Archive for the 'Marine Corps' Category

MARADMIN.

The provisions contained within paragraph 3.a of this MARADMIN constitute a lawful general order and any violation of these provisions is punishable as a violation of Article 92 of ref (i).  Marines shall take action to fully immunize themselves against COVID-19 per ref (j).  Paragraph 3.a is punitive and applies without further implementation.  Commanders, commanding officers, and officers in charge shall issue appropriate orders to ensure that their Marines and Sailors are fully vaccinated.  In accordance with Rule for Court Martial 306 of ref (n), initial disposition authority for cases arising from COVID-19 vaccine refusals is withheld to the general court-martial convening authority level except that administrative counseling pursuant to paragraph 6105 of ref (k) may be issued at the special court martial convening authority level.

There are no permanent exemptions, not even medical exemption unless contraindicated.  Further, they recognize no such thing as a religious exemption.  This is a standing order under the threat of court martial, regardless of proximity to date of discharge.

They make an awful lot of bold claims in this MARADMIN, such as the shot being “extremely safe and effective,” something we won’t know without long term data.  But let’s leave behind the medicine for a moment.

What they’re saying is that regardless of your religious beliefs, you must take the shot.  Recall that we’ve discussed this at length, and every shot out there was developed on the backs of cell lines from aborted babies.

Regardless of what you think about that, there are some who believe they should not take the shot for that reason alone.

So the USMC is now superseding religious views.

This is not your father’s or grandfather’s Marine Corps.  Not only did my son serve in the Marines, but most of my uncles served in WWII and the Korean war in the USMC.  I could never join the military because of RA.

Nonetheless, I repudiate them.  They are dead to me.

Newsbusters.

Univision aired a bombshell allegation in the midst of its coverage of the United States’ disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Per former Army Green Beret and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Roger Pardo-Maurer, the Department of Defense had knowledge of the homicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and scrambled a Predator drone only to order it to stand down as it locked on its target. Per Pardo-Maurer, the stand-down order was given in deference to negotiations with the Taliban.

Watch the stunning allegation, as aired on Univision’s midday Edición Digital newscast on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:

ROGER PARDO-MAURER: What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren’t even in control of their own government or their own people.

So the deaths of 13 Marines will be put down in the book of sins of the men who knew and participated in this, and the men who defend them and speak on their behalf.

A Holy God and His judgment awaits you.

You are doubtless all aware of the courage on display by Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller.  I embedded the video.  There is a follow up to this, but before we get there I should mention a few things.

First, as to the individual he mentions in the video who questioned his honor.  My first impression was “What sort of prick would do that?”  It was answered in the video.  Lt. Col. Scheller was very respectful, but it appears that it’s some staff officer still bitching about race relations.

If you’re a staff or flag officer bitching about race relations, listen up.  What you should have been doing is getting on your knees every night and begging God for mercy – mercy on you, and mercy on your Marines.  You should be praying nightly that you are an inspiration to them, that you are faithful to your wife (unlike some of the drama queens in the flag ranks recently), that God helps you to meet His demands for leadership, for the spiritual and physical well-being of your boys, and that they would return home safely after accomplishing your mission.  And just like Stu Scheller, you should be questioning your command structure for accountability.

If you cannot do that, resign, today.  I would do everything in my power to keep my son from following a man who is bitching about race relations in the military (or anywhere else), and I don’t consider that individual any man at all.  You can tell him that a Marine father said these words.  I stand by them, and I would meet him face to face and tell him he’s no man at all. What – you didn’t think the Marine Corps makes Marines, did you? Marines are made at home. They’re just refined in the Corps.

Speaking of which, I reminded my son a couple of days ago as we watched the debacle unfold in Kabul that I talked him out of reenlisting in the Marine Corps by saying to him, “If you reenlist, chances are that you will lose your legs or arms or hearing or brain function in some forgotten mission that some corrupt CiC sent you on, and then forgotten by the VA and ignored and disrespected by the rest of the world.”

