Five-Finger Discount

Five-Finger Discount

By Carl Prine Thursday, February 16th, 2012 10:38 pm
Posted in On Media, Readings and Reviews

Crap I’m mulling now …

1.  A lady old enough to be your granny just graduated from BCT.

Yeah, the Army’s Recruiting Command and Fort Leonard Wood’s PAO shack want to drizzle magical unicorn tit-syrup all over a huge stack of bull Twinkies, but I’m not going to eat it and neither should you.


At what point do we say that the All-Volunteer Force isn’t doing so well?  How about when we enlist a 51-year-old prior service join and turn the ex-sailor into a sergeant?

I know some of you are going to gripe.  She’s plucky!  She’s got grit!  She’s riding a very gray trend (until she breaks her hip, I guess)!  She deserves applause!

This isn’t about Sgt. Sandra Coast, who I bet is one helluva lady and I appreciate her patriotic commitment to our nation and the USAR.

It’s about an Army that after more than a decade of war considers itself lucky to send to BCT a woman who also qualifies for an AARP card and the Jack Benny Special.

I guess the GOs are just happy she’s not an ex-con wooed as a felony waiver, like others brought in after the invasion of Iraq.

Army Strong.   Hooah.

2.  Three-star discovers that some people think his Warrior Transition Unit sucks.

U.S. Army LTG Frank Helmick wants Fort Bragg’s Inspector General to do a “thorough inspection” of the Warrior Transition Battalion there.  This comes after a townhall meeting that saw soldiers and their families allege widespread abuses there.

Gosh, this is shocking! Surely no one has ever mentioned anything about these puzzling problems at Bragg before!

It must be quite a mystery.  Get the IG to sleuth it out!

Now, there’s always two sides to every story.  And I tend to distrust the word of Joes caught doing dope.

But we can’t pretend that the WTUs haven’t become notorious as chemical gulags warehousing our most vulnerable uniformed personnel, because they have and IG has documented their problems elsewhere.

That said, I doubt IG is going to scare up much at Bragg.  These problems won’t be fixed until the war winds down.

Of course, other GOs don’t see anything but puppy dogs and lollipops. And self-licking ice cream cones.   So maybe…

Oh, never mind.  But I want you to consider what it means to the AVF when the institutional military can’t even seem to care for our wounded with any competence or compassion.

3.  Stone-cold killers ordered to wear fake bellies and breasts to build PT empathy for pregnant soldiers.

Camp Zama, I dig it.

In the spirit of these guys, I propose that we all don massive man-boobs and burgers  so that we also might empathize better with our increasingly tubby troops, per SMA Chandler’s beef about the beefy.

I bet they loved that a PAO called the media for the photo op, too.

4.  McCaskill does her job and asks hard questions.

Yeah, a supine Congress has failed our democracy over the past decade of our wars, refusing to provide the real kind of oversight that should’ve guided our military through tough times.

But I can’t fault Claire McCaskill for grilling the brass about the OEF aid boondoggle and contractor costs.

Notice how no other lawmakers are around when she does her job?

SecDef apparently likes Starbucks.  Maybe the caffeine helps him dance around the issues.

5.  COIN vanity project gathers steam.

Sure, two COIN gurus dragooned me during their jihad prodding the Pentagon to make realistic revisions to FM 3–24, finally making the Maoist cartoon vaguely relevant for the 21st century.

But I’d lie if I told you I had even a tittle or jot of faith in the looming Leavenworth goat rope, perhaps because the preliminary debates already seem to be circling the drain of 1954.

Hey, maybe Sgt Coast can recollect a few COIN lessons from the early Eisenhower administration!

But I’d be a lesser man if I didn’t encourage anyone with a passing interest in counterinsurgency theory and practice to tell the prickly CACti what you think.

Beats having to wear fake boobs around Zama, right?

Nothing more follows.

V/r
Carl

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gian p gentile February 17th, 2012 at 9:07 am

You are right Carl about the attempts at revision to 3–24: it is still essentially painting just another version of a, to use your phrase, “maoist cartoon.” The letter from the coin center that you linked still reflects the Petraeus way of coin: populations are the key to winning any insurgency, and to get at that key they must somehow be secured and protected, given things, then they will come to our side. Evidence of the deadly grip of Petraeus 3–24 on the coin center from the letter is the privileging of “clear, hold, and build” and then combined action (premised on the belief that the marines made it work in Vietnam, hokum of course), and then saying that an enemy-centric approach is a possibility but such an approach can never get to the essential element in coin: the population. So sadly we are going to be stuck with a revised FM 3–24 that is still grounded in a theory and practice of coin generations old, and never worked in the first place.

CarlPrine February 17th, 2012 at 9:14 am

And then after it’s done they’ll say, “Hey, you had a chance to contribute and you didn’t.”

The end product is going to be the same. We can’t pretend otherwise. The question then becomes if you join in their reindeer games are you co-opted? Does your name go on the report, giving it tacit approval even if you think it’s terrible doctrine that’s just going to be used for more bad foreign decisions that get decent men and women killed?

No thanks. I want to sleep at night. But if others want to try to divert the train before it crashes, more power to you.

jack February 17th, 2012 at 9:14 am

The All Volunteer Military is doing quite well. The Draft forced good(and bad) folks in. They got in, got trained, got experienced, and got out. Volunteers reenlist in higher numbers and are much better for us in the long run. The femininization and homosexualization of our military will do us great harm. Bobo must go before he does us more harm. Carl–When are you going to join a Reserve Component unit ???

CarlPrine February 17th, 2012 at 9:19 am

Uhhhh, I did my time. No thanks.

That I did it with volunteers with felony drug dealing convictions and then got stoplossed so that I might involuntarily enjoy more of their company could put into some question how healthy the AVF really is.

jack February 17th, 2012 at 9:34 am

Wiil you work to run Bobo off ?

MikeF February 17th, 2012 at 10:35 am

But in this magical world that we live in Gian, let’s take a look at Insurgent X. We’ll call him Mufasa (no relation to my dear friend Moose. Actually, Mufasa could be Moose’s cousin, but I digress in order to put a name on the “ghosts” of the scary insurgent and terrorist.)

In 2003, Mufasa was our friend as we stormed into Baghdad, but since he was a member of the Ba’ath party, we outlawed him and he could not find work.

In 2004, down and out in Diyala, he took up resistance with the 1920’s Revolutionary Party and fought the Americans.

in 2005, he traveled over to Fallujah and fought the Americans in the the big battle.

In 2006, he went back to Diyala, joined al Qaeda in Iraq, and fought Americans.

In 2007, We bribed him with lots of cash while he was living in Buhritz, and he joined the Sons of Iraq. Now, he’s a good guy.

In 2010, as the Americans were leaving, Maliki placed a warrant out for his arrest. He’s now a bad guy again.

In 2012, Mufasa will head to Syria. To President Assad, he’ll be labeled a terrorist. But, when we decided to enact R2P, he’ll be a freedom fighter, and we’ll be paying him to fight again.

Sadly, in 2000, Mufasa just wanted to be an electrical engineer.

George Orwell has nothing on this story.

jack February 17th, 2012 at 1:28 pm

Carl–It is a God and Country issue. Bobo must go.

@jamesianburns February 18th, 2012 at 7:44 am

Don’t play possum near Granny, Carl. She might just put you in her stew.

Hohum February 22nd, 2012 at 12:42 pm

Actually, the fake boobs and belly is a pretty good idea, *because* it is ridicolous and it creates a certain sense of hiloarity wich again opens for internal humour *including* the pregnant soldier.

*required

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