"Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed."
How is this possible? If private businesses could do this, it would be mayhem.
I'm surprised that this is somehow even passed the slightest political oversight.
You need to be a special kind of bastard to ask some one who willingly signed up to get shot at while defending their country to pay back any amount of money they got paid for doing so.
Wars aren't pretty, regardless of what you think about them, and especially about Iraq and Afghanistan never ever take it out on the soldiers, they are probably on your side because unlike most of us they actually seen war.
Soldiers don't decide when, where or against whom to go to war, they are not at fault I never understood how the left in the US could blame people who either got drafted (vietnam) or signed up to defend their country (post 9/11) for the atrocities of war.
My understanding is that the US has a professional army. Why are they called "volunteers"? Over here, a volunteer is someone who voluntarily joins earlier than required to begin his mandatory army service. People who join a job are all volunteers of course, but that's not remarkable.
There are two types of military service compulsory and voluntary hence they are called volunteers.
Compulsory involves conscription or a draft, I'm not sure how the "jail or army" thing is classified but since you are given a choice it's technically stelly voluntary.
The "professional" classification of the army doesn't mean it's voluntary professional means that you can be a career soldier and you are paid for doing so even if you are drafted, conscripts on the other hand are not paid other than a small stipend.
That said once you sign up the contract this isn't a job, you can't quit, you can't "call in sick", can't say no to anything, you are effectively forced to give up certain rights for the duration of the contract.
While I'm certainly of the opinion that this is a ridiculous situation and those bonuses should be left alone (salary of 42 auditors alone would probably take the lion's share of the recoverable funds, independent of the moral issue), let's keep things in perspective - deployment to Iraq was not 'defending their country'. The US was never threatened by Iraq.
Similarly, not everyone in Vietnam got drafted, and even if they were drafted, that's no excuse for the abuses there. If you're signed up to fight against your will, that's no excuse for taking part in activities such as the My Lai massacre. Where is the moral high ground in punishing innocent foreigners because your government on the other side of the world forced you to fight?
> deployment to Iraq was not 'defending their country'
They served. They were certainly misused and misdeployed, but they served their country, they lost limbs, lives, time and the innocence that most of us enjoy our entire lives, and they deserve respect and support. Not worship; merely respect and support.
Why don't police get treated the same way? They risk life and limb as well, but you don't see unrelated people thanking them for their service, or getting misty-eyed on TV when talking about them. There are abuses by the police, yes, but there are also abuses by the military.
Words matter, and if you actually care about people losing their lives and innocence in these wars, then you should totally be on board with not calling the US military adventurism in Iraq "defending their country". It's mythologising the event in a way that's likely to get more people to sign up, when you should be getting fewer people to do so. The US unilaterally decided to invade a sovereign country that was no threat to it in the slightest, a country that was on the other side of the world, and that the US's own allies were begging the US to hold off. That is not 'defending'. 'Serving', yes, but not 'defending'. It also didn't do much for 'Freedom' in the area - one country is destroyed, another is imploding, and Europe is a little destabilised, all due to this adventurism.
If you care about people in general, you should call it what it is. Don't abuse soldiers who didn't do abuses themselves, but at the same time, don't mythologise them and chest-beat about how patriotic it is to go and kill brown people that aren't a threat to the people back home. Yes, 5000 US soldiers are dead, but that's only 1% of the death toll in Iraq from the invasion, and that doesn't include the knock-on effects in Syria. There was an article recently on HN about how even the guy who toppled the statue of Saddam in that famous photo-op, even he would rather live under Hussein's regime than modern Iraq.
If you want this kind of horror to stop happening, then people need to stop getting misty-eyed about serving their country in ways that are clearly not defence. There's a difference between 'not respecting' and 'not wanting the lie propagated'. Then the next time this kind of thing happens, there's not going to be a fresh source of recruits.
That was all you took away from this? You didn't say it on TV, either. Chances are, I wasn't talking specifically about the one single data point that is 'a3n', but on a broader, societal level.
People serve in the military for all kinds of reasons.
Some, because it's a family tradition. Others, because they believe in serving their country. And many others, because it presents them with an economic opportunity they would never otherwise have had: college, vocational training, and increased social status.
Very few join hoping to go to war. I doubt that most of the people sent to invade Iraq truly wanted to be there.
And when they went, they were sold a well-scripted dog-and-pony show about how they were defending the freedom of the Iraqi people, about how they were there to fight a horrible dictator that murdered countless innocent lives.
Those people are not to blame, and certainly not to be held responsible, for the utter failure of both our political system and our media, which is supposed to be a watchdog, not a lapdog.
Also, something most civilians don't know is that military service isn't like a regular job.
In civilian life, you can quit your job whenever you want. In the military, while you may be able to change your job and re-train for a new one, it's not that common. Also, you do your job until you finish your term of service, or you go to jail. Only way out is to be assessed by a military doctor as unfit to serve.
In civilian life, if you screw up, screw off, or screw around, the worst that will probably happen is being fired.
In the military, at best you will face Non-Judicial Punishment for minor infractions (show up late to work once), and at worst you go to jail (keep showing up late for work).
How severely punished you will be is in large part up to your boss (commanding officer).
