services office to create public awareness campaigns to encourage safer storage of guns and training for counselors, crisis responders and others.

The effort also includes the Justice Department finalizing a rule that was first proposed in 2016 and would require stores that sell firearms to also offer secure gun storage and safety devices, the White House said.

John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, commended the administration’s efforts on gun storage, saying they were “blazing a new path” to keep guns away from people who could be a danger to themselves.

In 2019, firearms were the most common method used in suicide deaths in the United States, accounting for nearly 24,000 deaths, or a little over half of all suicide deaths, according to federal health statistics. Experts say many people who take their lives using guns typically have quick access to firearms and have tended to be gun owners or their family members.

As part of the plan, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will distribute a guide for firearms dealers that spells out both safety steps that are required under the law and additional steps the federal government recommends. The guide will also detail the Justice Department’s focus on prosecuting gun crimes and violations of federal firearms laws.

The administration said ATF would also “seek to revoke the licenses of dealers the first time that they violate federal law,” with limited exceptions for “extraordinary circumstances.” Those violations would include selling guns to someone who can’t legally own them, failing to run a background check, falsifying federal records or refusing to cooperate in required ATF inspections.

The federal government will also create maps to help people find places to safely store guns outside of their homes, officials said. Officials will also expand efforts within the Department of Veterans Affairs focused on suicide prevention and safety planning, along with training for family members of people who could be at higher risk for suicide, administration officials said.

The Department of Defense’s annual calendar year suicide report released in September showed that 580 military personnel, including 384 active duty service members, died by suicide in 2020. The suicide rate among active duty service members has statistically increased since 2015, the report said. There’s been no statistical change for reservists and National Guard members during the same timeframe, according to the report.

What’s not mentioned in this article is how pressure will be brought to bear on the VA to ensure that veterans don’t have access to firearms.  If a veteran has been diagnosed with PTSD, he is already presumably on the NICS list as a prohibited individual.

This just makes things harder for the veteran.  A firearm for self defense is useless for self defense when it’s not within reach.  Besides, if Biden cared about the physical and mental health of veterans, he wouldn’t be pushing a vaccine mandate on the defense department.  None of this has anything to do with care for the veteran.  It’s about disarmament.

To be sure, suicide is awful, but suicide doesn’t obviate the right and duty of self defense among those who are not predispositioned to this awful thing.