It's official! The US military is entering a new century of personnel policy

Meaning they will have finally caught up to the rest of the modern world. Don't Ask Don't Tell is officially repealed in a Senate vote of 65 - 31 in favour of eliminating the policy.

The 65-31 vote came after an earlier procedural vote that brought the milestone in gay rights to the Senate floor. It also fulfilled a campaign promise by President Obama, who has been under attack from liberals in his own party for seeking compromises with Republicans on economic and tax issues during the lame-duck congressional session.

Don't anyone get too excited about this. The actual change in policy could take as much as a year. In that period of time you will hear a lot of dinosaurs howling about combat efficiency and "distraction".

Count on it.

The Galloping Beaver - Banned in Guantanamo

We get mail :

Greetings,

Your website is one I have long visited and I was quite surprised when I was visiting Guantanamo last month and I was not allowed to visit your website while at the base. I received a notice that the website was not allowed to be accessed by the "administrator" (military censors) (not an exact quote). I was quite surprised, went to other websites that I thought might be more controversial but had no problem and checked at various times to get on to your website (I was there for almost a week this visit) but I never could get on to your website.

So, please take my congrats….I would consider it an honor to be barred by those thugs!

Best regards,
Candace

H. Candace Gorman

Well ... just ... wow. We at The Beav also consider it an honour to be visited by Guantanamo human and civil rights lawyer Candace Gorman.

Ms. Gorman was successful earlier this year in freeing one of her clients from Guantanamo and maintains The Guantanamo Blog to "provide updates on developments concerning the plight of the detainees, the ongoing injustice of current U.S. detention policies in the "War on Terror" and efforts to hold accountable those men and women responsible for the war crimes".

Today she writes :

Of course Bush only spoke about his joy in waterboarding KSM.....I wonder how he will respond to questions about waterboarding Abu Zubaydah (some 100 times) as the government has now been forced to admit Abu Z was not al-Qaeda or taliban .... just some shmuck who had the misfortune to be captured by my criminal
Government.......

Another recent blog entry asks you to lend your support to a military lawyer who refused to prosecute a man who was tortured into confessing. Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveldis is now at risk of losing his 19 year military career for doing so.

Thanks for making our day, Candace, and for all your fine work defending justice and the rule of law from thugs.

Email published with permission of author.

Need a Job? Here 'Ya Go . . . .

Times are tough all over, and folks are in need of gainful employment.

How 'bout a job with lots of pluses?:

Travel opportunities;

Paid benefits;

Stress reduction techniques;

Multiple skill categories.

What more could you ask for?





Well, maybe not having to support the military-industrial-congressional complex for one thing . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moved to Vancouver)

More Sea Smurfs

Remember the Sea Smurfs?

.

Sea Smurfs was the mercifully shorter nickname given to NorthCom's 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, the Consequence Management Response Force, which, as reported in Army Times, is a military unit to be deployed within the US to deal with "homeland scenarios" where among other duties they "may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control".

.

Yeah, yeah, I know, the Posse Comitatus Act and all that, but since Bush attached a little note to the repeal of its repeal last year, if you can follow that, to say he does not feel bound by it, we are not greatly reassured.

More smurfs : Reporting on a National Homeland Defense and Security Symposium in Colorado last week, the Colorado Independent newspaper tells us the Sea Smurfs are about to grow by at least two more military units over the next two years, bringing their number to an estimated total of 4,700.
A worried ACLU is busy filing FOI's, while the commander of NorthCommand makes suitably soothing noises: "These are medical personnel, they’re chemical decontamination teams, they’re engineering teams, they’re logistics folks."

.

Ok, but they've got tanks and guns too , although a public-affairs officer for Northern Command has stated that "any decision to use weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary-of-defense level".

Army Times previously reported that they'll be using "a non-lethal crowd control package" and "military tactics, including some tested in Iraq" within U.S. borders but has since retracted those statements. Did I mention that these smurfs previously hailed from 15 months in Iraq?

.

As we discovered back in February : "Canada and the U.S. have signed an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other's borders during an emergency".

