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The Three “M’s”

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I know the author of this article. We never served together in the same unit, but during our careers we were within shouting distance of one another numerous times. Gary is the kind of Marine with whom I could saddle up to the bar at happy hour on Friday night at the O’ Club and shoot the bull. By that I mean we thought alike, had the same philosophies about Marine issues such as training, conduct, discipline, leadership, and the individual Marine himself. I fully concur with Gary in everything he says in this article. In fact, I would be shocked if any of my readers are not in agreement as well.

In the book I talk about some commands in which I served and one in which I commanded that were prime examples about which Gary is talking. An undisciplined command is like the old saying, an accident waiting for a time and place to happen. My fear is that with the current direction our military is headed accidents will be the daily headline news.

14 Feb 2022
Military.com | By Gary Anderson

 

 

The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel. He served as a special adviser to the deputy secretary of defense and as a civilian adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CBS’ 60 Minutes recently broadcast a feature on accidental training deaths in the military. The segment focused on technologies that could reduce fatal vehicle accidents. Training and discipline were barely mentioned.

I think they missed the point.

Most military accidents, in my experience, occur in units with lax discipline and inept leadership. I came to this conclusion early in my Marine Corps career.

As a young first lieutenant platoon commander, I joined a company stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The company was commanded by a former enlisted man who had risen through the ranks by doing well in combat in Vietnam. He believed in hard and realistic training but had a “boys will be boys” attitude regarding off-duty conduct.

The company lacked discipline and had a “cowboy” mentality in the field that troubled me. During a tank-infantry exercise, a Marine who was riding on the back of the lead tank fell off and was killed by a tank that was following behind. He should not have been on the vehicle to begin with.

The next day, the battalion commander called me into his office. His message was curt. “I just fired your company commander. You are the new commander. Square that mob away, or I’ll fire you too.”

I got the picture. I survived that command and went on to a few more over the course of three decades, but the lesson stayed with me. No Marine or sailor under my command ever died or was seriously injured in a training accident or while off duty. Nobody died in combat either, but I write that off to pure dumb luck. I am sure many people who served under me considered me to be a martinet, but all left under their own power, and not feet first.

I encouraged hard training, hand-to-hand combat and live-fire exercises, but all were conducted by the book. Over the years, I studied unit accident rates, and what I found confirmed my earliest observation: An undisciplined unit is an unsafe unit.

As I studied organizations that had poor safety records — and this included aviation units — there were four interrelated signs of underlying safety issues, but all are connected to leadership.

First is a unit’s incident rate. Serious incidents range from automobile accidents to off-duty bar fights.

Second is how commanders deal with such incidents, which one can find by looking at the Unit Punishment Book. If minor infractions are ignored or trivialized, an atmosphere of laxness sets in that tends to permeate the command.

A third indicator is maintenance. A commander can learn a lot about a unit by just walking around. A sloppy work area in a motor pool is a good indication that the little things in maintenance are not being attended to.

Finally, there is the attitude of the commander. “Cowboy” commanders who think that injuries or accidents in training are part of toughening the troops eventually are disasters waiting for an opportunity to happen.

The normal military response to a horrific accident is for higher headquarters to call for a “stand down” to examine safety procedures. This has always seemed to me to be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. If senior commanders would begin looking at the real causes of problems by spending time talking to the troops and poking around in their workspaces before accidents happen, we might prevent some of these events such as the five recent mishaps aboard the USS Carl Vinson.

One of the primary problems leading to a lack of leadership is command climate surveys. Too many commanders are more concerned with being popular than running tight ships, as the surveys can be critical to their career advancement. Gen. George S. Patton and Adm. William “Bull” Halsey likely would never have survived today’s command climate evaluations.

This brings me back to the Vinson. If the fleet commander would visit the ship and look at the indicators noted in this article, I think that he would find that several, if not all, are present in the Carrier Air Group — if not among the ship’s total complement.

Fortunately, no one has been killed … yet. This does not mean that the commanders are inherently bad, but they probably want more to be liked than respected or feared.

In war, a commander’s job should be to accomplish the mission with the least possible casualties. In peace, it should be to accomplish the mission without killing anybody.

The Three M’s; Mission, Men, Myself

Originally posted 2022-02-15 09:47:59.

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Cubans – My Opinion

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Cubans Are Fed Up With Communism. Democrats Aren’t So Sure.

Folks, I have some personal knowledge about this issue — I’ve been there!  We belong to Faith United Methodist Church, Fort Myers, Florida. Two years ago I was offered an opportunity to go on a mission trip to Cuba, (pronounced as Ku-Bah with a short U). While I had been to Cuba a few times during my career, I was packing a weapon guarding Guantanamo, I had never been inside the country, or any communist country for that matter; therefore I jumped at the chance. No surprises.

I expected eveything I saw, except such severe rationing of everything. Cuba’s primary agricultural product is sugar cane, so why is sugar so tightly rationed?  It is exported, that’s how the country survives economically. Another example, here is the meat department in a  town’s local grocery store.

