It is staggering to see this continuing on and on... No, not the war in Iraq and its' spiraling costs in blood and treasure, rather, the complete inability of the Pentagon to account for its' own expenditures. Today, another critical article was published.
For the first three quarters of 2007, $1.1 trillion in Army accounting entries hadn't been properly reviewed and substantiated, according to the Department of Defense's inspector general. In 2006, $258.2 billion of recorded withdrawals and payments from the Army's main account were unsupported. It's as if the Army had submitted multibillion-dollar expense reports without any receipts.
What can $1.1 Trillion buy? To put it in perspective, consider that this unaccounted for sum would buy the following:
· nearly 14 million accounting degrees from any four-year state college, estimating the cost at $20,000 per year;
· · · 36 million automobiles at an estimated cost of $30,000 each; and
· · · about 8 million single-family houses costing $140,000 per home.
Also, consider this:
· Assuming the average working life is 30 years, the average annual income is $34,000 and the average federal tax on that income is $6,830, nearly 5.5 million Americans will work their entire lives to pay $1.1 trillion in taxes.
"In the Defense Department, what you have now are material weaknesses that are in every single area, in every part of the department, so deep and so wide you do not really have any way of figuring out where money is being spent," says Linda Bilmes, a federal budget expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Every year, the Pentagon tries to justify its budget request to Congress by submitting three years of financial data: "actual" performance for the past fiscal year plus projections for the current year and the next. But because of the lack of reliable accounting, these totals are largely fictional. That, in turn, raises major questions about whether the government will be able to meet skyrocketing commitments for future spending on ships, planes, and high-tech ground weapons, especially given the expected growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the impact of tax cuts.
Interestingly, despite numerous Billion dollar patches and countless legislation passed to require fiscal responsibility we're still screwed!
In 1990, Congress enacted legislation requiring all federal agencies to pass independent audits. Every year, the Defense inspector general dispatched dozens of auditors to the military's financial and accounting centers. Every year, they reported back that the job couldn't be done. Defense Department records were in such disarray and were so lacking in documentation that any attempt would be futile. In 2000, the inspector general told Congress that his auditors stopped counting after finding $2.3 trillion in unsupported entries made to force financial data to agree.
In 2002, Congress relented. Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that "material amounts" in its financial reports can't be substantiated.
That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."
The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn't envisioned until 2016.
At the heart of this BS is the institutional rivalry between the services and the antiquated equipment utilized.
The dysfunction stems in part from the traditional independence of the military branches. Over several decades, they have cobbled together separate processes for identical functions, resulting in the uncontrolled growth of more than 4,000 accounting, financial, and inventory systems. Their names form an acronym soup: CAPS, Stanfins, IAPS, Somards, Samms, Mocas, HQARS, Stars. The department's primary system for handling weapons contracts and payments dates from 1958; a costly attempt to replace it was abandoned in 2002 as a failure. The Army's notoriously inaccurate main accounting system was created in 1966.
They run on old-style I.B.M. mainframes and rely on Cobol, the ancient Sumerian of computer languages. "This was a bunch of systems patched together," says Greg Bitz, a former director of the center. "I never went home at night without worrying about one of them crashing." Bitz predicts a crisis as older programmers retire. "Try to find somebody today who knows Cobol," he says.
Nevertheless, the four military services still can't be audited, and Jonas declines to predict when the entire Defense Department will finally pass an audit. "We don't know what we don't know," she says.
Astonishing, in this day and age! We deserve better!
I know most of my readers agree with me about the catastrophic results of 14 years of republican management of our country, topped off with George Bu$h. (For all I know, all you readers from the .mil sites sit there at your consoles saying, “Yeah, you olde farte! Get some!”) And I do mean the last 14 years. When Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America brought a swarm of new r’s into Congress, the machinery of government stopped like a transmission full of sand. Bill Clinton might have been President, but the only legislation that got passed was something the republicans wanted, and that group of people wanted government to fail. If you recall they shut down the government several times by refusing to find it.
Now we’re stuck in a republican-engineered eternal war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve got an exhausted Army with inadequate armor, troops rotating in and out of the catbox * soldiers and officers pulling the pin in numbers not seen in many years, and the divorce rate and suicide rate are up dynamically.
The Air Force has deadlined their entire fleet of F-15s because the damned things are breaking up. They want lots of new expensive planes to horse around the sky at 5 G’s playing Terry and the Pirates until those start to fall apart and then they’ll be back with their hands out for ever more ca$h. (And if they don’t get it, the evil terrorists will slip over our undefended borders and cut our throats in our sleep. The only thing that can keep us safe is $300 million fighter planes that are sort of stealthy!)
Thank any deity you like for the Navy. They’ll keep us safe, right?
Well, maybe not. Meatball One channels the War Nerd:, but first a word of warning.
I’ve mentioned Swedish Meatballs before. No one has a defense/ IO webpage quite like them. Actually, most defense-oriented webpages are work safe. And Meatballs may not be.
The War Nerd discusses the greatest Navy in the world and its chances in the Persian Gulf:
You might wonder, if you were real, real naive, why the Navy hasn't tried to learn from what van Ripen [sic] did to them six years ago in the same waters. Well, the truth is that no big, well-funded armed service learns or changes until it absolutely has to, which usually means when it starts to lose a war. And of all services, navies are by far the most stubborn, old-fashioned, snobby, retarded of all. I don't mean the submarine force, which is pretty much God. I mean the brass in their ridiculous floating targets, aka carriers, frigates, tankers and other dive-sites-in-the-making.
If they had any sense they'd realize that the way to deal with big overloaded targets is to saturate their defenses with a swarm of low-cost attackers. If you've got lives to spend, and the Iranians sure do, you spend lives to sink hardware. It's a good trade, when you consider what a carrier costs, and how little the average Iranian life is worth. They're Shia! These guys can't wait to give their lives away. The Kamikazes were squeamish moderates compared to the Revolutionary Guard. And thanks to Silicon Valley and its Chinese knockoffs, you can fire swarms of unmanned rockets instead of Shia martyrs, so you don't even need to spend one life per blip on the US fleet's little screens. You can even send empty rocket tubes as part of the swarm, because in the few seconds the surface vessel has to react, it can't determine which threats are nuke, which are conventional HE and which are decoys.
Of course the Navy insists their ships are safe, because they’ve got great ship-to-ship missiles and Aegis radar and the Phalanx last-resort close-in defense gun.
Hmmm… yes….
[T]he Phalanx was never meant to handle swarms of low-tech attackers. That's not the clean, temperate-zone war the computer dweebs in the Pentagon planned for. See, the original Phalanx only had 1000 rounds in its magazine. The newer models have 1.550, meaning even the USN realized that it was too easy to saturate the target with decoy attacks and deplete the magazine. But 1550 rounds isn't much at that rate of fire--and the Achilles heel of the system is reloading. It's not that easy to hoist 1550 20mm rounds into position, and I don't think either van Riper or the Iranians would be likely to agree to a 15-minute reloading break.
If it was me, and maybe I'm too "cynical" or something, I'd send all my empty missile tubes and expendable suicide squads in the first wave, all at once like van Riper did. I'd count to 90, because 90 seconds would be enough to empty every Phalanx magazine--and you can bet that those scared Navy computer nerds down in the Operations Room would be holding the red buttons down till the barrels were melting when they realized they were under a real attack. Then, while the grunts below deck were hauling the ammo into position, I'd send the second wave with the real stuff. And that, as they say, would be that. A trillion dollars of US Navy hardware becomes an artificial reef.
There’s a good argument to be made that when our Navy ships were teased in the Gulf two weeks ago they were there because someone hoped they would be attacked. Yes, I know – unthinkable. It was also unthinkable that the entire air defense forces of the United States were ordered to stand down on September 11, 2001. It’s a historical fact that they were, but there seems to be no record of who gave the order.
It all makes me wonder just why someone hasn’t had the sense and the testicles to demand these clowns be removed before they cripple us even more.
WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $1.4 million fine against 52 ABC Television Network stations over a 2003 broadcast of cop drama NYPD Blue.
The fine is for a scene where a boy surprises a woman as she prepares to take a shower. The scene depicted "multiple, close-up views" of the woman's "nude buttocks" according to an agency order issued late Friday.
ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Co. The fines were issued against 52 stations either owned by or affiliated with the network.
FCC's definition of indecent content requires that the broadcast "depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities" in a "patently offensive way" and is aired between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
The agency said the show was indecent because "it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs , specifically an adult woman's buttocks."
The agency rejected the network's argument that "the buttocks are not a sexual organ."
