Tag Archives: AFG

Current Events

“All Gave Some . . .

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But some gave all. And that is what this weekend is all about. So when you gather around the table for some traditional hotdogs and burgers this weekend, remember to hold hands and give a moment of silence to all those service men and women who are resting in ANC and in all those other hundreds of other  cemeteries spread around the world

Jazz Finally at Rest                    By: Greg Maresca

On January 24, 2022, less than a month after Robert “Jazz” Jasinski, celebrated his 60th birthday, his six-decade run on this third post from the sun came to an abrupt and unexpected close. It would not be until May 23, 2023, that his cremains would be finally interred to their ultimate resting place in Arlington National Cemetery.

As the nation prepares to observe Memorial Day, it was certainly a tailored time to have his last and long overdue request realized. The elapsed time of 16-months – two hockey seasons – would have stirred a hearty laugh tinged with a little disgust from my old friend. Jazz was all too familiar with the enduring federal bureaucracy having spent most of his life toiling on the front lines for Uncle Sam – first as a U.S. Marine and then with the Transportation Security Administration.

 The extended and unnecessary ripple effects of COVID-19 still resonate throughout America’s capital city and wokefully ground zero is Arlington National Cemetery. In no way does COVID still make such a prolonged wait for burial justified. It is nothing short of a national disgrace.

We have no issue with packaging multi billions in military aid to Ukraine and thought nothing of bequeathing nearly just as much military hardware to the Taliban in our flight out of Afghanistan – another national disgrace.

Millions pour over our southern border illegally, while we drown in government debt living in a cultural zeitgeist where plenty of folks think nothing of using a $1000 iPhone 14 Pro to check their food stamp balance.

The nation’s capital was like a second home to the Delaware County, Pennsylvania native having done a tour of duty at Marine Corps Headquarters. A favorite D.C. haunt of his was Arlington. Yet, it took 16-months to finally inter Jazz’s ashes among some of the men he served with and those he helped bury while serving with the Corps’ Casualty Notification Unit decades ago.

If Jazz had survived and knew that any veteran had such a long waiting period, he would have been heard. Given the circumstances, he never would have placed himself in a situation to jump the line, either.

Still, with this Memorial Day weekend upon America, we can’t bury some of our veterans in a timely fashion at the nation’s most hallowed and historic burial grounds affording closure for so many families.

There still exists a third of America who takes seriously the nation’s oldest president whose administration is devoid of many things, most of all – wisdom. According to Biden’s recent commencement address at nearby Howard University, America’s greatest threats are not foreign, but domestic. Is it any wonder why on this Memorial Day weekend, the nation is circling the drain of the abyss?

A call to Arlington’s general service number yielded nothing but excuses, namely COVID overkill. What was emphasized was how Arlington conducts approximately 6,400 burials a year averaging 30 per day. Their backlog consists of 4,500 extending the wait to 16 months – now in its third year.

Unanswered in another column from a year ago was when Biden abandoned Afghanistan in record time, why couldn’t he sign another one of his numerous presidential executive orders to expedite laying to rest heroic American veterans in a timely fashion?

Pulling punches is not in the Jasinski DNA as Jazz’s older brother Stan was generous providing solutions saying, “They (Arlington) need to think out of the box by holding larger ceremonies for groups at a time, use special ceremonial units or ROTC for extra manpower to reduce the wait. They have got to stop this ‘is what we have always done mentality.’”

Arlington guards the remains of more than 330,000 immortal souls buried under plain, white granite stones all in formation where every day is Memorial Day, and where waiting lists should be entrusted to the dustbin of history.

Arlington is the priciest of American real estate and is the unabridged narrative of the nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. And my old friend, whose ashes now finally rest here, would stress in no uncertain terms that we need to keep it that way.

Rest easy, Jazz, you are finally home.

Yes, may God please bless Jazz, and all the others who have served this once famous country. Amen

Postscript: I just received some very bad news from a Marine Brother, Sam Garland. Our best friend and brother Marine hero, LtCol Vic Taylor, USMC (Ret) from Steamboat Springs, CO has passed away. We know none of the details at this time. When I get more information, I will pass it along on here.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 An older picture (1959) of Vic as a LCpl

 

Originally posted 2023-05-28 10:52:31.

