Bell-bottom trousers, coats of navy blue...

About the only thing that makes me laugh harder than wing-wipers all decked out in camouflage outfits is when squids do it.

I mean, those cammie suits'll make you SO hard to see on that ginormous fucking hunk of steel out in the in a fucking hole in the water, right?

What, blue cotton shirts and dungarees too much not-like-a-video-game for ya, Navy? They worked just fine when grandpap went out to sink the Imperial Japanese Navy.

I think what irks me about this nonsense is what some of the other waitstaff over at MilPub have complained about; that this isn't what services at war do, and, at least in theory the armed services are out fighting in various less-paved portions of the world even if the nation as a whole (outside of Victor Davis Hanson's prion-disease-addled brain) isn't. This also, IMO, isn't what services with a better grasp of their actual mission do; this is an artifact that ISTM that our armed services are infected with something that you see a lot if you look around the United States - that it's "better to look good than be good".

I realize that this is an extreme effect of selective observational bias, but...to me the impact of all this fussing about appearance give the impression that We the People (and We the Armed Forces) care if you are terrific at something only if it gets out there in the news, or into social media.

Oh, and the solution to the USN's cammie-pant problem?

Put all the gobs in GREEN cammie outfits.

FFS, people. You're fucking sailors!

Why not be proud to look like 'em?

The Khalsa shall rule!

"In a decision by the U.S. Army Thursday, Capt. Simratpal Singh, a decorated Sikh-American officer and combat veteran, has received a long-term religious accommodation to serve with long hair, a beard, and turban in accordance with his Sikh faith."

But the turban has to be digital camo, I see.

Interesting, in that given the Sikh tradition of military service and the U.S. Army's need for warm bodies I'd have thought this one would be pretty much a slam dunk a long time ago.

But, then again, peacetime armies tend to be kinda anal about uniform regulations. Frankly, I'd have loved to see AR 670-1 updated to include something like this as Sikh dress blue headgear:

Ain't gonna happen, sadly. My Army just doesn't have the passion for fashion. Sigh.

Anyway, consider this an open thread about the minutiae of military dress.

Bunny Slippers

In a rather entertaining example of "blogging is an odd business", here's how this post developed:

In researching the trope of aliens arriving to chastise humankind I wandered over to the Wikipedia entry for the old Twilight Zone broadcast "To Serve Man" (because I vaguely remembered this as a TV trope from a long-ago viewing of the Simpsons spoof Hungry Are The Damned

Okay, so; having got that far, in the footnotes of the Wiki entry I stumbled across a reference to the whole "tasty, tasty humans" thing as a slogan on the unit patch of the 509th Bomb Wing, the USAF unit that flies the B-2 bomber.

I then ran down this patch, which does, in fact, have an aliens-eating-people connection but doesn't quote "To Serve Man" verbatim. Instead the motto on the unit patch is "gustatus similis pullus", very doggy-latin for the English phrase "tastes like chicken".

Are you with me so far?

The pursuit of this, then, led me here: to a small collection of oddball funny USAF patches. I like all of them, including the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron, whose motto is pretty direct: NOYFB is an acronym for "none of your fuckin' business" which is, one assumes, the attitude that the C-5 jockeys who "...deliver classified aircraft from aerospace plants in Southern California to testing facilities around the country." routinely give when asked what they do for a living.

Which, then, led my mind back to this patch:

Which, when you get past the existential horror of nuclear holocaust, is pretty funny. There's a certain humor value - midnight-black humor, mind you - to the notion of Capt. Joe or Maj. Molly shuffling to the control console in their b-robe and fuzzy slippers, coffee in hand, to put an end to life on Earth.

As an aside, I wonder if there is something about the youthful nature of the USAF that produces these funny patches? Certainly the Army had it's silly slogans and catchphrases but in my experience they tended to be unofficial at best and secretive at worst. We would never have been willing to openly chuckle at ourselves the way these patches do. I have been hard on the USAF in the past and will be in the future, but this is an aspect of that service that I can and do appreciate.

They have a certain perspective of themselves that my own service conspicuously lacks.

So, anyway, there's the destination of all this Internet wandering; tasty fried humans - not as a centerpiece for an alien Thanksgiving but as a result of our own inability to figure out how to solve our differences without a bow and spear.

Not exactly an original thought, but perhaps one to stop for a moment and curl a lip at on the last day of the year.

The Army I Knew: easy to be soft

I'm jumping ahead of myself a bit here, but this occurred to me just recently due to the cartoons being in heavy rotation and I wanted to post it before I forgot.

So - I drew this little cartoon in early 1984. Before I go on, look it over and try and guess what the point of the goof is. Any ideas?So the insignia on the eagle's wing probably blows the gaff.

The caption is a bit of Eighties Army slang that may be almost forgotten, but it comes from the little spread-eagle at the center of the inverted-teardrop specialist rank insignia. Since a Specialist Fourth Class (a "Speck-Four" in the term of the time) had nothing but the green upside-down teardrop and the eagle, getting promoted to Specialist Fifth Class was "getting an umbrella for the bird".

I'm kind of fascinated by the utter disappearance of the concept of a "specialist" or "technician" from the U.S. Army. It's hard to remember now but the the idea of paying extra to soldiers who had some specialty skills came into the Army way back in the Nineteen Twenties, in other words, almost as soon as technological/industrial warfare was invented. The first "technicians" were all officially privates first class (so even at the start the Army decided that these gomers were NOT sergeant material, regardless of what sort of gee-whiz cool shit they knew how to do) with a technical endorsement. So a technician third class was a "first-third"; a private first class and a technician third.