He told me a few days ago he appreciated my words.  But if he was still in the Marine Corps, I would be proud and honored for him to serve under Stuart Scheller.

Finally, a true leader doesn’t say “go.”  A true leader says “follow me.”

Biden appears to check his watch during the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base. pic.twitter.com/oMsBefnmfS

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) August 29, 2021

What happened, Mr. Creepy?  Did you miss your nap today?

Newsweek (from a Marine Corps officer).

How did we get here? The truth is that today’s military is running on the fumes of our vastly superior forefathers and the ever-shrinking proportion of each branch that still does truly heroic work and accomplishes truly extraordinary feats. The rest is a bloated military-industrial complex given over to Fortune 500-style corporate progressivism.

And if it’s bad in the Marine Corps, imagine how much worse it is in the other services.

America’s enemies are laughing at us. Frankly, we deserve it. But it doesn’t need to be this way. To get back on top, our military must reject “extremism” training, reverse all the progressive policies enacted over the past several years, return to a true meritocracy and focus exclusively on the only thing that matters: winning wars.

The entire commentary is worth a read.  The most interesting aspect of the commentary is the comments.  Here’s a sample below.

Did Newsweek seriously publish this? If an author is so lacking in honorable integrity regarding facts that he fails to understand what the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are, then he has no business opining on extremism. If he thinks that discriminating against gay people is acceptable, he might want to be reminded of the officers from previous generations who said that integrating black people was also ‘correctness run amok’. If he feel offended by facts? The Marines are better off without him. Oh, Army Ranger and combat veteran here, and I can’t recall defeating an enemy I was too obstinate to even acknowledge existing. This was deeply irresponsible.

God help the people of Texas if this article was written by a senior official in charge of justice. Sounds like he really believes it, God help the  USMC Reserve. Beliefs like this are reasons why the military should stand down.

More right wing extremist nazi (sic) propaganda. What do you want to bet that this rube supported little Donny’s attemped (sic) coup d’etat and attempt to convert our constitutional democracy into a fascist dictatorship!

And on the comments go.

You see, nearly half of America has now bought into the progressive agenda, hates God, hates the family, hates differences between the genders and tries to eradicate them, and hates America.

I know this can seem a sad commentary on the state of the nation, and indeed it is.  But this is all good.  This is a necessary fall the nation is taking.  The diminishing of the trusted and core elements of the society is good.

It’s necessary because people need to have that trust stripped away – America needs to repent.  Americans need to feel threatened.  America needs to see lost wars, and no, not to rag-headed goat herders in fourth world countries who live in the fifth century A.D.  America needs to see lost wars to near-peer states.

The wicked will continue in their direction until the consequences make it so uncomfortable it forces them to ask, “How did we get here?”

This is all part of the road to recovery – or the road to the end of the American experiment.  Either way, the development is a good and necessary thing.

Via David Codrea, this from American Thinker.

Americans need to understand that this is not their dads’ military. It’s not even the pre-2008 military. Barack Obama purged from the Pentagon anyone who was not with the new Democrat party. This Pentagon trend worsened under Trump, as people in the modern military resented the fact that he was not starting new wars and was drawing down troops. Trump’s peaceful ways may have saved lives and money, but they lessened opportunities for advancement within the military and shut down post-retirement sinecures in the defense industry.

With Biden’s ascension to the White House, the military has become an openly partisan, pro-Democrat, possibly anti-American institution dedicated entirely to turning itself into a social justice avatar for American society while maintaining endless small wars across the globe for the benefit of military officers. George Washington weeps.

And to the military men and women who read this and disagree, don’t attack me. Prove I’m wrong by becoming more of a fighting machine and less of a mewling college campus.

Yes, Obama purged 197 flag level officers in five years.  But it even started before that.  About as soon as my son’s battalion came back from its Iraq deployment, the senior enlisted officers, staff and field grade officers seemingly couldn’t do enough to purge anyone who had combat experience.