The definition of just what would constitute "an emergency" along the 100 mile deep "Constitution-Free Zone" on the U.S.-Canada border continues to worry me.

.

Good little vid on one man's reaction to the Sea Smurfs from ACR.
Cross-posted at Creekside

Just another brick in the wall...

As George Bush waxes eloquent about how romantic it must be to be a combatant in the quagmire formerly known as Iraq the US military crossed another grim threshold on Sunday.

A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000. The grim milestone came on a day when at least 61 people were killed across the country.

Rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone, underscoring the fragile security situation and the resilience of both Sunni and Shiite extremist groups despite an overall lull in violence.

The attacks on the Green Zone probably stemmed from rising tensions between rival Shiite groups and were the most sustained assault in months against the nerve center of the U.S. mission.

The romanticism of Bush's legacy is killing them.

Bush does a Guernica... and nobody notices

At 4:30 in the afternoon on April 26th, 1937, the first airplanes of the German Condor Legion arrived in the air over the Basque town of Guernica. For the next three hours they unleashed a ferocious aerial bombardment, dropping 45,000 kilograms of bombs on the unarmed civilian population of that town, reducing it to rubble. From PBS Online:

Those trying to escape were cut down by the strafing machine guns of fighter planes. "They kept just going back and forth, sometimes in a long line, sometimes in close formation. It was as if they were practicing new moves. They must have fired thousands of bullets." (eyewitness Juan Guezureya) The fires that engulfed the city burned for three days. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed. Sixteen hundred civilians - one third of the population - were killed or wounded.

Word is now emerging that the US military in Iraq may well have done exactly the same thing over a ten day period over the farming area of Arab Jabour, 16 kilometers south of Baghdad. There are no reports as to casualties, civilian or otherwise because there were no reporters anywhere in the vicinity of the bombing. Tom Engelhardt explains:

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed there - in person or by satellite phone - to check out the damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it's of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the "bombs" can be produced at approximately "the cost of a pizza", (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 45,000 kilograms of bombs just doesn't have the ring of something that matters. Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon's success in creating a dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. "Collateral damage" stands in for the civilian dead - even though in much of modern war, the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever-rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered "precisely" by "precision-guided" weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal. Army Colonel Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference:

The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons.

Reports - often hard to assess for credibility - have nonetheless seeped out of the region indicating that there were civilian casualties, possibly significant numbers of them; that bridges and roads were "cut off" and undoubtedly damaged; that farms and farmlands were damaged or destroyed. According to Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press, for instance, Iraqi and American troops were said to have advanced into Arab Jabour, already much damaged from years of fighting, through "smoldering citrus groves".

And there will be more of this to come. As the Bush administration starts to draw down its troops strength in Iraq, it will continue to maintain a similar level of power. In order to do that, expect the US to increase its air assault capability and to use it. The evidence is at Balad air base.

Radar traffic controllers at the base now commonly see "more than 550 aircraft operations in just one day". To the tune of billions of dollars, Balad's runways and other facilities have been, and continue to be, upgraded for years of further wear and tear. According to the military press, construction is to begin this month on a US$30 million "state-of-the-art battlefield command and control system [at Balad] that will integrate air traffic management throughout Iraq". [...] This gargantuan feat of construction is designed for the military long haul. As Josh White of the Washington Post reported recently in a relatively rare (and bland) summary piece on the use of air power in Iraq, there were five times as many US air strikes in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has, of course, started off with a literal bang from those 45,000 kilograms of explosives dropped southeast of Baghdad. That poundage assumedly includes the 18,000 kilograms of explosives, which got modest headlines for being delivered in a mere 10 minutes in the Arab Jabour area the previous week, but not the 7,200 kilograms of explosives that White reports being used north of Baghdad in approximately the same period; nor, evidently, another 6,800 kilograms of explosives dropped on Arab Jabour more recently.

The Bush administration is transforming Iraq from a ground war of grunts getting killed by IEDs to a techno-war of civilians being labeled "collateral damage". And the same military commanders who decry the behaviour of their opponents using Iraqi and Afghani civilians as human shields while they move among the general population will be doing something similar and perhaps much more repulsive in its sterility.

