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Stories tagged with “Air Force”

NEWS FLASH

Air Force Academy Graduates First-Ever Openly Gay Cadets | Though there wasn’t any particularly visible recognition, the recent commencement ceremony at the Air Force Academy was an important milestone: there were openly gay cadets graduating for the first time. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell only took effect last September, meaning this is the first time someone could have come out while enrolled in the academy without fear of discharge. ABC News caught up with some of the graduates to discuss how (minimally) the repeal DADT impacted their experience:

Security

Air Force Dumped Remains Of 274 Troops In Virginia Landfill

By Travis Waldron on Dec 8, 2011 at 9:32 am

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the United States Air Force, while overseeing the Dover Air Force Base mortuary that receives the bodies of troops killed overseas, had cremated and disposed some remains and sent them to a landfill in King George County, Virginia. At the time, neither military officials nor Post reporters could verify the number of body parts that had been handled in such a way.

But after combing through military and mortuary records, the Post found that partial remains of at least 274 dead American troops were sent to the landfill, and far more unidentifiable body parts were disposed of in the same manner:

This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.

An additional group of 1,762 unidentified remains were collected from the battlefield and disposed of in the same manner, the Air Force said. Those fragments could not undergo DNA testing because they had been badly burned or damaged in explosions. The total number of incinerated fragments dumped in the landfill exceeded 2,700.

Knowledge of the practices outraged families of fallen troops and the owners of the landfill, who told the Post they were “pulled in unknowingly” to the situation, and that they wouldn’t want “any part” of troops killed defending the country buried in the landfill.

The practice began at a time when there was little public oversight over the Dover mortuary. President George H.W. Bush banned news coverage of the return of deceased troops during the Gulf War in 1991, and the ban remained until 2009, when President Obama ended it. The first record of such a disposal, according to the Post, is from April 2004, and the Air Force decided to end the practice in 2008. It now buries cremated remains at sea.

Dover AFB was the subject of federal investigation after whistleblowers reported stories of lost body parts earlier this year. On November 8, investigators announced that they had uncovered “gross mismanagement” at the mortuary involving the handling of war dead, and similar scandals have haunted Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, where graves were misidentified and urns containing troop remains were improperly disposed of. That incident is now the subject of an FBI criminal investigation.

NEWS FLASH

Gay Air Force Alumni Create Visibility At Academy | Gay and lesbian alumni of the Air Force Academy are using the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to create more visibility at upcoming events. Known as Blue Alliance, the alumni group can now identify as an “affinity group” by the Association of Graduates and hold events on campus. They will proudly display a rainbow flag at an upcoming football tailgate, something they have not been able to do before. In addition, several high-ranking academy officials have accepted invitations to their annual dinner, including Gen. Dana Born, dean of faculty, and Adis Vila, the school’s chief diversity officer. (HT: AMERICAblog Gay.)

NEWS FLASH

Air Force suspends 20-year-long ethics course that used The Bible to Train Missile Launch Officers | For 20 years, chaplains at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California have used a PowerPoint presentation designed to help teach those in missile launch training the reasons behind “why we’re doing what we’re doing.” In what trainees called the “Jesus loves Nukes speech,” chaplains present religious figures including Abraham, John the Baptist, and Saint Augustine along with “many examples of believers engaged in wars in the Old Testament.” The presentation also states that there is “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.” But, after TruthOut got a hold of a copy, the Air Force is now dumping the material. “Senior leadership looked at [the material for the course] and said, no, we could do better than this,” stated Air Force Air Education and Training Command spokesman David Smith.

Page from the Air Force presentation

By Tanya Somanader on Aug 2, 2011 at 6:13 pm

Alyssa

George Lucas Touches Something, Manages Not to Poison It

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 2, 2011 at 11:06 am

Especially given the conversations we’ve been having about Captain America: The First Avenger’s whitewashing of the history of segregation in the armed forces in World War II, I’m moderately excited about Red Tails, the movie Lucas executive produced about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black Air Force unit that served with distinction in that conflict:

A lot of this looks like it will be a fairly standard enthusiastic integration movie, which is fine. But I’m glad to see the trailer, at least, give a nod to the extent to which the military resisted accepting the service of talented African-American pilots, even at a point when the air war wasn’t going well for the States. “I don’t believe your boys have scored a single arial kill,” a white officer says with the air of having won some sort of argument, only to have Terrence Howard bat back at him “It’s damn hard to shoot down the enemy 100 miles behind the front lines.” I hadn’t known this before looking into it, but apparently the reason the school was at Tuskegee in the first place was because after a campaign to force Congress to allocate funding for training black pilots, the Defense Department responded by shunting the money to civilian programs. It’s an impressive demonstration of racism that the normally acquisitive Defense Department would turn down an opportunity to take money if it meant taking black people. In any case, given the reverence normally attached to our military in pop culture, it’s a good thing to see this kind of internal critique show up in the movies, particularly prestige ones.

And as much ill-will as I have stored up about Lucas, this actually looks kind of in his wheelhouse. He’s always been better at the flyboys-with-destiny stuff than anything else.

Alyssa

On The Eve Of Obama’s Afghanistan Announcement, A Good War Novel

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 22, 2011 at 3:57 pm

Last week in The Atlantic, Matt Gallagher asked why we don’t have a great novel about the War on Terror. I think he’s right that a general disconnection from the war has made war novels a harder sell to publishers, and the lack of a draft means people who aren’t already novelists aren’t getting shipped to the front in the way they might have been in World War I and World War II. But I also think it’s a matter of time—we haven’t decided what the dominant literary or cinematic narrative out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are yet, and so our books and movies about the conflicts are still a bit diffuse.