This is such a target-rich paragraph…
This happened in 2003. Now it is 2008. Our FCC is just now waking up from its long slumber and discovering that a woman took a shower in 2003. Apparently taking showers is offensive to the Miss Prudes at the FCC. They’re OK with Michael Savage’s and John Gibson’s obscenities, but showers are right out of the permissible box.
Note also that Disney, that wonderful republican company that brought you the 9/11 film lies, is involved in sexual pandering. How horrible! What will Mickey say?
By the way, the FCC has now officially endorsed the republican position that buttocks are in fact a sexual organ. Just in case all the pederasts and perverts among the republican politician class hadn’t known that.
ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Police faced a difficult if not impossible task Thursday as they tried to stop the spread of pornographic video and photos of two high school girls, images that were transmitted by cell phone to dozens of the girls' classmates and then to the wider world.
District Attorney James B. Martin said at least 40 Parkland High School students believed to have received the images would not face prosecution as long as they show their phones to police by Tuesday to ensure the images have been erased.
But students at the school said the distribution was far more widespread.
"Most people got it and kept passing it along for fun to everyone in their phonebook," said Jon Gabriel, 16, a junior who said he received and deleted the images.
Apparently teeners in Allentown no longer engage in cow-tipping. Maybe they’ve been watching too much NYPD Blue, or too many half-time shows of NFL championship games. They’re doing exactly what teenagers have done for about 4,000 years, but it seems they’re not ashamed of it.
And that is probably what has the authorities all hysterical, because they seem to believe sex is dirty, and shameful, and has to be hidden away, lest the kids’ bestial natures come to the fore.
Let me add this as a troll prophylactic: I don’t endorse teenage sex. I don't need to; teenagers find out about it all by themselves, and if I had a teenaged child I’d try to discourage it, because it does distract you from other things, like school, and studying, and chores, and authorized extra-curricular activities like team sports and band and such. Failing that, I’d make damned sure they knew about the marvels of latex.
Despite the best efforts of parental figures I did it, and was damned glad I could. (Thank you, Regina West, Leslie Newman, and Jillian Kauffman. Wherever you are today let me hope you are happy.) And if my school grades suffered a bit I think I was a happier young man for it.
A state trooper was sent to the school Thursday and will return for two more days to ensure that images were erased from the cell phones of students whose parents got letters from prosecutors. The letter explained what had happened, set a deadline for erasing the images and asked the parents to sign consent forms.
Martin said students who fail to comply by the deadline could be prosecuted in juvenile court for possession of child pornography.
One of the girls in the pictures is shown engaging in a sex act with an unidentified boy, Martin said. The other girl took and transmitted a photo of her bare breasts, he said.
Martin said he was not certain if the girl shown having sex had known she was being photographed. As for the other student, "she's a victim and she's not a victim," he said.
"Our thrust has been to get the kids to come forward and we've indicated we will not charge them for possessing the images," Martin told The Associated Press. "I'm not sure what we're going to do with the participants at this point."
This is just stunning. Is there no crime at all in Pennsylvania? Don’t they understand that blowing this up to such an incredible extent just makes everybody more curious about it all?
I’m sure District Attorney James B. Martin is a very effective prosecutor, and I’m certain he’s hell on wheels with serious crime. I know he worked very hard to get to the bottom of the Charles Cullen matter, but I am glad I’m not one of his children. I will wonder whether his kids are required to have their cell phones examined every night.
Via today’s Agonist we learn that US military officials have decided that Afghanistan is going to be easy pickings this Spring.
The Taliban are unlikely to launch a spring offensive in Afghanistan this year because all their energies will be focused in Pakistan, United States military officials said. But as that battle heats up, US officials added that they do not have enough intelligence on the ground in Pakistan.
KARACHI - With the Taliban's spring offensive just months away, the Afghan front has been quiet as Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have been heavily engaged in fighting security forces in Pakistan's tribal regions.
But now Taliban leader Mullah Omar has put his foot down and reset the goals for the Taliban: their primary task is the struggle in Afghanistan, not against the Pakistan state.
Mullah Omar has sacked his own appointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the main architect of the fight against Pakistani security forces, and urged all Taliban commanders to turn their venom against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, highly placed contacts in the Taliban told Asia Times Online. Mullah Omar then appointed Moulvi Faqir Mohammed (a commander from Bajaur Agency) but he refused the job. In the past few days, the Pakistani Taliban have held several meetings but have not yet appointed a replacement to Mehsud.
Maybe you ought to pay attention to what your enemy says. So far, they've done exactly what they have declared they would do. I dunno, it just seems easy to me, although I lack a degree from Army Vo-Tech and advanced training from the glamor school.
2. From the same article, here’s some on-the-ground intelligence for US military officials:
This major development occurred at a time when Pakistan was reaching out with an olive branch to the Pakistani Taliban. Main commanders, including Hafiz Gul Bahadur and the main Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan, Sirajuddin Haqqani, signed peace agreements. But al-Qaeda elements, including Tahir Yuldashev, chief of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, undermined this initiative.
"We refused any peace agreement with the Pakistani security forces and urged the mujahideen fight for complete victory," Yuldashev said in a jihadi video message seen by Asia Times Online. Yuldashev's closest aide and disciple, Mehsud, last week carried out an attack on a Pakistani security post and then seized two forts in the South Waziristan tribal area.
I know you’re really aching to get stuck in combat in yet another country, but look – you can’t handle the two countries you’re stuck in now. Why not allow Pakistan, a sovereign country, to handle its own internal affairs?
Pakistan bombed South Waziristan and sent in heavy artillery and tanks for a major operation against Mehsud. Other important commanders are now in North Waziristan and they support the peace agreements with the Pakistani security forces.
Pakistan's strategic quarters maintain the planned operation in South Waziristan is aimed particularly at eliminating Mehsud.
"While talking to government representatives in the jirga [peace council] we could clearly discern a grudge against Baitullah Mehsud and the Mehsud tribes by the security forces. And there are signs that the government is obsessed with a military operation to make Baitullah Mehsud a martyr," a leading member of the peace jirga in South Waziristan, Maulana Hisamuddin, commented to Voice of America.
Yes, we’re all concerned about the possibility that Pakistan might fall to a fanatical Islamist movement, and thereby the nukes might come under their control. Well, leaving aside the fact that George Bu$h engineered this danger by his refusal to properly prosecute the Taliban and al-Qadeda (headed by O b L, scion of a family the Bu$h family has done business with for 30 years) it might be a good idea to use the nuclear bunker busters that Mr Cheney has been slavering to use in Iran on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons instead.
By the way, gentlemen, if, as MG David Rodriguez suggests, you’re not concerned with the Taliban making a spring offensive, why is GEN Dan McNeill asking for another 3,000 troops?
As NATO forces struggle to contain a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, the US is expected to send 3000 more marines to that nation in advance of an anticipated spring offensive.
U.S. Army General Dan McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, made the formal request for reinforcements this week. It has already received the backing of Central Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is likely to get quick approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
However, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company, the move has already been under consideration by the Pentagon for the last three months, while the Bush administration "has dragged its heels," partly out of fear that it would be seen as "an admission the US was far too absorbed in Iraq, while it left Afghanistan to dangerously deteriorate."
Isn’t this actually a reversal of your decision last year to not allow the Marines to concentrate in Afghanistan?
A confused man might not be able to decide whether you gentlemen have no frickin idea what to do with the mess the neocons left you with, or whether you just have too many uniformed PR flacks practicing public diplomacy through misrepresentation.
The Federal government of Australia has taken to warning its citizens of the dangers of traveling abroad. And one of the more dangerous countries apparently is – Canada!
Oh, Canada!
O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
Ummm, all the Australians I have ever known would be offended if you tried to warn them they were in danger. In fact, a couple of them would turn downright violent if you tried to suggest there was something tougher than them down the road. And that was before a liter or two of Fosters or Barefoot Radler.
Be that as it may, herewith the official Australian list of Canadian dangers:
Terrorists, thieves and tornadoes - oh, Canada!
Australians considering a trip to the Great White North may find themselves quickly making other plans after reading their federal government's travel advisory on Canada.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade recently updated its "Smart Traveller" website - intended to give travellers "up-to-date information about the risks Australians might face overseas" - and classified the world's nations into five categories based on their current "security situation."
Canada falls into the second safest category, called "exercise caution" (not as safe as Chile, Romania and South Korea), with terrorism listed as the top concern. [emph added]
"We advise you to exercise caution and monitor developments that might affect your safety in Canada because of the risk of terrorist attack," the website reads.
"Pay close attention to your personal security and monitor the media for information about possible new safety or security risks."
While the crime rate in Canada is acknowledged to be "similar to that of Australia," tourists are warned to remain vigilant as "pick pocketing and street theft occurs at tourist destinations, hotels and on public transit."
