For those knowing US and world history, CLINTON era sounded the alarms that global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS were ready to get serious with sacking and looting----bringing on those ROBBER BARON 5% freemason/Greeks basically MAFIA. Reading Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH published early CLINTON era----mapped the same massive global banking schemes of ROBBER BARONS in India as was unleashed here in US. MR FROG the municipal corporation----MR ABRAHAM the global corporation making most of its profits in global black market -----led by nothing more than a 5% freemason/Greek acting as mafia----capturing our US government at national, state, and local level.
Below, we see the same MOVING FORWARD under TRUMP-----POMPEO today as POMPEO 2 thousand years ago----working for global 1% pre-Christian NERO OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
SparkNotes: The Roman Empire (60 BCE-160 CE): Important Terms ...www.sparknotes.com/history/european/rome3/terms
Sextus Pompei - Consul in 70s BCE, procunsul thereafter. ... Otho - One-time crony of Nero who bribed the Praetorian Guard to raise him as Emperor in 69 CE.
Below we see a great big POT ----calling the much smaller KETTLE---BLACK.
After a few decades of making ARABIA a nightmare of civil unrest civil war simply for more wealth and power by global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS----now we focus on Persia. So, does ANY of continuous wars help our 99% of US WE THE PEOPLE? When the only jobs created are military deep, deep, really deep state---IT IS NOT JUST ANY JOB
NO----WE ARE BEING MADE A PERMANENT MILITARY JUNTA COLONIAL ENTITY.
Pompeo: Iran's leaders resemble the mafia
By Emily Birnbaum - 07/22/18 10:38 PM EDT 363
130
© Anna Moneymaker
Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo on Sunday said Iran's leaders resemble "the mafia more than a government."
"The level of corruption and wealth among regime leaders shows that Iran is run by something that resembles the mafia more than a government,” Pompeo said during a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
During his remarks and the Q&A afterwards, Pompeo lambasted the Iranian regime and emphasized U.S. support for Iranian citizens, particularly those opposed to the government.
Pompeo offered support for the anti-government protestors that have been rallying across the country in recent months.
"The specific grievances differ," Pompeo said. "But all those voicing dissatisfaction share one thing: they have been ill-treated by a Revolutionary regime. Iranians want to be governed with dignity, accountability and consent."
Our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE CAN RELATE TO THAT
President Trump in May stepped back from former President Obama's Iran nuclear deal, restoring heavy U.S. sanctions against Iran. The deal limited Tehran's nuclear ability in exchange for lifting international oil and financial sanctions, but America's departure has left Iran vulnerable to reinstated sanctions.
Pompeo since May has ramped up rhetoric against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's government. He threatened to impose the "strongest sanctions in history" if Iran did not take dramatic steps towards denuclearization.
The secretary of State described the U.S.'s current strategy toward Iran a "pressure campaign" to get the Iranian government to pull back from aggressive behavior.
"We are asking all nations who are sick and tired of the Islamic Republic’s destructive behavior to join our pressure campaign," Pompeo said.
Pompeo further lambasted Iranian religious leaders as "hypocritical holy men" who amass wealth through corruption and exploitation of Iran's people.
"Iran's leaders have enriched themselves from corruption," Pompeo said.
After his prepared remarks, Pompeo fielded questions about U.S. immigration policy toward Iranian "civil society," including students who want to study at American universities.
The Trump administration's travel ban includes Iran, which means even those unaffiliated with the Iranian government cannot travel to the U.S. without a waiver. The ban, which was upheld by the Supreme Court last month, have left many Iranian students and families in the U.S. in limbo, cut off from their families in their home countries.
"Iran continues to deny us the basic data-sharing systems that dozens of countries have already provided us," Pompeo said, explaining the ban. "We'd like Iran do to that. We still allow students to come in."
He added the Trump administration prioritizes vetting all those who enter the country.
__________________________________________
The US national media likes to make our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE think our US GLOBAL HEDGE FUND IVY LEAGUE universities are the winners-----they being the root of ROBBER BARON frauds these few decades have all the money as endowments---as global corporate profits. Here in Baltimore that would be global hedge fund IVY LEAGUE Johns Hopkins-----the same in US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES across the US. We discussed in detail those universities targeted to being ROBBER BARON centers for fraud----those MR FROG MUNICIPAL 5% freemason/Greek players.
We want to take this week to discuss just WHERE all those hundred trillions of dollars went in sacking and looting AMERICA----and as we state often----it is NOT to any corporation or institution that is AMERICAN.
Below we see where what were our strong, academic US IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES have been made these few decades into simply ABRAHAM GLOBAL CORPORATIONS specializing in black market profits. Now global corporate PRODUCT MILLS----creating PATENTS for anything that will sell.
This chart shows how much more Ivy League grads make than you ...
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/...
The median annual earnings for an Ivy League graduate 10 years after starting amount to well over $70,000 a year. For graduates of all other schools, the median is around $34,000.
For an US global IVY LEAGUE grad to graduate earning $70,000 a year ----that's what state university grads earned right out of college last century. We see our other US college grads earning US LIVING WAGE----THAT IS POVERTY LINE. So, the US no longer has IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES------and what national media PRETENDS are US IVY LEAGUES with big endowments----being powerful and wealthy----as Johns Hopkins have simply been made into MR FROG------these institutions do not have the money-----global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS have all those hundreds of trillions---simply using our once strong academies as MR FROG.
Are students graduating from US IVY LEAGUES paying $30,000 to 60,000 a semester graduating to earn $70,000 a year really WINNERS? Of course not---they are on their way to being global corporate sweat shop white collar professionals.
These 7 US colleges are more selective than some Ivy League schools
Abby Jackson
Jul. 14, 2017, 11:24 AM
And you thought the Ivy League was exclusive. A Stanford University student on campus.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Ivy League colleges are notoriously tough to get into.Their acceptance rates range from 5.2% to 12.5%, and former Ivy League admissions directors say it's harder than ever to gain acceptance to the schools.
So you might be surprised to learn that other schools have even lower acceptance rates.
Business Insider listed schools that are even more selective than some of the Ivies, according to statistics provided on the class of 2021* admission rates from school websites.
*The rates for the University of Chicago and California Institute of Technology reflect class of 2020, as rates for the class of 2021 are not yet publicly provided.
To start, here's the ranking of Ivy League schools by their class of 2021 selectivity:
BI Graphics But even more selective than some of the schools on this list are ...Claremont McKenna College — 10.35%
Claremont McKenna College/Facebook
Located in Southern California, Claremont is a small liberal-arts college. Its acceptance rate is lower than those of Cornell and Dartmouth.
US Military Academy — 9.4%
Robert Libetti/ Business Insider Also referred to as "West Point" or "Army," cadets enrolled have their tuition paid by the US Army. In return, they have an active-duty service obligation. Its admission rate is lower than the rates for Dartmouth and Cornell.
California Institute of Technology — 7.9%
Flickr/Dmitry Mitin Based in Pasadena, Caltech focuses on science and engineering. Its acceptance rate is lower than Cornell's, Dartmouth's, UPenn's, and Brown's.
US Naval Academy — 7.5%
CC BY 2.5 Also referred to as "Navy," students enrolled have their tuition paid by the US Navy and, in return, they have an active-duty service obligation. This school is more selective than Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 7.1%
Via Flickr MIT's mascot is the beaver because of the school's "remarkable engineering and mechanical skill and its habits of industry." Its admissions rate is lower than the rates for Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
University of Chicago — 7.6%
Wikimedia Commons / Adam Jones, Ph.D. The 125-year-old school is in Chicago's Hyde Park community. Its admissions rate is lower than the rates for Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
Stanford University — 4.65%
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Stanford is the most selective college in the US — aside from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which has an acceptance rate of around 4%, but is more of a conservatory than a traditional university.
_____________________________________________
The first thing we see about selective university institutions ----almost all of them are MILITARY ---TIED TO MILITARY----as California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ----with those US universities called most SELECTIVE being extremely far-right wing NEO-CONSERVATIVE-----with UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO having always been the source of global banking 1% far-right wing NEO-LIBERALISM. All those US GLOBAL HEDGE FUND IVY LEAGUES opening to accepting a global banking 5% freemason/Greek creating a CRONYISM THROUGH FAMILY TIES-----are now throwing those 5% freemason/Greek families under the bus.
RUSHDIE'S 'THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH' made a point early in the novel that any of our NEWLY MERELY RICH who bring in those poor relations----will see their corporations fall apart. The moral from RUSHDIE----as that global banking 1% freemason LITERARY STAR----
GO ON---TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN LEAVE THOSE POOR RELATIONS BEHIND.
That is what THE ME GENERATION of these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were about-----those families supported by a single rich relation getting that patronage as business or pay-to-play are first to be made extremely poor----and not soon after MR FROG----MR ABRAHAM as newly merely rich and their network IMPLODE.
Our US national media made big headlines for what are now called THE MOST SELECTIVE-----saying they were opening their doors to become more DIVERSIFIED----of course that simply meant ---instead of accepting our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens----they are now only accepting OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS' global 1% and their 2%---ready to be MR FROG AND MR ABRAHAM.
Stanford is the most selective college in the US --
Stanford University — 4.65%
STANFORD/YALE has always been far-right wing global banking 1% BUSH NEO-CON-----the KNIGHTS OF MALTA-----while UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO/HARVARD has always been the far-right wing global banking 1% TRIBES OF JUDAH----banking teamed with bombing.
March 25, 2016
Stanford offers admission to 2,063 students from around the world
The Office of Undergraduate Admission announced today that 2,063 high school students have been admitted to the Class of 2020 from a pool of 43,997.
Stanford University has offered admission to 2,063 students, including 745 applicants who were accepted last December through the early action program, the Office of Undergraduate Admission announced today.
Richard H. Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid, said the Class of 2020 was carefully selected from 43,997 candidates, the largest application pool in Stanford’s history. The admitted students come from 50 states and 76 countries.
“We are honored by the interest in Stanford, and overwhelmed by the exceptional accomplishments of the students admitted to the Class of 2020,” Shaw said. “Our admitted students reflect the deep and profound diversity of the world in which we live. We believe these students will impact that world in immeasurable ways.”
Under Stanford’s generous financial aid program, which the university expanded in 2015, for parents with total annual income below $125,000 and typical assets for this income range, the expected parent contribution will be low enough to ensure that all tuition charges are covered with need-based scholarships, federal and state grants and/or outside scholarship funds. For parents with total annual income below $65,000 and typical assets for this income range, Stanford will not expect a parent contribution toward tuition, mandatory fees, room or board.
Students admitted under the early and regular decision admission program have until May 1 to accept Stanford’s offer.
______________________________________________
For 300 years in US our US politicians have been given a BONE-----by allowing a political appointment to these US military academies------this is what kept ALL IN THE FAMILY these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----the top military officers MOVING FORWARD global military mercenary corporations. TOP US OFFICERS graduate from these military academies------it is these top officers tied to being made GENERALS----who are always tied to being global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA.
This network of ROBBER BARON 5% freemason/Greek players these few decades was that MR FROG----MR ABRAHAM US Department of Defense massive frauds of tens of trillions----global development corporations as offshore SHELL CORPORATIONS made that 5% US global banking player newly merely rich funneling that wealth down to poor relations.
HOW DID OUR US 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE ALLOW A STRONG, FIRST WORLD, DEVELOPED NATION, RULE OF LAW, THRIVING REAL FREE MARKET ECONOMY ---BE MADE INTO MR FROG AND MR ABRAHAM?
So, these CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ROBBER BARON POLS appointing to our US military academies----
NO LONGER HAVE THAT ABILITY.
So, our Maryland State global banking 1% pols no longer appoint to our ANNAPOLIS MILITARY ACADEMIES-----as to each state having these national military academies.
Bruce Fleming holds degrees from Haverford College, the University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University. He has published more than a dozen books and many articles on subjects ranging from literary theory to dance to military strategy and the U.S. Naval Academy, where he has been a professor since 1987.
His Web site is www.brucefleming.net.
THE FEDERALIST is a right wing think tank pretending to be conservative Republican ---there is nothing FEDERAL coming from this think tank----and Bruce Fleming having graduated from very global banking 1% universities is outing NOW what has existed for several decades because TIMES THEY ARE CHANGING.
Leaders of GLOBAL MILITARY JUNTA do not come from our US newly, merely rich families---they come from global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS' families who appoint to their own 'military academies'.
We see especially our once strong US military academies were taken to being degraded geared towards graduating global corporate mercenary military leaders----and not our US sovereign PUBLIC MILITIA leaders.
It’s Not Just West Point. U.S. Military Academies Have Become Disneyland For Politicians
The service academies are now the vanity projects of the military brass, not viable contributions to U.S. defense.
By Bruce Fleming THE FEDERALIST
October 16, 2017
The military world and military academies—I’m a tenured civilian professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis--were rocked by an October 11 “open letter” exposing the rotten underbelly of our sister academy at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy.
The letter was penned by Robert Heffington, an Army officer and West Point graduate who taught there for several years before retiring. Only his retirement made it possible for him to publish the letter, since officers in uniform cannot publicly disagree with superiors. Within 24 hours, West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslan Jr., head of the administration Heffington holds responsible for its deficiencies, responded by evoking the “thousands of graduates who sacrifice and serve honorably every day.”
Heffington’s letter is a scorcher. It pulls no punches and concludes it’s questionable whether West Point, founded in 1802, “should ever remain open.”
Heffington’s “BLUF,” Bottom Line Up Front: “First and foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but nowhere else. The senior administration at West Point inexplicably refuses to enforce West Point’s publicly touted high standards on cadets, and, having picked up on this, cadets refuse to enforce standards on each other.” He goes on: “The Superintendent refuses to enforce admissions standards or the cadet Honor Code, the Dean refuses to enforce academic standards, and the Commandant refuses to enforce standards of conduct and discipline.”
Heffington notes that students are admitted to play Division I football, which degrades academics: “we routinely admit athletes with ACT scores in the mid-teens across the board. I have personally taught cadets who are borderline illiterate and cannot read simple passages from the assigned textbooks.” Faculty members who object are silenced, he says.
To this, I say “Amen, brother.” Heffington’s letter caused me personal joy and professional agony. I’ve been making a number of the same points about Annapolis, an essentially identical taxpayer-funded institution, for the last several decades, earning repeated salvos of our administration’s ire and attempts to silence me. (West Point has few civilian professors, and no tenured ones.) So it was gratifying to hear someone else say the same things about our sister institution, with more vitriol than I usually employ.
So much needs to change with our institutions, yet there no signs of any changes even being contemplated. This is bad news for the taxpayers who are footing the bill and depend on them for one-fifth of the new officer pool. It’s also bad news for the disaffected, cynical students who have lost faith in the system. I think Heffington saw the cynicism without understanding its source. I think I do.
The Reasons to Prefer a Military Academy Are FewMost upper-class students at service academies have lost faith in the system, because it’s based on lies. First, these places produce about one new officer in five nowadays, far fewer than their glory days. Most other officers come from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, Officer Candidate School, or direct commissions. West Point (USMA) produces about half the number of officers of Army ROTC. Service academy graduates cost taxpayers about half a million dollars each plus wrap-around health care and so on, four times what the average ROTC officer costs and eight times what OCS costs.
That’s right: you can go to a civilian school ROTC for four years, put on a uniform a day or two a week, party as you like, have sex when you want (sex is forbidden at the academies), major in what you want, graduate, and serve alongside academy graduates—and no data show you’ll be a worse officer.
The students know this because they all have iPhones and Google.
The defenders of the academies fall back on that tired cliché of calling them “national treasures.” Up to World War II, they probably were, because that’s where almost all officers came from. We need officers, so if that’s their source, the source is a “treasure.” Only it turned out that officers can come from other sources! So it’s simply not true that all the pointless and infuriating things you have to do at the academies are necessary for being an officer, because 80 percent of officers don’t do these things and are just as good.
Defenders of the academies, invariably themselves graduates who got a college education at taxpayer expense, say they “set the tone” for the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard. There’s no evidence of this, and in any case I hope it’s not true, because their tone is one of deep disillusionment.
Hate to Break It, But We’re Not the ‘Best and Brightest’Another of the big lies, as Heffington shows, is the assertion that military academy students are the “best and the brightest.” I can’t tell whether the military brass really have no clue, or this is just hype to keep the tax dollars flowing and make the students feel it’s worth it. In fact, our SAT scores are about 100 points per test lower than Ivy-level schools, and the spread between upper and lower levels much greater. About 20 percent of our class consists of students recruited for athletics or given preferential admission to achieve racial goals (meaning non-white), and cannot get in even at the low level of SAT scores of 600 on each test with As and Bs in high school.
Not a problem; we send them at taxpayer expense to the relevant prep school, where nine months of a 13th grade are supposed to remediate what may be intrinsic mental slowness or decades of poor education. Typically it doesn’t, and these students fill our pre-college classes in English and math and fail to graduate at higher percentages. The truly gifted students (we have some) realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods. We have no magic chemical test for good “leaders” to make up for academic deficiencies. We don’t even require an interview for admission. Come to my classes to see how little “wow” factor many have.
Another lie is the wild exaggeration of our selectivity. I’ve been on our Admissions Board, so I have expertise Heffington doesn’t. We claim to get about 20,000 applicants, but define “applicant” as no other college does, by including the 7,500 high school juniors who want to come to our six-day summer seminar (only 2,500 come) and recently, all Navy ROTC applicants to any institution, as well as stubs of applications where a kid was convinced to enter his or her name and address and little more.
When I was on the Admissions Board, we considered about 4,500 applications for about 1,800 admits. That’s not the 7 to 8 percent “most selective” statistics the brass continue to report to U.S. News and World Report and the U.S. Department of Education. The students see the disappointing quality of those around them and begin to figure out that somehow these cannot be the “best and the brightest.”
Many Of Our Key Promises Are Broken
Because we admit to serve racial goals and to fill our teams, and because higher graduation rates make us look better, we aren’t about to throw anybody out. So what Heffington says is true: we “remediate” honor offenses nowadays, inability to pass the Physical Readiness Training, and just about everything else. Faculty members have also given up thinking that reporting plagiarism will result in any meaningful action.
Another set of lies is in the way that a policy of “no sex” has survived from the days when it made sense, back when we were all male with no out gays. Now we have one-third women, gay students, and, briefly, transsexual students. They all live in the same dormitory and are full of hormones. Of course they’re going to be having sex. They know what other college students do, and they know they’re not on ships (which also have problems with sex), so the lies the administration tells them about how this is like being deployed don’t impress them.
Finally, the officers they are supposed to emulate are fairly clueless and, according to the students, generally not very good role models. They aren’t here long enough to figure out what’s what, and because they are in the students’ chain of command, the students don’t talk freely with them. By contrast, I have had countless hall and office no-holds-barred conversations with midshipmen over three decades.
What the officers say to students frequently makes no sense: the training staff pitches the same full-bore fit at small infractions as at large. Plebes are told they have “just killed a platoon of Marines” if their uniform is out of reg. They know it isn’t true, so they tune out the adults shouting at them.
We’re All Going Through the Motions
The only reason for the military to get hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to run stand-alone colleges with standard classes is that these classes are somehow different. People on the outside think we’re Hogwarts. We aren’t. We teach the same subjects as down the street at the University of Maryland. Worse, the cadets and midshipmen are sleep-deprived and unwilling students, except for the few dozen top achievers who are candidates for coveted national scholarships. As Heffington notes, they can re-take an F for a higher grade in the summer—at taxpayer expense. Still, with grade inflation, that rarely happens.