Current Events

Generals Investigating Generals – Really?

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I know Col Anderson having personally served with him. He has been a thorn in public officials’ sides for many years. Even while on active duty he was an avid writer. For example, In December 1988, in a Washington Times article,  Gary criticized the Air Force, suggesting that it be dissolved and folded into the other military branches. The piece earned him a  personal call from the Commandant and a temporary stay from public writing. “He took my crayons away for a while,” Gary said.
I suspect no one reading this post will have difficulty agreeing with Gary’s thrust. That abysmal, downright disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan where Marines lost their lives needs to be thoroughly investigated and some one in the hierarchy held accountable, and I don’t mean some colonel or brigadier general. Heads need to roll, but  generals investigating generals is a joke. The upper echelon of flag officers are as inept and unprofessional as they have ever been.. Let’s just refer to them as members of the GPA (General’s Protective Association). Put retired senior enlisted and field grades who ate Afghan dirt on the investigation team, and we will find the truth.
There is so much truth in this article about our generals. Read and learn.

Keeping the Generals Out of the Afghanistan Investigation Is a Great Idea

6 Jan 2022
Military.com | By Gary Anderson

Our general officers should not be allowed to investigate themselves, and any conclusions about the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and its military forces inevitably will be tied to the actions of those officers who for two decades shaped U.S. strategy.

The recently passed annual defense policy bill includes a requirement for a new study of the failures in Afghanistan. In the past, it was pro forma to appoint retired flag rank officers, usually four-stars, to lead such an investigation. The current legislation precludes the generals and admirals who were part of the problem, as well as members of Congress serving since 2001, ostensibly a roundup of all of those who were responsible for the decisions made in Afghanistan.

That is a good call, but giving the Investigation three years is not; the war will be ancient history by then.

Several recent opinion polls suggest that the traditionally high regard that Americans have held for our military is eroding. But a closer look shows that the public still respects our troops. It’s senior military leadership that is losing the trust of the public. Americans appear to be far ahead of Congress, which let the generals who fouled up the Afghan evacuation off the hook with a proverbial slap on the wrist during hearings last fall.

The sad truth is that our flag rank officers have become merely another political interest group. They know that upon retirement they will be appointed to the boards of think tanks, corporations and universities. Going along to get along is the norm, and one never criticizes another member of the club.

This careerist, risk-avoiding atmosphere has been developing for years. Not all modern general officers are guilty, but far too many are. This goes a long way in explaining why no senior flag officer demanded that serious questions be asked about the course of the war in Afghanistan while their subordinates, particularly in the enlisted ranks, knew it was going sideways for two decades.

I listened as soldiers and Marines complained bitterly of being told that they had to abandon terrain that they had fought hard to take and hold because a general officer miles away had decided that it was no longer important or that the Afghans would take over, when it was obvious that they were not ready. Some of the revolving door American commanders in Kabul tinkered at the margins, but none had the intestinal fortitude to ask the really hard questions such as:

  • Why did we create an Afghan army in our own image? Soldiers from Herat in the west were defending Kabul while soldiers from Kabul were defending distant Herat. Regional forces would have made sense. That was the way the Taliban organized; they were not dependent on outside supplies that might or might not arrive, or far away chairborne Afghan generals who were pocketing soldiers’ pay. Such a reorganization was possible even as late as 2019, but the idea was never seriously considered.
  • Why was the Afghan air force not a priority? Given the nation’s abysmal road system, the only way to support remote army posts was by air. The Afghan air force was always a secondary consideration. Support to the air force was one of the first capabilities to be eliminated as the decision to leave was implemented while remote outposts were being left to wilt on the vine, and no American general officer had the moral courage to go public with the fact that the organization could never be self-sustaining.
  • About roads, why was the completion of the Ring Road, which would have connected the nation to Kabul, never a military priority? Instead, construction was left to often corrupt civilian contractors who lacked the ability and force protection to operate in contested areas. In 2012, my civilian District Support Team and our military partners in the remote northwest of Badghis Province were still totally dependent on NATO aerial resupply. That was 11 years after the initial NATO incursion. Nonetheless, no U.S. commander voiced opposition to handing over the province’s defense to the Afghan government, which was totally unprepared to assume the responsibility. Instead of publicly telling President Barack Obama the truth, the American commander of NATO forces, Gen. John Allen, punted.
  • Finally, as it became obvious that we were going to quit the country, why was the defensible Bagram Air Base abandoned in the dead of the night and the vulnerable Kabul Airport chosen as a point of embarkation? This was military incompetence of the highest order. Thirteen service members died unnecessarily, and no one has yet been held accountable. The same holds true with a drone strike that decimated an innocent Afghan family.

Who then should make up the congressionally mandated Afghanistan investigation commission? There are many retired midgrade officers who served in Afghanistan and have gone on to succeed in business and in the academic world over the past few decades; some are now in Congress. The same holds true of any number of enlisted personnel who have achieved advanced degrees.

People who saw the war up close should make up the commission. There should also be retired State Department and CIA operatives who knew what was really going on while the generals acted as combat tourists, occasionally visiting the troops and handing out challenge coins.

Without the perspective of those who did the real fighting, we will learn nothing.

Originally posted 2022-01-08 09:59:53.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Mattis & Petraeus – Warrior Monks?

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Or traitors to our country?  The harder I honestly try to get off my Mattis diatribe and move on to other items of equal disgust, the more I inadvertently find information that move these two deeper into the do-do.

While my initial problem was with Mr. Mattis, the more I read the more I understand Mattis the “Warrior Monk” general was not all he was cracked up to be. Both these generals were in my professional Marine opinion are total frauds driven by egos as large as the Pentagon. Currently, I consider both to be a danger to our country, of course, Colin Powell and several other so-called “generals” fit the mold as well. One must remember their age and when they came up through the ranks. But I’ll let you decide after reading this well-thought out oped below. Trust me fellow Americans, it is worth the read.

The following Op-Ed was written by Fred Gavin (USMC retired).

Generals Mattis and General Petraeus collaborated and published the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-24 on counterinsurgency operations (COIN) in 2006; it later became Joint Publication 3-24. The publication contained the lessons the generals learned from nearly 19 years of operations in Afghanistan and 16 years in Iraq.

 

 

 

 

 

These prolonged operations, which failed to develop strategic effectiveness in the internal defenses of either nation, sadly resulted in the vast majority of senior Pentagon, Congressional, and defense industry leaders adamantly supporting the status quo, urging that the U.S. continue to stay the course and have our tax dollars and military invested in the Middle East indefinitely.

Petraeus began promoting his work with a speech tour, which included Harvard University, describing his Iraq experiences. Harvard is where Petraeus first met Paula Broadwell while she was a graduate student at Harvard University, a U.S. Army reserve officer, a wife, and a mother of two children. The two would later develop a prolonged extramarital affair as Petraeus valued Broadwell’s offer to write a biography, peculiarly titled, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Petraeus retired from the Army in July 2011 swiftly accepting an appointment as the Director of the CIA. He was sworn into office by Vice President Joe Biden on 6 September 2011 with his wife of 37 years, Holly Petraeus, by his side. During his 14 months as the CIA Director, Petraeus became the subject of an FBI criminal investigation. The FBI found that the spy director provided unauthorized releases of large amounts of classified national security information and simultaneously had an extramarital affair with Lieutenant Colonel Paula Broadwell beginning in November 2011. (This was during the time in which Broadwell was completing the fatefully titled “All-In” biography on Petraeus.) The FBI investigation uncovered that both Petraeus and Broadwell attempted to avoid the discovery of their crimes by using the same Gmail account to relay messages by leaving draft messages to each other and making calls on burner phones.

