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So, the very first Marine goes into Tun tavern, and signs up. He heads out back and cops a squat for a smoke break.
About 10 minutes later, the second recruit shows up, and asks, “What kind of chickenshit outfit do you think we signed up for?”
The first Marine looks at him with a baleful eye, and says, “Boot, let me tell you how it was in the Old Corps…”

THE PEARLY GATES OF HEAVEN — In response to an investigation initiated by the Marine Corps Times, a spokesman for God has confirmed that because of a paperwork error Marines have actually been guarding the streets of Hell for the past 200 years.“Don’t get me wrong, we briefly did have Marines on guard up here,” St. Peter told Duffel Blog, “but they kept making all the new angels stand at parade rest and conduct police calls for cigarette butts at four in the morning.”“Seriously, anyone who thinks having Marines guarding your streets is bliss has never been knife-handed by some random Gunnery Sergeant for not calling him by his proper rank. They even insisted we refer to everything in nautical terminology.”

Source: Paperwork Error Sends Marines To Guard Streets Of Hell

Happy Birthday to our junior service, the United States Marine Corps.

Today would have been his 55th Birthday. Much love to his family.

With the January deadline approaching for Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s decision on opening all combat units to women, the contrast between the Marines integration testing and the Army’s Ranger training is telling.The Marines set out to answer a question: Can women perform at the same level as men in the infantry? While adversaries of the women’s combat exemption have been hard at work trying to discredit the testing and the results, the Marines’ gender integration study was executed according to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) required methodology. It had buy-in and observation from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, the University of Pittsburgh, Michigan State University and Rand Corp. Contrary to the claim that the Marines were biased against the females, participants and overseers say the opposite was true.The Marines’ Ground Combat Element-Integrated Task Force (GCEITF) was directed “to test the hypothesis that an integrated ground combat arms unit under gender neutral standards will perform just as well as a similar all male unit.” The results disproved the hypothesis. All-male units outperformed coed units in 69 percent of the 134 combat tasks. Women were slower, were less accurate shooters, struggled with tasks requiring upper body strength such as climbing over walls and lifting a 200-pound dummy off the field, and retained more than double the injuries of men, among other things:

Source: A Tale of Two Combat Integration Tests: Army v. Marines | The Stream

Read the whole thing.

This is not an endorsement of Dr. Carson for President, but clarification. Politico published one of the slimiest hit pieces ever on Ben Carson that was so riddled with falsehoods that they had to stealth edit the headline and lede, and it still manages to be wrong.

Basically, in his memoirs, Ben Carson stated that while in high school ROTC, he had the opportunity to meet with then Army Chief of Staff GEN William Westmoreland. At that meeting, Westmoreland assured the young standout that he was a shoe-in for a scholarship at West Point. Politifact among other things pointed out that West Point offers appointments, not scholarships. Well, yeah, but if someone offers you a full free ride of no tuition, room and board included, and an annual stipend, you could be forgiven for thinking of it as a scholarship. Especially since even West Point calls it a scholarship.

Can the Chief of Staff of the Army guarantee an appointment to West Point? Technically, no. But he’s the Chief of Staff of the Army. Let’s just say he knows a guy that can get things done.

The services like to tout the number of people that apply to the academies, versus the number they select, as a means of showing what top notch schools they are.

To gain an appointment to the academy, you must first secure a nomination. The normal route is to write to your Congressional representative and Senators.  The Vice President also has nominations to offer. But so does the Secretary of the Army. And recall the Carson was in high school ROTC at the time. There are special provisions for those students to secure nominations.

Applicants currently enrolled in an Army Junior or Senior Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program or an ROTC program from another branch of service that has been designated as an Honor Unit with Distinction are eligible for a nomination in this category. A request for a ROTC Nomination should be made through your Professor of Military Science or Senior Instructor who must fill out and submit a Request for ROTC Nomination (Form 5-497) to the Director of Admissions, U.S. Military Academy.

In the end, focused on becoming a doctor, Carson never actually sought a nomination nor applied to USMA. He instead applied to and was accepted at Yale.

As some folks were quick to point out to me this weekend, something like 10,000 people will seek a nomination to West Point, but only something like 4000 will be nominated. But the numbers are a tad misleading. Around 10,000 people annually ask for the information packet to seek a nomination and application. In fact, only about half those people will actually submit the packet. The acceptance rate is far, far higher than any of the academies would like to admit.

Let me tell you how easy an academy nomination is to get. I got one. Your humble scribe, at the time, wasn’t even assured of graduating high school. But we received a nomination to Annapolis.  In fact, we never asked for one. The first we heard of it was when our NJROTC instructor called us into the office to inform us that the Secretary of the Navy had nominated us for the Naval Academy. It had never actually occurred to us to even try for Annapolis. But with the nomination in hand, we began the process. What stumped us was the essay part of the application. Why do you want to attend the Naval Academy? With no good answer coming to mind, we quickly realized that we would be a poor fit, and so declined to actually apply.