They’re like all those military jets the current cabinet members love to use: flashy, expensive, and lots of fun.The vast majority are going through the motions, sleeping in class, memorizing, then mind-dumping largely technical material they forget anyway and whose utility has never been shown. (Electrical engineering for pilots, SEALs, or Marine Corps? Nonsense.) How do I know? They tell me. They won’t tell an 0-5, or anybody wearing a uniform, who can punish them for it.
I have to go to great lengths to get them involved in English, a subject most freshmen (plebes) have no interest in. Two semesters are required, which is good thing because typically their writing is terrible and they cannot organize their ideas coherently. But because the classes are mandatory and they came to be in the military, most are resistant. I have to win them over. We do things they like, such as push-ups and jumping up and down every 20 minutes to keep them awake. This is what it takes. Remember: I’ve been here more than three decades.
Do we teach them leadership? Well, we have courses called that, but at best these are intro psychology classes, and the high numbers of U.S. national academy graduates relieved of command in recent years or caught up in the Fat Leonard scandal suggests that our brand of “leadership” isn’t effective. Leadership, whatever that is, isn’t learned in a classroom.
The service academies are now the vanity projects of the military brass, not viable contributions to US. defense. They’re like all those military jets the current cabinet members love to use: flashy, expensive, and lots of fun. The superintendent lives in a Victorian mansion complete with waitstaff and has a reserved parking spot when he has to go two buildings over. The institution is the staging ground for their retirement ceremonies and funerals, and countless empty colloquia all based around the “leadership” we purport to teach but don’t.
It’s Basically a Military Disneyland
What does make us different from another college is the wrap-around control of students’ lives that leaves them unmotivated and mad, Mickey Mouse regulations that change from regime to regime, are applied randomly, and have no proven officer development benefits. The students realize they are cast members in a military Disneyland run for the benefit of the brass and the tourists, not the taxpayers who pay their way and want better-than-average officers. This is why they dress sloppily, answer back, and seem to take no pride in what they do—all the things Heffington saw as a direct affront to his officership.
For me, one of the most unsettling developments of the military in recent decades has been its courting by politicians to further their own personal agendas. A horrifying example was the disgusting commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence at our last graduation repeatedly telling the military that it was better than the civilians it defends, and his attempt to position President Trump as “the best friend the military ever had.” Who doesn’t support our military? This is creating enemies that don’t exist.
The military is supposed to be apolitical. It’s a tool, not part of a specific political party. We need to do what the British did with Sandhurst: turn undergraduate education over to the ROTC programs and colleges, and use our beautiful buildings (and West Point’s incomparable location on the Hudson) for military graduate courses.
Our service academies are anachronisms trying to pretend they aren’t. The students have caught on. The administration hasn’t, and never will, because then they’d lose their taxpayer-sponsored country clubs. Defense? Nah. It’s all about show. The students, and the taxpayers, pay the price.
__________________________________________
When a nation loses its national sovereignty---it loses its PUBLIC MILITIA-----and these well-respected military institutions were long ago corrupted just as all during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
We discussed last week just who those global banking 1% ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT 5% FREEMASON/GREEK US civil unrest civil war players will be. We KNOW these 5% civil unrest civil war players will be insiders for MR FROG----MR ABRAHAM ---
Below we see to where our US MILITARY ACADEMIES are MOVING FORWARD------revolutionary socialist-----that means these young men see themselves as far-right wing, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISTS----global corporate campus MILITARY JUNTA.
"I consider myself a revolutionary socialist," the 26-year-old Rapone told The Associated Press in a series of interviews'.
COMMUNISM WILL WIN indeed as this is the goal of MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE deep, deep, really deep state military junta.
'"I knew there could be repercussions," said Rapone, who is scheduled to speak at a socialism conference in Chicago next month. "Of course my military career is dead in the water'.
The only 'socialism' conference happening in SUPER-DUPER GLOBAL NAKED NEO-LIBERAL LAISSEZ-FAIRE Chicago of course----is global banking 5% freemason/Greek civil unrest civil war.
Who appointed a SPENSER RAPONE graduating from WEST POINT ready to be that global banking far-right wing LIBERTARIAN MARXIST rebel? ALTMIRE the great big raging global banking 1% Clinton neo-liberal.
Altmire, a Keystone State native and known as a centrist Democrat, represented the western Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District.
Army Splits with West Point Tweeter of 'Communism Will Win'
In this May 2016 photo provided by Spenser Rapone, Rapone raises his left fist while displaying a sign inside his hat that reads "Communism will win," after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. (Courtesy of Spenser Rapone via AP)
The Associated Press 19 Jun 2018 By Mary Esch
WATERTOWN, N.Y. --
The images Spenser Rapone posted on Twitter from his West Point graduation were intentionally shocking:
In one, the smirking cadet opens his dress uniform to expose a T-shirt with a blood-red image of socialist icon Che Guevara. In another, he raises his fist and flips over his cap to reveal the hand-scrawled message: "Communism will win."
Less than a year after Rapone's images drew a firestorm of vitriol and even death threats, the second lieutenant who became known as the "commie cadet" is officially out of the U.S. Army with an other-than-honorable discharge.
Top brass at Fort Drum's 10th Mountain Division accepted Rapone's resignation Monday after an earlier reprimand for "conduct unbecoming of an officer." Rapone said an investigation found he went online to advocate for a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers and U.S. officials. Officially, the Army said in a statement only that it conducted a full investigation and "appropriate action was taken."
An unrepentant Rapone summed up the fallout in yet another tweet Monday that showed him extending a middle finger at a sign at the entrance to Fort Drum, accompanied by the words, "One final salute."
"I consider myself a revolutionary socialist," the 26-year-old Rapone told The Associated Press in a series of interviews. "I would encourage all soldiers who have a conscience to lay down their arms and join me and so many others who are willing to stop serving the agents of imperialism and join us in a revolutionary movement."
Rapone said his journey to communism grew out of his experiences as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan before he was accepted into the U.S. Military Academy. And those views only hardened during his studies of history as one of the academy's "Long Gray Line."
He explained that he took the offending selfies at his May 2016 West Point graduation ceremony and kept them to himself until last September, when he tweeted them in solidarity with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was taking heat for kneeling for the national anthem to raise awareness of racism. Many other military personnel also tweeted in favor of Kaepernick, although most were supporting free speech, not communism.
West Point released a statement after Rapone posted the photos, saying his actions "in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army."
OH, REALLY????
And U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, called on the secretary of the Army to remove Rapone from the officer ranks.
"While in uniform, Spenser Rapone advocated for communism and political violence, and expressed support and sympathy for enemies of the United States," Rubio said Monday, adding "I'm glad to see that they have given him an 'other-than-honorable' discharge."
One of six children growing up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Rapone said he applied to West Point, which is tuition-free, because he couldn't afford college. He was nominated out of high school by then-U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire in 2010.
"He was an honors student, an athlete, a model citizen who volunteered in the community," recalled Altmire, a Democrat. "During the interview, he expressed patriotism and looked just like a top-notch candidate. There were no red flags of any kind."
But he wasn't accepted to West Point, so Rapone enlisted in the Army. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 and was assigned as an assistant machine gunner in Khost Province.
"We were bullies in one of the poorest countries on Earth," Rapone said. "We have one of the most technologically advanced militaries of all time and all we were doing is brutalizing and invading and terrorizing a population that had nothing to do with what the United States claimed was a threat."
Toward the end of his deployment, he learned West Point fulfills a certain quota of enlisted soldiers every year. Despite his growing disillusionment about the military, he applied and got in.
"I was still idealistic," he said." I figured maybe I could change things from inside."
In addition to classic socialist theorists such as Karl Marx, Rapone says he found inspiration in the writings of Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces master sergeant who became a socialist anti-war activist.
Even while still a cadet, Rapone's online postings alarmed a West Point history professor, who wrote Rapone up, saying his online postings were "red flags that cannot be ignored." Rapone was disciplined but still allowed to graduate.
Greg Rinckey, an attorney specializing in military law, said it's rare for an officer out of West Point to receive an other-than-honorable discharge. He added that it's also possible the military academy could seek repayment of the cost of Rapone's education because he didn't serve the full five-year service obligation required upon graduation.
"I knew there could be repercussions," said Rapone, who is scheduled to speak at a socialism conference in Chicago next month. "Of course my military career is dead in the water. On the other hand, many people reached out and showed me support. There are a lot of veterans both active duty and not that feel like I do."
__________________________________________
Throughout CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ------those handed privatized military mercenary corporations did not graduate from our US public military academies-----they were tied to being global banking 5% freemason/Greek players having little experience in military training. They learned all that lying, cheating, and stealing needed to move tens of trillions of dollars in Department of Defense spending to building these global military corporations----but taking their instructions from GLOBAL 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA. PRINCE is simply that 33rd degree freemason just as TRUMP, CLINTON/BUSH----
Prince was accepted into the United States Naval Academy and attended it for three semesters before leaving, citing that he loved the Navy but disliked the Academy. He went on to receive his B.A. in economics from Hillsdale College in 1992'
After college, Prince was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy via Officer Candidate School in 1992. Hillsdale College is a private, conservative Christian college in Hillsdale, Michigan.
As our US public military is being dismantled and employment being slashed-----what used to be our public militia are now being hired to be those global banking 5% freemason/Greek civil unrest civil war leaders.....NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR 300 YEAR OLD US PUBLIC MILITARY ACADEMIES.
So, PRINCE a few decades ago obviously wrote some good grant and outsourcing contracts to be made owner of what is now REPLACING our US military academies in training global military rank and file and recruiting and hiring what would be GENERALS-----now simply HIGH-RANKING CORPORATE EXECUTIVES.
MR FROG AND MR ABRAHAM as our local US city municipal corporation and global corporation steeped in black market profiteering----MOVING FORWARD to being GLOBAL MILITARY JUNTA as criminal---as corrupt---more brutal---filled with employees NOT tied to US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. An OCCUPYING military is never filled with people from that sovereign nation.
THIS is why our US public military academies which used to graduate quality officers tied to US Rule of Law and professional military standards-----is now in hands of global mercenary corporations doing all that training.
Starting a Private Military Company – A Complete GuideAre you interested in starting a private military contractor company?
If YES, here is a complete guide to starting a private military company with little money and no experience.
Okay, so we have provided you an in-depth sample private military company business plan template. We also took it further by analyzing and drafting a sample private mercenary services marketing plan backed up by actionable guerrilla marketing ideas for car private military companies. In this article, we will be considering all the requirements for starting a private military company. So put on your entrepreneurial hat and let’s proceed.
Why Start a Private Military Company?The need for a secured environment cannot be relegated to the background in our today’s world full of chaos and graphical waste of lives, as a matter of fact; there are organizations that can’t operate if they don’t have private military as security guards.
For example; oil companies that work in rigs in hostile environment or construction companies that work in areas prone to violence would need armed security personnel to provide security for them in order for them to carry out their operations. That is where private military companies come in.
At the end of the Cold War between the United States and the now balkanized USSR, the world’s standing armies began to get smaller. Meanwhile, the nature of warfare was changing. Low-intensity conflict began to replace large-scale wars. In such a conflict, armed force is just one small part of an expansive menu of social, economic and political tools available to engage an enemy.
Accompanying this silent wars trend was a dramatic increase in the use and proliferation of advanced weapon systems. Maintaining these systems became a serious challenge. Soldiers spent more time monitoring weapons and learning how to operate them. With resources already stretched thin, armies were having trouble keeping up.
Floating a private military company is a little bit challenging simply because of the various huddles and governmental challenges you need to scale through before you can be issued license from the United States government. You are expected to have a sound military background, relevant certifications and clean criminal records. Once you are able to secure your license, you will still be expected to abide by the rules and regulations governing the business or else your license will be revoked and your company shot down.
Starting a Private Military Company – A Complete Guide
The industry is growing with some estimating annual contracts in the $10-$20 billion range and others citing numbers as high as $100 billion. Though a worldwide phenomenon, the United States and Great Britain account for over 70% of the world’s market for their services.
Dramatic growth in the number and size of private military companies occurred at the time of the end of the Cold War, as Western governments increasingly began to rely on their services to bolster falling conventional military budgets. Some of the larger corporations are: Vinnell and Military Professional Resources Inc. in the United States; G4S and Keeni-Meeny Services in the United Kingdom; Lordan-Levdan in Israel and Executive Outcomes in South Africa.
The services of private contractors are used around the world. P. W. Singer author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry says “In geographic terms, it operates in over 50 different countries. It’s operated in every single continent but Antarctica.” Singer stated that in the 1990s there used to be 50 military personnel for every 1 contractor, now the ratio is 10 to 1. He also points out that these contractors have a number of duties depending on who they are hired by.
In developing countries that have natural resources, such as oil refineries in Iraq, they are hired to guard the area. They are also hired to guard companies that contract services and reconstruction efforts such as General Electric. Apart from securing companies, they also secure officials and government affiliates.
Starting a Private Military Company – Market Research and Feasibility
There’s always going to be competition. Some of it will be good for you, and some of it will be bad for you. Accept it as part of life. Just keep in mind that you’re in business because you feel you can do a better job; you can do it more efficiently; and you can do it with greater satisfaction to your customers than anyone else. Be aware of the competition, but don’t worry about it. Just stick to your own business plan and you’ll be okay.
List of Well Known Brands in the Private Military Industry
The market for private military forces is enormous, so it’s no surprise that many different companies have emerged to capitalize on the billions of available dollars. The following is a list of popular private military companies that have existed or currently exist:
The private military company business is really terribly expensive to get into. Once you have the necessary equipment, insurance, and supplies, you’re ready to roll. The hard part is going to be drumming up business. Now days, just about any small business is going to be very competitive, due to the fact that so many people have lost their military jobs over the last few years since the cold war, and many of them are going into business of security themselves. If you work hard and do a good job, then business will come your way.
Starting a private military company is not like starting a mom and pop business in a street corner in down town Chicago, IL; it is indeed a serious business hence critical economic analysis must be conducted to ensure that the risks and other threats associated with starting a business from the scratch or investing in a business idea are mitigated.
If you are considering starting a private military company in the United States, your concern should not be restricted to just acquiring an office facility and equipping the facility or hiring the best hands in the industry, you should also be concerned on how to attract clients and secure mouthwatering security contracts.
On the average, setting up and running a private military business in the United States can be cost effective simply because you don’t have to maintain a large workforce when you don’t have a security contract to execute. With key good company’s profile, highly trained, highly qualified and highly experienced staff members in your team, you won’t have to struggle much to win security contracts when you submit your bids.
Is a Private Military Company Worth Starting from Scratch or is Buying a Franchise Better?
Personally, I don’t see the need for you to even consider buying a franchised operation. There’s just too much real help available for the “independent” to go to the considerable expense and obligation of a franchise. Starting from scratch, and as an independent, this is most assuredly a low-investment, low-overhead type business the kind we recommend for anyone and everyone who’s determined to make it on his own.
Although there is the possibility of buying a franchise from a successful private military company or even partnering with a big security company if you are considering owning an investment in the security industry.
One thing is certain, people are motivated to start a business based on various factors and incentives. If you are looking towards building a business that you intend controlling, a business brand that you hope to one day transfer ownership to your children and perhaps also sell franchise in future, then starting from the scratch should be your best bet. But if you only interested in making money and multiplying your wealth, then you may as well buy the franchise of a successful private military company that is willing to sell its franchise.
Possible Threats and Challenges of Starting a Private Military Company
Generally in the private military industry, both the already established private military companies and start – up security companies are subject to threat and challenges from government policies, global economic downturn which usually affects spending and unforeseen natural disasters (disasters that may cause setback).
Another threat that you are likely going to face when you start your own private military company is the arrival of a well – established private military company in the location where your business has strong presence.
Starting a Private Military Company – Legal Issues
There are a number of tax and legal protections that you are afforded when you do so. Therefore, check with a tax or legal professional on the benefits of the different types of business entities and whether you should consider having your business become such an entity.
No doubt starting a private military company is indeed a serious business which is why the legal entity you choose will go a long way to determine how big the business to can grow. Choosing a legal entity for a business such as a private military company is some worth straightforward especially if you decided to grow the business big.
When it comes to choosing a legal entity for your private military company you have the option of choosing from a general partnership, a limited partnership, an LLC, a “C” corporation, or a “S” corporation. It is important to clearly state that these different forms of legal structure for business has its own advantages and disadvantages; which is why you must weigh your options properly before making your choice on the legal structure to build your private military outfit on.
These are some of the factors you should consider before choosing a legal entity for your private military company; limitation of personal liability, ease of transferability, admission of new owners and investors’ expectation and tax issues. If you take your time to critically study the various legal entities to use for your private military company, then you will agree that limited liability company; an LLC is the most suitable. You can start your private military company as a limited liability company (LLC) and in future convert it to a ‘C’ corporation or even a ‘S’ corporations especially when you have the plans of going public.
Upgrading to a ‘C’ corporation or ‘S’ corporation will afford you the opportunity to grow your private military company so as to compete with major players in the security industry; you will be able to generate capital from venture capital firms, stock market, you will enjoy separate tax structure, and you can easily transfer ownership of the company; you will enjoy flexibility in ownership and in your management structures as well.
Catchy Business Name ideas Suitable for a Private Military Company
Your private military company business name will be the first impression for your security business. Whatever the name is, it does not have to be flashy and lousy, make it less attention seeking as possible. Based on whichever name it is, it must create fear and make your clients feel safe. Consider the following names for your start-up;
In the United States and of course in most countries of the world, you can’t operate a business without having some of the basic insurance policies that is required by the industry you want to operate from. Besides, the nature of the security industry requires that you have the proper insurance cover in place or else you will be forced out of business if anything goes wrong with the security contract you are handling.
So, it is important to create a budget for insurance and perhaps consult an insurance broker to guide you in choosing the best insurance policies for your private military company; it is their duty to help you assess the risks involved in the type of security business you intend running and then advice you accordingly.
Here are some of the basic insurance covers that you should consider purchasing if you want to start your own private military company in the United States of America; General insurance, health insurance, risk Insurance, payment protection insurance, liability insurance, workers compensation, overhead expense disability insurance and, business owner’s policy group insurance.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
If you are considering starting your own private military firm, then you should consider filing for intellectual property protection. Filing for intellectual property protection for your firm is not only limited to your company’s logo and other documents, and but also protecting of course the name of your company.
If you want to file for intellectual property protection and also register your trademark in the United States, then you are expected to begin the process by filing an application with the USPTO. The final approval of your trademark is subjected to the review of attorneys as required by USPTO.
Is Professional Certification Needed to Run a Private Military Company?
Even though to operate legally, you must obtain a business license to operate the business, it is not technically required by law to employ licensed and certified personnel. To work for a private contractor agency as a security professional, workers must earn a private military contractor license or registration with their state.
Applicants typically need to hold a certain amount of training or experience and must pass a private military contractor exam. They may also need to undergo fingerprinting, and pass a criminal background test. Any security contractors who carry weapons must also be properly registered with their state.