American military spokespeople and administration officials have, over the years, decried Iraqi and Afghan insurgents for "hiding" behind civilian populations - in essence, accusing them of both immorality and cowardice. When such spokespeople do admit to inflicting "collateral damage" on civilian populations, they regularly blame the guerrillas for making civilians into "shields". And all of this is regularly, dutifully reported in the US press. On the other hand, no one in our world considers drone warfare in a similar context, though armed UAVs like the Predators and the newer, even more heavily armed Reapers are generally "flown" by pilots stationed at computer consoles in places like Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. It is from there that they release their missiles against "anti-Iraqi forces" or the Taliban, causing civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan.


[...]


To American reporters, this seems neither cowardly, nor in any way barbaric, just plain old normal. Those pilots are not said to be "hiding" in distant deserts or among the civilian gamblers of Caesar's Palace.

As Rez Dog points out, this is the cult of Air Power taking over in Iraq. The problem is that even in theatres where complete dominance of the air reigned, the high-priests of Air Power were unable to secure a single objective and were unable to reconcile the massive numbers of civilian deaths wrought by simply raining ordnance from the air.

[H]ere's the simple calculus that goes with all this: militarily, overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the "surge" for much longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won't be. Air force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region. In Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn, air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

At some point some expect somebody to utter the words "Bomb them back to the stone age".

Is the US military covering up the events of 26 Dec 2007 at al-Siha?

You my remember this story in which an Iraqi soldier opened fired on his US allies, killing a captain and a sergeant, and wounding three others.

Cernig, noticing something out of whack, stayed on the story. Certainly, there was more to it than originally reported and while we all waited for some reporter to jump all over and fill in the empty spaces in the story, nothing really happened.

Cernig hasn't dropped the story and it is slowly starting to fill out. The Iraqi soldier, Kaissar Saadi Al-Jibouri, is being elevated as a hero, not because he killed US troops, but because he may have been trying to defend an Iraqi woman. From IPS:

Conflicting versions of the killing have arisen. Col. Hazim al-Juboory, uncle of the attacker Kaissar Saady al-Juboory, told IPS that his nephew at first watched the U.S. soldiers beat up an Iraqi woman. When he asked them to stop, they refused, so he opened fire.

"Kaissar is a professional soldier who revolted against the Americans when they dragged a woman by her hair in a brutal way," Col. Juboory said. "He is a tribal man, and an Arab with honour who would not accept such behaviour. He killed his captain and sergeant knowing that he would be executed."

Others gave IPS a similar account. "I was there when the American captain and his soldiers raided a neighbourhood and started shouting at women to tell them where some men they wanted were," a resident of Mosul, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS on phone. "The women told them they did not know, and their men did not do anything wrong, and started crying in fear."

The witness said the U.S. captain began to shout at his soldiers and the women, and his men then started to grab the women and pull them by their hair.

"The soldier we knew later to be Kaissar shouted at the Americans, 'No, No,' but the captain shouted back at the Iraqi soldier," the witness told IPS. "Then the Iraqi soldier shouted, 'Let go of the women you sons of bitches,' and started shooting at them." The soldier, he said, then ran off.

As Cernig says, there should be a full investigation into the allegations that US troops were abusing Iraqi civilians and exceeding their authority. If the story is true, then there needs to be further explanation. If it is not true, then the details now need to be aired.

That, of course, is assuming that the truth is ever likely to come out. From Cernig:

Whether or not the story of US servicemen beating a pregnant women is true - and there should be a full investigation of those accusations - it is now, thanks to the US military's obsessive secrecy leaving the clear impression that something was being hidden, firmly fixed in the minds of exactly those who the military least wants to antagonize.

It is not like worse hasn't happened before. Back then Seymour Hersh dug the story out after speaking to someone who had second hand information, almost 20 months after the event.

So, yes, there is a history of this kind of thing happening when armies of occupation are fighting an elusive resistance and the US military has a track-record of trying to hide such incidents.

Bush screws the troops. (Again)

If you're in the US military, you might have been expecting a pay raise. In fact, if you were in the US military, you might have been expecting an expansion of some benefits.

