counter-recruitment

More Teens Wanting To Join The Military

2011-09-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

http://m.kionrightnow.com/default.aspx?pid=6823&wnfeedurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.kionrightnow.com%2fstory%2f15591567%2fmore-teens-wanting-to-join-the-military%3futm_source%3dtwitterfeed%26utm_medium%3dtwitter%26clienttype%3drssstory

War Resisters Inject Truth Into Military Recruitment

2011-07-27T17:49:00.001-07:00

War Resisters Inject Truth Into Military Recruitment

http://www.truth-out.org/war-resisters-inject-truth-military-recruitment/1311181786

Wednesday 20 July 2011
by: Eleanor J. Bader

The setting changes but the scene does not: Men and women in crisply
pressed uniforms enter public high schools across the country and
cajole the teenagers they meet into signing on the dotted line to
serve Uncle Sam.

Thanks to Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002,
recruiters from the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and
Navy have the same access to secondary school students as college
recruiters or potential employers. This, in concert with mandatory
Selective Service registration for all 18-year-old males and the
Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery [ASVAB] exam that is given
to nearly three-quarters of a million high school juniors and seniors
each year, has prompted many domestic peace activists to organize
opposition to the militarization of youth. They advocate
"truth-in-recruiting," arguing that lofty promises made at the time
of enlistment -- extensive travel, scholarships or an easy route to
U.S. citizenship -- often fail to materialize once service begins.

What's more, these peace activists say that they are paying
particular attention to female recruits, warning them of potential
pitfalls: The risks associated with wartime service even in
"non-combat" positions, as well as the too-common experience of
sexual harassment and assault by unit supervisors and peers.

Little-Known Facts

The War Resisters League, an 88-year-old national group with more
than 25 chapters across the U.S., targets students and, when
possible, tables at schools to provide little-known facts about the
military: One in four soldiers gets a less than honorable discharge,
making them ineligible for college money; nearly one-third of females
seeking health care from the Veteran's Administration report
experiencing a rape or attempted rape while conscripted.

"Up until the economic recession began, the military had a hard time
finding recruits," says Kimber Heinz, National Organizing Director of
the War Resisters League. "But now the military is not only meeting
its quota, it's a de facto jobs program and you have recruiters
preying on students who can no longer afford college or find work."

One of its brochures, Know Before You Go, offers this information for
those thinking of signing up: "The military contract states, 'Laws
and regulations that govern military personnel may change without
notice. Such changes may affect pay, benefits, and responsibilities
as a member of the Armed Forces regardless of the provisions of the
enlistment document.'" In other words, beware: Even though a recruit
has signed a contract, the terms can be modified at the military's discretion.

"We let people know that if we're at war a recruit can be stop-lossed
and might end up on multiple tours," Heinz continues. "The recruit
has no control over this. We always remind people that the military
is the only job where if the worker quits, he or she goes to jail."
The organization also provides data on what it means to be a
conscientious objector and outlines the penalties for failing to
register for Selective Service.

Other truth-in-recruiting messages are also hammered. For one,
despite promises to the contrary, Heinz reports that skills learned
in the military are rarely transferable to the civilian world. "We
make it clear that many, many people come out of the military
traumatized or disabled," Heinz continues. "We ask people to think
about what it means to be an occupier of someone else's land and we
try to get people to consider whether they'll be able to live with
killing someone or seeing someone killed."

It's a heavy message, and it is repeated by more than 75 local
organizations throughout the 50 states.

Joanne Sheehan is an adult advisor to YouthPeace, a student-led
social justice group at the Norwich Free Academy, a public, regional
high school in eastern Connecticut. Since 1998 YouthPeace has raised
issues including military recruitment and Islamophobia with the student body.

Students Can Opt-Out

For the past seven years, members have also coordinated an annual
opt-out campaign to inform students that the law allows them to
request that their contact information be withheld from recruiters.
"Schools typically send student names, addresses, and phone numbers
to the military in October, so we have about a month once school
starts to publicize the opt-out provision," Sheehan says. "A few
years ago we pushed the superintendent to put information about
opting-out in the first paragraph of a letter that is sent to parents
at the beginning of the year. We want to be sure they understand that
their children don't need to provide data to recruiters, that it's
something they can opt-out of."

In some schools recruiters have free rein in the hallways

The peace groups also broach a broader anti-militarist agenda, even
in places like San Diego with a heavy military presence and 110,000
military employees. There, the school board recently voted to ban
students enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps
[J-ROTC] from taking in-school marksmanship classes. "Fifteen of the
18 high schools in San Diego have ROTC. One of them, Lincoln, was
temporarily closed for rehabbing and when we saw the plan for the
renovation, we saw that it included a firing range. We brought this
to the community's attention and formed the Education Not Arms
Coalition," says Rick Jahnkow, coordinator of Youth and Non-Military
Opportunities, known as Project YANO.

The consensus, Jahnkow says, was to focus on ending gun classes
rather than campaigning against ROTC more generally because group
participants felt an anti-ROTC campaign would fail. Education Not
Arms pointed to the pervasive gun violence already plaguing the
Lincoln area and denounced planned cutbacks in Advanced Placement
classes needed by college-bound pupils. The efforts paid off: The
school board ended all in-school gun training.

Boosted by this victory, Project YANO and Education Not Arms next
turned their attention to school-based recruiters. In late 2010 San
Diego activists succeeded in restricting recruiters to two school
visits per year, similar to policies in New York City, Chicago,
Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. As a result,
recruiters must schedule specific times to meet with potential
conscripts and cannot disrupt "normal school activities."

"In some schools the recruiters eat lunch with the kids, hang out and
chill in the parking lot, and have free rein in the hallways," says
Pat Elder of Maryland's PeaceAction Montgomery. "In most places, what
they get to do depends on the principal. I've seen schools where male
recruiters are always around, playing one-on-one basketball with kids
who don't have fathers."

This scenario led New York City's Youth Activists-Youth Allies
Network to monitor recruiters to ensure that they obey the
regulations that circumscribe their access to individual students.

YA-YA Network staff -- all but one of whom are between 15 and 19 --
also lead workshops about U.S. foreign policy and the costs of war
and militarism. "Several years ago I asked participants what their
peers thought about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," says YA-YA
advisor Amy Wagner. "The wars were not very present for them. I
talked about how during the Vietnam War when you turned on your TV
you always heard the number of dead soldiers. They thought about this
and concluded that facts were being hidden from them on purpose. They
did a lot of research and the result was a short video now up on
YouTube, called The War Will Not Be Televised.

Terms can be modified at the military's discretion

The YA-YA Network is presently focused on making sure that schools
abide by regulations that mandate that a school staff person be
appointed to provide guidance on military recruitment in each high
school. "We first want to investigate and see if this is being done,"
Wagner says. "If not, why not. If it is, we want to know where these
people are getting their info and who's training them. We want to
give students the information they are entitled to so that they fully
understand their range of options."

Indeed, it is this idea of options that propels organizing against
militarism. Take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test,
a four-hour recruiting tool used in nearly 12,000 high schools
nationwide. To date, Maryland is the only state to require schools to
select a provision that stops student scores from being sent directly
to recruiters.

"Look, if you take even moderate Democrats and sit them down and ask
them who they think should give student data to the military -- mom
and dad or the Pentagon – they'll all support parental decision
making," says Pat Elder of PeaceAction Montgomery.

They want students to understand that becoming a soldier is not
necessarily the best way to show personal strength or valor. "A lot
of people want to be tough and powerful, so they enlist," says the
War Resisters League's Kimber Heinz. "They ultimately learn that
enlisting is not a good way to test how strong they are."
--

Eleanor J. Bader

Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance writer, teacher and feminist activist
from Brooklyn, New York. She writes for The Brooklyn Rail,
ontheissuesmagazine.com, RHrealitycheck.org and other progressive
blogs and publications.

Thank You for Your Service=?UTF-8?B?Pw==?=

2011-07-23T09:54:00.001-07:00

Thank You for Your Service?

by Laurence M. Vance, lewrockwell.com
July 19th 2011

It is without question that Americans are in love with the military. Even worse, though, is that their love is unqualified, unconditional, unrelenting, and unending.

I have seen signs praising the troops in front of all manner of businesses, including self-storage units, bike shops, and dog grooming.

Many businesses offer discounts to military personnel not available to doctors, nurses, and others who save lives instead of destroy them.

Special preference is usually given to veterans seeking employment, and not just for government jobs.

Many churches not only recognize veterans and active-duty military on the Sunday before holidays, they have special military appreciation days as well.

Even many of those who oppose an interventionist U.S. foreign policy and do not support foreign wars hold the military in high esteem.

All of these things are true no matter which country the military bombs, invades, or occupies. They are true no matter why the military does these things. They are true no matter what happens while the military does these things. They are true no matter which political party is in power.

The love affair that Americans have with the military – the reverence, the idolatry, the adoration, yea, the worship – was never on display like it was at the post office the other day.

While at the counter shipping some packages, a U.S. soldier, clearly of Vietnamese origin in name and appearance, dressed in his fatigues, was shipping something at the counter next to me. The postal clerk was beaming when he told the soldier how his daughter had been an MP in Iraq. Three times in as many minutes I heard the clerk tell the soldier – with a gleam in his eye and a solemn look on his face – "Thank you for your service." The clerk even shook the soldier’s hand before he left.

I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing, and I am no stranger to accounts of military fetishes in action.

Aside from me not thanking that soldier for his service – verbally or otherwise – I immediately thought of four things.

One, what service did this soldier actually render to the United States? If merely drawing a paycheck from the government is rendering service, then we ought to thank every government bureaucrat for his service, including TSA goons. Did this soldier actually do anything to defend the United States, secure its borders, guard its shores, patrol its coasts, or enforce a no-fly zone over U.S. skies? How can someone blindly say "thank you for your service" when he doesn’t know what service was rendered?

Two, is there anything that U.S. soldiers could do to bring the military into disfavor? I can’t think of anything. Atrocities are dismissed as collateral damage in a moment of passion in the heat of battle by just a few bad apples. Unjust wars, we are told, are solely the fault of politicians not the soldiers that do the actual fighting. Paul Tibbets and his crew are seen as heroes for dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Before he died, Tibbets even said that he had no second thoughts and would do it again. I suspect that if the United States dropped an atomic bomb tomorrow on Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing everyone and everything, and declaring the war on terror over and won, a majority of Americans would applaud the Air Force crew that dropped the bomb and give them a ticker-tape parade.

Three, why is it that Americans only thank American military personnel for their service? Shouldn’t foreign military personnel be thanked for service to their country? What American military worshippers really believe is that foreign military personnel should only be thanked for service to their government when their government acts in the interests of the United States. Foreign soldiers are looked upon as heroic if they refuse to obey a military order to shoot or kill at the behest of their government as long as such an order is seen as not in the interests of the United States. U.S. soldiers, however, are always expected to obey orders, even if it means going to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Libya under false pretenses.

And four, what is a Vietnamese man – who most certainly has relatives, or friends or neighbors of relatives, that were killed or injured by U.S. bombs and bullets during the Vietnam War – doing joining the U.S. military where he can be sent to shoot and bomb foreigners like the U.S. military did to his people?

And aside from these four things, I’m afraid I must also say: Sorry, soldiers, I don’t thank you for your service.

I don’t thank you for your service in fighting foreign wars.I don’t thank you for your service in fighting without a congressional declaration of war.I don’t thank you for your service in bombing and destroying Iraq and Afghanistan.I don’t thank you for your service in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.I don’t thank you for your service in expanding the war on terror to Pakistan and Yemen.I don’t thank you for your service in occupying over 150 countries around the world.I don’t thank you for your service in garrisoning the planet with over 1,000 military bases.I don’t thank you for your service in defending our freedoms when you do nothing of the kind.I don’t thank you for your service as part of the president’s personal attack force to bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise bring death and destruction to any country he deems necessary.

Thank you for your service? I don’t think so.

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The Revolution that Wasn't, and Rethinking the Good War. His latest book is The Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Original Page: http://lewrockwell.com/vance/vance250.html

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“Our” Troops vs. Our Eco-System

2011-07-23T09:50:00.001-07:00

“Our” Troops vs. Our Eco-System

by mickeyz, fairsharecommonheritage.org
July 18th 2011

Mickey Z.

Since I’ve already told you about the importance of repetition, let me recite some numbers I’ve shouted out a few hundred times or so:

80% of the world’s forests are gone90% of the large fish in the ocean are gone80% of the planet’s rivers can no longer sustain sustain life200,000 acres of rain forest are destroyed each day200 animal and plant species go extinct every 24 hours

If these statistics make you (at least) squirm, you might be interested to know something I’ve also repeated till I’m hoarse: The US Department of Defense (DoD)—the interventionist institution formerly known as the War Department—is the biggest polluter on Planet Earth, for example, releasing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined.

To add insult to injury, the world’s worst polluter—the entity wrecking havoc upon the landbase that makes all life possible—also gobbles up 54% of US taxpayer dollars. But it takes more than obscene amounts of money to keep this criminal enterprise afloat. It also takes more than the volunteers willing to be paid to wage illegal, immoral, and eco-system destroying wars. The DoD will be able to maintain its crime spree as long as most of us continue to unconditionally support (sic) those troops.

As long as the yellow ribbons fly, our shared heritage/future is doomed.

For some, the phrase “support our troops” is merely a euphemism for: support the policies that put the troops there in the first place. For others—sadly, including many activists—the mantra is a safe way to avoid taking an unqualified, uncompromising stand against this war (and all war). Many who identify themselves as “anti-war” still vigorously defend the troops…no questions asked.

The excuse-making typically falls into two broad categories. The first being: “Our troops are just following orders.”

If you activate the google function on your interwebs machines, you’ll easily find many reasons why this concept has no legal basis. For example, Principle IV of Nuremberg Tribunal (1950) states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

(Besides this, I hope I don’t have to explain that “only following orders” also has no moral footing.)

The second common excuse: “It’s a poverty draft. The poor have to enlist because they any economic options.” America is certainly an unjust economic society and this would be a compelling argument…if it were true. However, studies found that wartime recruits since 1999 are “on average a bit wealthier, much more likely to have graduated from high school, and more rural than their civilian peers.” It seems youths “from wealthy American ZIP codes are volunteering in ever higher numbers” while “enlistees from the poorest fifth of American neighborhoods fell nearly a full percentage point over the last two years, to 13.7 percent. In 1999, that number was exactly 18 percent.”

Did some of the soldiers enlist primarily for economic reasons? Sure. Did others sign up for a chance to shoot some “ragheads”? Probably. After factoring out these two relatively small groups and rejecting the illegal, immoral, and reactionary “only following orders” defense, I ask this of anti-war, pro-green activists: Exactly how are the men and women who willingly signed up to be paid to wage war immune from any and all scrutiny and/or blame?

They are also not immune from profound irony.

While most American citizens—even if they’re anti-war—are manipulated, harassed, coerced, and guilted into hanging yellow ribbons, from Shays Rebellion in 1787 to Coxey’s Army to the Bonus Army to the Gulf War Syndrome, generation after generation of US military personnel has suffered a distinct lack of support from their own government (and the corporations that own it). “Our troops” are just as controlled and exploited as the US citizens that worship them.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the number of suicides among people serving in the armed forces has jumped more than 25% since 2005. In 2010 alone, 454 service members killed themselves in combat zones.

Life doesn’t get easier for those who make it home. About one-third of the adult homeless population is veterans and, according to the VA, is 95% male.

The majority of homeless vets are…

singlecome from urban areassuffer from mental illness, alcohol and/or substance abuse, or co-occurring disorders

People of all ethnicities may sign up to defend (sic) the land of the free (sic) but 56% of all homeless vets are African American or Hispanic (despite only accounting for 12.8 percent and 15.4 percent of the US population respectively).

More VA stats:

107,000 veterans are homeless on any given nightOver the course of a year, approximately twice that many experience homelessnessOnly 8% of the general population can claim veteran status, but nearly 20% of the homeless population is made up of veterans

Another 1.5 million veterans, says the VA, are considered at risk of homelessness due to “poverty and lack of support networks.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “lack of support networks.”

Yellow ribbons, flag-waving, repressive laws, peer pressure, and loud chants of “USA” don’t qualify as support. Rather, this is self-policed obedience manipulated by a corporate-dominated state. As long as so many of us conform, our tax dollars will be stolen to fund endless foreign wars and interventions launched by the most egregious polluter on Planet Earth…and the lost souls volunteering for this global terror campaign will learn too late that no one gives a shit about them.

Support? Our eco-system needs it most. What our citizens could use is some assistance rediscovering the capacities of critical and independent thought.

One more thing: Let’s stop with the “our troops” charade. You and I may foot the bill, but “we” have no say in how that money is spent. If those truly were “my” men and women, I’d bring them right home and put them to work doing something useful…like turning the Long Island Expressway into the world’s longest organic farm.

Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.

Original Page: http://www.fairsharecommonheritage.org/2011/07/18/our-troops-vs-our-eco-system/

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Sexual Violence Against Women in the US Military: The Search for Truth and Justice

2011-07-17T19:20:00.001-07:00

Sexual Violence Against Women in the US Military: The Search for Truth and Justice

towardfreedom.com | Jul 14th 2011 12:20 PM

An investigation into the alleged suicide of US Army Private Lavena Johnson points to a larger story of sexual violence against women in the military.

Do you know the story of US Army Private Lavena Johnson and her alleged suicide? If you get most of your news from the mainstream media, probably not, considering the mainstream media has mysteriously cowered from her story of how a loving and happy 19-year-old suddenly killed herself in 2005 while serving in Iraq.

But now that the Cold Case Investigations Research Institute of Philadelphia has agreed to tackle the case, perhaps the story of Lavena and the mysterious deaths of other US female soldiers on bases in Afghanistan and Iraq will finally become recognized by a much larger audience.

Each year the Cold Case Investigations Research Institute (CCIRI) takes on a high-profile cold case. Past investigations have looked into the murders of Tu Pac and Chandra Levy, for instance.

So far, CCIRI has had their own ballistic and forensic experts and a psychologist who is an expert on suicides, take a good look at the military’s investigative file and autopsy photos. All have serious doubts Lavena took her own life.

“There’s no question the military’s [investigation and conclusion of suicide] has problems,” says Sheryl McCollum, director of CCIRI. “If there are any signs of murder, you can’t automatically call it a suicide.”

But while the CCIRI has found the courage to take on this potential military cover-up, major media such as CBS News’s 60 Minutes and ABC News have attempted to report on Lavena’s death, but backed away from airing the story, even though both CBS and ABC spent thousands of dollars on Lavena, sending multiple teams to the home of the Johnsons. 60 Minutes also paid to have Lavena’s body disinterred for a second autopsy, this according to Lavena’s father, Dr. John Johnson of St. Louis.

“No one will touch Lavena’s story with a ten-foot pole,” says Dr. Johnson about the mainstream and corporate media.

He believes the Pentagon has a choking grip on a media industry that has become so financially injured, if 60 minutes or ABC News were to air stories such as Lavena’s, the military would pull advertising from those channels, he says.

“The military sure as heck don’t want to admit black female soldiers are being raped and murdered because they’re having a hard time recruiting and retaining black females,” he told Toward Freedom. “Major media stories of brutally raped black female soldiers would devastate recruiting.”

Indeed, the Pentagon has tried to intimidate reporters and editors working on stories about Lavena. Essence magazine, for example, was threatened to have their military ad dollars pulled if they ran a story on Lavena. The magazine eventually caved to the Pentagon running a watered-down story as the editors reportedly said their survival depended on military advertising, which in Essence’s case, is seeking young black women recruits, such as Lavena.

Nonetheless, Lavena’s family continues their effort to raise awareness about a daughter who loved serving her country and lived for making a difference to help others.

The US military was her destiny, says her father; she’s third generation Army. So it was no surprise to her family when the former violin-playing honor student was ordered to Iraq in 2005.

Though she always maintained a positive attitude, on July 18th, 2005, Lavena’s spirit took a tremendous turn for the worse, claims the military. On that afternoon, says the military, her brand new boyfriend of two months broke up with her via email from his home in Kentucky.

Scorned, she printed out the e-mails and retreated to her barracks at Joint Base Balad, this according to the military. Later that night she changed out of her camos and put on a jogging suit. She took the break-up e-mails and put them in a pocket, slung her M-16 over her shoulder as most soldiers did on this base and headed out to buy snacks at a military store – with a male friend the military refuses to name.

Once at the store, Lavena used her debit card to buy a six-pack of soda and M&Ms. The pair returned to the barracks, claims the military, but sometime after this Lavena left one more time, making her way to an empty tent owned by the contractor Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), formally a subsidiary of Haliburton.

Just 24 hours before this fateful night, says her mother, Lavena called her with a global phone. Her daughter sounded happy, says the mother, as they made plans for her homecoming at Christmas and Lavena told her, “Don’t decorate the tree without me.”

But within the KBR tent, just one day after making plans for Christmas, Lavena was distraught beyond any hope after the breakup with her boyfriend – this according to the military. So Lavena found a can of aerosol, lit the break-up e-mails on fire, and lit the tent on fire. The military says Lavena then took her M16 and pulled the trigger. The happy soul and young life of Private Johnson was gone; a suicide.

This was the military’s official version of Private Johnson’s “non-combat related death”. This official version of what was deemed a suicide was based on an investigation by the US Army’s investigative arm, the US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID).

Soon after CID’s conclusion, the Armed Services Committees in the Senate signed-off. Case closed.

The story of Private Lavena Johnson, however, is far from over, as attested by the CCIRI’s decision to take on her case. What’s more, Lavena’s father says he has one simple reason to keep the pressure on the military: The evidence showing his daughter didn’t take her own life, but instead was murdered and possibly raped, is too great to take lying down, and the story of her being a jilted girlfriend simply a cover.

According to military documents, Lavena’s commanding officer, James Woods, told investigators that before her suicide, she was always smiling and that he did not see any changes in her behavior.

Two ballistics experts, Donald Marion and Cyril Wecht, told the family that Lavena’s wounds were not consistent with an M16 and the alleged exit wound from the top of her head looks more like a wound caused by a 9 mm pistol.

The US military’s autopsy of Lavena had revealed a busted lip, broken teeth, scratch marks on her neck, but no serious injuries. Yet after she was raised from the grave for a second autopsy, new X-rays would reveal a broken neck. Even stranger, the second autopsy also showed the military had removed part of Lavena’s tongue, vagina and anus, and didn’t tell the Johnsons, or document this in the first autopsy.

As implausible and twisted as it sounds, the taking of body parts, in some cases the heart or brain or both, has occurred to other bodies of female soldiers whose death’s were ruled “non-combat related”.

Dr. Johnson believes the military took Lavena’s body parts so to hide what truly happened to his daughter: Military Sexual Trauma or MST.

“My daughter wanted to serve her country, and they’re going to insult her like this?” asked Dr. Johnson to this reporter. “The Army had the absolute chutzpah to say she killed herself. We believe she was raped and murdered by a contractor. If they had a daughter [that died mysteriously in a war zone] they would be acting the same way, there’s no doubt. And I’m not resting until something is done.”

Coincidentally, rape by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be an isolated thing committed by a rare predator. In July of 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, then 20 and working in Iraq, alleged she was gang-raped and beaten by fellow KBR employees and locked in a shipping container by managers after she sought out law enforcement. Jones and her lawyers, who lost a federal civil suit against KBR in July, said nearly 40 other female KBR employees who worked in Afghanistan and Iraq told them stories of rape, beatings and sexual harassment.

Besides a cold shoulder from the military, the Johnsons say Congress has hardly lifted a finger to help, either. A team of Congressional staffers did investigate Lavena’s death, but nothing official ever came of it.

One of the Congressional staffers, however, agreed to speak to Toward Freedom anonymously, saying when the Congressional team asked for Lavena’s autopsy photos, “the Army pushed back hard.” This staffer suggests if you believe the Army’s version of how Lavena died, you need to check your intelligence for a power outage. “The Army’s story is ridiculous,” scoffs the staffer.

Activists such as Army Ret. Col. Ann Wright, now a peace activist who’s currently sailing the Mediterranean with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, says there are many more suspicious deaths of female soldiers and the military’s explanation behind them is simply not believable.

In fact, says Wright, there are 20-plus female soldier deaths under scrutiny, nearly all have occurred on bases in Afghanistan or Iraq. Of these 20, the military reports 14 were suicides, which includes Lavena Johnson. And like the Johnsons, many of these families refuse to accept the military’s explanation, believing their daughters died at the hands of fellow soldiers or contractors.

This much is clear: The mysterious deaths of female soldiers coincide with an increase in reported sexual violence against women in the military during a time when women are joining like never before. In 1970, female soldiers made up 1 percent of the entire armed forces; today, that number has jumped to roughly 15 percent, nearly 200,000 in all. As the numbers of female troops grow, the U.S. Department of Defense’s own reports bear out the rising problem of military sexual assaults in war zones: up 26 percent from 2007 to 2008, and another 33 percent over the following year.

One reason these numbers are spiking, says Wright, is because male soldiers know they can get away with it. In a 2008 Government Accountability Office survey that found 50 percent of military sexual-assault victims never even reported the crime because they felt their commanding officers would ignore the charges or worse, silence them is some way.

In a war zone, the air of intimidation following a rape, says Wright, can be ratcheted to another level simply because the victim is surrounded by violence and confusion.

“They’ll say, ‘You’re going to be dead by tomorrow,’” Wright says. “‘Raping you is just the cost of war. We’ll just chalk it up (your murder) to unsafe security.’”

John Lasker is a freelance journalist from Columbus, Ohio.

Original Page: http://towardfreedom.com/women/2474-sexual-violence-against-women-in-the-us-military-the-search-for-truth-and-justice

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Granny Peace Brigade has generated five years of anti-war activism

2011-07-05T00:13:00.001-07:00

Granny Peace Brigade has generated five years of anti-war activism

weeklypress.com

Whoever coined the phrase "youth is wasted on the young" never met the members of Philadelphia’s Granny Peace Brigade. A group of spry seniors ranging in age from their mid-sixties to their mid- nineties, the women who comprise the Granny Peace Brigade engage in social activism with the kind of idealism typically reserved for the very young.

But that blend of idealism proves fitting when taking into consideration the Granny Peace Brigade’s main objection: protecting this country’s youth from becoming subscripted into the U.S. military and its involvement in Iraq and Afganahastan. "So many kids lose their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan for no reason," explained Granny Jean Haskell. That’s why the Grannies have successfully launched an Opt Out Program in the city’s public schools. Before the program took-off a few years ago, the Granny’s took issue with the fact that public schools gave the military its students contact information for recruitment purposes. Students do however have the option of telling school officials that they do not want their information passed along to the military through the Opt Out Program. But when the Granny’s approached Philadelphia School System Officials about participating in the Opt Out Program, they realized that the program might not be enough to protect kids from military enrollment.

When students not going to college after high school would express interest in the military to their guidance counselors, the counselors "would simply tell them to talk to the school’s military recruiters, who used soda and movies as away to lure them into joining," said Haskell, citing an example of reasons why the Granny Peace Brigade needed to expand its involvement in the Opt Out program.

The Granny’s based this decision on the fact that many high school guidance counselors do not inform non-college bound high school students that they had other options besides the military, said Haskell. In order to correct this problem, the Grannies attended a citywide convention for public school guidance counselors, explained Granny Joan Kosloff. Retired Philadelphia School District teacher Paula Paul delivered a compelling presentation at that convention regarding the need to present students with more career information, said Kosloff, explaining that it led to cooperation between the Granny Peace Brigade and Philadelphia School District.

Today, information about the Opt Out Program can be found on the Philadelphia School District’s website in eighteen different languages, said Haskell. Moreover, the Grannies have assembled packets to give to guidance counselors covering all of the other training programs non-college bound students can enter after graduation. "Many of these programs are free or are offered at a very small cost," explained Haskell, adding that a lot of students simply don’t realize that they can receive training to secure jobs as "cooks, nurses’ aides or tradesmen."

Despite the Grannies’ many accomplishments since its founding on June 28th, 2006—that’s when a group of Grannies were arrested for protesting at a military recruitment center—the organization needs more community involvement to get its message across.

There was a recent op-ed article in the Inquirer asking what happened to the country’s anti-war activism, said Haskell, explaining that the Grannies responded with a letter highlighting their level of commitment to the anti-war movement. According Haskell, it’s not that the Grannies don’t lead marches and demonstrations, "it’s that the mainstream media basically ignores us."

For that reason, the Grannies plan to celebrate the organization’s 5th anniversary as a way to both celebrate the groups achievements as well as to draw more attention to its cause. And for Haskell, people should become involved in the anti-war movement, particularly given the fact that more and more people "are talking about how to bring war dollars home."

And according to Kosloff, the website National Priorities calculates how the money spent on the military could really benefit other agencies, such as the Department of Education.

The Granny Peace Brigade’s 5th year anniversary will be celebrated on Thursday, June 30th, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Rittenhouse Square, 18th and Walnut Streets. The anniversary celebration will include: music puppets, fortune cookies, photos of the Brigade’s activist history, knitting stump socks, petitions urging legislators to "Bring the War Dollars Home," and information about the Opt Out Program, which enables high school students to choose not to have their contact information sent to military recruiters. For more information on the Granny Peace Brigade, go to: www.grannypeacebrigade.org. For more information on National Priorities: http://nationalpriorities.org.

Original Page: http://weeklypress.com/granny-peace-brigade-has-generated-five-years-of-antiwar-activism-p2570-1.htm

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Epidemic: Over 400,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries for Vets Coming from Iraq and Afghanistan

2011-07-05T00:09:00.001-07:00

Epidemic: Over 400,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries for Vets Coming from Iraq and Afghanistan

by Conn Hallinan, alternet.org
June 21st 2011

"We are facing a massive mental health problem as a result of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a country we have not responded adequately to the problem. Unless we act urgently and wisely, we will be dealing with an epidemic of service related psychological wounds for years to come." -- Bobby Muller, President Veterans for America

"The multiple nature of it [multiple tours and longer deployments] is unprecedented. People just get blasted and blasted and blasted." -- Maj. Connie Johnmeyer, 332nd Medical Group

According to official Defense Department (DOD) figures, 332,000 soldiers have suffered brain injuries since 2000, although most independent experts estimate that the number is over 400,000. Many of these are mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI), a term that is profoundly misleading.

As David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, points out, "I don't know what makes it 'mild,' because it can evolve into anxiety disorders, personality changes, and depression." It can also set off a constellation of physical disabilities from chronic pain to sexual dysfunction and insomnia.

MTBI is defined as any incident that produces unconsciousness lasting for up to a half hour or creates an altered state consciousness. It is the signature wound for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where roadside bombs are the principal weapon for insurgents.

Most soldiers recover from mTBI, but between five and 15 percent do not. According to Dr. Elaine Peskind of the University of Washington Medical School, "The estimate of the number who returned with symptomatic mild traumatic brain injury due to blast exposure has varied from the official VA [Veterans Administration] number of 9 percent officially diagnosed with mTBI to over 20 percent, and, I think, ultimately it will be higher than that."

Serious consequences from mTBI are increased when troops are subjected to multiple explosions and "just get blasted and blasted and blasted," in the words of Maj. Connie Johnmeyer. Out of two million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 800,000 have had multiple deployments, many up to five times or more.

But mTBI is difficult to diagnose because it does not show up on standard CAT scans and MRIs. "Our scans show nothing," says Dr. Michael Weiner, professor of radiology, psychiatry and neurology at the University of California at San Francisco and director of the Center for Imaging Neurodegenerative Disease at the Veteran's Administration Medical Center.

