Veteran's Day

At the industrial campus where I work, the company took the celebration of Veteran's Day to another level, with marching bands, speeches from digniteries including the governor, a wall with photographs of past veterans who were family members (I saw one that went back to the Spanish American War), and more. It was quite moving as the events made real for all who saw it the feeling of sacrifice, patriotism, and tradition that everyone felt.

I was especially impressed by an exhibit in the cafeteria. They had a table with with white table cloth, a setting, a Bible, and a rose, suggesting all those who couldn't make it to the table the festivities of today. On the empty plate was a tiny pyramid of salt, suggesting the tears of those who had been left behind.

Conscientious Objector

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier who said his Christian beliefs compelled him to love his enemies, not kill them, has been granted conscientious objector status and honorably discharged, a civil liberties group said on Tuesday.

Capt. Peter Brown -- who served in Iraq for more than a year and was a graduate of the elite U.S. military academy West Point -- said in a statement issued by the New York Civil Liberties Union that he was relieved the Army had recognized his beliefs made it impossible for him to serve."

Rest of Article at:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071016/ts_nm/usa_soldier_beliefs_dc

What do you think about this soldiers conviction that he could not shoot an enemy in time of war?

My father was a CO in WWII. He took the position that he would not serve even in a supporting capacity such as a medic. He spent the war in a number of camps for COs at worked at the Byberry Insane Asylum and elsewhere. It wasn't a walk in the park. A number of COs in his unit volunteered for starvation and typhoid treament experiments. His younger brother served as a pilot on a B-24 over Germany and received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

There are different kinds of bravery.

Military Courage

Truth be told cowardice has killed millions and will continue to do so.

I could not agree more. The Bush war is a great example of that. Because of the cowards in the Bush administration, we entered into an unnecessary war. I hold in particular people such as former Secretary of State General Colin Powell or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, people that at the time had the crediability and prestige to make a difference instead of acting like compliant stooges of the neocons.

I think also of those military brass that appeared before a congressional committee investigating the Pat Tilman friendly fire death and coverup. In the C-SPAN broadcast, I heard nothing but evasiveness and excuses from JCS chairman General Michael Myers, General John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command, General Bryan Douglas Brown, former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command. and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Especially reprehensible to me was the one man who didn' t have the guts to even show his pathetic face to the camera: three-star general Philip Kensinger, who led Army special operations forces after the Sept. 11 attacks and then received a censure from the army for his lies and "failure of leadership."

None of these people are cowards in the physical sense. They have all seen death and have shown awesome bravery under fire. Yet, when it mattered most, they turned to jelly. At West Point, if a plebe cheats on his chemistry exam, if he is not expelled, he is shunned by the rest of his classmates. And yet it is more than clear that dishonesty-- moral cowardice-- is not the exception in the military but the rule from the PFCs to SOD. And why is that? It is because the military penalizes those who ask the hard questions and rewards careerists-- those who do not rock the boat, those who act irrespetive of whether or not they should act. They are sheep. Given the quality of officers that the military creates today, perhaps the highest and best use of West Point is to level it with bulldozers and erect condominums, perhaps calling it Trump Hudson.

An axiom in politics is that armies do not enter wars; countries enter wars. And when confidence in our civilian and military leadership wanes, it can only be a matter of time before the military capitulates to the enemy. And, more than anything, it has been the administration's inability to level with the public that has caused this erosion of trust.

Haditha and Abu Ghurab didn't happen in isolation. They rather are the very flower of the US military culture-- a culture that relies on loyalty up and loyalty down, unquestioning obedience to the chain of command, and unit group cohesion. It is the exceptional individual who is willing to defy the chain of command, his buddies, and his allegiences to tradition that have drilled into him since boot camp and do the hard right rather than the easy wrong.

But, frankly, I cannot trust anyone in the military to do the hard right anymore.

Well said! Authoritarianism is fatally flawed. A system that worships Bush is no more viable than a system that worships Hitler.

The civilian leadership has swallowed its own propaganda: It has repeated certain lies so often that it now treats those lies as truth. As a result, the actions of the system are divorced from reality. As the delusions become more compelling, the system comes to treat reality with arrogant contempt.

Eventually the system starts a war, and then its delusions collide with reality. In Iraq, this collision has killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. But the politicians back home who harbor the delusions remain secure, comfortable and unfazed. They don't have to hear the screams.

As the downwards chain of command becomes more rigid amd mechanical, insane orders passing smoothly downwards, the upwards chain of feedback breaks: Information about the situation on the ground, information that refuses to fit into the ideology, plan, or grand vision, fails to reach the top.

