Tag: war

Ruthless compliance

The Marine Corps appears to be going about complying with the Defense Department’s decision earlier this year to repeal the Direct Combat Exclusion Rule in a correct and effective manner.

The Marine Corps will allow enlisted women to participate in basic infantry training beginning this fall as part of ongoing research to determine what additional ground combat jobs may open to female personnel.

New female enlisted Marines will volunteer for spots in the service’s Infantry Training Battalion, mirroring a related effort allowing new female lieutenants to enroll in the Corps’ Infantry Officer Course, according to an official planning document obtained by Marine Corps Times. Titled “Assignment of Women in Combat Units,” the document is dated Aug. 16.

“Female Marines will have the opportunity to go through the same infantry training course as their male counterparts,” the document states. However, as with the research involving female officers, “female enlisted Marines who successfully complete infantry training as part of this research process will not be assigned infantry as a military occupational specialty and will not be assigned to infantry units.”

The correct way to address female claims to equality is always to insist upon completely objective standards.  Women tend to be highly skilled at manipulating subjective standards, which is why so many of them shriek with indignation whenever they discover that their tears, emotional appeals, prostitution, rhetorical sallies, and negotiating tactics will avail them nothing.

Take the oft-cited “women make 77 cents of the male dollar for doing the same job”, for example.  There is a very easy solution to that “problem”. Eliminate salaries and put everyone with the same job on equal hourly wages. Women will still be making less money on average, but their complaints won’t be credible because it is objectively clear why they are earning less: they work fewer hours.  As Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.”

Now, it can be expected that the Marine Corps will eventually come under considerable pressure to reduce the difficulty of its basic infantry training. But with a growing number of Obama Wars to fight, the Corps has very good reason to resist the political pressure to produce inferior Marines, and in the unlikely event a woman proves capable of successfully completing the course, (note that none of the 10 women who have tried have passed the Infantry Officer Course and only one of those ten made it through the course’s very first test), she is likely to be an extraordinary individual who will not be disposed to creating the sort of problems that most women in the military do.

A too-timely change in the calculus

It’s pretty well understood that the Assad regime has the Syrian civil war well in hand.  So, are we supposed to believe that the regime is not only dumb enough to resort to chemical weapons it didn’t use when it was in far more dire straits, but just happened to pick the one weapon that could be expected to trigger US involvement?  That makes no sense.

“A year ago President Obama promised that the use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels would bring a game-changing shift in U.S. posture toward Assad’s often brutal regime.

“‘We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground,’ Obama said on August 20, 2012, ‘that a red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.'”

I think it is considerably more likely that the Syrian rebels staged the chemical attack in order to try to force the West’s hand.  Foreign Affairs even stated: “months of fighting have underlined the harsh reality that the opposition is outmatched”. To be honest, if I thought the Obama administration wanted yet another war on its hands – and I most certainly do not – I would find Obama to be a far more credible suspect than Assad.

Combat Barbie wear

They still won’t be able to outfight a Boy Scout troop armed with jackknives, but the important thing is wearing the right clothes will help them feel more like real soldiers.

A new combat uniform with special consideration to the female body is
now available at Fort Gordon, almost a month after the Army announced
plans to open all units and military jobs to women by 2016. The March debut of the Combat Uniform-Alternate is the first in a
series of moves the Army hopes to make in the next three years to help
female soldiers feel like more professional members, officials said.

With narrower shoulders, a slightly tapered waist and a more spacious
seat, the unisex clothing line has been in the works since 2009 and is
being issued to all installations – except Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga.
– for men and women with a smaller or more slender body.

Enough of all the talk talk.  Let’s see some war war out of our brave amazons.  Let’s see the US Army form a combat division of its most formidable Combat Barbies and send it to Afghanistan.  Perhaps they can make a reality TV show of it called “Rape, Rout, or RIP?”

Behind the scenes

Unusual changes in the Corps:

The commander of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit was removed from
his position on Wednesday, less than a week after the force’s
subordinate units were first brought together to deploy in 2014, Marine
officials said. Col. James Christmas was relieved of command by
Maj. Gen. Raymond Fox, the commander of II Marine Expeditionary Force,
out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., after the general lost confidence in
Christmas’ ability to continue commanding the Marines and sailors of the
22nd MEU,” said Capt. Binford Strickland, a Marine spokesman. No
additional explanation was given for the decision….

At least six other Marine officers have been
removed from command since mid-March. In each case, Marine officials
have provided little explanation for why the decisions were made, saying
a general officer had lost confidence in that commander’s ability to
lead his personnel.

I don’t even have a crazy conspiracy theory here, I just know that seven reliefs of command in four months appears to be out of the ordinary.