The FBI investigation discovered Broadwell’s personal computer to contain over 300 occurrences of classified information. In the fall of 2012, Petraeus denied to FBI investigators having shared classified information with anyone and signed a form upon his resignation from the CIA confirming he had no classified material. Later the FBI seized eight volumes of classified national security information from his home. Petraeus pled guilty to misdemeanor offenses of compromising national security information in a plea bargain, thus avoiding a public trial.

After Petraeus pled guilty to his crimes, he assumed teaching positions with the City University of New York, Harvard University, Yale University, continued to advise the White House, attained board membership at both Optiv, and OneStream, and became partner and Chairman of KKR Global Institute.

General David Petraeus (Defense.gov.)

In 2005, while then-Lieutenant General James Mattis (call-signs “Chaos” and “Mad-Dog”) commanded the Marine Corps’ Combat Development Command, he began to jointly develop the COIN manual with Petraeus. The COIN or as it was later termed “Petraeus doctrine” focused on winning the “hearts and minds of the population” by employing actions on the battlefield, as Mattis stated, of, “First do no harm.”

On 1 Feb 2005, Chaos attended the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association forum held at the San Diego convention center where he made racist comments, contradictory of his COIN doctrine’s “hearts and minds… first do no harm,” to 200 attendees including San Diego’s KNSD television reporters. He stated, “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you’ve got guys who slapped women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” There has never been any evidence substantiating Mad-Dog ever shooting anyone or brawling as his tough talk proclaimed.

Nevertheless, on 4 March 2007, 13 months after Mattis’s macho statements the first-ever Marine Special Operations Task Force was brutally ambushed by the Taliban employing a suicide car-bomber, snipers, and multiple echelons of jihadists firing automatic weapons at close range. The Marines, as Mad-Dog would have undoubtedly expected from his previous press statement in San Diego, quickly counter-attacked and destroyed the Taliban, immediately reported the incident to the command center from the ambush site in less than 10 seconds, returned to their base, and treated their one casualty. Only 20 minutes after the ambush, the international press reported that the Marines killed innocent, unarmed Afghan civilians including women, children, and elderly. The Taliban-controlled village from where the ambush was launched along the Afghan-Pakistan border immediately coordinated large scale riots. The rioters pressured the Afghan Provincial Governor Sharzai and the Afghan President Hamid Karzai to take swift action that led a U.S. Army general to expel the entire Marine Special Operations Task Force only one day after his own appointed U.S. military investigator began his investigation. By that point, the investigator had questioned only 10 US Marines and no Afghans.

After the Marines were expelled, the U.S. preliminary investigation continued for three more weeks. It ultimately led to the matter being referred to the U.S. Marine Corps’ jurisdiction. Mad-Dog Mattis was appointed as the military Convening Authority to determine through a criminal investigation if the allegations of homicide were legitimate. Chaos’s investigators uncovered, through interviews and sworn statements from the Marines on the patrol, that the Marines were ambushed by a suicide car-bomber at point-blank range and were attacked by multiple jihadists, on which the Marines returned fire and killed. The Marine Special Operations Task Force commander, who was also on the patrol, provided a polygraph confirming that the Marines were ambushed starting at 9:03 am on an open road where they remained for five minutes before moving from the ambush site and that he did not observe any civilians killed that morning. His statement corroborated the same comments of all the other 29 personnel from the patrol.

After the receipt of the exculpatory polygraph and unanimous testimonies of the patrol’s Marines, Chaos decided to commission 45 criminal investigators and a team of four prosecuting attorneys who aggressively conducted illegal interrogations of U.S. Marines. One interrogation threatened to unlawfully deport one Marine’s mother to Mexico if an NCIS prepared false statement, which would incriminate seven accused Marines of homicide, was not signed.

Regrettably, the Marine was coerced into signing NCIS’s statement. He later admitted, during the trial, that the NCIS statement was a false statement that he signed under duress during this Gestapo style interrogation, (see ABC video at 4:30 mark). Mad-Dog’s torment, created from unprecedented dog piling of seven criminal investigators and prosecuting attorneys per one Marine, caused permanent damage to the seven Marines’ health, families, and careers. Meanwhile, Mattis obeyed the direction of his superiors which accelerated the approval for his fourth star and transfer of assignment just prior to the tricky trial. The seven Marines who were falsely accused of killing 19 Afghan civilians endured a three-week-long trial.

