The New York Times Blows It Again!

Frankly, if the New York Times cannot - still - understand basic military terminology, they should stop writing about national security; influential Americans should no longer pay attention to the Times, due to lack of confidence in their competence.

From an otherwise unrelated obituary on former Federal Appeals Court Judge, and unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork:

A View Made Clear

One of his opinions, in Dronenburg v. Zech in 1984, dealt with the Navy’s power to fire a veteran for consensual homosexual activity. Judge Bork not only granted the Navy that power, but he also took the opportunity to make clear that a right of privacy did not exist in the Constitution. “If the revolution in sexual mores that appellant proclaims is in fact ever to arrive,” he wrote, “we think it must arrive through the moral choices of the people and their elected representatives, not through the ukase of this court.”

OYE Comment:

James L. Dronenburg was a Sailor when he was kicked out of the Navy.  He only became a "veteran" after he had served, i.e., after he was kicked out.  Granted, his case only got to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit after he was discharged, and was fighting it.  However, it would be more correct to say that the Navy fired a Sailor, not a veteran.

Hel-lo!
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Go Tigers!

Thank you to Clemson University for truly supporting Veterans.

Rodriguez found out this week he had been cleared by the NCAA and the Atlantic Coast Conference to join Clemson's football team as a walk-on receiver.

Once Rodriguez trots onto the practice field Friday in his orange No. 83 for Clemson's first practice, he'll complete a transformation from a struggling teenager to a young man who's achieved his goal after witnessing some of the most horrific fighting in Afghanistan.

"It's been kind of long journey," he said Wednesday.

Rodriguez played football at Brooke Point High in Stafford, Va., but acknowledged he let his parents' divorce and problems at school get the better of him. When his father Ray, died four days after graduation, Rodriguez was devastated and seeking a way out. He chose the Army.

"I went to the recruiter and said, 'Get me away from here,'" Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez served in Iraq during the troop surge of 2007. On his second tour, he found himself in Afghanistan and in the line of fire during one of the war's bloodiest fights, the battle of Kamdesh in October 2009.

Deployed Servicemen Votes Not Counting

This is bullshit.

But the issue is a bigger concern during a presidential election year with a military force totaling more than 3 million, including active-duty and reserve forces.

In 2010, of the approximately 2 million military and overseas voters accounted for in data reported by the states to the Election Assistance Commission, only 4.6 percent of those voters were able to cast an absentee ballot that counted, according to the Military Voter Protection Project’s analysis of that data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, which tracks participation in voting. That compared with 5.5 percent in 2006, which was also a midterm election, the organization concluded.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/06/27/2332178/tens-of-thousands-of-service-members.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Another Correction of the Day: The New York Times: Hel-lo!

The New York Times has done it again.

OBITUARIES

An obituary on Friday about Wesley A. Brown, the first black graduate of the United States Naval Academy, referred incorrectly to Mr. Brown and other students at the academy. They are called midshipmen, not cadets. (Students at the United States Military Academy at West Point are cadets.)

OYE Comment:

One would think that The New York Times would try to do a better job about knowing basic facts about our military.  Think again.

A U.S. Ambassador (Retired) on America: Draft Registration: Hel-lo!

Here are a couple of paras from Danger and Opportunity [2008], by U.S. Ambassador (Retired) Edward P. Djerejian; he touches on our topic but, surprisingly, gets a basic fact wrong.

In an NPR interview in 2007, a United States Army general in Iraq observed that we are "an Army at war, not a nation at war."  He expressed the painful sentiment that "folks [at home] can do more to support the effort."  During a September 2006 visit to Baghdad by members of the Iraq Study Group, one of the most effective generals we met was Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli.  In an article in the journal Military Review, he wrote, "The U.S. as a Nation -- and indeed most of the U.S. Government -- has not gone to war since 9/11.  Instead, the Departments of Defense and State (as much as their modern capabilities allow) and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war while the American people and most of the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their normal business."

This is an important issue that strikes at the heart of American society and the concept of public service and sacrifice.  Senior military officers have told me that they prefer the all-volunteer armed forces because of the professionalism they can achieve within the ranks, without having to train new recruits drafted every two or three years.  But we should give consideration to registering Americans for the possibility of a draft if we are faced with a major war that would require an all-out national effort.  We should also consider creating a system of national service in civilian government operations and institutions, in lieu of military service.  When we started the all-volunteer armed forces in 1970 during the Nixon administration, the U.S. military began to lose a vital link to the country and American society.  The historic concept of "the citizen soldier" was weakened.  When we go to war we should be "a nation at war," with the citizenry engaged in various ways and, to the extent possible, from the broadest levels of society, to defend our national security interests at home and abroad

OYE Comment:  Ambassador (Retired) Djerejian makes some good points above; many are worthy of serious consideration.

However, we have already been "registering Americans for the possibility of a draft if we are faced with a major war that would require an all-out national effort" since 1980.  American men age 18-25, including new immigrants, are required to register.  Failure to do so before turning 26 can lead to ineligibility for various government activities later in life, so compliance is highly encouraged.  Just go to the Post Office.

