Saturday, April 30, 2016

Canada Military News-THE MILITARY TRUTH from 1997(Soviet-USA-Middle Class) - how ashamed our militaries were of our excessive behaviour as people in the free world (#HotelCalifornia) compared to the horrific daily suffering they witnessed in hard part of the world. Leave Root Causes aside- DESTROY ISIS STATE...PERIOD/links always/#POTUS 4 Secretary General of United Nations, clean that filthy house up u'd b perfect imho







comrades stick together always 


#Invictus Games2016 - Orlando -15 nations of Wounded Veterans competing in sports- GETCHA GLADIATOR ON .... 'r u not entertained???'

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1997 The Widening Gap Between Military and Society
U.S. military personnel of all ranks are feeling increasingly alienated from their own country, and are becoming both more conservative and more politically active than ever before. Do they see America clearly?
After following a platoon of Marine recruits through eleven weeks of boot-camp training on Parris Island in the spring of 1995, I was stunned to see, when they went home for postgraduation leave, how alienated they felt from their old lives. At various times each of these new Marines seemed to experience a moment of private loathing for public America. They were repulsed by the physical unfitness of civilians, by the uncouth behavior they witnessed, and by what they saw as pervasive selfishness and consumerism. Many found themselves avoiding old friends, and some experienced difficulty even in communicating with their families.
One typical member of Platoon 3086, Craig Hoover, reported that the Amtrak ride home to Kensington, Maryland, was "horrible." The train was "filled with smoke," he said. "People were drinking and their kids were running around aimlessly. You felt like smacking around some people." (An article I published in The Wall Street Journal in July, 1995, mentioned many of the recruits quoted here.) Hoover also found the train ride a sad contrast to the relative racial harmony of Parris Island. "It felt kind of segregated by race and class—a poor white car, a poor black car, a middle-class white car, a middle-class black car." Even McDonald's—which had become a fantasy-like symbol to the recruits as they ate military rations, particularly during a week of training in the woods-proved to be a letdown. "You look around and notice that a lot of the civilians are overweight, and a little sloppy," Hoover said.
Jonathan Prish, a former white supremacist, went with old friends to a bar in Mobile, Alabama. "We played pool and drank," he reported, in a typical comment. "It seemed like everyone there was losers. All they want to do is get smashed. They're self-destructive. They're not trying. They're just goofing around."
In the wealthy Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, Eric Didier felt the same way. "There are some friends I've stayed away from," he said. "They're not going anywhere, and I don't want to be around them. We don't have any common ground." Though they are in their early twenties, he said, "they're not doing anything, living at home, not working, not studying."
In Pittsburgh, Patrick Bayton went to a Saturday-night party where he saw two old friends as "losers." "Everything feels different," he said. "I can't stand half my friends no more." Frank DeMarco attended a street fair in Bayonne, New Jersey. "It was crowded. Trash everywhere. People were drinking, getting into fights. People with obnoxious attitudes, no politeness whatsoever." But, he said, "I didn't let it get to me. I just said, 'This is the way civilian life is: nasty.'"
Yet the member of Platoon 3086 perhaps most at odds with his former environment was Daniel Keane, whose background was probably the most privileged. The son of a Merrill Lynch & Co. executive, Keane seemed almost in pain when I interviewed him in the living room of his parents' house, in Summit, New Jersey. When he first got home from Parris Island, he said about being with his family, "I didn't know how to act. They said, 'What do you want to do?' I'd say, 'I don't know.' I didn't know how to carry on a conversation."
He found his old peer group even more difficult. "All my friends are home from college now, drinking, acting stupid and loud," the eighteen-year-old Marine said. He was particularly disappointed when two old friends refused to postpone smoking marijuana for a few minutes, until he was away from them. "They were getting ready to smoke their weed. I said, 'Could you just hang on for a minute? Can't you wait till you get to the party instead of smoking in the car?' They said, 'Then we'd have to give it out.'" So, he recalled, they lit up in front of their Marine friend. "I was pretty disappointed in them doing that. It made me want to be at SOI [the Marines' School of Infantry]."
Like many other members of 3086, Keane felt as if he had joined a cult or religion. "People don't understand," he told me, "and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to explain when the only thing that really impresses them is how much beer you can chug down in thirty seconds."


THE GAP
I think the Marines of Platoon 3086 were experiencing in a very personal way the widening gap between today's military and civilian America. To be sure, their reaction was exaggerated by the boot-camp experience, during which the Marine Corps especially among the services tries to sever a recruit's ties to his or her previous life. But because of the nature of American society today, the re-entry shock upon leaving recruit training appears to be greater now than it was in the past. Asked to explain this difference, retired Marine Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor said, "When I got out of boot camp, in 1946, society was different. It was more disciplined, and most Americans trusted the government. Most males had some military experience. It was an entirely different society—one that thought more about its responsibilities than its rights."
Similarly, Sergeant Major James Moore, now retired but at that time the senior sergeant on Parris Island, commented, "It is difficult to go back into a society of 'What's in it for me?' when a Marine has been taught the opposite for so long. When I look at society today, I see a group of young people without direction because of the lack of teaching of moral values at home and in school. We see that when we get them in recruit training. The recruits are smarter today—they run rings around what we were able to do, on average. Their problems are moral problems: lying, cheating, and stealing, and the very fact of being committed. We find that to get young people to dedicate themselves to a cause is difficult sometimes."
The idea of a gap between the military and civilian America is hardly new. For much of the nation's history, Samuel Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State (1957), the U.S. military has had "the outlook of an estranged minority." A decade ago the journalist Arthur Hadley called this strained civilian-military relationship "The Great Divorce." In The Straw Giant: Triumph and Failure—America's Armed Forces (1986) he defined this as "the less-than-amicable separation of the military from the financial, business, political, and intellectual elites of this country, particularly from the last two."
The fact that most Americans pay attention to the military only when they see news of a sexual-abuse scandal, such as the one at Aberdeen Proving Ground, underscores that separation. As far as media coverage is concerned, the U.S. military has fallen to the level of a mid-sized Asian nation that breaks onto the front page with a large disaster but gets just a few paragraphs for bus plunges and plane crashes. The estrangement appears to be more complete now than it was in the past, for, I think, two overarching reasons. First, more than twenty years after the end of conscription the ignorance of American elites about the military has deepened. Second, with the end of the Cold War the United States has entered into historically unexplored territory. If the Cold War is indeed considered to have been a kind of war, then for the first time in American history the nation is maintaining a large military establishment during peacetime, with 1.5 million people on active duty and millions more serving in reserve and supporting civilian roles in the Defense Department and the defense industry.
Several trends already under way in civilian society and in the post-Cold War military threaten to widen the gap in the coming years, further isolating and alienating the military. In his 1974 prologue to the revised edition of The Professional Soldier, Morris Janowitz concluded confidently that there would not be "a return to earlier forms of a highly self-contained and socially distinct military force; the requirements of technology of education and of political support make that impossible." But the conditions that shaped the military of which Janowitz wrote no longer obtain. It now appears not only possible but likely that over the next twenty years the U.S. military will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a society and subculture. "Today," says retired Admiral Stanley Arthur, who commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War, "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve. More and more, enlisted [men and women] as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve. This is not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."
In this light, the Clinton Administration's frictions with the military—over gays in the armed forces, the alleged "dissing" of a uniformed general by a White House aide, military resentment at the Administration's ham-handedness in the later phases of the Somalia mission, and military resistance to U.S. interventions in Haiti and Bosnia—can be seen not as the unique product of the personal histories of one President and his advisers but as a precursor of future problems. The Harvard political scientist Michael Desch concluded in a recent assessment of post-Cold War decision-making in the United States that civilians are now apparently less able "to get the military to do what they want them to do" than they were during the Cold War.
Three broad areas need to be examined to understand why this political, social, and cultural gap appears to be widening: changes in the military, changes in civilian society, and changes in the international-security environment.