That said, I just finished Lorraine Adams‘ novel The Room and the Chair, and while it’s flawed, it’s a striking and sometimes beautiful book about the institutions and people involved in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The flaws first: the novel isn’t big enough for its story, which traces the staff of a newspaper, an Air Force Pilot, and a secretive intelligence operative through a plane crash, the release of a classified report, an accident in Afghanistan, and a secret mission into Iran. Adams use of vernacular can be inconsistent and ineffective, especially when she’s trying to embody the novel’s most unrealistic minor characters, a group of very young teenage prostitutes. But what’s novel, and what I think really works about about The Room and the Chair, is the way that it draws a connection between Washington elites’ failure to see the District of Columbia clearly and their inability to comprehend what’s going on in the war they’re covering.

In the newsroom of a paper that stands in for the Washington Post, Adam, the editor in chief and former rival of Don Grady, the character who stands in for Bob Woodward, seeks counsel he doesn’t often take from Stanley, the night editor, who is a black man passing for white, and mentoring Vera, a black journalist who has grown up in the district. Adam gives up hope of getting a good story out of a major intelligence report after a rival paper scoops them it, dismissing Mabel, Don’s wife and an obvious if more sympathetic stand-in for Sally Quinn, when she gets a copy of the report and tries to give it to him. The incident humiliates her and represents a journalistic failure for him: “It was a version of death, one in which a persona realizes that what they imagined about themselves, however unflattering, was not nearly as awful as how they were, by many other people, seen. [...] She could have saved the day, but no one, including herself, had taken her as someone who could have anything to contribute. Adam, the nicest guy alive, someone she’d thought had a longtime crush on her, just wanted her to go away.”
Read more

Yglesias

F-22 Stimulus

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 21, 2009 at 2:39 pm

The big trouble with any kind of stimulus bill is that it has to pass congress and there’s virtually no chance of the congressional wringer doing anything other than making things worse. For example, defense contractors’ plans to get a bailout for the financially and strategically absurd F-22 Raptor is gaining steam on the Hill. One good thing about a McCain presidency would have been that a former naval aviator in the White House would have been the deadliest foe ever faced by the U.S. Air Force and its various boondoggles and there’s been some indication that some of the Obama administration’s outreach to McCain has focused on this project.

Yglesias

Air Force Strikes Back

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 8, 2009 at 1:05 pm

f_22_raptor_3_1.jpg

Robert Farley’s been agitating for a while now for the abolition of the Air Force. Now along comes the Air Force determined to prove its continued relevance by launching a new “counter-blog” initiative aimed at “counter[ing] the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinion about the U.S. government and the Air Force.”

Of course what this doesn’t do is allay one’s doubts that a branch of the military whose institutional identity and mission were a pure creation of the Cold War era may not be well-suited to the present-day geopolitical context.

Yglesias

Government Good and Bad?

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 14, 2008 at 7:17 pm

Ben Bernanke

Reader J.F. has a question about my post on how not all government agencies are as bad as that one time the DMV really screwed up: “RE: AirForce, I agree with your broad point, but do you have any thoughts regarding the fact that the well run government agencies you mention are all military? Are civilian run agencies just never as good? And why is that? Further, should we ask the military to run our healthcare. I’m only half-kidding on that last one.”

First off, I would reject the premise. One of the examples I cited of an effective public institution is the Federal Reserve system. The very same conservatives who seem certain that the government would botch even the most minor regulatory tasks have pretty much no problem with the idea of the Fed setting interests rates that do an enormous amount to control the overall level of employment, GDP growth, and inflation in the country. And rightly so — the details of the Fed’s conduct over the past 20-30 years are certainly open to criticism, but they’ve definitely delivered shorter, shallower recessions than we had in the past and the very same Bush administration that put Michael Brown in charge of FEMA picked a new Fed chief whose decision-making regularly earns praise from Paul Krugman.

Beyond the Fed and the military there are lots of parts of the government that work quite well — we have bad schools and bad police departments in this country, but also good schools and good police departments. We fight forest fires with extraordinary skill and I’ve had great visits to any number of attractions run by the National Park Service.

And then, yes, there’s the military. But there’s no real mystery here as to why our very large military is also a reasonably high-performing government agency — it’s something our political leaders put a high priority on. This is similar to the Fed — political elites wouldn’t stand for staffing it with incompetents and know-nothings. Other agencies become patronage mills or suffer from funding shortfalls or deliberate sabotage. When the government is run by people who don’t want environmental regulations, civil rights law, or labor law to be enforced properly those things don’t happen. What’s more, a lot of the better public institutions — from the Fed to the Navy to state universities and so forth — are structured in special ways to try to insulate them from problematic forms of politicization.

This topic initially arose in the context of some snark about the evils of the government taking over the health care system, and my point wouldn’t be to say that government-run health care would necessarily be good but only that one could envision a wide range of outcomes. Were the government to start running American health care, it would be important to think about a lot of questions of institutional design to try to make sure that it ran health care well. In the real world, the government is already pretty heavily involved in the health care system in terms of regulating it and the main progressive legislative proposals all involve basically maintaining the current framework of a regulated-and-subsidized but privately owned-and-operated health care system so I’m not sure that this debate is all that relevant. In terms of the military running health care, though, the Veterans’ Administration provides excellent health care and I hear good things about the schools the DOD runs on military babes.

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