What makes it worse is that most people only see the marketing campaign before they join (pay for college! defend freedom!). But after they enlist, they discover that they don't get the job they were promised (we're full up on surgical assistants and aircraft mechanics, so you'll be sent to train for food service), that they spend countless hours on utterly pointless work (yet another safety briefing), and that overall, the life of a service member is pretty much the opposite of glamorous.
You don't need to worship the uniform, or agree with what the US Government does, to at least appreciate that people who serve in the military are, generally speaking, at worst a bunch of well-meaning Americans that are doing the best job they can in a situation that they largely can't control.
Oh, and once you get out? Getting all that college funding and a lifetime of government healthcare ranges from "easy peasy" to "tell me again why I made a deal with the unholy spawn of Initech from Office Space and Satan's legal team"
None of what you have eloquently said particularly opposes what I said. If people joined up to fight in Iraq, they weren't defending America. America was never under threat from Iraq, and the Iraqi war machine never loomed over the US. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq due to that American misadventure, and Iraq did nothing to the US. It was also pretty clear for a long time that if you did sign up, you'd be sent to the warzone - and for the people that re-enlisted (like in the article), they shouldn't be as surprised as you suggest.
Similarly, it doesn't matter if you signed up to defend your country and were lied to, it still does not mean perpetrators get a pass on atrocities like the ones committed in Vietnam. No, not all soldiers did, but enough did to take that 'well-meaning' shine off.
The media also wasn't as unified as you suggest. I'm not even American and I saw plenty of different comedians mocking Powell's 'poster project' at the time, and there were plenty of American voices crying that there wasn't enough justification to invade Iraq. While there is some naivity to blame in going 'over there' (it's why the military recruit the young, after all), there is also some willful ignorance. To be clear, I don't think that soldiers are by default at fault, but at the same time, I don't agree with the current "never criticise a soldier" ethos coming out of the US at the moment. If it's as shit as you say, then soldiers should be coming back and telling everyone they can about the horror, and stopping kids from signing up, and generally that isn't happening.
In any case, if you want to risk your life in the service of your country, be a cop. You will directly serve the people in your community, and the greater country in general. If you want to fight for freedom, be a legal aid lawyer. Pay is as shit as the military, but you're directly helping people in need against forces they can't fight alone.
Just about every war ever has taught us these things over and over again. Maybe if we stop glorifying soldiers, those naive kids will stop believing it. Perhaps we should just admit that soldiers in wars do bad things and are bad people. We managed to convince most Germans that the Nazis were bad and not to be glorified. We partly achieved that with Vietnam veterans. But all the lessons of history were forgotten when Iraq came around.
It's not just the media's fault, it's every person who shows sympathy for soldiers and reinforces the idea that it's a good thing to do.
>And many others, because it presents them with an economic opportunity they would never otherwise have had: college, vocational training, and increased social status.
You should show empathy, not sympathy for Soldiers. We don't want your freaking sympathy(from former Soldier), most just want opportunity. If you want to stop people from signing up for the US Army then here's what you have to do:
1) End inequality in America
2) End the spiraling healthcare costs (adding a single payer would likely go a long way)
3) Provide a means for formal education and social support for everyone. It's not enough to teach people, there's life skills a vast swath of America misses out on.
4) Fix the credit rating system. It amazes me that this is even allowed. Security check, sure...credit? Give me a break, just another form of discrimination.
Do all those things and we can start to level the playing field. Until then we'll likely need public jobs programs (and the military is indeed such a program, even if it is also something much more) to throw folks a rope to climb towards the American dream.
> 2) End the spiraling healthcare costs (adding a single payer would likely go a long way)
Obamacare was introduced just before the US healthcare system would go into the red (be a net cost for the government, as opposed to a source of income) and delayed that by creating new income for the government. This was not a coincidence.
The whole purpose of Obamacare was to make healthcare less expensive for the government, by putting more of the burden on the population, without being a new tax. It is very far from an accident that healthcare costs have spiraled.
But Obamacare only delayed the government budget drain until somewhere between 2018 and 2020 according to the congressional budget office. So "Obamacare 2" is coming in the next president's term, don't worry. It might even have single payer, as obviously raising costs is not a compelling public message.
But it must raise costs. There's no other option. It must raise costs to get back into balance, as the US government has borrowed massively from the healthcare system and is in no position to pay back any of it, so it cannot be allowed to have more outflows than inflows. The consequences would be too great. Well, actually, unlike most of the rest of the world the US could choose to defund the military to a significant extent and actually get a few more years of healthcare out of it (but we'd be talking 10-20% budget loss for the military at least, and as you point out that would rob more than a few young people of economic opportunity). But it would only delay matters, it can't solve them.
What can you do ? Nothing really. Too few people paying into a system with too many dependents. More kids was the answer, but obviously those would have had to have been born 20-25 years ago. Right now, more kids would only put more load on the system for the first few decades. Massively opening up immigration could work in theory, but if Europe is any indication, it won't.
Of course, all of this is assuming there won't be an economic crisis, and at this point, we're overdue one.
I agree those are all problems and people suffer from them. But that doesn't excuse those unfortunate people from dragging others down to their level - ie the Iraqis. Or from killing people. Many criminals ruin other people's lives because they're desperate too - they also have no education or income. But we still lock up criminals even when we understand what drives them to do it. We want to make poor people's lives good enough that robbing others isn't the best option they have but at the same time, we don't excuse them for their crimes. Yet with soldiers, most people do excuse them.
