I also want to apologize for my anger and language. I’ve become a little less tolerant when I believe someone from the current crop of pin wearing, non-volunteering assholes patriotic Americans is trying to bullshit me.

Hey, no problem. You were well within your rights. I posted like a blowhard asshole (I’m not actually a fascist tho’, I just play one on TV every now ‘n then), so I had it coming.

Note to self: the next time somebody posts something that pisses me off, ask them to clarify what they mean first before trying to bring the hammer down, because they may mean something very different from what I think I’m reading.

One of the nice things about this blog is that we’re all human and John doesn’t even pretend to expect otherwise. Hot air, ill-informed banter, etc.

.
LOL, apology accepted.

.
You are correct in your 2nd description on what I was trying to say about our current crop of officers. In the future I will try to be a little more careful with my tenses.

I also want to apologize for my anger and language. I’ve become a little less tolerant when I believe someone from the current crop of pin wearing, non-volunteering assholes patriotic Americans is trying to bullshit me.

I apologise. My reading comprehension skills were not good enough to follow the argument you were making, until you clarified it. When I read at the top of your comment:

what is even more discouraging than the amount and quality of people leaving the military is the quality of the people staying in

I misread this statement (which you wrote using the present tense) as pretty clearly implying a difference in quality between the people leaving and the people staying in, because it scans as if you were saying that the quality of the people staying in is a reason to be discouraged.

I then misread the rest of your comment as proceeding from this assumption, namely that at the present time the good ones are leaving and the bad ones are staying in (in disproportionate numbers), in other words that the quality of the officer corps is going downhill right now, and from there I thought your argument was that this problem will in due time work its way up the chain of command as this group is promoted.

I thought that this idea was an overly broad generalization and a slur on the character of the officers who have elected to stay in for a variety of individual reasons. That is why I reacted angrily and commented the way I did.

Instead, re-reading your first comment and also your follow-up comment, I’m now understanding you to mean that a smaller peer group competing for the same number of spots will over time mean that there will be fewer chances to weed out the bad eggs, so some of the latter will manage to get promoted when under more normal circumstances and given a larger peer group they would have been forced out of the service due to lack of advancement. In other words, your argument isn’t about the quality of the officer corps at the present time, but about what will happen in the future as a smaller applicant pool translates into less darwinian pressure to excel, for this generation of officers.

Is that what you were saying? Did I get it right this 2nd time?

Can you see why I might have misunderstood what you were saying the 1st time, based on your unfortunate use of the phrase “the quality of the people staying in”?

Thanks for responding.

respectfully,
a proto-fascist asshole

Get off your fucking high horse, I’m speaking as someone whose actually served and has no problem realizing and admitting that a good portion of our military are mouth breathers (a polite way of saying dumbfucks who should not be let within a 1000 yards of a weapon). I also realize that even these mouth breathers have made sacrifices and some have even given the ultimate sacrifice, but that does not preclude me from pointing out that under normal circumstances a goodly portion of them would had their sorry asses shipped home and separated from the military.

This is the problem I have with you proto-fascist, everytime someone points out that maybe, just maybe the military isn’t made up entirely of all fine and upstanding geniuses, the proto-fascist come out of the woodwork and try to turn it into an attack on the “troops”. Well fuck you; I’ve served, so you can’t snow me with a line of bullshit, I’ve served with some of the smartest and best people on the face of the earth, people I trust with my life (which I have) and I’ve served with some douche bags, dumbasses, who besides being evil assholes couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were printed on the bottom.

My point was and still is that with the larger than normal amount of talented leadership leaving the military, there is a resultant larger group of flotsam left behind who under normal circumstance would have been separated out for not meeting standards. This flotsam, because they have less competition for promotion will naturally be promoted up the line until they are in real positions of power resulting in a weaker military 20 years down the line. I don’t know about you but 20 years from now I would much rather have a weaker Quickee Mart that a weaker US Army.

.
Oh before I forget, one more thing, you are one proto-fascist Asshole

I’ve pointed this out before, what is even more discouraging than the amount and quality of people leaving the military is the quality of the people staying in and getting promoted.

The military under normal circumstances usually has a promote up or get out policy after you make Captain, however under the current situation every mouth breather will make Major, most will make Lt. Colonel and Colonel, which means the pool for Generals in the next 15 to 20 years will be made up of mouth breathers. Think about it people, your military leadership in the 20 years will consist of personnel who under normal circumstances should be managing the local Quickee Mart.

I’m no supporter of the war, but this comment is just disgusting, and I hope it was merely ill-phrased or poorly considered rather than a product of deep reflection. If the former, then please regard my comments below as being aimed at someone else. If the latter, then please listen up:

What evidence exactly do you have, on the basis of which you can smear the officers who are remaining as “mouth breathers“?

Did it ever occur to you that staying in may be a decision they have weighed with care and at great length, putting more thought into their decision than you evidently put into this comment?

Did it ever occur to you that some of them may in fact be highly intelligent and ethical people who have decided that the best way they can redeem this mess to some degree is by doing everything which lies within their power to help those (both Americans and Iraqis) who are affected by it, and that their best chance of doing this is to stay in rather than get out, at great risk to themselves?

Did it ever occur to you that respecting the decision made by those who have elected to get out does not require that you denigrate the judgment or morals or intelligence of those who have decided otherwise?