It seems odd that an acknowledged national security expert would allow such an error into his own manuscript.  We noted a few other minor editing errors [mostly related to who was President when], but this is more serious.

Conclusion:  Even our national elites don't necessarily have a clue about some important things.  Nor do their staffs or those who edit their books.  Hel-lo!

et tu [et tui], William Kristol?

Neocon Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, in "Beyond Afghanistan" in the Washington Post, notes that, "We are at war with Political Islamism."  While the article is essentially off-topic for this blog, we do have one question for Mr. Kristol:

Has The Weekly Standard ever encouraged its eligible* readers at least to consider volunteering for military service, and its not eligible* readers to encourage their eligible* relatives and friends, their circles of influence, to consider serving?  Link(s), please.

More importantly, have you encouraged your new son-in-law to consider volunteering for military service?

We welcome any explanation you may wish to provide for publication on our blog.  Send to OperationYellowElephant - at --- gmail // dot \ com.

*Healthy Americans, mostly men, 18-34 are eligible to apply.

Liberal Academic in Naval Reserve

Operation Yellow Elephant salutes Dr. Eric Schuck, professor of economics at Linfield College in Oregon, for joining the Naval Reserve and deploying.

Liberal academic joins Navy reserve, stuns & puzzles several faculty colleagues 

By Eric Schuck

Best Defense department of All-Volunteer Force [AVF] issues

Two years ago, I was happily leading the life of a dilettante economics professor, spending a month roaming across southern England and western France with 14 economics majors. Hey -- it's a tough gig, but someone has to do it.  And then came a phone call.  Not just any call -- THE call.  The call where I stopped being Dr. Schuck and instantly transformed to LT Schuck, SC, USNR.  [ . . . ]  Everything after that point is a blur -- heading home, telling my family, rearranging my classes for the spring and fall, training to deploy and ultimately spending the better part of a foot fungus filled year coastwatching in Kuwait.


The past is prologue, and that is my past.  Here is my present.  I've been home for almost a year, and yet I still do not quite fit in.  I wander around a campus both achingly familiar and hauntingly distant.  I am back where I started, but it is not always clear if I am back where I belong.  It's hard.  But stating that is not enough.  I am, after all, an academic.  I cannot help but try to sort this all out.  Rather obviously, I am different from when I left.  Being recalled to active duty and mobilizing was a crucible event.  It will, for the rest of my days, mark a coda in my life, mark the defining point of 'before' and 'after'.  No one else around me has that.  More critically, no one else around me has EVER had that.  Where I have been and what I have done is simply completely beyond their scope of comprehension.  Most of the time this manifests in an unfortunate but typically well-meaning ignorance.  When other professors talk about my deployment, they either describe it as if I had the worst sabbatical ever or as if I taught in some horribly misguided semester at sea.  They simply cannot bring themselves to say -- or to acknowledge -- that one of their own went to war.  Such things are simply not dreamt of in their philosophies.


Nine years ago I joined the Navy Reserve for one simple, clarion reason: because people like me don't.  I found -- and find -- that fact to be utterly abhorrent.  So, much to my wife's rather pronounced but mercifully understanding displeasure, I instituted my own personal one-man draft.  I have never regretted it.  Not for an instant.  Make no mistake -- I am not some Fox News watching Red State zealot.  I'm a Subaru-driving, green-tea drinking, registered Democrat, college professor from Oregon.  To say I stand out in the military is a bit of an understatement.  But I serve with the same honor, courage and commitment that all sailors show and I do it because I love my country and I love the Navy. Simply put, this is a duty I must fulfill.


Unfortunately, few people feel this way, and the All-Volunteer Force [AVF] makes it all the easier for them to do so.  Under the AVF, the military is a job for 'other' people (and at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, in the context of a college campus 'other people' means non-upper/middle class people).  That's not good.  It's corrosive to our society.  Yet it is the corrosive effects on the military itself that are most worrisome.  It allows the military to adopt a culture and identity that is distinctly different from the society it defends.  For the record, I do not call myself a 'warfighter' or speak of a 'warrior ethos'.  I'm a logistics officer, and a part-time one to boot.  Faux-Spartan affectations grow in the military, however, because they enable the military to justify its distance from the rest of society not as a failure of society but as a sign of elitism.  Civilian society encourages the creation of a 'warrior caste' because it frees them of the guilt of not serving.  That needs to stop.  So while as an economist I fully recognize that there would be a loss in productivity by moving from an AVF to an at least partially conscripted force, any losses in [military] efficiency would be more than offset by gains in equity within society.  And if we hold true to the idea that 'all... are created equal', does that not have some weight?

In short, I agree with you:  Even as a volunteer in the AVF, I believe the AVF era should end.

Eric Schuck is a professor of economics at Linfield College in Oregon, where he specializes in natural resources and water usage.

OYE Comment:  We salute Dr. Schuck for finding the many courages within himself to Be A Man!  Enlist!

We think America would be a much better place if patriots from all of American society served in our military, so that many more Americans, in particular the more influential sectors of our society, personally knew someone wearing the uniform.