Low Speed, High Drag

So apparently some SEAL who went in on the Bin Laden raid can't read and doesn't understand how the system works after 16 years in the military. I find this difficult to believe for a couple of reasons.

Now, I don't know what they teach squids in general and SEALs in specific, so maybe he got told something different. Back was I was but a lowly enlisted trooper in the Army, it was pretty common knowledge that you don't get a pension unless you put in the full 20, disability excepted. It was also common knowledge that getting a disability pension was pretty goddamned hard, and you had to be clearly and obviously fucked up by your term of service.  A tendency to be startled by loud noises didn't make the grade. 

Likewise, the Army had all kinds of classes telling you what kind of transition assistance and benefits were available to you once you got out. I seem to recall they even had guys whose job it was to answer dumb questions about what to do with your life upon ETS. I think they were called 'transition counselors' or some such.  However, nobody was going to bust their ass making sure you went to the classes or talked to the counselors. The classes were provided, it was up to you to go and take notes and read the handouts.

Admittedly, I am relying on two layers of journalism filter here, so the truth may not be what was reported in Esquire or what was reported about what was said there. But from where I'm sitting, some SEAL is asking for special treatment because… well, I don't know, exactly. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen get out every year, and most of them manage to go on and do something productive with their lives. The fact that you can't perhaps says more about you than the system.

End of An Era

So, in reading an article about the current activities of my old unit, I came across this tidbit:

The 3rd ACR is the last unit of its kind in the Army. Upon completion of its mission in Iraq, the unit is scheduled to transform to a brigade combat team equipped with Stryker vehicles, making this the last deployment of a traditional armored cavalry regiment in U.S. history.

And thus ends the Armored Cav.

Cavalry, not being an actual branch of service, is always more subject to the winds of change in the Pentagon. The perceived utility of the stand-alone cavalry regiment waxes and wanes. Read a history of the regiments and you'll see the constant reorganizations and redesignations as the Army struggles with what, exactly, to do with the cavalry.

I have no doubt that in the future, the BCT approach will reveal some shortcomings and an idea similar to the armored cavalry regiment will become useful again. It's how things go in the Army. Ideas that work are shelved in order to try something new, and eventually, they return to what works.

But I still feel a little sad at finding out the Regiment will be reduced to just another Stryker brigade with a funny name and some old traditions.

Veterans' Day 2010

It is once again that day set aside to commemorate the veterans of military service and (originally) the end of the War to End All Wars. We all know how well that second bit turned out, since our prior governments rather neatly set up the circumstances for the sequel.

In any event, go out and say something nice to a veteran. They'll probably appreciate it.

Late and The Pot

So, yesterday was National Airborne Day. I simply neglected to mention it, as I was drinking Jack & Cokes much like I did when I was a young paratrooper. Unlike that time, I stopped after two. Anyhow, fire up the Wayback Machine, set it for yesterday, and say something nice to anyone you know who threw themselves from an aircraft in flight for the benefit of the US military. A drink might not be amiss, either.

Now that I have once again demonstrated conclusively that I am a lazy bastard, (I mean seriously, I couldn't get off my dead ass and post three sentences about National Airborne day yesterday? Slacker. How on earth did I ever finish, well, anything?) , let's move on to today's topic: rice. Roger Ebert wrote a post some time ago on the glories of using a rice cooker for rice and so much more. There is a subset of the populace, to which Roger apparently belongs, which thinks a rice cooker is some magical creation that can cook everything under the sun. I don't have any serious argument with this on the face of things, except maybe the magic part. A rice cooker is not complicated. At the most basic form it's a heater, a pot, and a thermostat. It works thusly: heat pot until temperature in pot rises past 212 degrees F, then turn heat off (or down). Not much magic involved. Basically, though, it's pot with a built-in heating element. I'm sure you can do lots of things with this, just like you can with a crock pot.

I don't have any personal experience with a rice cooker for one simple reason: I can cook rice. I don't see much need for a dedicated appliance, even if can do all the wonderful things Roger claims. I've failed at rice once in recent memory, and that was trying to cook rice for 100. That didn't go so well, but I don't think a rice cooker would have helped. The quantities got a bit too large, and scaling took over with a vengeance. Other than that, though, it's not usually difficult. Pot, rice, water, boil, turn down, simmer 25 minutes, serve. It's worked pretty well for me for a number of years now, and only requires minor tweaking for the stovetop involved.

