Archive for the 'Marine Corps' Category

The only explanation for allowing this sort of thing to continue is having sympathy for these actions.  Piracy isn’t some sort of movie – it’s reckless endangerment, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and thievery.  The Biblical punishments for these actions is death.  Cutting the heads off of pirates and running them up the flag pole might put an end to piracy right quickly.

However, in spite of the wishes of the founders, we have a standing army for purposes of foreign misadventures, and another standing army (police of all sorts) for purposes of violation of foundational constitutional rights at home. The one thing the federal government is tasked with, i.e., protection of the border, it routinely ignores and even laughs at.

And the one reason for a standing army for foreign wars was piracy.  Jefferson commissioned the U.S. Marines for such things, but rather than sending a couple of MEUs to handle this problems, we would rather send MEUs out on humanitarian missions across the globe.

Black is white, up is down, and darkness is light.

Houthis to world. Our Red Sea maritime interdiction has worked so well that we’ll expand it.https://t.co/oZ4S8JNTcz

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) December 9, 2023

Source.

Ahead of the event, Anime NYC advertised the Marines making an appearance (Booth #373) as “a military partner,” linking to an enlistment form for applicants to connect with a Marines recruiter. (The recruitment application on the official Marines website included the UTM code, “FY23ANIMECON,” in order to track the social media campaign’s performance across platforms.)

According to the exhibitor list, the Army (Booth #367) touted a 360-degree photobooth, oft-used at high school dances and wedding venues; a personalized dogtag-making station; and military “swag” to take home. “Join like-minded Army personnel who share a passion for anime and discover what the Army can offer you. With over 170 career paths, robust education benefits, and exciting job opportunities, the Army is a wide-open frontier to helping you Be All You Can Be!” reads the Anime NYC description.

I would expect that of the Army and the FBI (who was recruiting there too).  That the Marines were there is embarrassing for them.

How shameful.  Even now they cannot understand why good men no longer want to fight and potentially perish for the country.  It is no longer their country.

Marine Corps Times.

Leaders of Marine units can let their service members wear nonstandard uniform items amid a long-term shortage of the regular camouflage uniform.

The Marine Corps says it won’t have a full stock of the woodland-pattern camouflage combat utility uniform ― the everyday outfit for most Marines ― until summer or fall 2024. The shortage has prompted the top Marine leader to authorize unit commanders to allow the desert-colored camouflage combat utility uniform or the flame-resistant organizational gear, known as FROGs.

Ridiculous.  This is because of lack of planning, lack of logistics, lack of vision, lack of foresight, and lack of funding, along with worrying about the wrong things like gender and race studies.

U.S. Army from Glenn Reynolds.

NEGLECTING THE TROOPS: Congress blasts Pentagon for ‘dreadful’ barracks conditions. “In a scathing letter addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, lawmakers accused the Pentagon of failing to ‘provide the most basic oversight and care’ of barracks at 10 installations cited in a recent report and called it a ‘failure of leadership’ by Austin ‘that cannot be ignored.’”

I have a nephew in the Army and have heard a number of stories along these lines — no food, no toilet paper, filthy barracks, etc.

If living quarters – whether barracks or tent – aren’t squared away, that’s the fault of leadership.  If the troops are filthy or live in filthy conditions, there is a lack of discipline.

Either way, there is a general lacking that deeply affects the U.S. military.

And it’s all by design, you understand?

What do you want to bet this lack of discipline doesn’t affect the Mexican cartels or the army of Communist China?

Source.

When the Defense Department surveyed troops in 2021 on their experiences in the workplace regarding gender, the findings revealed significant room for improvement ― particularly in the Marine Corps.

Now, the Corps is bringing on new staff members in the latest effort to address this cultural trend. The service revealed its plans in a briefing presented to the Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in March.

Because nothing says “America’s Strike Force” like spending resources and time on ensuring that equal numbers of men and women fight in war.

Honestly, the cancer has gone so deep at this point I highly doubt it can be excised, even by the best surgeon.

From Twitchy.

” … both the AR-15 and M4 contain barrel rifling to make the round tumble upon impact … “

I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that’s the point of rifling, did you?

I am in absolute awe

I was today years old when I was informed, by an “expert” testifying for California’s DOJ, that an AR is an area effect weapon, a single .223 round can sever a human being in half, barrel rifling is what makes a round tumble upon hitting it’s target and… https://t.co/5VZ5vIWN4c pic.twitter.com/Qnl7Qr0uQC

— Bad Weapon Takes (@BadWeaponTakes) February 11, 2023

And not only that, semiautomatic rifles are more effective than fully automatic ones.  Furthermore, it’s “very difficult to use as a defensive weapon, except as a blunt force instrument.”

It can cut a body in half, the semiautomatic version is more dangerous and effective than a machine gun, and it’s no good for a defensive weapon.

No, it’s not just you.  No one else can make sense of this mish-mash either.