CHANGES IN THE MILITARY
By far the most important change that has taken place in the military is the termination of the draft in 1973. Twenty-four years later the consequences are still unfolding. Today all 1.5 million people on active duty are volunteers. That fact carries vast implications for how the military operates and how it relates to society. In contrast to the post-Second World War demobilization, for example, the post-Cold War drawdown is being met with fierce resistance by many soldiers, because all volunteered to be in the military and most are indeed fighting to stay in.
Partly as a result of the end of conscription, the past fifteen years especially has seen the rise of a professional military, even in the enlisted ranks. Although better trained as soldiers and more stable as a society, these professionals are very expensive, because they bring with them families and all the attendant social infrastructure, from health care to substance-abuse counseling to higher education on military bases. John Luddy, a Senate Republican aide, wrote that family-related costs to the Defense Department total more than $25 billion a year.
This strong social safety net may not be sustained. With defense-policy analysts in general agreement that a severe defense-budget problem looms in the late 1990s, the military's vast social infrastructure is likely to come under attack by Congress. The military—especially the Army, which is the most vulnerable of the services in terms of personnel—faces a dilemma in addressing those cuts. The social safety net appears necessary to support a professional military with a high "operating tempo." But to find the funds to maintain that net, the Army is likely to be required to take cuts in personnel far beyond what it will consider tolerable. Either course—curtailing support for personnel or curtailing personnel—is likely to engender resentment in the military.
The post-draft professionalization of the military has also wrought cultural changes. Richard H. Kohn, a former chief historian of the Air Force who now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that the officer corps has changed since the Cold War in the way it acts and feels. "I sense an ethos that is different," he told me in an interview. "They talk about themselves as 'we,' separate from society. They see themselves as different, morally and culturally. It isn't the military of the fifties and sixties, which was a large, semi-mobilized citizen military establishment, with a lot of younger officers who were there temporarily, and a base of draftees." Change in the military culture aside, the American people have never been comfortable with professional militaries, as Huntington observed in The Soldier and the State—theirs or anybody else's.
The Revolutionary War was described as a war of citizen-soldiers against the standing armies and mercenaries of George III. The Civil War was [the Union fighting] against the West Point directed armies of the South.... German militarism was the principal enemy in World War I.... The professionals, in other words, are always on the other side.
A second major area of change in the military is the rebuilding that has occurred since the Vietnam War. In this area, as in many other aspects of defense nowadays, the Marine Corps appears to be exemplary. During the 1970s the Corps was a disaster. Drug use was rampant and discipline ragged. There were 1,060 violent racial incidents in the Corps in 1970. Jeffrey Record noted in the May, 1995, Proceedings, the magazine of the Navy's professional society, that during the Vietnam era
the Corps registered rates of courts-martial, non-judicial punishments, unauthorized absences, and outright desertions unprecedented in its own history, and, in most cases, three to four times those plaguing the U.S. Army. Violence and crime at recruit depots and other installations escalated; in some cases, officers ventured out only in pairs or groups and only in daylight.
Today the Marine Corps has drastically reduced its discipline problems. Its drug problem, too, is minor, with less than four percent of Marines testing positive in random urinalysis. And although racial tension still exists in the military, the services, especially the Army, have probably done about as good a job of minimizing the issue of race as is possible in the American context. In the Army's officer corps of 78,000, there are now some 9,000 blacks. As Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, has observed, the U.S. military is still the only place in American society where it is routine for black people to boss around white people. (This may be one reason the black drill instructor has become a stock figure in American popular culture, not only in films such as Private Benjamin, An Officer and a Gentleman, Major Payne, Renaissance Man, and In the Army Now but also in commercials for beer and long-distance telephone services.)
In addition, two related post-Cold War trends having to do with the military's infrastructure may have had important consequences for civilian-military relations. These are the process of closing unneeded bases and the privatization of many functions of logistics and maintenance.
The many base closings may increase the geographical and political isolation of the military—or, to put it another way, may return the military to its pre-Second World War condition. "Before World War II, the majority of the military posts were located in the South and in the West," Janowitz notes. Also earlier in this century the South was disproportionately represented in the ranks of senior officers—in 1910 some 90 percent of Army generals had a "southern affiliation," Janowitz reports. The closing of bases has so far hit especially hard in the Far West and the Northeast—areas that are both more liberal and more expensive to live in and operate in than the rest of the nation.
The move to privatize much of the military's huge depot structure—the network that maintains aircraft, vehicles, and other defense gear—may also contribute to the social and political isolation of the military. Faced with the need to cut personnel, and seeking to preserve its war-fighting "tooth," the post-Cold War military has sought to privatize much of its support "tail." This privatization, which promises to reduce the number of soldiers in civilian occupations, is occurring not only on U.S. soil, where maintenance work is being farmed out to corporations, but also in other countries where U.S. soldiers operate. In Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, for example, Brown & Root has performed a host of functions once done or at least supervised by the uniformed military, from staffing mess halls to purifying water to preparing the bodies of soldiers killed in firefights for shipment home. A concern relating to extensive civilian contracting is that military personnel today are less likely to be serving in occupations that have civilian equivalents, and are more likely to specialize in military skills that are neither transferable to the civilian sector nor well understood by civilians.
These isolating trends are occurring amid broader cultural changes in the military—notably the politicization of the officer corps. Of course, military culture has always had a conservative streak, just as journalism has always had an element of anti-authoritarianism. I suspect, however, that today's officers are both more conservative and more politically active than their predecessors.
Admittedly, the evidence is hazy and the data are skimpy—in part because "conservative" is almost impossible to define. Nonetheless, the few indications available today are strikingly at odds with the conclusions Janowitz reached. Janowitz found that many officers continued to avoid open party preferences, but also detected a trend toward more liberals among military officers. He found the military becoming more representative of society, with a long-term upward trend in the number of officers "willing to deviate from traditional conservative identification." And he detected a correlation between higher ranks and greater intensity of conservative attitudes.
Today the available evidence indicates that all these trends have reversed. The military appears to be becoming politically less representative of society, with a long-term downward trend in the number of officers willing to identify themselves as liberals. Open identification with the Republican Party is becoming the norm. And the few remaining liberals in uniform tend to be colonels and generals, perhaps because they began their careers in the draft-era military. The junior officer corps, apart from its female and minority members, appears to be overwhelmingly hard-right Republican and largely comfortable with the views of Rush Limbaugh. Air Force Colonel Charles Dunlap observed in a recent essay published by the Air Force Academy, "Many officers privately expressed delight that" as a result of the controversy over gays in the military, the Reserve Officers Training Corps program is producing "fewer officers from the more liberal campuses to challenge [the Air Force officers'] increasingly right-wing philosophy."
A variety of recent formal and informal surveys point toward those conclusions. Midshipmen at Annapolis, who in 1974 were similar in their politics to their peers at civilian colleges, are now twice as likely as other students to consider themselves conservative, according to an unpublished internal Navy survey. "The shift to the right has been rather remarkable, even while there has been an infusion of rather more liberal women and minorities," one of the study's conductors concluded.
Former Army Major Dana Isaacoff, who taught at West Point in the early 1990s, routinely surveyed her students on their politics, assessing about sixty of them during each of six semesters. In a typical section, she reported in a talk last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seventeen would identify themselves as Republican, but none would label themselves Democratic or Independent, instead choosing the traditional course of adopting no political label. She concluded that to today's West Point cadets, being a Republican is becoming part of the definition of being a military officer. "Students overwhelmingly identified themselves as conservatives," she said. Here the definition of conservatism is important: this does not appear to be the compromising, solution-oriented politics of, say, Bob Dole. "There is a tendency among the cadets to adopt the mainstream conservative attitudes and push them to extremes," Isaacoff said. "The Democratic-controlled Congress was Public Enemy Number One. Number Two was the liberal media. . . . They firmly believed in the existence of the Welfare Queen."
This tendency toward right-wing attitudes is not limited to malleable students at military academies. A 1995 survey of Marine officers at Quantico, a large base in Virginia that focuses on training officers, found similar views. The Marines are not the most representative example, but because they are the most tradition-bound and unabashedly culturally conservative of the services, they are the most dramatic. They should be viewed as an indicator not of where the U.S. military is today but of where it is heading. The Corps was less altered by the Cold War than any of the other services. With the end of the Cold War the other services are becoming more like the Marines: smaller, insular, and expeditionary.
In the Quantico survey 50 percent of the new officers studying at the Basic School identified themselves as conservatives. In a parallel survey of mid-career officers at the Command and Staff College 69 percent identified themselves as conservatives. In a striking indication of alienation from civilian society, an overwhelming proportion of the Basic School lieutenants—81 percent—said that the military's values are closer to the values of the Founding Fathers than are the values of civilian society. At the Command and Staff College, where students generally have at least ten years of military experience, 64 percent agreed with that statement. A majority of officers at both schools agreed that a gap exists between the military and civilian society, and stated that they expect it to increase with the passage of time. Fewer than half believed it desirable to have people with different political views within their organizations.
"I believe these results indicate the potential for a serious problem in civil-military relations for the United States," concluded Army Major Robert A. Newton, who conducted the survey of Marine officers and analyzed the responses. "Instead of viewing themselves as the representatives of society," he wrote, "the participating officers believe they are a unique element within society."
Again, officers today appear to be not only more conservative than those in the past but also more active in politics—both in how they describe themselves and in how they vote. This change is all the more striking because traditionally the American military has avoided political involvement. After the Civil War, Huntington wrote in The Soldier and the State, "not one officer in five hundred, it was estimated, ever cast a ballot." In Once an Eagle (1968), an illuminating novel about the twentieth-century U.S. Army, Anton Myrer has his young hero tell a congressman, "When I serve my country as a soldier I'm not going to serve her as a Democrat or as a Republican, I'm going to serve her as an American." But military personnel have for the past decade been voting in greater percentages than the general population. In his survey of Marine officers Newton found that "although the majority of the officers did not believe the military should play an active role in political decisions, a significant minority did believe such activity was appropriate."
It is worth noting that the past two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have entered election-year debates on issues touching on the military. During the 1992 election General Colin Powell twice spoke out against military intervention in Bosnia, which candidate Bill Clinton was proposing. Less noticed, Powell's comparatively retiring successor, General John Shalikashvili, spoke out during the 1996 presidential-primary season against isolationism and anti-immigrationism—two issues the Republican candidate Pat Buchanan was promoting.
An odd little book titled Clint McQuade USMC: The New Beginning (1990) is perhaps unintentionally revealing. Reading this novel—which was privately published by the author, Gene Duncan, a retired Marine major—feels like taking a spelunking trip through the collective unconscious of the Corps. Indeed, Duncan states at the outset that any resemblance to real people "springs from my subconscious, over which I have no control." The book is about a retired Marine master gunnery sergeant who is reborn with the body of a sixteen-year-old while retaining the knowledge, memories, and experience of his old self. He eventually—of course—joins the Marines.
The book is most interesting for what it asserts as a matter of course: essentially that American society is decaying, corrupted, misled by its elected officials, and deserving of resentment from the Marines who protect it. "Americans are selfish people," the hero explains to his buddies. Later he tells them, "I think I have lost all faith in our politicians, so I take the narrow view and confine it to those around me of like mind, minds which dictate unselfishness and honor." In a postscript the author says that his "purpose in writing" has been to "give to the reader a sense of the heart of the United States Marine Corps." He explains that he has tried to show the Marines to be "special people with special hearts who serve a seemingly ungrateful nation."
The novel shows part of the military talking to itself when it doesn't think it is being overheard. Though hardly famous in the outside world, Gene Duncan is well known within the Marines: his books are sold by the Marine Corps Association, which at its Quantico bookshop has a special "Duncan's Books" area. The 1991 edition of General Military Subjects, the textbook used to train all recruits at Parris Island, quotes Duncan on its inside cover as saying that the job of a drill instructor is to undo "eighteen years of cumulative selfishness and 'Me-ism.'" Just after the table of contents the textbook gives Duncan a full page. The only other person so honored in the entire 199-page textbook is President George Bush.
These isolating attitudes, while perhaps most extreme in the Marines, are also found in varying degrees elsewhere in the military. "There is a deep-seated suspicion in the U.S. military of society," Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is the executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, told me in an interview. It is "part of the Vietnam hangover—'You guys betrayed us once, and you could do it again.'" This suspicion, he added, "isn't going away, it's being transmitted" to a new generation of officers.
Here again the long-term consequences of the end of conscription are still unfolding. It has become easier for the middle class in general and liberals in particular to follow their traditional impulse to turn away from the military. Within the military the end of the draft has also meant the end of its leavening effect: people from nonmilitary families were conscripted or spurred by the draft to enroll in ROTC, and found they actually liked military life. General Powell, for example, came from a nonmilitary background and attended the distinctly nonmilitary City University of New York. General Shalikashvili was a draftee. In some years of the early 1990s the Joint Chiefs contained more members who had come out of public universities than members who had gone the traditional routes of West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. But the generation of draft-era officers is now retiring, and it is a virtual certainty that in twenty years the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will be a volunteer. All this will make it easier for the military and the liberal professionals of the middle class to look upon each other with contempt.
It is one matter to acknowledge that much in American society today is deserving of contempt. It is another matter to propose that the role of the U.S. military—especially an all-volunteer professional military oriented toward conservative Republicanism—is to fix those problems. Yet that is what some are doing. "It is no longer enough for Marines to 'reflect' the society they defend," Michael Wyly, a retired colonel, advised in the March, 1995, issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. "They must lead it, not politically but culturally. For it is the culture we are defending."
In some ways this is nothing new. The military can be seen as just reverting to its pre-Second World War and pre-Cold War stances—socially isolated, politically conservative, and working primarily on bases in the South and West. In The Professional Soldier, Janowitz wrote, "Military ideology has maintained a disapproval of the lack of order and respect for authority which it feels characterizes civilian society. . . . In the past most professional soldiers even felt that the moral fibre of American manpower was 'degenerating' and might not be able to withstand the rigors of battle."
There are two important differences between today's military and the military before the Second World War. First, it is far larger—some six times the size of the 244,000-man active-duty military of 1933. (Over the same period the U.S. population has merely doubled in size.) Second, it is frequently used as an instrument of national policy, as it was with the recent large deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Possibly a third major difference is its quality: for the first time in the nation's history the U.S. military is generally regarded as the best in the world. If, as now appears likely, it is cut significantly over the next ten years, frustrated officers may be more politically direct in expressing their resentment than they were in the past. It would be surprising if all were to adopt the stance of General Omar Bradley, who in a passage quoted by Janowitz commented, "Thirty-two years in the peacetime army had taught me to do my job, hold my tongue, and keep my name out of the papers."


