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The unit with the greatest percentage of casualties in Afghanistan was 3rd Battalion/5th Marines. Out of 1000 men they lost 25 with another 184 wounded.[/url]
So sad, I believe 2nd battalion / 4th Marines had a lot of casualties as well Also, India battery 3/12.
The show Generation Kill was based on true story of First Reconnaissance Battalion, I think many of them did not survive.
Last edited by lilyflower3191981; 01-03-2016 at 02:03 PM..
One of my crazy friends told me months ago that integration in the U.S. military was one of the worst things to happen to the U.S. LOL. Do you agree or disagree?
Disagree.
First, the military was not desegregated as a social experiment. It was desegregated because the senior leadership of the Department of War ascertained after WWII that segregation was a hugely inefficient way to run the Army and led to combat losses. The military leadership itself advocated integration in order to win more battles.
One of the primary things the military--any military--must do is bind the troops into a unitary body. It takes a corps to gain esprit de corps, and with segregation the Army was working against itself.
Your Wikipedia link doesn't present any facts that aren't in my link. My link explains in far more detail what factually happened. Why don't you try reading first and get your facts straight?
The House Armed Services Committee found,
During the course of the investigation we found no substantial evidence of racial discrimination upon which we could place true responsibility for causation of these serious disturbances. Certainly there were many perceptions of discrimination by young blacks, who, because of their sensitivity to real or fancied oppression, often enlist with a ‘chip on their shoulder.’ Those young blacks, who enter the service from the ghetto with a complete black awareness, probably for the first time find themselves immersed in a predominantly white society which, in civilian life, they had come to mistrust. These young men are subject to being easily led–as was the case in the Constellation uprising where about 15 agitators orchestrated the entire affair. [emphasis in the original]
The Navy’s recruitment program for most of 1972 that resulted in the lowering of standards for enlistment, accepting a greater percentage of mental category IV and those in the lower half of category III, not requiring recruits in these categories to have completed their high school education, and accepting these people without sufficient analysis of their previous offense records, has created many of the problems the Navy is experiencing today.
In the subcommittee’s view, black sailors from the lower end of the recruiting pool faced no realistic prospect of specialized training and advancement, and often blamed their failure to progress on racism. The report attributed the trouble on the Kitty Hawk directly to this mentality:
The subcommittee is of the position that the riot on Kitty Hawk consisted of unprovoked assaults by a very few men, most of whom were of below-average mental capacity, most of whom had been aboard for less than one year, and all of whom were black. This group, as a whole, acted as ‘thugs,’ which raises doubt as to whether they should ever have been accepted into military service in the first place.
The military, at least in principle, is a meritocracy with race (and sex, mostly) a non-factor.
It works well this way.
The exception would be trying to shoe horn women into infantry positions where they physically have no business.
The military is meritocracy to a larger degree than the civilian sector, and that's better, but nothing is entirely merit based anymore. There's increasingly been a push for equal outcomes and 'diversity'.
To integrate is one thing. But equal outcomes shouldn't be forced neither should diversity nor allowing one group more slack. All should be held to the same standards and expectations as they would hold white males, but that's not happening.
The military is meritocracy to a larger degree than the civilian sector, and that's better, but nothing is entirely merit based anymore. There's increasingly been a push for equal outcomes and 'diversity'.
It was always slightly more a meritocracy than the civilian sector, but only slightly. It improved greatly as such with integration that progressed into the 70s.
Quote:
To integrate is one thing. But equal outcomes shouldn't be forced neither should diversity nor allowing one group more slack. All should be held to the same standards and expectations as they would hold white males, but that's not happening.
Can you provide any specific examples that you've witnessed while in uniform?
I was in the Navy when Clinton began putting women on war ships. Each ship had to go through many millions of dollars to reconfigure a berthing compartment for women. When the women were brought on my ship for the first time, things got bad. Some of those women didn't want to serve on a ship. Some ran away. Those who were in the engineering field were in for a shock. Work in the engine room is hot, smelly, long hours, and miserable. Some of those women either ran away or put in to transfer to a different department. A few women spent every Monday morning at sick call to get tested to see if they got pregnant. They were trying to get pregnant to get out of going out to sea on the ship. I worked with some women who pulled their own weight but these were the exceptions, not the norm. Within a few months the women clogged up the main sewage system with their tampons and maxi pads. Once things settled then the next and most obvious problem started. You put young physically fit adults in such close quarter living conditions and sexual relationships will occur. This happens in today's college dorms, but a Navy ship is not a college. It's a war ship with a mission. There were lovers' fights within the same division, single female officer and senior enlisted married man affair, female chief (E-7 rank) was having an affair with her first class petty officer (E-6) and when her husband found out he beat her to the point of putting her in the hospital. There were also cases of women using "sexual harassment" as a weapon against guys they didn't like. We moved supplies by hand forming working parties. We tossed boxes and bags of supplies from one person to the next. Most women couldn't lift those supplies so it ended up being almost totally male which meant sailors of ranks not normally serving on working parties were once again back tossing supplies. Less work got done in the engine room during those working parties. Junior female sailors were not as efficient in getting work done compared to the more senior male enlisted sailors now tossing supplies. The next phase of problems came during rating exams (test to see your knowledge of the job and that, along with other factors, decide if you can be promoted). We found out the Navy had a quota for certain ratings to have female sailors at a particular rank. If the navy has room for 100 sailors in a field to be promoted and decide 10 of those promoted must be women then the ten highest scoring women are promoted. However, if those ten women scored below ten men then those ten men at the bottom don't get promoted while less experienced and less knowledgeable female sailors are promoted over them. This happened in my division. We got a look at her scores and she barely passed but she was now a higher rank than those of use who scored much higher than her. She couldn't do the simplest watch duties without damaging equipment. She ended up having an emotional breakdown when her shipboard lover died in a motorcycle crash and she never returned. Though we're all sailors, we weren't equal. Men get their heads buzzed with clippers while women can keep shoulder length hair. Though we're expected to do the same job, women are on a lower fitness requirement than men and we're tested every 6 months. A man can barely pass the run but a woman who finished far behind him passes easily. After my injury I failed the run test but if I were a woman it would have been an easy pass.
ASVAB is nowhere near an IQ test. Rather, it's more a "what have you been spending your time learning to do" test.
Those tests measure reasoning skills and are used by researchers as proxy IQ tests. The key point is that the military can keep low-IQ people out based on these tests while other public and private employers cannot and that allows for successful integration. There is huge "disparate impact" by race, but because it's about national security, nobody bats an eye. We don't generally think of the armed forces as being something you need brainpower to join but large swaths of society, about one in four whites and two in three blacks, are not bright enough to make the cut.
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