I'm currently trying to scale back the number of things in my house, not add more. So no matter how useful Mr. Ebert thinks a rice cooker is, it ain't going on the wish list any time soon.

You First, Skippy

So, the somewhat less than lustrous Senator from the great state of Deseret Utah, Orrin Hatch (R-Cupholder) has proposed a law. If you receive any form of government assistance, he wants you to pee in a cup. Orrin is apparently offended by the thought of you low-lifes getting high with tax money.

There are some arguments against this that flow from first principles, but since we've rendered the 4th Amendment into a sad, pathetic joke, I won't go into them. I'll start by pointing out a fact of my misspent youth. During my tenure in the Army, we were regularly asked to take tests to tell if we were on drugs. Tellingly, the people who control the military are not asked to do any such thing. Us guys with the boots on the ground might do something wrong if we were high. The folks deciding where we should go kill people and break things are apparently immune from poor decisions while stoned, since they don't take whiz quizzes.

Additionally, I note Orrin's salary and bennies are paid by the federal government. He's taking taxpayer money, too. It strikes me that to be philosophically consistent, Orrin should pass a bill requiring him and 534 of his closest fellow legislators to take random drug tests. When he steps up and does that, maybe I'll think about supporting drug tests for welfare recipients. In the meantime, if he's not going to require Congress to take a drug test he needs to have a nice hot cup of STFU.

Remember The Fallen

So as I type this, I'm looking out over a cemetery in a small Texas town. The fields are irregularly spotted with American flags. Each one marks the site of a veteran's grave. I've wandered about and looked at the dates on the markers. I've seen a lot of War 2 and Vietnam service, but the death dates are far removed in time from the actual conflicts. So far, all I've seen is the resting places of the guys who made it home. The flags are a nice gesture, but today isn't our day. Our day is in November.

Today is the day for the ones who didn't come home. As my regiment trains at NTC and elements of my division are deployed in Afghanistan, it's a day to reflect on the terrible price paid when we decide to go to war. I don't think we pay enough attention to the enormity of the cost. Political considerations and budgetary issues dominate the debate, and I rarely hear politicians mention much about the human cost. Speaking as a guy who has loaded body bags on medevac choppers, this disturbs me.

So if you haven't already, take a moment today and think about the young men and women who are dying to achieve our nebulous foreign policy goals. Ask yourself if what we're trying to achieve is worth some more deaths. Personally, I'd like it if this generation doesn't have to keep pulling dog tags off shredded and mangled bodies before loading the remains for transport. But since we're going to continue to ask them to do just that, we'd better make damned sure what we're trying to do is worth the sacrifice.

Thoughts On Disaster

So, once again, the US military is called upon to be among the first responders to an emergency elsewhere in the world. This annoys some of my conservative and libertarian acquaintances. The general feeling is the US military should be not be acting as a kind of global "Meals on Wheels". While I sympathize with this viewpoint, there's one glaring problem with it.

There are very few organizations that can mobilize as quickly and effectively as the US military. If you want to put boots on the ground fast, anywhere in the world, and have the people there with enough equipment and support structure to do any good, you really don't have a lot of choices.

Let's look at what diaster relief really takes. First off, you need to transport a sizable amount of people and material to wherever your disaster might be. Once they get there, you need them to have a plan, some organizational structure to carry it out, and the communications capability to coordinate all this activity. In the middle of all this activity, you also have to make sure your people have site security, food, water, toilets, and a place to sleep. Keep in mind all of this capability, once you leave an industrialized 1st world society, has to come in with you since there isn't going to be any of the stuff where you're going. Now, imagine you want all these things to happen in less than 72 hours.

I'm not aware of any private organizations who have the resources to do this on the scale that's necessary when a disaster like the Haitian earthquake hits. Frankly, I'm not sure any other country has the military capability, either. If you want to put people and equipment anywhere in the world starting from scratch and have the capability to help other people, you need the US military. We're the only game in town. Yeah, it's not the core competency of the military. The main job is still kill people and break things. But in order to do the killing and breaking, we've had to get good at the logistics and C3. It's a nice bonus that can be put to use.