Unfortunately this is par for the course. DFAS' accounting systems are antiquated, involving 2200 individual systems, manual re-entry when data needs to be moved around, and "fudge" entries to fix the errors in the books. When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers.
It's been happening for decades now. On the whole, the Pentagon budget is one of the few (perhaps the only?) Federal budgets that is so screwed up that it can't even be audited. The pay for soldiers is just the tip of the iceberg here, contractors are also getting massively overpaid and the USG is not nearly as good about clawing those back (since contractors can fight back). Literally hundreds of billions of dollars each year are moving around these systems, and we cannot even reliably trace where they are going.
There's no political will to fix this because people automatically assume military = classified and golly we can't audit classified books. Another huge part of the population has a totemic fetishization of the military and criticising their books translates to criticizing the military itself. So in turn we end up tolerating terrible bookkeeping that would never be allowed in another Federal department let alone the private sector...
The USG civil retirement system is similarly weird and terrible. Please reference: the giant cave system where they have to keep multiple hundreds of thousands of square feet of cabinets full of paper records.
This terrible mess of ancient, individual systems is replicated all over the USG. The VA system operates similarly (cited above). During the 2011 and 2013 default crises the Treasury systems had no way of controlling individual payments, knowing the overall reserves at a future point in time, or even knowing when individual payments were going to happen.
>When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers.
I know from personal experience that if the military overpays you for anything, there's often no warning between when they find the error and when they garnish your paycheck. SOP is to take everything back at once, leaving the servicemember with nothing and with no warning. DFAS is supposed to send a letter of indebtedness to give the family time to prepare for any financial adjustments, this often arrives after the first garnishment.
Hardly, the vast majority of jobs in the US Army are non-combat. You shouldn't paint with such a broad brush, many who serve do so out of a sense of duty to the nation, to escape a bad situation including poverty or get out of a dying town, and/or to gain access to higher education through the use of tuition assistance and GI Bill programs.
Many people also turn to crime in an attempt to escape poverty or a dying town. Certainly we can have empathy for desperate people making difficult decisions, but it doesn't absolve them of moral agency or place them above scrutiny.
moral agency? scrutiny? these Soldiers were likely lied to by recruiters desperate to increase recruiting numbers in the longest war the US has fought. I suspect the churn in personnel was enormous, and the pressure was on. Sure, likely the details were buried somewhere in 30 pages of paperwork that each Soldier signed...and likely would have been caught if there were a lawyer looking of it. But these Soldiers don't have lawyers when signing up typically. I guess re-enlistees could have consulted JAG, however this isn't the norm. Recruiters are usually trusted. Somebody in the recruiting chain of command should have been been monitoring the numbers. They're the ones who should be at fault, not the Soldiers who've already served in good faith based on promises that weren't supposed to have been made.
first, blaming the economically disadvantaged foot soldier or mess hall cook or tank mechanic for the contemporary crimes of the political and economic ruling class has got to be the most morally reprehensible thing i've heard on this topic, and carries nearly psychopathic levels of non-empathy.
Economically disadvantaged members of U.S. armed forces are not in some special moral category. Whatever their motives, they voluntarily joined an organization that initiates force against others on behalf of the political and economic ruling class. They aren't solely responsible for the aforementioned "contemporary crimes", but they aren't innocent either.
What I struggle to reconcile in my own life is the difference between this logic, and the logic of a businessman who believes he cannot compete without polluting.
Do we accept "well, my business is unlikely to success, and so my family will starve" as a reason for shitting in the world the rest of us live in?
Or do we say, "there are alternatives, and yes, while your business may fail, we'll all be better off"?
How do you get to enlistment age in modern western society, where every second movie and video game is about military guys blowing things up and massacring wave after wave of lemming-enemy, without thinking that the army is there to kill people? If you're in a non-combat role, you're still there explicitly to support those in a combat role.
That is a pretty flat take on what exactly is happening. If you've never had to view military service as a "good" path out of poverty then it might seem as simple as that but surely if you sat and thought for a few minutes, you might be able to conceive of a situation in which someone might sign up for reasons other than the one you've given.
I wouldn't blame someone who got drafted, but it is reasonable to fault someone for joining a volunteer army of a militarily aggressive nation.
If you sign up to become a fire-fighter or paramedic, you will never be in a position where the machine you are a piece of requires / encourages you to kill people who don't need killing.
The fact is that there are parts of war / military life that are more exciting than being a fire-fighter, say. It's also culturally reinforced and lauded.
I've almost signed up at various times, but I view it as a form of "combat tourism."
We have almost a century of literature and culture devoted to uncovering the dark side of modern warfare. In addition, we have a large number of cases where our own governments have lied to us that are well documented, and entirely uncontroversial.
That said, I still see the appeal. It's just not a situation I want to allow myself to be put in.
Sometimes you don't have a choice, as you so blithely put it. Many people join the military because they would otherwise have no other career, or because they need a leg up, or health insurance (pre-affordable care act). So if someone offered you an extra years salary that would allow you to put your kids through college for doing something that you feel serves the people of your country, wouldn't you take it? How about if your kid had cancer, and you and your wife after working 3 jobs couldn't make a dent in the 150K medical debt created through our medical industrial complex? Wouldn't you take a change at giving your family a better life if you had no other way to do so? Not sure where you're getting the idea of "combat tourism," but please be my guest and sign up...enjoy!
