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.
December 21st, 2009 at 12:20 pm
You didn’t say what offense under UCMJ he intended to charge and prove. And maybe he missed the new Army policy to keep couples together. What he may be forgetting is that the decision to put women in uniform in key roles was made far above his pay grade for reasons that transcend his immediate concern with all-hands duty availability. I presume that the policy makers already took into account the expected loss from pregnancy and expect commanders to factor that loss into their planning. Maybe also he missed the class at general’s charm school on women in the military.
December 21st, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Disobeying orders.
December 21st, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Now that the general is a pioneer, he may soon find an arrow in his back. There is a relatively safe and simple solution for the pregnancy problem – abortion – that has equally simplistic attitudes surrounding it. I’ll guess that he will soon find some face-saving way to modify his order after the Army tells him that his order is causing more trouble than the pregnancies would have. .