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Follow the Line … or Else
During my days in the military, I was a Senior NCO, which meant it was my responsibility to see that all policies and regulations dictated by DOD and USAF were followed. Sometimes it was as picayune as haircuts and uniforms; sometimes it dealt with more important areas such as communications security. Whatever the issue, it was imperative that it be handled in a professional manner; even if I considered the regulation to be somewhat foolish.
Sometimes this could be difficult. My junior enlisted folks were not stupid and they instinctively knew when someone was trying to blow sunshine up their nether regions. I always strived to be the type of NCO that could be counted on for honesty, if not popularity.
Late last week at the McClatchy website, I read there were a number of enlisted troops who questioned the DOD’s latest moves geared toward rooting out “extremists” in the ranks. Many, if not most, of the questions concerned the equivalence between the events of January 6 at the Capitol and the riots of last summer in several US cities.
Evidently, senior leadership at the Pentagon was flummoxed by the questions (as well they should have been). So, it was up to the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (AF Chief Master Sergeant Ramon Colon-Lopez) to try to put a happy face on this idiocy. In a statement to reporters, the Chief stated:
Those are very, very tough conversations to have with people because sometimes they’re emotional about the subject…. We cannot confuse a First Amendment grievance because of social injustice organization (BLM) and some of the criminals that latched on to go ahead and loot, destroy and commit other crimes. There’s two clear, distinct groups right there.
So, there we have it. Since Chief Colon-Lopez was clearly speaking for the Joint Chiefs, it is now a certainty that our military has plunged into the world of “woke” politics with both feet.
To me, this is indescribably sad. The military has absolutely no place in justifying killing, looting, and burning in our cities. Yet, one of the highest-ranking enlisted people in our military is doing just that. Chief Colon-Lopez is no REMF; he is a highly decorated combat veteran who has risked his life for our country. Now, he has become part of the woke circus that has permeated the very organization that we depend on to defend us.
Even more ominous is the news that the Pentagon is “also weighing whether any additional mechanisms are needed, such as ways for service members to confidentially report potential extremist behavior within their units.” It used to be that unit cohesion was one of the most important things that we strived for. Now, it appears that the leadership is looking for ways to tear units apart.
There will be only one way to stop this madness. Somewhere in our military, people with stars on their shoulders will need the moral courage to stand up and say, “Enough.” As I look through our military, I am not seeing these people.
Sad; totally sad.
Published in General
If they do stand up during this administration, they will be investigated and some charges created.
With the 8% of the population that is radically anti-American leftist now in a position of dominance at the head of the military as well as almost every other social institution that free America depends on, including the White House the Federal Legislature, the advance can not be stopped from the top down, with everyone obeying authority without questioning.
I am not speaking of a revolution, of some new truth that just took effect with the Biden administration. Authority always has depended, and always will, on some degree of buy-in by the common people. Even a true slave society does! Authority must not go too far too fast or the NCOs; the people in the pews; the PTA; the rank and file of the NAACP, the Democratic Party, and the unions; the small business-owners; the cops on the beat…all of these will say, “that’s enough!” The machine at the head will lose buy-in of the ground forces needed to implement their oppressive scheme.
The hundreds of thousands of American Communists were so committed to the idea of communism that they were reluctantly but explicitly willing to break their moral rules and to destroy their own beloved country in order to achieve its victory. But when Stalin entered into a pact with Hitler, it was too much to accept. The above-ground American Communist Party lost a huge number of members. Even some in the underground who were spying for Stalin and had by then already become aware of the brutal nature of the USSR’s rule during the purges of the 1930s and reluctantly accepted it, defected or abandoned their posts. The Communists lost buy-in to a damaging degree by going too far.
Even Roosevelt and the New Dealers went from being friendly allies of the American Communist Party to being distrustful and breaking off ties. The alliance between the Government and the Communists, and the American Communists and the Party, were not restored until Hitler invaded the USSR, and Stalin did an about-face regarding America’s fascist enemy.
The obvious solution is to add political officers to every unit. It worked so well for the Soviet Union, why not here? Oh, BTW, take a look at this YouTube item to see a Political Officer in action. At least, it provided some good fiction…
And since the Ricochet commisars, or AI rulers, seem to have blocked the link, just search for “The True Story of the Hunt For Red October.”
So now they want them to be snitches. Isn’t that special?
I don’t understand this comment. The video plays fine for me. Is there some other problem? @geezerbob.
As I recall, we had a couple of snitches in boot camp who were treated to a little phenomena known as a blanket party…
I can guess what that is , . . 😏
No need to guess. Watch what his fellow recruits do to Pvt. Pyle in Full Metal Jacket to get him squared away. It wasn’t SOP but happened more than once in my knowledge.
“I was once willing to give my life for what I believed this country stood for. Today I’d give my life to protect my family from what this country has become.”
This was on facebook from one of my friends. He is a retired Gunnery Sergeant whose son did a cruise in the Corps as well. When such men make a public statement like this is a sign that the slide into chaotic times is picking up speed.
To understand that the senior NCO corps is as wormed out as the officer corps is highly troubling. I will no longer advise bright youngsters to do a cruise in the military. I now feel that I owe the Vietnamese an apology for thinking we had something to teach them.
Not SOP. Soap.
Danggit, I thought it was more like the below. Blanket party with Bingo!
