All posts by Jim

Left HS before report cards came out. Enlisted in the Marines for four years. By the time those years were over, I was hooked - they had me for life. Spent nearly ten years as enlisted. Received a Silver Star, Bronze Star w/V, Purple Heart as a Sgt during first RVN tour. Upon returning to the State's received a combat commission to 2Lt. Retired after 36 total years as a Colonel. Book follows my career, but is more about the heroes with whom I served, the great mentors I had, and the leadership principles they instilled in me.
Current Events, videos

The New USMC

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While I have pretty much remained silent about CMC Berger’s FD 2030, there has been and continues to be a plethora of verbiage about it. And as far as I have been able to ascertain none of it has been good. I reckon I considered it a long gone conclusion with the new CMC simply carrying on his predecessor’s image of the new Corps. In nine days the world is going to change, make no mistake about that; the proverbial shit will hit the fan globally, not just here in the US. Our mainstream nerds will have so much to talk about it isn’t even funny. I will start watching the news again, except it will be either CNN or that ridiculous MSNBC. I can’t wait to hear their spins.

But I digress. FD 2030 is a disaster; our Corps is not the same and there is some serious doubt that it never will again be America’s 911 Force. The divestitures were HUGE, so much so that anyone who thinks it can still respond to an urgent crisis somewhere in the world is living under a rock. Do you actually know what all was given up?

Here is an article written by Captain Dale Dye, USMC (Ret). In case you don’t know of him, once he retired he became a favorite consultant in Hollywood for any producer who wanted to show or talk about Marines. In fact, he convinced producer Oliver Stone to let him put the principal actors—including Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, and Forest Whitaker—through an immersive 30-day military-style training regimen before the filming of Platoon. He limited how much food and water they received; when the actors slept, he fired cartridge blanks to keep them awake. Dale who had a small role in the movie as Captain Harris, also wrote the novelization based on Stone’s screenplay.

Here, in his usual uncensored style, is a good recount of everything that has happened since Berger’s stroke of his pen behind closed doors.

Marine Swords Beaten into Puny Plowshares

Not likely anyone in authority will be influenced by a long-retired Mustang bitching about the state of today’s Marine Corps, but I feel compelled to lob a few grenades at Force Design 2030. That’s the radical restructuring of the Corps ordered by former Commandant General David Berger in a sleazy backroom deal that demanded all the sycophants involved sign non-disclosure agreements. Since it was announced three years ago, the revamping of Marine missions, tactics, and techniques has created a defecation deluge from opponents who believe—as I do—that the whole thing has a lot in common with a jet engine. It sucks and blows.

Before I get into the weeds here, let me say a thing or two about the general mission and offensive ethos of the United States Marine Corps. Simply stated, the Corps is—or was—always designed to be the country’s 911 force, most ready to fight when the nation is least ready. It’s meant to be the crash crew in crisis response anyplace and anytime around the world. The key asset for global combatant commanders was a Marine Corps air-ground team (MAGTF) always forward deployed—usually aboard Navy amphibs—trained, equipped, and instantly ready to handle any mission in the full range of military operations.

For some reason known only to General Berger and his clones, that wasn’t good enough for a force facing China in the Western Pacific as the perceived priority threat. Rather than tweak weapons, training, and positioning to meet that challenge as Marines typically do, they decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and ordered a tactical shift to defense with primary focus on small teams of missile-armed Marines who would jump from island to island in efforts to damage or deter a growing Chinese blue-water fleet in the event of a shooting war in the Western Pacific. The Navy—and certainly the Army—currently has a plethora of missiles capable of sinking ships. Here’s a hint. If you want to avoid redundancy arguments, don’t try to do something another service already does and probably does it better than you can.