They do now.

An MRI set to track the flow of water through the brain's neurons, has turned up anomalies that indicate the presence of mTBI. However, the military has blocked informing patients of results of the research, and if history is any guide, the Pentagon will do its best to shelve or ignore the results.

The DOD has long resisted the diagnosis of mTBI, as it has avoided paying for a successful - but expensive - way to treat it. The price of that resistance is escalating suicide rates and domestic violence incidents among returning soldiers. In 2010, almost as many soldiers committed suicide as fell in battle.

MTBI is hardly new. Some 5.3 million people in the U.S. are currently hospitalized or in residential facilities because of it, and its social consequences are severe.

A Mt. Sinai Hospital study of 100 homeless men in New York found that 80 percent of them had suffered brain trauma, much of it from child abuse. A study of 5,000 homeless people in New Haven discovered that those who had suffered a blow that knocked them unconscious or into an altered state were twice as likely to have alcohol and drug problems and to be depressed. It also found mTBI injuries were correlated with suicide attempts, panic attacks, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. And a recent study by Dr. Elaine Peskind of the University of Washington School of Medicine found that mTBI is a risk factor for developing Alzheimer's disease.

In spite of the documented consequences of mTBI, the military has been extremely tardy in dealing with it. Part of the problem is military culture itself. The Pentagon found that 60 percent of the soldiers who suffered from the symptoms of mTBI refused help because they feared their unit leaders would treat them differently. Many were also afraid that if they reported their condition it would prevent them from getting jobs as police and fire fighters after they got out of the service.

Even if soldiers wanted treatment, there are few resources available to them. "There are two things going on regarding vets," says Col. (ret) Will Wilson, chair of the American Psychological Association's Division 19 (Military Psychology). "One, there are not enough care providers available, and, two, there are not enough people focusing on the problem outside the military."

Indeed, there are not enough military psychologists to treat the problem, and since the military pays below-market rates for civilian psychologists, up to 30 percent of private psychologists are unwilling to take on soldiers as patients. The cheapest and easiest solution is to shoot up the vets with drugs. A study by Veterans for America found that some soldiers were taking up to 20 different medications, many of which canceled out the effect of others.

The situation appears to be even worse for National Guard and Reserve units, who make up almost 50 percent of the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Veterans for America found that such troops "are experiencing rates of mental health problems 44 percent higher than their active duty counterparts" and that their health care is generally inferior.

A Harvard study found that 1.8 million vets under 65 have no health care or access to the Veterans Administration. "Most uninsured veterans are low-to-middle income workers who are too poor to afford private coverage but are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or free VA care," the study found.

Treating mTBI injuries is difficult, but by no means impossible. Dr. Alisa Gean, chief of Neuroradiology at San Francisco General Hospital, who has worked with wounded soldiers at U.S. Army's Regional Medical Center at Landstuhl, Germany says the old conventional wisdom that brain damage was untreatable is wrong. "We now know that the brain can heal. It has an intrinsic plasticity that allows it to recover, and this is particularly true for the young brain."

A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections," thus "overturning a century of prevailing thought."

One method that has worked effectively is cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT) that retrains patients for tasks like counting, cooking, and memory. But CRT takes time and it can be expensive, ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 per patient. However, the DOD's health program - Tricare - refuses to endorse CRT, because it says there is no scientific evidence that justifies the expense involved.

However, an investigation by T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Daniel Zwerdling of National Public Radio found that the vast majority of researchers, even those associated with the DOD, sharply disagreed with Tricare's evaluation of CRT. According to the two reporters, "A panel of 50 civilian and military brain specialists convened by the Pentagon unanimously concluded that cognitive therapy was an effective treatment and would help many brain damaged troops."

The therapy is also endorsed by the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Neurophysiology and the British Society of Rehabilitative Medicine.

Instead of accepting the advice of its own researchers, however, Tricare hired ECRI- a company which had already done a study concluding that CRT was ineffective-to examine the therapy. But critics charge that the study was so narrow, and the assumptions behind it so loaded, that it was almost a given that the study would conclude the benefits of cognitive therapy were "inconclusive." Outside researchers blasted the ECRI study, one of them describing it as "hooey" and "baloney."

In spite of the criticism, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England concluded, "The rigor of the researchhas not met the required standard."

However, Miller and Zwerdling concluded that Tricare's resistance to CRT was not about science, but the bottom dollar. According to the reporters, a Tricare-sponsored study found "that comprehensive rehabilitative therapy could cost as much as $51,480 per patient. By contrast, sending patients home from the hospital to get a weekly phone call from a therapist amounted to only $504 a patient."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already made it clear that he intends to cut the military's $50 billion annual health budget. No matter how effective CRT is, it's not likely to get past the brass, who would rather spend the money on weapon systems than on healing the men and women who they so casually put in harm's way.

So far, the military has put the clamps on the new MRI technique. Dr. David L. Brody, an author of the study, told the New York Times that researchers were blocked from giving the MRI results to patients."We were specifically directed by the Department of Defense not to so," adding, "It was anguishing for us, because as a doctor I would like to be able to help them in any way. But that was not the protocol we agreed to."

Given that mTBI is so difficult to diagnose, and sufferers are many times told there is nothing wrong with them, that seems an especially cruel protocol. "Many of them [the doctors] were hoping we could give results to their care providers to document or validate their concerns."

In the end it will come down to treatment, and whether the wounded vets will get the care they need, or sit by a phone and wait for their once a week call from a therapist.

Original Page: http://www.alternet.org/story/151376/epidemic%3A_over_400%2C000_traumatic_brain_injuries_for_vets_coming_from_iraq_and_afghanistan?page=entire

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Troop morale plummets in a war without purpose

2011-06-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Troop morale plummets in a war without purpose

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/troop-morale-plummets-afghanistan.html

In Afghanistan, 80 percent have seen a friend killed or wounded

By Michael Prysner
June 10, 2011

The author is an Iraq war veteran and a member of the anti-war
organization of veterans and active duty service members, March Forward!
--

The Associated Press reports that soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan
are suffering the highest rates of psychological problems since 2005.
Similarly, troop morale is down the drain.

The reason for this is no mystery. A military report found that up to
80 percent of troops have witnessed a friend being killed or wounded in combat.

This is a staggering number. Indoctrinated from a young age, all the
fantasies from a culture brimming with over-romanticized "glory" of
war disappear when one watches a close friend's legs blown offthe
new "signature wound" in Afghanistanand has to try to stop the
gushing of blood by tying tourniquets around mangled flesh; or when
one is powerless to do anything but watch someone die from the sheer
devastation of their wounds, and having to literally pick up the
pieces. This would have a devastating psychological effect on any
personeven the most "Army Strong" of us. And 80 percent of us have
had to endure it.

But it is much more than just the reality of combat that is
responsible for plummeting morale. Human beings are capable of
enduring great hardship when there is a feeling of purpose.

And what is the purpose of endlessly fighting in Afghanistan?

Well, for service members, we are told first and foremost that this
is not our concern. Our job is to follow orders and trust the supreme
wisdom of the politicians in Washington. They are all millionaires,
so we are told they must be pretty smart! You know, they are people
like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, whose "expert" military and
foreign policy decisions come from two whole years in the Air Force
(never deploying), and much of the rest of his career spent in
corporate boardrooms for weapons manufacturers and oil drilling
companies. Surely, it is just a coincidence that his former office
buddies are making record profits. Chances are he will not be having
to watch any of them bleed to death in combat. Maybe that's why on
his trip to Afghanistan last week he said that there was "no rush" in
removing combat troops.

No good reason for war in Afghanistan

But for those of us who do look for purpose in what we are doing,
what do we find? We are told, on the one hand, that the purpose is to
defeat al-Qaeda, but then we hear CIA Director Leon Panetta admit
that there is virtually no al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan; maybe
"50-100 individuals," he says. Over 100,000 troops on the ground in a
10-year war to fight 50 individuals? That makes a lot of sense. He
also says to not pay attention to the fact that al-Qaeda is in 40
other countries as wellthe fight is in Afghanistan, where, as a
recent study found, only 8 percent of young men have even heard of
the Sept. 11 attacks.

We are told that there is a purpose because we're "making gains"
against the resistance movement in Afghanistanthat we are "winning
the war." Then, an April White House report says that there is "no
clear path" to defeating the insurgency. So when speaking to us, the
people who have to do all the fighting and dying, the politicians say
that "we are winning." But amongst themselves, in the Oval Office and
halls of Congress, they say "there is no possible way to win." What a
great sense of purpose they instill!

It comes from the generals, too. Gen. Petraeus tells us that we are
"reversing the momentum" of the resistance. Then, on May 21, he says
that this summer will bring even higher levels of violence and
"increased high-profile attacks." U.S. casualties are at record
numberswith a 60 percent increase in the loss of a limb and a 90
percent increase in wounds to genitalsand the past three months have
yielded far more fatalities than any previous year. It does not sound
too much like "reversing" anything. It sounds like things are about
to get much worse for us and our buddies. No worries for Petraeus,
though, he will be safe in his office.

And, of course, we're told that we must fight and die because
allowing the Taliban to regain any type of political power would be
catastrophic for the Afghan people and for us here at home.

But if any of us read the news, we can see that, actually, the U.S.
government is desperately trying to negotiate with the Taliban
leadership, offering them positions in the Afghan governmentbecause
Washington knows they cannot win the war militarily, even though they
tell us we are. And the Taliban will not take a power-sharing deal
right now, well, because they are winning and their morale is high,
so why would they quit? For those troops who try to believe that the
war will "save" Afghanistan from the Taliban, Washington's end game
puts the Taliban back in government. The war for "democracy" and
"national defense" is revealed to be just a political game.

Besides, the generals and politicians give the false impression it is
only the Taliban who are against the foreign occupation. Again, they
tell us our purpose is to defeat this one group. Then the Pentagon
releases official reports estimating that there are around 1,800
different armed resistance groups fighting the occupation.

Even Army General Ben Hodges admits that 80 percent of Taliban
fighters are not with the group for ideological reasons. Most, like
the vast majority of Afghans, just want us out. How could anyone
think "democracy" has anything to do with our purpose there?

The truth about the war

For those of us looking for purpose in why we are fighting, something
completely lacking, here is the truth that we find:

The war obviously is not about al-Qaeda or "fighting terrorism." It
is just another war for "American interests"or, American business
interestsin the most resource-rich region of the world.

Our esteemed leaders admit that the war cannot be won, yet they keep
sending us to die. Washington's goal is to put the Taliban on the
defensive so that they will accept a deal and enter into a unity
government, returning to political powerand they are using our
bodies as the bargaining chips.

The people of Afghanistan are not fighting because they are
"terrorists." They are fighting because a foreign military has been
bombing their villages and raiding their homes for 10 years. The
Afghan people were not a party to the Sept. 11 attacks, and many know
nothing about it to this day.

The people of Afghanistan, no matter which faction of the resistance
they fight with, are not our enemies; they are people struggling to
survive and provide for their families, just like us.

The people who are not like us are the smirking generals and
politicians who think they can treat us like pawns and give us vague
and ambiguous explanations for the supposed "purpose" of our suffering.

They are lying to us. Morale is not low just because 80 percent of us
have witnessed a friend killed or wounded, but because there is no
purpose for that bloodshed.

There is only one thing that can improve morale: realizing that we do
not have to follow the orders of those millionaire politicians and
armchair generals who are throwing our lives away.

Maltreated and hazed, one soldier is driven to take his own life

2011-06-09T16:28:00.001-07:00

Maltreated and hazed, one soldier is driven to take his own life

by Megan McCloskey, stripes.com
June 7th 2011

See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jsxw4Y21fY

For Army Spc. Brushaun Anderson, there was no escaping his torment.

The senior noncommissioned officers who ruled his life at a remote patrol base in Iraq ordered him to wear a plastic trash bag because they said he was “dirty.”

They forced him to perform excessive physical exercises in his body armor over and over again.

They made him build a sandbag wall that served no military purpose.

Anderson seemed to take it all in stride. Until New Year’s Day 2010, when the once-eager 20-year-old soldier locked himself inside a portable toilet, picked up his M4 rifle, aimed the barrel at his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Anderson left behind a note lamenting his failures in the military, and some soldiers in his unit immediately said that Anderson had been driven to kill himself by leaders bent on humiliating him.

“No matter what Spc. Anderson did, no matter how big or small the incident was, his punishment was always extremely harsh, [and] a lot of the time demeaning,” one corporal later told Army investigators.

“Spc. Anderson’s punishments were not like anyone else’s in the platoon,” another corporal said. “Spc. Anderson was singled out.”

The U.S. Army is confronting an unprecedented suicide crisis. Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 1,100 soldiers have taken their own lives, with the numbers escalating each year for the last six years. Last year alone, 301 soldiers committed suicide — a new record.

Army officials often profess bafflement over the causes of the suicide epidemic, and they have spent more than $75 million on studies to try to understand the problem and reverse the devastating trend.

In Anderson’s case, at least, there was little mystery.

An Army investigation into Anderson’s unit following his suicide concluded that he had been hazed on multiple occasions and subjected to “cruel, abusive and oppressive treatment.”

Anderson’s battery commander, first sergeant, platoon sergeant and squad leader were found responsible for his maltreatment, according to documents obtained by Stars and Stripes.

But the Army didn’t hold them criminally culpable, and they weren’t made to leave the service.

Instead, all four superiors are moving ahead with their careers in leadership positions, entrusted with molding the Army’s next generation.

This is the story of one soldier’s humiliation — and the Army’s decision to avert its gaze. It is based on interviews with Anderson’s family and soldiers who witnessed his mistreatment and more than 500 pages of Army documents, including sworn statements from members of his unit and the conclusions of two Army investigators.

Rocky deployment

Brushaun Anderson had been raised by his great aunt in a modest community in Columbus, Ga., and had joined the military for the same reason many low-income recruits do: He saw it as his chance to get ahead.

He was an inexperienced soldier, with only two years in the Army, and on his first deployment. He dreamed of joining Special Forces, perhaps becoming a sniper. He could rattle off details of the Army’s weapons systems and obsessively cleaned his rifle. He also wanted to recruit, because he liked to teach and talk and “he loved what he was doing in the Army,” said his great aunt, Phillis Eason.

In the beginning, Anderson saw success.

Capt. William Fisher, Battery A’s commander, praised him in Army documents, calling him “an impressive soldier with the highly sought after ‘self-starter’ quality,” and the battalion made him Soldier of the Quarter the month before they deployed.

Anderson was then given the honor of carrying the battalion’s colors at the pre-deployment ceremony at Fort Drum, N.Y., and promoted to specialist not long after.

Yet, in Iraq, Anderson found himself something of an outsider. He was an infantryman, not a field artillery soldier. He and a few other young infantrymen had been added to 2nd Battalion, 15th Field Artillery Regiment for the deployment. He was also one of the few black soldiers in the battery.

Anderson received only mediocre performance reviews. He wasn’t meeting expectations in many regards, including his attitude.

He had lapses in judgment and a hygiene problem that hurt his reputation among some of Battery A’s leadership, even though one lieutenant said much of his behavior was typical of young soldiers. He thought Anderson simply needed more guidance from his direct leadership to help him develop as a soldier.

That wouldn’t happen at Patrol Base Babil.

The base in eastern Baghdad was remote and austere. There was no running water, no amenities like Internet access and, for a while, no portable toilets. Battery A’s 2nd Platoon and an attached squad lived sparsely in a tight square of tents next to Iraqi Security Forces.

Their battalion was based at the larger Joint Security Station Zafaraniyah about 20 minutes away, so the 40 or so soldiers at Babil were largely isolated from the rest of the unit.

The platoon’s top enlisted man, Sgt. 1st Class Phillip Devos, was granted wide leeway to run the show, and he reveled in the power, declaring himself “Supreme Allied Commander¬–Babil,” noncomissioned officers told Stars and Stripes.

He had the backing of Fisher, the battery’s commander, and then-Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Amaral, the battery’s first sergeant, both of whom encouraged a domineering spirit among the NCOs and emphasized punishment as a primary means of leadership, the NCOs said.

With this shared philosophy, the three leaders were close knit, the soldiers said. The leaders were eager for the deployment to turn into something big, itching for combat at a time when the mission in Iraq had shrunk to conducting courtesy patrols with the Iraqi Security Forces.

In December 2009, Devos got a new soldier to command when Anderson was moved from 1st Platoon to Babil.

Devos and the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Charles Bruckner, immediately pounced on Anderson’s minor mistakes.

Soldiers said once Bruckner and Devos identified Anderson as a soldier they could pick on, they never let up. They called him names and told him he wasn’t good enough for their platoon, that he was a “shit-bag soldier.”

They encouraged the other NCOs to find it funny and “release the dogs” on Anderson, a sergeant later wrote in his sworn statement.

Bruckner and Devos lacked even a “hint of moral capacity or professionalism,” another soldier wrote.

According to one sergeant, Devos was known for his “belittlement, cruelty and his verbal abuse.” Another soldier stated that Devos called Anderson stupid and sneered that the specialist must have cheated on his recruitment test because the Army doesn’t accept “retards.”

Anderson was also punished for “unreasonably long periods,” a soldier wrote, often for violations of rules that no one else had to abide by.

“Spc. Anderson was not a perfect soldier and he knew he made mistakes,” the soldier continued, “but no one deserved to get smoked like he did.”

Harsh punishment

For Christmas, the entire battery squeezed in at Babil to celebrate together.

Anderson was pulling guard duty in the predawn hours while most of the battery slept. As the sun began to rise, he lit a cigarette while sitting in the truck.

That was technically against the rules, but it was common practice at Babil.

Fisher asked him if he was smoking.

“Yeah, roger,” Anderson replied.

Fisher and Amaral weren’t pleased with the response. Both men demanded not just respect but total deference, soldiers said.

They had Bruckner and Anderson’s team leader counsel the specialist for disrespecting a senior officer and violating a lawful order for smoking in the truck. Both NCOs then recommended that Anderson get a company-grade Article 15, a nonjudicial punishment through the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.

Fisher and Amaral decided against that. Instead, Anderson was ordered to perform hours of corrective training.

Fisher, in fact, never approved an Article 15 during the entire deployment, setting him apart from the other battery commanders in the battalion. He and the rest of the battery and platoon leadership portrayed this as if they were doing the soldiers a favor.

It was better to keep these things in-house with corrective training than to go through the UCMJ, the rationale went. Some of the soldiers in the battery agreed.

Fisher told Stars and Stripes there was a simple explanation for it: Nothing rose to the level of an Article 15 while his battery was deployed.

The Army specifically states that corrective training isn’t supposed to be punitive. It’s intended to teach a soldier how to improve and to instill discipline, and it should directly relate to a soldier’s weakness.

But in Battery A, corrective training was a euphemism for whatever punishment the leadership chose that day.

For Anderson on Christmas, that meant he would get little rest.

After his night shift on guard, he had to pull two more hours of the duty. Then he was ordered to don full body armor for an hour of strenuous physical exercise with his rifle: sprints, push-ups, lunges while holding his rifle over his head and mountain climbers.

A lieutenant with the battery was on his way to start his shift serving the enlisted men their holiday meal when he saw Anderson sweating through the exercise.

He went to find Fisher to see whether the captain was aware of what was going on.

“I’m a firm believer in disciplining soldiers,” Fisher replied, according to the lieutenant’s sworn statement.

The lieutenant “questioned the weight of the punishment” and “made it known” that he “did not agree [Anderson] should have to suffer that long for such an easy correction, especially on Christmas morning.”

Fisher, who was old for a captain as a prior enlisted soldier, replied that Anderson’s punishment was his decision and it needed to be done.

The lieutenant was unimpressed.

“Personally, I believe there are more important things to focus on rather than demanding respect from subordinates,” the lieutenant wrote in his statement.

He walked away from his talk with Fisher concerned that Anderson was the only one being held accountable for smoking on guard duty while more concerning infractions by other soldiers, such as urinating near the sleeping tents, went ignored.

As part of the corrective training, Anderson’s squad was also roused out of bed and told that because Anderson had messed up, they all had to start filling sandbags for what was called the “Wall of Shame” or the “Wall of Discipline.”

The construction of the random wall, which had no legitimate military purpose, had become routine punishment for Anderson and the junior soldiers in his squad. There was even a wooden sign reading “Wall of Discipline.” One private first class, though, said it was just a joke and no one took it too seriously.

Anderson was instructed to join his squad once he was done with his hour of physical training.

While the young soldiers labored on the wall with “a clearly broken spirit,” one sergeant said, Fisher and Amaral stood by laughing.

Devos joked that the soldiers looked like refugees.

Deriding mental help

Anderson started spending more time by himself. At Babil, he often paced around the small patrol base or stood alone by the campfire.

A private first class asked him whether he was OK one night, and Anderson said he just wanted to be alone to think.

Friends said Anderson, the happy guy who made jokes and was always willing to help out, seemed to shrug off his treatment at the hands of Bruckner and Devos.

“If he was humiliated he never really showed it,” a specialist in the platoon said in a sworn statement, “and if it bothered him he never said it did.”

Some of the soldiers in the battery said Anderson brought things on himself by being lazy and repeatedly making stupid mistakes. The trouble wasn’t the platoon or battery leadership, a few said in their sworn statements, it was his lack of discipline.

One soldier wrote: “He wasn’t singled out. He did dumb [stuff] and got in trouble for it.”

Two days after Christmas, when most of the battery had been up for at least 36 hours, Anderson failed a room inspection at Zafaraniyah. The platoon rotated through that base to get showers and a break from Babil.

Bruckner told him his room was a “disgrace” with “trash on the floor, leftover meals in trays, flies, empty soda cans, dirty laundry and military equipment strewn all over the floor,” according to a formal counseling statement that Bruckner prepared. “Once again this shows the unit you have no discipline.”

Amaral was livid. He started throwing Anderson’s stuff around in his room, saying, “I’ll show you NCOs how to toss a room,” according to one sergeant.

The NCOs had Anderson put on his body armor and remove everything from his room, wipe down the walls and floor and then move everything back in.

Then Bruckner, who soldiers said tried hard to impress Devos, told Anderson to pack up his stuff because he was being exiled back to the spartan Babil permanently. That was a threat Devos often held over the heads of soldiers, one sergeant said.

One of Anderson’s friends, another specialist, saw him afterward and asked whether he planned on doing anything stupid.

“No, I’m fine,” Anderson told him. “I just need to settle down and slow down.”

Back at Babil, the platoon’s leaders didn’t relent.

They yelled at Anderson for not keeping up with proper hygiene. They told him he smelled bad and called him dirty, and then they forced him to wear a garbage bag at all times, according to sworn statements.

That type of demeaning treatment of soldiers wasn’t new for Devos, and it wasn’t unknown to the Army.

The spring before the unit deployed, Devos was admonished by a military judge. During a court-martial of one of Devos’ soldiers, it came to light that Devos had called out the accused in formation, made threatening remarks and generally acted in a “manner designed to humiliate, punish and degrade” the soldier, the judge said.

He was so “gravely concerned” about Devos’ “inappropriate and unprofessional” behavior that his actions ended up being a “significant mitigating factor” in sentencing the soldier.

Less than a year later, Devos — or “Big Time” as soldiers said he liked to call himself — was back at it in Iraq.

He had the encouragement of Amaral, a close friend.

To Amaral, everything was a game, a sergeant who served with Anderson told Stars and Stripes.

He molded the battery’s NCOs into the kind of leaders who hound junior enlisted soldiers, lecturing them that “soldiers have no rights” and if “you aren’t yelling at soldiers, you aren’t doing your job,” several soldiers said.

The first sergeant often boasted of how he took his personal frustrations out on soldiers by yelling at them or making fun of them. Amaral called the practice “Joe Time,” referencing the common nickname for soldiers.

Neither he nor Devos had much tolerance for the Army’s new spotlight on soldier care and they mocked the emphasis of mental health. In fact, Devos subjected his soldiers to exactly the kind of stigma the Army claims it’s trying to eliminate from the ranks.

If a soldier went to the “wizard,” as Devos derisively termed mental health counselors, that soldier was considered weak, the sergeant told Stars and Stripes.

“He said it so frequently that everyone knew,” the sergeant continued, asserting that promotions were also withheld for anyone who sought mental health care.

Devos often turned suicide into a punch line. Before working his soldiers hard, for example, he’d tell them they’d better get their ACE cards ready, referring to the laminated pocket guide for suicide intervention that soldiers carry.

When Babil got three portable toilets, the sergeant told Stars and Stripes, Devos joked that no soldier should use one as place to kill himself because he didn’t want to have to clean up the mess.

Tired and defeated

On Jan. 1, 2010, soldiers at Babil didn’t get out of bed until around 1 p.m. They had spent the night before out on patrol and arrived back early in the morning.

Anderson had fallen asleep in the turret during the mission — a serious violation — and so would spend the first day of the new year working on the “Wall of Discipline.”

Before he could get started, Anderson was caught for another infraction, this time for uniform standards. He was wearing an unauthorized pair of eyewear with headphones.

Those type of standards were mostly nonexistent at Babil, and it was the kind of infraction that was commonly ignored, several soldiers said.

But Anderson was nabbed for the violation and promptly made to do mountain climbers in full body armor with his rifle. Amaral put an end to the exercise around 10 minutes later.

Soon after, wearing a trash bag, Anderson started filling sandbags for the “Wall of Discipline.” Soldiers described him as looking tired and defeated.

Anderson headed to the bathroom and, on his way, he ran into a friend, a private first class who asked him what he was doing.

“Taking a break,” he said, before going into the middle of three portable toilets.

About 15 minutes later, a gunshot brought the soldiers running to the latrines.

The first soldier there knocked and called out “Hello?” before yanking the door open. He saw an M4 rifle in a pool of blood and Anderson slumped over on the seat.

In his journal by his bunk, Anderson had written what appeared to be a suicide note.

“I really don’t know what to say in a note like this. I just don’t feel good about what I’ve accomplished in my life. I feel like a faliuer (sic). I feel like I’ve failed. And theirs (sic) no hope of improving. I’ve been a couple of places in the Army and it’s all been pretty much the same.”

'It was preventable'

Immediately after Anderson’s suicide, Bruckner told his soldiers to quickly empty the sandbags and take down the “Wall of Discipline,” three different sergeants said. Amaral also wanted the wall removed.

Devos later convened a meeting with all the NCOs. He told them there was a “circle of trust” and that they had to know who was on the inside and who was on the outside, a sergeant wrote. Devos tried to convince the soldiers that the questions being asked about Anderson’s death were an affront to the entire platoon.

Then a few days later, Bruckner held another meeting with the same NCOs, imploring them to stick together and protect Devos, to have his back.

“I believe he told us NCOs that … because they knew they were wrong in what happened,” a corporal wrote in a sworn statement.

The soldiers calling attention to how Anderson had been treated before his suicide were told to pipe down by battery and battalion leadership. At one point, some of the NCOs tried to convince a few soldiers that Anderson killed himself because he was gay, a sergeant told Stars and Stripes.

But the Army’s subsequent investigation into Anderson’s suicide revealed the battery’s troublesome corrective training practices, and some soldiers told the investigator that they thought the battery’s leadership played a role in Anderson’s death.

“I knew him very well, and I believe his suicide was in direct relation with how he was being treated and made an example out of in front of all his peers and fellow soldiers,” Anderson’s former team leader from 1st Platoon said.

A sergeant wrote: “It was preventable. The battery leadership allowed unorthodox and mean spirited punishment to take place. This was a direct result of how [Amaral and Fisher] ran the battery.”

Another soldier wrote: “I believe the constant pressure from his chain of command pushed him over the edge.”

Those concerns set off a larger investigation a few months later into the battalion’s use of corrective training and improper punishment.

Token reprimands

In the end, Anderson’s leaders escaped any serious consequences.

The captain who conducted the first investigation found that the battery’s corrective training was “imposed in an oppressive manner to evade procedural safeguards applying to imposing non-judicial punishment.” He blamed the command climate set by Fisher and Amaral, which “resonated throughout the battery.”

In the six-week follow-up investigation, a colonel concluded that soldiers in Battery A, and Anderson in particular, “were treated in a cruel, abusive, oppressive and harmful manner.”

Devos “was directly responsible for soldiers’ well-being and duty bound to foster a healthy environment to maximize their potential,” the colonel wrote. Instead, Devos created an “environment of maltreatment and abuse when he allowed unauthorized punitive actions to be imposed.”

As battery commander, Fisher’s actions “jeopardized the well-being of all his soldiers.” He fostered “unacceptable conditions affecting good order and discipline of his unit” and “instead of intervening and taking preventative measures, he stood idle.”

As did Amaral, according to the investigating colonel.

The colonel recommended that they all get General Officer Memorandums of Reprimand, a form of administrative action that would likely keep them from being promoted to the next rank.

He also recommended Bruckner and Devos be relieved of duty for cause, and they were reassigned to different positions within the battalion while the unit was still deployed to Iraq.

But the memos of reprimand didn’t stick for Fisher and Amaral.

Although the reprimand was ordered by Maj. Gen. Terry Wolff, the battalion commander worked to get the men off the hook.

Lt. Col. Heyward Hutson said he went to bat for Fisher and Amaral because he “didn’t think they were culpable enough to end their careers over it.”

The memos of reprimand were downgraded to more minor letters of concern and weren’t filed in their permanent records. Since they have each moved on to new assignments, their records are unblemished, and both can move up the chain of command without anyone knowing about their misconduct.

Wolff declined to comment on why the reductions were made to Fisher’s and Amaral’s punishments. Fisher had written Wolff a letter rebutting the conclusions of the colonel’s investigation.

In an interview with Stars and Stripes, Fisher said that Anderson’s suicide greatly affected the entire battery, and as a leader he considered it a failure.

“I take full responsibility,” he said. “I’ll live with this the rest of my life.”

However, Fisher said that incidents “were blown out of proportion,” and from what he understood from his soldiers, the “climate of the battery was exceptional and things were going really well.”

In sworn statements, some soldiers backed this up, either praising Fisher’s command or expressing neutral feelings.

Fisher said he thought a few soldiers who didn’t reflect the majority and had a grudge about other issues used the investigation to voice their displeasure, driving the investigation to go further than it needed to go.

“The picture that was painted in the findings wasn’t accurate,” he said.

Amaral wrote a letter to the brigade’s commander, saying the unit did not have “an alarming issue with corrective training.” The problem was junior leaders and their lack of training in how to develop soldiers, he wrote.

Devos is appealing his memorandum of reprimand with the full support of Hutson, who wrote a letter on his behalf recommending the appeal.

Even if the appeal is denied, Devos is high enough up the chain of command to stay in the service without being promoted. So is Bruckner. As a result, the reprimands won’t affect their ability to serve 20 years and retire with full benefits.

Amaral, Devos and Bruckner did not respond to requests from Stars and Stripes for comment.

U.S. Army officials declined to comment, including Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff and the man tasked with overseeing the Army’s response to the suicide problem.

But attending to the emotional needs of soldiers has long been a declared priority for Chiarelli.

“This generation needs caring and involved leaders,” Chiarelli told students at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., last October. “[Soldiers] are stressed and tired after nine years of war.”

Army spokesman Col. Thomas Collins referred questions about the case back to the chain of command of Anderson’s unit.

“What I can say definitively is that we have a system of justice in which commanders weigh the facts and make determinations on what is appropriate punishment,” Collins said.

Anderson’s case stands in stark contrast to how the Army dealt with a similar incident in Iraq the year before. In 2009, a private killed himself in a portable toilet and the Army charged two noncommissioned officers with cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting the soldier to ridicule and excessive physical training. They both served a few months in the brig and were reduced in rank.

