Thread: WORLD BRACES FOR WAR: Canada send Jetfighters to Poland to Bolster NATO Forces

The Decline of the West (Cont'd)

Paul Greenberg | Apr 19, 2014



The latest from the White House is that it has "overwhelming evidence" that Russia is now fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine. You think? How do you suppose our super-sleuths can tell? Maybe it's the busloads of the usual bullyboys being trucked in to take control of police stations, government installations and other key points in Donetsk, Slovyansk, Kramatorsk ... and points all along the next slice of Ukraine the Russians have their eye on.
Some of these thugs are in uniform, some without, and many wear St. George ribbons, the unofficial symbol of the old Soviet Union, and they're all following the same playbook they used in Crimea with great success. There's nothing like an absence of opposition to assure a smooth military operation.
This week's headlines could be a replay of what happened in Crimea, and in Georgia before that. And next? The Russians may not stop until they're stopped. And why should they? With a weak president in the White House, a vacillating European Union, and a United Nations that is as disunited as ever, this new tsar knows an opportunity when he sees it -- and he takes it.
And so the Russian Bear, awake from his long hibernation, goes back and forth, to and fro in the land, and up and down in it, seeing what he can see and grabbing what he can grab.
This isn't just a replay of Crimea, it could be a replay of the feckless 1930s, which were followed by the cataclysmic 1940s. Appeasement, even if it has a new name (Reset), breeds war. And all our president and his ever bumbling press secretary have to say is that "we are working with our partners and assessing for ourselves what response we may choose." There, that ought to scare a not-so-ex-KGB man like Vladimir Putin.
No wonder the Kremlin sneers.
The reaction in Washington and the West in general is more a lack of one. Western leaders wring their hands, express concern, and assure the world they're assessing events. Anything and everything but actually taking any meaningful action.
On the contrary, to quote the Associated Press, "President Barack Obama has not yet concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions warrant broader sanctions on key Russian economic sectors." You have to wonder at this point what would -- the Cossacks' descending on Kiev? Not that our fearless commander-in-chief might do anything realistic to deter Moscow even then. He seems much too busy assessing the situation to do anything about it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, to quote Edmund Burke, is for good men to do nothing, and by now the Hon. Barack Obama is an expert at it.
It's not just Georgians and Ukrainians who are being repressed these days but Russians, or at least those who dare express any qualms about this resurgence of Stalinism in their country. To quote a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which can do little more than issue statements given Washington's passive stance as this latest purge unfolds:
"In the last year, the Russian government has passed laws imposing unprecedented censorship and restrictions on media and online publications. In the past few months alone it has blocked independent websites and blogs; turned the respected news wire service RIA Novosti into a propaganda service; denied visas and accreditation to foreign professional journalists; and forced leadership changes at several media outlets simply because those outlets dared to challenge the Kremlin's extremist policies." Aggression abroad has a way of going with censorship at home.
Naturally the Voice of America has been shut down, lest a dissenting view be heard in this new but all too familiar Russia. To quote Moscow's chief enforcer of its new gag rule, Dmitri Kiselyov, head of the tame Russia Today news agency, the Voice of America was just distributing spam and had "nothing original to say." Remarkably enough, for an operation that had nothing original or important to say, the Voice of America was original and important enough to be shut down. Censorship remains the sincerest compliment that a police state can pay a news source, however unwittingly.
The Cold War is definitely back on, only this time unilaterally because the West has yet to respond to this series of outrages in any meaningful way, not even with meaningful sanctions. You've got to hand it to Tsar Vlad, he knows his victims, and how easily taken they are.
Back when Détente was in bloom back in the 1970s, long before it had been renamed Reset and staged a comeback, it was not done to resist evil or even call it by its right name, lest the tyrant be offended. It would take an amateur in diplomacy, an old B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan, to call an evil empire the Evil Empire, and when he did, the usual respectables were shocked. For nothing may be so shocking as to acknowledge what is happening right in front of our noses and, even more shocking, do something about it. Which is what Ronald Reagan proceeded to do, giving American diplomacy a new beginning and a new self-respect, the end result of which was the end to the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and, along the way, the Soviet Union itself.
There is no Ronald Reagan anywhere in sight these days, unless you count the John McCains and Lindsey Grahams and such, all of whom can be safely ignored by a White House intent on ignoring not just them but the reality staring it and the world in the face.
Leader of the Free World -- remember when that was almost a synonym for president of the United States? But that description can be applied to this president only ironically. This president, far from confronting aggression, seeks common ground with it, whether he's "resetting" relations with Moscow or his secretary of state is proceeding to aid and abet the mullahs in Iran in their long and now almost successfully completed effort to build a Bomb of their own. It takes two for appeasement to work, and the West is doing its share.
Peace Through Strength. There's another phrase that has acquired an antique sound as this administration cuts the U.S. Army's troop strength down to a size not seen since before Pearl Harbor, tells the Navy it'll have to do without sophisticated weapons like the Tomahawk missile, and generally cuts the defense budget beyond the bone.
Nothing may be so effective as facing reality, the first step in shaping it. But all of that seems to have escaped our current president and his hapless crew, who are still murmuring about assessing events, lest they have to recognize a clear and present danger and, even worse, do something about it.
As for those of us who dare take notice of this latest Decline of the West, and warn of the disaster it invites, defenders of this administration's passivity explain that Barack Obama is just leading from behind. Right. So far behind he's not even leading. All the usual apologists for appeasement can be counted on to have much the same response to the president's critics as Comrade Kiselyov had to the Voice of America. Shut up, they'll explain.
But we won't. We'll continue to speak out in the faith that one day the West will reawaken and find its old, vigilant self again. Let's hope it won't be too late.

