Posts Tagged us military

The Undermining Of The American Military and Police

From The Federalist:

One of the numerous reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire was an overreliance on foreigners serving in its military. American leadership would be wise to heed that lesson.

Rather than learn from these past mistakes, America’s political leaders seem destined to repeat them. Case in point: the halls of Congress, where Democrat Rep. Pat Ryan of New York and Republican Rep. John James of Michigan introduced legislation earlier this month to fast-track a path to citizenship for foreign nationals who sign up to serve in the U.S. military. Both congressmen indicated the measure was crafted to alleviate the military’s recruiting crisis.

LA Police Using Illegal Immigrants:

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is hiring illegal border crossers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status and equipping them with guns to police American citizens in California.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Whistleblower: Lower Standards For Women In Military

From The Federalist:

The female captain dropped out of physically demanding combat controller course exercises several times, but unlike male trainees with similar difficulties, Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) officials kept extending special concessions to keep her in the program.

, , , , , , ,

No Comments

Military Underground Urban Training

From Military.com:

Late last year, the Army launched an accelerated effort that funnels some $572 million into training and equipping 26 of its 31 active combat brigades to fight in large-scale subterranean facilities that exist beneath dense urban areas around the world.

, , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Tactics In The Modern Age

From War on the Rocks:

The historian David Edgerton authored a book entitled The Shock of the Old in which he argues that our society’s collective obsession with rapidly changing technology often blinds us to the older tools and techniques that actually drive most of what we observe around us. We believe this logic can be applied here. The diffusion of 100-year old combat techniques, coupled with readily available technology, may create serious threats that are not currently being considered.

, , , , , ,

No Comments

Marines To Upgrade Weapons

From Marine Corps Times:

The Small Arms Modernization Strategy will focus on updating current weapons in the short-term and developing futuristic systems that could hit the fleet in the mid-2020s, according to senior officials at Combat Development and Integration Command’s Fires and Maneuver Integration Division. That has significant implications for all Marines, from door-kicking squad leaders to logisticians running convoy operations.

“We are always looking to ensure our Marines have the best weapons in terms of lethality, range and accuracy,” Chris Woodburn, a retired colonel who now serves as the deputy Maneuver Branch head for the division, told Marine Corps Times in an exclusive interview that detailed the new strategy.

 

, , , , ,

No Comments

Green Beret “Involuntarily Discharged” After Assaulting Afghan Pedophille

From The Daily Mail:

Sergeant 1st Class Charles Martland, 33, was serving in the country’s war-torn Kunduz Province in 2011 when he apparently learned an Afghan police commander he had trained had raped a boy.

He and his team leader, Daniel Quinn, confronted Officer Abdul Rahman – who had also allegedly beaten the 12-year-old’s mother for reporting the sexual assault – and ‘shoved him to the ground’.

, , , ,

No Comments

First Two Women Graduate Ranger School

From Business Insider:

For the first time in military history, two women graduated from the excruciating 62-day Ranger School at Fort Benning on Friday.

Capt. Kristen Griest, 26, and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver, 25, were awarded the prestigious black and gold Ranger tab along with 94 of their male counterparts.

, , , , , ,

No Comments

The History of the M16

From Tactical Life:

Eugene Stoner was, by all objective, accounts a visionary. As a speculative venture while working for the Fairchild Engine and Aircraft Corporation in California in the mid-1950s, he designed the earliest iteration of what would eventually become the M16.

Applying aluminum casting technology and advanced polymer science perfected for the aircraft industry in World War II, Stoner designed an elegant, lightweight rifle that rethought what it meant to be a military weapon. Where everybody else in the world used Parkerized steel and walnut, Stoner used aluminum and plastic.

 

, , , ,

No Comments

Muslim ASU Professor Says U.S. Military No Different Than ISIS

From Clarion Project:

“It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS…But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by U.S. troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society.”

Al-Gharbi was confronted on Twitter by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy and author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam, who served in the U.S. Navy.

“As a former U.S. Naval officer, I was disgusted by his revolting comparison of the barbaric and inhuman sexual violence perpetrated by ISIS to the behaviors he deceptively insinuates are committed by our sons and daughters in uniform,” Jasser told the Clarion Project.

 

, , , , , , ,

No Comments

Four Hours of Ebola Training For Military

From The Daily Beast:

American military operations to fight Ebola in Africa are unfolding quickly—forcing the military to come up with some procedures and protocols on the fly.

Soldiers preparing for deployment to West Africa are given just four hours of Ebola-related training before leaving to combat the epidemic. And the first 500 soldiers to arrive have been holing up in Liberian hotels and government facilities while the military builds longer-term infrastructure on the ground.

 

, , , ,

No Comments

The End of Counterinsurgency and the Scalable Force

From STRATFOR:

By George Friedman

The U.S. military for years has debated the utility of counterinsurgency operations. Drawing from a sentiment that harkens back to the Vietnam War, many within the military have long opposed counterinsurgency operations. Others see counterinsurgency as the unavoidable future of U.S. warfare. The debate is between those who believe the purpose of a conventional military force is to defeat another conventional military force and those who believe conventional military conflicts increasingly will be replaced by conflicts more akin to recent counterinsurgency operations. In such conflicts, the purpose of a counterinsurgency is to transform an occupied society in order to undermine the insurgents.

Understanding this debate requires the understanding that counterinsurgency is not a type of warfare; it is one strategy by which a disproportionately powerful conventional force approaches asymmetric warfare. As its name implies, it is a response to an insurgency, a type of asymmetric conflict undertaken by small units with close links to the occupied population to defeat a larger conventional force. Insurgents typically are highly motivated — otherwise they collapse easily — and usually possess superior intelligence to a foreign occupational force. Small units operating with superior intelligence are able to evade more powerful conventional forces and can strike such forces at their own discretion. Insurgents are not expected to defeat the occupying force through direct military force. Rather, the assumption is that the occupying force has less interest in the outcome of the war than the insurgents and that over time, the inability to defeat the insurgency will compel the occupying force to withdraw. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

New Generation of U.S. Military Communication Satellites

The United States military is upgrading its communication satellites with two new programs known as Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) and Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS).

There is a detailed analysis of the new infrastructure at Aero.org.

, , , ,

No Comments

Pentagon’s New China Plan

From The Washington Times:

The plan calls for preparing the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to defeat China’s “anti-access, area denial weapons,” including anti-satellite weapons, cyberweapons, submarines, stealth aircraft and long-range missiles that can hit aircraft carriers at sea.

, , , , , ,

No Comments

Promotional Video for Beretta M9 25th Anniversary

, , , ,

No Comments

Never Fight a Land War in Asia

Never Fight a Land War in Asia is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By George Friedman

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” In saying this, Gates was repeating a dictum laid down by Douglas MacArthur after the Korean War, who urged the United States to avoid land wars in Asia. Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?

The Hindrances of Overseas Wars

Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , ,

No Comments