History > 2011 > USA > War > Pentagon / Army (I)

After Charging 8,

Army Is Scrutinized on Hazing

December 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

Under Army rules, a superior is allowed to subject a soldier to certain kinds of “corrective measures,” including “verbal reprimands and a reasonable number of repetitions of authorized physical exercises.”

But in light of charges filed this week against eight soldiers in connection with the death of Pvt. Danny Chen, a fellow soldier in Afghanistan, the line separating acceptable activities from hazing, which is forbidden, has come under renewed scrutiny both inside and outside the military.

“It’s important to know that Army training is rigorous and demanding and it’s often associated with violent action, but we’re very careful and very attentive to crossing that line,” George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said Thursday. “While we want to make our soldiers tough and resilient, we want to make sure that our training is not abusive.”

To that end, officials explained, all officers, both commissioned and noncommissioned, are trained in the distinctions during basic training and during refresher courses throughout their careers.

On Thursday, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on his Facebook page that military officials were investigating several other allegations of hazing. “These appear to be isolated instances of misconduct,” he said. “We are duty bound to protect one another from hazing in any form.”

Private Chen’s body was found on Oct. 3 in a guard tower on his base in southern Afghanistan. He had suffered what the military called “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.” The eight service members — one officer and seven enlisted soldiers — were charged with a range of crimes, including manslaughter and negligent homicide, officials announced on Wednesday.

One suspect, Specialist Ryan J. Offutt, 32, of Greenville, Pa., was sentenced to jail in 2002 after pleading guilty to charges of simple assault and indecent assault after attacking a woman in his house in 2001, according to court records and a 2002 account in a local newspaper.

In the Chen case, Specialist Offutt was charged with multiple counts, including involuntary manslaughter, assault consummated by battery, negligent homicide and reckless endangerment.

The authorities have revealed little about the circumstances surrounding the death, which remains under investigation. But Private Chen’s parents insisted that their son displayed no suicidal or depressive tendencies. They said Army officials had told them that in the hours before his death, Private Chen was harassed by fellow soldiers, who dragged him out of bed, pelted him with rocks and made him do painful exercises when he failed to turn off a water heater after showering.

According to the family, the soldiers used ethnic slurs against Private Chen, which are also prohibited by Army rules.

Private Chen’s parents, Su Zhen Chen and Yan Tao Chen, Chinese immigrants who live in the East Village, said they did not know if their son had done anything else that the other soldiers might have taken as a provocation. But in October, military officials gave the Chens a photocopy of a page from Private Chen’s personal journal that included a list, apparently in his handwriting, describing procedural failures: “Didn’t clear weapon,” “Didn’t hydrate,” and “No attention to detail (little things).”

Army rules define hazing as conduct whereby a service member causes another service member “to suffer or be exposed to an activity that is cruel, abusive, oppressive or harmful.”

Advocates for the family, while pressing for a full investigation, have also been lobbying the Army to crack down on hazing and to improve conditions for minorities, particularly soldiers of Asian descent, who enlist at lower rates than other minorities. Military officials said members of the Army — soldiers and civilian employees alike — undergo “equal-opportunity training” annually.

    After Charging 8, Army Is Scrutinized on Hazing, NYT, 22.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/nyregion/army-hazing-charges-where-discipline-crosses-line.html

Repressing Democracy, With American Arms

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

SITRA, Bahrain

WHEN President Obama decides soon whether to approve a $53 million arms sale to our close but despotic ally Bahrain, he must weigh the fact that America has a major naval base here and that Bahrain is a moderate, modernizing bulwark against Iran.

Yet he should also understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.

Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.

People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports — and every shell fired undermines our image.

In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.

The government claims that the bruise was “inconsistent” with a blow from a tear gas grenade. Frankly, I’ve seen the Bahrain authorities lie so much that I don’t credit their denial.

Jawad al-Sheikh, Ali’s father, says that at the hospital, the government tried to force him to sign papers saying Ali had not been killed by the police.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has recently distanced himself from the killings and torture, while pledging that Bahrain will reform. There have indeed been modest signs of improvement, and a member of the royal family, Saqer al-Khalifa, told me that progress will now be accelerated.

Yet despite the lofty rhetoric, the police have continued to persecute Ali’s family. For starters, riot policemen fired tear gas at the boy’s funeral, villagers say.

The police summoned Jawad for interrogation, most recently this month. He fears he will be fired from his job in the Ministry of Electricity.

Skirmishes break out almost daily in the neighborhood, with the police firing tear gas for offenses as trivial as honking to the tune of “Down, Down, Hamad.” Disproportionately often, those tear gas shells seem aimed at Ali’s house. Once, Jawad says, a shell was fired into the house through the front door. A couple of weeks ago, riot policemen barged into the house and ripped photos of Ali from the wall, said the boy’s mother, Maryam Abdulla.

“They’re worried about their throne,” she added, “so they want us to live in fear.”

Mourners regularly leave flowers and photos of Ali on his grave, which is in a vacant lot near the home. Perhaps because some messages call him a martyr, the riot police come regularly and smash the pictures and throw away the flowers. The family has not purchased a headstone yet, for fear that the police will destroy it.

The repression is ubiquitous. Consider Zainab al-Khawaja, 28, whose husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she told me, and they broke her father’s heart by falsely telling him that she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. She braved the risks by talking to me about this last week — before she was arrested too.

Khawaja earned her college degree in Wisconsin. She has read deeply of Gandhi and of Gene Sharp, an American scholar who writes about how to use nonviolent protest to overthrow dictators. She was sitting peacefully protesting in a traffic circle when the police attacked her. First they fired tear gas grenades next to her, and then handcuffed her and dragged her away — sometimes slapping and hitting her as video cameras rolled. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights says that she was beaten more at the police station.

Khawaja is tough as nails, and when we walked alongside demonstrations together, she seemed unbothered by tear gas that left me blinded and coughing. But she worried about her 2-year-old daughter, Jude. And one time as we were driving back from visiting a family whose baby had just died, possibly because so much tear gas had been fired in the neighborhood, Khawaja began crying. “I think I’m losing it,” she said. “It all just gets to me.”

Since the government has now silenced her by putting her in jail, I’ll give her the last word. I asked her a few days before her arrest about the proposed American arms sale to Bahrain.

“At least don’t sell them arms,” she pleaded. “When Obama sells arms to dictators repressing people seeking democracy, he ruins the reputation of America. It’s never in America’s interest to turn a whole people against it.”

    Repressing Democracy, With American Arms, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/kristof-repressing-democracy-with-american-arms.html

The Pentagon Budget, Under Scrutiny

September 29, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

“The Pentagon Budget and the Deficit” (editorial, Sept. 27) is on target in calling on the Pentagon to “sharply prune the tens of billions it spends every year on building new versions of cold war weapons systems ill suited to America’s 21st-century military needs.” This includes proposals for new nuclear subs and bombers that would cost upward of $100 billion over the coming decades.

The United States, by rightsizing its operational fleet of Trident nuclear-armed subs to 8 or fewer from 12 and building no more than 8 new nuclear-armed subs, could still deploy the same number of strategic nuclear warheads at sea as is planned (about 1,000) and save roughly $26 billion over 10 years, $31 billion over 30 years, and $120 billion over the life of the program.

By delaying work on a new long-range penetrating bomber beyond the next 10 years, Congress could save at least $3.7 billion in research and development costs, and if the program were canceled, it would save at least $50 billion in procurement costs alone.

