New Army Physical Fitness Test (1/3)

ArmyTimes Link: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/04/army-test-takers-offer-advice-opinions-on-new-prt-040211w/

And with good reason. Staff Sgt. Timothy Shoenfelt, drawing deep breaths and dripping with sweat, had just completed his first run of the new combat readiness test. He was one of four instructors from the Army Physical Fitness School to test the new fitness tests March 1.

Two weeks later, more than a dozen drill sergeants took the Army Physical Readiness Test before administering it to 137 basic-training soldiers.

Despite the vast differences in ages, body sizes, years of service and gender, all participants gave similar advice to an Army that awaits the change: Get ready. And you can do that by following two simple rules, they said.

• First: Give attention to form. The five-event physical fitness test marks the first change to the test in more than 30 years. Knowing the rules and right form for each event will enhance your scores. The wrong form will hinder your success.

For example, don’t take your good push-up scores for granted. The days of free-styling push-ups with wide arms or closed hands are over. Now, the index finger has to be aligned with outside of the shoulder. And it is harder than it sounds.

Sgt. First Class Jason Waller found out the hard way. The 18-year veteran saw his number of push-ups cut by half because of the restricted position and inability to rest.

“New soldiers don’t have as much of an issue with the form, because that is how they are taught to do push-ups,” he said. “But for soldiers who have been in awhile, there will be some breaking of old habits.”

This was clear for Staff Sgt. Danica Foster, a drill sergeant at the physical fitness school who demonstrated the events March 1. The observer quickly put her efforts to an end when Foster paused halfway through the push-ups to get a better position, much to her dismay.

Pfc. Joseph Kalsic said 20 percent of his push-ups didn’t count because his hands were too far apart.

“It’s all in the form,” he said.

In the rower event, about 10 percent of reps were not counted because they were not done properly. Participants had trouble keeping their feet together.

“I always maxed out on sit-ups, but only scored in the low 30s on the rower,” said Staff Sgt. Abner Baker, a drill sergeant. “I don’t know how many I did that didn’t count. You definitely need to learn to do them right.”

One thing that leads to a breakdown of form is the abdominal burn that results, said Staff Sgt. Luis Hernandez, a drill sergeant at the physical fitness school.

“When you’re doing a sit-up, you’re using abs and part of your legs,” he said. “With the rower, it is all abs — and you can feel it.”

And even something as simple as placing a wooden block behind the starting line, a requirement of the 60-yard shuttle run, can prove catastrophic.

“I saw soldiers running hard, but they would drop the block too soon,” said Pvt. Jeremy Tilley. “The drill sergeants kept telling them, but people kept doing it and it cost them a lot of time.”

Parts 2 and 3 will be posted this week.

U.S. launches new missile barrage at Libya

From: Army Times

Stepping up attacks far from the front-line fighting, a U.S. Navy ship fired 22 Tomahawk cruise missiles at weapon storage sites around Tripoli on Tuesday, while President Obama said the effectiveness of the allies’ fight is a factor in deciding whether to arm the rebels.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, held talks in London with an envoy from the Libyan political opposition group trying to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi.

In Washington, under questioning by Congress, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Adm. James Stavridis said officials had seen “flickers” of possible al-Qaida and Hezbollah involvement with the rebel forces. But Stavridis said there was no evidence of significant numbers within the political opposition group’s leadership.

The Tomahawks targeted storage sites for surface-to-surface missiles near the Libyan capital, while combat aircraft of the U.S. and its partners in an international air campaign struck at ammunition storage depots and other military targets in western Libya. The rebels, though, were reported in full retreat after trying to march on Sirte, a city about halfway between Tripoli and the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama conceded that “it’s conceivable that the process of actually getting Gadhafi to step down is not going to happen overnight ... it’s going to take a little bit of time.”

Whether the rebels will receive arms from the allies remains an open question, Obama told NBC News as he made the rounds of the network evening news programs.

“One of the questions that we want to answer is: Do we start getting to a stage where Gadhafi’s forces are sufficiently degraded, where it may not be necessary to arm opposition groups?” Obama said.

