Deep-rooted racism, discrimination permeate US military

Associated Press Logo

For Stephanie Davis, who grew up with little, the military was a path to the American dream, a realm where everyone would receive equal treatment. She joined the service in 1988 after finishing high school in Thomasville, Georgia, a small town said to be named for a soldier who fought in the War of 1812.

Over the course of decades, she steadily advanced, becoming a flight surgeon, commander of flight medicine at Fairchild Air Force Base and, eventually, a lieutenant colonel.

But many of her service colleagues, Davis says, saw her only as a Black woman. Or for the white resident colleagues who gave her the call sign of ABW – it was a joke, they insisted – an “angry black woman,” a classic racist trope. Continue reading.

Liz Cheney secretly organized key move to block Trump from using military to overturn election: report

Raw Story Logo

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was the organizer of an open letter by all living former Defense Secretaries against the military intervening in election disputes.

The revelation was made to Susan Glasser of The New Yorker by Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney’s who served as an advisor to her father.

“Cheney’s rupture with the House Republican Conference has become all but final in recent days, but it has been months in the making. Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the WashingtonPost by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump’s efforts to politicize the military,” Glasser reported. Continue reading.

Seeking to combat extremists in ranks, the military struggles to answer a basic question: How many are there?

Washington Post logo

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin faces an early test as he races to advance a major initiative targeting far-right extremism in the ranks, a challenge that officials acknowledge is complicated by the Pentagon’s lack of clarity on the extent of the threat following the U.S. Capitol riot.

Austin’s highly unusual order for a military-wide “stand-down,” slated to pause normal operations in coming weeks so troops can discuss internal support for extremist movements, underscores the urgency of the task ahead for the retired four-star general, who last month became the nation’s first African American Pentagon chief.

The Jan. 6 events at the Capitol, in which Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to prevent President Biden from taking office, laid bare the appeal of white-supremacist and anti-government groups among some veterans and, in smaller numbers, currently serving troops. Among the 190 people charged in the siege, at least 30 are veterans. Three are reservists or National Guard members. Continue reading.

Support for Trump appears to be slipping in the military. And no wonder.

The weekend warriors in their Army surplus battle rattle, their paintball weapons and gun show specials are getting lots of love from this clown show’s commander in chief.

GREAT PATRIOTS!” President Trump tweeted, along with a video of the vigilantes flouting the law and causing disorder while cruising the streets of an American city.

Meanwhile, the real defenders of freedom — the men and women of the U.S. military — aren’t getting love from Trump. And they’re sure not giving it. Continue reading.

Trump’s Vacuous West Point Address and the Revolt Against It

President Trump has enraged the U.S. military—from top to bottom. On June 11th, an angry and mournful letter signed by hundreds of graduates of West Point—spanning from the Class of 1948 to the Class of 2019—was posted on Medium. It addressed the Class of 2020. It cited the current “tumultuous time” in America: more than a hundred thousand deaths from a new disease with no known cure, forty million newly unemployed people, and a nation “hurting from racial, social and human injustice” after the murder of George Floyd. “Desperation, fear, anxiety, anger and helplessness are the daily existence for too many Americans,” the signatories wrote. They warned bluntly of leaders who “betray public faith through deceitful rhetoric, quibbling, or the appearance of unethical behavior.” They reminded students of the cadet honor code, which dictates not to “lie, cheat, or steal,” and not to tolerate those who do. Without naming names, they cited their fellow-graduates who are now in senior government positions and failing to uphold their oath of office. (The Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, and the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, both graduated in the West Point Class of 1986.) They wrote that their appeal “is not about party; it is about principle.” And, after welcoming the newest class to the Army tradition of the “Long Gray Line,” they concluded, “Our lifetime commitment is to the enduring responsibility expressed in the Cadet Prayer: ‘to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won.’ ” Continue reading “Trump’s Vacuous West Point Address and the Revolt Against It”

Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity

New York Times logoMore and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits.

COLORADO SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. Now two of his four children say they want to serve, too. And he will not be surprised if the other two make the same decision once they are a little older.

