After Jimmy Carter was elected, my stepfather said that he could now die happy knowing that he would have been as good a President as just anybody off the peanut farm. Well, here is the latest casualty of mediocre social instincts, and he is running the department. Of course, I mean his decision to shut down the Stars & Stripes (S&S) and then in the face of criticism from members of both sides of Congress, he has the wrong-headed gumption to double down on that decision. I mean, where do we find such men? This is disturbing on many levels \u2013 when you can\u2019t take criticism from the ranks, as the S&S is perceived, then you have no business running things in Washington or anywhere for that matter. He looks like a tough enough guy, and I appreciate the fact that the man has a lot on his plate; but squashing what is rightly perceived as the 1st Amendment rights of his own constituency \u2013 the US military and defense establishment, is way beneath his office. <\/p>\n Well, it has turned personal, so if he wants to act like a stupid ass, then who am I not to flame him? If he means to squash dissent, then he is picking the wrong fight with the wrong people \u2013 his own troops. What did Sun Tzu say \u2013 \u201cdon\u2019t go to bed at night with more enemies than you started the day with?\u201d <\/p>\n His obtuseness has made him about 200 million new enemies \u2013 good move, comrade Esper. Hope you like who you see in the mirror tomorrow morning, as you scrape the stubble off that manly jaw. I predict that you will cave \u2013 and you could have spared yourself the humiliation by tossing the assclowns who suggested this out of your office. Your job is to figure out how the execute the National Defense Strategy and beat the Chinese and Russians, not act like the $15M or so that it costs the Department to subsidize the publication of S&S each year will even approach the cost of one F-35 engine, which when you do this math is therefore more critical to national defense than troop morale? <\/p>\n This must be what it felt like living in the old Soviet Union, where there was no truth in Pravda, or news in Izvestia. I know that when I was in Europe in the 1980s and Japan in the 1990s, it was our go-to news. The S&S has a somewhat checkered past, but who among us doesn\u2019t? They picked on everybody, as any good journalistic endeavor worth a shit could, and should do.<\/p>\n A lot of great military writers, photographers, and cartoonists (e.g., Bill Mauldin) got their start, or in some cases met their end while chronicling the front-line experiences of US troops in combat. When I was in Germany back during the Cold War\u2019s heyday, we eagerly read the S&S to see how the latest insult or scandal involving general and flag officers was proceeding \u2013 yeah, there was a bit of National Enquirer going on with the editorial staff; but, that was to be expected. At that time, there was another publication produced by ex-GIs that was even more reviled by the brass \u2013 Off Duty.<\/p>\n Off Duty in the 1980s was like an American version of Charlie Hebdo, replete with its own classic cartoon pairing of Fred & Frank, an unapologetic rip-off of Mauldin\u2019s Willie & Joe. Off Duty was run by a bunch of ex-pat retired or former US troops, and relations with the Army leadership, in particular, were bad. Since we at HQ EUCOM were ostensibly Army claimants for our support, it was entertaining to see the lengths the leadership in Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Stuttgart would go to quash Off Duty \u2013 which only made them re-double their biting efforts. <\/p>\n The favorite targets of official ire were Fred & Frank, published for 20 years by active duty and then retired Air Force Captain Charles Kaufmann, who were famous for their bad attitudes about being GIs in Germany, and the 100-day \u201cshort-timer\u2019s calendar\u201d which was the countdown to one\u2019s rotation date back to the States. The kicker was when those were banned in all work and living spaces, as they were deemed to be \u201cdetrimental to morale, good order and discipline.\u201d Really, whose morale were they talking about? Of course, you know the result \u2013 the number of Fred & Frank calendars multiplied faster than the COVID-19 virus.<\/p>\n Well, they fucked it up by doing that. One of the first things you should learn about leadership as an officer in the military is to never issue an order that you know won\u2019t be obeyed, or even makes sense to the rank and file soldier. That is just as true today, as it was in yesteryears. Esper was an Army guy growing up and had a good career going before he turned into a designer soldier, and now uses it as a resume bullet along with being a lobbyist, but obviously that experience didn\u2019t really register, did it? <\/p>\n Okay, so it was a lot more poignant 35 years ago or so and Kaufmann has wisely put the collection in a book for sale so this was the best I could steal off the Internet that isn\u2019t copyrighted. Back then, there were still relics of WWII and the occupation around, like ration cards for smokes, booze, and coffee, and then there were the gas coupons to offset the cost of German gasoline, which was roughly something like $4\/gallon. <\/p>\n There were no real speed limits on the autobahn back then, but there are now, and photo and radar enforced. On my last trip to Germany in 2012, my friend and the CEO of the company I worked for as a consultant took my dare and rented us a Porsche Panamera, which is a beautiful beast of a car. Since I had \u201cautobahn cred\u201d I claimed the keys, even though I was not on the approved driver\u2019s list since he had rented the car at the Frankfurt Airport before my flight landed. <\/p>\n We flew low level down to Stuttgart and then back up to Ramstein a couple of days later, averaging over 100 mph and higher. About three months afterwards, the speeding tickets started to arrive at my friend\u2019s company out in San Diego \u2013 something over $2000 worth \u2013 ouch. <\/p>\n Yeah, that Germany is gone forever, and soon they will move EUCOM to Belgium, where it probably should have been all along, not in Rommel\u2019s old wartime Kaserne. But it was fun while it lasted, and there we lived and sometimes wasted our lives, worked hard, drove too fast, drank lots of beer, swapped girl and boy friends, and skied our asses off without fear of censure, or censorship. Our favorite movie was The Big Chill, and for a couple of three years, we had that vibe going on amongst us 20-somethings. We were tuned in, and S&S was part and parcel of the experience.<\/p>\n The President has now intervened in the S&S episode for a variety of reasons but one is apparent \u2013 the US military civilian leadership in the persona of the SECDEF has grown tone deaf and has presidential egg on his face, even though he is a smart guy who should have known better. Now he has a choice – suck it up, or quit. Can you hear us now? Copyright 2020 Point Loma Editor\u2019s Note: In following the traffic from several old pals and shipmates, I have an increasing certainty that the civil war some people mutter about has already occurred. We just missed it, because we were intimately familiar with how all this stuff works. The cognitive process doesn’t recognize that it doesn’t work that way any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-point-loma-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20029"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20038,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20029\/revisions\/20038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"PL091220\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/PL091220.jpg\")
\nSECDEF Esper \u2013 Defender of Free Speech?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nYou never give your foes a weapon with which to beat you \u2013 because they will.<\/p>\n![\"PL091220-2\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/PL091220-2.jpg\")
\nS&S \u2013 A Typical Headline from more Heady Days<\/strong>
\nHistorically, the S&S was briefly produced in 1861 during the Civil War, and began consistent publication during World War I. When the war was over, publication ended, only to restart in 1942 during World War II, providing wartime news written by troops specifically for troops in battle. It has been in publication ever since. <\/p>\n![\"PL091220-3\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/PL091220-3.jpg\")
\nFred & Frank<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nI remain your faithful servant.<\/p>\n
\nwww.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"