Many people joined the Taliban for those reasons, and ISIS and Al Quaeda. Many common criminals commit crime because they need money too. Just because you're desperate, doesn't give you the right to kill people. Just because you feel it serves your country doesn't make it OK to ruin someone else's country. These soldiers complaining about their money helped to destroy Iraq and caused the deaths of 100s of thousands of people.
The military in and of itself isn't necessarily bad. It can be used to do bad things. Soldiers in the military who do bad things are responsible for their actions. Is this a fair paraphrasing of your position? If not, please correct me.
If I'm understanding that correctly, I can follow that chain of reasoning.
It looks like you're also making the claim that if they've done bad things they're not allowed to complain if something bad happens to them. I don't know if that's an accurate interpretation of what you're saying, so please do correct or clarify.
I'm not trying to be argumentative or critical. I'm trying to understand your position. The politics and tragedy that surrounds the situation can make these discussions problematic.
Thanks!
Edit: I worked on the wording on this and I'm still not happy with it because I think it can still be read as being condescending or uncharitable. That is definitely not the intent. I'm open to suggestions for wording improvements as well!
I mean soldiers know when they sign up that they might be required to do bad things. They agree to do those bad things to save themselves from poverty/unemployment/etc. I don't think that's right. They're using their own problems to justify creating worse problems for other people.
Not so general as "if you do bad things, you can't complain" but more like "If you do very bad things and kill people and get away with it, you can't complain about minor inconveniences like refinancing your house". Although they are separate issues, since soldiers aren't going to face justice for their crimes, why not look at their lost money as a kind of coincidental punishment?
I'd like to separate the determination of which acts are good and which are bad from the reasoning of the argument itself. Is that fair?
I think there are many reasons people sign up, and that most people sign up in good faith and don't expect to be asked to do bad things. I don't think they perform some mental calculus like "I'm willing to risk doing bad things to escape poverty".
I can see how one might find a sort of karmic justice in the situation. And it's a part of human psychology to tend to wish bad things on bad people. After all, they deserve it, right? :) I know I'm guilty of feeling this on occasion.
However, I don't agree with it. If you believe the soldiers did very bad things, I wouldn't think the lost money--not associated with the bad acts--would be satisfying justice. Linking them this way could even weaken your stance, opening you up to accusations of wishing ill rather than seeking justice. I don't think such accusations are a good or fair argument--and not one I'm making or implying--but I can imagine someone uncharitably making it.
Does this make sense? I admit it's got aspects of reasoning combined with perception, but I think both need to be taken into account, especially when discussing issues that are potentially controversial.
I agree linking the two unrelated things is a weak argument. My comment was more of a reaction to the opposite linking shown so commonly by many people, which is "They deserve to be treated fairly because they're soldiers". That's they same type of argument as mine but in reverse.
Your heading down a slippery slope. If they did something wrong, they have a right to face and defend themselves against that crime. It seems like you're advocating against due process.
And maybe...maybe, I'd agree that the ends justify the means IF that was the intent. But since this is the Pentagon doling out the punishment . . .
If you believe that the wars were illegal, this is a double whammy. The Pentagon is by far the biggest criminal and they benefit the most from this punishment.
Perhaps soldiers should be exempt from due process because they don't apply it to the people they kill. Even if they don't directly kill anyone, they're stomping all over laws and rights in the countries they attack.
I'm still wet behind the ears here and am not familiar with all of the jargon. What does this mean? I take it you're scoping your response in some way but it's not clear to me what scope is intended.
If you're responding to my comment ("The military in and of itself isn't necessarily bad"), my only intent was to make sure I understood Hondor, not to make any claims myself. If that wasn't clear, I'll endeavor to be clearer in the future.
I'm making it clear that I'm responding but I'm not Hondor (aka, the parent comment to your comment). You don't generally have to be explicit, but since your questions were very much directed at him, I didn't want you to accidentally read that and think it was from "Hondor". I also didn't want Hondor to think I was putting words in his mouth (again, because it was a very one-on-one discussion).
The reason I did reply though was that regardless of any individual belief, there's some facts / laws about this that should be considered.
Thanks for clarifying the jargon. That makes sense.
Yeah, your points were useful, and close to ones I was thinking as well. I was just a little confused by the "you guys are conflating" as I wasn't making any claims, but that's minor, and I should have probably just let it go. Pedantry will get me nowhere!
> The military in and of itself isn't necessarily bad. It can be used to do bad things.
Of course, the military fulfils a necessary function. Unfortunately, it is often used for ill, and there's no sign of that ending. So, one might choose to not offer oneself as a tool to be used by corrupt or evil masters, except in the most direct cases of self-defence.
To clarify, I don't see "combat tourism" as the only explanation. I think the military can provide a useful hand up to those in difficult situations. We just need to be clear that that is essentially a selfish argument, not one for service.
Regarding the scenario you've laid out: in general, people will do what they need to do for family survival, me included. But, if I steal or I kill to save my family you are right to criticise me.
Additionally, how is that any different from the choices in front of the people whose countries we go and invade?
In Restreppo, e.g. the captain lectures villagers after an Apache strike kills and maims a number of civilians. It was basically, why do you allow the Taliban to shoot from your village, so that I have to come and kill your sons?
