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Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

latimes.com

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Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#121

Post by grzm »

Hondor wrote: post #119
grzm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thanks for your clarifications! 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 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.

Gotcha. Thanks!

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#122

Post by Hondor »

latch wrote: post #115
Hondor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your civil response. 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…

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…

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.

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#123

Post by latch »

grzm wrote: post #120
latch wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not your parent. This is a complicated situation, but I think you guys are conflating two points. Is superior orders a valid defense? No. [1] And while I'm loosely in the camp that feels that the 2nd Iraq war was a war of aggression, this action by the Pentagon is completely unrelated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

> Not your parent. 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'l…

For the jargon:

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.

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#124

Post by grzm »

latch wrote: post #123
grzm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not your parent. 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'l…

For the jargon: 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 re…

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!

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#125

Post by paulmd »

dogma1138 wrote: post #23
rileymat2 wrote: post #16

"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…

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.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1

Another similar situation that came up when I was searching down the first article: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad...

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...

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-B...

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhol...

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.

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#126

Post by brbsix »

beachstartup wrote: post #118
brbsix wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#129

Post by 1812calif »

dlp211 wrote: post #43
mnem wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they decide when they enlist to go kill people when told to.

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.

To start, I agree with what you're saying.

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"?

Re: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses

#130

Post by zhemao »

rileymat2 wrote: post #16

"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.

Didn't he keep a copy of his own employment contract? If it's the only copy, shouldn't that be the one that has legal force?
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