Generals may EVENTUALLY find the courage to spill the beans to the "media", but only when it is years too late to do any good.

Thus the system self-destructs. It happened in Germany, and it is happening here.

( General Sanchez said he was convinced that the American effort in Iraq was failing the day after he took command, in June 2003. Asked why he waited until nearly a year after his retirement to voice his concerns publicly, he responded that it was not the place of active-duty officers to challenge lawful orders from the civilian authorities.)+-- David S. Cloud, "Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is 'A Nightmare'", NYT, 13 Oct 2007
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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5150

+(The Wonderful Wizard of Washington
If ever a Wiz there was -- our fantasy-based foreign policyJustin Raimondo / 11 Mar 2005 ....Our penchant for asking too many inconvenient questions reveals our pathetically archaic insistence on belonging to **"the reality-based community,"** as one top White House advisor famously put it to reporter Ron Suskind:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"....)+
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+(Rundstedt put it bluntly to Allied interrogators after the war: "I realized," he said "soon after the attack was begun that everything that had been written about Russia was nonsense." )+-- William L. Shirer, /The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich/, p. 1119

Flat Daddy on the Homefront

As deployments for the military continue to stretch, the stay-at-home mom is trying to stem the tear drops of their children by building a Flat Daddy. Sometimes, it's the other way around-- the stay-at-home dad builds a Flat Mommy. This is a life-size paper doll, often on foam board, with a photo of their loved one. The deployed soldier sometimes get a Flat Kid-- a life-sized representation of their child to take to the barracks.

I cannot fault them for wanting this visual reinforcement. But these one-dimensional images are also a pathetic reminder of the disproportionate cost of this war to a narrow segment of our population. And the cost is not just in soldiers killed or maimed but also in kids who grow up in one-parent households. It once agains makes hollow claims that the current administration is the protector of family values, as a family sundered by a war of choice is anything but consistent with family values. The legacy of this war with its divided families are families at risk, and I predict we will see a surge of disfunction. The collateral damage of Bush's war will be spikes in divorce, drug abuse, teenage crime, and drop outs.

You're In the Army Now

The raw data tells the story.

(Facts are from TIME's April 6th cover-story America's Broken-Down Army.)

1. Today, half the Army's 43 combat brigades are deployed overseas, with the remainder recovering from their latest deployment or preparing for the next one.

2. Those deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan more than once—170,000 so far—have a 50% increase in acute combat stress over those who have been deployed only once.

3. Next year's proposed $625 billion defense budget is the highest, adjusted for inflation, since World War II.

4. The Air Force continues to buy $330 million fighters, and the Navy $2 billion submarines.

5. The soldiers' change of heart is reflected in a poll by the independent Army Times. In December, for the first time, more troops surveyed disapproved of the President's handling of the war (42%) than approved of it (35%). Over the past two years, the number of troops surveyed who think victory is likely has fallen from 83% to 50%. Army suicides, an admittedly rough barometer of morale, show a steady increase, rising from 51 confirmed in 2001 to 91 (plus seven possible suicides still under investigation) last year. Desertions are climbing.

6. Recruits from the least-skilled category have climbed eightfold, to nearly 4%, over the past two years. Just 81% had high school diplomas last year, a sharp drop from 94% in 2003. The past two years have been the first in a decade in which the Army missed the Pentagon goal of 90% with diplomas. (The rest have GEDs.) The Army has boosted the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42—but 12% of recruits over 35 drop out within six months, double the rate for younger soldiers. To boost its numbers, the Army has had to cut its standards. It granted recruits nearly twice as many waivers for felonies and other personal shortcomings in 2006 as it did in 2003.

7. The Army will be at least 3,000 midlevel officers short through 2013 because of overly deep cuts made in the young officers' ranks a decade ago.

8. There were only 25,100 ROTC cadets last year, 6,000 shy of the target. The U.S. Military Academy generated 846 freshly minted 2nd lieutenants in 2006, 54 short of its goal.

9. The Army had only 32,000 sets of body armor when the Iraq war began. The Army said at the start of the war it would need 235 armored humvees; the number is 18,000 today.

10. Next year the Army is seeking a 19% budget hike, including a 55% rise in procurement dollars, to $130 billion.

Falling Stars

A Pentagon investigation is recommending that up to four generals should be held accountable for the coverup of the friendly-fire death of Arizona Cardinal's star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman.

I hope every one of them is stripped of their command and send to a brig, for they should be if faith is to be restored in our military. But my guess is that notation in the officer's efficiency rating form will bring this sordid matter to a close, at least the the eyes of the military.