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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
His rampant stop-lossing of troops during the war.
Being put on stop loss means that the end of your contract occurs, and they essentially give a federal order that you have to stay until they let you go. Usually it's in the event that your contract is supposed to end, but your unit is going to deploy very soon around that time, so they extend your contract against your will to the end of the deployment. A Stop Loss order can only be given by the Secretary of Defense. Also, he was responsible for the ridiculously unreasonable length of deployments for the Army and Marines, and the short turnover/rest time in between deployments. So not only were we all getting ran ragged, but troops with lots of experience or rare/in-demand job skills were being barred from leaving if they didn't want to sign up for another re-enlistment.
It absolutely destroyed morale amongst the combat arms community(sans special forces) because it meant the idea of "One more deployment and I'm done with this shit..." was quite possibly not true.
edited 5th Jun '13 11:12:04 AM by Barkey
Yeah, I can see why the provision exists, but Rumsfeld abused it.
^^
You get used to the government fucking you over in the military, it just happens regularly. But only a few things are supposed to hold absolutely true and never be broken. One is that you get paid, and the other is that if you hate military life, there's always that golden string of numbers for the end of your contract that you can just hum to yourself and use for hope. I've never been the guy going "Good god I can't wait till my ETS" but I can understand how the people who are feel.
^
It's like this, but replace Disneyland with Going Home, and that dude is actually rumsfeld.
edited 5th Jun '13 11:19:56 AM by Barkey
Susan Rice to replace Tom Donilon as national security adviser
ObamaCare critics outspent supporters 5-1 on ads, analysis finds
Report: Leon Panetta disclosed top secret info to ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ filmmaker
edited 5th Jun '13 12:51:31 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016I'm in a bad mood and I'm going to purge it with links.
A brief history of corporate whining
The subject matter experts are the civil servants. Politicians are put in charge of stuff they know nothing about so that they let the civil servants run the show, without the politicians interfering with short-sighted, ratings-oriented, ill-thought-out messes.
Ideally, that is.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Then lets stop paying politicians to run things they don't actually run or know anything about, and just let the civil servants do their job?
I just don't like it when I see politicians in jobs that should require actual knowledge. Go take a 20 year intelligence analyst or a retired colonel or something and give them that job. Not some shithead ambassador.
She is a former UN Ambassador, so maybe she knows more about national security than she's being given credit for. The article is shaping this as a reflection on his foreign policy, so there's that too. Course, it could be he's doing it to annoy all the Republicans that scuppered her chances at a nomination for whatever it is Kerry's doing now.
A not so subtle "fuck you" in political terms. Being practical, he could be doing it for all of those reasons.
edited 5th Jun '13 4:09:58 PM by AceofSpades
To be fair, the FULL quote from Ken Emanuelson was "Well to be perfectly honest, the Republican Party doesn't want black people to vote if they're going to vote Democrat."
I know the Republican Pary is building the next Death Star and plotting to depopulate the Solar System, but it's a bit misleading to make it look like their racists when they, just like the do-no-wrong saintly Democrats, want people voting for them.
I mean....is Toure a racist when he gets on MSNBC and blasts Dr. Ben Carson for supporting the Republicans??
It was an honor"We don't want you to vote if you're voting for the wrong people."
That's basically what he said. For a party that bent over backwards to justify it's voter suppression efforts by saying it didn't disproportionately target minorities that's a pretty glaring gaffe. The racism inherent in his statement only makes it worse.
edited 5th Jun '13 4:48:34 PM by Kostya

Donald Rumsfeld 'can't tell' if Obama 'switched sides' in war on terror
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016