Aloha kakou he Hawaii au, Mele Hauoli! Now play at a Occupation nearest you! The U. S. Army protocol happening at Hale Koa is no different than the Department of Interior (DOI) 15 Day Paina in Hawaiian Islands this past summer. The DOI provided ono food but the Army may just have chow (MRE). From Braddah Als report, a car load of Hawaiian Nationals is only $5.00 at Hale Koa Parking Structure (Mauka of Hotel). You cant beat that price, Carload of Hawaiians for $5.00? Come and hear what is going to happen to you no matter what is the direction, it still is BOHICA! Just to hear the government types cry, Please Mr. Custer, you dont have to go! is worth the parking fee? malama ke kino, pilipo Hawaiian National (1936) .............................................................................................. Aloha Kakou, If youre busy just delete this email. This email is to discuss the latest article in the SA today. An article that mysteriously does not allow any on-line comments to be made. This article as Ive titled it is just to show how many missions the Army on Oahu is currently inventing for itself to make it look busy, ready and engaged. This type of engagement is very expensive and actually detracts from combat readiness. There is so much in this article that is BS it would take me days to respond and no one would car anyways. Much of the engagement referred too hasnt happened yet; very few deployments have actually occurred since the Shafter HQ invented this boondoggle concept; only two deployments total I believe so far have occurred; +/- one. Youll hear Colleen Hanabusa yap pacific pathways in her recent speeches so many times, youd think the Armys been doing them forever - they havent, the local command just invented this expensive program to appear relevant. As you can see from this and the other article I attached, the Army is trying to appear expeditionary. We dont need two services doing the same job - we tax payers cant afford it. Besides the Army is not equipped to be expeditionary; their attempt to do so is fraudulent. Heres the take away from this article and recent media events; there is a full court press to minimize our campaign and hype the public on how important the Army is to Oahu. There is actually fear in the eyes of the anti-downsizing faction, I hope this would give you encouragement that there is a REAL possibility of convincing the Army and more importantly Senators and Congressman on the continent that the Army isnt needed here. A huge turnout at both of the Armys listening sessions would go a long way in showing the visiting Army team, that not everyone in Hawaiis is drinking the kool-aide. MG Flynn (the Commander at Schofield referenced in the attached article) will be the host of the Army team coming to visit. He will do part, if not all of the intro briefing; he will do his best to continue to propagate the Hawaii BS in his briefing and he will do his best to control the situation and community comments. If he turns the event from a hearing/listening session and feels he has to respond to everyones comments that he doesnt like (which will take valuable time away from our testifiers) then the audience will have to assert more control and shut him down; its your time - not his. The events on the 27th and 28th are the Armys listening sessions, not the local commands PR campaign - its your chance to speak. There will be two Armies represented at the event; the local Army Commander who has been tasked by the local 4-Star, the CoC and local politicians to defend the Army on Oahu and the listening Team (the second Army present) from the Department of the Army who just want to gather justifiable reasons why the Army should be here or why it should not - this team is just looking for data points and allowing the public to air their concerns. The Department of the Army really has no idea how much the Army is not wanted or needed here - what they hear from you will likely shock the hell out of them; especially compared to the testimony they will hear at the other 18 States. Although there are two sessions now, we really want everyone to turn out to the first one at the Hale Koa at Waikiki. If you cant attend both, please consider attending the first one - this is the most difficult for most of us to attend due to the distance, parking and venue - which is precisely why we all need to be there. The event at the Hale Koa is a special event so parking is supposed to be only $5.00 flat rate. Please car pool, load up the car and bring all of your Ohana; especially the loud ones; and please consider wearing red. Olelo and the news channels will be present. So you read this far? Mahalo, AL Army’s ‘Pacific Pathways’ initiative sets up turf battle with Marines By Rajiv Chandrasekaran December 29, 2013 ABOARD THE USS LAKE ERIE — Approaching from the Hawaii coast, the mosquito-shaped helicopter buzzed around this guided-missile cruiser twice before swooping toward the landing pad. The Navy crew on the deck crouched, the helmeted faces betraying more than routine concern as the aircraft, flown