All 22 Tomahawks were launched from the guided-missile destroyer Barry, according to a U.S. defense official. It was the highest number of Tomahawks fired in several days, even as the Navy has reduced the number of missile-firing ships and submarines off the coast and as the U.S. has prepared to give NATO full control of the Libya campaign.

The Libyan missiles targeted by the U.S. onslaught could have been used by pro-Gadhafi forces defending Tripoli, should heavy combat spread to the capital, which remains under Gadhafi’s control. The rebels are outmatched in training, equipment and other measures of military might by Gadhafi’s remaining forces, and would be hard-pressed to mount a full-scale battle for Tripoli now.

As for the overall international campaign against Gadhafi, Stavridis said he expected a three-star Canadian general to assume full NATO command of the operation by Thursday. Meanwhile, the Pentagon put the price tag for the war thus far at $550 million.

Clinton told reporters in London that the U.S. is operating with incomplete information about the Libyan opposition. But she said there was no information about specific individuals from terror organizations that are part of the political opposition.

“We’re building an understanding, but at this time obviously it is, as I say, a work in progress,” she said. “We don’t know as much as we would like to know and as much as we expect we will know.”

The Obama administration is not ruling out a political solution in Libya that could include Gadhafi leaving the country, she said, but she acknowledged there is no timeline.

Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, a representative of the Libyan political opposition.

“Their commitment to democracy and to a very robust engagement with people from across the spectrum of Libyans is, I think, appropriate,” she said.

A senior administration official said the U.S. will soon send an envoy to Libya to deepen relations with leaders of the rebels. But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said the meeting wouldn’t constitute formal recognition.

Chris Stevens, who until recently was the deputy chief of mission at the now-shuttered U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, will make that trip.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the opposition leaders Obama officials have met with have expressed views that correspond with U.S. goals.

“We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the opposition and now meeting with opposition leaders,” Carney told reporters. “The folks who were in London, the leaders that Secretary Clinton met [previously] in Paris have made clear what their principles are. And we believe that they are meritorious.”

Carney added: “That doesn’t mean, obviously, that everyone who opposes Moammar Gadhafi in Libya is someone whose ideals we could support.”

The pace of air strikes by the U.S. and its international partners has picked up in recent days. The Pentagon said there were 119 strikes on Monday, up from 107 on Sunday and 88 on Saturday.

Clinton said international leaders have made no decisions about arming the rebels, but they talked at a London conference on Tuesday about providing non-lethal assistance including funds to keep them going. In his speech to the nation on Monday, Obama pledged that $33 billion in Libyan government funds frozen by the U.S. Treasury would at some point be made available to the Libyan people.

Obama said the U.S. was stepping back from the lead military role in Libya, although the extent of future participation remained unclear.

The president continued to take political heat for his approach, with Republicans leading the criticism.

They vowed to press senior administration officials for greater clarity at closed briefings slated for Wednesday. Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen are to brief members of the House and then meet with members of the Senate.

“The president’s remarks were a step in the right direction. They didn’t answer every question, but we’ll continue to pose those to Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters.

Obama received strong backing for his efforts in Libya from his 2008 presidential rival, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

“The president’s decision to intervene in Libya deserves strong bipartisan support in Congress” and in the country, McCain said in a speech on the Senate floor.

“We have prevented the worst outcome in Libya, but we have not secured our goal,” he said, stressing that Gadhafi must go.

Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Service Committee, said Obama needs to further refine U.S. purposes.

“I still did not hear a clearly defined goal for how long military operations will last in Libya,” McKeon said. “Utilizing U.S. warriors to protect civilians from a brutal dictator is a noble cause, but asking them to maintain a stalemate while we hold out hope that Gadhafi will voluntarily leave his country raises serious questions about the duration of the mission.”

Collapse - Another Documentary

I posted a great documentary yesterday; here's an even better one. Although it's not military-based, it's definately America-based and sends chills down my spine.

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1503769/

One review (official review) that I read while watching the trailer to this film described it at "an intellectual horror movie." Having listened to Mike Ruppert speak in the past, this comes as no surprise. From his scathing indictment of Dick Cheney in his talk "The Truth and Lies of 9/11" to the speech he gave in Seattle in January of 2005 (available in two parts on YouTube under the title "Talk by Michael C. Ruppert") the picture he paints for the future of the world has been a stark one for some time now.