List of Legal Documents Needed to Run a Private Military Company
Register your business with the government. Laws vary by state. Talk to your state Department of defense and Department of Licensing to receive the forms that you need to establish your business and to learn if you need a license to do b. You can notify the federal government of your business by applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN). You can also create a business name for yourself and file a “Doing Business As” or “DBA” notice.
These are some of the basic legal document that you are expected to have in place if you want to start a cleaning business in the United States of America;
Now, setting up a business plan to help start a carpet cleaning business isn’t rocket science and does not necessarily involve a business consultant’s input. The key to any business plan is to make a list of those things you will be spending money on and how much you will be getting in.
You might wonder why you need to have a business plan. You already know what kind of services you could offer. All you need is to find a client to start your bookkeeping business. If you need to do some marketing, you might say “I will think about it along the way”.
However, one of the most important management functions is planning. Without planning, you don’t know which way your business is going and you cannot measure your progress. A lot of small businesses fail because of poor planning.
Here is a list of items in your business plan to consider:
There are several expenses that you would have to make before successfully launching your own private military company. It is important to state that the location you choose to launch your business will definitely impact on the overall cost of starting the business which is why it is very important to have concluded and analyzed your feasibility studies and market survey before drawing up a budget and sourcing for funding for your business.
Here are some of the basic costs you must look towards fulfilling when starting a private military company in the United States of America;
On the average, you would need over 500,000 US dollars to start a medium scale private military company in the United States of America. If you choose to start a large scale private military company, then you should look towards budgeting about 4 million US dollars and above. This money includes paying military experts that will be on your employee / payroll.
Choosing a location for your business is not what you should do without due consultation. The truth is that if you get it wrong with the location where you have decided to pitch your business tent, you are more likely going to struggle to make headway with the business.
One of the major reasons why businesses struggle, fail and eventual close shop is the fact that the owners decided to choose a wrong location for the business. As a private military contractor, situating your firm in a country or state hostile to your cause will kill your business from onset.
Nonetheless, if you are able to build a successful security company brand, you can pitch your business in any part of the world and still make success out of the business- especially if you run a security consultancy and advisory business. Conversely, if you are just starting out; especially if you are a newbie in the industry, it is important that you locate your business in an area with healthy business activities.
Starting a Private Military Company – Technical and Manpower Details
Your manpower as a military contracting firm depends on the scale at which you operate, if you operate on a small scale, you will only be the one running the business but if you choose to expand and go medium then you will need at least 4 more workers, anything above 4 employees means you are operating on a large scale.
Whichever scale you wish to operate will determine your manpower need and it is important for you to know that the industry is labor intensive which only needs people to man the equipment.
These are only issued by authorized and recognized government agencies, such as Ministries of Defense and Interior (Police). Further in order to use lethal equipment and or equipment that may interfere with the Air Defense, Air Space Control, GSM, and or radio frequencies, they have to have permission and coordination of the government in the territory in which they are going to operate.
For especially sensitive equipment, it is normally GFE or Government Furnished Equipment. Which means in order to do the job, the government will provide the equipment and you (the contractor) operate and maintain it.
Starting a Private Military Company – The Marketing Plan
In most cases, you’ll be favorably impresses with the work, and will only have to pay with a copy of the finished flyer for the student’s portfolio, and a recommendation or testimonial about his work for you. Even if there should be a charge for the work you have done at the college, it will be a reasonable one.
Contracting with an advertising agency will probably take longer and will cost a significant amount of money. However, you might be able to contact a staff member who does private work on the side. But you should set a specific date for completion of the project, and agree to pay no more than half the total estimated cost until the job is finished, and meets with your approval.
The next step is to take this original of your flyer to a printer, and have printed whatever number of copies you want to start. Most quick print shops will be able to print up to 20,000 copies, and deliver in a reasonable time, with nominal costs. If you decide to start with more than 20,000 copies, you will do better by going to a regular commercial printer. Larger quantities that would take a quick print shop all day can be handled by a commercial print shop in a few hours.
While your flyers are being printed, you should be lining up your delivery people -local Brownie or Cub Scout Troops. No big problem here. Either look up their local headquarters office in your phone book or call a friend or two with children about the right age for the name and phone number of troop leaders. Arrange to pay these scout troops $10 for each thousand circulars they hand out door-to-door.
One other thing before you start handing out your flyers, be sure that you have someone available to answer the phone and set up appointments for you. It’s usually best to have a woman do this; it makes the caller think of your service as an established business. You can pay an answering service to handle these calls for you, but if your wife or a friend is available that would be even better. It is, however, imperative that a “live voice” answer your phone. People have some strange ideas about answering machines, and most businesses find they do much better not using them.
Possible Competitive Strategies for Winning Competitors in the Private Military Industry
Even before the acquisition of equipment, you need customers. Your prospects are all the businesses and organizations you can convince. Your problem is going to be in reaching these prospects, impressing upon then the benefits of your service, and getting them set up with an appointment for you to do the work.
Contracting with an advertising agency will probably take longer and will cost a significant amount of money. However, you might be able to contact a staff member who does private work on the side. But you should set a specific date for completion of the project, and agree to pay no more than half the total estimated cost until the job is finished, and meets with your approval.
Possible Ways to Increase Client Retention for your Private Military Company
Once you have the skills and your equipment ready, it is time to start sourcing for clients and most times based on your pedigree and past records, your clients will look for you. It is important for you to decide the category of military business you want to opt for. To create awareness for your business, you should develop a business proposal and send to likely clients. You should also consider opening a website.
Strategies to Boost your Brand Awareness and Create a Corporate identity for your Private Military Company
A good way to boost your corporate reputation and create an impression is to invest in a uniform and dress neatly at all times. You should also have your employees wear uniforms and be of proper conduct. This will ensure that you are properly branded. You must also ensure that you handle your client’s property with care and observe all safety rules.
You should know that most client’s would be observing you while you work and therein lies the success of your business because the probability of a client calling you back for another job or recommending you to other people depends on their first impression of you and the way you handled their job.
Creating a Suppliers/Distributors Network for your Private Military Company
As a private military firm, be on the lookout for opportunities and referrals from other firms who are not in your niche. So also, utilize you chances by contacting your banks, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and multi-national corporations to patronize and help them with their security needs.
Tips for Running a Private Military Company Successfully
The business of military contracting is a very risky venture that will later come with several court litigations and petitions due to the excesses of your personnel. As a business owner, you will succeed more in this field if you can train your military personnel to tone down these excesses. If they don’t, a bunch of the millions you make will be used in settling lawyers and paying damages in the long run.
___________________________________________
When our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens allowed our REAL public military be taken by global corporations-----when our US military leaders are graduating from global mercenary military corporations owned and operated by people having no ties to US public military academies------we get NATO AS NERO.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
We discussed last week how global mercenary military corporations act just as MR ABRAHAM global corporation black market profiteer of RUSHDIE'S 'THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH'.
NATO AS UNITED NATIONS AS NERO/CATO/SENECA------Indeed, Europe as US are slated to BURN. The US after several decades of funding global military actions using our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE Federal, state, and local taxes will now step aside as head of NATO to allow global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS decide who those GENERALS----MAJORS inside US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----will be.
LET'S SEE, BACK IN 3000BC ---1000 BC ANY BEOWULF RUTHLESS, BRUTAL, AND MOST MEGLOMANIAC GOT TO BE COLONIAL MILITARY JUNTA---
So, that is indeed what TODAY'S US CITIES as deep, deep, really deep state global MILITARY JUNTAs will look like as well. The difference today from 1000BC----the goals of PERMANENT SMART CITIES with goals of massive depopulation.
Below we see US far-right wing think tank CATO outing NATO AS NERO-----when in fact CATO was team NERO AND SENECA. Again, in US what have always been far-right wing LIBERTARIAN political groups and think tanks----are being made to sound like they CARE FOR OUR US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown ----
ALL THE ACTIONS THESE FEW DECADES OF CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA WERE FAR-RIGHT LIBERTARIAN----PLEASE DON'T FALL FOR MORE PRETENDING.
Commentary
NATO as Nero: Alliance Postures While Europe BurnsBy Doug Bandow
This article appeared in Forbes on May 20, 2012.
NATO leaders are meeting in Chicago with a full agenda. It’s the biggest NATO meeting ever, with some 60 governments in attendance. But no one is asking the most important question: why is America still defending Europe?
The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance once had an obvious purpose: to defend North Atlantic countries. More precisely, the U.S. was to protect everyone else. The war-ravaged western European states feared pressure, if not conquest, by the Soviet Union. NATO also helped tie a rearmed Germany to its neighbors.
The alliance finished its work on November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Soon the Warsaw Pact dissolved and the Soviet Union disappeared.
There then ensued a desperate attempt to find a new role for the alliance. Some officials suggested that NATO could fight the illicit drug trade, promote the environment, or even aid student exchanges. Alliance advocates settled on engaging in “out-of-area” activities. That is, NATO abandoned its traditional role of defending its members and switched to pursuing social engineering around the globe, as well as acting as a tool to socialize former communist states.
One thing did not change. The U.S. continued to subsidize the defense of everyone else. NATO essentially stood for North America and The Others. If anything was going to happen, it would have to be organized and paid for by Washington.
Even during the Cold War the Europeans would promise to increase military spending, only to welsh when budgets got tight. Once the threat from the Soviet Union dissipated so did the continent’s heretofore modest interest in self-defense. Before he retired as Defense Secretary, Robert Gates complained that European military budgets “have been chronically starved for adequate funding for a long time, with the shortfalls compounding themselves each year.”
The consequences have been grave. According to the group Notre Europe, the continent suffers “some alarming shortfalls in the areas of strategic transportation, communication, intelligence, logistics and satellites, requiring the implementation of costly reforms in terms of resources.” Despite having 1.8 million men under arms, at most 100,000 of them “are equipped and sufficiently trained to be able to be deployed in crisis theaters.”
Successive crises have driven down European military outlays. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has detailed cuts in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and others. Even Great Britain, which traditionally maintained the most serious European military with the greatest expeditionary capabilities, is dramatically cutting outlays and capabilities. James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School complained: “The European countries have made a strategic-level to disarm essentially.”
For years the Europeans talked of creating a continental military capability separate from NATO. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty was supposed to boost this process. However, the idea was stillborn. It’s not much good having a Common Defense and Security Policy without the military necessary to back it up.
The problem was evident in 1999 when the allies bombed essentially defenseless Yugoslavia. America did most of the work since Europe was estimated to have barely 10 to 15 percent of U.S. combat capabilities.
Last year’s intervention in the Libyan civil war was no better. It was supposed to be a European-led operation, but the Europeans took months to push the opposition to victory over the ragtag forces of Moammar Qaddafi.
Just eight NATO members contributed anything militarily; most contributions were minimal. Several countries ran short of munitions. According to the IISS: “the NATO air operations center in Italy managing the campaign had been designed to run 300 sorties a day, but was struggling to manage 150, about one-third the number flown over the much smaller Serbia/Kosovo theater in 1999.” Washington was responsible for destroying anti-aircraft defenses, launching drone attacks, providing 80 percent of aerial refueling, and, of course, resupplying the Europeans when their weapon stocks ran low. “Europe is dead militarily,” one general told Robert Kaplan of the Center for a New American Security.
However, for the Obama administration there is no looking back. America’s NATO ambassador, Ivo Daalder, wants the alliance to go global. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently opined: “Of course, NATO is and always will be a transatlantic organization. But the problems we face today are not limited to one ocean and neither can our work be.”
Where will the necessary forces come from? National Security Adviser Tom Donilon admitted: “We know that allies need more advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. They face shortages in helicopters and transport aircraft. They need to make greater investments in the precision munitions and unmanned systems that are critical on today’s battlefields and will be even more important in the future.” Last year only two of the other 27 NATO members devoted more than two percent of GDP to the military.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: “We need to use this moment to make the case for the need to invest in this alliance, to ensure it remains relevant to the security challenges of the future.” Similarly, NSA Donilon noted that President Barack Obama was “asking the alliance to ensure that it has cutting-edge capabilities.”
Greece appears headed out of the European monetary union. Voters in France, Germany, and Italy have revolted against fiscal austerity. Britain’s economy has fallen back into recession. The government in the Netherlands collapsed with early elections to follow. The economic news in Spain continues to worsen. Who in Europe is going to spend more money to provide “cutting-edge capabilities”?
An embarrassed NATO Secretary General Andes Fogh Rasmussen has proposed “smart defense,” which means “money spent more effectively. It is shared defense. It is efficient defense.”
Which in practice means NATO is going to remain North America and The Others. Washington will still be on call to meet European as opposed to American security needs, as in Libya.
With the end of any existential threat to Europe, NATO today only fights wars in which the members have no common interest. The Balkans conflicts were tragic, but had only minimal impact even on European alliance members. The status of the former Yugoslav republics was of no meaningful interest to America. Yet Washington essentially fought that war for the Europeans, who have since ruled Bosnia as colonial overlords and are attempting to force the ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo to submit to another artificial state based in Pristina.
The U.S. dragged the Europeans into a more than decade long war in Afghanistan against the wishes of the European peoples. They have little interest in establishing a modern, liberal democratic state in Central Asia. Which is why most European countries imposed “caveats”—an incredible 83 at the start—limiting their personnel’s exposure to combat.
The Europeans now all desperately want out. The Chicago summit was supposed to formalize a gradual withdrawal timetable. However, newly elected French President Francois Hollande promised to pull his nation’s 3300 troops out by the end of the year, though doing so may be logistically difficult. With the NATO military mission formally scheduled to last until the end of 2014, the Obama administration fears Paris’s plan may spark a rush to the exit.
Britain and France returned the favor in Libya when they effectively got the rest of Europe and the U.S. to fight their war. Similar efforts are brewing to ensnare NATO—which means America—in Syria’s civil war. For instance, the foreign minister of Belgium, which has all of 34,300 men under arms, recently pushed for debate over invading Syria to create “humanitarian corridors.” Everyone knows who would be doing the bulk of the fighting, and it wouldn’t be Belgium.
It brings to mind Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn’s insistence last year that stopping Qaddafi “requires military action.” The Grand Duchy had a population of less than a half million, no air force or navy, an army of 900 men, and a paramilitary gendarmerie of 612. Just whose military did Minister Asselborn expected to do the stopping?
Yet NATO expansion is in the air. In March Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), just defeated for reelection in his party’s primary, and Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) introduced the “NATO Enhancement Act” to extend the alliance. Unfortunately, NATO expansion adds security liabilities rather than military abilities.
Originally the alliance was created to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union. Today no country is in a position to dominate Eurasia. The idea of an attack on western—or central—Europe is but a paranoid fantasy. Russia may be an unpleasant neighbor, but it has reverted to pre-1914 great power mode. Moscow wants secure borders and international respect. Florid threats to preempt a missile defense system to the contrary, even Vladimir Putin at his most aggressive isn’t likely dreaming of a revived Red Army marching down the Unter den Linden in Berlin or Champs-Elysees in Paris.
If there is genuine danger of Russian military action, it is in the east, precisely where NATO is expanding. However, these areas were part of or dominated by both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. America still has an interest in the liberated states’ development into vibrant democracies, but that does not warrant potential war with a nuclear-armed power.
Morgan Lorraine Roach and Luke Coffey of the Heritage Foundation argue that adding new members “is critical to mobilizing Europe and its allies around a collective transatlantic defense.” But look at the list of potential new members.
The top tier of aspirants, endorsed by Sen. Lugar’s legislation, holds Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia, and Montenegro.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is an artificial country ruled by the European Union’s “High Representative.” Bosnia exists only because Western military intervention forced Serbs and Croats to remain in a territory dominated by Bosniaks. There is little more unity today than in 1995 when Bosnia was established by the Dayton Accords. Bosnia’s internal tensions—Serbs in the Republic Srpska continue to strongly resist “national” rule—would become an American problem with NATO membership. The IISS describes the Bosnian armed forces as “an uneasy amalgam of troops from all three formerly warring entities.” Bringing such an entity into NATO would be little short of madness.
Adding Georgia would be even more foolish. Tbilisi desperately wants to join NATO, but has a very bad relationship with Russia, with which it fought a brief war in August 2008. Georgia’s human rights record remains “uneven,” according to Human Rights Watch. Indeed, Freedom House reports “electoral problems such as the abuse of state resources, reports of intimidation aimed at public employees and opposition activists, and apparent voter-list inaccuracies.”
Worse, President Mikhail Saakashvili started the 2008 conflict by attacking Russian forces in the breakaway territory of South Ossetia. Many suspect that he did so because he expected Western support. The Georgian people deserve to be free and secure, but not at the risk of war for America. For Moscow border security is a vital interest: imagine America’s reaction if Russia forged a seemingly hostile military alliance with Mexico.
Macedonia also wants in but has been blocked by Greece in a dispute over the former’s name, which refers to territory included within the latter’s boundaries. Macedonia also has been caught in the riptide of Albanian nationalism, barely avoiding a destructive civil war like that in Kosovo. Freedom House warned that “poor relations between the Macedonian Slav majority and the ethnic Albanian minority have raised doubts about the country’s long-term viability.” Last year the International Crisis Group cited “rising ethnic Macedonian nationalism, state capture by the prime minister and his party, decline in media and judicial independence, increased segregation in schools and slow decentralization” which “risk undermining the multi-ethnic civil state Macedonia can become.” With a military of just 8000 Macedonia would add little to the alliance.
Montenegro is much the same, only it has an even smaller armed forces and closer economic relationship with Russia, the chief target of NATO. Montenegro also managed to achieve a peaceful separation from Yugoslavia and avoided being pulled into the violent whirlpool of Albanian separatism next door. But there is no reason to add it as a new American defense client.
Kosovo, Serbia, and Ukraine are on some lists as well.
Kosovo is another artificial state born of war with allied military support. Kosovo has been recognized only by about half of the world’s states. It remains under allied occupation without a formal military. Its government contains men charged with criminal involvement and war crimes; corruption and human rights remain problems. The European Commission acknowledged that “public administration reform in Kosovo remains a major challenge.” The north of Kosovo, with an ethnic-Serb majority, continues to maintain a separate existence with close links to Belgrade.
Another candidate is Serbia, which NATO countries bombed for 78 days in 1999. Now Belgrade wants to join the onetime aggressors. However, Serbia continues to refuse to recognize Kosovo—a perfectly reasonable decision, but one in conflict with the policy of most NATO members. And while the Serbian military is larger than Montenegro’s, it would require bountiful American subsidies to bring it up to alliance standards.
Ukraine also has its supporters, though a majority of Ukrainians oppose the idea and the Yanukovich government is in very bad odor in the West. Kiev is capable of deterring an attack from Russia. Moreover, adding Ukraine would further poison relations with Moscow, appearing as part of an American-inspired effort at encirclement. NATO membership also would make Ukraine’s disputes with Russia America’s disputes.
Advocates of NATO expansion treat security guaranties as hotel chocolates to be placed on every nation’s pillow, irrespective of America’s national interests. The U.S. has nothing at stake which warrants the expense necessary to upgrade the alliance aspirants’ militaries or the risk of going to war for them against a nuclear-armed power. Adding these nations would not fulfill the most basic purpose of any alliance: to enhance America’s security.