“Hey, if that’s what your calling is, I encourage it, absolutely,” said Sergeant Comes, who wore a dagger-shaped patch on his camouflage uniform, signifying that he had been in combat.

Enlisting, he said, enabled him to build a good life where, despite yearlong deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt proud of his work, got generous benefits, never worried about being laid off, and earned enough that his wife could stay home to raise their children.

Why does the US pay so much for the defense of its allies? 5 questions answered

Since the start of Donald Trump’s run for the U.S. presidency in 2015, he has been critical of the amount of money U.S. allies contribute to their own defense.

Now, the Trump administration is demanding that Japan and South Korea pay more for hosting U.S. troops stationed in those countries.

The media also reported that U.S. military leadership in South Korea discussed the possibility of withdrawing up to 4,000 troops from South Korea if it does not increase its contributions. The Pentagon has since denied having such plans.

Continue reading

The Pentagon faces a massive purge after the Gallagher affair

AlterNet logoThere are two misconceptions about President Donald Trump. First, that he runs a totally chaotic administration and there’s no method to his madness. Second, that he is a great supporter of the military. He himself frequently brags that the U.S. military has been rebuilt and is the strongest it has ever been.

The reality is different — and far darker. Trump is degrading and dishonoring the U.S. military. What’s more, he is doing so in a deliberate and systematic way.

That is why the news about Trump intervening in the case of convicted Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, overriding his commanding officers and ordering the Pentagon to let him keep his SEAL Trident, the Special Warfare insignia, is so important. What Trump is really signaling with this move goes far beyond pardoning a war criminal.

View the complete November 29 article by Alexei Bayer from The Globalist on the AlterNet website here.

President Trump’s claim that ‘when I came in, we had no ammunition’

Washington Post logo“When I took over, it was a mess. … One of our generals came in to see me and he said, ‘Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘That’s a terrible thing you just said.’ He said, ‘We don’t have ammunition.’ Now we have more ammunition than we’ve ever had.”

“We were very low. I could even say it stronger. I don’t want to say, ‘No ammunition,’ but that gets a lot closer.”

— Trump, in remarks at the White House, Sept. 16

This is a good example of how Trump’s most-repeated claims tend to become more exaggerated over time. The president has insisted in recent weeks that when he took office in 2017, the U.S. military brass told him there was no more ammunition.

As the two quotes above show, the claim quickly grew from snowball to avalanche. Trump hedged in September: “We were very low … I don’t want to say ‘no ammunition.’ ” But one month later, the hedges were gone: “One of our generals came in to see me and he said, ‘Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘That’s a terrible thing you just said.’ He said, ‘We don’t have ammunition.’ ”

Had the president stuck to his formulation in September, we might have skipped this fact check. Near the end of President Barack Obama’s term, military leaders publicly warned that stockpiles of precision-guided munitions were running low.

View the complete October 18 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

Military expert warns support for Trump in the US armed forces is ‘downright cult-like’ — and creating frightening divisions within the ranks

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump set off yet another controversy on Twitter when, on September 29, he echoed the rhetoric of far-right evangelical wingnut Robert Jeffress and tweeted, “if the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, which they will never be, it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which our country will never heal.” Although Trump’s irresponsible tweet has drawn widespread condemnation, the armed militia group the Oath Keepers applauded the tweet and posted, “We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859.” And intelligence expert Patricia Ravalgi, in an October 6 op-ed for the Daily Beast, contemplates how the U.S. military would respond if a civil war did, in fact, break out in the United States in response to Trump’s impeachment.

rump is now facing an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives because of the Ukraine scandal and a whistleblower’s revelation that during a July 25 phone conversation, Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into digging up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. If the House does end up indicting Trump on articles of impeachment, he would face a trial in the U.S. Senate.

Ravalgi spent 19 years working intelligence-related jobs in Washington, D.C. — including jobs at the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — before working for United States Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida. And she is troubled by the fact that after Trump posted his civil war-related tweet, the hashtag #CivilWarSignup and the phrase “Civil War” started trending on Twitter.

View the complete October 7 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.