Stand by for high seas, heavy rolls in NSW and JAGC

[AllAmerican75]

You are falling into the civilian troupe of the “broken warrior”. Shouldn’t we expect the elite to also be professional?

What's broken about them? These dudes are highly-competitive, aggressive, physical specimens. They are selected and trained to be the guys who can accomplish nearly anything on the battlefield. These dudes are the ideal warriors. We then put them into battle and tell them to win; and they do. They are not calibrated like you or me. That's why we're not SEALs and will never be. It takes a very special individual to want to deal with the difficulties of the NSW lifestyle.

Thinking that they're broken is like thinking that the dudes in the Golden Horde who razed entire villages for Genghis Khan were broken. They weren't, they just had a different calibration of their moral compass than we do. Same thing with the SEALs. We tell them to be saints like us, but they spend enough time in indian country and they realize that doesn't work. The moral outrage is entirely on the people stateside who would and will never be in the shoes of the Chief Gallagher and will never have to deal with hardships of war and thus clutch their pearls because they can't deal with the horrors of war and human conflict.

We have pushed the margins with NSW for a long time. Many times from the highest levels. When a DEVGRU CO starts giving out tomahawks to his SEALs and tells them to bring him scalps, then acts shocked when they try to do it... Maybe we should have put that CO on trial. That would have sent a clear message that the teams were getting out of hand and not above the law.

If pushing these guys so hard to be "stone cold killers and ruthless on the battle field" is going to drive them to do things that society finds morally reprehensible, then maybe we should rethink how we train/use NSW.

The thing is is that we select for this behavior and mindset. It's like telling Seaman Timmy about all the great things you can do in Thailand and Singapore, recruiting him into the Navy while telling him these stories, cajoling him into choosing an FDNF ship, and then being surprised that he goes out and does every single one of those fun things in those foreign ports. We specifically recruited the kind of guy who is wired to like adventure, puts up with difficulty and hardship, and also is motivated by being able to drink, fight, and bang foreign women in faraway lands. Same thing with the SEALs.

We need to get out of our minds that we build up our military and then send them away to foreign lands to knock on doors politely and have afternoon tea with our enemies. Militaries by nature are designed to destroy the will and ability of the enemy to fight and bring about their capitulation as quickly and efficiently as possible. We need to rid ourselves of the notion that they're designed to win hearts and minds; that's how you lose wars and get mired in endless pyrrhic conflicts that accomplish nothing other than sending our young men and women to slaughter for ambiguous strategic goals in countries that have never known and will never know democracy.

 

[Brett327]

words...

I'm having a tough time buying into the picture you've painted. It's not unreasonable to ask that our warriors of all types follow the rules. They don't get a pass because what they do it hard. There's a hell of a lot of space between "having tea with our enemies" and breaking the law to accomplish the mission. That's a shitty false dichotomy to excuse bad behavior. I know you're better than that. You need to recalibrate your moral and professional compass.

 

[Hotdogs]

Naive Comments

Couldn’t disagree more.

 

[nittany03]

Shoe ranting about what he thinks it's like being a SEAL

This is an absolutely horrible take. We're not Genghis fucking Khan.

 

[SynixMan]

Admiral Green was brought in to clean up NSW. Since the start of OEF/OIF NSW has gone further and further off the reservation to eventually become the biker gang of DOD. As a JAG friend at RLSO SW told me, NSW is notoriously impossible to prosecute. They put up so many road blocks and cling to "the brotherhood" to such a degree that normal prosecution is a very difficult task. Because of that, NSW imposed pressure and restrictions on Gallagher and his legal team from day one that would have been unjust for any other defendant. I have no doubt Admiral Green thinks he's guilty of murder. Now he's grasping at any straw he can to make sure that Gallagher is in some way punished. If posing with a dead fighter is so egregious (which it is) as to warrant taking his trident, then it warrants taking the trident of an entire platoon of ST7 that posed for that picture. But he can't do that without completely turning the teams against him. There is no good way forward.

I keep re-reading this and agreeing with the overall premise. Regardless of the current imbroglio, NSW is starting to go off the reservation. I don't know what the answer it, but it aint regulation haircuts. Probably getting a generation of desert deployments in the rearview mirror, plus some wholesale changes.

