Bowe Bergdahl to be charged with desertion

Was he? Seems that God deserted Napoleon's Big Battalions in Russia. Napoleon could not maintain effective command & control over his larges formations, nor could he provide them with the necessary logistics to keep them fed and supplied.

As such, his Big Battalions were decimated.

 

Triple C, the point with the Israelis, being a small, well trained army, with the will to win, beats larger army.....you can draft all you want, without the will to win, and the country backing it, hard to win or even achieve basic goals in those type wars......
in Nam, they were using the 12 and 13 month system for servicemen...worse, officers were on a 6 month system...this is a recipe for disaster....once someone was in the combat groove, and comrades got to know each other, they're gone!! unit integrity and effectiveness totally wiped out...once they are in the groove, they know they have only a few months left...not like WW2 where they know they had a job to do, and that was defeating hitler....in Nam, they didn't know what the job was....all they wanted was to stay alive until their upcoming exit....no win situation
so you send the entire US military to Nam? we invade NVietnam? we occupy it? then leave? in the meantime the South Vietnam government is a joke, unreliable..the SVietnam government turned over three times in less than 2 years, one by a bloody coup!...and the SVietnam officer corps was corrupt...
with the draft, you are going to get more Bergdahls.....this isn't 1968..the country has changed....I doubt very much the US population would go for it...

 

You are missing the point--the argument is conscription v. volunteer militaries. Quality v. quantity is only tangentially related but there is no necessary relationship. There is also no necessary relationship between success or failure in counterinsurgency and draft or volunteer forces. The army of draftees lost Vietnam, but professionals didn't win Iraq, either, so the comparison is not IMHO valid.

I am not supporting either argument and I think the US is stuck on a volunteer, professional military for the foreseeable future; I simply do not buy the line that conscript forces are somehow inherently inferior to professional ones. They each have their strengths and the political/economic/cultural context in which they are appropriate...

 

Vietnam shouldn't be used at all when it comes to the military matter of the subject being discussed, the soldiers, sailors and airmen did accomplish their mission in preventing the fall of South Vietnam, it was the morons in congress who threw away our victory when they stopped providing military support to the South Vietnamese Armed Forces, which pretty much sealed their fate when the North invaded in '75.

No, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong puppets were fighting to subjugate the Republic of Vietnam, a sovereign and internationally recognized nation under their banner, the north and south were two separate countries, so if Vietnam was an imperialistic war, it was the communists who were the aggressive imperialists.

 

I just wanted to throw something in on this guy. I think they should court martial him for desertion. I wasn't far from where he left his post when I was in Afghanistan. We had to drop our current mission and spend the next 12 hours checking vehicles. Then we spent the next month setting up traffic control points at night looking for that a-hole. We were lucky we didn't lose anybody because of him. Too many people have been let off the hook after joining the military and deserting after 9-11.

 

I'm still a little surprised that the army still accepted him, even though his records from the National Guard show him being unfit for duty. Are they just desperate for gaining numbers? It is puzzling to me and has been ever since this whole thing came about.

 

You bet they needed numbers. Guys were getting out of the army in droves because the deployments were so frequent. The recruiters were also under tons of pressure to get guys in.

 

Of course they were, he mishandled them flagrantly. In the subsequent campaigns (1813-1815), the Allies assembled larger armies and used their numbers more effectively than Napoleon did. Numbers do matter in the long term.

 

I stick to my argument. Note that the Japs failed, even after Singapore. Note also that while the Taliban has been unseated from power the war in Afghanistan is still going on. Yes, Israel is still there, but I must repeat that their quality-over-quantity victories in the field have not given them real long-term security. Yes, we had a draft in Vietnam but we did not call up our guard or reserves, we still dissipated our strength trying to maintain forces in Europe and Korea as well as Vietnam, to make up the numbers we should have had we had to depend on an unreliable allied force (ARVN), and we managed the war about as badly as you can anyway. In the long term, numbers matter in modern war and quality-over-quantity is a dangerous delusion.

That said, I think we should cut this short as we are getting away from the subject of Bergdahl.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3225310/Military-selects-rarely-used-charge-Bergdahl-case.html

just saw this today.....sorry if brought up before, but the charge looks like it's '''misbehavior before the enemy''' [kind of a ridiculous way of putting it ]???.....so this looks like if he did the misbehavior, he also deserted......they say the desertion is harder to prove.....I say BS...either he deserted or he was dragged off his post....DM also says this was used in WW2

http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/mcm/bl99.htm

Article 99 UCMJ Misbavior before the enemy

 

No offense, but you did read the UCMJ link...Right.

Article 85 - Desertion is a "Lesser included offense" of Article 99 - Misbehavior before the enemy (1)Running Away & (5)Cowardly Conduct.

So, it would appear that you are arguing that Mr. Bergdahl be charged with the lesser crime of Desertion, and therefore receive a lighter sentence.

Somehow...I don't think that is the point you are trying to make.

 

According to the article, desertion would get a 5-year sentence. The "misbehavior" charge can get him life in prison. Also, the article says the latter charge is harder to prove, not desertion. Granted, that portion of the article is not written well.

 

What makes you think that this is not the case, and that is the reason he is being charged under Article 99 instead of under Article 85.

Article 99 has the maximum penalty of death in either times of war or times of peace, whereas Article 85 has the maximum penalty of death only in times of war - which in this case could be argumentative since Congress never formally declared war here. Yex, Congress did authorize the use of military force, but I think any good lawyer could argue this point.

 

AFAIK, the maximum penalty is death, although I can't see that judgement being handed down, which is why the DM likely went with a life sentence.

 

I'll defer to you on that. I was just referencing the news article.

 

It's the Daily Mail. What do you expect...Accurate reporting?

 

yes I forgot to highlight that point.......they do have the best pics though.....they had more info, and more pics of a murder in my hometown than the hometown news

 

not trying to make any point.....if he deserted, he deserted....there's no murky area there......looks like the if he deserted he did the misbehavior and vice versa, etc....