I’ll note in passing that before Canadians got themselves saddled with a conservative national government the greatest danger was the loss in value of the dollar (dollar Francaisé in Quebec) when shopping in the States. Now it’s all terror, all the time up there.
Those conservatives sure know how to be terrified of people with brown skins, though, don’t they? Why, a cynical man might think they’re just like our conservatives.
Somehow I don’t think Canada is less safe than Chile or Romania. It doesn’t seem like Chile has a great deal of terrorism activity now that they have a leftie government and have clamped down on the rightwing paramilitary goons. And I know the biggest danger in Romania is having your car stolen. Whereas in Canada – I’ve seen the Canadiens play at Madison Square Garden and the Islanders were not terrified.
And if you thought the dangers of wingmen with suicide hockey pucks was bad, wait till you hear about the Canadian climate!
The section on climate, which was just updated with new information about natural disasters, would turn even the most hardened adventurer away.
"Heavy snowfalls and ice in the winter can make driving dangerous. The wind-chill factor can also create dangerously cold outdoor conditions. ... The province of British Columbia in western Canada is in an active earthquake zone. Alberta and British Columbia are also subject to avalanches. ... Tornadoes can occur in some areas of Canada between May and September. Bush and forest fires can occur any time in Canada."
If I weren’t such an adventurous, laugh-at-danger kind of guy, I’d probably cross Canada off my list of refuge countries in the event of another Republican in the White House.
But I think the real motivation of the Australian government trying to keep their cobbers out of Canada is fear that they might try Molson Golden Ale. They'd definitely overstay their visas.
Faced with a possible collapse of the world’s banking system brought on by the greed of Wall Street bankers and money grubbers, the Feds have demanded some sort of rescue operation (paid for by the taxpayers, of course.)
Ever eager to grovel before George Bu$h, Nancy Pelosi and her spineless cohorts in the House have agreed to a proposal that will soften the edge of the greedheads' panic by reducing the Fed interest rate in two steps: ¾ of a point was stripped off the Fed interest rate the day before yesterday, and there will be an additional cut, perhaps half a point, signed off on next week.
Wall Street reacted exuberantly yesterday, with the Dow-Jones Industrial average finishing the day up more than 150 points from the start. We can confidently expect another bog jump next week when they Feds give their best friends another bog wet kiss.
Just to pretend that this recession won’t hurt the middle class and the poor there’s even something in it for you and me: we’ll get token tax “rebate” checks, which are actually part of our 2008 tax return payments/credits. That means you have to pay these rebates back next year. But in the meantime you’ll think Nancy loves you.
WASHINGTON — House leaders and the White House on Thursday announced a tentative agreement on an economic stimulus package of roughly $150 billion that would pay stipends of $300 to $1,200 per household, and more for families with children, plus provide tax incentives for businesses to encourage spending.
The accord was announced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. at a Capitol news conference and hailed minutes afterward by President Bush as the fruit of “patience, determination and good will” in both parties.
By now you should understand that if George Bu$h compliments the Dem “leadership” that means he’s laughing at what’s on their chins. And it’s a big load this time.
As it was presented on Thursday afternoon, the package calls for workers who paid income taxes to receive $300 to $600, and couples to receive up to $1,200 — plus $300 more for each child. The stipend, which some lawmakers were calling a “tax rebate,” would be subject to income limits so that the wealthiest taxpayers would not receive it. Payments would go to individuals with adjusted gross incomes under $75,000 and couples with adjusted gross incomes under $150,000. (Late Thursday afternoon, the White House corrected an earlier statement that the $75,000 and $150,000 ceilings applied to taxable incomes.)
Just remember that even some of the politicians are telling the truth. These are “rebates.” If you can remember back a few years when Mr Bu$h fraudulently sent out “rebates” everyone danced for joy. “Oh,what a wonderful kind man he is! He’s giving us our own money early.”
And then we all had to account for it in next year’s tax returns. Watch for the same thing for your 2008 returns.
And even the republicans like this one because not only does it give more tax breaks to businesses, it screws the poor and needy.
[I]t was unclear how the package, without extended unemployment benefits or increased food stamps, would be received by Democrats in the Senate, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who have said that those proposals offered the best prospects for quickly injecting added spending into the economy. [emph added]
Just to be clear, Nancy couldn’t find it in her to fight for the Americans who need the help the most. If you’re out of work, or need help to feed your kids properly, toughski shitsky, as they say in the Polish Army.
One of the great dreams of the Osprey was that it would deposit Marines with their own organic support weapons, ready to support the assault. It looks as if the Marines might be able to assault with the Osprey, but without mortar support.
When the Marines shipped their V-22 Osprey aircraft to Iraq last year, they had to leave behind the assault vehicles and mobile mortar system that fit inside the planes.
The Marines' new mortar system can't safely carry its ammunition.
That conclusion, from a government audit, is the most recent bad news for the Marines' attempt to ferry firepower inside the Osprey. The Defense Department inspector general is investigating the program, which is two years behind schedule and $15 million over budget.
The system consists of a jeeplike vehicle called the Growler that pulls trailers carrying mortars and ammunition.
Infantrymen who’ve made a combat assault, or dealt with a swiftly-developing meeting engagement, understand just how useful organic mortars can be. They’re right there, on the spot, and can provide the artillery support you need, usually much dater than tubes or heavier artillery, at a distant fire base.
That Growler sounds like a jim-dandy little gadget to schlep round your tubes and ammo. Looks kind of cute, too. Doesn’t it remind you of those Jeeps your grampaw used to drive waay back in “the big one” ? Looks like kind of a short wheelbase, though, doesn’t it?
The Growler, made in Robbins, N.C., costs $127,000 each and cannot safely pull its ammunition trailer, according to interviews and the report from the Government Accountability Office. The trailer has a tendency to bounce or tip over, which could crush a Marine riding in the back of the Growler. A Growler, not pulling a trailer, was reported to have tipped over last summer when it swerved to avoid a turtle in the road.
Oops.
One of the reasons the Army sent away their little Jeeps, and went with the Hummer was the wider stance, thereby ensuring a more stable platform.
Should I infer from the article that the Marines are buying the puppies at $127,000 per, just because they’re tiny enough to fit inside the Osprey?
Didn’t they – you – know – test-drive them first?
Apparently not.
The problems were predictable, said Philip Coyle, who directed the Pentagon's weapons testing from 1994 to 2001. The Marines decided to start production before testing the vehicle and mortars, Coyle said.
"It is a sign of rushing to failure," he said.
Some sailor-boy in green landed on shore with a pocket full of ca$h and said “Now I need me a ride.” And an obliging salesman was right there to show him this cute little go-cart with the macho name.
“Son, what do you do?”
“Sir, I’m a mortarman.”
“Well, son, I’ve got just the thing for you. You know how heavy those mortar tubes are? And how hot and nasty it can be some places? Son, you’re gonna love this unit. It’s got a small wheelbase, so you an turn around in tight corners, and it’s narrow enough that you can fly this thing anywhere you want to. And look! It’s got a trailer hitch so you carry around trailers for your tubes and ammo! And I gave it this great name, ‘Growler.’ Chesty would have loved it.”
“Gee, that sounds great, Sir. How much is it?”
“Well, son, how much have you got?”
“Ummmmm….. about $17 million, sir.”
“Son, you just bought yourself a bunch of go-carts. Your buddies are gonna love them. No need to dirty your nice clean greens test-driving this now. I’ll send it on to your base. No you go have a nice time on shore leave.”
Now I can’t guarantee the conversation went exactly like that, because I don’t really know. Sure, there might have been a bit of poetic license. And the Marines aren’t talking because the Inspector General is really interested in the entire purchase.
The Marines won't discuss the program, known as the Expeditionary Fire Support System, because of the Defense Department's investigation.
Now, that DOD IG might not say anything harsh about the whole matter. That office has a spotty record, after all.
But they probably can’t miss this:
The contract award was controversial because the founder of Carolina Growler, Terry Crews, is a retired Marine colonel with strong connections. The Defense Department received an anonymous complaint claiming that Crews was a close friend of Brig. Gen. William Catto, who headed the agency that awarded the contract, Marine Corps Systems Command in Quantico, Va.
The complainant, who identified himself as a career procurement professional, said Catto steered the contract to Carolina Growler and General Dynamics.
After demonstrations from three companies, the selection committee recommended the contract go to a team of United Defense, which supplied the mortar, and Rae-Beck Automotive of Michigan, which built a new vehicle from scratch. According to the complaint, the United Defense bid was technically superior and cost less, while the Growler flunked crucial tests and was coupled to a much more expensive mortar system.
Gasp. Shocking, simply shocking. I also liked the part about buying a mortar system from General Dynamics, because, you see, the Marine Corps apparently doesn’t own any mortars.
