Military Ring Info

Our Coast Guard has of neccessity been around for quite a long time and has evolved over its many years as a premier all purpose Naval force. The Coast is probably the mot versatile of all of our branches of the military. I read different accounts of incidents every day where they have performed a daring rescue or law enforcement action. These actions don’t even account for the many day to day routine operations that they conduct.

The Coast Guard was established on August 4th 1790 as the Revenue Marine Service. They were joined by the US Lifesaving Service in in 1915 to form the service known as the United States Coast Guard. This was after the addition of the Revenue Cutter Service. In 1939 the Lighthouse Service was added to the mix and the Steamboat Inspection Service joined in 1946. You can see how the Coast Guard came to have so many modern day functions. It was moved from the US Treasury Department to the Department of Transportation in 1967, and became a part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

Our Coast Guard custom ring customers are facing daunting challenges in the years to become because of the world situation now. They have to adapt and overcome despite a severely limited budget and limited resources.

Marine Corps ring customers are not filling out the surveys about the don’t ask don’t tell policy that the armed forces now has. There needs to be a certain number of the surveys done before the powers that be can conduct some kind of evaluation to determine how effective the policy is and what needs to be changed. I can tell them though that it will not happen.

Let the military ring man drop a little knowledge on you about the situation. I was once a young officer in an Artillery Battalion where one such survey was passed out for us to fill out. This particular survey was about our Battalion Commander who’s real name was James B. It asked us what we thought about him and supposedly our information would remain anonymous to the commander. Even though the entire Officer’s Corps talked about him like a dog behind his back I was the only fool honest enough to say what I really thought. Now as you can see I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer by any means and I wouldn’t do the same thing if it happened today, but I did at the time and paid for it dearly. The survey was set up so that he could find out who said what as everyone else had sense enough to know.

Once I got myself put on his hit list there was no amount of butt kissing that would get me back in his good graces. I didn’t try to kiss his butt to get there because it would not have worked anyway. This was the lesson that cost me my career because I never did recover from the pen whipping that that colonel (small c) put on me.

These Marine Corps ring customers and everyone else in my unit had a whole lot more sense than I did so let me tell the powers that be this; even if you coerce them into filling out the surveys you won’t get accurate results because they know better than to tell you the truth. Can you handle the truth?

The book definition of this term is the rate that any weapon that launches projectiles can launch in one minute.There are many circumstances which affect the rates of fire of weapons systems but ideally the military wants to put as many rounds down range as possible. When a weapon has a high rate of fire it destroys more than a weapon with a low rate of fire. Machine guns are used for their ability to spit out a lot of rounds which keeps the enemy that you are shooting at from advancing on your position.

The cyclic rate of fire doesn’t take into effect any of the other factors which may effect the number of rounds that will be realistically fired but it speaks of the weapons peak capability. Realistically it won’t happen. The cyclic rate of fire can be as high as 6,000 rounds per minute (100 per second) for mini guns which are normally mounted on aircraft. It can be as high as 1,200 rounds per minute for heavy machine guns.

The effective rate is more realistic in that it accounts for the actions that the crew has to take which will slow down the process. This is what a well trained crew will be able to do in combat situations.

The effective rate of fire is the rate of fire that can be sustained over an indefinite period of time. You will see this term used more with artillery pieces and bigger guns because they may have to fire programs which will continue for an extended period of time. Every military ring customer who serves with a heavy or crew served weapon is intimately familiar with its capabilities and knows how much abuse that that weapon will take.

The USS Healey arrived in Alaska today to perform its summer arctic mission. The Healey is the largest Ice Breaker in the Coast Guard. When I did the reading to write this post I was impressed with the versatility of the Coast Guard and felt that I should mention it here.

We think of the Coast Guard in terms of rescues at sea and drug interdictions but its functions go much farther than this. Our Coast Guard is a complicated and diverse organization as we see when we state the Healey’s mission capabilities. The Healey is capable of scientific support, search and rescue, ship escort, environmental protection, and law and treaty enforcement.

It is 420 feet long and has a permanent 80 man crew. Its mission this summer will be hydrological research and the mapping of the continental shelf. there will be some experiments done with NASA which will largely consist of the collecting of water and ice samples to learn more about the refractive properties of sunlight in an arctic environment. Now it seems to me that many of our Coast Guard ring customers must be real eggheads based on the type of work that they will be assisting with.

The Costa Rican government has agreed to allow the United States to place troops in that country to help in the battle against drugs.

The problem in Costa Rica is that there are several factors which lend it to use by drug cartels. First of all they have no army so there is no armed force to stop the cartels from coming in and having their way. Drug cartels are always quick to size up a situation and take advantage of weaknesses. Another weakness is that the country has many miles of unpatrolled coastline. This lends itself to drug trafficking. The vast amount of shoreline gives the drug cartels plenty of space to use to smuggle drugs into the country. Its borders are porus and poorly guarded so smugglers can move in and out of the country easily and at will.

