"This can’t be true, right? The U.S. Navy can’t be forcing their elite commando units to rotate their rifles with other units as they come back from deployments, leaving them only to train with unfamiliar weapons, can it?" asks Captain Ed this morning.
You know the answer: "Yes! It! Can!":
Navy SEAL teams don’t have enough combat rifles to go around, even as these highly trained forces are relied on more than ever to carry out counterterrorism operations and other secretive missions, according to SEALs who have confided in Representative Duncan Hunter, R-CA50.
After SEALs return from a deployment, their rifles are given to other commandos who are shipping out, said Hunter, a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. This weapons carousel undercuts the “train like you fight” ethos of the U.S. special operations forces, they said.
One is tempted to believe - and it is entirely believable - that Barack Obama has so defunded and disarmed the U.S. military that Special Forces Command really can't afford to even provide SEALs and Delta Force and Marines (who are their own special forces, thank you very much) their own personal rifles, "tricked out" or not. But that would not seem to be the case:
There are just 2,450 active SEALs and 600 special-boat operators (the AP puts the combined total at 2,710). Even if each rifle costs $5,000 fully tricked out for special-operations use — and according to the AP, the DoD gets its M-4 carbines for around $1,000 — that would put the cost of properly equipping the SEALs at $15.25 million. The proposed U.S. Navy budget for FY2017 comes to $155.4 billion. Using the $5,000 cost as a baseline, providing every single SEAL and SWCC with a new rifle in FY2017 would eat up 0.0098% of the annual budget.
The AP notes that the numbers of special forces in all branches have grown dramatically over the past decade, from 33,600 to 56,000. The current budget for Special Forces Command, which oversees units from all branches of the military, is at $10.4 billion. But even if we take the $5,000 number and assume every single member needs a new rifle next year, the cost would be $280 million — just 2.6% of the budget.
So if the problem isn't a lack of resources, then it must be a deliberate deprivation of Special Ops personnel of the tools they need to carry out their missions - a matter of intentional, calculated policy. Which is curious given that the Regime ostensibly has Delta Force over in Iraq and Syria right now supposedly combating ISIS. Are those elite ass-kickers going into battle unarmed or are their counterparts back home being left to let their skills atrophy? There doesn't seem to be any other logical or plausible explanation but that The One wants our top warriors to no longer be "special" anymore so that one more military option will be denied to us - right along with every other one he's "degraded and destroyed".
Special Forces Command's explanation? "Maintenance problems":
Army General Joseph Votel, the top officer at U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, and Losey’s superior, told Hunter last week he is aware of the congressman’s concerns. “We’re certainly running that down,” Votel said during testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.
Votel added that heavily used rifles need to undergo maintenance and that may be contributing to the perception of a shortage. But “we’ll certainly take immediate action,” Votel said, if it’s determined the combat readiness of the SEALs is being degraded.
That sounds to me like a standard-issue "They caught us, so we'll feed them the 'maintenance issues' excuse, that should hold them for a while" BS answer. In other words, once again the Regime is begging "incompetence" to obfuscate their deliberate malevolence in disarming the only small slice of the U.S. armed forces that is even a shadow of the most powerful military on Earth it once was but will never be again. And that doesn't even touch on the question of to what else all those appropriated resources ARE going if not weapons and training.
Ours is not the "hollow" military of the Jimmy Carter 1970s; this is the disemboweled corpse of The Age Of The One, with three hundred million more literal ones to follow in the not too distant future.
Either that or O started his gun-confiscation campaign in the most unexpected place of all.
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