I think the confusion about how a contract is honored is in one not so fine detail. There is a caveat in every single contract a person has while in service. That caveat is that the needs of the service over ride any particular contract . If you were promised Airborne school and a choice of duty stations on a reenlistment, as long as the Army didn't need you somewhere else, you are going to get your school and duty station. If you are deemed critical to another mission the school and duty station you were promised part of the contract will be ignored because the needs of the service take priority..It is the same if you are married to another military member and enroll in the married couples program. That is supposed to see that you are are stationed within a reasonable distance of each other, generally int he same post or posts within a certain mileage of each other. But it is not guaranteed that you will be due to the needs of the service. There are perks to being in, this is just one of the down sides. It;s part of embracing the suck when you have too.
As for my personal morality, I am still on the positive side. More importantly to me, I am still on the side of legality. Because morality is too fluid and conditional, and can be far too radically different between individual people to be any kind of pole star on anything bigger than an individual level.
I didn't intend to conflate the military with the VA in my comments, sorry if that was how it sounded. It still seems pretty stupid to me to make a contract you don't intend to cannot actually keep and then expect other people to make other contracts with you. It smacks of our current mire that Tom Cotton famously predicted by threatening Iran with revocation of an agreement the he personally didn't like.On the other hand, there has to be a means of changing course when situations go the shape of a pear and associated agreements go south with them.Thank you for your service - I sincerely hope you weren't asked to do anything(s) too morally damning, once the scales have been all balanced out. Blessings.
No career military person expects the government to actually follow through with the promises made. Politicians are not held accountable for not following through, so why should they. This is nothing new. It goes back as far as the Bonus Army post WWI.
For instance I was promised free health care for life if I made it to retirement. That was taken away by Congress in '95. The reasoning used was that health care cost too much and a current Congress cannot be bound by the promises of a past Congress to any individual troops. It happens. My costs and copays are still far lower than any other plan you are going to find, but it's not free.
One thing to remember about any contract an individual signs when in the military is that the needs of the service will over ride a contract if need be.
Also, I think there is some confusion about the military and the VA. The day anyone is out of the military, they go to the VA, not back to the military for anything they might need or have been promised. It does not matter if it a retirement, a medical or other chapter, or just the end of a term of service, they are not the military's responsibility anymore. They are two separate agencies with two separate missions.
Intel gathered is not kept for long in any case. Calls and intercepts are logged in. If they are not flagged for further review they are deleted. If they are flagged they may or may not be deleted by the higher ups.
But, yeah, the whole Admin was incompetent. From firing Shinseki for telling them they needed 500K+ troops on the ground to secure everything post invasion, to the war will pay for itself, to dissolving the entire local police, Army, and all security forces with no plan to fill the power vacuum that it created leading directly to the sectarian conflict and AQI gaining ground, to not not allowing, but actively pushing for the mission creep that put all the attempts at rebuilding onto the military instead of the agencies who are actually supposed to do it. Incompetent from start to finish.
If that was the case, then when those fired from that system warned that the recording capacity of the Iraqi-language intelligence gathering system would be overwhelmed and the oldest transmissions collected would be overwritten within the month then the fact that there were no backups made to preserve those records in the (uhhh... I think it was) three months would have to be put down to incompetence of epic proportions, not just of Bush but of the entire administration and that system in particular.
Let's back up, here. If a person goes into the service there is a contract agreed to. If that contract includes certain benefits after the end of that service then denying those benefits is short sighted and counter productive. What it does in the long run is select future soldiers from the ranks of those who expect to be cheated. Those people will either be unaware of this and therefore disgruntled (and trained) when the denial of earned benefits occurs or they will be aware of the likelihood of contract violation to come and will join with ulterior motives.That short-sighted enough for you?
I don't think so. I think it was pandering to the religious front groups disguised as military readiness advocacy groups. I think it was unintended consequences.
US gov't has a history of not keeping promises, including those made to it's own soldiers. I wonder if they are better at keeping promises to officers, historically?
A little different. As stupid as discharging our linguists was, and it was stupid, at least they were not going to be under a death sentence just for existing.
