Enjoy your hotdogs and your friends, but...

 

Dad's second tour in Nam

 At this point he's make rank so he's not shoving supplies out of a tent, but it's still pretty austere.  After all, Marines.  And Nam.  But there's perks to his job, as he's now in charge of the supply chain for his entire regiment, and one of those perks is that he's in charge of the food for the annual meetings of diplomats that were held on a monthly basis in Thailand.  Remember, the Marines guard our embassies, and the diplomatic meetings were a function of said embassies, do Dad gets to order the food for the once-a-month party.

Said food being steak and lobster, because..  well...  diplomats.  And bullshit.  In Thailand.

But here's the thing:  The meetings were SCHEDULED for every month, but that doesn't mean that they actually happened every month.  And Dad, being a good supply officer, knew that you just couldn't have last month's steak and lobster just sitting there in the freezer.  That wouldn't do for the high and might diplomats, not at all.  So dad orders new steak and lobster, then takes the old steak and lobster, and goes searching for people who care enough about their status that they'll trade away a lot of nice stuff to get the food.  After all, he can't just bring the food back to Nam with him.

Enter the Air Force.  Not only did the Air Force desperately want the steak and lobster, but they were willing to bring in cases of Jack Daniels from the states to trade.  Yes, there was a lot of steak and lobster for these meetings, and the Air Force couldn't understand why some jarhead had what should rightly be their supper, but fine, here's some whiskey and yes we'll get more and fly it here.

Dad also got a nice case of the AF survival knives at one point.  All of it easily transportable.

So now dad has quite a bit of Jack Daniels.  Is he going to give it to his own men?  Dad knows Marines.  Dad knows what Marines and whiskey will accomplish in country, and Dad wisely says "Nope, not today" and trucks the whiskey over to the people who think they can drink.  

Enter the Navy.  Specifically the SeeBees.  Why the SeeBees?  Because they build shit.  And they have the materials to build said shit, and they have a mighty thirst that can only be quenched by Old Number 7.  And when Dad describes what he'll accept in trade for the cases of whiskey (and the knives.  The Navy guys loved the AF survival knives for some reason), the SeeBees look around, scratch their hands, and say "So you want this when?  Done."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how my father's regiment had the only enclosed, hardened gym in country.  His Marines could work out in mosquito-free comfort, safe from pretty much anything but a direct artillery strike.  And they were a bit too far back for a round to drop on their heads at that point.

Later on I would take some of these lessons my father imparted to me and use them to great effect during my own career.  I still have some gear that was never on the books stashed away, that was traded for other stuff that fell off the books or "expired".  And whenever I could, I made sure that my guys had EVERYTHING they needed.

Things veterans carry with them.

 Let's see here...

Two, Four (and how), both five AND six together and I'm not sure how that works but it does, seven, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen (although I'm getting better), fourteen, fifteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and twenty-two.

Yep.

Veteran's Day

 

I got nothing today.  Hell, I finally managed to sleep through the night for the first time in a week.  I don't know what it is about 0300, but my brain seems to think that I need to be wide awake at that time.  

I'll always be proud to be a Soldier.  But right now I want to take all the senior military "leadership" and drop them into the Marianas Trench.

US Army tells Drill SGTs "No more screaming"

I just....  fucking can't.

By the time this current crop of "leadership" is done, we're going to end up with the 69th Intersectional Dildo Brigade getting absolutely fucking DESTROYED by a country who actually trains their troops for combat.

Yeah, pretty much.

 

I know I'm preaching to the choir here

 

This shit here made me cheer

 Someone finally called that pathetic waste of oxygen Lloyd "I'm a fucktard political douchebag" Austin to account just a little bit.

While the US military entered into the last half of the 20th century with an unbroken string of wins, the last 70 years have been unkind. Where we have been most successful are in the wars that your typical Infantry major could plan (Panama, Grenada). Conflicts requiring an overarching strategy have been dismal failures. That is because we have raised a generation of general officers, including field commanders, who don’t see strategic acumen or tactical proficiency as part of their job description. Instead, they are resource managers and self-seeking careerists.

And yet, the Secretary of Defense comes before Congress asking for more money than the GDP of Poland to defend this nation, and he can’t explain why a French socialist is giving a lecture at the National Defense University on how to use a “new emancipatory and egalitarian horizon on a global scale, a new form of democratic and participatory, ecological and postcolonial socialism,” to defeat Communist China. He definitely can’t explain what the military services are doing to train the warriors of all ranks who will have to do the job.

There's not a single four-star general who I would trust right now to do the actual job of winning actual wars.  Lloyd Austin isn't an outlier.  His arrogance, stupidity, incompetence and complete inability to think outside of his politically woke box is the de facto standard amongst the flag officers right now.  When they're pushing "Be Nice To Trannies" training while Russia is invading Ukraine, you know where their priorities lie.

I don't think Matt Gaetz went far enough in excoriating Lloyd "I'm a fucking tool for Biden's puppetmasters" Austin.  But I'll take what I can get.

