Posts Tagged ‘Defense’

An Intervention for Pete Hegseth

Tuesday, December 10th, 2024

By Bob Gaydos

Pete Hegseth … taking the pledge

Pete Hegseth … taking the pledge

  If it swims like a fish, smells like a fish and drinks like a fish, you’ve got a drunken fish. Or, in this case, Pete Hegseth.

   The evidence is everywhere, starting with the fact that Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense is running around apparently telling everyone that if he is confirmed as head of the most powerful military organization on the planet, he would stop drinking completely. He’s even telling people who didn’t ask him about his drinking. In fact, I’m not sure anyone asked him to stop drinking, but apparently he thinks it’s a good idea, if not a job requirement, for the secretary of defense to abstain completely from alcohol.

    Like an alcoholic. Which Hegseth apparently does not think he is because he told his colleague, Megyn Kelly, on TV, “It’s not hard for me because it’s not a problem for me.” He added: “This is the biggest deployment of my life, and there won’t be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I’m doing it.”

    Pete, Pete, Pete. Take a seat. First of all, if “it” is not a problem for you, then there’s no reason for you to abstain completely from drinking. I’m sure some secretaries of defense have had a glass of wine at some fancy dinner, someplace or other with no one raising an eyebrow.

      But if you’re swearing off, there must be some reason. Usually, that means a lot of other people have suggested or outright said you have a drinking problem.

    I’m not making this stuff up out of thin air, Pete. I’ve been writing a column about addiction and recovery for 17 years and I’ve interviewed literally dozens of members of Alcoholics Anonymous. They agree that people who don’t have a drinking problem (1) don’t accidentally wind up at AA meetings and (2) don’t feel the need to swear off drinking totally in order to get a good job or not get kicked out of the house or fired.

    Or, as The New Yorker reported, get carried to your room at a Memorial Day veterans event in Virginia Beach in 2014 because you were “totally sloshed.” Or,  had to be held back from joining female dancers on stage at a Louisiana strip club.

  Or go on the air to host a morning show on Fox TV smelling of alcohol, as colleagues reportedly complained.

   Or, as reported, be removed from leadership positions at two military veterans organizations amid allegations of financial mismanagement, inappropriate sexual behavior and, yes, drunkenness.

   I guess that’s why you’re promising to be abstinent if you’re put in charge of the Defense Department, Pete, a job for which, by the way, you are also clearly unqualified.    

    And, Pete, as long as we’re being honest here, there’s that painful note your mom sent you six years ago: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.

   “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. I…say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”

    That’s the kind of behavior which experience tells usually involves alcohol. 

    There’s no time like the present, Pete. Your mom is right. Get some help and take an honest look at yourself.

     You sound like a macho guy, Pete. Do yourself a favor. Find an AA meeting, walk in quietly and take a seat and listen. You don’t have to say anything. They don’t even want to know your last name. A lot of macho guys have told me it was the hardest thing they ever did.        

     And the best.

                   ***

    As long as we’re on the subject, in the past, I’ve posted several different questionnaires used to assess whether a person has a problem with alcohol. The shortest one is the AUDIT, offered by The World Health Organization and is the most widely used alcohol use assessment tool in the world.

      AUDIT stands for alcohol use disorders identification test. This test is for Pete and anyone else wondering about a drinking problem. As always, be honest for the best result.

 

The AUDIT questionnaire:

Please circle the answer that is correct for you

  1. How often do you have a drink containing alcohol?
  • Never
  • Monthly or less
  • 2-4 times a month
  • 2-3 times a week
  • 4 or more times a week
  1. How many standard drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when drinking?
  • 1or2
  • 3or4
  • 5or6
  • 7to9
  • 10 or more
  1. How often do you have six or more drinks on one occasion?
  • Never
  • Less than monthly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly
  • Daily or almost daily
  1. During the past year, how often have you found that you were not able to stop drinking once you had started?
  • Never
  • Less than monthly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly
  • Daily or almost daily
  1. During the past year, how often have you failed to do what was normally expected of you because of drinking?
  • Never
  • Less than monthly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly
  • Daily or almost daily
  1. During the past year, how often have you needed a drink in the morning to get yourself going after a heavy drinking session?
  • Never
  • Less than monthly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly
  • Daily or almost daily
  1. During the past year, how often have you had a feeling of guilt or remorse after drinking?
  • Never
  • Less than monthly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly
  • Daily or almost daily
  1. During the past year, have you been unable to remember what happened the night before because you had been drinking?
  • Never
  • Less than monthly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly
  • Daily or almost daily
  1. Have you or someone else been injured as a result of your drinking?
  • No
  • Yes, but not in the past year
  • Yes, during the past year
  1. Has a relative or friend, doctor or other health worker been concerned about your drinking or suggested you cut down?
  • No
  • Yes, but not in the past year
  • Yes, during the past year

