Monday, June 27, 2011

Warning Will Robinson OT AGAIN!

A quick and I promise relatively short clarification on the last post.

I actually got feedback on that one so I guess there are some readers ;~)

Apparently it came off as an anti war rant to a bunch of folks, which means I missed my point.

So...

It has nothing to do with whether you think we should or shouldn’t be over there.
The point is that politicians get to play the “war” game and pretend they are at war but they have never declared war.
It’s the perfect political war. The naysayers say it’s un-winnable, what they miss is it’s also un-looseable! There is no metric for a claim either way so whenever you need it to end declare victory and go home. The trick is you have to go home after the victory or people start to squawk.

The folks actually IN the war are woefully under supplied, get no “war” benefits and are the first troops to be in a “for the duration” situation since the last World War.

If you are in the armed forces and are going to be deployed (and want to come back in one piece) you need to spend upward of $6,000 to buy equipment that you should have been provided. This number is from families who have had to do this for members that were deployed not some theorized amount. It’s what it actually costs, if your smart enough to buy it before you leave. It’s a lot more to get it to a member once they are over there.

In the intro to new recruits they are told what model of flack jacket to buy if they want to survive and are given a demo of why what the military issues will get them killed. Again first hand from someone who was there and wrote down the list of things that they HAD to buy.

As expensive as these wars (were in four now, or one with four fronts depending on how you look at it) are they are a fraction of what they should cost because the politicians have shifted a LOT of the expense onto the troops and at the same time yanked many of their benefits.

Someone said “It’s all volunteer and only stupid people are in now”.
God I hope not.
And “volunteer” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s a “non draft” army. A not insignificant portion of the troops are National Guard. They are supposed to mostly go into disaster zones and help out. They didn’t volunteer for combat duty and they don’t get compensated for that. But surprise. Not only have National Guard members been sent overseas but they have been swept up into the “stop loss” in for the duration nightmare. The other group are all those folks in inactive reserve. Turns out if you are an officer being discharged doesn’t do it. You have to specifically “resign” your commission or you are on inactive reserve till you die. A lot didn’t realize this till they got their “draft notice” informing them they were back in. The only real press this got was when they served papers on a 80 year old grandma. I think she got let off.

So volunteering is pretty much like you accept a job with a two year contract and at the end of that they tell you that they have you for life and BTW were cutting your benefits.
If signing a two year contract means your a “volunteer”, well I think some dictionaries need to be altered.

If the press actually educated and everybody knew the facts then there might be an argument for “diminished capacity” with some of the troops. And as much as I would love to lay it at the feet of FOX news, tain’t nobody covering it. You might get a snippet, but it will be sidelined by whatever bit of juicy BS comes around. Ex governors boring email, congressman's twitter accounts... And how much real information can you squeeze into a two minute sound bite between commercials?

My general point was that we are screwing a generation of military personnel. No mater what your position on our current “entanglements” is any reasonable person will concede that at some points there is a need for a military, even if it’s only for humanitarian missions. Once this generation of military comes back and word really gets out about how screwed they were, we may be in a position where only the stupid will join.

Think about that for a few seconds.
Now that IS scary.

Well don’t debate it here. Call a congressman.

...Now back to our regularly scheduled programing...


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