My son was one of the last in his battalion to leave (I think there were some dozen or two remaining combat veterans left).  Of the newer Marines, they tended to complain bitterly when my son trained them like he was trained, knowing that a deployment to Afghanistan was coming up.

This has been going on for a long time.

Where did you go?

A U.S. Marine Corps unit’s Twitter account says it “messed up” in its comments while responding to Fox News host Tucker Carlson as part of a debate over his commentary about social justice initiatives in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The official account for the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group used a pejorative on social media in responding to Carlson’s recent statements on how the military should be focused more on adversaries and less on culture issues.

The Marines shared a picture of a female soldier carrying a male one and tagged Carlson, writing that the photo showed “what it looks like in today’s armed forces.”

“Get right before you get left, boomer,” the account said, using a word widely considered a pejorative term.

After intense pushback for using an official military account to slam a private citizen, the Marines unit wrote in tweets: “We are human and we messed up. What was intended as a tweet in support of our female Marines and sisters serving in uniform was clearly not aligned with our standard practices or an appropriate representation of the Marine Corps. We will do better and serve the people.

“We can do better and we will collectively take a knee, review our procedures and get back in the fight. Our focus is to train, fight and win and we have a hard time doing that without your support.”

[ … ]

Military leaders realize “there’s much, much more work to be done to ensure that women’s leadership is recognized and we have more diverse leaders” and that “all women feel safe and respected in our military,” Biden said. “Some of it is relatively straightforward work where we’re making good progress designing body armor that fits women properly; tailoring combat uniforms for women; creating maternity flight suits; updating—updating requirements for their hairstyles.”

After playing the clip, Carlson told viewers: “So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. Military. While China’s military becomes more masculine as it’s assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore since men and women no longer exist. The bottom line is, it’s out of control, and the Pentagon is going along with this.”

The segment drew criticism from Pentagon press secretary John Kirby, who told reporters that “the diversity of our military is one of our greatest strengths.”

“We are better and more effective not only when we represent the American people—all the American people—but also, when we have the moral courage to include other perspectives and ideas into our decision-making; perspectives that, as the secretary himself noted Monday, are based on lived experience.

[ … ]

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “shares the revulsion of so many others to what Mr. Carlson said in his opening statement,” according to the press secretary.

Here is the post and some responses.  The tweet sounds like a high school girl wrote it.

So aside from the notion of diversity being a strength in, say, mathematics or engineering or computer science or whatever, where physics governs processes, which I don’t think can be proven (but this is a difference discussion), let’s pose a challenge problem to the Marines.

Prove that diversity is a strength in the US Marine Corps?  Prove it.  Demonstrate categorically that sameness, the one intended end of all of the training my own son went through to ensure common goals, common tactics, techniques and procedures, and common devotion to duty and orders, shouldn’t have really been the goal after all.

Prove categorically that the US Marine Corps, who won multiple world wars, who has served honorably in countless other engagements, and who is the most feared strike and expeditionary force on earth, wasn’t really as good as they could be and would have been better with more diversity.

Oh, I see, you can’t.  You’re just aping the actions and parroting the words of the controllers and current administration.  If you’re not, and you really believe that diversity is a strength, you aren’t fit to lead because you can’t prove what you’re saying.

If you’re just aping the actions of your superiors, then you’re liars.

It isn’t necessary to rehearse the experience of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan where they placed women in combat roles and found a disproportionate number of lower extremity injuries, or the experience of Marine Corps infantry officer’s course at Quantico where every woman thus far has had several hip injuries or pelvic fractures.

We all know the truth regardless of the focus group wording you parrot.  Repeat after me: There is no way that a woman can do the same physical things a man does.  God designed it that way.

How far the Marine Corps has fallen.  Shameful, loathsome and contemptible.  I think your future adversaries will think the same thing.

From the annals of I hate America, God and everything good and decent, comes this from the USMC.

The Marine Corps is considering a plan in which it could close its two existing boot camp locations and funnel all recruits to a new base where men and women would train together.