Not much thought—if any—was given to moving these small vulnerable Marine detachments, much less resupplying and otherwise supporting them under the ever vigilant eyes of Chinese radars, satellites, and cyber capture networks. And apparently never mind if the sovereign nations that claim the territory Marines would need to launch their ship-killer missiles want no part of a super-power fight. What if—as entirely likely—those sovereign nations deny the Marines those operational bases? I’ll wait while someone thinks that through.

Under this misbegotten concept, the US Navy has a huge vote as the provider of small, fast amphibious ships needed to move Marines. And they voted no. Not only do we have insufficient gator freighters in our current fleet, but the Navy has no apparent plans to produce the smaller inter-island transports called for under FD 2030.

Screwing around with the Marine’s central mission—locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver—threatens to turn the US Marine Corps into a single-mission niche outfit ready to die in place on remote islands and unready to handle crises anywhere else. It puts Marines in a defensive posture when our time-tested ethos has always been the offense, forward deployed and eager to fight any enemy. It’s that attitude that used to permeate Marine ranks and kept us supplied with avid young recruits. Seems to me given the puny recruiting numbers we’re seeing from all the other services, the Marine Corps can ill-afford to sacrifice this aspect of their gung-ho, first-to-fight reputation.

In order to twist itself around this maypole of new war fighting concepts, General Berger cooked the books in what he called “divest to invest” which basically amounts to robbing Peter to pay Paul as my Dad used to call false-economy measures. That little bookkeeping maneuver made some $16 billion available which the new model planners spent on long-range missile batteries, drones, and other high-tech goodies to equip what are now proudly called Marine Littoral Regiments. Fine if all future fights are in littoral areas of the world but history begs us not to bank on that.

Most stunning in an outfit that focuses on the combat power of basic infantry, FD 2030 orders a reduction of three full battalions from the point of the Marine Corps bayonet, or a loss of 14 percent of combat strength. If that wasn’t dumb enough in formations that face inevitable casualties in ground combat, the end-strength for a Marine infantry battalion has been reduced by 200 Marines across the board which translates to a loss of 4,200 frontline war fighters. Marine Corps Reserves won’t be there to fill in the gaps. The reserves lost two full infantry battalions under the FD 2030 axe.

None of this seemed to bother force designers all that much as they also eliminated all—that’s correct all—Marine Corps tanks. So much for lessons learned in Ukraine or the Middle East. Supporters say if the Marines need tanks in a future fight, the US Army will provide them. That’s unlikely to be any kind of high priority for an Army outfit that might well be engaged in its own fight. And even if they were willing to cough up a platoon or two of Abrams, it would likely be at the end of a lengthy and complicated pipeline. Marines need tanks at hand, not in some remote Army motor pool.

Which brings me kicking and screaming to the matter of fire support for what’s left of Marine Corps maneuver battalions in the next fight. God help the grunt commander who needs quick and accurate artillery fire support, a reliable staple of infantry combat in modern times. He might not get it as FD 2030 cut a full 16 battalions of cannon artillery for a firepower reduction of a whopping 76 percent. Savings were spent to stand up 14 rocket artillery battalions which is OK if you’re shooting over the horizon at Chinese ships, but not worth a damn to a grunt outfit pinned down and in need of rapid steel on target at close ranges in crappy weather. We will hopefully live to regret this emasculation of versatile, reliable tube artillery. If you have any doubts about the utility of cannons and howitzers on the modern battlefield, let me direct your attention to the Ukraine where artillery on both sides is proving to be a deciding factor.

Another dumb-ass divestiture under FD 2030 came in Marine Corps aviation. One of the most brilliant assets of forward-deployed Marine units is that they come to the fight carrying their own air support. Both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aviation was quickly available to a MAGTF commander who could call it up and then down on an enemy without having to ask the Air Force or compete with other battlefield priorities. Not so simple these days.

