Thanks for your service
So here we are in the midst of several deployments to the various shit holes around the world. The Afghan War isn’t ending this year, thousands are supporting the newest Iraq War, 3000 are headed to Liberia to battle Ebola and at home, the folks in the Pentagon are hard at work to support them. Says Military.com;
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said Tuesday that the Pentagon will continue pressing to trim military pay, pensions, and housing allowances despite rejections by Congress.
The Pentagon will also try again to reform the Tricare health care system and kill the A-10 attack aircraft despite nearly universal opposition from veterans service organizations, Work said at a Council on Foreign Relations forum.
“This whole idea of compensation is absolutely critical. Compensation (reform) is a really big deal” in DoD’s efforts to maintain readiness, fight wars in Afghanistan and the Mideast and rebalance forces to the Pacific while working under the budgetary restrictions of the Congressional sequester process, Work said.
Yeah, they cut pay raises, but that’s not enough, apparently, I’m sure we can find a senior NCO somewhere who can spur the general officers and the civilian employees onward in their quest to make military service even shittier, so shitty, in fact, that they’ll be in command of nothing after a while.
Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.
Category: Big Pentagon
Speaking of cuts, when was the las time anyone saw the pols in DC take a pay cut, and has anyone ever looked into possible fraud in SSI, welfare, or any other handout like the 0bamaphone program?
Or am I being “racist” by asking that? If so, I’ll wear the title with pride!!
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Washington, the fools who run the Medicare program allow unscrupulous health care providers to bilk taxpayers out of billions like this rag head doctor in Michigan:
http://www.freep.com/article/20130806/NEWS05/308060139/Oakland-County-oncologist-charged-with-Medicare-fraud
I read on another site the other day which I cannot now find, that he actually defrauded Medicare to the tune of $90 million rather than the $39 million reported in the link.
One doctor-$90m. Imagine the losses for the entire country.
Heretic! How dare you suggest a pay cut for the dirtbag politicians!?
You know, I love CCR’s music and John Fogerty’s solo stuff even though he’s a douchebag liberal. I will tell you this almost sounds like that line in “Fortunate Son”: “Ohh they’ll send you down to War
And when you ask them how much should we give, ooh they only ask for more and more and more and more”
Fuck this clown Work. Clearly he is inaptly named. I don’t think this fuckstick has done an honest day’s work in his life.
He is an Obama appointee, after all. Don’t tell me you’re surprised.
That song really takes on new meaning during these times.
In fact, you could almost use it as the banner song of our movement against the current Administration.
I wouldn’t mind that at all. I love that song.
Why is it that the Pentagon is the only department in the federal government that is so willing to fuck over its own people (by that I mean military personnel). I don’t see any other federal agency/department going out of their way to cut the pay/benefits of civilians (and there is a lot more fat to cut there).
To be fair, the USDA has a long, proud tradition of rewarding US Forest Service firefighters (many of whom are vets) with their very own green weenie. And the current administration seems determined to ensure that Border Patrol agents have the most unsafe work environment possible (kinda like they’re doing with the military through the Glorious Leader’s I’ll-conceived misadventures abroad). And you know that Lois Fucking Lerner and every douchebag at the EPA make more than all of Forest Service and Border Patrol combined. And don’t get me started on the cockfucks in the Senate.
So. How many GOs are there? Like one per every line company in the entire army?
They should start there.
There are more admirals than ships, if that tells you anything.
Don’t forget all the SESs.
The military is and always will be an easy target for cuts, because the fact is it is so few of the overall popualtion that serve or have served that the overwhelming majority really don’t know enough about the lives of Military personnel to care. “It doesn’t directly affect them in a meaningful way”, in other words it isn’t hurting them in their own wallet, and bumper sticker slogans are hard to apply to it… It’s for the children…or the Elderly, or the poor…
Billions of dollars in wasted tax payer money through duplication of effort, feel good programs that do nothing, corruption, and just plain waste. That is all someones “pet project” or vote getter, so hands off!!
