šØ Breaking: Fully vaccinated, fully masked and fully shielded US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tested positive for Covid š§š pic.twitter.com/J6rjMealwf
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) January 3, 2022
From Guest writers Matthew Newgent and Glen Whitner
Matt and Glen are both former West Point officers where they were classmates from the Class of 1996. Glen spent 28 months over three combat deployments in Iraq both as an enlisted infantry scout and later as a logistics officer and achieved the rank of Major. Matt was enlisted as a linguist in Army Intelligence and later an engineer officer. He graduated from the US Army Ranger School and achieved the rank of Captain.
When Matt was a combat engineer officer in the 20th Engineer Brigade (Airborne) at Ft. Bragg, NC, he was temporarily attached to the 1st Brigade of the famed 82nd Airborne Division for a massive mock-war exercise, where Colonel (at the time) Lloyd Austin commanded the 1/82nd. It was an honor even to be temporarily attached to the 82nd. The exercise took place at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC), Ft. Polk, LA, where they conducted a massive airborne insertion into the training area. The climax of the exercise was the battle to liberate the town of Shugart Gordan from the opposing force (OPFOR) insurgents. The OPFOR consisted of hundreds of real-world actors who had roles from shoppers, to spies, to enemy infantry. OPFOR gear included armored vehicles, non-conventional weapons, and even the Russian Hind-D helicopter (like in the movie Red Dawn).
Continue reading “Duty or Disgrace: Choosing the Harder Right over the Easier Wrong”
The US isnāt serious, and the fiasco this week where Lloyd Austin stammered in front of a committee, clearly unprepared to answer questions about what his own command is doing, was only one sign. Austinās sheepish admission that heās blown a half-billion dollars training a Syrian insurgent force that can be counted on a single handās fingers,Ā max,Ā wasnāt even the low point of his testimony, and Austinās failure isnāt the Armyās only failure this week.
Friday PM ā the usual time for a Data Dump of Shame in DC, because all the overpaid, underworked .gov workers areĀ out of the city and into Beltway traffic in the early afternoon ā the Army dumped the name and circumstances of the new Secretary of the Army, and heās a doozy. The youthful-looking Secretary-designee, Acting Undersecretary Eric Fanning comes by his youthful looks honestly: heās young (46) and callow, a career midrange bureaucrat without significant executive experienceĀ (.pdf), or private-sector experience, although heās been parked in Democratic lobbying firms during Republican administrations. He has never served in the military and has never displayedĀ much respect for those who do and have. They are there to serve him. He has never held a job in the productive economy.
He is also a proponent of the nuclear armament of Iran, also known as the Iran Deal, which should give you an idea of just how he didnāt succeed in one of his previous bureaucratic sinecures,Ā Deputy Director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. He is also a former CBS reporter, in the Dan Rather fabrication days. Hey, but he is an Ivy grad (Dartmouth), where he majored in Not Joining ROTC, and that counts for something.
Why pick him, then? To Send A Messageā¢, to count a valuable bean among people for whom the military exists to enable bean-counting. Fanning is fabulouslyĀ gay, and his tasking is to increase the social engineering pressure on the Army to make it more friendly to GLBTQWERTY individuals, and more hostile to those who are not, whilst presiding over the readiness and end-strength declines heās already been managingĀ as Acting Undersecretary. He has said that his highest priorities are to forbid criticism of gay (etc) soldiers and to encourage transgender soldiers.