Dave Philipps

The U.S. military is replacing the aging and little-loved Humvee, the all-purpose military truck that bumped and slogged and sweltered through decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the fact that it offered nowhere to put a drink was just one of the many shortcomings, large and small, that came to irritate, and even endanger, the troops who spent long deployments in its cramped confines.

Now the Pentagon is rolling out the Humvee’s successor, a 340-horsepower beast called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV. And as a recent test ride at an Army training base made clear, it is leaps and bounds ahead of the Humvee.

The new truck, which began arriving at military bases in the spring, is faster, smarter and safer. It is powerful enough to bound through rough terrain, despite carrying armor so thick that the truck has to automatically level itself when parked, so that troops can swing open its 400-pound steel doors.

And unlike the stripped-down Humvee, the JLTV — which is far costlier than the latest Lamborghini Huracan — comes with a few conveniences, including a backup camera, phone-charging plugs, and not just one cup holder, but two.

“That may seem like a small thing, but not if you’re on a 10-hour convoy in the desert,” said Staff Sgt. Kelsi Anderson as she put the new truck through its paces.

Anderson, an Army veteran of the war in Iraq, trains soldiers in how to drive the JLTV. Speeding through an off-road course in the rolling terrain of Fort McCoy, the truck’s sophisticated suspension devoured each bump and rut while her caramel Frappuccino, sitting in its holder on the dash, barely swayed.

Whether the new truck will actually be a better match than the Humvee for the conflicts of the future is a matter of debate. Some warfare experts see questionable value in simply adding more armor and horsepower.

“This truck was built to solve problems from the last war — which, by the way, is still going on — but future wars will be different,” said Matthew Schmidt, who teaches national security at the University of New Haven and has taught at the Army War College.

“A heavily armored vehicle is an asset if the villagers are angry at you,” Schmidt said, “but in any real conflict against a foe like Russia or China, all armor will quickly be destroyed. In those wars, the advantage will go to speed and deception.”

Even so, if the next 50 years look anything like the last 50, with U.S. troops more often called upon to fight smoldering insurgencies than conventional armies, the JLTV’s thick armor is likely to save lives.

The truck will also be a far more comfortable ride for the men and women who do the fighting. It has seats designed to fit the bulky body armor and backpacks that soldiers now wear, and unlike the underpowered Humvee, it has air conditioning that actually worked in the sticky heat of a late-summer morning at Fort McCoy.

Anderson barreled down a winding trail, punching the JLTV’s bullet-resistant tires through deep, sandy ruts and dancing over rocks at speeds that would have rattled a Humvee to pieces.

“This thing is a monster,” she said as tree branches flew by, slapping the truck’s thick sides. “It wants to be driven off road. It loves it. The faster, the more aggressive you are, the smoother it is.”

The truck also comes packed with technology, including electronics that can communicate with fighter jets, drones and other military assets around the globe. In place of a sun visor mounted above the thick blast-resistant windshield, the JLTV has a fold-down night-vision driving system.

Just as important for Anderson, the seats can be adjusted to suit her 5-foot-3 frame. That new feature is crucial for the Army, which has a growing proportion of women in its ranks and plans to buy about 49,000 JLTVs over the next decade.

Eager to show a visitor what the truck can do, Anderson pulled to a stop at a broad creek cutting through the woods, and pushed a button marked “fording mode.”

The JLTV hitched itself up on its shock absorbers until it had 30 inches of ground clearance, and could easily splash through the creek. The air conditioning and much of the electrical system were automatically shut off to protect them from the water, and the truck limited its speed to 10 mph until Anderson switched modes again on the far bank, and the truck lowered to a more stable height.

“This truck is smart; it won’t let anyone damage it,” she said.

When the truck detects mechanical problems, it can limit its speed or shut itself down if necessary. To avoid any HAL 9000 moments when digital safeguards like those might accidentally endanger the crew, the JLTV also has a combat override switch that the driver can use to take all control away from the computer.

“All the soldiers who drive it, they love it,” Anderson said. “It’s fun, its powerful, and it’s safe.”

Soldiers generally agree that it’s long past time to replace the Humvee, which was conceived in the 1970s as a roomier, more powerful replacement for the World War II-vintage jeep. Just like the jeep, it was a light troop and equipment mover with no armor, meant mainly for use behind the front lines.

The Humvee was a welcome upgrade when it debuted in 1985, and the distinctive-looking turtle-backed truck even became a breakout star in the celebratory atmosphere that followed the brief blitz of the first Gulf War in 1991.

A civilian version — the Hummer H1 — soon hit the streets, and despite reviews calling it underpowered and noisy, it gained a cult following that included Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities. “They’re like the American spirit,” one Hummer owner told The New York Times in 1994.

But after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Humvees proved to be an easy target for roadside bomb attacks, which skyrocketed during the first year of the war. Shredded, blackened carcasses of the trucks became a common sight on Iraqi highways.