CHANGES IN SOCIETY
There is widespread agreement that over the past few decades American society has become more fragmented, more individualistic, and less disciplined, with institutions such as church, family, and school wielding less influence. Whatever the implications of these changes, they put society at odds with the classic military values of sacrifice, unity, self-discipline, and considering the interests of the group before those of the individual.
The split is all the deeper because the military has effectively addressed the two great plagues of American society, drug abuse and racial tension, but civilian society has not. In addition, the military is doing a better job in other areas where society is faltering, including education. The Army especially has done well with the growth of realistic training at facilities such as the National Training Center, the Joint Readiness Training Center, and the Combat Maneuver Training Center, where soldiers live in the field and conduct bloodless battles against well-trained opponents. Younger enlisted soldiers and Marines frequently exude an air of competence that is rare in today's eighteen- and nineteen-year-old civilians. Local military recruiters report that they no longer recruit from certain high schools, because so few of the graduates of those schools are able to pass the military entrance examination—the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a simple test of reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. The result of this selectivity is that the military is now far better educated than the general population: about 96 percent of recruits in 1995, for example, earned high school diplomas, as compared with 79 percent of civilians aged eighteen to twenty-four. Indeed, about 40 percent of all officers now hold postgraduate degrees.
The end of the draft has altered the way society looks at the military. Charles Moskos traces the American people's supposed intolerance of casualties to the end of the draft: because the elites aren't putting their own offspring in harm's way, the American people mistrust their sending everyone else's children into battle. I disagree with this analysis, and am instead persuaded by the explanation put forward by James Burk, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, that the American people will not tolerate casualties when they dislike a policy or don't understand it, as was true with Somalia.
But I think that Moskos is pointing in the right direction: American political and economic elites generally don't understand the military. A comment published this spring in the Utne Reader—the Reader's Digest of the New Age crowd—captured the disdain for today's military. In an editorial introduction to an article the magazine stated that in light of the Tailhook and Aberdeen scandals, "it's hard to imagine why any woman—or any man with a conscience—would want to join the military."
Nor is such understanding deemed important, even in making national-security policy. Consider, for example, the conspicuous lack in the White House of staff members with military experience—in an Administration that has proved to be militarily activist. Even after bungling an inherited mission in Somalia and then using U.S. forces to feed Rwandan refugees, invade Haiti, and enforce a peace agreement in Bosnia, the Clinton Administration did not see fit to follow Pentagon suggestions that it appoint someone with a military background to a senior post on the National Security Council. Misunderstanding the military is dangerous for both the military and the civilian population. Nowadays, I think, policymakers tend to overestimate what the military can do. It isn't clear, for example, just how the Clinton Administration expects the appointment of a four-star general, Barry McCaffrey, as drug czar to revitalize its efforts against drugs. Overestimating the military is probably even more dangerous than believing that it is made up of incompetent buffoons, as Baby Boomers seemed to believe in the 1970s.
An uncertain grasp of military affairs is likely to characterize policymaking for the foreseeable future. As recently as during the Vietnam War two thirds of the members of Congress were veterans. Today almost two thirds are not. What most congressmen know of the military is what they saw on television during the Gulf War. They learned two lessons: high-tech weaponry works, and the United States needs missile defenses. Partly because the Army effectively blacked out media coverage of its Gulf War triumph, Congress came away with little interest in training, personnel issues, or ground forces in general. It should have been no surprise to the military that after the Republicans won a majority in Congress in 1994, they advocated missile defenses and B-2 bombers while trying to cut military pensions. In March of last year several younger members of Congress formed the Republican Defense Working Group, which, they said, would "scour the defense budget for savings." As Andrew Bacevich has observed, it will be interesting to see how the political beliefs of the officer corps change when officers realize that to be conservative is no longer necessarily to be in favor of defense spending.
But the most salient point is that Congress isn't particularly interested in defense issues. This isn't a matter of ideology. Even before the Republican victory the Armed Services Committees were declining in prestige. Mainly because of the post-Cold War reduction in military budgets, defense is an unpleasant issue for members of Congress. Several rounds of base closings have made membership on the Armed Services Committees something of a liability: as one congressional staff member told me several years ago, "Back home, they'll ask, 'If you're on the committee, why couldn't you do something about it?'" Among the congressional freshmen elected to the House in 1992, nineteen requested seats on the Science and Technology Committee, historically a backwater, whereas only seven asked for Armed Services.
CHANGES IN THE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT
With the evaporation of the Soviet Union, many Americans don't understand why the nation needs a large standing army. For the first time in its history (with the possible exception of the two decades preceding the Spanish-American War) the U.S. Army must justify its existence to the American people. Again, this suggests that the Army will become more like the Marines—small, expeditionary, and, for the good of the institution, better at explaining itself to Congress and the media. Peacetime trends in American civilian-military relations already point toward huge budget cuts in the coming years. Last year, for example, Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, proposed reducing defense spending to $210 billion in 2001, from the current $263 billion. The Electronic Industries Association in 1995 forecast a 2005 defense budget of $214 billion. The Army is likely to suffer a disproportionate share of the cuts, and most of the cuts will be aimed at personnel rather than at procurement or operations and maintenance.
Also with the end of the Cold War, the military's definition of "the threat" went up for grabs. Everybody used to agree that it was the Soviet Union. Now there is a lot of talk in the military, especially in the Marines, that the new threat is chaos. Sergeant Darren Carey, a drill instructor for Platoon 3086, the unit I followed home from Parris Island, taught the platoon that "today the threat is the low-intensity things, the nine-one-one, that you never know what's going to happen—it's Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia." He told me that he also teaches that the threat is "the decline of the family, the decline of morals."
As his comment indicates, it is easy to blur the line between foreign and domestic enemies. I think this haziness may already be occurring on an institutional scale with the Marines, for whom the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were a preamble to the Somalia deployment later that year. From a military perspective, the operations were similar: in both cases Marine combat units based in California were sent to intervene in fighting between armed urban factions. "As soon as we got to Mogadishu, we were struck by the similarity to L.A.," one Marine colonel involved in both operations told me.
Some of the lessons learned by the Marines in Los Angeles are worrisome, especially when seen in the context of a strongly conservative, politically active military. Marine Major Timothy Reeves argued in a paper written at the Marine Command and Staff College that because of "the rising potential for civil disobedience within the inner cities" it is "inevitable" that the U.S. military will be employed more often within American borders. The trouble, he said, is that a variety of U.S. laws inhibit the execution of domestic missions. In Los Angeles, Reeves said, when faced with a choice between violating doctrine and violating federal law some Marines chose the latter course, detaining suspects and conducting warrantless searches. Similarly, Marine Captain Guy Miner reported in a 1992 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette that Marine intelligence units were initially worried by the need to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens in ways that would violate a 1981 Executive Order, but that "this inhibition was quickly overcome as intelligence personnel sought any way possible to support the operation with which the regiment had been tasked."
Reeves called for major alterations of U.S. law to enable the Marines to execute these new domestic missions just as they execute missions abroad—changes that could carry long-term consequences for U.S. civilian-military relations. "Experience from the Los Angeles riots," he said in his paper, "demonstrated the need to grant U.S. Marine forces the legal right to detain vehicles and suspects, conduct arrests, searches, and seizures in order to accomplish the peacekeeping mission." (The Los Angeles mission also demonstrated a need for the Marines to coordinate terminology with the police: when police officers asked some Marines to cover them while they confronted an armed suspect barricaded in his residence, Reeves reported, the Marines shot approximately thirty rounds of what they call "covering fire" into the building before the police stopped them.)
In a December, 1994, article in the Marine Corps Gazette, William S. Lind, a military analyst who has been influential in the doctrinal thinking of the post-Cold War Marines, wrote with two Marine reservists that American culture is "collapsing."
Little is remarkable about that paragraph, which reads like standard right-wing American rhetoric of the nineties—not all that different from Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan. Its significance lies in the conclusion that Lind and his co-authors drew: "The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil."
As a coda, retired Colonel Michael Wyly wrote a few months later in another Gazette article, "We must be willing to realize that our real enemy is as likely to appear within our own borders as without." He then took swipes at the two fundamental principles of U.S. military professionalism: unwavering subordination to civilian control and nonparticipation in politics. "If our laws and self-image of our role as military professionals do not allow for [the recognition that the real enemy may be within] we need to change them." Wyly raised the possibility that the Marines would refuse to enforce certain laws. Specifically, if Congress were to restrict gun ownership, then Marines would need to understand that "enforcing such a restriction could quickly make us the enemy of constitutional freedom." (To its credit, the Gazette carried in the same issue a commonsense response to the Lind article from Major Mark Bean, who wrote, "America is made of tougher stuff than the authors would have us believe.")
When the military is politically active, when it believes it is uniquely aware of certain dangers, when it discusses responding to domestic threats to cherished values, then it edges toward becoming an independent actor in domestic politics. "A classic example of this situation happened in Chile," Major Robert Newton warned at the conclusion of his report "The Politicization of the Officer Corps." "The Chilean military was a very professional organization. The majority of the officer corps came from the middle class. When the society elected a communist President, the military broke from society. The officer corps believed this change threatened the basic principles upon which the society rested."
Starting in the mid-1960s, we have thrown away the values, morals, and standards that define traditional Western culture. In part, this has been driven by cultural radicals, people who hate our Judeo-Christian culture. Dominant in the elite, especially in the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry (now the most powerful force in our culture and a source of endless degradation), the cultural radicals have successfully pushed an agenda of moral relativism, militant secularism, and sexual and social "liberation." This agenda has slowly codified into a new ideology, usually known as "multiculturalism" or "political correctness," that is in essence Marxism translated from economic into social and cultural terms.
WHAT MUST BE DONE?
A U.S. military coup remains extremely unlikely. Samuel Huntington seems closer to the mark when he attributes the civilian-military turbulence of the Clinton Administration to the process of seeking out a new post-Cold War equilibrium in the civilian-military relationship.
But not all equilibriums are equal. The United States may be in danger of drifting into a situation in which the military is neither well understood nor well used and yet—as was not true in previous eras of military estrangement—is big, politically active, and frequently employed on a large scale to execute American foreign policy. The development of the semi-autonomous military described by the Harvard political scientist Michael Desch isn't healthy in a democracy. In addition, it isn't clear that the U.S. military, for all its political-military expertise, is best placed to decide how it should be used, either at home or abroad. However ignorant of military affairs the Clinton Administration may be, its estimate of the human costs of invading Haiti appears to have been far more accurate than the Pentagon's. Similarly, sixteen months into the Bosnian deployment none of the military's grim warnings that the U.S. military would suffer widespread casualties as it became entangled in a guerrilla war had been realized. This is a testament in part to the professionalism of today's soldiers. But it should also suggest that future Pentagon estimates of the human costs of possible operations deserve to be viewed with great skepticism.
Mutual distrust between the nation's political elites and military leaders could ultimately undercut U.S. foreign policy, making it more difficult to use force effectively. Indeed, this unease may in part explain why the Army was reluctant to take a more activist stance in the Haiti and Bosnia missions, and instead fretted publicly about "mission creep." To begin to repair the relationship, several steps could be taken.
First, consideration should be given to reinstating some form of a draft. Along the lines of the current German system, youths could be given the choice of performing, say, eighteen months of military service or two years of public service.
But the resumption of conscription appears unlikely for the foreseeable future, so several other steps should be considered in order to engage the military with civilian society. ROTC programs should be vastly expanded, especially at elite institutions. The service requirement attached to attending one of the three military academies might be shortened, in order to encourage more military officers to pursue careers in civilian society. Among other things, this might eventually lead to the presence in Congress of more people with military experience. Whenever possible, military officers pursuing higher degrees should be sent to civilian universities, whether or not this means closing some military schools. As Eliot Cohen, a military strategist at Johns Hopkins who is one of the most thoughtful commentators on U.S. civilian-military relations, has suggested, there may even be ways of bringing people into the military later in their lives—possibly at ranks as high as lieutenant colonel. And the military could use the skills of reservists far more imaginatively, especially in an era when civilian technologies are outpacing military ones. To help recruiters draw from the other end of the socio-economic scale, retired Admiral Stanley Arthur suggests that the military establish special preparatory programs that would enable more inner-city youths to enlist.
But the most important change that should be made involves the military only secondarily. This concerns the isolation of professional Americans, or the upper middle class, from the broad concerns of society. Ignorance of the military is, I think, just one manifestation of that larger problem. We live in an era when a Democratic President sends his child to private school and few eyebrows are raised. America's military problem is not unlike that facing parts of the former Soviet Union. In reviewing the depredations of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous militias in thirty-one new states and "ministates" in the old Eastern bloc and the former Yugoslavia, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., an expert on post-Communist transitions, recommended that in order to assert public control over those forces, "it is particularly important to involve the new middle class ... in military service." America would do well to take the same advice.


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HOTEL CALIFORNIA-    1976- BEST QUOTE OF OUR 60s and early 70s-   Lost soul, high, in desert of lost hope, is spiritually dying, but sees a hotel, like a mission church, with a beautiful woman, death, inviting him inside to rest.  Heaven or Hell, guided by Death, he hears other residents welcoming him to their lost world.   California or californication is often a symbol for a lost cursed land of plenty but wasted, in its ruined beauty it seduces lost souls to their ruin.  Lady Death has all the riches of Benzs and her vapid pretty boys, empty of feelings, the "guests" dance in the heat of Hell.  The wine/spirit of 1969 is gone, the idealism of the Sixties, abandoned to empty pleasures that need excuses to tolerate.  The room is copy of brothel with champagne riches.  The people there put themselves there via empty chases after sensation and that lure keeps them chasing.   They try to eat and kill their sins, but The Beast, Satan, can not be killed.    Escape is impossible.  You can check out, die, anytime but can never escape your wasted life.



