MEDAL: Former Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta just gave away the highest valor award a soldier can receive. So he clearly doesn’t need another medal in any form. Nevertheless, the Medal of Honor recipient deserves a salute for presenting his award to the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team during an event in early July. The commander in chief bestowed Giunta with the MOH in 2010 for his actions three years earlier during an enemy ambush while serving with the 173rd in Afghanistan. Since then, the award weighed heavily on his shoulders. No recipient in recent times has been more adamant that the award wasn’t his alone: “The medal [Medal of Honor] should go to the guy on the right of me and the guy on the left of me,” he said after he received it. Army Times readers praised him for showing true military leadership. This act is more than an NCO’s leadership. It is a legacy. It is Giunta’s legacy to the soldiers to the right of him, to the left of him, and to all those at the 173rd who will follow after him, and see what one humble man can do.
F-22 vs civilian drones
MISFIRE: Thanks to human ingenuity and the free market, any joker can now spend a few hundred bucks and start flying their own UAV all around town. Drone proliferation in the neighborhood is one thing, but it takes a special breed of dumb to fly your drone onto a U.S. military installation. That’s exactly what some folks are doing, and right now the Air Force’s hands are tied. Gen. Mike Holmes, the head of Air Combat Command, said there have been a number of incidents of civilian drones interfering with base operations (in one case an F-22 Raptor had a near-collision). Holmes seeks Congressional authority to stop these drones and hold these “pilots” accountable. We recommend blasting these drones out of the sky (that qualifies as weapons training, right?). A big MISFIRE to those misguided civilians who think it’s OK to fly onto base and endanger our service members.
Getting lonely at the Pentagon
MISFIRE: President Donald Trump recently named Mark Esper as his latest pick to be Army Secretary, more than two months after his previous pick withdrew from consideration. Despite that delay and similar lengthy waits for other top defense nominees, White House officials have repeatedly and aggressively attacked Senate Democrats for holding up the confirmation process. While Democrats are using some parliamentary tricks to protest Republican actions, the bigger problem is the lack of nominees. Only seven of 22 Defense Department nominations have been confirmed this year. But of the remaining 15, 10 were announced in the last six weeks. Same with the Department of Veterans Affairs — until recently, only VA Secretary David Shulkin had been formally nominated by the White House. If the administration wants to fill the executive branch more quickly, they need to spend more time naming appointees and less time complaining about the process.