So anyways, this happened a few days ago

 "This" being the ACFT, which was mandated years ago to be a gender-neutral test, being "diversified" so that girls can pass.

[A] female soldier between 17 and 21 years old now has to deadlift between 120 and 210 lbs. while a male soldier has to lift between 140 and 340 lbs. In that same age group, female soldiers have to run two miles between 23:22 and 15:29 minutes while male soldiers must perform that exercise between 22 and 13:22 minutes. That minimum run time for male soldiers is a minute longer than the previous version of the ACFT that the Army previously trialed, following data showing the run is by far the most failed event for both genders.

Leg tucks are totally eliminated as the event to measure core strength, with planks taking their place. … Test designers were concerned that the leg tuck doesn’t strictly measure core muscle strength but also requires that a soldier spend a lot of energy on upper-body and grip strength. …

“If I don’t have the grip strength, but have the core strength, I can’t do a leg tuck,” [Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston] said. “That was the reason for taking that out; we wanted to measure core strength.”

Most females couldn't do the Leg Tuck.  THAT is why they're taking it out.  You know who else couldn't do the leg tuck?  A bunch of fat ass bastards who were too lazy to do PT.

I've taken the ACFT a couple of times.  The worst event for me was the Sprint/Drag/Carry.  But guess what you have to do in combat?  Motions just like sprinting, dragging a buddy out of fire, and carrying ammo cans.  The Leg Tuck did measure a bit of upper body strength, but you weren't even doing a pull-up.  You just had to bend your arms enough to touch your elbows to your legs as you curled your body.  And girls couldn't do ONE leg tuck.

But women should totally be in combat units.  Yeah.  Sure.  Uh huh.  Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

So now we have a pussified PT test so that women can feel just as strong as men without having to actually meet the same standard.  Rawr.  Grrl power and shit.  Just don't ask a girl to actually do what a man has to do, because that's sexist or something.  But women should be in the infantry.

Fuck.  That.  Noise.

The ACFT was, in part, brought about BECAUSE women were allowed to join combat units, and the men in those units rightly pointed out that if you wanted to join their unit you should have to meet their standards.  And combat, ladies and gentlemen, is still a physical event, no matter what the pathetic fucktards in charge want to make-believe.  Not only to allowing lesser standards to prevail put people in danger, it also handicaps men who now have to face promotion boards against other Soldiers who DON'T HAVE TO FOLLOW THE SAME STANDARD THEY DO.

You want to piss people off?  Yeah.  Oh, Soldier X got a 300 on their PT test!  They must be a super Soldier.  Except that Soldier X did fewer push-ups than Private Snuffy did, ran slower than Private Snuffy did, and somehow managed to outscore Private Snuffy on the PT test.  Huh.  Oh, and during field problems, while Private Snuffy was the fucking mule of the platoon, Soldier X was given the lightest load because she literally couldn't fucking carry the weight that was expected of male Soldiers.  Gosh, that builds unit cohesion, doesn't it?  

Do you trust someone who doesn't have to meet the same standard as everyone else?  I don't.  Not in combat.  If you can't get me ammo when I need ammo because you don't have the strength to haul the cans to my location, there's a problem.  If I have to push your ass over a wall because you don't have the strength to get yourself up and over?  That's a problem.  

I've been chewing on this ever since the news was released last week.  And all I can say is that eventually, the US Army is going to go back into combat, and it will not be as capable as it needs to be.  And this is by design.  This is being done on purpose.

Oh, and the Army is having to reduce its numbers because they can't meet their recruiting goals.  Gosh, I wonder what could have made the recruiting numbers drop so much?  Like there's TOTALLY no way that a vaccine mandate on top of so-called leadership caring more about Tranny training than war training, following a disaster of a pull-out from Afghanistan, and at least three more years of this so-called leadership might cause people to re-think their decision to enlist.  And as woke military leadership force their woke political views on to the military, fewer and fewer patriots are going to join up.

Nobody enlists to be told that they're evil because their white, or that a man is a woman if he says he is.

Did I mention that I'm glad I'm retiring?

And my response is "Go Fuck Yourself"

 

Or as I said to my commander yesterday, "You got my retirement paperwork, right?  You did?  Good."

A good summation of what the military is for

 Of course, the current junta is doing their level best to destroy the military, but sometimes it's good to remind ourselves that things have an actual purpose.

Many Americans, particularly our most senior politicians and military leaders, seem to have developed a form of dementia when it comes to warfare. The result is confusion or denial about the essential ingredients of a competent military force, and the costs of major power conflict. The memory loss is largely irrespective of political bent because all too many are seduced by a Hollywood infused sense of antiseptic warfare and push-button solutions, while forgotten are the one million casualties of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, or the almost two million in the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.  

This “warfare dementia” is a dangerous and potentially catastrophic malady, because the price for it could alter the success of the American experiment and most assuredly will be paid in blood. The condition is exacerbated and enabled when the most senior military leaders — those who ought to know better — defer to the idealistic judgments of those whose credentials are either nonexistent or formed entirely by ideology.

Read the whole thing.