http://townhall.com/columnists/paulg...6036/page/full

Tactical advantage: Russian military shows off impressive new gear

Tanks-to-troops modernization

By Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
Sunday, April 20, 2014

Elite Russian troops are displaying a new arsenal of body armor, individual weapons, armor-piercing ammunition and collar radios — a menu of essential gear that gives them a big tactical advantage against a lesser-equipped Ukrainian army.

If President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion, the new-generation body armor, in particular, would provide exceptional protection against small arms if Russian troops go street by street to capture Kiev and other cities.

“What we saw and what was dangled in front of the West was a clear indication that Putin is on a roll,” retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales said. “It just seems to me from watching the films that their arrows are pointing up and ours are sadly pointing down.”

Weapons specialists such as Gen. Scales have been studying images of Spetsnaz, Russia’s ubiquitous special forces, and airborne troops since they conquered the Crimea region and mobilized to strike eastern Ukraine.

What they see are the fruits of a modernization plan begun in 2008, not just in tanks and vehicles but all the way down to the individual warrior. Russia now has the world’s third-highest defense budget, at over $70 billion.

“They’ve got better equipment than they had five years ago,” said Scott Traudt, an executive with Green Mountain, a Vermont gun manufacturer. “They’ve got new grenade launchers that are awesome. The helmets are better than our helmets. The body armor is better than our body armor. They’re doing a lot of things right. I’m pretty amazed at it.”

Mr. Traudt is paying special attention to the body armor because it presents a big challenge to rifle and munition makers. It might be able to deflect NATO’s basic 5.56 mm rifle round. If so, Ukrainian soldiers face a daunting task because their AK-74 assault rifles fire a similar munition.

The Russians, in their new 6B43 model body armor, issued chest and back plates made of titanium and hard carbide boron ceramics.

“The stuff they have is impervious to 5.56, whereas our body armor is not completely proven against their weapons,” Gen. Scales said.

Gen. Scales said the Russians carry AK-74s whose magazine is loaded with 5.45 “steel core” ammunition — a round that on April 8 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives banned from importation because the agency deemed it armor-piercing.

Gen. Scales described the 5.45 as “extremely lethal against any kind of body armor.”

While some national leaders focus on big defense issues, Mr. Putin has taken a personal interest in one of the smallest: the rifle. Last year, his government consolidated rifle manufacturing into one new firm, the Kalashnikov Corp., named after the AK’s famous inventor, Mikhail Kalashnikov.

“Putin actually goes out and shoots these things,” Gen. Scales said.