The US is sending about 7,000 marines, 5 planes and 46 warships to the country for about a six month period. You can see by the large number of warships that our navy ring customers will have to do the brunt of the work. The Costa Rican legislature allowed US troops in by a 31-8 vote.

Our custom marine corps ring customers along with our navy ring customers should be able to help the Costa Rican government gain control of its land mass and the sea around it. While our air force ring customers should be able to help them out from the skies above the country.

US Attorney General Eric Holder is in Kabul to address the issue of corruption with Afghan government officials. This is an attempt to try to get the Afghan government to get a handle on the widespread corruption which has been a plaque to its being able to function as it should.

To be perfectly honest with you I just don’t see how we will be able to stop the corruption which has been in place for such a long time. One thing is for certain, and it is that we are not going to end official corruption with talk. I don’t know what will. In a government where corruption is the norm how do you stop officials from making some easy money at every opportunity. It kind of sounds like home doesn’t it?

Attorney General Holder is trying to get a handle on the seemingly ineffectual court system which does not evenly mete out justice in all cases (that sounds like home also). Officials who have some sort of pull seem to be able to get away with whatever. President Karzai has pubicly affirmed that he doesn’t condone corruption at any level and has urged citizens to come forward with any allegations of official corruption no matter if it involves one of his close friends or family members. Well yea right on that one. I’ll bet that anyone who does will get whacked in a hurry. Thats the official view of the military ring man. What do you think?

A new proposal to allow abortions in DOD facilities has been passed. This will allow women who choose to have an abortion to do so. Now grasshopper, you are probably wondering exactly what the military ring man thinks about this one. Well let me tell you that I am strictly from the old school. I do not believe that we should start practicing performing abortions in DOD facilities.

This is a modern military and there is room for both sexes but even apart from the fact that I think that abortion is murder we are getting into an area here that is not good to be in. Think of the rammifications from botched procedures etc. The policy will apply to facilities in the US and abroad but its intent is to provide abortions in overseas areas where service members may not be able to get them done otherwise. Still I don’t like the message that it sends. In my old military mind the military is a fighting force and everything done therein should be geared towards fighting. Not towards performing abortions.

Under the proposal women would have to pay for the procedure and those medical personnel who have a problem with performing the procedure won’t have to. This all sounds well and good now but it will all change as soon as abortionists get their foot in the door. Mark the words of the military ring man. The paying part will disappear and military medical people will eventually be coerced into performing the abortions whether they want to or not. I just hope that ten years from now someone digs up this post and says yes he did tell us so.

When you look at the drug situation along with other types of smuggling operations that directly effect the United States you will see that most of these activities involve many of the Carribbean Nations in some way, shape, or form. There has been an increase in violence recently in many of the countries. Drug dealers and smugglers are becoming bolder in their activities.

Secretary of State Clinton didn’t give any of the details of the plan other than to say that it will take into account the effects that actions in one country will have on other countries. I think that the thing which drives this train of thought is the way that terrorists were able to move from one country to the next one when the pressure was really put on them. The account thus takes any actions which will be taken in Mexico and every other country in the region where we may have to conduct some type of future operation. US operations range throughout the Carribbean and central and South America because the problem is so widespread.

Our custom military ring customers who will be used in these future operations will definitely have their hands full.

In what I consider to be a brilliant piece of diplomacy President Hamid Karzai is calling for peace in his country and is holding out the olive branch to Taliban leaders and low level fighters. His concept of peace is just a little bit different from the US concept. Karzai wants to include Taliban leaders in the process but the US does not. The US would be willing to offer repatriation to the low level Taliban fighters but not leaders.

President Karzai has just conducted a peace conference, or jirga, where he had about 1,500 attendees represented. None of the known Taliban leaders attended but I am sure that there were many there who are sympathetic to the Taliban, and I’m sure that whatever was discussed was made known to those Taliban leaders by someone who was at the conference.

This strategy is so good because it gives everyone an opportunity to save face. It puts President Karzai in the middle and makes him the good guy. The biggest obstacle remaining to our military ring customers being able to leave the country is the insistence of the Taliban that all of our forces leave before peace negotiations can begin. I think that we all know that it ain’t going to pan out that way.

Content I have done a post or two on BUDs training at least once before but this time let me look at it with fresh eyes. First of all I just happened to be reading about this training and saw a few things that I had never seen before.

First of all I didn’t realize that most of the SEAL trainees who drop out do so before the famed “Hell Week.” I guess that by the time hell week arrives those who really don’t want this training have had time to make up their minds and leave. Maybe hell week just eliminates the last few hangers on.

I found that 70 to 80 per cent of SEAL trainees don’t complete the course due to dropout or injury. The training is all voluntary so a student leaves the course by being dropped on request DOR. The BUDs course alone is a 26 week course. It is followed by Army Airborne School. After that the SEAL goes through a 15 week SEAL Qualification Training program. The new SEAL then must spend about eighteen months with his new unit before he is awarded the trident. Our Navy SEAL ring customers are one of the most valuable assets that our military can have.