However, gloomy is one thing. Being deadly accurate in nearly all predictions is another thing altogether. Ruppert, and his team at From the Wilderness (his newsletter) have been bang on the money when it came to oil prices, housing prices, and of course the collapse of the US housing market, and in other areas as well including drugs, the CIA and 9/11 itself. Ruppert being an ex LAPD narcotics officer who was born into an intelligence family, has had experience in seeing truth where others bury their heads in the sand. When he tried to bring to light evidence that the CIA was dealing drugs within the USA, he was shot at and forced off of LAPD. This was only the beginning of his investigative career, and of the vicious repercussions he suffered because of it. In November of 2004, his book "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire and the End of the Age of Oil" went largely unnoticed, even though it could serve as a final nail in Dick Cheney's political coffin concerning his culpability for 9/11. Ruppert has said, "This is a book that I, as a detective, would... drop in the lap of a DA and say, 'I want a filing for murder, premeditated, first degree, multiple counts with special circumstances." The best part: he makes no mention of bombs in buildings, or holes in the pentagon, or molten metal, but merely treats the case as another crime to be pieced together and solved. His conclusions are staggering.

And in light of this, to hear what he predicts is yet to come is guaranteed send a chill down your spine, even if you don't believe him. And what does he predict? Nothing short of the collapse of industrialized civilization itself. How could this ever happen? Quite simply, the world runs out of oil. Since everything we do is dependent upon oil... well it's probably best if I let Ruppert speak for himself.

The film plays like one of Ruppert's more impassioned talks, albeit with some cinematography added in to keep the eye amused. We are in an undefined space that looks like a bunker, or an interrogation room. Ruppert sits in a chair, smoking cigarettes (presumably to calm his nerves, or as he's been known to say "I smoke as many cigarettes as I want to, but not nearly as many as the movie would have you believe") and tells us what's on his mind. And by the time you're done seeing "Collapse" it'll be on your mind too... no matter how hard you try not to believe it.

What makes "Collapse" so much more powerful than the angry rants and shenanigans of Michael Moore is that while Moore may be passionate about what he's talking about, it's clear that Ruppert is more than passionate... he's scared to death. What's worse, and also unlike Moore who has received greater publicity than many fiction filmmakers, Ruppert has suffered from a kind of Cassandra syndrome for sometime. His writings and speeches are prophetic and yet, until recently, he has gone mostly unnoticed by the majority of people. Despite this, he's cracked open some of the biggest cases of all time: the CIA dealing drugs, empirical evidence that Dick Cheney was directly responsible for thousands of deaths on 9/11, and most recently, the collapse of the global housing market. It's not difficult to picture a similar but more ancient voice shouting "Don't let the horse through the gates of Troy! It will bring ruin!" only to be met with violence and humiliation.

As is true with so many visionaries, Mike Ruppert is just now beginning to be heard... and like so many useful visions, the realization is coming too late.

Why We Fight - Military Documentary

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436971/

Despite obvious comparison with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, this is not a gonzo bit of egotistic movie making with a big cuddly shambolic star doing stunts. This is a serious piece of research and reporting of the highest standard. Instead of the meaningless Bushite mantra of 'freedom; freedom; freedom' it pinpoints the historical dimension of the Iraq war and the ideological manipulation and monetary and political interests of the military industrial complex that has landed USA into the hand of crypto Fascists who hide the truth from the people who instead are fed 'bread and circuses' by the culture industry. However Jarecki includes key neocons like Richard Perle and great clips of Rumsfeld schmoozing with Saddam Hussein – our ally against Iran to whom US sold his WMD. Jarecki also includes a fascinating story of a Vietnam vet who backs the war because it was against Al Qaidia but falls apart as he watches Bush shuffle sheepishly away from that. It was been premièred at the Sundance film festival where it won the Grand Jury prize for documentary. But I doubt any of the US mass media which colludes with the military industrial complex as part of the 'national security state' will allow it to be shown.