Troops in Iraq scrambled to add extra protection however they could, including welding on pieces of junked steel. And the soldiers who generations before had loved the jeep began to loathe the Humvee.

“We were sending soldiers out with no armor — heck, there weren’t even doors — and guys were putting sandbags on the floor for protection,” said Col. Charles Kidd, who was an operations officer in Iraq in 2003 and is now chief of staff of the 84th Training Command at Fort McCoy. “I was in a soft-skin Humvee at a checkpoint when I got hit. The truck was completely destroyed. It was one of the worst days of my life.”

He patted the cold steel side of one of his unit’s new JLTVs and smiled. “This is a game changer for our soldiers,” he said.

The military responded to the roadside bomb threat by building thousands of “up-armored” Humvees fitted with up to 3,000 pounds of hardened steel, but the extra weight made the trucks slow and prone to breakdowns. And insurgents reacted with more sophisticated and deadlier explosives to pierce the stronger trucks.

The military eventually replaced many Humvees with heavy-duty vehicles called MRAPs, designed specifically to withstand roadside bombs. But they were slow, top-heavy and had limited capability off-road.

Enter the JLTV, a concept approved by planners in 2006 but just now reaching military bases. The Army says it offers the protection of an MRAP with off-road performance approaching that of a Baja racer.

“It’s a blast to drive — you hit the skinny pedal on this thing, you’re going somewhere,” said Sgt. 1st Class William Almquist, who oversees JLTV maintenance at Fort McCoy.

In fact, some in the Pentagon worry that driving it may be too much fun, and that troops will be tempted to turn deployments into the Dakar Rally. Not without reason, perhaps: At Fort Stewart in Georgia, someone managed to roll one of the trucks within three days of the troops there receiving it.

The Army says there have been no more incidents since then. “You know, we rolled a lot of jeeps and Humvees too,” Almquist said.

If a soldier does decide to go Evel Knievel, he added, the JLTV’s onboard computer will record and report it — and the daredevil will probably be looking at long stints of weekend duty.

This article originally appeared in

Here Comes the Smooth Ride to Replace the Military's Hated Humvee

FORT McCOY, Wis. — The war zone of tomorrow may be a dystopian hellscape of crippling cyber strikes, autonomous death rays and swarms of killer bots. But whatever America’s future conflicts might bring, this much is certain: There will finally be cup holders.

His campaign manager, Abe Rakov, stopped him and asked, “Are you sure this is the thing you want everyone in the world to remember about you forever?”

Kander said yes. So his manager pressed Send.

In a strikingly candid public letter, Kander announced that day last October that he was dropping out of the race because of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder from his military service, saying it had become too much for him to bear.

“After 11 years of trying to outrun depression and PTSD symptoms, I have finally concluded that it’s faster than me,” he explained in the letter. “I have to stop running, turn around and confront it.”

Kander is surely not the first politician to grapple with the psychological wounds of war, but he appears to have been the first to do it so publicly, in the middle of a campaign.

It was not what some close supporters hoped he would do.

“People were telling him to deal with it in secret and stay in the race, but to him, that would be dishonest,” Rakov recalled in a recent interview. “Hiding it would be a disservice to other people. He wanted to be part of changing a stigma.”

Generations of politicians have assumed that openly acknowledging a psychiatric disorder would kill any chances of a public life. Kander now has a chance to test that assumption. After months of treatment, he has begun to take his first steps back into politics.

Kander, a Democrat, is not running for office, though he has not ruled out doing so in the future. He is leading a national expansion of a Kansas City nonprofit group called the Veterans Community Project that provides transitional housing and support services for homeless veterans. The group plans to build housing in eight other communities in the next three years.

That job has put him in a position to host national candidates passing through Kansas City. And so far, three Democratic presidential candidates — Pete Buttigieg, Seth Moulton and Beto O’Rourke — have made campaign stops at the group this summer.

“I haven’t experienced stigma,” Kander said. “If anything, it’s the opposite — party donors and boosters, candidates, they are asking me to get more involved.”

Until the moment Kander dropped out last fall, he had led such a charmed political life that even his losses were treated as victories. A progressive in a conservative state, he had served two terms in the state Legislature and one as Missouri secretary of state, all before his 37th birthday. In 2016, he nearly unseated an incumbent Republican senator, Roy Blunt, while Hillary Clinton was losing Missouri by 19 percentage points.

Though he lost that race, he gained national attention for a viral ad in which he assembles a military-style rifle blindfolded while explaining why, as a war veteran, he supported background checks on gun purchases. Soon after, when President Barack Obama was asked who best represented the future of the Democratic Party, Kander’s name was first on the list.

But all that time, Kander said, he was racked by nightmares, depression and suicidal thoughts stemming from his time as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan. Those symptoms had grown so persistent last year that whenever his wife returned home with the couple’s 5-year-old son, she made sure to enter the house first, in case she found her husband dead inside.

Kander joined the Army National Guard in 2005 after getting a law degree at Georgetown University. He deployed in 2006 to Afghanistan, where his mission was to assess the corruption levels of former Afghan warlords and government leaders.