U.S. soldiers have complained that their main rifle and round, the M4 carbine and its 5.56, lacked lethality in Afghanistan against a Taliban enemy that does not often wear body armor. Without a shot to the head, the enemy could take several 5.56 hits and keep going, soldiers said in surveys.

“If the Russians are coming across mechanized, with airborne and infantry units wearing their body armor, it basically means the Ukrainian rifles have no ability to penetrate the body armor worn by the Russian troops, meaning you’re talking about having to shoot somebody six, seven, eight times, in the chest,” Mr. Traudt said. “They’re going to get bumped, but there’s no lethality involved.”

In all, Russian fighters, including Mr. Putin’s hired guns of ex-military commandos who wear civilian clothes, have displayed a new inventory of rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and rocket-propelled grenades. The Russians claim the RPG can kill a tank.

Photographs of masked Spetsnaz troops in Crimea show them with what might be U.S.-designed sights and silencers on their assault rifles.

Jacob Kipp, a former director of the Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., said what stands out to him are new mobile communications.

Spetsnaz commandos carry collar, or helmet-mounted, radios that enable them to talk to one another and to the battalion level overseeing the operation.

“A couple things stand out, and one of them is the radio equipment attached to the uniform up by the face so he doesn’t have to use his hands to communicate,” Mr. Kipp said. “That’s real new. There is also a helmet version that also has ‘commo’ gear inside. It basically allows you not to have to do hand signals to move people around.”

The Russians have employed a different communication tactic than the United States.

“There is a whole different culture about ‘commo’ in the Russian army than there is in ours,” Mr. Kipp said. “We tend to want everyone to report in whenever they do something. The Russians lay out an assignment and tasks and give it a timeline and you report in if you are not on your timeline, or if you run into unexpected opposition.”

Gen. Scales said Mr. Putin is displaying for TV cameras his best forces: Spetsnaz, airborne, naval infantry (akin to U.S. Marines) and interior security forces, or about 30,000 of the 860,000 active military force.

“We don’t know what shape the Russian military is in, really,” he said. “It would be like us highlighting a foreign adventure by only showing Delta, SEALs and Special Forces and Rangers. We’d look a lot more intimidating if we only showed that face of our force.”

On the conventional side, Gen. Scales said, the Russians do not have an answer to U.S. Apache gunship helicopters and armored vehicles.

Still, the better-equipped Russian soldier is bad news for the smaller and budget-strapped Ukraine military, which numbers about 160,000.

The wide gap in capability is spelled out in a report by retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s former top commander who directed the 1998 air war against Belgrade, and Phillip Karber, a former Pentagon adviser to Caspar Weinberger.

Financed by the nonprofit Potomac Foundation, the two spent time in Ukraine this month interviewing government officials and visiting troops on the front lines.

In a report outlined in The New York Times, they said the Ukrainian army badly needs at least four essential items: American body armor, night-vision goggles and sights, radios, and aviation fuel.

“What little Ukrainian body armor available, is only designed for smaller caliber lower velocity projectiles,” the report said. “Given that Russian troops are universally equipped with high-quality body armor, it is both militarily untenable and politically ridiculous to deny symmetrical protection to the victim of aggression.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...hows-off-impr/

Being ‘Army strong’ gets weak backing with Obama’s strategy

Equipment plans left behind as technology forges ahead

By Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
Sunday, April 8, 2012

"The Army is going to go into the future with no major platform modernization that I can see. It’s entirely likely that my grandchildren, should they choose to go in the Army, will be fighting with equipment I was using when I was a captain.”

The Army is coming out of a decade of war beat up and strapped for cash.

The force that arguably did most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffered the most casualties, now finds itself in a new conflict.

It has begun a round of soul-searching and bureaucratic battles to determine its place in the Obama administration’s new military strategy, which celebrates the global striking power of air and sea forces and downplays the chance of another major land war.

After spending huge amounts of money on equipment to fight terrorists, the Army has none to truly modernize itself with new core platforms such as attack helicopters and battle tanks.

“We have an opportunity to take this experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and really achieve dominance on the ground, just like the Air Force achieved with the F-22 and F-35 and the Navy has achieved with its modern fleet of carriers,” said retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales.