Back in last October, the Marines asked to be excused from the Anbar province of Iraq and sent instead to Afghanistan where things are…. problematic might be a diplomatic word to use. The logic was that it would simplify troop rotation to have the Army responsible for Iraq, with their 15 month tours, and the Marines in Afghanistan, with their seven month deployments.
Additionally, since Marines are all riflemen, wherever they go they bring along riflemen temporarily assigned to Super Cobra helicopters, Harrier jets, and F/A-18 Hornet fighter bombers. Being able to deploy with your own air force makes things a bit neater.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!) methodology.... so at first glance I'm liking this plan. Marines in Afghanistan, Army in Iraq, and the Air Force out somewhere in middle America reminding everyone of how important they are.
Sarcastic irony in the Air Force. Who could have guessed?
There was some credible sense to the proposal, since the Army could rotate its troops out of Afghanistan and into Anbar, a province that is presently the great showpiece for the Bu$h malAdministration. They’re bribingpaying tribute paying the $300 per month salaries of somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 tribesman, designated as “concerned local citizens” to keep them quiet and keep the supply lines open from Kuwait and Aqabah.
Picture credit: Moon of Alabama
Only cynical people would claim that the Marines wanted to get out from under a situation (Iraq) that has been a complete failure, and especially to get out of Anbar before it blows up. I’m sure the Commandant and his staff felt they could contribute something significant to the fight in Afghanistan.
At the time it was decided that no, the Marines should stay just where they were. I can’t help feeling that decision wasn’t made in the Pentagon, but rather within our White House. After all, Anbar is the only bragging point they’ve got in the Global War On Terror ™ and why fix it if it ain’t broke?
Then last week we saw Secretary Gates going off (unfairly) on our NATO allies in Afghanistan, an attack he apologized for the next day.
Also last week we learned that GEN David McKiernan, presently CG, US Army, Europe, is slated to be assigned to command all NATO forces in Afghanistan. His predecessor, GEN Dan McNeill, asked for an additional 3,200 troops to be assigned to his command. There are presently about 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, including 14,000 Americans. There is also a separate command of about 12,000 US troops tasked on a counter-terrorism mission.
The Army is pretty well strapped, with all of its ready forces (including the Strategic Reserve) in Iraq. The surge escalation planned and enacted last year has tied the Army’s hands by forcing it to deploy brigades ahead of schedule (and in one case delaying a brigade’s return in order cover the planned in-country deployment around Baghdad.) The five “surge” brigades are now out of the Army’s inventory for a year or more, and as I mentioned, the Army had to dig deep into its Strategic Reserve, which is a serious matter. That’s the immediate follow-on reinforcement after the one ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne division is dispatched to whatever hot spot suddenly flares up. Those units that have recently returned to their home bases are currently combat-ineffective as they replace positions emptied by retirement, death, wounds, or soldiers released from active duty.
Finding 3,200 more US troops for Afghanistan could become a problem. Fortunately, the Commandant suggested last year that Army troops in Afghanistan be supplanted by Marines.
With the Corps currently in the process of expanding from its active duty strength of 175,000 to a planned 202,000 it will become larger and more vigorous. The reserve force provides about 40,000 additional troops. It seems quite possible the Commandant will get his wish.
This will make the proposed complete failure in Iraq the fault of the Army, and not the republicans and Mr Bu$h.
Friday was the beginning of the feast of Ashura, a festival holy day for Shiites, which commemorates the martyrdom of Husseyn, grandson of the prophet Muhammed at the battle of Karbala in 680, C.E.
Shiite pilgrims traveling to celebrate the holy day in Karbala included some members of a millenialist sect called the Soldiers of Heaven who believe that the 10th Imam is about to return to end injustice in the world. Comparisons to some of our more remarkable christianist lunatics just can’t be avoided.
The country was spotted by violence and death: a two-hour running gun battle between a group believed to be the Soldiers of Heaven in Basra and Nasariya in the South brought about the deaths of dozens, including several prominent Iraqi central government figures as Naji Rustum, the commander of the Special Operations, and Zamil Rumayid, head of Dhi Qar Governorate Intelligence Department.
The deaths of these two men is significant because it indicates that they were prepared to go out into the street fighting in order to take personal control of the fighting.
Unless you want to take the position that they didn’t trust their men to fight properly, you’d be forced to the conclusion that these men died of leadership. Reports that the fighting was quelled within two hours in the south seem to hint at the abilities of the Iraqi Army and National Police in that area.
The fighting, which started off with small gun battles in the vicinity of the Basra corniche, quickly spread to other areas of the city. There has been speculation that other groups took advantage to try to pile on, yet were apparently smothered pretty quickly.
I can’t help but recall that this is the area where MNF-I was claiming the British screwed the pooch and failed to train the security forces properly. A cautious man might think the MNF-I could be wrong.
A rocket attack killed seven people and wounded 20 in Tal Afar, a northern city. The attack marred an otherwise uneventful Ashura celebration, said Maj. Gen. Najim Abdullah, the mayor of Tal Afar.
Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar Province, suffered some of its worst violence in months when three suicide car bombers attacked a police station just outside the city. Five policemen were killed and seven were wounded, Lt. Col. Thamir Ali Suleiman said.
A Marine Corps spokesman in nearby Falluja said there was a report of a suicide attack late Saturday afternoon about five miles from Ramadi, but further details were not immediately available.
Two Shiites celebrating Ashura were killed in Kirkuk, the northern city where Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen are vying for control. They were killed by two improvised bombs hidden in trash near a Shiite mosque. Seven others were wounded.
In Baghdad, a bomb exploded in a restaurant in Sadr City, killing one person and wounding 13, an Interior Ministry official said.
Weren’t all these areas declared pacified in the wake of the surge escalation designed by Generalissimo Field Marshal Fred Kagan, and carried out so superbly by GEN Saint David Petraeus? Here we have quite a few separate incidents of violence. I get so confused when reality doesn’t agree with Bu$h malAdministration pronouncements…
The NY Times article quoted immediately above tries to make the MNF-I point that the fighting in and around Basra shows the South is not pacified, and the Iraq national forces are vulnerable. I’m not sure that statement is supportable. They were faced with a tough situation, reacted, and squelched the gunmen. Of the 66 dead in the Basra area, 50 are reported to be gunmen.
Professor Juan Cole, in writing about these incidents yesterday, makes a point worth considering:
Some will say that it is good news that the Iraqi security forces were able to put down the uprising by themselves. This is true, though how much help the US gave, exactly, is shrouded in mystery on these shores. But it is also true that the cultists were able to kill one high ranking army officer and to wound two others, and to kill several police and military troops. And it is further true that this group is relatively tiny, whereas if the Mahdi Army really did launch a challenge to the government, it is not clear whether it could survive.
Ah, yes. The “radical Muslim cleric” Muqtada al-Sadr. His six-month mandated stand down period for the “Mahdi Army” is almost over, and many wonder what he will do.
When discussing fighting and deaths in Iraq you have to keep an open mind about the accuracy of reports. This may be one of these glass-half-full moments, but if in fact the object of the exercise is to enable the Iraqis to stand up for themselves, and thereby facilitate our standing down (and unassing the George Bu$h ego-war) then it appears at first reports that the central government forces did what they were supposed to do.
UPDATE: Frequent reader and good friend Dubhaltach, of Gorilla's Guides has smacked my hand for forgetting we're waiting for the 12th Imam and not the 10th. He has also pointed out that some news stories have made the argument that the millenialist gunmen were not disposed of as easily as first reports would indicate, but we don't know for sure since Iraq is in electrical blackout for 12 hors pf the day\.
The US Army has a parameter called “deployable strength.” This figure seems to be the nominal, optimal strength of a unit as reflected on what used to be named its DA-1, the unit Morning Report. The Morning Report listed the total strength of a company-sized unit, including all personnel assigned or attached for rations and administrative support and UCMJ, and personnel on leave, in hospital or medical hold, and detached for duty elsewhere. It told a higher headquarters just who was available. The Morning Report was phased out in 1978, replaced by a more efficient electronic gizmo, but the reporting goes on. “Present For Duty” is “Deployable Strength.”
Soldiers who were medically unfit or considered borderline have been sent to the Middle East to meet Army goals for “deployable strength,” The Denver Post reported Thursday.
Quoting internal Army e-mails and a Fort Carson soldier, the newspaper said that more than 50 troops were deployed to Kuwait en route to Iraq while they were still getting medical treatment for various conditions. At least two have been sent home.
Capt. Scot Tebo, the surgeon for Fort Carson’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, wrote in an e-mail obtained by the newspaper that “We have been having issues reaching deployable strength, and thus have been taking along some borderline soldiers who we would otherwise have left behind for continued treatment.”