That meant traveling dangerous roads in an unarmored SUV to meet armed men with questionable allegiances. Usually he had no backup other than his Afghan interpreter.

Back in the United States, Kander would often shrug off his deployment as uneventful. He was never shot or blown up, no one close to him was wounded, and he had never killed anyone.

But deep down, he could not seem to shake the stress of walking into so many meetings where there was a reasonable possibility of his being kidnapped and held hostage, or worse.

He developed a twitch in his left eye, he said. Stopping for red lights made his heart race. Sitting in crowded restaurants became excruciating. He would find himself simmering with anger for no reason. Nightmares of being abducted and killed seemed to play on repeat.

For more than a decade, Kander said, he refused to acknowledge to himself or anyone else that these might be signs of post-traumatic stress. “I didn’t feel like I did enough to earn it,” he said, looking back. “I was just some jerk who went to meetings. To even consider I might have PTSD felt like stolen valor.”

He dove headlong into politics, allowing himself few spare moments when his thoughts could wander. He would stay up late studying bills or answering constituents’ emails to put off the nightmares that would rush in when he went to sleep.

Rakov said Kander’s military service was a crucial icebreaker on the campaign trail. “A politician doesn’t start with the benefit of the doubt, but someone who served in the military does,” he said. “People know you have sacrificed something. They may not agree with you, but they are willing to listen to you.”

At the same time, Kander’s military experiences, and their psychological aftermath, were undercutting his ability to function. Close friends and supporters started to notice, but said nothing. “I saw him every day, and saw his symptoms, and didn’t do anything about it,” Rakov said with regret.

Military service has long been a steppingstone to a political career. But whether they fought at Kip’s Bay or Khe Sanh, political leaders have rarely been open about the aftereffects of combat.

Was George Washington jarred awake on winter nights by the memory of horses shot out from under him or musket balls passing so close that they ripped his coat? Was President Rutherford B. Hayes haunted by the memory of lying wounded in no man’s land while the men of his Union Army brigade fell around him? Was Sen. George McGovern troubled by the 30 bombing missions he flew during World War II, including the time his B-24 caught on fire and nearly crashed? If they were, they did not say so on the stump.

Few politicians have had to navigate this minefield quite like Sen. John McCain, who was held prisoner and tortured for years in North Vietnam. The senator, who died last year, suffered permanent physical injuries, but said he had emerged essentially unscathed psychologically, except for an aversion to the sound of jangling keys, which reminded him of his jailers.

“I pressed him on it,” his longtime aide and biographer Mark Salter said in an interview. “‘Nothing? You got nothing? Nothing keeps you up at night?’ He said no. He said he had left it all behind him.”

Even so, McCain was hounded during two presidential runs by whisper campaigns claiming that his years as a prisoner had made him erratic and unfit for office, even after he released thousands of pages of medical records to the media to support his denials.

Over more than 30 years in the Senate, McCain never spoke in depth publicly about the mental toll of his war experience. Neither did his peers.

“We never talked about it, because we couldn’t — you couldn’t say you were having problems and still be elected,” said Max Cleland, who lost both lower legs and part of an arm to a grenade in Vietnam, and went on to represent Georgia in the Senate from 1996 to 2002.

Cleland said several fellow senators who had fought in Vietnam had nightmares and other post-traumatic stress symptoms while in office, but they would only discuss them privately.

“There wasn’t the acceptance there is today,” he said. “And we didn’t have a name for the issues from combat. We just called it alcoholism.”

Kander decided to break with that tradition last fall. Feeling increasingly depressed and suicidal last fall as the mayoral campaign wore on, he decided to drop out of the race and seek help.

“It was an incredibly difficult decision, because he didn’t know there was a solution,” said his wife, Diana Kander. “He didn’t know he was trading being mayor for getting healthy, he just knew he was trading away the one thing that was going well.”

In May, Moulton, the Massachusetts congressman and Marine Corps veteran running for president, revealed that he was haunted by regrets and intrusive memories from four deployments to Iraq and was seeing a therapist regularly. When he suspended his presidential bid last week, political analysts generally blamed his failure to stand out from a crowded field of candidates, not his candor about his mental health. He remains in the House and said he would seek reelection.

When Kander dropped out of the mayoral race, he also tried to drop out of sight. He deleted his Twitter account, gave his phone to Rakov and changed his appearance, growing a beard and wearing a hat to be harder to recognize. He wanted to focus on healing, he said, and not the public reaction to his announcement.

During the next several months, he went to regular therapy sessions at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Kansas City. Just learning how to recognize and address the symptoms made a huge difference, he said.

His therapist had him record himself telling the stories of his most harrowing experiences in Afghanistan, and then play them back repeatedly until the emotional reins of the episodes loosened. As he did, the nightmares steadily waned.

Kander said he started exercising and meditating, and he feels more at peace now than he had for a decade.