Scoring the AUDIT

   Scores for each question range from 0 to 4, with the first response for each question (eg never) scoring 0, the second (eg less than monthly) scoring 1, the third (eg monthly) scoring 2, the fourth (eg weekly) scoring 3, and the last response (eg. daily or almost daily) scoring 4. For questions 9 and 10, which only have three responses, the scoring is 0, 2 and 4.

    The range of possible scores is from 0 to 40, with 0 indicating an abstainer who has never had any problems from alcohol. A score of 1 to 7 suggests low-risk consumptions, according to World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. Scores from 8 to 14 suggest hazardous or harmful alcohol consumption and a score of 15 or more indicates the likelihood of alcohol dependence (moderate-severe alcohol use disorder).

    If you’re concerned about your score, reread the above message to Pete. Again, be honest. And have a safe and sober holiday season.




Pentagon UFO Report is Too Dismissive

Sunday, March 31st, 2024

By Bob Gaydos

8D6DD022-FE1D-4464-BEEC-FA84D1B4BF91   “They’re not out there.”

    The little green men.

    The flying saucers.

    The UAPs.

    The UFOs.

    The whatever-they-are that-move-faster-than possible.

     Trust us. It’s one big game of phone tag encouraged by movies, TV and conspiracy theorists. Nothing happening. Nothing covered up. Nothing being reverse engineered. Get on with your day. That is all.

       The above is the gist of a 67-page report issued recently by the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, entitled “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”

    To wit: Nothing out there. Nothing in some desert in New Mexico. The AARO, given full funding by Congress to do its job, concluded that most sitings were simply “misidentification” and, contrary to recent whistleblower claims, it “found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.”

     Well … not so fast. I’m not a UFO fanatic or a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe the odds favor some form of life elsewhere in the universe and I know it’s risky business blindly accepting a report by a government agency summarily dismissing allegations against other segments of the same department.

   Also, I know that there were no weapons of mass destruction buried in Iraq, the U.S. did secretly buy weapons from Iran to arm Nicaraguan rebels and it’s still a bit sketchy on whether North Vietnamese ships really attacked U.S. Navy warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, thrusting the U.S. fully into the war in Vietnam.

    The point? The Defense Department investigating the Defense Department on a matter of wide public interest and controversy is probably not the best way to resolve long-standing questions.

      The mere fact that the government stopped referring to UFOs as UFOs and started calling them UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, suggests an effort to distance from easier public understanding of the topic. Give it a serious sounding name, suggesting all the other UFO stuff is just Hollywood making money. Most of the world will probably still refer to the balloons, satellites and other objects as UFOs, regardless.

     The report was requested by Congress after numerous reports by Navy pilots and other military personnel regarding the sighting of strange objects in the sky and reports from former Defense Department employees of some technology, not of this planet, being secretly reverse-engineered by  the government and private companies.

     A congressional committee held a closed-door meeting with the inspector general of the Intelligence community on such reports a while back and several members emerged thinking that, at the very least, the reports were credible enough for further investigation.

      AARO was given full funding by Congress to do so, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, being one of the senators pushing for the full funding. Haven’t heard any response from the senator yet to the AARO report.

       Most of the mainstream media simply reported the facts straight out of the report as presented: No UFOs, no little green men, nothing being hidden, ever, in the desert, or anywhere else regarding alien life. Just people repeating the same stories to each other, misidentified stuff, some references to other secret government programs and, well, maybe a few things there’s too little information on to draw a conclusion.