Certainly, the United States Congress passed a bill which would have seen the US military receive a raise in pay and allowances, improvements to military health benefits, expanded health care for those wounded in action, improvements in the care, management and transition of recovering veterans, improvements in family housing and on and on and on. And, the bill passed both houses of Congress with solid majorities.

But, if you're serving in the US military or are a veteran no longer on active service, you're going to be disappointed.

George W. Bush, in an unannounced move and with no warning or negotiation, said that he will veto the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.

At the behest of the Iraqi government, President Bush has vetoed the annual defense authorization bill, saying an obscure provision in the legislation could make Iraqi assets held in U.S. banks vulnerable to lawsuits.

The veto startled Democratic congressional leaders, who believe Bush is bowing to pressure from the Iraqi government over a provision meant to help victims of state-sponsored terrorism. The veto was unexpected because there was no veto threat and the legislation passed both chambers of Congress overwhelmingly.

At issue is section 1083 of the bill which amends Chapter 97 of title 28 of the US Code by removing the jurisdictional immunity of foreign states from US courts when that state is alleged to have sponsored terrorism.

The Iraqi government has a problem since the Bush administration has declared that Iraq, prior to the US invasion was designated as a state sponsoring terrorism. The same goes for Afghanistan. What that essentially does is open the door for law suits against the Iraqi government and the possible freezing of Iraqi assets held in US financial institutions.

The Iraqi's have threatened, if the bill passes, to withdraw all funds from US banks. That would be some big bucks - in the billions.

At issue is a provision deep in the defense authorization bill, which would essentially allow victims of state sponsored terrorism to sue those countries for damages. The Iraqi government believes the provision, if applied to the regime of Saddam Hussein, could target up to $25 billion in Iraqi assets held in U.S. banks. Iraq has threatened to pull all of its money out of the U.S. banking system if the provision remains in the bill.

All of this came as a surprize to both houses of Congress since Bush had made no indication that a veto was in the offing.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) was angered that the White House decided on a veto long after the bill passed both chambers of Congress.

"It is unfortunate that the administration failed to identify the concerns upon which this veto is based until after the bill had passed both houses on Congress and was sent to the President for signature," Levin said. "I am deeply disappointed that our troops and veterans may have to pay for their mistake and for the confusion and uncertainty caused by their snafu.”

What is so unusual about this pending veto is that the White House almost always telegraphs a veto threat while a bill is under consideration so that changes can be made to the legislation to avoid a veto. This defense bill passed the House 370-49 and cleared the Senate on a 90-3 vote. According to Democratic leadership aides, the Bush administration did not raise any objections about the section in question until after the bill was transmitted to the White House.

Cool. He used SNAFU. An apt description of the Bush administration. Situation Normal. All Fucked Up.

Hey! Don't worry about it all that much. I'm sure the Commander Guy will make it all up to the troops by serving them a special Valentine's Day meal.

H/T Crooks and Liars

Shafted in Seattle

The ill treatment of veterans in the US continues, only this time the administration reached waaay back and poured salt in the wounds of a 2nd World War veteran.

A month after the Army said it made a mistake when it court-martialed Samuel Snow and 27 other black soldiers in World War II, the Pentagon has cut Mr. Snow a check for back pay, money withheld while he served a year in prison on a rioting conviction.

That should be a pretty hefty back pay cheque. It has, after all, been almost 62 years since the event which caused the problem in the first place.

Brace yourselves.

The check was for $725. No interest. No adjustment for inflation.

The army explained themselves thusly:

Col. Daniel L. Baggio, chief of media relations for the Army, said in an interview and in e-mail messages that he could not discuss Mr. Snow’s specific payment because of privacy laws. Colonel Baggio said a private of Mr. Snow’s grade was paid $50 a month in 1945.

He said Mr. Snow’s $725 appeared to reflect money withheld from his conviction on Dec. 18, 1944, to what would have been his likely discharge date, March 2, 1946. In an e-mail message, Colonel Baggio said the law controlling the board “does not authorize payment of interest, pain and suffering or damages.” If the back pay had been calculated at 8 percent for 61 1/2 years, compounded annually, Mr. Snow could have received more than $80,000. If the $725 was simply adjusted for inflation, it would amount to more than $7,700, a calculator on the Labor Department Web site shows.

