-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a prelude to war! ***************************************************************** ********** VOICE OF THE GRUNT ********** ********** SFTT NEWSLETTER ********** ********** 09 February 2000 ********** "When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen." General George Washington, New York Legislature, 1775-1 Soldiers For The Truth, PO Box 63840, Colorado Springs, CO 80962-3840 ***************************************************************** TABLE OF CONTENTS ARTICLES Message from the President Defending America: Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Figure 1 >From The Field: Next Stop...Congo! 2 Administrivia' drives Officers out of Navy, survey shows 3 Looking like Russian Generals - Soldier comments on Awards 4 On Infantry - A young Officer speaks out! 5 Retired Opinion: State of the Union or Socialist Manifesto? 6 Medal of Honor: 7 *POYNTER, JAMES I. Sergeant, USMC (Reserve), Korea 1950 G.I Humor: 8 GI HUMOR - Snakes, Why'd it have to be snakes. =========================================================== 1. In my absence, the transition from VOTG to SFTT quietly continues. Please note the new snail mail address for SFTT: SFTT, PO Box 63840, Colorado Springs, CO 80962-3840. 2. On 1 March 00 we will only produce one newsletter (SFTT/VOTG). Website updates should be on target by mid-March. 3. Please do not send contributions until SFTT has full administrative capability to provide a receipt for those contributions. Expect a full scale campaign and breakout early this summer. Recruit another reader for SFTT. Just one new subscriber recruited by every reader doubles our voice. New recruits can subscribe by sending an email subscription request to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> until the auto-subscribe is set in place. 4. Please print a copy of each newsletter and post it for others to read. Post a copy to your favorite military news groups on the internet. Spread the word. ZIMM Beware that our letter is still limited in scope so we can reach all users of the Internet. If you cannot get the letter by E-mail, look it up on the Webpage at: http://www.freeyellow.com:8080/members7/rlmcmahon/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ===================================================== ARTICLE 1 -- DEFENDING AMERICA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FIGURES DON'T LIE, BUT LIARS FIGURE ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ By DAVID H. HACKWORTH, February 8, 2000 Texas cattleman Robert Shoaf must have thought the Russians were coming when artillery shells thumped down on his ranch one night last month. As his cattle property near King, Texas was pummeled with 11 rounds of artillery fire, the foundation of his house cracked and pictures shook off the walls. When the sun came up, his ranch looked like it had been through a night in Kosovo. Since the Cold War is at half-time and the U.S. Army's Fort Hood is but eight miles away, it didn't take a Texas Ranger to I.D. the perps. Fort Hood officials admit two 155mm artillery battalions were firing at the time that Shoaf and his family were bombarded. And "shrapnel consistent with 155mm high explosive ammunition" and fuses found on the ranch match the ammo the two artillery battalions were firing the night the incident occurred. Fortunately, there were no human casualties, nor did Shoaf lose any of his prized Texas longhorns to Fort Hood's not-so-friendly fire. A very embarrassed U.S. Army has suspended all artillery practice at Fort Hood until it finds out what happened -- which won't be hard. Mistakes like this shouldn't be made by combat-ready fighting units. Before these units slammed a live round in the breech, they had to be determined combat-ready. Leaders from firing section to battalion would've been certified to lock, load and pull that lanyard. But I'll bet a few folks used the good old M-1 pencil and faked the guilty unit's readiness report. That's how too many commanders in our Army get by these days. A captain in an artillery battalion at Fort Sill, Okla., recently resigned. He was directed to falsify the combat evaluation of a sister battalion whose performance was substandard. He said the outfit was so bad that "even in the motor pool, they posed a mortal threat to themselves and anyone else in the near vicinity." He was relieved of the task, and the battalion commander submitted a good-to-go report himself. This very bright and gifted captain resigned not because he was asked to violate what he understood to be his ethical and professional responsibility and obligation, but because he didn't want to belong to an institution that would fake a combat-readiness report. This sort of cheating leads to friendly fire casualties -- the biggest U.S. casualty-producer in the Gulf War -- and also explains why the Army is experiencing the highest quit-rate of Regular Army captains in its long and proud history. Just before our botched war with Serbia, another brave officer sent me a copy of Germany-based V