Archive for the 'Marine Corps' Category

Source.

When the Defense Department surveyed troops in 2021 on their experiences in the workplace regarding gender, the findings revealed significant room for improvement ― particularly in the Marine Corps.

Now, the Corps is bringing on new staff members in the latest effort to address this cultural trend. The service revealed its plans in a briefing presented to the Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in March.

Because nothing says “America’s Strike Force” like spending resources and time on ensuring that equal numbers of men and women fight in war.

Honestly, the cancer has gone so deep at this point I highly doubt it can be excised, even by the best surgeon.

From Twitchy.

” … both the AR-15 and M4 contain barrel rifling to make the round tumble upon impact … “

I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that’s the point of rifling, did you?

I am in absolute awe

I was today years old when I was informed, by an “expert” testifying for California’s DOJ, that an AR is an area effect weapon, a single .223 round can sever a human being in half, barrel rifling is what makes a round tumble upon hitting it’s target and… https://t.co/5VZ5vIWN4c pic.twitter.com/Qnl7Qr0uQC

— Bad Weapon Takes (@BadWeaponTakes) February 11, 2023

And not only that, semiautomatic rifles are more effective than fully automatic ones.  Furthermore, it’s “very difficult to use as a defensive weapon, except as a blunt force instrument.”

It can cut a body in half, the semiautomatic version is more dangerous and effective than a machine gun, and it’s no good for a defensive weapon.

No, it’s not just you.  No one else can make sense of this mish-mash either.

At this point it makes no sense to try to decipher this gobbledygook.  But it does go to show just how badly the USMC has screwed up by promoting men like this, either idiots, or traitors, or both.  The USMC should be ashamed, but probably isn’t.

The last vestige of reliable American defensive forces has been infected, corrupted, and turned into a sham and hollow shell.  How sad.

UPDATE: Here is a rebuttal to the nonsense in the opinion of Tucker.

“They blew me off.” It’s not the same MC today as even when my son served in Fallujah.

Hi @USMC. My dad will be 100 yrs old on 2/24. A Marine during WWII. 5 assault landings. We'd love it if a uniformed Marine came for a visit – say "HI" to him. Few WWII Marines are left alive. Sent a message thru the Marine Corp portal.
They blew me off.
Thanks pic.twitter.com/V273AE648O

— Jim Thompson (@JimmySportToons) February 2, 2023

Give the Marines credit for at least citing the cause. Last week here at TCJ, we noted how the Navy gave no reasons for its recruiting and retention problems.

The COVID-19 vaccine mandate is contributing to the military’s recruitment troubles, the top general in the Marine Corps said on Saturday.

Speaking during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger defended the vaccine mandate as a necessity for keeping the force healthy. But he indicated the mandate has posed problems for recruiting in pockets of the United States where vaccine misinformation is prevalent.

“Where it is having an impact for sure is on recruiting, where in parts of the country there’s still myths and misbeliefs about the back story behind it,” Berger said.

Speaking to reporters at the conference later Saturday afternoon, Berger added that the mandate has posed an issue for recruiting in the South in particular.

“There was not accurate information out early on and it was very politicized and people make decisions and they still have those same beliefs. That’s hard to work your way past really hard to work,” he said in response to a question from Military.com.

“Small areas, big factor,” he added when pressed about how much the mandate has contributed to recruiting issues. “You talk to me in the cafeteria, and one of my first questions is, ‘Do I have to get that vaccine?’ And you go, ‘Yeah, you do.’ Ok, I’ll talk to you later. It’s that fast.”

The military has faced a recruiting crisis over the last year as it tackles the twin difficulties of increasing numbers of Americans unqualified to serve and decreasing numbers of those who are qualified being interested in serving.

One Pentagon study found that only 23% of young Americans would be eligible, pointing primarily to obesity and minor legal infractions related to things like marijuana use as precluding the vast majority from putting on the uniform.

