A new report by the New York Times suggests that the 5,600 US troops “rushed to the brown, dry scrub along the southwest border” to deal with the approaching Central American migrant caravans are “going through the motions of an elaborate mission that appeared to be set into action by a commander in chief determined to get his supporters to the polls.”
The Times notes that the soldiers are subsisting on basic provisions in tents without electricity.
There is no mess hall, just the brown, prepackaged M.R.E.’s. Military police officers patrol the perimeter at night, armed with handguns. The tents sleep 20 soldiers and have no electricity or air-conditioning. Phone charging is relegated to a few generators that power the spotlights around the living area. –NYT
The worst part, according to the Times? US troops at Base Camp Donna are being tempted by a local Whataburger just 8 miles away while being forced to settle for military rations known as M.R.E.s (or “Meal, Ready-to-Eat”).
from the cot outside his platoon’s tent at the Army’s latest forward operating base, Sergeant Micek could almost see the bright orange and white roof of Whataburger, a fast-food utopia eight miles away but off limits under current Army rules. The desert tan flatbed trucks at the base are for hauling concertina wire, not food runs. Such is life on the latest front where American soldiers are deployed. –NYT
While the Times is eager to compare living conditions at Camp Donna to those in Afghanistan, we somehow missed their coverage panning the same MREs and living conditions during Obama’s protracted opium-guarding mission – ostensibly not a direct threat to the US. In fact, The Times suggested in 2010 that US MREs in Afghanistan were “fun” and sought after. Then again, there wasn’t a Whataburger 8 miles away.
Morale at the border, meanwhile, is apparently low despite The Times admitting that “The soldiers, by and large, shy away from talking about the political winds that sent them to the border.” And since no soldiers actually indicated their opposition to the mission, one can only assume The Times is presenting its opinion as fact.
Instead of football with their families on this Veterans Day weekend, soldiers with the 19th Engineer Battalion, fresh from Fort Knox, Ky., were painstakingly webbing concertina wire on the banks of the Rio Grande, just beneath the McAllen-Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge.
Nearby, troops from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State were making sure a sick call tent was properly set up next to their aid station. And a few miles away, Staff Sgt. Juan Mendoza was directing traffic as his engineer support company from Fort Bragg, N.C., unloaded military vehicles.
Come Thanksgiving, they most likely will still be here. –NYT
“When you give a soldier a real mission, you have less of a morale problem, even if it’s Christmas or Thanksgiving,” said Representative Anthony G. Brown, Democrat of Maryland and a former Army helicopter pilot who served in the Iraq war. “But when you send a soldier on a dubious mission, with no military value, over Thanksgiving, it doesn’t help morale at all.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, apparently views the deployment as an “expensive waste of time and resources, and a morale killer to boot.” While there has been no announcement on cost, estimates as high as $200 million have been floated if the deployment expands to 15,000 troops, as President Trump has suggested it may.
The Times would also like us to know that “There has been no money set aside to combat the men, women and children who are bound for the American border, many of them fleeing violence or corruption, nearly all seeking better lives.”
In short; Trump has sent troops to combat men, women and children who simply want better lives (and are unwilling to accept asylum from Mexico or seek entry into the United States through the proper legal process).
In late October, the Department of Homeland Security sent a memo to the Pentagon with a series of formal requests for support in handling immigrants at the southern border, including the caravan on its way from Central America, according to two senior administration officials.
Among the requests, issued at the White House’s behest, were that troops deployed to the border be armed, prepared for direct contact with the migrants and ready to operate under rules for the use of force to be set by the Defense Department.
When Defense Department officials replied the same day, on Mr. Mattis’s orders, they rejected those requests and referred the Department of Homeland Security to the White House, the officials said. The Defense Department viewed the requests as inappropriate and legally treacherous, potentially setting up soldiers for violent encounters with migrants. –NYT
“A wasteful deployment of overstretched Soldiers and Marines would be made much worse if they use force disproportional to the threat they face,” tweeted Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between 2011 and 2015.
Dempsey, of course, participated in the death of thousands of civilians in Iraq as the commander of the 1st Armored Division, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division between 2003 – 2005. One imagines that the use of force was also disproportional to that of the now-dead Iraqi civilians in that very necessary regime change based on dubious US intel.
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