Corps' combat-readiness report. The corps' CG had the integrity to declare his unit not fit to fight. I wrote a column about it, praising the general's guts and grousing about how despite the millions of dollars the corps had spent, it still wouldn't be fit to fight when called upon. The general was called in front of Congress and testified that I was full of it. His mighty V Corps was ready to fight anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Feeling like a fool, I went back to my source and asked what had gone down. He replied that the three-star was leaned on by a four-star and told to rewrite his report to reflect that his corps was indeed combat-ready. The general did. And all was well until -- like the artillery battalions at Fort Hood -- the corps was asked to put iron on the target during the war with Serbia. And did V Corps screw things up! Almost half a billion dollars went toward deploying a V Corps lash-up called Task Force Hawk that couldn't do anything right, beginning with the gunship crews not being combat-ready. It took this V Corps unit several months to accomplish what any second-string outfit could have done in a week. If the Army sticks to its track record, the errant rounds will be blamed on bad ammunition or mean-spirited UFOs. And rancher Shoaf will be given a big chunk of taxpayer money to cover the damage and keep his mouth shut. Oh, you ask, what happened to the V Corps general who changed his readiness report? He's a four-star now. The same Congress that accepted his "reworked" report recently confirmed his promotion. http://www.hackworth.com is the address of David Hackworth's home page. Sign in for the free weekly Defending America column at his Web site. Send mail to P.O. Box 5210, Greenwich, CT 06831. ===================================================== ARTICLE 2 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Next Stop…Congo! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ By R W. Zimmermann 02/08/00 First Bosnia, then Kosovo, next the Congo and possibly the Golan Heights! Madeleine Albright and the foreign policy wizards are at it again. Their latest direction reeks of election year politics. Why to the Golan? So we can buy the outgoing President his legacy as a peacemaker between Arabs and Israelis. The other gain -- votes for Al Gore from moderate Jewish supporters and the Arab-American community. Why the Congo? In Bosnia and Kosovo, America brought peace to the world of the white man. Somalia, a conflict of color, we abandoned. Ruwanda, we ignored, although casualties were in the hundreds of thousands, but again, it was a conflict of color. Now, in an election year, black voters and lobby groups want to know when we will follow an evenhanded peacekeeping approach. The answer will come as another UN resolution. U.S. troops and the taxpayers will pay the price. As many of the Washington elite are indulging in the "new age" peacekeeping fad, trying to become known as good, liberal, and evenhanded, the impact on our ability to maintain forces strong enough to defend our real national interests is devastating. Our overstretched armed forces will find themselves in another open-ended commitment on the African continent. There will also be a direct fallout on our ability to recruit young Americans for our armed forces. Why should you voluntarily join the armed forces if you know that you'll find yourself in places you never wanted to visit in the first place? I predict a time when we won't be able to convince our young citizens to join our forces to keep the peace in every Banana Republic that decides to declare independence from someone else. There won't be enough bonus money in the defense budget to make it happen. A sensitive but possible solution -- reinstate the draft. A touchy subject in a country that regards the military as a service to be provided, just like police protection, emergency health and fire services. I would expect flag burnings and large migrations across our borders to express disagreement with the draft for places like the Congo. Another solution -- if we want a peacekeeping force, then recruit one for just that purpose! Pay them adequately and equip them for success. A mercenary force a la French Foreign Legion? Maybe yes, but the best course of action to solve issues beyond the national interest. The ultimate solution: follow a foreign policy of common sense and stay out of conflicts that can't be resolved with a quick fix. Redefine what's in our national interest and clearly state when we will commit forces through Congress and the people, to secure resolution and victory. How to we get there -- with a president who isn't only in it for his own gain, a man who isn't enslaved by special interest and social engineers. What's needed is a return to values, courage, and true commitment. Think about that when your cast your vote. © SFTT 00 ========================================================= ARTICLE 3 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 'Administrivia' drives Officers out of Navy, survey shows ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Another costly survey why junior officers are leaving the service. This time the Navy learns the obvious lessons, as detailed in an article by the Virginian pilot. Hmmm…who would have guessed? ************************************************************************ BY DALE EISMAN, The Virginian-Pilot WASHINGTON -- A two-year effort to make their work more rewarding is paying off, but young officers on the Navy's destroyers, cruisers and other surface combatants still face too much of what one admiral calls ``administrivia'' and live in fear that even one mistake will ruin their chances for advancement, a new survey suggests. The poll of almost 2,500 young officers, taken in September, found that only about one-third intend to make a career of the Navy and that those planning to leave are disgruntled about ``micromanagement,'' heavy workloads while in port, and a ``zero defects mentality'' among their superiors. The survey also found that about one-third of the young officers don't believe that honesty and hard work will help them move ahead in the Navy and that a plurality believe the surface community, the largest branch of the Navy, ``does not take care of their own.'' The admirals who commissioned the survey, probably the most detailed such study ever of a group of young naval officers, said Friday that it validates their sense of where the problems are in the surface fleet. The Navy was attacking micromanagement and the zero-defects mentality long before the poll; the results ``confirmed a lot of things that we thought we already knew,'' said Vice Admiral Henry C. Giffin III, the Atlantic Fleet's top surface officer. ``You don't do something like this if you don't want to hear the bad news,'' Giffin added. Giffin and Vice Adm. Edward Moore Jr., his Pacific Fleet counterpart, sent to surface ship skippers and executive officers a five-page summary of the survey results on Friday, underscoring what Giffin said is their intent to "create a dialogue, which is the start of fixing the problem.'' The admirals said commanders in the fleet are critical to fixing ``the dissatisfiers'' about Navy life that have been driving too many young officers away. Because they moved up through the ranks as the Navy was shrinking in the years just after the end of the Cold War, those skippers and executive officers had to maintain near-flawless records just to stay in the Navy. Too many now expect the same from their subordinates and micromanage those young officers to make sure they get it, the admirals suggested. What the junior officers want ``is to be given a job, to be given some guidance -- like all of us depending on what the job is -- and then execute it,'' said Rear Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the Navy's director of surface warfare programs. Mullen's critical years as a young officer came when the Navy was growing and there was more tolerance for mistakes, he said. ``I know I fell on my face plenty,'' but it didn't stop him from advancing, he said. ``The JOs sense that it (does) now. And we've gotta change that.'' While many mid-grade and senior officers have quickly picked up on the leadership's insistence that they loosen the reins, cut back on paperwork and rearrange in-port schedules so that officers and enlisted personnel can spend more time with families, ``some are on the fence and for some it's going to take a little longer,'' Mullen said. Moore said the poll found no unwillingness to work among young officers. Asked what they most like about Navy life, the officers most often cited things like ship driving, missile and gun firing and visits to ``good liberty ports,'' all key parts of the Navy's ``tip-of-the-spear'' mission when ships are deployed. It's when they come home from overseas that the sailors get frustrated -- by long hours, endless paperwork and a relentless schedule of inspections -- the results suggest. ``We've got to provide an opportunity for them to be home'' when the ships are home, Mullen said. Inspections already have been cut by about one-third, and many skippers are rearranging watch schedules so that an individual officer has to stay on board overnight about once every 10 days while the ship is in port. ``People are our most important resource. We can get all the hardware in the world that we want. We can get all the resources . . . that we think we need. But unless we have people to manage all that, the rest of it doesn't much matter,'' Moore said. Still, the admirals acknowledged that there are limits to how far they and the Navy can go to make life more livable for young officers. Though the poll found a high level of frustration with the limited availability of spare parts aboard ship for example, Moore said the Navy can't afford to go back to the days when parts bins were kept fully stocked. ========================================================== article continued in next section **COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! 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