By law, most skin mags can’t be sold in military stores. Playboy and Penthouse aren’t deemed scandalous enough to fall under those regulations, though.

When I was in Air Force technical school, you could have porn in your room as long as it didn’t involve penetration. The service wanted to save penetration for itself. “If anyone’s going to get fucked up the ass, it’s going to be you, airman, with this 24-foot Air Force cock.”

What kind of wacko group — okay, we know what kind, Donald Wildmon’s — would want to keep porn mags from highly armed, young, over-testosteroned soldiers faced with a dearth of real, live females (what’s the ratio of males to females in the military, anyone? Bueller?)?

You’re old enough to kill, son, but don’t touch yourself. You’ll go blind.

A commenter on the story over at Military.com summed it up nicely:

Pornography is one of the things that seperate us from the Islamofacists and Sharia law.

Porno is Patriotic

Damn unpatriotic, troop-hating Christian fanatics.

[Hotel Tango: The D-Ring]

FOR NEARLY 200 years, cadets at the United States Military Academy have been guided by the “Thayer System,” a rigid structure of unyielding regulation, austere discipline, fierce loyalty, and strong emphasis on math, science, and engineering. The method is calculated to produce Army officers of the highest caliber. And the system has worked. West Point graduates constitute some of the most celebrated, highly decorated officers in American history. No doubt if you traveled further back in time, West Pointers would rank amongst some of the finest combat leaders in the history of warfare.

. . .

However, one of the cornerstones of Slyvanus Thayer’s system, his dated academic infrastructure, no longer meets the needs of the mission. The same can be said for nearly identical curriculums at Annapolis and Colorado Springs.

West Point and all of the service academies promote math and engineering above all other disciplines. Thayer wanted math savvy artillery officers. The Navy sought officers with a firm grasp of engineering to keep their ships running and navigate the seas under the harshest of combat conditions. And the Air Force desired officers capable of operating the service’s cutting-edge technology. It’s the perfect academic infrastructure for a young cadet, if we expect him to fight the Cold War.

Unfortunately, we are fighting a new war. Tomorrow’s war. This is a war where we fight an enemy who understands that the battlefield lies in the human heart, not in the skies or on the seas. And while the liberal arts curriculum is precisely the school of thought needed to effectively prepare our cadets to fight in the 21st century, not one of the service academies offers a Bachelor of Arts degree.

An Army platoon leader would be better equipped to administer to tribes in Anbar province if he had a degree in International Affairs and a minor in Arabic. A Marine infantry Lieutenant might be more effective unifying warlords in Afghanistan if he spent his four years at Annapolis studying the history of central Asia. U.S. Special Forces have been deployed to over 180 different countries since 9/11, and, to be sure, the military offers them the education needed to meet that goal. But in all that training an academy cadet will only get as much foreign study as he can squeeze into his schedule between orbital mechanics and advanced calculus.

Read the rest for yourself.

Great guest post over at The Gunner’s World by Col. Michael Visconage explaining the role of field historians. He then goes into the current situation in Iraq, from his unique perspective.

My job as the Multi-National Corps Iraq Historian is to collect as much data for the military archives as possible so that, once declassified, the events at hand can be studied by researchers, writers, and historians to tell the story of this phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. To do this, I’ll focus on conducting one-on-one oral history interviews, collecting key documents, and taking photographs. I’ll also keep a lot of notes on the evolving issues to help me focus my collection efforts. My mission is to collect data—I do not have a specific publication I must produce. Because of that, I have no thesis or “outline” in my head that drives my work in a particular pre-determined direction. Collecting a wide range of data for unknown future researches will cause me to collect a broad base of information, not knowing what will be needed, or by whom, in 2 years or 50. I will use my experience as a combat arms officer and historian to guide me to the key issues and decision points.

Capt. Ben Richards had been battling insurgents from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for three weeks when he received an unexpected visitor.

Abu Ali walked into the Americans’ battle-scarred combat outpost with an unusual proposal: the community leader was worried about the insurgents, and wanted the soldiers’ help in taking them on.

The April 7 meeting was the beginning of a new alliance and, American commanders hope, a portent of what is to come in the bitterly contested Diyala Province.

Using his Iraqi partners to pick out the insurgents and uncover the bombs they had seeded along the cratered roads, Captain Richards’s soldiers soon apprehended more than 100 militants, including several low-level emirs. The Iraqis called themselves the Local Committee; Captain Richards dubbed them the Kit Carson scouts.

“It is the only way that we can keep Al Qaeda out,” said Captain Richards, who operates from a former Iraqi police station in the Buhritz sector of the city that still bears the sooty streaks from the day militants set it aflame last year.