See here for one example of an officer who decided to stay and paid the ultimate price for his decision. If he had lived, he might have gone on to be one of those future Colonels you are talking about. I wish that we would have been so lucky as to have someone of that caliber in the upper ranks of our officer corps.

The military under normal circumstances usually has a promote up or get out policy after you make Captain, however under the current situation every mouth breather will make Major, most will make Lt. Colonel and Colonel, which means the pool for Generals in the next 15 to 20 years will be made up of mouth breathers. Think about it people, your military leadership in the 20 years will consist of personnel who under normal circumstances should be managing the local Quickee Mart.

That to me is scary.

just seems to me that in that little world, If i play a bad strategy whereby I pour my army into foreign disputes, policing instead of training, with badly maintained support and armour due to poor finance, and generally over stretching myself.
A slowly growing casualty rate and ever slowing recruitment.
A slowly collapsing economy, and trillion dollar bill.
One of two results ensue; either i’m invaded, destroyed and generally blasted to itty bits, or I realise I fecked up and start again.

What does a real country do in the same situation ??

Just a thought.

In return for this somewhat limited strategic accomplishment we now risk some unexpected conflict catching America flat-footed, unable to answer any serious challenge unless the enemy fields a Navy. In any meaningful sense America is less secure now than we were back when Colin Powell frightened the UN with bugbears and basilisks.

It’s times like these that I marvel that there’s anybody in this country either egoistic or masochistic enough to actually want to be President.

What I found significant was that the article claimed that 58% of the Class of ‘02 had left the service by November, 2007 (i.e., within a few months of their obligation ending). The normal rate would be 25-33%, so this is double the normal rate. Considering the war, not so bad.

Except – some large chunk of the Army is on deployment, or locked into an upcoming deployment, and so those officers would not be able to leave the service. And West Point officers tend to be in the combat arms, which should have the highest percentage of time deployed to Iraq (if you’re an infantry officer, you should spend more time in Iraq and Afghanistan than if you were finance or personnel, for example).

If 25% of the class was locked in, this would mean that the attrition rate was 58 out of 75, not 100; which means that it’s actually 77%.

If 33% of the class was locked in, this would mean that the attrition rate was 58 out of 67 = 86%

Either way, what this means is that the elite core of the young officer corps, West Pointers, is leaving the Army as soon as they are allowed. This is basically saying that the Army if f*cked, and we’re just waiting for it to finally actually crash.

At the end of 1942, the US Army numbered 5.4 million. That was one year after the beginning of hostilities. Today, the US Army numbers 519,472, the National Guard 346,288 and the Army Reserve 189,975. This is five years after hostilities started in what is described as an existential struggle for the future of America. The Bush administration has known for years that they needed more troops but instituting a draft was dead out (Start draft – war over) and that pressing Congress for more troops would be an admission that all of their rosy pronouncements of incipient victory were just so much bullshit. So we have troops now on their fourth and fifth tours, 81,000 men and women being kept beyond their terms of enlistment by Stop Loss orders, and if something goes badly wrong elsewhere we won’t be able to do a damned thing about it.
As a citizen I am outraged that Bush went into Iraq. As a vet I am furious that Bush has so abused the troops when he could have had more for the asking at any point in his term. That he would willingly and knowingly do this to his own people shows just how deeply disturbed and out of touch he is.

“I must tell you, I’m sleeping a lot better than people would assume,” Bush famously said, with his usual mixture of arrogance, ignorance and defiance. There are 4011 Americans and countless Iraqis who are also sleeping – only they’ll never get up again. Sleep well, you little son of a bitch.

Ewww, Pat Robertson breeding. First thing that came to mind was the guy has the lights out, and there is 7 seconds of “OH GOD!” and then he gets out of bed, kneels and prays for forgiveness. Then he gets back in bed and asks Ted Haggard if he is ready for seconds.

Dear sir,

Thank you for taking a giant toxic dump all over our imaginations. We will forward you our therapy bills and bar tabs.

Regards,

The World

the Iraqi operation was not what the United States expected. Instead of methodically building up their combat power and gradually stepping up operations against renegade militias, Mr. Maliki’s forces lunged into the city, attacking before all of the Iraqi reinforcements had even arrived. By the following Tuesday, a major fight was on.

“The sense we had was that this would be a long-term effort: increased pressure gradually squeezing the Special Groups,” Mr. Crocker said in an interview, using the American term for Iranian-backed militias. “That is not what kind of emerged.”

“Nothing was in place from our side,” he added. “It all had to be put together.”

The big methodical build up has been a traditional American approach to operations since at least the time of Grant and Sherman, so I may be reading too much into this, but a sudden lunge like this is what I would expect from an Army which has no confidence in their internal security and is worried about operational details being leaked to the other side.

The United States helped the Iraqis ferry in supplies by C-130. The Iraqis, however, also began to fly in supplies and troops using their two C-130s. More than 500 Iraqi replacement soldiers were moved by air while an additional brigade was sent by ground. The Iraqis also flew Huey and Hip multimission helicopters.

Reading between the lines here, I wonder if the prominent use of C-130s to move troops and supplies was merely to speed up the tempo, or is it a hint that Maliki and the IA did not have confidence in being able to keep supply lines open on the ground between Baghdad and Basra – i.e. they can’t control the roads.

If the latter, this is not good.