Because the Pentagon will continue to deploy 60 already proven B-2s and B-52s, delaying the new bomber program would not have any effect on United States nuclear force deployments.

By responsibly reducing strategic nuclear forces we no longer need and can’t afford, we can help close the budget deficit and reduce Russia’s incentive to maintain a larger nuclear arsenal.

DARYL G. KIMBALL
Exec. Dir., Arms Control Association
Washington, Sept. 27, 2011



To the Editor:

Your editorial did not mention that military compensation costs rose over the last decade because America spent the previous two decades whacking military pay, retirement and health care. When those cuts undermined retention and readiness in the ’90s, Congress had to fix them.

Most Americans understand that it takes powerful incentives to induce top people to serve decades under conditions like those of the last 10 years. That great military benefit deal is available to any who meet the entry standards and pay the necessary upfront premium of decades of service and sacrifice. Few are willing.

You would cut benefits for those who serve and sacrifice the longest to pay more to those who leave early, and do not mention the retention-killing history of past, less severe cuts.

(Vice Adm., Ret.) NORB RYAN
President and Chief Executive
Military Officers Association of America
Alexandria, Va., Sept. 27, 2011



To the Editor:

Your editorial highlighted the long-term costs of military pensions without fully acknowledging the sacrifice of our service members and their families.

While I agree that replacing the current pension system with a 401(k) plan is ill advised, delaying pension payments until normal retirement age would break a decades-old commitment to our veterans. We should not ask for additional sacrifices from our troops.

While an 18-year-old enlistee may retire at 38 after a 20-year career and begin receiving a pension, he is not on easy street. The average service member with a pay grade of E-7 after 20 years of service would receive an after-tax yearly pension of under $17,000. This is not a paltry sum, but hardly enough to retire and live out the rest of his life unemployed.

That retiree must re-establish himself in civilian life by finding a new career, likely requiring further education and job retraining. He or she may also have children to support.

We ask our service members to endure many burdens so that we may live in safety and security. The least we can do as a nation is maintain our commitment to properly compensate our service members for their service.

BOB CASEY
Washington, Sept. 28, 2011

The writer, a Democrat, is a United States senator from Pennsylvania.


To the Editor:

The military budget needs to be cut, but your editorial takes aim at the wrong place. Instead of cuts in pay and benefits for our soldiers, cuts should come from the billions spent on nuclear weapons.

Debate in Washington dismisses almost $700 billion in spending over 10 years on nuclear weapons. New nuclear-capable submarines have an estimated price tag of $116 billion, and a new nuclear-capable bomber could cost $3.7 billion.

Additionally, new nuclear weapon facilities at an estimated $10 billion are on the way. And what for? Nuclear weapons are unable to protect Americans from today’s threats, and President Obama has stated that the United States seeks the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

The crisis in spending is a crisis of priorities. To cut the pay and benefits of our military would be shameful when wasteful spending on nuclear weapons needs to be cut instead.

ALICIA GODSBERG
Executive Director
Peace Action New York State
New York, Sept. 27, 2011

    The Pentagon Budget, Under Scrutiny, NYT, 29.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/the-pentagon-budget-under-scrutiny.html

The Pentagon Budget and the Deficit

September 26, 2011
The New York Times

It was not just two mismanaged wars and trillions of dollars in misconceived and poorly supervised weapons contracts that drove Pentagon spending to unsustainable levels over the past decade — about $700 billion for last year alone. Military pay, benefit and retirement costs rose by more than 50 percent over the same decade (accounting for inflation). Leaving aside Afghanistan and Iraq, those costs now account for nearly $1 out of every $3 the Pentagon spends.

Much of that is necessary to recruit and retain a high-quality, all-volunteer military. The men and women who risk their lives to keep us secure deserve decent pay while they serve and ample benefits once they retire. But current military pay, pension systems and retiree health care benefits are unsustainable and ripe for reform.

President Obama has proposed two changes that would save $27 billion over 10 years: increasing co-payments for some prescription drugs for retirees and dependents of active-duty soldiers and charging a modest fee for policies supplementing Medicare coverage for retirees. That would still leave insurees paying substantially less than most other Americans.

Working-age military retirees also pay too little for basic family coverage. The current annual premium of $460 has not been increased since 1995. The Pentagon hopes to raise that to $520 for new enrollees once Congress approves financing bills for the new fiscal year that starts on Saturday. That is still barely a tenth of what federal civilian workers pay for comparable insurance.

Another $45 billion to $50 billion could be saved by adjusting the formula for pay increases to take account of special allowances and benefits worth about $5,000 a year.

The retirement system is both unfair and increasingly expensive. Most veterans, including many who have served multiple combat tours, will never qualify for even a partial military pension or retiree health benefits. These are only available to those who have served at least 20 years. Those who do qualify can start collecting their pensions as soon as they leave service, even if they are still in their late 30s, making for huge long-term costs.

Mr. Obama called for a commission to study possible reforms. But the change the Pentagon reportedly has in mind, phasing in a 401(k)-type plan for future retirees, is the wrong way to go. Military pensions should not be held hostage to stock market gyrations. Partial pensions should be made available to those serving less than 20 years. Payments should begin at normal retirement age.

The Pentagon needs to contribute at least $400 billion in 10-year budget savings if the Congressional deficit panel does reach an agreement by December and as much as $900 billion if it does not.

To find those savings, the Pentagon must also sharply prune the tens of billions it spends every year on building new versions of cold war weapons systems ill suited to America’s 21st-century military needs: aircraft carriers, nuclear attack submarines, stealth destroyers and manned aerial combat fighters. The United States already has a comfortable margin of dominance in all these areas. The Pentagon’s ambitions expanded without limit over the Bush era, and Congress eagerly wrote the checks. The country cannot afford to continue this way, and national security doesn’t require it.

The White House and Congress must find the courage to proceed. Reforms of pay, benefits and pensions must be phased in fairly and commitments already made must be honored. But they, too, cannot be deferred any longer.

    The Pentagon Budget and the Deficit, NYT, 26.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/opinion/the-pentagon-budget-and-the-deficit.html

Global Arms Sales Dropped Sharply in 2010, Study Finds

September 23, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The global economic crisis may set off upheaval and even unrest, but the ability of the world’s governments to buy new military hardware was sharply curtailed last year by strains on their national treasuries, according to a new Congressional study.

Worldwide arms sales in 2010 totaled $40.4 billion, a drop of 38 percent from the $65.2 billion in arms deals signed in 2009 and the lowest total since 2003, the study found.

Even in this tight market, the United States maintained its dominating position in the global arms bazaar, signing $21.3 billion in worldwide arms sales, or 52.7 percent of all weapons deals, a drop from $22.6 billion in 2009.

Russia was second with $7.8 billion in arms sales in 2010, or 19.3 percent of the market, compared with $12.8 billion in 2009. Following the United States and Russia in sales were France, Britain, China, Germany and Italy.

Developing nations continued to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales, according to the report, by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. The annual study is considered the most detailed collection of unclassified global arms sales data available to the public.

The report found that the total value of arms transfer deals with developing nations last year was $30.7 billion, or 76.2 percent of worldwide deals. That was a drop from $49.8 billion in 2009.