Of course, while war with Moscow is unlikely, it remains possible. As Kaplan argued, it would be wrong to assume “that Europe will face no geopolitical nightmares in its future.” However, this argues against moving NATO further eastward. For Russia border security is a vital concern. Four years ago Russia demonstrated its willingness to defend those interests with military force, if necessary. The deterioration in that nation’s conventional forces means that Moscow would be forced to rely on nuclear weapons as the ultimate equalizer in any confrontation with the West. Warned Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian General Staff: “In certain conditions, I do not rule out local and regional armed conflicts developing into a large-scale war, including using nuclear weapons.”
Europe still should be defended. But by Europeans.
Before the Chicago summit former U.S. NATO ambassador Kurt Volker complained about “things that are not on the agenda that are the most important issues.” He pointed to Syria, Iran, and the Arab Spring, none of which NATO could—or should—do much about. But one important issue was left off the agenda: NATO’s future.
Last June Secretary Gates predicted “a dim if not dismal future” for the alliance. He warned “that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” Last October Gates’ successor, Leon Panetta, was only slightly less blunt: “legitimate questions about whether, if present trends continue, NATO will again be able to sustain the kind of operations that we have seen in Libya and Afghanistan without the United States taking on even more of the burden.”
Of course, the answer obviously was no, and nothing decided in Chicago will change it.
To coin a phrase, it is time for a change. Washington once opposed an independent European defense. Now the U.S. should insist on it. Or rather—since it is not America’s place to decide Europe’s future for Europe—should adopt policies likely to lead to that result. Washington should bring home the 80,000 troops which remain in Europe and announce that it will be formally leaving NATO after a “decent interval.” The Europeans could use the existing alliance structure to organize continental military affairs, perhaps in cooperation with the European Union. (Albania, Croatia, Iceland, and Turkey are not currently EU members, but Croatia is slated to join next year and the others are candidates for membership; Canada is the only true outlier.)
The U.S. should not “leave” Europe but forge a less formal cooperative relationship including intelligence sharing, joint maneuvers, and mutual base access. In the rare case where military action served both America and Europe, such as confronting Somali piracy, they should act together. In the unlikely case of an uncontainable hegemonic threat against Europe—which currently enjoys about ten times the GDP and more than three times the population of Russia—the U.S. could intervene. However, normal responsibility for protecting Europe and ensuring security in adjoining regions would be left to Europe.
Retrenchment is necessary to better defend the U.S. Washington should not entangle America’s future in geopolitical controversies of no concern to the U.S. At a time of fiscal stringency Washington cannot afford to continue to protect America’s prosperous and populous allies. And the only way they will do more for themselves is if the U.S. does less for them. Welfare dependency is not only a domestic problem.
NATO played an important role during the Cold War. The collapse of communism and the Soviet Union have eliminated its raison d’être. Even NATO admits that the alliance’s “value is less obvious to many than in the past.”
Instead of desperately concocting new missions for an old alliance, the U.S. should applaud NATO’s success and turn the organization over to the Europeans. America no longer need protect a continent that is both richer and more populous than our own nation.
___________________________________________
Here we see the same for our US Naval Academy as for our US West Point Army academy.
When these US national media articles speak of ROTC as being just as good as our US public military academies in educating and training our US military leaders-----they do not explain how those ROTC training are tied to institutions no longer PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES-----ROTC training tied to vocational community colleges are extensions of global corporate campuses which contract with global mercenary military corporations.
Local
Naval Academy professor: A veneer of selectivity
By Daniel de Vise December 30, 2011
U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen signal their classmates in semaphore at the 112th Army-Navy football game. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst) In a recent article, I wrote of allegations that the U.S. Naval Academy artificially inflates its application totals by counting large numbers of applications that are incomplete.
The Naval Academy reported an admission rate of 7.5 percent last year, one of the lowest in all of higher education. But academy officials now acknowledge that roughly two-thirds of the 19,146 applications were incomplete and never seriously considered for admission.
Overcounting applications can give an institution an unfair advantage in its admission rate, a key measure of selectivity. I found, in a survey of local institutions, that several other colleges around Washington count small numbers of incomplete applications in their official totals, but not the large numbers reported by the Naval Academy.
Academy officials said the institution has an admission process that is fundamentally different - - and far more extensive - - than those at traditional universities. The process comprises 11 distinct steps, whereas the bulk of a traditional college application can be completed in one sitting.
Here is a guest post by Bruce Fleming, the Naval Academy professor whose Freedom of Information request prompted the disclosure. Fleming is an outspoken critic of the service academy.
The U.S. Naval Academy’s response to my recent FOIA request seeking clarification regarding what we count as an applicant produced the sensational information that we overstate our selectivity by what is probably a factor of about 4-to-1. It’s still unclear what our true selectivity is, because though only about 5,700 applications (out of more than 19,000 claimed) go to the Admissions Board, I know from my own time on the Board that not all of these are complete either. More relevant may be the fact that about 1,900 applicants are deemed “fully qualified,” and about 1,500 are accepted. It’s not hard to be “fully qualified.” All it requires is SAT scores above 600, a B average from an undemanding high school, and some pushups. So our true acceptance rate may be over 50 percent.
This is a shocking revelation about an institution that claims it’s “held to a higher standard,” and from the military that exists to defend taxpayers. As Dan de Vise points out, selectivity is the coin of prestige among colleges. Though selectivity counts for only 1.5 percent of the much-cited US News rankings, public perception of exclusivity is a huge part of the 22.5 percent of the US News score devoted to “peer assessment.” Although some of the less stellar schools de Vise questioned admitted to counting a few incomplete applications, the Naval Academy apparently claims about 70 percent of its reported total are incomplete. That we do this is no longer under debate.
Here’s a question, by me, with a one-word answer—taken from the FOIA letter from the Academy to me: “Are High School juniors and above who initiate an application online counted as part of this number whether or not they subsequently complete an application?” Response: “Yes.”
This revelation is indicative of many things, none of them good. First we should consider the appalling fact that it required a Freedom of Information request—which a government entity like the Academy cannot legally refuse to comply with—to wrest from this taxpayer-supported institution data that it should be eager to share with its paymasters, the civilians. This, unfortunately, is consistently the way the academies operate. It took a similar FOIA request from a reporter at the Annapolis Capital to elicit the fact that the Naval Academy’s (taxpayer-supported) Prep School in Newport is composed of about half non-white minorities and half recruited athletes, who are generally admitted with lower grades and SAT scores than other midshipmen, and who make up about 20 percent of the following year’s USNA class. Another FOIA request by the same paper produced the revelation that Naval Academy disciplinary measures were slanted towards women and against men.
This unwillingness to share information with the civilian world contributes to a culture of suspicion and impunity with respect to civilians who pay their bills. Consider that the most recent Superintendent was removed a year early for having presided over an administration that worked with off-the-books “slush funds” for recruited athletes and racial minorities that the Navy Inspector General blasted. But the Board of Visitors wasn’t even told until months later, when the report was about to be made public. The Superintendent before that was yanked after a single year—he’d grabbed the wrist of a Marine gate guard who asked for his ID (as the guard was supposed to do). But it took having this incident in the Annapolis paper to produce this result.
The Academy wants respect bordering on reverence from the civilian world, yet it wants to be able to forgo following the same rules as everybody else: it wants to be able to win a two-mile race by running a mile. The FOIA response made clear that the Naval Academy does not follow, nor should it be expected to follow, the criteria of the Common Data Set (though this is also used to provide such information to the U.S. Department of Education as well as private outlets such as the hyper-important US News rankings).
To quote the letter: “There is no mandate to apply the definition of the common data set to the U.S. Naval Academy’s admissions process. Of note, the requirements for admission to the Service Academies are different than other colleges and universities.” And this was echoed by the Academy spokesman quoted in Dan de Vise’s article of 28 December: the Naval Academy is different. Yet, they supply this completely cockeyed data to best other schools that are playing by the rules.
Similarly, the academies claim incessantly that their students are the “best and the brightest.” They also claim to teach “leadership” and to produce “leaders.” (Check out their Web sites.)
On what are these claims based?
Apparently the gullibility of the taxpayers. “Best” is apparently defined by being at the service academies, and that is a circular definition. “Brightest” is never justified—nor can it be. More than a quarter of our students have SAT scores in the 400s and 500s. Yes, our top quarter is comparable to the top half of Ivies. So we have some bright kids, but they’re the exception. Oh, we hear: But they’re leaders! This, too, is circular: the only “leadership” we consider in admission is things like student council offices—which also help get you into the University of Maryland (whose SAT scores, a visiting lecturer pointed out recently, are now higher than USNA’s). And for our target groups of recruited athletes and racial minorities, even this leadership score becomes irrelevant: students below our minima simply enter by the taxpayer-supported back door of NAPS.
What’s striking nowadays is the unrelenting barrage of self-serving hype coming from the academies, little of it apparently justified by facts. The academies are like any government program, intent on their own survival. This they do by claiming over and over to be better than they are compared to the alternatives—much to the disgust of most of their students, who are not allowed to talk to the public on this subject. (Increasingly USNA reminds me of East Berlin, which I got to know as a Fulbright Scholar in West Berlin: only good news, lie with statistics, control information, and make the citizens cheer on the streets—for us it’s the mandatory football games.)
In 1950 the academies were the primary officer production source; this is no longer true. Now, after radical expansion of ROTC in the 1960s and 70s, more than twice as many young officers come from ROTC programs housed in civilian colleges and universities as come from the academies. And as many Officer Candidate School officers are produced each year as Academy graduates. These ROTC officers cost taxpayers on average one quarter of what the academies’ products cost—and are apparently just as good. We’d better hope they are, because there are twice as many of them as academy graduates. (An academy graduate costs taxpayers close to a half a million dollars.) The academies don’t actually produce better “leaders” than an ROTC program, or for that matter than the civilian universities. Certainly they’re prestige objects for the military—and I’m sure the Superintendent and the other brass who live on our gorgeous campus like their taxpayer-supported mansions with the white-coated servants and the groundsmen. Who wouldn’t? This, I believe, is why the academies have begun to engage in a desperate end-game to artificially burnish their image and ensure their own survival. The wild over-inflation of selectivity is part of this campaign.
The shrill insistence by the military on its own virtue is, finally, indicative of a serious problem in the military’s relationship with the civilian world. Consider the Army’s dogged initial insistence that Pat Tillman was not, in fact, killed by “friendly fire;” the fabrication of the story of Jessica Lynch; and the recent embellishment by the Marine Corps of their medal winner’s story. This is lying to the people the military is meant to protect, and who pay for it. It is absolutely, completely, unacceptable. Yet it now has become common.
I have suggested in my book “Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide” that this too-glowing misrepresentation by the military of itself is part of this largest problem of all, the fact that the minority professional military in these all-volunteer times lacks a coherent sense of its purpose with respect to the civilian world. It’s not so clear that what they do is defense (how was Iraq defense? Afghanistan?). Still, it costs lives, and limbs, and psyches, and civilians go about their business of shopping—as President Bush suggested we do. Apparently the military disdains and resents the civilians it exists to defend—and feels free to lie to these civilians. The Naval Academy’s wild exaggeration of its selectivity is the tip of an iceberg.
____________________________________________
We will segue from MILITARY JUNTA public policy to education public policy looking at what happens in our US cities when once strong, local, domestic universities are consolidated into global hedge fund IVY LEAGUE corporations------if our US public military academies are going to be replaced by ROTC instruction on global corporate campuses as 'universities'----of course that ROTC will be tied to the same global mercenary military corporations being installed in MOVING FORWARD US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----and of course it will be global banking 1% educating our US citizens just how to be that military EMPLOYEE.
If our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE all race to get that multi-national corporate ROTC training----we are MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL MILITARY JUNTA in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.
Creating global monopolies of the only pathway our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE will have to an education -----global corporate campus pre-K to career vocational tracking apprenticeship child labor.
Is today’s university the new multinational corporation?
June 5, 2015 4.07am EDT
A growing number of colleges and universities are emerging as multinational organizations – creating start-up versions of themselves in foreign countries.
Those vacationing in western France may drive past a campus of Georgia Institute of Technology. Similarly, those visiting Italy may come across a Johns Hopkins nestled in Bologna; or if you are a visitor to Rwanda, you may come across a Carnegie Mellon University campus.
According to the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) at SUNY-Albany, 51 US universities now operate 83 branch campuses outside of the United States. Arkansas State has recently announced it will build a campus in Mexico. Qatar is already home to campuses from six American universities.
Students can now earn degrees from New York University in New York City, Abu Dhabi or Shanghai.
This sort of activity is being duplicated by institutions from Australia, the United Kingdom, India and more than two dozen other countries. Globally, universities in 32 countries export 235 branch campuses across 73 nations.
How are we to understand these developments? Do they bring advantages for students, academia as well as nations? Have higher education institutions become tools of public diplomacy? Or, are such institutions evolving into multiple national corporations with limited affinity with their home nation?
For the past five years, as co-directors of C-BERT, we have been tracking the development of this phenomenon, research that has included visits to some 50 of these institutions in 15 countries.
Universities go global
The fact is that no longer are global activities limited to the for-profit educational conglomerates such as the Apollo Group University of Phoenix and Laureate that have developed an international footprint through investment in online education and the purchase of colleges in multiple countries.
Rather, a growing number of public and private nonprofit universities have entered this space, creating, for example, branch campuses where a student in a local country can attend classes, join student organizations, engage in research projects and earn a degree awarded in the name of the home campus.
The earliest branch campus we’ve identified opened in the 1920s, when Parsons Fashion School in New York opened a location in Paris, so they could be in the fashion capital of the world, even though much of the growth in this sector started only in the 2000s.
Today, this effort is not limited to a handful of elite four-year institutions; it includes schools ranging from community colleges to boutique graduate schools, offering associates’ degrees to doctorates.
Proponents argue that branch campuses provide needed educational capacity in underserved areas, while allowing the home institution to diversify its revenue and enhance its reputation. Critics claim that operating under authoritarian governments hampers the academic freedom of faculty and students.
Push and pull factors
Most branch campuses seem to fall somewhere in between the glorious and the atrocious. But, first, let us look at some of the factors leading to the setting up of these branch campuses.
In our view, there are a number of internal factors pushing institutions to open branches - mainly, resources, regulations and reputation.
With declining government subsidies at home, concerns about rising tuition rates and heightened competition for students, some colleges and universities are looking for new ways to expand their economic base, through the delivery of courses overseas, foreign research monies and relationships with donors in other countries.
Having a physical presence is helpful, and at times necessary.
Also, it is sometimes easier to expand and be innovative in a different country, where the rules and regulations of the home and host nations (or states) do not constrain their efforts as much. In the US, we have found that while accreditation standards apply to international activities, many state regulations do not extend beyond their borders.
In addition, places like the Dubai International Academic City and EduCity in Malaysia are considered “free trade” zones designed to provide such regulatory relief from both the importing and exporting nations.
Global engagement also seems to be increasingly tied to an institution’s and nation’s reputation. For example, global university rankings such as those by US News and World Report and Times Higher Education factor in the international engagement of institutions.
This is not all. Higher education institutions have become tools of public diplomacy. Some exporting governments see International Branch Campuses (IBCs) as a means to strengthen their alliances with the importing nations.
There are also a number of factors pulling institutions to set up overseas.
Foreign universities have demonstrated interest in locating branches near rapidly expanding academic markets and being part of the emergence of Asia as a power player in the higher education landscape. It is no accident that most of the IBCs built in the past decade are located around the Indian Ocean and Pacific Rim.
Indeed, some countries have developed strategies and enacted policies to encourage international branch campus development through an “education hub.” Hubs usually indicate a country’s intention to promote itself as a regional or international destination for students.
Places like Abu Dhabi (UAE) and Qatar have provided financial and regulatory incentives to attract prestigious IBCs. But destinations such as Dubai, that do not offer any subsidy, are popular locations as well; in fact, IBCs are charged high rents to operate in places such as Dubai International Academic City (though they can receive exemption from many local regulations).
Some importing nations seek to raise their own international reputation by aligning themselves with well-respected institutions such as Duke, Yale and Texas A&M University.
Why some fail
However, at times the reasons for expansion do not align with reality, as the recent retreats of George Mason, Michigan State and the University of La Verne illustrate.
These campuses, like the 26 others that C-BERT data report, closed because they either encountered unexpected market and cultural conditions or lacked sufficient support from the home campus.
Unrealistic projections of revenue and enrollment, regulatory conflicts, and incompatible partnerships are the hallmarks of a bungled branch.
Creating an IBC is akin to creating a “start-up” in a foreign nation – with a different set of laws, cultural expectations and educational infrastructure. Abu Dhabi is very different from New York City. And it isn’t China either.
The established infrastructure of a campus in one country is repurposed in another country with the intention of educating students, fostering local research and innovation, and, through spillover, improving the overall quality of the domestic education sector.
As pioneers in an educational experiment, faculty and staff may be called on to help with a variety of tasks including budget planning, recruiting students, course scheduling, website design, furniture construction, staffing residence halls and even fixing computers.
Changing loyalties
It is clear that colleges and universities are emerging as important international actors, offering benefits to the institution as well as the importing and exporting nations.
What is not clear is how these arrangements will affect the relationship between a nation and its higher education sector.
Historically, colleges and universities have been viewed as anchor institutions that are tightly linked to their local communities and often are significant engines of economic development.
But we are now seeing campuses move locations in their effort to find “best deals” in terms of more regulator flexibility or government subsidies. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business announced in 2013 that it would leave Singapore and set up shop in Hong Kong.
Similarly, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has indicated that it will leave Singapore this year. It is now looking for another Asian base.
Do these trends suggest that US universities will close their home campus if they get a better deal elsewhere? Likely not. Much of the cachet of the branch campus comes from being associated with a home country like the United States, for example.
But both institutions and nations need to realize that these endeavors can be big gambles, and not everyone has a winning hand.
Below, we see the same MOVING FORWARD under TRUMP-----POMPEO today as POMPEO 2 thousand years ago----working for global 1% pre-Christian NERO OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
SparkNotes: The Roman Empire (60 BCE-160 CE): Important Terms ...www.sparknotes.com/history/european/rome3/terms
Sextus Pompei - Consul in 70s BCE, procunsul thereafter. ... Otho - One-time crony of Nero who bribed the Praetorian Guard to raise him as Emperor in 69 CE.
Below we see a great big POT ----calling the much smaller KETTLE---BLACK.
After a few decades of making ARABIA a nightmare of civil unrest civil war simply for more wealth and power by global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS----now we focus on Persia. So, does ANY of continuous wars help our 99% of US WE THE PEOPLE? When the only jobs created are military deep, deep, really deep state---IT IS NOT JUST ANY JOB
NO----WE ARE BEING MADE A PERMANENT MILITARY JUNTA COLONIAL ENTITY.
Pompeo: Iran's leaders resemble the mafia
By Emily Birnbaum - 07/22/18 10:38 PM EDT 363
130
© Anna Moneymaker
Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo on Sunday said Iran's leaders resemble "the mafia more than a government."
"The level of corruption and wealth among regime leaders shows that Iran is run by something that resembles the mafia more than a government,” Pompeo said during a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
During his remarks and the Q&A afterwards, Pompeo lambasted the Iranian regime and emphasized U.S. support for Iranian citizens, particularly those opposed to the government.
Pompeo offered support for the anti-government protestors that have been rallying across the country in recent months.
"The specific grievances differ," Pompeo said. "But all those voicing dissatisfaction share one thing: they have been ill-treated by a Revolutionary regime. Iranians want to be governed with dignity, accountability and consent."
