As an Israeli retaliation for Iran's massive ballistic missile strike looms, the Biden White House has decided to deploy a six-launcher battery of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles to shore up Israel's air defenses, and at least 96 US soldiers will man the missile battery. //

THAAD was developed as part of the ballistic missile defense program and has proven itself effective against Iranian-designed missiles. THAAD can counter short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missile threats and is the only U.S. system designed to intercept targets outside and inside the atmosphere. //

In previous Iranian attacks on Israel, US aircraft and warships have engaged Iranian cruise missiles and drones but only in international airspace. This deployment not only places American soldiers in Israel as the region slides, inexorably, in my view, toward a regional war that has the possibility of going nuclear; see Israel Hammering Iran's Proxy Armies Sends a Clear Message to Tehran That the Rules Have Changed – RedState, it marks the beginning of positive rather than incidental participation in the brewing war.

Purrl
10 hours ago
To me what this signals is Biden ignoring his pro-Iran advisors. As much as I despise the man, until he became a vegetable he was a pretty strong supporter of Israel (IIRC), and now that he's in full "screw you" mode I suspect he's reverting to type. Also, still in awe of the level of love for the mullahs displayed by the State Department; there's no good reason whatsoever to protect Iran's nuclear facilities.

But whatever his reason for adding another layer of defense for Israel, I approve. //

streiff wildmlm
11 hours ago
we are all pretty sure that Iran has enough fissile material (they were 2-3 months from that point in 2015 according to the Obama administration. They probably have a nuke ready to test. We know they have the delivery system.

Black Magic streiff
9 hours ago
Yes, Streiff is probably totally correct, and if anything is possibly low in his estimate.

And the Iranians idea of a test, will likely be to launch the missile at Israel and see if it works.

May God bless and watch over the Israelis.

And I truly pray he is still willing to bless and watch over America after the evil of the last 4 years.

Purrl wildmlm
10 hours ago
For the most part, anything you can put a conventional warhead on you can put a nuke on.

streiff Purrl
10 hours ago
once you have the fissile material, the rest is an engineering problem that was first solved 70 years ago.

Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, retired Army General Mark Milley, fears that a Trump win in November will see him recalled to active duty and court-martialed. //

Milley's fear is based on a couple of things. At one point, President Trump told Milley he intended to do that to two of his most vociferous critics among retired general officers, and Milley was able to talk him out of it. //

The other reason is that Milley went out of his way to sabotage President Trump. Milley made a big production out of letting everyone in the media know that during the BLM riots, he considered resigning if President Trump ordered out federal troops under the Insurrection Act; he even made his alleged resignation letter public. He also made two calls to his "counterpart" in China's People's Liberation Army during the last three months of the Trump administration, assuring them the US would not attack China and again let the "right" people know.

We now know that Milley was a prime mover in the decision to ignore President Trump's directive that either the National Guard or active duty military be on hand to preserve order on January 6. That failure led directly to the disorder on Capitol Hill and Trump's second impeachment. //

One of the critical first steps an incoming President Trump has to be to gain control of the military, the Department of Justice, and the Intelligence Community. That will entail him demanding the resignation or retirement of hundreds, if not thousands, of hostile bureaucrats. He should take a page from General George C. Marshall's playbook and remove virtually everyone holding three- or four-star rank; see President Trump's Alleged War With His Generals Shows How the Military Is Producing Self-Centered Careerists Not Leaders – RedState.

If Trump is unable or unwilling to do this, then his second term will be the same squandered opportunity at national renewal as his first.

Forty U.S. Army soldiers who were in Israel as the advance team for what they thought was a routine training exercise last October 7 suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war, unarmed, and being forced to beg reluctant Pentagon officials to send an Air Force plane to extract them.

Approximately a quarter of the soldiers were just miles from Gaza in off-base housing near the IDF’s Tze’elim base when the attack began. A group of local Israelis – IDF reservists, police officers, and ordinary citizens – got them to the base, which Hamas terrorists were quickly heading toward. With his men in mortal danger, the U.S. team leader requested permission to open the arms locker so they could retrieve their firearms but was denied at the US Central Command level and “denied and/or ignored” at a level above that, according to a military intelligence analyst with knowledge of the mission and exfiltration.