India, which signed $5.8 billion in weapons transfer deals, was the top purchaser in the developing world last year, followed by Taiwan with $2.7 billion in agreements and Saudi Arabia with $2.2 billion in deals. Other major purchasers were Egypt, Israel, Algeria, Syria, South Korea, Singapore and Jordan.

The United States was not only the largest weapons supplier last year, but also the main source of weapons to the developing world, accounting for about $14.9 billion of these deals — or 48.6 percent. That was a striking rise from 2009, when its sales of $15.1 billion to developing nations accounted for 30.3 percent of the market.

Russia was second in arms deals with developing nations last year, signing $7.6 billion in agreements, or about 24.7 percent.

“Worldwide weapons sales declined generally in 2010 in response to the constraints created by the tenuous state of the global economy,” wrote Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service and author of the study.

“In view of budget difficulties faced by many purchasing nations, they chose to defer or limit the purchase of new major weapons systems,” he wrote. “Some nations chose to limit their buying to upgrades of existing systems or to training and support services.”

To compare weapons sales over various years, the study used figures in 2010 dollars, with amounts for previous years adjusted for inflation to give a constant financial measurement.

    Global Arms Sales Dropped Sharply in 2010, Study Finds, NYT, 23.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/world/global-arms-sales-dropped-sharply-in-2010-study-finds.html

Out and Proud to Serve

September 20, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — Now it can be told: A prominent gay rights advocate who called himself J. D. Smith is in fact 1st Lt. Josh Seefried, a 25-year-old active-duty Air Force officer. At 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, he dropped the pseudonym, freed from keeping his sexual orientation secret like an estimated tens of thousands of others in the United States military.

“I always had the feeling that I was lying to them and that I couldn’t be part of the military family,” said Lieutenant Seefried, who helped found an undercover group of 4,000 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender active-duty service members. “I feel like I can get to know my people again. When I go to a Christmas party, I can actually bring the person I’m in a relationship with. And that’s a huge relief.”

The 18-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy officially ended at midnight and with it the discharges that removed more than 13,000 men and women from the military under the old ban on openly gay troops. To mark the historic change, gay rights groups are planning celebrations across the country while Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will usher in the new era at a Pentagon news conference.

The other side will be heard, too: Elaine Donnelly, a longtime opponent of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, has already said that “as of Tuesday the commander in chief will own the San Francisco military he has created.” Two top Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee — the chairman, Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, and Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina — have asked the Pentagon to delay the new policy, saying commanders in the field are not ready. But the Pentagon has moved on.

No one knows how many gay members of the military will come out on Tuesday, although neither gay rights advocates nor Pentagon officials are expecting big numbers, at least not initially.

“The key point is that it no longer matters,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “Our feeling is that the day will proceed like any other day.”

Gen. Carter F. Ham, who was a co-director of a Pentagon study on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said last week that he expected the effect to be “pretty inconsequential.”

That is not the case for Lieutenant Seefried, an Air Force Academy graduate and a budget analyst at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, who had to work in the shadows with the Pentagon in an 18-month effort to change the policy.

As Lieutenant Seefried told it in a recent telephone interview, in late 2009 a civilian instructor at a technical training course found out through social networking sites that the lieutenant is gay and began harassing him. Lieutenant Seefried reported the instructor in early 2010, and the instructor responded by outing him. Under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Lieutenant Seefried was temporarily removed from his job. But around the same time, Robert M. Gates, who was then defense secretary, changed the rules so service members could not be discharged by third-party outings. “That saved my career,” Lieutenant Seefried said.

Back in his job, Lieutenant Seefried began building what eventually became OutServe, a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender active-duty service members connected by secret Facebook groups and e-mail lists. In April 2010, he spoke for the first time publicly against “don’t ask, don’t tell” at the State University of New York at Oswego, but under a pseudonym he had hastily created for the occasion — J.D., for his initials, Josh David, and Smith because it is his mother’s maiden name. He asked the group of about 70 students and administrators at Oswego not to take pictures of him or out him on the Internet. No one did.

“It was a risk I was willing to take,” he said. “There were a lot of times I should have been caught last year doing this, but I never was.”

When Lieutenant Seefried appeared on television, his face was always in shadow, although he did not disguise his voice. “I thought that was too creepy,” he said. “I wanted to appear as human as possible.”

Then last summer, something surprising happened — the Pentagon reached out to him. The department was conducting a broad study of the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” but was stumped by how to interview active-duty gay and lesbian service members without having to discharge them under the rules of the policy. Working through a civilian liaison to OutServe, Lieutenant Seefried gave the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation — which was conducting a survey of service members — access to his database.

When the final study was presented to the Senate, many of the quotations read at the hearings were from members of OutServe.

In December, he was invited to the White House when President Obama signed into law the bill repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I was there as Josh,” he said. “You can’t go into these events with a pseudonym.” Although other gay rights advocates knew who he really was, the Defense Department never knew — or at least chose not to know.

On Tuesday, the lieutenant will appear at a Capitol Hill news conference with senators who pushed for the repeal. In October comes the publication of a book he edited, “Our Time: Breaking the Silence of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”’ (Penguin Press).

Lieutenant Seefried said he was happy to say goodbye to J. D. Smith. “There’s not a day when you don’t think of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ when you live under this policy,” he said. “It consumes your thought process, it consumes your future, because of the fear of getting caught. I never thought I would see the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ during my military career.”

    Out and Proud to Serve, NYT, 20.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/
    after-toiling-in-shadows-to-end-dont-ask-dont-tell-1st-lt-josh-seefried-greets-a-new-era.html

Discharged for Being Gay, Veterans Seek to Re-enlist

September 4, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

They lived shadow lives in the military, afraid that disclosure of their sexuality would ruin carefully plotted careers. Many were deeply humiliated by drawn-out investigations and unceremonious discharges.

Yet despite their bitter partings with the armed forces, many gay men and lesbians who were discharged under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy say they want to rejoin the service, drawn by a life they miss or stable pay and benefits they could not find in civilian life.

By some estimates, hundreds of gay men and lesbians among the more than 13,000 who were discharged under the policy have contacted recruiters or advocacy groups saying they want to re-enlist after the policy is repealed on Sept. 20.

Bleu Copas is one. He had been in the Army for just three years when someone sent an anonymous e-mail to his commanders telling them he was gay. After he was discharged in 2006 under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military’s ban on openly gay troops, “It took away all my value as a person,” he recalled.

Michael Almy is another. When the Air Force began its investigation into whether he was gay, it suspended his security clearance and relieved him of his command. On his final day in service in 2006, police officers escorted him to the gate. “It left kind of a bitter taste,” he said.

Though the Pentagon says it will welcome their applications, former service members discharged for homosexuality will not be granted special treatment. They will have to pass physical fitness tests and prove that they have skills the armed services need right now. Some will have aged to the point that they will need waivers to get back in.

Even if they pass those hurdles, there is no guarantee that they will go back to their former jobs or ranks. And because the armed services are beginning to shrink, some will be rejected because there are no available slots.

People discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” who wish to return to service “will be evaluated according to the same criteria and requirements applicable to all others seeking re-entry into the military,” said Eileen Lainez, a Pentagon spokeswoman. “The services will continue to base accessions of prior-service members on the needs of the service and the skills and qualifications of the applicants.”

To be eligible for re-enlistment, former service members cannot have been discharged under “other than honorable conditions,” Ms. Lainez said. The majority of people released under the policy since 1993 — a significant number of them highly trained intelligence analysts and linguists — received honorable discharges.

