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Why Is The Pentagon Ripping Off The Troops? |
Current rating: 5 |
by Traveling Soldier
Email: contact (nospam) traveling-soldier.org (verified) |
02 Dec 2003
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Explains WHY Pentagon penny-pinching budget cutters are betraying the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. |
While hundreds of thousands of troops are off fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon another target in its sights: commissaries and schools run by the Department of Defense that serve service members and their families. Nineteen commissaries are slated to be closed and another nineteen may be closed later, while at the same time the Pentagon is finishing a study on how to close or transfer control of 58 schools located on 14 installations throughout the continental U.S. These two initiatives come on the heels of the Bush administration’s campaign to cut or hold down basic pay, combat pay, health care services, and death gratuity pay for the families of soldiers killed on active duty.
"Betrayal - write that down and put it in your report," said Col. John Kidd, garrison commander of Fort Stewart, Ga. at a forum on the school closings. "As a commander, I will fight this tooth and nail. Folks down here are not just militant on this issue. They will march on Washington."
But the betrayal doesn’t stop there. A quarter of the 130,000 troops stationed in Iraq don’t have the ceramic body armor that can stop bullets from AK-47s, the main rifle of choice of the Iraqi resistance. Critics in Congress blame the Pentagon’s sluggish supply chain and some soldiers’ families have resorted to buying body armor with their own money and shipping it there.
These are only a few examples of the outrageous bullshit that soldiers have to deal with. The question is: why is it happening?
It's not because the country is running out of money. President Bush has raised over $84 million for his re-election campaign by having $2,000 plate dinner events at posh parties for the ultra-rich. As Jan Hogan put it, "I'd like to take some of those millions he raised and help those two boys as well as all the others." Hogan's nephews, Chad Krandall, 36, and Dave Schmaltz, 35, are in the Minnesota National Guard, 142nd Engineer Combat Battalion, stationed north of Baghdad.
Marine Col. James Lowe, the base commander at Quantico, had it right when he said: "The very fact that [the cuts are] being conducted at this time when Marines, sailors, soldiers, airmen, and their families are increasingly required to give more of themselves to go into harm’s way is taken by many as a personal affront. It raises serious questions about DoD’s commitment to quality-of-life issues." The truth is, the Pentagon looks at the troops not as people with families, not as patriotic Americans defending freedom or democracy but as employees. And disposable employees at that.
The military is run like a business is because it's owned by big business. Joseph Tafoya, Director of Education Activity at the DoD, said that as soon as Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, he began asking: "Why am I running stores? Why am I in education?" He is pushing for the "transformation" of the military into a swift moving, micro-chipped, killing machine, where electronics turn night into day, satellites and laser-guided weapons destroy enemy armor and artillery, and where labor costs are kept to an absolute minimum. Anything that doesn’t help the military kill is an extra - schools for military children, health care for veterans, combat pay for troops, and even bullet-proof vests!
Rumsfeld is abusing the Army, Army Reserves and National Guard by increasing the number missions while holding the number of troops down. From World War I to Gulf War I - 75 years - the Reserves and Guard were called up nine times. In the past 12 years they have been mobilized 10 times. And they are serving in combat zones for a full year - the same as active-duty troops. The thinking behind all this is simple math: Reserve and Guard troops are much cheaper than regular troops. As Christopher Caldwell at the Weekly Standard notes, "it is hard not see a similarity between the army's shift to part-time soldiering and businesses preferences for part-time vs full-time labor."
It’s not a coincidence that the civilian leaders of all the services are former CEOs. Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army until Rumsfeld fired for disagreeing with him in public, was also on the executive board at Enron. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the welfare of the troops is the last thing on their minds.
But the problem is bigger than just Rumsfeld, the Bush administration, or whether or not someone who holds office at the Pentagon is a former CEO. The House of Representatives recently killed a bill that would have given $3.6 billion of funding for medical and dental screening of reservists, funding family assistance centers, pre-paid phone cards for troops in Iraq, transportation of troops for their R&R, construction of more water treatment and power plants to service soldiers, and the replacement of damaged equipment.
The government itself is set up and designed to protect the interests of big business - at home and overseas in places like Iraq, where the world's second largest oil reserve sits under its sand. But big business doesn’t foot the bill; instead taxpayers pay in dollars, and people in the service pay in blood.
The majority of people in the armed forces - Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, the Reserves, and National Guard - have nothing in common with the people at the top of the chain of command. In fact, they have more in common with the Iraqis who are supposed to be the "enemy." The same Pentagon that ordered the invasion on the bogus pre-text of WMDs is the same Pentagon that is trying to cut combat pay for its troops!
The main enemy isn’t in Baghdad or Kabul - it’s in Washington, D.C. and on Wall Street. |
See also:
http://www.traveling-soldier.org
http://www.traveling-soldier.org/11.03.pentagon.php
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