The rest of the soldiers had just arrived in Tel Aviv, where Hamas rockets were hitting near their hotels. //

“With everything going on, with all kinds of indirect fire, with rockets, for a good six, eight hours those [soldiers who were at Tze’elim] were in very mortal danger and the military and civilian leadership [at the Pentagon] was perfectly willing to not even worry about it.” //

Approximately 40 hours after the attacks started, and only after lengthy “conversations at the 3-star HQ level,” a U.S. Air Force C-17 briefly touched down in Tel Aviv to exfiltrate the soldiers.

Hamas fired a barrage of 150 rockets at the airport shortly after the C-17 took off for Kuwait. //

Thanks to three separate military sources – one of whom was personally involved in the mission – who spoke to RedState exclusively, the harrowing and disturbing story can now be told. The sources are not named due to fear of retaliation. //

There’s never been an official acknowledgment that there were U.S. troops in Israel on October 7, but an October 31, 2023, New York Times story states: “But other U.S. officials said the Defense Department has dispatched several dozen commandos in recent days, in addition to a small team that was in Israel on Oct. 7 conducting previously scheduled training.”

The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century.

The deal – reached after years of negotiations - will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move.

This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft.

The announcement, made in a joint statement by the UK and Mauritian Prime Ministers, ends decades of often fractious negotiations between the two countries.

The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China. //

Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its vast global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.

The remaining British overseas territories are: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands. There are also two sovereign base areas on Cyprus under British jurisdiction.

China is, to be sure, a nation with big ambitions. They want a big, ocean-spanning navy like a wolf wants a sheep, and they seem to be determined to get one. But they are going to have to step up their game. The country has been beset by quality problems in everything from shipbuilding to buildings to electric scooters, cars, and cell phones. Until they figure out their quality problems and learn to develop tech of their own that is on a par with Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the United States, we will continue to see incidents like this laughable failure of their vaunted new killer submarine - that sank alongside the pier. //

anon-6879
6 hours ago
As a retired Navy O-6, I would say Ward needs to get his stuff a little more together. (1) The picture in the article is of a ballistic missile sub, not an attack boat. (2) The attack sub was under construction, which means it sank while in the hands of the shipyard, probably without navy crew. Industrial accidents occur---we've had some bad ones when ships were in the yard, including fires and floodings. In the early '60's the attack carrier Constellation had a major fire while under construction which delayed its completion for more than a year. Did that man we didn't have an effective navy at the time? (3) The Chinese navy is much more than a "frigate navy." Their first supercarrier is at sea, and that gives them three afloat, with one carrier recently at sea in the South China Sea and off the Philippines with it's battlegroup. (Admittedly, they have a lot to learn about carrier ops.) However, they're projected to have five or six carriers by the end of the decade. That's as many as we have in Pacific. The Type 55 cruiser or destroyer leader (depending on how you classify it) is being built in numbers (Eight active, eight building.) Meanwhile, we're decommissioning our 30+ year old Ticonderoga Aegis cruisers without replacement. Their Type 52D missile destroyer is quite comparable to our Burke Class or the British Type 45 in size and capability; it's been built in numbers (25 active) and production continues. (4) The USN would love to have some frigates---we're struggling to build the new Constellation Class after the fiasco of the Littoral Combat Ships which were supposed to replace our once robust---now non-existent---frigate force. (5) The Chinese do have a good replenishment capability---their task groups operate in the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic, and the North Pacific with replenishment ships in company. They're also acquiring foreign ports for use by their deployed squadrons. (Meanwhile, our carrier strike group in the mid-east is without a replenishment oiler because it went aground and is out of service while the navy is struggling to get a replacement on scene.) Our replenishment capability is a mere shadow of what it was in the cold war due to "Peace Dividend" budget cuts in last three decades. (6) In any fast developing conflict over Taiwan or dispute of the South China Sea, China would have home court advantage and a massive advantage in numbers over what our 7th Fleet could muster. The truth is, in the last three decades the Chines navy has made massive strides in numbers, the quality of it's equipment and its operational expertise at sea. Meanwhile, the USN is undeniability in decline: our numbers are diminishing and in recent years we've had a rash of collisions and groundings not to mention poor material readiness of our ships due to industrial maintenance deficiencies. In summary, we underestimate the PLAN at our peril.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk @RepLoudermilk
·
President Trump directed senior DoD leaders to ensure events on J6 be safe.

