military

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Political Identity Crisis


For my entire adult life I have been a registered Democrat.  I am not certain what in my childhood pushed me in that direction as both my parents were registered Republicans.  I loved my parents.  Politics was never discussed in our house so that was not an influence.  But I know my parents supported Eisenhower and Nixon.  In 1968 when Nixon was elected president I was in the army but I did not trust him for reasons I am not certain of.  I was not of age to vote but I remember having strong negative feelings about him, even though I was already in the military.  Those feelings did not change some years later when he was responsible for a huge increase in our military pay.

I bring up my military background because I have very strong feelings about the military.  I am very proud of my service and feel very protective towards it when I see anyone threaten any part of their existence.  That is, I have never fully embraced the base closures and reductions that started under the first Bush and have continued to this day.

Among conservatives, it seems to me, there is a belief that if you are a registered Democrat you are not strongly in the military’s corner.  Nothing could be further from the truth for me.  I guess that means that my beliefs about the military are extremely Republican.  I have no desire to change that in the least.

Then there is my somewhat strange stand of being anti-abortion but pro-choice.  For me there is nothing conflicting about such a stand.  I think abortion to be morally wrong, reprehensible.  But since I view it as a moral issue I also believe in the idea that each person must have the right to make a decision about the morality, or lack of morality, associated with abortion.  Every woman must be given the right to decided if having an abortion is the right thing to do.  Were I to be asked by such a woman, I would always tell her that I think she should not have an abortion, regardless of the condition that made her pregnant or of any implication of the state of the child upon birth.  I simply believe that upon conception there exists a human life.  We as a society decry the taking of a human life and I extend that to mean “at any stage of life.”  To differentiate is to abrogate responsibility.  This, quite sadly, includes cases of rape, incest, and where it is reasonable to expect that a live birth will result in a child with substantial physical and/or mental problems.  I am also against the death penalty for the very same reasons.  I believe in consistency and I think it inconsistent to believe in one but not the other.

I think that we as Americans have a responsibility to the unfortunates of our society.  That includes programs such as welfare and other such government sponsored programs.  But that said, I also think we have gone beyond the point of reasonableness in the administration of these programs.  We have made it easier for some to continue on such welfare programs than it is desirable for the individual to remove themselves from its roles.  The size of social programs need reduction, desperately.

We are one of the most violent nations in the world.  We want all deserving Americans to be afforded the right to possess the fire arms of their choice but we are unwilling to take the responsible task of clearing each person for their right to possess any single arm.  It seems to me reasonable that any law-abiding person would not mind a background check to ensure they have not at some point in their past given up the right to legally possess a fire arm.  I do not think there should be any restriction, with a very few exceptions, on the type of fire arm a person might purchase, just on how that comes to pass.  Any reasonable person who truly desires to have responsible purchase and sale of fire arms necessarily wants safeguards in place to restrict the criminal element from gaining access to such arms.  That does not exist in America today.  That means Americans, right now, do not mind criminals purchasing fire arms since they refuse to allow reasonable background checks.

In that same vein, Americans are also unwilling to provide for the proper incarceration of criminals, particularly violent criminals.  America’s laws in the prosecution of violent criminals can vary greatly from one state to the next.  A criminal can commit a murder, admit to it, and walk free because of certain deals that prosecutors make.  If we are ever to get a substantial reduction in our crime rate we must do several things.  One is a more uniform sentencing criteria from one state to the next.  Part of that would include a universal minimum sentence requirement in all states, to include cases where a criminal makes a plea deal.  Minimum sentencing would eliminate any criminal from getting “a walk” on a serious crime because of his help in prosecuting another criminal.  But this also means we are going to have to build more facilities to accommodate the increased prisoner population.  We also have to increase the size of our police forces and their budgets of course.

