Free Republic

Unfortunately, many of the same people taken in by Trump have been taken in by the likes of Jimmy Swaggert, Bob Tilton, and many others. I’m saddened to see religious voters (and veterans) rolled out as political suckers whistling behind the next Pied Piper. I’d bet that Trump hadn’t touched that Bible since the day his mother gave it to him until he needed to wave to a crowd of desperate to believe suckers at campaign rallies.

If you are the only one in the room who doesn’t know who the mark is-you are the mark. Classic sucker.

Obamacare expansion. Anyone who caves on amnesty or ObamaCare is literally dead to me.

As someone who has sent far to many Soldiers to Walter Reed as patients and who has been there to visit them far to many times, I’m deeply grateful for you all. I’m in awe at your dedication.

I’d prefer to have the mortgage companies take this sort of action on their own as opposed to having Congress pass some idiotic law that takes a novel concept and converts it into a law where it cannot be influenced by any market forces. For me this is simply telling these companies to face up to this reality. People who bought homes using these ARMs are, at some point, going to be driven into foreclosure if rates continue to go up. Take your loss and fix the rate or take a bigger loss when you end up with a bunch of empty properties on your hands. Its like this - you have gangrene in your foot. You can amputate your foot and get rid of the gangrene or you can just ignore it until it runs up your leg and you lose the entire leg or it kills you. To me this is no different than a credit company settling for a lesser amount - at least you got something. I might even look at having this reflect on the credit reports of these individuals. If they don’t address it themselves Congress is going to and the chances of that going well are slim to none.

The other issue is that in this part of the world the locals tend to do their business standing over a hole. They don’t go for the “do your business while seated.” This means that when you go into a port-o-john to do your business you find the seat covered in mud or whatever else was stuck the the bottom of the local’s shoes.

There are actually port-o-johns that we use that are custom built for the locals. They are lower to the floor and have a place to stand (rather than sit) and a hole cut into the floor that gives him something that he’s used to seeing. These “local worker” port-o-johns are serviced and maintained just like the ones for US personnel.

Food is much the same way. Many locals don’t like typical US American food. We feed them local food. You often find our guys eating with them and vice versa. Our local cooks eat in our DFAC.

Actually, the Canadians have lost 42 soldiers in Afghanistan. I know, some of them have been friends of mine.

Liberdad
US Army

The Army and Marine Corps are far to small. This is the fault of the Sec. of Defense and the President. They have made decisions based on a flawed world view that says that the current situation is an expection rather than a view of the future. We are now at the 5th year of the GWOT. We are still only able to produce 400 armored HMMWVs a month (this is simply and example, not a statement that we need more of them at the moment.) Three years into WWII the US had produced approximately 100 infantry divisions, 100 large aircraft carriers, and more than 100,000 airplanes. The difference is that WWII was a national fight to the death and GWOT is war war being fought by about 300,000 Americans rather than 300 million.

O yeah, for what its worth. I'm an Army officer with 14 years on active duty, 9 of them overseas. I'm posting this from the middle of the war where I've been for more than 9 months. I have a wife and a 5 month old son at home.

I have no complaints with the war. I voted absentee for GWB two times. I voted for his father as well. I fully support the GWOT terror. That said, we'd actually be winning the war much, much faster if we were actually fighting a war based off of trying to defeat the enemy.

This screw up with the Stryker guys is simply that - a screw up forced on the Army by a Sec. of Defense who is unwilling to face the realities of the modern world. If we'd used the last 5 years to double the number of Stryker Brigades we wouldn't have this problem. We haven't and as a result its left to the current miltiary to fight the war for everyone. Today's army is becoming something like the Roman Legion or the Pretorian Guard defending the nation absolutely and totally disconnected from the rest of the country. I've lost dozens of friends and soldiers over the last 5 years. I've missed most of their funerals and had few chances to grieve with their wives and children. This is the story of the modern Army. Even here in the most conservative internet site in the world how many of you have been to a soldier's funeral or have an immediate family member in the Middle East? I bet there is plenty but I bet its less than 50%. Ever go to mid-town Manhattan? I have. I might as well be a Neanderthal there. This war is being fought on the cheap by a nation unwilling to fight and win. Maybe this would have been different if the political leadership had made different decisions but they didn't. Now we are where we are and it can't be changed.

For what its worth I bet that most of the first term soldiers in that unit in Alaska doesn't re-enlist.

If these women are given so much credibility to speak about the US and its efforts in the War on Terror shouldn't the wives of dead soldiers in Iraq be given the same platform to speak on the US efforts there?