I wonder what to call this

 How about Whoreshit?  I got a little letter in my email yesterday from the Secretary of the Army.

About the only thing I could say after reading that pile of word garbage is WHAT FUCKING HORSE SHIT!  If it's not an ode to the most woke fucking garbage that the Marxists have foisted on this country, then it's meaningless political babble from some commie cunt who knows that her job is to destroy the military from the top down.  

Point 1 - a "sustainable strategic path"?  What the fuck does that even mean?  It's bullshit word salad with no meaning behind it, much like almost every proclamation from this administration.

Point 2 - Become more data-centric?  Operated in contested environments?  Hey lady, I'm not sure anyone has filled you in on this last little part, but in combat EVERYTHING IS A CONTESTED ENVIRONMENT!

Point 3 - face climate change.  Uh.  Tell me you're a brainwashed indoctrinated commie without using the words brainwashed indoctrinated commie.  Here's a clue to the clueless:  the climate has always changed.  It will always change.  And that gigantic thermonuclear explosion happening in the middle of our solar system is the cause.  Not human activity.  And assuming that mankind WAS causing climate change, whaddya gonna do about it?  Deal with the worst polluter on the planet, CHINA?  Yeah, like Drooling Joe and his puppet masters are going to do anything against the country that owns them lock stock and barrel?  Please.

Point 4 - "build positive command climates".  Positive for whom, exactly?  The Taliban?  Gen. Milley did love to give the Taliban a pretty positive climate.

Point 5 - "reduce harmful behaviors in the Army".  Oh joy.  Another fucking mommy to tell me what to do.  Guess what lady, I already have a mommy, and she's more intelligent than you, more patriotic than you, and far better at teaching people how to defend this country than you.  I don't need a governmental mommy to guide me.  So go fuck yourself.

Point 6 - "adapt the way we recruit and retain talent in the Army".  Yeah.  Like mandating a fucking jab that's causing an massive uptick in various illnesses in the Army?  Like that utterly woke and pathetic "Corporal has two mommies" ad that proved we're wasting our advertising money?

I gotta retire.  This shit here is going to drive me up the fucking wall.  And I'm NOT going to be on the front lines if this is the level of "leadership" that the Army has.  They'll get people slaughtered in whole lots.

I can't explain why I'm laughing so damn hard at this

 

So Insty posted about the Selective Service needing some volunteers

 And I haz questionz.

In order to meet the minimum requirements for serving as a Local Board Member, you must be at least 18 years of age and a U.S. citizen who registered with Selective Service, if male. Further, you must not work in law enforcement (e.g. police officer or judge), must not be an active or retired career member of the Armed Forces, Reserves, and/or National Guard, and must not have been convicted of any criminal offense.

NOT be active or retired career military?

I think I can understand the whole not wanting active military part, because those people can't really guarantee that they're going to be around when they get the call.  Uncle Sam might have something else for them to do.  Got it.  But no retired military?

Anyone wanna try to explain that one to me?  I mean, if you're going to have a board to determine who gets a deferment or exemption, wouldn't you want a guy who's actually done the job and knows what it takes?

Or maybe that's why the DON'T want retired military.  Because then not a many people would skate through.  Especially some politician's kid. 

This one hit a little too close to home.

 

Drooling Joe and his puppet masters are destroying the military

 Deliberately.

Let’s revisit military readiness for a minute. Here we have a woke military, led by a vaccinated Sec Def who just got Covid, who is all in on kicking people out for not getting vaccinated. They are ignoring the exceptionally high rate of suicides within the ranks, and instead bleating on about vaccines. 

Do you want to talk about military readiness? Ask the command staff why, when people who’ve been in for 18, 20, 22 years put in for retirement are told, NOPE and are ordered to stay in for another year to two years. Remember, this is a volunteer military. Yet, while suicides are rampant and the military is kicking unvaccinated soldiers out, those who decide to retire are ordered to stay. Quite the morale booster isn’t it?

Lloyd Austin is a worthless piece of shit.  He's always been a worthless piece of shit, and he will continue to be a worthless piece of shit in the future.  He's a racist asshole who is friends with more racist assholes and black nationalists, who in turn have decided that they're going to conduct their purge on what they see as the last bastion of white supremacy.  All of this destruction is being done DELIBERATELY.  

And the damage being done will go on for generations.  Because that's what happens when you attack the foundation of an organization.  You can't just toss a few patches on the wall and say that you fixed it.  You have to tear it down to the studs and fix the foundation before you can repair the damage to the walls and the roof and the sides.

I hope Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley die screaming and spend eternity in hell for what they've done to my Army.

Up and out early again today

 Y'all know why.  

Once I retire, if I have to get up at the buttcrack of dawn and put in an 18 hour day, it'll be because I'm getting rich.

I was a SAW gunner

And I was besties with my medic.  This is entirely accurate.

The Fat Electrician Reviews: The Trench Sweeper (War Crime Stick)

I don't know why I'm laughing so hard at this, but it will probably piss off my wife.

I think I might need help

 I have been laughing at this for fifteen minutes straight.