Yet, a year and half after Anderson’s death, all four of the leaders called out in the investigation maintain their leadership positions within the Army:

Bruckner is back in the position of platoon sergeant with the same battery.

Devos, with 2nd Battalion, 307th Field Artillery Regiment, is training National Guard and Reserve soldiers at Camp Atterbury in Indiana before they deploy.

Amaral was promoted and is a battery first sergeant at Fort Carson, Colo., with 2nd Battalion, 77th Field Artillery.

Fisher is mentoring U.S. troops and American allies, ensuring they follow Army doctrine as they train for combat at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.

“The Army has spoken on this and said it’s acceptable,” the sergeant who had served with Anderson told Stars and Stripes. “That’s the big crime.”

mccloskeym@stripes.com
Twitter: @megmccloskey

Original Page: http://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/suicide-in-the-military/maltreated-and-hazed-one-soldier-is-driven-to-take-his-own-life-1.145941

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Early Childhood Military Education=?UTF-8?B?Pw==?=

2011-06-08T23:37:00.001-07:00

Early Childhood Military Education?

by Ann Pelo, commondreams.org
June 8th 2011

Does our national security rely on top-quality early childhood education?

Yes, say the military leaders of Mission: Readiness, an organization led by retired military commanders that promotes investment in education, child health, and parenting support. In March, Mission: Readiness released national and state-by-state education briefs, declaring that “high-quality early education is not only important for the children it benefits but also critical to ensuring our military’s long-term readiness. . . . Investing in high-quality early education is a matter of national security.”

Actually, the generals are right, but for all the wrong reasons.

They see early childhood education as military readiness training. Mission: Readiness argues that investment in early childhood education for at-risk and low-income children will pay off in higher graduation rates and lower incarceration rates—expanding the pool of potential military recruits. “Recruitment and retention challenges could return if America does not do a better job now of producing more young men and women qualified for service,” says the mission statement on the organization’s website. “We must ensure America’s national security by supporting interventions that will prepare young people for a life of military service and productive citizenship.”

Who are the young people for whom these military leaders are supposedly advocating? Low-income, at-risk children—the pool of children from which the military has traditionally recruited. What sort of education do the generals want for these children? Skill-and-drill, standards-driven, assessment-burdened curriculum that prepares children for skill-and-drill basic training, for standards-driven military discipline, for test-based military promotion. The generals’ aim is to prepare low-income children to be soldiers, trained from their youngest years to follow directions and to comply with the strictures issued by the ranking authority. That’s not high-quality education; that’s utilitarian education designed to serve military and economic needs.

This approach to education may prepare young people for a life of military service, but it certainly does not prepare them for citizenship. The Mission: Readiness statement of purpose unwittingly exposes a central conundrum in the organization’s thinking: “The earliest months and years of life are a crucial time when we build the foundation of children’s character, how they relate to others and how they learn.”

Exactly. High-quality early childhood education teaches for citizenship, not for test taking and reductionist assessment. The goal is not compliance but creativity, critical thinking, and compassion. Children are invited to engage meaningful questions in collaboration with others, to embrace complexity, to strive for the well-being of others with generosity, to pay attention to issues of fairness, and to act with courage, conviction, and imagination. Top-flight early education fosters in children dispositions toward empathy, ecological consciousness, engaged inquiry, and collaboration. These are the dispositions of citizens.

Citizens care for their country and its security. They inhabit the commons and they act on behalf of the common good. They are emboldened by personal sovereignty and know themselves to be protagonists in the unfolding history of their country—not passive observers, not dull-minded consumers, not obedient followers of military or government direction, but patriots acting for the good of the commonwealth. Active citizens, thinking critically and compassionately, resist military action as the quick and easy answer to complex challenges. They point out the horrifying absurdity of the idea of “collateral damage.” They fight against imperialism and work for justice nationally and internationally.

This is the citizenship that our nation needs at this juncture in our evolution. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a gulf slicked with oil, pristine lands on the chopping block for drilling and mining, health care out of reach for nearly a third of our people, unions under siege by state governments and by corporations—our nation needs citizens concerned with national security, with the well-being of our nation. There is much work to be done, and it will take citizens, not soldiers, to do it.

So, yes, because high-quality early childhood education prepares children to be citizens, it is essential to national security. The investment should and must be a national priority.

Original Page: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/08

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How America Screws Its Soldiers

2011-06-02T21:27:00.001-07:00

How America Screws Its Soldiers

by Andrew J. Bacevich, thedailybeast.com
May 28th 2011 7:24 PM

Everyone claims to “Support Our Troops.” But as Andrew J. Bacevich explains, telling the military it can do whatever it wants works for everyone—except for the soldiers themselves.

Riders on Boston subways and trolleys are accustomed to seeing placards that advertise research being conducted at the city’s many teaching hospitals. One that recently caught my eye, announcing an experimental “behavioral treatment,” posed this question to potential subjects: “Are you in the U.S. military or a veteran disturbed by terrible things you have experienced?”

Just below the question, someone had scrawled this riposte in blue ink: “Thank God for these Men and Women. USA all the way.”

Here on a 30 x 36 inch piece of cardboard was the distilled essence of the present-day relationship between the American people and their military. In the eyes of citizens, the American soldier has a dual identity: as hero but also as victim. As victims—Wounded Warriors —soldiers deserve the best care money can buy; hence, the emphasis being paid to issues like PTSD. As heroes, those who serve and sacrifice embody the virtues that underwrite American greatness. They therefore merit unstinting admiration.

Whatever practical meaning the slogan “support the troops” may possess, it lays here: in praise expressed for those choosing to wear the uniform, and in assistance made available to those who suffer as a consequence of that choice.

From the perspective of the American people, the principal attribute of this relationship is that it entails no real obligations or responsibilities. Face it: It costs us nothing yet enables us to feel good about ourselves. In an unmerited act of self-forgiveness, we thereby expunge the sin of the Vietnam era when opposition to an unpopular war found at least some Americans venting their unhappiness on the soldiers sent to fight it. The homeward-bound G.I. spat upon by spoiled and impudent student activists may be an urban legend, but the fiction persists and has long since trumped reality.

Today such egregious misbehavior has become unimaginable. Even if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not especially popular or successful, no one blames the troops. Instead we cheer them, pray for them, and let them go to the front of the line when passing through airport security. And we take considerable satisfaction in doing so.

From the perspective of those who engineer America’s wars, the principal attribute of this relationship is that it obviates any need for accountability. For nearly a decade now, popular willingness to “support the troops” has provided unlimited drawing rights on the United States Treasury.

Since 9/11, in waging its various campaigns, overt and covert, the United States military has expended hundreds of billions of (mostly borrowed) dollars. By the time the last invoice gets paid, the total will be in the trillions. Is the money being well spent? Are we getting good value? Is it possible that some of the largesse showered on U.S. forces trying to pacify Kandahar could be better put to use in helping to rebuild Cleveland? Given the existing terms of the civil-military relationship, even to pose such questions is unseemly. For politicians sending soldiers into battle, generals presiding over long, drawn-out, inconclusive campaigns, and contractors reaping large profits as a consequence, this war-comes-first mentality is exceedingly agreeable.

One wonders how many of those serving in the ranks are taken in by this fraud. The relationship between American people and their military—we love you; do whatever you want—seems to work for everyone. Everyone, that is, except soldiers themselves. They face the prospect of war without foreseeable end.

Americans once believed war to be a great evil. Whenever possible, war was to be avoided. When circumstances made war unavoidable, Americans wanted peace swiftly restored.

Present-day Americans, few of them directly affected by events in Iraq or Afghanistan, find war tolerable. They accept it. Since 9/11, war has become normalcy. Peace has become an entirely theoretical construct. A report of G.I.s getting shot at, maimed, or killed is no longer something the average American gets exercised about. Rest assured that no such reports will interfere with plans for the long weekend that Memorial Day makes possible.

Members of the civil-military-corporate elite find war more than tolerable. Within its ranks, as Chris Hedges has noted, war imparts meaning and excitement to life. It serves as a medium through which ambitions are fulfilled and power is accrued and exercised. In Washington, the benefits offered by war’s continuation easily outweigh any benefits to be gained by ending war. So why bother to try?

As the 10th anniversary of what Americans once called their Global War on Terror approaches, a plausible, realistic blueprint for bringing that enterprise to a conclusion does not exist. Those who might once have felt some responsibility for articulating such a plan—the president, his chief lieutenants, senior military leaders—no longer feel any obligation to do so. As a practical matter, they devote themselves to war’s perpetuation, closing one front while opening another. More strikingly still, we the people allow our leaders to evade this basic responsibility to articulate a plan for peace. By implication, we endorse the unspoken assumption that peace has become implausible.

Here at last we come to the dirty little secret that underlines all the chatter about “supporting the troops.” The people in charge don’t really believe that the burdens borne by our soldiers will ever end and they are not really looking for ways to do so. As for the rest of us, well, we’re OK with that.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

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For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Original Page: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-28/memorial-day-how-america-screws-its-soldiers#

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An Open Letter to the Troops: You=?UTF-8?B?wpJyZSBOb3QgRGU=?=fending Our Freedoms

2011-06-02T14:38:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to the Troops: You’re Not Defending Our Freedoms

by Jacob G. Hornberger, lewrockwell.com
June 1st 2011

Dear Troops:

Yesterday – Memorial Day – some people asserted, once again, that you are “defending our freedoms” overseas.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Those people are just repeating tired old mantras. The reality is that you are not defending our freedoms with your actions overseas. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Your actions overseas are placing our freedoms here at home in ever-greater jeopardy.

Consider your occupation of Iraq, a country that, as you know, never attacked the United States, making it the defender in the war and the United States the aggressor. Think about that: Every single person that the troops have killed, maimed, or tortured in Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

Yet, the countless victims of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have friends and relatives, many of whom have become filled with anger and rage and who now would stop at nothing to retaliate with terrorist attacks against Americans.

Pray tell: How does that constitute defending our freedoms?

It was no different prior to 9/11. At the end of the Persian Gulf War, the troops intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water and sewage facilities after a Pentagon study showed that this would help spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people.

It worked. For 11 years after that, the troops enforced the cruel and brutal sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. (See “America’s Peacetime Crimes against Iraq” by Anthony Gregory.) You’ll recall U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.”

By “it” she meant the attempted ouster of Saddam Hussein from power. You will recall that he was a dictator who was the U.S. government’s ally and partner during the 1980s, when the United States was furnishing him with those infamous WMDs that U.S. officials later used to excite the American people into supporting your invasion of Iraq.

The truth is that 9/11 furnished U.S. officials with the excuse to do what their sanctions (and the deaths of all those Iraqi children) had failed to accomplish: ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a U.S-approved regime.

That’s what your post-9/11 invasion of Iraq was all about – to achieve the regime change that the pre-9/11 deadly sanctions that killed all those children had failed to achieve.

No, not mushroom clouds, not freedom, not democracy, and certainly not defending our freedoms here at home. Just plain old regime change.

In the process, all that you – the troops – have done with your invasion and occupation of Iraq is produce even more enmity toward the United States by people in the Middle East, especially those Iraqis who have lost loved ones or friends in the process or simply watched their country be destroyed.

In principle, it’s no different with Afghanistan. I’d estimate that 99 percent of the people the troops have killed, maimed, or tortured in that country had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Why did you invade Afghanistan or, more precisely, why did President Bush order you to do so?

No, not because the Taliban participated in the 9/11 attacks and, no, not because the Taliban were even aware that the attacks were going to take place

President Bush ordered the troops to invade Afghanistan – and, of course, kill Afghan citizens in the process – because the Afghan government – the Taliban – refused to comply with his unconditional extradition demand. You will recall that the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to an independent tribunal to stand trial upon the receipt of evidence from the United States indicating his complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Bush responded to the Taliban’s offer by issuing his order to the troops to invade Afghanistan, kill Afghans, and occupy the country. In the process, U.S. officials installed one of the most crooked, corrupt, and dictatorial rulers it could find to govern the country, one who is so incompetent he cannot even hide the manifest fraud by which he has supposedly been elected to office.

In the process of installing and defending the Karzai regime, the troops have killed brides, grooms, children, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and countrymen, most of whom never attacked the United States on 9/11 or at any other time. They simply became “collateral damage” or “bad guys” for having the audacity to oppose the invasion and occupation of their country by a foreign regime. (It should be noted for the record that U.S. officials considered these types of “bad guys,” as well as Osama bin Laden and other fundamentalist Muslims, to be “good guys” when they were trying to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan.)

Was there another way to bring bin Laden to justice? Yes, the criminal-justice route, which was the route used after the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

That’s right. Same target, different date. In fact, the accused terrorists – Ramzi Yousef in 1993 and Osama bin Laden in 2001 – were ultimately located in the same country, Pakistan.

In Yousef’s case, he was arrested some three years after the attack, brought back to the United States, prosecuted, and convicted in federal district court. He’s now serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary.

No invasions, no bombings, no occupations, no killing of countless innocent people, no torture, no war on terrorism, and no anger and rage that such actions inevitably would have produced among the victims, their families, and friends.

In bin Laden’s case, we instead got a military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, where the troops have killed, maimed, tortured, and hurt countless people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

How in the world have your invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq defended our freedoms here at home? Indeed, how have the assassinations and bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and who knows where else defended our freedoms?

All these things have accomplished is keeping foreigners angry at us, thereby subjecting us to the constant and ever-growing threat of terrorist retaliation here at home. As I have pointed out before, the U.S. military – that is, you, the troops – have become the biggest terrorist-producing machine in history. Every time you kill some Iraqi or Afghan citizen, even when accidental, ten more offer to take his place out of anger and rage.

That’s the same thing that was happening prior to 9/11. In fact, there were some, including those of us here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, who were warning prior to 9/11 that unless the U.S. Empire stopped what it was doing to people in the Middle East (including the deadly sanctions on Iraq, the support of Middle East dictators, the stationing of U.S. troops near Islamic holy lands, and the unconditional money and armaments to the Israeli regime), Americans would be increasingly subject to terrorist attacks. On 9/11, we were proven right, unfortunately. (See Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson.)

How does the constant threat of terrorist retaliation arising from your actions in Iraq and Afghanistan make us freer here at home, especially when you – the troops – are responsible for engendering the anger and rage that culminates in such threats, owing to what you are doing to people over there?

Consider also what the U.S. government does to our freedoms here at home as a direct consequence of the terrorist threat that you, the troops, are producing over there. It uses that threat of terrorism to infringe upon our freedoms here at home! You know what I mean – the fondling at the airports, the 10-year-old Patriot Act, the illegal spying on Americans, the indefinite detention, the torture, the kangaroo tribunals, Gitmo, and the entire war on terrorism – all necessary, they tell us, to keep us safe from the terrorists – that is, the people you all are producing with your actions over there.

In other words, if you all weren’t producing an endless stream of terrorists with your invasions, occupations, torture, assassinations, bombings, and Gitmo, the U.S. government – the entity you are working for – would no longer have that excuse for taking away our freedoms.

This past Sunday, the Washington Post carried an article about American wives who were recently greeting their husbands on their return from Afghanistan. Newlywed Anne Krolicki, 24, commented to her husband on the death of one of her friends’ husband: “It’s a pointless war,” she said.

That lady has her head on straight. She’s has a grip on reality, doesn’t deal in tired old mantras, and speaks the truth. Every U.S. soldier who dies in Iraq and Afghanistan dies for nothing, which was the same thing that some 58,000 men of my generation died for in Vietnam.

Please don’t write me to tell me that you all are good people or that you’re “patriots” for simply following whatever orders you are given. All that is irrelevant. What matters is what you are doing over there. And what you are doing is not defending our freedoms, you are jeopardizing them

Sincerely,

Jacob G. Hornberger
President
The Future of Freedom Foundation

Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Copyright © 2011 Future of Freedom Foundation

Original Page: http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger187.html

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New Data on High Unemployment Among Recent Veterans

2011-06-02T14:29:00.001-07:00

New Data on High Unemployment Among Recent Veterans

by JAMES DAO, atwar.blogs.nytimes.com
May 30th 2011

Much has been said about the high unemployment rate among veterans from the post-9/11 wars, but a new Congressional study offers some fresh insights into the nature of the problem, which does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

The report, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans was 10.9 percent in April. Although that is more than 2 percentage points lower than a year before, it is significantly higher than the rate for all veterans, 7.7 percent, or for the nonveteran population, 8.5 percent.

Theories abound on why the rate remains stubbornly high, including that employers do not fully appreciate the ways that military skills might translate into nonmilitary jobs.

But the report, by the chairman’s staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, suggests a fairly straightforward reason: the typical work experiences of recent veterans are best suited to the very industries which were particularly hard hit by the recession.

“Prior to the start of the recession, post-9/11 veterans were more likely than nonveterans to be employed in mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation and utilities, information, and professional and business services — all industries that experienced significant drops in employment during 2008-2009,” the report says. “These veterans also were less likely to be employed in education and health services, the only major sector that added jobs during the Great Recession.”

The report notes that the problem is particularly severe among young male veterans, ages 18 to 24, for whom the unemployment rate is nearly 27 percent. While younger people in general are more likely to be unemployed, that number is still significantly higher than the rate for male nonveterans of the same age group: 17.4 percent.

The report also raises concerns about whether disabled veterans will begin dropping out of the labor force over time, as seems to have happened with Vietnam-era veterans. While labor force participation among post-9/11 veterans is relatively high, at 81 percent, the report says that a quarter of those veterans have service-connected disabilities that could “lead to a decline in employment among them.”

Labor force participation refers to people who are either working or actively looking for work, and includes those receiving unemployment benefits.

The report was prepared by the staff of the committee’s Democratic chairman, Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., of Pennsylvania. The committee includes 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, chosen from both houses of Congress.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the report comes with a plug for legislation supported by Mr. Casey, including the Hiring Heroes Act of 2011, which would make it easier for new veterans to apply for federal jobs, provide money for job training programs and require service members to participate in job-hunting programs before the leaving the military.

“In the upcoming budget deliberations, not only must Congress support essential programs for veterans, but we also must modernize and improve them,” Mr. Casey said in a statement. “Education and training which targets expanding sectors of the economy is vital – both before and after service members leave the military. We need to do a better job helping veterans translate their military experiences and skills to employers.”

The report also includes some ideas that might not go over well with Republicans in Congress or with Republican-controlled state legislatures that are working hard to slash public sector spending.

The report notes, for instance, that 16.3 percent, or almost one-sixth, of recent veterans are employed by the federal government, compared with 8.7 percent of all veterans and just 2.2 percent of nonveterans. And it points out that nearly a third of recent veterans work in the public sector generally, compared with 14.8 percent of nonveterans.

Given those high rates, the report argues that federal, state and local governments need to be aware that deep budget cuts could hurt veterans.

“As Congress deliberates how best to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path, efforts to reduce the federal deficit must not come at the cost of helping recent veterans succeed in today’s labor market,” the report says.

Original Page: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/new-data-on-high-unemployment-among-recent-veterans/?pagemode=print

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Iraq veteran Eddie Falcon speaks out against the war

2011-05-28T10:09:00.001-07:00

Iraq veteran Eddie Falcon speaks out against the war

by KALW News, sfgate.com
May 25th 2011 5:14 PM

* * *

EDDIE FALCON: I was pretty young. I didn't think I understood, really, how things worked in the world.

SHANI AVIRAM: Eddie Falcon is an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He enlisted when he was 18, after growing up east of Los Angeles, in a community plagued by drugs, gangs, and crime.

FALCON: I enlisted in the first place to get money for school and to get out of, you know, like harsh socio-economic situations that I was living in. So, what people call that is the "economic draft."

Growing up in West Covina and La Puente in the Southern California desert, he says he had only two paths to choose from.

FALCON: La Puente is a really crazy neighborhood to live in. There's a lot of gang violence around. It's a really tough area. And then over when I was living in the desert there was nothing to do there but drugs. So those were just, like, my two options: get addicted to drugs or keep running around with gangs.

In 2001, he enlisted in the Air Force with the goal of using the GI Bill to pay for college. But, he found that he didn't quite fit in. He was one of the few Mexican-Americans in a mostly white unit.

FALCON: A lot of people did say things like "beaner" or "spik" or something like that, but there's also really subtle things that you don't notice that I'm starting to notice now. They were always surprised at how smart I was. "I didn't expect you to know that" or "you're a smart Mexican." Like stupid s*** like that.

Falcon served as a Loadmaster Journeyman on a C-130 aircraft. His job was to load cargo and passengers - passengers who were sometimes prisoners.

FALCON: You would take all the seats out of the plane...

...in order to make room to lay the Iraqi detainees on the floor like cargo. According to Falcon, the procedure was to handcuff and blindfold the prisoners...

FALCON: ...and then you put them on the floor, and then you put them in rows of five and then strap them down to the floor with cargo straps. I mean, there's not really too much. They wanted you to do all this other stuff too. Like, inside the kit there's like these gloves so like ... because they wanted you to feel disgusted by them, by the people or something, and people will tell you that they'll piss or they'll s*** or stuff like that, so they want you to put like a tarp under them. I think the kit even comes with diapers. It's, like, really weird. It comes with a face mask and like all this stuff. I didn't use any of it and I never had any prisoners s*** or piss any where or spit at me or nothing like that. They were all really scared that they were there.

The "detainee runs," as Falcon calls them, left a lasting impact on him.

FALCON: When I was there in Iraq and did the prisoner runs, people were blindfolded and when I took the blindfolds off of them and they saw me, they actually thought I was Iraqi.

Falcon deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan. As the wars went on and violence escalated, he started questioning the military operation.

FALCON: It just didn't make sense to me that we were sending so many people there. And like so many people were dying and it just didn't seem justified for what happened. Like having to tie people down to the floor of the plane and take them to prisons and like getting shot at and running from rockets. That s*** gets old, you know?

In 2005, after he was discharged, Falcon enrolled at San Francisco City College. He started sharing his military stories with student groups to raise awareness of what's going on overseas. That's when he first met members of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

It's March 19, the 8th anniversary of the Iraq War, and ANSWER Coalition is holding its annual march. It's pouring rain, but the energy on the streets is high. Falcon has been coming every year since he left the military.

FALCON: One time I was out of town, I was in Europe, but I still was in Paris on a corner holding a "U.S. Out of Iraq" sign by myself.

Falcon is now the acting president of Iraq Veterans Against the Wars' Bay Area chapter.

Only a handful of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have come out to march today. They explain that many veterans feel discouraged by the government's lack of response to their issues. Others are still dealing with the psychological scars of war, like PTSD, and just want to put their war experiences behind them. But for Falcon, sharing his story - making connections with people - is a way of dealing with his past.

FALCON: Sharing my story with other people and I hear how other people's stories were in the military or whatever, and like it starts to bring out other things for me too, so I think it's good to keep talking and to keep sharing your stories with people because that's how you end up making connections and really analyzing things and finding out you got more in common with people than you thought

Some try to portray the anti-war movement as anti-American. But, Falcon says, protesting a war doesn't mean you hate your country.

FALCON: It's not that I don't like America. I love America. That's why I live here. I grew up here. I'm culturally American. We have really cool s***. Everybody likes our music, everybody likes our style. We're cool. I like us. And I'm willing to defend the people who are around me against any outsiders.

Falcon is currently a student at UC Berkeley using the GI Bill to pay for his education. Despite his views of the military and government policies, he isn't conflicted about using state money to pay for college.

FALCON: I think it makes even more sense. Whatever, people can say whatever they want. I feel like the government has taken away a lot of things away from me. It's taken away my youth, it's taken away my mental stability, the state has taken away members of my family. So I'll take some money from them to get by and do what I gotta do. I got no problem with that. It's the least that they can f***ing do for me is pay me to go to school after all the s*** that they put me through.

It has been six years since Falcon left the military, and he says he is still dealing with the aftermath of his service. That's why he is sharing his own story with as many people as he can.

FALCON: I want to talk to kids because kids are going into the military from high school. The people who really need my help or need to hear this are people who are going to go through the same struggle that I went through. Like, people over here, college students aren't going to go through the same things I went through. They're going to go through something different. So, I want to talk to kids that are going to be enlisted.

Falcon's voice of opposition might be rare among new veterans, but his need to heal is shared by many of them. Talking about his experiences has been Falcon's way of doing so.

For Mills College, I'm Shani Aviram

Shani Aviram is a student reporter at Mills College in Oakland.

Original Page: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/kalw/detail?entry_id=89749

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Army Seeks Recruits in Social Media

2011-05-25T12:39:00.001-07:00

Army Seeks Recruits in Social Media

by STUART ELLIOTT, nytimes.com
May 24th 2011

WHEN ads for the Army used the theme “Today’s Army wants to join you,” a joker rewrote it this way: “Today’s Army wants to join you. At your place.” These days, the Army is getting social — if not quite that sociable — as potential recruits increasingly spend time with social media like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

The next phase of the Army’s recruitment ad campaign keeps a theme, “Army strong,” that was introduced in 2006 and adds a focus on the Army uniform as a “symbol of strength” as well as symbolic of qualities like commitment, achievement and leadership.

The direction of the campaign is typified in a line recited in commercials by the voice-over announcer, the actor Gary Sinise, who talks about the significance of the uniform before concluding, “Try it on at goarmy.com.”

The recital of the Web address underlines the concentration on digital media for the campaign, although there are traditional elements like television spots.

“We’re working hard to increase our social media,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, because “we fully recognize that young people TiVo over commercials or are multitasking on their smartphones when the commercials come on.” General Freakley is commanding general of both the Army Accessions Command, which oversees recruitment, and Fort Knox, Ky.

“Since the late ’80s, 9 percent of the population is propensed toward military service,” General Freakley said, compared with about a third in the 1970s. As a result, he added, “we have to reach out in forms like we’re discussing to get them to want to know more, to join us in social media and extend the dialog.”

The campaign continues previous elements like video clips, blogs and a microsite, armystrongstories.com, that are intended to connect would-be soldiers “with real soldiers,” General Freakley said.

At this time of year, potential recruits — men and women ages 17 to 24 — are also spending time at the movies, which has led the Army to its first sponsorship deal with a Hollywood film. The film, “X-Men: First Class,” will be released on June 3 by 20th Century Fox.

On the Army Facebook page (facebook.com/goarmy), visitors are invited to “view exclusive content from the upcoming movie” as well as watch a trailer for the film and a commercial that promotes the Army by comparing the experience to becoming an X-man.

The movie “is about young people who are ordinary doing extraordinary things,” General Freakley said. “Ordinary people come in the Army and do extraordinary things every day.”

That said, he took note of the differences between the two: “Soldiering is real. ‘X-Men’ is for Hollywood.”

Clifford E. Marks, who helped broker the sponsorship in his capacity as president for sales and marketing at National CineMedia in New York, said the deal represented “the big screen and the small screen working together” in that the promotional content can also be watched on Web sites that are part of a National CineMedia network like rottentomatoes.com and traileraddict.com.

The Army is also running the commercials featuring the voice of Mr. Sinise in National CineMedia movie theaters, which include those owned by AMC, Cinemark and Regal.

Mr. Marks brought the sponsorship proposal to Universal McCann, one of seven agencies working on the Army account that belong to the McCann Worldgroup unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The others include McCann Erickson Worldwide, MRM Worldwide and Weber Shandwick.

(Four other agencies working on the assignment are independent, among them Gravity Media and Carol H. Williams Advertising.)

The agencies were hired by the Army in late 2005 and rehired on March 31 for an additional year with four one-year renewal options.

“There’s a lot of ways to talk about the kind of strength we mean when we say ‘Army strong,’ ” said Craig Markus, executive vice president and executive creative director at McCann Erickson Worldwide.

“The human truth is, we all react when we see a soldier wearing a uniform,” Mr. Markus said. “It means a lot to us, and it means a lot to them.”

“With symbol of strength, it’s about all these other things” that the uniform stands for, he said, including “a key, a passport, an all-access pass, a family tree, a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, the power of the team, how people like you, yet different from you, are all moving in the same direction.”

Jason Culbertson, creative director at MRM, said the digital aspects of the campaign “allow people to have a direct line of communication with those who wear the uniform,” and such dialog helps potential recruits “understand what it means to be in the Army, to be ‘Army strong.’ ”

As more of the campaign appears in social and other digital media, the spending for ads in major media has declined, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, to $41.8 million last year from $168.7 million in 2007.

Those at the Army Accessions Command “are novices at using Twitter,” General Freakley said, in that only a bit more than 3,030 Twitter users follow the command’s account at @GoArmy. (The main Army account, with the handle @USArmy, has more than 74,270 followers.)

Describing rappelling and other activities that recruits go through in boot camp, the general said: “It’s exciting stuff. Would I love to have those young people tweeting about that.”

Why can’t they? Well, “in the first three weeks of basic training, we take away your smartphone,” General Freakley said. “You don’t even get mail from home.”

Those policies may one day be changed, he said, in that “as digital natives join us” in larger numbers, “we’ll get the balance of that right.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 25, 2011

An earlier version of this column misspelled the surname of an executive at McCann Erickson Worldwide. He is Craig Markus, not Marcus.

Original Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/media/25adco.html?_r=2∣=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

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Troop morale in Afghanistan plummets

2011-05-21T11:22:00.001-07:00

Hawaii News Now - KGMB and KHNL HomeTroop morale in Afghanistan plummets, report says

hawaiinewsnow.com | May 19th 2011 10:33 AM By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - As fighting and casualties in Afghanistan's war reached an all-time high, U.S. soldiers and Marines there reported plunging morale and the highest rates of mental health problems in five years.

The grim statistics in a new Army report released Thursday dramatize the psychological cost of a military campaign that U.S. commanders and officials say has reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency.

Military doctors said the findings from a battlefield survey taken last summer were no surprise given the dramatic increase in combat, which troops reported was at its most intense level since officials began doing mental health analyses in 2003.

"There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as the exposure to combat and seeing what war can do," Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said at a Pentagon news conference.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of troops surveyed for the report said they had seen a buddy killed, roughly half of soldiers and 56 percent of Marines said they'd killed an enemy fighter, and about two-thirds of troops said that a roadside bomb - the No. 1 weapon of insurgents - had gone off within 55 yards of them.

Most of those statistics were significantly higher than what troops said they experienced in the previous year in Afghanistan as well as during the 2007 surge of extra troops into the Iraq war, the report said.

Some 20 percent of troops said they had suffered a psychological problem such as anxiety, severe stress or depression. Considering the intense levels of combat they are seeing, that number may actually be small, said Col. Paul Bliese, who led the last three survey teams to the battlefield, in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

"We would have expected to see a much larger increase in the mental health symptoms and a much larger decrease in morale ... based on these incredibly high rates of exposure" to traumatic combat events, Bliese said. The report's authors took the statistics as evidence that the force is resilient, a trait the military has been working to develop in troops.

The report is a snapshot of the health of the forces in Afghanistan last year, drawn by a mental health team that polled more than 900 soldiers, 335 Marines and 85 mental health workers on the battlefield in July and August, as troops surged into the country under the Obama administration's new strategy for fighting the insurgency.

President Barack Obama sent an additional 30,000 troops there last year to build the force to the current 100,000. Commanders and administration officials say the push has weakened the Taliban, and a limited troop withdrawal is planned by this July.

Troops said they were receiving better training in suicide prevention and other coping strategies and that mental health treatment was easier to get at the warfront.

"I do believe we're making progress," Schoomaker said.

But a particularly stubborn problem for the Army persisted: About 50 percent of soldiers said they believe getting professional help for their problems would make them appear weak. Defense officials have gone to great lengths over a number of years to encourage troops to get treatment, and Marines made some headway in reducing the perceived stigma, according to the report.