Because every uniformed bureaucrat knows the legend is more important than the fact, and soldiers with crippling injuries will miraculously be cured when landed in a combat zone. After all as Mr Bu$h’s neocon advisors keep insisting, it’s all a matter of the will. Apparently that famous Jewish carpenter isn’t the only man who has ever been able to heal a sick man and will him to rise from his bed.
Master Sgt. Denny Nelson said he was sent to Kuwait last month despite a severe foot injury. He was sent back to Fort Carson after a military doctor in Kuwait wrote that he never should have been shipped out.
Maj. Harvinder Singh, the 3rd Brigade Combat Team’s rear detachment commander, said he did not believe medically unfit soldiers have been sent to Iraq. He said soldiers with medical problems are deployed only if they can be assigned to light-duty jobs and if medical services are available at their destinations.
Fort Carson spokeswoman Dee McNutt said she knew of no Army policy defining “deployable strength” levels that Army commanders must meet.
Singh said commanders have goals, “but there is no repercussion if you don’t hit that goal.”
Uh huh. I see. A commander is not criticized if he doesn’t meet his goals, and it will never affect his promotion chances.
Certainly.
MSG Nelson mentioned above, injured himself while playing on his daughter’s trampoline, circumstances that the Army used to consider in “line of duty” and before the Army’s desperate push to fulfill the demands of Mr Bu$h’s ego and the greed of Mr Cheney’s friends, MSG Nelson would have been left home to fully recuperate, and to follow on when fully recovered.
Now they’re shipping bodies that breathe once in a while to Iraq.
He said he was sent to Kuwait last month even though Fort Carson doctors ordered that he not run, jump or carry more than 20 pounds for three months.
Nelson said two other soldiers were deployed with torn rotator cuffs, another was deployed even though he was taking morphine for nerve damage and another had mental health issues.
Nelson said the soldier with nerve damage was sent home after medical staff at a clinic in Iraq turned down his request for more pain medication.
Nelson said that while he was in Kuwait he was told by superiors he would be in charge of 52 soldiers who were receiving medical treatment.
“I expected to find a whole bunch of people, but when I got there, they were all gone. They were already all in Iraq,” Nelson said.
By the way, MSG Nelson did not continue on to Iraq.
Nelson said he feared he would be a liability to fellow soldiers because of his inability to carry full combat gear.
“I’m not going to Iraq not being able to wear any of my gear, not carry a weapon,” he said. “I become a liability to everybody around me because if they get mortared, they’re going to have to look out for me because obviously, I can’t run. I can’t look out for myself. Now I’ve got soldiers worrying about my welfare, instead of their own.”
A doctor in Kuwait – an officer actually paid to think - sent his ass (and damaged leg) back to CONUS, and sent a rather unhappy email back to the authorities at Ft Carson.
Nelson was sent back to the U.S. after a physician in Kuwait, Maj. Thomas Schymanski, sent Fort Carson officials an e-mail saying, “This soldier should NOT have even left [the continental United States] ... In his current state, he is not full mission capable and in his current condition is a risk to further injury to himself, others and his unit.”
I couldn’t speculate how The Denver Post got the copy of the email, but I’ll bet that receives a lot more attention than investigating why the Army is shipping troops to the sandbox who are not fit for duty. And then they have to be sent home, costing the US taxpayer two unnecessary plane tickets.
Paul Bogosian is a lifetime US government bureaucrat. He graduated from college in 1972, enlisted in the Army and then got a Master’s degree. He has been working for us since 1976. He recently gave a talk at Association of the U.S. Army's (AUSA) Aviation Expo in Arlington, Va., Jan. 10th and discussed the future of Army Aviation.
U.S. Army Must Reinvigorate Future Rotorcraft Design, Aviation PEO Says
As the U.S. Army begins to shape its future concept of operations for vertical systems, the service needs to begin thinking more creatively about new designs and technology if it is to advance its rotorcraft capabilities, aviation program officer Paul Bogosian says.
"The concern is...we're fielding essentially the same kind of aircraft" with the same characteristics as in the past[.]We've contributed to behavior in the industry where we've invested heavily in existing platforms or building new versions of existing platforms."
A Teal Group study on the world rotorcraft market essentially said the same thing in August 2007, calling the nature of Army procurement "completely derivative." The study pointed out Sikorsky's newest offering, the upgraded UH-60M, is a modernized Black Hawk, and Boeing's CH-47F is a modernized version of an aircraft from 1962. Army Aviation wants to "reawaken" a drive for new designs and technology, Bogosian said. "Compound helicopters, more speed, what kinds of requirements for lift are associated with a future force?" He added that it is important to answer those questions and then "align science and technology investments to pursue those needs."
Bogosian had hoped to make "a more dramatic impact" on Army aviation science and technology (S&T) spending in an upcoming Program Objective Memorandum (POM), but Army Aviation lacks the "clarity and force to do that" right now. Which, he said, is "not a bad thing, considering DOD's consideration of the Joint Heavy Lift," which could have the effect of defining the next set of technologies for the industry. By the 2012-2017 POM, Bogosian added, "we'll see a dramatic realignment of aviation S&T."
It sounds to me as if Joe Taxpayer is going to be asked for $ome $erious money to keep Bell-Boeing and Lockheed Martin afloat as heavy combat in Iraq slowly recedes into the history books with a Democratic Administration.
I'm fine with giving the troops the best equipment possible. I just resent paying for it with carloads of $1,000 bills.
Some quick computation on the back of a napkin tells me Mr Bogosian is about ready to retire, too. I’ll just bet he’ll want to find a new job in some industry he knows something about.
The US general in charge of training the Afghan police has criticised British-backed plans to arm local militias in an attempt to defeat the Taliban. The remarks by Maj-Gen Robert Cone, the second most senior US soldier in Afghanistan, are likely to deepen the row between London and Washington over how to counter the insurgency.
General Cone, who is in charge of rebuilding the Afghan police force, is the second US commander to condemn the initiative. He said: "Anything that detracts from a professional, well-trained, well-led police force is not the answer."
Last month, Gordon Brown said Britain would increase its support for "community defence initiatives, where local volunteers are recruited to defend homes and families modelled on traditional Afghan arbakai". The arbakai system involves arming untrained Afghani men, who agree to come running at the beating of a drum if their village elders feel threatened.
British diplomats and military strategists in the restive southern province of Helmand hope the idea might bolster Afghanistan's fledgling police force, which is unable to defend itself against attacks by Taliban insurgents. At least 10 officers died yesterday in a Taliban attack on a checkpoint in Kandahar. But US officials fear that arbakai fighters would fall under the command of warlords disloyal to the Afghan government. Their reluctance to endorse the plan follows a disastrous international initiative to build an "auxiliary" police force, which was scrapped last year.
Auxiliary officers were given assault rifles and uniforms after just a few days of rudimentary training, on the understanding that they would be required only to police the area they came from. "The auxiliary police was an attempt to take short-cuts," said General Cone, warning that there were similarities between the doomed auxiliaries and Mr Brown's arbakai plan. "It is very important to understand why the Afghan National Auxiliary Police Force did not work, as we look at any informal programme that doesn't promote professional policing," he added.
Analysts also fear the introduction of arbakai would undo years of effort by the United Nations to disarm illegal militias.
General Cone's remarks follow earlier criticism of the idea by the commander of the 37-nation Nato coalition in Afghanistan. General Dan McNeill said the plan would work only in small parts of the countryside which did not include Helmand, where most of Britain's 7,700 troops are stationed. He said: "My information, from studying Afghan history, is that arbakai works only in Paktia, Khost and the southern portion of Paktika, and it's not likely to work beyond those geographic locations."
General Cone is leading a root-and-branch reform of the Afghan police force, which has been ill-equipped, badly paid, poorly trained and dogged by corruption since 2001. The US government has pledged $7.4bn (£3.7bn) to improve Afghan security forces between now and October. But General Cone admitted there was no "model of what policing should be" in the country. "When Afghan people understand what well-trained, well-paid police do, they will demand it," he added. "But right now they are just not familiar."
He said he backed greater community involvement in the police if it meant "neighbourhood-watch type programmes" rather than arming and paying local people.
Britain has faced increasing criticism from allies in recent months for championing alternative tactics to defeat the Taliban. The Prime Minister promised more "tribal engagement" during a recent visit to Kabul. But last month the Afghan government expelled two UN and EU diplomats for meeting commanders sympathetic to insurgents.
There has been a lot of recent criticism of NATO efforts in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Gates fired off a broadside claiming that the NATO allies who agreed to come to Afghanistan after Mr Bu$h screwed it all up with his childish ego-war in Iraq in search of oil and his mother’s approval have in fact not been killing and dying enough.
