Ken Nelson

This Saturday Dixie High school hosts a Celebration of the Triple Deuce at 6:30pm.

This will be an exciting night held in the honor of the 222nd.  All five batteries are invited to attend:  St. George, Beaver, Cedar City and Richfield.   The purpose of the event is to express gratitude and appreciation for their service and sacrifice.  The celebration will include our local politicians:  Speaker David Clark, Senator Steve Urquhart, Congressman Don Ipson and Mayor Ken Neilson.   In addition, the posting of the colors will be by the Dixie High School JROTC and drill performance, patriotic medley by the Dixie High Honor Choir, Ronald Reagan Youth Presentation "9/11: Never Forget", and a pictorial slideshow of life in Iraq of the 222nd while they were deployed.

To conclude, one of the Leadership Academy committee members will receive recognition for his Eagle Scout Award for successfully completing his project.  The Eagle Scout project included two monument plaques in Veterans Memorial Park dedicated to the 222nd, with their names and ranks engraved.  See:  http://222eaglescout.webs.com/

This celebration is free of charge and open to the public.  Even if you are not a member of the 222nd, but are a veteran and you wish to wear your uniform, the school would be honored.  In addition to the 222nd, this celebration is to honor all of those that have given so much.  "No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks." — James Allen.

Here is a timeline for the Triple Deuce

Back in 1945 concern about malnutrition in incoming recruits helped create the national school lunch program. In typical big government fashion, that program moved well beyond its initial scope and now poses… a threat to the nutrition of incoming recruits.

Readiness urged Congress to pass a new childhood nutrition law to remove school junk food, improve nutritional standards and quality of school meals, and to open access to anti-obesity programs for children.

One of the extra duties I had as an Army officer was “Weight Control Officer”. This involved me supervising the body fat measurement and PT tests of soldiers exceeding Army body weight and fat standards.   I thought the program was a joke. People hardly ever improved, yet I could rarely separate them from the Army.

My view… fail a PT test, get another, fail – see ya!

Enforcing higher, stricter, standards would actually cause people who can’t stay fit to not join.  And avoid many of the 12,000 separated from service due to obesity.

Hey military… do something that works, that you control, not something that feels good and grows government. Don’t  create tomorrow’s problem.

He apparently, intends to ruin us financially, emotionally, and militarily.

Here is one view of the US defense budget:

but here is another, perhaps more useful one:

The entire article is interesting. Read it here.

From a series of photos in the Denver Post by an AP correspondent in Afghanistan.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/50668

12 men, no regrets

I’d have done it in a heartbeat. It was the right thing to do in all ways.

My son just sent me this picture of a MIG 25 Foxbat that the Iraqi’s buried to try and hide it from us:

Makes you wonder what else they’ve buried in Iraq and Syria….

No Patraeus

I’ve no idea about what kind of man Colin Powell is. He seems to have been an earnest young man who served well in the Army as a young officer.

But from Lieutenant-Colonel on, one things seems to have been paramount on Colin Powell’s professional mind… what’s good for Colin Powell.

So during the 80’s he did the Reagan thing. Then the Bush thing. Then he did the Clinton thing. Then the Bush thing again. Whoever was in power, he was cool with them.

And now that Obama is in power, he feels the need to apologize for Bush.

This article by Michael Wolff thinks Powell is correct now:

He has been wrong about nearly everything that matters, as so many have, but he has, as the result of what seems to be great suffering and some respect for the obvious, admitted it

But is Wolff right about Powell always being wrong until now.

Or am I right about Powell always doing what’s best for Powell, including now, with right or wrong not playing a critical role?

Or are we both right? I’ve agreed with some things he has said over the years, but I’ve never felt I could trust that he believed them.

Powell epitomizes, to me, the ultimate careerist.  And his careerism has had real costs that I don’t think apologies will help. Careerists, whether in the Army or in the Senate, do us all harm.

He should do us all one last BIG favor and just shut up and collect his pension.

BTW: Another general that fits this category is Wesley Clark.

The 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines have gone to war – in Afghanistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14marja.html?hp

For the Marines of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, the assault into the last large Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province was beginning. For almost all of them, this was to be their first taste of war. And an afternoon of small-arms combat was ahead.

The article covers them fairly. Here is their battalion website:

http://www.iimefpublic.usmc.mil/public/iimefpublic.nsf/unitSites/3bn6mar

I wish them well.

No accident a Navy guy support this.

Is it brave to advocate what your boss wants?  Bravery is what the usual media pundits call Admiral Mike Mullen’s support for gays in the military.  But , to me, that is sort of like the Fed Ex ads where everybody likes the idea when the boss says it, cutting out the guy who actually suggested it.

True bravery would be to resign in the face of a decision clearly bad for the military and the nation.