Americans "have not solved this problem in the civilian world," said Dr. Robert Heinssen, a research director at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The military says it boosted the mental health staff in the Afghanistan to 1 for every 646 soldiers last year, compared with 1 for every 1,123 in 2009.

"War affects everyone ... and most are able to deal with their experiences and move on to stable, productive lives," said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Key to coping with those experiences is available care, access to care and knowing that you are not alone."

Some of the report's highlights:

- Only 46.5 percent of soldiers said their morale was medium, high or very high last year, compared with 65.7 percent in 2005. For Marines, it was only 58.6 percent last year compared with 70.4 percent when they were surveyed in 2006 in Iraq. (The report compares numbers of the Marine to their time in Iraq because they were not in Afghanistan in significant numbers before the surge.)

- Nearly 80 percent of Marines and soldiers said they'd seen a member of their unit killed or wounded, compared with roughly half who said that in the earlier years.

- Nearly 1 in 5 soldiers and Marines reported psychological problems such as acute stress, depression or anxiety last year, compared with 1 in 10 among soldiers in 2005 and about 1 in 8 among Marines in 2006.

- The use of drugs for mental health or combat stress was lower among soldiers and Marines than among civilians in the same age group.

___

Online:

The report: http://www.armymedicine.army.mil/reports/mhat/mhat_vii/J_MHAT_7.pdf

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Original Page: http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/14676683/troop-morale-in-afghanistan-plummets-report-says?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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Army Chief Faults Unfit Recruits for Injuries

2011-05-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

Army Chief Faults Unfit Recruits for Injuries

foxnews.com | May 19th 2011

U.S. Army recruits have had poorer diets and are less fit than past generations, making them more prone to injury from heavier loads lugged in combat, its top general told a Senate panel on Wednesday.

"It's really the generation of Americans that have this problem," said Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey. "But it's exacerbated by the load we ask them to bear."

He singled out poor eating habits plus carbonated drinks as a contributing factor to "musculoskeletal" injuries that have been a leading cause of U.S. medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan. Such injuries typically include fractures, tendinitis and connective tissue disorders but not combat injuries.

Dempsey was responding to concerns from U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, a World War Two veteran who won the Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. decoration for military valor.

Inouye, 86, fretted that individual U.S. troops' combat gear was pushing toward 125 pounds compared with, as he put it, the no-frills load he carried as an infantryman.

"I feel for them because I believe my combat kit never exceeded 20 pounds, including my rifle, boots and helmet, grenades and all the ammo I carried," the Hawaii Democrat said at a hearing on the Army's fiscal 2012 budget request at the Appropriations Defense subcommittee he chairs.
"I hope we can lighten the load and lighten the injuries," added Inouye, who lost his right arm in a battle against German forces.

Dempsey said troops' heavy combat load was a "constant issue on our minds" as the Army tried to lighten everything from boots to helmets to rifle opticals. It is also studying squad-level changes that could shift more of the batteries being lugged to automotive "mules" and robotic devices, he said.

But part of the problem "is that young men and women coming in the army today are not as fit or as skeletally sound as you were," he told Inouye.

"Even in basic training, before we load the soldier with the gear that eventually they will have to learn to bear, we have these same kind of musculoskeletal injuries," Dempsey said.

The Army did not immediately respond to a request for details of a typical combat load.

Inouye said musculoskeletal injuries had risen ten-fold in the last four years and the cost of related disability benefits was topping $500 million a year.

Original Page: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/05/19/army-chief-faults-unfit-recruits-injuries/

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Military Rape: Rampant, Ignored

2011-05-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

Military Rape: Rampant, Ignored

by Nan Levinson, inthesetimes.com
May 18th 2011

A lawsuit against Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld and new legislation try to stop an epidemic.

When Panayiota Bertzikis tried to tell her commanding officers that she had been raped in May 2006 by a shipmate four months into her tour at the Burlington, Vt., Coast Guard Station, they discouraged her from talking to an Equal Opportunity officer, barred her from seeing a civilian therapist, ignored a written confession from her attacker and browbeat her into silence.

But thanks to victims-turned-activists like Bertzikis who are pulling military sexual trauma (MST) out from the shadows, it’s become harder for the U.S. military to ignore the problem. In February, Bertzikis, along with 14 other women and two men, filed a lawsuit (Cioca et al. v. Rumsfeld and Gates) charging Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, with mishandling their sexual assault cases.

MST is an epidemic. Nearly a quarter of women serving in combat areas say they have been sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers. But everyone agrees that reliable statistics don’t exist. The Pentagon, which recorded 3,158 cases of sexual assault in 2010, estimates that only about 14 percent of all incidents are reported.

Back in 2006, when Bertzikis went online after her rape to look for help, she found almost no information. But when she blogged about her experience, stories similar to hers poured in. In response, Bertzikis—who left the Coast Guard in 2007 and is now 29—set up the Military Rape Crisis Center in Cambridge, Mass. She estimates the organization has provided 6,200 people with counseling, legal advocacy and case management—along with the assurance that they are not alone.

Susan Burke, the attorney in Washington, D.C., who initiated the lawsuit, says, “The military is woefully mishandling these cases all the time.” Intending to file what she calls “a reform lawsuit,” she sought plaintiffs through advocacy groups, including the Crisis Center.

Their allegations are not easy reading. The plaintiffs report being spat on, grabbed at, masturbated over, stripped, drugged, stalked, beaten and raped. One rapist took photos; another videotaped the event. (That tape was later used as evidence against the victim because, she was told, it showed that she “did not struggle enough.”) When victims’ reported the abuse, their commanders ignored them, insisted the sex was consensual or a result of drinking, and ordered them not to pursue action because it would ruin their attacker’s career. In a world where rank is everything, those raped were generally low-level, while their rapists were often their superiors. The plaintiffs report being forced to continue working under their attackers’ supervision or to live nearby.

By the Pentagon’s reckoning, fewer than 21 percent of reported cases make it to court martial and only a little over half of those result in convictions. In the ultimate insult, as a result of their trauma, many MST victims are deemed unfit to serve and were kicked out of the military. “Every case I get,” says Bertzikis, “they blame the victim, the perpetrator never gets punished and the survivor is the one who ends up losing her career.”

Because the military investigates itself, there is little incentive to deal with a problem that makes everyone look bad. In civilian life, of course, most rapes also go unreported and most assailants don’t spend time in prison. But because enlistees cannot just walk away, the aftermath of an unpunished assault in the military can often be more traumatic for victims. Commanders have control over an enlistee’s career, living situation, safety, medical care and community standing. When a rape survivor is forced to confront her attacker daily, Bertzikis says, “The only options out are going AWOL or suicide.”

It may not be possible for civilians to change military culture, but they can create oversight and accountability. In April, a pair of legislators re-introduced a bill to do just that. The Defense STRONG Act, co-sponsored by Reps. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.) and Mike Turner (R-Ohio), would guarantee access to a military lawyer, allow victims to transfer from where the assault happened, ensure confidentiality of communication with advocates and counselors, give teeth to the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office and institute effective rape prevention training, which now seems to focus on telling service women how to avoid getting raped. The Holley Lynn James Act, written by Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) with the help of SWAN, would go further by creating a system of independent oversight; MST cases would go to military court automatically.

The bills’ prospects remain uncertain, but the lawsuit, along with some horrific high-profile cases, has focused attention on pervasive sexual trauma in the U.S. military. “There’s a groundswell,” says Anu Bhagwati, executive director of the advocacy group Service Women’s Action Network and a former Marine captain. “The epidemic is widely known, so Congress can’t afford to ignore it any longer.”

Original Page: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7317/military_rape_rampant_ignored

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U.S. Troops' Mental Health Continues to Erode

2011-05-21T01:49:00.001-07:00

U.S. Troops' Mental Health Continues to Erode

by Mark Thompson Thursday, battleland.blogs.time.com
May 19th 2011 9:41 AM

U.S. troops' minds are going to hell in a hand basket, according to the latest comprehensive survey of the mental health of U.S. soldiers and Marines waging war in Afghanistan.

"Psychologically, it is hard to imagine that these elevated levels of combat are not taking a toll on Soldiers," the study concludes. "Reports of acute stress symptoms among Soldiers surveyed in 2010 have significantly increased and reports of individual morale have significantly decreased relative to 2009."

The key findings in the study released Thursday morning are depressingly blunt. Here's a sampling of the conclusions from the 112-page report:

Among Army soldiers:

   -- Morale: Significant decline in reports of individual morale relative to 2009 and 2005.

    -- Psychological Problems: Acute stress rates significantly higher than rates from 2009 and 2005. Rates of combined psychological problem measure (acute stress, depression, or anxiety) significantly higher than 2005.

    -- Combat Exposures: Dramatic increase in combat exposure relative to 2009. Higher combat levels reported than in any previous MHAT to either OEF or OIF. [OEF is Operation Enduring Freedom -- the war in Afghanistan; OIF is Operation Iraqi Freedom -- the war in Iraq.]

    -- Multiple Deployments: More multiple deployers than in 2009. Soldiers on their third/fourth deployment report significantly more psychological problems and use of mental health medications than Soldiers on their first or second deployment.

Among Marines:

   -- Individual Morale: ...the percent of Marines reporting high or very high unit morale is significantly lower in 2010 than in 2006 or 2007.

    -- Psychological Problems: The rate of Marines reporting psychological problems (acute stress symptoms, depression or anxiety) is significantly higher in 2010 than in 2006 or 2007.

    -- Combat Exposures: Marines report dramatic increase in combat exposure relative to 2006 and 2007 in OIF.

    -- Sleep Problems: Significant increase in the percentage of Marines who report high or very high concern about not getting enough sleep. Sleep disruption primarily due to poor sleep environment (e.g., too hot, noisy, etc.).

    -- Multiple Deployments: Marines on three or more deployments report lower morale than those on first deployment. Multiple deploying Marines also show increased psychological problems.

All this bad news comes despite reported improvements in unit cohesion, leadership, and reduced barriers to getting mental-health care in theater.

Bottom line: the Pentagon's mental-health workers are fighting a valiant war for the minds of the nation's soldiers and Marines, but they continue to lose ground.

The Army-led seventh Mental Health Advisory Team surveyed combat soldiers and Marines (as opposed to those in support units) in both Afghanistan last summer to get an accurate picture of how they're faring, mentally, after nearly a decade of war. They surveyed 911 (a coincidence, I'm sure) and 335 Marines. It's a pretty impressive feat; in past conflicts such studies generally were conducted among soldiers after they returned home. It's known as "MHAT-7" around the Pentagon.

Other interesting findings:

-- 11.4% of soldiers were taking medication for sleep problems, up slightly from 2009's 9.6%. But 60% of those taking sleep meds also were drinking at least one highly-caffeinated energy drink a day. "It is difficult to determine if caffeine consumption is the cause or the effect," the study reported.

-- 3.7% of soldiers were taking medication for mental-health problems. That's up from 2.6% in 2009, an increase of 42%, although the report said the hike was "non-significant" and "well-within the National estimates for this demographic group."

-- IED blasts can cause PTSD. "Over 50% of the Soldiers reported being dismounted and within 50 meters of a blast at least once," the survey found. "This number is almost certainly an underestimate of the percent of Soldiers that will experience exposure to blast in a full 12 month tour."

-- In Iraq in 2006 -- the most violent period of that war -- 12.7% of Marines surveyed said they had killed an enemy combatant. Last year in Afghanistan, the number was 56.1%

The Army quoted many of the soldiers it surveyed. Grunts have griped since the days of the Roman Empire, of course. But after a decade of fighting, some of the recurring comments about poor command -- which can aggravate, if not trigger, mental-health ills -- are distressing. It certainly offers an unvarnished look inside a war that you can't get at a Pentagon briefing or Capitol Hill hearing. It's also more candid than reporters get when talking to troops; here, they are speaking, more or less, among themselves:

Leaving home station, we didn't have a clue what we were going to do here. Mission set has changed 6 times since in country ... be flexible, but not THAT flexible! We are mission jumping constantly.

Goals/standards are ridiculous ... you can't meet them if they keep changing. Doing the right thing here is wrong."

"There was no guidance from leadership on the goal of specific missions.

Role? I don't know if I am a platoon sergeant, squad leader, or team leader ... I still don't know my role and we are58 days out from coming home.

Info comes down, but we don't have a good understanding of it, but then we have to take it, try to make sense of it, and try to give It to our Joes. I know it doesn't make sense to them.

We had a large white board in the TOC [tactical operations center] for the purpose of writing down changes to the mission but the NCO wouldn't use it...instead he would keep the changes to himself.

You never get positive feedback, but you will get an -ss-chewing if you screw up ... They tell you what is not going to work.

There is no feedback at all from leadership.

Our platoon sergeant usually tells us that 'You guys are s--t bags for making me look bad.'

You want to throw 20 people into a 10 man tent and have us live like that for the past 9 months....REALLY.

Leadership was never NOT breathing down my neck...poor planning on many issues.

They use any sign of error to belittle you...focus is on failure to make themselves look better. Cruise control once we got here... it is nota problem until it is a catastrophe.

Nobody advocates for us. They never listen to the experts...they don't listen to the people that know. But I go toe-to-toe with them. I have to serve as the advocate. I get the blame though for everything that could go wrong.

Leadership is giving us Uunior enlisted] no support. They let themselves be walked all over.

They challenge us in unrealistic ways ... good idea fairy.

Leadership isn't teaching you how to fish, but instead they are just giving you a fish.

They are not engaged and have no concept about what is going on out there. They just don't get involved.

He [NCO] will send us to work while he stays back and watches TV.

They dictate methodology, don't innovate, and don't let others innovate either. Appearance means more than anything.

There is one solution and it's his solution.

It's their way or the highway.

They tell us to do it ourselves all the time...It's frustrating that when we do it ourselves they then come back and get mad at us because we didn't do it their way even though they didn't tell us how they wanted it done.

All my guys are hurt. No one cares. A guy with fractured foot is still going out on missions.

We survived a crash and all the NCO wanted to know was when we were going to be back to work.

Original Page: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/05/19/u-s-troops-mental-health-continues-to-erode/

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Strain on forces in the field at a five-year high

2011-05-13T20:58:00.001-07:00

Strain on forces in the field at a five-year high

by Gregg Zoroy, usatoday.com

U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan are experiencing some of the greatest psychological stress and lowest morale in five years of fighting, reports a military study.

"We're an Army that's in uncharted territory here," says Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, who has focused on combat stress. "We have never fought for this long with an all-volunteer force that's 1% of the population."

Mental health strain was most severe among veterans of three or more deployments, with a third of those showing signs of psychological problems defined as either stress, depression or anxiety, the report obtained by USA TODAY says.

The research, based on a survey of soldiers and Marines in 2010, also found that the praise the troops have for their unit sergeants has never been higher as the United States approaches the 10th year of its longest war.

The report says decline in individual morale is significant: 46.5% of troops said they had medium, high or very high morale, compared with 65.7% who said that in 2005. About one in seven soldiers — and one in five Marines — reported high or very high morale.

President Obama ordered a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan last year, bringing the total number to 100,000 troops. He said at the time that withdrawals would begin this July depending on security. The report says soldiers and Marines reported more intense fighting than during the surge in Iraq in 2006-07, with 75%-80% of those in Afghanistan involved in firefights.

Half or more of those surveyed said they had killed the enemy, and 75%-80% described the death or wounding of a buddy. Half also said that an improvised explosive device detonated within 55 yards while they were on foot patrol. The study's researchers also found evidence of physical wear-and-tear with a third of the force experiencing chronic pain.

"I'm not worried about our ability to continue the fight," Chiarelli says. "Folks who are coming home now are going to see that they're not going back for 24 months. And that hasn't been the way it's been for 10 years."

Mental health staffing has doubled in Afghanistan since 2009 and troops report better access to this care, though many are so busy fighting "outside the wire" to seek help, the study says.

"Having therapists forward, we're able to get them to talk to someone right away and intervene," says Kathleen Chard, a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs who trains Army medics. "In as little as two to four sessions we can begin having an impact on these guys and women."

The report noted that the emotional strain, while high, was lower than expected given the severity of combat — evidence of a growing resilience in the force. And confidence in the command skills of squad and platoon leaders has never been higher at close to 50%, up from 38.6% in 2005.

"They have learned to be leaders in a crucible," Chiarelli says. "And their soldiers have seen that."

Original Page: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-05-08-troops-strain-morale-afghanistan_n.htm

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Soldiers hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased 7000 percent over pas

2011-05-09T12:19:00.001-07:00

Soldiers hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased 7000 percent over past five years: study

by Nina Mandell, nydailynews.com
May 6th 2011 12:22 PM

The rate of soldiers hospitalized for having suicidal thoughts has soared a staggering 7,000% in the last five years, a new Pentagon report says.

The report, which covers the period from the fourth year troops were in Afghanistan and the third year they were in Iraq, is the latest troubling survey on potential suicides in the military.

* The Army reported last month there in March had been eight reported potential suicides involving soldiers who were not on active duty, and seven potential suicides among active duty soldiers.

* A study released in March found the suicide rate for female soldiers tripled while at war between 2004 and 2009 compared to soldiers who were not overseas.

* Five months ago, another survey found suicides had doubled among National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve soldiers from 65 in 2009 to 145 in 2010.

"Suicide is a symptom of a bigger problem," Gen. Pete Chiarelli, the army's top anti-suicide advocate told Time Magazine.

"It is rarely based on a single factor, but from work, health, finance and relationship problems."

The Pentagon says a new diagnostic code and greater awareness of the problem could be helping to drive the numbers higher.

The Defense Department has focused on improving suicide prevention among its troops who suffer from high rates of mental illness following their returns from war zones.

"Efforts to improve suicide prevention awareness, education and support that is readily available to all members of the Army family continue to be of paramount importance," said Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of the Army Health Promotion, Risk Reduction Task Force.

"Informed and engaged leaders at every level help foster a sense of responsibility in soldiers, Army civilians and family members."

"Leaders will reduce the stigma associated with seeking help by promoting positive behavioral health opportunities that include physical, emotional, social, family and spiritual well-being."

Original Page: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/05/06/2011-05-06_soldiers_hospitalized_for_suicidal_thoughts_increased_7000_percent_over_past_fiv.html

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Anti-war group claims message stifled

2011-04-29T12:10:00.001-07:00

Anti-war group claims message stifled — Elgin news, photos and events — TribLocal.com

by Melissa Jenco, triblocal.com
April 15th 2011

Fox Valley Citizens for Peace and Justice is pushing for permission to continue giving high school students literature that some have complained paints a negative picture of the military.

Members of the group told the Elgin-based School District U-46 school board Monday that administrators at Elgin High School no longer will let them distribute some of their material, which focuses on veteran unemployment rates, sexual harassment of women and the military contract. Members usually staff a table at the school monthly in order to counteract what military recruiters hand out.

“It is in the best interest of students to have as much information as possible before making such an important decision,” said Bettina Perillo, a board member. But after some students complained, administrators told the group to stop.

Washington Elementary parent Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford, who staffs a similar table at Larkin High School, told the school board she is concerned the military is being promoted to younger and younger students.

“I believe the school board must ask a serious question about how promotion of the military is creeping into our schools, carrying with it the promotion of violence,” she said.

The board also heard from a man lost his son fighting in Afghanistan and feels the military lied to him. An Iraq War veteran who now shares his experiences with youth spoke, too.

“I’ve never been anti-military, probably never will be, but I do believe as a young 16-, 17-year-old child you should be given a balanced understanding of what you’re getting into, especially into something you’re going to be doing for a career that could possibly cost you your life,” veteran Melvin Lyons said.

Members and supporters of Fox Valley argue they are passive, only talking to the students who approach their table. They have been making visits to Elgin High School since 2006 and also visit South Elgin and Larkin high schools.

When questions were raised two or three years ago, about the group’s presence, a new policy was formulated on access to students.

The policy states recruiters, whether for college, military, or alternatives to the military, cannot interfere with students’ education, talk to students outside the designated area, provide information to students who don’t ask for it, require students to take predictive tests, sponsor drawings or recruit when students are unable to leave.

U-46 Chief Legal Officer Pat Broncato said the district will look into Fox Valley’s complaints about not being able to hand out literature.

Elgin High School Principal Dave Smiley declined comment Tuesday.

Original Page: http://triblocal.com/elgin/2011/04/26/anti-war-group-claims-message-stifled/

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The return of ROTC

2011-04-28T19:53:00.001-07:00

The return of ROTC

sfbg.com | Apr 28th 2011

The almost-certain end to the military's discrimination against lesbians and gay men is causing all kinds of educational institutions to take another look at ROTC programs, the latest being Stanford [1], which scrapped the on-campus military training regime during the waning days of the Vietnam War.

I'm not going to get into an anti-military rant here (tho I could), but in a sense, the "don't ask, don't tell" bullshit has given us on the left an easy way out: As long as the military discriminates -- and by definition it does -- then it doesn't belong in our schools. I'm okay with that, but I also think we need to go a bit deeper here, and ask:

At what age, and under what circumstances, is it okay for military recruiters and recruitment programs to go after young people?

It's all the more imperative today, since college is becoming unaffordable for so many -- and military programs like ROTC, with their ample scholarships, have to be tempting.

I'd start with a basic premise: No recruiters should have access to kids under 18, anywhere, any time. That means no JROTC programs in high schools. Kids that young are too easily swayed by uniforms and bravado; they need to learn to think before they decide they might want to die.

The law says you can enlist at 18, so I guess it's arguable that college kids can enlist while they study. But it seems to contracy to what college ought to be about. In fact, if it were up to me, I'd say nobody could join the military until he or she reaches 21. Old enough to drink, old enough to fight. We have decided as a society that college-age kids aren't mature enough to handle alcohol; it would seem like a no-brainer to conclude that they aren't old enough to make a fateful life decision.

ROTC in college? It still bothers me. Even after don't ask, don't tell is gone.

Original Page: http://www.sfbg.com/print/politics/2011/04/28/return-rotc

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The State Does Not 'Support=?UTF-8?B?wqBJdHPCoFRyb29w?=s'

2011-04-22T21:04:00.001-07:00

The State Does Not 'Support Its Troops'

by Andrew Mason, lewrockwell.com

The state has little care for veterans. The notion of an uncaring state has shown itself over the course of America’s one-hundred years of imperial conquest. This can especially be observed when their contract with the state is no longer valid. Of course, some will argue that the benefits the government gives to veterans (G.I Bill and disability benefits) claim otherwise. However, these so-called benefits create a culture of dependency where the veteran is made a slave to the state like many other Americans who need the government to survive and not thrive. Furthermore, veterans have and will be financially and physically violated by the state in the long run. I am not going to talk about the fact of being sent to unjust wars, or the hundreds of thousands that have been murdered or maimed. What needs to be brought to light are the more subtle costs of war that do not get as much public attention. If you are a veteran reading I beg you to read carefully.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is quite animate in leaving you and your family in misery. The agency that is supposed to look out for your best interests and help care for you, Department of Veterans Affairs has failed miserably, it is after all a government agency, and has dealt a great has even made a deal with Prudential Financial Inc which was withholding the death benefits from your family when you are deceased. Prudential would then use this money for their investment pleasures. We have only just begun.

I hope that some of you remember the depleted uranium rounds you used while deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of you probably had some concerns about handling depleted uranium and your officers probably told you that it was harmless since the word "depleted" is next to "uranium" but this is really a misnomer. Uranium is still uranium no matter how much of it is in an armor-piercing projectile. Once depleted uranium munitions explode, uranium oxide is released into the atmosphere or absorbed into the soil which is extremely toxic. There are thousands of Iraqi children now being born with birth defects as a result of uranium weapons usage in and around the cities of Iraq. God knows how many innocent Afghanis and most likely Libyans have been exposed to this toxicity. Of course, there are also countless numbers of veterans who have also been exposed to this weapon of mass of destruction, so there is no telling how many of them have been afflicted. The government refuses to acknowledge that "depleted" uranium is terrible for one’s health. This is also cited as a potential cause of the Gulf War Syndrome the veterans of Gulf War I have encountered. Not only is the government sanctioning the use of ammo that also harms you but remember they are burned waste products next to your dwellings.

Yes, the thought that the burning trash pits next to your barracks probably never crossed your mind. I, for one, was more concerned about not being killed by Iraqis who were upset by our military’s occupation of their country. Nonetheless, there have been veteran victims of the burning trash pits which the state or government contractors rubber-stamped. This is should be extremely disheartening to all of us. Those who were prepared to be killed by a bullet from a foreigner are actually being slowly killed by the actions of their own government.

Of course now that you have returned from the wars abroad and are now mostly liberated from the physical clutches of the state; you are much more of a liability. Remember those towel wearing cave dwellers who we were fighting because they "hated us for our freedom"? Well, now you are the terrorist threat, according to state security. Head of the Department of Homeland Thuggery, Janet Napolitano, has already made her official apology, or in other words, she apologized that you found out how the government perceives you. The threat is grave for the state lest you learn the truth about what you (and I) have really helped defend.

You see, the longer we are at war across the sea the greater the state’s power over us becomes and has it become great. The power of the state has rapidly increased with the creation of an agency whose sole purpose is to spy on you and other Americans who just may be anti-establishment. Moreover, the state also has the power to kill those who are considered terrorists and the state’s definition of terrorist can change whenever it wants. In other words, it may not always be the turban-wearing cave dwellers who are the terrorists but it could be you. Remember they believe you already have the potential to be one. The state did not "thank us for our service" in the defense of the American people, rather we were being thanked for perpetuating the state’s own interests. You would have the potential to spark a revolution in the minds of millions of Americans who buy into the official lies of the state’s imperial policies. Of course, this is because you have seen the horrors of war yourself and would be most influential in swaying the people’s opinion on this government’s foreign policy based on your experience alone.

The war-mongering and chicken-hawk conservatives absolutely do not give a flying crap about your well-being. One self-proclaimed conservative who claims to support the troops does not in fact support them after they come home and are left with the scars of war such as missing limbs, PTSD, and various other war inflicted diseases. In essence, she says let us continue to fight the war on terror and leave the increasing amount of war veterans on the side of the road. If that is not the definition of a double-standard I really do not know what is. You have members of Congress support the troops when they are killing for them but when they come back home; well, it was the killing that really mattered. Thus the conclusion should come as quite a serious matter.

The state has no real interest in your well-being for many reasons although it may appear to care. From the signing away of death benefits to financial firms, using toxic weaponry in combat, building burning trash dumps next to your quarters, and countless other examples of willful negligence by the state; it should become quite apparent that we were mere pawns on a global chess board. The media has reported that veteran’s disability benefits and medical care are to become as big as social security, so with the economic crisis deepening there is a good chance these benefits will not last. We need to start looking to build a society based on self-reliance, peace, and liberty. Lastly, the liberty I speak of has been encapsulated into a book and has been defined!

Andrew Mason is a former corporal in the U.S.M.C.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Original Page: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/mason-a3.1.1.html

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On Encountering Support for the U.S.=?UTF-8?B?wqBNaWxpdGFyeQ==?=

2011-04-01T19:45:00.001-07:00

On Encountering Support for the U.S. Military

lewrockwell.com

Yellow ribbons pasted on cars is the least of the support given to the military by Americans. In a blog, Laurence Vance reports on third-graders singing "Thank You Soldiers." Stephan Kinsella reports an airplane flight attendant thanking members of the military on board "for their service."

These reports encourage me to report on an incident about which I had previously decided to keep quiet, for there may be a nationwide trend going on here that should be brought out into the open. Of even greater importance is a serious intellectual issue. Is support of the military a political action or is it a neutral action? Can one separate support for the military personnel from what the military does, or from its obedience to military actions that one finds objectionable?

This story and the debate on these questions will be told without my editorializing. Instead I will display the contents of e-mails. They contain the debate. They contain my side of it, and they contain that of my opponents.

The story began on February 7 at 9:25 a.m. when I got an e-mail from a committee of the School of Management (SOM) at University at Buffalo. This is where I used to work. The committee is called Strengthen Our Sense of Community Committee. It informed me

"The UB School of Management SSCC (Strengthen Our Sense Of Community Committee) is working with AMillionThanks.org to send thank-you notes to members of our military (active, reserve and veterans). During the week of February 7 to 11, there will be a table set up in the Alfiero Center Atrium. Please stop down and write a brief note of appreciation and gratitude to send to our men and women serving our country. We have over 200 note cards to fill out, please spread the word!"

Six members of the committee signed this appeal.

At 10:11 a.m., I sent a bluntly worded e-mail to the Dean of the SOM:

"The SSCC sent me this strange request. I don't know whose idea this was, but it's a bad idea. The UB School of Management should not be involved in politics! This kind of thing supports the military, but such support is a political thing. A huge number of people object to using the military in such ventures as Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as many, many other places in the world. Therefore, such support coming from UB definitely takes a political position that is not neutral. The School has no business taking such a stance. I won't wash the School's dirty linen in public, but if this idea is not dropped, I surely will inform the Provost and the President of the University."

The Dean replied to me that night at 11:44 p.m., writing

"Thank you for your e-mail. I appreciate the concern you have expressed. I wish to assure you that the School of Management should absolutely stay out of politics, to me this is axiomatic in the academic community. However, I do not agree that the SSCC request indicates a political position. This is a volunteer activity that supports a segment of our society that serves the nation. I venture to think that veterans can be worthy of gratitude for their service without regard to their particular assignments, just as I do not consider the Vietnam memorial as a glorification of that war. It is entirely possible that others may disagree with this view, in which case they would opt not to respond to [SSCC’s] call. To my mind, suppressing an activity like this goes against the spirit of free exchange of ideas that the academy should preserve. It would also put the dean in the unwelcome position of favoring one cause over another, which I would be loathe to do. I will try to be vigilant that future volunteer efforts of this kind maked [sic] the non-political nature of the effort more explicit."

At 5:30 a.m. the next morning, having read the Dean’s reply, I responded at some length as follows:

"I wish I could agree with you 100%, but I cannot, for I find contradictions in your thinking about this.

"1. You say ‘...absolutely stay out of politics...’ That is my position too, and I agree it's ‘axiomatic’.

"2. Does the SSCC activity breach this axiom? Yes, indeed. How else are we to understand what I was told? It says ‘The UB School of Management SSCC (Strengthen OurSense Of Community Committee) is working with AmillionThanks.org to send thank-you notes to members of our military(active, reserve and veterans). During the week of February 7 to 11, there will be a table set up in the Alfiero Center Atrium. Please stop down and write a brief note of appreciation and gratitude to send to our men and women serving our country. We have over 200 note cards to fill out, please spread the word!’

"The SSCC decided this was a worthwhile activity. It decided to partner with a supportive group. It designated a time and place, within the SOM, as a locus for the activity. It asked people and encouraged them to participate. It took the political position that these men and women are serving the country, when that is the very thing that is non-neutral, for many believe they are not serving the country but other interests and the State. They encouraged spreading the word.

"They advertised the organization AMillionThanks. Its activity is thoroughly political. I quote [from their website]: ‘A Million Thanks is a year-round campaign to show our appreciation for our U.S. Military Men and Women, past and present, for their sacrifices, dedication, and service to our country through our letters, emails, cards, and prayers.’ Who do you think commands them? The executive-in-chief. To do what? Aren't wars political? Who pays for these wars? How? Through taxes. Aren't those politically determined?

"What do you think all of that activity is, if not political activity?

"I have strongly to disagree with you.

