Posts Tagged ‘military’

Ask a Vet about their story

Posted: November 9, 2019 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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I will be forever amazed how well our country treats veterans. Anytime I’ve traveled in uniform, it becomes hard to pay for a meal. This is especially true if I’m driving in the middle of the country where there aren’t a lot of military bases. This Veterans Day will doubtlessly be no different, and I’ll get reminded again that this is a country full of great people that care.

Over this past week I had a chance to interact with some of the older veterans from WW2 and Korea. Those veterans are disappearing at an alarming rate, and it won’t be long until they are gone. After that, we’ll eventually have nobody that lived through the Cold War. That time is coming faster than we think.

These veterans have stories that bring these conflicts to life. One WW2 veteran told me about the large number of plane accidents near his hometown. It reminded me that while we increased production of everything from ships to planes, it doesn’t mean it was the greatest quality. We cranked out Liberty ships in less than a month, but more than a few brittle fractured in half due to cold weather and poor welding. Planes and other weapon systems had similar issues. There are a lot of training aircraft on the bottom of Lake Michigan due to equipment failures.

The Liberty ship S.S. Schenectady, which, in 1943, failed before leaving the shipyard. (Reprinted with permission of Earl R. Parker, Brittle Behavior of Engineering Structures, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1957.) From: https://metallurgyandmaterials.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/liberty-ship-failures/

I would encourage every non-veteran reading this to not just thank a veteran this weekend for their service, but ask them if they have 5 minutes to share a story. Our veterans can become increasingly isolated in their own little groups, and after a while your sea stories get old in the same groups of people. Having even a brief chance to hear about something they did will help bring the conflicts alive. You won’t read these stories in a book. History books capture facts and numbers well, but history is made by real people who are far too complex to capture on paper. This Veterans Day gives us a golden opportunity to remember that and carry on these stories in our minds before they are lost.

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.

Breaking the SCIF phones

Posted: October 26, 2019 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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What all phones should look like after a SCIF visit.

If you’ve never heard of a SCIF before this past week, you probably don’t work in government. SCIFs are Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities. If you want to read or work on a document that is classified Top Secret, you work in a SCIF. As you can see from a released set of specifications, SCIFs are fairly intensively constructed. Floors and ceilings are solid, wires are in buried conduits checked by the NSA’s TEMPEST program, and access is tightly controlled.

It’s not surprising that when Republican lawmakers go into the SCIF with cell phones, it causes alarm. And it should. Photography equipment isn’t allowed, nor is anything that can conduct two-way communication. Already you have people calling for removal of clearances. But is that appropriate?

In short, no. Congressional Representatives and Senators get access to classified information based on their position. While they are required to take an oath of secrecy, they don’t have to go through the SF86 process. By electing them to their office, the people of the United States (whether they realize it or not) have declared their comfort with that individual having access to classified access.

While some very sensitive information is only released to certain individuals, its pretty small. A Congressman visited a site I worked at before and had access to everything. Now, his staff members did not, and I had to keep them out of certain briefings, but the Congressman himself was good.

In short though, you can’t take away access, unless you kick them out of office.

However, there should be consequences for violating rules. All the Armed Services have harsh and effective ways of dealing with this. Cell phones brought into a SCIF are normally sent to NCIS to be scanned. With people having most of their lives on a phone, losing it for a week while NCIS painstakingly goes through every image and file tends to be good persuasion. The Marines in Iraq, in response to people plugging their personal devices into classified computers, simply confiscated the devices and nailed them to a wooden board outside the SCIF. After walking by a board with iPhones and tablets nailed and screwed to the wall, you get the message quickly.

Confiscate and scan some phones, and put a policy in place that repeat offenders lose their devices. After a few of those, you won’t have idiots bringing phones into a SCIF.

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. The author kindly reminds you to keep your damn phone out of the SCIF!

What is a military for?

Posted: March 8, 2011 by datechguy in culture, war
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Apparently its primary purpose is to make a social statement:

The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Let me point out something very simple. The purpose of the military is not to reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix of the country. The job of the military is to:

  • Fight and deter the enemies of the united states
  • Defend our allies and to deter those who would threaten them.
  • Protect American interest and citizens.

