In January 2018, Florida National Guard’s 164th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, 3rd Battalion, 116th Field Artillery Regiment deployed to Southwest Asia (Kuwait/Iraq?).
This month (February), Massachusetts National Guard’s 188th Engineering Detachment also deployed, to Kuwait, for Operation Spartan Shield.
Currently the Iowa National Guard’s 248th Aviation Support Battalion is in Kuwait: “It’s been the largest deployment of the Iowa National Guard [since 2011]…”-Major General Timothy Orr, February 2018
These increased National Guard deployments to Southwest Asia coincide with a ‘Army Day’ Task Force Spartan exercise ordered by U.S. Central Command (CentComm) at Udairi Range, Kuwait.
“Information is a weapon the brigade yields. We’re training Soldiers on their mission command weapons systems. We’re making information more lethal.”-Chief Warrant-3 Jerred Edgar, 116th Cavalry Brigade Combat Team
Idaho Army National Guard photo by Captain Robert Taylor, 10FEB2018.
Idaho’s Army National Guard signal personnel spent the early part of February learning how to kill using information. Actually, the 116th Cavalry Brigade (Snake River) has signal corps personnel spread across four northwestern states, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Oregon.
Typically a “Signal Corps develops, tests, provides, and manages communications and information systems”, but this year the Idaho based Snake River militia decided to weaponize the information they gather in an exercise they called Signal Gunnery: “We wanted to create a process that trains crews in a manner similar to tank gunnery to create shared understanding with commanders.”-CW3 Jerred Edgar
Can you see me now? Idaho Army National Guard photo by Captain Robert Taylor, 10FEB2018.
The week long Signal Gunnery brought at least 60 personnel from four states together at Orchard Combat Training Center (OCTC), south of Boise. It’s hoped this weaponizing-info-exercise becomes a annual event.
Idaho Army National Guard’s Regional Training Site–Maintenance Ordnance Training Battalion is big and bad and getting bigger and badder!
During a November 2017 comprehensive accreditation inspection the Idaho training facility scored an overall 99.2%, getting 100% in five of the seven categories.
The facility is used by hundreds of Guard and U.S. Army personnel each year. Plans are to expand the training site by 2022, doubling student enrollment to about 850.
According to military reports the expansion of Idaho’s Maintenance Ordnance Training Battalion, including the creation of additional training battalions, could make it an equal to the U.S. Army’s Fort Benning, Georgia!
“Through all of the chaos, I realized I had to keep my eye on the prize and keep going.”-Captain Kelley Thury
The biggest hot potato about women in the U.S. military is whether they should directly work in combat jobs. But what about the spiritual battlefront?
Kelly Thury getting pinned with her new rank by her husband, and title by her father. South Dakota Army National Guard photo by Staff Sergeant Austin Pearce, 06JAN2018.
In January, South Dakota Army National Guard welcomed its first ever female chaplain, Captain Kelley Thury.
Thury stated that she never thought about becoming a military chaplain, at first. It was after graduating university, and then serving as a evangelical missionary overseas (motivated by the evangelical slogan Getting to know God and making God known) that she began to doubt what she thought was God’s plan for her: “I was left coming back to states going, ‘Okay God, what in the world? Did I hear you wrong? What’s going on? What have I done? What did I not hear correctly?”
Her brother convinced her to join the South Dakota National Guard, as a photographer. During basic training one of her drill sergeants openly professed his faith to trainees, something during my Cold War basic training would’ve gotten a drill sergeant into trouble, and I as a believer in The Constitution-Bill of Rights believe religion should be kept to oneself especially if you’re a government employee (after all Jesus in the Bible says “render unto Caeser what is his”, and “you cannot serve two masters”). But I digress. Thury credits her Bible thumping Drill Sergeant with showing her The Way: “At basic training, I had a drill sergeant who was very vocal about his faith. Right before we left in-processing and were shipped out to our respective training units, he prayed over us. I said, ‘You know what drill sergeant? Let us pray for you too.’ So I prayed for him. He was kind of the first one that spoke it out. He said, ‘Some of you are going to do certain things in the military, some of you will get out, some of you will become chaplains’ and he looked straight at me. It’s kind of when I said, ‘Yeah. I have felt the call of ministry on my life.’”