They ignored his guidance, prioritized optics concerns over security, and pushed a flawed narrative in their IG report.

The American people deserve the full truth.
cha.house.gov
Transcripts Show President Trump's Directives to Pentagon Leadership to
12:09 PM · Sep 20, 2024 //

We’ve known some of this before, but the transcripts themselves are pretty startling. They all but tell the sitting president of the United States to shove off:

When I first hit play, I was expecting some typical TikTok political video with a person on a coach saying some funny one-liner. What I wasn't expecting was for the camera to pan and show multiple U.S. servicemembers, currently serving in a combat zone, ripping Harris for her misleading statement:

Where these troops are deployed is not something we can know (or should know), but somewhere in Iraq or Syria is a decent enough guess. So, do those places qualify as combat zones? When I posted the video, I had a few people snipe in the replies that because America isn't in an active, large-scale war, Harris wasn't lying. That's not how combat zones are defined, though, and the United States government still recognizes much of the Middle East as an active combat zone.

To pretend otherwise is to play a ridiculous, insulting game of semantics that should be ruthlessly mocked into oblivion. American service members are still serving in combat zones where they are being injured and killed by rocket attacks and during active operations. Those people didn't cease to exist because Harris needed a talking point on Tuesday night.

The argument's premise is that Trump left Biden and Kamala with no plan for withdrawing from Afghanistan. The fact is that Trump signed the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020. For graduates of Baltimore public schools and others challenged by mathematics, that is 534 days before the Kabul airlift began. If there was no plan for the withdrawal, that really isn't the direct responsibility of the guy who left office 207 days prior to the event. The responsibility for planning the operation lay with the Defense Department, specifically within the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If Biden didn't have a plan, then it is the fault of service leaders who refused to do their duty and, in this telling of events, sat on their hands and refused to plan for a US withdrawal from Afghanistan. (During the big drawdown of the Army after the USSR went belly up, the Army refused to plan for a force reduction because it was felt that if word got out that we were planning, then the political people would think we were fine with the idea and make us do it. If we didn't plan, the reasoning went, we might not have to do it. I can see the same logic in effect in executing the end of our adventure in Afghanistan.) That would mean the very people blaming Trump for the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan include some of the people who were responsible for that withdrawal.

Thanks to the efforts of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, we know there was a plan, but Biden and the "last person" in the room overruled it. //

The real threat to our democracy are military officers who trade on their rank to tell lies in the name of partisan politics. //

Mike Ford
17 hours ago edited
One of AFNN’s best writers, COL Jack Tobin (rest his soul) wrote the initial plan well before Biden came on the scene….

It called for the use of Bagram as the evac base and its subsequent retention.

It also followed standard NEO doctrine whereby you evac the noncombatants and THEN extract troops.

You damned sure don’t put your evac point in a downtown version of Dien Ben Phu //

Hoover the Great
18 hours ago
This debacle really shows why we need to take a meat cleaver to the US army. And by that, I don't just mean replacing personnel, I mean reducing footprint and eliminating force and positions. Reduce the size by maybe 80-90%. As Eisenhower stated, a massive standing army like we have does not make America safer.

ECoolidge19 Hoover the Great
17 hours ago
I saw a post on RS sometime ago, it listed the number of 4 star Generals during WW 2 compared to now. It was like 1-8. I forget exactly but I remember being surprised. Sounds like a good starting point. At minimum, you don't fire but just put a freeze on hiring new //

Hoover the Great anon-x1lc
2 hours ago
There is no security benefit from maintaining a massive standing army like we have now. Or if there is one, it does not remotely approach the cost of it, both monetary cultural and spiritual. That position is essentially the one held by President and Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Dwight Eisenhower.

