Since the CIA is back in the war business, might as well put a general in charge.
Military
Weekend Planning, Resistors’ Edition
Not this weekend, but next. From the Courage to Resist website:
Quantico, VA: Rally for Bradley! March 20
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Rally at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Army Pfc. Bradley Manning on March 20th! Supporters will gather for a 2pm rally at the town of Triangle (map: intersection of Main St. and Route 1), then march to the gates of the Quantico Marine Corps Base. Bradley has been held at the Quantico brig in solitary-like conditions for six months. We stand for truth, government transparency, and an end to our occupation wars… we stand with Bradley! Event endorsed by the Bradley Manning Support Network, Veterans for Peace, Courage to Resist, CodePink, and many others. Buses from Washington DC have been chartered for this event (departing Union Station at 12:30pm)–reserve your seats today for only $10 RT. The day before, on Saturday, March 19th, in Washington DC, we will be joining the noon rally at Lafayette Park and march on the White House to “Resist the War Machine!”
For the rest of us, here’s a link to Amnesty International’s petition.
DFH’s Say No Blood For Oil
That would be DFH’s like Assistant Secretary of Defense Sharon Burke.
Just to take a break from Wisconsin perfidy, consider Burke, whose brief is “operational energy plans and programs,” making the connection between death and dinosaur wine in a speech at Harvard last week:
Though the official price of a gallon of fuel within the military is set at $3.03, Burke said that the actual cost of fuel delivered, depending on the difficulty transporting it and protection needs, can be as high as $50 a gallon.
Burke told a story of tent usage in Iraq. One large tent used as a gymnasium required six generators to power the air conditioning, and even then the temperature was only lowered to 90 degrees. The problem, of course, was that a tent isn’t insulated well, so much of the cooling was lost to the desert.
“People were dying so we can vent our air conditioning to the desert,” Burke said.
Some key factoids from Burke’s speech:
The average U.S. soldier on a 72-hour patrol carries between 10 and 20 pounds of batteries.
There are seven kinds of batteries that power flashlights, GPS devices, night-vision gear, and other equipment considered essential for the modern soldier. Including spares, a soldier lugs 70 batteries, along with the devices themselves, weapons, food, water, and other necessities.
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“We’re seeing pack weights of 130 pounds these days,” said Sharon Burke, assistant secretary of defense for operational energy plans and programs. “You can’t carry 130 pounds without turning up with injuries.”
The idea that our soldiers can’t fight (or can’t fight as easily and with as much stamina as they need) because of all the tools they must needs carry is a very scary one indeed — but that’s a topic for another day. In the meantime, back to that blood for oil problem:
The soldiers’ battery burden is just the tip of the military’s energy problem, Burke said. Heavily armored vehicles get just 4 miles per gallon. Air conditioners, computers, and other equipment at forward operating bases are powered by inefficient generators, at an enormous cost in fuel, requiring constant resupply. Delivering the fuel to where it is needed requires soldiers to protect the ferrying convoys, and costs both money and lives.
Hence Burke’s job: to find and support efforts like this one:
In Afghanistan, a company of soldiers is testing energy-saving technology in a frontline situation, relying on solar panels on tents, solar-powered lights, and stand-alone solar panels to recharge batteries — together cutting the company’s generator fuel consumption from 20 to 2.5 gallons a day. That drop means fewer fuel convoys which, in that part of Afghanistan, are almost certain to be attacked.
This, of course, runs directly counter to what Real Americans know about energy. Part of the GOP conspiracy to accelerate the decline and fall of the United States includes a state-by-state level assault on alternatives to fossil fuels.
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Against such purity of purpose, what is one to make of the reckless liberalism of that well-known hotbed of hippie fervor, the Pentagon’s inner rings? Well — our Galtian overlords know what dangers lurk in the heart of reality’s liberal bias:
The Senate confirmed Burke to the job in June, after she came under initial fire from Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe (R) for her apparent support of a 2007 law that bars federal agencies from buying alternative fuels that have higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels (ClimateWire, March 25).
Props to the Obama administration and to the DOD for taking action here…and, as always:
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Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.
Image: Jacopo Tintoretto, Young man in a gold-decorated suit of armour, 1555-1556.