What happened to cause this unbelievable generosity and the return of Mr. Snow's 1945 army pay at the 1945 rate?

In October, an Army board effectively overturned the convictions of Mr. Snow and the other former soldiers on rioting and other charges. The men, two of whom are known to survive, were imprisoned in many cases and dishonorably discharged after a riot at Fort Lawton here in August 1944 that led to the hanging death of an Italian prisoner of war held at the post.

The Army Board for Correction of Military Records specifically set aside the convictions of Mr. Snow and three others whose families requested reviews of the cases. The board found that the convictions were flawed because two lawyers defended 43 soldiers, the lawyers had 13 days to prepare for trial and, most critically, the prosecution withheld important evidence that could have potentially helped the defendants.

“All rights, privileges and property lost as a result of the conviction should be restored to him,” the board said of Mr. Snow. Rulings in the other cases were similar.

In 1975 Mr. Snow's records were adjusted to reflect a "General discharge under honorable conditions".

The case involving Samuel Snow and 42 other black soldiers has its own twists. Former NewsHour Seattle bureau chief Jack Hamann discovered a headstone which led him on a lengthy investigation. He overturned a story of racial discrimination and questionable behaviour on the part of army prosecutor, Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, who would go on to become the special prosecutor who faced-down Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

Hamann discovered that at Fort Lawton, now Discovery Park near Seattle, Guglielmo Olivotto, an Italian prisoner of war, had allegedly been lynched during a riot by black troops.

The base itself was crammed with up to 10,000 troops returning from or embarking for wartime theatres in the Pacific. The black troops were employed as stevedores loading and unloading ships. Worse however, was the fact that there was a large contingent of Italian prisoners of war who enjoyed a great deal of freedom and liberty as a condition of parole. The black American troops were treated somewhat differently. From Publishers Weekly:

The Italians had freedom of movement and received hospitality in Seattle homes; the African-Americans were subject to massive discrimination and restrictions. The resulting tension led to escalating scuffles, which in turn led to a riotous assault by the GIs on the Italians' quarters and to the death of one Italian.

Hamann produced the results of his research in his book On American Soil. It was only as a result of Hamann's research that the US Army reviewed the case and, this October, set aside the convictions of all those tried and granted them full honorable discharges.

Samuel Snow, now 83, is the only survivor of that event to have received the whopping $725 that constituted his back pay at 1945 rates.

Injustice heaped upon injustice.

Reserve? What reserve?

Via Buckdog we hear from the new chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

America's top military officer said the country does have the resources to attack Iran, despite the strain of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Adm Michael Mullen, who took over as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff three weeks ago, said diplomacy remained the priority in dealing with Iran's suspected plans to develop a nuclear weapon and its support for anti-US insurgents in Iraq.

But at a press conference he said: "there is more than enough reserve to respond (militarily) if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do".

Oh, where to begin?

Let's start with that "national leadership" comment. Yeah. What national leadership? Bush is a buffoon; Cheney is interested only in what he can pillage on behalf of his corporate sponsors; and the rest of them are still wrapped in the belief that the United States can accomplish anything by simply saying the words "pre-emptive airstrike".

Apparently Mullen thinks any strike against Iran would go "according to plan". That being something along the line of, Launch an airstrike; Destroy a bunch of Iran's infrastructure; Threaten to do it again; Call it a day. Something close to, (what was it they called that?), Shock and Awe, take over Iraq, do a "Mission Accomplished", and try to find the troops under the piles of flowers and candies.

Mullen didn't identify the "reserve" the US military purportedly has on hand. Given that Bush has been using the National Guard, an organization primarily intended to operate as a national militia on home ground, as a supporting expeditionary force in Iraq, it seems he believes any assault on Iran would not involve an already overstretched ground force. Add to that fact that the US is using mercenaries and Mullen's "reserve" becomes more than a little questionable. That is, unless he truly believes he could accomplish whatever mission he accepts through single-element strikes originating with the US Navy.