Marine entry-level training is a long way off from being able to meet a congressional mandate to make its East and West coast training bases both able to support gender-integrated training in the coming years, the Corps’ top general said on Thursday.

That is leading the service to study the option of opening a third training base in a new location to which all new recruits would ship, rather than spending cash on construction projects at aging training bases.

“Nothing, the way we’re organized right now, lends itself to integrated recruit training,” Commandant Gen. David Berger said on Thursday. “If that’s our start point — and it is — we have to get to a place on both coasts, or at third location or whatever we end up with, that … there are male and female recruits around.”

Both the Marine Corps’ recruit training depots have storied pasts — particularly Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in South Carolina, which was first used by Marines in the 1890s. Hundreds of thousands of Marines have stood on the famous yellow footprints on each base at the start of their careers before earning the coveted eagle, globe and anchor and title of Marine.

But with a new law bearing down on the service to make both locations support coed training — within five years at Parris Island and eight at San Diego — the Marine Corps is exploring different options, Maj. Eric Flanagan, Berger’s spokesman told Military.com.

“The question becomes, ‘Are we better off just using [military construction] dollars to create a new third site, or put that money into our existing sites?'” he said. “No decisions have been made. We’re not investing any money anywhere else. It’s just an option we’re talking about.”

The Marine Corps hasn’t yet identified a state where the new boot camp location might be located, Flanagan said. In assessing the possible change though, he said they’re considering a lot more than just the need for coed squad bays and other facility changes to support gender-integrated boot camp.

Maybe put it alongside Portland or Seattle.  It would go well there.

A once storied, dignified institution, now degraded and shamed.  It’s all going according to plan.

Glenn Reynolds posted this on the U.S. Marine Corps.

 Marines Cancel Military Strategy Training Because the Instructor is a Christian.

The USMC scheduled an annual training for military lawyers earlier this month, at which the Battle of Gettysburg would be discussed. The instructor for one portion of that training was supposed to be Jay Lorenzen, an Air Force veteran who taught for 10 years at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Lorenzen’s biography, provided to the military lawyers in advance of the training, included references to Christianity, including his affiliation with Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru, and a couple of religious-themed courses he teaches in his spare time. Several of those lawyers complained to Mikey Weinstein, who heads up a secular, anti-Christian group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that Lorenzen was going to teach about religion.

That allegation was false. It didn’t matter.

Says Glenn, “I remember when Marines were brave.”

How shameful and humiliating.  There is also this bit of nervous Nelly hand-wringing and self-righteous unction over the social acceptability of their practices.

Nearly 300 female Marines have moved into combat-arms jobs that were, up until less than five years ago, previously open only to men. But only one female officer has led a Marine infantry platoon so far.

Now, the Marine Corps is calling on female lieutenants and captains to consider making a lateral move into the infantry officer military occupational specialty. The decision would require women to attempt the arduous Infantry Officer Course, which prepares Marines to lead grunts in combat.

Two female Marines have passed the course so far. Women have been allowed to attempt it since 2012.

The Marine Corps put out a service-wide message this week soliciting female company-grade officers to volunteer to go infantry. The Infantry Officer Course is typically open to second lieutenants just out of The Basic School.

The push aligns with a priority Commandant Gen. David Berger set in February to get more women leading grunt units. Berger told Military.com earlier this year that he’s not only open to extending the opportunity to first lieutenants and captains, but also women who left active duty before the restrictions blocking them from serving in combat jobs were lifted.

Yes, let’s push this as hard as we can so we can see more women with broken pelvises, torn cartilage and dysfunctional lower extremities.

The Marine Corps Commandant, General David H. Berger, is a loser and an awful man.  He is unfit for duty.

With this kind of leadership, they deserve to become redundant to the army.

Reader and friend Joefour sends this think-piece from a Navy author about the MAGTF being the downfall of the USMC.

