More from DAVID H. HACKWORTH

**Piña** · July 1st, 2004, 04:06 PM

Originally posted by travelinman:
I could go on, but what's the point.

The very question that I was pondering.

**LanDroid** · July 2nd, 2004, 01:56 AM

No need to ponder, Pina, we all know Trav is a dick head. There is good reason he is reprinting David Hackworth articles from over four years ago. That's because Colonel David W. Hackworth, owner of the Silver Star medal amongst many others, is totally against the cluster-fuck in Iraq! Here is a small sample of his latest thinking.

America would be a whole lot safer if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, was flying for Virgin Airlines, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was competing on ?Survivor.? Both war leaders have done so miserable a job honchoing the military side of our critical conflict against global terrorism, and in the process so jeopardized our national security, that they should be sacked for dereliction of duty.

Contrary to continuing political spin, Iraq and Afghanistan both are running sores with little promise of even a long-term turnaround, and our world today is far more dangerous than it was before 9/11. Unless there's a 180-degree change in overall strategy, the USA is doomed to follow the same bloody path through these two brutal killing fields that the Soviet Union took in Afghanistan.

The mighty sword that Rumsfeld and Myers inherited four years ago ? the finest military force in the world ? is now chipped and dulled. And the word is that it will take at least a decade to get our overextended, bone-tired soldiers and Marines and their worn-out gear back in shape.

Top generals like former NATO commander Wes Clark and a squad of retired and active-duty four-stars warned long before the invasion of Iraq: Don?t go there. It doesn?t involve our national security. It?s not the main objective in our war with international terrorism. Even retired four-star Colin Powell said that if we go to Iraq and break the china, we own it. But know-it-all Rumsfeld and go-along-to-get-along Myers totally ignored this sound military advice.

Hackworth rant continued.

As shown above, it is well known that Hackworth did a complete 180 degree turn in his opinion of Wesley Clark. Only a Bone Head Troll would bring up old opinions Hackworth repudiated himself years ago...

[ July 01, 2004 10:57 PM: Message edited by: LanDroid ]

[ July 01, 2004 10:58 PM: Message edited by: LanDroid ]

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 03:51 AM

DEFENDING AMERICA
BY DAVID H. HACKWORTH
17 October 2000

NO MORE COLES AND NO MORE SNOW JOBS

Seventeen American sailors were killed last week. Did these young men and women die because their seniors failed to do their duty?

That's the question Congress should ask President Bill Clinton, Defense Secretary Bill Cohen and the uniformed brass from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton to Navy Chief Adm. Vern Clark to the skipper of the destroyer USS Cole.

Last month, U.S. intelligence warned that an attack on an American warship in that dangerous region was in the wind. Simultaneously, superterrorist Osama bin Laden and some like-minded rats ranted on Arab TV about making Americans bleed.

So why did the brass send sailors into the Port of Aden like grunts onto Hamburger Hill, when only days before our State Department had closed its embassies in that area because of terrorist threats?

If State was worried about the risk to embassy personnel in Aden -- long known as a terrorist snake pit where only two days before thousands of Yemenis took to the streets calling for a holy war -- why didn't the brass show the same concern for our sailors? And why didn't the Cole refuel at sea or at least in the outer harbor of Aden, where the ship could've been protected by gun crews capable of blowing a suicide craft out of the water before it got danger-close?

Almost before the smoke drifted away from the Cole, the White House launched into its too familiar after-the-terrorist-attack damage control. First Clinton addressed the nation using the identical words he uttered in 1996 when 19 U.S. airmen were killed by terrorists in Saudi Arabia -- "a despicable and cowardly act" -- followed by the now well-worn threat that we're going to get 'em and extract an eye for an eye.

Then he ordered his spinners to flood the media with the party line. The following, culled from a dozen similar snow jobs, says it all:

* Gen. Wesley Clark of Serbian War shame -- now retired and working for the same Arkansas gang that contributed so generously to Clinton's taking over the White House in 1992 -- told TV journalist Geraldo Rivera that the U.S. military must take risks; that big guys don't hide from trouble; and that because we're a superpower, we had to enter this terrorist hangout to "show the flag."

