By Colonel Andy Weddington, USMC, (Ret)  of http://acoloneloftruth.blogspot.com/

Another great post from my good friend and fellow Marine, Andy.

Square box, round pizza, triangle slices. I’m confused! Author Unknown

Last evening I had dinner at the Officers’ Club aboard the Marine Base, otherwise known as the Combat Center, in Twentynine Palms, California.

For the uninformed the Combat Center is the Corps largest live-fire base in the country. It’s where Marines go to exercise – to maneuver and integrate fires (ground and aviation) and deconflict problems (before deploying and potentially heading into battle).

It’s serious business – friendly rounds as lethal as enemy.

A Marine pal for nearly 25 years and not seen in nearly 20 was in town. He was helping prepare a unit for deployment. Mission complete, the O Club our rally point.

We talked Marine stuff before, during, and after dinner. No politics.

After about 20 minutes of ‘until next time farewells’ in the deserted parking lot, Mr. Trump came up.

For context…

This Marine is no dummy. I don’t know an infantryman that is. To the contrary. While brainiacs are trying to reengineer how to force round discs into square and triangular holes and the latter into round holes to create something new, he looks at the problem differently.

With a step back, he notices that the round discs actually fit in the round holes and the squares and triangles into their mates and that creates the new thing simply; to the astonishment of all.

So about Mr. Trump he said, “When I receive RNC propaganda and solicitations in the mail I angrily scribble ‘GO TRUMP!’ on it and mail it back,” and continued, “I don’t care that he’s loud and crude nor whatever else he’s accused of being. I’m sick of the nonsense. I don’t care! GO TRUMP!”

A lot of Marines I know feel similarly. Though some not.

Fact: Mr. Trump is going. Steamrolling might be a better word. In Marine vernacular Mr. Trump is moving, shooting, and communicating – effectively. Put the actions in whatever order you want.

He’s on a mission and not taking prisoners.

He nearly doubled the count of his closest competitor (Senator Rubio) in Nevada yesterday.

Last week in South Carolina he drew sword and finished off Jeb! (and the entire Bush family).

Next Tuesday will be big. Real big.

There are no signs of slowing much less stopping the Trump battlewagon.

So it seems Mr. Trump has figured out round discs fit in round holes. He’s created something new, something simple. His vision for America – “Make America Great Again!” – has a familiar look and sweet sound. Americans like what they see and hear.

Four words. Simple. Powerfully so.

Yes indeed Americans are sick of the nonsense. That’s clear.

Stay home next Tuesday. Call Domino’s – the place that offers triangles in the shape of round that fits into a square – and enjoy the show.

Go figure, a Marine founded Domino’s.

Confused?

Ask a Marine! But not one assigned to the Pentagon.

Originally posted 2016-02-24 14:11:19.

 

I love it, I absolutely love it! Once again the Silent Majority is as quiet as a church mouse. That is until a subject hits close to home. Placing women in direct combat roles was a non-issue for the average American — “if it doesn’t affect me, don’t bother me with such trivia, I’ve more important things to worry about.” Then SecDef and SecNav mandated it be done and done now! The Commandant of the Marine Corps and the Chief of Staff of the Army, the two services affected by this radical decision asked the question, “When are the women to begin registering for the draft.”

“WHOA! What a minute, I thought it was a volunteer thing.” Now, parents of these “women” as well as they themselves are scared.  Once again, I find myself in hysterics laughing at the so-called “silent majority.” Those of us who have “been there, done that” have been shouting from the roof tops for years — all for naught. My most often-heard response when the subject came up was, “What’s the big deal?” Now the ill-informed, inexperienced SecNav has spoken out and said we need a national debate on the subject of draft. Really? Why no national debate on placing women in direct combat roles in the first place? A decision having ramifications for every 18-25 year old woman in the U.S., and you are allowed to make it on your own? However, now when the next logical step of draft registration is broached, you side-step and pawn it off on a “national debate.” This is actually funny! I can’t wait to see how this one ends. Great article here by someone with some common sense, and she has “been there, done that.”

COMMENTARY BY

Jude Eden@Jude_Eden

Jude Eden served in the Marines from 2004-2008.

The question of drafting America’s young daughters is finally making the average voter consider the real implications of fully integrating the combat arms. The large majority of the population may have little or no connection to the military and therefore no concept of what’s at stake, until now. They’ve simply supported the idea because they support women generally, and think it’ll be their choice.

Drafting women is a bad idea because putting women into combat units is a bad idea on a myriad of fronts from degraded combat readiness to skyrocketing injuries, risk, expense, and danger to the long-term medical bill and increased casualties. We always need men to fight whereas drafting women is totally unnecessary.

Justifying a policy with such wide-ranging negative impacts based on the performance of a couple of women like the ones who graduated Ranger School is ludicrous. Having equal natural rights under the law does not mean men and women are the same. Combat is not an equal opportunity for women because they don’t have an equal opportunity to survive.