"To make my point, what if the SSCC had done the opposite? What if it partnered with a peace group and encouraged a campaign to ask Congress to stop funding these wars? What if it organized a campaign of writing letters to soldiers asking them to STAND DOWN and not obey immoral orders in immoral wars that kill civilians? What if it organized protests against some egregious activities of soldiers in these wars?

"Would you tell me that this is not political?

"I shouldn't have to spell this out for you. You are an intelligent man. I think you have not thought through this clearly enough, and so I have to make you understand that your position is superficial and wrong in being inconsistent with the axiom that you propose and that is correct.

"There are those who are grateful to the military, but there are those who are not. That is true. That implies that the SOM should not take a position one way or another by the activities involved in providing a locus and focus for one side and encouraging the expression of one side.

"You express a very naive attitude toward this, which is that support of troops in this way doesn't support the activities that these troops engage in, but it does. It is merely one step removed, because these troops join and are paid to do these tasks. The money is exacted by the government. The troops willingly become part of a political process that has a military manifestation.

"I request that you stop this activity as quickly as possible and certainly do nothing like it in the future. If that prohibition needs to be made explicit in the code of the SOM, that should be done."

At 8:46 a.m., the Dean replied:

"It is clear that we disagree. I have nothing further to contribute as I do not find it appropriate for a dean to engage in a discussion of political leanings or preferences."

I then informed the Provost, as I said I would. I left the President out of it since he has resigned. I sent the Provost all the e-mails and added these comments:

"It seems to me that the SOM is engaging in political activity when it should not. The Dean and I disagree on this.

"A committee in the SOM is acting as a locus and focus to encourage a letter-writing campaign to U.S. military personnel.

"My ideas on this and the Dean's ideas are contained in the attached exchange of e-mails.

"I'd like to see the SOM cease this activity and return to a true state of neutrality, which means saying and doing nothing one way or another with respect to military personnel. Disengagement seems to me to be neutral.

"Dean Assad seems to think that using SOM facilities, committees, and batch e-mails to promote letters to the military is neutral. I do not. That takes a stance in favor of the military who have joined the armed forces willingly and who willingly become instruments of the political policies of U.S. administrations. Since these by nature are political and meet with disagreement in the nation, I do not see how the Dean's position can be maintained. I think he is wrong and that the activity is wrong. I want to see it stopped."

On Wednesday, I had a few further thoughts and passed them on to the Provost:

"Dear Dr. Tripathi,

"As you deliberate, consider another thing. In re-reading what Arjang said in his reply, I realize that he has made an argument that supports my contention. He wrote

"‘This is a volunteer activity that supports a segment of our society that serves the nation. I venture to think that veterans can be worthy of gratitude for their service without regard to their particular assignments, just as I do not consider the Vietnam memorial as a glorification of that war. It is entirely possible that others may disagree with this view, in which case they would opt not to respond to [SSCC’s] call.’

"He asserted his opinion that the activity supports ‘our society’ that ‘serves the nation’. But he admits that ‘others may disagree with this view.’ Yes, they may. That indicates that the activity is not neutral.

"In his view, what makes it neutral is that it is a ‘volunteer’ activity and that those who disagree with it can ‘opt out’. But is that true? I think not. The fact that one is not required to participate (participation is voluntary) doesn't make it neutral politically. Imagine that this committee or some other one now comes along and looks for letters to Congress that protest against the use of the military in Iraq, or against some other current issue like national health insurance, and suppose these letters are voluntary. Does that make the activity neutral? It means that the SOM has become a forum for political matters, that e-mails are being sent in batches to everyone promoting positions, and that space is being used, and time of employees being used for political positioning. This, I say, is not neutral to politics.

"Arjang goes on to say ‘To my mind, suppressing an activity like this goes against the spirit of free exchange of ideas that the academy should preserve. It would also put the dean in the unwelcome position of favoring one cause over another, which I would be loathe to do.’ But since when is it the mission of the SOM to air political conflicts and to promote support for one side or another? And, more fundamentally, is letter-writing an aspect of any ‘free exchange of ideas’? Does Arjang propose to use the SOM facilities to have a debate on the role of the U.S. military? That would be more in line with an academic mission. It might not be the SOM's bailiwick, but it would be consistent with a university. But taking one side of such a debate is not.

"Is the Dean favoring one cause over another by promoting this activity? I say he is. He says that if he disallowed this campaign, he'd be suppressing the free exchange of ideas. I think that is nonsense. There's no exchange going on in this. It's strictly one-sided. There is no SOM committee or statement that I know of that has opened up the SOM for political debates and begun to promote the school as a locus for airing particular political postures. If there were and if this activity were done properly in such a context, it might lend it the credibility that Arjang seeks. Even then, would this be a credible avenue for such activity? It doesn't look that way. It would need a neutral committee to promote debates and exchanges. This committee has not been formed in that way or with that purpose by the appearance of its communications or by what it has chosen to do."

"Cordially,

"Michael

This missive resulted in silence. Days passed. On February 18, I sent an e-mail to Provost Tripathi:

"Dear Dr. Tripathi,

"It's now 9-10 days since I communicated to you, in detail, my concerns about political activity within the SOM.

"What have you decided on this matter?

"Cordially,

"Michael Rozeff (Professor Emeritus)"

Dr. Tripathi answered the next day:

"Dear Professor Rozeff,

"I apologize for my belated response. I have given this matter thought. Indeed, we are mindful that some may view the efforts of the Strengthen our Sense of Community Committee as having a political message. From my vantage point, I believe that this particular activity is, on balance, probably more aptly deemed a community service activity. This is a completely voluntary effort and faculty and staff can chose [sic] to participate or chose [sic] not to participate. I know that my perspective on this does not conform with your perspective, but as academics I think we are use [sic] to people approaching issues from different frames of reference. As I write, I know that this is not the response you were seeking, but I do hope that at least we can respect our differences of opinion at least on this matter.

"Sincerely,

"SatishTripathi"

The entire interchange ended with my final e-mail sent to Dr. Tripathi an hour later:

"Dear Dr. Tripathi,

"You know, if you had been willing to give just a little, we could find a solution. If you had simply said that in the future you'd instruct the committee to be more mindful of the kind of concerns expressed by me and to make a concerted effort to avoid any hint of political involvement, that would have sufficed.

"You didn't do that. Instead you told me what your belief is about this particular activity. That means you were 100% nonresponsive to me and my concerns. You gave them no weight. Only your judgment mattered.

"Well, I'm sorry, but I find that an unacceptable response on your part.

"Therefore, I ask you to reconsider along the lines I've just mentioned. Does it not seem reasonable that the committee be made to know from you that it needs to be more mindful of crossing boundaries that should not be crossed? Doesn't it need to know that cystic fibrosis is not the same as supporting war? Doesn't it need to know that ‘community’ is not a catchall phrase that justifies support of everything involving any community in America? After all, there are good and bad communities.

"Sincerely,

"Michael Rozeff"

I never got an answer.

An interesting thing happened on March 17. Tripathi was chosen to be UB’s next President.

I really did not expect to change much immediately. At most I expected to plant seeds of doubt, so that the next time something like this arises, people will think twice about what they are doing. Raising doubts is a step in awakening consciousness.

It is dismaying that people who possess ordinary intelligence do not see that support of the military is a political position, and that turning a blind eye to such support in a business school is biased in favor of a political position, which in this case is pro-militarism.

I was taken aback by this military support coming to roost in a business school. This committee has all sorts of community efforts that it can support and has supported, such as its effort on cystic fibrosis. The fact that it chose to support the military could be, in my opinion, a sign of people refusing to face unpleasant facts about what the American military has been and is doing overseas. Hearing criticism, many people whose being is associated with the nation-state respond by asserting the value of the military and expressing support of it. A person indoctrinated into a supine patriotism of flag-waving and blind support of the state and its wars will naturally rally to its defense against criticism, because their person has been lost or diminished as a result of the indoctrination. They have submerged themselves into the state. Freeing them from these beliefs requires patience and continual exposure to ideas of freedom, peace, and government to which they are unaccustomed. Plant seeds and wait for their fruition. Don’t expect instant conversions. It takes time to shed old beliefs and take on new ones.

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Original Page: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff345.html

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Half the Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated by VA receive mental health

2011-04-01T19:28:00.001-07:00

Half the Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated by VA receive mental health care

by Bob Brewin, nextgov.com
March 22nd 2011

Slightly more than half of all Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans treated by the Veterans Affairs Department received care for mental health problems, roughly four times the rate of the general population, according to statistics compiled by the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense based on data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The data show that among the 625,834 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans enrolled in the VA health care system as of December 2010, 313,670 were treated for mental health conditions.

Lee Igel, a psychologist and assistant professor at New York University, said the numbers were "staggering" when compared to the general population.

The National Institute of Mental Health reported in 2008, the latest data available, that 13.4 percent of adults in the United States received treatment for mental health problems.

Read the entire Broken Warriors series.Sonja Batten, assistant deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health at the Veterans Health Administration, agreed the data obtained by Veterans for Common Sense showed that a "significant number" of veterans from the current wars were receiving mental health care. She told Nextgov these were provisional diagnoses that could be revised downward by as much as one-third.

Data VA subsequently provided to Nextgov showed that the department cared for 386,497 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans in fiscal 2010, and out of that number, 161,794 -- or 41.9 percent -- received a primary diagnosis of a mental health condition, a rate three times higher than that of the general population. Data compiled by Veterans for Common Sense included Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated at VA facilities from 2002 through 2010, whereas the numbers VA provided Nextgov reflect 2010 data only.

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said VA is trying to downplay the mental health problems of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans.

The data Sullivan's group obtained under the FOIA request were categorized according to diagnostic codes used by VA clinicians, Sullivan said. The numbers showed that 122,175 veterans were diagnosed with depression, 102,767 with neurotic disorders and another 72,952 with a combination of depression, anxiety and mood swings. More than 78,000 were diagnosed with a variety of other conditions, including alcoholism and drug abuse.

The data also showed that 182,147, or 29 percent of all Afghanistan and Iraq veterans treated by VA, sought care for post-traumatic stress disorder, Sullivan said. This is almost double the rate of PTSD for Vietnam War veterans, which is 15.2 percent, and more than double the rate of PTSD among Gulf War veterans, which is 12.1 percent, according to a fact sheet from VA's National Center for PTSD.

The data Veterans for Common Sense obtained from VA does not include any information on veterans who sought help from clinicians outside the Veterans Health Administration, Sullivan said. As such, he believes Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans' mental health problems actually are underreported.

Barbara Van Dahlen, founder and president of Give an Hour, a Bethesda, Md.-based nonprofit that arranges free counseling services with private practitioners for veterans, agreed. She said 67 percent of Vietnam veterans sought help outside VA, and expects many current veterans to do so, particularly in areas that do not have a VA hospital or clinic.

Tom Vande Burgt, an Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq and runs the Lest We Forget PTSD peer-support group in Charleston, W.Va., with his wife, Diane, also believes the data obtained by Veterans for Common Sense likely underreports mental health problems because many veterans do not fully understand their benefits.

In addition, Vande Burgt said many veterans do not seek mental health care, preferring to "hide out in the basement, playing video games until there is some sort of triggering event."

Effects of Multiple Deployments

VA's Batten, mental health professionals outside the department and veteran advocates all agree the large numbers of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans seeking mental health care reflects the cumulative effects of multiple deployments during the past decade. As deployments increase, "the population in need grows," she said.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said he is concerned that troop cuts recently proposed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates "will only increase the burden of deployment on an increasingly smaller force." Miller, in an e-mail statement, added that the Defense Department "must ensure that our soldiers have adequate dwell time between deployments and that we are not relying too heavily on a fewer number of troops."

Miller, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said Defense needs to demonstrate that "the number and length of deployments are not having an effect on the mental health of service members."

Diane Vande Burgt, echoing the views of mental health experts interviewed by , said, "There is no doubt in my mind that multiple deployments are the biggest reason for the high numbers. Stress levels are probably through the roof. When someone is overloaded on stress and gets no relief they begin to suffer both mentally and physically."

The fact that so many Afghanistan and Iraq veterans have sought help from VA for their mental health problems stands out as good news among otherwise grim statistics, experts and advocates agreed. Igel said the data show the current crop of veterans have overcome the stigma that felt by Vietnam veterans.

Miller agreed. "We're doing a much better job encouraging service members to come forward and seek treatment than at any other time in our nation's history, and that is one of many reasons for the high numbers. Some of our service members and veterans have experienced severe mental anguish, and I am thankful that they are seeking treatment," he said.

But Margaret Stone, co-founder and chairwoman of the Veterans Healing Initiative, which provides funding to treat veterans who suffer from substance abuse and PTSD in nongovernment facilities, said, "The stigma associated with mental health [and] substance abuse remains pervasive throughout the military and society and so we still see a lag time between the time a vet returns and when he or she ultimately receives care."

Miller said a number of factors could explain the increase in the number of recent veterans seeking mental health care from VA. "Better education on mental health and reducing stigma associated with asking for help are contributors. I also believe this increase can be attributed to outreach by VHA and increased access to VA health care enrollment.... Health care professionals are also better now at diagnosing mental health conditions both in the field and in VA and DoD medical facilities," he said.

The data on the mental health treatment of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans indicate that more resources are needed to treat these veterans, Stone said. In particular, she said VA must do a better job serving veterans who don't live or work near the department's hospitals and clinics.

Vande Burgt agreed, and noted National Guard and reserve troops have been hit hard by multiple deployments and are more likely to live in rural communities poorly served by VA.

Veterans Affairs should consider opening more rural clinics and contracting with outside services to reach underserved areas, she said.

Original Page: http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20110322_2917.php?oref=topnews

Shared from Read It Later

Selective Service issue raises question for Terre Haute family

2011-03-27T23:47:00.001-07:00

Selective Service issue raises question for Terre Haute family

http://tribstar.com/local/x740871273/Selective-Service-issue-raises-question-for-Terre-Haute-family

Howard Greninger
Posted: 03/10/2011

Terre Haute resident David Cooley knew it was mandatory that his son
Jacob register with the U.S. Selective Service, especially when
applying for college financial aid.
And the Cooleys thought Jacob had registered at age 16 in 2008 when
he obtained his Indiana driver's license. But, they discovered just
last week, Indiana had not then yet implemented draft registration at
license branches.
A law to make Selective Service registration optional when obtaining
a driver's license in Indiana was signed on April 25, 2007, but was
not to be effective until June 25, 2009. It did not become fully
operational until Sept. 24, 2009, said Pat Schuback, spokesman for
the Selective Service at its Washington, D.C., office.
"We were furious when we found out he was not registered. We
certainly wanted to comply with the law," David Cooley said. "I
didn't particularly agree with what was going on in Vietnam … but
when I was 18, I went down and did my duty by registering."
After finding his son was not registered, David Cooley instead went
online and did so, allowing the family to complete a Free Application
for Federal Student Aid application for college financial aid.
While there has not been a military draft enacted since 1973, it is
law that all male U.S. citizens and immigrant men living in the
United States, age 18 to 25, register with the Selective Service.
By law, males are to register within 30 days of turning 18. If not
registered, federal assistance for college can be withheld and
employment with any federal government agency denied. Fines and
incarceration also can be imposed.
BMW spokesman Graig Lubsen said the agency now asks a question
regarding Selective Service of all males between age 15 and 25
seeking a new license or license renewal.
"We have a question that pops up on our system for our [BMV]
associate to ask. The question is, 'Do you authorize the BMV to
submit the necessary information to the Selective Service System to
register you in compliance with federal law?'" Lubsen said.
Regardless of the answer, a form acknowledging that the question was
asked is printed and "they [person seeking a license] have to sign
that," Lubsen said.
Indiana in 2008 had 79 percent of men born in 1989 registered with
Selective Service. That percentage increased to 90 percent in 2009.
Schuback said there was no special media campaign that increased that
number and Indiana's driver license law had been active less than
four months in 2009.
"It could be something that is in the national news that makes people
more aware of this. In 2006, Indiana was at 88 percent [registered
with Selective Service]. In 2007, it was 85 percent," Schuback said.
"That's why it is so beneficial when states' BMVs link with Selective
Service, as it drives up registration rates," he said.
As of Nov. 5, 2010, 37 states, three U.S. territories and the
District of Columbia had enacted laws for Selective Service
registration when obtaining a driver's license. Some states,
including Colorado and Arizona, make registration mandatory, while
others, such as Indiana, make it optional when obtaining a driver's license.
Schuback said not signing up with the Selective Service is punishable
by law with up to 5 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.
"However, the U.S. Department of Justice is not enforcing that [as
there is no draft], but it is linked to federal and state" financial
assistance programs, plus federal jobs and job training assistance
programs, he said.
The Selective Service has representatives in schools nationwide to
remind students to register, Schuback said, plus the agency sends out
reminder cards twice a year "in national mailings."
There were 16.3 million of the 17.8 million U.S. males aged 15 to 25
registered with the Selective Service as of 2009, Schuback said.
--

Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or
howard.greninger@tribstar.com.

Marines in Deadly Valley Face Combat Stress

2011-03-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

Marines in Deadly Valley Face Combat Stress

http://www.military.com/news/article/marines-in-deadly-valley-face-combat-stress.html

March 06, 2011

SANGIN, Afghanistan -- When U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Derek Goins
deployed to the most dangerous place in Afghanistan five months ago,
he mentally prepared for the risk of getting shot by the Taliban or
stepping on bombs buried throughout this southern river valley.

But he wasn't ready for what happened to his two best friends, who
were shot to death inside a patrol base by an Afghan army soldier who
escaped into the arms of the Taliban.

"I grew up with those guys in the Marine Corps and shared a lot of
laughs and tears with them," said Goins, 23, from Trumbull, Texas.
"We expected to come here and fight and not just get murdered, and
that's what it was."

The Marines who arrived in Sangin district of Helmand province in
October have seen the kind of tragedy and combat stress that few can
imagine - more than 30 deaths and 175 wounded, with scores losing
arms and legs when they stepped on bombs.

The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment and smaller Marine units
attached to it are fighting to regain this key insurgent stronghold
in one of the country's bloodiest regions.

At least 288 NATO service members were killed in Helmand province in
2010. Last year was the deadliest of the nine-year Afghan war for the
international forces, with 701 killed.

Many of the Marines in Sangin say they are coping by blocking out the
horrors they have seen. Psychiatrists say that behavior is normal
during combat, but it could trigger post-traumatic stress disorder
when the Marines go home next month.

"It's a day-by-day thing and you don't know if you're going to be the
guy to get hit the next day, so you just keep on pushing," said
Goins, who like most of the Marines in Sangin is on his first combat
deployment.

Lance Cpl. James Fischer, whose platoon lost a Marine to Taliban
gunfire the first time they patrolled outside their base, said he has
become numb to even the most gruesome scenes.

"Afterward, you just don't get that shock anymore," said Fischer, 20,
from Glendora, California. "You'll have to deal with it at some
point, but right now the most important thing is keeping everyone
around you alive."

Cmdr. Charlie Benson, a Navy psychiatrist who has visited the Marines
in Sangin nearly a dozen times, said he has not seen an abnormally
high rate of mental health issues in the battalion - although it's
too early to tell who will have problems when they go home.

Benson, 46, from Marcelus, New York, believes the Marines are coping
relatively well with the combat in Sangin because they have good
leadership and feel they are making progress. Sangin is a major
narcotics hub that funds the insurgents and a gateway to stream
fighters into Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual heartland.

The Marines have stepped up their efforts to deal with combat stress
in recent years by deploying additional mental health professionals
with the troops. They also have trained medical corpsmen, chaplains
and Marines to recognize when troops are having trouble coping.

"There is a lot of stress, and it's not just combat," said Sgt. Adam
Keliipaakaua, a 26-year-old Marine from Newport News, Virginia, who
is on his fourth combat deployment. "It's from back home, too, with
people's parents getting divorced, people's wives cheating on them or
leaving them."

Keliipaakaua said he tries to prepare his Marines for the nightmares
and irritability they may face when they return home and have to deal
their emotions.

"For me, I'm pretty much emotionally cold. My wife tells me that all
the time," said Keliipaakaua, who suffers from nightmares of a Marine
dying in his arms.

An average of 15 to 20 percent of troops who have traumatic
experiences during combat often suffer post-traumatic stress
disorder, or PTSD, when they return home, Benson said. The condition
arises when troops continue to try to suppress emotions with drugs,
alcohol or by avoiding situations that trigger painful memories.

"If you're having issues six months after the event, then that would
be a good indication," Benson said. "One of the things that Marines
hate is the feeling that if they had only done X, Y or Z, this guy
would still be alive."

Psychiatrists often treat PTSD by having troops repeatedly tell the
story that haunts them, forcing them to face their emotions and
pushing them to see that often there was nothing they could have done
to save their buddy, Benson said.

Sgt. Matt Lewoczko, a Marine in Sangin on his fourth combat
deployment, said everyone deals with the horrors of war differently
when they return home.

"Some guys are going to go back and it will be good to have their
family, some will crawl into a bottle for a week, month or couple
months and then will crawl out and be fine," said Lewoczko, 27, from
Houston, Texas. "Unfortunately, some guys don't get over it."

What awaits GIs in Afghanistan

2011-03-27T18:08:00.001-07:00

Limb from limb

http://www2.answercoalition.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=77302.0&dlv_id=69204

What awaits GIs in Afghanistan

March 13, 2011
By Ryan Endicott

The author is a former Marine corps infantryman who served in Iraq
and is a member of March Forward!
--

The war in Afghanistan, now approaching its second decade, is more
horrific than ever for U.S. troops.

New data revealed in the March 4 Washington Post showed a massive
increase in injured soldiersthe "signature wound" being the loss of
both legs from the knee or higher-up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030403258.html

In addition to having both legs blown off, soldiers are suffering
severe injuries to the genitals and pelvic region. The report further
states, "Twice as many U.S. soldiers wounded in battle last year
required limb amputations than either of the two previous years." As
a result, three times as many soldiers lost more than one limb and
nearly three times as many suffered severe injuries to their genitals.

The percentage of soldiers losing one limb increased by 60 percent,
and those suffering injuries to their genitals increased by 90 percent.

It was also reported that many of the soldiers who wake up in the
hospital in Germany are so medicated and confused from their injuries
that they "discover" their loss more than once during their stay,
adding to the severe psychological trauma associated with the wounds.

New slang: double amp, trip amp

These wounds have become so common that there is new military slang
used to refer to fellow GIs after they're wounded: "double amps" and
"trip amps," referring to the number of limbs lost. The already
bloody war in Afghanistan has grown far more gruesome in the past year.

So many troops are enduring these wounds because of the missions they
are sent on. A deployment in Afghanistan means daily patrols through
villages and farmland where the local population hates the foreign
occupation. Most of the time, the mission is to do nothing more than
walk around and wait to be blown up by a bomb in their path.

Those troops are told that their missionconstantly occupying and
patrolling these areasis of vital importance; they are risking life
and limb for the Pentagon's master plan to "win" in Afghanistan. Or,
maybe not. Areas that troops are told are a top priority are later
abandoned by the Pentagon after heavy losses.

Most recently, the Pentagon ordered a retreat from the Pech Valley.
Soldiers there were told that it was a top priority to control the
valley. They did daily patrols, as ordered. Over 100 were killed.
Hundreds more were horribly wounded. Then, Petraeus and his team of
generals said, "Well, maybe this place isn't that important."

Those who lost friends and limbs there will have to wonder for the
rest of their lives why they fought endlessly in that valley, why
their lives will never be the same.

The same is true for those who served in other areas that the
occupation forces have retreated fromKorengal Valley, Wanat,
Nuristan Province, and many others.

They were ordered to occupy regions where the fight was
hopelesswhere the people would refuse foreign domination, and would
fight back until the foreign troops left.

This is the situation in the entire country. Like in the Pech and
Korengal Valleys, the United States cannot win in Afghanistan. But
the generals will send young GIs in wave after wave, simply because
they do not know what else to do.

Vietnam War resistance

During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops started seeing the futility of
their missions: the constant, pointless patrols; fighting to win "key
terrain," then abandoning it once scores had died.

When they realized the absurdity of the mission, entire units refused
orders to go on patrols and conduct combat operations, refusing to
die and be maimed for a failed strategy in an imperialist war.

With casualties at the highest level yet, for both troops and
civilians, in a war that cannot be won, it is time to follow the
example of those heroic troops who refused their orders in Vietnam.

Army Recruiters Made Son Diet to Death

2011-03-27T16:27:00.001-07:00

Vermilion Mom:
Army Recruiters Made Son Diet to Death

http://www.fox8.com/news/wjw-vermilion-army-recruiters-diet-death-lt-txt,0,6784062.story

By Lorrie Taylor Fox 8 Reporter
March 25, 2011

VERMILION, Ohio
The U.S. Army is investigating whether recruiters from its Sandusky
recruiting station caused a Vermilion man to diet to death.

Lorain County Coroner Dr. Paul Matus ruled Glenni Wilsey, 20, died
due to acute cardiac dysrhythmia from an electrolyte imbalance
brought on by dieting.

"I'll be damned if this'll ever happen again," said Wilsey's mother,
Lora Bailey, who has vowed to fight for a change in the military's
policies and procedures when counseling young people on weight loss.

"I looked at him in that hospital and I knew exactly why he died,
nobody had to tell me," she told Fox 8.

Wilsey was determined to enlist in the Army's EOD (Explosive
Ordinance Disposal) Unit. Bailey claims he was told he needed to lose
70 pounds in a matter of months in order to go active duty.

"Glenn had never failed at anything, at anything, and he wasn't going
to fail at this," she said.

Bailey claims army recruiters pushed Wilsey to sweat weight off by
wearing a wet suit under two sweat suits while wrapped in a waist
band. She says they encouraged him to run for hours on 800 calories a
day. Purging, she says, was encouraged.

"It was the 'vomiting on 800 calories a day diet,'" Bailey said.

A senior picture of Wilsey in his high school football uniform shows
a healthy looking teenager about six feet tall weighing roughly 270 pounds.

Another picture taken in the third week of February shows a chiseled
young man with muscular arms. Bailey said Wilsey was told he still
hadn't met the army's standards for height and weight.

Less than two weeks later, Wilsey took another picture. His upper
body appeared emaciated, his skin clinging to his clavicle and
shoulder bones. Bailey says her son still had seven pounds to lose
when he took the picture.

Two days later he collapsed in their Vermilion home and died a short
while later. He had lost 85 pounds in 3 and a half months. Wilsey
weighed 197 pounds the day he died.

"I have to live with the fact that I allowed this to happen to my
son," said an emotional Bailey.

The 41-year-old mother of three says she intends to fight for changes
in the army's recruiting process so that no one else's son or
daughter will be put at risk by irresponsible advice like that which
she says was given to her boy.

The Chief of Public Affairs for the Army's Cleveland Recruiting
Battalion told Fox 8, "We are deeply saddened by the loss of Glenni
Wilsey. Our hearts, thoughts, and prayers go out to his family and
friends during this time of grief and pain. There is a pending
investigation regarding the death of Glenni Wilsey. We are confident
that all details pertaining to this unfortunate loss will be revealed
and appropriate actions will be taken based upon those findings."

According to his mother, Wilsey was an honor student who lettered in
football, practiced Buddhism, was an accomplished artist and an organ
donor. Bailey asks other military families with similar stories to
come forward so that together their voices will be heard and changes
will be made.

"They had no right to take his life, whether on purpose or not," said Bailey.

Speaking Out: US Military Sexual Violence and Trauma Against Women

2011-03-27T14:02:00.001-07:00

Speaking Out: US Military Sexual Violence and Trauma Against Women

towardfreedom.com | Mar 15th 2011 7:48 PM

Former US Marine Carri Leigh Goodwin was like many young Americans from Alliance, a small town in Ohio. She was self-reliant, teaching herself to play guitar at 15. She wanted more out of life than the limited opportunities offered in her home town.

So like many teenagers from the American heartland with limited career prospects, the 18-year-old joined the military, seeking to earn the military’s most sought after benefit, college tuition. She also confided to her family that enlisting would help her escape the traps that plagued her small, rural community; namely alcoholism and drug abuse.

Yet what she soon discovered, as many female U.S. soldiers have before her, is the unexpected cost of seeking military-sponsored tuition: being sexually assaulted or harassed by a fellow soldier.

Carri first revealed to her family that just before boot camp a recruiter had exposed himself to her. Then while stationed at Marines Corp Base Camp Pendleton near San Diego, she told them a fellow Marine raped her.

What happened after the alleged rape is in dispute, mainly because Marine investigators at Camp Pendleton offer little information about Carri’s time there to anyone, even her family, and never responded to written questions submitted by this reporter.

Her family, however, believes Carri alerted her chain of command about the alleged rape, pressed charges, and also sought medical attention.

But her commanding officers, Carri told her family, scoffed at the rape accusation and tried to intimidate her into silence. A complaint often heard by what advocates and victims refer to as Military Sexual Trauma, which also encompasses sexual harassment.

“She said they laughed at her at the military hospital,” says her father Gary Noling, a former Marine who is also from Alliance. “A sergeant major believed her, but she must have been overridden. But I will be heard, because I plan on going to the top of my roof and shouting it out to the entire world my daughter was raped in the military, and she’s not the only one.”

The Department of Defense’s own statistics bear out the problem of Military Sexual Trauma, also called MST. In 2008, 2,900 sexual assaults were reported across the armed forces. This was a nine-percent increase and a 26 percent increase in war zones from 2007. For 2009, there were 3,230 reports of sexual assault, an 11 percent increase across the armed forces from the previous year, with a 33 percent increase in war zones.

In February of 2009, the Marine Corps released Carri with an Other Than Honorable discharge, on the grounds she had a drinking problem, a personality disorder, and non-combat related post-traumatic stress disorder.

She immediately came home after the discharge, but within five days she was dead. Carri had binged on alcohol and her body was found in the back of a friend’s car outside a local Alliance bar. An autopsy revealed her blood alcohol was six times the legal limit, with the cause of death acute alcohol intoxication and hypothermia.

Therapist notes given to Carri’s family by the Marines following her death revealed Carri admitted she drank regularly as a teenager, but that the rape and its aftermath had brought her drinking habit to another level. To curb this, the military prescribed the drug Antabuse for Carri, which hinders the body from processing alcohol, but Noling said he was unaware of the diagnoses.

After his daughter’s death Noling also discovered a journal Carri had kept. In it she expressed mental anguish over the alleged rape and that the Marine Corps’ unsupportive response was unbearable. She also drew a picture of a hand with a slashed wrist with the date of the alleged rape written nearby.

“I don’t know why I’m blaming myself,” wrote Carri on a separate page. “I didn’t ask for this, and he can deny it all he wants. I know what happened.”

Noling contacted a Marine Corps prosecutor at Camp Pendleton asking if the alleged rapist had been held accountable.

“I asked about whether he had been court-martialed,” Noling said. “He was rude and even laughed once during our conversation.”

However, the prosecutor admitted Carri’s commanding officers – which are judge and jury when issuing criminal charges against enlisted soldiers that commit criminal offenses while on duty – had given the suspect Non-Judicial Punishment for the incident, and the sex probably was consensual. Non-Judicial Punishment is a disciplinary action for minor offenses with punishments ranging from confinement to quarters, diminished rations, extra duties and forfeiture of pay.

Victims of MST and their families are now mobilizing behind a federal lawsuit suing the DOD seeking to change how the military deals with sexual assault committed within its ranks. Washington D.C.-based attorney Susan Burke, who has previously taken on the military regarding torture at Abu Ghraib, filed the class-action suit on February 15th, with Noling and Carri named as Plantiffs, but in a separate wrongful-death suit.