* Navy Chief Adm. Vern Clark followed the Wesley Clark act by stating, when asked why the destroyer wasn't refueled at sea, that there weren't enough oilers to go around.

America is engaged in an undeclared but very real war against terrorism, but as with the Vietnam War, our senior military types are thinking and acting conventionally. In Vietnam, the brass refought World War II while their opponent fought -- and won -- a nonconventional war.

Showing the flag may have worked when Teddy Roosevelt dispatched the Great White Fleet. But it doesn't make a lick of sense when a high-tech warship capable of mass destruction can be taken out by two martyrs in a small craft who pulled off a kamikaze attack with a tactic as old as the Trojan Horse.

Adm. Clark, along with the most of the Navy's top brass, has long been silent regarding the state of naval readiness. Candidates George W. Bush and Dick Cheney rightly say readiness stinks, while their opponents Al Gore and Joe Lieberman say it's just peachy keen -- and the Navy brass continue to duck and weave just as the Pentagon did in 1993 when 18 soldiers were killed in Somalia because there were no tanks to protect our troops.

Have Adm. Clark and his fellow gold-stripers shirked their duty by allowing our fleet to be downsized in the past seven years from 435 ships to 311 without telling the president and the candidates that the Navy doesn't have the ships to do the job?

Had they stood tall, an oiler would have been available. Had they fulfilled their sworn duty to their country and their sailors, the USS Cole would have stayed with its battle group -- instead of being dispatched by itself to pick up the slack in the Gulf because there aren't enough warships to accomplish all assigned missions.

Come January, let's hope our new president rebuilds our broken military not only materially, but morally, by putting in top leaders with the guts to hold to their sworn duty.

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 03:52 AM

DEFENDING AMERICA
BY DAVID H. HACKWORTH
12 September 2000

GROUND "WILD BILL" BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

Bill Clinton didn't write the script for the movie "Wag The Dog." But the commander in chief sure learned a thing or two from the flick about a president who -- in trouble over a young girl -- hires a Hollywood producer to create a fake war as a diversion from his sins.

Bill's first "WTD" operation was executed in 1998 -- as Monica-gate was peaking -- when he flung missiles costing a half-billion bucks at what turned out to be a vitamin factory in Sudan and an old CIA camp in Afghanistan.

Take that, terrorist Osama bin Laden. Don't you mess with us!

Bill flexed America's military muscles before a nation that suddenly found itself focused on terrorists and missiles instead of blue dresses, cigars and congressional inquisitors.

Since "WTD" worked so well, in 1999, when Clinton once again found himself in deep poo -- this time over his playing fast and loose with Red China -- he quickly launched "WTD" II against Serbia.

Militarily, the op was a bust. Our air power knocked out a few tanks at a cost of a billion bucks a tank, then NATO and the U.S. Air Force declared they'd won the first war in history that used only air power.

Bill scored from the phony war, too. "WTD" delivered once again as his troubles went south at the expense of the millions of Yugoslavians who were savaged in Kosovo and Serbia.

Now he's ordered "WTD" III, a two-Wag-in-one op: the deployment of Patriot missiles to Israel, supposedly to save the Israelis from Saddam Hussein's Scuds; and the dispatch of Delta Force warriors to Bosnia to grab war criminal Radovan Karadzic.

Of course, as with all Bill's "WTD" ops, there are a few problems with reality:

1. Israel didn't know it needed saving. Its prime minister clearly stated that there was no need to send U.S. Scudbusters. Then there were snafus. The Patriot unit rushed there at great taxpayer expense wasn't combat-ready and must now be replaced by a unit from Germany. But there's another hang-up. That unit won't be good to go because it doesn't have the intelligence gear to do the job -- the supersecret stuff they need is in the States and isn't exactly mobile.

2. If Patriot units from Germany are sent to Israel, our 80,000-strong Army Corps there won't have the right air-defense protection from enemy missiles. And if the Pentagon claims there's no real threat, then why are we still in Germany -- especially since the Cold War is long over? If these units were returned to the United States, we could save about $50 billion a year, which could go a long way toward solving problems for our not-combat-ready military.