Similarly, in our first year of active service, we were invited to apply for the Preparatory School for West Point. Again, with no burning desire to attend West Point (and the thought of spending five years in an academic setting not at all appealing) we declined.

Our Canadian friends are commemorating Remembrance Day today, their version of Memorial Day. In the US, we remember all veterans on November 11, and our fallen on Memorial Day. Our Commonwealth neighbors, on the other hand, use this day to honor their fallen.

Witnesses from Southern California to the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday evening said they saw an unexplained moving light in the night sky that was reportedly an unarmed missile test-fired by the U.S. Navy”

Light seen in OC sky was confirmed through JWA tower to be a Naval test fire off the coast,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said on Twitter, referring to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana.

A Navy spokesman told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the luminous object was an unarmed Trident missile that was test-fired from a submarine off the coast of Southern California.

Source: Bright Moving Object Seen Above SoCal Was Unarmed Missile Test-Fired by Navy: Officials | KTLA

So, a couple days ago, the FAA issued a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) for LAX that closed the airspace off the western side of LAX airport. Normally, LAX likes traffic to approach from the west, over the ocean, to minimize noise over the city. Local news published a brief blurb about the closure, noting that it was in support of unspecified military operations.

In the comments, various nutjobs figured it was the start of the imposition of martial law and taking over the country by the military.

In fact, it was in support of a validation exercise of the Trident D-5 missile system of an Ohio class ballistic missile nuclear submarine, reportedly the USS Kentucky.

Test firings of missiles from regular fleet assets are somewhat interesting. They validate not only the stockpile of missiles, but are also a test of the crew and the ship.

The crew knows they’re tasked to fire a test shot. I mean, they take inventory of what exactly is being loaded in the missile tubes, and they know where they’re ordered to sail.

What they don’t know is exactly when they’ll take the shot.

The ship gets orders to patrol within a certain geographical box, in this case, a small box off the SoCal coast that is part of the Pacific Missile Test Range.

From there, they simply cruise around as if on patrol, and the orders to fire come in just as they would in the event of a nuclear war.

For the crew, it’s relatively straight forward. They practice firing procedures all the time.* But for the range, it is another story. The range team needs to ensure that both the surface and the airspace in the launch box is clear. Not only at the launch point, either. They also need to ensure the impact area (likely at Kawajelein atoll) is clear, and that monitoring aircraft and cameras are on station). Getting everyone on the same sheet of music is sometimes a challenge.

Watching half of SoCal on twitter thinking this launch was a UFO was amusing, as a few years ago, someone put a clip on YouTube. A jetliner heading west into the sunset off the California coast had people thinking it was an ICBM launch. But here we have a missile launch, and they didn’t recognize it.

*What is kind of funny is, when you tour an Ohio class sub, they’re happy to show off the missile firing control panel and the missile tubes. What you aren’t allowed to see is aft of the missile tubes where the reactor and engineering plant is.

India has canceled Greenpeace International’s license to operate and gave the group 30 days to close down, citing financial fraud and falsification of data, the environment watchdog said on Friday.Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has turned the spotlight on foreign charities since he took office last year, accusing some of trying to hamper projects on social and environmental grounds.Last year, Modi government withdrew permission to Greenpeace to receive foreign funding, saying the money was used to block industrial projects.

Source: India orders Greenpeace to shut down over fraud | Reuters

40% of India’s population is still living in the Bronze Age, and dammit, Greenpeace thinks that shouldn’t change!

During his time in the Senate, McCain’s pushed to kill a number of programs, often in the name of curbing government waste. In the 1990s, he tried to stop construction of the third Seawolf-class submarine, USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23). That loss was good news for the Navy, which has turned that sub into a special missions platform.The problem, is that cutting so-called Pentagon waste can leave the troops having to soldier on with older gear. In 2002, the Air Force had reached a deal with Boeing to lease 100 tanker variants based on the 767 airframe. McCain butted in, and eventually the deal got called off. All this time, the bulk of the American tanker force consisted of KC-135 tankers – the youngest of which entered service in 1965. The Air Force soon found itself in a long, lengthy drama over the KC-X program, which included media fights, an award to Airbus for the KC-45, a protest that overturned the award to Airbus, and the military soldiering on with the aging KC-135. Just last month, the KC-46A Pegasus – based on the 767 – has begun testing for the Air Force, thirteen years after McCain helped halt the 2002 leasing deal for what was virtually the same aircraft.

Source: When McCain Butts In On Procurement, Troops Take The Hit | The Daily Caller

It’s a little more nuanced than “It’s all McCain’s fault.”

But he really has been on the wrong side of a lot of arguments. There’s a big difference between “expensive equipment” and “wasteful spending.”