When your tires on your vehicle become worn, you retire the old ones and put on new. This is common sense. To drive with worn ones will eventually result in an accident of being left in the lurch somewhere. War-weary soldiers, like worn tires, must be given a reprieve when they are over-employed. As this article so readily points out, we were never designed mentally to be subjected to the stresses we are putting our troops through now. They can’t see the forest for the trees, and their commanders are instructed to keep it that way. The shrinks are instructed to keep certifying them as good to go. Force retention mandates ensure the ranks are filled-but filled with what?

I received this from Bob who has his ear on the railroad tracks and hears a lot:

Every Modern Marine knows the name Chesty Puller, a general that is now the template by which all measure themselves. But not so many know the story of Smedley Butler a Major General, recipient of the Brevet medal from one action and two Congressional Medals of Honor for two other separate actions. The only Marine so honored.

The reason for this may be the jaundiced view he developed toward the end of his career towards America at war: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”

He was a veteran’s advocate and wrote the book “War is a Racket”. His distrust of bankers was public and intense.

Knowing today that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was based on at least one false flag operation and having so recently been sent into Iraq, a nation ruled by a despicable villain, but not one that had WMDs or had ever attacked the US, it seems that little has changed in the century between his wars and ours. Yet there are 3 issues I have noticed that disturb me for our nation’s security going forward.

First and most dangerous is the outsourcing of security to civilian companies. The role of protecting our diplomats was once the job of Marines but just last week the Secretary of Defense visiting Afghanistan had combat troops disarm before coming into his presence, a tacit admission that Washington knows how badly today’s troops have been treated and thus fears them, trusting their security instead to mercenaries and CIA paramilitary assets.

The second issue may explain the first: we have enslaved anyone so innocently trusting that they join the service. The two Presidents Bush combined for two Force Depletion extensions; obligating new recruits to 9 years of service. I am not aware of anyone who did 4 combat tours in Vietnam or Korea, certainly no one who did not volunteer for it. Today 3 or 4 tours are common. We have simply worn our troops out. The cowardice to detain volunteers for extra duty to avoid a politically untenable draft is, simply put, reckless endangerment on a national scale.

Finally it is the combination of unprecedented numbers of badly broken troops returning to a medical and administrative machine that fixes their reports of those troops condition to fit political needs, rather than those of the patient, that poses the most frustrating (and despicable) problem for active military, older Veterans deserving of help with the conditions they have suffered from their service and then the security of the nation at large. What kind of parent would recommend military service to their child today? We have again betrayed the best of us, those who came when duty called, and they have every reason to carry a sense of that betrayal, and the distrust of our government, for the rest of their lives. We can bail out Bank of America and countless others but we can not bring ourselves to offer proper care and relief by drafts on our treasury or populace.

War is a racket… Now more than ever.