FD 2030 cut almost 30 percent of tactical and logistical aviation support. Offensive aviation cuts included at least two of seven light attack helicopter squadrons which will be sorely missed by grunts on the ground who always appreciate the quickly available support of helicopter gunships. Also eliminated were three of the current 17 Osprey tilt-rotor squadrons and three of eight heavy-lift helicopter units. With the Corps struggling to field a reliable sea-shore connector—the new Amphibious Combat Vehicle is still not approved for deployment—now seems like a hell of a time to be cutting aviation logistic and transportation support.

I could go on here about the elimination of engineer support units such as bridging and breeching units that are always a valuable and versatile piece of the battlefield toolbox, but my morale might not survive it. What’s keeping me afloat as an old but loyal believer in the spirit and inherent value of the Corps, is the controversy at very high and influential levels that surrounds the changes mandated by FD 2030. Wiser heads than mine are arguing for a return to sanity. It may take some long and bloody time to correct our course, but I believe we will do just that.

In the end active-duty Marines, veterans, fans, and friends of the Corps will demand it. As General Brute Krulak wisely said back in 1957, “America does not need a Marine Corps. It wants one.” And the one it wants is not the one that’s being shaped by Force Design 2030.

I was fortunate enough to meet Dale while I was at Marine Barracks, NAS, Lemoore CA. It was during an attempt to have Brian Dennehy as our guest for a birthday ball. Quite an impressive guy to represent our Corps to Hollywood.

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Deployed US Navy Has A Pregnancy Problem,

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And It’s Getting Worse!
Come on folks, it doesn’t take a genius to have foreseen this problem, you need not even have served. Anybody should be able to understand the problem here. We can thank the idiots pictured here for this disaster. Navy ships at sea MUST be combat ready at all times, capable of going to battle stations at a moments notice, they are essentially in harm’s way once they leave port. You ask why is the defense budget so high, yet we are lacking spare parts, ammunition, and flyable ready air craft? Wake up Americans, as much as I hate to say it that also includes Democrats like Pelosi, et al. This, along with all the many other social experiments imposed by these folks need to be stopped if we are going to be able to cut taxes and institute President Trumps promises. I really dislike picking on our Navy, but they are the ones that are always in harm’s way and they are being degraded by these idiotic policies.
     
Richard Pollock
Reporter
9:28 PM 03/01/2017
 
5504487
A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.
 
That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing both their unit’s manpower, military budgets and combat readiness.  Further, such increases cast a shadow over the lofty gender integration goals set by former President Barack Obama.
 
Overall, women unexpectedly leave their stations on Navy ships as much as 50% more frequently to return to land duty, according to documents obtained from the Navy.  The statistics were compiled by the Navy Personnel Command at the request of TheDCNF, covering the period from January 2015 to September 2016.
 
The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy.  Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land.  That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone.
 
 
“This is an avoidable cost and expense, leaving a gap for other people to pick up the work slack,” Eden said.
 
“A pregnancy takes you out of action for about two years. And there’s no replacement,’ said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a nonpartisan public policy organization. “So everybody else has to work all that harder,” adding that on small ships and on submarines, “you really have a potential crew disaster.”
 
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nathan Christensen told TheDCNF the Navy tries to plan for the unplanned.
 
“Just as we deal with other unplanned manning losses due to injury or other hardships, we work to ensure that pregnant service members are taken care of and that commands are equipped to fulfill their missions when an unexpected loss occurs,” he said.
 
In January 2015, 3,335 women were pregnant aboard military vessels, representing about 14 percent of the 23,735 women then serving such duty, according to the data.
 
But by August 2016 that number reached nearly 16 percent, an all-time high. The Navy reported 3,840 of the 24,259 women sailors who were aboard Navy ships were pregnant.
 
The Obama administration understated the pregnancy problem throughout its eight years and even suppressed some data about the impact of its “gender-neutral” policies on the Navy.
 
For decades, for instance, the Navy published results from exhaustive surveys of 25,000 men and women in a document called the “Navy Pregnancy and Parenthood Survey.”
 
The reports once were 75 to 100 pages long and disclosed attitudes among men and women and their behavior.  However, the Obama administration published only brief two to three-page summaries from 2012 onward.
 