I’ll agree completely that the vast majority of people who haven’t served don’t know enough about the lives of military personnel. I’m not quite so cynical to think they don’t care, it’s more just that people get by on assumptions, tired old tropes about those who join, and the usual politics. Off the top of my head, some of the issues are that few people really have any sense of what military pay rats are like. Sure, they could look it up, but how often does that happen these days? Sadly, the advocacy has to start from the group that wants the facts known, not the ignorant side. The only time civilians typically hear about military pay is when some dishonored, high-ranking officer is in the news for some scandal and they hear about how he’s getting his pretty nice pension. They don’t hear about your typical PFC and the struggles his family faces. Then of course there’s the fact that the issue gets conflated with military spending at large, or the size of the military itself, both of which are overall ‘budget-related’, whereas the discussion about pay needs to be focused on the individuals who serve and the families whom they support. And, naturally, you’ve got politics. I’m firmly in the camp of better pay for the military, but any time someone starts ranting about how liberals hate the military and this is part of their insidious plan to gut it, I tend to tune out. That forces the discussion to shift away from an apolitical and fairly straightforward topic into something which is just going to cause frustration. Same goes for comparison to other spending items, such as social programs, educational grants, etc. – basically, if you attack wasteful spending in an area other people feel is more useful than ‘military spending’, you’re just making your own fight harder. Do all this and you’ll STILL get the occasional left-wing nutjobs who feel that it should be a low paying job to discourage people from what they see as a terrible career, but again, that’s even more reason to… Read more »
” They don’t hear about your typical PFC and the struggles his family faces.”
Unless a Republican or Conservative is in the White House. Then the media goes bananas talking about those poor lower enlisted who must subsist off welfare and EBT or starve. I remember them doing that to Bush. As soon as Obama was elected, all that talk stopped. I guess soldiers aren’t destitute anymore when a leftist is president.
And they also talked it to death when Romney was campaigning about his “millions” of dollars, but never once said anything about the wealth of Kerry or even Nanny Bloomberg.
The fact that Kerry could buy Romney about 20 times over because he’s Mr Heinz is appalling, but they’ll never mention that fact. Same goes for Bloomberg the billionaire who spews money around the US to push his personal agendas like gun control (even though he has a personal security force that are armed).
Oh, I get it. It goes like this: Thanks for working here. You’re fired. Now go fuck yourself.
So if I understand this correctly you are telling us the new plan seems to be to fuck the troops more and pay them less, all while the pretty commercials talk about global forces for good and such…. Let’s kill the one aircraft program that was actually designed to keep 11Bs alive in the A-10 (what a great sounding aircraft, and that lovely Vulcan just raises the hairs on my arm)….and then let’s see if we can reduce morale by paying the men and women who risk life and limb less money and further fuck them after they retire by reducing their benefits….and then when we get some decent mid-grade officers to lead our men and women let’s fuck those officers while they’re deployed on our behalf by sending them a letter to let them know when they return from that deployment they can hit the bricks because the military no longer requires their presence on base. I never joined the military for the money, I joined because of an obligation I felt to my nation. My family started here in the US in 1900 with my grandfather being born in Connecticut, we’ve prospered here certainly and I love this country dearly. I suspect that all of you here also never joined for the money. When I left the service I never needed a VA loan or college funds or anything else so I’ve never used those benefits. But I can honestly say it’s incomprehensible to me that millions of men and women who came after me and did their duty as requested with honor and depth of character as they promised are finding out that the nation they served might not keep up its side of the agreement. If the military can fuck you when you fail to keep your end of the bargain and now it appears they can fuck you when you do keep your end of the bargain what’s the point of a contract if only one side is held accountable? How about a more honest assessment in those cool Navy commercials? “A global force for… Read more »
The Pentagon, like others, will soon realize that you do indeed get what you pay for as far as personnel are concerned…
“..so shitty, in fact, that they’ll be in command of nothing after a while.”
That’s the idea.
Mike
I suspect 70% plus of the Pentagon class of military personnel, officer and enlisted, could be handed their walking papers today, and there’d be no malaffect to the military. Actually, I bet the entire lot could be fired and no one would actually notice the difference.