The Army has to rely upon the AH-64 Apache (above) as well as the OH-58 Kiowa Scout because the next-generation Comanche helicopter has been canceled. (Associated Press)

“But for whatever reason, the Army is going to go into the future with no major platform modernization that I can see. It’s entirely likely that my grandchildren, should they choose to go in the Army, will be fighting with equipment I was using when I was a captain.”

The Army’s share of the total defense budget grew significantly over the past decade. The nation’s largest military branch spent billions of dollars on the health care and salaries of its soldiers, and the active roster ballooned from 480,000 to more than 570,000.

More billions were spent on the never-ending quest to protect soldiers by providing superarmored vehicles, special body armor, and bomb-detection and sophisticated surveillance gear.

Today, as the fog of war is clearing, the Army sees that something is missing. Though upgraded with new technology, its front-line combat systems are stuck in the post-Vietnam, Cold War era of the 1980s. Its budget is set to stay around $134 billion next year, with procurement falling by $1.3 billion from $19.5 billion this year.

As money moved out of procurement and into counterterrorism, the Army’s future moved to the casualty list.

‘List of failed programs’

The next-generation Comanche helicopter has been canceled. The Army will continue to rely on the OH-58 Kiowa scout and AH-64 Apache.

There is no planned successor for the M1 Abrams tank.

The Army’s ambitious Future Combat System (FCS), a mix of land and air combat assets, is gone because of delays, cost overruns and budget constraints.

The George W. Bush administration killed the Crusader artillery piece as too Cold War-ish, despite Army arguments that it would deliver precision strikes to protect land forces.

The Future Combat System once stood as the Army’s future, with its artillery piece, infantry carrier, light tank, and air and ground sensors designed to dominate the battlefield. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates scrapped most of it, saying he wanted more money spent on current wars, not future ones.

“There is no analogy for this in any other service,” Gen. Scales told The Washington Times. “Army modernization died when FCS died.”

The Army scorecard: No new tanks. No new combat helicopters. No new artillery. And, possibly, no new tactical vehicles.

“The Army is zero for four in its big-ticket programs,” said Gen. Scales, who headed the Army War College, which molds officers for senior rank. “You can just go down the list of failed programs.”

Some retired officers are whispering the word “hollow,” the infamous label imprinted on the Army in the late 1970s after budget cuts left combat units existing virtually in name only.

They also are a bit bitter, noting that it has been the Army that has spilled the most blood in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see it rewarded with a personnel cut of 80,000 soldiers and with little hope of true modernization.

‘Use it up, wear it out’

Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Dubik, whose infantry career included command of a combat division, told The Times that modernization advocates are “absolutely right,” but the time is not.

“The tank, the Bradley, the Apache — they’re all old platforms,” said Gen. Dubik, now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “But given the financial situation the county is in right now, my personal opinion is that modernization should wait and we should spend the money on personnel cost and readiness and not on modernization.

“In an objective sense, we should have replaced them 10 years ago. But once the financial crisis is over and we are in a better financial footing, then it is time to revisit.”

Even the few major systems left in the Army’s budget face an increasingly skeptical Congress.

Some lawmakers are questioning the need to buy two new troop carriers, the $40 billion Ground Combat Vehicle to replace the M2-3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the $54 billion Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, to succeed the ubiquitous all-terrain Humvee.

As the top Army procurement brass sat at the witness table on March 27, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, told them that those two new vehicles are projected to double or triple the cost of adding improvements to the ones that they would replace.

“I do want to ask our witnesses today whether the higher costs of those two new vehicle programs are justified by increased capabilities they will buy, as opposed to sustaining current programs for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Humvee,” said Mr. Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Armed Services air/land subcommittee.

The Army took another blow last month. Andrew Krepinevich, an influential military futurist who has advised Congress and the Pentagon, issued a paper arguing that now is the time to wear out what the troops are using while beginning a search for a truly advanced family of vehicles.

“Given prospective resource constraints, the ground forces should seek to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ whenever possible,” wrote Mr. Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who runs the Center for Strategic Budget Assessment.