Our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE CAN RELATE TO THAT
President Trump in May stepped back from former President Obama's Iran nuclear deal, restoring heavy U.S. sanctions against Iran. The deal limited Tehran's nuclear ability in exchange for lifting international oil and financial sanctions, but America's departure has left Iran vulnerable to reinstated sanctions.
Pompeo since May has ramped up rhetoric against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's government. He threatened to impose the "strongest sanctions in history" if Iran did not take dramatic steps towards denuclearization.
The secretary of State described the U.S.'s current strategy toward Iran a "pressure campaign" to get the Iranian government to pull back from aggressive behavior.
"We are asking all nations who are sick and tired of the Islamic Republic’s destructive behavior to join our pressure campaign," Pompeo said.
Pompeo further lambasted Iranian religious leaders as "hypocritical holy men" who amass wealth through corruption and exploitation of Iran's people.
"Iran's leaders have enriched themselves from corruption," Pompeo said.
After his prepared remarks, Pompeo fielded questions about U.S. immigration policy toward Iranian "civil society," including students who want to study at American universities.
The Trump administration's travel ban includes Iran, which means even those unaffiliated with the Iranian government cannot travel to the U.S. without a waiver. The ban, which was upheld by the Supreme Court last month, have left many Iranian students and families in the U.S. in limbo, cut off from their families in their home countries.
"Iran continues to deny us the basic data-sharing systems that dozens of countries have already provided us," Pompeo said, explaining the ban. "We'd like Iran do to that. We still allow students to come in."
He added the Trump administration prioritizes vetting all those who enter the country.
__________________________________________
The US national media likes to make our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE think our US GLOBAL HEDGE FUND IVY LEAGUE universities are the winners-----they being the root of ROBBER BARON frauds these few decades have all the money as endowments---as global corporate profits. Here in Baltimore that would be global hedge fund IVY LEAGUE Johns Hopkins-----the same in US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES across the US. We discussed in detail those universities targeted to being ROBBER BARON centers for fraud----those MR FROG MUNICIPAL 5% freemason/Greek players.
We want to take this week to discuss just WHERE all those hundred trillions of dollars went in sacking and looting AMERICA----and as we state often----it is NOT to any corporation or institution that is AMERICAN.
Below we see where what were our strong, academic US IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES have been made these few decades into simply ABRAHAM GLOBAL CORPORATIONS specializing in black market profits. Now global corporate PRODUCT MILLS----creating PATENTS for anything that will sell.
This chart shows how much more Ivy League grads make than you ...
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/...
The median annual earnings for an Ivy League graduate 10 years after starting amount to well over $70,000 a year. For graduates of all other schools, the median is around $34,000.
For an US global IVY LEAGUE grad to graduate earning $70,000 a year ----that's what state university grads earned right out of college last century. We see our other US college grads earning US LIVING WAGE----THAT IS POVERTY LINE. So, the US no longer has IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITIES------and what national media PRETENDS are US IVY LEAGUES with big endowments----being powerful and wealthy----as Johns Hopkins have simply been made into MR FROG------these institutions do not have the money-----global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS have all those hundreds of trillions---simply using our once strong academies as MR FROG.
Are students graduating from US IVY LEAGUES paying $30,000 to 60,000 a semester graduating to earn $70,000 a year really WINNERS? Of course not---they are on their way to being global corporate sweat shop white collar professionals.
These 7 US colleges are more selective than some Ivy League schools
Abby Jackson
Jul. 14, 2017, 11:24 AM
And you thought the Ivy League was exclusive. A Stanford University student on campus.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Ivy League colleges are notoriously tough to get into.Their acceptance rates range from 5.2% to 12.5%, and former Ivy League admissions directors say it's harder than ever to gain acceptance to the schools.
So you might be surprised to learn that other schools have even lower acceptance rates.
Business Insider listed schools that are even more selective than some of the Ivies, according to statistics provided on the class of 2021* admission rates from school websites.
*The rates for the University of Chicago and California Institute of Technology reflect class of 2020, as rates for the class of 2021 are not yet publicly provided.
To start, here's the ranking of Ivy League schools by their class of 2021 selectivity:
BI Graphics But even more selective than some of the schools on this list are ...Claremont McKenna College — 10.35%
Claremont McKenna College/Facebook
Located in Southern California, Claremont is a small liberal-arts college. Its acceptance rate is lower than those of Cornell and Dartmouth.
US Military Academy — 9.4%
Robert Libetti/ Business Insider Also referred to as "West Point" or "Army," cadets enrolled have their tuition paid by the US Army. In return, they have an active-duty service obligation. Its admission rate is lower than the rates for Dartmouth and Cornell.
California Institute of Technology — 7.9%
Flickr/Dmitry Mitin Based in Pasadena, Caltech focuses on science and engineering. Its acceptance rate is lower than Cornell's, Dartmouth's, UPenn's, and Brown's.
US Naval Academy — 7.5%
CC BY 2.5 Also referred to as "Navy," students enrolled have their tuition paid by the US Navy and, in return, they have an active-duty service obligation. This school is more selective than Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 7.1%
Via Flickr MIT's mascot is the beaver because of the school's "remarkable engineering and mechanical skill and its habits of industry." Its admissions rate is lower than the rates for Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
University of Chicago — 7.6%
Wikimedia Commons / Adam Jones, Ph.D. The 125-year-old school is in Chicago's Hyde Park community. Its admissions rate is lower than the rates for Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
Stanford University — 4.65%
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Stanford is the most selective college in the US — aside from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which has an acceptance rate of around 4%, but is more of a conservatory than a traditional university.
_____________________________________________
The first thing we see about selective university institutions ----almost all of them are MILITARY ---TIED TO MILITARY----as California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ----with those US universities called most SELECTIVE being extremely far-right wing NEO-CONSERVATIVE-----with UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO having always been the source of global banking 1% far-right wing NEO-LIBERALISM. All those US GLOBAL HEDGE FUND IVY LEAGUES opening to accepting a global banking 5% freemason/Greek creating a CRONYISM THROUGH FAMILY TIES-----are now throwing those 5% freemason/Greek families under the bus.
RUSHDIE'S 'THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH' made a point early in the novel that any of our NEWLY MERELY RICH who bring in those poor relations----will see their corporations fall apart. The moral from RUSHDIE----as that global banking 1% freemason LITERARY STAR----
GO ON---TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN LEAVE THOSE POOR RELATIONS BEHIND.
That is what THE ME GENERATION of these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were about-----those families supported by a single rich relation getting that patronage as business or pay-to-play are first to be made extremely poor----and not soon after MR FROG----MR ABRAHAM as newly merely rich and their network IMPLODE.
Our US national media made big headlines for what are now called THE MOST SELECTIVE-----saying they were opening their doors to become more DIVERSIFIED----of course that simply meant ---instead of accepting our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens----they are now only accepting OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS' global 1% and their 2%---ready to be MR FROG AND MR ABRAHAM.
Stanford is the most selective college in the US --
Stanford University — 4.65%
STANFORD/YALE has always been far-right wing global banking 1% BUSH NEO-CON-----the KNIGHTS OF MALTA-----while UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO/HARVARD has always been the far-right wing global banking 1% TRIBES OF JUDAH----banking teamed with bombing.
March 25, 2016
Stanford offers admission to 2,063 students from around the world
The Office of Undergraduate Admission announced today that 2,063 high school students have been admitted to the Class of 2020 from a pool of 43,997.
Stanford University has offered admission to 2,063 students, including 745 applicants who were accepted last December through the early action program, the Office of Undergraduate Admission announced today.
Richard H. Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid, said the Class of 2020 was carefully selected from 43,997 candidates, the largest application pool in Stanford’s history. The admitted students come from 50 states and 76 countries.
“We are honored by the interest in Stanford, and overwhelmed by the exceptional accomplishments of the students admitted to the Class of 2020,” Shaw said. “Our admitted students reflect the deep and profound diversity of the world in which we live. We believe these students will impact that world in immeasurable ways.”
Under Stanford’s generous financial aid program, which the university expanded in 2015, for parents with total annual income below $125,000 and typical assets for this income range, the expected parent contribution will be low enough to ensure that all tuition charges are covered with need-based scholarships, federal and state grants and/or outside scholarship funds. For parents with total annual income below $65,000 and typical assets for this income range, Stanford will not expect a parent contribution toward tuition, mandatory fees, room or board.
Students admitted under the early and regular decision admission program have until May 1 to accept Stanford’s offer.
______________________________________________
For 300 years in US our US politicians have been given a BONE-----by allowing a political appointment to these US military academies------this is what kept ALL IN THE FAMILY these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----the top military officers MOVING FORWARD global military mercenary corporations. TOP US OFFICERS graduate from these military academies------it is these top officers tied to being made GENERALS----who are always tied to being global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA.
This network of ROBBER BARON 5% freemason/Greek players these few decades was that MR FROG----MR ABRAHAM US Department of Defense massive frauds of tens of trillions----global development corporations as offshore SHELL CORPORATIONS made that 5% US global banking player newly merely rich funneling that wealth down to poor relations.
HOW DID OUR US 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE ALLOW A STRONG, FIRST WORLD, DEVELOPED NATION, RULE OF LAW, THRIVING REAL FREE MARKET ECONOMY ---BE MADE INTO MR FROG AND MR ABRAHAM?
So, these CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ROBBER BARON POLS appointing to our US military academies----
NO LONGER HAVE THAT ABILITY.
So, our Maryland State global banking 1% pols no longer appoint to our ANNAPOLIS MILITARY ACADEMIES-----as to each state having these national military academies.
Bruce Fleming holds degrees from Haverford College, the University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University. He has published more than a dozen books and many articles on subjects ranging from literary theory to dance to military strategy and the U.S. Naval Academy, where he has been a professor since 1987.
His Web site is www.brucefleming.net.
THE FEDERALIST is a right wing think tank pretending to be conservative Republican ---there is nothing FEDERAL coming from this think tank----and Bruce Fleming having graduated from very global banking 1% universities is outing NOW what has existed for several decades because TIMES THEY ARE CHANGING.
Leaders of GLOBAL MILITARY JUNTA do not come from our US newly, merely rich families---they come from global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS' families who appoint to their own 'military academies'.
We see especially our once strong US military academies were taken to being degraded geared towards graduating global corporate mercenary military leaders----and not our US sovereign PUBLIC MILITIA leaders.
It’s Not Just West Point. U.S. Military Academies Have Become Disneyland For Politicians
The service academies are now the vanity projects of the military brass, not viable contributions to U.S. defense.
By Bruce Fleming THE FEDERALIST
October 16, 2017
The military world and military academies—I’m a tenured civilian professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis--were rocked by an October 11 “open letter” exposing the rotten underbelly of our sister academy at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy.
The letter was penned by Robert Heffington, an Army officer and West Point graduate who taught there for several years before retiring. Only his retirement made it possible for him to publish the letter, since officers in uniform cannot publicly disagree with superiors. Within 24 hours, West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslan Jr., head of the administration Heffington holds responsible for its deficiencies, responded by evoking the “thousands of graduates who sacrifice and serve honorably every day.”
Heffington’s letter is a scorcher. It pulls no punches and concludes it’s questionable whether West Point, founded in 1802, “should ever remain open.”
Heffington’s “BLUF,” Bottom Line Up Front: “First and foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but nowhere else. The senior administration at West Point inexplicably refuses to enforce West Point’s publicly touted high standards on cadets, and, having picked up on this, cadets refuse to enforce standards on each other.” He goes on: “The Superintendent refuses to enforce admissions standards or the cadet Honor Code, the Dean refuses to enforce academic standards, and the Commandant refuses to enforce standards of conduct and discipline.”
Heffington notes that students are admitted to play Division I football, which degrades academics: “we routinely admit athletes with ACT scores in the mid-teens across the board. I have personally taught cadets who are borderline illiterate and cannot read simple passages from the assigned textbooks.” Faculty members who object are silenced, he says.
To this, I say “Amen, brother.” Heffington’s letter caused me personal joy and professional agony. I’ve been making a number of the same points about Annapolis, an essentially identical taxpayer-funded institution, for the last several decades, earning repeated salvos of our administration’s ire and attempts to silence me. (West Point has few civilian professors, and no tenured ones.) So it was gratifying to hear someone else say the same things about our sister institution, with more vitriol than I usually employ.
So much needs to change with our institutions, yet there no signs of any changes even being contemplated. This is bad news for the taxpayers who are footing the bill and depend on them for one-fifth of the new officer pool. It’s also bad news for the disaffected, cynical students who have lost faith in the system. I think Heffington saw the cynicism without understanding its source. I think I do.
The Reasons to Prefer a Military Academy Are FewMost upper-class students at service academies have lost faith in the system, because it’s based on lies. First, these places produce about one new officer in five nowadays, far fewer than their glory days. Most other officers come from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, Officer Candidate School, or direct commissions. West Point (USMA) produces about half the number of officers of Army ROTC. Service academy graduates cost taxpayers about half a million dollars each plus wrap-around health care and so on, four times what the average ROTC officer costs and eight times what OCS costs.
That’s right: you can go to a civilian school ROTC for four years, put on a uniform a day or two a week, party as you like, have sex when you want (sex is forbidden at the academies), major in what you want, graduate, and serve alongside academy graduates—and no data show you’ll be a worse officer.
The students know this because they all have iPhones and Google.
The defenders of the academies fall back on that tired cliché of calling them “national treasures.” Up to World War II, they probably were, because that’s where almost all officers came from. We need officers, so if that’s their source, the source is a “treasure.” Only it turned out that officers can come from other sources! So it’s simply not true that all the pointless and infuriating things you have to do at the academies are necessary for being an officer, because 80 percent of officers don’t do these things and are just as good.
Defenders of the academies, invariably themselves graduates who got a college education at taxpayer expense, say they “set the tone” for the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard. There’s no evidence of this, and in any case I hope it’s not true, because their tone is one of deep disillusionment.
Hate to Break It, But We’re Not the ‘Best and Brightest’Another of the big lies, as Heffington shows, is the assertion that military academy students are the “best and the brightest.” I can’t tell whether the military brass really have no clue, or this is just hype to keep the tax dollars flowing and make the students feel it’s worth it. In fact, our SAT scores are about 100 points per test lower than Ivy-level schools, and the spread between upper and lower levels much greater. About 20 percent of our class consists of students recruited for athletics or given preferential admission to achieve racial goals (meaning non-white), and cannot get in even at the low level of SAT scores of 600 on each test with As and Bs in high school.
Not a problem; we send them at taxpayer expense to the relevant prep school, where nine months of a 13th grade are supposed to remediate what may be intrinsic mental slowness or decades of poor education. Typically it doesn’t, and these students fill our pre-college classes in English and math and fail to graduate at higher percentages. The truly gifted students (we have some) realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods. We have no magic chemical test for good “leaders” to make up for academic deficiencies. We don’t even require an interview for admission. Come to my classes to see how little “wow” factor many have.
Another lie is the wild exaggeration of our selectivity. I’ve been on our Admissions Board, so I have expertise Heffington doesn’t. We claim to get about 20,000 applicants, but define “applicant” as no other college does, by including the 7,500 high school juniors who want to come to our six-day summer seminar (only 2,500 come) and recently, all Navy ROTC applicants to any institution, as well as stubs of applications where a kid was convinced to enter his or her name and address and little more.
When I was on the Admissions Board, we considered about 4,500 applications for about 1,800 admits. That’s not the 7 to 8 percent “most selective” statistics the brass continue to report to U.S. News and World Report and the U.S. Department of Education. The students see the disappointing quality of those around them and begin to figure out that somehow these cannot be the “best and the brightest.”
Many Of Our Key Promises Are Broken
Because we admit to serve racial goals and to fill our teams, and because higher graduation rates make us look better, we aren’t about to throw anybody out. So what Heffington says is true: we “remediate” honor offenses nowadays, inability to pass the Physical Readiness Training, and just about everything else. Faculty members have also given up thinking that reporting plagiarism will result in any meaningful action.
Another set of lies is in the way that a policy of “no sex” has survived from the days when it made sense, back when we were all male with no out gays. Now we have one-third women, gay students, and, briefly, transsexual students. They all live in the same dormitory and are full of hormones. Of course they’re going to be having sex. They know what other college students do, and they know they’re not on ships (which also have problems with sex), so the lies the administration tells them about how this is like being deployed don’t impress them.
Finally, the officers they are supposed to emulate are fairly clueless and, according to the students, generally not very good role models. They aren’t here long enough to figure out what’s what, and because they are in the students’ chain of command, the students don’t talk freely with them. By contrast, I have had countless hall and office no-holds-barred conversations with midshipmen over three decades.
What the officers say to students frequently makes no sense: the training staff pitches the same full-bore fit at small infractions as at large. Plebes are told they have “just killed a platoon of Marines” if their uniform is out of reg. They know it isn’t true, so they tune out the adults shouting at them.
We’re All Going Through the Motions
The only reason for the military to get hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to run stand-alone colleges with standard classes is that these classes are somehow different. People on the outside think we’re Hogwarts. We aren’t. We teach the same subjects as down the street at the University of Maryland. Worse, the cadets and midshipmen are sleep-deprived and unwilling students, except for the few dozen top achievers who are candidates for coveted national scholarships. As Heffington notes, they can re-take an F for a higher grade in the summer—at taxpayer expense. Still, with grade inflation, that rarely happens.
They’re like all those military jets the current cabinet members love to use: flashy, expensive, and lots of fun.The vast majority are going through the motions, sleeping in class, memorizing, then mind-dumping largely technical material they forget anyway and whose utility has never been shown. (Electrical engineering for pilots, SEALs, or Marine Corps? Nonsense.) How do I know? They tell me. They won’t tell an 0-5, or anybody wearing a uniform, who can punish them for it.
I have to go to great lengths to get them involved in English, a subject most freshmen (plebes) have no interest in. Two semesters are required, which is good thing because typically their writing is terrible and they cannot organize their ideas coherently. But because the classes are mandatory and they came to be in the military, most are resistant. I have to win them over. We do things they like, such as push-ups and jumping up and down every 20 minutes to keep them awake. This is what it takes. Remember: I’ve been here more than three decades.
Do we teach them leadership? Well, we have courses called that, but at best these are intro psychology classes, and the high numbers of U.S. national academy graduates relieved of command in recent years or caught up in the Fat Leonard scandal suggests that our brand of “leadership” isn’t effective. Leadership, whatever that is, isn’t learned in a classroom.
The service academies are now the vanity projects of the military brass, not viable contributions to US. defense. They’re like all those military jets the current cabinet members love to use: flashy, expensive, and lots of fun. The superintendent lives in a Victorian mansion complete with waitstaff and has a reserved parking spot when he has to go two buildings over. The institution is the staging ground for their retirement ceremonies and funerals, and countless empty colloquia all based around the “leadership” we purport to teach but don’t.
It’s Basically a Military Disneyland
What does make us different from another college is the wrap-around control of students’ lives that leaves them unmotivated and mad, Mickey Mouse regulations that change from regime to regime, are applied randomly, and have no proven officer development benefits. The students realize they are cast members in a military Disneyland run for the benefit of the brass and the tourists, not the taxpayers who pay their way and want better-than-average officers. This is why they dress sloppily, answer back, and seem to take no pride in what they do—all the things Heffington saw as a direct affront to his officership.