As with all people who join the military, the reasons for wanting to rejoin vary widely. Some say they want to finish what they started, but on their own terms. Others point to the steady pay, good health care and retirement benefits. Still others talk idealistically about a desire to serve and be part of an enterprise larger than themselves.

“It’s a hunger,” said Mr. Copas, who now works with homeless veterans in Knoxville, Tenn. “It doesn’t necessarily make sense. It’s the idea of faith, like an obligation to family.”

Jase Daniels was actually discharged twice. Because of a clerical error, the Navy failed to note on his records that the reason for his first discharge in 2005 was homosexuality. So the following year, when his services as a linguist were needed, the Pentagon recalled him.

“I wanted to go back so bad, I was jumping up and down,” he said. “The military was my life.”

He was open about his sexual orientation while deployed to Kuwait for a year, he says. But a profile of him in Stars and Stripes led to a new investigation, and he was discharged a second time upon coming home in 2007.

Now 29, Mr. Daniels says that in the years since, “I’ve had no direction in my life.” He wants to become an officer and learn Arabic, saying he is confident he will be accepted because he has already served as an openly gay man.

“No one cared that I was gay,” he said of his year in Kuwait. “What mattered was I did a good job.”

The issue of rank could discourage many from rejoining. Because there are fixed numbers of jobs or ratings in each of the armed services, some people might have to accept lower ranks to re-enlist. And those allowed to keep their former ranks will still find themselves lagging their onetime peers.

“I’ve been out six years, so my peers are way ahead of me in the promotion structure,” said Jarrod Chlapowski, 29, a Korean linguist who left the Army voluntarily in 2005 as a specialist because he hated keeping his sexual orientation a secret. He is now thinking about rejoining.

“It’s going to be a different Army than the one I left,” he said. “And that’s a little intimidating.”

Mr. Almy, 41, Mr. Daniels and another former service member have filed a lawsuit asserting that they were unconstitutionally discharged and should be reinstated, presumably at their former ranks. A former major, Mr. Almy, who was deployed at least four times to the Middle East, was among the highest-ranking members removed under the ban.

But even advocates for gay and lesbian troops say it might not be practical for the military to adopt a blanket policy of allowing all service members discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” to return to their previous ranks.

“You have to think long and hard from a policy perspective whether you want to put somebody who’s been out 5 or 10 years back into the same billet just because an injustice was done,” said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United, a gay rights advocacy group. Mr. Nicholson, 30, who was discharged in 2002, is considering going to law school and trying to become an officer.

For Mr. Copas, who is 35, age could be a factor in whether he gets back in. An Arabic linguist during his first enlistment, he is thinking of learning Dari or Pashto so he can go to Afghanistan. He also is a musician and has a master’s degree in counseling.

But the Army may consider him too old and demand that he get a waiver. Even as he searches the Web for potential Army jobs, he worries that he will jump through many hoops only to be rejected again.

“It almost feels like I’m getting back in bed with a bad lover,” he said. “I’m still dying to serve. But I don’t know how realistic it is.”

    Discharged for Being Gay, Veterans Seek to Re-enlist, NYT, 4.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/us/05reenlist.html

Soldier, Thinker, Hunter, Spy:

Drawing a Bead on Al Qaeda

September 3, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — Every day, Michael G. Vickers gets an update on how many in Al Qaeda’s senior leadership the United States has removed from the battlefield, and lately there has been much to report. Al Qaeda’s No. 2 died in a C.I.A. drone strike late last month, another senior commander was taken out in June, and the Navy Seals made history when they dispatched Osama bin Laden in May.

“I just want to kill those guys,” Mr. Vickers likes to say in meetings at the Pentagon, with a grin.

Mr. Vickers’s preoccupation — “my life,” he says — is dismantling Al Qaeda. Underneath an owlish exterior, he is an ex-Green Beret and former C.I.A. operative with an exotic past. His title is under secretary of defense for intelligence, and he has risen to become one of the top counterterrorism officials in Washington.

As covert American wars — in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — continue in the second decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, so will the questions of legality, morality and risk that go along with them.

Mr. Vickers, a top adviser to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta who has helped shape American military and intelligence policy for three decades, knows the perils well. He bears some responsibility for the unintended consequences of helping arm the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s, only to have them turn their weapons against United States troops years later.

In recent months, it was Mr. Vickers, an administration official said, who helped persuade a cautious Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary, to go along with the Bin Laden raid. It was Mr. Vickers who was a driver behind two other covert American military operations, in Syria and Pakistan, which killed more than two dozen militants in late 2008. It was Mr. Vickers who made sure that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal had enough drones at his disposal when he ran the military’s Special Operations Command, which staged secret raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We had one Predator available to us, and we built an entire fleet of them,” General McChrystal, now retired, said in a recent interview. “He was a major player.”

Mostly unknown outside of Washington, Mr. Vickers, 58, had a moment of fame in the 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” based on the book by George Crile. Mr. Vickers was portrayed as a chess-playing nerd from the 1980s C.I.A. who armed the Afghan resistance against the Soviets, still the largest covert operation in the agency’s history.

Although the chess was artistic license (Mr. Vickers recently spent his spare time finishing what his academic adviser, Eliot A. Cohen, calls a 1,000-plus page “cinderblock of a dissertation” for a doctorate), the rest is, for better or for worse, accurate. During the Reagan administration, Mr. Vickers funneled weapons to, among others, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, both now morphed into Afghan insurgent leaders who are fighting the United States.

“Yes, most of my colleagues from those days are now on the dark side,” Mr. Vickers acknowledged in a recent interview in his antiseptic office. “We were well aware that they weren’t the ideal allies.” Nonetheless, he said, “You make a deal with the devil to defeat another devil.”

The devil these days is Al Qaeda, and Mr. Vickers is more cautious than Mr. Panetta in declaring it on the verge of collapse. (The defense secretary said in July that the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda.”) In Mr. Vickers’s assessment, there are perhaps four important Qaeda leaders left in Pakistan, and 10 to 20 leaders over all in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Even if the United States kills them all in drone strikes, Mr. Vickers said, “You still have Al Qaeda, the idea.”

“You’re never going to eradicate that, but you want to take away their ability to be this global threat,” he said. “So yes, it is possible. It will take time.”

Mr. Vickers, despite his zeal for hunting terrorists, looks like a buttoned-up tax lawyer, or at least someone unlikely to know a Stinger missile from a Kalashnikov, two weapons he lavished upon the mujahedeen.

Mr. Vickers’s younger brother, Richard, a California health care administrator, said, “Whenever I would introduce him to my friends, they all said he was so mild-mannered, they thought he worked in a library or something.”

But in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Mr. Crile calls Mr. Vickers a romantic at heart, a man transfixed by James Bond movies who dreamed (along with becoming a football or baseball star) of espionage. “It was pretty easy to see it coming, he was interested in all that spy stuff,” Richard Vickers said. The brothers grew up in Hollywood, where their father worked as a master carpenter on movie sets for 20th Century Fox.

Mr. Vickers went to Hollywood High School, failed to make it in professional sports and then signed up for the Green Berets in 1973, at the age of 19. “It sounded cool,” he said.

