Posse Stupidtatus

 So it turns out that sending U.S. soldiers to be ersatz Border Patrol was a pretty stupid idea.

"Leaders initiated more than 1,200 legal actions, including nonjudicial punishments, property loss investigations, Army Regulation 15-6 investigations and more. That’s nearly one legal action for every three soldiers. At least 16 soldiers from the mission were arrested or confined for charges including drugs, sexual assault and manslaughter. During the same time period, only three soldiers in Kuwait, a comparable deployment locale with more soldiers, were arraigned for court-martial.

Troops at the border had more than three times as many car accidents over the past year — at least 500 incidents totaling roughly $630,000 in damages — than the 147 “illegal substance seizures” they reported assisting.

One cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded due to misconduct and command climate issues — an extremely rare occurrence."

Gee. I wonder? Where did we have the occasion to learn - and recently - that soldiers are usually good at soldiering, usually not so much as domestic - or foreign - policemen.

"Tensions were ignited on April 28, however, when soldiers from the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment opened fire on a group of protesters in front of a school, killing 15 and wounding more than three dozen others. Although the military said the soldiers fired in self-defense under attack from Baathist provocateurs, residents said many of the demonstrators were unarmed.

The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks. Exchanges of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks started to occur almost daily."

 Oh, shit, yeah. That.

I swear, we're the fucking 21st Century Bourbons. We learn nothing but we forget nothing.

Lazy Sunday

The sun is out, the rain is - at least for the moment - gone, and I'm feeling lazy and unwilling to devote myself to anything serious, so since I'm aware of all Internet traditions, here's a cat picture:

These two are outstanding as cats, sleeping constantly until there's an opportunity to be a ginormous pain in the ass. The little gray-and-white one is the house Junior Cat (her name is "Nine" because she was practically feral and living in a storage unit with that number) and she's a mistress of the Dark Cat Arts, waking up at 3am to walk all over my pillow, yowl, and myurp for cat food. I've tried to sleep through her night ramble and it hasn't worked, so I get up and feed the beast and just go back to sleep.

When she's not being a pest she's a very sweet kitty, though, so there's that.

She did NOT enjoy our February ice storm, however. She has a catbox but loves to go outdoors like a natural kitty, so all that cold white wet stuff? Nopenopenope.

 Give her credit, she did try it out.

...and quickly concluded that this white shit was NOT cat-friendly.

That's Life, cat; you gotta take what it hands you.

Like this:

Damn, that's one zesty-ass sandwich!

Other randomeness: the CPAC saga of the Golden Trump is a nice reminder of what I've been talking about lately; that my GOP brothas are just fucking Jim Jones Koolade-cult whackadoodle, but the kicker this morning was reading about some joker named Jahn who got up at the US Soccer annual general meeting, of all places, to rant about how US slavery was actually fairly cool and that most of those uppity Negroes aren't shot by coppers but probably each other and he knows this because he's Cherokee and also a high-speed, low-drag Special Forces sooooopersoldier who can kill you in seven languages.

Now...everybody's entitled to their opinion. Even stupid ones (maybe especially stupid ones...).

But.

And I've talked about this before here, so;

Whipping civilians with your DD 214 is a total dick move that I've been seeing a LOT of.

This "I gave my service to you! And that means you need to respect mah athoriteh!" bullshit  stuff from GIs seems to go hand-in-hand with the cult-of-the-badass/soldiers-are-better-than-you-civilian-pukes thing that we’ve developed over the course of these endless wars fought by a tiny self-selected slice of We the People.

So it wasn’t so much WHAT this joker said. Yeah, lots of people share those opinions, and while I might disagree I’m not gonna dopeslap the guy for blarting them out.

But it’s dragging in his military credentials – stripping his sleeve and showing his scars and saying "These wounds I had on Crispin’s day!" – as if somehow killing foreigners for national interests make his opinion more valid that gets my goat. If you don’t get the whole "protest" thing, fine. But having been shot at in Kunar Province doesn’t make your opinion on the subject any more – or less – valid.

So, as my old platoon sergeant used to tell me; soldier, shut up and soldier.

Oh, well.

Off to do the grocery shopping.

Hole in my pocket

One thing that kinda drives me nuts about my Fellow Americans is the ridiculous luuuurve they have for the U.S. Army (and the other uniformed services) that lives only inside their heads.