“I’m not cured, but I’m so much better,” he said. “PTSD is like an old knee injury. It’s always going to be there. If you treat it and manage it, it doesn’t have to restrict what you do.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/us/jason-kander-ptsd.html" id="a18f40a0-f95d-3911-afce-e46c3d62b07f">The New York Times</a>.

PTSD Made Him Walk Away From Public Life. Now He's Heading Back.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Jason Kander was a rising political star, in the homestretch of a race for mayor of Kansas City that he was widely expected to win. And he was moments away from upending it all.

Officials did not release any details. But a senior Navy official with knowledge of the matter said the Navy is investigating reports that the unit, Foxtrot Platoon of SEAL Team 7, held a Fourth of July party where some members consumed alcohol against regulations, and that a senior enlisted member of the platoon had raped a female service member attached to the platoon.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about a continuing investigation.

Jeremiah Sullivan, a civilian attorney representing one of the SEALs in the platoon, confirmed that there was an investigation into reports of sexual assault and unauthorized drinking.

When commanders began investigating the allegations, the entire platoon invoked their right to remain silent, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. At that point, the official said, commanders decided to send the whole platoon home, including the lieutenant in command.

The commander of U.S. special operations troops in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Eric Hill of the Air Force, ordered the extremely rare removal of the platoon — the only group of SEALs in Iraq — “due to a perceived deterioration of good order and discipline within the team during nonoperational periods,” according to a statement from Special Operations Command.

“There were allegations of wrongdoing, and the commander initiated an investigation, which is still ongoing,” said Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command. “After the investigation began, the commander lost confidence in the platoon’s ability to accomplish the mission and ordered the platoon’s redeployment.”

The Navy ordered the SEALs to take drug tests, according to a Navy SEAL officer who has been briefed on the matter. The results of those tests are not yet known, the officer said.

Foxtrot Platoon — including 19 SEALs and four support troops — was in Kuwait on Thursday, en route to Seal Team 7’s base at Naval Base Coronado near San Diego. The unit was not immediately replaced in Iraq, increasing the burdens on other U.S. troops there, but the Navy said in a statement that “the loss of confidence in this case outweighed potential operational risk” from their absence.

Enlisted Navy SEALs at Coronado said that while individuals are occasionally removed from missions for misconduct, they could not recall another instance of an entire SEAL platoon being sent home. Last year, a Green Beret detachment from the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group was withdrawn from Afghanistan after members of the unit were implicated in the abuse of an Afghan prisoner.

The withdrawal of Foxtrot Platoon is the latest in a series of black eyes for the SEAL teams, which have been hit repeatedly over the last year by reports of drug use, misconduct and violence.

Two SEALs and two Marines were charged in the death of a Green Beret who was strangled in 2017 during a hazing incident while the commandos were on a secret deployment in Mali in West Africa. One of the SEALs pleaded guilty and was sentenced in May.

Earlier this week, Navy Times reported that cocaine use was widespread among members of SEAL Team 10, based in Virginia, and that SEALs in the team considered the Navy’s drug testing efforts “a joke.”

Accounts of broad drug use among senior enlisted SEALs emerged in the court-martial of Special Operator 1st Class Edward Gallagher. He was acquitted earlier this month of charges that he had shot unarmed civilians and stabbed a wounded captive to death while leading a platoon in Iraq in 2017, but he was convicted of posing for photographs with the teenage captive’s corpse.

During the trial, SEALs from his platoon testified that they had constructed a rooftop bar at their safe house in Iraq, and that officers in charge of enforcing regulations drank there with enlisted men, and even took turns acting as disc jockeys.

Bradley Strawser, who teaches ethics in war at the Naval Postgraduate School, said the reports of rogue behavior in the SEALs are partly a product of nearly 20 years of constant special-operations warfare.

“This kind of slide in the ethical culture, standards, ethos and expectations we have been seeing across the service now for several years is yet another cost of this kind of endless war-fighting,” he said. “Our military desperately needs time to circle the wagons, go deep in working out some of the systemic problems, and effectively right the ship. But it’s very hard to do that when we are literally at never-ending war.”

Military regulations forbid the consumption of alcohol in Iraq and Afghanistan, two predominantly Muslim countries. But its presence among U.S. troops serving there is hardly rare, and in many units, including the SEAL teams, leaders sometimes turn a blind eye to moderate use.

But this year, in response to repeated reports of misconduct, the commander of Navy Special Warfare, Rear Adm. Collin Green, took steps to clean up SEAL culture with a focus on accountability, character, and what he called “ethical compliance.”

When Green heard of the allegations about Foxtrot Platoon, he pushed for the unit to be withdrawn from Iraq, according to two Navy officials with knowledge of the event.

A spokeswoman for the SEALs, Cmdr. Tamara Lawrence, said that in general top commanders are increasingly focused on enforcing discipline.

