Posted on 08/18/2026 7:04:51 AM PDT by rlmorel
From the article:
Having spent over 55 years inside academe — earning Bachelor of Science (BS) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees, then serving as a post-doctoral cancer researcher, faculty member, and research administrator, not retiring until almost 79 years of age — how the one-year title of Staff Sergeant (SSG) decades ago could mean more to me than my PhD might seem bizarre. Nonetheless, it’s true.
Why?
The 19-months in the U.S. Army, as a 24-year-old draftee, transformed my life. Essentially every significant civilian success thereafter can be attributed to that brief stint serving America, and two main factors were responsible.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
That is because you saw the rigid structure and strict rules obeying in the military as a terrifying structure forcing your obedience and behavior, when it was just the opposite, it told you their every move, their every thought, and made them half blind and totally predictable, which made it easy for you to live free and easy moving within their organization while they all lived in cages.
One thing I did was to physically and uniform wise strive to look better than any of them, a weekly haircut, embroidered name and us army tags (what were known as lifer tags), jump boots spit polished and finished with floor wax, and my olive drab uniforms sent to civilian cleaners so that I would have the 3 lifer creases in the back of the shirt.
There were times when I could see the look in their eyes of looking at the uniform appearance and deciding that they hadn’t seen what they had just seen, because someone that recruiting poster perfect couldn’t have done that.
The more rigid the organization and the more fixed the rules and the mentality, the easier it is to use the system against itself.
Wow! You must've been pretty damn good to play D1 basketball!
Sigh. I'm afraid that NIL has ruined my poor D1 basketball team. We were only 11-20 last year.
LOL, I grew up in a military family, and the last thing in my mind was how to get around it...I had spent my whole life up until that point trying in futility to do that at home!
At home you had a single commander to deal with, but in the military all of those authority figures are actually operating while trying to please the other authority figures around them and over them, they talk tough, but they are caught inside the vertical cage and you are watching them while they think they are watching you, and you have a lot of power in their lives if you know how to use it.
Yes. “Roj” (aka @AzadiRojava , Joana Hisso) was my friend for 7 years. It took me 3-1/2 years to find out what happened to her. I have the photo’s and video’s of the service.
About 3 months after we pulled most of our forces from Derr Ezzor in North Eastern Syria a Turkish drone killed all 3 of them.
You need not explain the Kurds and their allies to me. Nor the string of conflicts they were in. And the 11,000 dead soldiers.
Roj was the head social media person. We have very few exchanges in open on Twitter (X).
At the time my screen name on Twitter was @TX_1. You need not try to find that on X. Not a trace still there. But I have my data files from the 15 years I was on Twitter (X).
Long story.
I posted a lot of stuff here on Free Republic.
About 2 months ago I got an invite to come back with a different screen name. I considered it. I had between 7,000-8,000 for many years. The tone of the last exchange told me with X, made me decide I did not like the terms.
I won’t go into that.
Wow! That is truly awesome to think about.
I can't top that, but I still remember one day in Hanger 7 at RAF Lakenheath, England. I'd been over to the paint shop to inspect their work on the static ports after repainting a radome. There was one of our aircraft that was in for one of the major phased maintenance cycles. The engines had been removed, the ejections seats were out, the canopies were off, my shop had removed the entire instrument panel, the radome was off, the radar set had been removed, virtually every panel (called doors) on the aircraft had been removed with wires, cables, and hoses hanging down from many of them, and lots of equipment had been removed from behind those doors. What was left was just a shell of an airplane.
I thought to myself, "Who's going to put this airplane back together"? It dawned on me: we are! The aircraft repair shops of the base, mostly by a bunch of 20–25-year-olds.
And once back together there was a QC test pilot who would look at things with a fine-toothed comb and then fly the plane out over the North Sea beyond the speed of sound.
I still feel the pride!
All waiting on me, an average 20 year old guy.
You were not average. You were working aircraft maintenance in the United States Navy! And I've come to believe that the Air Force and Navy do a pretty damn good job of matching needs with ability.
You might be interested this:
Welcome to Raqqa (ISIS headquarters was taken down by a female Kurd as commander.
https://joeyl.com/blog/all/post/welcome-to-raqqa
(Commander: Rojda Felat)
Yes. Kurdish women were great warriors.