Retired US Army Col. Ann Wright, a MST victim advocate, says the way Marines investigated and prosecuted Carri’s charge is typical of how the military handles alleged sexual assaults.

In 2007, she says, out of roughly 2,200 sexual assaults across the armed forces investigated, just 600 suspects were punished. Of these 600, a third was given Non-Judicial Punishment. Because a majority of predators go free or are essentially slapped on the wrist, she says, victims simply accept the rape and deal with it on their own and for the rest of their lives.

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office, after surveying 103 military sexual-assault victims, reported over half said they never bothered to report the crime because they felt nothing would come of it.

“This matter is a laughing stock among men in the military,” says Wright. “It’s a joke for the guys because they know they’ll never get prosecuted. The atmosphere in the military is you know you can get away with it.”

The DOD insists it is taking the issue of sexual assault seriously, establishing in 2005 the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), which leads the DOD’s effort to prevent sexual assault and set policy across the armed forces.

SAPRO soon established a 24-hour global hotline, given to all soldiers before being deployed overseas. In 2005, SAPRO began training 1,200 Sexual Assault Response Coordinators or SARCs, while the Army has 4,000 of its own SARCs mobilized or in training.

MST advocacy groups such as VETWOW (Veteran Women Organizing Women) claim not allowing a victim’s chain of command know of the rape is vital, considering the military’s culture of “re-victimizaton”. Responding to this issue, SAPRO initiated a new two-track sexual assault reporting policy called Restricted and Unrestricted reporting.

Restricted reporting allows the victim to by-pass their chain of command and permits a SARC to field the complaint. This will trigger healthcare and counseling for the victim, but cancels out any investigation.

SAPRO director Karen Whitley says since 2005 an estimated 3,500 soldiers have utilized Restricted reporting. She calls it “remarkable progress.”

“That’s 3,500 people we feel we’re helping who would never come forward if not for restricted reporting,” she says. “And that tells me it’s working.”

VETWOW director and US Army veteran Susan Avila-Smith and the 3,000 MST victims she represents see it another way: that’s 3,500 predators walking free.

“Restricted reporting? It’s a joke,” says Avila-Smith, who left the military after her Army husband stomped on her pregnant stomach killing their baby and threatened with being discharged by commanding officers for speaking out.

Restricted reporting also allows alleged rapists to still interact with their victim.

Carri filed an Unrestricted report because she alerted commanding officers. She also told her family she had to continue to work with the alleged rapist, which intensified her anxiety.

U.S. Army veteran Olga Ferrer, director of A Black Rose, a nonprofit MST advocacy group, says Carri’s story may inspire serious change. For instance, the military allows civilian elements to field sexual assault allegations.

“Every military site — overseas or in the U.S. — should have a unit or group, that includes doctors, nurses, therapists, that investigates sexual assaults and does not fall under the DOD or military,” she said.

She said restricted reporting makes her anger boil.

“The alleged rapist should immediately be removed from the victim’s unit, and the victim should also be placed somewhere else. They should not be working together – period. The only one being restricted is the victim.”

John Lasker is a freelance journalist from Columbus, Ohio. This story was partially funded by Spot.us, a crowd funding site for independent journalists.

Links for More Information and Resources

Military Rape Crisis Center

Veteran Women Organizing Women

A Black Rose Advocacy Group

In Memory of Carri Leigh Goodwin Facebook Website

Memorial Video for Carri

Original Page: http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/2320-militaryviolenceagainstwomen

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Puppet Masters

2011-03-27T13:59:00.001-07:00

Puppet Masters

sott.net | Mar 16th 2011 12:11 AM

Reagan's "morning in America" created "Red Dawn," and a Pentagon-fueled pop culture that trained the masses

Let's be completely clear: I did not consciously know I was a devout militarist in 1988 at the young, impressionable age of 12. When I ordered my G.I. Joe Snowcat tank to indiscriminately fire one of its six missiles at the Cobra soldiers who so often held my LEGO city hostage, I didn't think that if this were real, it would probably leave a smoldering pile of blood and limbs and innocent victims. All I thought was: Awesome!

When I rented Hollywood's first PG-13 rated production, 1984's Red Dawn, and I saw the teen heartthrobs protect America by racking up execution after execution, I didn't know the movie would also become the Guinness world-record holder for violent acts depicted per minute in a film. All I did was cheer.

And when I played Contra on my Nintendo NES, I wasn't questioning the premise of a game named after violent terrorist death squads in Nicaragua that were being funded by the Reagan administration's illegal CIA cash transfers from Iran. I was just punching in up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A, then happily mowing down anything and everything that moved.

"Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable," writes public relations expert Nancy Snow. "In an open society, such as the United States, the hidden and integrated nature of the propaganda best convinces people they are not being manipulated."

Exactly, and neither I nor my parents were supposed to think much about what the 1980s were teaching me and every other kid in our basements-turned-bunkers. But for a generation that grew up on Reading Rainbow, Memory, and Speak and Spell's "E.T." Fantasy Module (geranium has only one r!), games and entertainment were teaching tools, and the militarization of childhood that started in the 1980s made the little green men, cap guns, and Boy Scout retreats of old-time Americana look positively pacifist. With the Pentagon shaping movie screenplays, investing in video games, cooperating with toy marketers, and eventually working with baseball-card companies to publish Desert Storm trading cards, 1985's classic sci-fi novel Ender's Game seemed more prophecy than fantasy.

Reaganism abetted this dawn of the "the military-entertainment complex," as Wired magazine called it. The administration's hawkishess provided the political rationale for parental complicity, and the White House's deregulatory agenda helped television become the most influential -- and most invasive -- marketer of kids products, more and more of which were violent and military-themed.

Now, the investment is paying off, just in time for the current era's obsession with permanent war. Today's soldiers, for example, frequently reference their childhood devotion to G.I. Joe cartoons and action figures of the 1980s when explaining their decision to enlist. (An October 2008 article in The Believer found that "a national newspaper search for G.I. Joe references turned up 35 obituaries for soldiers killed in Iraq since the war began, in 2003. In each article, family members reminisced how the men had loved to play with the toy soldiers.") Similarly, during the Iraq invasion military brass named the search for Saddam Hussein Operation Red Dawn because officers said the John Milius film "was a patriotic, pro-American movie [that] all of us in the military have seen."

Considering this, do you truly think it was mere coincidence that George W. Bush's aides exquisitely re-created the final aircraft-carrier scene from "Top Gun" to commemorate their boss's declaration of Iraq victory? Or that Bush's "bring it on" taunt had nothing to do with an attempt to access fond memories of Milius one-liners from the 1980s? And can you really argue that it's just happenstance that the Pentagon today airs recruitment ads in movie theaters, ads that portray soldiers as bulletproof RoboCops and war as the bloodless arcade game from The Last Starfighter?

White House strategists and Pentagon propagandists use information and imagery as strategic weapons, and they are well aware that the most valuable of those weapons is cheery childhood nostalgia. They also know that in a country where almost half the population was born after 1979, some of the most compelling of those youthful memories come from the schlock that was originally stockpiled in the 1980s basement.

And a lot of it plays into the ideological agenda of the Pentagon. "Young men of recruiting age cited movies and television as their primary source of their impressions about the military, so [movies and television] are very important [to the Pentagon]," an army spokeswoman told PBS, citing the Defense Department's extensive surveys of youth attitudes. "It's an opportunity for [kids] to see what the possibilities are and to see what being a soldier would be like."

Red Dawn is a classic invasion flick, but with a deliberate twist for recruitment-age teens. It tells the story of youngsters from the fictional town of Calumet, Colorado, who call themselves the Wolverines and who go rogue by mounting a preposterous guerrilla resistance against a massive Soviet assault on the American homeland. To further sex up the adolescent appeal, Red Dawn cast '80s teen heartthrobs such as Thompson, Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell and, yes, Charlie Sheen, in the lead roles.

The film starts out with the bedrock provisos of militarist paranoia, including key pillars of eighties Vietnam-related revision:

-- Anti-gun-control extremism: One of the film's first scenes shows a Soviet thug pulling a gun from an American corpse as the camera pans across a pickup truck bearing an NRA bumper sticker that reads, "They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers." Later, the Soviets are able to hunt down American resisters through the secret master list of gun owners that the U.S. government allegedly keeps (one of the longtime conspiracy theories among gun enthusiasts).

-- Retaliation/revenge on countries that defeat the United States: One of the kids' fathers is shown in a concentration-camp cage, yelling to his son to "Avenge me!" by killing as many enemies as possible. His scream could be the name of every back-to-Vietnam flick from the 1980s.

-- Backstabbing politicians: The film shows Calumet's mayor as a cowardly and conniving Soviet collaborator who does nothing while his constituents are rounded up and murdered. Additionally, the mayor's son (also student body president at Calumet High School) presses the Wolverines to surrender and later betrays them. Taken together, Red Dawn argues that politicians are all weak-kneed, corrupt, and traitorous.

-- United States as embattled underdog: In the same way adult politics, media, and entertainment in the eighties tried to recast the U.S. military as a yellow-ribbon-worthy under- dog helping supposed "freedom fighters" in Latin America, rescuing POWs from Vietcong, and liberating Kuwait from the supposed Iraq behemoth, Red Dawn's Wolverines are positioned as outgunned insurgents scratching their way to victory against the Russian colossus. "The message of 'Red Dawn,'" its director, Milius, said, "is to liberate the oppressed" -- the "oppressed" somehow being America, the most militarily dominant nation in human history.

Soon after fleeing to the woods for some good old-fashioned Unabomber-like survivalism (including drinking deer blood as a male-bonding exercise), the Wolverines come upon a fallen U.S. pilot who articulates a few more paranoias of eighties militarism:

-- Stealth terrorists are already among us: "The first wave of the (Soviet) attack came in disguise as commercial charter flights," says the pilot in an eerily prescient vision of a 9/11- like onslaught.

-- The need for a militarized southern border: "Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico, Cubans mostly," he continues.

-- Weak-kneed western allies justify the United States spending more on the military than all other nations combined: When the kids ask if Europe is going to help stop the Soviet invasion, the pilot says that Europe is "sittin' this one out -- all except England, and they won't last very long."

Recall that four years before this film was released, Ronald Reagan had given voice to many of these theories, saying "the Soviets and their friends are advancing" and chastising the Carter administration for "failing to see any threatening pattern." It was propaganda in its most literal form.

In 1997, after reports that Red Dawn was one of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's favorite films, MGM/United Artists vice president Peter Bart revealed to Variety that when his company first considered the movie's script, the studio's CEO "declared in no uncertain terms that he wanted to make the ultimate jingoistic movie." The studio subsequently recruited Reagan's recently departed secretary of state, retired general Alexander Haig, to serve on MGM's corporate board, "consult with ['Red Dawn's'] director and inculcate the appropriate ideological tint." Though the screenplay's first draft strived to lament the tragedies of war, Bart recounted how the studio "demanded to know why [it] should try to remake Lord of the Flies when it could instead try for Rambo."

Of course, the military had been working with Hollywood filmmakers since 1927, when it helped produce Wings, the winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Picture. Pentagon involvement varied through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but it always had kids in its sights. In the 1950s, for example, the military worked with Lassie on shows that highlighted new military technology and produced "Mouse Reels" for The Mickey Mouse Club, one of which showed kids touring the first nuclear submarine. As investigative journalist David Robb discovered, a Pentagon memo noted at the time that child-focused media "is an excellent opportunity to introduce a whole new generation to the nuclear Navy."

The 1970s saw far fewer Pentagon-backed war films for a public that was fatigued from Vietnam and its aftermath on the evening news. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, as Reaganite militarism began ascending, the 1980s saw "a steady growth in the demand for access to military facilities and in the number of films, TV shows and home videos made about the military."

For that access, the military began exacting a price. The Pentagon's focus on juveniles created the heavy hand it was beginning to use to shape popular culture in the 1980s. Increasingly, for filmmakers to gain access to even the most basic military scenery, Pentagon gatekeepers began requiring major plot and dialogue changes so as to guarantee that the military was favorably portrayed. In a Variety story from 1994, the Pentagon's official Hollywood liaison, Phil Strub, put it bluntly: "The main criteria we use [for approval] is ... how could the proposed production benefit the military ... could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?"

According to Strub, Pentagon-Hollywood collusion hit "a milestone" with 1986's Top Gun, a triumphalist teen recruitment ad about the navy's "best of the best," who, of course, never even think to ask the most basic of the basic questions. The movie's glaringly incurious characters and story were no accident. The script was shaped by Pentagon brass in exchange for full access to all sorts of hardware -- the access itself a priceless taxpayer subsidy. According to Maclean's, Paramount Pictures paid just "$1.1 million for the use of warplanes and an aircraft carrier," far less than it would have cost the studio had it been compelled to finance the eye candy itself.

As if that carrot-stick dynamic weren't coercive enough to aspiring filmmakers, the Pentagon in the 1980s expanded the definition of "cooperation" to include collaboration on screenplays as scripts were being initially drafted. "It saves [writers] time from writing stupid stuff," said one official in explaining the new process.

Such a cavalier attitude coupled with the box-office success of the Pentagon-approved Top Gun convinced studios in the 1980s that agreeing to military demands and, hence, making ever more militaristic films was a guaranteed formula for success. Consequently, between the release of Top Gun and the beginning of the Gulf War, the Pentagon reported that the number of pictures made with its official assistance (and approval) quadrupled, and a large portion of these action-adventure productions (quickly synergized into video games, action figures, etc.) were for teenagers.

The short-term impact of the military-entertainment complex was enlistment surges correlating to specific eighties box-office hits. As just one (albeit huge) example, recruitment spiked 400 percent when Top Gun was released, leading the navy to set up recruitment tables at theaters upon realizing the movie's effect. Medium term, of course, is the Red Dawn effect. Contemporary missions are named after the film (and various other militarist fantasies from the eighties), tapping into the hardwired psyches of the "Wolverines who have grown up and gone to Iraq," as Milius recently called the eighties generation.

Then there are the standards that were set for the long haul. Today, the Pentagon offers Hollywood just as much enticement for militarism, and just as much punishment against antimilitarism, as ever. On top of the eighties militarism that is now endlessly recycled in the cable rerun-o-sphere, it's a safe bet that whichever Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay blockbuster is being fawned over by teen audiences is at least partially underwritten by the Pentagon, and as a condition of that support, these blockbusters typically agree to deliberately reiterate the morality of the military and war.

By contrast, as the director of The Hunt for Red October recounted, this new reality prompted studios in the eighties to start telling screenwriters and directors to "get the cooperation of the [military], or forget about making the picture." What greater control could the Pentagon ever have hoped for?

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose upcoming book "Back to Our Future" will be released in March 2011. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota

Original Page: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/225909-How-the-80s-programmed-us-for-war

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Veterans for Peace calls LZ Lambeau a recruiting event

2011-03-27T13:35:00.001-07:00

Veterans for Peace calls LZ Lambeau a recruiting event

by Scott Williams, greenbaypressgazette.com
March 15th 2011

Anti-war activists are criticizing the LZ Lambeau event and planning a counter program in Green Bay this weekend.

A group called Veterans for Peace is conducting a series of workshops and discussions about military recruiting, combat stress and ongoing international conflicts.

Members of the group say that LZ Lambeau started out as a worthwhile tribute to Vietnam veterans, but has become a pro-war exhibition aimed at getting kids into the military.

"There will be no peace presence," critic Buzz Davis said. "The whole thing's been hijacked."

LZ Lambeau director Don Jones said he welcomes Veterans for Peace participation this weekend. There will be space at Lambeau Field for all veterans groups to distribute their literature, he said.

Jones, however, denied that the tribute and belated welcome home for Vietnam veterans has strayed from its original purpose. No military recruiters will be permitted on site, he said, and the focus will remain on honoring Vietnam-era veterans.

"It doesn't have anything to do with promoting war or anything else," he said.

The three-day event, which officially starts on Friday, is expected to draw tens of thousands of veterans for exhibits, memorials and ceremonies.

Veterans for Peace is presenting a documentary Friday afternoon at the Brown County Library, 515 Pine St., Green Bay, and other events Friday and Saturday at the Green Bay Labor Temple, 1570 Elizabeth St.

The counter programming is being billed, "Operation Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, Wage Peace not War."

Tony Vanderbloemen, president of the Greater Green Bay Labor Council, said he is a member of Veterans for Peace, but does not endorse their weekend activities and has no plans to participate. He said his council only agreed to lease space to the group.

"Personally, I'd rather forget the war," said Vanderbloemen, who served in the Navy during Vietnam.

Davis, a Stoughton resident who served in the Army, said his group has no plans to demonstrate at Lambeau Field, although he said some members might attend LZ Lambeau events.

The group has dropped plans to display 5,000 mock tombstones near Lambeau Field to symbolize the number of U.S. lives lost in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ronna Swift of Appleton, coordinator of the Fox Valley Peace Coalition, said her group likely will be represented by a carload of people who will travel to Green Bay.

Swift said she objected to LZ Lambeau organizers making "almost a party" out of what she said should be a somber occasion. She said she was pleased that Veterans for Peace were presenting the anti-war perspective.

"I don't see it as a protest at all," she said. "I see it as a healthy alternative for people."

Original Page: http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20100520/GPG0101/5200588/Veterans-Peace-calls-LZ-Lambeau-recruiting-event?odyssey=nav%7Chead

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Pocatello Navy Recruiter Told To Remove Facebook Posts

2011-03-20T19:37:00.001-07:00

Pocatello Navy Recruiter Told To Remove Facebook Posts

by Genevieve Judge, localnews8.com
March 1st 2011 POCATELLO, Idaho -- The U.S. Navy said they're calling Facebook posts a local recruiter put on the website regarding Monday's student walkouts inappropriate.The Navy said while recruiters are trained to use social media to recruit, the context of his post is wrong. Students in American Falls are on the fence and said Monday wasn't about being absent from class while others say it's an abuse of power by a recruiter.On Monday hundreds of Idaho students statewide walked out of class in protest of Tom Luna’s education reform. Some students were excused while others not. Navy Petty Officer Aaron Cavin posted this on Facebook: “Talking with a recruiter is also an excused absence. If your parents won't give you a note, just hit one of us up,” said Cavin."None of the students responded to it, none of us took it. Most of us on the page understand civil disobedience and we know exactly the rules behind it and none of us were going to accept it,” said Madai Montes, senior at American Falls High School."I think he was taking advantage of his position and ability to excuse absences for students,” said “Joe,” a senior at American Falls High School.Both students for and against Luna’s plan were aware of the officer's post after it was posted several other times on other Facebook pages.The Navy issued a statement:"Our recruiters are trained to use social media to proactively communicate with future Sailors and others who may be interested in serving in the Navy. After reviewing the recruiter's comment on the future Sailor's Facebook posts, our local Recruiter in Charge determined that it was not appropriate. The recruiter was asked to remove the posts and he did so,” said Dan Puleio, NRD Denver Public Affairs."I can assure you the Navy take these matters very seriously, however, the disposition of Petty Officer Cavin is an internal Navy matter,” said Dan Puleio, NRD Denver Public Affairs."This is what really starts to get people angry at recruiters. When actions like this come out, it makes everyone look bad. In reality, I think 99.99% of military recruiters are actually very legit,” said “Joe.”"I don't know what he was thinking or what he was doing. I just know that he posted on my page and that he was supporting us,” said Montes.According to IdahoReporter.com, the student attendance office at American Falls High School said no students took advantage of Cavin's offer. Even if they would have, all excused absent notes from recruiters must be cleared through the central office.In another post on Facebook, Cavin hinted that the Pocatello branch of the Navy supported the walk out. He posted "the watery wing of the federal government (Pocatello branch) sides with the students of our nation.” That post has also been removed.

Original Page: http://www.localnews8.com/news/27047432/detail.html

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Iraq, Afghanistan veterans struggle to find jobs

2011-03-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

Iraq, Afghanistan veterans struggle to find jobs

wcax.com | Mar 11th 2011 2:07 AM By KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - After almost two years in New York looking for work in law enforcement, Iraq veteran Christopher Kurz just moved back in with his parents in Arizona. His military police work in Iraq and aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier didn't seem to translate into a job.

"The employers out there, they are military-friendly and veteran-friendly, and they love us and thank us and everything, but when you go apply for a job, it's almost like they are scared to take a risk for you. I don't get it. It doesn't make sense," said Kurz, a 28-year-old Navy reservist.

The Labor Department is expected to release new unemployment numbers Friday for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans ages 18-24. More than one-fifth, 21.1 percent, were reported unemployed in 2009, and veterans' advocates say the number is expected to be just as high for 2010.

Concerns that Guard and Reserve troops will be gone for long stretches and that veterans might have mental health issues or lack civilian work skills appear to be factors keeping many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans out of work.

The problem has persisted despite government and private initiatives designed to help them. Advocates say more of a concentrated effort to have licensing and skills obtained in the military translate into the civilian workplace and more public awareness about what veterans offer employers are needed to tackle the problem.

Sen. Patty Murray, chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, said veterans have told her they take their military experience off their resumes because they fear a potential employer will decide they're at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder and not hire them.

"They take four or eight years of experience and throw it out the door and pretend it doesn't even exist," said Murray, a Washington Democrat. "That to me is a huge consequence to them, professionally."

One of the largest government efforts is the Post-9/11 GI Bill administered by the Veterans Affairs Department, which by the end of last year had paid out nearly $7.2 billion in tuition, housing and stipends for more than 425,000 veterans or their eligible family members.

Kurz said that without the new GI Bill he probably would have been homeless or moving back in with his parents in Mesa, Ariz., much sooner. He recently transferred from the City College of New York to Ottawa University in Arizona so he can finish his bachelor's degree.

As he's looked for a job with police departments and federal agencies such as Homeland Security, he said his years as a military police officer haven't seemed to count when pitted against someone with a degree in criminal justice - even if the college grad didn't have previous law enforcement experience.

"I don't understand why they don't want to hire a veteran who's got on-the-job experience, because a college student who has got a criminal justice degree_that might be great, don't get me wrong_he's smart, but he's not street smart," Kurz said. "You can't teach people the stuff you learn in the street in school."

Staff Sgt. Meghan Meade, 27, of East Moriches, N.Y., said her lack of a bachelor's degree also seems to have kept her from getting a full-time job, even doing administrative work. A member of the New York Air National Guard, she said she's spent five years on active duty and did a tour in Iraq. When she brings up her military experience, she said she gets a lot of questions about when she will deploy again. She has an associate's degree, but she's reluctant to go back to school because she's not sure exactly what to study. She's waiting tables and doing temporary clerical work.

Meade said she hears questions at job interviews like, "'Do you have to deploy again? Well, how often do you deploy? And well, how much notice would you have?' It just starts a long stream of questions. I don't think they hold it against you that you have deployed, in the past, but they definitely inquire more about your future with the company, and I think they are more hesitant to hire you."

Tim Embree, a legislative associate with the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said some certifications in the military such as for pilots and nurses easily translate into a job down the road. Other jobs - ranging from military barbers to mechanics - vary by how years of experience are counted. Each state also has its own licensing requirements.

As a start, he said his organization is pushing for a robust study looking at every job in the military and how it translates into the civilian and academic world, as well as each state's licensing requirements pertaining to military experience. He said he's hopeful a private organization will step forward to do such a report.

"We're dealing with a situation right now where you have veterans, service members taking off their uniform that have amazing skill sets, and you also have a lot of employers out there that want to hire folks like this, but something is being lost in the translation."

Murray said transferring military experiences into the private sector is one issue her committee will look at as it addresses veterans' unemployment. She said she'd also like to see the military make mandatory for everyone leaving the military its Transition Assistance Program, which provides resume help and other job-related guidance to those leaving the military.

_____

Online:

Transition Assistance Program: http://www.turbotap.org/

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America: http://www.iava.org/

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Original Page: http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=14231309&config=H264

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Amputations and genital injuries increase sharply among soldiers in Afghani

2011-03-19T09:59:00.001-07:00

Amputations and genital injuries increase sharply among soldiers in Afghanistan

by David Brown, washingtonpost.com
March 4th 2011

Twice as many U.S. soldiers wounded in battle last year required limb amputations than in either of the two previous years. Three times as many lost more than one limb, and nearly three times as many suffered severe wounds to their genitals. In most cases, the limbs are severed in the field when a soldier steps on a buried mine.

The increase in both rate and number of such wounds is most likely a result of the troop surge in Afghanistan that began last spring, combined with a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes foot patrols in villages and on farm compounds. It was noticed by military surgeons in Afghanistan last fall and quantified in late December by a team of surgeons at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where virtually every evacuated soldier stops en route to the United States.

"I've seen these types of injuries before. What I haven't seen is them coming in over and over and over again," said John B. Holcomb, a trauma surgeon at the University of Texas at Houston and retired Army colonel who helped identify the trend.

The report prepared by Holcomb and two surgeons at Landstuhl has circulated at the highest levels of civilian and military command in the past two months. An abbreviated version was provided to The Washington Post with Pentagon permission.

It shows that from 2009 to 2010, the proportion of war casualties arriving at Landstuhl who had had a limb amputated rose to 11 percent from 7 percent - a 60 percent increase. The fraction suffering genitourinary (GU) injuries increased to 9.1 percent from 4.8 percent - a 90 percent increase.

The actual number of patients with the injuries increased even more drastically.

In 2009, 75 soldiers underwent amputation and 21 lost more than one limb. In 2010, 171 soldiers had amputations and 65 lost more than one limb. GU injuries increased from 52 to 142 over the same period.

Month-by-month totals were not provided, but numerous people who have seen the full report say that multiple-limb amputations rose especially steeply starting in September. Lt. Col. Paul Pasquina, a physician who heads the amputee program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, recently confirmed that those injuries had "gone up a lot." Also on the increase are patients requiring "hip disarticulation" - the removal of the entire thigh bone, which makes fitting and using a prosthesis more difficult.

Injuries to the genitals

Of the 142 soldiers with genitourinary wounds who arrived at Landstuhl last year, 40 percent - 58 men in all - suffered injury to the testicles. Of that group, 47 had injury to one testicle, and 21 men lost a testicle. Eleven soldiers had injuries to both testicles, and eight lost both testicles.

Body armor, which has greatly reduced fatalities, usually includes a triangular flap that protects the groin from projectiles coming from the front. It does not protect the area between the legs from an upward blast. Various laboratories are reportedly working on shielding that would provide such protection.

Although the U.S. Army Medical Command released the data on genital injuries, military officials are reluctant to discuss these wounds further.

Original Page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030403258.html?sid=ST2011030504659

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Military recruiters visit MHS

2011-03-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

The MHS Mirror

by Jessica Burke, my.hsj.org
March 11th 2011 Walking through the cafeteria of Mattoon High School, one might pass a table adorned with information regarding a certain branch of the military with recruiters standing ready behind it. A man or woman may pass through the halls of MHS in full military attire, headed straight for the JROTC rooms, ready to tell his or her story of how the military does business, and how the students can be a part of the experience too.
The 2010-2011 school years has shown an unprecedented amount of recruiters passing through the JROTC classrooms and even the PE classes.
“The amount of recruiting last year to this year has quadrupled I would say” said senior, Blake Fryman.
The Marines, Navy, Air Force, Army and National Guard recruiters have all visited the JROTC classes with the Army Rangers visiting the PE classes.
“The primary age group that we’re looking for is 17-24 years old,” said Sgt.1st Class Steve Fehrenbacher of the National Guard. “We target high schools like colleges do… that’s the point where students begin making future plans.”
Just because the number of recruiters has increased does not mean that the military is understaffed; in all actuality, they are overstaffed Fehrenbacher mentioned. However, they don’t accept any average Joe who passes through.
“In the past six to seven years, the standards to get in have gotten higher than ever before. You have to be physically fit; pass the ASVAB test, in which passing is now scoring a 50 out of 99 when in the past passing was 31; pass the background check; pass the medical exam; and be an A-B student,” Fehrenbacher said.
With so many recruiters coming in to vouch for their branch, one would assume there would be a high amount of students who enter the military after high school. The evidence at MHS, however, shows just the opposite.
“About five percent [of the JROTC students] join the military right after high school. Ninety-three to ninety-five go to straight to college,” said MHS JROTC instructor Sgt. Stokes. “Last year, we had 18 seniors go straight to the military, 16 went to college and two went to the National Guard.”
Why then, does the JROTC program have so many recruiters come if not even half are going straight to the military?
“My main goal is for them to graduate college before joining any military branch. I teach them to be better citizens and to have leadership skills,” said Stokes. “If a student shows interest in a certain branch, then I can call in a recruiter.”
Enough interest has been shown to sway the decisions of at least four seniors already. Senior Blake Fryman was accepted to one of the most prestigious military schools, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. Seniors, Christopher Landrus, Basil Beadles, and Hannah Bell have already sworn into the Marines, National Guard, and US Army Reserves respectively.
“My family played a big part in my decision to join” said Bell.
Although nervous, Bell remains optimistic, seeing this choice as an asset to her future.
“[By joining,] I hope to get good connections with the government. I want to do foreign language in international relations as a career,” said Bell.
The military is now offering opportunities for students to further their future goals in ways they couldn’t in the past.
Students considering joining any branch of the military should invest in researching and talking directly with a recruiter. Recruiters will be able to offer more information, answer direct questions, and quell any fears that students may have.

Original Page: http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/articleid/422339/newspaperid/3104/Military_recruiters_visit_MHS.aspx

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Females from Southern West Virginia Aren=?UTF-8?B?4oCZdCBFbmxpc3Rp?=ng

2011-03-19T09:52:00.001-07:00

Females from Southern West Virginia Aren’t Enlisting

wvnstv.com | Mar 9th 2011 “We haven't had a female Marine come out of Southern West Virginia in a few years,” said Staff Sergeant Edward Guevara.

Recruiters aren’t sure why those females aren’t enlisting, but they said it’s vital to get more females from the area into the Marine Corp.

More opportunities are opening up to women in the fleet everything from linguistics to intelligence. "Women are still restricted in the combat arms, but military specialists have opened up and combat engineer…Females can do anything the males can do,” said Melanie Salinas Second Lieutenant in the Marines.

Kristen Keichline is a recruit in the Marines and said there is a standard the females have to be held up, “There is only one female battalion. It’s kind of hard, but it’s not a problem we have to live up to our names.”

Drill instructors like Francisca Rodriguez say they're looking for mental toughness from the females, “We might expect them to do a little more and work a little harder, but we all train the same.”

Even though maybe the training is the same, something is different when it comes to fighting the wars in the Middle East women are being used in Special Forces.

"Because of the cultural aspect these marines are able to talk to the females in the country its really grown great strides. Without these female marines we could have had the progress we are making in these countries,” said Guevara.

Parris Island is the only place where females can go to become a United States Marine.

Original Page: http://www.wvnstv.com/story.cfm?func=viewstory&storyid=95654

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Panel Recommends Ways to Improve Military Diversity

2011-03-18T13:24:00.003-07:00

Panel Recommends Ways to Improve Military Diversity

by Lisa DanielAmerican Forces, defense.gov

WASHINGTON, March 8, 2011 – A commission created to improve diversity among military leaders has issued 20 recommendations its members say will make the military better reflect the composition of the United States in its ranks.

The Military Leadership Diversity Commission, created as part of the 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, issued the findings yesterday of its 18-month research with recommendations for how the Defense Department can improve the promotion of women and minorities at a time when the nation is expected to become increasingly diverse.

“The armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as demographically diverse as the nation they serve,” the report says.