“Naval Special Warfare insists on a culture where ethical adherence is equally important to tactical proficiency,” she said in a statement. “Good order and discipline is critical to the mission. We’re actively reinforcing, with the entire force, basic leadership, readiness, responsibility and ethical principles that must form the foundation of special operations.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/navy-seal-platoon-withdrawn-iraq.html" id="abe97da5-057b-3662-abb8-6593a8c04028">The New York Times</a>.

An entire platoon of Navy SEAL commandos was abruptly removed from Iraq this week after commanders heard reports of serious misconduct and a breakdown of discipline in the elite unit.

Platoon of Navy SEALs Is Sent Home From Iraq After Reports of Misconduct

Foxtrot Platoon — including 19 SEALs and three support troops — was in Kuwait on Thursday, en route to Seal Team 7’s base at Naval Base Coronado near San Diego. The unit was not immediately replaced in Iraq, increasing the burdens on other U.S. troops there, but the Navy said in a statement that “the loss of confidence in this case outweighed potential operational risk” from their absence.

A Navy SEAL Platoon Is Pulled From Iraq Over Misconduct Reports

Duncan, a Republican who has represented a conservative and heavily military district near San Diego since 2009, sent out a mailer this month attacking his opponent and some of his colleagues as radicals and terrorist sympathizers. On the envelope was the official U.S. Marine Corps emblem. This week, the California congressman got a letter from the Marine Corps telling him he did not have permission to use the symbol and should stop immediately.

The Marines said the Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem was a registered trademark, along with the phrase “No better friend, no worse enemy,” which also appeared on the campaign materials.

“We thereby request your campaign immediately remove the emblem and the phrase from its mailers,” said the letter, which was first disclosed by NBC News.

The letter suggested that Hunter use an approved “Marine Veteran” emblem instead.

The mailer showed photos of Ammar Campa-Najjar, the Democrat who is running against Hunter in 2020, and two Democratic congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, next to a boldface message: “These three radical Democrats want you to forget their anti-Semitism or family-terrorist ties!”

Hunter has repeatedly called attention to the fact that Campa-Najjar, who was born in California to Mexican and Palestinian parents, had a Palestinian grandfather who was assassinated by Israel in 1973 in retribution for the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar was born after his grandfather was killed and has condemned his actions.

Campa-Najjar responded to the latest mailer on Twitter, calling the accusations on the mailer hateful lies. “Hunter’s campaign has illegally used the Marine Corps emblem and phrase for years,” he said, “but these mailers were so dishonorable and discrediting that they drew the attention of the United States Marine Corps.”

He also noted that the mailer spelled Israel incorrectly.

Hunter’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesman told NBC that as soon as the campaign was aware of the problem, “The campaign immediately complied and is taking all appropriate measures to ensure this matter is addressed appropriately and thoroughly.”

The emblem issue is perhaps not the biggest of problems for Hunter, who is facing 60 federal charges including campaign finance violations, falsifying records, wire fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors say the congressman and his wife improperly spent more than $250,000 in campaign funds on lavish trips, shopping sprees, private school tuition and airfare for their pet rabbit.

Hunter has pleaded not guilty and denies all charges. His wife recently pleaded guilty. Despite the swirling corruption accusations, the congressman won re-election last year.

Hunter served as an active-duty Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2005, deploying to Iraq twice. He then joined the Marine Corps Reserve and deployed to Afghanistan. He is still in the reserve, where he holds the rank of major.

The Marine Corps said it was not uncommon to encounter politicians using the Eagle, Globe and Anchor, commonly referred to as the EGA, and officials routinely send letters telling them to stop.

“We encourage such individuals to be proud of their service,” the Marine Corps said in a statement. “But the use of the EGA or other indicia, where it could appear that the Marine Corps endorses or sponsors a particular candidate, is inappropriate.”

The U.S. military has registered hundreds of trademarks in recent years. The Marine Corps alone has more than 175. Entrepreneurs who want to use phrases like “Semper Fi,” “tip of the spear” or “Pain is weakness leaving the body” are required to secure a licensing agreement.

The military has fought for the past decade over improper use of its intellectual property, targeting everything from small businesses to unlicensed logos on thong underwear.

The appearance of partisanship is a chief concern. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke got a cease-and-desist letter in 2012 when mailers critical of President Barack Obama sent by a political action committee he was running featured the logos of all four service branches.

“We can’t appear to endorse them,” Jessica O’Haver, director of the Marine Corps Trademark Licensing Office, said at the time. “We don’t currently license nonprofits and charities, especially if they’re promoting a political cause.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/duncan-hunter-marines-emblem.html" id="4062643d-87c2-35cb-ad93-dcd84345cb5f">The New York Times</a>.

Rep. Duncan Hunter wore the U.S. Marine Corps’ iconic Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem on his uniform for years when he deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. But that evidently did not give him license to put it on his campaign materials more than a decade later.