Over the next 10 years, he learned how to parachute with a small, and simulated, nuclear device strapped to his waist, he submerged himself in the study of Soviet weapons and he helped with two hostage rescues in Honduras. In 1983, he joined a C.I.A. paramilitary unit and was pinned down that same year during the American invasion of Grenada. He was sent to Lebanon to collect intelligence after the United States Marine barracks was blown up in Beirut in 1983 and soon began arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Mr. Vickers left the C.I.A. in 1986 and spent 20 years in Washington research organizations and academia (he has a master’s degree from the Wharton School and just got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies). In 2006 he impressed then-President George W. Bush when he was invited to a meeting on Iraq. By the next year Mr. Vickers was working for Mr. Gates as a top adviser on counterterrorism at the Pentagon. President Obama promoted Mr. Vickers to his current job, and the Senate confirmed him in March.

Mr. Vickers was one of a handful of people who worked with Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, now the head of Special Operations Command, on the Bin Laden raid this year. “He was the one person in the room who really understood both sides of the business,” said Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director at the time of the May raid and now the agency’s acting director, until David H. Petraeus is sworn into the top job this week. “There was an intelligence side to this and a military operational side.”

Mr. Vickers’s contribution was overseeing the Pentagon’s collection of intelligence in Pakistan in the months before Bin Laden was killed and working with Admiral McRaven and others on options for the raid. Mr. Vickers favored what eventually happened, sending a Navy Seal team into Bin Laden’s compound. A month before the operation, he went with Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michele A. Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, to make the argument to a skeptical Mr. Gates that the raid was not too risky. Mr. Gates eventually supported it along with all other top officials.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary at the time, said in an interview that the meeting was “significant” but that it was incorrect to say it convinced Mr. Gates to support the raid. Nonetheless, Mr. Morrell said, getting Bin Laden in Pakistan was Mr. Vickers’s “baby,” and “more than anybody else in the department, he drove this issue.”

Mr. Vickers, who has been mentioned as a possible C.I.A. director someday, is in the meantime focused on the rest of Al Qaeda. Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, he is not predicting its imminent demise. “They’re still very dangerous,” he said.

    Soldier, Thinker, Hunter, Spy: Drawing a Bead on Al Qaeda, NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/world/04vickers.html

The Military and the Death Penalty

August 31, 2011
The New York Times


Racism in the application of capital punishment has been well documented in the civilian justice system since the Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976. Now comes evidence that racial disparity is even greater in death penalty cases in the military system.

Minority service members are more than twice as likely as whites — after accounting for the crimes’ circumstances and the victims’ race — to be sentenced to death, according to a forthcoming study co-written by David Baldus, an eminent death-penalty scholar, who died in June.

The analysis is so disturbing because the military has made sustained, often successful efforts to rid its ranks of discrimination. But even with this record, its failure to apply the death penalty fairly is more proof that capital punishment cannot be free of racism’s taint. It is capricious, barbaric and discriminatory, and should be abolished.

The number of capital cases in the military system is small: of 105 cases in which the death penalty might have been applied between 1984 — when the military revamped its death penalty process — and 2005, 15 defendants were sentenced to death. (Another capital case in 2010 was not included in the study.) Eight have since been removed from death row because of various legal errors, and two were granted clemency.

In its analysis, the new report found a significant risk that minority service members would be given the death penalty in cases in which there was at least one white victim, while a similarly situated white defendant would more likely be spared.

This connection between race and the death penalty is notably different from the results found in state criminal courts. A landmark study of state cases by Mr. Baldus and others in the 1980s showed that a death sentence often hinged not on the race of the defendant, but on the race of the victim. People accused of killing white victims were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as those accused of killing black victims.

Clearly, the military has not succeeded in keeping racial bias out of its judicial process. The broad discretion of judges and jurors in military tribunals and the system’s lack of transparency may make it harder to root out discrimination.

Still, the number of military capital cases has dropped to roughly one every two years since life without parole became a military option in 1997, far fewer than in the previous decade. Military courts now generally avoid seeking the death penalty when the crime is no different from crimes handled in civilian courts except that the defendant is in the military.

Almost all the capital cases involve victims who were American troops on duty or otherwise significant to the military. The reversal rate on these cases has been shockingly high: eight out of 10 death sentences have been overturned, compared with a reversal rate of 3 to 8 percent in military non-capital cases. An important reason is inadequate counsel: the military often assigns inexperienced military lawyers incapable of mounting a strong defense.

The last military execution was in 1961. The de facto moratorium has not made the country or the military less secure. The evidence of persistent racial bias is further evidence that it is time for the military system to abolish the death penalty.

    The Military and the Death Penalty, NYT, 31.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/opinion/the-military-and-the-death-penalty.html

The Wrong Way to Help Veterans

August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By SALLY L. SATEL

Washington

IF all goes according to plan, by the end of the year, 10,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan will be home with their families — and their memories. As many as 20 percent of them will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety or depression, while suicide rates have reached tragic new highs among veterans. In response, the Department of Veterans Affairs has greatly expanded its mental health services and made veterans well aware that disability benefits are available.

It seems only logical that a veteran who thinks he has a long-lasting impairment as a result of military service would file a disability claim. The problem is that the system allows him to receive these benefits for a condition without ever having been properly treated for it. As a result, a system intended to speed up entitlements for veterans could end up hurting them.

Currently, for a disability determination, Veterans Affairs requires the claimant to go through a psychiatric exam, also known as a “comp and pension.” But the session typically lasts just 90 minutes and does not provide enough information for an examiner to make a firm decision about a veteran’s future function — that is, whether he or she will continue to be sick in a way that impairs the ability to work, and thus require compensation.

After all, gauging the prognosis of mental injury in the wake of war is not as straightforward as assessing a lost limb. What’s more, it is very difficult to predict the pace and extent of a patient’s progress when the odds of success also depend heavily on nonmedical factors: the veteran’s own expectations for recovery, availability of family and social support, and the intimate meaning the patient makes of his or her distress, wartime hardships and sacrifice. And there is an even more delicate risk: awarding disability status prematurely can actually complicate a veteran’s path to recovery.

Consider a real-life case, a young soldier returning from Afghanistan, whom I’ll call Joe. He is 23 years old and suffers from classic P.T.S.D. He is plagued by bloody nightmares. When awake, he can barely concentrate, twitches with anxiety and feels emotionally detached from everything and everybody. He fears he’ll never be able to hold a job, have a family or fully function in society. He applies for “total” disability compensation for P.T.S.D., about $2,600 a month. The only humane thing to do, it would seem, is to grant the poor man those benefits.

But it’s more complicated than that. In fact, total disability is probably the last thing Joe needs, because it will confirm his fears that he will remain deeply impaired for years, if not for life.

While a sad verdict for anyone, it is especially awful for someone so young. Imagine telling someone with a spinal injury that he’ll never walk again — before he has had surgery and physical therapy.

This isn’t a problem unique to veterans. Anyone who is unwittingly encouraged to see himself as seriously and chronically disabled risks fulfilling that prophecy. “Why should I bother with treatment?” he might think. Once someone is caught in such a downward spiral of invalidism, it can be hard to reverse course.

It’s not just a matter of self-doubt. Such premature decisions create dependency, leading a capable veteran to fear losing the financial safety net if he leaves the disability rolls to take a job that ends up demanding too much.

Of course, some veterans will remain so irretrievably wounded by their war experiences that they are not likely to ever participate in the competitive workplace, and generous support is due them. But it borders on malpractice to allow young veterans to surrender to psychological wounds without first urging them to pursue recovery.