Thury also praises the chaplain training she got through the South Dakota militia: “I wasn’t thrust into a church and told, ‘Here, go lead a congregation.’ I was really led through the process by several chaplains in South Dakota. It was an incredible training experience for me because I got to see how it works before having to do it. It is a great program.”
“Every year, since we’ve been doing the National Take Back, the DEA and the National Guard have worked side-by-side with collection and transportation of the prescriptions. The National Guard is a huge help in collecting a lot of pills in a short amount of time and then getting them to the destruction point.”– Timothy McMahon, DEA
Ever notice that local police, and now National Guard, conduct “drug take back” days? The problem with this phrase, Prescription Drug Take Back Day, and the fact that it is conducted by government law enforcers, implies your doctor issued prescription drugs came from the government.
Prescription Drug Take Back Day is an operation of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). As an example of how much prescription drugs are out there, in October 2017, under the guidance of the DEA the New Jersey National Guard Counterdrug Task Force incinerated seven tons of prescription drugs during a Drug Take Back op!
Ohio National Guard conducts Drug Take Back Day, 01May2017
You don’t have to take my word that government and corporations (employees of at least) are involved in drugs dealing, read the following Real News sources from the past month.
In December 2017 Hanscom Air Force Base, in Massachusetts, became the first U.S. Air Force installation to arm its police with naloxone, in an attempt to prevent opioid overdoses.
Also towards the end of 2017, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Chemical and Biological Technologies Department began research on a new, potentially weaponized, opioid drug threat called carfentanil. One poppy seed sized amount of carfentanil (aka Elephant Tranquilizer) can potentially kill you. The U.S. Department of Defense is so sure that carfentanil is being weaponized (they didn’t say by whom) that efforts are being made to find antidotes for military personnel, and eventually silly-vilians.
Official video attempting to explain why Nevada National Guard Counterdrug Task Force was sent to Kingdom of Tonga:
Another sign of the growing prescription drug problem is that the military health insurance TriCare just jacked up the out-of-pocket cost of drugs for military families. USAF Lieutenant t. Colonel Ann McManis, of the Defense Health Agency Pharmacy Operations Division, revealed it’s part of a plan to force military families to do their drugs shopping solely on military based: “Military pharmacies and TriCare Pharmacy Home Delivery will remain the lowest cost pharmacy option for TriCare beneficiaries.”
02FEB2018, signing a pledge not to drink booze while watching the Super Bowl
Even drinking booze has apparently become a major problem for the military (despite decades of taxpayer funded anti-booze policies) as before Super Bowl weekend the Naval Medical Center San Diego intimidated personnel to sign a pledge promising they wouldn’t drink booze on Super Bowl Sunday!
Last month Cristina Howe, with the Marine Corps’ Substance Abuse Counseling Center, intimated an increase in cases saying “We have a lot of command referrals that come in, but we also have a lot of self-referrals….”
It was also revealed, at the end of January, that the Defense Logistics Agency has connections with about 1-thousand manufacturers/distributors of more than 25-thousand types of drugs: “If we can’t get drugs to our overseas bases, then it affects our ability to project air power, deploy forces….The fact that they have the ability to push our vendors to make things happen is critical to the warfighting mission….”-Major Rohin Kasudia, USAF Misawa Air Base, Nippon
Militarizing the Police; official National Guard Counterdrug Schools for cops video which claims that drugs cause violence (not people, kinda like the anti-gun argument that guns, and not people, kill people) and that drug dealers are better armed than local cops (after decades of hearing that claim I have yet to see evidence of that, I remember in Junior High in late 1970s southern California we got a visit from a San Bernardino County Sheriff deputy who opened the trunk of his cop-car to reveal a footlocker type box filled with shotguns, M16s, ammo, and various types of grenades, for a short time in the 1980s my father was a San Bernardino County Reserve Sheriff deputy and confirmed that the cops, at least in San Bernardino County, out-gun any criminals or silly-vilians), where even cops from Boise, Idaho, learn how to bash in your door:
Counterdrugs schools operators (usually a local college, with counterdrugs program names varying from region to region) claims to offer free counterdrugs training to local law enforcers across the country. Specifically it is ‘free’ to local law enforcement agencies because it is 100% funded by your taxes paid to the federal government. Such counterdrugs schools are overwatched by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Guard Bureau.