The Eagles Hotel California [Remastered] 01 Hotel California-1976



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct4iyhslGRs






·      Written by Don Felder, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, this song is about materialism and excess. California is used as the setting, but it could relate to anywhere in America. Don Henley in the London Daily Mail November 9, 2007 said: "Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce."

On November 25, 2007 Henley appeared on the TV news show 60 Minutes, where he was told, "everyone wants to know what this song means." Henley replied: "I know, it's so boring. It's a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was something we knew about."

He offered yet another interpretation in the 2013 History of the Eaglesdocumentary: "It's a song about a journey from innocence to experience."
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Canada”s military mission in Iraq A closeup look at the fight against ISIS
By CTV News -
April 28, 2016
ERBIL, Iraq — Abandoned villages, a shattered bridge, hidden bombs and a steady stream of fighters headed to the frontline.
That’s the scene that greeted Canada’s top general as he paid a dramatic visit to northern Iraq Thursday to the area where Canadian special operations forces soldiers are aiding Peshmerga fighters.
Gen. Jonathan Vance, chief of defence staff, said the Islamic State is doomed to defeat and predicted that Canadian forces and their Peshmerga allies will play a key role in the coming battle for Mosul, the Iraqi city that remains a key extremist stronghold.
“We are on key terrain with a key partner as what is being billed as the final coup de grace of ISIL in Iraq occurs on Mosul,” Vance said.
CTV News and The Toronto Star were on hand as Vance came to take stock of Canada’s military mission, to “get eyes on as we contemplate next steps in the campaign.”
For more than a year, a small group of Canadian special operations forces soldiers have been working here, teaching Peshmerga troops skills that range from the basics — map reading and shooting — to calling in airstrikes.
That mission will get bigger in the coming months with the Liberal decision to end airstrikes and instead triple the number of troops on the ground to act as advisors.
The United States has also committed Apache attack helicopters, more cash and more troops as Western nations lay the groundwork for a final push to defeat ISIS, which has wreaked havoc across Iraq and Syria since 2014.
With the extra personnel, Canada will stretch its reach in this area west of Erbil, assisting Peshmerga along a line more than 100 kilometres long.
All of it is key terrain, some within sight of Mosul.
Vance predicts the battle for the city will unfold over the coming year, a battle delayed as Iraqi forces first seek to oust Islamic extremists from other sites across the country.
“There’s no question that Iraq and the coalition, they all want to get on with it but there’s other things that have to get done,” said Vance, who was making his first visit to Iraq since taking over as chief of defence staff in 2015.
“For a battle that must be started correctly and finished correctly, you don’t want to necessarily rush it,” Vance said.
But when that battle comes, Iraqi forces will squeeze Mosul from the south and it will be up to the Peshmerga soldiers, mentored by Canadian special operations forces troops, to protect the northern flank — and block the ISIS’s path of escape.
“At some point, the coalition and Iraqi security forces will deal with Mosul and our forces will be on vital ground, key to the containment of ISIL,” Vance said.
Vance stressed that the Peshmerga — not Canadians — will be on the frontline to hold Islamic State fighters in place. “We are responsible to train and support them. They’re responsible to hold,” Vance said.
Canadian forces and their Peshmerga allies are already eroding the Islamic State’s capabilities in Mosul, thanks to their proximity to the city which enables intelligence collection and targeting, said Col. Andrew Milburn of the U.S. Marines, who commands coalition special operations forces.
“It’s very careful targeting. Your guys are not causing civilian casualties here. I can affirm that,” Milburn told the Star in an interview earlier this week.
“That’s a hard claim to make but these guys are doing this very well. They’re deliberately going after what we call key nodes in ISIS infrastructure, leadership, (command and control) nodes,” he said.
It was Vance’s first visit to Iraq since taking over as top general last summer and he saw firsthand the devastation caused by Daesh and the ongoing disruption caused by the conflict.
Vance visited a key stretch of the highway linking Erbil and Mosul where it crosses the Khazir River.
In 2014, this territory was all held by ISIS. With Erbil at risk, Peshmerga forces counterattacked, pushing ISIS fighters back. In their retreat, the militants blew up the bridge to stall the Peshmerga counterattack.
Today, two spans of the bridge are nothing more than smashed concrete and twisted metal, resting in the river.
An improvised single-lane, steel girder bridge has been erected in its place. On Thursday afternoon, a steady of cars passed by carrying Peshmerga fighters headed to and from the front, just a short distance to the west. Lacking military transport, they are forced to rely on their personal vehicles to move about.
Three villages, all within eyesight, have been largely abandoned and the buildings and terrain remain littered with explosive devices.
“Anything in the bushes, avoid it. The last thing I want is for you guys is to step on something that goes boom,” a Canadian special operations sergeant cautioned journalists as they awaited Vance’s arrival.
Indeed, the general’s visit — done under a tight cordon of security provided by Canadian special operations forces troops — was not without risk. ISIS militants are just a few kilometres away and their rockets and mortars land on the riverside villages every day, the sergeant said.
Vance cast an expert eye on the demolished bridge and said it highlights the capabilities of ISIS. “That’s a professional military act to drop that bridge,” he said.
But while still dangerous, Vance painted a picture of ISIS as a faltering force, starved of financing, losing terrain and forced to put inexperienced personnel into battle as “cannon fodder.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind — and I don’t want to overplay this — they will lose militarily in Iraq. It’s inevitable,” Vance said.
“But between now and the time they lose militarily they still have the power to generate big events that can cause a lot of problems,” he said.
That’s why local commanders like Maj.-Gen. Aziz Waisi, commander of the Zeravini forces, express gratitude for the work of Canadian soldiers — and appeal for more.
“The Canadian people should be proud of their forces on the ground. They’re doing excellent work with us,” said Waisi, who accompanied Vance.
But like others here, he pressed home their need for better weapons to replace decades-old military gear, equipment like vehicles, anti-tank weapons, night-vision goggles, robots to help defuse improvised explosive devices and drones.
“We are hoping that Canada can assist us more,” Waisi said.
As part of its retooled mission, Canada has committed to providing arms for a new Zeravini commando force. “As we form it and train it, they’ll have the weapons necessary to do the job,” Vance said.
But he quickly adds, “we are not doing a wholesale re-equipping of the Peshmerga.”
Canadian commanders have conceded that more troops on the ground means more risk.
But Vance is hoping Canadians get behind the expanded mission.
“Just because it’s hard and dangerous doesn’t mean it’s bad,” Vance said.
“We do danger. That’s what a military force is for. Canada’s military goes to dangerous places all the time. It’s always for a good cause. I’d like very much for Canadians to put their shoulder behind what we’re doing here,” Vance said.
“Despite the dangers, it is for a good cause,” he said.





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BLOGSPOT:

CANADA MILITARY NEWS: War Hero George S. McGovern opposed the Vietnam War- Castro Fixation and decried America's capacity for Nuclear 'overkill'-I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars 4 young men 2 die in..../musings.... God bless our troops and yours

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Leave Root Causes Aside—Destroy the ISIS ‘State’
·         Of course it would be daunting to solve the conflicts the Islamic State feeds on. But that isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the mission.
Stephen Biddle and Jacob Shapiro’s recent Atlantic article, “America Can’t Do Much About ISIS,” advocated containing the Islamic State and questioned America’s ability to destroy the group. The first problem with this analysis is how the authors define “destroy ISIS.” They compare the amorphous fight against al-Qaeda with the one against ISIS, discussing how to get at the roots of its terrorist ideology and fix the ungoverned space that provides its sanctuary. This leads them repeatedly to conflate destroying ISIS in its current form as a quasi-state with the monumental task of resolving the Syrian Civil War and the Sunni-Shia split in Iraq. To the contrary, if the mission is properly defined, America can destroy ISIS, and must.
James Jeffrey is the Philip Solondz distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute, and a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq. A former infantry officer in the U.S. army, Ambassador Jeffrey served in Germany and Vietnam from 1969 to 1976. Full Bio
Defeating ISIS-as-state is not dependent upon solving Syria as a social, historical, cultural, religious, and governance project, let alone doing the same with Iraq. ISIS feeds on the conflicts in both countries and makes the situation in both worse. But it is possible to defeat ISIS as a “state” and as a military-economic “power”—that is, deal with the truly threatening part— without having to solve the Syrian and Iraqi crises or eliminate ISIS as a set of terrorist cells or source of ideological inspiration. Of course, even if ISIS is destroyed as a state, we would still have the Syrian Civil War and Iraqi disunity, but we have all that now, along with ISIS, which presents its own challenges to the region and the West.
Normally, if one opts not to ignore a foreign-policy problem, the two choices are: Fix it (which in ISIS’s case would mean defeat and destroy it, per America’s official policy), or contain it. The choice is made based on an analysis of the likely costs and risks of eliminating the problem versus those of living with it, as well as the impact of one’s decision on broader concerns. From both points of view, Biddle and Shapiro’s arguments are flawed.
Admittedly the costs of destroying ISIS as a jihadist ideological movement, and its remnants as an insurgency (i.e., what it was in Iraq before 2014), not to speak of “fixing” Syria and Iraq, are just as daunting as Biddle and Shapiro repeatedly argue. But that isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the mission. The mission should be crushing ISIS as a state and as a military and economic power. That is a different challenge, and one far more responsive to conventional military power. Local forces with minimal U.S. indirect support have already made progress in some areas, including recently in Shadadi, Syria, and Ramadi, Iraq. ISIS has fewer foot soldiers than at any time since 2014, and has problems, as the authors note, paying its bills.
A much more robust indirect support package of advisers, artillery, and attack helicopters, more special-operations raids, and even more liberal rules of engagement for air strikes than those just adopted (decentralizing strike decisions, accepting slightly higher risk of civilian casualties, and using more airpower and more powerful bombs) could generate more rapid victories. A limited commitment of U.S. ground troops—two brigades of 5,000 troops each, reinforced by other NATO forces, along with local allies—could make even more rapid progress. These would supplement the 5,000 or so American troops now in Iraq training local forces and the 250 special-operations forces just deployed to Syria. Thus even a tweaking of current U.S. indirect support (now in the works), and certainly limited direct American combat, could destroy ISIS relatively rapidly as a “state” and “army.” That would leave a “day after” problem, but would solve ISIS-as-a-state.
And the U.S., at least sometimes, has effectively dealt with such “days after” without massive American troop presence, from northern Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991, to Kosovo, El Salvador, and Colombia. But even a messy post-ISIS situation is better than containment, given that course’s dangers and costs. It’s those, which the authors largely ignore, that have to be weighed against the costs of destroying the ISIS state.
The costs of containment begin with a huge military campaign, in terms of time (almost two years so far, with no end in sight), forces (thousands of American ground troops, large coalition contributions, hundreds of aircraft, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi regular and Iraqi and Syrian irregular forces), and money ($7 billion so far, with billions more spent by the Iraqis), just to “contain” and slowly degrade ISIS.
If the Baghdad and Kurdistan governments start collapsing, any ‘containment’ strategy would as well.
Right now, maintaining troops and dealing with millions of internally displaced persons is bankrupting the Iraqi state (and the Kurdistan government) and generating much political turbulence. If those governments start collapsing, any “containment” strategy would as well.
Finally, if you don’t deal with a problem, particularly in the Middle East, it usually gets worse. The Syrian Civil War, unchecked, eventually spawned ISIS, a migration crisis straining Europe, and a worrisome Russian intervention.
Until ISIS is destroyed as a state, it can still launch horrific terrorist attacks, provoke political collapse in Baghdad or among the Iraqi Kurds, and even trigger a descent into a Sunni-Shia regional conflict, if Shia Iran targets ISIS and thereby threatens the Sunni Arab territory in which ISIS is nested. (ISIS remnants could still threaten terrorist attacks, but not of the same magnitude or with the same geostrategic consequences.)
The second consideration in any decision about how to handle a foreign-policy problem is its impact on broader foreign relations. For example, in 2007, the U.S. opted not to act itself against Syria’s secret al-Kibar nuclear reactor, which Israel destroyed in an airstrike that year. This was not because U.S. action was less risky than an Israeli attack, but largely because America’s “plate” in the Middle East was full with two wars, along with negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But today, after Obama’s 2013 failure to enforce his self-declared “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the forces of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the U.S. needs to build credibility that it will follow up threats of force with action to counter states like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea that threaten the existing global order. The best place to build such credibility, with maximum chance of success and least escalation risk, is the fight against ISIS.
Finally, Biddle and Shapiro’s arguments all would have sounded equally reasonable if made against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Syrian intervention. But he went ahead, and with a fraction of America’s diplomatic and military capabilities achieved a limited but important victory, avoiding the “quagmire” President Obama predicted. And America can’t?