     Not good enough. Many of the recent reports, based on advanced technology, were made by credible witnesses. In fact, so were some of the older reports, many of which described objects similar to recent reports. Some older reports apparently were not even included in the AARO report.

   Instead of the Executive Department investigating the Executive Department, Congress, as an equal member of government, the funding member, should do so. There are reports that legislation is being prepared for just that purpose.

      People are unlikely to stop believing in UFOS or at least the possibility of them, especially when they’re dismissed as engaging in a game of phone tag. In fact, that’s the kind of response some bad Hollywood scriptwriters would come up with  

                                     ******

PS: The AARO report is unlikely to dampen the annual UFO parade and celebration in the Hamlet of Pine Bush in upstate New York. The UFO capital of the Northeast will hold its annual festivities June 1 and, yes, there will be little and big green men, robots, other strange creatures, lots of good food, music, goods to be bought and fun to be had. There will also be some serious discussion by serious people about UAPs, etc. I’d venture to say the AARO report will come up. A fun day for believers, non-believers and everyone in-between. Maybe Senator Gillibrand will stop by.


rjgaydos@gmail.com


     

      

The Leaks: When Reality is not Virtual

Saturday, April 15th, 2023

By Bob Gaydos

Airman Jack Teixeira

Airman Jack Teixeira

     I suspect I am not alone in wondering how, in the name of Jack Ryan, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman trying to impress an online gamer chat group called Thug Shaker Central, got his hands on hundreds of pages of top secret intelligence briefings on the war in Ukraine, U.S. spying on Russia and lots of other countries (friend and foe) and posted it online, thereby presenting a potential whopper of an international crisis and a not-so-small for-real embarrassment for the Pentagon.

   I also wonder how, in the names of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a young man who was part of the military, intelligence and computer communities, could not (if the allegations against him are true) appreciate the potential risk in human lives of exposing such information to the worldwide web. How could he not process the difference between real life warfare and video gaming?

    And finally, I wonder how, in the name of basic common sense, could a young man apparently unable or uninterested in making such vital national security distinctions be granted access to so much “secret” information?

     More, as they say, will be revealed, but we already know enough to be concerned.

     So far, there are apparently two threads of “explanation” coming from Pentagon and intelligence services:

  1. Yes, the information leaked was important for military and intelligence gathering reasons, but their dissemination is survivable. Ukrainian officials are even said to be glad for the leak, because it exposes their true need for more military support.
  2. Young people in the military are given all sorts of important responsibilities and are expected to abide by the rules. In fact, they are essential to the storing and processing of all sorts of important intelligence material.

    This is all sorts of troubling. President Biden has ordered a review of the process of granting clearance to classified material. The Pentagon says it will do so. But what exactly will it do?

      Reassessing the actual classifying of documents would be a good place to start. How many secrets do we actually need? The people who collect them are likely to always think they need more. Maybe some outside eyes are needed.

       Then there’s the issue of who gets to actually look at the secrets. Is it crucial for a 21-year-old living on Cape Cod and serving in the National Guard to have what appears to be easy access to classified reports on the war in Ukraine and USA spying on Russia? Was there anything in his background to suggest an inability to comprehend that casual dissemination of the material he was privy to was a serious crime?

     The airman, Jack Teixeira, apparently knew what he did was against the law, the FBI says, because he was searching the topic of  “leaks“ on the web the day before he was arrested. 

    In response to the online leaks, the Defense Department is reviewing its processes to protect classified information, reducing the number of people who have access, and reminding the force that “the responsibility to safeguard classified information is a lifetime requirement for each individual granted a security clearance.” So said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks in a memo issued following Teixeira’s arrest.

     That’s all well and good and necessary. But the Defense Department also admits that it has long been concerned about the proliferation and popularity of video war games with many of its younger members and cites its inability to monitor such games for any illegal activity. That’s the purview of the FBI. It’s probably safe to assume that some agents will be working on their video gaming skills in the near future.

    Meanwhile, Airman Teixeira, apparently well-schooled in the victories and defeats of virtual reality, is about to get a crash course in real-life consequences. Wonder if he’ll notice the difference.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in/residence at zestoforange.com.