For me, one of the most unsettling developments of the military in recent decades has been its courting by politicians to further their own personal agendas. A horrifying example was the disgusting commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence at our last graduation repeatedly telling the military that it was better than the civilians it defends, and his attempt to position President Trump as “the best friend the military ever had.” Who doesn’t support our military? This is creating enemies that don’t exist.
The military is supposed to be apolitical. It’s a tool, not part of a specific political party. We need to do what the British did with Sandhurst: turn undergraduate education over to the ROTC programs and colleges, and use our beautiful buildings (and West Point’s incomparable location on the Hudson) for military graduate courses.
Our service academies are anachronisms trying to pretend they aren’t. The students have caught on. The administration hasn’t, and never will, because then they’d lose their taxpayer-sponsored country clubs. Defense? Nah. It’s all about show. The students, and the taxpayers, pay the price.
__________________________________________
When a nation loses its national sovereignty---it loses its PUBLIC MILITIA-----and these well-respected military institutions were long ago corrupted just as all during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA.
We discussed last week just who those global banking 1% ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT 5% FREEMASON/GREEK US civil unrest civil war players will be. We KNOW these 5% civil unrest civil war players will be insiders for MR FROG----MR ABRAHAM ---
Below we see to where our US MILITARY ACADEMIES are MOVING FORWARD------revolutionary socialist-----that means these young men see themselves as far-right wing, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISTS----global corporate campus MILITARY JUNTA.
"I consider myself a revolutionary socialist," the 26-year-old Rapone told The Associated Press in a series of interviews'.
COMMUNISM WILL WIN indeed as this is the goal of MOVING FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE deep, deep, really deep state military junta.
'"I knew there could be repercussions," said Rapone, who is scheduled to speak at a socialism conference in Chicago next month. "Of course my military career is dead in the water'.
The only 'socialism' conference happening in SUPER-DUPER GLOBAL NAKED NEO-LIBERAL LAISSEZ-FAIRE Chicago of course----is global banking 5% freemason/Greek civil unrest civil war.
Who appointed a SPENSER RAPONE graduating from WEST POINT ready to be that global banking far-right wing LIBERTARIAN MARXIST rebel? ALTMIRE the great big raging global banking 1% Clinton neo-liberal.
Altmire, a Keystone State native and known as a centrist Democrat, represented the western Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District.
Army Splits with West Point Tweeter of 'Communism Will Win'
In this May 2016 photo provided by Spenser Rapone, Rapone raises his left fist while displaying a sign inside his hat that reads "Communism will win," after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. (Courtesy of Spenser Rapone via AP)
The Associated Press 19 Jun 2018 By Mary Esch
WATERTOWN, N.Y. --
The images Spenser Rapone posted on Twitter from his West Point graduation were intentionally shocking:
In one, the smirking cadet opens his dress uniform to expose a T-shirt with a blood-red image of socialist icon Che Guevara. In another, he raises his fist and flips over his cap to reveal the hand-scrawled message: "Communism will win."
Less than a year after Rapone's images drew a firestorm of vitriol and even death threats, the second lieutenant who became known as the "commie cadet" is officially out of the U.S. Army with an other-than-honorable discharge.
Top brass at Fort Drum's 10th Mountain Division accepted Rapone's resignation Monday after an earlier reprimand for "conduct unbecoming of an officer." Rapone said an investigation found he went online to advocate for a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers and U.S. officials. Officially, the Army said in a statement only that it conducted a full investigation and "appropriate action was taken."
An unrepentant Rapone summed up the fallout in yet another tweet Monday that showed him extending a middle finger at a sign at the entrance to Fort Drum, accompanied by the words, "One final salute."
"I consider myself a revolutionary socialist," the 26-year-old Rapone told The Associated Press in a series of interviews. "I would encourage all soldiers who have a conscience to lay down their arms and join me and so many others who are willing to stop serving the agents of imperialism and join us in a revolutionary movement."
Rapone said his journey to communism grew out of his experiences as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan before he was accepted into the U.S. Military Academy. And those views only hardened during his studies of history as one of the academy's "Long Gray Line."
He explained that he took the offending selfies at his May 2016 West Point graduation ceremony and kept them to himself until last September, when he tweeted them in solidarity with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was taking heat for kneeling for the national anthem to raise awareness of racism. Many other military personnel also tweeted in favor of Kaepernick, although most were supporting free speech, not communism.
West Point released a statement after Rapone posted the photos, saying his actions "in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army."
OH, REALLY????
And U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, called on the secretary of the Army to remove Rapone from the officer ranks.
"While in uniform, Spenser Rapone advocated for communism and political violence, and expressed support and sympathy for enemies of the United States," Rubio said Monday, adding "I'm glad to see that they have given him an 'other-than-honorable' discharge."
One of six children growing up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Rapone said he applied to West Point, which is tuition-free, because he couldn't afford college. He was nominated out of high school by then-U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire in 2010.
"He was an honors student, an athlete, a model citizen who volunteered in the community," recalled Altmire, a Democrat. "During the interview, he expressed patriotism and looked just like a top-notch candidate. There were no red flags of any kind."
But he wasn't accepted to West Point, so Rapone enlisted in the Army. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 and was assigned as an assistant machine gunner in Khost Province.
"We were bullies in one of the poorest countries on Earth," Rapone said. "We have one of the most technologically advanced militaries of all time and all we were doing is brutalizing and invading and terrorizing a population that had nothing to do with what the United States claimed was a threat."
Toward the end of his deployment, he learned West Point fulfills a certain quota of enlisted soldiers every year. Despite his growing disillusionment about the military, he applied and got in.
"I was still idealistic," he said." I figured maybe I could change things from inside."
In addition to classic socialist theorists such as Karl Marx, Rapone says he found inspiration in the writings of Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces master sergeant who became a socialist anti-war activist.
Even while still a cadet, Rapone's online postings alarmed a West Point history professor, who wrote Rapone up, saying his online postings were "red flags that cannot be ignored." Rapone was disciplined but still allowed to graduate.
Greg Rinckey, an attorney specializing in military law, said it's rare for an officer out of West Point to receive an other-than-honorable discharge. He added that it's also possible the military academy could seek repayment of the cost of Rapone's education because he didn't serve the full five-year service obligation required upon graduation.
"I knew there could be repercussions," said Rapone, who is scheduled to speak at a socialism conference in Chicago next month. "Of course my military career is dead in the water. On the other hand, many people reached out and showed me support. There are a lot of veterans both active duty and not that feel like I do."
__________________________________________
Throughout CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA ------those handed privatized military mercenary corporations did not graduate from our US public military academies-----they were tied to being global banking 5% freemason/Greek players having little experience in military training. They learned all that lying, cheating, and stealing needed to move tens of trillions of dollars in Department of Defense spending to building these global military corporations----but taking their instructions from GLOBAL 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS KNIGHTS OF MALTA. PRINCE is simply that 33rd degree freemason just as TRUMP, CLINTON/BUSH----
Prince was accepted into the United States Naval Academy and attended it for three semesters before leaving, citing that he loved the Navy but disliked the Academy. He went on to receive his B.A. in economics from Hillsdale College in 1992'
After college, Prince was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy via Officer Candidate School in 1992. Hillsdale College is a private, conservative Christian college in Hillsdale, Michigan.
As our US public military is being dismantled and employment being slashed-----what used to be our public militia are now being hired to be those global banking 5% freemason/Greek civil unrest civil war leaders.....NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR 300 YEAR OLD US PUBLIC MILITARY ACADEMIES.
So, PRINCE a few decades ago obviously wrote some good grant and outsourcing contracts to be made owner of what is now REPLACING our US military academies in training global military rank and file and recruiting and hiring what would be GENERALS-----now simply HIGH-RANKING CORPORATE EXECUTIVES.
MR FROG AND MR ABRAHAM as our local US city municipal corporation and global corporation steeped in black market profiteering----MOVING FORWARD to being GLOBAL MILITARY JUNTA as criminal---as corrupt---more brutal---filled with employees NOT tied to US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES. An OCCUPYING military is never filled with people from that sovereign nation.
THIS is why our US public military academies which used to graduate quality officers tied to US Rule of Law and professional military standards-----is now in hands of global mercenary corporations doing all that training.
Starting a Private Military Company – A Complete GuideAre you interested in starting a private military contractor company?
If YES, here is a complete guide to starting a private military company with little money and no experience.
Okay, so we have provided you an in-depth sample private military company business plan template. We also took it further by analyzing and drafting a sample private mercenary services marketing plan backed up by actionable guerrilla marketing ideas for car private military companies. In this article, we will be considering all the requirements for starting a private military company. So put on your entrepreneurial hat and let’s proceed.
Why Start a Private Military Company?The need for a secured environment cannot be relegated to the background in our today’s world full of chaos and graphical waste of lives, as a matter of fact; there are organizations that can’t operate if they don’t have private military as security guards.
For example; oil companies that work in rigs in hostile environment or construction companies that work in areas prone to violence would need armed security personnel to provide security for them in order for them to carry out their operations. That is where private military companies come in.
At the end of the Cold War between the United States and the now balkanized USSR, the world’s standing armies began to get smaller. Meanwhile, the nature of warfare was changing. Low-intensity conflict began to replace large-scale wars. In such a conflict, armed force is just one small part of an expansive menu of social, economic and political tools available to engage an enemy.
Accompanying this silent wars trend was a dramatic increase in the use and proliferation of advanced weapon systems. Maintaining these systems became a serious challenge. Soldiers spent more time monitoring weapons and learning how to operate them. With resources already stretched thin, armies were having trouble keeping up.
Floating a private military company is a little bit challenging simply because of the various huddles and governmental challenges you need to scale through before you can be issued license from the United States government. You are expected to have a sound military background, relevant certifications and clean criminal records. Once you are able to secure your license, you will still be expected to abide by the rules and regulations governing the business or else your license will be revoked and your company shot down.
Starting a Private Military Company – A Complete Guide
- Industry Overview
- Interesting Statistics About the Private Military Contracting Industry
The industry is growing with some estimating annual contracts in the $10-$20 billion range and others citing numbers as high as $100 billion. Though a worldwide phenomenon, the United States and Great Britain account for over 70% of the world’s market for their services.
Dramatic growth in the number and size of private military companies occurred at the time of the end of the Cold War, as Western governments increasingly began to rely on their services to bolster falling conventional military budgets. Some of the larger corporations are: Vinnell and Military Professional Resources Inc. in the United States; G4S and Keeni-Meeny Services in the United Kingdom; Lordan-Levdan in Israel and Executive Outcomes in South Africa.
The services of private contractors are used around the world. P. W. Singer author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry says “In geographic terms, it operates in over 50 different countries. It’s operated in every single continent but Antarctica.” Singer stated that in the 1990s there used to be 50 military personnel for every 1 contractor, now the ratio is 10 to 1. He also points out that these contractors have a number of duties depending on who they are hired by.
In developing countries that have natural resources, such as oil refineries in Iraq, they are hired to guard the area. They are also hired to guard companies that contract services and reconstruction efforts such as General Electric. Apart from securing companies, they also secure officials and government affiliates.
Starting a Private Military Company – Market Research and Feasibility
- Demographics and Psychographics
- Governments
- Multi-National Corporations
- Oil Companies
- International Organizations
- Humanitarian agencies
- Non-Governmental organizations
- Media Personal
- The United Nations
- Logistics
- Arms trade
- Escort services
- Combatant services
- Technical services
- Training and re-training.
There’s always going to be competition. Some of it will be good for you, and some of it will be bad for you. Accept it as part of life. Just keep in mind that you’re in business because you feel you can do a better job; you can do it more efficiently; and you can do it with greater satisfaction to your customers than anyone else. Be aware of the competition, but don’t worry about it. Just stick to your own business plan and you’ll be okay.
List of Well Known Brands in the Private Military Industry
The market for private military forces is enormous, so it’s no surprise that many different companies have emerged to capitalize on the billions of available dollars. The following is a list of popular private military companies that have existed or currently exist:
- BlackWater Corporation Worldwide
- Control Risks
- DynCorp
- Erinys
- Executive Outcomes
- Global Strategies Group, formerly Global Risk Strategies
- Kroll
- Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI)
- Olive Group
- Sandline International
- Triple Canopy
- Vinnell
The private military company business is really terribly expensive to get into. Once you have the necessary equipment, insurance, and supplies, you’re ready to roll. The hard part is going to be drumming up business. Now days, just about any small business is going to be very competitive, due to the fact that so many people have lost their military jobs over the last few years since the cold war, and many of them are going into business of security themselves. If you work hard and do a good job, then business will come your way.
Starting a private military company is not like starting a mom and pop business in a street corner in down town Chicago, IL; it is indeed a serious business hence critical economic analysis must be conducted to ensure that the risks and other threats associated with starting a business from the scratch or investing in a business idea are mitigated.
If you are considering starting a private military company in the United States, your concern should not be restricted to just acquiring an office facility and equipping the facility or hiring the best hands in the industry, you should also be concerned on how to attract clients and secure mouthwatering security contracts.
On the average, setting up and running a private military business in the United States can be cost effective simply because you don’t have to maintain a large workforce when you don’t have a security contract to execute. With key good company’s profile, highly trained, highly qualified and highly experienced staff members in your team, you won’t have to struggle much to win security contracts when you submit your bids.
Is a Private Military Company Worth Starting from Scratch or is Buying a Franchise Better?
Personally, I don’t see the need for you to even consider buying a franchised operation. There’s just too much real help available for the “independent” to go to the considerable expense and obligation of a franchise. Starting from scratch, and as an independent, this is most assuredly a low-investment, low-overhead type business the kind we recommend for anyone and everyone who’s determined to make it on his own.
Although there is the possibility of buying a franchise from a successful private military company or even partnering with a big security company if you are considering owning an investment in the security industry.
One thing is certain, people are motivated to start a business based on various factors and incentives. If you are looking towards building a business that you intend controlling, a business brand that you hope to one day transfer ownership to your children and perhaps also sell franchise in future, then starting from the scratch should be your best bet. But if you only interested in making money and multiplying your wealth, then you may as well buy the franchise of a successful private military company that is willing to sell its franchise.
Possible Threats and Challenges of Starting a Private Military Company
Generally in the private military industry, both the already established private military companies and start – up security companies are subject to threat and challenges from government policies, global economic downturn which usually affects spending and unforeseen natural disasters (disasters that may cause setback).
Another threat that you are likely going to face when you start your own private military company is the arrival of a well – established private military company in the location where your business has strong presence.
Starting a Private Military Company – Legal Issues
- Best Legal Entity to Use for a Private Military Company
There are a number of tax and legal protections that you are afforded when you do so. Therefore, check with a tax or legal professional on the benefits of the different types of business entities and whether you should consider having your business become such an entity.
No doubt starting a private military company is indeed a serious business which is why the legal entity you choose will go a long way to determine how big the business to can grow. Choosing a legal entity for a business such as a private military company is some worth straightforward especially if you decided to grow the business big.
When it comes to choosing a legal entity for your private military company you have the option of choosing from a general partnership, a limited partnership, an LLC, a “C” corporation, or a “S” corporation. It is important to clearly state that these different forms of legal structure for business has its own advantages and disadvantages; which is why you must weigh your options properly before making your choice on the legal structure to build your private military outfit on.
These are some of the factors you should consider before choosing a legal entity for your private military company; limitation of personal liability, ease of transferability, admission of new owners and investors’ expectation and tax issues. If you take your time to critically study the various legal entities to use for your private military company, then you will agree that limited liability company; an LLC is the most suitable. You can start your private military company as a limited liability company (LLC) and in future convert it to a ‘C’ corporation or even a ‘S’ corporations especially when you have the plans of going public.
Upgrading to a ‘C’ corporation or ‘S’ corporation will afford you the opportunity to grow your private military company so as to compete with major players in the security industry; you will be able to generate capital from venture capital firms, stock market, you will enjoy separate tax structure, and you can easily transfer ownership of the company; you will enjoy flexibility in ownership and in your management structures as well.
Catchy Business Name ideas Suitable for a Private Military Company
Your private military company business name will be the first impression for your security business. Whatever the name is, it does not have to be flashy and lousy, make it less attention seeking as possible. Based on whichever name it is, it must create fear and make your clients feel safe. Consider the following names for your start-up;
- AirScan
- Allied Barton
- Arma
- Armor Group
- Asia Security Group
- Black Element
- Black Tiger International
- Blue Mountain Group
- Bohemia Interactive
- Chubb Security
- Corps Security
- Cubic Defense Applications
- Draken International
- Finnish Defense Forces
- H.O.S.T. Company
- G4S Risk Management
- GardaWorld
- Global Defense Systems
- HB Solutions
- International Intelligence Limited
- Jack Desmond Worldwide
- Paladin Tactical Solutions
- Pinkerton Government Services
- Red Sand Solutions
- RSB Group
- Securitas AB
- Sharp End International
- The Brink’s Company
- Triple Canopy
- Washington Group International
In the United States and of course in most countries of the world, you can’t operate a business without having some of the basic insurance policies that is required by the industry you want to operate from. Besides, the nature of the security industry requires that you have the proper insurance cover in place or else you will be forced out of business if anything goes wrong with the security contract you are handling.
So, it is important to create a budget for insurance and perhaps consult an insurance broker to guide you in choosing the best insurance policies for your private military company; it is their duty to help you assess the risks involved in the type of security business you intend running and then advice you accordingly.
Here are some of the basic insurance covers that you should consider purchasing if you want to start your own private military company in the United States of America; General insurance, health insurance, risk Insurance, payment protection insurance, liability insurance, workers compensation, overhead expense disability insurance and, business owner’s policy group insurance.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
If you are considering starting your own private military firm, then you should consider filing for intellectual property protection. Filing for intellectual property protection for your firm is not only limited to your company’s logo and other documents, and but also protecting of course the name of your company.
If you want to file for intellectual property protection and also register your trademark in the United States, then you are expected to begin the process by filing an application with the USPTO. The final approval of your trademark is subjected to the review of attorneys as required by USPTO.
Is Professional Certification Needed to Run a Private Military Company?
Even though to operate legally, you must obtain a business license to operate the business, it is not technically required by law to employ licensed and certified personnel. To work for a private contractor agency as a security professional, workers must earn a private military contractor license or registration with their state.
Applicants typically need to hold a certain amount of training or experience and must pass a private military contractor exam. They may also need to undergo fingerprinting, and pass a criminal background test. Any security contractors who carry weapons must also be properly registered with their state.
List of Legal Documents Needed to Run a Private Military Company
Register your business with the government. Laws vary by state. Talk to your state Department of defense and Department of Licensing to receive the forms that you need to establish your business and to learn if you need a license to do b. You can notify the federal government of your business by applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN). You can also create a business name for yourself and file a “Doing Business As” or “DBA” notice.
These are some of the basic legal document that you are expected to have in place if you want to start a cleaning business in the United States of America;
- Certificate of Incorporation
- Business License
- Business Plan
- Non – disclosure Agreement
- Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)
- Apostille
- Employment Agreement (offer letters)
- Operating Agreement
- Company By laws
- Operating Agreement for LLCs
- Insurance Policy
Now, setting up a business plan to help start a carpet cleaning business isn’t rocket science and does not necessarily involve a business consultant’s input. The key to any business plan is to make a list of those things you will be spending money on and how much you will be getting in.