Exactly the same argument applies in reverse. If you voluntarily join the aggressive American military machine, you're no better than the villagers who we kill for failing to root out the Taliban.
If you're a Sunni in Iraq and you're being massacred by Shia death-squads, then why is it wrong to support this ISIL gang who promise to protect you? You see where this argument leads?
I have sympathy for US soldiers, but I have more sympathy for civilians facing worse choices in the countries that we tend to invade or intervene in.
There are ways to serve that do not make you part of a machine that has historically been used to commit mayhem and murder on a vast scale.
EDIT> None of the above means that I think it is justifiable to claw back these enlistment bonuses. A promise was made to these enlistees, and it should be honoured. Is there an estimate of the total cost to forgive all of these repayments?
I would think that the fact that they paid him should be de facto evidence that he signed a contract for the money, and that the burden of proof would be on them to show that the contract was invalid for some reason.
Based on the amount, they can probably determine what kind of bonus it was (special forces, radio operator, etc.) and then determine if he was eligible for any of those bonuses.
Yeah. They gave the radio operator bonus to the cook (as an example). It's easy to see from the amount it was the radio bonus, and it's easy to see from the service record somebody was a cook, and that was bonus was overpaid. And now they want their money back (which is pretty shitty, given the circumstances). But the amounts of the correct bonus and the given bonus are not unknowable. These aren't bespoke contracts, every one unique.
The military is very good at doing whatever they want to.
There's a better than good chance they just started docking 100% of his pay without telling them anywhere but their pay stub, then put them in a situation where it takes man-days at a minimum to get answers. It's something that happened to a way too many people that I knew. first one was old navy so ended in a hilarious fist fight(after being without pay for two months from an admin error), second one was new navy so it was a very painful process of working with personnel while they were on 4 hour workdays in shipyard, then there are way too many people that fell into classic bonus blackmail were the navy just beats you down in all directions(socially, finciancilly, and time) after getting disqualified from your job(mast, medical, mental, and family issues all included) (basically if you get bonus of some sort it hangs over your head for a good 4-6 years, and if you do pay it back you're paying it back in docked pay, withheld taxes, and maybe even your bank account. And in the amount that was paid to you before taxes).
I'm guessing here, but I imagine there's a clause like "recipient agrees to attend X training, and return bonus otherwise." Whether the recipient remembers seeing that clause is another matter.
That sounds like a scam. If the collecting agent can't find proper documentation, then there is no indebtedness. I would wait until they served you papers, then get any sane judge to throw out all charges. If they send it to collections then go at them with full might of consumer and labor protections.
If they cannot find a contract, doesn't that mean they have no evidence that he owes them money? Doesn't mean that they would have to take him to civil court for a tort, but then it would just be their word against his?
and this is why I have three giant books upstairs in the attic, with every order, leave request, expense report that I've ever made. Soldiers are used to it. We've come to call them "I love me books" ( http://www.ezarmypoints.com/army-i-love-me-book/ ). They shouldn't be able to come back after that many years for a signature, that's insane.
I do lots of contracts with people. Sometimes I've been told the other party "lost" the contract or "didn't remember making a deal with me", etc. I say "no problem, I have a copy of it right here with your signature on it!"
It doesn't happen very often, but enough to make it worthwhile to always keep a copy.
I'm not a veteran, I'm a desk jockey. I didn't like the foreign entanglements we've been involved with over the past 15 years. But that's not the point here.
When young men and women volunteer to fight and die for our country, and are made promises by the system, these promises should be honored.
This behavior by the California National Guard is disgusting.
I don't get why it has to be at all about the role itself, the honour of the military, or anything else.
If I'm extended an offer of employment including a $10,000 signing bonus, sign, take the job, receive my bonus, complete the job as agreed, and the contract expires and I go on my way... The company doesn't get to come back to me years later and say "Oh, oops, I actually forgot to have my boss sign off on that bonus I gave you. You need to give it back."
If you broke agreements with your financers on where/how that money was to be spent, that's your problem. Our contract was still valid - you have broken your contract with your financer and you can deal with the penalties.
Seriously. The people who illegally gave away the government's money should be on the hook for repaying it. Not the people who accepted it legitimately and in good faith.
The behavior is disgusting indeed. A collection attempt to the wrong type of veteran is doing to result in that veteran categorizing the collector as a kill-on-sight target. Demanding money back from trained killers sounds like a mistake likely to result in unnecessary deaths.
Yes. Think about the 911 bill. Taking a decade to help cover medical costs of first responders and those that helped dig out dead bodies and hoping to find survivors. It was so sad to see Jon Stewart talk about this years later with only one person from the original panel because two were too ill now to show up and one died.
Kudos to Jon Stewart though. He walked the halls of Congress on his own time after leaving the Daily Show to shame representatives into passing the bill responsible for covering the care of first responders.
This smells like recruiters gaming the system while under pressure from the top to fill quotas. In the same vein as Wells Fargo.
Hit this impossible target or you're fired. We can't tell you to lie/cheat people to hit the numbers but we will promote the people who do and PIP the ones who don't. Meanwhile we will go through the motions of legal compliance.
Everyone gets what they want and the higher ups can come back later and act like it is a huge surprise to them that the people they hired and trained were gaming the system.
Elsewhere, a for-profit prison extended their contract[1] with Feds barely a month after the Department of Justice said it would end[2] contracts with private prison operators.