British commanders were outraged after the US defence secretary criticised other Nato troops for their role in the bloody conflict in Afghanistan.
Robert Gates said the 30,000 US troops in Afghanistan were "doing a terrific job" in confronting the Taliban insurgency.
He added, however: "I think our allies over there, this is not something they have any experience with."
Mr Gates's comments caused an international outcry following months of simmering tensions between the U.S. and its allies over strategy in Afghanistan.
Senior British officers in Afghanistan said he should "wind his neck in".
…
Mr Gates told the Los Angeles Times he believed America's allies lack the skills to pursue successful counter-insurgency operations against Taliban guerillas.
It’s accurate to say that Denmark, Germany and Canada do not have the COIN experience that the US has purchased so expensively in Iraq. However, Mr Gates might have forgotten that Britain has had the only successful counter-insurgency campaigns in the history of the NATO member states. Even though Saint David Petraeus got to put his name on a book written by others, in true American military/management style, Britain defeated an uprising in Malaya and a particularly brutal and long-running insurrection in Northern Ireland. (My good friend A.E, might disagree with me that Northern Ireland was an apt example of COIN.)
Just because we’re in the middle of a pissing contest with the UK because they feel they’ve accomplished their mission in Southern Iraq and we wanted them to be tied down for 50 years like us is not a good reason to play Calvinball with them. They did what we asked them to, with a proportionately larger slice of their Army than we have stuck into the tarbaby.
What’s your problem, Mr Gates? Not enough Germans dying in Afghanistan? It was an American general who put them in the quiet part of Afghanistan.
Plus, no fair saying the Brits are not allowed to do in Afghanistan what we’re doing in Iraq! We’ve taken civilians in Iraq who are kinda-sorta ex-brigands, thieves, murderers and all-around not nice people and given them lots of guns, lots of money, and lots of free fire zones because they have a better dislike of Saudis than our government. We called that a great success, although in reality it’s only a temporary marriage of convenience. The Bu$h malAdministration was just seeking a propaganda victory. Sooner or later the US is going to stop paying these Anbaris baksheesh and then it will be Katie bar the door, with 70,000 well-armed and pissed off locals out of work.
The Shiite central government has decided that no more than 20% of these Iraqi mercenaries concerned local citizens will be permitted to join the army or national police forces and the other 80% are going to be left kicking the curb.
While there might be a legitimate concern that some of the Afghan police auxiliaries might be Talibani moles, we have seen that there are takfiri moles in the Iraqi Army. It’s going to happen when your colonialization policy includes kicking crates of rifles and bags of ca$h off of helicopters in a desperate attempt to stop them killing US troops in the runup to a national election.
I know I’m right, you know I’m right, and less importantly, but better-publicized, is the fact that Secretary Gates pulled in his horns the next day.
WASHINGTON - U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates scrambled Thursday to praise Canada and other NATO allies fighting in Afghanistan, saying reports that he's unhappy with their efforts don't "reflect reality" or the views of the American government.
Countries like Canada that are committing combat troops are "playing a significant and powerful role," Gates told a news conference called to quell an international furor after he told the Los Angeles Times he's worried some allied forces weren't trained in counterinsurgency operations.
…
Asked whether his comments this week fit "the Washington definition of a gaffe, which is accidentally telling the truth," Gates replied: "No, I don't think so."
And he insisted the additional U.S. marines, something Canada has been requesting for some time, doesn't "reflect dissatisfaction" with the military performance of allied forces.
U.S. military analyst Bruce Riedel said Gates was venting growing unease about a badly stretched U.S. military which is facing two serious insurgencies - in Iraq and Afghanistan - without the resources to fight them both effectively. [emph added]
If Mr Gates is unhappy with the flavor of his soup he’d do better to complain to the chef, who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
After a prolonged period of imprisonment, a deranged blogger has finally broken free of his captors. Advise the FBI to call off the search. (Unless, of course, you believe that….)
Note to my lawyer: don’t pay the ransom. I did manage to find this in a newspaper on the floor of the cell, however, and it might explain a lot about the CIA’s “send George a copy” torture tapes controversy.
MADERIYAH, Iraq -- Saad Mahami wanted more firepower. He didn't trust the Iraqi government to give him support, so inside Patrol Base Whiskey, at the edge of this village south of Baghdad, he told U.S. commanders that his 71 Sunni fighters needed additional weapons to fight the insurgent group [Saudis of] al-Qaeda in Iraq.
As he listened to Mahami's demand, Capt. David Underwood reminded his superiors that Mahami's men -- all members of a U.S.-backed Sunni paramilitary movement called Sahwa, or "Awakening" -- were already buying arms with U.S. reward money for finding enemy ammunition dumps. "And as we confiscate weapons, we hand them to Saad Mahami," Underwood told Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top commander in the region, during their meeting with the Iraqi.
The United States is empowering a new group of Sunni leaders, including onetime members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, intelligence services and army, who are challenging established Sunni politicians for their community's leadership. The phenomenon marks a sharp turnaround in U.S. policy and the fortunes of Iraq's Sunni minority.
The country was awash in guns when Saddam ruled the land (a time many Iraqis now refer to as “the good times” I believe. Doesn’t it sound like the NRA is in charge of things in Iraq? Three guns for every man? It’s like one of those first person shooter games you can theoretically carry four or five different weapons at the same time and switch from one to the other as needed.
Sunni Security Unit Leader, Colleagues Killed in Attack Encouraged by Bin Laden
BAGHDAD, Jan. 7 -- A suicide bomber killed the leader of a U.S.-backed neighborhood security force in Baghdad's Adhamiyah district Monday, his aides said, the latest in a string of attacks against such forces.
The blast, along with a second explosion, killed Col. Riyadh al-Sammarai and at least 10 others, witnesses said.
The campaign against the so-called Awakening groups began after Osama bin Laden called on Muslims late last month to attack such "dangerous conspiracies."
"They are sending a message to the Awakening fighters that we must leave the movement," said Riyadh Hadi, field commander of the Adhamiyah Awakening, as he stood among the corpses of his colleagues. "But this will only increase our will to fight against them more and more."
Oh, but –wait!
Safa Hussein, Iraq's deputy national security adviser, said al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to both attack the Awakening and penetrate its ranks. "Al-Qaeda's policy is in two directions," he said.[emph added-
One is immediately reminded of Caesar/ Qaisar Saadi al-Jubory , the Iraqi soldier who killed two GIs and wounded three others after allegedly watching the GIs manhandle/mistreat/beat up an Iraqi female during a house search in the al-Haramat area, western Mosul, on December 26th.
Naturally, the immediate (automatic) reaction from MNF-I was “the guy’s an al Qaeda mole.” Somehow it seems staff pukes are incapable of understanding what happens out in the boondocks. Maybe it’s the fact that high speed, low-drag ring knockers are impervious to the shit, and always seem to get the best assignments.
As it turns out, there’s quite a bit more to the story than what the Bu$hCo drones at MNF-I admitted, but you have to read an non-bought-out press to learn what happened. See the excellent report from our friend Siun at FDL for the grits.
Special stringer support from new Daddy Dubhaltach of Gorilla's Guides.
For dessert, instead if leechee nuts, I was trying to find a report from MNF-I about the mythical [Saudi} al Qaeda being on the run, but they’re hard to find,
Nethoggers’ Cernig has picked up on Larissa Alexandrovna’s echoing of my commentary 10 days ago regarding the post-shooting bomb blast at the assassination of the Bu$h malAdministration’s beard, Benazir Bhutto. (I’m not being harsh about Ms Bhutto. Her death was a tragedy for Pakistan, despite her family’s rather spotted record of corruption and alleged skimming of that country’s national treasury.)
Three former US intelligence officials have told Raw Story that not only is the gunman dead, he was likely the actual target of the suicide bomber.
According to a former high ranking US intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the delicate nature of the information, the US intelligence community understands the gunman to have been killed in the blast following Mrs. Bhutto's assassination.
"He was killed, probably not knowing that the suicide bomber was there," said this source. "We don't know for sure if the two men arrived together. We do know that the assassin died in the explosion, and was probably meant to."
I certainly don’t know anything about political assassinations, because I will deny that’s a skill set the US Army teaches its soldiers. But if I wanted to take a very important political target I wouldn’t use just one hitter. I might have a gunman in close in case the opportunity presented itself, and I might back him up with a dedicated zealot willing to kill himself (and the target) with a bomb. (This would also ensure the gunman couldn’t talk later.)