Instead, Mullen  just helps the Obama administration in their attempt to gut the military that they, rightly, view as a threat to the ultimate takeover of the country by the forces of progressivism.

So they want to gut the military and make it something that no parent will want their kids to join.  Turning barracks into bath houses would do just that.

Mullen, a careerist at core, is all too happy to help as thanks for elevating him to the ultimate spot in a military career. Never mind what is good for the military or the country.

Competitors can teach the Army about cool and clean running M16s
Shown: The JP Rifles JP-15 AR.

The NY Times covers the Army’s attempts to build an M4 (shorter variant of the M16) that won’t jam:

Watch the video closely. After several magazines, the barrel smolders. Then it becomes red hot. After 1 minute and 20 seconds the barrel begins to droop between magazines — like a piece of warm licorice. Then comes the catastrophic ending, at 1 minute and 51 seconds and after the 535th round, when the barrel ruptures.

They Army has decided to make the barrel heavier to help avoid the problem:

The barrel gets hotter and hotter, and the heat spreads throughout the weapon. The shooter wears a heat-resistant glove even to pull the trigger. Soon the barrel smolders and glows, but it does not droop and does not rupture. At 2:22 the hand guard assembly catches fire. It burns for about two and a half minutes. But the rifle keeps firing, magazine after magazine, until it stops firing on automatic at 4 minutes and 47 seconds, after 911 rounds.

In my experience fouling, not shooting too much/too fast, causes most M16 jams.  Although I have seen M16 barrels begin to get soft from heat, this was before the introduction of the 3-shot burst automatics the soldiers of today use.

The M16 runs very dirty because the gas used to blast  the bolt back to cycle a new round comes directly back into the receiver depositing all sorts of nasties that collect quickly there.  Shoot a 100 rounds through an M16, or AR-15, then put your finger in there and it comes back black.

Competitive shooters don’t risk their lives due to jams, but they do risk losing, which motivates them to modify the guns to never jam.  Most serious competitors in multi-gun, or 3-gun, shooting (pistol, shotgun, carbine) have moved to a gas-piston system of cycling the action. In this approach the gas doesn’t go all the way back to the bolt, instead it operates a piston that moves the bolt. The action runs clean and cool. You can go a 1000 or more rounds and not have to clean the action (you should clean the barrel to extend its life however).

These systems also typically minimize the bolt slap against the back of the receiver.  Most AR-15’s come back too hard, making recoil much worse than need be.

The Army, IMHO, would be better served moving to a clean running, lower recoil, gas-piston variant of the M16/AR-15.   The guns would jam a lot less.  And valuable soldier time wouldn’t be wasted cleaning the weapons.

I’d note that soldiers given a choice, usually in Special Ops or other specialties, generally prefer the gas-piston systems. Reliability plus less maintenance and lower recoil… you can have it all!

Brian and I toured the U.S.S. Torsk in Baltimore and a found memorial to a St. George resident:

Joseph Grant Snow was the only member of the Torsk crew to die during World War II. He was lost when he didn’t get below decks during a training dive in 65 years ago today.

Here is his page at OneEternalPatrol.
And here is the Torsk log from the day he died.

"This weekend in Prague," he said, "I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons."  
Barack Obama

Some would say “admirable goal but unrealistic”.  And they would be stupid.

Some would say “admirable goal and we should do it”. And they would be dangerous.

Why?  Because there will never, again, be a world without nukes. Even if successful getting rid of the weapons, the world would never be more than a week or two from having them again. Such a world would be dangerous, unstable, and prone to rapid preventive escalations.

I have to wonder, is Obama just naive? Or is there some underlying ill will he has against the world and our country?

Isn’t it sad I have to wonder such questions.  300+ million people in our country, and THIS is the best we can elect? Sad.

To the stockade with you!

An Army Major General in command in Northern Iraq will soon have his hat handed to him, but I admire his effort. The general, sick of losing skilled soldiers to pregnancy, intends to put a little teeth in his efforts to stop the losses by court martialing both the woman, and the father, if they are on active duty.

‘I’ve got a mission to do, I’m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them,’ Maj Gen Cucolo said.

‘So I’m going to take every measure I can to keep them all strong, fit and with me for the twelve months we are in the combat zone.’

Married soldiers on active service should either put their love lives on hold or take precautions. It was a ‘black and white’ issue, he said.

I like it.  His command loses more soldiers to pregnancy than the enemy and he puts a reasonable measure in place to stop it. Good thinking.  While some of these pregnancies are inadvertent, many aren’t. When I was in, I heard more than a few female soldiers say they would use pregnancy to get out of a deployment or assignment they didn’t want to do. Now they have some consequences to consider.

Alas, he should prepare to retire as a Major General. But hey, career is over rated.

Personally, I’d promote him and put him in charge of the whole war. Sounds like he knows how to achieve a mission.

Navy Seals