military
All posts tagged military
- “We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion.” — Nicolas Chaillan, former first Chief Software Officer for the Air Force, who resigned in protest over the Pentagon’s slow pace of technological development, citing China’s fast advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and general capabilities in cybersecurity, Financial Times, October 10, 2021
- “By the time the Government manages to produce something, it’s too often obsolete.” — Preston Dunlap, the Pentagon’s first Chief Architect Officer, responsible for promoting technological innovation at the Pentagon, who also resigned, labelling the Pentagon “the world’s largest bureaucracy;” The Japan Times, April 19, 2022.
- “Our lack of adopting these [commercial innovations] quickly creates an asymmetric disadvantage if our adversaries adopt them more rapidly… These differences are extremely relevant for conflicts we may face in the next decade where our adversaries effectively employ commercial technologies. For example, when U.S. troops were stationed in Iraq, ISIS sent small drones, which can be purchased on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, with grenades to kill American soldiers in Mosul… The DoD must add new capabilities like these in 1-2 years rather than 1-2 decades.” — Michael Brown, Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Pentagon, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, April 6, 2022.
- “[In the PRC and Russia], private companies… work together closely with their militaries to gain experience with new technologies and concepts. From drone swarming to anti-satellite weapons programs, Russia and the PRC have studied our capabilities carefully and are rapidly modernizing its own military capabilities with a priority both on asymmetry designed to neutralize U.S. overmatch and accessing innovations in its commercial sector… Imagine how well our forces will defend against PLA swarms of drones if we have not experimented with this concept,” — Michael Brown, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, April 6, 2022.
- “The current sequential process lags commercial product cycles and delivers technology several generations behind which would be the equivalent of supplying flip-phones and fax machines to our warfighters today…” — Michael Brown, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, April 6, 2022.’https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18512/pentagon-losing-to-china
‘Liberty Counsel filed a response asking federal Judge Steve Merryday to deny the Department of Defense’s (DOD) motion to dismiss the case of Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin. The DOD raised the same arguments the court has previously rejected. The DOD added a new argument that each of the plaintiffs and the class should be separately litigated in different courts around the country. However, venue is proper in Tampa because some of the Plaintiffs reside in the Tampa district. The courts are unanimous that a lawsuit may be brought in a court district where some of the plaintiffs or defendants reside. Moreover, the lawsuit alleges a cause of action common to all members of the class – namely, that the DOD and the military branches have unlawfully denied the religious accommodation requests of the service members under both the First Amendment and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Liberty Counsel represents many military plaintiffs and is seeking class certification for all six branches of the military who have been unlawfully denied religious exemptions from the COVID shot mandate.
Previous injunctions granted by the Court have already determined that the Plaintiffs’ free exercise rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) have been violated. This in addition to the irreparable harm of being discharged and, for some, having to pay back education and training costs. As a result of the pressure, some service members have committed suicide.
After Judge Merryday ordered each branch of the military to file a detailed report regarding religious exemptions from the COVID-19 shot every 14 days beginning Friday, January 7, 2022, the filings prove the DOD is committing blatant religious discrimination. Out of thousands of thousands of requests received, only a few were granted and those service members were already scheduled to leave the military. However, at least 3,449 medical exemptions have been granted. The reports confirm the military continues to deny religious exemptions while granting medical exemptions.
Liberty Counsel presented testimony and several critical documents before federal Judge Steven Merryday during a preliminary injunction for a U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet who faced immediate discipline after being denied his appeal for a religious accommodation from the COVID shot mandate.
During one of the hearings, Liberty Counsel also presented evidence that on January 6, 2022, Brigadier General Paul Moga, a one-star general and commandant of the Air Force Academy, announced to the cadets at a lunch meeting regarding the Omicron variant that “there is very little danger to the force.”
In Congressional testimony on February 17, 2021, Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Director for Operations, Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro, a two-star general, said the military was “fully capable of operating in a COVID environment before vaccinations were available.” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), Ranking Member of the House Homeland Security Committee, asked: “So I take that to mean yes, they’re deployable even if they have not been vaccinated?” Maj. Gen. Taliaferro responded: “Yes, Sir.”