He said the Army’s future battles are likely to be on so-called “nonlinear” battlefields with no defined front lines. The enemy is increasingly able to secure precision anti-armor weapons that require the Army to constantly update vehicle defenses.

For that reason, instead of fielding a new generation of vehicles, he and analyst Eric Lindsey wrote, “the ground services should do the opposite, pursuing recapitalization and off-the-shelf solutions whenever possible, upgrading existing systems as much as possible.”

The next big idea

Gen. Scales took umbrage at Mr. Krepinevich’s “wear it out” procurement plan.

“This, to the service that has suffered the most in terms of dead and wounded, hugely disproportionate to any other service, to me is just unconscionable,” he said.

At the least, he said, the Army needs the new infantry carrier capable of taking a squad into battle while defeating future anti-tank weapons. It also needs a new mobile howitzer to attack enemy encampments.

What the Army lacks, Gen. Scales said, is a big idea on the scale of the Army’s Air/Land Battle plan of the early 1980s. President Reagan and Congress bought into it, ushering in procurement of mainstay systems such as the Bradley, the M1 tank, the Apache, and the Patriot air-defense missile whose improved versions arm soldiers today.

Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, an author and revolutionary thinker on Army warfare, has another view on what the next big idea should be.

He advocates the Army breaking down its current battlefield formations; join the Marines, the Navy and the Air Force in joint scenario planning; and then develop the weapon systems to match the contingencies.

“I think we are talking about an institution that has successfully resisted any serious reform and reorganization for 20 years, and the current outcome is the result,” he told The Times.

“The Army four-stars have sent a clear and unambiguous message ever since the end of the [1991] Gulf War that the Army is a single-service war fighter, and that it has no interest in any form of integrated operations that would diminish Army general officer command and control of Army forces.”

Army leaders say that when it comes to new vehicles, the service cannot wait for the next transformation or a better deficit picture.

“The Bradley does not have the maneuverability and the protection for our rifle squads that we believe we might encounter for those adversaries that would employ hybridlike tactics against us,” Army Lt. Gen. Keith Walker, director of the Capabilities Integration Center, told Mr. Lieberman’s subcommittee.

He said insurgents have made significant advances in armor-penetrating weapons since the 2004 battle for Fallujah, Iraq, where Bradleys protected M1 tanks.

“If we did that again today, given the advances that we’ve seen in [enemy weapons], we would lose a lot of people,” he warned senators.

But Gen. Dubik said the Ground Combat Vehicle is not futuristic enough.

“My belief is we should either suspend it altogether or reduce the plan, because if we use technology that’s present right now, what we’re going to produce is going to be very similar to what we have,” he said.

“The money would be better spent improving what we have now and investing in the research and development to get something different from the Bradley. If we spend the money now, we’re going to get basically the same thing, because the technology is what it is.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...=all#pagebreak

Fast and light: Army overhauls its gear strategy

Apr. 13, 2014 - 06:00AM

Smaller sets of Army equipment, such as Bradley fighting vehicles, will be prepositioned around the world to speed time to deployment. (Spc. Bryan Willis / Army)

By Paul McLeary
Staff writer

WASHINGTON — The Army is putting the finishing touches on a bold new strategy for how it pre-positions stocks of critical equipment around the globe, how it uses those stocks to speed deployments — and who pays for it.

Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno ordered the revised strategy last year as part of his vision to make the service more capable of deploying quickly to meet threats, and assist in humanitarian and disaster relief missions.

And a key element of the plan is to pass off some of the cost of using and resetting the equipment to the combatant commanders.

“What we want is for [advanced positioned stocks] to be a part of the theater, a part of the plan, a part of the combatant commander’s thinking, a part of the allies’ thinking,” as opposed to being a static reserve, one senior officer said.

The idea is to break up the massive stocks of vehicles, weapons, and ammunition the Army has traditionally warehoused across the Middle East, Europe and aboard ships into smaller, theater-specific “activity sets” that troops can simply fall in on. This way, units can fly in with only their personal gear and make use of the heavy equipment already in place, then leave the equipment behind once the event is over.

“When we let someone use it, they pay for it,” an Army official said.

