Just one day after the Air Force’s chief of sexual assault prevention was arrested for sexual assault himself, a new Pentagon report shows a sharp increase in the estimated number of assaults in the military annually.

The report from the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office for Fiscal Year 2012 found a 6 percent rise in reported assaults over the last year, for a total of 3,374. But much more troubling is the estimated number of sexual assault incidents that were never officially reported. In last year’s report, there were an estimated 19,000 instances, but this year the number has jumped to an unprecedented 26,000 instances of assault, leaving thousands unreported.

The disparity in the total number of instances of Military Sexual Trauma (MST) compared to those fully reported — where the victim fills out an official report and action is taken — can be seen as being due to victims’ fears of retaliation, including possible discharge from service or being overlooked for a promotion. The new results line up with those seen in a 2011 Pentagon health survey released in April. According to that report, more female service members were willing to come forward about sexual abuse and assault, with roughly one in five women saying they were victims of unwanted sexual contact from another member of the military, but under reporting remains a serious issue.

“Sexual assault has no place in the United States military,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said in a statement released Monday night in reponse to news that Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, the Air Forces’s chief of sexual assault prevention, had been arrested on charges of sexual assault. “The American people, including our service members, should expect a culture of absolutely no tolerance for this deplorable behavior that violates not only the law, but basic principles of respect, honor, and dignity in our society and its military.”

Despite that pledge, assault and abuse in the military has been under increased scrutiny in recent months, following a series of high-profile scandals. In February, Lt. Col. James Wilkerson was reinstated into service after an Air Force general overturned a jury, voiding Wilkerson’s sexual assault conviction. In 2012, Lackland Air Force base saw 12 instructors investigated for sexual misconduct toward 31 trainees, with at least one trainer sentenced to twenty years for rape and sexual assault. Army Gen. Jeffery Sinclair was likewise charged in 2012 with sexually assaulting a female subordinate, then threatening her career if she went public.
Read more

The officer in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s response to sexual assault was himself arrested for sexual battery this weekend, drawing attention yet again to the extent of rape culture in the armed services.

Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski is accused of assaulting a woman in an Arlington, VA, parking lot early Sunday morning. According to the police report of the incident, Krusinski approached the woman in question after a night of drinking:

On May 5 at 12:35 am, a drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks. The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, VA, was arrested and charged with sexual battery. He was held on a $5,000 unsecured bond.

Krusinski is the head of the Air Force’s branch of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, a Department of Defense initiative to combat sexual assault in the ranks. A spokesperson for the Air Force confirmed to local blog ARLnow.com the man described in the police report is in fact Lt. Col. Krusinski, but gave no further comment. ARLNow also confirmed that the woman and Krusinski did not know each other prior to the encounter.

The Air Force’s response to sexual violence was last scrutinized following a controversial case involving an Air Force general overturning a jury’s sexual assault conviction. That case launched a review of the military’s approach to cases involving sexual assault, resulting in Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel sending Congress a series of recommendations for them to pass into law. As it stands, however, an estimated 19,000 instances of sexual assault occurred in 2011 alone.

(HT: Graham Jenkins)

As mandatory budget cuts loom, a group of Congressional Republicans has cheered the coming reductions in federal spending — so long as federal funding is maintained for a plane that is years behind schedule and doesn’t fly, that is.

The Department of Defense announced on Friday afternoon that it has grounded the entire fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in light of an issue with its engine. Grounding the fleet, in all three of its variations, is just the latest in a slew of setbacks to the troubled acquisition program. Produced by Lockheed Martin to the tune of $100 million per plane, the total cost of the project so far has climbed over $400 billion, making it the most expensive weapons system in U.S. history. By contrast, the Manhattan Project — which created the nuclear weapon from scratch — cost about $55 billion in today’s dollars.

The F-35 project as a whole is currently at least six years behind schedule, slated for delivery in 2015 at the earliest. Beginning on March 1, the Defense Department budget is poised to fall under the effect of mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration, cutting $1 trillion from the budget in military and domestic spending over the next ten years.

Enter the Joint Strike Fighter Caucus.

Formed in 2011, as talks to avoid sequestration were first ongoing, 49 members of the House of Representatives — hailing from both parties — signed on to protect the F-35. Several of the Republican members of the JSF Caucus, however, are among the most ardent supporters of slashing federal funding currently in Congress. Among their ranks are Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), each of whom have called for deep reductions to programs that actually work.

Broun, in a 2012 interview with Politico, estimated that he had proposed $4 billion in cuts in the House Science, Technology, and Commerce committee alone. Franks has made clear that he believes the only way to shrink the government “is to choke the monster.” Poe has compared Congress to “addicts” when it comes to spending, proposing a 12 step program to break the habit as he argued against the fiscal cliff deal.

While several Republicans have favored raising revenues to help offset sequestration, none of the Republicans listed above have joined in. Instead, the Representatives listed above all voted “aye” on a bill to replace the defense cuts in sequestration entirely with cuts on the domestic side. Cuts to defense can be made certainly made to military spending — if done smartly — making voting to protect a plane that doesn’t work in opposition to providing health care to millions of Americans near unconscionable.

During tonight’s foreign policy presidential Mitt Romney repeated his attack on President Obama for the U.S. Navy and Air Force being smaller than they were in 1917 and 1947 respectively. This is a “pointless” comparison, as CNN noted recently, explaining that it’s “wrong to assume that fewer ships translates to a weaker military” or fighters for that matter “[b]ecause of the technological supremacy of current Navy ships, the military can get more from each one than it did even 10 to 15 years ago.”

Obama pointed this out during the debate:

OBAMA: But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting slips. It’s what are our capabilities

Watch the clip:

In other words, 1,000 1940s-era fighter planes combined can’t do what one of today’s B-2 Stealth bomber can do, the same for Navy ships in 1917 versus today.

The Washington Post fact checker agreed with CNN. “This is a nonsense fact.” Factcheck.org noted it’s “a meaningless claim.”

In a very matter-of-fact television interview earlier this month, President Obama said Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian machinations have “not had a serious national security impact on us.” Hard-pressed to find points of divergence between his own national security policies and Obama’s, Mitt Romney — focused on Chávez’s “military ties with Iran” — blasted the president as “simply naïve,” and called his comment “disturbing.”

One wonders if Romney feels the same way about Air Force General Douglas Fraser, who, as the head of Southern Command, has responsibility for U.S. military operations in Latin America. Asked by the Associated Press if Venezuelan arms purchases and weapons development posed a threat to the U.S., Fraser said:

From my standpoint, no, I don’t see it that way. I don’t see them as a national security threat.

…As I look at Iran and their connection with Venezuela, I see that still primarily as a diplomatic and economic relationship.

The experts side with Obama and Fraser on this question. Riordan Roett, who directs Johns Hopkins’ Latin American Studies Program, said Chávez “poses no security threat to the United States or anyone else.” Roett dismissed Romney’s outrage as “just pure electoral politics.” Another expert said in 2009, “They just don’t have the stuff that could pose a serious threat to the United States.”

On Afghanistan, Romney was for listening to the generals before he was against it. Maybe he should lend them his ear, at least for a while, on Latin America, too.

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.