Marine Corps Tells Duncan Hunter to Stop Using Emblem on Political Mailers

In the two-week trial, Gallagher was accused by fellow SEALs of committing a string of war crimes in Iraq in 2017, including stabbing a wounded captive to death and shooting unarmed civilians with a sniper rifle. The jury found him not guilty of those charges, and convicted him only of posing for inappropriate photos with the captive’s corpse.

The military depends on its own to speak up and report crimes committed on the battlefield, holding one another accountable in environments where no one else can. But some SEAL commanders are worried that the verdict in this case will send a damaging message, discouraging SEALs from reporting similar crimes in the future. And SEALs who served under Gallagher now wonder whether Special Operations troops serving in combat will feel more free to cross the line, as they say he did.

The war crimes trial attracted wide attention and became a rallying cause for conservative politicians and media outlets. President Donald Trump intervened to order that Gallagher be released from pretrial detention. On Wednesday, despite the conviction and demotion, Trump congratulated Gallagher on the outcome of the trial in a Twitter message and added, “Glad I could help!”

Six members of Alpha Platoon, SEAL Team 7, came forward to report the crimes they said they saw Gallagher commit. They worked with Navy investigators and prosecutors for more than a year despite pressure from peers to keep mum and warnings from commanders about harm to their careers. One SEAL sniper said on the witness stand last week that testifying publicly would probably cost him his current position in SEAL Team 6, the most elite commando unit in the Navy.

The lead Navy prosecutor in the trial, Cmdr. Jeff Pietrzyk, told the jury that believing the SEALs’ testimony was crucial not just to the case before them, but to the Navy’s ability to continue to attract top-quality recruits.

“If the truth can’t get out,” he said, “who’s going to let their kids enlist?”

A Navy SEAL official said top commanders who were watching the Gallagher case unfold were stunned at the outcome.

“We don’t bring these charges lightly,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Navy is still investigating aspects of the case. “But we need to show that when young SEALs come forward, they will be listened to.”

Rear Adm. Collin Green, who heads the Navy’s Special Warfare Command, said in a statement Wednesday that the SEALs “take allegations of misconduct seriously.”

“Our community will learn from this experience through critical self-examination and be better for it,” he added. “We must always continue to uphold the highest ethical and professional standards to ensure we preserve the trust and legitimacy with our nation and our global partners.”

The Gallagher court-martial offered a counternarrative to the often heroic image of the SEALs, and exposed a rift in the force between so-called pirates — operators who believed they should have free rein to execute tough combat missions with limited oversight — and others called boy scouts, who saw oversight and strict adherence to ethics as essential to accomplishing those missions.

Members of Alpha Platoon say they reported the captive’s killing to superior officers soon after it happened in 2017, but several leaders in SEAL Team 7’s chain of command either did nothing for months or actively worked to stop an investigation.

In testimony last week, Master Chief Brian Alazzawi said his commander, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Breisch, ordered him to stop platoon members from reporting Gallagher to a commodore outside the SEAL team.

One relatively junior SEAL officer, Lt. Jacob Portier, has been charged with failing to report the allegations. He has pleaded not guilty and denies the charges; his trial is scheduled for September.

A day after finding Gallagher not guilty of murder, attempted murder, obstruction of justice and other charges, the military jury of five Marines and two sailors sentenced him to four months confinement — the maximum sentence they could impose — over the inappropriate photos. They also demoted him to special operator first class, from special operations chief; and ordered that he forfeit some pay. The reduction in rank will significantly reduce his retirement pay.

His sentence of four months’ confinement was shorter than the time he had already been held in pretrial detention, so he left the courtroom a free man.

On hearing the sentence, Gallagher looked back at his wife, made a gesture of removing the anchor pins on his collar signifying his rank, shrugged and smiled. Then they hugged.

Standing before the jury during the sentencing hearing Wednesday morning, Gallagher said he was wrong to have posed for photos with the corpse but did not acknowledge any other wrongdoing.

“I put a black eye on the two communities I love, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Navy — specifically the SEAL community,” he said.

He told the jury that he could do better. “I’ve made mistakes in my 20-year career — tactical, ethical, moral — I’m not perfect,” he said. “But I’ve always bounced back from my mistakes.”

The jury deliberated for about two hours before announcing the sentence.

The verdict shocked the platoon members who testified in the trial, according to one platoon member who asked not to be named because he has received death threats from fellow SEALs for participating in the trial.

The witnesses spoke up despite the code of silence in the close-knit SEAL community and the stigma attached to reporting on a fellow member of the SEALs, the platoon member said, only to face a wide backlash in the ranks and be portrayed by conservative media outlets as cowards and conspiratorial liars.

“A lot of the ‘head shed’ are saying we did the right thing,” the platoon member said, referring to the SEAL leadership. “But the mafia, the enlisted guys, they are out for blood.”

He said many of the SEALs who testified now fear they will be sidelined or pushed out of the SEALs.

“There is a dark cloud hanging over every single one of those guys,” the platoon member said. “Everyone is getting squeezed. Some guys decided it wasn’t worth it, and changed their stories. Maybe I was naïve to think that justice would be served.”

