Common sense prevails in the military?

This morning I was greeted by this story on CNN (I don’t know why I watch it anymore, the lack of real news is astounding) in which they were talking about the shocking (!!!) results of a new study which says that soldiers are reluctant to seek help for mental health problems because they think they will negatively impact their careers.  The announcer was asking how this could possibly be the case and the interviewee wasn’t particularly insightful, just saying that the military was increasingly encouraging soldiers to seek help.

To anyone in the military however, the answer is very clear.  Doors definitely close if you report any instance of mental health issues.  I’ve seen outstanding soldiers denied the opportunity to become officers because at some point in their past (even years earlier) they sought out help for depression or other conditions.  Evaluations by doctors that the problem(s) are under control or no longer remain are irrelevant.

Also, security clearances can be delayed or rejected if the applicant has a history of seeking treatment for mental health issues.  That strikes right at the heart of a soldier’s career since some jobs require a clearance as a prerequisite and in any case they are required as one reaches the senior levels of non-commissioned officer.

It was therefore nice to see that Defense Secretary Gates is about to announce that he’s changing the questionnaire for security clearances so that soldiers will not be required to reveal if they sought help for wartime related mental health issues.  It’s that sort of practical measure that is infinitely more effective than countless press releases and public statements.

And as an aside, let me express my extreme displeasure again at U.S. based news websites that often write stories about studies and reports and then don’t link to the source document.  The BBC doesn’t seem to have a problem placing a few related outside links to each story, why can’t CNN or MSNBC?

Great news from Africa!

Just when you think that everything is controlled by amoral corporations, corrupt governments and similar bottom feeders, you get some news that really provides some inspiration.

The Chinese sent a cargo ship (the An Yue Jiang) loaded with weapons and ammunition to Zimbabwe where it looks like the Leech in Charge (Robert Mugabe) has decided that 27 years in power isn’t enough and is preparing to destroy the country in order to continue ruling it.

No countries on the continent would allow the ship to unload the weapons at their ports which left Mugabe (Zimbabwe is land locked) out of luck.  The most dramatic refusal occurred on Friday where South African dock workers refused to unload the ship even though the government said it was had no legal authority to interfere with what was a legal transaction between China and Zimbabwe.

So…a definite win for Africans!

Stronger than your average bear

This weekend I got the treat of catching a glimpse of a fox (no, not this kind of fox) running along the road (I’m not sure if it was a gray or red).

Then, upon arriving at my Fortress of Semi-Solitude, I found that the local neighborhood black bear decided to demonstrate his (or her) strength by bringing one of my bird feeders down to snacking height by bending the metal pole it was attached to.  That’s the third time that’s happened and I strongly suspect it’s the same bear.

So, what do I do?  Bend the pole back and load it back up with bird food.

Somewhere I heard that the definition of crazy was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.  Well, maybe but this time I’m sure it won’t happen again.

Street Gangs…just how organized are they?

A recent comment in one of my posts about 4th Generation Warfare brought up a common controversy in law enforcement/public policy circles. Are street gangs organizations with structure and hierarchies like traditional organized crime, networks of criminals that share some sort of loose commonality but essentially act independently, or some other type of grouping.

It usually serves the interest of law enforcement and elected politicians to claim that gangs are highly organized groups that resemble a corporation in structure like General Motors. After all, if you have a threat like that you can justify all sorts of policies and expenditures that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster among the general population.  Also, by making street gangs (or whatever the threat d’jour is) essentially evil mirror images of our police forces you get a nice narrative that explains why we have so much trouble eliminating them.

My experience has been that gangs want to be organized and structured (the desire screams through in their correspondence and rules that attempt to impose some sort of rankings to their members) but ultimately, members put their individual interests ahead of those of the organization. This leads to a sort of “Tragedy of the Commons” run amok. Most members, complements of an inflated sense of self worth, think that they are superior and have more intrinsic worth than their peers. Hence the large number of gang members willing to become informants and give evidence against those that they swear loyalty to unto death. My guess is that they watch Scarface and the Godfather too many times and draw the wrong lessons from each.