This isn't the actual Army, the one with the dudes and gals and hosers, the studs and the spuds, the hard workers and goldbricks, the one that can cut you like a knife and then fall over its own feet like a sack of sawdust. You know...the one that is a bunch of Americans wearing the same colored clothes with all the same virtues and all the same vices you see and hear about on the evening news.

This is some sort of shiny, perfect Army populated by heroes and supermen, driving dinosaur-powered tanks that shoot laser beams from their eyes and have the sorts of powers found typically in comic books. This Army is composed of A-students who were the #1 in their Bible Study class and can deadlift 300 pounds while putting all thirty rounds into a two-inch square 300 meters away on full automatic.

I've never once seen this Army, and I kinda wish I could just to see what it'd be like.

I suspect I'd feel completely inadequate.

Anyway, the real Army managed to lose 6.5 trillion back in FY15.

Not steal. Not spend. Not waste. Just...lose. As in "...the fuck? It was...I know I had it. Where...let me look under the desk. Goddamn it..."

The Inspector General's report lays it out pretty clearly; the Army just flat-out has no idea where this jack is, or what it did with it. It wasn't criminal, it probably got put to some sort of use, possibly good use...but nobody knows. The accounting at DFAS and the associated Army financial agencies was bad enough that if a private company had done it that badly it'd have gotten its nuts thoroughly rapped by the IRS.

The IG concludes that due to a waterfall of errors and fuckups:

"As a result, the data used to prepare the FY2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions. Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated deadline of September 30, 2017."

The really frustrating part of all this is that you'd think, with 6.5 trillion just kind of lost somewhere the Army could have slipped a hardworking old platoon sergeant a couple of casual hundred thou. on the downlow. Y'know? Kind of a "thank you for your service" kinda thing?

But, noooooo.

The coveted Portland Public Schools Achievement Medal...

So...you know that there's a U.S. Army tradition called the "I-love-me" wall, right?

Since we can't get on-demand (or achievement-related) pay raises or promotions, soldiers get plaques or certificates or other gimcracks when we done good. These testimonials are usually hung up on the wall inside the platoon office, or in a barrack room, to remind us just how awesome we really are. Sometimes it helps when we suffer the inevitable fuckup and the First Sergeant calls us "oxygen-thieves".

Well...my ten-year-old daughter - with absolutely NO prompting or example from Daddy - created this:

Her very own "I-love-me" wall.

I trust that she'll be bitching about the chow, goldbricking her way through detail (or "chores" as they're referred to in fifth grade...), and coming to me with ridiculous schemes to go on extended TDY any day now.

Sniff! I couldn't be prouder!

Getting this off my chest

The largest single operation planned in U.S. military history, the invasion of the Kwanto Plain to capture Tokyo was code-named "Coronet", not "Kill Jap Dagger".

It was "Market-Garden", not "Death from Above" or "Ripcord Slammer".

The landings at Inchon in Korea were code-named "Chromite".

In Vietnam we had operations with code names like "Cedar Falls", "Bright Light" and "Phoenix". Normal, sensible, every-day kinds of names.

But the invasion of some crappy little Caribbean island is code-named "Urgent Fury"?
(This is young Doc Chief and his buddy Doc Clyde doing some emergency splinter surgery during a lull in the fighting during "Operation Urgent Fury")

Bitch-slapping the PDF is called "Just Cause"? Doing the Taliban is "Enduring Freedom"? Invading Iraq is called - wait for it - "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (cunning, guys - those Ba'athists'll never guess what THAT code-name is hiding). And now the latest spectacles brought to you by Bushco: Operation "Arrowhead Ripper" and "Phantom Thunder"?

"Arrowhead Ripper"???

WTF is wrong with us lately?


IMO this is all part and parcel with the "selling war as fun for the whole family" thing. It's bullshit, it's being sold to the press and the public as bullshit, and if I was the Magic SecDef I'd download a list of about 20,000 one-word codenames into the server at the Five-Sided Funny Farm and force my service chiefs to use them in alphabetical order.
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OK, they could petition me to avoid stuff like, say, "Operation Stupid" or "Operation Smegma" as they worked through the S's. But otherwise: that's the end of "Operation I'm Ready For My Closeup" operation names.
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"Arrowhead Ripper"
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Sounds like some 19-year-old private thought that up after a night of sitting up drinking vodka and Red Bull and playing "Worlds of Warcraft". "Whoa, dude, Arrowhead Ripper, that's fuckin' sick, dude!" But this is our multi-billion dollar Department of Defense?
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Now that's fuckin' sick, dude.