If you are not there at the very hour the meat is put out, sorry. This is what you will eat and what we ate everyday.

Everyone lives by needs only, not desires; there are no such thing as wants. Examples, what’s missing in these photos?

 

 

 

The passenger does not see when it is raining, one doesn’t need a toilet seat, and regardless how many outlets a light fixture has, it only needs one bulb to see.

Our sponsor was a district head of the local Methodist churches; fifty-six of them! There are literally 1000’s throughout the hinterlands. Plus, so many other denominations are there as well. After seeing how many of these  mission churches there are, I came away convinced it was only a matter of time when the population would become educated, God loving, and  wanting to fill wants, not just needs. That. my friends, is what I believe you are seeing now, and it will only get worse. The government “tolerates” these mission churches for they know they best not try to shut them down. Without them those in the hinterlands could not survive. In effect, these churches provide a service the government cannot provide, but you can bet their are a deep thorn in their side.

This trip  simply reinforced to me these liberals who tout socialism, need to go there. And I don’t mean Havana, go to the hinterlands where we went. But they won’t as they know better; they want the U.S. to be degraded to the level of Cuba

Just prior to our arriving Raul’s gay daughter wanted to get married. All the mission churches form all the denominations banded together and produced a petition stating they would not perform a gay marriage as it was against their religions. So in retaliation Raul cancelled all religious VISAS; therefore, days before we were to leave we had to change ours to a Visitors VISA, and when we arrived we had tell a fib and tell the very inquisitive custom agents we were there just to visit. We found this sign posted on the door of every church we visited.

She was married, but not by one of the mission churches. These churches have filled a vacuum in Cuba and their flock gets larger by the day

AOC and her band of swamp creatures need to go there for a real look-see, they “might” learn something but I seriously doubt it. The regime would not dare show them the hinterlands, but the folks out there are getting restless by the day and learning there is life out here in the world; they see it daily with all the many mission trips.

From the Daily Beast

Matt Lewis Senior Columnist

Done with being hungry, unemployed, without water, without power”—as one 88-year-old protester put it—thousands of Cubans are, after 60 years of oppression, taking a brave stand against an authoritarian regime quick to crack down on dissent. As unprecedented street protests aimed at Cuba’s vengeful Communist government have continued, here in the comfortable confines of American politics, the Democratic Party risks blowing yet another opportunity to seize both the center and the moral high ground at a time when those have been largely abandoned by the GOP.

Who or what is stopping them from simply assuming this position as America’s mainstream, majority party? A small, but young and energetic and growing band of activists with outsized influence who support radical causes like CRT, “defund the police,” and socialism. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like Bernie Sanders, prefers the label of democratic socialist.)

On important issues as diverse as crime and infrastructure, Joe Biden has had to walk the line between appeasing this base and delivering on his promise of being a centrist. The result tends toward a mushy compromise that is passable, but during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday, he delivered. “Communism is a failed system—a universally failed system. And I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute. But that’s another story,” he said.

Better late than never. The danger, as Marc Caputo warned, was that the president “could blow it by being too slow to move, too timid in his actions or by embracing the messaging from progressives who have been reluctant to denounce the Cuban regime in strong, unqualified and moralistic terms.”

Cuba is a wedge issue, and if you doubt this issue still resonates, think again. One of the reasons Biden became the Democratic nominee was Bernie Sanders’ past praise for Fidel Castro. Likewise, California Rep. Karen Bass’s 2016 praise of Castro (“the passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba”) helped scuttle talk of her being Biden’s running mate. She walked that back in 2020, but it was too little and too late to resuscitate her vice presidential ambitions.

That’s not one but two high-profile Democrats (one of whom came within a whisker of being his party’s nominee and still retains enormous influence) who had high praise for a Communist country and its bloodthirsty dictator. As much as the dark and authoritarian strains of America’s right-wing extremists have been rightly scrutinized, the left harbors its fair share of radicals.

For example, before Biden’s comments, Black Lives Matter (specifically, the group operating under that name founded by Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza) posted a statement blaming the U.S. government for Cuba’s problems that Cuban citizens are bravely taking to the streets to protest.

“Black Lives Matter condemns the U.S. federal government’s inhumane treatment of Cubans and urges it to immediately lift the economic embargo,” it reads. They are literally blaming America first.

To be sure, U.S. sanctions are squeezing Cuba (along with COVID and reduced support from Venezuela). But the fundamental problem is the communist system’s failure to deliver on its utopian promise by modernizing its economy. Cuba, not America, is responsible for the disastrous decision to develop their own COVID vaccine (instead of joining COVAX, the World Health Organization’s sharing program). By blaming America, progressives are parroting the communist regime’s own propaganda talking points even as lots of mainstream Democrats—like Rep. Gregory Meeks—are using the protests as an opportunity to call on the U.S. to end sanctions.

So why are they doing it?

Some of the radicals truly believe America is to blame. For others, it’s a political calculation. “There’s a concern by some in the party that if we condemn what happens in Cuba that we’re somehow making a moral judgment on the most progressive elements of our party who have described themselves as Democratic socialists,” z, a former Democratic state representative who is the son of exiles, told Caputo. “That concern about offending certain progressive elements in the party is why you see statements of the kind from the likes of Congressman Meeks.”

