by
Chelsea Schilling
America’s men and women in uniform – many of whom have risked their
lives in service to their country – are now being stripped of
once-guaranteed college benefits as the Obama administration seeks to
ensure citizens feel the pain of its loss in the sequester battle.
It’s just the latest move in a series of Obama administration actions
that have chipped away at the U.S. military’s size, strength and
benefits structure – and drastically changed the face of the most
powerful fighting force in the world.
The U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine Corps have now halted their
tuition assistance programs after across-the-board federal spending cuts
went into effect March 1. The suspension applies to all components,
including Reserve and National Guard personnel on active-duty orders.
The U.S. Navy is also expected to deliver a similar announcement soon.
The cuts do not affect G.I. Bill benefits.
According to new reports,
any new applications for tuition assistance will be rejected by the Air
Force. The branch’s application site states, “Air Force Military
Tuition Assistance Currently not Available.”
The Air Force is also limiting its career training at its
Non-Commissioned Officer Academy and Squadron Officer School – which
means commanders will be forced to limit the number of airmen attending
the training.
The program pays up to $4,500 per fiscal year for service members seeking a high-school diploma, certificate or college degree.
“This week, DOD’s comptroller issued guidance indicating that the
services should consider significant reductions in funding new tuition
assistance applicants, effective immediately and for the duration of the
current fiscal situation,” Pentagon spokesman Nathan Christensen told
the Marine Corps Times just days ago.
A petition posted on the White House website is urging Obama to
restore the tuition assistance program through an executive order.
At the time of this report, that petition has garnered more than 90,000 signatures.
As WND reported just days ago, the Obama administration has directed federal agencies to make sequestration cuts as devastating as the administration warned they would be.
The Washington Times obtained a March 5 email sent by Charles Brown,
an official with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office
in Raleigh, N.C. The email asked “if there was any latitude” in
spreading the sequester cuts across the region and lessening the impacts
on fish inspections.
Officials in Washington replied that whatever he does, he needs to
make sure he doesn’t lessen the pain America will feel from
sequestration.
The reply explained: “We have gone on record with a notification to
Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to
producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture
industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our
opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure
you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”
Before sequestration went into effect, the administration predicted it would be a catastrophe.
As WND reported,
the public was warned the $85 billion in spending cuts would include
the loss of police officers, firefighters, teachers, soldiers, air
control towers and shipyards.
Once it became clear the administration would not get the tax
increases it demanded and sequestration would go into effect, Obama
began downplaying the effects of the automatic spending cuts, even
calling the idea of sequestration just “dumb.” Now, it appears the
administration wants to make sure its previous threats are realized.
The tuition assistance freeze comes just a year after the Obama
administration began pushing for U.S. service members – and especially
military retirees – to
pay as much as 30 percent more for their health care.
Is Obama declaring war on U.S. military?
Obama has made no secret of his plans for deep military cuts that
would downsize the Pentagon. In 2010, he cut $487 billion from the
defense budget. In 2011, he signed into law a budget process intended to
cut an additional $492 billion over 10 years.
The New York Times recently
reported:
“On the list are not only base closings but also an additional
reduction in deployed nuclear weapons and stockpiles and a restructuring
of the military medical insurance program that costs more than America
spends on all of its diplomacy and foreign aid around the world. Also
being considered is yet another scaling back in next-generation
warplanes, starting with the F-35, the most expensive weapons program in
United States history.”
According to the report, some senior Pentagon officials have argued
that massive cuts could leave room to increase funding for “building
drones, developing offensive and defensive cyberweapons and focusing on
Special Operations forces.”
But retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, a national security and foreign affairs analyst, warned,
“These cuts leave America with a military inventory of ancient and
broken equipment. Our tanker aircraft are on average 47 years old and
our strategic bombers 34 years old, and besides, their numbers are
totally insufficient for America’s global missions. For example, our
air force shrank from 82 fighter squadrons at the end of the Cold War to
39 today and our Navy is in worse shape. We have a naval fleet of 284
ships and shrinking even though naval planners indicate we need at least
328 ships.”