“Instead of it being the Army, we let people use it and they pay for the use. The cost comes from the combatant commander.” Cost would involve restoring the gear to its original condition.

The new strategy is “fiscally sound, it keeps us from buying readiness that we don’t need because you’re not having to move stuff around, and you’ll have the capability and capacities that you’ll need for those exercises that you want to do more regularly,” the officer added.

Odierno’s review has already saved $30 million, since some of the stored equipment that combatant commanders had no need for has been retired or sent elsewhere.

One activity set is being used by rotational forces in Europe.
When the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team from Fort Hood, Texas, falls in on dozens of brand-new Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles this spring at multinational training centers in Europe, it will be the first unit to take advantage of the new plan.

The 30 M1A2 Abrams tanks and 70 upgraded M2A3 Bradleys, along with 40 tracked armored vehicles, 150 wheeled vehicles, about 10 pieces of engineer equipment and 10 Paladin M109A6 self-propelled howitzers, which make up the European Activity Set (EAS) can’t compare to the wall of armor deployed across Germany during the Cold War. But the idea is no longer to mass armor across the Fulda Gap.

Instead, positioning armor stocks at the Grafenwöhr joint training facility and the Joint Multinational Readiness Center at Hohenfels, Germany, will allow a succession of rotational brigades to use them for training activities with European allies.

Army officials estimate they’ll save about $10 million a year by having units use the EAS, as opposed to shipping a brigade’s worth of equipment to Europe and then back home.

Service officials say they’re working closely with the combatant commanders and the Army component commands to design activity sets that best fit the region’s needs.

“It’s being largely driven by the combatant commanders, and that’s sort of our strategy,” the officer said.

Bill Roche, a spokesman for US Army Europe (USAREUR), wrote in an email that USAREUR “receives a significant amount of funding to cover the maintenance and repair costs for the rotational units,” but that units are still required to bring equipment back to ready-for-issue standards prior to turn-in with USAREUR funds.

The Army’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is tasked with being part of the NATO Response Force, and as such will conduct drills across the continent with NATO allies using the new equipment.

While European Command is the first to make use of an activity set, the Pacific theater and Africa are where the idea could really suit the Army’s shifting posture. Specifically, the service’s “Pacific Pathways” initiative — which would train and equip soldiers to deploy quickly across the region — is a key cog in the plan.

Part of the plan, still a work in progress, is to make more use of the Navy’s large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off (LMSR) ships that the Army leases to move equipment across the Pacific.

“The time is right to begin using the LMSRs in a more effective way,” the officer said, adding that the ships could be used to move troops around the region for training exercises to reduce the number and duration of boots on the ground. Reserve soldiers could also use the ships during training periods to reduce costs by allowing them to train while partnering with allies.

Using the ships this way would signal a commitment by the United States to the Pacific region, service officials contend, by allowing troops to move quickly from place to place while underscoring the American commitment to partnering and humanitarian missions.

http://www.armytimes.com/article/201...-gear-strategy

The U.S. Army's New 84-Ton Tank Prototype Is Nearly IED-Proof [Updated]

The new Ground Combat Vehicle weighs twice as much as the tank it's designed to replace, and it's massive enough to survive a roadside bomb.

By Kelsey D. Atherton
Posted 02.25.2013 at 11:30 am


The Ground Combat Vehicle

U.S. Army . . .

@ http://www.alipac.us/f19/american-ta...2014-a-301444/

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

The U.S. Army's New 84-Ton Tank Prototype Is Nearly IED-Proof [Updated]

----------------------------------------

FOCUS if you will sir on the word 'PROTOTYPE.'

Hitler had many of them, 98% never saw battle.

