The US Military – A Fish Rotting from the Head

I wish Mr. Starmann would really open up and not mince words or hold back. LOL

Ray Starmann served as an army intelligence officer in Germany during the last days of the Cold War. He is also a veteran of the Gulf War. Ray also wrote the Hallmark original movie, “Generation Gap” with Sean King.

The US Military – A Fish Rotting from the Head

By Ray Starmann

The US military is a fish rotting from the head; a politically correct, feminized, decrepit, nearly bankrupt force that is one step away from complete obliteration on the land, on the seas and in the air.  The military is decaying by the hour. Veterans know it, the troops know it, the military’s senior leaders know it, yet they do nothing as the floor gives way underneath them.  As long as we favor civilian leadership (per the Constitution) the Military top bass will have to play politics (LM)

From our commander-in-chief, to the Secretary of Defense, the secretaries of each service branch, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the admirals and generals, the US military is being led by a combination of leftists, feminists, selfish careerists and all around lackeys and yes men. Only compliant four-stars are picked for the top jobs (LM)

The current crop of senior leadership in the US Armed Forces has either green lighted, watched or turned away in embarrassment as every form of budgetary cut, equipment shortage, dimwitted national security directive and social engineering policy is hammered into the military like a thousand nails in a wooden coffin.

We now have a military where Marine Corps planes don’t have spare parts, where Navy ships are decrepit and Naval air assets have less range than the planes Bush 41 flew in WWII; where Armor officers can’t run a tank range; where breastfeeding soldiers express milk in the field; where the slightest non-PC comment gets you a ticket to unemployed obamaland; where male ROTC cadets parade around in red high heels to express empathy for rape victims; where women are want to serve in the Navy SEALs and the US Army’s Delta Force; where fantasy and delusion have become standard operating procedures.

An example of the moral relativism wafting through the Pentagon like Sarin nerve gas are the comments made by General Mark Milley, the Army Chief of Staff, who sports Ranger and Special Forces tabs and who once served in the famous 5th Special Force Group. Milley told the nation and the world that women will serve in direct ground combat units and furthermore, he has no problem with young American girls being subject to a draft that could ultimately send them into direct ground combat units, aka the infantry.

We’re all supposed to nod in a semi catatonic state as a man who wore the famed Green Beret spouts out this absolute nonsense with a poker face. Unless Milley has become some kind of bleeding heart liberal, I doubt he believes anything he has said. What Milley does believe in is the greater good of Milley, just like Dempsey believed in the greater good of Dempsey.

And, look where that’s got us.

What’s in it for you General Milley, the Chairman of the JCS once General Joe pops smoke? What’s the price today for selling out America’s women to mass slaughter on a distant battlefield?

Tis the season of moral cowardice at the Pentagon and it’s quite reminiscent of the Vietnam era, when political perfumed princes (great image) skulked through the hallways of the Pentagon like mastodons; admirals and generals who cared more about their careers than about the troops and the nation they had sworn to serve.

Some point out that the military is subordinate to civilian authority. (I just did) They need to remain silent. (no thanks) I’ll say it again. Someone with a lot of stars on their shoulders is going to have to fall on their sword and resign. (that’s the spirit) When they do, they need to hold a press conference and tell the nation how a combination of the Obama White House and willing minions are demolishing the military by the hour. (now, who is first?)

But, this will never happen, mark my words.

A more realistic option is this:

The US military must be gutted from the top down by a President Trump. A President Trump must fire the Secretary of Defense, the secretaries of each service branch, the entire JCS and every admiral and general until he gets to a point where he’s cleaned out the perfumed princes, feather merchants, and narcissistic careerists who have run roughshod over the military in order to pursue their own goals.

The US Army was on the verge of self-destructing in the post- Vietnam years of the early and mid 1970’s. What saved it from imploding were the field grade officers and some tough and truthful general officers who maintained Army traditions and who rebuilt it from the bottom up; men like Dick Cavazos, Carl Vuono, Shy Meyer, Paul “Butch” Funk, Norman Schwarkopf and Fred Franks.

In 1974, the Army’s problems were at the bottom, not the top. The Army had soldiers who were thugs, gang bangers, druggies and race baiters. Race riots were common and officers were afraid to walk into a barracks without being armed.