The verdict came an unprecedented four months later. It was sent only to one media source at the Associated Press on a Friday evening at the start of a four-day military weekend over Memorial Day. Chaos’s successor, as the convening authority for the case, clouded the verdict by not using any legal terms of “innocent” or “not guilty” to clarify the case. Instead, the ambiguous phrase of, “the Marines acted appropriately” led to eight years of multiple media reports claiming that the Marines got away with murder. This led to many international courts and organizations to demand that the Marines be retried.

In 2013, while Chaos served as the Commander of the U.S. Central Command (all U.S. forces assigned to the Middle East), he took the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with Elizabeth Holmes, a 29-year-old, Stanford University dropout. Holmes was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a Silicon Valley biotech startup, and America’s youngest self-made female billionaire. As time showed, Holmes exploited Chaos’s willingness in order to falsely claim Theranos’s ability to swiftly conduct blood tests on U.S. troops on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Chaos showed favor towards Holmes and while serving as an active-duty four-star general Mad-Dog distorted the truth saying that his efforts were “legal” and forcefully attempted to coerce Pentagon officials to adopt Holmes’s blood-testing technology prior to it gaining FDA approval — which it later failed to get.

“How do we overcome this new obstacle? I have tried to get this device tested in theater asap, legally and ethically…this appears to be relatively straight-forward yet we’re a year into this and not yet deployed.” — Gen. Mattis email to the Pentagon while serving on active duty as the CENTCOM Commander.

Worse yet, Chaos was cautioned by his military legal representative, before his retirement from the Marines, against immediately accepting a board membership with Theranos in 2013. Mad-Dog ignored his attorney’s recommendation to wait out the “cool-off” period for senior military leaders. He immediately accepted Holmes’s board position. Mad-Dog continued to perpetuate Theranos’s false technology by stating to the Washington Post in December 2015 that he, “had quickly seen tremendous potential in the technologies Theranos develops, and I have the greatest respect for the company’s mission and integrity.”

In late 2015, Federal regulators began investigating Theranos over suspicions of the validity of the company’s testing and for misleading investors. Regulators found that Theranos falsely claimed its technology was used, “on the battlefield in Afghanistan.” As regulators began investigating, Theranos’s investors retreated and Theranos quickly cut its staff by 40 percent. Although he was never Airborne qualified, Mattis’s timing for his “golden parachute” escape from the charring Theranos was impeccable. On 1 December 2016 Mad-Dog accepted an appointment to become the Secretary of Defense.

Mattis, like Petraeus, never demonstrated the moral courage to speak out while in uniform regarding his strong opposition to the war in Iraq; Mad-Dog’s own book, “Call sign Chaos” describes how he vehemently opposed the war in Iraq. Immediately after military retirement, Mattis was also a board member for a large defense firm, General Dynamics, where he persuasively advocated in the beltway for increasing defense spending in the Middle East.

Chaos battled President Trump for two years while serving as the Secretary of Defense, urging Trump to remain completely invested in the Middle East indefinitely. This became a pivotal issue leading Mattis to quit and later be fired by the President. Mattis wasted no time in returning again to other high paying defense industry board memberships and positions advising, teaching and lobbying for General Dynamics, the Hoover Institute, and becoming an advisor to the United Arab Emirates. Mad-Dog continues to influence power brokers in the beltway to heavily increase U.S. defense forces and big-ticket programs in the Middle-East.

As in 2005-2006, both Petraeus and Mattis recently coordinated their efforts by writing judgmental articles of the Trump Administration that were published in The Atlantic in June 2020. Contrary to their own Counterinsurgency strategy, their most recent editorials promote sedition from their self-promoting perspectives as inerrant and selfless military experts. Petraeus and Mattis, who both remain unrepentant to the American people for their unethical actions, argue that their enlightened positions are inclusive and oppose divisiveness — except that their personal and public history proves otherwise.