One would think an admiral with Mullen's background and qualifications would be aware that no military operation ever goes exactly as planned. He's got Iraq and Afghanistan on his plate to prove it.

I suspect the "reserve" to which Mullen refers is somewhat nebulous. It's that body of manpower not yet tapped. They haven't been to the recruiting office yet and they're not yet in uniform.

No, I think Mullen's "reserve" includes lazy, fat-assed, chickenhawks who can't even finish a cartoon of themselves without considerable whining.

As an army dies, its commander in chief swans

Whether the US withdraws from Iraq may soon become moot.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.'

Not to put too fine a point on it, but members of a public affairs team have a specific set of marching orders. Public Affairs Specialists are there to tell the story of the unit from the unit point of view and to put things in a positive light. Negativity coming from the group which is intended to provide a firewall tells a story in itself.

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).

But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.

In short, the US military ground force in Iraq and Afghanistan, is well beyond its limits of endurance.

In other recent news, George W Bush, Commander In Chief of the United States military, is looking forward to a bit of a rest. He'd like to go to France, if he could go mountain biking, but he's more than happy to go to Crawford, Texas.

"If people were asking me where I think they ought to vacation, it would be right here in America - where I'll be vacationing, as you know. Monday, starting in Crawford," Bush said.

Bush began his vacation on Thursday at his family's ocean-side estate. On Monday, he will continue on to his ranch in Crawford.

There are, after all, Presidential Daily Briefings to ignore.

With friends like these...

Another friendly fire death confirmed in Afghanistan. It's bad enough when Canadian soldiers are killed by the Taliban, but roughly ten percent of our losses to date have been to the United States military. I know that accidents happen, and that friendly fire deaths have occured in every war, but to lose a tenth of our dead to the people who asked us to go and help them out is unacceptable.

They're Number One

Oh boy, the US is number one in a lot of categories. Aren't we just so damn proud?!?

The thing is, the categories we're number one in are those that don't give one a warm and fuzzy feeling. That is, unless you're into war games or maiming and killing other human beings.

No surprise that we lead the world in weapons of mass destruction - sad nonetheless. But hey, as long as the military - industrial - congressional* complex is happy with our position, I guess that's all that matters, right?

Compliments of TomDispatch and Frida Berrigan:


A Nation of Firsts Arms the World By Frida Berrigan

They don't call us the sole superpower for nothing. Paul Wolfowitz might be looking for a new job right now, but the term he used to describe the pervasiveness of U.S. might back when he was a mere deputy secretary of defense -- hyperpower -- still fits the bill.

Face it, the United States is a proud nation of firsts. Among them:

One of the more disturbing "firsts" is this one:

First in External Debt:

The United States owes $10.040 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.

If you think that won't come back to bite the economy in the ass one day, you're dreamin' . . . .

*Yes, in Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 address to the nation, he did include the Congress in the equation. Funny how that's been minimized over the years.

(Cross Posted from Moving to Vancouver)

And somebody will call them volunteers

One thing about the US not having a draft is that that country gets a totally volunteer army and marine corps.

Well... sort of.

The Marine Corps is recalling 1,800 reservists to active duty, citing a shortage of volunteers to fill some jobs in Iraq.

Members of the branch's Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) will get letters this week notifying them of plans to mobilize them involuntarily for a year, said Lt. Col. Jeff Riehl of Marine manpower and reserve affairs.

The Individual Ready Reserve being the people who have completed their active duty obligation.

From the 1,800 called, officials hope to get 1,200 Marines for aviation maintenance, logistics support, combat arms and several other skills needed for the early 2008 rotation into Iraq.

As Moderate Man says: Isn't that special.

Way back when, when the US was in a different war, in a different time, people could be in the a branch of the US military and avoid being deployed to combat because they had an arrangement.

Amazing, isn't it?

The rich kids either found a way around the draft during Vietnam, or they actually volunteered to join a branch of the US military which wasn't committed to deployment. The draftees took the hit for them.