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21st Century-

Our Revolution in Military Affairs


Anna Silk
The battlefield of today’s world will be a relatively sparse one. Thanks to advancements in technology, wars will be fought with the push of a button rather than an invasion of thousands of troops à la World War 2. We are seeing technology rise to the forefront of military operations and be utilized in lieu of the human soldier. What are the implications for this intersection of technology and its military usage? That is the question I will seek to answer this summer through my contributions to the blog. By exploring the mechanics and implications of drone usage and the newfound battle arena of cyber warfare, I will attempt to paint a picture of our modern war landscape and question how this technology changes the nature of war and our understanding of it. I will do these through short exposes on various fields within drone and cyber war, focusing on topics as the National Security Agency, the use of robots, and computer worms like Stuxnet.
One concept that really captures this technological advancement and its application to the military is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, or, RMA. Throughout history, there have been several of these “Revolutions,” spurred, usually, by the invention of new weapons or tactics. There was the Napoleonic Revolution of the early 1800s, which witnessed the creation of the levée en masse, or, mandatory military conscription, thus leading to vast armies capable of increased fighting.1 The Land Warfare Revolution of the late 1800s was characterized by the invention of the telegraph and railroad system.2 This Revolution was especially apparent during the Civil War, where generals relied on telegraphs for more spontaneous communication with other officers to relay troop movements, and trains were utilized for transport of food and soldiers.3 War thus became a more concerted effort, with increased ability to mobilize and communicate. There are, all in all, ten recorded Revolutions, beginning in the 1300s with the Infantry Revolution and leading up to the most recently recorded one, the Nuclear Revolution of the late twentieth century.4 What these Revolutions show is that warfare is not a stagnant enterprise, but rather a shifting mode of technology and organization that adapts to, and serves, the needs of those engaged in fighting.
So what does our Revolution look like? 21st century warfare will inevitably be dominated by information technologies that lend an increased accuracy and lethality to fighting.5 In defining information technologies, I refer to computers and other communications platforms such as cellphones and televisions.6 Here, I will outline a few characteristics of what is currently happening with war and what we can expect in the future.
·         With the use now of Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVS, aka drones) and the ability for computers to monitor and launch attacks thousands of miles from an intended target, our capability to conduct surveillance and lead orchestrated attacks has risen.7
·         A marked increase in involvement of the civilian sector in military affairs as corporate contractors begin to develop and supply more weaponry.8 For example, as Time reports, the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States “has been the most privatized engagement in U.S. history, with private contractors actually outnumbering traditional troops.”9
·         Steven Metz, a researcher at the Strategic Studies Institute in Pennsylvania notes that, “ ‘information superiority’ will be the lifeblood of a post-modern military and thus the key to battlefield success.”10 Who, right now, is capable of such “information superiority”? The United States. Political theorists cite the 1991 Gulf War as a turning point for U.S. military operations, that the technology we developed to refine our air strike capabilities finally proved itself in battle.11 We are continuing that trajectory today in developing and applying new technologies to the battlefield and fueling asymmetry.
·         There will be a rise in asymmetrical warfare.12 This type of warfare occurs when a powerful entity, such as the United States, has an advantage (currently in the field of military technology) over other states that are weaker in that field.13 This promotes the use of atypical military tactics by these weaker states to subvert and counteract the advancement of the U.S military.14 Examples of asymmetrical warfare in recent times include 9/11, where terrorists utilized planes and box cutters, seemingly ordinary objects, and used them as weapons against the powerful U.S.15
This Revolution is ongoing and has consequences in the field of military policy and action. What we must consider now is the nature of warfare and how it will change…exploring the rise of the drone and computer as modern weapons of warfare is a good start. Stay tuned.
Works Cited:
Krepinevich, Andrew F. “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions.” The National Interest, no. 37 (1994): 30-42. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42896863, 34.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 36.
Cohen, Eliot A. “A Revolution in Warfare.” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 2 (1996): 37-54. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047487, 43.
“Information Technology.” Wikipedia. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology.
Cohen, Foreign Affairs, 43.
Ibid.
Hagedorn, Ann. “Is America’s Second Contractors’ War Drawing Near?” Time. Last modified August 29, 2014. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://time.com/3222342/invisible-soldiers-iraq-contractor-war/.
Metz, Steven. Armed Conflict in the 21st Century: The Information Revolution and Post-Modern Warfare. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, War Army Collee, 2000, 5.
Cohen, Foreign Affairs, 37.
Metz, Armed Conflict in the 21st Century: The Information Revolution and Post-Modern Warfare, 6.
Norton-Taylor, Richard. “Asymmetric Warfare.” The Guardian. Last modified October 3, 2001. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/03/afghanistan.socialsciences.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Photo:
U.S. Air Force. Military and Computers. Photograph. Wired. November 4, 2010. Accessed May 28, 2015. http://www.wired.com/2010/11/it-begins-militarys-cyberwar-command-is-fully-operational.
Author Bio:
Anna Silk is a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University originally from Los Angeles, California. Majoring in International Studies with a concentration in Security Studies and a minor in History, she hopes to work in the field of international affairs one day. She discovered her passion for the subject during a yearlong independent research project she completed in high school on U.S. counterterrorism actions against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other topics she is interested in include nuclear non-proliferation issues, cyber warfare, and bioweapons.
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Why Millennials Are Not Interested In Your Corporate Service Program
Category:
When a Millennial employee swipes their card to gain access to the company’s building, their interests, networks, and personal passions don’t remain at the door. After all, the concept of work-life balance is not a term with which Millennials are familiar. They live an environment where work-life blending is the norm. Like it or not, the lines are blurring.
When it comes to community engagement, the lines are also blurred. Millennials see their involvement with causes not as a thing that happens outside of work, but as an interest to be explored throughout the day. The data continues to suggest that Millennials place higher value on companies that offer service and pro-bono, skills-based volunteering opportunities.
If this is the case, then why are Millennial employees not getting involved in your organization’s CSR programming?
The answer lies in how corporations approach volunteer programming, and whether or not they can be an asset in a Millennial’s search for community interaction, experimentation and action.
It is Not About Your Company
Millennials are interested in making things happen in their communities, and look to any institution – their work, home, and/or faith – to channel their passion. When doing ‘good’ through the company is focused on corporate attention in the process, it will loose its importance with Millennial employees. Millennials care about the issues, not the company wanting to gain awareness for efforts addressing the issues. The goal of the company should be to help Millennials channel their passion to causes and experiment with service to find the issues they care about.
It Is About Being Challenged
Millennials are inspired by the opportunity to tackle a challenge, build a prototype that will solve a problem, and create a concrete solution. Volunteer programming based on long standing relationships with community organizations is appreciated, but may not be personal and challenging to the Millennial. Identifying and providing opportunities that will challenge their thinking and test their skills will draw them closer to community organizations and ultimately more service.
The Big Question – Why?
Millennials need to know why their participation in service or workplace giving matters. Not why it matters to the company, but why their work will matter to the people they help. If companies are going to ask Millennials to participate in service, just like nonprofits, they need to report back on the people helped and how the community issue is different because of their efforts. Even if the experience is a one-time volunteer project, it is imperative that Millennials are provided feedback to quickly inspire future engagement. Remember: this generation gets instantaneous feedback from social networking all the time.
The ultimate goal of any corporation is to be the conduit for Millennial cause action. Companies acting as honest and fair brokers of Millennial service, skill, and interest with causes will move into a different role than where they are currently. This new role, as manager and advisor to Millennials on their cause interests, will place a new value on the company. A value driven by their Millennial employees that represents one of trust, appreciation, and openness to a very personal thing – the issues in the community that drive their passion. The bottom line? Millennials invested in the ethos of the company.
Join us on July 18, 2013 at MCON to explore how Millennials are redefining their workplace engagement, connection with causes, and how they activate for good.
Derrick Feldmann is the CEO of Achieve – the agency that leads the Millennial Impact Project - a research initiative to understand how Millennials connect, involve, and give to causes. He is the organizer of MCON, the annual conference on Millennial cause engagement and the coauthor of Cause for Change: The Why and How of Nonprofit Millennial Engagement.


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Analysis of Financial Support to the Surviving Spouses and Children of Casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

Research Questions
How have the deaths of service members during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan affected the subsequent labor market earnings of their surviving spouses?
Do survivor benefits provided by the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Social Security Administration (SSA) compensate for lost household earnings?


This study examines how the deaths of service members during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have affected the subsequent labor market earnings of their surviving spouses and the extent to which survivor benefits provided by the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration compensate for lost household earnings. It also assesses the extent to which payments that surviving spouses and children receive compensate for earnings losses attributable to combat deaths. The labor market earnings of households experiencing a combat death in the years following deployment are compared with those of deployed but uninjured service-member households. Because the risk of combat death is likely to be correlated with characteristics of service members that could themselves affect household labor market outcomes (e.g., pay grade, military occupation, risk-taking behavior), the study controlled for a rich array of individual-level characteristics, including labor market outcomes for both service members and spouses prior to deployment. This approach includes potentially unobserved factors that are unique to specific households and fixed over time and increases the likelihood that the results capture the causal effect of combat death on household earnings.
Key Findings
Household Labor Market Earnings Decline Substantially in the Years Following the Combat Death of a Member of the Household
·         Household earnings losses following the combat death of a household member are economically large and persistent over time.
·         Most (approximately 90 percent) of the losses can be attributed to the loss of the deceased service member's own earnings, with the remainder attributable to declines in spousal earnings.
·         Recurrent benefits replace a substantial fraction of earnings losses, but meaningful income losses remain after taking them into account.
·         The combined value of recurrent and lump-sum benefits can fully offset household earnings losses for 20 years or more.


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Attracting College-Bound Youth into the Military
Toward the Development of New Recruiting Policy Options


Although the military's need for enlisted personnel has declined by almost one-third since the end of the cold war, the armed services are finding it difficult to meet their recruiting goals. Among ongoing changes in the civilian labor market is a strong demand for skilled labor, which has prompted an increasing number of "high quality" youth to pursue post-secondary education and subsequent civilian employment. Because of this competition for high quality youth, the Department of Defense may want to explore new options for attracting desirable young people into the armed forces. The military, for example, offers a myriad of options for service members to take college courses while in active service. However, the programs do not in fact generate significant increases in educational attainment during time in service. One popular program, the Montgomery GI Bill, enrolls large numbers of individuals, but the vast majority of service members use their benefits after separating from service. Thus, the military does not receive the benefits of a more educated and productive workforce, unless the individuals subsequently join a reserve component. The authors suggest the Department of Defense should consider nontraditional policy options to enhance recruitment of college-bound youth. Recruiters could target more thoroughly students on two-year college campuses, or dropouts from two- or four-year colleges. Options for obtaining some college before military service could be expanded by allowing high school seniors to first attend college, paid for by the military, and then enlist. Or the student might serve in a reserve component while in college and then enter an active component after college. Alternatively, the military could create an entirely new path for combining college and military service by encouraging enlisted veterans to attend college and then reenlist (at a higher pay grade). The most promising alternatives should be evaluated in a national experiment designed to test their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, similar to the one that led to the creation of the Army College Fund and the Navy College Fund.


