Posts Tagged ‘military’

Biden’s Title IX rules serve military injustice to college students

Posted: April 27, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Blame Biden Administration
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Liberal college campuses typically try to distinguish and distance themselves from the military. For the longest time, many campuses had banned or essentially banned ROTC, although that has waned in the past decade. The longtime myth was that the military was a place of last resort for people who couldn’t otherwise make it in college. Given the recent trend of college life breeding anti-semitism and people that can’t seem to perform basic activities like reading, I give the military the upper hand on this one.

College and the military now share one very dark truth when it comes to prosecuting crimes. President Biden recently changed many Trump-era Title IX regulations that required due process in dealing with sexual harassment claims. In the past, if you accused someone of sexual assault on campus, the accused person had a right to confront the accuser and demand evidence. That seems so basic, yet campuses howled in pain at being required to take seriously accusations and, you know, actually look for evidence before disciplining students.

That’s entirely gone now. You can now, quite literally, accuse a fellow student of sexual assault, not provide evidence, and if the judge is persuaded by your story, your fellow student can be kicked out of the school without ever getting the chance to provide his or her side of the story.

That sounds insane to anyone who thinks justice is important. But its exactly like another system that exists in the US Military called non-judicial punishment (NJP).

Now, the “non-judicial” title might make you think it is some sort of proceeding that will be swept under the rug and not really hurt you. That couldn’t be further from the truth. NJP can impose some harsh punishments, such as cutting half of your pay for up to 2 months as well as restricting you to a barracks room for up to two months. More importantly, any NJP action can basically end your career. The military’s high year tenure system means if you don’t advance to a certain rank after so much time, they can separate you with the stroke of a pen.

The military has been under the gun to “do something” about sexual assault, so its not uncommon anymore to see someone accused of sexual assault get punished at NJP even with a lack of evidence. That’s because NJP, like Title IX, uses the “preponderance of evidence” standard, meaning that you don’t have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt, just that there is some evidence that might point to the person being guilty. It could simply be a statement from the accuser. It doesn’t have to be scrutinized, it just needs to be persuasive to the military officer holding NJP.

The military and college campuses can now both hold claim to being centers of injustice in America.

Grooming standards and military recruitment

Posted: December 2, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in culture, News/opinion
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I’ve written a lot about the military’s recruiting crisis, and the overall military retention issues. Most of the retention problems are brought on by the military’s own stupid policies (such as cutting training pipelines, treating people like garbage, and focusing on killing babies instead of foreign terrorists) and others are assisted by members of Congress, most notably John McCain pushing for the changes to the military retirement system.

In an odd twist of fate, the Navy gave me a set of temporary orders to help assist in recruitment efforts in the town I grew up in. Over the past week, I interacted with both high school and college students, and the results were a bit surprising.

I accompanied two other Sailors for a few hours recruiting at a high school not far away from me. We sat at a table outside the lunchroom, handed out the main recruiter’s business card and some other Navy paraphernalia, and answered questions.

Image generated by Bing…I don’t look this good in uniform :)

The first thing I noticed is that despite it being winter and cold (it was 25F when I walked in the school), many of the students were in basketball shorts and even the occasional booty skirt, which I define as a skirt that barely covers your rear end. I had long pants, long sleeves and was wearing a jacket and I was still a bit cold since we were next to a window that leaked a lot of heat. I don’t even want to comment on the grooming standards, because there really were none.

That being said, the more surprising thing was the aimlessness of most of the students I interacted with. Our conversations would go something like this:

Kid: “I’m interested in joining the Navy.”
Me: “Great! Did you have a specific rate or job you’re interested in.”
Kid: “Not really, what’s available?”
Me: (Remembering there are 89 ratings in the Navy) “There’s lots of jobs! What sort of things do you like to do?”
Kid: “Meh, I don’t really know.”

This wasn’t just one conversation…it was the overwhelming majority of conversations. I mean, who the heck can’t tell me what they like to do??? Even if it was “play computer games,” I can turn that into “Would you like to fly drones?” The body language was also telling. Almost nobody looked me in the eye when we talked. Fidgeting, nervous, and just anxious in general. Since I was speaking to mostly juniors and seniors, the effects of being the high schoolers that grew up in COVID lockdowns were quite noticeable.

I spoke with the guidance counselor as well for some insight. She is assigned by the state, which specifically puts guidance counselors at schools to assist in career development. That’s a good thing, considering my guidance counselors were worthless when I was in high school. The one at this high school did everything from arrange ASVAB testing to factory tours and industry placement, on top of assisting in college applications and FAFSA forms.

It sounds like a much-needed change. The guidance counselor had similar experiences to mine with kids not having any clues about their direction in life. Most of them had to be pushed to do something, anything, to at least get somewhere. It wasn’t that they were opposed to one thing or another, it was that they didn’t have the desire for…anything, even stuff you would think is fun. We’ve already heard the rates of sexual intercourse and alcohol use are down among high school students. These are good things, but what we’re not catching is that teens are choosing to do…nothing. It’s similar to the “lying flat” movement in China. Teens today aren’t having sex, partying, going to the movies, working jobs, or…much of anything else.