The fact that Ms Bhutto was in what is reported to have been an armored vehicle might well have mandated the bomb, should the pistol attack have failed. Providentially (or unfortunately) the pistol worked, and the bomb created further death and chaos, as well as silencing the shooter. It’s probably just coincident that the person with the vest bomb just happened to be standing right next to the shooter, eh?
Never one to leave a healing scab on a wound, I speculated further,
In case of failure I’d also have a couple of teams along the route of retreat, possibly with sophisticated anti-vehicle weapons, like RPGs. And I would need a spotter at middle distance to advise the cutoff teams whether the first attack failed, to alert them of the target’s approach.
While the suspicion of the world community has rightly settled on President Musharraf, having an inconvenient competitor eliminated in what can be passed off as a regrettable terrorist incident saves a lot of face for the Pakistani government. Face they promptly lost when they initiated an on-again, off-again series of speculations and laughable explanations about car roof levers and such. Shutting up the doctors after the fact was a nice touch, because it immediately switched the focus of the news cycle buzz from the killing to the cover up.
The danger in all this lies with the possibility that the USG might lose confidence in Musharraf, or at least more confidence than they had lost as evidenced by the insistence of Mr Bu$h and our alleged Russian expert, Ms Rice, that only Benazir Bhutto could save Pakistan from a fate worse than death. Or something.
And the only thing that could have pushed the Bu$h people to change course in Pakistan would have been the commentariat and punditocracy figuring it all out, spurred by a lot of questions from the man in the street inside the US.
Fortunately the only news audience that the Bu$hies ever pay attention to is domestic consumption. Propaganda Public diplomacy at its best, Bu$h-style. And the US corporate media has cooperated magnificently, speculating endlessly about neck wounds and moon roof levers and fortunately ignoring the first rule of political assassination: cui bono? How lucky.
As I said at the time,
I’m not saying anything. I‘m just saying eventually the truth will surface.
It should be obvious to any conscious mind that Ms Bhutto in exile was a minimal threat to President Musharraf. She was out of the country and has been noted in many places she was basically the heart and soul of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party. While it is true that any exiled politician with strong domestic support is a danger to incumbents, the simple fact is that she could not have re-entered the country without the state’s permission, and the PPP was sufficiently neutered so that there was no chance of a “students’ rebellion” a la Iran, 1979, which would gave paved the way for her triumphant return to replace the incumbent President.
I still find it hard to believe that the Bu$h malAdministration really believed they were going to get President Musharraf to shuffle off into retirement so easily, so they must have figured that they could prevail on Musharraf to allow Ms Bhutto to be Prime Minister and actually allow US forces to operate in the NWFP and FATA in order to somehow to something to distract the Taliban and al Qaeda from operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we have seen before that, they take counsel from their dreams, rather than from their fears.
Cernig ends his piece on a high note.
Can Bush at least stop selling the General-in-plainclothes advanced weaponry (e.g. nuke-capable fighters, anti-tank missiles, airborne early warning platforms) more useful against his neighbours than extremists, even if it does help line US arms manufacturers pockets with US taxpayers' money?
Gorilla’s Guides discussed missing children yesterday, starting with a 2007 UNICEF report on the subject. (Story originates with Al Jazeera, no link to UNICEF)
- An estimated 2 million children in Iraq continue to face threats including poor nutrition, disease and interrupted education.
- Many of the 220,000 displaced children of primary school age had their education interrupted.
- An estimated 760,000 children (17 per cent) did not go to primary schools in 2006.
- An average 25,000 children per month were displaced by violence or intimidation, with their families seeking shelter in other parts of Iraq.
- In 2007, approximately 75,000 children had resorted to living in camps or temporary shelters.
- Hundreds of children lost their lives or were injured by violence and many more had their main family wage-earner kidnapped or killed.
That’s the big picture.
For a closeup:
Abu Muhammad, a Baghdad resident, found it difficult to let go of his daughter’s hand but he had already convinced himself that selling her to a family outside Iraq would provide her with a better future.
“The war disgraced my family. I lost relatives including my wife among thousands of victims of sectarian violence and was forced to sell my daughter to give my other children something to eat,” he told Al Jazeera.
In 2006, Abu Muhammad and his family were forced to leave their home in Adhamiya, a district of Baghdad, after militia fighting claimed the streets in his once tranquil neighbourhood.
They began living in a makeshift refugee camp on the outskirts of Baghdad, but he soon lost his job and the children, unable to make the daily trek, quit school.
“There wasn’t enough money to spend on books, clothes and transport,” he said. His daughter, Fatima, the youngest of four children, began to show signs of malnourishment and a local medic said she had become anaemic.
Desperation
By mid-2007, conditions for his family had become desperate and his children, once healthy and bubbling with life, had become gaunt and lethargic.
It was then that a translator and a Swedish couple claiming to be part of an international NGO arrived in the makeshift refugee camp.
“They heard about my situation and the woman, who said she could not have babies, offered some money to give her my youngest daughter of two years old,” he said.
“I refused in the beginning but the Iraqi translator was constantly coming at the camp and insisting with the same question. One day I found that my children would die without food and a clean environment and the next time he came to my tent, I told him that I agreed.”
He gave the translator all personal documents and after a week the couple came with new documents for Abu Muhammad to sign, authorising the adoption and to pick up his daughter.
Abu Muhammad, who received $10,000, believes he is now damned by God, but he says his inner turmoil is allayed somewhat by his belief that Fatima will have a better life than many in Iraq.
“I could see her love in the first time she looked at her,” he said of the adoptive mother.
I usually like to comment on stories like this. I’m too ashamed of what my country has wrought to say anything.
Soldiers get killed and wounded in combat. That’s what war is. Some die quickly, screaming, their life’s blood spurting out, staining their buddies as they try desperately to save them. Others die slowly, inch by inch, day by day once they get home. They have no visible wounds, so amputated limbs. Their minds are dying.
Saving them is the job of the VA, which hasn’t done well in the past. The professionals at the VA are trying to win that battle.
The only outward sign of something amiss at Garry Naipo's household in this community of well-tended homes south of Fort Lewis is the ragged, yellowing lawn.
"It used to be like Safeco Field out there," Paoakalani "Paoa" Naipo said of the lawn his father no longer trims every three days. Before, Garry Naipo would forgo watching football on the weekend until the grass was cut. Once he started so early on a Saturday morning, his wife, Alii, rushed out, as she put it, "to save him from the neighbors."
Then Garry Naipo, a grandfather of three, went to Iraq -- boomeranging from cul-de-sac to combat and back in 15 months, a journey that would change his life -- and that of his family -- in subtle, corrosive ways.
Naipo, 51, is one of thousands of National Guard citizen soldiers who have left established jobs and families to answer a call and come back altered men and women. On the outside, they look fine, the same even. They blend in at work, in the grocery line, at their children's soccer games. People tell them they're lucky. They're not dead.
They don't bear the grim signatures of combat, the missing limbs or shattered skulls. Their wounds, though, are as insidious as they are invisible. Many return with brains and psyches damaged by chronic exposure to the hammering of blast waves and the afterimages left by bodies blown apart.
They come home, but not back to themselves.
“This portrait of Garry Naipo and his extended family was taken just before he left for Iraq in January 2004, when his National Guard unit was deployed. Alii Naipo says her husband came home from Iraq ‘a different man.’ She's been his main advocate in seeking help for him for post-traumatic stress disorder from the VA.”
This citizen-soldier answered his country’s call and came back a changed man. Combat changes many of us, and we don’t revert back to the person we were before.
In Iraq the exposure to significant bomb attacks has created a huge new class of wounded soldier: the Traumatic Brain Injury.
Veterans Affairs doctors estimate 60 percent to 65 percent of soldiers have experienced a significant explosion, or multiple detonations, by the time they leave the service. "Our mouths drop sometimes at how many blast events our servicepeople have been exposed to," said Jay Uomoto, a neuropsychologist with the VA Puget Sound.
That, in turn, has likely left many with undiagnosed mild to moderate brain injuries, a prognosis that some fear is setting a long fuse that could eventually swamp the system with disabilities as they emerge in the months and years to come.
There are pages of research information about this consequence of combat in Iraq, but not a great deal has reached the public about the scandal of the Army’s disgraceful soughing off of this injury.
Surprisingly, the VA recently announced that only six percent of GIs suffered from TBI. They must have been working from figures supplied from the Army. Soldiers with brain problems that were obvious to their buddies were certified as sound, and discharged into civilian life with no VA referral and no chance for disability payments for their wounds.
A VA mandatory screening program that took effect in April has looked at 61,285 veterans of the wars. Of those, 19.2 percent were identified on the screening questionnaire as potentially suffering from traumatic brain injuries and were referred for more tests.
While evaluation continues, VA spokeswoman Alison Aikele said officials believe, based on a smaller sample, that the final result about 5.8 percent will be diagnosed with TBI.