Evidence presented during the hearing included March 2022 memos from Major General Richard D. Burke (Two-Star General), Deputy Principal Cyber Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and Senior Military Advisor for Cyber, and Lieutenant General Michael Howard (Three-Star General), who oversees the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) as Deputy Commander, regarding the approval of mission critical travel for unvaccinated service members who have “no discernable negative impact” on military readiness.
The memo dated March 5, 2022, from Maj. Gen. Burke requested certain “unvaccinated” service members be approved for “mission essential” travel and deployment. He wrote, “Assessed risk to force for co-mingling vaccinated and unvaccinated personnel is low.” In a second memo written the same day, Maj. Gen. Burke wrote: “Headquarters and Headquarters’ Battalion (HHBN), V Corps is 97% fully vaccinated. Assessed risk to force for comingling vaccinated and unvaccinated personnel is low.”
On March 6, 2022, Lt. Gen. Michael Howard’s response to Maj. Gen. Burke’s request regarding “unvaccinated” service members for “mission essential” deployments, wrote “The request…is approved.”
Liberty Counsel also introduced evidence regarding a new change by the Marine Corps for “Quarantine and Isolation” (Q&I). Based on the data, the Marine Corps no longer requires COVID-positive Marines to Q&I from healthy Marines. Now, they are in the same barracks as Marines who do not have COVID and there is no longer any testing required.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The evidence is clear that these courageous service members have a strong case and are being used as part of a purging of our military members who love God and love America. There is no other logical or scientific explanation for the Department of Defense’s continued insistence on the shot mandate. We will continue to fight for every service member.”’https://theiowastandard.com/dods-desperate-attempt-to-dismiss-navy-seal-1-case/
Biden has made the US government WOKE and WEAK! Now, ‘The United States Army’s Assistant Secretary for Installations, Energy and Environment released a memo on May 14 that identifies climate change as a “serious threat to U.S. national security interests and defense objectives.” According to the memo, the president and secretary of defense have directed the Army to prioritize “climate change considerations in its threat picture, strategic plans, operations, and installations.” In January, Defense News reported that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wants the Department of Defense (DOD) to “change its carbon footprint.” In April, Secretary Austin called climate change “an existential threat.”
To that end, the memo states that the Army convened a 24-member “Army Climate Change Working Group (ACCWG)” in early March to develop the Army’s “Climate Strategy and Army Climate Action Plan.” The plan includes “energy reform,” which calls for the “development and use of renewable energy, energy and water efficiency and consumption, and other environmental initiatives that steward the land, air and water to enable Army operations and maximize readiness.” The Army, the memo continues, is “[p]oised to lead the way in technology development for tactical vehicles that balances increased capability with decreased climate impacts.” One member of DOD’s Climate Action Team said that the group is taking a “holistic approach” that extends to “environmental justice.”’https://spectator.org/army-climate-change/
One doesn’t have to be a prophet to see that if things do not change the USA will be a vassal state of China before the next Presidential election.
Sadly, Tucker is correct!
‘Fox News host Tucker Carlson fired back at the Pentagon after a slate of military leaders berated him for comments he made about Defense Department changes meant to attract more female recruits.
Carlson, who had bashed the changes, rebuked the “woke generals” for their criticism and said he and his supporters were not “rattled.”
“We were almost rattled. Then we realized if the woke generals treat us like they’ve treated the Taliban, we’ll be fine. Twenty years later, the Taliban are still here. Maybe we ought to promise the Pentagon that we’ll get rid of traditional gender roles on this show. Change the pronouns, defeat the patriarchy, and all that,” Carlson said on his program Friday night.
The response marks the latest salvo in a back-and-forth between Carlson and the Pentagon. The conservative host on Monday railed against President Biden’s promotions of two female generals and remarks touting new efforts to improve conditions for women in the military, including work to design maternity flight suits and updating grooming standards to allow for a wider range of hairstyles.
“So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military,” Carlson said.
“While China’s military becomes more masculine as it has assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore,” he continued.’ https://thehill.com/homenews/media/543045-tucker-carlson-swats-back-at-woke-generals-after-criticism
I was in the National Guard for seven years and as a Conservative would probably not be fit to be at the Biden inaugural 20th January, 2021. All I can say is that being a conservative has its advantages and in this case keeps one out of the pig pen.