You might wonder why you need to have a business plan. You already know what kind of services you could offer. All you need is to find a client to start your bookkeeping business. If you need to do some marketing, you might say “I will think about it along the way”.
However, one of the most important management functions is planning. Without planning, you don’t know which way your business is going and you cannot measure your progress. A lot of small businesses fail because of poor planning.
Here is a list of items in your business plan to consider:
- Summary of Business Plan
- Management and Operating Plan
- Competitive Analysis
- Market Analysis and Marketing Plan
- Financial Plan
- Summary of Business Plan
There are several expenses that you would have to make before successfully launching your own private military company. It is important to state that the location you choose to launch your business will definitely impact on the overall cost of starting the business which is why it is very important to have concluded and analyzed your feasibility studies and market survey before drawing up a budget and sourcing for funding for your business.
Here are some of the basic costs you must look towards fulfilling when starting a private military company in the United States of America;
- The Total Fee for incorporating the Business in United States of America – $750.
- The budget for Insurance, permits and license – $5,000
- The Amount needed to rent a suitable office facility with enough space in the United States of America (Re – Construction of the facility inclusive) – $50,000.
- The Cost for equipping the office (computers, printers, fax machines, furniture, telephones, filing cabins, safety gadgets and electronics et al) – $15,000
- The cost for acquiring security equipment, gadgets, accessories and uniforms – $100,000
- The Cost of Launching an official Website – $700
- Additional Expenditure (Business cards and Signage) – $2,500
- Other miscellaneous – $10,000
On the average, you would need over 500,000 US dollars to start a medium scale private military company in the United States of America. If you choose to start a large scale private military company, then you should look towards budgeting about 4 million US dollars and above. This money includes paying military experts that will be on your employee / payroll.
- Financing your Private Military Company
- Your own resources: Do a thorough inventory of your assets. People generally have more assets than they immediately realize. This could include savings accounts, equity in real estate, retirement accounts, vehicles, recreation equipment, collections and other investments. You may opt to sell assets for cash or use them as collateral for a loan. Take a look, too, at your personal line of credit. Many a successful business has been started with credit cards.
- Friends and family: The next logical step after gathering your own resources is to approach friends and relatives who believe in you and want to help you succeed. Be cautious with these arrangements; no matter how close you are, present yourself professionally, put everything in writing, and be sure the individuals you approach can afford to take the risk of investing in your business. Never ask a friend or family member to invest or loan you money they can’t afford to lose.
- Partners: Using the “strength in numbers” principle, look around for someone who may want to team up with you in your venture. You may choose someone who has financial resources and wants to work side-by-side with you in the business. Or you may find someone who has money to invest but no interest in doing the actual work. Be sure to create a written partnership agreement that clearly defines your respective responsibilities and obligations.
- Government programs: Take advantage of the abundance of local, state and federal programs designed to support small businesses. Make your first stop the U.S. Small Business Administration; then investigate various other programs. Women, minorities and veterans should check out niche financing possibilities designed to help these groups get into business. The business section of your local library is a good place to begin your research.
Choosing a location for your business is not what you should do without due consultation. The truth is that if you get it wrong with the location where you have decided to pitch your business tent, you are more likely going to struggle to make headway with the business.
One of the major reasons why businesses struggle, fail and eventual close shop is the fact that the owners decided to choose a wrong location for the business. As a private military contractor, situating your firm in a country or state hostile to your cause will kill your business from onset.
Nonetheless, if you are able to build a successful security company brand, you can pitch your business in any part of the world and still make success out of the business- especially if you run a security consultancy and advisory business. Conversely, if you are just starting out; especially if you are a newbie in the industry, it is important that you locate your business in an area with healthy business activities.
Starting a Private Military Company – Technical and Manpower Details
Your manpower as a military contracting firm depends on the scale at which you operate, if you operate on a small scale, you will only be the one running the business but if you choose to expand and go medium then you will need at least 4 more workers, anything above 4 employees means you are operating on a large scale.
Whichever scale you wish to operate will determine your manpower need and it is important for you to know that the industry is labor intensive which only needs people to man the equipment.
- Equipment Needed to Start a Private Military Company
These are only issued by authorized and recognized government agencies, such as Ministries of Defense and Interior (Police). Further in order to use lethal equipment and or equipment that may interfere with the Air Defense, Air Space Control, GSM, and or radio frequencies, they have to have permission and coordination of the government in the territory in which they are going to operate.
For especially sensitive equipment, it is normally GFE or Government Furnished Equipment. Which means in order to do the job, the government will provide the equipment and you (the contractor) operate and maintain it.
Starting a Private Military Company – The Marketing Plan
- Marketing ideas and Strategies for a Private Military Company
In most cases, you’ll be favorably impresses with the work, and will only have to pay with a copy of the finished flyer for the student’s portfolio, and a recommendation or testimonial about his work for you. Even if there should be a charge for the work you have done at the college, it will be a reasonable one.
Contracting with an advertising agency will probably take longer and will cost a significant amount of money. However, you might be able to contact a staff member who does private work on the side. But you should set a specific date for completion of the project, and agree to pay no more than half the total estimated cost until the job is finished, and meets with your approval.
The next step is to take this original of your flyer to a printer, and have printed whatever number of copies you want to start. Most quick print shops will be able to print up to 20,000 copies, and deliver in a reasonable time, with nominal costs. If you decide to start with more than 20,000 copies, you will do better by going to a regular commercial printer. Larger quantities that would take a quick print shop all day can be handled by a commercial print shop in a few hours.
While your flyers are being printed, you should be lining up your delivery people -local Brownie or Cub Scout Troops. No big problem here. Either look up their local headquarters office in your phone book or call a friend or two with children about the right age for the name and phone number of troop leaders. Arrange to pay these scout troops $10 for each thousand circulars they hand out door-to-door.
One other thing before you start handing out your flyers, be sure that you have someone available to answer the phone and set up appointments for you. It’s usually best to have a woman do this; it makes the caller think of your service as an established business. You can pay an answering service to handle these calls for you, but if your wife or a friend is available that would be even better. It is, however, imperative that a “live voice” answer your phone. People have some strange ideas about answering machines, and most businesses find they do much better not using them.
Possible Competitive Strategies for Winning Competitors in the Private Military Industry
Even before the acquisition of equipment, you need customers. Your prospects are all the businesses and organizations you can convince. Your problem is going to be in reaching these prospects, impressing upon then the benefits of your service, and getting them set up with an appointment for you to do the work.
Contracting with an advertising agency will probably take longer and will cost a significant amount of money. However, you might be able to contact a staff member who does private work on the side. But you should set a specific date for completion of the project, and agree to pay no more than half the total estimated cost until the job is finished, and meets with your approval.
Possible Ways to Increase Client Retention for your Private Military Company
Once you have the skills and your equipment ready, it is time to start sourcing for clients and most times based on your pedigree and past records, your clients will look for you. It is important for you to decide the category of military business you want to opt for. To create awareness for your business, you should develop a business proposal and send to likely clients. You should also consider opening a website.
Strategies to Boost your Brand Awareness and Create a Corporate identity for your Private Military Company
A good way to boost your corporate reputation and create an impression is to invest in a uniform and dress neatly at all times. You should also have your employees wear uniforms and be of proper conduct. This will ensure that you are properly branded. You must also ensure that you handle your client’s property with care and observe all safety rules.
You should know that most client’s would be observing you while you work and therein lies the success of your business because the probability of a client calling you back for another job or recommending you to other people depends on their first impression of you and the way you handled their job.
Creating a Suppliers/Distributors Network for your Private Military Company
As a private military firm, be on the lookout for opportunities and referrals from other firms who are not in your niche. So also, utilize you chances by contacting your banks, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and multi-national corporations to patronize and help them with their security needs.
Tips for Running a Private Military Company Successfully
The business of military contracting is a very risky venture that will later come with several court litigations and petitions due to the excesses of your personnel. As a business owner, you will succeed more in this field if you can train your military personnel to tone down these excesses. If they don’t, a bunch of the millions you make will be used in settling lawyers and paying damages in the long run.
___________________________________________
When our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens allowed our REAL public military be taken by global corporations-----when our US military leaders are graduating from global mercenary military corporations owned and operated by people having no ties to US public military academies------we get NATO AS NERO.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
We discussed last week how global mercenary military corporations act just as MR ABRAHAM global corporation black market profiteer of RUSHDIE'S 'THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH'.
NATO AS UNITED NATIONS AS NERO/CATO/SENECA------Indeed, Europe as US are slated to BURN. The US after several decades of funding global military actions using our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE Federal, state, and local taxes will now step aside as head of NATO to allow global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS decide who those GENERALS----MAJORS inside US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----will be.
LET'S SEE, BACK IN 3000BC ---1000 BC ANY BEOWULF RUTHLESS, BRUTAL, AND MOST MEGLOMANIAC GOT TO BE COLONIAL MILITARY JUNTA---
So, that is indeed what TODAY'S US CITIES as deep, deep, really deep state global MILITARY JUNTAs will look like as well. The difference today from 1000BC----the goals of PERMANENT SMART CITIES with goals of massive depopulation.
Below we see US far-right wing think tank CATO outing NATO AS NERO-----when in fact CATO was team NERO AND SENECA. Again, in US what have always been far-right wing LIBERTARIAN political groups and think tanks----are being made to sound like they CARE FOR OUR US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown ----
ALL THE ACTIONS THESE FEW DECADES OF CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA WERE FAR-RIGHT LIBERTARIAN----PLEASE DON'T FALL FOR MORE PRETENDING.
Commentary
NATO as Nero: Alliance Postures While Europe BurnsBy Doug Bandow
This article appeared in Forbes on May 20, 2012.
NATO leaders are meeting in Chicago with a full agenda. It’s the biggest NATO meeting ever, with some 60 governments in attendance. But no one is asking the most important question: why is America still defending Europe?
The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance once had an obvious purpose: to defend North Atlantic countries. More precisely, the U.S. was to protect everyone else. The war-ravaged western European states feared pressure, if not conquest, by the Soviet Union. NATO also helped tie a rearmed Germany to its neighbors.
The alliance finished its work on November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Soon the Warsaw Pact dissolved and the Soviet Union disappeared.
There then ensued a desperate attempt to find a new role for the alliance. Some officials suggested that NATO could fight the illicit drug trade, promote the environment, or even aid student exchanges. Alliance advocates settled on engaging in “out-of-area” activities. That is, NATO abandoned its traditional role of defending its members and switched to pursuing social engineering around the globe, as well as acting as a tool to socialize former communist states.
One thing did not change. The U.S. continued to subsidize the defense of everyone else. NATO essentially stood for North America and The Others. If anything was going to happen, it would have to be organized and paid for by Washington.
Even during the Cold War the Europeans would promise to increase military spending, only to welsh when budgets got tight. Once the threat from the Soviet Union dissipated so did the continent’s heretofore modest interest in self-defense. Before he retired as Defense Secretary, Robert Gates complained that European military budgets “have been chronically starved for adequate funding for a long time, with the shortfalls compounding themselves each year.”
The consequences have been grave. According to the group Notre Europe, the continent suffers “some alarming shortfalls in the areas of strategic transportation, communication, intelligence, logistics and satellites, requiring the implementation of costly reforms in terms of resources.” Despite having 1.8 million men under arms, at most 100,000 of them “are equipped and sufficiently trained to be able to be deployed in crisis theaters.”
Successive crises have driven down European military outlays. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has detailed cuts in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and others. Even Great Britain, which traditionally maintained the most serious European military with the greatest expeditionary capabilities, is dramatically cutting outlays and capabilities. James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School complained: “The European countries have made a strategic-level to disarm essentially.”
For years the Europeans talked of creating a continental military capability separate from NATO. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty was supposed to boost this process. However, the idea was stillborn. It’s not much good having a Common Defense and Security Policy without the military necessary to back it up.
The problem was evident in 1999 when the allies bombed essentially defenseless Yugoslavia. America did most of the work since Europe was estimated to have barely 10 to 15 percent of U.S. combat capabilities.
Last year’s intervention in the Libyan civil war was no better. It was supposed to be a European-led operation, but the Europeans took months to push the opposition to victory over the ragtag forces of Moammar Qaddafi.
Just eight NATO members contributed anything militarily; most contributions were minimal. Several countries ran short of munitions. According to the IISS: “the NATO air operations center in Italy managing the campaign had been designed to run 300 sorties a day, but was struggling to manage 150, about one-third the number flown over the much smaller Serbia/Kosovo theater in 1999.” Washington was responsible for destroying anti-aircraft defenses, launching drone attacks, providing 80 percent of aerial refueling, and, of course, resupplying the Europeans when their weapon stocks ran low. “Europe is dead militarily,” one general told Robert Kaplan of the Center for a New American Security.
However, for the Obama administration there is no looking back. America’s NATO ambassador, Ivo Daalder, wants the alliance to go global. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently opined: “Of course, NATO is and always will be a transatlantic organization. But the problems we face today are not limited to one ocean and neither can our work be.”
Where will the necessary forces come from? National Security Adviser Tom Donilon admitted: “We know that allies need more advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. They face shortages in helicopters and transport aircraft. They need to make greater investments in the precision munitions and unmanned systems that are critical on today’s battlefields and will be even more important in the future.” Last year only two of the other 27 NATO members devoted more than two percent of GDP to the military.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said: “We need to use this moment to make the case for the need to invest in this alliance, to ensure it remains relevant to the security challenges of the future.” Similarly, NSA Donilon noted that President Barack Obama was “asking the alliance to ensure that it has cutting-edge capabilities.”
Greece appears headed out of the European monetary union. Voters in France, Germany, and Italy have revolted against fiscal austerity. Britain’s economy has fallen back into recession. The government in the Netherlands collapsed with early elections to follow. The economic news in Spain continues to worsen. Who in Europe is going to spend more money to provide “cutting-edge capabilities”?
An embarrassed NATO Secretary General Andes Fogh Rasmussen has proposed “smart defense,” which means “money spent more effectively. It is shared defense. It is efficient defense.”
Which in practice means NATO is going to remain North America and The Others. Washington will still be on call to meet European as opposed to American security needs, as in Libya.
With the end of any existential threat to Europe, NATO today only fights wars in which the members have no common interest. The Balkans conflicts were tragic, but had only minimal impact even on European alliance members. The status of the former Yugoslav republics was of no meaningful interest to America. Yet Washington essentially fought that war for the Europeans, who have since ruled Bosnia as colonial overlords and are attempting to force the ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo to submit to another artificial state based in Pristina.
The U.S. dragged the Europeans into a more than decade long war in Afghanistan against the wishes of the European peoples. They have little interest in establishing a modern, liberal democratic state in Central Asia. Which is why most European countries imposed “caveats”—an incredible 83 at the start—limiting their personnel’s exposure to combat.
The Europeans now all desperately want out. The Chicago summit was supposed to formalize a gradual withdrawal timetable. However, newly elected French President Francois Hollande promised to pull his nation’s 3300 troops out by the end of the year, though doing so may be logistically difficult. With the NATO military mission formally scheduled to last until the end of 2014, the Obama administration fears Paris’s plan may spark a rush to the exit.
Britain and France returned the favor in Libya when they effectively got the rest of Europe and the U.S. to fight their war. Similar efforts are brewing to ensnare NATO—which means America—in Syria’s civil war. For instance, the foreign minister of Belgium, which has all of 34,300 men under arms, recently pushed for debate over invading Syria to create “humanitarian corridors.” Everyone knows who would be doing the bulk of the fighting, and it wouldn’t be Belgium.
It brings to mind Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn’s insistence last year that stopping Qaddafi “requires military action.” The Grand Duchy had a population of less than a half million, no air force or navy, an army of 900 men, and a paramilitary gendarmerie of 612. Just whose military did Minister Asselborn expected to do the stopping?
Yet NATO expansion is in the air. In March Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), just defeated for reelection in his party’s primary, and Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) introduced the “NATO Enhancement Act” to extend the alliance. Unfortunately, NATO expansion adds security liabilities rather than military abilities.
Originally the alliance was created to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union. Today no country is in a position to dominate Eurasia. The idea of an attack on western—or central—Europe is but a paranoid fantasy. Russia may be an unpleasant neighbor, but it has reverted to pre-1914 great power mode. Moscow wants secure borders and international respect. Florid threats to preempt a missile defense system to the contrary, even Vladimir Putin at his most aggressive isn’t likely dreaming of a revived Red Army marching down the Unter den Linden in Berlin or Champs-Elysees in Paris.
If there is genuine danger of Russian military action, it is in the east, precisely where NATO is expanding. However, these areas were part of or dominated by both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. America still has an interest in the liberated states’ development into vibrant democracies, but that does not warrant potential war with a nuclear-armed power.
Morgan Lorraine Roach and Luke Coffey of the Heritage Foundation argue that adding new members “is critical to mobilizing Europe and its allies around a collective transatlantic defense.” But look at the list of potential new members.
The top tier of aspirants, endorsed by Sen. Lugar’s legislation, holds Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia, and Montenegro.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is an artificial country ruled by the European Union’s “High Representative.” Bosnia exists only because Western military intervention forced Serbs and Croats to remain in a territory dominated by Bosniaks. There is little more unity today than in 1995 when Bosnia was established by the Dayton Accords. Bosnia’s internal tensions—Serbs in the Republic Srpska continue to strongly resist “national” rule—would become an American problem with NATO membership. The IISS describes the Bosnian armed forces as “an uneasy amalgam of troops from all three formerly warring entities.” Bringing such an entity into NATO would be little short of madness.
Adding Georgia would be even more foolish. Tbilisi desperately wants to join NATO, but has a very bad relationship with Russia, with which it fought a brief war in August 2008. Georgia’s human rights record remains “uneven,” according to Human Rights Watch. Indeed, Freedom House reports “electoral problems such as the abuse of state resources, reports of intimidation aimed at public employees and opposition activists, and apparent voter-list inaccuracies.”
Worse, President Mikhail Saakashvili started the 2008 conflict by attacking Russian forces in the breakaway territory of South Ossetia. Many suspect that he did so because he expected Western support. The Georgian people deserve to be free and secure, but not at the risk of war for America. For Moscow border security is a vital interest: imagine America’s reaction if Russia forged a seemingly hostile military alliance with Mexico.
Macedonia also wants in but has been blocked by Greece in a dispute over the former’s name, which refers to territory included within the latter’s boundaries. Macedonia also has been caught in the riptide of Albanian nationalism, barely avoiding a destructive civil war like that in Kosovo. Freedom House warned that “poor relations between the Macedonian Slav majority and the ethnic Albanian minority have raised doubts about the country’s long-term viability.” Last year the International Crisis Group cited “rising ethnic Macedonian nationalism, state capture by the prime minister and his party, decline in media and judicial independence, increased segregation in schools and slow decentralization” which “risk undermining the multi-ethnic civil state Macedonia can become.” With a military of just 8000 Macedonia would add little to the alliance.
Montenegro is much the same, only it has an even smaller armed forces and closer economic relationship with Russia, the chief target of NATO. Montenegro also managed to achieve a peaceful separation from Yugoslavia and avoided being pulled into the violent whirlpool of Albanian separatism next door. But there is no reason to add it as a new American defense client.
Kosovo, Serbia, and Ukraine are on some lists as well.