By way of brief followup to my post entitled Things Learned About Modern Warfare From The Ukrainian War, I thought I would roll in the experience of my former Marine son.

It was long held that the USMC is special operations, so they don’t need one.  I have a whole host of thoughts on this claim that would take us very far afield and ruin the main point I want to make.  Besides, readers would get bored and skip out on it.

But sooner or later the MC would capitulate, and Marine Raiders were folded into SOCOM.  When that happened, money flooded in.  They had all sorts of perks that other Marines didn’t have, for example, when my son learned to perform CQB and room clearing, he went to hot shoot houses, all over the country, before his deployment to Iraq.

The SOCOM Marines do too, but before that, they have (onsite at Camp Lejeune) better-than-video-game quality simulations of shoot houses (with physical movement) that could be programmed for whatever situation they wanted to test, and it could be run at any time, night or day, but only for the SOCOM Marines.

Each SOCOM Marine, even when my son was in the Corps, which ended in 2008, had his own cage with equipment.  Literally anything he wanted was in this cage.

When my son visited these cages with a buddy on Camp Lejeune, you know what was found in many of the cages?  Drones, along with controls for them.  They could pick them up at will and carry them on whatever deployment was next.

Drones.  Modern warfare requires them for intel and surveillance.  The losers will not have drones.  The winners will.

Ed Palm.

So much for reasoning the need, but there is a humanly redemptive sense in which I believe we still need the Marine Corps.

I grew up in a single-parent working-class home in a bad neighborhood. I had no prospects for college. I seemed destined for a life of industrial-strength monotony, and the Corps at the time was the only avenue to distinction open to me. The Marines shored up my flagging self-respect and self-confidence, and I’m sure it has done likewise for countless young men, and now women, who have been put down and underestimated by the authority figures in their lives. In the words of the poet, “I took the [road] less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.”

The difference is that the Marine Corps is not just a branch of the military. The Army has its elite units; the Navy has its SEALS. But the Marine Corps is an elite fraternity (in a genderless sense) with a distinctive sense of esprit de corps.

That fraternal sense is a Marine thing. If you’ve never been a Marine, you may not understand it.

This is a heartfelt tribute to the history of the U.S. Marine Corps and what it has meant to our history, so I hate to say it to Ed, but this comes from another time, another culture, and another world.

My son saw it after Iraq when the Corps wouldn’t allow him to train his “boots” the same way he was trained.  He also observed that they were intentionally attempting to rid the Corps of combat experience.

It didn’t take too long until women were invited to join Marine Corps infantry officer training at Quantico, and then on to integrated men/women training at boot camp.  The U.S. Marine Corps is but a shell of what it once was.

They could have taken a different route.  It would have involved making enlistments five or six years instead of four, raising entrance standards for all Marines, more specialized schools, jettisoning the ridiculous notion of large scale amphibious landings, learning to operate in stealth and with distributed operations in smaller teams, learning and applying different means of ingress and egress, and so on.  In other words, many of the things the Marine Raiders do now, except on a wider scale.

It’s too late.  The DoD relies too heavily on JSOC for that sort of thing, so much so that their operational tempo has caused problems.  You can add to all of this the vaccine mandate, and the entire DoD has been eviscerated.

What Ed Palm remembers is now just a phantom – a ghost.

I really don’t want to rehearse the goings-on surrounding Marine Lt. Col. Scheller any more, but this article caught my eye, where this is said.

Scheller responded with another video on Aug. 29 that appeared even more emotional. His former mentor, retired Col. Thomas Hobbs, had commented on his first video and said that if Scheller was honorable, he would resign his commission.

“You didn’t say, ‘is,’ as if challenging me,” Scheller responded to Hobbs in the video. “You said, ‘was,’ as if I wouldn’t do it.” Scheller then announced that he was resigning, and told viewers that if people followed him, they would bring “the system down.”