. . .

Many Sunnis, for their part, are less inclined to see the soldiers as occupiers now that it is clear that American troop reductions are all but inevitable, and they are more concerned with strengthening their ability to fend off threats from Sunni jihadists and Shiite militias. In a surprising twist, the jihadists — the Americans’ most ardent foes — made the new strategy possible. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi organization with a small but significant foreign component, severely overplayed its hand, spawning resentment by many residents and other insurgent groups.

Imposing a severe version of Islamic law, the group installed its own clerics, established an Islamic court and banned the sale of cigarettes, which even this week were nowhere to be found in the humble shops in western Baquba to the consternation of patrolling Iraqi troops.

The fighters raised funds by kidnapping local Iraqis, found accommodations by evicting some residents from their homes and killed with abandon when anyone got in their way, residents say. A small group of bearded black-clad militants took down the Iraqi flag and raised the banner of their self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq.

“They used religion as a ploy to get in and exploit people’s passions,” said one member of the Kit Carson scouts, who gave his name as Haidar. “They were Iraqis and other Arabs from Syria, Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They started kicking people out of their houses and getting ransom from rich people. They would shoot people in front of their houses to scare the others.”

. . .

The meeting between the residents and the Americans was Abu Ali’s initiative. The locals wanted ammunition to carry on their fight. Captain Richards had another proposal: the residents should tip off the Americans on which Iraqis belonged to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and where they had buried their bombs.

At first, no more than a dozen of the several hundred Sunnis who were taking on the militants served as Kit Carson scouts, but they made a vital difference.

. . .

The American military is trying to expand the alliance into the western sector of the city, which a Stryker brigade recently wrested back from Qaeda militants. During the recent American assault in the western sector, soldiers from Blackhawk Company got a glimpse of an alliance the Americans hope to see. An Iraqi seemingly emerged from nowhere, announced himself as a member of the 1920s Revolution Brigades and warned the soldiers that insurgents could be found on the far side of a sand berm around the corner. The tip was accurate.

That’s all very good news.

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government’s capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.

Of course, 118,000 of those contractors are Iraqi, which is a good thing if you ask me. Rather than contracting out services to Americans or other foreign nationals, better to give Iraqis jobs and money.

Note that it is unclear if the numbers above include contractors hired by the Department of State as well as the Department of Defense. The U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) contractors are not included in the above.

Unfortunately, and ultimately damningly:

Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials.

Continuing uncertainty over the numbers of armed contractors drew special criticism from military experts.

“We don’t have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That’s dangerous for our country,” said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon “is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that’s obscene.”

Anyway, beyond what little I’ve posted, there’s a ton more to learn in the quite long article. I’d write more on the subject (because I have serious problems with contractors taking over military duties), but I’m too inebriated from celebrating Independence Day to continue in this vein. If I did, this post would be far too long.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and some allies in the Bush administration are seeking to build bipartisan political support for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq by moving toward withdrawing significant numbers of troops from Iraq by the end of President Bush’s term.

The complicating factor is how long the administration will stick with its “surge” strategy of keeping high levels of troops in Iraq to try to tamp down violence there. On this issue, the administration — and even the military — is deeply divided.

The longer the surge lasts, the harder it will be to achieve the longed-for political consensus. Without such agreement, Bush administration officials fear, the U.S. could be forced into a hasty withdrawal that could have dire consequences both for the region and for U.S. stature in the world.

The Journal has picked up — and elaborated upon the political aspects of — the story I first noted in discussing what’s been floating around the upper echelons of the military intelligentsia for a short while now.

From Small Wars Journal Blog piece entitled “Plan B in Iraq” by Fernando Martinez Lujan:

Regardless of “the Surge’s” outcome this summer, growing domestic political pressure will likely soon force American decision-makers to “pull the plug” on the large US troop presence in Iraq. Faced with this difficult situation, senior military and civilian leaders must act now to develop a viable “Plan B” as an alternative to precipitous, forced troop withdrawal. By necessity, this Plan B must incorporate both a smaller, sustainable troop presence and a series of sweeping organizational reforms to address the military’s badly outdated intervention strategies.

This is definitely a variation on the expressed strategy of the Bush administration (I’m not certain Secretary of Defense Gates would have come out with it without upper-level approval), and a policy shift of which I don’t think the Democrats have taken full and effective advantage.

To counter Republican claims that a withdrawal would send the region into chaos and provide a safe haven for terrorists (which a full, immediate withdrawal would result in), Democrats can support this reasonable and logical strategy for withdrawal proposed by senior military officers.