In some areas of the country I’m sure gangs do exhibit the sort of internal discipline necessary to establish a hierarchy and structure but the vast majority of gangs operate via informal relationships and try to take more out of their relationship with the gang than they’re willing to put into it. It matters more who grew up in the same project as who or who is the natural leader rather than which person has the title of ‘5 star general’.

I guess one argument against gangs being 4^th Generation warfare threats is their political blindness. Regardless of their criminal behavior, most gangs and gang members are firm believers in Western capitalism whether they know it or not. That is why, despite being economically deprived with little hope of advancing, gangs don’t try to alter the underlying political structure but rather just try to leap frog ahead of others in the race to get more stuff.

The problem with virtually all street gangs (at least from their point of view) is that they aren’t able to make decisions or plans that extend beyond the short term. My opinion is that this is because many people who become gang members have difficulty in conceiving of life in the long term (for an example of such thinking check out the documentary ‘Reversal of Fortune‘ which, while it doesn’t discuss gangs and crime, I think gives a wonderful glimpse into this mindset I’m talking about here) and so don’t seem to be able to plan much further beyond immediate needs or desires. That is why, the vast majority of crimes committed by gang members can best be described as ‘impulse’ crimes. That is, crimes either designed for immediate monetary reward or some sort of retaliation for a (real of perceived) slight. If street gangs are the scourge of many parts of the country than why, after more than thirty years of existence (in their present manifestation) are they still overwhelmingly focused on retail narcotics sales, robbery/burglary, assaults and other crimes that carry relatively low profit potential along with high risks of getting caught?

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that street gangs today pose no threat to the general population. Research has demonstrated that gang members do commit more crime than their delinquent non-gang peers and certainly many people are legitimately frightened by gangs that may be active in their neighborhoods. But that does not necessarily mean that gangs are highly organized or that their actions are dictated by a centralized command structure.  And (finally) I can come full circle back to my original post.  I don’t think a threat has to intend to destabilize a system in order for it to be a threat to that system.  Street gangs are both a threat to the existing civic structure as well as a manifestation of the flaws within that structure.  The only way to get rid of the former is to eliminate the latter.

Afghan Rambos

The Washington Post yesterday described the creation and deployment of Afghan commandos to fight the Taleban.  The article makes the 4,000 soldiers sounds very impressive and it sounds like the U.S. is putting some significant time and resources in training and equipping these forces.  I found this quote very interesting:

In marksmanship, for example, commandos fire more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition in their initial training alone, while the average Afghan soldier fires 60 rounds in training each year.

This got me thinking about the training we recently did at Ft. Dix and my comments about how the Army plays it cheap with weapons training when it comes to many of its soldiers.  That 60 rounds of ammunition per soldier per year is about the same amount that I’ve received ever since I’ve been in the army with the exception of when I was mobilizing (and it that case I doubt I fired more than 200 rounds).  I’ve always questioned just how proficient a marksman you can be when you only shoot one day a year, under unrealistic conditions with a minimal amount of ammunition but what do I know?  As I’ve said before, training has gotten better over the years but there’s still this approach that neglects training (at least among the reserve component) to do minimal training until the word comes down to mobilize and then there’s a mad dash to cram as much training as possible in a short period of time.  I think that’s the wrong way to approach it since (as anyone who’s crammed for a test can tell you), there’s just no way you can expect soldiers to absorb and retain the flood of new information and procedures as well as if they were involved in training over the long term where they could be exposed to these procedures and tactics repeatedly.

But that’s not why I wanted to blog about this news item.

I haven’t done any research on this but I wonder if there are any examples of fragile (or failed) nation states developing elite military units which didn’t end up abusing their power?  It’s not a huge leap from counterinsurgency force and death squad if there’s no effective control of the military.  The Karzai government doesn’t have a great deal of control in many parts of the country and I doubt there’s deep loyalty to the new Afghan state system.  So, we’re in a precarious place here.  The development of the force and their apparent competence is definitely a good sign.  In many ways though, that was the easy part.  What needs to happen now (just like in Iraq) is a strengthening of the legitimacy (both perceived and actual) of the central government.