Kosovo is another artificial state born of war with allied military support. Kosovo has been recognized only by about half of the world’s states. It remains under allied occupation without a formal military. Its government contains men charged with criminal involvement and war crimes; corruption and human rights remain problems. The European Commission acknowledged that “public administration reform in Kosovo remains a major challenge.” The north of Kosovo, with an ethnic-Serb majority, continues to maintain a separate existence with close links to Belgrade.
Another candidate is Serbia, which NATO countries bombed for 78 days in 1999. Now Belgrade wants to join the onetime aggressors. However, Serbia continues to refuse to recognize Kosovo—a perfectly reasonable decision, but one in conflict with the policy of most NATO members. And while the Serbian military is larger than Montenegro’s, it would require bountiful American subsidies to bring it up to alliance standards.
Ukraine also has its supporters, though a majority of Ukrainians oppose the idea and the Yanukovich government is in very bad odor in the West. Kiev is capable of deterring an attack from Russia. Moreover, adding Ukraine would further poison relations with Moscow, appearing as part of an American-inspired effort at encirclement. NATO membership also would make Ukraine’s disputes with Russia America’s disputes.
Advocates of NATO expansion treat security guaranties as hotel chocolates to be placed on every nation’s pillow, irrespective of America’s national interests. The U.S. has nothing at stake which warrants the expense necessary to upgrade the alliance aspirants’ militaries or the risk of going to war for them against a nuclear-armed power. Adding these nations would not fulfill the most basic purpose of any alliance: to enhance America’s security.
Of course, while war with Moscow is unlikely, it remains possible. As Kaplan argued, it would be wrong to assume “that Europe will face no geopolitical nightmares in its future.” However, this argues against moving NATO further eastward. For Russia border security is a vital concern. Four years ago Russia demonstrated its willingness to defend those interests with military force, if necessary. The deterioration in that nation’s conventional forces means that Moscow would be forced to rely on nuclear weapons as the ultimate equalizer in any confrontation with the West. Warned Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian General Staff: “In certain conditions, I do not rule out local and regional armed conflicts developing into a large-scale war, including using nuclear weapons.”
Europe still should be defended. But by Europeans.
Before the Chicago summit former U.S. NATO ambassador Kurt Volker complained about “things that are not on the agenda that are the most important issues.” He pointed to Syria, Iran, and the Arab Spring, none of which NATO could—or should—do much about. But one important issue was left off the agenda: NATO’s future.
Last June Secretary Gates predicted “a dim if not dismal future” for the alliance. He warned “that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” Last October Gates’ successor, Leon Panetta, was only slightly less blunt: “legitimate questions about whether, if present trends continue, NATO will again be able to sustain the kind of operations that we have seen in Libya and Afghanistan without the United States taking on even more of the burden.”
Of course, the answer obviously was no, and nothing decided in Chicago will change it.
To coin a phrase, it is time for a change. Washington once opposed an independent European defense. Now the U.S. should insist on it. Or rather—since it is not America’s place to decide Europe’s future for Europe—should adopt policies likely to lead to that result. Washington should bring home the 80,000 troops which remain in Europe and announce that it will be formally leaving NATO after a “decent interval.” The Europeans could use the existing alliance structure to organize continental military affairs, perhaps in cooperation with the European Union. (Albania, Croatia, Iceland, and Turkey are not currently EU members, but Croatia is slated to join next year and the others are candidates for membership; Canada is the only true outlier.)
The U.S. should not “leave” Europe but forge a less formal cooperative relationship including intelligence sharing, joint maneuvers, and mutual base access. In the rare case where military action served both America and Europe, such as confronting Somali piracy, they should act together. In the unlikely case of an uncontainable hegemonic threat against Europe—which currently enjoys about ten times the GDP and more than three times the population of Russia—the U.S. could intervene. However, normal responsibility for protecting Europe and ensuring security in adjoining regions would be left to Europe.
Retrenchment is necessary to better defend the U.S. Washington should not entangle America’s future in geopolitical controversies of no concern to the U.S. At a time of fiscal stringency Washington cannot afford to continue to protect America’s prosperous and populous allies. And the only way they will do more for themselves is if the U.S. does less for them. Welfare dependency is not only a domestic problem.
NATO played an important role during the Cold War. The collapse of communism and the Soviet Union have eliminated its raison d’être. Even NATO admits that the alliance’s “value is less obvious to many than in the past.”
Instead of desperately concocting new missions for an old alliance, the U.S. should applaud NATO’s success and turn the organization over to the Europeans. America no longer need protect a continent that is both richer and more populous than our own nation.
___________________________________________
Here we see the same for our US Naval Academy as for our US West Point Army academy.
When these US national media articles speak of ROTC as being just as good as our US public military academies in educating and training our US military leaders-----they do not explain how those ROTC training are tied to institutions no longer PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES-----ROTC training tied to vocational community colleges are extensions of global corporate campuses which contract with global mercenary military corporations.
Local
Naval Academy professor: A veneer of selectivity
By Daniel de Vise December 30, 2011
U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen signal their classmates in semaphore at the 112th Army-Navy football game. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst) In a recent article, I wrote of allegations that the U.S. Naval Academy artificially inflates its application totals by counting large numbers of applications that are incomplete.
The Naval Academy reported an admission rate of 7.5 percent last year, one of the lowest in all of higher education. But academy officials now acknowledge that roughly two-thirds of the 19,146 applications were incomplete and never seriously considered for admission.
Overcounting applications can give an institution an unfair advantage in its admission rate, a key measure of selectivity. I found, in a survey of local institutions, that several other colleges around Washington count small numbers of incomplete applications in their official totals, but not the large numbers reported by the Naval Academy.
Academy officials said the institution has an admission process that is fundamentally different - - and far more extensive - - than those at traditional universities. The process comprises 11 distinct steps, whereas the bulk of a traditional college application can be completed in one sitting.
Here is a guest post by Bruce Fleming, the Naval Academy professor whose Freedom of Information request prompted the disclosure. Fleming is an outspoken critic of the service academy.
The U.S. Naval Academy’s response to my recent FOIA request seeking clarification regarding what we count as an applicant produced the sensational information that we overstate our selectivity by what is probably a factor of about 4-to-1. It’s still unclear what our true selectivity is, because though only about 5,700 applications (out of more than 19,000 claimed) go to the Admissions Board, I know from my own time on the Board that not all of these are complete either. More relevant may be the fact that about 1,900 applicants are deemed “fully qualified,” and about 1,500 are accepted. It’s not hard to be “fully qualified.” All it requires is SAT scores above 600, a B average from an undemanding high school, and some pushups. So our true acceptance rate may be over 50 percent.
This is a shocking revelation about an institution that claims it’s “held to a higher standard,” and from the military that exists to defend taxpayers. As Dan de Vise points out, selectivity is the coin of prestige among colleges. Though selectivity counts for only 1.5 percent of the much-cited US News rankings, public perception of exclusivity is a huge part of the 22.5 percent of the US News score devoted to “peer assessment.” Although some of the less stellar schools de Vise questioned admitted to counting a few incomplete applications, the Naval Academy apparently claims about 70 percent of its reported total are incomplete. That we do this is no longer under debate.
Here’s a question, by me, with a one-word answer—taken from the FOIA letter from the Academy to me: “Are High School juniors and above who initiate an application online counted as part of this number whether or not they subsequently complete an application?” Response: “Yes.”
This revelation is indicative of many things, none of them good. First we should consider the appalling fact that it required a Freedom of Information request—which a government entity like the Academy cannot legally refuse to comply with—to wrest from this taxpayer-supported institution data that it should be eager to share with its paymasters, the civilians. This, unfortunately, is consistently the way the academies operate. It took a similar FOIA request from a reporter at the Annapolis Capital to elicit the fact that the Naval Academy’s (taxpayer-supported) Prep School in Newport is composed of about half non-white minorities and half recruited athletes, who are generally admitted with lower grades and SAT scores than other midshipmen, and who make up about 20 percent of the following year’s USNA class. Another FOIA request by the same paper produced the revelation that Naval Academy disciplinary measures were slanted towards women and against men.
This unwillingness to share information with the civilian world contributes to a culture of suspicion and impunity with respect to civilians who pay their bills. Consider that the most recent Superintendent was removed a year early for having presided over an administration that worked with off-the-books “slush funds” for recruited athletes and racial minorities that the Navy Inspector General blasted. But the Board of Visitors wasn’t even told until months later, when the report was about to be made public. The Superintendent before that was yanked after a single year—he’d grabbed the wrist of a Marine gate guard who asked for his ID (as the guard was supposed to do). But it took having this incident in the Annapolis paper to produce this result.
The Academy wants respect bordering on reverence from the civilian world, yet it wants to be able to forgo following the same rules as everybody else: it wants to be able to win a two-mile race by running a mile. The FOIA response made clear that the Naval Academy does not follow, nor should it be expected to follow, the criteria of the Common Data Set (though this is also used to provide such information to the U.S. Department of Education as well as private outlets such as the hyper-important US News rankings).
To quote the letter: “There is no mandate to apply the definition of the common data set to the U.S. Naval Academy’s admissions process. Of note, the requirements for admission to the Service Academies are different than other colleges and universities.” And this was echoed by the Academy spokesman quoted in Dan de Vise’s article of 28 December: the Naval Academy is different. Yet, they supply this completely cockeyed data to best other schools that are playing by the rules.
Similarly, the academies claim incessantly that their students are the “best and the brightest.” They also claim to teach “leadership” and to produce “leaders.” (Check out their Web sites.)
On what are these claims based?
Apparently the gullibility of the taxpayers. “Best” is apparently defined by being at the service academies, and that is a circular definition. “Brightest” is never justified—nor can it be. More than a quarter of our students have SAT scores in the 400s and 500s. Yes, our top quarter is comparable to the top half of Ivies. So we have some bright kids, but they’re the exception. Oh, we hear: But they’re leaders! This, too, is circular: the only “leadership” we consider in admission is things like student council offices—which also help get you into the University of Maryland (whose SAT scores, a visiting lecturer pointed out recently, are now higher than USNA’s). And for our target groups of recruited athletes and racial minorities, even this leadership score becomes irrelevant: students below our minima simply enter by the taxpayer-supported back door of NAPS.
What’s striking nowadays is the unrelenting barrage of self-serving hype coming from the academies, little of it apparently justified by facts. The academies are like any government program, intent on their own survival. This they do by claiming over and over to be better than they are compared to the alternatives—much to the disgust of most of their students, who are not allowed to talk to the public on this subject. (Increasingly USNA reminds me of East Berlin, which I got to know as a Fulbright Scholar in West Berlin: only good news, lie with statistics, control information, and make the citizens cheer on the streets—for us it’s the mandatory football games.)
In 1950 the academies were the primary officer production source; this is no longer true. Now, after radical expansion of ROTC in the 1960s and 70s, more than twice as many young officers come from ROTC programs housed in civilian colleges and universities as come from the academies. And as many Officer Candidate School officers are produced each year as Academy graduates. These ROTC officers cost taxpayers on average one quarter of what the academies’ products cost—and are apparently just as good. We’d better hope they are, because there are twice as many of them as academy graduates. (An academy graduate costs taxpayers close to a half a million dollars.) The academies don’t actually produce better “leaders” than an ROTC program, or for that matter than the civilian universities. Certainly they’re prestige objects for the military—and I’m sure the Superintendent and the other brass who live on our gorgeous campus like their taxpayer-supported mansions with the white-coated servants and the groundsmen. Who wouldn’t? This, I believe, is why the academies have begun to engage in a desperate end-game to artificially burnish their image and ensure their own survival. The wild over-inflation of selectivity is part of this campaign.
The shrill insistence by the military on its own virtue is, finally, indicative of a serious problem in the military’s relationship with the civilian world. Consider the Army’s dogged initial insistence that Pat Tillman was not, in fact, killed by “friendly fire;” the fabrication of the story of Jessica Lynch; and the recent embellishment by the Marine Corps of their medal winner’s story. This is lying to the people the military is meant to protect, and who pay for it. It is absolutely, completely, unacceptable. Yet it now has become common.
I have suggested in my book “Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide” that this too-glowing misrepresentation by the military of itself is part of this largest problem of all, the fact that the minority professional military in these all-volunteer times lacks a coherent sense of its purpose with respect to the civilian world. It’s not so clear that what they do is defense (how was Iraq defense? Afghanistan?). Still, it costs lives, and limbs, and psyches, and civilians go about their business of shopping—as President Bush suggested we do. Apparently the military disdains and resents the civilians it exists to defend—and feels free to lie to these civilians. The Naval Academy’s wild exaggeration of its selectivity is the tip of an iceberg.
____________________________________________
We will segue from MILITARY JUNTA public policy to education public policy looking at what happens in our US cities when once strong, local, domestic universities are consolidated into global hedge fund IVY LEAGUE corporations------if our US public military academies are going to be replaced by ROTC instruction on global corporate campuses as 'universities'----of course that ROTC will be tied to the same global mercenary military corporations being installed in MOVING FORWARD US CITIES DEEMED FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES----and of course it will be global banking 1% educating our US citizens just how to be that military EMPLOYEE.
If our US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE all race to get that multi-national corporate ROTC training----we are MOVING FORWARD GLOBAL MILITARY JUNTA in US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES.
Creating global monopolies of the only pathway our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE will have to an education -----global corporate campus pre-K to career vocational tracking apprenticeship child labor.
Is today’s university the new multinational corporation?
June 5, 2015 4.07am EDT
A growing number of colleges and universities are emerging as multinational organizations – creating start-up versions of themselves in foreign countries.
Those vacationing in western France may drive past a campus of Georgia Institute of Technology. Similarly, those visiting Italy may come across a Johns Hopkins nestled in Bologna; or if you are a visitor to Rwanda, you may come across a Carnegie Mellon University campus.
According to the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) at SUNY-Albany, 51 US universities now operate 83 branch campuses outside of the United States. Arkansas State has recently announced it will build a campus in Mexico. Qatar is already home to campuses from six American universities.
Students can now earn degrees from New York University in New York City, Abu Dhabi or Shanghai.
This sort of activity is being duplicated by institutions from Australia, the United Kingdom, India and more than two dozen other countries. Globally, universities in 32 countries export 235 branch campuses across 73 nations.
How are we to understand these developments? Do they bring advantages for students, academia as well as nations? Have higher education institutions become tools of public diplomacy? Or, are such institutions evolving into multiple national corporations with limited affinity with their home nation?
For the past five years, as co-directors of C-BERT, we have been tracking the development of this phenomenon, research that has included visits to some 50 of these institutions in 15 countries.
Universities go global
The fact is that no longer are global activities limited to the for-profit educational conglomerates such as the Apollo Group University of Phoenix and Laureate that have developed an international footprint through investment in online education and the purchase of colleges in multiple countries.
Rather, a growing number of public and private nonprofit universities have entered this space, creating, for example, branch campuses where a student in a local country can attend classes, join student organizations, engage in research projects and earn a degree awarded in the name of the home campus.
The earliest branch campus we’ve identified opened in the 1920s, when Parsons Fashion School in New York opened a location in Paris, so they could be in the fashion capital of the world, even though much of the growth in this sector started only in the 2000s.
Today, this effort is not limited to a handful of elite four-year institutions; it includes schools ranging from community colleges to boutique graduate schools, offering associates’ degrees to doctorates.
Proponents argue that branch campuses provide needed educational capacity in underserved areas, while allowing the home institution to diversify its revenue and enhance its reputation. Critics claim that operating under authoritarian governments hampers the academic freedom of faculty and students.
Push and pull factors
Most branch campuses seem to fall somewhere in between the glorious and the atrocious. But, first, let us look at some of the factors leading to the setting up of these branch campuses.
In our view, there are a number of internal factors pushing institutions to open branches - mainly, resources, regulations and reputation.
With declining government subsidies at home, concerns about rising tuition rates and heightened competition for students, some colleges and universities are looking for new ways to expand their economic base, through the delivery of courses overseas, foreign research monies and relationships with donors in other countries.
Having a physical presence is helpful, and at times necessary.
Also, it is sometimes easier to expand and be innovative in a different country, where the rules and regulations of the home and host nations (or states) do not constrain their efforts as much. In the US, we have found that while accreditation standards apply to international activities, many state regulations do not extend beyond their borders.
In addition, places like the Dubai International Academic City and EduCity in Malaysia are considered “free trade” zones designed to provide such regulatory relief from both the importing and exporting nations.
Global engagement also seems to be increasingly tied to an institution’s and nation’s reputation. For example, global university rankings such as those by US News and World Report and Times Higher Education factor in the international engagement of institutions.
This is not all. Higher education institutions have become tools of public diplomacy. Some exporting governments see International Branch Campuses (IBCs) as a means to strengthen their alliances with the importing nations.
There are also a number of factors pulling institutions to set up overseas.
Foreign universities have demonstrated interest in locating branches near rapidly expanding academic markets and being part of the emergence of Asia as a power player in the higher education landscape. It is no accident that most of the IBCs built in the past decade are located around the Indian Ocean and Pacific Rim.
Indeed, some countries have developed strategies and enacted policies to encourage international branch campus development through an “education hub.” Hubs usually indicate a country’s intention to promote itself as a regional or international destination for students.
Places like Abu Dhabi (UAE) and Qatar have provided financial and regulatory incentives to attract prestigious IBCs. But destinations such as Dubai, that do not offer any subsidy, are popular locations as well; in fact, IBCs are charged high rents to operate in places such as Dubai International Academic City (though they can receive exemption from many local regulations).
Some importing nations seek to raise their own international reputation by aligning themselves with well-respected institutions such as Duke, Yale and Texas A&M University.
Why some fail
However, at times the reasons for expansion do not align with reality, as the recent retreats of George Mason, Michigan State and the University of La Verne illustrate.
These campuses, like the 26 others that C-BERT data report, closed because they either encountered unexpected market and cultural conditions or lacked sufficient support from the home campus.
Unrealistic projections of revenue and enrollment, regulatory conflicts, and incompatible partnerships are the hallmarks of a bungled branch.
Creating an IBC is akin to creating a “start-up” in a foreign nation – with a different set of laws, cultural expectations and educational infrastructure. Abu Dhabi is very different from New York City. And it isn’t China either.
The established infrastructure of a campus in one country is repurposed in another country with the intention of educating students, fostering local research and innovation, and, through spillover, improving the overall quality of the domestic education sector.
As pioneers in an educational experiment, faculty and staff may be called on to help with a variety of tasks including budget planning, recruiting students, course scheduling, website design, furniture construction, staffing residence halls and even fixing computers.
Changing loyalties
It is clear that colleges and universities are emerging as important international actors, offering benefits to the institution as well as the importing and exporting nations.
What is not clear is how these arrangements will affect the relationship between a nation and its higher education sector.
Historically, colleges and universities have been viewed as anchor institutions that are tightly linked to their local communities and often are significant engines of economic development.
But we are now seeing campuses move locations in their effort to find “best deals” in terms of more regulator flexibility or government subsidies. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business announced in 2013 that it would leave Singapore and set up shop in Hong Kong.
Similarly, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has indicated that it will leave Singapore this year. It is now looking for another Asian base.
Do these trends suggest that US universities will close their home campus if they get a better deal elsewhere? Likely not. Much of the cachet of the branch campus comes from being associated with a home country like the United States, for example.
But both institutions and nations need to realize that these endeavors can be big gambles, and not everyone has a winning hand.
RSS Feed