A civilian attached to the Navy Personnel, Research, Studies and Technology group, which researched and published the surveys, told TheDCNF full reports were completed regularly even though it’s detailed findings were not released to the public. The individual requested anonymity.
 
“The military has been tight lipped over the years about these numbers.  They don’t like to publicize them,” Eden told TheDCNF.
 
The Navy has been dogged for years by lingering claims that some women get pregnant simply to avoid deployment.
 
“We all know that happens. Women do it to avoid deployment,” Eden told TheDCNF.
 
“There do seem to be coincidences,” said Donnelly. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence.”
 
“This information is considered so sensitive. You just don’t talk about it. And you don’t ask. It’s just something that everybody knows occurs. Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Donnelly said. She served on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services and on the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces.
 
The sudden departure of pregnant women aboard military vessels severely hurts military readiness and morale for those left behind and who must pick up the slack. The expecting sailors must be transferred from a ship after the 20th week of pregnancy.
 
The Navy officially considered pregnancy incompatible with military service and women who became pregnant were automatically discharged, according to The Alliance for National Defense.
 
However, with the introduction of the all-volunteer military, the Navy provided many lucrative incentives to men and women — including free housing, medical care, recreation and educational opportunities.
 
But women got additional benefits, including free prenatal care, daycare, counseling, and special education for toddlers and children with disabilities or for other “special needs.”
 
“Since benefits offered to recruits who are women are so very generous, it almost becomes an incentive,” said Donnelly.  “One feminist advocate many years ago referred to the military as a ‘Mecca for single moms.’”
 
“I think there are so many carrots.  The military has become a modern-day jobs program,” Eden said.
 
Obama during his eight years in office sought to increase dramatically the number of women on ships.
 
In May 2015, Admiral Michelle Howard announced a quota of 25% women on all ships. “We’re going back and looking at the ships — all of them — and what percentage of women are on the ships. Over time, we’ll modernize them to make sure we get to about 25 percent on each ship,” she said.
 
Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus in September 2015 pushed the new policy, stating that the Navy SEALs and all other combat jobs in the Navy should be open to women, with no exemptions as part of the Pentagon’s new “gender-neutral” employment policy.
 
Eden believes the policy of increasing women on ships results in failure. “It’s bad policy when you think of ships that have to be battle-ready and then have to transfer women off for pregnancy — something that has to do with controlled behavior or voluntary behavior,” she said.
 

It is unclear how President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will handle women in the military.  He has been a skeptic, but also said during his confirmation hearing he would support a combat role for women.

Originally posted 2017-03-04 12:47:15.

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Climategate II

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A taxpayer-funded organization said no to congress? Are you kidding me?  Another action on the part of the Globalists in the last administration to unite the world in everything.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Britney Spears, “Oops, climate scientists did it again!”

The award-winning scientist responsible for creating, collecting, and maintaining the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) data archive, John Bates, recently disclosed leading NOAA’s climate scientists violated the agency’s rules, rushing to publication data which had yet to be tested and confirmed in order to influence the outcome of the Paris climate negotiations in 2015.

In a second breach of agency protocol, the scientists involved, led by Tom Karl, failed to properly archive and store their datasets for testing and public disclosure.

Subsequently, some of the original datasets were lost when the computer used to process the data suffered a complete failure. 

Karl, et al.’s 2015 “pause busting” research purported to show, contrary to every temperature dataset in existence at the time, Earth had not experienced an 18-year pause in rising temperatures, claiming instead everyone else’s data had been wrong and temperatures had continued to rise at an alarming rate right along with carbon-dioxide levels. As Bates put it, Karl’s team put their “thumb on the scale” to produce the results they wanted.

Much of the climate science community became suspicious of Karl’s claims over the months after the study was released, when it was discovered in the words of David Rose in the Daily Mail, “[Karl, et al.] took reliable readings from buoys but then ‘adjusted’ them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations … even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.” As a result, the ocean temperature dataset used by Karl exaggerated the warming.