At this point it makes no sense to try to decipher this gobbledygook.  But it does go to show just how badly the USMC has screwed up by promoting men like this, either idiots, or traitors, or both.  The USMC should be ashamed, but probably isn’t.

The last vestige of reliable American defensive forces has been infected, corrupted, and turned into a sham and hollow shell.  How sad.

UPDATE: Here is a rebuttal to the nonsense in the opinion of Tucker.

“They blew me off.” It’s not the same MC today as even when my son served in Fallujah.

Hi @USMC. My dad will be 100 yrs old on 2/24. A Marine during WWII. 5 assault landings. We'd love it if a uniformed Marine came for a visit – say "HI" to him. Few WWII Marines are left alive. Sent a message thru the Marine Corp portal.
They blew me off.
Thanks pic.twitter.com/V273AE648O

— Jim Thompson (@JimmySportToons) February 2, 2023

Give the Marines credit for at least citing the cause. Last week here at TCJ, we noted how the Navy gave no reasons for its recruiting and retention problems.

The COVID-19 vaccine mandate is contributing to the military’s recruitment troubles, the top general in the Marine Corps said on Saturday.

Speaking during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger defended the vaccine mandate as a necessity for keeping the force healthy. But he indicated the mandate has posed problems for recruiting in pockets of the United States where vaccine misinformation is prevalent.

“Where it is having an impact for sure is on recruiting, where in parts of the country there’s still myths and misbeliefs about the back story behind it,” Berger said.

Speaking to reporters at the conference later Saturday afternoon, Berger added that the mandate has posed an issue for recruiting in the South in particular.

“There was not accurate information out early on and it was very politicized and people make decisions and they still have those same beliefs. That’s hard to work your way past really hard to work,” he said in response to a question from Military.com.

“Small areas, big factor,” he added when pressed about how much the mandate has contributed to recruiting issues. “You talk to me in the cafeteria, and one of my first questions is, ‘Do I have to get that vaccine?’ And you go, ‘Yeah, you do.’ Ok, I’ll talk to you later. It’s that fast.”

The military has faced a recruiting crisis over the last year as it tackles the twin difficulties of increasing numbers of Americans unqualified to serve and decreasing numbers of those who are qualified being interested in serving.

One Pentagon study found that only 23% of young Americans would be eligible, pointing primarily to obesity and minor legal infractions related to things like marijuana use as precluding the vast majority from putting on the uniform.

By way of brief followup to my post entitled Things Learned About Modern Warfare From The Ukrainian War, I thought I would roll in the experience of my former Marine son.

It was long held that the USMC is special operations, so they don’t need one.  I have a whole host of thoughts on this claim that would take us very far afield and ruin the main point I want to make.  Besides, readers would get bored and skip out on it.

But sooner or later the MC would capitulate, and Marine Raiders were folded into SOCOM.  When that happened, money flooded in.  They had all sorts of perks that other Marines didn’t have, for example, when my son learned to perform CQB and room clearing, he went to hot shoot houses, all over the country, before his deployment to Iraq.

The SOCOM Marines do too, but before that, they have (onsite at Camp Lejeune) better-than-video-game quality simulations of shoot houses (with physical movement) that could be programmed for whatever situation they wanted to test, and it could be run at any time, night or day, but only for the SOCOM Marines.

Each SOCOM Marine, even when my son was in the Corps, which ended in 2008, had his own cage with equipment.  Literally anything he wanted was in this cage.

When my son visited these cages with a buddy on Camp Lejeune, you know what was found in many of the cages?  Drones, along with controls for them.  They could pick them up at will and carry them on whatever deployment was next.

Drones.  Modern warfare requires them for intel and surveillance.  The losers will not have drones.  The winners will.

Ed Palm.

So much for reasoning the need, but there is a humanly redemptive sense in which I believe we still need the Marine Corps.

I grew up in a single-parent working-class home in a bad neighborhood. I had no prospects for college. I seemed destined for a life of industrial-strength monotony, and the Corps at the time was the only avenue to distinction open to me. The Marines shored up my flagging self-respect and self-confidence, and I’m sure it has done likewise for countless young men, and now women, who have been put down and underestimated by the authority figures in their lives. In the words of the poet, “I took the [road] less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.”

The difference is that the Marine Corps is not just a branch of the military. The Army has its elite units; the Navy has its SEALS. But the Marine Corps is an elite fraternity (in a genderless sense) with a distinctive sense of esprit de corps.

That fraternal sense is a Marine thing. If you’ve never been a Marine, you may not understand it.

This is a heartfelt tribute to the history of the U.S. Marine Corps and what it has meant to our history, so I hate to say it to Ed, but this comes from another time, another culture, and another world.

My son saw it after Iraq when the Corps wouldn’t allow him to train his “boots” the same way he was trained.  He also observed that they were intentionally attempting to rid the Corps of combat experience.

It didn’t take too long until women were invited to join Marine Corps infantry officer training at Quantico, and then on to integrated men/women training at boot camp.  The U.S. Marine Corps is but a shell of what it once was.