In 2012, Obama declared that the “tide of war is receding” and called
for shrinking the U.S. Army and Marines. The Los Angeles Times reported
that Obama vowed to “ensure our security with smaller conventional
ground forces,” adding that the armed forces “will be leaner” but
“agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and
threats.”
During the presidential campaign, former GOP presidential frontrunner
Mitt Romney accused Obama of “cutting the capacity of America to defend
itself.”
Obama’s also announced his plan to carry out
a new round of nuclear-warhead cuts.
The strategy is expected to leave the U.S. with only about 1,000
warheads, a level that experts say would weaken strategic nuclear
deterrence capability.
Meanwhile,
Obama has expanded the U.S. military role in Latin America and deployed U.S. Special Operations forces to
at least 75 countries.
He
deployed troops to the West African country of Niger to set up drone bases and approved $50 million
to assist France in Mali.
Obama also reportedly agreed to
substantially increase America’s military presence in the Philippines.
In his 2013 Inaugural speech, Obama called for the U.S. to
maintain a global military presence.
As commander in chief, Obama leads a military of about 1.5 million
active duty troops, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. That’s
less than half the 3.6 million troops during the Korean War.
As Face the Facts, a nonpartisan think-tank, explains, “This smaller
force has been stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Troops faced longer deployments and multiple tours of duty to compensate
for fewer personnel.”
According to Defense News, “Obama is sticking by plans to shrink the
Army to 490,000 active-duty troops and the Marine Corps to 186,000 …
over the next five years.”
During his time in office, Obama has also forced
at least four generals to resign from their command.
The Obama administration plans to leave
10,000 U.S. troops
in Afghanistan after NATO combat operations end in late 2014. More than
2,000 American soldiers have died since the Afghanistan war began on
Oct. 7, 2001.
A full 72 percent of those casualties happened during Obama’s first term.
Obama fundamentally changes America’s military
WND reported in August 2012
when former military and CIA officers blasted Obama for leaking
national intelligence secrets for political gain – and jeopardizing the
U.S. mission.
A 22-minute video, titled
“Dishonorable Disclosures,” was released by
Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund,
an independent watchdog organization designed to stop U.S. leaders from
politically capitalizing on national security secrets and to educate
the public on the importance of operational security.
The group accused Obama of nearly a dozen breaches of national
security, beginning with foolishly announcing the death of Osama bin
Laden “to prop up his presidency politically,” rather than keeping a
silent cover in order to use the information obtained in the bin Laden
raid.
“In a few brief moments of selfish grandstanding and political
opportunism,” OPSEC asserted, “our commander in chief lost the single
opportunity to exploit intelligence that, had secrecy been preserved,
might well have crushed al-Qaida once and for all.”
Also, under Obama administration guidance, the military adopted the
president’s goal of homosexuality in the ranks through the 2011 repeal
of its long-standing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy implemented by
President Bill Clinton. In February 2013, Obama also issued a directive
requiring the military to treat cohabitating homosexuals as married
couples,
including extending federal benefits to same-sex domestic partners.
Since the policy change, chaplains’ organizations have told WND there
is bigotry against those who follow a traditional biblical and military
perspective that does not promote homosexuality.
In September 2012, officials with the Chaplain Alliance said among the situations that have developed:
- Senior military officials have allowed personnel in favor of repeal
to speak to media while those who have concerns have been ordered to be
silent.
- Service members engaged in homosexual behavior protested a service
school’s open doors policy for all students that prohibited the closing
of room doors for sexual purposes. The protesters were upset because
they claimed that they had a right to participate in sexual behavior
with their same-sex roommates.
- A senior chaplain was stripped of his authority over the chapel
under his charge because, in accordance with federal law, he proclaimed
the chapel as a “sacred space” where marriage or marriage-like
ceremonies would only be between one man and one woman.
- Same-sex ceremonies have been performed at military chapels,
including one at Fort Polk, La., a state that constitutionally defines
marriage as one man and one woman.