As Army shrinks, young officers being pushed out

Associated Press
By LOLITA C. BALDOR 1 hour ago

As Army shrinks, young officers being pushed out
Associated Press
By LOLITA C. BALDOR 1 hour ago



FILE - This Nov. 7, 2013 file photo shows Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, young men and women joined the military to fight through the rugged mountains of Afghanistan and the dusty deserts of Iraq. Less than 10 years later, many of these young officers are captains in the Army with multiple combat deployments under their belts. But now, as the wars wind down and Pentagon budgets shrink, many are being told they have to leave. The process is painful and frustrating. In quiet conversations across Fort Bragg, N.C., and at Fort Eustas in Virginia, captains talked about their frustrations and their fears. And they nervously wait as their fates rest in the hands of evaluation boards that may spend only a few minutes reading through each service record before making the decision that may end their careers. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) — After the 9/11 attacks, tens of thousands of young men and women joined the military, heading for the rugged mountains of Afghanistan and dusty deserts of Iraq.

Many of them now are officers in the Army with multiple combat deployments under their belts. But as the wars wind down and Pentagon budgets shrink, a lot of them are being told they have to leave.

It's painful and frustrating. In quiet conversations at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Eustis in Virginia, captains talk about their new worries after 15-month deployments in which they battled insurgents and saw roadside bombs kill and maim their comrades. They nervously wait as their fates rest in the hands of evaluation boards that may spend only a few minutes reading through service records before making decisions that could end careers.

During the peak war years, the Army grew to about 570,000, as commanders worked to fill combat brigades and support units to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of newly minted officers came in during 2006-2008.

Already down to about 522,000, the Army must shrink to 490,000 by October 2015, and then to 450,000 two years later. If automatic budget cuts resume, the Army will have to get down to 420,000 — a size service leaders say may not allow them to wage even one major, prolonged military campaign.

While a lot of the reduction can come from voluntary retirements, resignations and decreased enlistments, Army commanders will have to force as many as 3,000 officers — nearly 10 percent of the planned decrease — to leave by the end of October 2015. Of those, nearly 1,500 are captains, 550 are majors.

Behind some of those big numbers are soldiers in their late 20s who will be forced out of their military careers long before retirement age and into the still struggling American job market. They would leave with honorable discharges, but without 20 years in the service they would not be eligible for retirement benefits.

"The captains are a problem," Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "Because when we increased the size of the Army we recruited heavily in certain year groups. So as we draw the Army down, those are over strength."

The military has been through this before. In the years after Vietnam and during the 1990s as the Cold War thawed, the Pentagon pushed thousands of service members out the door, creating what some felt was a hollow military that lacked the soldiers, training and equipment needed to fight and win.

This time, Army leaders argue they're trying to do it right. They're not asking for volunteers, because too many good people leave. So they are combing through files, looking for soldiers with disciplinary or other problems in their annual evaluations — known as efficiency reports — to weed out lower-performing officers.

Col. Trevor Bredenkamp, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, said he talked to all of his majors who were in that group, and he had his battalion commanders talk to their captains.

"The challenge is there are about 8 percent that they will have to select that don't have any derogatory information in their file. So there will be some people that will say I don't know why I was selected," Bredenkamp said. "I'm telling people, hey, they're going to decide who they decide on, and if you've been working hard and doing a good job, by and large, the majority of you don't have to worry about it."

Capt. Fred Janoe, a battery commander with the 18th Fires Brigade at Fort Bragg, said the process may create a short-term decline in morale but will be positive in the long term.

"You keep your best performers and as an organization you're able to do more with less," Janoe said.

Sometimes, he said, "you see guys who just barely get by. I don't wish for anything bad to happen to them." But he added, "I grew up on a cattle ranch, and sometimes you cull the herd a little bit."

Other captains did not publicly discuss their concerns about impending separation. But there are broad concerns that when the young officers were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan during the peak war years, the attention paid to their evaluations may have slipped a bit and many of them got largely the same positive ratings. Some worry that a less than stellar relationship with one senior officer may doom their relatively short careers, while others say many lower performers got high marks while deployed, skewing the system.

Some officers have even found themselves in the odd position of being up for a promotion at the same time as they are being considered for separation, with both evaluation boards going on at about the same time.

Odierno said he recognizes the concerns and the Army is trying to go through the process carefully once it gets to the officers who don't have problems in their files.

"We're doing that a bit slower. I want to make sure that they have enough years where we can do a proper evaluation," he said. "We want to keep the best. We want it to be very competitive."

Once chosen for departure, the young officers will have two months to leave.

