Military

This morning’s military article comes to us with news that the sailor who had been accused of burning down a baby carrier has been cleared of any wrongdoing. The article actually points out two problems that have plagued the Navy for decades.

The first is that the US Navy has a long history of finding scapegoats upon whom to place blame for institutional failures. In this case, you have a ship that is poorly maintained and cluttered with junk. A sailor warns his division officer that the place is a fire hazard and is ignored. A fire is started by some unknown source. Sailors can’t put it out because they and their officers have no idea how to perform even basic damage control. Instead of blaming the command for poor training, maintenance, and housekeeping, blame the sailor who tried to warn you. The Navy saves face, and who cares about those stupid enlisted men? They are there to be destroyed for the sake of officer careers.

That is reminiscent of the Iowa explosion. In the case of the Iowa battleships, there was a flaw in the firing system. The silk making up the 50 pound bags that the gunpowder comes in were famous for leaving embers behind in the chamber of the 16 inch guns. Ramming them into the breech too quickly while those embers were still there was a recipe for explosions. They had been known to cause mishaps in those guns for decades.

However, those cannons were a huge PR point for the Navy, providing tons of photo ops and bragging rights for recruiting commercials. So when the Iowa had an explosion, instead of blaming a faulty process in a 50 year old weapons system and hurting their recruiting tool, they blamed a sailor who they alleged was a jilted gay lover.

That brings us to the second issue exposed by the above article. The Navy has had recruiting issues for decades. The smarter and nerdier recruits all want to go to the Air Force, which is seen as more technical and cerebral. A lot of the muscle-head jocks want to prove their masculinity and join the Marines. Many other kids want to be able to play with machine guns and blow shit up, so join the Army. What does the Navy have? The Navy has historically solved that problem by trying to project this image that everyone in the Navy is a fighter pilot, a SEAL, a computer technician, or an officer. You will note that no one in Navy movies except Steven Seagal is ever a cook, and even then, Seagal was a Navy SEAL cook. Assigned to a battleship. Not everyone can have those awesome jobs. In fact, most Navy jobs are tedious jobs more akin to janitorial work than to anything cool or technical. There are more people cleaning toilets and doing officers’ laundry than there are SEALS in the Navy. (There are as many Admirals as there are ships– someone has to be their orderlies.)

So the Navy convinces everyone that they can be a SEAL, or a Rescue Swimmer, or a nuclear power plant operator. The recruiters make the pitch and convince you that your job is going to be AWESOME, and will come with all sorts of promotions and large cash bonuses. What they don’t tell you, or at least gloss over, is that the washout rates are on the order of 80 percent or more for some programs. Sometimes they wash you out for nebulous reasons, like “possesses traits undesirable in this career field” because the kid got caught with a beer while under 21 years old. Starry eyed high school kids join the military to be SEALS, washout before training even starts, and find themselves cleaning toilets and chipping paint with a hammer for the next four years.

The Navy knows that those jobs suck, but they have you under contract for the next four years, so they don’t care if the sailor is happy or not. As evidenced by the statement from the Navy prosecutor:

Prosecutors said Mays was angry and vengeful about failing to become a Navy SEAL and being assigned to deck duty, prompting him to ignite cardboard boxes on July 12, 2020…Mays thought he would be jumping out of helicopters on missions with the SEALs, but instead he was chipping paint on the deck of a ship, and he hated the Navy for that, Jones said.

This is a common story. The reality of the Navy is far different from the image it portrays in the movies. The Captain of the ship doesn’t listen to some E-4 Petty Officer with grudging respect for the knowledge he possesses. The Captain is more likely to be a career ticket puncher who is desperately trying to become one of the Navy’s 265 Admirals, and will destroy that E4’s life to do so. I can’t speak for the other branches, but that is life on the big, gray boat.

The US military will now begin accepting people who once tested positive for weed. I didn’t know that this policy had ever ceased. When I was in the military back in the 80s, you could get a waiver for THC use in your past, as long as you stayed clean after enlisting.

The US has sent about $49 billion in aid to the Ukraine so far in 2022. That is about $1.75 billion per week, or $1,100 for every man, woman, and child in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the US Air Force has announced pay cuts to some airmen, citing lack of funds as the reason.

Not only that, but it turns out that the US military doesn’t have enough artillery shells, rockets, and missiles. It turns out that we have given the Ukraine 800,000 shells for 155mm artillery pieces and another 108,000 shells for 105mm cannons. Nearly a million shells given away, and we don’t have enough as it is.

That isn’t smart.

The US Army is missing an M240B machine gun. It belongs to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, from Fort Riley, Kansas.

To me, there are two possibilities here:

• It was in California. One of the local troops from Fort Irwin just made themselves some extra cash, and a Mexican cartel has itself some additional firepower.
• There is a patriot somewhere who is waiting for some IRS or FBI agents to come calling. Maybe there are some soldiers who saw an opportunity to increase their own firepower. God help them if anyone rats them out.

The Biden administration is looking to start a fight with Russia? Perhaps. The Carrier Strike Group centered around the USS George HW Bush just entered the Mediterranean Sea, accompanied by her escort ships. In addition, there are two guided missile submarines in theater.

The Truman strike group remains in the Med, so this isn’t a normal carrier handoff.

Is our government insane? Are they seriously picking a fight with Russia using the depleted, paper tiger of a military we have? WTF.

We keep hearing from the left how our Ar-15s are no use against an Army that has tanks, aircraft, and artillery. I won’t even bother finding a link to any of those claims. We have all heard them before. But what if all of those toys don’t have any people to run them?

The Army is supposed to be able to engage in Corps level engagements by 2035. The problem with that is our Army is having trouble meeting recruiting goals, and will likely have fewer than 450,000 personnel by October 2023 (pdf alert). That means our Army has only 31 active duty brigades, and those will be understrength. To even reach THAT number of brigades, the Army has had to strip personnel from other locations to the point where readiness has been affected. To put this in perspective, the troops who put ashore on D-Day as a part of Operation Overlord numbered about 160,000 troops. That would be roughly half of our entire Army today. Army planners think that the only way they can maintain 31 brigades is to cut them from 3 battalions per brigade down to 2. Paper tiger, indeed.

So what, you say. We can just bring in the reserves to get our staffing up to snuff, right? Nope. The Army has had so many issues finding officers to command reserve units that they have had to engage in some creative personnel management.

Over a five-year period, 110 command positions could not be filled because the Army Reserve lacked willing commanders. The shortage of willing commanders has become so acute in the Army Reserve that O5 command is no longer an opt-in board to be considered for command, but opt-out board, meaning that lieutenant colonels and majors who are up for promotion who do not wish to command must proactively go into the system and state that they do not wish to be considered for command.

This is creating havoc with morale and retention, which is making the problem even worse.

Army Reserve soldiers have seen commanders who are clearly in their position not because they were highly qualified or competitive, but solely because they put their names on the list, and that is not a good place to be as an organization.

That makes for an Army that won’t be able to put down an uprising of kindergarteners, much less repel an invasion. Reading this would you say that allowing women, fags, and trannies to serve has made our military better, or worse?

The only good thing here is knowing that it will be difficult to slaughter armed citizens when there are no warfighters left. We appear to be back in the days of Jimmy Carter’s hollow military. Sure, some units will be staffed with capable and willing soldiers, but those are far less likely to be gunning down civilians than the woke units that make up the majority of the force.