Archive for the 'Department of Defense' Category

From John Guandolo at Understanding The Threat.

This morning, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Milley, U.S. Army, publicly came against the President of the United States and apologized for being with President Trump when he walked to St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. and held up a bible.

This behavior should be understood as an act of treason and sedition as General Milley’s comments are not only regurgitations of communist narratives, but directly contradict his duty under his oath to crush insurrections against the United States as the senior U.S. military leader under the direction of the President.  However, General Milley is clueless about the communist and Islamic Counter-State operations in America which makes him ignorant of the very things he is required to know under professional standards of conduct.

Milley’s comments come on the heals of similar traitorous remarks by General Mattis, Admiral Mullen, and Secretary of Defense Esper.

UTT’s recommendation prior to President Trump’s inauguration was that every military officer with stars on their shoulders be fired.  A Lieutenant Colonel leading the miltary services could not possibly make things worse than general officers who were and are at the helm as America lost wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere because they were too unprofessional to actually know or even try to know the enemy.

Firing all of the generals would have been a good start, as well as never hiring Kelly or Mattis to do their jobs.

News from the land of controllers.

Nearly 10% of asymptomatic Bostonians have coronavirus antibodies, and more than 2% of that same apparently healthy group actually currently has the virus, according to the results of a sampling study done in several Boston neighborhoods.

“In conclusion, approximately 1 in 10 residents in this study have developed antibodies and approximately 1 in 40 currently asymptomatic individuals are positive for COVID-19 and potentially infectious,” the city said in a news release Friday morning.

The study, by Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Public Health Commission, involved what the city says is a representative sample of asymptomatic Bostonians, testing 750 residents and city employees over the past couple of weeks in East Boston, Roslindale and Dorchester for COVID-19 and the antibodies that suggest that a person already had it — and is now potentially immune to reinfection.

Oh, I suspect way more than that have already been exposed, infected with it, shed it, and had no symptoms at all and didn’t even know they had it.

While I’m at it, I’ve seen reports that the U.S. military is planning to reject applicants who were at one time diagnosed as having had SARS-CoV-2.  So if someone has gotten it, shed it, never even knew they had it, and has the antibodies for it, the U.S. military plans on rejecting them.

That sounds profoundly stupid to me, but right in line with the stupidity I usually associate with the Department of Defense.

From a reader, Army.mil.

Chaplain Shabazz: The issues involving religious accommodation during the month of Ramadan typically occur in three areas: training exercises in the field; physical training; and proper hydration. Commanders can help Muslims Soldiers fulfill their religious requirements during Ramadan by accommodating them in a couple of ways.

First, when possible, commanders can allow Muslim Soldiers to participate in light duty when on an exercise or in the field, as opposed to strenuous duty.

Second, they can grant liberal leave during part or all of the 30-day fasting period, and grant practicing Muslim Soldiers three days of leave for Eid-Al-Fitr, the celebration that ends the 30-day fast of Ramadan.

Third, commanders can exempt Muslim Soldiers from physical training or grant them limited time outdoors during the fasting period. It’s important to keep in mind that Soldiers will spend approximately 16 hours with no food or water during daylight hours, so ensuring proper hydration is a serious concern.

Finally, commanders can allow observing Muslim Soldiers time to observe the five daily prayers at a Mosque or at a designated prayer location during this time.

HuffPo.

The Pentagon took steps on Wednesday to give individual troops greater latitude to wear turbans, head scarfs, yarmulkes and other religious clothing with their uniforms, but advocacy groups said the new policy fell short of what they were seeking.

Question: If you tried really hard to come up with ideas that would break unit cohesion, tear asunder the readiness and morale of the U.S. military, and create a circus freak show atmosphere, what would you do any differently than what they’re doing (and have been doing with gender bending)?

The Epoch Times.

Under the simple-minded President George W. Bush and the feckless President Barack Obama, as well as the peacetime generals whose conduct of the war will live in infamy, the U.S. military has been subjected to the greatest humiliation in its long and storied history.

It should have been asked to finish—decisively, quickly, and definitively, just as British Gen. Herbert Kitchener crushed the Mahdist forces at Omdurman in 1898—the conflict that began on 9/11; instead it has been turned into an instrument of “social justice,” a meals-on-wheels, three-cups-of-tea aggregation of sitting ducks, one held in open, murderous contempt by an armed rabble of primitive, superstitious, dog-hating goatherds.

Yep.  That sounds about right.  I had suggested that they drop Marines and Rangers at the border with Pakistan and let the Northern Alliance drive them to their deaths as they tried to cross the border, putting them in a pincer.  Then they could have put the Northern Alliance in charge and left.

Instead, they wanted anti-American Pashtuns in charge, and tried to test out their “three cups of tea” social workers with guns counterinsurgency bullshit.  And American boys perished for it.

And don’t even get me started on Iraq, or how they let the lawyers fight Americans as the Americans tried to stay alive.  There will be many men who stand before God and answer for the deaths of Americans on fields of battle in foreign misadventures.