Instead, Veterans Affairs should adopt a treatment-first approach. The sequence would begin with treatment, move to rehabilitation and then, if necessary, assess a patient for disability status, should meaningful functional deficits persist.

At the same time, veterans too fragile for employment while in intensive therapy and rehabilitation — which, for some, could last up to a year — should receive financial support. Not disability payments, mind you, with their specter of permanent debilitation; call it a “recovery benefit” — as generous as total disability, but temporary.

With some exceptions, it is both realistic and important to instill the expectation in veterans that they will get better and find a comfortable and productive niche within the community and family. The road home from war is already an arduous one — the mental health system shouldn’t make it any longer than it already is.

 

Sally L. Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, is co-author of “The Health Disparities Myth: Diagnosing the Treatment Gap.”

    The Wrong Way to Help Veterans, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/opinion/the-wrong-way-to-help-veterans.html

The Pentagon After Mr. Gates

July 1, 2011
The New York Times

Robert Gates was already a 40-year veteran of the national security establishment when President George W. Bush summoned him to assume command of a demoralized and embattled Pentagon in late 2006. He inherited incoherent spending priorities, a broken procurement process and two disastrously mismanaged wars.

Mr. Gates left office with a well-earned reputation for having met these challenges smartly and successfully.

In four-and-a-half years, under two very different presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, Mr. Gates began refocusing military spending around rational, 21st-century priorities. He demanded better accountability from top officers and military contractors. He started an urgently needed discussion on burden-sharing in NATO.

Mr. Gates presided over the successful withdrawal of roughly 100,000 American troops from Iraq, making it possible to devise new and better-resourced strategies to try to bring enough stability to Afghanistan so American troops will be able to come home from there, too.

The challenge for Mr. Gates’s successor, Leon Panetta, is not just to build on that record but to go much further. He will need to press for more reforms to a military budget that accounts for roughly 50 cents of every dollar of federal discretionary spending. This can and must be done without endangering America’s vital interests.

Mr. Panetta has the right credentials to do it. He made his name as a budget-cutter in Congress and in the Clinton White House and as a foreign policy moderate respected by both parties. Most recently, he ran the Central Intelligence Agency for President Obama.

Most of Mr. Gates’s success in reordering the Pentagon’s spending priorities has come from shifting money from cold-war-inspired programs that are no longer justified, like the F-22 fighter, to urgently needed new ones, like mine-resistant troop vehicles.

But when this year’s fiscal crunch demanded real spending cuts, Mr. Gates resisted. Mr. Panetta must deliver the $400 billion in further savings (over the next 12 years) that President Obama has already called for and find ways to cut even further.

In a time of ongoing wars and other dangers, reductions cannot safely be applied across the board. They need to reflect a realistic reassessment of America’s global priorities and strategies. Those are not matters for the Pentagon to decide on its own. But Mr. Panetta needs to play an active role in making sure military leaders are heard in the White House and in seeing that the president’s decisions are faithfully carried out.

He must also stretch American tax dollars by increasing pressure on NATO and other allies to contribute more effectively to future military operations. And he must help the Obama administration devise a safe and honorable exit strategy from Afghanistan. American interests, not budget pressures, should drive that strategy. And an exit from Afghanistan will not mean an exit from global military responsibilities. The United States must be ready to intervene unexpectedly, in places like Libya, and cannot afford to ignore China’s military ambitions and prowess.

As Robert Gates so often stressed, the Pentagon’s focus must be on fighting today’s wars and tomorrow’s, not yesterday’s, and fighting them alongside allies capable of doing their share for the common defense.

    The Pentagon After Mr. Gates, NYT, 1.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02sat1.html

Obama’s Pentagon and C.I.A.

Picks Show Shift in How U.S. Fights

April 28, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTIand ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s decision to send an intelligence chief to the Pentagon and a four-star general to the Central Intelligence Agency is the latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama is expected to announce that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, will become secretary of defense, replacing Robert M. Gates, and that Gen. David H. Petraeus will return from Afghanistan to take Mr. Panetta’s job at the C.I.A., a move that is likely to continue this trend.

As C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta hastened the transformation of the spy agency into a paramilitary organization, overseeing a sharp escalation of the C.I.A.’s bombing campaign in Pakistan using armed drone aircraft, and an increase in the number of secret bases and covert operatives in remote parts of Afghanistan.

General Petraeus, meanwhile, has aggressively pushed the military deeper into the C.I.A.’s turf, using Special Operations troops and private security contractors to conduct secret intelligence missions. As commander of the United States Central Command in September 2009, he also signed a classified order authorizing American Special Operations troops to collect intelligence in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and other places outside of traditional war zones.

The result is that American military and intelligence operatives are at times virtually indistinguishable from each other as they carry out classified operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. Some members of Congress have complained that this new way of war allows for scant debate about the scope and scale of military operations. In fact, the American spy and military agencies operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.

The operations have also created tension with important allies like Pakistan, while raising fresh questions about whether spies and soldiers deserve the same legal protections.

Officials acknowledge that the lines between soldiering and spying have blurred. “It’s really irrelevant whether you call it a covert action or a military special operation,” said Dennis C. Blair, a retired four-star admiral and a former director of national intelligence. “I don’t really think there is any distinction.”

The phenomenon of the C.I.A. becoming more like the Pentagon, and vice versa, has critics inside both organizations. Some inside the C.I.A.’s clandestine service believe that its bombing campaign in Pakistan, which has become a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy, has distorted the agency’s historic mission as a civilian espionage agency and turned it into an arm of the Defense Department.

Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer and formerly the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, praised General Petraeus as “one of the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence.” But Mr. Crumpton warned more broadly of the “militarization of intelligence” as current or former uniformed officers assume senior jobs in the sprawling American intelligence apparatus.

For example, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force general, is director of national intelligence, Mr. Obama’s top intelligence adviser. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, formerly the senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, is soon expected to become one of Mr. Clapper’s top deputies.

“If the intelligence community is populated by military officers, they understandably are going to reflect their experiences,” Mr. Crumpton said.

At the Pentagon, the new roles raise legal concerns. The more that soldiers are used for espionage operations overseas, the more they are at risk of being thrown in jail and denied Geneva Convention protections if they are captured by hostile governments.

And yet few believe that the trend is likely to be reversed. A succession of wars has strained the ranks of both the Pentagon and the C.I.A., and the United States has come to believe that many of its current enemies are best fought with timely intelligence rather than overwhelming military firepower.

These factors have pushed military and intelligence operatives more closely together in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“In the field, there is a blurring of the mission,” said Senator Jack Reed, a senior Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who served as an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. “Military operations can buy time to build up local security forces, but intelligence is the key to operations and for anticipating your adversary.”

American officials said that, for the most part, the tensions and resentments were greatly reduced from the days when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld expanded Pentagon intelligence-gathering operations to become less dependent on the C.I.A.

The secret “Execute Order” signed by General Petraeus in September 2009 authorized American Special Operations troops to carry out reconnaissance missions and build up intelligence networks throughout the Middle East and Central Asia in order to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat and destroy” militant groups and “prepare the environment” for future American military attacks. But that order greatly expanding the role of the military in spying was drafted in consultation with the C.I.A., administration officials said.