- The Navy has allowed sailors who have openly engaged in homosexual behavior to choose their bunk mates.
More recently, the Obama administration lifted the ban on women
serving in direct combat positions, the infantry and special operations,
despite
concerns from high-profile veterans and leaders that doing so would create a less capable fighting force and open the door for
women to be drafted into military service.
Do America’s warriors’ votes even count?
Perhaps most alarmingly, despite their personal sacrifice to protect
Americans’ freedoms, the nation’s men and women in uniform are often
deprived of the chance to cast a ballot for their own commander in
chief.
WND reported in August 2012
when the Obama re-election campaign sued Ohio state officials in an
attempt to suppress, in that pivotal swing state, the votes of America’s
military men and women – who traditionally lean conservative and vote
Republican. (CNN exit polling data from 2008 showed voters favored
Republican John McCain over Obama by a 10-point margin, 54 to 44
percent.)
WND also reported in October 2012,
during one of the most hotly contested elections in recent U.S.
history, the number of military absentee ballot requests was strangely
down by staggering numbers compared to the 2008 election. That news came
just as a Military Times survey of military forces showed Romney with a
26-percent lead over Obama. The Times survey followed an earlier
Rasmussen poll that showed a 59 to 35 percent lead for Romney among
military service voters.
The low number of military requests perplexed Republican lawmakers,
who in 2009 pushed and passed the Military and Overseas Voter
Empowerment Act, which was supposed to make it easier for overseas
military personnel to vote. The law required a voter assistance office
at every military installation. It also automatically provided military
voters with an opportunity to update their voter information during the
check-in process at their duty stations.
However, the Defense Department’s Inspector General reported that the
Pentagon was not complying with the 2009 law, citing information that
only about half of overseas locations had functioning voter assistance
offices.
“Tens of thousands of service members’ votes not counted” was the headline of a
June 27, 2012, McClatchy newspaper article
detailing just how seriously flawed the current system has been for
enabling the millions of men and woman in the U.S. military to vote.
The story included the following statistics:
In 2010, of the approximately 2 million military and
overseas voters accounted for in data reported by the states to the
Election Assistance Commission, only 4.6 percent of those voters were
able to cast an absentee ballot that counted, according to the Military
Voter Protection Project’s analysis of that data from the federal
Election Assistance Commission, which tracks participation in voting.
That compared with 5.5 percent in 2006, which was also a midterm
election, the organization concluded.
In his Washington Times column, American Majority Action CEO Ned Ryan
placed the blame squarely on the president for the “abysmal” military
absentee voting in the last two elections:
“So, why aren’t soldiers voting? In many cases they simply can’t, and
they have their commander in chief, President Obama, to blame,”
Ryan argued.
“Hundreds of thousands of our uniformed personnel have been shut out of
the process, and we can thank the Obama administration and even the
Obama campaign for this tragedy. …
“The explanation? The Obama administration by way of the Pentagon
blamed a lack of funds for their failure to comply with the law. That’s
right, the same administration that has spent more money in less time
than any other in American history is pleading poverty when it comes to
ensuring that our military can vote …”
Ryan blasted the Obama administration for sending $2 billion to the
Egyptian government and funding Solyndra, Obamacare, “Cash for Clunkers”
and other massive federal programs while refusing to “spare change to
help ensure that our nation’s heroes can exercise the right to vote.”
“It’s a national disgrace. Worse, the facts make us wonder if it is
intentional. After all, members of the military vote overwhelmingly
Republican.”
It’s a new year, a revamped event, and we are going to blow this thing up. We’re talking a full-on Irish Testicle Festival
with a Beer Garden, authentic live Irish music, individual and team
ball-eating contests, the authentic can't-find-anywhere-else atmosphere,
and one more thing... Have you seen the bars in Virginia City? Need we
say more? It's time to gather the gang and make this the bar crawl town
it deserves to be, starting with this event! A 2013 addition is the
first annual Leprechaun Crawl. There's gold in them
there hills! Well, actually it's silver, but who wants silver colored
beer or whiskey? Just follow the rainbow to find your jackpot! 
