Military Marchers Wearing Uniforms Cheered at Homosexual Pride Parade

Some of the loudest cheers Saturday at San Diego’s gay pride parade were for active-duty troops marching in military dress, the first time that U.S. servicemembers participated in such an event while in full uniform. Dozens of soldiers, sailors, and Marines marched alongside an old Army truck decorated with a “Freedom to Serve” banner and a rainbow flag. They were joined by dozens more military personnel in civilian clothes, but the uniforms stood out among the flower-bedecked floats and scantily clad revelers. http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/jul/23/military-marchers-wearing-uniforms-cheered-gay-pri/

U.S. of Gay Watch: Obama’s Queering of the Military

Obama has changed the military culture not by merely treating homosexuality as a non-issue (“Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell”), but, rather, by approving, endorsing, and now celebrating and divisively giving special status to homosexuals–setting them apart for praise from others in military service, like freaks who need special petting and praise for their unique differentness, and throwing a spotlight on it. http://www.newswithviews.com/Lloyd/rees131.htm

Medicinal Abuse by Enlisted Men Leading to Violent Confrontations

The United States military has participated in two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, with more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs. According to figures recently disclosed by a U.S. Army surgeon general, nearly 8 percent of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6 percent is on antidepressants – an eightfold increase since 2005. http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=45647

Active Duty Troops to March on White House

One thousand veterans and active duty troops will shatter the corporate media hoax that insists members of the American military do not support Ron Paul due to his opposition to the unconstitutional forever war agenda of the establishment. http://www.infowars.com/active-duty-troops-to-march-on-white-house/

Morale to the Left, Morale to the Right, and Not a Stop to Think

Ever wonder why the US military can’t win wars? Why a few ragtag guerillas could send it running out of Somalia (Black Hawk Down)? Why one guy with a truck bomb could chase the Marines out of Lebanon? Why the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran was such a disaster? Why the world’s most expensive military can’t win its unending wars against peasants with rifles? How is this possible? http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed204.html

An All-White Military Unit

On Monday, we reported that something called the Military Leadership Diversity Commission says the officer corps of the American armed forces is too white and too male. “This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change,” the report adds. A reader has sent us a group photo of the kind of men who go on to become officers. This photo was taken of the Marines of the 3rd Platoon of the 1st Force Recon., an elite unit. The brown-skinned fellows in the upper left are interpreters; everyone else is a useless white male. The platoon strikes us as pretty formidable-looking unit, but no doubt the Military Leadership Diversity Commission would say it would be a lot more effective with a stiff dose of blacks, Hispanics and, of course, women. http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2011/03/an_all-white_mi.php

How the Pentagon Turns Working-Class Men into the Deadliest Killers on the Planet

Since the Vietnam War, the United States has dropped all pretense of a military draft equally applied to all. Instead we spend billions of dollars on recruitment, increase military pay, and offer signing bonuses until enough people “voluntarily” join by signing contracts that allow the military to change the terms at will. If more troops are needed, just extend the contracts of the ones you’ve got. Need more still? Federalize the National Guard and send kids off to war who signed up thinking they’d be helping hurricane victims. Still not enough? Hire contractors for transportation, cooking, cleaning, and construction. Let the soldiers be pure soldiers whose only job is to kill, just like the knights of old. Boom, you’ve instantly doubled the size of your force, and nobody’s noticed except the profiteers. http://www.alternet.org/world/149165

The American War Dead Disappear Into the Darkness

In understanding how this relative lack of attention is possible, it’s worth noting that the American dead tend to come disproportionately from easy-to-ignore tough-luck regions of the country, and disproportionately as well from small town and rural America, where service in the armed forces may be more valued, but times are also rougher, unemployment rates higher, and opportunities less. In this context, consider those November dead. If you look through the minimalist announcements released by the Pentagon, as I did recently, you discover that they were almost all men in their twenties, and that none of them seem to have come from our giant metropolises. Among the hometowns of the dead, there was no Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, or Houston. There were a range of second-level cities including Flagstaff (Arizona), Rochester (New York), San Jose (California), Tallahassee (Florida), and Tucson (Arizona). For the rest, from Aroostook, Maine, to Mesquite, Texas, the hometown names the Pentagon lists, whether they represent rural areas, small towns, parts of suburbs, or modest-sized cities, read like a dirge for places you’d never have heard of if you hadn’t yourself lived in the vicinity. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2010/12/07/the-american-war-dead-disappear-into-the-darkness/

Threats to Troops Opposed to Open Homosexuality

Is this policy of open homosexually in the military, with an apparent gag order on military personnel who do not support it, a policy desired and supported by members of the military, or by the American people — the military defense of whom, from enemies foreign and domestic, is the primary duty, above all other duties, of the National Government, particularly the Presidency, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers? http://www.newswithviews.com/Lloyd/rees106.htm

Queer Pressure Groups Step-Up Pressure on Congress to Force Homosexual Integration on the Military

NEW YORK – Elated by a major court victory, gay-rights activists are stepping up pressure on Congress to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy this month. They want to avoid potentially lengthy appeals and fear their chances for a legislative fix will fade after Election Day.