There is no place for God in our American government.  God is a purely religious concept that has as many variations as there are people in the United States.  To allow God into the government, regardless of the level, necessarily requires definition.  The creates the problem of what definition is accepted, and ultimately, how is that definition fair to all the people of the United States.  To be fair, there are millions of people, other than atheists, who do not believe in God as the Judeo-Christain concept goes.  Ultimately those people are opted-out when such a definition is decided upon.  Our government must be better than that.  It is better that all religious definition be removed from our government than to allow even an amalgam in.

I believe in my state that my district US representative and both my state’s US Senators have failed us.  The are more concerned with political expediency that constituent desires.  I have heard nothing out of the Elizabeth Warren camp in her opposition to Scott Brown, the incumbent Republican.  My tendency now is to vote for Brown even though I am a Democrat because I think the arrogance of the Democrat party in Massachusetts has resulted in too much failure.  I can only think Warren is displaying some of that arrogance now, thinking Massachusetts Democrat tendencies will propel her come November.  She will be surprised if she continues to think that way.

I am disillusioned with America’s Republican and Democrat political parties because I think it painfully obvious that each has allowed PACs to rule its positions, to select its candidates in some cases, and to ultimately become insensitive to the needs of its constituency.  Each party has with lies, which it euphemistically calls spin, to justify positions it takes.  Each party uses various fear tactics to reel in voters to the positions they desire, even when such positions are at the peril of the very voters they represent.  As Pogo said so eloquently, and so long ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 

 

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Reducing the Size of the Military a Big Mistake


I remember some years ago hearing that the 26th Infantry Division was going to be reduced to a single brigade.  The 26th, the Yankee Division, was the army component of the Massachusetts National Guard.  At the time I did not think too much about it.  I recognized the desire of many to reduce the size of the military.  The mistake in my thinking was that the reduction was coming at the expense of reserve units.

Let’s start with the active duty force.  There are about 522,000 men and women in the army today.  During the Vietnam era the army was more than a million men and women strong, to put this in perspective.  After Vietnam, as was true after every other war, the size of the entire military was reduced.  But what is different this time?  The difference is simple.  There was no military build-up during Iraq and Afghanistan.  To meet requirements the burden was shifted to Army Reserve and National Guard units.  And it was early in Iraq that it was realized how unprepared the National Guard units in particular were.  That has changed.  The point is, our active duty force was too small to handle the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Now our politicians have pressed the Pentagon to reduce an already lean active duty force.

I expect the Pentagon will push back by suggesting how to further reduce reserve and national guard forces.  This is a very dangerous tact.  The reason is very simple.  Regardless of how mechanized, how computerized, how modernized you make our armed forces, it still comes down to soldiers, not computers and machines, to win the wars.

I am certain that the Pentagon will push to keep our reserve forces better trained than they were prior to Iraq.  If there is one thing Iraq taught us, it is that our reserve forces were poorly prepared for extended active duty.  One has to remember, these forces train one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer.  That limits how much training you can do regardless of how hard  you try.  To think you can take these forces from their peacetime reserve status and throw them into a wartime stance as quickly as you can an active unit is absurd.  Short of doubling the training time allotted to the reserves, you are going to need a substantial ramp up period from peacetime to wartime stance for any reserve unit.

I think if anything our active ground forces need to be increased.  I think a 200,000 man increase, to about 750,000 troops is much more reasonable and gives us a much better defense force.  An additional investment into increasing the size of our reserve forces is also called for.

A standing army has always been an expensive item.  People are quick to look at the defense budget and think it is bloated.  I can assure you, nothing is further from the truth.  Another thing Iraq made painfully obvious was how woefully underfunded our reserves were.  They had too much obsolete equipment or equipment requirements that had not been filled due to budget constraints.  Having a well equipped army is not something that we can compromise on.

It is impossible to predict when and where the next conflict we will be involved in.  It is just as impossible to predict how much of a force we will need.  We cannot afford to be penny wise and pound foolish with our military.  We have to be fully prepared to meet the demands on our military in the future.  We can only have that with a reasonably sized military.