Squeezing Biden and the Democrats from the other direction, many Floridians are emotionally invested in these Cuban protests. “‘Where is Biden? Where is Biden,’ shouted Cuban-American demonstrators Tuesday in Tampa,” according to the Miami Herald.

This isn’t just a few protesters who can be easily ignored. There’s a good argument to be made that Elian Gonzalez defeated Al Gore in 2000. Since that time, though, Democrats talked themselves into the notion that Florida had changed, that Cuban Americans weren’t as important a slice of the Florida Hispanic community as they once were, and that younger Cuban Americans have different political sensibilities. Just as 2016 shattered notions about the “coalition of the ascendant,” meaning they could ignore working-class whites, this assumption about Cuban Americans seems premature at best.

A lot of emphasis has been put on Biden saying the right things, but while a Democratic president and party expressing solidarity with the protesters is helpful, it is not sufficient. The real test is action. One obvious thing America should do is open our doors to Cuban refugees, yet the Biden administration is warning that “if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.” Would the Biden administration really turn away Cubans fleeing persecution, and risk the political fallout that could entail? We may find out.

A more helpful and proactive idea comes from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is now calling on Biden to help restore Cuba’s internet access, which has been blockaded by the regime; this action alone would be instrumental in helping protest organizers and allowing the world to see any retribution. On Thursday, Biden gave a nod in this direction, saying: “We’re considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access.”

Will Biden answer the call? His decision will have both moral and political implications. The stakes are high.

As Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago puts it, “Before Trump, Cuban Americans twice voted for Obama. If Democrats bungle the bloodshed in Cuba, they will forfeit Cuban-American voters forever—and they will deserve it.”

I’m highly disappointed this article failed to touch on the effect these missions have had on the current state of affairs in Cuba. I firmly believe they are awakening the people.; I’ve seen it first hand. Oh and bear in mind they have yet to taste a Big Mac or a  Coke LOL. Is anymore wondering why Joey the puppet doesn’t want Cuban immigrants entering the U.S.? Who would they vote for? Go figure. 

In sum, Cuba is a country stuck in the 20th Century (1900’s), with a little 21st Century mixed in (2000’s), and a very small touch of the 22nd Century (2100’s). The more these missions provide of the  latter two centuries, the worse it’s going to get for the government.

Our Taxi.  By the way, he had a cell phone.

Originally posted 2021-07-17 16:11:27.

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Castro is DEAD!!!!

Yes, he is reportedly dead, Miami’s Little Havana community celebrates. I hope we have enough therapy dogs to handle all the snowflakes’ new grief? Ronald Reagan at his best.

 

Fidel Castro, the Marxist degenerate who took over Cuba and turned it into an impoverished island prison, has died, and not a moment too soon.

Castro will forever be romanticized by the American left for his revolutionary chic attire and anti-western swagger, and because hipsters freaking love beards. But make no mistake, this man was an absolute monster.  The Babalu Blog, an anti-Castro oasis on the internet, chronicles some of his worst atrocities:

The Cuba Archive which documents deaths and disappearances resulting from Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution has documented 3,615 firing squad executions conducted by the Cuban state since Castro took over on January 1, 1959.

Opponents of the death penalty should be horrified at the amount of death Fidel Castro and his accomplices have directly caused. It’s important to note that in Revolutionary Cuba there are none of the due process guarantees found in a western-style democracy. Most of Castro’s firing squad victims were afforded only a perfunctory show trial the outcome of which was predetermined, some didn’t even get that. Ernesto “Ché” Guevara is a popular culture icon, his face adorns posters and t-shirts around the globe. Most people don’t realize that he was Fidel Castro’s chief enforcer and had a personal hand in at least 100 firing squad executions, often delivering the coup de grace personally. In response to questions about Castro’s firing squads Guevara once said, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”

Castro’s effort to remake the country as a Marxist paradise turned a beautiful island nation into a prison colony. Over the years Castro ruled Cuba with an iron fist, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the island on anything that could float, establishing a vibrant, freedom loving community in Miami. Last night, they came together to celebrate the tyrant’s death. Per CNN:

News of Fidel Castro’s death was quick to reach Miami, Florida, the center of the Cuban exile community, where an outpouring of emotion brought jubilant crowds onto the streets of Little Havana.

Some popped champagne corks, others clanged pots and waved the Cuban flag as they cheered the death of a man who defined the lives of so many of their number through decades in exile in the United States.

Hundreds gathered outside the neighborhood’s Versailles restaurant, a longtime haunt of the exile community, spilling out on to the street from the sidewalk as they chanted, sang, danced and took smart phone videos of a historic moment.

We at American Action News stand with those folks in Miami, and we hope that Castro’s death puts us one step closer to consigning communism and its related totalitarian, collectivist ideological cousins to the dustbin of history where they belong.

 

Originally posted 2016-11-26 11:58:23.