As long as we are able to do this, I don’t care if our military is composed of three-legged aliens who all answer to the name “Harold”. I’ll let others argue the specifics, the bottom line is promotion and leadership should be based on whatever helps the military achieve those goals I listed, that it!

The moment we do otherwise we lose the best military in the world, and believe me the rest of the world and our enemies are watching.

Blackfive unclear on the concept

Posted: January 5, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news, war
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Captain Owen Honors has been relieved and apparently so are liberals everywhere:

Without any regard for the highest moral values that military officers are expected to uphold, he broke barriers of taste and decency. Or, as the Navy put it in a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the Enterprise’s skipper used “poor judgment.”

I don’t know if Luisita Lopez Torregrosa served, I didn’t but Blackfive has. That’s most likely why he has this reaction over the relief of Captain Honors:

Well, and while you can compare an aircraft carrier to a frat house, it isn’t. But the further away from that alpha male and females mentality, the more pussified and Dutch-like our military will become. They have a union for their troops FFS. If we don’t have guys like the XO flapping his gums, buzzing the tower and deriding Surface Officers and other lower life forms, then we won’t have the mentality that flies toward an incoming swarm of 200 enemy planes, that charges a machine gun, or that leaps on to a grenade to save comrades.

For the most part it takes a particular type to be a great soldier. I’m reminded of the Falklands war when the British commented on the bravery of the Argentine Pilots saying that any country that produces world-class formula one drivers are going have brave fighter and bomber pilots.

A Soldier’s perspective provides some:

Let’s be honest, the videos were not politically correct, but they contained messages of importance that every command must convey to their subordinates. I’ve heard from many people directly who were either on those deployments and saw the videos firsthand or viewed them later. Their response was that, for the first time ever, those messages were actually watched by Sailors on the ship.

Typically, military command messages are monotonous, cheesy, dry and boring. Not “or”, but “AND.”

The Navy has to endure a different type of suckiness than land forces do when they deploy. By and large, they are confined to the limits of the ship on which they are assigned. Unlike Soldiers and Marines, Sailors do not get to drive into town, move from camp to camp, etc. They are stuck in confined spaces with perhaps a tenth of the personal space that ground combat forces enjoy during their deployments. The mood gets pretty crabby and I’m sure that Capt Honors understood that and did a great job livening the mood on board the ship.emphasis mine

Of course some people found it offensive. As a Christian, I found it distasteful, but I also saw the humor in it and thought it was a brilliant stroke of genius to get the Sailors to pay attention.

In the military the goal is results, what results did we get:

Capt Honors served a successful tour as the XO of the USS Enterprise and followed that with a successful command of the USS Mount Whitney (LCC/JCC 20), in Gaeta, Italy. The ship conducted humanitarian assistance missions in Lebanon and the Republic of Georgia in support of Operation Assured Delivery. His awards include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Joint Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medals, Meritorious Service Medal, and various campaign/unit awards.

Yeah, sounds like this incident really reflected poor performance didn’t it? Luisita Lopez Torregrosa again:

Though the videos have caught everyone’s attention, the captain’s anti-gay slurs cut more deeply, especially now, just weeks after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the beginning of a new era of openness and tolerance in our armed forces.

Because what we are all looking for in combat is openness and tolerance? I’m sure that is just what is needed when fighting in Afghanistan. Funny how our friends on the left don’t have the same openness and tolerance for humor that others are expected to have. Do you hear Sicilians going nuts over every mafia joke out there? However let’s go back to Blackfive again:

I have given my fair share of shite to any number of fighter pilot types, heck quite a few of them bought me and my friends drinks in O-clubs like Osan and Cubi Point as we told stories using our hands to show how we got on the guy’s six. But I sure as hell respect the stones, ability and discipline it takes to ride a rocket into the sky and then land it on a boat in the ocean. So unfortunately a good officer loses his chance to command the Enterprise over something this lame, but worse yet we lose a bit of our warrior spirit.

He doesn’t get it. The left has never cared for the “warrior spirit” The loss of American warrior spirit IS the goal of these folks. This isn’t a bug, this is a feature.

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