Hobbs, in a brief phone interview, said on Tuesday that Scheller served under his command at one point, and was one of his best company commanders. Hobbs said that while Scheller was a top performer, he warned him long ago that his arrogance could be his downfall.

“He hasn’t shown one speck of remorse or admitted he was wrong in any way,” Hobbs said. “I 100 percent believe it’s a ploy for him to run for office.”

Uh huh, and Hobbs himself has no dog in this political fight, does he?  But maybe he does.  From his commentary at Marine Corps Times (The Marine Corps: Always faithful – to white men), he makes some startling assertions.

The struggle of minority officers I witnessed at TBS has never left my mind. Over time, I have come to understand the cause. TBS is a high-pressure environment where lieutenants are in direct competition with one another. The first three significant tests are swim qualification, rifle/pistol qualification, and land navigation. Many of the minority officers I led grew up in low socio-economic areas, typically poor urban neighborhoods. They did not have access to scouting, neighborhood pools or hunting. Many of my minority officers struggled with swim qualification. Ultimately, every one of those officers passed, but at a cost to their prestige, confidence, and lineal standing. The pattern remained the same for rifle/pistol qualification and land navigation. Furthermore, remediation and re-qualification attempts were time intensive, fostering a vicious cycle as the lieutenants fell behind in other topics. These three major evaluations occurred during the first third of TBS, and by the time those events concluded, reputations were set for the remainder of school and, one can argue, the remainder of their Marine Corps careers.

Another aspect of TBS that favors lieutenants from white middle- and upper-class families is the language we use in the Marine Corps, particularly among officers. We speak “proper” English, that is English deemed proper by those who have power and determine the standards. Even if no one ever said it out loud, those who struggled to write and speak “correctly” were not respected by the officer culture, a culture determined by white men over the past 244 years.

My white lieutenants who excelled at TBS did so because they worked hard. This fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the institution creates a level playing field for all officers. I believe the institution has not and does not. The institution is biased towards middle- and upper-class white culture. The institution perpetuates the unspoken narrative of white superiority by setting up minority officers for failure. It puts minority officers in occupational specialties they did not want or have not been thoroughly prepared for by the system.

The fact that this should all be embarrassing for him – and isn’t – should cause even more embarrassment.  He should be humiliated that he isn’t humiliated by such tripe.

He claims he wants a “level playing field,” and recognizes that hard work results in advancement, but wants equality of outcomes, which is precisely the opposite of all of that.

If a Marine cannot shoot, he should never have graduated from boot camp, much less school of infantry.  If an infantry officer cannot shoot, engage in land navigation, speak English, and compete with others, he shouldn’t be a Marine Corps infantry officer.  How on earth is someone who cannot excel at those things going to conduct warfare or lead other men?

I don’t care whether they hunted, swam or had been part of the Boy Scouts as a child.  That’s irrelevant to their skills, drive, motivation and moral constitution today.  If Mr. Hobbs wants better blacks to join the Marine Corps, the problem isn’t the Marine Corps.  The problem is rotted out inner cities, fatherless families, gangs, SNAP, TANF and the rest of government handouts.  Study in school, learn to speak English, learn calculus, take AP courses, get a part time job, and stop joining gangs.

There is a rejoinder at the Marine Corps Times, but it should never had to have been written.  It should be enough to let Mr. Hobbs’ stupid commentary stand on its own, forcing all good Marines to look away in shame at what the Corps has become that a man like Hobbs would ever have been an officer to begin with.

And by the way, the play on words of the post title, is a reminder to readers that Hobbes believed that “state and government are necessary for the realization of acceptable social conduct by its citizens.”

Hobbs also appears to be a lover of the state.

Shameful.  The entire thing is shameful.  The Marine Corps is just a shell of what it once was.

MARADMIN.