Given that, it’s not surprising the grooming standards dropped. If you don’t have to impress the other sex, why bother dressing nice? Or combing your hair? Or picking out half-way fashionable clothes? Or taking a shower (yup, saw that too…). If you don’t care about much of anything, then much of anything goes. While plenty of people focus on the physical standards and obesity as issues, what I saw on the front line was a lot of aimlessness, of kids drifting through life without a clue, simply unsure of themselves.

I wasn’t that way growing up. As a junior, I knew I wanted to do engineering of some kind. Most of my peers were the same, having at least an idea of what they wanted to do for the next few years. My senior year I settled on electrical engineering, and I stayed that course in college. I currently have one kid in high school focused on the medical field, and whether she becomes a nurse, doctor, or some other job, she at least has direction and purpose.

More than anything else, our high schoolers need right now is a bit of direction and purpose. That might fix the recruiting crisis and a whole lot of other problems at the same time.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

And So The Selling of the Draft Begins

Posted: August 3, 2023 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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For a very long time I’ve been warning that the policies of this administration (and the Obama admin) would lead to a peacetime draft.

Well while some might question if we’re in “peacetime” or not we’re finally seeing it being discussed publicly.

Today, the military needs only about 160,000 youth from an eligible population of 30 million to meet its recruitment needs. But after two decades of war — both of which ended unsuccessfully — and low unemployment, many experts believe the all-volunteer force has reached a breaking point. And American confidence in its military is at a low.

The fastest and most effective way to resolve this recruiting crisis is to change how we recruit.

Instead of an “either an all-volunteer force or a fully conscripted force” model, I propose a both-and solution.

We should have our military recruiters sign up new troops for 11 months out of the year, and then have the Selective Service draft the delta between the military’s needs and the total number recruited.

The most interesting about this article to me personally is it twists a point concerning the military that I made almost 20 years ago at Instapundit the very first time leftists called me a Nazi:

While the all-volunteer force had the effect of lowering discipline problems and professionalizing the force, it also created a vast gap between American citizens and those who serve — effectively creating a military warrior caste that now appears more like a multi-generational family business than an organization that represents the true makeup of our democratic republic

emphasis mine

Seriously? The people who have been volunteering for decades and fought when others stayed home are the problem? Well if the goal is a strong military that can stop China then I guess it is.

Kurt Schlichter sums the reality up as to why people have not been joining:

Let’s look at the attitude of the military towards the people who they want to enlist. Many are white males who know which bathroom to use, but if you’re a white male who knows which bathroom to use, you’re an extremist and a racist and an enemy and you’re going to get passed over for promotions and assignments for people based not on anything that you did, and not because of merit, but purely because of your race, sex, and normality. “Come, join an organization that actively hates you!” is not much of a sales pitch. 

I can see how this might put a damper on recruiting from military families (Funny how Col Plenzer the author of the piece never mentions this as a possible cause of the numbers falling short.) On the bright side for Col Joe this might decrease the number of those icky military Caste people there.

Kurt Closes thus:

Here is the hard reality. If you choose to join this military, you’re putting your lives in the hands of people who, at the highest level, don’t care about you at best and hate you at worst and are grossly corrupt and grossly incompetent. When you die, likely because of their utter failure to adequately perform their duties at even the most basic level of proficiency, your families going to get shafted and you’ll be forgotten or disrespected. And if you think this makes me happy to write, you’re dumb or dishonest enough to be a modern general or admiral.

The real question is this:

You can have an elite fighting force of motivated volunteers or a draft army lead by woke leaders, you can’t have both. The Biden/Obama admin has demonstrated most emphatically it does not want the former

The only question is: Are they doing this because of ideology, because of payment or both.

I’m betting both.

A classified duh

Posted: April 8, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in in Ukraine, war
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It now looks like our very secret plans concerning Ukrainian movements and some of our weapons capabilities have been leaked online. Here’s a link from the Japan Times (it does NOT contain any photos of the documents, which I won’t share):

The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.

First, ANY leak of classified data causes a nightmare for our allies. Many of them share very sensitive data with us, which requires them to trust the U.S. to treat their data seriously. When you break that trust, those allies hesitate to share data in the future. This makes it really hard to build comprehensive war plans with them, or to cooperate in general.

Now, leaks happen, both in the U.S. and by our allies, so the response to these leaks is the important part. Given that the leaks involved information stamped “Top Secret,” its not going to take the government too long to figure out who leaked it. Here’s the kicker though…what is going to happen because of it?

When I wrote a while back about the Hillary Clinton leaks and everyone treating it as “no big deal,” I was most concerned that not punishing her would essentially excuse other people to leak classified data in the future. If you’re some mediocre bureaucrat that gets to handle classified material, and you see your boss get away with leaking it, then why not leak your material to further your own agenda?

My bet is that the DoD will either find the person, who will be some mid-range bureaucrat in the intelligence community that will, at best, be removed from his or her position, or they won’t find anyone at all, which will likely mean the person that leaked it is too connected to punish. Our allies will hesitate for a while on sharing, and China and Russia will use this as an excuse to say its proof we’re really “at war” and to excuse further transgressions on their part.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. Don’t forget to donate to DaTechGuy or purchase one of the author’s books!

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