Shortly before I got out of the Marines, still in the Obama era, we were forced to endure a growing number of idiotic classes; Don’t smoke because it’s bad, Eat your vegetables because they’re good, don’t engage in the slave trade, and don’t rape people.
The first were frivolously insulting. The last two were insultingly infuriating.
Don’t engage in the slave trade was presented to mean that you should never have sex with anyone because they are probably, most likely slaves being trafficked by nefarious peoples. The “don’t rape people” class was presented to mean that if you’re a man, you’re most likely a rapist, but only if you have sex, and don’t drink alcohol because that would only decrease your inhibitions against raping people. Drinking makes a woman a victim and makes a man guilty.
I only slightly exaggerate. Very slightly.
The key learning point was that if you have sex and the woman complains, you will be guilty.
Afterwards, I put on my lawyer hat and talked about it with my Marines and told them that this appears to be new DoD policy and since it is theoretically neutrally applied (though all examples were of bad men) that if they ever have sex with someone, they should do it sober and should immediately report it to their command, just to cover their butts by reporting it first. Or something like that. Maybe I had been drinking.
It made me glad to be retiring.
Agree – very sad and not very relate-able to my years in the USAF, which were not that long ago. But, I have some faith that the enlisted and officer force are generally not so gullible or ignorant that they cannot see what is happening and that they will learn from these awful examples. We’ve been to similar dances before, just not ones where the music was this bad.
The “Circle of Hate” anecdote: this all reminds me of a time over in the sandbox when I was trying to describe an incident to my operations officer (from another guard unit) and I described the setting as a bunch of idle aircrew in lawn chairs fussing about the latest idiotic dictate we were suppose to enforce . . . “oh yeah, the ‘circle of hate'” he interrupted. I said “yeah, that’s it . . . that’s what it is!” Although I’d spent a lot of time in that circle myself (which was the point of the story I was trying to tell), eventually you may wind up being the subject matter. Knowing that looking down range and looking backwards is pretty useful. I think a lot of people have learned a lot from these horribly tedious and redundant “discussions” – there is a lot more there than just the words.
Which, reminds me of another time when our First Shirt, standing on the edge of the circle (trying to get volunteers for something none of us wanted to do – including the First Shirt) got fed up with me and said “you’re the biggest complainer in the entire Air Force!” Although taken a bit aback at the effrontery I looked to the circle for support asking, “is that what you guys think?” The response was a long pause and then one wag said, “nah, there’s this one guy from Nellis . . . . ” It was kind of funny (and I did volunteer), but the First Shirt was right about me at the time and for years I never missed a chance to poke him about that.
So, the moral of all this is that so long as we have the circle of hate we should be fine.
I can’t even imagine such a conversation like that in the Marines. Asking for volunteers?
Flying squadron – it was an E7 trying to get a bunch of entitled O4-5s to help with something. They’ll always help, but not without 20 questions and a ration of abuse. It’s kind of like a mating dance – you know, like water birds.
Yeah, I can’t even imagine that happening in the Marines. If an E-7 came to the pilots or me in the squadron asking for help, then he really needed it and everyone would fall over themselves to help. Besides, what else would they be doing?
Another good one Crab. The Chiefs and PO1s on my carrier had a good handle on the morale of their sailors and worked to find any problems that might compromise the mission of getting 90 plans off the flight deck headed to Hanoi. The race riots set them back a little with the extra “training” required to be race sensitive but they figured out how to deal with it and still get the job done. And save the ship’s lawyer (me) extra work.
Planes. I need a proof reading course. Or less wine at night.
That must have been a thrilling sight!
The bridges on the large carriers were so big even a lawyer could walk in and take in the flight deck chaos. I never seen guys work so hard as the flight deck crews.
Where, unfortunately, they would be authorized to hit targets approved only by Robert McNamara and LBJ. Heck of a way to fight a war…
One of my biggest disappointments was when I was not sent to replace a peer who left his second cruise as the maintenance/material control officer of VMA(AW)-121 then on the USS Ranger. He had to leave early to head to Naval Post Graduate School in Monterrey, California. I was named to go, but the powers that be decided that getting me spooled up halfway through the deployment wasn’t worth it. I argued that even if I weren’t helpful, for this cruise, I’d be better prepared for the next one. They didn’t buy it. That would have been exciting.
Crab this was 1972. McNamara is long gone. It was Katy bar the door in air operations. About 6 weeks before Nixon turned the B-52s loose on Hanoi. The remains of one of which I saw in a pond in Hanoi in 2015. The air dales did their job and got the NVA to say “enough.” What happened later is a different story. Thank God for the US Air Force. The Navy helped out.
K. 5 years after I left. I suppose I was “fortunate” enough to be there when those two geniuses were running the war…
There was a delay in getting the graphic when I posted, so I edited my comment. Only then did it show up. More a tech problem than anything else.
I shared a link to this discussion with my best friend, whom I have known since his birth. Here is what he had to say:
Interesting comments about Air Force promotion tests. Thanks.
I’m pretty sure promotion boards work the same way. I never served on a promotion board. I suspect it would not have gone well if I had and procedures such as this were in place.
You have to wonder how all this will work in the future. Will they set up some sort of system that will assign “weights” in which “diversity” is assigned a much higher “weight” than technical expertise?
Not hard to imagine a military in which a mechanic will not know one end of an aircraft from another and a mortarman who can’t hit the side of a barn.
But they’ll be diverse!