We built this military machine after WWII. Before that, we had a skeleton military that we would quickly put the meat and muscles onto if we needed to fight a war. We never lost a war with that model. Since we built this military machine, the military's record is more mixed. That spans several decades, so is not just the result of bad people in leadership. It's the system itself.

So she's still in the Navy. We can hope that she will never be placed in a position of trust with classified information, but a reduction in grade? That's all? Really?

The military, as I'm constantly pointing out, is like no other institution in our society. A breach of faith, a breach of trust like this cannot be tolerated - and it cannot be forgiven. This is an act that, in the event of war, could have gotten everyone on that ship killed and a multi-billion dollar ship destroyed. Is checking your high-school friend's latest recipe for macaroni and cheese worth all that?

Given my brief and modest experience with operating in a secured environment with classified information, this punishment seems unbearably light. Chief Marrero has broken faith with her chain of command, has proven herself unfit to serve on a U.S. Navy warship, and should be handed a bad-conduct discharge and sent back to the block. //

PNC(SW) Mac
8 hours ago
As a retired USN Chief, I find this absolutely reprehensible. The most distressing factor is it wasn't just this POS E7, the whole Chief's Mess was complicit. What has happened to the United States Navy when it's senior enlisted leadership can't be trusted? They all should have been court-martialed and separated. //

Ace PNC(SW) Mac
8 hours ago
Chief, this is Obama’s Navy, not ours.

Just a small town boy PNC(SW) Mac
8 hours ago
All it takes is a few DEI hires in leadership positions for a lot of other people to DIE.

SAN DIEGO — A U.S. Navy chief who wanted the internet so she and other enlisted leaders could scroll social media, check sports scores and watch movies while deployed had an unauthorized Starlink satellite dish installed on a warship and lied to her commanding officer to keep it secret, according to investigators.

Internet access is restricted while a ship is underway to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cybersecurity threats. //

She and more than a dozen other chief petty officers used it to send messages home and keep up with the news and bought signal amplifiers during a stop in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, after they realized the wireless signal did not cover all areas of the ship, according to the investigation.

Those involved also used the Chief Petty Officer Association’s debit card to pay off the $1,000 monthly Starlink bill.

The network was not shared with rank-and-file sailors.

Marrero tried to hide the network, which she called “Stinky,” by renaming it as a printer, denying its existence and even intercepting a comment about the network left in the commanding officer's suggestion box, according to the investigation.

But there is yet another dose of hypocrisy at play, from the very news outlets bleating about Trump’s alleged offensive use of the cemetery images. Look back over the past weeks of this outrage coverage, and you notice something curious: Nearly every report mewling about the disrespect these photos deliver includes those very images. Somehow, it is offensive for him to use the pics, but not the outlets displaying them.

And it gets worse. Many of these photos sport attribution from the news syndicates, meaning the pictures have been licensed – not only are the outlets receiving paid traffic while wailing about the dishonor, but the syndicates, like Getty Images, are charging for the use of their photos from Arlington.

If Trump using these photos is disrespecting the memory of the fallen, what is to be said of news providers who turn a profit from those same types of pictures? //

cupera1
7 hours ago
There are three big problems with the NPR Arlington National Cemetery story.

First: It is a story that had no named witnesses or named people that were harmed. In every reported story about ANC there is an un-named person that is reporting it and another un-named person that was pushed out of the way by the Trump campaign people. It is basic journalism. When a news story has the: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, verified evidence, documentation or a named source to can be relied on to be a factual news story. When left wing news sources, like NPR is missing any of these important items it can be deduced that it is a fake story or a hoax.

Second: ALL seven gold-star families and all other people that were there the entire time stated that they had permission to take pictures and video. The Trump people did the same and were also given permission for both. Also, there was nobody from the cemetery that objected to them being there, so the story is a hoax.