‘It appears you can’t be trusted in the U.S. military anymore if you have Conservative beliefs.
The FBI is now vetting National Guard members in DC over their political views.
This is illegal and a disgrace to our National Guard troops.’
‘We’ve come to the point that anyone who believes in Conservatism is deemed an extremist and considered an insider threat in our military.
Absolutely ludicrous!’https://welovetrump.com/2021/01/18/national-guard-members-are-being-vetted-for-conservative-beliefs-and-cowardly-republicans-are-silent/?utm_source=PTN&utm_medium=mixed&utm_campaign=PTN
If cheating will win a Presidential election why will it not allow you to play football? This will make you proud to be an American!
‘The United States Military Academy, commonly known as West Point, cited a number of athletes, including football players, for cheating on a spring 2020 calculus exam.
But university officials suspended its own rules to allow football players to play in games this season, including a bowl game.
The public military university has a rule against violators of its honor code from representing the university.
“We delayed it [the rule] until final adjudication,” Christopher Ophardt, West Point spokesperson, told USA Today. The newspaper reported that some athletes were found in violation of the honor code on November 30, a month before the New Year’s Eve bowl game against Liberty University. The university decided in October to suspend the rule.
A December 30 letter addressed to alumni from Darryl Williams, the superintendent of West Point, explained the scandal. Williams made the decision to allow the football players to take the field, according to USA Today.’https://www.thecollegefix.com/west-point-leadership-allows-football-players-who-cheated-on-exams-to-play-in-bowl-game/
Is President Trump correct when he said ‘The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?’
Well, yes, he was even though ‘The WHO at first glance seems an innocent bystander to Chinese obstruction until one considers the story of SARS in Taiwan. Taiwanese health officials attempting to inform the WHO of their cluster of cases were rebuffed and asked to report their findings to the central government in China instead.
You see, the allegedly apolitical, humanitarian, and guided-by-science WHO doesn’t think Taiwan exists because China doesn’t recognize Taiwan’s independence. The WHO even refused to publicly report Taiwan’s cases of SARS until public pressure prompted numbers to be published under the label of “Taiwan, province of China.”
Clearly these matters are worthy of debate, but why would the WHO put its thumb on the scale? The answer, increasingly obviously, is that the WHO is a political organization that attempts to give its political preferences the veneer of objectivity using the label of science.
WHO Also Failed in the 2013 Ebola Outbreak
The Ebola outbreak of 2013 provides yet another window into the WHO’s lethal failings. One of the important controversies at the time related to how the virus spread. An excellent 2015 New Atlantis article dissects the controversy of transmissibility, and concludes the available evidence at the time could not rule out through-the-air transmission.
Of particular concern was evidence from the field about health-care worker infections. Health care workers who did not wear maximal Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the form of respirators to filter out airborne transmission were infected with Ebola at a high rate.
Rather than err on the side of safety, the WHO ignored this evidence. Local health officials and administrators followed their lead for a similar approach in their hospitals. First responders paid the price. The SARS outbreak in Canada was notable for the number of health workers who were infected and succumbed to the disease, in part, because the initial responders to the crisis relied on PPE guidance that wasn’t adequate.
The CDC Is In on This Action
To be fair, what’s on display here is a broader institutional malady. The U.S. version of the WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took a similar stance with another controversial topic—quarantines for health-care workers returning from treating patients with Ebola. Four states—New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Illinois—instituted policies to quarantine anyone who had contact with someone infected with the Ebola virus while in west Africa, including medical personnel who cared for patients.
No less than the Obama administration, backed by the CDC, attempted to quash these policies, arguing this would serve as a disincentive for U.S. health workers to travel to Africa to combat the disease at a time this help was sorely needed.
The argument made by many, including the now famous Dr. Anthony Fauci, was that Ebola could only be transmitted by those who were symptomatic, so it was anti-science to consider mandatory quarantines. Of course, crossing the threshold from asymptomatic and not infectious to symptomatic and infectious isn’t a sudden process, and as the history of science repeatedly shows, theories have a way of evolving with time.