Now, the kids who have volunteered once keep getting called back to active duty by the same people who deliberately avoided that kind of service. And the kids of those rich kids? They don't have to go because they don't have to volunteer.

No matter what mode of recruitment and induction exists, the rich kids, and their kids, have always had somebody else do the dirty stuff.

Helluva system.

The US Army and Marine Corps are becoming the cripples of the US armed forces.

US ground combat forces are so overwhelmed by insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that they are nearing a point where they are no longer capable of doing anything else. Training, equipment and personnel are all lacking.

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.

"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

Not to mention the fact that, lacking a large strategic reserve, Bush has been using the National Guard on a rotational basis to supplement the manning levels of his Iraq adventure. That means "homeland defence" is also lacking.

But it gets worse. The US military has always maintained pre-positioned, readily deployable equipment to fit-out at least five brigades in the event of an urgent deployment.

The Army should have five full combat brigades' worth of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the afloat stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units to rotate in and out of the country. Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, according to military and government officials.

Then there is the little matter of increased frequency in rotation. Instead of the two-year dwell between rotations, the Pentagon is scrambling to try and keep it at 12 months. In that 12 months out-of-theatre soldiers and marines need to take occupational training, should be involved in at least some field training up to at least one brigade exercise which is not centered on requirements in Iraq and practice personal skills for other environments and combat conditions.

That's not happening. Troops arrive home and within a few months are put back in the training cycle preparing for dealing with an insurgency in Iraq. US troops are losing the versatility to be able to respond to other emergencies.

The increasingly rapid tempo of rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan is also constraining the length and focus of training as active-duty Army combat brigades and Marine combat battalions spend at least as much time in the war zone as at home. As a result, all the training is geared toward counterinsurgencies, while skills important for other major combat operations atrophy.

The Marine Corps is not training for amphibious, mountain or jungle warfare, nor conducting large-scale live-fire maneuvers, Conway said. "We've got a little bit of a blindside there," he said. The Marine Corps and Army both lack sufficient manpower to give troops a break from the combat zone long enough to complete their full spectrum of training, senior officials said.

"We're only able to train them . . . for counterinsurgency operations," Cody told the House panel last week. "They're not trained to full-spectrum operations."

The US Marine Corps has a primary role of amphibious and jungle warfare. So, who does it instead? Nobody.

Under current Army and Marine Corps plans, it will take two to three years after the Iraq war ends and about $17 billion a year to restore their equipment levels. It will take five years and at least $75 billion for the Army to increase its active-duty ranks to 547,000 soldiers, up from the current 509,000, and for the Marine Corps to increase its numbers to 202,000, up from 180,000.

After the Iraq war ends... Those figures are the ones used by the generals if the Iraq war ended tomorrow. With each passing day it gets worse.

But, at least the neo-cons got their war.

They shoot helicopters, don't they.

I've spent a good deal of time in military helicopters. They aren't my favourite place to be. In fact, given a choice, I would rather be in a fixed-wing aircraft any day. When things go wrong helicopters have a crappy ability to glide to a landing. And they do that auto-rotate thing which makes the most topsy-turvy circus ride look positively tame.

I don't know how to fly, which might have made my outlook worse. I was always in the after end of any helicopter, helpless in the event of an emergency.

I have never been shot at in a helicopter, but I have been in more than one that had to land due to some failure in the mysterious combination of parts that keeps it airborne. On those occasions the pilot went into a rapid-fire description of the problem on the air-ground circuit, keeping his air-controller (on the ground or in the ship) informed of absolutely everything that was going on.

I have listened to helicopters, while I was on the ground, which were experiencing ground-fire in a combat zone. Those pilots, too broke into a rapid and clear description of events. If they were hit, they said so - immediately.

Military helicopters rarely go anywhere without positive and continuous communications with a controller on the ground. They like to stay in touch, just in case something goes wrong. When a military helicopter abruptly stops communicating with the controller, especially if the helo is in a hostile area, the worst is assumed until other information is forthcoming. If a helicopter was in an area where it could have been shot down and radio communications ceases for no explainable reason, the possibility that it was shot down becomes the focus of both operations and rescue.

Which is why you have to go read this post at Hullabaloo.