"We have an obligation to help them land softly on the outside of the Army," said Bredenkamp..

http://news.yahoo.com/army-shrinks-y...180314730.html

Originally Posted by HAPPY2BME

----------------------------------------

FOCUS if you will sir on the word 'PROTOTYPE.'

Hitler had many of them, 98% never saw battle.

I very seriously doubt that anything Hitler did or didn't do in the past

has any correlation to what the U.S. Army will or won't do now.

U.S. says will act 'in days' if no Russian action in Ukraine
Reuters
By Doina Chiacu and Patricia Zengerle 14 hours ago

Biden in Kiev to announce U.S. aid package to Ukraine

By Doina Chiacu and Patricia Zengerle
Related Stories

US demands 'concrete steps' by Moscow on Ukraine AFP
Russians sent to foment 'chaos' in east Ukraine: Kerry AFP
U.S. Secretary of State urges Russia to help implement Ukraine agreement Reuters
US warns Russia of 'additional consequences' over Ukraine AFP
Kerry to meet with top diplomats on Ukraine Associated Press

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States' government said on Monday it will decide "in days" on additional sanctions if Russia does not take steps to implement an agreement to ease tensions in Ukraine reached in Geneva last week.

The steps include publicly calling on pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine to vacate occupied buildings and checkpoints, accept an amnesty and address their grievances politically, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

"If they don't take steps in the coming days, there'll be consequences," she said at a Monday news briefing. "Obviously, we would have to make a decision in the matter of - in a matter of days - if there are going to be consequences for inaction."

Some U.S. lawmakers have been clamoring for President Barack Obama's administration to impose stiff new sanctions on Russia's energy industry and major banks to encourage President Vladimir Putin to withdraw troops from the Ukrainian border and discourage further Russian incursions into Ukrainian territory.

"I think it's time to move on the next round of sanctions," Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy told Reuters on Monday, although he added that he backed giving Moscow two to three days to implement the Geneva agreement.

"I think it is important to explore diplomatic solutions when they potentially become available," the Democratic chairman of the Senate's Europe subcommittee said in a telephone interview.

"The Russians were willing to sit down in Geneva for the first time across the table from their Ukrainian counterparts, I think that discussion was worthwhile. I don't think the jury is fully in on the Geneva agreement," he said.

'GOING TO LOSE EASTERN UKRAINE'

Some members of Congress have made it clear they do not believe sanctions already in place - such as travel restrictions on individuals announced by the Obama administration - will stop Moscow.

"I think we're going to lose eastern Ukraine if we continue as we are," U.S. Senator Bob Corker, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC television's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

Washington and Moscow each put the onus on the other to ensure tensions are eased in the worst confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

"If there's no progress, we remain prepared, along with our European and G-7 partners, to impose additional costs. So there'll need to be decisions made in a matter of days," Psaki said.

In a telephone call on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to "influence Kiev, not let hotheads there provoke a bloody conflict, and impel the current Ukrainian leadership to fulfill its obligations unflaggingly," Russia's Foreign Ministry said.

But Kerry said casting doubt on Ukraine's commitment to the accord "flies in the face of the facts," according to Psaki.

Ukraine has sent senior representatives to the east with representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), put forth an amnesty bill for separatists to give up public buildings and weapons and called an Easter pause in military operations, Kerry said.

"He asked that Russia now demonstrate an equal level of commitment to the Geneva agreement in both its rhetoric and its actions," Psaki said, such as by sending its own senior representative to work with the OSCE.

Kerry also asked Russia to join the United States in seeking the release of Imra Krat, a Ukrainian journalist being held by pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country, she said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman in Moscow and Steve Holland and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; editing by G Crosse and; Bill Trott)

http://news.yahoo.com/u-says-act-day...210040700.html

The War on Antiwar Republicans - 'Rabid War Hawks Don't Want Competition'

The real issue is Jones’s willingness to stand against his party on foreign policy. A man from a military-heavy district with patriotic instincts, he initially supported the Iraq war and famously led the “freedom fries” campaign. He came to doubt the intelligence used to justify the war and turned sharply against it—and most of the subsequent military interventions pushed by the bipartisan establishment.