UPDATE: Talk of “purges” is considerably overblown, in my opinion.  Now, this is a purge: “Of 90 generals arrested, only six survived the purges, as did only 36 of
180 divisional commanders, and just seven out of 57 army corps
commanders. In total, some 30,000 Red Army personnel were executed.”

It occurs to me, however, that there is one time when it would make very good sense to replace MEU commanders, and that is when new military action is at hand.  When one considers how the Syrian rebels appear to have failed in their bid to overthrow Assad and the recent army coup in Egypt, I find myself wondering if this might be an early sign of expanded American military intervention in the Middle East.

Courage as cowardice

If you’re going to redefine cowardice as a willingness to engage in conflict, and portray a refusal to engage in it as manhood, you might as well start wearing a pink Gamma Rabbit shirt.  A commenter at Dr. Helen’s objects to my post yesterday at Alpha Game:

Your post highlights a big problem with the “manosphere”: It’s quite
misogynistic and not very manly. A man does what is right regardless of
the consequences, and he does it as a function of his own sense of self.
The “manosphere”, in contrast, is all about men shaping themselves in
their profoundly negative view of women. Vox Day is characteristically
defining manhood downwards by his approval of men using physical
violence against women, even if it is in self-defense.

A warrior
would never define himself by the number of children and old ladies he
had defeated in combat, any more than a real man would pride himself on
the number of women he’s beaten. An alpha takes the blows and walks away
with his self-respect intact. But for Vox Day and his sleazy ilk, men
exist only as responses to women. If women are horrible, then men must
be as well. What an awful world that makes for.

First of all, there is nothing more intrinsically wrong about using physical violence against women than against men. This white-knighting gamma knows nothing about the genuine warrior ethic; by his reckoning, the greatest warriors of history were not warriors at all because they slaughtered men, women, and children with equal abandon.  Warrior’s codes teach respect for all, which in martial terms means taking even the most seemingly overmatched opponent seriously and dispatching her without needless humiliation.

The outmoded code of the gentleman to which Funktacular is implicitly referring is European and is based on a post-martial chivalric ideal that primarily relates to the transition of the medieval aristocracy from a warrior elite to a post-warrior social elite.  As such, it is the exact opposite of a warrior ethic.  Joseph Schumpeter addresses this in some detail in Imperialism and Social Classes. The warrior ethic is focused on the defeat of the enemy, and the defeat of the enemy requires the destruction of his women from whom the future enemy combatants will come in as the destruction of the current generation of combatants.

Were the Romans less than manly because they destroyed Carthage?  Was Genghis Khan a coward because he spared neither women nor children, neither dog or rat, when he stacked skulls outside the shattered walls of the city where one of his sons died?  Was Shalmeneser III defining manhood downwards when, on his annual summer vacation, he crossed the Euphrates, threw down the walls of one city or another, and burned it with fire?

As for misogyny, one need not hate women to refuse to subject oneself to physical assaults by women.  Shall we similarly conclude that the man who defends himself against attacks by men is a misanthrope? The logic is wholly specious.

Funktacular’s comment isn’t merely anti-equality, it is also anti-male, because he attempts to deny men one of their most basic and fundamental rights, the right to self-defense.  He attempts to create a virtue out of cowardice, and in doing so, lends support to the environment where sniping and running away is considered brave, while standing one’s ground is falsely accused of defining manhood downward.  And in doing so, he provides a useful example of how the gamma delusion bubble distorts a man’s view of reality.

Finally, I note that one cannot “turn the other cheek” unless one is first willing to assert the right to strike back.  He who claims there is no right to strike back cannot also claim to be purposefully declining to exert his nonexistent right.

Who are the terrorists?

How is this militarily necessary or anything but disastrous PR?

“Many were wounded in the attack, local tribesman Kaleemullah Dawar said, but rescuers delayed for fear of falling victim to a second attack, a common tactic with drone strikes.“

That tactic is known as the “double tap,” which bombs multiple targets in relatively quick succession — meaning that the second strike often hits first responders. In 2007 the FBI said the tactic as commonly used by terrorist organizations such as Hamas.

Last year a study by the NYU School of Law and Stanford Law School detailed the U.S. use of the double tap, providing first-hand accounts of its devastating effect on rescuers and humanitarian workers.

In other words, the USG is using a terror tactic against non-terrorists in the War on Terror.  Brilliant.  Even Rumsfeld understood that the key to winning this sort of amorphous war was to avoid making more terrorists than were killed.  Which is impossible if you’re going to make your own soldiers into terrorists.

The side the USG won’t take

Ron Paul points out that no matter who wins in Egypt, Americans will be the losers:

Looking at the banners in the massive Egyptian protests last week, we saw many anti-American slogans. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government that was deposed by the military last week was very critical of what it saw as US support for the coup. Why is it that all sides in this Egyptian civil war seem so angry with the United States? Because the United States has at one point or another supported each side, which means also that at some point the US has also opposed each side. It is the constant meddling in Egyptian affairs that has turned Egyptians against us, as we would resent foreign intervention in our own affairs.