Petraeus argues that his prior ignorance while training or visiting seven U.S. Army bases named after Confederate leaders is not an excuse for tolerating bases named after racists. He does not acknowledge his lack of courage or integrity over these “systemic racist” Army programs which provided his ill-gotten gain over 37 years. He continues to also further identify such problems as Fort Benning’s location being on “former Native American territory that became the site of a plantation,” without putting any skin in the game in the form of providing any resolutions: For example, giving the bases’ land back to Native Americans, selling the military equipment for reparations to former slaves. or offering his entire military retirement salary to immediate family members of indentured servants all of whom were exploited throughout American history and provided him with his woke unwarranted privileges. No. Rather, with just approximately 150 days before the upcoming Presidential election, Petraeus and Mattis acting as 21st century Che Guevaras piously describe America and our President as racist, evil and deranged, while they and their views are selfless, sound, and virtuous.

Mad-Dog’s Atlantic editorial falsely re-writes American military history through stating,

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

Mattis’s repetitive and self-promoting wisdom, which comes from his 7,000 volume library — something that is overstated in the media who genuflect to their beloved “Saint James Mattis” — overlooked the 1st Marine Division as two of its ground combat battalions were deployed to Los Angeles in 1992 during the riots. They provided active-duty Marines who effectively protected American lives and property without Chaos’s contempt or protest. Just like Petraeus, Mattis never demonstrated courage or integrity while in uniform by protesting any, “violation of the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.” It is clear to see the conflict of interest in Chaos’s public revolt against the President who opposes endless funding of defense programs that Mattis aggressively advocates for the Middle East forever wars. After all, his financiers at General Dynamic lavishly reward him for it.

Chaos’s contempt of a “bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside,” is akin to the false propaganda he peddled to the Pentagon as a board member at Theranos. In 2016-2018, Secretary of Defense Mattis approved multiple security operations using U.S. Armed Forces to support the President of the United States. Chaos’s predecessor, Secretary Ash Carter, did the same for President Obama with his employment of U.S. Navy SEALs on state roads and waters during his multiple vacations to Hawaii and across the Nation. These precedents run contrary to the historical facts undoubtedly known by the so-called “Warrior Monk” and his 7,000 book library.

Mattis’s analogy below of America’s current state being compared to the Nazi regime more accurately depict his own corrupt actions as a military leader with nearly unlimited power who allowed Gestapo tactics of “Divide and Conquer” in an effort to illegally imprison his own innocent Marines and deport their families for fighting the Taliban after being severely attacked.

The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court… “The Nazi slogan for destroying us… was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’”

The late Congressman Walter Jones sponsored House Resolution 21 (H.Res. 21) on 3 Jan 2017 during the 115th Congress urging the Commandant of the Marine Corps to bring “equal justice” to his Marines by publicly stating that the Marine Special Operators were not at fault for the 4 March 2007 ambush in Afghanistan. A second initiative requesting the Marine Special Operators who were falsely accused be awarded the Marine Special Operator Insignia was also submitted to the Pentagon. These matters were under Mad-Dog’s immediate control while serving as the Secretary of Defense in 2017-2018. He had a two-year opportunity to demonstrate his courage by rectifying his errors of approving illegal interrogations in his attempt to imprison his own innocent Marines. Mattis’s newly found courageous public comments could, as he stated, “unite” by bringing these heroes out of the shadows and back into the folds of the Corps, but his inaction shunned his own Marines.

These facts above are to caution all Americans of senior military leaders whose self-serving actions contradict their carefully coordinated righteous words. These retired senior military leaders are dutifully obeying their defense industry financiers by coordinating a seditious revolution and re-manufacturing history. Their true agenda, which they are being paid to peddle, is an overthrow of the government and its replacement with more willing leaders who will double-down on their endless failed Middle East military escapades.

Well, what have you decided, please comment.

Originally posted 2020-06-19 14:19:44.