Now, I have some sympathy for the argument saying it's not our responsibility and we shouldn't spend the resources. I understand that point of view completely, and 99 times out of 100 I'll endorse it. Shit, two days ago I was bitching about coerced charity. So why is this different? Because there isn't anybody else. Those people need help, and they need it now, not in 2 weeks or a month or whenever the international aid bureaucracies can get off the dime and get moving. If there was any NGO that could do what needs to be done, I'd point you at them and say donate. In the absence of said NGO, somebdoy needs to step up, and if it isn't America, it won't be anybody. My friends who tell me we have no obligation to help are absolutely correct, just as you are under no obligation to help when you see someone drowning. However, if you have the capability to help and you don't, you're a sonofabitch.

Having said all that, I will also say that the military role in cases like Haiti should be as a stopgap. Get in there, get on the ground and get things organized so the nice folks at International Red Cross or Caritas or OxFam can show up and start getting to work. Once that happens, the military should pull out and regroup and get back to their real jobs.

Similar thoughts can be found over here.

Veterans Day

I must admit, I'm mildly confused about the name of this particular holiday. I would swear there should be an apostrophe in there, but these guys disagree.

In any event, be kind to a veteran today. I offer my usual suggestion to buy one a drink, but you'll have to disinclude me this year. I'm sitting around at home whacked out on Vicodin after surgery, so I don't think drinking is indicated.

Valor

On September 17, 1944 the largest airborne operation in history began: Operation Market Garden. 36,400 troops of the 82d Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division, the British 1st Airborne Division, and the Polish 1st Airborne Brigade went into the Netherlands by glider or parachute.

In similar news, SFC Jared Monti was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor today for his actions while fighting in Afghanistan.

The Army's most quotable General, George S. Patton, had something to say that seems relevant.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.

VD 2008

The official proclamation from the folks in charge of my branch of service is here. I presume similar announcements are available for the other lesser services. One of these days I'll get around to a more thorough discussion of being a veteran. It wasn't going to be this year, for a variety of reasons. So instead, I will impart to you some wisdom I learned in the Army.

• When traveling, anything important stays attached to your person no matter what anybody else says.
  
• You can have too much ammunition if you have to carry it yourself. If you have a vehicle, though, there's really no upper limit.
• You can push off a hangover almost indefinitely by continuing to drink. Unfortunately, once it does catch up to you, it'll be epic.
• Most of the things in life which are truly important are conceptually very simple. Execution, however, is often a bitch.
• Getting shot sucks.

I'm sure there's more, but that's all I can think of right now. As always, buy a veteran a drink today.

Sympathy Deficit

Somehow, I can't bring myself to shed a tear for young Mr. Robin . Maybe I'm just a heartless old veteran, but this is not 1962. Nobody has been drafted lately. If you are in the military in this day and age, you volunteered. Accept the consequences of the choices you have made.

Think the war is illegal? Stand up in front of everybody and say so. Take the lumps for your decision. Don't puppy out and run to Canada.

Garry Fucking Owen

On this date in 1876, one each George Armstrong Custer managed to firmly cement his place and the place of the 7th Cavalry in the history books. Unfortunately for him and his men, he did this by getting his command slaughtered by the Lakota and the Cheyenne.

I bet at some point you wished you took them Gatlings, huh, George? Raise a toast for the poor troopers who paid the price for their commander's fuckup. Such is the way of the world.

End of an Era

Ft. Bliss has finally raised the drinking age on post to 21. As the article notes, Ft. Bliss was the last CONUS installation where the drinking age was 18. Another piece of my misspent youth goes into the dustbin of history.

Memorial Day 2008

As I sit here getting ready to fire up the grill and drink beer, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment is on it's third deployment to Iraq.

This time, as in both previous deployments, not all of them will come home.

Remember the fallen.

Colt Is Expensive

So, somebody in the Senate finally figured out what the rest of the world figured out a long time ago: Colt is pricey for what you get. The dancing pony adds a couple hundred bucks on for no more functionality.