3. Our Delta Force snatch-and-grab unit is America's best. Already deployed in Europe, they know Karadzic's every move, including how many sheets of toilet paper the very paranoid former Bosnian Serb leader uses. But Karadzic knows they're coming, and his thugs might fight back just as Mohammed Aidid's gang did in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 -- when 18 of our warriors were killed and more than 100 wounded.

Just like "WTD" I and II, there's no military necessity for "WTD" III. It's all about:

* Legacy. Capturing Karadzic will give Clinton -- in his desperate need-for-glory mind-set -- at least one feather in his cap after eight years of military misadventures gone awry.

* Votes. Defending Israel with Scudbusters could swing a lot of Jewish-American votes to Gore/Lieberman and Hillary.

* Readiness. Scooping up Karadzic and deploying missiles -- even if they don't work -- could smear egg on Dubya and Cheney over their charges that our military readiness is shot.

It's common inside-the-Pentagon knowledge that when President Nixon was under Watergate siege, the Pentagon was told not to execute his war orders.

Now that Bill's "WTD" game is so apparent, Congress should take a long, hard look at his self-serving behavior with our military and consider setting up similar restrictions. It's time our elected representatives did their duty and took the keys to the Pentagon away from this desperate lame duck. His track record leaves no doubt that he, like Nixon, is far too dangerous to leave behind the military wheel.

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 03:53 AM

DEFENDING AMERICA
BY DAVID H. HACKWORTH
August 15, 2000

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Another fun-filled week of balloons and baloney as the Democrats try to outpitch the Republican snow-job-a-thon.

Besides wanting to frag the Bush-Cheney parade, Gore and Lieberman are distancing themselves from President Clinton as if he had fleas.

Smart idea. But this separation shouldn't just be limited to issues of character -- it must also include how, if elected, Gore and Lieberman intend to defend America. We-the-people deserve to know their vision before November, what kind of folks they'll put in the Pentagon's top civilian slots and how they'll excise the rot.

Rot always starts at the head. And for the past eight years, the Pentagon's been headed up by dilettantes, social engineers and racketeers. These so-called leaders have allowed our forces' readiness level -- the ability to get there quickly and whack an enemy with a club before he knows we're standing behind him -- to reach a new post-Cold War low.

But throwing big bucks at the Pentagon, as both major parties plan to do, isn't the answer. How this largesse is wasted -- since there's never been more money per serving person in our county's history -- is another story.

Any solution must start with proper leadership.

The way our system works is that this leadership must come from the civilians who run the Pentagon. But since 1993, no way has Clinton's defense team at the secretariat level been selected for their proven leadership skills. Not one past or present Clinton- appointed Pentagon head could lead a troop of scouts into a barn during a snowstorm. And they certainly weren't picked for their defense expertise -- few would know a Stinger missile from a snack bar. None of Clinton's three SecDefs held a leadership position in our armed forces. Only one wore a soldier suit.

Clinton's selection criteria was simple: an A Team that would push his agenda to make our military politically correct via max sensitivity training and a women in every foxhole. Equality and consideration for others over fighting skill became the password. Meanwhile, the B Team remained the same old Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) porkers, still into greasing the greedies who play the defense money game -- like major Clinton contributor, defense contractor and friend of Red China, Loral.

William Cohen would have to be the worst SecDef since Louis Johnson. He runs the bloated Pentagon as if he were still a U.S. senator -- lots of hot air and too many VIP trips at taxpayer expense. Then there's his predecessor, William Perry, who seldom saw a gold-plated, high-tech system he didn't want to buy. And once he took care of the players, he flashed back to his high-paying MICC job like a rocket. Before Perry there was Les Aspin, a bumbling academic who got canned because he refused to send tanks to Mogadishu, Somalia -- a bad decision that caused a lot of good men to die.

And remember Professor Sheila Widnall of MIT, the disastrous Secretary of the Air Force? A smart engineer, maybe, but she didn't have one leadership bone in her body and became a total puppet of the generals. Or try Togo West, a slick Washington insider who as Secretary of the Army spent his time arranging burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for top contributors -- when he wasn't pushing Clinton's kinder, gentler agenda. Or his assistant Sarah Lester, who referred to our valiant Marines as "extremists" because they're willing to die for our country.