By WW2 the entire institution of "technicians" was formalized in something like seven classes. The rank of E-5 buck sergeant had a shadow technician rank, Technician Fourth Class - note the insignia below. This guy had the same technician grade as the 1980's E-4 but wore a buck sergeant's stripes above his "T".But, again, he was NOT a "sergeant", although I suspect that in technical outfits like commo and medical units he might well have been referred to as "sarge."

It was in the Fifties that technicians became specialists and my old rank was invented, although at the time it was called a "Specialist Two". There's actually a decent Wiki entry discussing the whole business, if you're interested. There were a pantsload of these specialist grades during the Vietnam years. Pretty much anyone who wasn't a combat arms MOS got a soft-stripe rather than a hard. It really wasn't all that easy to be soft. But I liked the idea, and I'll bet there were others like me back in the day.

Mind you, by the time I got an umbrella for my bird the higher-grade specialists were getting rare. I had a SP-6 as an AIT instructor at Ft. Sam Houston in 1981 and there was a rumor that one of the other company's cadre was actually a SP-7, a beast as rare and wonderful as a unicorn. Not long after I got my umbrella even the E-6 LPN in the battalion aid station was a staff sergeant hard-stripe.

The thing was that what hadn't changed between the technicians of the Twenties and the me of the Eighties was the relationship between the noncommissioned officers and the specialists. An NCO - a "hard stripe" - was considered by the Army and, usually, the soldier him or herself as a leader of soldiers, by God. The specialist was just a nice guy that hung around and got paid like a noncom but didn't do any actual noncomming, a sort of overpromoted private.

And the thing is, I never really objected. It was worth the widely accepted notion that I was an overpaid waste of good oxygen to be able to respond to the First Sergeant when he burst into the dayroom on a Sunday afternoon looking "for a couple of hard-charging NCOs who don't owe me no money for a nice, simple, easy detail" by reminding him that I was NOT an NCO, let along "hard-charging", and was in point of fact a sort of gentleman of leisure, an idle upper-deck passenger on the luxury liner S.S.H.H.C. 1/325th Infantry. This never failed to irritate the piss out of him which had the pleasant side-effect of ticking me no end.

My lovely soft-stripe idyll lasted less than a year.

By 1985 the U.S. Army finished converting all the specialists into hard-stripe NCOs (the higher grades had been shifted over in the early Eighties) and I was informed that the Secretary of the Army would be pleased if I would but on some stripes and get on with earning my money and leading soldiers.And you can see by my expression in the picture above how gracefully I took the news and how delighted about the whole business I was.

Uselessly useless

It's been a long time since I had to care about the minutia of U.S. Army uniform.

But every so often I come across something that pokes me right in my NCO gland.

As a species we tend to be the U.S. Army's official custodians of niggling bullshit and militarily useless fripperies; the details of dress uniforms, drill, and ceremonies are perhaps the most nitpicky aspect of our function. So when I see this:...a U.S. infantry company marching in the Russian WW2 V.E. Day parade, my asshole old sergeant reflex kicks in and begins to ask;

1. If you're going to send someone all the way to Moscow to march, Army, why not send someone (like a company from the 3rd U.S. Infantry) instead of a bunch of yayhoos from 2/18th Infantry (and, yes, I know that the 18th landed in Normandy on D-day. Compared to the Soviet war effort, their activities at that little tea party had about as much to do with winning WW2 as the 3rd Infantry did ambling around CONUS). The 3USI specializes in useless pagentry like this, this unit doesn't, and it shows.

2. And if you're going to have them march past in their blues (which I do understand is the Army's official Class A dress uniform now) can't you at least find them their "bus driver" caps instead of that goddamn beret?The damn thing looks silly enough with fatigues (you haven't seen a beret until you've seen it worn by an Army cook or a light wheeled vehicle mechanic - my favorite was the "jeff cap" look, where the stiffened bit with the flash is pulled down flat over the forehead) but it makes the wearer look perfectly ready to ride the short bus when worn with blues.

3. And if you're going to have them march past the Kremlin, Army, you can't march past at shoulder arms instead of sling arms, like a bunch of recruit privates? Were you afraid that the rifles would be every-which-way, like sticks in a barrel? And what does that say about the marching unit's attention to detail in preparing for this ceremony?

4. And if you're going to march past in mass formation, Army, get your D&C head out of your fourth point of contact! (Note: understanding this comment requires watching the BBC video) Either the officers in the front rank of the formation are ALL commanders-of-troops and entitled to render the hand salute for their unit (and if so, why are they together in a single rank?) or they're part of the formation and they should be executing an eyes-right. Actually this is a trick question, because I KNOW where the COT is, he's up at the head of the formation. So these guys are fucked up. Oh, yeah, and would it be too much to ask these gentlemen's sons to march with their arms? What's their plan, to slap-fight with the enemy?

The Brits and Russians look their usual dapper selves on parade, and I'm sure that the French and Poles managed to put together a couple of smart looking march units. Personally, I think that this sort of military preening is a useless throwback to the 18th Century and should be restricted to a tiny handful of ceremonial units like the 3rd Infantry. But if we're going to go to the effort to show up at one of these dog-and-pony shows, why do a half-assed job?

I feel the way about this goofy Army crap the way Lord Burleigh did about keeping a mistress; the pleasure is transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. But if we're going to do it at all, why not do it to a higher standard?

(Crossposted at Milpub and a huge h/t to Jason over at Armchair Generalist, and a sheepish admission of fellow military geek-guydom in finding the pass-in-review of the operational T-34s and SU-85s pretty fucking cool.)