Third: The Trump people stated that have video of the entire event. From the time that people got out of their cars to when they left the cemetery. When the people in charge of ANC heard this they abruptly dropped any and all charges, none were ever listed. It was a hoax story.

Taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio shouldn’t be a starting place for aggressively biased coverage against either Democrats or Republicans. But you can ask Clarence Thomas how the machine works.

On Aug. 27, NPR veterans affairs reporter Quil Lawrence lit into former President Donald Trump for bringing cameras to a section of Arlington National Cemetery with some families of soldiers killed during President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The entire manufactured controversy is perverse. It’s obvious NPR is exploiting the cemetery for a political goal, and it then spread to the rest of the national media. Trump is showing support for grieving Gold Star families, while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would not appear. They were MIA. But Trump was singled out as the one with grotesque political optics, not the no-shows whose negligence cost American lives.

They weren’t seriously considering the Biden-Harris disaster on “All Things Considered.” They could call it “All Democrats Defended.” Conservatives quickly found snapshots from private photographers of Biden in the same sacred section of the Arlington cemetery. That thing cannot be “considered.”

One would have thought that twenty years of deployments and combat would have produced a noncommissioned officer corps as hard as nails. It didn't. The post-Abbey Gate Army noncommissioned officer corps seems more like the one that came out of Vietnam than the one that went into Iraq. Should Trump win, he has his work cut out for him, purging the officer corps of that trash and detritus that gamed its way to the top. He must find a merciless and bloody-minded SOB to do the Army NCO corps what Sherman did to Georgia.

I served as an Army IG investigator for three years. I never encountered anyone engaged in epic misconduct who had not eased himself into that position with a series of baby steps. The panache with which Hamilton called members of the selection board on behalf of a particular officer is not something displayed the first time you do it. This is particularly true when meddling with a critical selection board strikes at the very heart of the integrity the system must have to be respected. Hopefully, the investigators are looking into other possible incidents of Hamiltion trying to influence a command selection board. Second, a male general breaking all known rules on behalf of a female subordinate looks like more was going on here than fighting racism unless that's what the kids are calling it this week. //

In short, given the public domain information available, there doesn't seem to be any empirical evidence to support Hamilton's claim that he was intervening to prevent an injustice to Black officers and a great deal of evidence to indicate that he was personally pushing the candidacy of one particular officer who happened to work directly for him and who appears to be totally unqualified to command.

If Wormuth removes Hamilton from command, the fallout from a liberal White woman sacking a Black man during an election year will make me a fortune in my popcorn futures investment. //

Chuck in TX
3 hours ago
That initial 0-5 vote should have been a red flag and warned him off. Five generals unanimously and without reservation put it firmly on the record she was unqualified. There was no way that was getting changed without setting off alarm bells. Hubris is a hell of a thing. //

flyovercountry
4 hours ago
We’ll soon find out he was having an unprofessional relationship with said LtCol, this was pay back on the investment.

streiff flyovercountry
4 hours ago
That's my bet, he was given an ultimatum by her to get her a battalion command slot or face the consequences.

Min Headroom llme streiff
4 hours ago
If it looks like a duck, and all that.

But as you note, an interesting thing is that the blatancy of this suggests he’s practiced at it. So he probably either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how it looks.

Laocoön of Troy
a minute ago
What Hamilton did was corrupt to the core. Sadly I cannot say that I haven't seen similar abuses in my beloved AF. However I don't hafta like it.

This entire thing is essentially out in the open and Hamilton is DARING the Army to do anything about his misbehavior. //

Laocoön of Troy
a minute ago
What Hamilton did was corrupt to the core. Sadly I cannot say that I haven't seen similar abuses in my beloved AF. However I don't hafta like it.

This entire thing is essentially out in the open and Hamilton is DARING the Army to do anything about his misbehavior.

As Phil Root, the deputy director of the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA, recounted to Scharre, “A tank looks like a tank, even when it’s moving. A human when walking looks different than a human standing. A human with a weapon looks different.”