When you take good data and mix it with bad data and then average it, you no more produce reliable results than adding muddy river water to purified bottle water produces safe drinking water.

Karl’s actions show climate scientists wedded to the theory humans are causing catastrophic climate change learned nothing from the Climategate scandal of 2009. In Climategate, hacked e-mail exchanges between prominent climate scientists advising world leaders on climate policy exposed the scientists behaving badly. 

The scientists involved used a “trick” to remove inconvenient data from their datasets to “hide the decline,” in a critical set of proxy temperatures. In addition, the e-mails showed they collaborated to persecute and have fired an editor of a prominent climate science journal who allowed articles questioning the extent of humanity’s role in global warming to be published. 

The e-mails also showed the scientists actively sought to avoid releasing their taxpayer-funded data to other researchers and government bodies with oversight responsibility for testing and confirmation.

In the aftermath of the Climategate scandal, in order to ensure scientific integrity and regain the public’s trust, scientific bodies called on scientists to allow access to their raw data, assumptions, methodologies, and software and to promptly and completely respond to all Freedom of Information Act and government requests for information. 

Karl and his team not only violated NOAA’s own protocols, they also ignored all the suggestions made by the scientific community to improve transparency and accountability for research. When the U.S. House of Representatives’ House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, the committee with oversight over federally funded research, requested and eventually subpoenaed NOAA’s documentation for its pause-busting claims, NOAA refused to turn over all the materials requested, citing concerns about confidentiality and the integrity of the scientific process. New investigations are being launched into NOAA’s research in light of Bates’ disclosures.

Transparency is a paramount virtue in science since scientists can only produce discoveries that expand human knowledge and further human welfare when different teams of researchers collaborate by sharing data, assumptions, and methodologies; exchange theories and ideas; and review and test each other’s work. For NOAA, sound science took a backseat to scoring a political victory.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, yet world leaders ignored this fact when they pointed to NOAA’s claims the world was warming, despite other research showing no warming for 18 years. Disturbingly, this research of dubious merit provided impetus for producing the climate change treaty agreed to by leaders of more than 190 nations in Paris in December 2015.

These are dark times for climate science, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump being in the White House. Let’s hope future climate charlatans are exposed to the light of day before they do further damage.

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hburnett@heartland.org) is a research fellow on energy and the environment at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Originally posted 2017-03-03 13:52:07.

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What a shameful performance!

