Senator McCain at the Naval Academy

Addressing the Middies, laying out the honor, duty and, yes, rewards of seriving the American people. Senator John McCain:

“You will be asked to defend America’s interests overseas, and thereby to defend the ideals that encompass and transcend those interests. You will protect the international order that American politics, with all its inefficiencies and human frailties, has done so much to create.

“Many of you will risk everything for your country. You will make sacrifices for your fellow Americans, who won’t be asked to make sacrifices for you. That’s your calling. Thank you for accepting it. I promise, there will be compensations for the hard times you endure. You will have lives of adventure. You will have the best company. And you will know a satisfaction far more sublime than pleasure.
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“I know what you will risk and what you will receive in return. I know America is lucky to have you, and that you will think yourselves lucky to serve America. Even in the worst of times – and they come for most of us – you’ll know that to serve this country is to serve its ideals – the ideals that consider every child on earth as made in the image of God and endowed with dignity and the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a noble cause. It is your cause, and it’s worth living and dying for.

Active Duty, Reserves, National Guard, and the various Auxiliaries, it is indeed a calling.

It's also one of the reasons I tend to look on with pity at those people who, when they learn that I served and that my sons serve now, react with "Aren't you scared of what might happen to them?"

My response,"No, I worry what would happen to our country and the world if young men and women like them didn't step up and 'risk every thing' for the ideals our country" ends a lot of conversatiions.

Recommended reading Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton: Six Characteristics of High-Performance Teams discussed on Midrats 3 years ago:

What I heard at the Marine Corps War College graduation

First, congratulations to the graduates of the various programs offered by the Marine Corps University who were honored on 6 June. You are an impressive group, you mid-career Marines, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Army officers, along with the remarkable group of foreign military students from Afghanistan to Ukraine who were your classmates.

For those of you who could not attend this ceremony, part of the MCU is the Command and Staff College (CSC) which enrolls Marine/AF/Army majors and Navy/Coast Guard Lieutenant Commanders who have taken on the challenge of a military career.*

If not all future generals or admirals, these CSC grads will be part of that core around which forms the U.S. military. And, yes, I know that there are those other Command and Staff schools who also annually send a couple of hundred of graduates out into the field for field commands but I was at this graduation.

For the graduates, a career milestone has been checked off. The first PME has been fulfilled.

Of the 204 or so 2012 graduates of the CSC about 164 received Masters of Military Science degrees. Unknowing civilians may scoff at such a degree, noting its apparent lack of usefulness in their civilian world.

That civilian world misses the point.

You want your military to have read Clausewitz, to have walked the fields of Gettysburg, to have studied logistics and read John Boyd, because that is the world of the military professional.

You want that hard-charging young major or LtCol to draw on more than just personal experience when the nation's defense is in his or her hands.

So, again, congratulations to the grads. And a further congratulations to the American people. You should take pride that in the service of your country are such amazing young people.

Second, let me talk about the graduation speech for the class of 2012. The Assistant Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps delivered it.

It was short as such things go, but a couple of things struck me. In the absence of a transcript, you will have to live with my recollection (and I was not taking notes).

General Dunford pointed out that for some time there were few changes in the way in which the Marines went to war. He noted that when he entered the Corps, he was issued the same "cold weather gear" that his father had used in the Korean War ("not like the gear my father used, but the same gear") and that a platoon leader in Korea or Vietnam would not have had difficulty, if magically transported to the future, with the tactics first employed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He then noted in past few years that great changes have occurred in the ways of war. Changes such that a Marine who fought in Afghanistan 6 years ago would not find things the same - there had been such a rapid revolution in tactics and equipment that the American battlefield was off in a new direction. A platoon once responsible for a limited front, now has coverage of a vastly larger area. Better communications, better equipment, and (I assume) better Marines allow such an expansion of responsibility.

So, Lesson #1: "Things change"

Then the challenge - he had a couple of good yarns about things that seemed, well, "unnecessary" at the time they occurred. He spoke of an effort he led, as a young colonel, to assess the threat to and protection of various key national infrastructure assets - ports and bridges and highways and the like - which his boss did not really appreciate the need for, at least in early 2001.

He also spoke of a paper written by a young officer that addressed the threat of "improvised explosive devices (IEDs or roadside bombs)" and suggested a look at the South African response to such weapons. All of which ultimately led to the MRAP vehicle. The paper was written in 1996 by an officer taking a "what if?" look at things.

Things change. You never know exactly how, so you need to be flexible and ready.

So, Lesson 2: "Challenge the conventional thinking."

We no longer line up in box formations and attack in broad fronts. The aircraft is not just used for spotting targets. Submarines are not interesting novelties. Anti-ballistic missile systems can work. OODA.

