He's gutted their healthcare, plans to cut their pay and apparently, doesn't trust them either. David Codrea over at Gun Rights Examiner points out that Marines marching in President Obama's second inaugural parade recently were caring rifles without bolts, meaning they were removed.
Two Russian nuclear-armed bombers circled the western Pacific island of Guam this week in the latest sign of Moscow's growing strategic assertiveness toward the United States. The Russian Tu-95 Bear-H strategic bombers were equipped with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and were followed by U.S. jets as they circumnavigated Guam on Feb. 12 local time-hours before President Barack Obama's state of the union address.
Phi Beta Iota: The Marines should have refused to decommission their weapons and refused to march. This is a classic example of silence and complacency replacing integrity at multiple levels. Shades of Third World dictatorships and the “Palace Guard.”As for the Russians, they are stupid, so we put this down to perestoika's revenge — they want the lunatic right and the military-industrial complex to continue death-spiral spending. A clever analyst would conclude that the Russians are vastly amused by the “pivot” to Asia and sick with laughter over how incoherent and inept US governance is, both at home and abroad.
‘The damage we're doing to the Defense Department is enormous'
By Charlie Rose
Someone said to me that, since you received your heart transplant last year, you’re a new man. That you’re mellow, less strident. Is this true?
My family’s accused me of being downright chatty on occasion. I don’t sense that I’m a different personality. A lot of people want to know, “Did your new heart change your political views?” I went from end-stage heart failure, near death, to a new heart. I wake up every morning with a smile on my face in anticipation of a day I never expected to see.
You were in Wyoming last weekend, and you talked about Obama’s new team being “second-rate.” What issues stand out for you?
I’m very concerned about what I see happening in the national security arena. I think the administration’s policies are terribly flawed. I think the damage we’re doing to the Defense Department is enormous with the sequester. I think the president’s performance in the international arena, the Middle East and so forth, is worse than many of my friends and colleagues deem his domestic policies. I see him headed for the exits in the Middle East. We’re getting out of Iraq … getting out of Afghanistan as quickly as he can. We’re jawboning the Iranians on their nuclear program, but at the same time we withdraw one of our carriers from the Persian Gulf.
So you’ve got problems with Obama’s policies—and his nominations of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan.
With respect to Hagel and Brennan, just in the last week their performances in front of the committees that have to confirm them have been pretty poor. And that’s not my judgment. That’s the judgment of senators on both sides of the aisle. When I think of a secretary of defense for a Democratic administration … Sam Nunn. He’s a tremendous talent, enormous experience. Chuck doesn’t have those credentials. He doesn’t have that stature. I think [Obama] wants a Republican to be the foil, if you will, for what he wants to do to the Defense Department, which is to do serious damage to our military capabilities.
This is absolutely insane….ranks higher than a Bronze Star for Valor and cannot be awarded for serving in a combat zone. The Air Force pushed it in an effort to control the Drone and Cyber environment….Air Force would not let any comments from Afghanistan….payoff for the homage of the Air Force Generals? Most likely………
WASHINGTON (AP) — They fight the war from computer consoles and video screens.
But the troops who launch the drone strikes and direct the cyberattacks that can kill or disable an enemy may never set foot in the combat zone. Now their battlefield contributions may be recognized with the first new combat-related medal to be created in decades.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Wednesday that the Pentagon is creating a medal that can be awarded to troops who have a direct impact on combat operations, but do it well away from any combat zone.
Thought at first it was a hoax but it’s not and it’s precedence sits just below the DFC. It was bad enough when NATO suggested the Courageous Restraint Award but this worse. This is Panetta’s going away slap in the face to our Nations warriors. There are plenty of rewards available for support billets without insulting/degrading front line troops. What’s next? Purple Heart for monitor eye strain or the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome?
There are a few officers still serving that I hold in high regard. Below is a discussion I had with one such officer via email recently.
DNI Anon:
Current discussion about drones to kill “high-value targets” may miss the point, ethically and politically. Discussion has centered on the toll a drone exacts on nearby luckless individuals and the fact that some high value-targets can lay claim to being U.S. citizens.
The technology for remote killing has become increasingly precise—from carpet bombing to TLAMS to smart bombs, now hellfire missiles. Extrapolate forward to a remote controlled weapon that promptly and reliably impacts just a single, targeted individual, absolutely no collateral damage. Better, or worse? The catch is the targeting process itself. Our national mantra is “innocent until proven guilty”. How proven and, to what standard of proof? Do we abide the Blackstone ratio, “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”?
The larger issue, however, is that as precision increases, the barriers to use drop. Previously, a more scatter-shot killing on another’s sovereign soil might occasion war. But, precision technology has lowered the profile for extra-territorial attack and war need not be the outcome. Good, so far as it goes, but less constrained technology can mean less restrained actors …and, technology proliferates.