The article doesn't quote anyone from California's Congressional delegation, or from the White House. Is there really no reaction here? We're talking about a few million dollars from the federal government to relieve an awful situation.
It's not clear from the article how this situation came to be.
Were these soldiers told how much they would receive before enlisting? If so surely that is a contract and they don't have to repay. It only makes sense if they ALL received more than they were told and all didn't report it. But ~10,000 people doing this doesn't make sense.
From the article
"Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets."
But fraud on the part of the California Guard is an internal matter. If I form a contract with a company that says they will pay me some amount of money, but the company representative was committing fraud internally then too bad. The company needs to deal with that. It can't reneg on its agreement years later after having already fulfilled the terms of the agreement.
If you buy a piece of electronic equipment from a dealer at a flea market, and it is later found out that the merchandise was stolen, you have to return the merchandise to the original owner. Even if there was a valid contract between you and the dealer that sold it to you.
I think this is seen as something similar -- the people giving out the bonus money basically "stole" it, so it wasn't theirs to give. Kind of like if a sales person at a store told you "buy now and I can give you an instant rebate", then pulled rebate money from the cash register. I think you'd have to give that money back too (assuming the "rebate" wasn't authorized, and was effectively stolen money).
This seems to resemble more a problem of agency law. The recruiter was an agent of the government. Is the government liable for their agent's statements to potential soldiers?
>[Considering a swimming pool salesman...] Envision a situation in which a third party questioned the agent about the expected life of a chlorinator. Suppose the agent told the third party that the chlorinator's expected life was twenty years when it was actually only five years. Suppose further that the agent made this representation knowingly and with the intent to induce the thirty party to buy the equipment, and that the third party did buy this equipment in reasonable reliance on the agent's misrepresentation.
> Even assuming the manufacturer did not authorize the agent's misrepresentation, and in fact told him always to be truthful with potential customers, the manufacturer would be liable if the third party brought a common law fraud action against him. The court would determine liability under an authority analysis, applying the general rule that an innocent principle is liable for an agent's misrepresentations if the misrepresentations fall within the general class of statements that the principal apparently authorized the agent to make.
Dealing with stolen goods is something that's specially handled by the law (e.g. fencing is a separate crime).
All these are situations where due to actions of person A a situation has occurred where either person B or person C must be harmed. The general principle is that the solution should harm that one of them who was more negligent to allow such a situation to occur.
> But if the dealer was known he would have to reimburse me, no?
Yes, but even if you've caused a judgement against him to be passed there'd likely be nothing to collect from (because you're not the only person in such a situation and he's likely had used the money).
In this case though, it seems some of the terms of the agreement were "become a radio operator" and the recipient didn't do that. I imagine the recruiter very likely said "don't worry, nobody will check" but now they're checking.
I tell my son, his friends, and anyone who will listen: don't join the military unless this is your calling, indicated by God's finger touching your heart.
Because the military will treat you like shit if it's merely inconvenient to do otherwise. VA. Guard units called up to combat for one day shy of the time that would qualify them for combat pay. The linked article. Institutional abuse. Forced reenlistment during questionable wars. Etc.
USN, E6, 1975-1981. Not that that gives me any particular place on the moral ground. And for the record, I had a relatively easy time in the Navy. But even if I'd never been in, I'd be as outraged as I am now.
I imagine this only damages the USA. The next time they need heavy recruitment numbers, people will look at the signing bonuses offered and either say "My life is worth more than this amount" or "this amount is too good to be true, they'll ask for it back in the future" and not sign on.
So did recruiters cut bigger checks than they were supposed to? If so, someone had to sign off on that... either recruiters or the managers should be held accountable.
Soldiers got contracts promising one amount but received checks for another amount? Yeah, they should have to pay that back then.
But who wrote checks and / or promised numbers higher than the contracts?
> Soldiers got contracts promising one amount but received checks for another amount? Yeah, they should have to pay that back then.
No, soldiers got promised one amount, got contracts for that amount, got paid that amount, and now it's being clawed back because the people who did the original promising and paperwork filing were breaking various laws.
Well if they have contracts for the higher amount... how is this a thing?
Unless the contracts weren't signed by someone from the government who could sign those contracts?
How would the soldiers know if the government recruiter was legit or not... yeah seems fucked. Government didn't supervise their recruiters correctly. Wouldn't that make all the contracts void? Messy.
If the military needs bodies, they should just go back to drafting them. Would help society see the true cost of policing the world instead of taking advantage of the poor.
As an Army vet myself, the truth is is that the Army will never miss an opportunity for fucking you over. Its the nature of the system. If you can make it to 20 years, you are some combination of exceptional/lucky/broken from years of fuckery.
"We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law"
Yeah, I'm sure the California National Guard tried really, really hard not to go after their bonuses.
Is this merely a reflection of general American population that views the army as a major drain on national resources that can be better spent elsewhere. Or is there something more sinister going on inside the National Guard.
Support from the American populace consists of flag-waving and slapping "Support our Troops" yellow ribbon magnets on their cars. Unless they're personally related to someone in the military, servicemembers and veterans are invisible at best, or seen as deranged reactionary boogiemen at worst.
EDIT: I should really note that this depends on where you live. Support is certainly more sincere in the South, over here on the West Coast people by and large don't give a shit.
