Jacob's Politics

Col. Wilkerson destroys US Army

In an explosive speech delivered by Col. Larry Wilkerson, former Aide to former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, he demolished the myth that the US has a "Professional Army", something that Democratic presidential hopeful, General Wes Clark, has been shouting at from the rooftops for the past couple of months. (All emphasis in the quoted text is mine.)

You can also listen to the entire speech as well as the quesion and answer session as a video.

I don’t think, in our history, we’ve ever had a presidential involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice-presidential involvement, an attorney general involvement in telling our troops essentially carte blanche is the way you should feel.  You should not have any qualms because this is a different kind of conflict.  Well, I’ll admit that.  I’ll admit that.  I don’t want to see any of these people ever released from prison if they’re truly terrorists.  I don’t want to see them released because I know what they’ll do.  I’m a former military man, 31 years in the Army.  They will go out and they will try to kill me and my buddies, again and again, and some of you people, too. 
 
So I understand the radical change in the nature of our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we make a radical change in the nature of America.  But that’s what we did, and we did it in private.  We did it in such privacy that the Secretary of State had to open the door into my office one day – we had adjoining offices and he liked to do that, and I never objected – he came through the door and he said, Larry, Larry, get everything, get all the paperwork, get the ICRC reports, get everything; I think this is going to be a real mess.  And Will Taft, his lawyer, got the same instruction from a legal point of view.  And Will and I worked together for almost a year as the ICRC reports began to build and come in, and Kellenberger even came in and visited with the Secretary of State.  And we knew that things weren’t the way they should be, and as former soldiers, we knew that you don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it – unless you’ve condoned it.  And whether you did it explicitly or not is irrelevant.  If you did it at all, indirectly, implicitly, tacitly – you pick the word – you’re in trouble because that slippery slope is truly slippery, and it will take years to reverse the situation, and we’ll probably have to grow a new military. 
 
We may have to do that anyway because my army right now is truly in bad shape – truly in bad shape.  And I’m not talking about the billions and billions of dollars of equipment it’s burning up in Iraq at a rate 10 or 15 times the rate its life cycle said it should be burned up at, but I’m also talking about when you have officers who have to hedge the truth, NCOs who have to hedge the truth .  They start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam, my war.  They come home and they tell their wife they’ve got to go back for the third tour and the fourth tour and the wife says, uh-uh, or the husband says, uh-uh, and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel.  And the signs are very concrete right now that the Army and the Marine Corps – to a lesser extent the other services because they’re not quite as involved in the deployments that we’re talking about here and the frequency thereof, the op tempo as we say it – problems are brewing.  Problems are brewing.

Col. Wilkerson says that General Powell will say nothing because he is a good soldier.

I disagree - General Powell will say nothing as he was a COLLABORATOR, and is a WAR CRIMINAL.

He might like to hide behind the ethics of his former Army uniform, but that shows he is a coward, just as I claim the Gen. Wes Clark cannot speak the truth.

They think about their buddies and the niceties about their realtionships with soldiers whereas the truth is that are the ones that trained and brought to the positions of power these sycophants that are now the Generals in the US Army.. Condemn the students means condemning themselves! The US version of the stiff upper lip.

It exposes that the training these old soldiers as Powell and Clark imparted and the examples they set were WRONG.

Hence they hide behind a facade of camaraderie.

posted by Jacob Matthan @ 01:50