Tag Archives: military

Link

Army to join Air-Sea Battle Office. Whatever that is.

DODBuzz.com tries to parse through a background briefing at the Pentagon yesterday at which defense officials announced the Army’s formal invite to join the Navy and Air Force in the Air-Sea Battle effort — as well as a new 15-person “Air-Sea Battle” office.

Reported Phil Ewing: “Their profusion of buzzwords and jargon; their reluctance to define exactly what “Air-Sea Battle” is; and their refusal to talk in concrete terms left several reporters scratching their heads as to what exactly the briefers were talking about.”

Example

To that end, the new office will “Facilitate inter-service and inter-agency coordination during the development of the concept, supervise the implementation of ASB-related training, manning and equipping; and manage the executing the ASB concept,” the official said.

Ewing: “In other words: Air-Sea Battle is Air-Sea Battle, and the Air-Sea Battle Office will be charged with promulgating Air-Sea Battle. Simple, see?”

Link

Wounded Warriors

From a new Pew survey of U.S. veterans. (Download PDF).

One out of every ten veterans alive today was seriously injured at some point while serving in the military, and three-quarters of those injuries occurred in combat. For many of these 2.2 million wounded warriors, the physical and emotional consequences of their wounds have endured long after they left the military, according to a Pew Research Center survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,853 veterans conducted from July 18 to Sept. 4, 2011.

Veterans who suffered major service-related injuries are more than twice as likely as their more fortunate comrades to say they had difficulties readjusting to civilian life. They are almost three times as likely as other veterans to report they have suffered from post-traumatic stress (PTS). And they are less likely in later life to be in overall good health or to hold full-time jobs.

Link

Sexual harassment in the military

For those who cover mulitary bases, and the military, here’s a fairly fresh U.S. Government Accountability Office report (PDF) on sexual harassment in the military. Among the findings: 

GAO found that DOD has limited visibility over the occurrence of sexual harassment because not all military installations and commands report sexual harassment complaint data to their respective service-level sexual harassment program offices and found that the department does not have a set of uniform data elements with which to collect such data.

GAO also found that servicemembers resolve most complaints of sexual harassment informally rather than report them formally. Estimates from DOD’s survey found that the majority of servicemembers who felt they were harassed sexually chose not to formally report the incident. Similarly, GAO’s survey found that 82 of 583 servicemembers indicated that they had been harassed sexually during the preceding 12 months; of these, only 4 indicated that they had reported the incident formally.

Chart with results of a survey conducted a various domestic and foreign bases. 

Report on effects on troops of open burn pits and air pollution in war zones


By SB Anderson

News stories all over today about this report, but here are a few links if you want the actual report itself (it’s pretty dense) or a quick deck with the major briefing points from the Institute of Medicine, which concluded no apparent links between health problems and pollution in war zones, particuularly the pits.

Download briefing slides (PDF)

Download the full report

On eve of Gitmo detention camp’s 10th anniversary, former prosecutor decries its ‘torture’ tactics


By SB Anderson

(Guardian) The former chief prosecutor for the US government at Guantánamo Bay has accused the administration he served of operating a “law-free zone” there, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the order to establish the detention camp on Cuba.

Retired air force colonel Morris Davis resigned in October 2007 in protest against interrogation methods at Guantánamo, and has made his remarks in the lead-up to 13 November, the anniversary of President George W Bush’s executive order setting up military commissions to try terrorist suspects.

Davis said that the methods of interrogation used on Guantánamo detainees – which he described as “torture” – were in breach of the US’s own statutes on torture, and added: “If torture is a crime, it should be prosecuted.” (Full story)