Table of Contents
·         Preface PDF
·         Figures PDF
·         Tables PDF
·         Summary PDF
·         Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments PDF
·         Chapter One
Introduction PDF
·         Chapter Two
Framework and Data PDF
·         Chapter Three
Trends in Post-Secondary Education PDF
·         Chapter Four
Military Opportunities for Combining Service and Post-Secondary Education PDF
·         Chapter Five
Designing Policy Options to Attract College-Bound Youth: Issues and Examples PDF
·         Chapter Six
Conclusions and Areas for Future Research PDF
·         References PDF


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USA- Alternative Ways to Meet Your Goals Without Joining The Military

There are many reasons people consider joining the military. You may be thinking about money for college, job training or the physical challenge. You may just need to get out of the house, out of the neighborhood, out on your own. You may want to travel, serve your country, or do something meaningful with your life.
Before you consider enlistment, it is important to know of the hundreds of other options available for you.
Paying for College
The government provides financial aid to help students pay for college. There are also millions of dollars available in scholarships and grants.
FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Apply for student financial aid from the federal government, including grants, loans, & work-study. Its free. You can download FAFSA forms in English or Spanish, get help filling out the forms and track the status of your application. www.fafsa.ed.gov.
Federal Student Aid Information Center 1-800-4-FED-AID (1-800-433-3243)
Scholarship Search Tools. There are several web tools that help you search for scholarships.
·         FastWeb
Various National Scholarships and Grants
·         United Negro College Fund
·         Scholastic Art & Writing Award
·         Art & Design Scholarship Guide
·         McNair Scholars Program
Getting Ready For College
Free SAT/ACT Test Prep:
·         http://www.number2.com
·         http://www.testprepreview.com/
CollegePrep-101
A Web-based Course to Help Students Prepare for College.
·         Or read it online.
Job Training & Trade Schools:
Want to become a culinary artist or learn cosmetology? Maybe, you want to learn a skilled trade that will provide you with a good living. If this type of future is where you see yourself heading, but you don’t have the necessary skills, you can get job training from a variety of sources. Non-profits, community colleges, large corporations and vocational schools provide the necessary skills training to do a variety of jobs and skilled trades. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate among military veterans age 20-24 is three times higher than the national average. Before you think about the military, check out these options.
Directories and Databases
·         Vocational Information Center. This is a GREAT website. It includes a searchable directory of trade, career & technical schools, and apprenticeships, and much more.
·         Consortium for Worker Education. This program provides training for bakers, artists, and chefs.
·         School of Cooperative Technical Education. Various FREE courses from computer to culinary arts, to cosmetology.
·         Youth Action Programs and Homes Inc. A program that provides GED and construction training.
Be sure to do a background check on a school before signing up. Many of them are completely legit, but some are a rip-off. Here are some tips on how to do this.
National Opportunities>
·         Job Corps. This program gets you out of the house, and provides academic, vocational, and social skills training you need to gain independence and get quality, long-term jobs or further your education.
·         YouthBuild. Teaches young people how to build new homes for people in need, and new lives for themselves. Receive a combination of classroom academic and job skills development and on-site training in a construction trade.
·         Americorps. Jobs in all types of community programs. Provides training, work experience, stipend and scholarships.
Finding a Job
Finding a job is a lot of work. Start by checking out your local newspapers to get an idea of what is out there and what you are qualified for.
Job Search Sites:
·         Craigslist
·         HotJobs
·         Monster.com
·         Career Builder
·         Idealist
See the World : Living/Working/Volunteering Abroad
“Traveling” with the military doesn’t exactly mean traveling. If you are lucky enough not to get sent to a war zone, you’ll spend most of your time on a US military base, oftentimes to a country that doesn’t welcome the US Army. “Traveling” with the Navy can mean 6 months confined to a ship, without ever going ashore. If this is not what you have in mind, there are many other options.
·         Peace Brigades International (Guatemala, Columbia, and Indonesia). PBI offers volunteer positions, paid job positions (which are limited) and internships.
·         Service Civil International. Has short term (2- weeks) and long term (3-12 months) opportunities that costs approximately $175 plus cost of travel. Includes food and housing.
·         VE Global Voluntarios de la Esperanza. This program offers an intensive (living with host family) and part time (mostly administrative work) program in Chile. This unpaid program last three months and will require some out of pocket expenses.
·         Operations Crossroads Africa Volunteers. Volunteer work in Africa. Program costs $3500.
·         Independent Volunteer. Volunteer database of work around the world organized by country and type of work.
·         Global Crossroad. Global Crossroad organizes volunteer and internship programs.
·         Global Volunteers. Global Volunteers organizes teams of volunteers to work in local communities and help with projects run by local leaders.
There are many useful books and websites on cheap travel. You can get them at your local library or buy them used on amazon.com for very little money.
·         Finding Voluntary Work Abroad: All the Information You Need for Getting Valuable Work Experience Overseas (How-to Series) by Mark Hempshell
·         Cheap!: "How-To" Strategies and Tips for Free Flights & Cheap Travel, by Vicki Mills
·         You Can Travel Free, Robert William Kirk
·         How to Go Almost Anywhere for Almost Nothing, Maureen Hennessy
·         Encyclopedia of Cheap Travel (Updated Annually), Terrance Zepke
Challenge Yourself
There are many ways to challenge yourself physically & mentally. There are other careers that command respect. Here are some things to check out:
·         Firefighter
·         Aviation School Directory. A complete directory of flight schools, aviation colleges, helicopter training, and aircraft mechanic schools.
·         Police and Detectives
Serving your Country
Many young people feel that the only way they can serve their country and community is to join the military. That is not true! There are many opportunities to become a hero, build communities, and promote peace and justice without risking your life or taking another.
An excellent book of alternatives called “It’s My Life” is available FREE to youth. Websites that can give you some ideas, tips, next steps, and local, national, and international professional and volunteer opportunities:
·         Idealist
·         City Year
·         AmeriCorps
·         Public Allies
·         City Limits
·         PaseSetter
For more information:
Ya-Ya Network*
212-239-0022
Project YANO
760-753-5718
War Resisters League
212-288-6193 / 212-288-0450
*The Ya-Ya Network compiled this document.
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Beyond the Military: Why the US Needs More National Service Options
July 2, 2015 By Stephen Hadley
Building a next generation of American foreign policy and national security leaders requires new options for national service.

Back in November in recognition of Veterans Day, I wrote a piece to honor the service and sacrifice of our veterans and those currently serving in our military. The piece talked about the importance of fostering and nurturing a culture of service in our country – “where service becomes the norm rather than the exception.” Let us once again reflect on national service here at home.

With many others, I serve on the Leadership Council of The Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute. This is a bipartisan initiative led by retired General Stanley McChrystal, working to transform how we think about national service. The Franklin Project believes that a year of service should be a common opportunity, civic rite of passage and cultural expectation for young Americans. From the birth of our nation through today, America has always recognized that a commitment to each other and a sense of shared responsibility to our country as citizens is a critical part of our security and well-being as a nation.
Transforming the idea of national service here at home and elevating it as an issue in our personal conversations, political debates and media coverage is going to require a serious concerted effort. The time is ripe for this sort of vision, particularly in light of the upcoming presidential elections. While nothing may be more powerful than an idea whose time has come, the idea needs a campaign behind it with surrogates and visionaries to amplify the idea around the country. Between the barbecues and fireworks of this July 4th holiday, let us think about the sacrifices made for our nation and the sacrifices we as a nation can make today for its future.
National service doesn’t just make an impact on local communities and provide skills and benefits to the individual doing the service, but it also has the potential to get more young people interested in careers in foreign policy and national security. There are a wide array of service programs, some of which develop skills that would be extremely beneficial to the next generation of security and foreign policy leaders. There are many individuals who may be interested in serving their country, but are either not qualified or interested in joining the military. Exposing young people to service programs like FEMA Corps, Global HealthCorps & Peace Corps can expose them to crisis response here at home and working to address various challenges in countries around the globe.
Without private-public partnerships and investment, we will never be able to get to the transformative vision towards which the Franklin Project and its National Service Alliance are working. Americans have a strong desire to serve, but right now there simply aren’t enough full-time opportunities to meet the demand. For example, just one in three Peace Corps applicants are able to serve and hundreds of thousands are turned away from AmeriCorps. Just last week, national service funding has been put at risk on Capitol Hill. The House and Senate are each considering bills that would reduce the budget of the Corporation for National Service, or CNCS, by up to $370 million, a 34 percent reduction over the previous year. These proposed cuts would remove AmeriCorps members from schools and communities, and would eliminate several core programs that serve millions of seniors, at-risk youth, veterans and people with disabilities. These bills would destroy the public-private partnership approach of national service that last year generated $873 million in outside resources to increase community impact and stretch the federal dollar. CNCS funds should not be cut. Investing in national service yields significant return on investment for our nation – not just in the problems it can help us to address – but in terms of economic savings. Every federal dollar invested in national service yields $2.20 in savings to other government programs. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?sz=600x300&c=525346080&iu=%2F617%2Fdefenseone.com%2Fsection_ideas%2Fcontent%2Fpid_116872&t=noscript%3Dtrue%26referring_domain%3Dwww.ask.com%26pos%3Ddefenseone-instream%26level%3D0
The Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute recently launched its own corps of ambassadors to serve as powerful voices on national service in local communities around our country. For the United States, at the most basic level, the role of our ambassadors around the globe has been to represent the interests and policies of our country. Similarly, The Franklin Project Ambassadors Program has selected 45 individuals around the country based on their service experience and demonstrated leadership to help advance the Franklin Project vision in local communities across the country – in 35 cities across 25 states. These ambassadors encourage discussion of national service in the 2016 election conversation, increase service year positions in their communities and foster the next generation of national service leaders. These leaders will also be executing a local event in their respective cities over the upcoming year. This month, these ambassadors traveled to the Washington DC area to participate in an intensive 3-day training to prepare them for this mission.
National service has traditionally been a bipartisan issue. Presidents on both sides of the aisle have played a role in advancing service in our country through the creation of new programs and the expansion of existing ones. Let us this July 4th ask all those candidates aspiring the presidency to make a similar public commitment to national service.

Building a next generation of American foreign policy and national security leaders requires new options for national service.


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2da youngbloods NOT going to sacrifice 4 flag and nation- It's 2016 folks and we are in a f**king mess... UN is worse than Leage of Nations.... and nations at war same as when time began... we need education and prosperity for all not hate and war....  so let's dump the politicos and $$$ men and let nations look after nations.... links


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 #BarackObama4SecretaryGeneralUN - clean that filthy house up.... u'd b perfect







UN secretary general: The other New York race - BBC News

www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35997985

Apr 12, 2016 ... Who is in the running to succeed Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general of the United Nations? ... Just as Campaign 2016 could end up with the election of the first female US president, there's a strong possibility that the next head of the UN will become the organisation's first female .... Obama laughs at WHCD ...
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    Why Obama as UN Secretary General is Very Unlikely | Frontpage ...

    www.frontpagemag.com/.../why-obama-un-secretary-general-very-unlikely-daniel-greenfield - Cached - Similar
    12 Jan 2016 ... Even OIC support would be far from certain now that the Saudis and their ... This
    is the sort of job that Kerry is insane enough to want. ... what Obama and
    Netanyahu are doing than any American or Israeli ... If Obama becomes UN
    Secretary General, that is the final ... He needs to pay the price of traitors.
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  1. Articles: To become UN Sec General Obama must 'Solve' the ...

    www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/to_become_un...
    To become UN Sec General Obama must 'Solve' the Existence ... the beginning of a run for UN Secretary General, ... Obama’s orders when he runs for UN ... 
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THE CRUELTY OF THE GOOD ONES... who have had their souls stolen by the vicious hate and cruelty in the real world of truly evil hate... and when the come home... the haunting begins... and their comrades who died  right there by them.... Canada's Soldiers of Suicide- and this is how Canada treats her sons and daughters who souls are 2 haunted to live.... CANADA'S SOLDIERS OF SUICIDE... PTSD-


Left behind

After an army captain took his life, his family turned to a scholarship program for children of fallen soldiers. They didn’t get the help they expected, Renata D’Aliesio reports

















Sherri Elms and her children Jake and Stephanie looking through old family photos at their home in Kingston.
JOHNNY C Y LAM/FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Sherri Elms was walking to her office when she received a much-anticipated e-mail from Canada Company, a charity that has the ear of the military and federal government and the backing of some of the country’s most prominent business leaders and wealthiest people.
A pharmacist and military wife, she had inquired about the organization’s scholarship program for children of fallen soldiers. Her husband, a respected infantry officer who did tours in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Afghanistan, had died nearly five months earlier, on a chilly overcast morning in Kingston, in November, 2014.
The sudden death of Captain Brad Elms of the Royal Canadian Regiment shook many in the Canadian Forces. The country’s top commander, General Jonathan Vance, then a lieutenant-general, flew in for his funeral.
“Your husband, and his enormous contribution to our nation, is an account of both great pride and tremendous tragedy for all of Canada, an account that very few Canadians will ever understand,” read the first part of the e-mail to Ms. Elms from Canada Company president Angela Mondou.
Ms. Elms was told her inquiry was carefully considered. But the charity’s three-member scholarship committee – which includes philanthropist Garfield Mitchell, Bay Street legal titan William Braithwaite and Canada Company founder Blake Goldring – concluded that her two children were not eligible for the education fund because the circumstances of her husband’s death did not meet the organization’s scholarship criteria.
The rub is this: Capt. Elms did not die a war hero in Afghanistan. The 51-year-old soldier, one of about 40,000 who served in Canada’s longest military operation, took his life five years after returning from the Kandahar battlefront. He had been treated on and off for major depressive disorder for about a decade. His family believes he also had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but he never sought a diagnosis because he worried it would destroy his army career.
“It just crushed me that Brad’s service was so discounted,” Ms. Elms says, her children, Jake and Stephanie, by her side in their old brick house near Queen’s University. “How is 33 years of service, four tours, any less honourable?”
