They could have taken a different route.  It would have involved making enlistments five or six years instead of four, raising entrance standards for all Marines, more specialized schools, jettisoning the ridiculous notion of large scale amphibious landings, learning to operate in stealth and with distributed operations in smaller teams, learning and applying different means of ingress and egress, and so on.  In other words, many of the things the Marine Raiders do now, except on a wider scale.

It’s too late.  The DoD relies too heavily on JSOC for that sort of thing, so much so that their operational tempo has caused problems.  You can add to all of this the vaccine mandate, and the entire DoD has been eviscerated.

What Ed Palm remembers is now just a phantom – a ghost.

I really don’t want to rehearse the goings-on surrounding Marine Lt. Col. Scheller any more, but this article caught my eye, where this is said.

Scheller responded with another video on Aug. 29 that appeared even more emotional. His former mentor, retired Col. Thomas Hobbs, had commented on his first video and said that if Scheller was honorable, he would resign his commission.

“You didn’t say, ‘is,’ as if challenging me,” Scheller responded to Hobbs in the video. “You said, ‘was,’ as if I wouldn’t do it.” Scheller then announced that he was resigning, and told viewers that if people followed him, they would bring “the system down.”

Hobbs, in a brief phone interview, said on Tuesday that Scheller served under his command at one point, and was one of his best company commanders. Hobbs said that while Scheller was a top performer, he warned him long ago that his arrogance could be his downfall.

“He hasn’t shown one speck of remorse or admitted he was wrong in any way,” Hobbs said. “I 100 percent believe it’s a ploy for him to run for office.”

Uh huh, and Hobbs himself has no dog in this political fight, does he?  But maybe he does.  From his commentary at Marine Corps Times (The Marine Corps: Always faithful – to white men), he makes some startling assertions.

The struggle of minority officers I witnessed at TBS has never left my mind. Over time, I have come to understand the cause. TBS is a high-pressure environment where lieutenants are in direct competition with one another. The first three significant tests are swim qualification, rifle/pistol qualification, and land navigation. Many of the minority officers I led grew up in low socio-economic areas, typically poor urban neighborhoods. They did not have access to scouting, neighborhood pools or hunting. Many of my minority officers struggled with swim qualification. Ultimately, every one of those officers passed, but at a cost to their prestige, confidence, and lineal standing. The pattern remained the same for rifle/pistol qualification and land navigation. Furthermore, remediation and re-qualification attempts were time intensive, fostering a vicious cycle as the lieutenants fell behind in other topics. These three major evaluations occurred during the first third of TBS, and by the time those events concluded, reputations were set for the remainder of school and, one can argue, the remainder of their Marine Corps careers.

Another aspect of TBS that favors lieutenants from white middle- and upper-class families is the language we use in the Marine Corps, particularly among officers. We speak “proper” English, that is English deemed proper by those who have power and determine the standards. Even if no one ever said it out loud, those who struggled to write and speak “correctly” were not respected by the officer culture, a culture determined by white men over the past 244 years.

My white lieutenants who excelled at TBS did so because they worked hard. This fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the institution creates a level playing field for all officers. I believe the institution has not and does not. The institution is biased towards middle- and upper-class white culture. The institution perpetuates the unspoken narrative of white superiority by setting up minority officers for failure. It puts minority officers in occupational specialties they did not want or have not been thoroughly prepared for by the system.

The fact that this should all be embarrassing for him – and isn’t – should cause even more embarrassment.  He should be humiliated that he isn’t humiliated by such tripe.

He claims he wants a “level playing field,” and recognizes that hard work results in advancement, but wants equality of outcomes, which is precisely the opposite of all of that.

If a Marine cannot shoot, he should never have graduated from boot camp, much less school of infantry.  If an infantry officer cannot shoot, engage in land navigation, speak English, and compete with others, he shouldn’t be a Marine Corps infantry officer.  How on earth is someone who cannot excel at those things going to conduct warfare or lead other men?

I don’t care whether they hunted, swam or had been part of the Boy Scouts as a child.  That’s irrelevant to their skills, drive, motivation and moral constitution today.  If Mr. Hobbs wants better blacks to join the Marine Corps, the problem isn’t the Marine Corps.  The problem is rotted out inner cities, fatherless families, gangs, SNAP, TANF and the rest of government handouts.  Study in school, learn to speak English, learn calculus, take AP courses, get a part time job, and stop joining gangs.

There is a rejoinder at the Marine Corps Times, but it should never had to have been written.  It should be enough to let Mr. Hobbs’ stupid commentary stand on its own, forcing all good Marines to look away in shame at what the Corps has become that a man like Hobbs would ever have been an officer to begin with.

And by the way, the play on words of the post title, is a reminder to readers that Hobbes believed that “state and government are necessary for the realization of acceptable social conduct by its citizens.”

Hobbs also appears to be a lover of the state.

Shameful.  The entire thing is shameful.  The Marine Corps is just a shell of what it once was.