Though his court-martial is over, Gallagher could still face further administrative punishment by the Navy over violations of regulations that came to light during the war crimes investigation. The SEAL leadership was still reviewing the case on Wednesday.

Among other things, a search of his house found a live Navy training grenade in his garage. Investigators combing through text messages sent on his phone found detailed conversations about buying and using marijuana and prescription narcotics with other SEALs.

Those infractions could cost him his coveted Trident pin and his status as a SEAL, according to the Navy official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Gallagher appeared Wednesday morning on “Fox &amp; Friends,” a cable television program that has championed his cause for months. Asked by the host what message he had for future SEALs, he paused for a moment and then said: “To future Navy SEALs, loyalty is a trait that seems to be lost, and I would say, bring that back. You are part of a brotherhood. You are there to watch your brother’s back, he’s there to watch your back — you just stay loyal.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/us/Edward-Gallagher-acquitted.html" id="f80cf690-2557-3d08-a674-4990915db060">The New York Times</a>.

After Navy SEAL's acquittal, fears that war crimes will go unreported

SAN DIEGO — Edward Gallagher, a decorated member of the Navy SEALs, was pleased and relieved when he emerged from his court-martial on Wednesday with just a demotion and time served, and not the life sentence he could have faced if convicted on the most serious charges. But many in the Navy were in no mood to celebrate.

But the platoon leader, Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, was convicted of one charge: posing for photos with the teenage captive’s dead body.

Gallagher, 40, who was serving with SEAL Team 7, became a rallying cause of some Republicans in Congress and members of the conservative media. Trump said on Twitter in March that he would have the chief released from pretrial confinement “in honor of his past service to our country.”

Because the maximum sentence Gallagher could now face is four months, and he has spent more time than that in pretrial confinement, he was expected to go free Tuesday.

The chief was turned in by his own platoon last spring. Several fellow SEALs reported that their leader had shot civilians and killed the captive Islamic State fighter with a custom hunting knife during a deployment in Iraq in 2017. He was also charged with obstruction of justice by threatening to kill SEALs who reported him.

In the SEALs, Gallagher had a reputation as a “pirate” — an operator more interested in fighting terrorists than in adhering to the rules and making rank. When members of his platoon reported his actions to superior officers, fissures were revealed in the polished image of the SEALs and the unwritten code of silence among members of the secretive force, who see themselves as a brotherhood.

Some of the platoon members who spoke out were called traitors in a closed Facebook group and were threatened with violence. In court, some said they had started carrying weapons for self-defense.

From the beginning, the Navy portrayed the murder case in particular as a simple one with eyewitnesses to the crime and a culprit whose text messages appeared to admit guilt. But the military repeatedly stumbled in investigating and prosecuting the chief.

The SEAL command initially downplayed the platoon members’ reports about the chief, and did not start an investigation of the alleged crimes for more than a year, allowing the trail of evidence to grow cold. The lead prosecutor was removed from the case in May after he was caught improperly attaching tracking software to email messages sent to defense lawyers, leaving his replacement with just a few weeks to catch up before trial. And a key witness changed his story on the stand to favor Gallagher.

The witness, Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott, a SEAL medic who was given immunity from prosecution by the Navy, stunned prosecutors by testifying that he, and not Gallagher, had killed the captive, by covering a breathing tube inserted in the captive’s neck. His testimony also deviated in other significant ways from what he had told investigators before trial; the Navy has indicated it is considering charging him with perjury.

In a courtroom at Naval Base San Diego — close to the harbor where hulking destroyers and missile cruisers dock — a jury of five Marines, a member of the SEALs and a Navy officer, nearly all with combat experience, spent two weeks hearing testimony in the trial, including unvarnished accounts of one platoon in the Navy’s celebrated elite commando force. They deliberated for a little more than eight hours before reaching a verdict.

“The jury found him not guilty of the murder, not guilty of the stabbing, not guilty of the stabbings, not guilty of all those things,” one of his lawyers, Timothy Parlatore, told reporters outside the courtroom. “They did find him guilty of taking a photograph with a dead terrorist, which we admitted from the beginning.”

Gallagher sat stoically in the courtroom in a white dress uniform during the trial, with his wife, brother, mother and father, who was a West Point graduate, sitting behind him. He did not testify.

Marc Mukasey, another of his lawyers, said the chief began to cry when the verdict was read. He described the moment as “tears of joy, elation, freedom, absolute euphoria.”

Gallagher emerged from the courthouse beaming, hugging his wife and brother as photographers thronged around his legal team.

Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who put the team together, said it was time to stop second-guessing the men and women fighting overseas.

“Let them do their job. Eddie Gallagher did his job,” Kerik said. “He’s a hero. He’s a hero in the eyes of every American who followed this case.”

There was little physical evidence in the case, so the trial hinged on the credibility of the platoon members who testified. Prosecutors held them up as courageous whistleblowers who broke the SEAL code of silence to stop a rogue chief who was on a track to higher leadership positions. The defense painted the accusers as scared and entitled millennials who could not meet their chief’s high expectations, and fabricated war-crimes allegations to take him down.