Can you go into more detail? I'm not trying to dispute what you say, but as someone who's never been in the military, I'm curious what kind of trouble soldiers are likely to run into.
Note he's talking specifically about active duty Army, not necessarily any other branch. I can relate a story as an example.
I was enlisted in the late 90's and stationed Germany. I had a POV (personal vehicle) that I had to license/register. I had to drive to a neighboring facility to get to the license office. The office was closed, for some stupid reason (they where short staffed, and someone was out sick). The Area Military Police where in the same building, and I (stupidly) stopped a the desk sargeant and complained. I was escorted in to see the MP Sergeant Major, who yelled at me for a while, and took my ration card and confiscated my license plates (for no reason other than he could bully a lower enisted).
So this all meant I had to leave my car, and take the train back to my home base. I was late, and got into a lot of trouble for that. Then, I had to beg and finagle to go back and get my car properly licensed a week later, when I was supposed to have already had it done. This all contributed to me getting a reputation as 'shit bag', do nothing low life of a private. You get a lot hell when you have that type of reputation; a lot of 'extra duty' and unfair treatment. Like being ordered to crawl through mud in near freezing weather, with no change of clothes and no oppurtunity to dry off for DAYS.
But yeah, normal humans can't comprehend; fuckery. The term "fuck fuck" games from the reddit link is very fitting.
The Army combines the worst aspects of civilian life back stabbing politics with the most stereotypical portrayals of inefficient and uncaring government bureaucracy. To top it off, what really does set it apart from both the civilian world and normal government is of course a hierarchical rank structure, which shit freely flows downhill towards those who can't stand up to it.
That's a really good question-I'd need to stop and think about a decent reply, because a lot of what I'd say wouldn't make any sense to someone who knows nothing about Army life.
Instead of hitting the soldiers who signed what they thought were reenlistment bonuses, why don't they pommel the commanding officers who presided over these "overpayments"?
Wasn't clear from the article; did someone or a group of people break the law so that these ("illegal") bonuses could be paid? Basically, who (or what org) will be held accountable for this so that it won't happen again?
At least a partial answer is there, but presumably there are lot more people involved:
> Army Master Sgt. Toni Jaffe, the California Guard’s incentive manager, pleaded guilty in 2011 to filing false claims of $15.2 million and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Three officers also pleaded guilty to fraud and were put on probation after paying restitution.
It's disturbing that someone whose actions have brought such heartache and hardship to so many gets such a short sentence compared to 'blue collar' crimes. Rob a shop with a weapon, and you harm one person and get a trivial amount of money, but you'd be lucky to see a sentence that short.
It sounds like this was not at all limited to California, just that there were more cases there due to various reasons (population, individuals, policies/incentives).
I'll be writing to my representative (Duckworth), both candidates to replace her, and her Senate opponent (Kirk). I expect responses at least from the two named since both are former military.
Honestly, this story is just sad. I understand that there was fraud involved in order to incentivize soldiers to reenlist, but it's not their fault; It was the people who manipulated them into reenlisting.
I definitely think in this case the government should "forgive" this debt - and they probably will. VA benefits are already pretty flimsy, our vets have it hard enough.
>>Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed.
>>We’d be more than happy to absolve these people of their debts. We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law.
This is so unbelievable they could mess up somthing like this. I hope this becomes major news. These people shouldn't be paying for someone else mistakes. If the money is mentioned in the contract, I don't see how they could just take it because of their mistake.
I used to think this was more like a conspiracy. It's very far from it, though. Years ago, even one of the most powerful US Government officials, who used to be labelled the most powerful man in the world, and the US's highest ranking technocrat, Alan Greenspan, wrote that the Iraq War was largely about oil.
Greenspan was an economist, and economists sometime us an analogy of looking at macro topics through the framework of a household, i.e. a national budget vs a household budget. Using that same framework, if one neighbor went to war with another over natural resources on their block and declared "he had a gun, a very big gun," as the reason -- and conveniently after the house was broken into but with nothing connecting the perpetrators to the victim, that would be clearly illegal, and probably viewed as insane.
I think those of us from America are very lucky to live in a country that places high relative value (though far from perfect history) on human rights and civil liberties, and it's likely a large reason we are so successful. I want us to keep improving on it instead of devolving into something less.
Looking down Wikipedia's list of active conflicts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...), it's hard to believe that money is a primary cause of any of them. I'm sure someone somewhere is making a profit, but that's different from the conflict being "about money".
Marx said of history that war is always about an economic motive. He wrote that even going back through evolutionary history, wars are a struggle over control of resources.
I don't agree with Marx on a lot, but I think a sad fact is that he was right about that, at least over 90% of the time. US independence can be largely seen in this way, Germany's aggression in WWII after the league of nations crippled the German economy, Japan's aggression in WWII, Korea, Vietnam...
Worst thing about this is the scarcity problem--what economists regard as a problem of having enough resources--today is pretty much solved. For example, already enough food is produced for everyone on earth. We don't have a pressing need to go to war over resources. We do drive large cars, trucks and SUVs, and live in oversized houses that we don't need. A person looking at this from another planet would shake their head and ask what will ever be enough for us to stop bloodshed.
It would be poor press to announce that a war is about money, but the veneer of pretense is thin. The Syrian war, especially given Russia's involvement is almost certainly about securing passage for natural gas pipelines.