For more than 30 years, since the US-brokered Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, the US supported Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Over that period the US sent more than $60 billion to prop up Mubarak and, importantly, to train and seek control over the Egyptian military. Those who opposed Mubarak’s unelected reign became more and more resentful of the US, which they rightly saw as aiding and abetting a dictator and denying them their political aspirations.

Then the US began providing assistance to groups seeking to overthrow Mubarak, which they did in 2011. The US continued funding the Egyptian military at that time, arguing that US aid was more critical than ever if we are to maintain influence. The US Administration demanded an election in Egypt after Mubarak’s overthrow and an election was held. Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood won a narrow victory. The US supported Morsi but kept funding the Egyptian military.

After a year of Morsi’s rule, Egyptians who did not approve of his government took to the streets to demand his removal from power. The US signaled to the Egyptian military that it would not oppose the removal of Morsi from power, and he was removed on July 3rd. With the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government came the arrest of many politicians and the closure of many media outlets sympathetic to them. Then the US government warned the same Egyptian military that undermined democracy that it needed to restore democracy! Is it any wonder why Egyptians from all walks of life are united in their irritation with the United States?

Despite the Egyptian government being overthrown by a military coup, the Obama Administration will not utter the word “coup” because acknowledging reality would mean an end to US assistance to the Egyptian government and military. That cannot be allowed…. So, successive US administrations over the decades have supported all sides in Egypt, from dictator to demonstrator to military. There is only one side that the US government has never supported: our side. The American side. It has never supported the side of the US taxpayers who resent being forced to fund a foreign dictatorship, a foreign military, and foreign protestors.

And remember, this is the man that Republicans refused to nominate because they claimed that his foreign policy was crazy….

Military coup in Egypt

Egyptian Military Ousts Morsi, Suspends Constitution

On Wednesday, Gen. Abdel Fatah Said Al-Sisi announced a military coup in Egypt. He said that the Constitution had been suspended, that early elections would take place, and that there would be a “code of ethics” for the media. He stated that the chief of the Constitutional court would be taking charge during a transitional period before another election. He said the new government would be “diverse and include all the people,” and that the constitution would be revised to reverse changes made by ousted Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi.

As some of you may recall, I predicted that the Arab Spring wasn’t going to go well.  I don’t know why people continue to believe that democracy is equally functional no matter how the electorate is comprised.  It’s simply a form of government, it’s not magic.

Of course, given the state of our own democratic leadership, one wonders if military rule could possibly be any worse.

A mysterious sinking

MOL Comfort Suffers Broken Back, Sinks Off Yemen Remains Adrift Off Yemen
26 crewmembers of an MOL container ship were forced to abandon ship
Monday off Yemen after the ship suffered from catastrophic hull failure
and
reportedly sankbroke in two. The MV MOL Comfort, an 8,000 TEU-type container ship cracked in half
about 200 miles from the Yemeni coast at about 12’30″N 60′E while
enroute from Singapore to Jeddah with a load of 7,041 TEUs. All 26 crew –
made up 11 Russians, 1 Ukrainian and 14 Filipinos – escaped the sinking
ship on two life rafts and a lifeboat.

So, do the Russians have an attack sub called “Yet Unclear Reasons“? Or, as appears more likely, did one of those Russian crew members take a creative approach to ship’s maintenance? If it is true that the MOL Comfort was carrying arms intended for the Syrian rebels, it would appear that Mr. Putin has called Mr. Obama’s decision to raise the ante.

Presenting this summer’s distraction

If there were any doubts about the wisdom of the US getting militarily involved in Syria, the combination of the Benghazi, IRS, and NSA scandals appears to have resolved them:

The Obama administration has concluded that Syrian President Bashar
Assad’s government used chemical weapons against the rebels seeking to
overthrow him and, in a major policy shift, President Obama has decided
to supply military support to the rebels, the White House announced
Thursday. “The president has made a decision about providing more
support to the opposition that will involve providing direct support to
the [Supreme Military Council]. That includes military support,” Deputy
National Security Adviser for Strategic Communication Ben Rhodes told
reporters.

Well, it’s better than a false flag event.  It’s probably preferable to give the administration the easy foreign policy distraction they are seeking than force them to generate one.  And as an added bonus, the country will receive about 800,000 Syrian immigrants, which will help replace the now-declining native white population.

The Obama administration is considering resettling thousands of refugees who left Syria during the country’s ongoing civil war to multiple towns and cities across the United States, the L.A. Times reports. A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families…. The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement.

More diversity = more better, right?