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No comment necessary here.
Matt Walsh: Democrats, that shameful performance proves why normal Americans despise your party.  Members of congress wear white to honor the women’s suffrage movement and support women’s rights as U.S. President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of the U.S. Congress on February 28, 2017 in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.
 Trump’s first address to Congress focused on national security, tax and regulatory reform, the economy, and healthcare.  President Trump delivered an impressive speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. He hammered on a lot of familiar Trump themes but did so in a more effective way than we’ve seen before. People will say it was a “presidential” speech, but of course any speech given by a president is, by definition, presidential. Better to say that it was a successful speech. Successful in communicating Trump’s core message in a clear, concise, and even eloquent way.
 On the other hand, while Trump’s messaging was on point, Democrat messaging was somewhat less inspiring. Of course, we’re all familiar with how the Clapping Game is played during these speeches: The president’s party gives a standing ovation after every third syllable while the opposition party chooses its applause spots more carefully, usually electing to clap only when bipartisan platitudes are offered.
 But that changed last night. Democrats remained seated with their hands in their laps even as Trump uttered the most noncontroversial and universal of sentiments. They refused to applaud when Trump said we should put Americans first. The refused to applaud when Trump talked about fighting drug addiction in the inner city and corruption in Washington. They refused to applaud when Trump discussed the need to make sure certain blue collar Americans, like coal miners, still have jobs. They refused to applaud Trump’s vow to fight Islamic terrorism. They refused to applaud when Trump movingly stated that “we all salute the same flag and are made by the same God.”
 When the president highlighted the victims of illegal immigrant crime, many Democrats let out audible groans of disgust. And, most shameful of all, a number of top Democrats refused to stand and clap as the president honored the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL. Disgusting. Truly disgusting. If we were to judge their positions by the things they declined to applaud, we must arrive at the conclusion that Democrats are staunchly opposed to the flag, God, the law, job creation, and military widows, and enthusiastically in favor of drug addiction, terrorism, crime, unemployment, and murder.
 To those who’ve been paying attention, this is not much of revelation. They’ve given us a lot more than a lack of applause to indicate their positions on these topics. But it’s still somewhat surprising that Democrats are so eager to advertise the fact. Mostly, this absurd performance on the part of Democrats tells us two things. First, they have a bunch of maniacs in their base and they’re fully aware of it. Democrat politicians know they’ll get in trouble with their liberal constituency if they appear to be even vaguely opposed to illegal immigration, Muslim terrorism, and the impoverishment of coal miners, or even slightly in favor of the rule of law, prosperity, freedom, and God.
 Second, their hatred for Trump, and their base’s hatred for Trump, is pushing them ever further into the extreme fringes. Democrats have been booing God, defending radical Islam, and explicitly encouraging illegal immigrants to break the law for years now, but giving such an icy reception to a concept like “creating jobs,” and publicly giving the cold shoulder to a military widow, is a new step. That’s something they’re doing purely to spite Trump. But, in the process, they only make Trump look dignified and themselves look like monsters.
 It’s clear that Democrats will automatically oppose anything Trump says simply because it’s Trump saying it, and for no other reason. Personally, I’d love for him to exploit this power. For instance, he could give a speech forcefully opposing puppy murder, head lice, and diabetes, just so that Democrats will feel required to come out in favor of all three. Perhaps Trump could even get them to abandon their support for gay marriage and abortion by announcing his support for both. Well, maybe they’d draw the line there.
 Or maybe not. Who knows anymore? But what’s clear, in any case, is that the Democrat Party has no interest in, or love for, normal Americans, and has now given up even pretending otherwise. They are the party of anti-Americanism, elitism, and lawlessness, and have been for quite some time. Last night they simply made it official. The rest of us have taken note.

Originally posted 2017-03-02 15:37:38.

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How much of this are we going to tolerate?

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A U.S. Navy veteran was brutally beaten and killed outside his own home in McAllen, Texas—while being carjacked by an illegal immigrant.

Jose Luis Oviedo, 56, served in the U.S. Navy for 15 years: from 1981 to 1996.

Oviedo was apparently home alone when he heard a noise from outside—where he found Andres Roberto Ortiz, 32, attempting to steal his car. Ortiz turned on Oviedo, severely beating the Navy veteran unconscious.

Several hours later, local police found Oviedo’s SUV abandoned in a ditch. Upon visiting his home to report the vehicle, they found him unconscious in the backyard.
Oviedo was rushed to the hospital, but never regained consciousness. After spending a month in a coma, he died last Friday.

Ortiz was taken into a custody ten days after the attack. Ortiz is a Honduran who is in the United States illegally—and had been deported multiple times by the U.S. government. (my bold added)

Ortiz was initially charged with aggravated assault and robbery. After Oviedo’s death, the county district attorney is seeking to upgrade his charges to capital murder. Oviedo’s son, Victor, 29, spoke briefly to the media about how his outlook had changed, after his father’s death at the hands of an illegal immigrant:

“I had no real opinion as far as the immigration stance goes, but now I believe that something like this could have been prevented had the right steps been taken,” he said.

Source: American Action News
Read more at http://americanactionnews.com/articles/breaking-illegal-immigrant-brutally-kills-navy-veteran#jQb9ke4Z02ZEU5Jf.99

Originally posted 2017-03-02 10:47:59.