RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home: Is the Selection of General Mattis a Signal for Us to Expect a Continuation of COIN Philosophy?

History can be either a Schoolmaster or a Mistress. It depends on the intent of the reader. It also depends on what the reader considers sacrosanct. We all tend to hold certain things as so inviolable as to make objective questioning that might breach that privately held trust, unacceptable.

This is all fine when the only thing that might be defiled is our personal conscience or even the feelings of another.

But when the thing or person questioned, has power and the ability to send men and women, who have selflessly granted those certain powers unfettered access unto death, those things and people thought to be untouchable, must be questioned. When President Elect Trump announced, he was selecting General Mattis as his Secretary of Defense I was simultaneously elated and troubled.

I will not apologize for applauding the selection of a Marine Corps General to the highest influential position for the Military especially given Mattis’s demonstrated love for Marines, and the Corps. At the same time, I reserve the right to criticize what I believe to be the single most destructive decision made in the past 15 years of war; the decision to shift from a Hunt and Kill strategy to the historically failed, Counter Insurgency Operation (COIN).

This move from the violent – and effective, hunt and kill strategy to COIN really made national headlines following the second Battle of Fallujah. The Media and certain Political types were quick to credit General Petraeus’s institution of COIN strictures in the years that followed, for pacifying Al Anbar Province but the truth is, it was most certainly the surge of US uniforms that forced the Insurgents to displace.

It is astonishing that Military Leaders, including Mattis and Petraeus would so willingly adopt a strategy that history teaches us, has not been successful in its 76 years as a formal battlefield doctrine. It has failed to produce the intended result in every single application while simultaneously producing a grotesque and vaulted pile of body bags filled with the lifeless bodies of America’s Best, who were tricked into believing that America’s civilian government and her upper echelon military staff actually cared about a successful, and victorious conclusion to the wars that ended their lives.

It is a damnable truth, that Marines and all American War Fighters win every battle we enjoin, and that the political and upper military strategists manage to lose the wars. This, is the legacy of COIN warfare.

All the major conflicts we have witnessed since the publication of the Small Wars Manual in 1940 and with the notable exclusion of World War II which was not governed by this insanity, have failed to produce a Victor or a repentant enemy.

Following World War II, there were several major shifts in the geo-political landscape, the first being the establishment of the United Nations. The Charter literally placed a perverted choice before each member Nation; accept the Charter, or retain complete National autonomy.

Many will argue with this assessment but in truth, a Nation and its leadership cannot serve two masters; the National people it represents or its allegiance to an outside entity which does not share the concerns of that Nation. The UN was the Orwellian concept made manifest and placed all member nations on notice that the needs of the “world”, outweighed the needs of the individual nations. While that concept may play well on the big screen depicting non-existent alien beings and a fanciful future galactic societal construct, it is a pitiful and treacherous way for a Nation’s Leader to treat the people he has sworn to protect.

After decades of improvement, life expectancy in America is no longer on the rise.

Over the past few years, the increasing longevity that was once the norm has stalled out. In 2015 American life expectancy actually declined, year-on-year, by about a month, shrinking to 78.8 years. So we read this week in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “Nation’s Death Rate Rises as Progress Against Heart Disease Stalls,” and in USA Today’s dispatch, “Has U.S. life expectancy maxed out? First decline since 1993.”

Similar alarms have been clanging for some time now, including three stories in the New York Times last year: “Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds”; a report this June on the broader trend, “First Rise in U.S. Death Rate in Years Surprises Experts”; and a story this September titled “Maternal Mortality Rate in U.S. Rises, Defying Global Trend, Study Finds.”

In story after story, we read about demographers and medical experts puzzling over what’s gone wrong. They point to heart disease, obesity, drug use, stroke, Alzheimer’s, suicide. The USA Today article notes that since World War II, it’s been rare to see a rise in U.S. mortality rates, and such spikes have usually been linked to highly specific events such as the spread of AIDS in the early 1990s, or a “nasty flu season” in 1980. By contrast, what we’re seeing now are rising mortality rates involving a broad range of causes, especially among middle-aged Americans.

Missing from all these accounts is a single word that ought to command unblinking attention: Obamacare.