by a pilot who had never before alighted upon a ship, hovered a foot off the tarmac and then set down with a thud. The sailors’ trepidation was prompted by three words painted in black block letters on the drab olive fuselage: United States Army. The Army, which fights on terra firma, does not usually land its helicopters on ships — the domain of the Navy and the Marine Corps — but these are not usual times in the U.S. military. As the Obama administration winds down the Army-centric war in Afghanistan, Pentagon leaders are seeking to place the Air Force, Navy and Marines in dominant roles to counter threats in the Asia-Pacific region, which they have deemed to be the nation’s next big national security challenge. Fearful that the new strategy will cut its share of the defense budget, the Army is launching an ambitious campaign to transform itself and assert its relevance in the Pacific. And that, in turn, is drawing the Army into a fight. With the Marines. Calculating that there are only slim chances of the Army fighting a big land war anywhere in the Far East other than the Korean Peninsula, the new top Army commander in the Pacific, Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, wants his forces to  more quickly and effectively respond to small conflicts, isolated acts of aggression and natural disasters. Doing so, however, has traditionally been a challenge for the Army, which bases most of its soldiers assigned to the Orient in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington state. To overcome what he calls “the tyranny of distance,” Brooks is trying to make his forces more maritime and expeditionary. To cut travel time and increase regional familiarity, he is seeking authorization to send key elements of a U.S.-based infantry brigade to Asia and keep them there for months at a time, moving every few weeks to different nations to conduct training exercises. The rotating deployment, which amounts to the first proposed increase in U.S. forces in Asia in years, could enable the Army to move more speedily to address humanitarian crises and security threats. Brooks said he wants “a capable force that can respond to a variety of contingencies” — rapidly. “Forces that are already in motion have an advantage in responding,” he said. The initiative, which Brooks is calling “Pacific Pathways,” is also an opportunity to recast the Army’s image in Washington, yielding television images of soldiers — not just Marines and sailors — responding to typhoons and cyclones. “We can no longer afford to build [combat] units and put them on a shelf to be used only in the event of war,” Brooks’s command wrote in an internal planning document. To the Marine Corps, however, Brooks is committing the military equivalent of copyright infringement. Marines regard themselves as the nation’s first — and only — maritime infantry force. They have troops in Asia that are not tied down in Korea — three infantry battalions, an aviation wing and a full logistics group based on the Japanese island of Okinawa — and, they note, they have an expeditionary unit that sails around Asia to conduct bilateral exercises and respond to crises. Those Marines were among the first to respond to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines last month. “They’re trying to create a second Marine Corps in the Pacific,” said a Marine general, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Army’s internal plans. “To save their budget, they want to build a force the nation doesn’t need.” Okinawa’s governor on Friday acceded to U.S. plans to maintain a large Marine contingent on the island, despite local opposition, by approving site preparation for a new air base on the less- populated northern half of the island. To win permission, the Marines have pledged to relocate almost 5,000 personnel to the U.S. territory of Guam, about 1,400 miles away, which could bolster the Army’s case for a small rotating force closer to mainland Asia. The Army-Marine fight has profound implications for both services. If Brooks succeeds, Army leaders would lay claim to a new strategic narrative and gain a powerful argument to stave off additional rounds of personnel cuts, while the Marines could face an existential crisis without their exclusive expeditionary status. If he doesn’t, the Army, which is planning to shrink from 540,000 to 490,000 soldiers by 2017, could become even smaller. “The Army is in genuine crisis at the moment,” said Kori Schake, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has served as director of defense strategy on the National Security Council. “They’re grasping for a mission to justify their end-strength.” Both sides see the battle in winner-take-all terms: The administration’s national security strategy and the Pentagon’s strategic guidance to commanders have all but rejected the sorts of troop-intensive counterinsurgency campaigns waged by the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, they call for a focus on Asia to counter China’s growing influence in the region. The documents envision