General Petraeus has worked closely with the C.I.A. since the Bosnia mission in the 1990s, a relationship that grew during his command tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, some of the missions he has overseen seem to have been more like clandestine operations than traditional military missions.

Even before General Petraeus took over as the leader of the military’s Central Command overseeing Middle East operations nearly three years ago, he ordered a study of the threat posed by militants in a country few American policy makers had focused on — Yemen. Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen is now considered the most immediate threat to the United States.

The general’s relationship with Yemen’s mercurial president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was well documented in the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year. And the military’s operations there, beginning with airstrikes in December 2009, are shrouded in even more secrecy than the C.I.A.’s drone attacks in Pakistan.

Mr. Saleh, however, drew the line at General Petraeus’s request to send American advisers to accompany Yemeni troops on counterterrorism operations.

Now, with Mr. Saleh’s government teetering on the verge of collapse, General Petraeus is taking over at the C.I.A. — and will once again be part of America’s secret war in Yemen.

    Obama’s Pentagon and C.I.A. Picks Show Shift in How U.S. Fights, 27.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/us/28military.html

U.S. wants death penalty in USS Cole attack

WASHINGTON | Wed Apr 20, 2011
5:41pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military prosecutors want the death penalty for a detainee being held at the Guantanamo prison camp as they reaffirmed charges against him over the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent, is charged with planning and preparing the attack on the warship off Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and wounded 40.

Suicide bombers rammed an explosives-laden boat into the Cole, blowing a massive hole in its side.

The United States accuses Nashiri, captured in Dubai in 2002 and held at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of being al Qaeda's operations chief for the Arabian Peninsula.

Military prosecutors are recommending the death penalty, but that would have to be approved, the Pentagon said in a statement.

Prosecutors sent the charges to the Pentagon appointee overseeing the Guantanamo tribunals, retired Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, who will decide whether to refer the charges for trial and whether to prosecute it as a death penalty case.

The charges filed on Wednesday make Nashiri's the first capital case filed at Guantanamo under President Barack Obama's administration, which lifted its moratorium on new Guantanamo charges in early March.

Retired Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who was in command of the Cole during the attack, said he supported the death penalty for Nashiri and hoped to be called as a witness at his trial.

"I am thrilled that this long overdue move for justice for the crew and families is finally happening," said Lippold, now a Republican candidate for Congress in Nevada.

Nashiri has also been charged with planning a 2002 attack on a French oil tanker off Yemen and with plotting an attack on another U.S. ship in 2000.

The charges announced against him included terrorism, murder and other crimes.

In 2008, Nashiri was charged in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal with conspiring with al Qaeda, murder and other suspected crimes. Those charges were dropped in 2009 to give the Obama administration time to review Guantanamo cases.

Obama had pledged to shut down the Guantanamo prison camp and make the civilian federal courts the preferred venue for trying prisoners. But Congress blocked those plans, forcing the administration to change course, and prosecutors have resumed filing charges in the Guantanamo tribunals.

Some evidence against Nashiri could be compromised by the CIA's admission that it used the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding on him.

CIA agents also revved a power drill close to Nashiri's head and threatened him with a gun in efforts to scare him into giving information, according to a CIA inspector general's report that was partly made public in 2009.

It was unclear where those incidents took place, but Polish prosecutors are investigating Nashiri's claims that he was tortured by interrogators at a secret CIA prison in Poland before he was moved to Guantanamo in 2006.

(Reporting by Missy Ryan in Washington and Jane Sutton in Miami; editing by Christopher Wilson)

    U.S. wants death penalty in USS Cole attack, R, 20.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/20/us-usa-guantanamo-cole-idUSTRE73J5WR20110420

A Rational Budget for the Pentagon

April 19, 2011
The New York Times

In their budget-cutting zeal, Republicans are demanding harsh sacrifices from the country’s most vulnerable citizens. At the same, they are determined to leave one of the biggest areas of wasteful government spending untouched: the Pentagon budget.

The budget plan they pushed through the House this month would spend $7.5 trillion on the military over the next dozen years. And that does not include the cost of actual war-fighting. The country cannot afford to spend that much, and it doesn’t need to.

The $7.5 trillion was President Obama’s projection, which he has since lowered to $7.1 trillion. Saving $400 billion is better but still not enough, especially since it can be achieved merely by holding annual nonwar-related spending at its current swollen level, adjusted for inflation.

National security is a fundamental responsibility of government. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon has spent without limits and in some cases without sense. Annual budgets, adjusted for inflation, have grown by 50 percent in the past decade. And that is apart from the more than $1 trillion spent on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House and Congress must impose some rationality on this process. Here is a path that could save hundreds of billions of dollars more through 2024:

PERSONNEL Pay and benefits account for nearly half of the basic Pentagon budget. The size of the uniformed services should not be reduced, at least for now. The Pentagon’s civilian work force, currently 650,000, should be cut by up to 10 percent, saving more than $7 billion a year.

We in no way minimize the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform. But after years of lagging far behind, military pay is now more than $5,000 a year higher than comparable civilian employment, more than $10,000 a year higher when special allowances and benefits are counted. Freezing noncombat pay for three years would save $3 billion per year. The formula for future increases should be adjusted to incorporate allowances and benefits, saving an additional $5 billion a year.

Another $4 billion to $6 billion annually could be saved by reasonable increases in annual health insurance premiums for military retirees of working age. Those premiums — currently $460 per family — have been frozen for the past 15 years while health care costs soared.

All told, these changes would save about $20 billion annually or more than $200 billion over the next 12 years.

FORCE STRUCTURE The Pentagon took too long to recognize that today’s wars make more intensive demands on the Army and Marines and less on the Navy and Air Force. Ground forces have been increased, but that needs to be paid for by corresponding reductions at sea and in the air. That shift has already begun but needs to go further. Another $1 billion to $2 billion a year could be saved by reducing the number of aircraft carrier groups from 11 to 10 and associated air wings from 10 to 9.

PROCUREMENT Twenty years after the cold war’s end, the Pentagon is addicted to hugely expensive weapons systems that are poorly suited to current and future military needs. Defense Secretary Robert Gates successfully pressed Congress to end production of the costly Air Force F-22. He now needs to cut way back on the far overbudget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Far fewer of these are needed to assure American dominance of the skies. Terminating the deeply troubled Marine Corps version of the F-35 and cutting back the Navy and Air Force versions by 50 percent would save $130 billion over the life of the program, with most of those savings achieved in the 2020s. Eliminating the Marine Corps’ costly and accident-prone V-22 Osprey vertical take off and landing aircraft would save another $10 billion to $12 billion. Further savings may be possible by scaling down future orders for the Virginia class nuclear attack submarine and reconsidering the newly vulnerable littoral combat ship.

For too long America’s military spending decisions have been insulated from serious scrutiny or discipline. The result is that more than 50 cents of every dollar of discretionary federal spending now goes to the Pentagon. There is no way to bring the deficit under control without making substantial and rational cuts in that budget.

    A Rational Budget for the Pentagon, NYT, 19.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/opinion/20wed1.html

Pentagon Seeks Biggest Military Cuts Since Before 9/11

January 6, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and CHRISTOPHER DREW

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that the nation’s “extreme fiscal duress” now required him to call for cuts in the size of the Army and Marine Corps, reversing the significant growth in military spending that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The White House has told the Pentagon to squeeze that growth over the next five years, Mr. Gates said, reducing by $78 billion the amount available for the Pentagon, not counting the costs of its combat operations.