The troublemakers were discharged, the new volunteer Army began to slowly attract motivated and better educated soldiers and with the election of Ronald Reagan money flooded into the lean green machine; resulting in new equipment like the M1 tank and funds for endless training at places like Hohenfels in Bavaria and on major NATO exercises like REFORGER. (I got to lead a dozen USNR war-gamers to Germany for that one – fun in 93 – Kaiserslaughten)

By 1990, the US Army was a magnificently trained and equipped fighting force. The men responsible for the military’s ascent were the senior leaders who had seen the military savaged by political generals and admirals.

General Fred Franks, an amputee, who rose to lead the VII Corps to victory in the Gulf War is a symbol for everything the Army’s senior leadership once stood for and doesn’t today; devotion to duty, honesty, moral courage and most importantly, putting the troops always above personal ambition.

During the Gulf War, a soldier in Third Armored Division noticed that General Franks looked very worried as he spoke to young soldiers. The soldier told General Franks, “Don’t worry General, we trust you.”

How many soldiers can say the same thing about their senior leadership today?

A young adult who enlists in the military must know that their leaders care more about them than their careers and retirement benefits and investment portfolios.

Wanted: US military senior leadership with honesty and moral courage. Apply here.

Originally posted 2016-09-19 15:01:49.

First of all, I find it interesting that this NFL logo, is plastered over our flag. How disturbing is that?

I do not know the author. I am sure he and I were within shouting distances many times throughout our careers. I could not have put on paper my frustrations with the society within which we live any better than he  did. Told only the way a Marine could do it. Up front and pulled punches.I am not done with the NFL. Oh, I’ll watch a game or two, but only when my team is playing  so I can make a list of the sponsors, whom I will immediately begin boycotting. Money talks folks You want to get the NFL’s attention, don’t buy any product that sponsors an NFL game. Then the companies withdraw their sponsorship, the broadcasting companies can’t sell their airtime, so they stop showing or cut back on games.T rust me it works.

That freak show they put on at last years’ Super Bowl was a sickening, anti-American society, racist piece of pathetic garbage I have ever seen. The world watched as we made fools of ourselves during a freaking football game. It would be laughable if it weren’t such a disgraceful snapshot of our America.

Commissioner,

I’ve been a season pass holder at Yankee Stadium, Yale Bowl and Giants Stadium.

I missed the ’90-’91 season because I was with a battalion of Marines in Desert Storm. 14 of my wonderful Marines returned home with the American Flag draped across their lifeless bodies. My last conversation with one of them, Sgt Garrett Mongrella, was about how our Giants were going to the Super Bowl. He never got to see it.

Many friends, Marines, and Special Forces Soldiers who worked with or for me through the years returned home with the American Flag draped over their coffins.

Now I watch multi-millionaire athletes who never did anything in their lives but play a game, disrespect what brave Americans fought and died for. They are essentially spitting in the faces and on the graves of real men, men who have actually done something for this country beside playing with a ball and believing they’re something special! They’re not! My Marines and Soldiers were!

You are complicit in this!

You’ll fine players for large and small infractions but you lack the moral courage and respect for our nation and the fallen to put an immediate stop to this. Yes, I know, it’s their 1st Amendment right to behave in such a despicable manner. What would happen if they came out and disrespected you or the refs publicly?

I observed a player getting a personal foul for twerking in the end zone after scoring.  I guess that’s much worse than disrespecting the flag and our National Anthem. Hmmmmm, isn’t it his 1st Amendment right to express himself like an idiot in the end zone?

Why is taunting not allowed yet taunting America is OK?   You fine players for wearing 9-11 commemorative shoes yet you allow scum on the sidelines to sit, kneel or pump their pathetic fist in the air. They are so deprived with their multi-million dollar contracts for playing a freaking game! You condone it all by your refusal to act. You’re just as bad and disgusting as they are. I hope Americans boycott any sponsor who supports that rabble you call the NFL. I hope they turn off the TV when any team that allowed this disrespect to occur, without consequence, on the sidelines. I applaud  those who have not.

Legends and heroes do NOT wear shoulder pads. They wear body armor and carry rifles.
They make minimum wage and spend months and years away from their families. They don’t do it for an hour on Sunday. They do it  24/7 often with lead, not footballs, coming in their direction. They watch their brothers carted off in pieces not on a gurney to get their knee iced. They don’t even have ice! Many don’t have legs or arms.

Some wear blue and risk their lives daily on the streets of America. They wear fire helmets and go upstairs into the fire rather than down to safety.   On 9-11, hundreds vanished. They are the heroes.

I hope that your high paid protesting pretty boys and you look in that mirror when you shave tomorrow and see what you really are, legends in your own minds. You need to hit the road and take those worms with you!

Time to change the channel.