Captain Brad Elms and Governor General David Johnston.
COURTESY SHERRI ELMS

Capt. Elms is part of a growing list of casualties that had long been hidden. Officially, 158 Canadian soldiers died on the Afghanistan mission, which ended in 2014. What had not been public until recently was that at least 62 military members and veterans have killed themselves after returning from the gruelling operation, swelling the war’s toll to 220, a continuing Globe and Mail investigation has found.
The Afghanistan mission was a contributing factor in some of the suicides, although it is unclear how many. A military board of inquiry determined that Capt. Elms’ death was attributable to his military service. Veterans Affairs concluded his service-connected mental illness was “the underlying cause of his death.”
Even so, the fact that Capt. Elms killed himself means his legacy and his family are treated differently in a number of ways. His name – and those of the 61 others – is not on Afghanistan war memorials. There is no grand public thank-you for their service or collective embrace for their loved ones’ grief.








Captain Brad Elms and his son, Jake.COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
For Ms. Elms, the scholarship rejection from Canada Company landed like a sucker punch. She stood on the sidewalk and cried after reading the charity’s e-mail on her phone on March 31, 2015. What stung was the message – and what it symbolized about military suicide. It made the family feel as if others thought the army captain’s death was shameful, and that he was less of a soldier because he took his own life. The rejection seemed out of step with the Canadian Forces’ evolving thinking on suicide and with the public’s increasing awareness of PTSD. It was a harsh reminder of the discord between the ideal of military strength and the reality of mental illness.
“It was like rubbing salt into the wound,” Stephanie, 21, says of Canada Company’s decision. “They don’t want to see this nitty-gritty suicide thing. It doesn’t fit with the narrative of the glorified soldier.”
No members of Canada Company’s scholarship committee were available to comment to The Globe, after repeated requests over six weeks. Ms. Mondou, who was a captain in the air force and worked as a logistics officer in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf War, says the issue of suicide was not contemplated when the scholarship program was created in 2007, at the height of Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan. The query from Ms. Elms was the charity’s first scholarship request from the family of a soldier who died this way.

Your husband, and his enormous contribution to our nation, is an account of both great pride and tremendous tragedy for all of Canada, an account that very few Canadians will ever understand.
General Jonathan Vance, then a lieutenant-general, in an email to Sherri Elms
Ms. Mondou notes that Canada Company’s education fund is finite and was established specifically for children of Forces members killed while on a military operation. She adds that donors provided funding on the basis of this mandate, and that the scholarship program has not received government money.
“We have a commitment to our donors to support the children of Canadian soldiers who … have been killed while serving in an active role in a military mission, and we take that very seriously,” Ms. Mondou says. The scholarship committee’s decision was fully supported by the charity’s board of directors, Ms. Mondou adds. Donors, she says, were not consulted about Ms. Elms’ request.
Canada Company has made exceptions to its eligibility criteria in the past for children of parents killed in training mishaps in Canada and while on leave from overseas operations. The charity’s education fund, valued at nearly $2.6-million at the end of 2014, is one of largest private scholarship programs for children of military members.
















Family photo of Captain Brad Elms, his wife Sherri and his son Jake.
REPRODUCED BY JOHNNY C Y LAM/COURTESY ELMS FAMILY

The Globe surveyed 21 other private and government education-assistance programs available to children of fallen veterans and found that only one other – the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Fallen Heroes Scholarship – does not include students who lost a parent to suicide. In one other case – the Project Hero scholarship that is offered at about 60 colleges and universities and affiliated with Canada Company – the participating institutions have no common policy on inclusion of deaths by suicide.
Retired lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, a former senator and one of about 600 members of Canada Company listed on the charity’s website, is urging the organization to rethink its scholarship position on service-related suicides.
“It is crass and has to be completely changed,” he said while in Toronto for a screening of the Afghanistan war film Hyena Road. “The children of those who are suffering from PTSD are living in hell, and there is next to no support for them,” he added. “You have an organization that could, in fact, pull them out of that and give them a breath of hope.”
After Canada Company’s rejection, the Elms family did not apply for other military-related scholarships. Ms. Elms says they just could not endure another battle after what they went through in Capt. Elms’ final years, in which the proud and caring soldier, father and husband unravelled after his return from Afghanistan. He was, by the end, scarcely recognizable.

Broken bootstraps

















Tall, smart and pragmatic, Brad Elms was also a tremendous athlete who won the army’s version of the Ironman race.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY

Capt. Elms was once a poster boy for the superhuman. At the age of 29, he won the military’s version of the Ironman at the Petawawa base, northwest of Ottawa. The punishing race starts with a 32-kilometre run in combat boots and a 40-pound rucksack on the shoulders. Next, contestants must carry a canoe over their head for four kilometres and make their way to the Ottawa River for an eight-kilometre paddle before a six-kilometre push on foot to the finish – still in combat boots, still hauling the rucksack.
Capt. Elms was “a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-and-get-on-with-it” kind of man, Ms. Elms recalls. “‘That’s how you win an Ironman,’ he would say. ‘Put one foot in front of the other and keep going – no matter what.’”
The couple were teenagers when they met on the dance floor of a bar near the Gagetown base in New Brunswick. Sherri McHarg, a bright, sweet-looking pharmacy student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, was visiting her father for the summer. Capt. Elms was a private then, fresh into his military career. The Ontario-raised soldier was tall, smart, eloquent and pragmatic. He was an emotional rock with a soft side, courting his future wife with song.
He enlisted in the army right after high school. He did not come from a rich military family background, but he had found a sense of belonging in the cadets program during a difficult stretch in his teen years. His first overseas deployment was to Somalia in December, 1992, with the Canadian Airborne Regiment. The country’s residents were starving; a United Nations peacekeeping mission was organized to thwart the theft of international aid.

Brad was a pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get on with it [kind of man]. ‘That’s how you win an Ironman,’ he would say. ‘Put one foot in front of the other and keep going – no matter what.’
Sherri Elms
Canadian troops won praise for distributing humanitarian supplies and helping establish civilian police in their area of responsibility. But the horrific torture and killing of a 16-year-old Somali boy who had sneaked into a Canadian military compound cast a shadow over the country’s efforts. Two soldiers were charged in the slaying and one was convicted of manslaughter. The federal government later disbanded the Airborne regiment.
The Somalia tour left a deep mark on Capt. Elms. He lost a close friend on the mission. Corporal Michael Abel was shot and killed on May 3, 1993, when a fellow member accidentally discharged his rifle while cleaning it. Capt. Elms was nearby, and Cpl. Abel had been like a little brother to him.
Cpl. Abel’s death was one of several “emotionally traumatic events” that Capt. Elms was exposed to during his deployments, according to a partly censored military board of inquiry report on his suicide. Details of the traumatic events were blacked out in the 18-page report provided to his widow in August, 2015. What exactly he witnessed and experienced in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Afghanistan is a mystery to his family. Like many soldiers, he did not talk about the harsh realities of war or peacekeeping with his spouse and kids.
















Captain Brad Elms and his son Jake.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY

Based with the Royal Canadian Regiment in Gagetown from 1994 to 2005, Capt. Elms was diagnosed with clinical depression after his Bosnia deployment. But it was not until he returned from a seven-month tour in Afghanistan in the spring of 2009 that his family noticed a big change in him. He started drinking heavily. His son and daughter, who were teenagers at the time, began tiptoeing around the house for fear of setting him off.
He would get angry at everything and nothing. He would yell if a cup was left on the kitchen counter or if the house did not look clean enough. Jake often intervened in screaming matches between his father and mother.
“I had to keep yelling him down,” Jake, 23, remembers. “His reaction to things was totally disproportional to what was actually happening.”
The honours student struggled to cope with his new home life. It became harder to remember the father that was. Capt. Elms used to take his children camping and hiking. He got them into running and helped them with their essays. He had encouraged them to excel, in and out of the classroom.
Capt. Elms never hit his wife or children, but he did not have to lay a hand on his family to hurt them. He was an imposing figure – husky with a deep voice. His words cut deep.
“The person that I grew up with and went camping with in New Brunswick was not the same person,” his daughter explains at the family’s dining table. “It wasn’t because my dad suddenly realized he was going to be an asshole for the rest of his life. It was because he was so, so sick.”

Dire choices

Eleven months before his death, Capt. Elms wrote a list of options for his future: divorce; no divorce, just leave and send money; get out of the military; stay; and suicide. Suicide was listed first.
He then wrote that he would never do any of the above because he was “a crazy, angry, abusive, fuck-up.”
Ms. Elms found the note after his death on a clipboard in his woodworking section of the garage. “It was full of self-loathing,” she says. She shredded the paper.
“He never felt it was his illness,” his daughter notes. “He felt like he had done all this awful wrong in his life.”

In my view, those who commit suicide and it is deemed caused or contributed to by service to Canada, their children must be treated like those of casualties that are caused by direct physical action. Mental injuries are every bit as devastating as physical ones and we [should] look after their survivors in an appropriate manner.
Retired general and former chief of the defence staff Rick Hillier
In his last year, Capt. Elms confessed to his wife that he had been thinking about taking his life. But he tried to dissuade her from mentioning it to his commanders. He told her, “You can’t use the S word, Sherri, because if you use that, I will not be deployable. And then I might as well be dead.”
Worried about his safety, Ms. Elms told his boss, padre, family doctor and friends that he was not well and was thinking about suicide. He denied it when they asked him. The weekend before he died, Ms. Elms wanted to take him to the emergency department for treatment. He told her to go ahead and try – he would just lie again.
Capt. Elms was smart, but did not have a diploma or a degree. He feared seeking help would end his military career and he did not know what else he could do for a living. About 15,000 members have been dismissed from the military for medical reasons since 2001, when the 9/11 attacks triggered the Afghanistan war. Some are too ill to work or have not found steady employment.
The battered captain began spending a lot of time at home in the final days of his life. He had left the family earlier that year for a woman about 15 years his junior with a young child. The relationship did not work out.
