The Russian system is beginning to decay. It cannot sustain the crumbling status quo, nor can it be certain of finding a new incarnation for itself. The only real questions are what stage of decay the system is in, whether the agony of its final demise has already started, and, if so, how long it will last.
To be sure, the system still has some resources, if not to revive itself, then to draw out its death, and that survival instinct could take a nasty, even bloody, form.
The Future of the Russian Matrix
The system can still reproduce itself through regime change and the emergence of a new Leader, who will personify authoritarian rule.
It can't be excluded that the forces who present themselves as “liberal,” declaring the need to “influence” the system from within and supporting “partial” changes, will try to highjack the protest movement and reestablish personalized power under liberal slogans.
Most certainly, any new attempt to breathe life into the rotting Matrix will necessarily involve coercion in order to preserve its power.
Prospects for Change
For the first time in its long history, Russian society is ready to free itself from the stifling embrace of the Russian system and of the political regime that is its engine, and to accept new rules of the game.
It is true that only a minority is ready to publicly stand up for a state based on the rule of law. It is more important, however, that the idea of the new order is not rejected by the vast majority of Russians, and they are ready to accept it, if it is offered to them.
At this point, however, the demoralized and corrupt Russian ruling elite is not ready for any change that will endanger its monopoly and its corporate and personal interests.
For its part, the Russian opposition, still weak and fragmented, has so far failed to present society with a viable agenda for an exit solution.
However, there is no doubt that Russia's moment of truth is fast approaching. The question is whether the confluence of several specific factors will occur in the same time frame and in the not too distant future. These factors include:
public pressure on the regime;
the consolidation of the non-system opposition;
the split of the ruling elite, with its pragmatic part joining the opposition;
the power structures' reluctance to defend the old order; and
the creation by the opposition of a “road map” for the transition to the new rules of the game that will include Constitutional reform and a new state structure.
Failure to reach these goals will deepen the rot and/or implosion of the system and the state.
Read rest of report.
Phi Beta Iota: Carnegie has written a perfect self-description of the USA. They will never admit this, and no one in a position of power is capable of actually connecting to the truth even if the US intelligence community were capable of presenting the truth — as Daniel Ellsberg lectured Henry Kissinger:
The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
The Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees this week arguing that unless their budgets are augmented with still more money they will hollow out the armed forces. Most in the press and Congress didn't read their assertions that way, but two near simultaneous reports that provide some meaningful context for the Chiefs' demands recently became public. They put the Chiefs' behavior in a very different light.
America's generals are just as morally bankrupt as Congress.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER
Foreign Policy | FEBRUARY 14, 2013
I read two critically important reports this week on the impact that sequestration would have on national defense. That possible reduction in military spending — $48 billion, or 7.4 percent of the $645 billion currently appropriated for fiscal year 2013 — is being characterized by the stampede of hysterics who run the Pentagon as the virtual end of national security as we know it. What these two reports show is that we should now consider the Pentagon as morally and mentally broken as Congress.
The first report, by Chuck Spinney, who spent a few decades inside the Department of Defense evaluating budgets, weapons, and bureaucratic behavior, was published at Counterpunch and Time's Battleland blog. The second was a Congressional Research Service report by Amy Belasco, who has spent the last few decades at CRS and the Congressional Budget Office parsing defense budgets and their implications.
Both authors indirectly address the testimony this week of the deputy secretary of defense and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff at the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. To a man, they lent all the rhetorical and substantive support they could muster to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's depiction of sequestration as “doomsday” and to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey's description of it as an “unprecedented crisis” — a characterization he augmented by adding that he was “jumping up and down.” He truly was.
Put simply, the chiefs and their ostensible civilian masters plan to implement the cuts mandated by law in the most destructive, negative way possible, which has the convenient effect — for them — of pushing Congress and the White House to cough up more money. According to their testimony, the Army will reduce training levels to such a low point that units cannot be sent to Afghanistan. The Navy plans to postpone, if not cancel, maintenance for ships in a fleet already at historic lows for upkeep and repair, and deployments to the Persian Gulf have already been postponed. The Air Force is going to further reduce its historically low training of pilots, and maintenance will also hit new lows. Throughout the services, civilian maintainers, auditors, and program overseers will be furloughed, aircraft will be grounded, and ships held in port.
Two Russian nuclear-armed bombers circled the western Pacific island of Guam this week in the latest sign of Moscow's growing strategic assertiveness toward the United States. The Russian Tu-95 Bear-H strategic bombers were equipped with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and were followed by U.S. jets as they circumnavigated Guam on Feb. 12 local time-hours before President Barack Obama's state of the union address.