The problem is that you haven't really "won" if the other side doesn't realize that it has "lost." We did what amounted to a "drive by shooting" from Kuwait to Bagdad. Most of the towns along the way saw Americans for a few hours and that was it. We never came back. We created a power vacuum and then we left it empty. Vacuums don't last. We had two options: Go in very light and work with an Iraqi structure like the military or Go in heavy and take responsibility ourselves. We picked the non-existant middle route of abolishing all structures in the country without sufficient forces in place to provide any semblance of security or order. The Iraqi culture at this point in its history only works when "someone" is in charge. We got rid of Sadaam and then didn't have any plan in place to replace his authority.
Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to prove a point to the US Army that it didn't need large ground maneuver units to win a war. He personally cancelled troop deployments and rearranged the deployment schedules of others. He ensured that a Marine Division had to conduct an operation for which it was not equipped or resourced - namely fight its way to Bagdad. Look at the casualty figures from the 3rd ID and the Marine Division on the other side of the river. Those Marine casualties are a direct result of the differences in capabilities between a Marine Division and a Heavy Army Division. He (and especially his staff) had an arrogant, we know more than you do, attitude and it directly led to what has happened. Rumsfeld has done a lot of good for the military over the years but his problem is this. He's used to being the smartest guy in the room. The problem is that being the smartest guy doesn't necessarily mean that you know the most. If we had gone in to Iraq with a much larger force we could have set the conditions for our withdrawl much earlier. There are a lot of other issues at work here too but the lack of bodies during the invasion and in its immediate aftermath were a critical error in judgement.

As a guy who does this for a living (active duty Army) and who lived through this first hand I can tell you that the civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office screwed this up. I voted for Bush, support the war, have spent plenty of time in the Middle East getting shot at. Rumsfeld wanted to prove a point that war no longer takes people. He was wrong. Fortunately, the few people we did have were very, very good or it could have gone very, very wrong. Two things have prevented us from "fixing" the problems. First, we didn't have enough people to do the job. Secondly, we were unwilling and unable to spend the money at the ground (troop commander) level with sufficient speed and ease to make a difference. When a mayor has a problem he doesn't want to hear "Becdel will be here in 2 years to build your bridge." He wants a solution. Since our accounting procedures don't let us spend money like this, we failed to deliver the goods and lost a huge opportunity to get it right. We'll bounce back and will come out on top. We go out every day and kill bad guys and work to make Iraq a better place. That said it would have been much easier if the SecDef hadn't been out to prove a point that machines are more important than humans - they aren't.

Actually, this was a project dreamed up by Madeline Albright called the Mexican Training Initiative. We had to get State Dept. waivers to train them because a lot of us was stuff that normally isn't trained to non-US personnel.

Liberdad

Actually, most of these countries contributed troops to our efforts in Iraq. El Salvador is still there and has promised us that they will stay as long as there is a single American soldier in Iraq. They are trying to say thanks for our help in the 1980s.
These countries were actually treated pretty poorly by the US when they went to Iraq. Central American countries are not equipped to fight in the desert and we promised them that we'd get them the equipment.....and then we didn't. Most of them went with no body armor driving US junk/scrap equipment that no one wanted.
Latin America isn't going away. We need to take care of our friends down there because if we don't, Chavez or the Chinese will.

Liberdad

This program was begun by Madeline Albright and the State Department. The military had no input into whether this program was a smart idea. It also had no control over who was sent for training. Ms. Albright also required the military to train these individuals on tactics and techniques that are generally not taught to non-US personnel. These guys were trained in some very advance counter-terrorism tactics and then returned to Mexico. Many of them immediately went to work for the bad guys who pay better than the government. After crimes began to occur using tactics that could have only come from the US Military, Ms. Albright quietly killed the program. Not, however, before several hundred Mexican officers received some of the most advanced training the US has ever given to any other military.
If you read Spanish you can read about this at http://www.leavenworth.army.mil/milrev/Spanish/SepOct02/burton.htm

This guy is a typical butt-kissing, white washing, State Department idiot. His name might sound familiar to some of you. He ran the investigation (white wash) of the shoot down of the missionary plane in Peru in 2001. (http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/global/drugs/01080203.htm)

His investigation consisted of "How much of this can be blamed on Peru?"

He has been heavily involved in the mess that we call a "War on Drugs" in Latin America. Typical civilian government employee - Screw Up, Move Up. DEA agents everywhere are thrilled to see this jackass leave government service.

At least working for Kerry he is no longer wasting taxpayer money as a government employee.