January 8, 2025 / Christopher Kilmartin and Ronald Levant / Guest opinion / Akron Beacon Journal - When it comes to preventing and responding to military sexual assaults, leadership matters a great deal. Thus, we are very concerned about the safety of our service women and men under President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
Both men have sexual assault allegations against them, and in both cases, there is reliable evidence that corroborates these reports. Trump seems to be an especially egregious offender who is named in more than 20 reports. This is not a case of he said, she said; it is a case of he said, they said.
The U.S. military publishes reliable estimates of sexual assaults every two years based on those both officially reported and recorded by survey. And this is not a problem only for women in the ranks — many of the assault victims are men.
Pfc. Florence Shmorgoner woke up one afternoon in 2015 and realized that she was in someone else’s bed in someone else’s room. Something was wrong. The 19-year-old had been playing video games in her friend’s room in the barracks with the door open — the rule at their base at Twentynine Palms in California was that if male and female Marines were together in the same room, the door had to be left open. Although it was midafternoon, at some point she had dozed off on his bed. Now the door was closed, and her friend was groping her. She felt as if she was having an out-of-body experience, as if she was watching what was happening but not actually experiencing it. He took off her clothes and penetrated her.
April 23, 2025 / Fabiola Cardozo Ponte / NNOMY - It began at a very young age, born and raised in an environment of precariousness and economic hardship, where I felt the hostility of the world.Structural violence reduces your opportunities for advancement and makes your life an endless series of daily challenges.Living in a poor home where violence and its various manifestations were present made me understand that it was neither appropriate nor fair for me or any other human being.Over time, I grew up rejecting all expressions of violence, but at the same time, I strengthened my rebelliousness, my critical thinking, and my insatiable need to explore other ways of relating.From a young age, I was certain that education was my only option to overcome my situation of extreme poverty, and I took refuge in books.I had a special sensitivity to the injustices, slights, and marginalization of the victim era, and although my destiny seemed already determined by my social class and gender, I continued as a good rebel, determined to achieve what I so yearned for… At 16, I had a clear understanding of Gandhi's principles, his peaceful resistance, his Satyagraha, and his rejection of any unjust social imposition.The economic difficulties continued, and although I attended various public universities, it was in 2018 that I finally graduated from the Central University of Venezuela with a degree in Sociology, and in 2021 from the Latin American and Caribbean University with a degree in International Humanitarian Law.
Today an SSS spokesperson provided me with this official response to my questions about DOGE and SSS records:
A DOGE representative visited our Agency this week. We’ve established a great working relationship. They asked us about our data and requested access, which we gave in compliance with the President’s Executive Order on Establishing and Implementing the Department of Government Efficiency.
The SSS spokesperson also told me that no new computer matching programs involving SSS registration records have been carried out (yet) by DOGE. But it’s not clear whether the SSS would even know what DOGE has done with SSS data, once DOGE has gotten access to it and possibly exfiltrated it. DOGE and the SSS have operated computer matching programs that appear to violate the Computer Matching Act, so there’s little reason to expect that either would provide the required advance notice of new uses of SSS data.
The SSS registration database contains information on all those male U.S. citizens or residents born on or after 1 January 1960 who have registered with the SSS or have been registered by state driver’s license agencies. Compliance is low, many men in these cohorts never registered, and few of the addresses, even for draft-age men, are up to date. But the database is still huge and vulnerable to abuse. Because SSS registration records are so inaccurate and incomplete, matching them against other databases would produce large numbers of mis-matches, with unknown consequences.
The Army is grappling with a staggering attrition rate among newly enlisted troops, even as recent recruiting figures suggest the service is clawing its way out of a yearslong enlistment crisis.
Nearly one-quarter of soldiers recruited since 2022 have failed to complete their initial contracts, according to internal Army data reviewed by Military.com. While the Army's recruiting totals look solid on paper, a high dropout rate raises serious doubts about whether those numbers are an accurate portrayal of how well the service is manned.
It remains unclear why the Army is losing so many soldiers, but one explanation could be the declining quality of its recruiting pool. One-quarter of all enlistees last year had to go through at least one of the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, which were set up as a sort of silver bullet for recruiting woes -- getting applicants up to snuff with academic or body fat enlistment standards before they ship out to basic training.
NNOMYnews reports on the growing intrusions by the Department of Defense into our public schools in a campaign to normalize perpetual wars with our youth and to promote the recruitment efforts of the Pentagon.
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January 8, 2025 / Christopher Kilmartin and Ronald Levant / Guest opinion / Akron Beacon Journal - When it comes to preventing and responding to military sexual assaults, leadership matters a great deal. Thus, we are very concerned about the safety of our service women and men under President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