Hidden casualties

This story from the AP caught my eye about the scale of mental health problems arising from our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The latest estimates are that approximately 300,000 soldiers are suffering from some sort of mental health issues, including depression, PTSD and anxiety.  That’s about 18% of the total number of forces that have deployed.  The really bad news (that’s right, it’s even worse) is that only half of those suffering from such problems are seeking help.  The rest are suffering without treatment or ’self-medicating’.

The shame of that is that there is help available for soldiers.  This is one area where there have been significant improvements since I returned home in 2004.  Military OneSource offers a range of services (including free counseling) for soldiers.  It’s run by a contracted company (Ceridian) which would normally make me dubious but it does make their claims of confidentiality seem more trustworthy than if such services were being provided by the Department of Defense.  That’s important because soldiers are often reluctant to seek treatment for mental problems via the military medical system because they are afraid it would negatively impact upon their career.  I’ve known people who’ve had career doors shut because they were treated for depression or similar issues years in the past.  Unfortunately, even though the military (at least the Army) has gotten better at encouraging soldiers to seek help there is still a stigma about those who actually attempt to get help.

I imagine the costs of these mental health problems will be following us around for years.  The question will be once troops are eventually pulled out of Iraq will there be any will to properly fund treatment for all these vets?  My suspicion is that most Americans desperately want to pretend that Iraq never happened (and, I suspect, most have made that transition anyway) and I fear that soldiers from that conflict are going to get the short end of the stick as a result.  After all, Iraq has been supplemented by the economy and why Obama won’t wear a flag pin as the most important issues facing the country today.  I can’t imagine there will be more pressure to attend to wounded veterans when we aren’t actively involved in combat operations.

Mission Accomplished

Well, it seemed to last much longer than it actually did, but my military training is finally finished and I can go back to ‘normal’ working hours.  In the past 16 days we got over 630 soldiers to fire the 240B machine gun on three different ‘tables’.  It was an exhausting experience.

A number of soldiers from the NJ National Guard are getting ready to deploy to Iraq later in the year and I’ve been able to observe how some of them are preparing for that deployment over the past 4 months.  It’s been very interesting to compare the training and preparation these soldiers are getting with the training I received before mobilizing in 2003.

The training I received back then was substandard in virtually all areas.  Basic soldier skills which were ignored up to that point (because, according to the leadership, we’d get lots of refresher training on them in the unlikely event we were ever called to war) were passed over because (ready for this?) everyone assumed we had been maintaining our proficiency in them for years.

Combat training was minimal because we weren’t a combat unit and our leadership couldn’t conceive a scenario where such training would be necessary (despite evidence in the early days of the Iraq war that support units were, in fact, finding themselves in combat).  To be fair to the leadership it must be said that additional training would have cut into their drinking time and so would have placed an undue burden on them.

The training I’ve observed (especially that conducted at the armories) has been much better than what I encountered.  The one exception that I can see is weapons training.  Given how much soldiers are going to rely on their weapons, I think more time (much more time) needs to be spent getting soldiers proficient with the weapons they’ll be expected to use.  When I entered the army I received one full week of training in the M-16.  I learned how to take it apart, put it together and shoot it (again and again).  After that, in the reserves, training is limited to firing the weapon for a couple of hours, once a year.  When getting ready to spend a year in a war zone, the army gives (at best) a few hours of instruction and then throws you on the range to ‘qualify’ (which is a minimum number of targets you need to hit in a specific time period).  The whole thing is more about checking off a box than actually conducting any meaningful training but that’s all they get.  That’s a shame since soldiers more proficient in weapons use means less ‘collateral damage’ which is a definite boon to any hearts and minds campaign.

What I’ve been doing this past week

Get up at 5am, head off to the M240B range,

Watch soldiers shoot all day long and all night,

Collapse into bed around midnight.

Repeat ad infinitum…

Update: A reader emailed me to ask what exactly that bottom picture is.  A good question and I can only claim extreme sleep deprivation as to why I didn’t think to explain it in my post originally.  Those lights are tracer fire coming from the machine guns at night.  They’re designed to help figure out where you’re shooting (which is not always as easy as it sounds, particularly if there are a whole bunch of people shooting around you).  I left the shutter on my camera open for a few seconds so that you could see the path of the rounds.