In order to train the artificial intelligence, it needed data in the form of a squad of Marines spending six days walking around in front of it. On the seventh day, though, it was time to put the machine to the test.

“If any Marines could get all the way in and touch this robot without being detected, they would win. I wanted to see, game on, what would happen,” said Root in the book. //

the Marines, being Marines, found several ways to bollix the AI and achieved a 100 percent success rate.

Two Marines, according to the book, somersaulted for 300 meters to approach the sensor. Another pair hid under a cardboard box.

“You could hear them giggling the whole time,” said Root in the book.

One Marine stripped a fir tree and held it in front of him as he approached the sensor. In the end, while the artificial intelligence knew how to identify a person walking, that was pretty much all it knew because that was all it had been modeled to detect. //

The moral of the story? Never bet against Marines, soldiers, or military folks in general. The American military rank-and-file has proven itself more creative than any other military in history. Whether that creativity is focused on finding and deleting bad guys or finding ways to screw with an AI and the eggheads who programmed it, my money's on the troops.

According to his official Report of Separation and Record of Service, he re-enlisted for six years on September 18th, 2001. However, in his response he says that he re-enlisted for four years, conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq. Even if he had re-enlisted for four years following Sept.11, his retirement date would have been September 18th, 2005. Why then did he "retire" on May 16th, 2005, before his supposed four-year enlistment was up? And he makes it sound like he "retired" a year before his battalion deployed to Iraq; when in reality he knew when he "retired" that the battalion would be deployed to Iraq.

Tim Walz is an American coward, plain and simple. He betrayed his word, his contract; he betrayed his men. He committed the ultimate act of betrayal, and that is irrefutable. It is beyond offensive to those of us who not only served our country but who had the honor and privilege to serve with our brothers and sisters in combat. //

SeekingRationalThought
8 hours ago
Well said. Having never served, I won't accuse Walz of cowardice. That is for veterans like the writer above, not the likes of me. However, remember this. If Walz, as the senior enlisted in his unit, was willing to abandon his troops, and his responsibilities to them, for personal gain (Congress), what isn't he willing to do for personal gain?

https://avgeekery.com/kc-46-flies-around-the-world-nonstop/

Brian Millar about 15 hours ago 2

Search 20-46075 and you should be able to see its most recent flights; RCH046 on June 29 and July 1.

Departed from McConnell June 29 around 21:00Z headed west. Left the CONUS near Ft. Bragg, CA and dropped from tracking. Picked up a brief blip as it passed over Hawaii.

The July 1 RCH046 flight track picks it up again over the UAE, through the Persian Gulf to Turkiye and across Europe. We see a loop off the coast of England north of RAF Mildenhall for refuelling.

It appears again with a brief blip off the coast of Iceland and disappears again until it re-enters the CONUS over Lake Superior.

I searched through all the 16-46.., 17-46.., 18-46.., etc Pegasus aircraft’s in the fleet and any flights around July 1 to try to figure out which one it was.

Once I landed on 20-46075 and googled it I found a good write up on Twitter/X by “MeNMyRC”

https://x.com/MeNMyRC1/status/1808242275710898243 //

srobak about 7 hours ago 2

The funniest part is it also couldn't refuel itself - and instead had to rely on the 135 that it is supposed to replace to keep it in the air lol. //

srobak about 7 hours ago 0

The boomers hate them because the remote boom ops are complete garbage. Latency and precision issues. They've been plagued with design and electrical issues on multiple fronts and the entire fleet has been grounded more times than the max. Read up on the history - the 46 and the 35 alike are the most hated aircraft in the af. The funniest part is it also couldn't refuel itself - and instead had to rely on the 135 that it is supposed to replace to keep it in the air lol.

matt jensen about 5 hours ago 2

We love the KC135 as it only requires three man crew. The 46 needs 8-10 men to do the same job

Josh Brooks @F530Josh
·
Big Army deciding their Soldiers from 130 years ago don't deserve the MOH because history is inconvenient and doesn't work with the modern narrative is a pretty good look.