I have a lot of files of data, on DVD’s.
By the way, my first contact with @AzadiRojava “Roj” was just before the first siege of Kobane.
I was waste deep in this.
And many other such conflicts.
I never went to war. But followed many groups starting with the Iran-Contra Affair.
I have a letter from GHW Bush (by staff) as he left office and I wrote him a letter for pardoning Ollie North.
Good is relative.
I was good enough to know I had zero chance in the NBA.
"Orientation shapes what you observe. Action generates new observations. Orientation can bypass the decision step entirely. The system is continuous and overlapping, not sequential.Competitive advantage comes from better orientation: seeing things your opponent misses, acting on patterns they haven’t recognized, and generating confusion by behaving in ways their mental models can’t predict."
Are you a Marine (veteran)? WMs have been a complement of the Corps since WWII. A lot of Marines have included me in their friendship, for which I am very grateful. Some of them were/are WM.
And yes, there's an awful lot that I don't know about today's military, tjough I keep on learning. Some of what comes to light makes me sick.
It was a question.
Do you think the Marine Corps could be turned 100% female and remain just as effective?
"Why do you ask?"
and demand an answer. Which I do, althpugh you may not respond.
If you can’t answer yes or no, that it would be just as good or worse, then I have to assume you think that it would remain as equally effective if they replaced all of the men with females in the Marine Corps.
Hahaha...well, I never had a problem with officers. And I was only concerned with doing my job well enough not to be noticed by them for the wrong reasons.
You know-I think of that on occasion. Granted, the pilots were older and many of them were better educated using the standard metrics, but I was impressed with the pilots who really paid attention when they did their pre-flight walk around inspection.
Most were average, a few did it like their lives depended on it (which...they did!) but there were a select few who barely paid attention during their walk around. They would shine their flashlight somewhere as if someone was watching them do their walk around and they had to put on a performance, but they would look at something else as they were doing it, and you could see it was a pro forma thing.
I thought that was crazy.
Not because I thought we did shoddy maintenance or were unreliable. But even at that young age, I fully grasped that we were all humans, and any of us might have a bad day. Which could make that pilot's day a bad one too.
Thanks so much! I read Joey’s article all the way through. Almost 10 years old, I guess I’m Not up very well informed on current status. Everyone focused ob Iran.
Let me suggest that you taiior your inquiries to seek truth, not wo confuse a debate.
As far as my general attitude toward who makes decisions in the military, my bet is on people one can rely on. If it's a woman who can best complete the role assigned, so be it. But my bet is on exemplary people like Pete Hegseth and the nature of his philosophy, as his actions demonstrate. Of him, it was recently written:
Before his appointment by the Trump administration, Hegseth wrote books disparaging the U.S. military as woke and suggesting that diversity in the ranks had weakened the force.Id vote for him as Presidebt over anyone else I see on the horizon.
You didn’t like my post 42 implying that replacing males with females weakens the American military, which is true and you don’t seem to agree with it, in post 58 you seem to feel that as long as they are all females they can be “equally” effective.
Frankly your posts don’t make much sense about women replacing men in the American military.
Your logic is shortsided and fails.
I said the same as you in the sense that generally leavening a military (presumably combat-oriented) unit with females likely weakens that unit, andI gave the reason why.
But contrary to your suppositions that women cannot bear the rigors of deadly combat, the YPG arm of SDF have unmistakably proven you wrong, which you refute.
I can't help you dismiss that fact. You'll have to manage your thinking process a little better. You can see that by consistently winning battles over ISIS (definitely all-male) units, the YPJ have fully illustrated my point.
What I did NOT say--and never would--that replacing all the males of a whole branch of a nation's Corps completely with females would not weaken that combat arm.
So, in your unstated faulty reasoning, what are you going to do with the replaced males, eh? Send the home to wash clothes, bake bread, take the kids to school, etc.?
It is your thinking that is flawed.
If you take the well-furnished trained all-male combat arms. and to them add units of well-trained woman-only combat-fit units fulfilling designated roles suited to their abilities, surely this addition strengthens the capability, not dilute it.
And that is what the YPJ have proven beyond question to which the Special Forces they have protected and defended have clearly agreed.
Take a break. Think this out. Read a little Sun Tzu. Have some ice cream.
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