The combat integration policy has been sold to us on smoke. Advocates for it have made the demonstrably false claim that women are physically capable of anything military men are while decades of military and sports medicine studies prove the opposite. They’ve ignored the heavy negative effects that sexual dynamics already have on coed units, especially those that deploy. They’ve told us women becoming men’s physical equals is just a matter of leadership and training when women tested continually demonstrate it’s nature, not nurture, dictating the reality here.

These same proponents have maligned the Marine Corps’ impeccable 9-month Gender Integration Task Force study as “flawed”—except for the parts they like, of course. They love the part about co-ed teams being better at decision-making but omitted that the women were rested at the time, and these were a mere two of the 134 combat tasks. That all-male teams outperformed them on 69 percent of tasks and they retained more than twice men’s injuries must be hushed up and suppressed as they obliterate the argument that women strengthen combat readiness.

With a dictate from Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to increase female representation in the ranks to 25 percent, top-performing military women can be plucked from their units to “show success” in a combat unit. If the next president agrees with this scheme, who’s to say he or she won’t use the draft to get the desired “diversity metrics”? The Obama administration has done all sorts of unprecedented things. Women, especially athletic ones, are not going to have the choice to ride a desk to “free a man to fight” like in WWII. They will be under orders just like men, and they will go where the military needs them even if that “need” is to achieve “diversity metrics.”

The prospect of drafting women brings the issue home to average Americans who before had no skin in the game. Realizing now that this isn’t just about “a few women who want to,” they are starting to internalize the meaning of “tip of the spear,” and they don’t want their daughters there, fighting the rape and beheading-happy ISIS. Technology has not lessened the face-to-face bludgeoning that our infantrymen are doing when the gun jams or ammo runs out as they’re fighting house to house and cave to cave on foot.

But is it too little, too late? The policy is in place, but policies change. Although Israel hasn’t put women in direct combat since 1948, they experimented with women in tank crews and the armored corps and reversed the policy. Britain, too, has gone back and forth depending on who’s in office. Although neither is comparable to the U.S. military’s size and scope, both found the same problems: much higher injuries and lower performance among women that skyrocketed costs and degraded readiness.

Congress can defund or postpone the effort in the next National Defense Authorization Act, or postpone implementation until they can review the studies and ramifications. It may take the next president to reinstate women’s combat exemption, but it can be done.

 The Daily Signal published a different perspective on the issue of women in the draft last year: No More Double Standards for Women in the Military

Originally posted 2016-02-22 11:25:31.

This has been going around for quite a while. Great read, albeit I cannot validate it was actually written from where he says. But it sounds like something a Recon Marine would write. It would be funny if it were not so true.

FROM A RECON MARINE IN AFGHANISTAN — FROM THE SAND PIT

It’s freezing here. I’m sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and
shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, along the Dar’yoi
Pamir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a
cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of
miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds
to avoid another scorpion sting. I’ve actually given up battling the
chiggers and sand fleas, but the scorpions give a jolt like a cattle
prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission
fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my
pack. The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or
not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and
drink water. That requires couriers and that’s where an old bounty
hunter like me comes in handy.

I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage
facilities, type the info into the handheld, and shoot the coordinates
up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop
the hardware. We bash some heads for a while, and then I track and
record the new movement. It’s all about intelligence. We haven’t even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they’re in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin. But you know me; I’m a romantic. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This country blows, man. It’s not even a country. There are no roads, there’s no
infrastructure, there’s no government.

This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century
warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs. Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family, join the opium trade or join the army. That’s it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened,  crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that’s your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those ‘tent cities of the walking dead’ is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to
cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

I’ve been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Turkmen and even a couple of Pashtu’s, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure: These guys, are Huns, actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It’s what they do. It’s ALL they do. They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor for each other, nor for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human
cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other’s barbarism. Cavemen with AK-47’s. Then again, maybe I’m just a cranky young bastard.

I’m freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is
running out of juice, and I can’t recharge it until the sun comes up
in a few hours. Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a
favor, Bizarro. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban ‘smart.’ They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is ‘cunning.’ The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless, and when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else.

Smart! Bullshit! Yeah, they’re real smart, they’ve spent their entire
lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They’re still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a
Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to
teach an ape how to hold a pen, eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole.
Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I’m good
at it.

Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and
move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver
truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen so you will watch the commercials. We’ve got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we’re doing over here, because you have no idea what we’re doing, and really, you don’t want to know. We are your military, and we are only doing what you sent us here to do.

From a Jack Recon Marine in Afghanistan. Semper Fi. “Freedom is not free, but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share”.

Send this to YOUR FRIENDS so that people there will really know what is going on over here.

GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Originally posted 2016-02-21 15:27:35.