The disparity between the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities in the military and their leaders “will become starkly obvious without the successful recruitment, promotion, and retention of racial/ethnic minorities among the enlisted force,” the report says. “Without sustained attention, this problem will only become more acute as the … makeup of the United States continues to change.”

The commission’s chairman, retired Air Force Gen. Lester L. Lyles, told American Forces Press Service that while the military is free of the institutional biases of decades past, it retains the appearance of bias because so few women and minorities occupy senior positions.

“There are no institutional biases in the United States military today, … and probably have not been for many, many years,” Lyles said. “But there are some people who think there are, because when you look statistically at the demographics in the United States, and you look at the demographics in the military, then you look at the senior leadership positions, both in officer and senior enlisted ranks, to some it may give the appearance that there are biases that prevented women and minorities from achieving those senior ranks.”

The commission found four reasons for low representation of women and minorities in senior military positions:

-- Low representation of women and minorities in initial officer accessions;

-- Lower representation of women and minority officers in career fields associated with higher officer rank;

-- Lower retention of midlevel female service members; and

-- Lower rates of advancement among female and minority officers.

“Our recommendations were to ensure we remove any potential barriers that exist today; that we make recommendations that enhance the culture, career progression and recruiting [of women and minorities]; and that we grow the pool of eligible candidates,” Lyles said.

The commission recommends that the services consider commitment to diversity in officer promotions and require diversity leadership education and training at all levels.

To further promote diversity, the services must increase their pool of eligible recruits and officer candidates, the report says. Pentagon statistics show that three out of four Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are not eligible to enlist because of low education or test scores, past criminal history, or because they can’t meet health and fitness requirements.

“This is a national security issue requiring the attention and collected effort of top public officials,” the commission’s report says.

The commission also recommended a new, broader definition of “diversity” that would add backgrounds and skills largely missing from today’s military, such as recruiting people from more varied regions and cultural backgrounds and with foreign-language skills and higher math, science and technological abilities.

“Diversity is all the different characteristics and attributes of individuals that are consistent with Department of Defense core values, integral to overall readiness and mission accomplishment, and reflective of the nation we serve,” the report says.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr., the commission’s vice chair, said the military’s needs in recruiting and retaining the right people must start much earlier than at the end of high school.

“Unless we start at the pre-kindergarten level, we’re never going to increase how many kids are graduating and going to college,” said Becton, a former college president and superintendent of Washington, D.C., public schools. Issues such as full-day kindergarten, summer school, and lengthening the hours American children spend in school all have an impact on the military, he said.

Such steps are important, Becton said, to ensure that potential recruits can meet military standards. Nothing the commission has recommended calls for lowering standards, he added.

“There are no efforts whatsoever to decrease standards,” he said. “The standards are proven, and we want people to come up to the standards.”

The commission also recommended that the Pentagon lift its ban on assigning women to ground combat units below the brigade level, citing the policy as a barrier to women attaining the military’s most-senior ranks.

Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said Defense Department officials will evaluate the panel’s recommendations as part of an ongoing review of diversity policies.

Original Page: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=63065

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Report: U.S. Military Leadership Lacks Diversity at Top

2011-03-18T13:24:00.001-07:00

Report: U.S. Military Leadership Lacks Diversity at Top

by Daniel Sagalyn, pbs.org
March 11th 2011 3:11 PM

For decades, the U.S. military has worked to create a force that mirrors the racial and ethnic diversity of the American population. Now, a congressionally charted commission has reported that while the Pentagon has achieved that goal in the lower ranks, the story is much different the higher you go up the officer ladder.

According to the report, "the demographic composition of the officer corps is far from representative of the American population and ... officers are much less demographically diverse than the enlisted troops they lead." The Military Leadership Diversity Commission also found that "with some exceptions, racial and ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among senor noncommissioned officers". (Read the full report.)

The report says that while non-Hispanic whites make up 66 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise 77 percent of active duty officers. Similarly, blacks account for 12 percent of the U.S population, but represent just 8 percent of active duty officers. When it comes to Hispanic Americans, which make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, they number only 5 percent of the officer corps.

Click on the graph for a larger version.

At the general-officer rank -- or so-called flag-officers in the Navy -- the level of military diversity diminishes considerably. As of 2009, the Army was the most diverse service, with minorities making up roughly 10 percent of its generals. In the other services, the minority general- or flag-officer population was 9 percent in the Marine Corps, 6 percent in the Navy and 5 percent in the Air Force.

Click on the graph for a larger version.

Gender diversity among U.S. military officers also diverges from levels seen in the nation's population. Fifty-one percent of Americans are women, but they account for 16 percent of uniformed officers.

At the general-officer rank, the commission found very few females: only 4 percent of the Army's generals, 3 percent of the Marine Corps' generals, 7 percent of the Navy's admirals, and 9 percent of the Air Force's generals.

Click on the graph for a larger version.

Reasons behind the disparities

The report cited two main reasons for the shortage of women at top levels: the exclusion of women in combat arms -- often a source of promotion -- and a higher turnover rate than their male counterparts.

The commission recommended eliminating laws and policies that exclude women from serving in military jobs such as infantry, armor and special operations.

The commission also played down an often cited argument that gender integration could harm combat effectiveness.

"There is little evidence that the integration of women into previously closed units or occupations has had a negative effect on important mission-related performance factors, such as unit cohesion," the commission said. "The blanket restriction for women limits the ability of commanders in theater to pick the most capable person for the job."

But women are less likely to remain in service as long as men, saying when surveyed that "the high frequency of deployments and the desire to settle in one location were both listed as primary motivations for separating" from the military. In general, women were less likely than men to see the military as a career, affecting their chances at promotion.

A barrier to minorities becoming high-ranking officers was a desire to move into the civilian world. According to the report, research found that many minorities enlist in the military because they seek knowledge and training to help them in the outside job market, and therefore choose jobs in transportation, food services, military police and finance. Opportunities for promotion to general-officer rank in these fields are much more limited than those in combat arms, the commission stated.

In addition, some minorities in the military interviewed by the commission "commented that Army Green Berets and Rangers were believed by many to be white organizations with racist attitudes," so they shunned those services, according to the report.

The commission also found that promotion rates from major to colonel for several minorities were lower than the average. But the promotion board process "appeared to be designed to be institutionally fair and to mitigate the effects of bias on the part of any individual board member," the commission said, so it was hard to pinpoint specific causes.

In addition, the commission pointed out simply that lower levels of minorities and women enlist in the military compared to their numbers in the general population.

Recommendations

The commission offered 20 recommendations for improving the diversity of the military's leadership, ranging from more training in diversity dynamics and practices, to improving the recruitment of minorities and women among the pool of qualified candidates to enlist, to establishing a "chief diversity officer" who reports directly to the Defense secretary. It also recommended the secretary conduct "accountability reviews" and meetings with top brass to encourage diversity.

More transparency in the promotion system, so that service members would better understand performance expectations and promotion criteria, also would help, the commission said.

The commission's members included 30 men and women, most of whom had military careers. It was led by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles and retired Army Lt. Gen. Julius Becton.

Original Page: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/03/military-report.html

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Before Call of Duty we were killing at recess

2011-03-18T13:05:00.001-07:00

Before Call of Duty we were killing at recess

by Jerrad Peters, winnipegfreepress.com
March 5th 2011 1:00 AM

Every now and then, after school shootings and other repulsive crimes, someone makes the inevitable tie-in between the violence of the act and the evil inspiration that probably caused it: video games.

They certainly make a case. The scenes and assignments in games such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto are so brutal, so full of carnage, that it's hard not to equate the real-world evil with its virtual-world equivalent. It seems an automatic comparison.

But that doesn't make it accurate. In fact, it's a downright lazy argument.

That video games are time and again singled out as a social danger in the wake of every violent crime says more about our knee-jerk, reactionary response to such outrages -- and our inability to either predict or prevent them -- than our understanding both of games and the way in which they impact real life.

If you think violent play was introduced with the Playstation, you're in need of a wakeup call. Hurting, killing and war have been the playthings of children for as long as their adult role models have participated in those very things. In other words, since the beginning of time.

I, like many of you, grew up before the press of a control-pad button could fire a gun and kill a person on a screen. But I did, in my imagination, kill more people than I would care to count. I killed them on the playground at recess with my classmates; I killed them in my backyard tree fort. My young friends and I would separate into groups and kill each other in games of war. I defy most men my age to claim they didn't do the same.

Was there shame in it? Absolutely not! Was there a lesson? No! At least not for us kids.

Playtime, by and large, is actually not a practice session for reality. That's what makes it play; it's what makes a game a game. I may have been a pretend, gun-toting, bloodthirsty pirate as a seven-year-old, but I'm anti-war, anti-gun and a pacifist at 27.

See the tie-in? Neither do I.

If anything, modern video games are a very good thing. First off, they're a terrific communication tool. Where television and the Internet encourage isolationism, these games connect people -- virtually -- from all over the world.

Let's face it. Your kid probably isn't going to spend the afternoon playing hide-and-seek with his neighborhood friends. Those days are long gone. But he can still play with them by putting on his headset, picking up his plastic rifle and storming the virtual beach.

Secondly, these games tell us a lot about ourselves.

Games -- be they video games, or the war games I used to play with my buddies -- are representations of real-world surroundings and circumstances created by adults. They do not shape our societies; they are shaped by them. The sleazy, violent underworld of Grand Theft Auto is not creating car thieves, gangsters and trouble on the streets. If anything, it's representing and reflecting that reality.

That's a lesson for us adults. Kids only play in the world we create for them. If we really want to analyze video games, we'll look at the reflection they offer and do something about it. Maybe we'll learn where to place the blame for crime -- not on games, but on poverty, social injustice and stigmatized mental illness.

That should keep us busy for a while. At the very least, it would go a lot further in preventing senseless acts of violence than doing away with the video games we mistakenly place the blame on.

And in the meantime, why not let the kids have their harmless fun.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Original Page: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/before-call-of-duty-we-were-killing-at-recess-117457443.html

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Weight Of War: Soldiers' Heavy Gear Packs On Pain

2011-03-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

Weight Of War: Soldiers' Heavy Gear Packs On Pain

by Patricia Murphy, m.npr.org
March 12th 2011

The Seattle Times

Soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely carry between 60 and 100 pounds of gear including body armor, weapons and batteries.

The heavy loads shouldered over months of duty contribute to the chronic pain suffered by soldiers like Spc. Joseph Chroniger, who deployed to Iraq in 2007.

Twenty-five years old, he has debilitating pain from a form of degenerative arthritis and bone spurs. "I mean my neck hurts every day. Every day," he says. "You can't concentrate on anything but that because it hurts that bad."

Like many soldiers and Marines, Chroniger shouldered 70 to 80 pounds of gear daily.

A 2001 Army Science Board study recommended that no soldier carry more than 50 pounds for any length of time. "We were doing three, four, five missions a night sometimes," Chroniger says. "You're jumping out. You're running. I mean it hurts — it hurts."

A New Concept

Muscle strain is usually a short-term condition that has always been prevalent among soldiers.

But after a decade of war, the number of acute injuries that have progressed to the level of chronic pain has grown significantly.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who retired with musculoskeletal conditions grew tenfold between 2003 and 2009.

Col. Stephen Bolt, chief of anesthesia at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., says the Army has started deploying physical therapists to serve with some infantry brigades in combat areas.

"The faster you can address some of those issues at the clinic level, the less likely you are to see those injuries progress to a true chronic-pain state that's going to require them to be evacuated from theater and replaced by someone else," Bolt says.

But that's a relatively new concept.

Col. Diane Flynn, chief of pain medicine at Madigan, says chronic pain is complex and challenging for the patient and the physician.

"Primary care providers who provide most of the pain management to patients have had very limited tools in their toolbox," she says. "And it's medications for the most part and maybe physical therapy — but very little to offer in addition to that."

Alternative Routes

In an effort to provide more options for pain management and lessen the dependence on prescription drugs, the Army is starting to incorporate other forms of treatment including yoga, meditation and acupuncture.

On a recent day at Madigan, Chroniger lies face down on an examination table. He's at his first acupuncture treatment with Dr. Shashi Kumar, a physiatrist.

Chroniger stiffens as Kumar inserts the small needles into his damaged neck. It's too soon to tell in Chroniger's case, but Kumar says many of her patients report that regular acupuncture treatments help relieve some of their pain.

The Army surgeon general has directed medical centers to incorporate complementary and alternative medicine into patient treatment plans. Currently, such care at the Army's hospitals is limited.

Those who seek private care will have to pay out of pocket. Chroniger will take an early retirement from the Army, so he'll then be eligible to apply for disability benefits from the VA.

This story was a collaborative project done in conjunction with The Seattle Times. [Copyright 2011 Puget Sound Public Radio]

Original Page: http://m.npr.org/story/134421473?url=/2011/03/12/134421473/weight-of-war-soldiers-heavy-gear-packs-on-pain&ft=1&f=1001≻=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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Report reveals steep increase in war amputations last fall

2011-03-14T13:06:00.001-07:00

Report reveals steep increase in war amputations last fall

by David Brown, washingtonpost.com
March 9th 2011

Military officials had previously released data showing that amputations, and especially multiple-limb losses, increased last year. The information presented to the 20-member board is the first evidence that the steepest increase occurred over the last four months of the year.

In September 2010, about two-thirds of all war-theater amputation operations involved a single limb (usually a leg) and one-third two or more limbs. The split was roughly 50-50 in October and November. In December, only one-quarter of amputation surgery involved only one limb; three-quarters involved the loss of two or more limbs.

The Marines, who make up 20 percent of the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, were especially hard hit. Of the 66 wounded severely enough to be evacuated overseas in October, one-third lost a limb.

In the first seven years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, about 6 percent of seriously wounded soldiers underwent amputation.

Wounds to the genitals and lower urinary tract - known as genitourinary injuries - accounted for 11 percent of wounds over the last seven months of 2010, up from 4 percent in the previous 17 months, according to data presented by John B. Holcomb, a trauma surgeon and retired Army colonel.

The constellation of leg-and-genital wounds are in large part the consequence of stepping on improvised explosive devices - homemade mines - and are known as "dismounted IED injuries."

The data were assembled by Holcomb and two physicians at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where all seriously injured soldiers are taken on their way back to the United States.

The steep increase in both the rate and number of amputations clearly disturbed both Holcomb and members of the board, which met at a Hilton hotel near Dulles International Airport.

Holcomb, who spent two weeks at Landstuhl in December and is a former head of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, said he had heard of "unwritten pacts among young Marines that if they get their legs and genitals blown off they won't put tourniquets on but will let each other die on the battlefield."

Richard H. Carmona, who was U.S. surgeon general from 2002 to 2006 and is now on the board, said the information was "very disturbing."

He said it has made him ask: "What is the endgame here? Is the sacrifice we are asking of our young men and women worth the potential return? I have questions about that now."

Carmona, 61, served as an Army medic in Vietnam before going to college and medical school. He has a son who is an Army sergeant and is serving in Iraq.

Jay A. Johannigman, an Air Force colonel who has served multiple deployments as a trauma surgeon, said his stint at the military hospital at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan last fall "was different" both personally and medically.

"We see the enormous price our young men and women are paying. It should not be for naught," he said. He didn't want to elaborate.

Why amputation-requiring injuries increased so much in recent months isn't entirely understood. It is partly a function of tactics that emphasize more foot patrols in rural areas. Some people have speculated the mines may be constructed specifically to cause the devastating wounds.

"Do the Marines know? Probably," said Frank Butler, a doctor and retired Navy captain who has spearheaded improvements in battlefield first aid over the last decade. "But they're not releasing a thing. And they shouldn't."

Original Page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030806043.html

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Multiple-limb war amputations on rise

2011-03-14T13:00:00.001-07:00

Multiple-limb war amputations on rise

azcentral.com | Mar 9th 2011

The majority of American soldiers undergoing amputations for war wounds last fall lost more than one limb, according to data presented Tuesday to the Defense Health Board, a committee of experts that advises the Defense Department on medical matters.

Military officials had previously released data showing that amputations, and especially multiple-limb losses, increased last year. The information presented to the 20-member board is the first evidence that the steepest increase occurred over the last four months of the year.

In September 2010, about two-thirds of all war-theater amputations involved a single limb (usually a leg), and one-third involved two or more limbs. The split was roughly 50-50 in October and November. In December, only one-quarter of amputation surgeries involved only one limb; three-quarters involved the loss of two or more limbs.

The Marines, who constitute 20 percent of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, were hit especially hard. Of the 66 wounded severely enough to be evacuated from those countries in October, one-third lost a limb.

In the first seven years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, about 6 percent of seriously wounded soldiers underwent amputations.

Wounds to the genitals and lower-urinary tract, so-called genitourinary injuries, accounted for 11 percent of wounds over the last seven months of 2010, up from 4 percent in the previous 17 months, according to data presented by John Holcomb, a trauma surgeon and retired Army colonel.

The data were assembled by Holcomb and two physicians at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where seriously injured soldiers stop on their way back to the U.S.

The steep increase in both the rate and number of amputations clearly disturbed both Holcomb and members of the board, who met at a Hilton hotel near Washington.

Holcomb, a former head of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research who spent two weeks at Landstuhl in December, said he had heard of "unwritten pacts among young Marines that if they get their legs and genitals blown off, they won't put tourniquets on but will let each other die on the battlefield."

Richard Carmona, who was U.S. surgeon general from 2002 to 2006 and is now on the board, said the information was "very disturbing."

He said it has made him ask: "What is the endgame here? Is the sacrifice we are asking of our young men and women worth the potential return? I have questions about that now."

Carmona, 61, served as an Army medic in Vietnam. He has a son who is an Army sergeant serving in Iraq.

Jay Johannigman, an Air Force colonel who has served multiple deployments as a trauma surgeon, said his stint at the military hospital at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan last fall "was different" both personally and medically.

"We see the enormous price our young men and women are paying," he said. "It should not be for naught."

Why injuries requiring amputation increased so much in recent months isn't entirely understood. Some people have speculated that the mines may be constructed specifically to cause the devastating wounds.

"Do the Marines know? Probably," said Frank Butler, a physician and retired Navy captain who has spearheaded improvements in battlefield first aid over the past decade. "But they're not releasing a thing. And they shouldn't."

Original Page: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2011/03/09/20110309military-amputations0309.html

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Assessing the Strategic Readiness of the U.S. Armed Forces

2011-03-14T12:18:00.001-07:00

Assessing the Strategic Readiness of the U.S. Armed Forces

by Robert Rector, heritage.org
March 3rd 2011

My name is Mackenzie Eaglen. I am a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

Thank you, Chairman Forbes, Ranking Member Bordallo, and members of the Readiness Subcommittee for the opportunity to evaluate readiness broadly and provide a framework from which you may examine the President’s defense budget request for fiscal year (FY) 2012.

America’s military remains the most capable and professional in the world. The Armed Forces are combat hardened and of high quality. Yet, such standing cannot be maintained without the continued support of Congress. Today’s world is home to a growing number of threats from both state and non-state actors, each with a myriad of ever-expanding capabilities ready to challenge our own. If the supposed peace dividend of the post–Cold War years was insufficient to allow for an easy military drawdown, today’s intense pace of operations unquestionably requires a strong defense capability. Between force reductions, a dramatic slowing of new starts, and closures of production lines, America’s domestic industrial capacity is slowly being whittled away. Once domestic military production capabilities are lost, it will be almost impossible, if not prohibitively expensive, to rebuild the industry.

It has been said that America waits for wars to become prepared for them. Such a pattern, as evidenced by recurring procurement holidays in the twentieth century, leads to repeated surges in spending that are more expensive than continued, sustained outlays. The best and most cost-effective way to preserve the military’s core capabilities, high readiness levels, our domestic production, and a sound defense budget is to keep the military in a constant state of health, ever ready to defend this country from both known and unknown threats.

Not since the end of World War II has America more urgently needed honest and clear thinking about its enduring national interests and a bipartisan commitment to building up the civilian and military capabilities necessary to protect them.

Yet Washington is increasingly looking inward. Policymakers spend enormous energy arguing about tactics without thinking about strategy. They react to events rather than planning for the future. Without a common purpose and driven by the desire to save money, they take steps which reduce military spending in the short term but vastly increase the danger and cost to America over the longer term.

A Sample of Events that Should Have Been Wake Up Calls … But Weren’t

A recent survey of events around the world serves to highlight that others are not sitting still while U.S. defense budgets and select capabilities are set to decline. Though such declines do not guarantee the rise of new peer competitors, the incentives they provide all but guarantee that others will challenge the United States even more in those areas where the nation is less prepared.

China’s January 2007 anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) test not only showcased a new missile development, but did so from a transporter-erector launcher. According to the Congressional Research Service, the “mobility of this ASAT weapon under development also could present challenges for U.S. tracking and warning time.” Admiral Robert Willard, Commander, U.S. Pacific Command, recently announced the initial operational capability of China’s anti-ship ballistic missile capable of threatening U.S. aircraft carriers from significant distance. During the recent visit of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to China, the People’s Liberation Army conducted a test flight of the Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter. According to Secretary Gates, China was “further ahead in the development of that aircraft than our intelligence had earlier predicted.”

China’s unveiling of the J-20 comes on the heels of Russia’s own stealth fighter with advanced stealth technology and high-tech avionics that debuted last January, the PAK FA, one more in an impressive and unexpected list of Russian military modernization programs. Russia is also selling modern fourth-generation fighter aircraft to the Indian, Chinese, Algerian, Vietnamese, and Libyan militaries. In August, Russia undertook the largest airborne military exercises since the collapse of the Soviet Union, only a short time after its illegal invasion of Georgia that went largely uncontested by Europe or the country’s prospective NATO allies.

With closure of the F-22 production line and changing air power and air defense capabilities across the globe, American air supremacy is not as assured as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) once predicted. Indeed, Lieutenant General David Deptula, recently departed Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence in the U.S. Air Force, recently announced: “For the first time, our claim to air supremacy is in jeopardy.… The dominance we’ve enjoyed in the aerial domain is no longer ours for the taking.” These events and more should have been opportunities for policymakers to revisit basic assumptions in current defense planning, identify gaps in strategic thinking, and reevaluate investment decisions.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Over the past two years, policymakers have cut plans and programs which are critical to recapitalizing the legacy fleets of all the military services. The Secretary of Defense has warned that a resource-constrained environment requires hard choices be made, and on that basis has cancelled or sought to kill a number of defense programs, including the F-22 fifth-generation fighter, the C-17 cargo aircraft, the VH-71 helicopter, the Air Force’s combat search and rescue helicopter, and the combat vehicle portion of the Army’s Future Combat System. While the Army is attempting to build a replacement ground combat vehicle, this is essentially the third generation of modernization skipped in the last 30 years.

Missile defenses have suffered as well. In September 2009, the Administration cancelled America’s commitment to place land-based interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic. Further, the Pentagon reduced the overall budget for missile defense in 2010 by $1.6 billion, or 16 percent from 2009 levels. Specifically, the Administration scaled back the number of ground-based midcourse interceptors in Alaska and California from the planned 44 to 30, terminated the multiple kill vehicle program for defeating countermeasures, deferred the purchase of a second Airborne Laser aircraft, abandoned the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program (designed for intercepting ballistic missiles in their boost phase), and purged funding for the space test bed for missile defense.

These recent defense cuts come on top of the military’s dramatic reduction that began in the early 1990s. The size of the U.S. Navy has been cut by half since then, and today it is the smallest it has been since 1916. Yet in a speech last May, the Secretary of Defense ridiculed the idea that the U.S. Navy is too weak. Recent decisions are reducing core naval capabilities, however. On Gates’s watch, the Navy has already ended purchases of the next-generation DDG-1000 destroyers, extended the production of the next carrier from four years to five, killed the MPF-A large-deck aviation ship and its mobile landing platform, and delayed indefinitely the next-generation cruiser.

Overall, defense spending is falling by every metric: as a percentage of the federal budget, as a percentage of the overall economy, and in real terms. Yet even with the dizzying pace of defense reductions of late, some policymakers are increasing their demands for more defense cuts.

Defense budget cuts are already having dramatic negative consequences for the U.S. military today, and will compromise America’s ability to fight and win both war and peace tomorrow. If America’s elected officials do not reverse the rapid decline in long-standing core U.S. military capabilities, the United States will not only lose a core ingredient of the nation’s superpower status; it will be unable to sustain the capabilities necessary to defend vital American interests in an increasingly unsettled world.

Because not every potential threat can be predicted and because procurement cycles typically take decades to field a particular system, the U.S. military must plan its forces around a grand strategy and hedge with specific capabilities to meet any future requirements. These core capabilities--many of which the military possesses today--should be the mainstays of strategic planning. They include:

Protecting and defending the U.S. and its allies against attack, Air dominance, Maritime control, Space control, Counterterrorism, Counterinsurgency, The ability to seize and control territory against organized ground forces, Projecting power to distant regions, and Information dominance throughout cyberspace.

The traditional margins of U.S. military technological superiority are declining across the services and domains. Those margins—too often considered a birthright—have helped uphold the implicit contract most Americans have had with the all-volunteer military and ensured our forces were never in a “fair fight.” That is simply no longer the case.

Comprehensively Unprepared for the Future

To mitigate an increasingly unstable future, the U.S. must acknowledge the greatest areas of foreseeable risk. Policymakers should consider the full spectrum of potential threats to U.S. national security, including those that may not seem immediate or most likely. Preparing only for the danger of the moment would be a mistake. History has repeatedly demonstrated that the only predictable feature of war is its unpredictability. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, German troops were training with sticks. Six years later, they were threatening to take over the world. Responding to that rapid threat required massive and nimble U.S. defense investments.

Policymakers should understand that the number and variety of threats challenging U.S. interests are growing. The Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel report identifies key global trends that will affect America, including:

Islamist extremism and the threat of terrorism, The rise of new global powers in Asia, The continued struggle for power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East, An accelerating global competition for resources, and Persistent problems from failed and failing states.

Yet the Pentagon’s major strategy, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), does not adequately identify the panoply of risks confronting the United States. Beyond the challenges that defense planners and policymakers can predict are the unforeseen challenges. History indicates that as states destabilize and as rising powers see weakness among Western-allied democracies, international crime, terrorist safe havens, piracy, oppression, and lawlessness will increase. Such drastic scenarios may seem unrelated, but as the QDR Independent Panel report notes, “the risk we don’t anticipate is precisely the one most likely to be realized.”

Further, the defense strategy does not address the elephant in the room: The U.S. military is already too small and its equipment too old to fully answer the nation’s call today, much less tomorrow. The U.S. has largely failed to recapitalize its military in a generation, leading to an ever-growing gap between what the U.S. military is asked to do and the tools it has to accomplish their missions.

Any discussion of how to build an appropriate Pentagon strategy should begin with the President’s foreign policy strategy, which follows from the nation’s vital interests rather than vice versa. Many Americans across the political spectrum are uncomfortable with the primary role the United States continues to play in world affairs, yet no President of either political party has backed away from America’s global leadership role. Nor has any recent President significantly reduced America’s commitments by treaty or interest around the globe. Judging by the number and expanded scope of U.S. military missions over the past 15 years, the exact opposite holds true.

A de facto bipartisan consensus on America’s duties continues to provide evidence that strong American leadership is necessary to protect the nation’s vital interests. As long as America undertakes a comprehensive role in guiding the international order toward peace and freedom, the nation’s leaders must sustain the power necessary to accomplish that mission.

Defense strategy should consider an exhaustive list of possible threats and, most importantly, consider both current and potential future foes as part of the exercise. This axiom is especially relevant today. While the U.S. is heavily engaged in counterinsurgency operations overseas, policymakers will be tempted to simply believe that other risks may never materialize by accepting the assumption that no other nation will attempt to challenge the U.S. using traditional forms of military power. This risk is all the more dangerous because the ramifications of such a decision would likely be felt not by those who made it, but by their successors.

In this context, recent history is enlightening. For example, operating under the false belief that putting large numbers of boots on the ground would be unnecessary in the post–Cold War world, a Republican-led Congress and the Clinton Administration cut the size of the force, including the Army, by more than one-third in the 1990s. Less than a decade later, the nation was involved in two substantial ground wars, which continue to strain the Army’s resources even today. Several years ago, Congress authorized a permanent increase in Army endstrength. The expense of reconstituting the Army, together with the human and monetary costs of overworking the force for the past two decades, is far greater than the cost of simply maintaining the Army at adequate force levels in the first place.

Today’s planners are claiming—with the same level of certainty with which they incorrectly argued the opposite proposition in 1993—that the military should focus on ground wars, particularly irregular and counterinsurgency conflicts, and that traditional air and naval assets will likely be redundant. The truth is that America continues to face myriad risks and needs to maintain a similarly broad set of capabilities to confront them.

Short- and Long-Term Readiness Challenges

Maintaining readiness is no less urgent in today’s technologically advanced and globally interconnected world in which enemies can arm themselves even more rapidly or crudely counter U.S. systems. High readiness levels require robust National Guard and Reserve forces that can provide national surge capacity when needed, and it entails investment in a wide range of dual-use, multi-mission platforms. Policymakers should reject the premise that defense is a zero-sum game and refuse to rob the future military to pay for today’s capabilities.

Further, the U.S. should not only prepare for the full spectrum of risks, but also maintain substantial safety and technological superiority margins. Seeking to have “just enough” of any important capability would be foolish. Planning is never perfect, but the cost of being too strong is far less than the cost of weakness.

For example, if the U.S. buys slightly more airlift capacity than it needs today, the downside is paying for assets that go unused for the moment. However, if America has less airlift capacity than it needs tomorrow, the cost will be measured in higher casualties, protracted engagements, and the possible sacrifice of a vital national interest. In the long run, supplying sustained and predictable funding to the military and providing for regular, modern upgrades is far more cost-effective than allowing the force to become hollow and then rebuilding it from tatters. This is particularly true if the industrial base to rebuild a military capability has disappeared. The United States built its last bomber more than a decade ago, and that plant is now a Wal-Mart. The time, cost, and consequences of building capabilities after the nation has permanently shed them are higher than what policymakers should be prepared to bear.

Another reason the U.S. must maintain military primacy is that the military’s missions are not only to fight but also to deter conflict. America decisively won Operation Desert Storm because it brought overwhelming power to bear. Clear victory in that conflict is one reason why no other country has since chosen to engage the U.S. in a direct, high-intensity conflict. Similarly, a missile attack is less likely if America deploys a comprehensive, layered missile defense system. China is less likely to use aggressive means to reunify with Taiwan if U.S. air and naval assets can unquestionably protect the island. Russia will be less adventurous in the former Soviet republics if its leaders feel that NATO is more than prepared for any contingency.

However, the current superiority of America’s capabilities should not lead officials to be complacent. Military primacy is fleeting unless purposefully maintained through robust investment in next-generation technology and systems. Equipment ages and deteriorates from wear and tear, and America’s enemies and potential foes are constantly developing new ways to challenge the U.S. On one end of the spectrum, more countries with sophisticated militaries are developing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could soon reach the U.S. homeland. On the other end, terrorists constantly find creative ways to defeat U.S. advanced technology with cheap, primitive weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, which have caused thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To keep its global edge and to develop the abilities to defeat shifting threats ranging from IEDs to ICBMs, the U.S. military must maintain, modernize, and ultimately replace old weapons while simultaneously researching, designing, testing, and fielding next-generation systems. The average ages of most major weapons systems in use are startling, and many next-generation programs are being eliminated. Congress has acceded to most of the Administration’s defense budget requests and voted to terminate or truncate more than one dozen major defense programs in the 2010 defense bills--predominantly for budgetary rather than strategic reasons. As a result, the military will lose vital capabilities along with the potential to develop them later as defense industries shut down production lines and hemorrhage skilled workers.