10:58 AM · Jul 25, 2024 //

Congress started down this road by apologizing in 1990. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act required the Department of Defense to examine the medals. //

No matter what this Potemkin board organized by Austin finds, the facts remain that the 7th Cavalry was operating under legal orders, and the men awarded the Medal of Honor met the criteria of the time. There is no wrong to be righted here. This is simply a political act by the losers to count coup on the winners. Austin's order to “consider the context of the overall engagement" is just a way to open the door to relitigating the Indian Wars by the "stolen land" nutters.

Don't think this is the end of it. //

DaleS 2 hours ago

Wikipedia has a list of the 20 medal winners for Wounded Knee, though they claim the award to Marvin Hillock was for fighting at White Clay Creek, and he was listed for Wounded Knee "due to a later error in War Department lists."

I believe that the battle at Wounded Knee was certainly mishandled and probably avoidable. I'm sympathetic in general to the U.S. Army during the western Indian Wars; they were forced to do a difficult job (often made much worse by the behavior of local settlers and government bureacrats), and most of the time I think they did a pretty good job. But this wasn't one of those times. I care nothing for Austin's conclusions, but Miles at the time was appalled by the battle, and he was actually the superior to the commander at the battle (Forsyth) and relieved him of command. He was in a better position to make that judgment than anyone in the DoD today, and certainly had more experience in Indian fighting than the folks in Washington who reinstated Forsyth. Miles was a fine general, but hard-hearted enough to exile his own apache scouts after Geromino's capture, so for him to call for compensation to Wounded Knee survivors demonstrated that this wasn't the usual brand of Indian fighting. It was a battle, but also ended up as a massacre. I'm willing to trust Miles' assessment of the battle.

With that said, even if what we would now consider war crimes happened at Wounded Knee, this wasn't an unprovoked slaughter like Sand Creek. There was actual combat and likely actual heroism. To take an example from the list:

"Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy."

I don't know what the late-19th century criteria for assigning Medal of Honor was, but that sounds pretty darn heroic to me, and has nothing to do with killing Sioux, justly or not. After all these years, how could you possibly determine that John Clancy not only didn't deserve his medal, but that he and his fellow honorees should be singled out for "cruelty".

It seems to me if you want to virtue signal by dishonoring the dead, the place to start should be with Forsyth, who was the responsible for the force there. It was his job to see his soldiers acted properly, and to take measures against any of his soldiers who targetted non-combatants. //

Sojourner 2 hours ago edited

The Medal of Honor, at that time, was the only decoration for valor, and the criteria were very different from those today.

^^^This^^^

The whole Wounded Knee episode was a mess. Mistakes committed by both sides. A messy almost-ending to the Indian Wars. But make no mistake, it was a war.

These social justice warriors are wrong here, just as they are wrong in opposing dropping the A-bombs on Japan in August 1945 or, as Streiff notes, our recent base renaming and statue removal mania. They are sermonizing with the luxury of hindsight in a way that is wrong in terms of historiography/hermeneutics.

Just as in mid-July 1945 (when it was clear Japan was going to fight until no one was left alive on the Home Islands; a view, btw, which the Japanese didn't change until AFTER the second bomb dropped), at the time of the Ghost Dance no one knew what was going to happen. But there were enough Indians who felt the pull to cause the Army to be legitimately concerned. On one hand, sorry for the dead Indians. On the other, they paid (perhaps unjustly) the price for the style of warfare their tribe and other tribes had historically waged. Whatever the injustices of Wounded Knee might there have been, it clearly signaled the end of our first War on Terror (which we won, unlike Round 2). The question no one on the social justice side of things wants to answer (b/c they can't) is to name a better outcome (and path to that outcome) than what happened. I'll repeat what I've written here before: the tribes were lucky how the Indian Wars ended. It could have been much worse.

Full disclosure, I was previously more inclined to review the actions at Wounded Knee. But we no longer live in that better universe. Streiff is 100% correct: this isn't going to be a review conducted in good conscience. Instead, it's 100% political warfare waged by those who hate America on those of us who love America. It's yet another play in a series of plays to destroy the fabric of our military and of our country under the guise of "righting wrongs." Base renamings, land acknowledgments, etc. IT'S ALL BS. And it's also utterly ironic; they're doing to us what they criticize America for doing to the Indians. They believe we should have left the Indians alone to live in peace, so to make their point they won't let us live in peace.