The provisions contained within paragraph 3.a of this MARADMIN constitute a lawful general order and any violation of these provisions is punishable as a violation of Article 92 of ref (i).  Marines shall take action to fully immunize themselves against COVID-19 per ref (j).  Paragraph 3.a is punitive and applies without further implementation.  Commanders, commanding officers, and officers in charge shall issue appropriate orders to ensure that their Marines and Sailors are fully vaccinated.  In accordance with Rule for Court Martial 306 of ref (n), initial disposition authority for cases arising from COVID-19 vaccine refusals is withheld to the general court-martial convening authority level except that administrative counseling pursuant to paragraph 6105 of ref (k) may be issued at the special court martial convening authority level.

There are no permanent exemptions, not even medical exemption unless contraindicated.  Further, they recognize no such thing as a religious exemption.  This is a standing order under the threat of court martial, regardless of proximity to date of discharge.

They make an awful lot of bold claims in this MARADMIN, such as the shot being “extremely safe and effective,” something we won’t know without long term data.  But let’s leave behind the medicine for a moment.

What they’re saying is that regardless of your religious beliefs, you must take the shot.  Recall that we’ve discussed this at length, and every shot out there was developed on the backs of cell lines from aborted babies.

Regardless of what you think about that, there are some who believe they should not take the shot for that reason alone.

So the USMC is now superseding religious views.

This is not your father’s or grandfather’s Marine Corps.  Not only did my son serve in the Marines, but most of my uncles served in WWII and the Korean war in the USMC.  I could never join the military because of RA.

Nonetheless, I repudiate them.  They are dead to me.

Newsbusters.

Univision aired a bombshell allegation in the midst of its coverage of the United States’ disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Per former Army Green Beret and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Roger Pardo-Maurer, the Department of Defense had knowledge of the homicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and scrambled a Predator drone only to order it to stand down as it locked on its target. Per Pardo-Maurer, the stand-down order was given in deference to negotiations with the Taliban.

Watch the stunning allegation, as aired on Univision’s midday Edición Digital newscast on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:

ROGER PARDO-MAURER: What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren’t even in control of their own government or their own people.

So the deaths of 13 Marines will be put down in the book of sins of the men who knew and participated in this, and the men who defend them and speak on their behalf.

A Holy God and His judgment awaits you.

You are doubtless all aware of the courage on display by Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller.  I embedded the video.  There is a follow up to this, but before we get there I should mention a few things.

First, as to the individual he mentions in the video who questioned his honor.  My first impression was “What sort of prick would do that?”  It was answered in the video.  Lt. Col. Scheller was very respectful, but it appears that it’s some staff officer still bitching about race relations.

If you’re a staff or flag officer bitching about race relations, listen up.  What you should have been doing is getting on your knees every night and begging God for mercy – mercy on you, and mercy on your Marines.  You should be praying nightly that you are an inspiration to them, that you are faithful to your wife (unlike some of the drama queens in the flag ranks recently), that God helps you to meet His demands for leadership, for the spiritual and physical well-being of your boys, and that they would return home safely after accomplishing your mission.  And just like Stu Scheller, you should be questioning your command structure for accountability.

If you cannot do that, resign, today.  I would do everything in my power to keep my son from following a man who is bitching about race relations in the military (or anywhere else), and I don’t consider that individual any man at all.  You can tell him that a Marine father said these words.  I stand by them, and I would meet him face to face and tell him he’s no man at all. What – you didn’t think the Marine Corps makes Marines, did you? Marines are made at home. They’re just refined in the Corps.

Speaking of which, I reminded my son a couple of days ago as we watched the debacle unfold in Kabul that I talked him out of reenlisting in the Marine Corps by saying to him, “If you reenlist, chances are that you will lose your legs or arms or hearing or brain function in some forgotten mission that some corrupt CiC sent you on, and then forgotten by the VA and ignored and disrespected by the rest of the world.”

He told me a few days ago he appreciated my words.  But if he was still in the Marine Corps, I would be proud and honored for him to serve under Stuart Scheller.

Finally, a true leader doesn’t say “go.”  A true leader says “follow me.”