Who thinks the Iraq war was actually about Freedom? That might have been the rallying cry but it was about securing access to oil and securing massive re-building contracts and/or reparation money. Many argue that the 1990s stock market boom was a direct result of the US getting $10/barrel oil via the Iraq war reparation deal, where they repaid the US for the costs of having to attack the US.
Any war where people suddenly have an interest in saving humanity should be viewed very skeptically, since there are hundreds of crises of freedom around the world. If the crisis happens to be on top of a giant oil field, well, then there may be some conflating variable.
Oil and Money are definitely on the minds' of the higher ups regarding the wars in the Middle East. So much so, private groups with oil interests hold tight court with governments officials and do not hesitate to strongly suggest foreign policy strategy.
"The Syrian war, especially given Russia's involvement is almost certainly about securing passage for natural gas pipelines."
Do you have a cite for that? No one on any side is building pipelines in Syria anytime soon, because, well, war. Also, pretty sure if I told Suheil al-Hassan or Abu Mohammad al-Julani they were fighting for natural gas pipelines, they'd knock my teeth out.
July 25, 2011 'Islamic pipeline' seeks Euro gas markets
>ASALOUYEH, Iran, July 25 (UPI) -- Iran, Iraq and Syria say they're set to sign an official contract to construct a natural gas pipeline connecting Iran's South Pars field to European customers.
>Iran's state-run Press TV announced that a deal between Iran's interim Oil Minister Mohammad Aliabadi and his Iraqi and Syrian counterparts -- the biggest of its in the kind in the Middle East -- would be signed at Asalouyeh, Iran.
Something tells me the US is not too keen on Iran-Iraq-Syria joining forces for much of anything, and I do not believe the Russians are too keen on the idea considering their existing natural gas pipeline to the EU and the just proposed one between Russia and Turkey
I have no idea if or how much this factors in, or even if it's true, but the story I've heard is that several years back, there was a plan for a pipeline that would go from Qatar and Saudi Arabia through Jordan, Syria, and Turkey to Europe. This would be a significant economic threat to Russia, since gas exports are about $25 billion/yr, about 2% of Russia's GDP, and a big source of hard currency, but also important is Russia's use of its gas pipelines to Europe to threaten to cut off supplies to countries in Eastern and Central Europe, which would not be possible if there were a gulf source of gas available. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a lot of gas that is going to waste or is staying in the ground, so they could easily supply the European market. Supposedly, Assad turned down the deal, and the civil war started shortly after.
The main Russian alternative pipeline I'm aware of is Nabucco, which would be from Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany. I've not been aware of any pipeline projects from Qatar and Saudi Arabia--their natural gas is exported mostly via LNG. Considering that, unlike oil, natural gas prices are not priced equally around the world, and that the price for natural gas is much, much higher in Asia than elsewhere (Europe is about 20% the price of Asia and the US about a third to a half that of Europe (yay fracking!)), it's much more profitable for them to export to Asia.
Edit: After doing some research, I did find that there was a proposal for a Qatar-Turkey pipeline in 2010 (see https://web.archive.org/web/20120228125310/http://pipelinesi... ). It was proposed to connect to Nabucco, which hasn't been built. The articles that link the Syrian civil war, or more specifically Qatari involvement in said war, contend that Qatar wants a Muslim Brotherhood government to build the pipeline, which ignores Saudi coolness to the idea of the pipeline (Saudi Arabia also funds rebels in the civil war) and the fact that Qatar also funded the uprisings in Libya and Egypt, in the path of no contended pipeline.
In other words, the idea that the Syrian civil war is mostly about gas pipelines looks rather like people trying to find some resource that the war must be about because they can't believe war is about anything other than resources.
Lets be serious here. Do you think the US or Russia will announce on their newspapers their actual interests and actually note money/commodities/whatever? This is big business on a global scale with decade-long goals. The pipelines can wait some years.
But lets say you are right -- do you think Russia is suddenly interested in some far-away humanitarian conflict or...perhaps there is something more?
Also, given the vast injustices around the world, any opinions on why the US decided to suddenly instill freedom in Iraq in 1992?
Yeah, there is a reason some highly wealthy people are bank rolling both sides in wars. It's not only about the war but the aftermath is ripe for shady stuff as you can read from history books including power, rebuilding, contracts, natural resources to name few.
The vast majority of the money made from war (or the entirety of the money, depending on the war) comes from supplying war materiel. If some actors can figure out how to make money from the subject of the war, fine, but the money is being made from feeding, clothing, and arming the belligerents - so the important thing is their respective bankrolls. US military aid, for example, is not given to Egypt or Israel or the Saudis or Bahrain as dollars, it's given as dollars to US companies to send goods to those countries (to suppress their own populations.) US corporate lobbyists have a multi-billion dollar interest in Bahrain using full military force on peaceful protesters.
edit: There are versions of the theory of "imperial overstretch" that say that empires are forced to expand by the influence of internal elements that are enriched by the process of making war, thus increasing the influence of those elements, forcing more expansion, requiring more taxation and privation from the citizens of the empire, until eventually the entire empire collapses from the strain.
Maybe this is a good thing as it will make it harder to get people to go to war next time. Perhaps we might think twice about invading other countries.
How is this possible? If private businesses could do this, it would be mayhem.