Want to be even more revolted, see this:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/07/20/medals-of-honor-for-soldiers-who-perpetrated-wounded-knee-massacre-may-be-rescinded/

This is what we're up against. When even our supposed allies in the press lead off their articles with titles like this.

In a classified letter, US Central Command commander General Michael Kurilla warned Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that US military operations to keep the Red Sea open to commercial traffic are "failing." General Kurilla's warning to Austin and his cronies predicted that “U.S. service members will die if we continue going this way.” According to reports, there was a sudden demand for brown trousers in the upper reaches of the Pentagon. //

There is no doubt we are getting our asses kicked in the Red Sea. That is happening for one reason. Our foreign policy and defense strategy establishments are running on empty. The Israel Air Force has done more to establish dominance over the Houthis in one airstrike than we have in a year of half-hearted and hamstrung efforts to keep a vital international maritime route open. //

Houthi attacks are responsible for a significant drop in container shipping through the Red Sea, with a 90% decrease since December 2023, affecting 10-15% of global maritime trade. //

According to the report, alternate shipping routes around Africa, despite adding about 11,000 nautical miles, approximately $1 million in fuel costs per voyage, and 1-2 weeks of transit time, can be less expensive than the combined costs of crew bonuses, war risk insurance, and Suez transit fees.

Insurance premiums for Red Sea transits have increased to 0.7-1.0% of a ship’s total value as of mid-February, up from less than 0.1% before December 2023. //

Not only have our efforts to protect shipping not worked, but they have resulted in our allies forming a counter-coalition to avoid being under US command. US leadership in an area of immense national security interest, both the Red Sea route and the freedom of navigation, has been lost and will require much hard work to regain.

Once American hard power is used, it must emerge victorious. The failure to do so leads to instability and more warfare.

Much of Iran's resurgence and instability in the Middle East is directly attributable to Biden's horrendous leadership in closing out our Afghan misadventure. Now, he's about to end his misrule of America with another catastrophe that will echo for generations as a bookend to his Afghanistan failure. All in all, this is a fitting legacy for Joe Biden's life and political career.

President Biden broke that faith with us, he spoke the unspeakable to Trump in a pathetic and vain attempt at bringing Trump to his knees. Biden lied about what he said, and that is the first insult. The president made the decision to pull out of Afghanistan the way he did, even against the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs and the commanders on the ground. Biden unilaterally decided to pull out haphazardly and recklessly, which resulted in 11 United States Marines, one Navy Corpsman, and another Army soldier killed in a suicide bomber blast that wounded dozens more on that August day in 2021. To this day, Biden's response to the criticism is blase at best, but the facts still remain, he lost 13 American troops that day. Then in January of this year, two U.S. Navy SEALs were initially listed as missing but later confirmed as killed in action as they were attempting to board a vessel at night that was carrying illegal weapons. Three more American Soldiers were killed in an Iranian-backed Hezbollah drone strike on their base in Jordan.

President Biden has had at least 18 United States servicemembers killed in action in the past three-plus years since he has been in office. I do not know what makes that lie worse; the fact that he legitimately forgot about them would show he truly doesn't care. Or the fact that Biden hates Trump so much that he will say whatever it is he needs to say, as long as it makes Trump look horrible. I think it is both and more. //

President Biden was not acting in good faith when he said what he did. He was showing his true colors and that he is a hateful, disgusting old man who needs to step down and or aside. He is not in full control of his faculties, and he is, by far, one of the worst commanders-in-chief that this nation has ever had. //

GBenton
7 hours ago
Biden's biggest lie is that he won in 2020, but beyond that, the current biggest lie is that Trump is the liar.

Biden and the Dems and the media are proven liars.

Trump told nothing but the truth during the debate and all the hoaxes have proven to be lies.