Just a few months ago, as Mr Bu$h was preparing to address the VFW, telling them what a Great Warrior Leader he was and how Islamofascism is the greatest danger ever facing the country, a group of real patriots was demanding the Bu$h malAdministration deal honestly and completely with the human consequences of its policies.
As President Bush prepares to address the 108th annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City tomorrow, Democrats today called on the President to offer more than the same empty rhetoric and broken promises on the issues that matter to America's veterans and military families. Despite years of promises, on President Bush's watch the Administration has allowed conditions at VA hospitals and medical centers like Walter Reed to deteriorate to appalling levels, has failed to accurately project the cost of treating thousands of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and has jeopardized the personal financial information of America's 26.5 million veterans. Worse, the President's budget proposals have consistently shortchanged the VA, with his 2008 budget including a two percent cut.
Garry Naipo’s been home for two years. He has trouble with his memory, trouble with his speech centers, his fingers are going numb, and he spends his days sheltering in his garage, which he sweeps out daily.
“Since returning from Iraq, Garry Naipo leaves his house less and less. His routine is to go to work, then come home to the bunker of his garage, which he cleans on a daily basis. "My safe place," Naipo calls his garage. "I just want to feel normal," he said recently. "I want to stop looking over my shoulder."
And he’s had little help.
Although he suffers ringing in his ears, is going deaf, has memory lapses, difficulty retrieving words, problems concentrating, anxiety and anger outbursts, he has yet to be medically evaluated for concussive brain injury. A few weeks ago, more than two years after his return, he got a questionnaire in the mail regarding blast wave exposure, but he said he hasn't been able to organize his thoughts enough to answer it.
Regardless of how the symptoms are labeled, his family is sure of one thing: Iraq transformed the man they knew as husband, father and grandfather -- and he's come back to a culture that, for the most part, has hardly noticed.
Those of us who have watched the trainwreck that is George Bu$h and his elitist policies realize he has no thought for soldiers once they have been expended, physically or mentally, in the ego-war of Iraq. They make great backgrounds for his political photo ops, but beyond that their deaths and maimings mean nothing to him.
A representative of the VA sent Jesse Wendel of the Group News Blog an email after reading his carrying my original story about the “MkII Pencil test” of body armor. The email denied the truth of assertion by military officials that soldiers who wore Dragon Skin armor into combat would be penalized if they died. It was claimed that the soldiers beneficiaries would be denied the SGLI payment.
Jesse Wendel sent me a copy of an email he received regarding the SGLI denial story.
Folks:
My title is below. One of my responsibilities is managing the Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance (SGLI) program on behalf of the Department of Veterans Affairs. I have been involved in the SGLI program for nearly 30 years.
I can assure you, there is ZERO truth to the statement about SGLI not being payable if the service member is injured or killed while wearing or not wearing that Dragon body armor or any other item.
99% of active duty service members have elected to be insured under SGLI. Except for extraordinarily serious situations, such as treason, desertion, etc. SGLI death proceeds are always payable for those individuals. SGLI is 24/7 coverage, everywhere in the world, and is payable whether the death is combat-related or not.
Please correct your story, or at least advise your staffs to not repeat the erroneous information in the future. Thank you very much.
Steve
Jesse and I have taken it as accurate and honest in tone and tenor. There is no need to contact jim by phone or email and discuss the matter with him. It goes without saying there is no need to appoint oneself a soldiers’ collective representative and abuse him in anyway at all.
Obviously, the next step was to backtrack the SGLI denial story. This story emanates from a January 14, 2006 article written by Nathaniel Helms under the DefenseWatch subsection of the pro-soldier Soldiers For The Truth which was started and inspired by COL David Hackworth, one of the greatest infantry soldiers the US was ever honored to have wear its uniform.
Go read the original, which I have excerpted, and decide for yourself. Remember: the issue here is not whether soldiers were actually denied their SGLI benefits, but whether or not the Army intentionally, mendaciously and dishonorably lied to troops going into combat.
Two deploying soldiers and a concerned mother reported Friday afternoon that the U.S. Army appears to be singling out soldiers who have purchased Pinnacle's Dragon Skin Body Armor for special treatment. The soldiers, who are currently staging for combat operations from a secret location, reported that their commander told them if they were wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin and were killed their beneficiaries might not receive the death benefits from their $400,000 SGLI life insurance policies. The soldiers were ordered to leave their privately purchased body armor at home or face the possibility of both losing their life insurance benefit and facing disciplinary action.
The soldiers asked for anonymity because they are concerned they will face retaliation for going public with the Army's apparently new directive. At the sources' requests DefenseWatch has also agreed not to reveal the unit at which the incident occured for operational security reasons.
On Saturday morning a soldier affected by the order reported to DefenseWatch that the directive specified that "all" commercially available body armor was prohibited. The soldier said the order came down Friday morning from Headquarters, United States Special Operations Command (HQ, USSOCOM), located at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. [editor: Special Ops soldiers are usually not given to telling tall tales unless it is at a bar.] It arrived unexpectedly while his unit was preparing to deploy on combat operations. The soldier said the order was deeply disturbiing to many of the men who had used their own money to purchase Dragon Skin because it will affect both their mobility and ballistic protection. [emph added]
"We have to be able to move. It (Dragon Skin) is heavy, but it is made so we have mobility and the best ballistic protection out there. This is crazy. And they are threatening us with our benefits if we don't comply." he said.
The soldier reiterated Friday's reports that any soldier who refused to comply with the order and was subsequently killed in action "could" be denied the $400,000 death benefit provided by their SGLI life insurance policy as well as face disciplinary action.
As of this report Saturday morning the Army has not yet responded to a DefenseWatch inquiry.
…
One of the soldiers who lost his coveted Dragon Skin is a veteran operator. He reported that his commander expressed deep regret upon issuing his orders directing him to leave his Dragon Skin body armor behind. The commander reportedly told his subordinates that he "had no choice because the orders came from very high up" and had to be enforced, the soldier said. Another soldier's story was corroborated by his mother, who helped defray the $6,000 cost of buying the Dragon Skin, she said.
The mother of the soldier, who hails from the Providence, Rhode Island area, said she helped pay for the Dragon Skin as a Christmas present because her son told her it was "so much better" than the Interceptor OTV they expected to be issued when arriving in country for a combat tour.
"He didn't want to use that other stuff," she said. "He told me that if anything happened to him I am supposed to raise hell."
At the time the orders were issued the two soldiers had already loaded their Dragon Skin body armor onto the pallets being used to air freight their gear into the operational theater, the soldiers said. They subsequently removed it pursuant to their orders.
Currently nine U.S. generals stationed in Afghanistan are reportedly wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin body armor, according to company spokesman Paul Chopra. Chopra, a retired Army chief warrant officer and 20+-year pilot in the famed 160th "Nightstalkers" Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), said his company was merely told the generals wanted to "evaluate" the body armor in a combat environment. Chopra said he did not know the names of the general officers wearing the Dragon Skin. [emph added]
While searching to track down the original story which emanated from the Solders For The Truth webpage I happened upon this interesting tidbit:
Former Head of Army's Body Armor Program Under Criminal Investigation
Retired Army Colonel John D. Norwood (West Point '80), former head of the Army office responsible for body armor, is reported to be under criminal investigation for alleged violations of federal law related to his taking a post-retirement job with Armor Holdings, Inc., one of the major providers of Interceptor Body Armor to the Army .
Two sources aware of the investigation have told DefenseWatch that at least three federal agencies are investigating Norwood's transition from being the Project Manager for Soldier Equipment under PEO-SOLDIER (from 2003 until his retirement in the summer of 2006) to his post-retirement job as a Vice President of the Aerospace & Defense Group of Armor Holdings.
Editor's Note: Effective August 1, 2007 BAE became the owner of Armor Holdings, Inc., and the new owners assigned components of former Armor Holdings to already existing divisions within BAE. A representative of BAE confirmed to DefenseWatch that Col. Norwood is a current employee with the title of "Vice President for Business Development" of a BAE component. This representative stated that he was "unaware of any investigation involving Col. John Norwood."
(DefenseWatch first exposed Norwood's trip through the revolving door from a senior position in the Army's body armor program responsible for Interceptor Body Armor (IBA) to a senior position with Armor Holdings.)
A third source, a long-time member of the personal protective equipment industry, has told DefenseWatch that one of the specific allegations for which Norwood is being investigated involves possible illegal actions with regard to classified information.
DefenseWatch will continue to pursue this story and keep its readers informed as more information becomes available.
Editor's Note: It is important to emphasize: (1) that Norwood is entitled to the presumption of innocence. To this point a criminal investigation is underway. And, (2) that an investigation means