This is just a sampling of the harebrains Clinton put in key Pentagon slots. They and the many house-trained generals and admirals who wouldn't stand tall have driven morale so far down that our warriors are now crawling through it.

An Army sergeant from Fort Stewart, Ga. -- who asked to remain anonymous -- sums it up for many: "I'll be happy when Mr. Clinton and Mr. Cohen and their ilk are excused from their positions. Perhaps then our military will be treated with respect and dignity from the people at the top and given the right missions. For the sake of my fellow soldiers, I pray that quality, caring leaders who can put our military back on the right track will soon take over."

Amen, Sergeant.

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 03:54 AM

DEFENDING AMERICA
BY DAVID H. HACKWORTH
11 April 2000

"GI JANES ONLY HACK IT ON THE SILVER SCREEN"

Over the past decade, I've gotten calluses on my lips trying to convince folks across this great land that women won't make it as grunts in ground combat. The minute I start my spiel, I see some people turn off. They're probably thinking, "Why doesn't this old male dinosaur tune into the 21st century and get with reality or crawl back into his retirement cave and shut up. Future wars will be about missiles, satellites and high-technology gadgets. And Jane can push buttons a lot better than Tarzan."

Now help is on the way! A woman, no less, agrees with my old grunt point of view derived from more than 50 years of trudging around battlefields as a sailor, soldier and reporter.

One thing this rough journey underscored is that missiles and high-tech contraptions don't win wars, only well-trained, highly disciplined and granite-hard men do. Somalia and Kosovo have only reinforced that truth.

In "The Kinder, Gentler Military" (Scribner, $25), Stephanie Gutmann -- after spending several years in the trenches doing research and interviewing scores of male and female members of our military -- has concluded that the push to increase the number of females in the military has seriously weakened our armed forces.

Amen.

Gutmann's reporting is mainly anecdotal, backed by hard research, a lot of shoe leather and sweat. The book is "you are there" -- listening to scores of fine men and women on the aircraft carrier USS Stennis, at the Army training fields of Fort Jackson, S.C., and at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois. These patriots shout that the experiment by the social engineers and the PCers has failed. A woman Marine, Sgt. Charlotte Crouch, says, "Truth be known, that's one of the reasons that I'm getting out. It's all too PC. I came in to be in an organization with a clear mission policy and a focus on individual and unit efficiency. Now, the focus is what you say, how you say it and to whom do you say it. Whatever happened to simply training Marines? And how in the hell did we ever get stuck in this mire?"

Ex-Army Capt. John Hillen says, "It's becoming like Mao's cultural revolution. Everybody knows it's a system built on a thousand little lies, but everybody's waiting for someone that's high ranking who's not a complete moral coward to come and say so."

Navy Lt. John Gadzinski says, "This is a boat (USS Eisenhower) where our job is to put bombs on target, missiles on target." But in reality, the maiden cruise of the giant carrier with a crew that was 10 percent female was all about snowing the public on how well sexual integration worked in the Navy.

Gadzinski told Gutmann the cruise was a con job from beginning to end. He said, for example, that female sailors who worked in data processing were put in the flight deck and the control tower "to make a pretty picture for the VIPs on their walk-throughs."

The high rankers are still hiding the truth from Congress, and Ms. Gutmann takes a shot at their dereliction of duty and five-star hypocrisy like no one has before.

I hear from scores of Army drill sergeants, all sounding off about how training's been weakened and standards lowered because of mixing male and female trainees together. Gutmann captures their despair when she describes Fort Jackson as a kind of a Sesame Street with a lot of teen-age sex.

Gutmann found that many women trainees couldn't toss a grenade the required 115 feet. So the bar was lowered; women only had to "pick up a live grenade and essentially dump it over the wall of a deep concrete enclosure, where it could burst to its little heart's content."

She quotes one drill sergeant, "You're not being a soldier, you're being a mama." The same sergeant says "Abuse is one thing, being tough and demanding is another."