“He didn’t coddle them,” Parlatore told the jury, so the platoon “fomented a plan of hate and mutiny.”

The case centered around the death of the captive fighter, who was brought in to the SEALs’ command post near Mosul, Iraq, by Iraqi forces. SEALs testified that after giving the fighter first aid, Gallagher, a trained medic, stabbed the fighter repeatedly in the neck.

SEALs from the platoon also accused him of firing from a sniper post at unarmed civilians who posed no threat, including an old man and a schoolgirl. Gallagher denied all the charges.

About 20 minutes after the captive died, Gallagher posed for what both sides in the trial described as trophy photos with the corpse. In one hand he held the captive’s hair; in the other he held a small, custom-made hunting knife by the captive’s bandaged neck. Some of the photos show several other SEALs gathered around and smiling.

A few days later, Gallagher texted the photo to comrades in the United States, sending one the message, “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”

During two weeks of testimony, two SEALs testified that they had seen Gallagher stab the captive in the neck for no clear reason. Several others said that they heard the chief admit to the killing that evening when confronted by the platoon, and that he told them, “I thought everyone would be cool with it; next time, I’ll do it where you can’t see.”

The defense described the accusers as disgruntled conspirators who plotted in a group text chat they called the “sewing circle.” Gallagher’s lawyers said the men were bitter because their chief was stealing snacks from them, needlessly exposing them to fire and then calling them cowards when they questioned his tactics.

The defense argued that the evidence for the charges of shooting civilians was so vague that in one case it amounted to little more than one sniper saying he thought he saw Gallagher shoot someone, but did not actually see the chief pull the trigger.

“There is no physical proof this ever happened, no date, no day, no photos, no video,” Mukasey told the jury. “There is no proof they ever happened, period.”

In rebuttal Monday, Lt. Scott McDonald, one of the Navy prosecutors, told the jury that the defense’s theory of a platoon conspiracy did not make sense because Gallagher’s text messages of him posing with the corpse were not discovered until months after platoon members reported the stabbing to law enforcement.

“An incredible coincidence,” McDonald said. “Out of all the false allegations they would supposedly make up, it would be the one he admitted to.”

The jury of officers and relatively high-ranking enlisted troops listened as matters the Navy probably did not want to air publicly were discussed in court.

At one point, the classified rules of engagement that guided SEALs on who they could kill in Iraq were delivered in a locked black bag by an armed guard. They were not read aloud in court, but one Marine attached to the SEAL platoon testified about part of what they said. Regarding one section of the crowded city of 660,000 along the Tigris River, the Marine testified that for SEAL snipers, “everything on the other side of the river was good to go, was cleared hot, were good targets.”

Other details brought out at trial cast unfavorable light on the elite SEALs. According to testimony, Gallagher’s platoon built a rooftop bar at their compound and had empty beer cans rolling around in their trucks; a lieutenant made a video montage for the platoon, set to music, of enemy corpses from the deployment; a number of SEALs and Marines besides Gallagher took photos with the dead militant; and one SEAL mistook a car loaded with women and children in Mosul for Islamic State fighters and flew a hand-launched explosive drone, known as a Switchblade, into the vehicle, killing them all.

Gallagher could still face administrative punishment from the Navy, including an other-than-honorable discharge.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/us/navy-seal-trial-verdict.html" id="1e6715d2-d208-344c-a357-e6d1e3c35184">The New York Times</a>.

Navy SEAL Chief Accused of War Crimes Is Found Not Guilty of Murder

SAN DIEGO — In a war-crimes trial that roiled the elite Navy SEALs and drew the attention of President Donald Trump, a decorated eight-tour SEAL platoon leader was found not guilty Tuesday of first-degree murder of a captive Islamic State fighter and attempted murder of civilians in Iraq.

Navy SEAL Chief accused of war crimes is found not guilty of murder

The medic, Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott, testified that he watched Gallagher stab the prisoner, a teenage ISIS fighter, in the neck, but that the stab wound did not appear to be life-threatening. After the chief walked away, Scott told the court, he pressed his thumb over the captive’s breathing tube until he died.

“I knew he was going to die anyway, and wanted to save him from waking up to whatever would have happened to him,” Scott said, adding that he had seen other captives tortured and killed by Iraqi forces.

He testified after being granted immunity from criminal prosecution for the events and actions that he would discuss on the stand. A Navy official said that he could still face nonjudicial punishment, including being dropped from the SEALs or discharged from the Navy entirely.

Gallagher, 40, is charged with premeditated murder in the death of the ISIS captive, as well as shooting Iraqi civilians and other crimes. He has pleaded not guilty and denied all the charges.

SAN DIEGO — In stunning testimony that may upend the war crimes trial of Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, a SEAL medic told the court on Thursday that he — not the chief — had killed a wounded captive in Iraq.

Dave Philipps

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