Readiness Case Study: The U.S. Air Force

All the military services, including the National Guard and Reserves, are experiencing lower levels of readiness after ten years of major combat operations overseas and more homeland defense missions in the United States. Symptoms include:

Delayed, shortened, or less diverse training; Cross-leveling of personnel and equipment from disparate units to plug deploying-unit shortfalls; Less maintenance for worn-out weapons; and Shortened rest time at home before redeploying overseas.

While Congress has provided necessary funding for many urgent needs of the services, more must be done to restore short- and long-term readiness within the U.S. military. An illustrative example is the readiness crunch facing the U.S. Air Force. While the availability rates of aircraft—fighter, bomber, tanker, cargo, rotary wing, and training—are holding relatively steady (except bombers), the aircraft are spending longer periods of time in depot to maintain the fleet. Meanwhile, the cost per flying hour is increasing as the force ages while being employed at wartime rates. While depot funding has increased over the past six years, at some point the increasingly intensive maintenance will give way to the reality that aircraft must be replaced with newer frames. Fighters, such as the F-15, are nearing 30 years in average age. At some point soon, it will no longer be possible to maintain these assets at reasonable cost.

For example, some of the A-10Cs are currently experiencing fuselage cracks after substantial funds were spent to re-wing these aircraft and upgrade their avionics. The fatigue of this airframe highlights that investing money in aging systems is a gamble because it is hard to predict what failures may occur next. Accordingly, Congress must carefully monitor how much the services hedge by spending funds on service life extension programs because they alone are not fail-safe.

Of all current aircraft, the B-1 has the worst availability rate at 32 percent, representing a true challenge. B-1s are a fundamental platform used at high rates in current combat operations. Additionally, since the long-range strike fleet is so small, the number of bomber tails matters. Retiring the B-1 fleet now would invite tremendous strategic risk as the Air Force proposes to begin work on a new bomber. Given that there is no guarantee the Air Force will ultimately acquire a new bomber in sufficient numbers, the service must hedge by maintaining this increasingly costly and less capable system because of the dearth of options.

The C-130 fleet illustrates another example of the major costs associated with sustaining legacy aircraft. The C-130’s center wing box design has inherent weaknesses that necessitate replacement. This will affect all C-130s as they age over time. Replacement costs roughly $6 million to $8 million per aircraft above the $18 million cost per to modernize the H model avionics. There are times when the purchase of a new system would save taxpayer money in the long run over maintaining older ones.

America’s space assets are increasingly geriatric and in need of modernization. Nearly all of these systems are in operation beyond their intended design lives. Repairs are not possible in space so this aging invites increased mission risk. Considering the large volume of old space systems, Congress must ensure defense leaders are not creating an unaffordable replacement cost bow wave that could lead to mission failure in key areas.

Congress must honestly determine how much risk leaders in the military should be able to absorb as a result of their increasing mission demands and declining inventories. For example, there are many scenarios that could occur where the U.S. would be unable to utilize its tactical strike fleet. Carriers may have to stay out of a region due to various threats. Regional basing might not be available due to political constraints. These and other limits in a future scenario could require the U.S. to launch strike missions with its bomber fleet. If the adversary has a reasonable air defense network in place, the B-1 and B-52s would be relegated to standoff strikes. By way of comparison, America lost 15 B-52s in 12 days during Operation Linebacker 2 in 1972. Over the past thirty years, global air defense networks have grown increasingly lethal and yet over one-third of America’s long range strike force is composed of these same B-52s. While standoff strikes are of some utility, it is unlikely the U.S. could afford the inventory of munitions required to service the roughly 30,000 aim points that exist in the average theater-size campaign. That would leave the Air Force dependant upon 20 B-2s. The risk remains that only four to six of these aircraft are available for combat operations at a given time. Therefore, depending on how much this capability is valued, the Air Force is assuming a great deal of risk in this realm.

While growing in technological sophistication, increasingly smaller air fleets are also posing greater readiness challenges. The F-22 fleet provides a useful example. With a fleet of 185 F-22s, the service does not have any elasticity to absorb attrition or wartime losses. That means when the Air Force lost two production F-22s in recent years, this attrition came at the expense of core inventory. There are no backup reserves to absorb these losses. When leaders factor out F-22s involved with training or undergoing depot maintenance, there is only a small fleet of jets that are combat deployable. This is occurring as the legacy fleet is drawing down in size. Practically, this means fewer jets flying more hours to meet requirements around the globe. This then leads to increased fatigue, higher maintenance costs, and a demand for recapitalization in a shorter period of time than originally planned.

National Consequences: Higher Risk, Less Strategic Flexibility

A significant component to maintaining readiness is training. Training does not just include preparing forces about to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan in counterinsurgency operations, but also conventional warfare training in non-desert terrains, for example. Military servicemembers do not have the luxury of preparing for or focusing on only one type of conflict. They must be trained on all weapons systems and platforms for all types of contingencies—even while major combat operations are underway.

Senior military commanders in Iraq repeatedly noted that soldiers and Marines lacked training for major combat operations using their entire range of weapons. For example, artillerymen have not been practicing firing heavy guns but are instead doing counterinsurgency work as military police. General Robert Magnus, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, has said the Marine Corps’ ability to train for potential conflicts has been “significantly degraded.” General Michael Moseley, former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, was concerned that airmen—particularly those in the Guard and Reserves—were spending too much time training outside their mission specialties. In one of his notes to airmen, he described this phenomenon as “ancillary training creep” that jeopardizes mission accomplishment with the potential to overshadow combat focus.

The potential consequences of reduced readiness levels across the U.S. military range from the practical--such as more time in depot for maintenance on equipment used at five or six times the peacetime rate and more mechanics required to keep older planes, ships, and vehicles running--to the dire, such as an unforeseen crisis requiring aid from the U.S. military. Restoring readiness is critical because the nation does not have the residual capacity in many units, particularly the Army, to respond to domestic emergencies should they arise. Beyond potentially misspent time, there are secondary and tertiary effects of reduced training in a servicemember’s core competency. These negative possibilities may include an altered career path where professional military education, specialty certifications, or other development and education suffers, thereby affecting the performance reviews that, in part, help determine promotion and pay increases.

In addition to a reduced ability to respond quickly to crises here in the United States, there are many second-tier effects of low readiness levels in the military. Regional combatant commanders beyond Central Command have seen their personnel and equipment diverted to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past several years. Admiral Timothy Keating, former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, said that mission demands hindered his ability to respond to an unforeseen crisis in the military’s largest geographical command region because 30,000 ground forces that are typically under his control were in the Middle East instead.

Strategic engagement has also suffered as exercises with foreign militaries and allied partners have been curtailed over the last several years. These demands have also hamstrung Pacific Command’s ability to conduct exercises and build alliances that could one day prove decisive particularly in reducing the potential for future conflict. Large and small exercises with foreign militaries provide an effective display of capabilities, acting as a deterrent to would-be aggressors--and are important methods for enhancing military readiness. An effort to increase these exercises would be especially useful in the Asia-Pacific and in places like the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Hormuz, where increased coordination is required to stem the threat posed by both pirates and terrorists.

Similarly, since 9/11 the U.S. has worked diligently to train and equip foreign militaries in counterterrorism as well as other security and stability operations. The U.S. military participates in the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, the Regional Strategic Initiative, the DoD Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, and the Building Global Partnerships Train and Equip program. Both U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Africa Command have made building partnerships and enhancing strategic cooperation central pillars of their missions. In addition to the benefits offered by training foreign militaries, these initiatives also serve to strengthen respect for the civil-military relationship and should not be bill payers for readiness. These marginal investments can reap savings for taxpayers in the event they help avoid conflict and the expenditure of greater resources.

Further consequences of continued low readiness levels include recruitment and retention difficulties and the overall decline in the condition of the nation’s all-volunteer force. While all the services have done tremendous work in meeting high recruiting and retention goals since 2001, there are palpable signs of strain. The QDR Independent Panel “stress tested” America’s all-volunteer force and found there is reason to doubt the military can attract and maintain the requisite high quality numbers of personnel as the economy improves. The report noted that even if endstrength numbers remain steady, the quality of the force may decline due to emerging challenges and the loss of institutional memory. There is also some evidence to suggest that the average length of service is getting shorter.

The U.S. Army is currently experiencing a shortfall in mid-career officers that poses long-term risks to the service. In 2007, the U.S. Army was short about 3,000 mid-career officers and as a result promoted captains and majors at rates above its own guidelines. These and other lagging indicators, including promotion rates, are growing in volume. Congress must prevent the U.S. military from crossing any “invisible red line” of dangerously reduced readiness that would likely be detected only after the fact.

How to Shape, not Chase, the Future

Congress must help the Armed Forces create opportunities to mitigate growing risks and free up resources to invest in priorities. Specifically, Congress should:

Maintain the capacity that exists today as the minimum force needed for the future while selectively expanding some areas of investment, to include shipbuilding, long-range strike, and additional space and cyber assets. Support the building of next-generation capabilities to compete against future threats, including a sixth-generation fighter, a new bomber, and a modern nuclear submarine. Ensure the Department of Defense has a sound industrial policy to preserve the highly skilled defense industrial workforce that designs and builds modern equipment. Support increased foreign military sales and ITAR (U.S. International Trade in Arms Regulations) regulatory reform. Bolster resources spent on missions that reduce the potential to spend more later, including the need to maintain cutting-edge and varied training and participate in robust building partner capacity missions.

To preserve traditional U.S. margins of military technological superiority, Congress should review potentially outdated requirements and projections, and policymakers should push defense officials to enact more forward-looking budgeting and acquisition strategies. Increased investment in modernization and new partnerships with allies will be necessary to prevent the naval, air, space, and cyberspace power balances from tilting in favor of others and to hedge against the potentially destabilizing proliferation of advanced technology and platforms to unstable actors, non-state groups, and/or terrorism-sponsoring rogue states around the world. For example, if Syria or Iran acquires Russia’s PAK FA, it could provide the fighter to the non-state group Hezbollah to form a proxy air force against Israel.

Congress should address the military’s urgent modernization needs and take into account the long-term implications of procurement freezes and underfunding of the defense industrial base. The Pentagon’s defense strategy should direct the military to build core capabilities across a broad range of areas to hedge against various risks. America’s enemies will likely exploit areas of weakness, attacking precisely those areas where the country is least prepared. However, maintaining a broad range of capabilities will minimize these risks.

Replacing military platforms that the U.S. has developed and fielded since World War II is also vital to ensuring a superior fighting force. America’s defense manufacturing industrial base has allowed the United States to design and build an advanced array of weapons systems to meet the full spectrum of missions the military has been called upon to fulfill. But the workforce is shrinking. In less than ten years, the number of major defense contractors has fallen from 50 to six. A decade ago, America boasted six major aircraft producers, while today only two. For the first time in a century, the nation has no manned military or civilian aircraft in design.

Securing America’s military dominance for the decades ahead will require:

An industrial base that can retain a highly skilled workforce with critical skill sets and Sustained investment in platforms that offer future commanders and civilian leaders a vital set of core military capabilities and equipment to respond to any threat.

In order to properly guide future defense investments, robust analysis must include substantial input from defense acquisition leaders, program managers, systems engineers, compliance managers, auditors, and other experts. The national defense strategy should also discuss at length the ability of the defense industrial base to respond rapidly to defense strategy changes.

The critical workforce ingredients in sustaining an industrial base capable of building next-generation systems are specialized design, engineering, and manufacturing skills. Already at a turning point, the potential closure of major defense manufacturing lines in the next five years with no additional scheduled production could shrink this national asset even further. While the manufacturing workforce alone should not dictate acquisition decisions, the potential defense “brain drain” must be considered when Congress determines whether or not to permanently shut down major production lines--particularly shipbuilding and aerospace. More often than not, once these highly skilled workers exit the federal workforce, they are difficult to recruit back and more expensive to retrain, leading to significant project gaps.

Congress should also broadly support increased foreign military sales. America’s defense industrial base also serves an important role in helping to build the military capacity of foreign allies while enhancing their interoperability with the U.S. military. These efforts indirectly save U.S. taxpayer funds over time and include the advantage of reducing wear and tear on U.S. equipment. Increasing international sales between the U.S. and its allies and partner nations will require either limiting the restrictions placed on the defense sector by the U.S. International Trade in Arms Regulations, which are both time-consuming and confusing, or, in the case of America’s closest allies, negotiating bilateral defense trade cooperation treaties to help facilitate easier market access. While the concern that sensitive defense technologies may fall into the wrong hands without proper oversight is valid, the archaic ITAR regulations remain insufficient in today’s globalizing defense market. Congress should pursue these opportunities to deregulate the defense market as opposed to adding more layers and rules to an already risk-averse and weighed-down process.

Readiness levels should be restored across the services. Immediate steps that can be taken include timely maintenance on all the military’s major platforms to sustain or extend the service lives of equipment being used at wartime rates. A significant element of restoring readiness levels includes the procurement of new platforms and resetting older, worn-out items. Congress must also help the Armed Forces avoid training creep. Recent Army posture statements have simply accepted that operational requirements for soldiers and insufficient time between deployments require a focus on counterinsurgency training and equipping at the expense of preparing for the full range of military missions. As forces in Iraq finish drawing down, U.S. ground forces must resume training for both irregular and conventional missions (amphibious assault, combined arms, etc.) using their entire range of weapons. This includes the need to increase realistic live-fire training and reduce reliance on simulation when possible.

The benefits of stability and security are served by building military partnerships and preserving coalitions by training and advising foreign military forces. Larger military engagements, such as the biannual Rim of the Pacific exercise, and smaller bilateral training opportunities that target specific operational issues serve to increase interoperability between the United States and its friends and allies. These important exercises and engagements should be restored or increased based on combatant commander assessments. Congress should help the Department of Defense reduce reliance on Navy and Air Force personnel to supplement ground forces in counterinsurgency missions overseas. This will bolster varied training for sailors and airmen and keep a healthier all-volunteer force by not hurting individual sailor and airman promotion rates and military career specialties when they work outside of their specialty.

Conclusion

If America continues to under-resource the military, it will not mean a less ambitious foreign policy. It will hollow our nation’s security and treaty commitments, greatly increase the risk of conflict, and cause substantially greater casualties for the men and women who serve in the military.

The American Founders held out the possibility of more peaceful relations among nations. But they nevertheless understood that “the surest means of avoiding war is to be prepared for it in peace.” America’s Founders believed that peace through strength is preferable--militarily, financially, and morally--to allowing war to come through weakness. Congress would be wise to reaffirm these first principles.

Original Page: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Testimony/2011/03/Assessing-the-Strategic-Readiness-of-the-US-Armed-Forces

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Former U.S. Soldier Told He Has No Country

2011-03-14T12:09:00.001-07:00

Former U.S. Soldier Told He Has No Country

by Viji Sundaram, ipsnews.net
March 12th 2011

SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 4, 2011 (IPS) - Forty-four-year-old Ramdeo Chankar Singh is at his wits' end.

The former U.S. soldier, honourably discharged from the Army nine years ago, believes he is fully qualified to become a U.S. citizen, and has been trying to become one for almost a decade. But immigration officials are telling him he doesn't meet the eligibility requirements.

Not only that, Singh, married to a Trinidadian native like himself, and with two U.S.-born children ages 10 and five, is now facing deportation. A hearing has been set for Mar. 22.

"They are, in effect, saying I am a man without a country," Singh said in a telephone interview from his home in Queens, New York. "I don't understand this."

"I've been paying my taxes for years, have never got into trouble with the law and served in the military for nine years. I don't need to buy my citizenship; I believe I have earned it," he said.

What is making him more confused and frustrated is that after passing his naturalisation test back in September 2004, he was initially told by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that his citizenship application "has been recommended for approval".

DOJ informed him, "At this time it appears you have established your eligibility for naturalisation. If final approval is granted, you will be notified when and where to report for the Oath Ceremony."

That notification never came, and on Dec. 1, 2004, Singh was told that his petition was denied because he did not "meet the requirements" of the provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, under which he had filed.

Since then, Singh and his wife, Savitri, have spent countless hours researching U.S. immigration laws and presidential executive orders relating to citizenship eligibility for immigrants who served in the military around the time Singh did.

So far Singh has spent nearly 60,000 dollars in lawyers' fees in his citizenship fight. He has written pleas for help to lawmakers, especially congressional representatives from New York, such as Rep. Gregory Meeks and Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, who is now secretary of state.

Singh said some responded, saying they would contact immigration officials, but nothing has come of those promises to date.

His case reflects the complex relationship between the federal government and immigrants in the armed forces. Undocumented immigrants aren't allowed to join, but if they find a way to get in, immigration laws sometimes provide them a path to citizenship.

Through its proposed DREAM Act, the Barack Obama administration hopes to bolster enlistment partly by legalizing some undocumented immigrants willing to join the military. The Senate rejected the DREAM Act last December, but administration officials are trying to get it reintroduced.

Singh knows that the one crucial thing he needs for securing U.S. citizenship is a green card, or permanent residency. But he is convinced that his years of service in the military overrides that requirement - a conviction reinforced by Edward M. Daniels II, a New York-based Veterans Affairs advocate, who has joined forces with Singh in his fight for U.S. citizenship.

"The Immigration and Nationality Act [INA] is all that's needed to prove that he is entitled to becoming a citizen," Daniels asserted.

In 1981, at age 15, Singh came to the United States from his native Trinidad via Canada without legal documents. He soon began earning a living.

Ten years later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, soon after obtaining a work permit through a class action lawsuit filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) on behalf of immigrants of any nationality, who were wrongfully told they were ineligible for amnesty under a special federal programme. At the time of getting the work permit, Singh said he was led to believe that it would automatically lead to permanent residency.

But as it turned out, "the LULAC lawsuit kept dragging on and on," said Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Eventually, some who had applied for amnesty got it. But not Singh.

In 1993, the Army sent Singh to Germany for a few months, before he returned to New York and served in the Army Reserves for about six years before he pulled a tour in war- torn Kosovo. In both overseas postings, he worked as a licensed practical nurse with the rank of sergeant. In March 2001, he was honorably discharged. Two years later, he filed for naturalization.

In his 2007 lawsuit against the district director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), seeking another review of his naturalisation application, Singh invoked Section 329 of the INA, , as well as a Persian Gulf War executive order issued by President Bill Clinton allowing immigrants, documented or otherwise, who have served in a combat zone to receive expedited citizenship.

"I was in Kosovo in 1999," a combat zone, Singh asserted. "That automatically makes me eligible."

But it is here that Singh fell through cracks both in the INA and the executive order, according to Margaret Stock, an expert on military citizenship, who served in the U.S. military for 28 years. Stock, an attorney, said she has worked on military-related immigration issues for the Pentagon.

There is no executive order that covers the time when Singh served in the Army, she said. In fact, there is no executive order relating to military citizenship covering the period between Apr. 12, 1991 and Sep. 11, 2001, Stock said.

Clinton did sign an executive order to exempt soldiers who were on active duty in Kosovo from filing their income tax returns, Stock said. But that order did not allow for expedited citizenship of military personnel. Clinton issued a different executive order regarding military citizenship only covering veterans who served from Aug. 2, 1990 and Apr. 11, 1991. In his lawsuit, Singh maintained there was no closing date to that order, and therefore was still in effect when he joined the Army.

"I sympathise with Singh, but he is wrong" on all counts, said Stock, who said she was familiar with Singh's case and is writing a paper on it.

She said that had Singh stayed in the Army until Sep. 11, 2001, instead of being discharged in March 2001, he might have qualified for citizenship under President George W. Bush's executive order, issued soon after the World Trade Center towers came down.

That order, still in effect, expedites citizenship for anyone serving in the military, or receiving an honourable discharge, on or after 9/11.

When there is no executive order in effect, another law allows immigrants - but only those with green cards- to have their citizenship expedited through military service.

For this reason, Stock said, when Singh joined the military, he was supposed to have a green card. But Singh joined at a time when neither recruiters nor the military "really knew what a green card was."

She explained, "Recruiters were not trained in immigration law. Some of them put out wrong information." And she added: "Now Homeland Security carefully checks your documents. A guy like Singh wouldn't be allowed to join the military today."

Stock said she thinks Singh's best bet now would be to plead with the judge at the upcoming hearing to cancel the deportation orders against him on compassionate grounds. He should convince the judge that his two U.S.-born children would face "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship" if he were deported.

The other option Singh has, she said, is to petition President Obama to issue an executive order that covers the period Singh served in the Army.

"Many times presidents forget to issue an executive order to cover foreign armed conflicts," she said. "But a president can do this retroactively. There's nothing to stop President Obama from doing this."

Neither suggestion appeals to Singh. He believes he has a "straightforward case" that should win him citizenship.

He is now planning to convince the judge at his upcoming hearing that there is yet another provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that states that a soldier who has served in a combat zone "even for a day" is entitled to U.S. citizenship.

"But that law applies only if an executive order is in effect," pointed out Stock, noting: "In fact, you don't even have to spend time in a combat zone. You can serve anywhere. But there was no such order in effect when Singh was in the Army."

Veterans Affairs advocate Daniels asserted that Singh should get his citizenship purely because of his long service in the military.

"I don't know why they are persecuting him like this," Daniels said. "I'm puzzled by [the DOJ's] reaction.

"Talk about injustice," he went on. "This is the epitome of it. It's a black eye on the U.S. military."

Original Page: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54717

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Report: Too many whites, men leading military - Military News | News From A

2011-03-14T12:00:00.001-07:00

Report: Too many whites, men leading military - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

militarytimes.com | Mar 7th 2011 3:10 PM

Report: Too many whites, men leading military

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Efforts over the years to develop a more equal opportunity military have increased the number of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of leadership. But, the report said, “despite undeniable successes ... the armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as diverse as the nation they serve.”

“This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change,” said the report from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, whose more than two dozen members included current and former military personnel as well as businessmen and other civilians.

Having military brass that better mirrors the nation can inspire future recruits and help create trust among the general population, the commission said.

Among recommendations is that the military eliminate policies that exclude women from combat units, phasing in additional career fields and units that they can be assigned to as long as they are qualified. A 1994 combat exclusion policy bans women from being assigned to ground combat units below the brigade level even though women have for years served in combat situations.

“If you look at today’s battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not like it was in the Cold War, when we had a defined battlefield,” retired Air Force Gen. Lester L. Lyles, the commission’s chairman, said in an interview. “Women serve — and they lead — military security, military police units, air defense units, intelligence units, all of which have to be right there with combat veterans in order to do the job appropriately.”

Because they are technically attached to, but not assigned to, combat units, they don’t get credit for being in combat arms, something important for promotion to the most senior ranks.

Lyles said the commission consulted a panel of enlisted women on the issue. “I didn’t hear, ‘Rah, rah, we want to be in combat,’“ Lyles said. “But I also didn’t hear, ‘We don’t want to be in combat.’ What they want is an equal opportunity to serve where their skills allow them to serve.”

Stretching the definition of diversity, the report also said the military must harness people with a greater range of skills and backgrounds in, for instance, cyber systems, languages and cultural knowledge to be able to operate in an era of new threats and to collaborate with international partners and others.

Original Page: http://militarytimes.com/news/2011/03/ap-military-report-too-many-whites-men-leading-military-030711/

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Affirmative action targets the military

2011-03-14T11:59:00.001-07:00

: Affirmative action targets the military News

by Pauline Jelinek March, gopusa.com
March 8th 2011 6:18 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 demands greater diversity among the military's leaders so it the service will reflect better the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Efforts over the years to develop a more equal opportunity military have increased the number of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of leadership. But, the report said, "despite undeniable successes ... the armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as diverse as the nation they serve."

"This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change," said the report from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, whose more than two dozen members included current and former military personnel as well as businessmen and other civilians.

Having military brass that better mirrors the nation can inspire future recruits and help create trust among the general population, the commission said.

Among recommendations is that the military eliminate policies that exclude women from combat units, phasing in additional career fields and units that they can be assigned to as long as they are qualified. A 1994 combat exclusion policy bans women from being assigned to ground combat units below the brigade level even though women have for years served in combat situations.

"If you look at today's battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's not like it was in the Cold War, when we had a defined battlefield," retired Air Force Gen. Lester L. Lyles, the commission's chairman, said in an interview. "Women serve — and they lead — military security, military police units, air defense units, intelligence units, all of which have to be right there with combat veterans in order to do the job appropriately."

Because they are technically attached to, but not assigned to, combat units, they do not get credit for being in combat arms, which is important for promotion to the most senior ranks.

Lyles said the commission consulted a panel of enlisted women on the issue. "I didn't hear, 'Rah, rah, we want to be in combat,'" Lyles said. "But I also didn't hear, 'We don't want to be in combat.' What they want is an equal opportunity to serve where their skills allow them to serve."

Stretching the definition of diversity, the report also said the military must harness people with a greater range of skills and backgrounds in, for instance, cyber systems, languages and cultural knowledge to be able to operate in an era of new threats and to collaborate with international partners and others.

Affirmative action targets the military, 5.2 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

Original Page: http://www.gopusa.com/news/2011/03/08/affirmative-action-targets-the-military/

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Review : Poster Girl : Santa Barbara Edhat

2011-03-13T01:36:00.000-08:00

Review : Poster Girl : Santa Barbara Edhat

edhat.com | Mar 12th 2011 8:30 AM

By Youth CineMedia

The compelling Academy Award nominated documentary, Poster Girl, screened to a full house at the Lobero Theatre earlier this month.

The short documentary didn't disappoint. The story line follows the life of Robynn Murray, a former high school cheerleader and national merit scholar. At only 19 years old, she entered the Iraq war and eventually became a gunner on a Humvee. This "Poster Girl" graced the cover of Army Magazine, as one of the new faces of women in combat.

The emotional story details how she came from a family with a long history of military service. Now a veteran, Murray returned home to find herself struggling through effects of war and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Her journey is as inspiring as it is insightful. The 39-minute film is full of honesty and redemption. The story details the transformation of a soldier to an anti-war activist, writer and budding artist.

Murray attended the screening, and Youth CineMedia spoke with her afterwards, "I wish I never had my hands on any trigger or gun that would claim the life of another human being," Murray said.

Youth CineMedia students attended the screening. Some are old enough to sign up for the Army.

"When I was still in high school recruiters would come to my pad and meet my parents and gave me coffee cups. Now I think I won't go because it's not worth killing innocent people or coming back with a disability or your head messed up," said 19-year-old Fernando Hernandez.

An 18-year-old Youth CineMedia student felt the film was informative, but feels the truth about war and the Army is covered up.

"Basically, it seems like they slack off on helping veterans out after war. One of the things that stood out about the movie was when she didn't want to fire on innocent people. I thought that was thoughtful towards them and their families," said Daniel Cano.

Younger Youth CineMedia students found the film "inspiring and shocking at the same time".

"It was surprising at how much medication she was being prescribed just to get by. She was brave to get help and then to speak out for those with PTSD," said 16-year-old Sergio Medrano.

"It was inspiring and made me think about what war is really like. It was an inside view how messed up it is. It was cool when she said she felt sorry for pointing the gun at family members and what she did to the people in Iraq. If she could go back she would say sorry. It's good that she is trying to educate people about the effects of war," said 17-year-old Victor Mayo.

This documentary comes as we approach the 8th anniversary of the Iraq war. It's an appropriate time to remember that we have waged war against Iraq for 20 years, spanning four administrations. Starting in 1991 with Desert Storm, then followed by 10 years of deadly economic sanctions; escalating with the March 19th, 2003 invasion known as Operation Iraq Freedom.

As the war in Iraq has shifted to what some are calling a permanent occupation, many of our troops have been sent to Afghanistan, and it seems fewer have been fortunate enough to come home. The young people making their way back have witnessed the death of fellow servicemen and women lost in this war (nearly 4,500), as well as carrying the burden of the estimated 1 million Iraqi civilians killed by the United States military, allies or insurgent forces.

The results have been devastating for Iraqis as well as for our troops, as far as integrating back into communities across the country. Many, like Murray, have returned from war with PSTD. The effects include anxiety, addiction, alcoholism, violence and suicide.

According to statistics, 18 veterans commit suicide every day, and yet there continue to be stories of hope and inspiration.

Youth CineMedia found Murray's story to be just that...Inspirational!

Keep an eye out for Youth CineMedia's full interview with Robynn Murray, and Poster Girl Director, Sara Nesson at youthcinemedia.org, and here on EdHat.

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About Youth CineMedia: Youth CineMedia is a Santa Barbara based, nationally recognized non-profit teaching at-risk youth documentary production, journalism, graphic design and photography. The students' work is featured annually in The Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Each week Youth CineMedia students will give readers an insight into their world. It may be sharing a compelling photo, weighing in on current events or sharing a new Youth CineMedia film with the Edhat community. We hope you enjoy the weekly contributions from Youth CineMedia. You can learn more about Youth CineMedia at www.youthcinemedia.org.

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Review : Poster Girl

2011-03-13T01:31:00.001-08:00

Review : Poster Girl : Santa Barbara Edhat http://www.edhat.com/site/tidbit.cfm?nid=50738

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Iraq, Afghanistan veterans struggle to find jobs

2011-03-11T10:46:00.001-08:00

Iraq, Afghanistan veterans struggle to find jobs

by KIMBERLY HEFLING, washingtonpost.com
March 11th 2011

Concerns that Guard and Reserve troops will be gone for long stretches and that veterans might have mental health issues or lack civilian work skills appear to be factors keeping the unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at 20.9 percent, a slight drop from the year before, but still well over the 17.3 percent rate for non-veterans of the same age group, 18-24.

"The employers out there, they are military-friendly and veteran-friendly, and they love us and thank us and everything, but when you go apply for a job, it's almost like they are scared to take a risk for you. I don't get it. It doesn't make sense," said Iraq veteran Christopher Kurz, 28, who just moved back in with his parents in Arizona after spending two years looking for law enforcement work in New York.

Kurz said his time as a military police officer in Iraq and aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier didn't seem to translate into a job.

For Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of all ages, the unemployment rate last year was 11.5 percent. In 2009, 21.1 percent of young Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were unemployed.

The problem has persisted despite government and private initiatives designed to help them. Advocates say more of a concentrated effort to have licensing and skills obtained in the military translate into the civilian workplace and more public awareness about what veterans offer employers are needed to tackle the problem.

Sen. Patty Murray, chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, said veterans have told her they take their military experience off their resumes because they fear a potential employer will decide they're at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder and not hire them.

"They take four or eight years of experience and throw it out the door and pretend it doesn't even exist," said Murray, a Washington Democrat. "That to me is a huge consequence to them, professionally."

One of the largest government efforts is the Post-9/11 GI Bill administered by the Veterans Affairs Department, which by the end of last year had paid out nearly $7.2 billion in tuition, housing and stipends for more than 425,000 veterans or their eligible family members.

Kurz said that without the new GI Bill he probably would have been homeless or moving back in with his parents in Mesa, Ariz., much sooner. He recently transferred from the City College of New York to Ottawa University in Arizona so he can finish his bachelor's degree.

As he has looked for a job with police departments and federal agencies such as Homeland Security, he said his years as a military police officer haven't seemed to count when pitted against someone with a degree in criminal justice - even if the college grad didn't have previous law enforcement experience.

"I don't understand why they don't want to hire a veteran who's got on-the-job experience, because a college student who has got a criminal justice degree - that might be great, don't get me wrong - he's smart, but he's not street smart," Kurz said. "You can't teach people the stuff you learn in the street in school."

Original Page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/11/AR2011031100798.html

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