It works.  The Marines and Soldiers love it.  It’s a life saver.  It’s the greatest close air support aircraft ever built. It isn’t a “fifth generation warfare” F-35, so the flybois don’t want it.

Of course.

This is a long but good interview.  If you don’t have time for the entire video, watch 1:27 – 1:34.

We all know that there were other assets to respond to Benghazi, and we’ve covered that in the past.  But here we learn straight from the guy who was there after the event that he had a “full platter” of potential responses for the perps, including kill-capture.

He was told that the political climate was “too sensitive” and we weren’t going to do anything.  Presumably because the cover-up (i.e., blaming it on a ridiculous video) was still in progress by the Obama administration.  You also learn from him that it was often said that there were no dangers in Libya prior to that event, and he clearly says he got the sitreps and knew there were many threats.

Threats that left the U.S. unprepared, all by intent.

Via David Codrea, this kid thinks he knows something.

Perhaps the biggest factor that stands between modern America and another civil war is obvious: the armed forces. Prior to the American Civil War in 1860, the U.S. military consisted of a mere 16,000 men. As the civil war broke out, one in five of the U.S. Army’s officers resigned to join the confederacy, leaving the armed forces too small and powerless to put a stop to what was occurring. Such a thing would be impossible today with how vast and expansive America’s military is now. The groups vowing to rally around Trump if he should be impeached, such as the Oath Keepers and United Constitutional Patriots, are unauthorized and scarce in number, making them a minor threat to America’s military.

Oh.  Is that how it works?  “Unathorized?”  In other news, the democrat house is spending time on making sure the U.S. military is a welcoming place for folks confused about their gender.

Nothing says “Thanks for your service” like ignoring the needs of U.S. troops. But apparently, that’s the most our military can hope for under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) majority. While the president tries to deal with conflicts around the globe, contain the threats from ISIS and rogue nations like North Korea, you’ll be relieved to know that the House is hard at work on its most important mission: ushering into the military people who are in conflict over their biological sex. And they’re willing to tie up the most important bill of the year to do it.

In yet more recent news, the U.S. military has been buying Chinese-made cameras for their rifles.

Federal agents refrained from naming the Chinese manufacturers involved. But over the years, Aventura received shipments from more than 40 different suppliers in China. The network surveillance equipment also suffered from publicly known vulnerabilities documented by the Department of Homeland Security that could pave the way for remote takeovers.

Well then.  I guess the Chinese can watch while the U.S. military tries to keep the peace across 3.8 million square miles of land in the case of any trouble.  That is, unless they’re not using rifles because they’re in mutilation surgery.

News and views.

Do  you remember when Obama started purging the upper echelons in the Pentagon, sometimes under cover of law, sometimes under cover of darkness? After the pullout from Iraq, Obama had a little list of those people he didn’t want to see serving anymore in America’s military. Some he fired outright. Others he treated so shabbily that they had no option put to leave.

Just in the first five years of his presidency, Obama fired almost 200 military officers:

[W]hat has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture. We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham. He 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.

Rear Adm. Chuck Gaouette, commander of the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, was relieved in October 2012 for disobeying orders when he sent his group on Sept. 11 to “assist and provide intelligence for” military forces ordered into action by Gen. Ham.

[ … ]

Retired Army Major General Paul Vallely: The White House protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into fast and furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.

I know some readers have brought this up in the past, but it’s good to see some folks have gone public with Obama’s treachery.

One interesting factoid for me is that I’d never seen in publication before that General Carter Ham was relieved because he disagreed with the decision not to mount a rescue.

Benghazi is on the Obama administration’s shoulders.  God will hold them accountable in eternity.  They are murderers.

Via this piece, I was sent to this piece.

When John Bolton took over for McMaster in April 2018 and began appointing his own defense and foreign policy team, Mattis stopped receiving transcripts of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, the kinds of sensitive conversations that are now at the center of the House’s impeachment inquiry.

Mattis’ patience began to wear especially thin in the spring of 2018 when Trump failed to consult with him on a host of big policy moves, from ordering the creation of a military Space Force to deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, Snodgrass writes.

The surprise presidential decisions had grown for months, after beginning in earnest with a tweet from Trump in the summer of 2017 banning transgender troops from the military.

“Trump’s tweets created chaos in the Pentagon,” writes Snodgrass, who was detailed to work for Mattis early in his tenure. The damage from the transgender pronouncement “was a terrific example of how an ill-informed, and ill-considered, tweet from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could result in a strategic defeat.”

[ … ]

Mattis also chafed at the president’s push for the Pentagon to deploy active-duty troops to the border to help stem the flow of illegal immigrants, a move the secretary considered an abuse of the military. “Mattis was now caught in his own graveyard spiral, expressing public support for a policy he didn’t agree with, bending his personal and professional beliefs to support the president,” the book says.

What in the name of all that is decent and sensible would make someone think it’s appropriate to consult a general for policy decisions or to care what the military thought of presidential orders?  Does the civilian not still command the military in this country?

Why on earth would Mattis expect to receive transcripts of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders?  What world do I live in?