Or, if you prefer the full title: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as the signature achievement of Obama’s first-term. It is a big part of his legacy, a cornerstone of his 2008 campaign promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” It is a big part of the legacy Obama is now urging President-elect Donald Trump to preserve.

President-elect Donald J. Trump should nominate soldier and veterans advocate Pete Hegseth as his secretary of veterans affairs. The VA bureaucracy has devolved into a deadly mess, and this energetic, telegenic, passionate reformer is exactly the man to upend it.

Hegseth is 36, and his age would put a spring in the step of a Cabinet that, so far, has more than a touch of gray around the temples. Millennials and Generation Xers should be heartened to see a contemporary advise Trump. But his youth notwithstanding, Hegseth has seen plenty since graduating from Princeton University with a degree in politics in 2003.

As a major in the U.S. Army National Guard, Hegseth battled the Taliban in Afghanistan, helped liberate Samarra, Iraq, and kept his rifle at the ready as he guarded radical Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. For his outstanding service as an officer, he earned two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

Out of uniform, Hegseth has been a voice for vets. He served as Vets for Freedom’s executive director. And as its CEO, he grew Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) into the nation’s largest center-Right vets group. Concerning those still deployed, Hegseth presses for policies to help GIs win military engagements, rather than those that merely stop them — as did President Obama’s ISIS-creating, premature withdrawal from Iraq.

At CVA, Hegseth inspired his members to demand a better deal for vets. Decrying the lethal delays at VA hospitals in Phoenix and beyond, Hegseth wrote in 2014:

In the military, such a pattern of command failures would be met with decisive action — the underperforming leader would be replaced, period. But that strong performance standard doesn’t exist at the VA, and thus executives can be shifted from one post to the next, with little regard for performance or results.

From rallies to TV interviews to congressional testimony, Hegseth pushed the Veterans Access to Care through Choice, Accountability and Transparency Act and the VA Management Accountability Act. Congress approved both measures with broad, bipartisan majorities, and Obama signed them into law.

“No one has been more effective than Pete Hegseth in advocating reform of veterans’ health,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich told American Military News. CVA’s Dan Caldwell said, “Pete was tireless in working with Congress and other stakeholders, holding countless meetings with House and Senate members, staff, and organizations around the nation to push VA reform to give veterans more choice and better health care.”

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has slow-walked the new rules that should expand vets’ health-care options and ease the dismissal of inept, obstructive, sadistic VA functionaries. Consequently, too many VA facilities remain macabre:

• An unidentified dentist at Wisconsin’s Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center resigned on December 3. Rather than treat patients with sterile, disposable equipment — per VA regulations — he improperly cleaned and sterilized his own gear. Hence, he may have infected 592 veterans with hepatitis and HIV. (Tomah also was dubbed “Candy Land” because of alleged opioid over-prescription by its doctors.)

Business leaders are predicting a dramatic unraveling of regulations on everything from overtime pay to power-plant emission rules as Donald Trump seeks to fill his cabinet with determined adversaries of the agencies they will lead.

The president-elect’s pick Thursday to head the Labor Department, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, is an outspoken critic of the worker-pay policies advanced by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s choice for the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a primary architect of legal challenges on President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations.

Other cabinet nominees critical of regulations advanced under Mr. Obama include Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, financier Wilbur Ross Jr. at the Commerce Department and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. All will require Senate confirmation.

Those picks suggest the Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, is determined to advance labor, environmental and financial regulatory policies more favorable to many American corporations, though not all will back his proposals. Business leaders say all Americans stand to benefit from a lighter touch that would boost profits, growth and hiring, particularly for small and midsize businesses.

“If government can stimulate business to hire more, rather than vilify us, that’s going to be a better milieu,” said Andrew Berlin, CEO of Chicago-based Berlin Packaging LLC, which makes glass and plastic bottles for consumer products.

“The continual onslaught of regulation over the last eight years—that probably has been pretty much our No. 1, overall concern as manufacturers,” said Jason Andringa, CEO of the Vermeer Corp., a Pella, Iowa-based maker of construction and farm machinery. “That there may be some relief from that is very appealing to us.” CONTINUE AT SITE