I’m pretty sure my plans are fine. Jesus is going to take one look at us and turn around.
I’m pretty sure my plans are fine. Jesus is going to take one look at us and turn around.
The very nature of a supply chain sabotage like this is indiscriminate.
Consensus candidate gives consensus answer on question that can only hurt her with the election weeks away.
That’s all there is to it. This is just not something we’re going to see her real thoughts on until after the election.
Me too, every time I thought about going back I realized I couldn’t willingly put myself under that anymore. The combat deployments sucked, but it was what it was. Having people above you tell you that you can’t wear the issued sun hat in a deployed desert environment because, “it’s not professional”, is just one ridiculousness too far.
Yeah the Israeli government pushed hard for that nonsense IHRA definition.
Yes I agree. I should have been more clear. I’m just trying to rebut the idea that 1 dead infant would or should stop a war. It sucks, I hate it, but it’s just not how the world works, and good people do their best to keep that number as low as possible. Israel is showing us their military is not made of good people.
At least in the VFW I can use my worst coping mechanism. But yeah, the one consolation I think our generation gets is that we really did remove a murderous sociopath from running the place. Everything else is murky but that’s a shiny bit. You keep your head up too.
And from a military perspective I’ve seen new commanders make incredibly stupid decisions just to make it look like they’re making a difference. I’ve also seen reporting channels get shut down or restricted to prevent inconvenient facts from going up the chain of command. I can’t really talk about specifics for the second one except to say they weren’t war crimes, they were just inconvenient to their next promotion. And at scale is probably why Biden, Trump, and Obama had an inflated sense of the ANA’s readiness.
But the first one, haha let’s go. In the Infantry drinking is a lifestyle, especially in the early-mid 2000’s when it seemed like you were just existing until the random number generator gave up your number. So the headquarters company gets a new CO. Of note, this guy isn’t the Battalion commander. He’s just the guy responsible for running the company that houses communications, scouts, mortars, etc. We’re not under his command, we’re one of the line companies. He decides his big splash is going to be tackling the alcohol problem. Looking back it really was a problem, but good luck telling us that when we knew we were going to be going back to Iraq at some point and for our sins were considered capable of taking on hard missions. No lazy patrols in a peaceful area for us. So yeah, we drank, and we partied, a lot, and we felt we were entitled to it. This living embodiment of the good idea fairy issues an order banning all alcohol from dorm rooms with headquarters company soldiers staying in them. The problem? The scouts and mortars were some of the hardest partiers and they were largely billeted with roommates from other companies. Reader, you can see where this is going right? But in order to see the entire depth of folly possible we need to keep going.
That Friday, their dear leader orders a surprise inspection of their rooms. This is actually against regulations. Health and welfare checks can be a surprise, but they are supposed to be conducted by neutral NCOs, typically Alpha will do Bravo and vice versa. Otherwise you can only do a surprise inspection with a warrant and MPs. (Believe or not there’s a union of enlisted soldiers that got this stuff written into regs.) Even better, this guy does it during the workday. So we’re not in our rooms. We come back from some training that afternoon to find trashcans all over the barracks filled with our alcohol. And of course they also wanted to write guys up for finding “contraband”. (There’s very little that’s actually contraband stateside in the military, it basically has to be illegal.) It turns out this guy was trying to enforce General Order Number 1, which is a deployed rule saying no porn, no sex, and no alcohol. Applying it to our barracks was not only unprecedented and outside his authority, it was seen as a declaration of war by the E4 mafia. To be fair, we didn’t abide by GO1 overseas either, and the idea of an officer who was going to make it his mission to enforce it, instead of using GO1 to go after guys who went too far was intolerable. He had broken the unspoken contract of ignoring small infractions and hammering the big ones.