 

[snake020]

Eddie Gallagher controversy: Esper fires Navy secretary, SEAL will keep Trident pin, Pentagon says

Defense Secretary Mark Esper fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer Sunday over his handling of the case of a Navy SEAL who posed for a photo next to an Islamic State terrorist's corpse in Iraq, and the SEAL will be able to keep his Trident pin, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday.

www.foxnews.com

Spencer asked Trump to let the Navy review board go forward, promising that the board would, in the end, allow Gallagher to keep his Trident and rank, effectively alluding to his willingness to fix the results of the board usually comprised of the defendant’s peers, a senior U.S. official told Fox News.

Inconsistent with SECNAV Spencer's termination letter; not sure what to believe in the news anymore.

 

[Brett327]

Eddie Gallagher controversy: Esper fires Navy secretary, SEAL will keep Trident pin, Pentagon says

Defense Secretary Mark Esper fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer Sunday over his handling of the case of a Navy SEAL who posed for a photo next to an Islamic State terrorist's corpse in Iraq, and the SEAL will be able to keep his Trident pin, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday.

www.foxnews.com

Inconsistent with SECNAV Spencer's termination letter; not sure what to believe in the news anymore.

You don't expect him to put his alleged impropriety in his resignation letter, do you? Those details came from the Pentagon spokesman, Jon Hoffman.

 

[xmid]

These dudes are the ideal warriors.

They are not the ideal warriors if they are killing prisoners (not saying he did, purely rhetorical) or taking war trophy pictures with dead combatants. If they are harming their countries objectives, painting their country in the wrong light, or otherwise committing acts that most find unethical, then they are not the ideal. We're better than that. CAG doesn't have nearly the same issues and their guys are accomplishing the same high speed objectives. I'll keep saying it, but NSW has a cultural issue that has allowed them to get to this point. Maybe the recruitment and training that you describe is part of the problem.

All of that doesn't change the fact that this case with Gallagher was and is incredibly mismanaged.

 

[Spekkio]

Focus here. I’m not asking whether there’s a process for redemption. I’m asking whether POTUS has the authority to arbitrarily override the FAA administrator simply by virtue of being the head of the Executive Branch. It’s a very precise question.

Dunno about the FAA, but in the case of the military he can and just did.

 

[Brett327]

Dunno about the FAA, but in the case of the military he can and just did.

The thrust of my question was more along the lines of whether a member of the CoC would have a legal basis for not following the order... I.E. whether doing so falls completely within the bounds of what we understand as a lawful order.

 

[Spekkio]

The thrust of my question was more along the lines of whether a member of the CoC would have a legal basis for not following the order...

SECNAV just found out the hard way that he doesn't.

Typically for an order to be considered unlawful, there has to be some law or regulation that forbids the superior from giving the order or the subordinate from performing the act. What law is Trump's order violating and/or what law would SECNAV have violated by executing it.

 

[Jim123]

Maybe he intended to get fired for taking this stand.

History will be the judge of all this. And by that I mean that fifty years from now, when all this is a footnote, there will still be more than one side of the argument.

 

[FormerRecruitingGuru]

For those of us on OPNAV staff, were pissed we have to update routing sheets and coordination pages for the Acting guy.

The life of a Don Tracker warrior...

 

[MIDNJAC]

Maybe he intended to get fired for taking this stand.

History will be the judge of all this. And by that I mean that fifty years from now, when all this is a footnote, there will still be more than one side of the argument.

Personally, I think this was the case. And the letter written to explain what he was knowingly doing (i.e. he knew he would be fired).

 

[llnick2001]

The thrust of my question was more along the lines of whether a member of the CoC would have a legal basis for not following the order... I.E. whether doing so falls completely within the bounds of what we understand as a lawful order.

I think at least one big part of the difference is the FAA is acting pursuant to an enabling statute; the authority it exercises, though organized under the executive, actually belongs to Congress (like most of our government agencies). POTUS can't, but Congress could easily designate victor airways and fix requirements for pilot licenses by statute (subject to bicameralism and presentment, of course), but they chose to delegate to an agency. CiC authority actually belongs to POTUS.