The decision to go after the Pentagon budget, even while troops remain locked in combat overseas, is the clearest indication yet that President Obama will be cutting spending broadly across the government as he seeks to reduce the deficit — and stave off attacks from Republicans in Congress who want to shrink the government even more.

Republicans have for the most part resisted including military spending as they search for quick reductions in federal spending.

To make ends meet, Mr. Gates also announced that he would seek to recoup billions of dollars by increasing fees paid by retired veterans under 65 for Defense Department health insurance, even though Congress has rejected such proposals in the past. And he outlined extensive cuts in new weapons.

Cutting up to 47,000 troops from the Army and Marine Corps forces — roughly 6 percent — would be made easier by the withdrawal under way from Iraq, and the reductions would not begin until 2015, just as Afghan forces are to take over the security mission there. But Mr. Gates said the cuts in Pentagon spending were hardly a peace dividend, and were forced by a global economic recession and domestic pressures to find ways to throttle back federal spending.

“This department simply cannot risk continuing down the same path where our investment priorities, bureaucratic habits and lax attitudes toward costs are increasingly divorced from the real threats of today, the growing perils of tomorrow and the nation’s grim financial outlook,” Mr. Gates said at an afternoon news conference.

The president’s budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which is due by mid-February, would freeze discretionary spending, but that would not apply to military, veterans and Homeland Security programs. Last fall, a majority of the members of Mr. Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, including three Republican senators, said military spending also should be reduced as part of a long-term debt-reduction plan.

The Pentagon’s proposed operating budget for 2012 is expected to be about $553 billion, which would still reflect real growth, even though it is $13 billion less than expected. The Pentagon budget will then begin a decline in its rate of growth for two years, and stay flat — growing only to match inflation — for the 2015 and 2016 fiscal years. (The Pentagon operating budget is separate from a fund that finances the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.)

“This plan represents, in my view, the minimum level of defense spending that is necessary, given the complex and unpredictable array of security challenges the United States faces around the globe: global terrorist networks, rising military powers, nuclear-armed rogue states and much, much more,” Mr. Gates said.

To be sure, the actual size and shape of future military budgets will continue to be reset by annual spending proposals from the president, and those in turn will be based on shifting economic factors — decline or growth — and threats around the world, as well as by Congressional action.

But for now, the Army is expected in 2015 to begin cutting its active-duty troop levels by 27,000, and the Marine Corps by up to 20,000. Together, those force reductions would save $6 billion in 2015 and 2016.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that all four service chiefs supported the proposals, and that the military would still be able to manage global risks. “We can’t hold ourselves exempt from the belt-tightening,” he said. “Neither can we allow ourselves to contribute to the very debt that puts our long-term security at risk.”

The Army’s ranks number 569,600, and the Marine Corps has just over 202,000 members; both would remain larger than when Mr. Gates became defense secretary four years ago.

Mr. Gates already had instructed the armed services and the Pentagon bureaucracy to find ways to operate more efficiently, with the savings plowed back into the budget to make up for anticipated shortfalls; otherwise the cuts in troops and weapons would have been even steeper.

The armed services have identified about $100 billion in savings over five years.

Separately, the Defense Department bureaucracy had identified about $54 billion more, from things like reducing contractor hiring, freezing personnel rolls, reducing the number of generals and admirals and closing or consolidating headquarters.

Many of those changes can be carried out unilaterally by the Pentagon or the armed services.

But some — especially increases in fees for the military’s health-care system, called Tricare — require Congressional approval, and have been rejected before.

Proposals to increase Tricare fees will pit Mr. Gates against those in Congress — and veterans’ groups — who say retired military personnel already have paid up front with service in uniform. Ten years ago, health care cost the Pentagon $19 billion; today, it tops $50 billion; five years from now it is projected to cost $65 billion.

But Tricare fees have not increased since 1995.

Mr. Gates was expected to press for increasing the cost of health insurance premiums and spot fees only for working-age retirees and their families, not for those on active duty or those 65 and older, to save $7 billion over five years.

Mr. Gates also announced cuts in several weapons systems, led by the cancellation of the Marines’ $14.4 billion Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a combined landing craft and tank for amphibious assaults.

Mr. Gates said the Pentagon would add $4.6 billion to the cost of developing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, made by Lockheed Martin, and would cover much of that expense by delaying purchases of 124 of the planes.

He said that one of the three versions of the aircraft might need to be redesigned, and that he was placing that model, made for the Marines, “on the equivalent of a two-year probation.”

Federal officials said Mr. Gates had been seeking to increase the basic Pentagon budget, excluding war costs, to $566 billion for the 2012 fiscal year, but had to push the White House to approve $553 billion.

Gordon Adams, a Clinton administration budget official who served on Mr. Obama’s transition team, said he understood that White House budget officials initially wanted to shave the Pentagon’s original, larger request by at least $20 billion for 2012.

Mr. Adams said Mr. Gates met with Mr. Obama three times before Christmas to get at least $7 billion restored. Mr. Gates was also able to persuade the White House to reduce its demands for cuts over the next five years to $78 billion from $150 billion. Even so, Mr. Adams said, “I think the floor under defense spending has now gone soft.”

    Pentagon Seeks Biggest Military Cuts Since Before 9/11, NYT, 6.1.20111, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/us/07military.html

New Year’s Resolution:

Cutting the Military Budget

January 1, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Big (Military) Taboo” (column, Dec. 26):

Nicholas D. Kristof is right. Our bloated military budget not only drains our nation from making investments we need to retain our superpower status but also does not even give us the appropriate defenses with the rise of India and China. He is also tragically correct that no politician will touch this issue because military cutbacks would make politicians subject to recriminations and political defeat.

Perhaps in a second Obama administration, our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president will have the courage and vision to break this pattern, but he will need the support of the people, who have thus far been too afraid or reluctant to give it.

David E. Pasinski
Fayetteville, N.Y., Dec. 26, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Thanks to Nicholas D. Kristof for raising the issue of military spending. I sense that the subject is taboo no longer.

The Sustainable Defense Task Force, established by Representatives Barney Frank and Ron Paul and others, identified ways to cut almost $1 trillion out of the Defense Department budget with no detriment to national security. If the 112th Congress’s newly elected deficit hawks are serious, the task force’s recommendations are a fine place to start.

Moreover, it’s high time to stop thinking about national security in terms of bombs, tanks and missiles. Critical to national security are a healthy, well-educated population, modern infrastructure and reduced dependence on imported energy sources.

For example, Mission: Readiness, a bipartisan organization led by retired senior military leaders, has raised alarms over the fact that 75 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds don’t meet basic minimum requirements for military service. They are overweight and undereducated.

Kathy Stackhouse
Pittsburgh, Dec. 26, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof’s clarion call for reduced military spending will go unheeded unless American policy makers can overcome their reliance on the unworkable concept of a “war on terror.”

Its disastrous consequences include several ill-advised actual wars, indiscriminate trampling on civil liberties at home, and actually provoking a good deal of the terrorist activity toward which it is ostensibly directed.

The widespread taboo on questioning this ill-defined and harmful concept is the most glaring impediment to a sensible reordering of foreign policy priorities.

Edwin M. Schur
New York, Dec. 26, 2010

    New Year’s Resolution: Cutting the Military Budget, NYT, 1.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/opinion/l02kristof.html