“People are addicted to this idea that you have to use tough love, let people hit rock bottom, kick it cold turkey. That works for some people. It kills others.”-Kassandra Frederique, New York State Director at the Drug Policy Alliance
25JAN2018, U.S. Coast Guard & Royal Canadian Navy proudly displays more than 47,000 pounds of cocaine in California!
U.S. Department of Transportation revealed a 77% increase in drug use by people working in the transportation industry, since 2006! USDoT administrators admitted the numbers could be higher because their drug testing requirements have “significant gaps . . . that should be addressed.”
02FEB2018, U.S. Coast Guard offloads two tons of cocaine captured off Florida!
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revealed that ‘offshored’ U.S. airlines maintenance facilities are exempt from drug testing for their U.S. employees.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) reported that random drug testing revealed that the number of railroad employees addicted to drugs jumped by 43% from 2015 to 2016! Since 2014 there’s been a sudden increase of railroad accidents involving railroad workers whacked on drugs.
National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that at least 10.9-million people in the United States were addicted to opioids in 2016!
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports the number of opioid deaths in 2016 at a record 42-thousand!
In California, a National Guard sergeant blames the capitalist system for the growing number of homeless people whacked on smack: “…these people are being pushed out not because of laziness, not because they couldn’t try hard enough, but because the system is stacked against them.”-Jason Carney, Vets for the 99%
Last month the New York National Guard Counterdrug Task Force hosted a forum to come up with ideas about how to end the opioid crisis in The Empire State. Even representatives of the New York Police Department blamed the current situation on the decades old War on Drugs: “I’m the living history of the failure of the drug war. The fact that I’m here dealing with the same problems that I’ve been dealing with for the past 35 years is no accident. If we attack this in a more policy-oriented way, to prevent the involvement of the criminal justice system, not only would more treatments be available…”-Jeff Kauffman, former police officer and attorney with the New York Police Department
In this video learn that one of the reasons for opioid addiction is skyrocketing unemployment, proving that the official government touted unemployment rate is Fake News:
In this video learn that opioid use is overwhelming the foster care system for children:
“A lot of this is teaching resiliency training to military kids so they know how to cope with deployments and know that there’s a support system always there for them.”-Katie Kohlbecker, father is member of Idaho State Militia
Idaho National Guard has a Child and Youth Services program which held a four day Beyond Camp Wonderland-Snow Bash 2018 to instill team building and leadership skills, and build resiliency for tough times ahead, in the children that took part.
Beyond Camp Wonderland-Snow Bash 2018, Cascade, Idaho. Idaho National Guard photo via Captain Robert Taylor, 13JAN2018.
One participant gave ominous Orwellian sounding praise for the program: “Everyone is the same because we all have parents in the military. It’s different than interacting with kids at school because most kids at school don’t have parents in the military and don’t know what it’s like to have a parent gone.”-Elijah Maisey
Children can join the Idaho National Guard Child and Youth Services when they turn ten years old. They can even gain rank: “It’s rewarding to see the development of the older kids who have transitioned from campers, to counselors to chaperons.”-Colonel Farin Schwartz
Beyond Camp Wonderland-Snow Bash 2018, Cascade, Idaho. Idaho National Guard photo via Captain Robert Taylor, 13JAN2018.