I think the confusion about how a contract is honored is in one not so fine detail. There is a caveat in every single contract a person has while in service. That caveat is that the needs of the service over ride any particular contract . If you were promised Airborne school and a choice of duty stations on a reenlistment, as long as the Army didn't need you somewhere else, you are going to get your school and duty station. If you are deemed critical to another mission the school and duty station you were promised part of the contract will be ignored because the needs of the service take priority..It is the same if you are married to another military member and enroll in the married couples program. That is supposed to see that you are are stationed within a reasonable distance of each other, generally int he same post or posts within a certain mileage of each other. But it is not guaranteed that you will be due to the needs of the service. There are perks to being in, this is just one of the down sides. It;s part of embracing the suck when you have too.
As for my personal morality, I am still on the positive side. More importantly to me, I am still on the side of legality. Because morality is too fluid and conditional, and can be far too radically different between individual people to be any kind of pole star on anything bigger than an individual level.
I didn't intend to conflate the military with the VA in my comments, sorry if that was how it sounded. It still seems pretty stupid to me to make a contract you don't intend to cannot actually keep and then expect other people to make other contracts with you. It smacks of our current mire that Tom Cotton famously predicted by threatening Iran with revocation of an agreement the he personally didn't like.On the other hand, there has to be a means of changing course when situations go the shape of a pear and associated agreements go south with them.Thank you for your service - I sincerely hope you weren't asked to do anything(s) too morally damning, once the scales have been all balanced out. Blessings.
Not really.
No career military person expects the government to actually follow through with the promises made. Politicians are not held accountable for not following through, so why should they. This is nothing new. It goes back as far as the Bonus Army post WWI.
For instance I was promised free health care for life if I made it to retirement. That was taken away by Congress in '95. The reasoning used was that health care cost too much and a current Congress cannot be bound by the promises of a past Congress to any individual troops. It happens. My costs and copays are still far lower than any other plan you are going to find, but it's not free.
One thing to remember about any contract an individual signs when in the military is that the needs of the service will over ride a contract if need be.
Also, I think there is some confusion about the military and the VA. The day anyone is out of the military, they go to the VA, not back to the military for anything they might need or have been promised. It does not matter if it a retirement, a medical or other chapter, or just the end of a term of service, they are not the military's responsibility anymore. They are two separate agencies with two separate missions.
Intel gathered is not kept for long in any case. Calls and intercepts are logged in. If they are not flagged for further review they are deleted. If they are flagged they may or may not be deleted by the higher ups.
But, yeah, the whole Admin was incompetent. From firing Shinseki for telling them they needed 500K+ troops on the ground to secure everything post invasion, to the war will pay for itself, to dissolving the entire local police, Army, and all security forces with no plan to fill the power vacuum that it created leading directly to the sectarian conflict and AQI gaining ground, to not not allowing, but actively pushing for the mission creep that put all the attempts at rebuilding onto the military instead of the agencies who are actually supposed to do it. Incompetent from start to finish.
If that was the case, then when those fired from that system warned that the recording capacity of the Iraqi-language intelligence gathering system would be overwhelmed and the oldest transmissions collected would be overwritten within the month then the fact that there were no backups made to preserve those records in the (uhhh... I think it was) three months would have to be put down to incompetence of epic proportions, not just of Bush but of the entire administration and that system in particular.
Let's back up, here. If a person goes into the service there is a contract agreed to. If that contract includes certain benefits after the end of that service then denying those benefits is short sighted and counter productive. What it does in the long run is select future soldiers from the ranks of those who expect to be cheated. Those people will either be unaware of this and therefore disgruntled (and trained) when the denial of earned benefits occurs or they will be aware of the likelihood of contract violation to come and will join with ulterior motives.That short-sighted enough for you?
Why is it short sighted? If you are no longer in the service why should the service be responsible for you?
I don't think so. I think it was pandering to the religious front groups disguised as military readiness advocacy groups. I think it was unintended consequences.
I ... don't think that was stupid. I think that was the plan.
This seems like an even more short-sighted policy than just dumping on lowly soldiers.
I thought 'well, he should use his middle name. what is his middle name?'So I looked it up.OMGTucker Swanson McNear Carlson
Not really. Once you are out of the service you are the VA's problem or you are on your own.
US gov't has a history of not keeping promises, including those made to it's own soldiers. I wonder if they are better at keeping promises to officers, historically?
Very much this, and it's covered in painful detail by that "Last Days in Vietnam" documentary I link to in the story. It's truly shameful.
A little different. As stupid as discharging our linguists was, and it was stupid, at least they were not going to be under a death sentence just for existing.
The foolish optimist in me thinks that this will make it marginally more difficult for us to invade other countries.
Completely naive, I know.