not a head-on war with China but the need to be able to confront Chinese efforts to control shipping lanes and seize disputed territory with a combination of air and naval power — and an agile, fast-moving ground combat force. “There is no doubt about the need for expeditionary, amphibious troops,” a senior Defense Department official said. “The question is whether we need the Army to provide that capability.” Reclaiming ground For decades, Asia was the Army’s domain. It was the first service to establish a base in Hawaii. During World War II, the Army deployed five times as many troops to the Pacific theater as the Marines, and it was the Army that took the lead in the Korean and Vietnam wars. “The Army’s history in the Pacific has been long — and unbroken,” Brooks said. But in the 1970s, the Army scaled back its presence across the Far East, save for South Korea, to focus on defending Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. It left the continent to the Navy, Air Force and Marines. The Marines have about 24,000 uniformed personnel west of the International Date Line — most of them based on Okinawa — while the Army has fewer than 2,500 outside Korea. For years, that disparity did not bother Army leaders, who regarded Asia as far less important than the Middle East. China was not a global power. There were wars to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. For much of the past decade, the Army’s troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy was the flavor of choice in the Pentagon. No longer. As the administration began to pivot toward Asia, the other services, burned by the Army’s claim on post-Sept. 11 defense spending, saw an opening. They formulated an Asia-centric strategy called “air-sea battle,” which calls for the Navy, Air Force and Marines to play the leading role in responding to China’s rise. The strategy assumes that the United States is unlikely to need to wage a protracted ground war in East Asia; instead, it envisions the use of Air Force stealth fighter-bombers, Navy littoral ships and Marine amphibious forces to respond to crises. “Air-sea battle is an essential part of sustaining America’s military freedom of action and ability to project power,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, wrote last year with his then-Air Force counterpart, Gen. Norton Schwartz, in the magazine American Interest. The Army, distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan, initially scoffed at air-sea battle. Its strategists — convinced that the most likely venue for America’s next war will be in the Middle East, not in Asia — offered up an alternative called “strategic land power” that would serve its interests in justifying large infantry and armor units. But top officials in the White House and Pentagon have been unswayed, prompting worry within the Army that it would be the principal loser in the next big war — the battle over the defense budget. As a consequence, Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno has opted to turn westward. One of his first moves was to elevate the job of leading Army forces in the Pacific to a four-star position, a higher rank than for any other Army geographic command. Odierno selected Brooks, a distinguished infantry officer who had been commanding Army forces in the Middle East, to assume the challenge. The distance factor Tall and lean, Brooks became a television star in the opening weeks of the Iraq war in 2003, when he conducted many of the military’s daily news briefings detailing the march to Baghdad. His ability to convey U.S. strategy in an engaging, charismatic way is a tailored fit for the Pacific job, which involves more military diplomacy than traditional lead-the-troops generalship. An initial focus has been to build army-to-army rapport. Although six of the world’s 10 largest armies are in the Pacific, and most of the militaries in the region are led by army generals, the top U.S. military officer in the region — the chief of the U.S. Pacific Command — has always been a Navy admiral. U.S. Army officials believe an Army four-star general may be able to forge closer bonds with Asian army leaders. “There’s a shared understanding as army commanders,” Brooks said. One of his first priorities was to ensure that Army units assigned to the Pacific actually focused on it. For the past decade, the Army’s 1st Corps, based in Washington state, and its subordinate divisions, including the 7th Infantry and the 25th Infantry, were sent on multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. Officers paid little attention to events in Asia, and their soldiers came to expect a year’s notice before deployment, as well as a full component of equipment at their destination. “We completely lost the part of the Army’s culture that was expeditionary,” said Maj. Gen. Kurt Fuller, commander of the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division. AL Frenzel in Waianae, Military army down sizing 10 -14-14 youtu.be/gpPOuOJPHrM
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 23:22:09 +0000