The rest of the article is the same debate that has gone on since literally before I was born. Gas piston systems are cleaner and less prone to fouling issues than Papa Stoner's wayward child. Or at least, that's what everybody unhappy with the M-16 family has said for the past 40 odd years. Never having owned or carried a gas piston rifle, I have no opinion on their merits. From a design perspective, it makes a certain amount of sense. I can also see gas piston designs failing for the same reasons. Too much crap in your piston housing will eventually cause it to quit moving. I have neither the time nor the resources to do a comprehensive test program, so I'll have to trust DOD. I will note that any of the replacement weapons have not been adopted by any other armed force, so field data as to reliability is in short supply at this point. Once SOCOM runs the SCAR for a while, we may have some hard data to judge.

Until that happens, I can speak to the military procurement issues. Short answer: DOD ain't giving up on the M16 series any time soon. Yes, there may be better rifles out there. The transition costs are not insignificant and aren't going to happen in the middle of the current wars. Too bad, so sad, but them's the breaks.

Music to Interrogate Prisoners By

So Mother Jones, a magazine I always get confused with Mother Earth News*, has songs it says are used in American military facilities for “torture”. I’ll quickly mention the fact Mother Jones, like many on the anti-war side, has an exceedingly loose definition of torture. Some people apparently think anything which might make a prisoner uncomfortable is torture. While being somewhat ludicrous, such behavior also reduces the term down to a pointless smear. If everything beyond asking prisoners politely is torture, then the term is effectively meaningless. The vast majority of people will quit responding to the accusation once the bar is set low enough. For a clear example in contemporary American culture, look at accusations of racism and sexism.

Anyhow, by my quick count, on the RAID box that holds all our music we have 10 of the 24 songs listed. Does this mean I’m trying to torture myself? Funny, I never noticed any tendencies towards masochism before now.

I recall the last time this issue surfaced, when we were trying to get Noriega out of a church in Panama, I had a greater percentage of the music used. Of course, I was actually in the Army then, so it’s not surprising. I’ll call attention to only two of them that stand out as particularly egregious behavior:

The Barney Song and the Meow Mix commercial.

I don’t know who came up with those choices (PsyOps, maybe?) but I’ll freely admit that if you played either of those at me for an extended period of time, my already fragile sanity would snap like a twig. I think Barney may be a little culturally specific to work on the rest of the world, but a loop of the Meow Mix commercial would drive anybody mad after a while. It’s an inspired choice.

Speaking of inspired musical choices, I present to you Celtic Frost performing Mexican Radio. Stan Ridgway is still out and about and releasing records, so you might go by his website and see if his latest offerings interest you.

*One group of hippies is much like another to my mind.

Posse Comitatus and the Constitution

Posse comitatus has popped up over the past few days in two different forums. I'm going to address something I've seen which irritates the hell out of me. Some people are under the misconception that the prohibition enacted in the Posse Comitatus Act (18 USC 1385) has some grand constitutional basis. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Constitution nowhere addresses the issue of using the military domestically for any purpose. The principles behind the Posse Comitatus Act are not enshrined in the Constitution and inviolate against all comers. The prohibition against the use of the military in domestic law enforcement is, as I just linked, a part of the US Code. If the Congress decides to change, revoke, or otherwise invalidate the relevant section of US Code, they are free to do so. People need to quit acting like the Posse Comitatus Act is anything other than current law. Laws can be changed quite easily.

Whether or not the law should be changed is a different kettle of fish entirely.

Celebrate

Today, for the unaware, is Veteran's Day. This kicks off Veteran's Awareness Week, in which you are supposed to be more aware of veterans or something. I don't know, I didn't really read the memo. I'll make the same suggestion I always make. Buy a veteran a drink! Yes, this is a shameless and transparent ploy to get people to buy me drinks. Well, it would be if I had any plans involving leaving the house today. Since I don't, that drastically decreases the opportunity for anyone to buy me drinks. Failing that, you could always thank your local veteran(s) for their service. That always seems to go over well.

Long Strange Trip, Indeed

Saturday, the 22, marked the 20^th anniversary of me going on active duty with the U.S. Army. I can honestly say that if you had asked me then where I would be in 20 years, it wouldn’t have been here.

National Airborne Day

That’s today, for you clueless legs. Blackfive is all over this one, so I don’t really have to add anything.