So did Mattis support transgender troops being in the military?  This book makes it sound like he did.

Finally, the one, single, solitary duty of the armed forces under the constitution is to prevent and respond to invasion.  And Mattis apparently rejected that mission in favor of foreign entanglements.  Good Lord.

And good riddance.

Via WRSA, from Matt Bracken.

I have no doubt he was promised something for this bit is silliness.  No one actually believes those things about Hillary Clinton.  With the corruption, Uranium One, the misadventures in Haiti, and the trail of dead bodies lining the streets from Arkansas to Washington, D.C., everyone knows all about the Clintons.  This isn’t hard.  It’s also not difficult to believe that no one in the audience believed a word of his speech.  The more difficult thing is to understand why anyone would care what McRaven thinks?

Let me switch gears for a moment to General Mattis.  He comes with indisputable creds form the USMC, but even then, his view of things is broken.  He upbraided Trump several days ago with these words.

“I earned my spurs on the battlefield … Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor,” Mattis joked at one point, in a reference to the medical deferment for bone spurs that kept Mr. Trump from serving in the military during the Vietnam War.

At another point, Mattis responded to reports that Mr. Trump called him “the world’s most overrated general” during a meeting with Democrats earlier this week. Mattis joked that he felt like he had “achieved greatness,” because he was “not just an overrated general, I am the greatest, the world’s most overrated.”

“I’m honored to be considered that by Donald Trump, because he also called Meryl Streep an overrated actress,” he continued. “So, I guess I’m the Meryl Streep of generals. Frankly that sounds pretty good to me.”

I have no problem with his upbraiding of the president.  I don’t like him.  I didn’t like the one before him, nor the one before him, nor the one before him.  What I do have a problem with is discussed here.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, military brass quickly began to plan an attack on al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But Marines almost missed being a part of this effort, as planners including Army Gen. Tommy Franks, then CENTCOM commander, didn’t see the point in sending an amphibious force into a landlocked country. But Mattis was part of a small team of officials who crafted a plan to send Task Force 58 — amphibious ships and a landing force — into Camp Rhino in southern Afghanistan. “The minute [5th Fleet Commander Vice Adm. William Moore] pointed to a map showing landlocked Afghanistan, hundreds of miles from the sea, I knew I could land there with thousands of Marines,” Mattis writes.

Mattis indicates another clash with Franks, the CENTCOM commander, elsewhere in the book, when he describes the 2001 search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Mattis believed, with the use of light infantry and special operations troops, he could close off the escape routes and take bin Laden. Franks thought sending Marines and vehicles into the mountains would only repeat Soviet mistakes. Ultimately, the trap was not laid, and bin Laden would not be killed until 2011. “If I had to do it again,” Mattis wrote, “I would have called both [the U.S. Army Central Command] commander and Admiral Moore and said, ‘Sir, I have a plan to accomplish the mission, kill Osama bin Laden, and hand you a victory. All I need is your permission.'”

And he was right.  Readers from long ago may recall that my counsel would have been to put Marines on the border with Pakistan in the Hindu Kush, perhaps supplemented by Rangers, while a MEU drove him and his fighters towards the border and snared him there before he could escape to live a lot longer.  After this brief campaign, we should have withdrawn.

But instead, Mattis kept his mouth shut and allowed America to get bogged down into a two decade COIN effort as part of nation building and winning hearts and minds, all run by social justice warriors, college graduates with guns who wanted to cure the world’s evils.  Petraeus was too busy with his concubine to do much there, while McChrystal brought in ROE that hampered the effort and killed American troops.

McChrystal and his ROE was directly responsible for the boys at Joyce denying support to the Americans at Ganjgal, along with the corollary deaths of 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, 25; Gunnery Sgts. Aaron Kenefick, 30; and Edwin Johnson, 31; and Hospitalman 3rd Class James Layton, 22, and Army Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook, 41.  Three marines and naval corpsman, 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, Staff Sgt. Aaron Kenefick, Gunnery Sgt. Edwin W. Johnson, and Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class James Layton, were killed after remaining behind to cover the withdrawal of the Afghan soldiers from the ambush site.

Yet after all of that, Petraeus and McChrystal have the temerity to continue to push for gun control over Americans, despite the oath to the constitution they swore to uphold.  There is a sense of entitlement among the military elite, as if experience in strategy and logistics enables them and gives them righteous jurisdiction over American policy.

This is an error made by not only McChrystal, Petraeus, and Mattis, but Trump as well.  Trump’s insult to Mattis is as irrelevant and unimportant as Mattis’ rebuttal.  But this is an error made by many of the American people.  Even the left will engage the error as long as the general pushes policies of which they approve, despite their hatred of everything America.

So why should anyone care about McRaven’s policy preferences?  They shouldn’t, any more than they should care about those of McChrystal or Petraeus or Mattis.  But Americans are always searching for a hero to worship, and they find them in the military elite.

Oh, and there is one more item of interest here.  McRaven is as much of a gun controller as Petraeus and McChrystal.  How do you SpecOps guys feel about that?  And McChrystal?  Didn’t you call him “The Pope?”