The head of the CDC at the time, Tom Frieden, had initially recommended that health-care professionals not use respirators when taking care of patients with Ebola. It took two health-care workers in Dallas contracting Ebola from a patient for the CDC to change its recommendations in October 2014.
An important recurring theme with viruses may be to follow what people do rather than what they say. This is Tom visiting a Doctors Without Borders Ebola treatment center in August 2014, at a time the CDC was saying a surgical mask was adequate to care for these patients.
More Concerned about Population Control than Illness
The charitable take is that institutions like the WHO and CDC are simply coming down on the wrong side of contentious scientific debates. But there is a persistent directionality to these mistakes that betrays a current of ideology. A review of the timeline of announcements by the WHO after the COVID outbreak shows an organization more concerned with avoiding panic and stigma than the virus.’ The whole article is at https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/09/why-the-who-is-a-danger-to-public-health/
Without doubt it was the totalitarian Communist Party that is responsible for this pandemic of Coronavirus around the world! The China Communist Party knew what the West just might do to conquer this virus and that the freedom and liberties we once knew and loved would be eroded. That is exactly what the ‘Former Supreme Court Justice, Jonathan Sumption, QC, warned this week that we are in danger of becoming a police state. He was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 World at One on Monday, and it is worth reflecting on some of his comments.
This is how freedoms are lost
Lord Sumption explained that the lesson of history is that freedoms are lost in exchange for protection from a threat.
“The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.”
Lord Sumption does not deny that the threat from Covid-19 is serious, but questions whether the measures are appropriate:
“So yes this is serious and yes it’s understandable that people cry out to the government. But the real question is: is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hardworking people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister.”
‘This is what a police state is like’
Police in Derbyshire were criticised for releasing drone footage of people out walking in the Peak District. Lord Sumption was scathing about this, describing it as “disgraceful”, and pointing out that going for a walk in the countryside is not illegal – it is just something that government ministers have said they prefer that people not do. When the police start enforcing guidance, we are in the realms of a police state:
“This is what a police state is like. It’s a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes.”
Derbyshire police subsequently admitted that Lord Sumption was right and they did not have authority to stop people from walking in the Peak District.
Phone tracking
The government has been given legal permission to use mobile phone data to track whether people are complying with coronavirus regulations. The government can then watch where you go and how often to travel to see whether you are in compliance. This extreme invasion of privacy is deemed worthwhile because of the health risks at the present time.
Informants
Several police forces have set up websites encouraging people to inform on their neighbours if they see them breaching the coronavirus regulations. This means that we now face the prospect of law-abiding citizens worrying whether a neighbour might report them for leaving the house more than once a day! In fact, the BBC has reported that a police force has had a surge in calls from people reporting their neighbours for “going out for a second run”.
No parliamentary scrutiny
What is more, with parliament now disbanded, the government is now acting with no scrutiny or accountability. After explicitly telling parliament that there would be no changes to abortion rules, the government then went ahead and made changes shortly after parliament was closed. Changes that would most likely not have been possible if parliament was sitting. The government is therefore now not acting democratically. Is there really no possible way with modern technology for parliament to meet and scrutinise these things?
Unimaginable a few weeks ago
Just a few weeks ago, such restrictions on freedom in the UK were unimaginable. I would never have believed that within a few weeks we would have people reporting their neighbours for leaving the house more than once in a day. If someone had told me this would happen, I would have dismissed them as an irrational crackpot. Yet here we are!
I understand the fears. I understand how dangerous this virus is. I know that the nation needs to take action to try to stop its spread. But stopping people from going for a run more than once a day? Just how many lives will that save?
It is incredible how quickly this has happened. Freedoms not fought for are freedoms forfeited. Our freedoms are being forfeited before our eyes in real time. Freedoms are hard to obtain, and easy to lose. I hope and pray that we will recover them and recover them soon. I pray that the Lord would have mercy on us. Our nation is spiritually sick and needs the healing that only God can provide.’ https://christianconcern.com/comment/are-we-becoming-a-police-state/
whatyareckon 