Revolutions in military affairs were not led by assuming things have to be as they have been

I don't know how many of the graduates were listening to the speech.

I can't remember a single line of any graduation speech I have ever heard because, well, I had other things on my mind. Like getting the heck out of there.

But, if they were listening they should have heard the warning order implied in the softly delivered speech, which I took to be:

We do not know what you will face in the future, We only know that you will need to use your education and experience to face those challenges that come your way. We have added to your tool kit and trust you to put those tools to good use.

Our national defense is- well - you and your band of brothers in arms.

Be flexible, be ready, be strong.

Because you never know.

*And FBI/DEA/BATF/DOS and others

The EagleSpeak Suggested Way to Reduce the Military Force

There will come a time, soon probably, that there will be a call to reduce the size of the military services (excluding the Coast Guard, which is too damn small anyway).

I offer up my thoughts on how to approach the problem in two steps:

1. Identify every member of the military* who has not received combat pay** for any of the last 10 years that we have been at war.
2. Once these people have been identified, fire them. If they are flag officers, fire them twice.

See, that wasn't so hard.

Reward the warriors.

* Who has at least 10 years service
 ** Meaning "imminent danger pay" or submarine pay and/or whatever AF missileers get.

Rep. Rangel to reintroduce military draft measure?

According to the The Hill.com, U.S. Charles Rangel (D, NY) is again going to introduce his military draft measure as set out here:

Republicans are likely to seize on the reintroduction of Rangel’s unpopular military draft bill. When they controlled the House in 2004, Republicans scheduled a vote on the Rangel measure, which was defeated 402-2. Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Pete Stark (D-Calif.) supported it, while Rangel voted against his own bill, claiming the GOP was playing political games.
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A decorated Korean War veteran and a member of the Out of Iraq Caucus, Rangel argues that the burden of fighting wars falls disproportionately on low-income people and that cost should be borne more broadly.

If a draft had been in place in 2002 when members were making the decision on whether to support the war in Iraq, Rangel has said, Congress never would have approved the war resolution, because the pressure from constituents would have been too great.

With the Iraq war off the front page and the economic crisis taking center stage, nerves are not as raw on the topic of strain on the military as they were a few years ago, so Rangel’s legislation may not make as many waves this time around.

But some Democrats — even one who supported Rangel’s efforts in the past — are a little perplexed about his plans to reintroduce the legislation, especially now that President-elect Obama is poised to take over the White House.

“That was really a political statement at the beginning of the war that we continued,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), one of only two co-sponsors of Rangel’s draft bill. “I’m not sure we’re going to do that this time.”

Whatever their motives, which seem mostly to have been to harass outgoing President Bush, Rep Rangel and his cronies prove once again that facts don't matter much to them.

A recent Heritage study confirms that, contrary to Mr. Rangel's assertions that "the burden of fighting wars falls disproportionately on low-income people," the current U.S. military is not composed of the losers in life's lottery as Mr. Rangel apparently posits. Instead:

1. U.S. military service disproportionately attracts enlisted personnel and officers who do not come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Previous Her­itage Foundation research demonstrated that the quality of enlisted troops has increased since the start of the Iraq war. This report demon­strates that the same is true of the officer corps.
2. Members of the all-volunteer military are sig­nificantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 per­cent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) pro­gram, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods—a number that has increased substantially over the past four years.
3. American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted per­sonnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18–24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor’s degree.
4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service. Enlisted troops are somewhat more likely to be white or black than their non-military peers. Whites are proportionately represented in the officer corps, and blacks are overrepresented, but their rate of overrepresentation has declined each year from 2004 to 2007. New recruits are also disproportionately likely to come from the South, which is in line with the history of South­ern military tradition.

The facts do not support the belief that many American soldiers volunteer because society offers them few other opportunities. The average enlisted person or officer could have had lucrative career opportunities in the private sector. Those who argue that American soldiers risk their lives because they have no other opportunities belittle the personal sacrifices of those who serve out of love for their country.

Of course, the insistence on the part of the military that at least 90% of recruits have high school diplomas may have an "adverse impact" on the ability of the lowest economic levels of our society to join the services since that it is much more likely that high school dropouts will end up in the lower income levels. See the chart here in which it appears that completing high school adds about $10,000 a years in income compared to high school dropouts.

Perhaps Mr. Rangel should be less worried about who carries the burden of serving in the military (especially since he is completely wrong in his analysis) and worry more about how to encourage the lower economic levels of our society to finish high school so that they can be full participants in our society. Perhaps they even will be able to correctly file their own income tax forms . . . except that they mostly don't pay income taxes.

UPDATE: Where do recruits come from?