The House voted in May to repeal the 17-year-old policy banning openly gay service members. Many majority Democrats in the Senate want to take up the matter in the remaining four weeks before the pre-election recess, but face opposition from Republican leaders.

National gay-rights groups, fearing possible Democratic losses on Nov. 2, urged their supporters Friday to flood senators’ offices with phone calls and e-mails asking that the Senate vote on the measure during the week of Sept. 20.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100910/ap_on_re_us/us_gays_in_military

Navy: White Men Need not Apply

August 4, 2010: The U.S. Navy leadership, unhappy with the lack of diversity (non-white, non-male officers) in its senior ranks, is setting up a secret list of high potential junior officers who are non-white, or women. These officers would be given special attention (mentoring, influential assignments) by the senior admirals, as well as special attention when it came to promotions.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20100804.aspx

Navy Admiral: White Men Need not Apply?

Gary Roughead

The latest national security leak is a shocking e-mail from a Navy admiral on “Diversity Accountability.” The message, sent to a list of other flag officers, notes that “a change in focus of this year’s diversity brief is the desire to identify our key performers (by name) and provide insight on each of them.” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, who apparently originated this order, “is interested in who are the diverse officers with high potential and what is the plan for their career progression. He may ask what is being done within to ensure they are considered for key follow on billets within the Navy.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/30/high-seas-segregation/

The End of (Military) History?

“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective. Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2010/07/29/the-end-of-military-history/

Thousands of Soldiers Unfit for War Duty

More than 13,000 active-duty Army soldiers — the equivalent of four combat brigades — are sidelined as unfit for war because of injury, illness or mental stress. In an unmistakable sign that the Army is struggling with exhaustion after nine years of fighting, combat commanders whose units are headed to Afghanistan increasingly choose to leave behind soldiers who can no longer perform, putting additional strain on those who still can. The growing pool of “non-deployable” soldiers make up roughly 10 percent of the 116,423 active-duty soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands more Army reservists and National Guard soldiers are also considered unfit to deploy, a growing burden on an Army that has sworn to care for them as long as needed. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/05/thousands-of-soldiers-unfit-for-war-duty/?icid=main|htmlws-main-n|dl1|link1|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicsdaily.com%2F2010%2F07%2F05%2Fthousands-of-soldiers-unfit-for-war-duty%2F&sms_ss=email

America Detached from War

As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment. The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/24-7

How the Pentagon Is Cheating Wounded Vets — Soldiers Aren’t Disposable

The military’s sad legacy of denying the care troops need after combat. http://www.alternet.org/world/146391

The Exploitation of the American Soldier

Hidden behind the illusory fantasy the corporate media portrays of noble fighting in tumultuous wars, lies a world of death, suffering and lifelong sacrifice, a world of psychological trauma and physical torture, a world of Veteran abandonment by the same government that has sent millions to kill and be killed, a world where America’s finest, along with their families, are swept underneath the rug of indifference and a world in which ethnicity, class structure and society’s deadly ills mix in a noxious concoction to form that most clandestine of military drafts that is based on poverty, lack of education and the caste one is born into. http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/2003/12/exploitation-of-american-soldier-part.html

A Grand Adventure

He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the war came in a far country. It doesn’t matter which. It was just a country. http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed177.html

Medicating the Military

At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug. And many troops are taking more than one kind, mixing several pills in daily “cocktails” — for example, an antidepressant with an antipsychotic to prevent nightmares, plus an anti-epileptic to reduce headaches — despite minimal clinical research testing such combinations. The drugs come with serious side effects: They can impair motor skills, reduce reaction times and generally make a war fighter less effective. Some double the risk for suicide, prompting doctors — and Congress — to question whether these drugs are connected to the rising rate of military suicides. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/03/military_psychiatric_drugs_031710w/

Not Your Father’s Army

Most of us Americans have a deep and abiding respect and admiration for our country’s fighting men who have served–and are serving–within the US Armed Forces. We appreciate their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way for the preservation of our nation’s liberty and independence. We honor their sacrifice. Indeed, many of us share that sacrifice with the deaths, dismemberments, and paralysis of our most cherished loved ones who were killed or injured in the line of duty. It is time, however, that we awaken to the reality of what our military is becoming and where it is heading. Suffice it to say, this is not your father’s army. http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin567.htm