Col Jeffrey A Powers USMC (Ret)

Originally posted 2016-09-16 17:03:11.

Trumped: How Donald Totally Played the Media

I LOVE IT!! Shows just how hungry they are for any dirt they can use against him. They will really go after him now! Oh Dear, How much I do love it!!

Originally posted 2016-09-16 16:39:48.

I find impossible to believe that anyone possessing even a piece of brain, unless he/she is sitting on it, to see what liberal policies and tactics produces. If I were a cop in that city, I be so fat from sitting in Country Donuts eating myself to oblivion. You want me to do what? Patrol those streets? They once sang Chicago, Chicago, my kind of town, now it’s the new home of the OK Corral. And everyone was upset because the Olympics were not held in this city? Are you kidding me? Remember, this is from where that person in our White House came. Where he learned his how to be a politician, by being a Community Organizer (aka Street Hustler) 

The Wall Street Journal

The Black Body Count Rises as Chicago Police Step Back

In 2016 nearly 3,000 people have been shot in the city, an average of one victim every two hours.

By HEATHER MAC DONALD

Sept. 11, 2016 5:58 p.m. ET

‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.

On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.

By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.

“There is no way out of this shooting spree,” Mr. Angelo said. His despair is understandable, because Chicago is the country’s most-glaring example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Chicago officers have cut back drastically on proactive policing under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers.

In October 2015, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch during a crime meeting in Washington, D.C., that the Chicago police had gone “fetal,” and were less likely to interdict criminal behavior. That pull-back worsened in 2016, with pedestrian stops dropping 82% from January through July 20, 2016, compared with the same period in 2015, according to the Chicago police department. The cops are just “driving by people on the corners,” Mr. Angelo says, rather than checking out known drug dealers and others who raise suspicions. Criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for two decades.

Chicago’s cops are responding to political signals from the most powerful segments of society. President Obama takes every opportunity to accuse police of racially profiling blacks and Hispanics. The media, activists and academics routinely denounce pedestrian stops and public-order enforcement—such as dispersing crowds of unruly teens—as racial oppression intended to “control African-American and poor communities,” in the words of Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt. Never mind that it is the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who beg the police to clear their corners of loiterers and trespassers.

Further discouraging proactive policing in Chicago is a misguided agreement between the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union and the city that allows the ACLU to review every police stop. The police are also experiencing fallout from City Hall’s mishandling of the unjustified fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014.

Chicago cops regularly encounter aggressive hostility when they leave their vehicles. In August a  Chicago Tribune reporter filmed a group of teens taunting officers for over an hour while the cops investigated a shooting on the West Side. “F— the police!” went one chant. “Get the f— off my block!” came another insult. Someone fired off shots in a nearby alley for the fun of seeing cops run toward another possible victim. “Run, b—-, run!” a shirtless male shouted as the officers took off in a sprint.

Three gangs—the Vice Lords, Black Disciples and Four Corner Hustlers—reached a pact in August to assassinate Chicago officers, according to a police departmental alert. The National Gang Intelligence Center has also picked up on plans to shoot officers.

The media blame poverty, racism and a lack of government services for the growing mayhem. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson blames lenient prison sentences for releasing Chicago’s gun criminals onto the streets too soon. The Illinois Legislature’s Black Caucus, however, blocks any effort to mandate stricter sentences for gun-toting felons—in a sub rosa acknowledgment that the vast majority (80%) of Chicago’s gun criminals are black.

But neither Mr. Johnson’s lax-sentencing explanation nor the media’s systemic-injustice explanation aligns with the timing of Chicago’s surge in violence. Sentencing protocols did not weaken in 2015 when crime started rising. Nor did poverty or alleged racism grow worse. What did change was the intensity of anti police ideology, driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, relentlessly amplified by the press, and echoed by President Obama.

“Where does this end?” Mr. Angelo asked last month. “We’re in an unknown environment. We don’t know at what point in time the people in this city and the city council will stand up and say: ‘Enough is enough,’ so that cops feel that they have the support to be the police again.”

The ideal solution to Chicago’s violence would be for more at-risk boys to be raised by their mother and their father. Until that happens, the only hope for law-abiding residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas is that police regain control of the streets.

Ms. Mac Donald is the author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter, 2016) and a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose fall issue this article is adapted.

Even the ship named after that place is defunct, gone, turned into razor blades. She was a proud ship though, I spent a year aboard her, not my best tour, but definitely an educational tour.

Originally posted 2016-09-16 16:18:40.