Same for the huge bloat of Lt. Cols and such that do nothing other than “supervise” defense industry contracts while actually doing little more than working as toadies for their assigned projects and ensuring their post retirement careers.
That sounds like a challenge, lets do it!
Money? Yes, that $97.00/month that I received as a recruit was generous beyond belief. Bennies? Oh, please – if you went to sick call with a bad cold, you were a malingerer, a goldbricker. And that ads said ‘It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure’. At least I can laugh about it now.
I guess his thought process is: I got mine, fuck everybody else. He could return his pension to the government if he feels military pensions need to be reformed.
http://www.defense.gov/bios/depsecdef/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_O._Work
robert.work@sd.mil
I wonder how much of that is a blind bluff to get Congress off their asses and do something productive since they are still being strangled by the sequester. They keep putting politically unpalatable options before Congress that get shut down and its almost like they are doing it with the aim of forcing a hand. There certainly is a lot of fat that could be trimmed besides putting the cuts on the backs of the Joe and families and the constant mantra that personnel costs have exponentially increased (outside of the VA) over the last few decades has been discredited. I came in in 1977, got out in 1993, and then came back in in right after 9/11 and stayed until I retired in 2010 and what strikes me is that we have a whole generation of military now reaching mid to late career that have always been on war footing which is unprecedented. The ground war in Viet Nam lasted roughly 6 years, WWI lasted about 18 months, WW II about 4.5 years, and now we are into our 14th year in GWOT. Think about that for a minute. Part of what is hurting our argument is that the economy has been so bad for so long that recruiting isn’t suffering so there is a false sense among the cabal in Washington that cuts like being proposed can be absorbed with little direct impact on operational readiness which is just a false reading. Mid career folks who are key to the military in particular are feeling the pinch and uncertainties over retirement, the OPTEMPO, and rampant social engineering are driving them out. The bloat in the senior officer corps, expensive weapons systems that seem to provide a lessor bang for the buck than they should, and excessive “restructuring” (I went through 3 redesignations in my 9 year Army career) are dragging us down at a precipitous rate. And how short sighted is it to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on projects like the MRAP only to see them doled out to LEO after about 18 months of… Read more »
All these reasons are why it so concerns me that Obama went to speak to the American Legion and they allowed him to even speak there. On the one hand, yes how do you tell the President of the US “no” about anything?
However, they should’ve declined that opportunity for him to speak. That would’ve given a much more significantly telling (especially politically) response than letting him speak.
If they had said “you fuck the troops every chance you get, so nevermind, don’t speak here” then it would be far more remembered, then him giving a speech that he forgot within an hour of leaving the place. And maybe in that, the press would look for reasons why they’d tell him no.
The glorious speech he forgot as soon as he left, or maybe even while he was giving it.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/26/remarks-president-american-legion-national-convention
I have no doubt that B. Hussein 0bama just wanted to get his speech over with and head straight to the golf course!
Well, the Legionnaires could have, and maybe should have, stood up and walked out. Or, at the least, turned their backs to the speaker.
I think it is far more telling when you have veteran service organizations doing more for troops after they return than our own government.
You also remember quite “fondly” as I do, the Senior Enlisted Advisors for each service going in front of Congress saying “cut personnel” because fuck them! Where did they get that mantra to spew? Why, their Commander in Chief of Course, where else would they get it?
I’d like to see the other department heads going before Congress asking for a reduced budget, but that will never happen because heaven forbid anyone else doesn’t get a budget increase every year.
Its so much easier to just cut DoD’s budget. Oh and since we’ll look bad cutting the budget of contracts, we’ll just cut personnel because that’s the easiest thing to do.
” I’m sure we can find a senior NCO somewhere who can spur the general officers and the civilian employees onward in their quest to make military service even shittier, so shitty, in fact, that they’ll be in command of nothing after a while.”
Not this Senior NCO. I’m sitting home on terminal leave because they RIF’d my arse. Best of luck to the folks still in….it’s only going to get more shitty.