So the first thing we did was we lodged a complaint, he had destroyed our personal property and invaded our privacy without authority. We were told it was unfortunate but it wouldn’t happen like that again, there would be a one time amnesty for anything illegal or contraband found, and we were to make sure we paid him his due respect still. Also, we should mark our alcohol clearly so that inspectors knew it was the property of someone in a different company, under different authority. Well you can guess how that went. The guys that didn’t share a room with someone from a line company got space in our fridges. The guys that did labeled an entire shelf as the one for beer from another company. Which I want to stress, was not an uncommon amount of beer for one person to keep on hand. On Monday they pulled a health and welfare check. And wouldn’t you know it there was nothing for them to find. The sergeants knew we were covering for them but as long as we told them it was ours and not owned by someone from headquarters there was nothing they could do. At this point only a few days have passed and the commander for headquarters is angry. He knows we’re working around him. He knows the E4 mafia has started making sure he doesn’t get anything done on time, headquarters company is the last to know about anything, the last to arrive to anything, the last to receive anything, and all of that goes doubly for anything he personally needs. They’ve begun making him look like he’s incompetent. So he ups the ante and orders a 100 percent piss test. Most of his barracks guys comes up dirty, they’ve been drinking and they can’t hide it. Now he’s got half of his company for disobeying GO1. This 900 IQ chad orders them all written up for administrative punishment. That means they could lose rank, pay, free time, or all three. Now this next part is a bit murky but one of two things happens. The Battalion Commander notices this shitfest and relieves him of command. That is the official version. The unofficial version is one of the E4’s with not much to lose signed for a courts martial. If you think your administrative punishment is unjust you can sign a line to turn it into a courts martial, where the punishment possibilities jump up to fun things like jail time. However an investigator from up the chain of command is assigned and everything comes out. More than one soldier has saved themselves punishment by signing that line.
So yeah, the moral of the story is the military has a special place in the annals of bad leadership, because of the complete control leadership exercises over their subordinates.
That sucks for him, but he could also have used that knowledge, and the warning that command wasn’t going to let him keep doing that, to engineer a defection. On the whole I hope Russian commanders keep being this stupid and corrupt.
Something tells me these guys are more bark than bite. Either that or they’re really really good at shooting and they’re going to shoot the next person they see on their property before figuring out why they’re there.
The most hilarious part of that to me is that he put it all the way at the bottom, even below the references.
Well I do want you to know you’re not alone, I’m in therapy too. I was in the 101st for OIF 1. And yeah this shit is distressing. For me it’s the people blithely excusing war crimes we bent over backwards to keep from committing.
Putting together the bombing, indiscriminate killing of civilians near the aid centers, and blocking aid convoys to restrict calories available in the “humanitarian” areas, paints a pretty good picture. The only thing they haven’t copied from Nazi Germany yet is camps with ovens.
I hate to defend Israel here because they’ve gone off the deep end. But there was always going to be a response and unfortunately there was always going to civilian deaths, including children. Keeping those to a minimum is a big deal to any military trying to operate in good faith, but zero won’t happen until we turn the moon into an arena and have all of our wars up there.
There’s also the fun fact that despite similar bombings, the death toll seems to have stopped going up after Israel did their best to destroy every major hospital and health infrastructure in the country. It’s entirely possible they’ve lost the ability to effectively count the dead and this isn’t the current number, it’s the last known good number. A country not being able to count it’s dead in a war should only happen because the other side is controlling the hospitals and thus responsible for those reports. So yeah, the next time someone questions if they can even count the dead remind them of Israel repeatedly targeting their healthcare system.
They are the government of Gaza. Calling their civil service workers terrorists is just ridiculous. Are Ambulance drivers in the US responsible for the CIA’s doings?
And if they don’t have ability to count the dead anymore, (40k is a months old number at this point), could that have anything to do with Israel repeatedly targeting the healthcare infrastructure in Gaza?
Isn’t also a game at defcon to spread a harmless package to as many devices as possible?
I said a while ago that these would be like the Iranian F-14s if Israel keeps going at Gaza. We should have stopped letting Israel into weapons programs decades ago. Any other country whose been doing what they do would have been a pariah state already.
Ah yes, totally unacceptable but there’s just nothing we could possibly do to let Israel know how displeased we are. Nothing at all. Definitely no weapons shipments we could stop or Israeli units we could sanction.
They were always right about the date. They just were wrong about what Jesus is looking for.