The MAGTF took the Marines from a specialized force (amphibious operations) and attempted to turn them into an all-purpose, do everything, force.  It’s not hard to imagine that the genesis of the concept was budget driven with the idea being that the more versatile the Corps, the more it would be called on and, therefore, the more it would be funded.

Unfortunately, the lack of focus led to the Marines being employed in all manner of situations for which they were not specialized.  They became just another army unit.

There was also an enormous opportunity cost associated with generalization.  The generalization and loss of focus on the core amphibious mission cost the Marines their institutional knowledge about amphibious assaults as they embarked on a decades long turn towards purely land warfare.  In recent years, Marine generals have proudly announced that the Marines are taking the first steps towards relearning amphibious assault.

Relearning?!!!?  It was your core mission.  How could you have lost it?  This is a sad commentary on Marine Corps leadership over the last couple of decades.

The loss of focus also meant that the technology, doctrine, and tactics of amphibious assault languished or was lost.  We wound up with doctrine calling for 25-50+ mile stand off assaults coupled with AAV/ACV landing craft that only had an effective range of a few miles – a mismatch of colossal proportions, to say the least.  By not maintaining focus on the core mission, the mission atrophied and was lost.

MAGTF also began the myopic focus on the aviation side of the Corps to the great detriment of the ground side.  Huge, questionable investments were made in the MV-22 and the F-35 with little or no supporting doctrinal or operational underpinning.  Again, it was a budget grab, pure and simple – an attempt to be all things in all situations instead being proudly specialized.

The Marines were once something special and respected.  Now, they’re just a poor, small copy of the Air Force and Army.  MAGTF destroyed the Marine Corps.

Or I should have said, “purported” think piece.  There is a lot of confusion in this analysis.

First of all, saying that the USMC is a poor copy of the Air Force and Army is beyond stupid, and could only be said by someone who has never been in ground combat with the Marines, Army or Air Force.

Second, I don’t think the author understands the concept of the MAGTF.  It isn’t, and was never intended to be, a tool to turn them into another massive ground force, if you will, the “big army.”

The MAGTF was always intended to keep control of all assets – Force Recon, infantry, armor, artillery, air support, other spec ops – under the complete control of a single chain of command, all reporting to a Colonel or Lt. General.  What the Marine Corps doesn’t like to do is rely on assets NOT under their immediate control to achieve the mission.  The MAGTF remedies that weakness.

That can even be true of assets not assigned to but not formally part of the USMC.  When the Marine Corps launched their operations into Helmand in earnest, army spec ops also participated, but it was made clear to them that they didn’t report to JSOC or SOCOM.  They reported to a Marine Corps general.  As long as they were fine with that, they could participate.  They were, and they did, and they reported only to the Marine Corps chain of command while assigned to that operation.

When the author says that the MAGTF caused this or caused that, he’s just making things up.  With all of that said, the author does hit on the major tingling nerve in the Marine Corps today, i.e., mission statement.

The Marine Corps Commandant has just recently stood down the Marine Corps tank battalions – completely.  They are no more.  I have no particular commitment to Marine Corps tank battalions, so I won’t comment in the positive or negative about this.

But he does indicate that he intends to go back to the amphibious roots.  But this, he means heavy-laden, large scale, and foolish beach assaults.  The author we cited also apparently wants the Marines to return to such a paradigm.

I’ve argued for years that the Marine Corps has never been able to get past their silly romance with Pacific beach landings in WWII, a romance that would prove deadly and ineffective in modern warfare.  It would be deadly for the Marines, and would be effective for nothing more than sending LCACs to the bottom of the ocean.

But they are “solders of the sea,” don’t you see, so for years they tried to push their ridiculous notions of the EFV (Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle) on Congress, after they had blown a wad of cash finally getting the Osprey off the ground and somewhat reliable.  Congress (correctly) refused to fund such a concept.