Captain Brad Elms and his daughter Stephanie during a marathon run.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY

The former Ironman winner and marathon runner looked drained. He sat in the basement and cried in front of his daughter. He had dropped about 30 pounds and was down to 167 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame. “He was a shell of a man,” his daughter says.
Capt. Elms’ suicide stunned the military. He was a methodical and meticulous infantryman who polished his boots with ritualistic care. The inquiry into his death found that “he was respected by those he worked with and had a reputation as an intense and highly dedicated soldier.”
But he also hid the true extent of his condition. The inquiry report notes that he minimized his mental-health concerns when dealing with his commanders and medical professionals to avoid a negative impact on his ability to deploy. He was worried about his future after the military and frustrated with his reversion to captain after filling in at the rank of major, the inquiry found.
“He was operationally focused and a significant part of his self-worth was tied to his life as a soldier and his ability to conduct operations,” the report states.
Capt. Elms never received the urgent care he needed.
His family is working to come to terms with his suicide and years of living with his undiagnosed PTSD. All three are in therapy. They hope lessons from Capt. Elms’ death will bring changes. They want the Forces to overhaul its post-deployment screening process for combat and peacekeeping missions. Instead of asking soldiers whether they are experiencing mental-health problems after an operation, the Elms believe the military should assume they are and treat them pro-actively.
They also want military doctors to involve soldiers’ families in their care, so they can offer the truth if members lie about their mental health. Other families and veterans’ groups have recommended this before, but privacy concerns have stymied change. Soldiers are treated by the military’s medical system, while their families fall under provincial health care.
“He was, in his soul, a soldier’s soldier. He kept going when nobody else could,” says Ms. Elms, who works in the department of family medicine at Queen’s. “They have to recognize that you train these people to be soldiers, so it’s going to be harder to treat them. It’s going to be harder to get to them. It’s going to be harder for them to stop moving forward and admit that they have a problem, because you’ve trained them to walk until they die.”

A lingering stigma

















A military board of inquiry determined that Capt. Brad Elms’ suicide was attributable to his 33-year military service.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY

At the Toronto Market Exchange on a recent sunny morning, a group of bankers, traders and veterans’ advocates gathered to set off the market’s opening siren and announce a new scholarship program for children of military members.
The Wounded Warriors Canada education fund is the first in the country specifically designed for children of members with PTSD or other service-connected mental illnesses. Phil Ralph, the charity’s national program director, hopes it will help children heal.
The fund has netted $40,000 in donations so far and is supported by The Bay Street Children’s Foundation, CIBC, RBC and the Investment Technology Group (ITG). In the program’s first year, eight children will receive up to $5,000 each for the first year of their postsecondary studies. Students whose parents died by suicide will be eligible.
“The stresses and things that these guys are going through when they come back sometimes will lead to suicide. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, and that … shouldn’t exclude any of their children,” says James Duncan, who is director of sales and trading at ITG and founder of The Bay Street Children’s Foundation, which helped launch the new scholarship program. Suicide, he adds, is “not a dishonourable thing, in my mind. This is another one of the problems that come out of battle.”








Captain Brad Elms and his wife Sherri in Paris.REPRODUCED BY JOHNNY C Y LAM/COURTESY ELMS FAMILY
Before Ms. Elms sent her query to Canada Company in February, 2015, she did her homework. She looked up the charity’s previous scholarship winners. The organization appeared to apply a broad brush to the condition that a member must have been “killed while serving in an active role in a military mission” since Jan. 1, 2002. The organization granted scholarships to the children of a father who died in a moped accident in Greece while on a three-day leave from his Kosovo tour in 1999. In three other cases, exceptions were made for training accidents on home soil.
In all, the charity has awarded 87 scholarships to 33 children since its fund was established in 2007. Students receive up to $4,000 per year during their studies, for up to four years. Many of the recipients lost a father in the Afghanistan conflict – to suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and firefights. The scholarship program has made a big difference in their lives and fostered a community among the children of the fallen.
“We have a lot of companies and organizations that say they support the troops, but some don’t do anything,” says scholarship recipient Jocelyn Ranger, whose father, Chief Warrant Officer Robert Girouard, was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in November, 2006. “Canada Company has been incredibly good to me and my family.”
The Toronto-based charity has amassed an impressive list of influential members and financial backers in its decade of operation. Created at a time when Canadian soldiers were dying in theatre at a rate not seen since the Korean War, the organization has pledged to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with military members and to raise awareness in the corporate world about their work and sacrifices.








Captain Brad Elms and his children Jake and Stephanie.








Captain Brad Elms and his children Jake and Stephanie.
COURTESY ELMS FAMILY

The scholarship program was Canada Company’s first major initiative. Financial supporters include CIBC, TD Bank Financial Group, Scotiabank, BMO Financial Group, RBH Inc., W. Garfield Weston Foundation, AGF Management, Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk, Paul Desmarais Jr. of Power Corp., and Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Research In Motion and current chairman of the Council of Canadian Innovators. Senior military officials have attended Canada Company’s scholarship ceremonies. So did Peter MacKay in 2012, when he was defence minister in the Conservative government.
The charity’s focus has since expanded to include assisting released military members find civilian jobs. That program operates in partnership with Veterans Affairs and the Canadian Forces and has helped connect nearly 1,300 vets with jobs. The charity is also spearheading a federally sponsored program to convert decommissioned light-armoured vehicles into 250 monuments to be installed in communities across Canada. The armoured vehicles were used in the Afghanistan war.
Canada Company is one of many veterans’ groups included in stakeholder meetings with Veterans Affairs. The Globe requested several times over six weeks, through charity president Ms. Mondou, to speak with Canada Company founder Blake Goldring, but did not hear from him. An e-mailed request was also sent to AGF Management, where Mr. Goldring is CEO.
Mr. Goldring, who is chairman of Canada Company’s board of directors and a member of its scholarship committee, has received numerous honours for his charity work, including a meritorious service medal from the Governor-General and a Vimy Award from the Conference of Defence Associations Institute. In 2011, he was appointed the first Honorary Colonel of the Canadian Army.
Ms. Elms’ scholarship query was reviewed by both the scholarship committee and the board of directors, Ms. Mondou says. All three scholarship-committee members are on the 12-member board. On March 12, 2015, Ms. Mondou told Ms. Elms in an e-mail that her request was a high priority for the charity and that a final decision would be provided in about two weeks.
On March 31, that decision was relayed: Stephanie and Jake were not eligible for the scholarship program because their father did not die on a mission. Suicide, Ms. Mondou explained to The Globe, was not part of the original mandate of the scholarship fund and never has been.
“The reality is we still have many children remaining who are eligible,” Ms. Mondou says. “To expand beyond our current mandate could deplete the fund or impact those current children who are on the eligibility list as of now.”
When the scholarship program was created, the charity estimated about 100 students would apply, based on the mission deaths in Afghanistan and the number of children left behind. With $346,000 in financial support already awarded to one-third of that group, about $2.6-million remains to support the others. The fund has grown over the years, from $1.7-million in 2011 to $2.6-million in 2014, according to Canada Company’s annual reports.

Your company motto is, ‘Many Ways to Serve.’ Well, there are many ways that service kills. My husband died in a way that no one speaks of – he took his life in Canada, close to home, and left more devastation in his wake than an IED on a roadside in Afghanistan ever could.
Sherri Elms in an email to Canada Company
Devastated by the charity’s decision, Ms. Elms wrote to the ministers of defence and veterans affairs. In e-mails to Ms. Mondou, she pressed the charity for an explanation and told Canada Company its position ran counter to the message she had received from National Defence: that dying as a result of an operational stress injury, such as clinical depression or PTSD, was no different than being killed in an explosion on a mission.
“Your company motto is, ‘Many Ways to Serve,’” Ms. Elms wrote to Ms. Mondou. “Well, there are many ways that service kills. My husband died in a way that no one speaks of – he took his life in Canada, close to home, and left more devastation in his wake than an IED on a roadside in Afghanistan ever could.”
After her e-mails, and after e-mails and voice mails to Canada Company from the widow’s friends, Ms. Mondou told Ms. Elms that Mr. Goldring had agreed to hold an urgent meeting of the scholarship committee to review its decision. Ms. Elms said the family did not want the case re-examined. Jake and Stephanie, who both just finished their third year of studies at Queen’s, receive aid for their education from Veterans Affairs. Ms. Elms said she only applied for the Canada Company scholarship because a peer support worker suggested it. She told Ms. Mondou her children would not “beg for something that is not freely given.”
Instead, she asked the charity to further explain its mandate and why it viewed suicide differently than deaths in combat and training. She urged the charity to include deaths like her husband’s in its eligibility criteria. The Canadian Forces and Veterans Affairs had both determined his death was service-related, she told Ms. Mondou.
Canada Company’s board of directors weighed Ms. Elms’ questions and request, but the charity’s position remained unchanged. Ms. Elms urged the organization to spell out its stand in its terms of reference so no other family would endure a similar rejection. And so the charity rewrote the terms of reference for its scholarship program last year, adding authorized training missions to its eligibility criteria. It also included this line: “Eligible candidates do not include children of Canadian soldiers whose deaths result from suicide.”
The Elms family feels the charity’s position further stigmatizes suicide and mental illness. More military members have taken their lives since 2002 –– at least 213 – than were killed in the Afghanistan war or in training accidents.
The Globe e-mailed questions to nine scholarship-fund donors listed in Canada Company’s media releases, but most did not respond. Of the three who did, none answered the question of whether they support extending the program to suicides linked to military service.
A spokesman for CIBC, which kick-started the education-assistance fund with $1-million in 2007, said Canada Company has done “incredible work” delivering on its mandate.
“We recognize that the understanding of the needs and issues facing our military families continues to evolve,” the spokesman, Kevin Dove, said in an e-mail. “We are proud of our affiliation with Canada Company and we will continue to engage with them as it continues to develop programs that support our military families.”
Among the 22 education-assistance programs for children of deceased military members examined by The Globe, there is variation in how the words “active role,” “active service” and “on duty” are viewed. Both Canada Company and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton apply a narrow definition, saying a death must occur while the person is physically on a mission or at work.
Some, such as the Canadian Hero Fund and Brandon University’s Afghanistan Mission Memorial Award, follow the approach taken by the Canadian Forces. If a suicide is determined to be “attributable to military service,” it is also deemed as a result of “active service.” Other scholarship programs do not ask how applicants’ father or mother died.
The Project Hero scholarship program, which was started by businessman Kevin Reed and retired general Rick Hillier, a former chief of the defence staff, has been affiliated with Canada Company since 2010. Project Hero does not rely on a pool of donations, like Canada Company’s program. Instead, about 60 colleges and universities have agreed to waive tuition for children of soldiers killed while serving on a military mission.
The Globe contacted all the schools listed as offering Project Hero on Canada Company’s website. The survey showed that 15 would consider suicide deaths, while most said they were not sure whether suicides qualified. Several directed The Globe’s questions to Canada Company.
Mr. Reed and Mr. Hillier said they would like children who have lost a parent to suicide included in Project Hero, although it is unclear who is responsible for modifying the program’s criteria. Both are no longer involved in the administration of Project Hero.
“In my view,” Mr. Hillier told The Globe in an e-mail, “those who commit suicide and it is deemed caused or contributed to by service to Canada, their children must be treated like those of casualties that are caused by direct physical action. Mental injuries are every bit as devastating as physical ones and we [should] look after their survivors in an appropriate manner.”
Canada Company did not respond to questions on who would consider clarifications to Project Hero’s criteria. Leah Jurkovic, spokeswoman for Colleges and Institutes Canada, said the advocacy group does not have an ongoing role in the scholarship program or in establishing the eligibility criteria.
“Certainly no one would be opposed to revisiting the criteria, but it wouldn’t be our role to ask for this,” she says.
Without the help of Canada Company and Project Hero, Ms. Ranger does not think she could have afforded to study business at Algonquin College. She was newly married with a young child and reeling from her father’s death in the Afghanistan war. Canada Company also aided her two brothers with their education.
Ms. Ranger, a mother of three whose husband is in the military and served in Afghanistan, believes the scholarship programs that helped her should be extended to children whose parents have died by suicide.
“I just think with the prevalence of mental illness now in the military, it’s something that needs to happen,” she says. “As families of fallen soldiers, we know the jobs that they do and the pain that they suffer, and I really don’t think a distinction should be made.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigation-canada-companyscholorships/article29808916/?click=sf_globefb
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