Gutmann's book must be read by all caring Americans and its cogent message must be urgently transmitted to our lawmakers -- who go along to get along to get re-elected -- and in the process put political correctness over the security of our nation and the lives of our frontline fighters.

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 03:56 AM

DEFENDING AMERICA
BY DAVID H. HACKWORTH
11 January 2000

TWO STRIPERS AS CHIEFS

Last week, Al Gore said he'd require any appointee to the U.S. armed forces Joint Chiefs of Staff to agree in advance to allow homosexuals to serve openly in our military.

When asked about Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, here's how he responded: "I would insist before appointing anybody to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the individual support my policy. And, yes, I would make that a requirement."

After enduring the next 48 hours of heavy incoming fire, the vice president stumbled out of his bunker and told millions of Americans they'd misheard. He weasel-worded that he "did not mean to imply that there should ever be any kind of inquiry into the personal political opinions of the officers."
Millions of Americans "misheard"? I don't think so.

Clearly, Gore lied. But what's new? He lied about his combat service in Vietnam when he said he'd been there and done that grunt stuff, lied about plowing the back 40 on his daddy's tobacco farm and now is lying about what our ears transmitted to our brains.

Sure, most politicians lie. But to lie so blatantly about an issue so critical to our security and then have the chutzpah to say we got it wrong is even more insulting than usual.

My take is that, like President Lyndon Johnson, Gore has issues with the brass. I reckon what we witnessed on television was the real Gore caught dead in the center of a subconscious slip. He's on record when he was a soldier in Vietnam for calling his officers "fascists" and driving his buddies nuts over how much he hated the Army.

Granted the Army drill must've been hard for a Harvard graduate -- an enlisted man who'd led a privileged life of servants and private schools. The son of a rich and powerful senator wouldn't exactly be thrilled with an outfit that made him get up at o'dark hundred, stand in line in the rain, eat out of a mess kit and shout "How high, sir?" when told to jump.

Things got better once Gore got to Vietnam. There his basic weapon was a Remington typewriter, and the headquarters' snack bar was light-years away from the trenches where the daily fighting and dying occurred. He was special: the only enlisted man in Vietnam with his own bodyguard.
Gore's senator daddy also got his son's 12-month tour cut to five by leaning on a political general. The unconnected, of course, served a minimum of 12 months unless they went out Purple Heart early on a stretcher or in a body bag.

So it's easy to see why he wants generals and admirals who'll go-along-to-get-along, advisers to expedite his political agenda and help scoop up the homosexual vote -- while finishing off our armed forces.

But it's critical that the service chiefs and the chairman of the JC of S be their own men, not presidential lap dogs. They must be selected because they're the best in the armed forces to win wars, not because they'll be the president's personal yes men.

The chiefs were just so politicized and manipulated by LBJ during the Vietnam War. And as a result of LBJ's anti-brass paranoia, his lies to the public and the service chiefs' dereliction of duty, we lost our first war and have a black monument in Washington D.C. inscribed with the names of 58,000 sacrificial lambs.

There's already been too much compromise and not enough standing tall by the chiefs and the rest of our brass hats. In the last seven years, not one serving senior officer has challenged the Clinton-Gore agenda -- pushing political correctness and committing our forces on wrongheaded missions -- that's led to the near destruction of our military.

If Gore becomes the prez, I bet a six-pack not one serving admiral and general will sell his or her soul for a chief's job if it means going along with Gore's open-homosexuality-in-the-ranks scenario. There'll be an avalanche of resignations instead. And then a bunch of very liberal corporals will be brought in to take over the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally, the Clinton-Gore demolition job on the armed forces will be complete!

It just might be expedient to learn Chinese.

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 03:57 AM

I could go on, but what's the point.

**travelinman** · July 2nd, 2004, 06:34 AM

Damn LAN I thought you liked me.

Now I know this may be hard for you , but go to Hackworth's web site and read the archives. It's obivious that prior the last election he was all over Cliton, Gore, Clark and anyone else in government. As soon as it Bush started getting close in the polls, Hackworth started attacking him.