The idea was that they would use  Amphibious Transport Ships carrying F35s, LCACs, Ospreys, and a battalion of infantry, and be able to land anywhere within reach at the president’s order.  But why this concept?  That’s never explained.  Near peer states would easily be able to manage such a threat, and with drones, surface to ship missiles and air assets, the ships would be sunk before ever getting within reach.  The LCACs could be taken out with nearly commercial grade equipment, and if the EFVs ever did make it ashore, they would be alone.

If not a near peer actor, then who?  A troubled or failed state?  A place like Somolia?  Why would they outfit the Marines with such a heavy footprint (like they’re going to battle against Japanese in the South Pacific) for a failed state?

Specialized operators, UAVs, MilStar uplinks, and a whole host of other developments have made the sort of battle fought in the South Pacific irrelevant today.  Such a strategy would involve deaths on a scale not seen since then, and it’s improbable that the public would support such an adventure, likely seeing it as a misadventure instead.

To date, MEUs have been used primarily (or perhaps exclusively) for training and medical relief on humanitarian missions.  The claim is that they stand in ready should the president ever call.  The reality is that they have turned into a gigantic waste of money, resources and talent.

How did we get here?  As the demands of modern warfare caused development in training, equipment, TTPs, electronics, weapons systems and small arms, the Marine Corps got stuck in the South Pacific battling imaginary enemies.  And no, they aren’t going to engage in massive landings on or near China in disputed territory.  The public will not support something like that.

A half century ago, the Marine Corps could have seen this coming and jettisoned their romantic notions of massive beach landings.  They could have shrunk the size of the Corps and focused on more specialized missions.  Posted at TFB, “The Marine Corps Scout Sniper Schools are the best combined precision marksmanship and observation packages in the United States Military, Period.”

Every branch of the military has a combat diver course and qualification, and the Marine Corps Recon school is storied.  My own son took Scout Sniper training, as well as months of shoothouse and CQB training before deployment to Iraq.  Airborne school is still an option, and at least MARSOC is getting assigned to specialized schools like high altitude shooting in Nevada.

Four year enlistments could have been jettisoned in favor of six years or more, and specialized schools could have been pursued and developed in lieu of the idiotic EFV, Osprey and F35.  Insertion of troops could have been designed around improved air assets and HALO or LALO jumps.

Finally, the Marine Corps Commandant could have gotten his panties out of a wad over Marines being deployed in groups of under company size units (You see, they don’t trust their people without the proper chain of command, and don’t like mission failure, and so Marine Corps doctrine has always been opposed to distributed operations of fire team or squad size).

Instead of this, the country has turned to the Navy, and more specifically, the SEALs and then DEVGRU to perform air insertions, specialized operations and other highly secretive distributed operations across the globe.  There is no logical reason that it had to be the Navy – it could have been the Marine Corps who chose to pursue this path.  Frogmen will always be needed in the Navy.  But there is no logical reason that Frogmen had to become land operators.  This only happened because they saw the opportunity.

The Marine Corps didn’t because of their love affair with massive beach assaults and, apparently, death on a large scale.  No return to their core amphibious roots will save the Marine Corps from becoming irrelevant.

It doesn’t really matter at this point anyway.  The DoD’s focus on women in combat billets, race relations, LGBT parades, and sensitivity training will ruin what’s left anyway.  My son believes with the current state of affairs, there is no way America could fight and win against a near peer state if the majority of the fighting is on the ground.

The Marine Corps made him and other Iraq veterans feel unwelcome and let them go.  Big army is too slow and infected with political correctness to respond quickly or effectively (Have you seen basic training at Fort Jackson?  And did they ever call the shooting at Fort Hood anything other than “workplace violence?”).

The Navy is crashing ships into other ships and letting fires ruin their assets.  The Air Force is too taken with their love affair with 5GW to think about support for ground combat troops (oh, wait, is the proper term now Mosaic Warfare?).  I want to make sure I get the terms correct.  Otherwise, it won’t sound smart and informed to the brass.

In my opinion, it’s really a sad state of affairs.  It’s not the fault of the DoD.  It’s the fault of America, a country coming apart at the seams.  The DoD is just a reflection of the country.