A Personal Blast From the Past
Thought I would share this with you:
That is me, on my 21st birthday in 1991 in Kuwait, being hogtied by my platoon. Good times. One of my buddies from the Army just forwarded it to me.
Feels like it just yesterday.
Catch-22 at Quantico
Not sure how many of you follow Jane Hamsher’s twitter feed, but she is currently being detained in the guardhouse at Quantico. Best I can guess is she was going to deliver petitions with David House, Bradley Manning’s friend, and was detained. She’s been there before, and never had any incidents, but now they have decided to step up a program of outright harassment. They won’t let her on the base or off the base, and are threatening her with arrest if she leaves. It’s pretty crazy. Way to go, America! Home of the free and land of the brave!
Now I know two things are going to happen with this thread. First, the Hamsher haters will cackle with glee. Second, the internet tough guy and worshipers of an authoritarian state will giggle about “You should know better than go on a military base.” If that is all you have to contribute to the debate, save us all some time and energy putting up with your bullshit.
They are now towing her car because they refuse to accept her proof of insurance. I think we all need to break out our foam fingers! USA! USA!
Spectacularly Bad Judgment
Via Sully, this astonishing story:
In one scene, two female Navy sailors stand in a shower stall aboard the aircraft carrier, pretending to wash each other. They joke about how they should get six minutes under the water instead of the mandated three.
In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.
They’re all part of a series of short movies produced aboard the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Enterprise in 2006 and 2007 and broadcast to its nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines. The man who masterminded and starred in them is Capt. Owen Honors – now the commander of the carrier, which is weeks away from deploying.
The videos, obtained by The Virginian-Pilot this week, were shot and edited with government equipment, many of them while the Enterprise was deployed supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the time, Honors was the carrier’s executive officer, or XO, the commanding officer’s deputy. He took command of the ship in May.
There is nothing on the videos that would even compare to your average nightly fare on Skinemax or Show-it-all-the-Time, and most of it strikes me as knuckle-dragging Maxim/SpikeTv humor. In other words, the kind of shit that would happen whenever you get 4-5 soldiers or sailors together with time off. But there is a difference between a couple privates joking around, and the XO of a ship making videos like this and showing them to 6,000 people.
Hell, you tell some of these jokes in a group of five people at a party and you are guaranteed to piss off two of the people and bore the other two. Showing this to 6,000 people, all of whom are under your command, is just insane. I have no idea what he was thinking. You can bet this is the end of his career. Hell, this would be a firing offense for a shift manager at McDonalds.
Not Even Trying
Way to go, Army:
Officially, the Army says only that Sergeant Senft, 27, a crew chief on a Black Hawk helicopter in the 101st Airborne Division’s aviation brigade, was killed as a result of “injuries sustained in a noncombat related incident” at Kandahar Air Base on Nov. 15. No specific cause of death has been announced. Army officials say three separate inquiries into the death are under way.
But his father, also named David Senft, an electrician from Grass Valley, Calif., who had worked in Afghanistan for a military contractor, is convinced that his son committed suicide, as are many of his friends and family members and the soldiers who served with him.
The evidence appears overwhelming. An investigator for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, which has been looking into the death, has told Sergeant Senft’s father by e-mail that his son was found dead with a single bullet hole in his head, a stolen M-4 automatic weapon in his hands and his body slumped over in the S.U.V., which was parked outside the air base’s ammunition supply point. By his side was his cellphone, displaying a text message with no time or date stamp, saying only, “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.” (Mr. Senft shared the e-mails from the C.I.D. investigator with The New York Times.)
With Sergeant Senft, the warning signs were blaring.
The Army declared him fit for duty and ordered him to Afghanistan after he had twice attempted suicide at Fort Campbell, Ky., and after he had been sent to a mental institution near the base, the home of the 101st. After his arrival at Kandahar early in 2010 he was so troubled that the Army took away his weapon and forced him into counseling on the air base, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator. But he was assigned a roommate who was fully armed. C.I.D. investigators have identified the M-4 with which Sergeant Senft was killed as belonging to his roommate.
“I question why, if he was suicidal and they had to take away his gun, why was he allowed to stay in Afghanistan?” asked Sergeant Senft’s father. “Why did they allow him to deploy in the first place, and why did they leave him there?”
This is inexcusable. Absolutely no excuse. Heads should roll for this.