What to Fear in a War with North Korea

Thanks to all of you who have been joining me here. We help bring change to lives. The response has been wonderful.  We just past 4,000 new subscribers. That was a huge increase in 2016. We only had 1,000 two years ago.The year 2017 helped us to make it to 4,000.

We have reached our goal.  We will now be giving a prize to the person who is our 4,500th person to subscribe. We just passed 4,065.

Help us make it to 4,500 by subscribing today if you haven’t already. This shows you care for veterans. Just click on the icon right after the title of this post and click on FEEDBLITZ , and the posts will come straight to your inbox.                            ____________________________________________________________

Doug Bolton, the founder of the blog, Signs of Hope, which is at www.dailysignsofhope.com, has written a new book, “Signs of Hope for the Military: In and Out of the Trenches of Life.” It reaches out the many military and veterans who may be battling anxiety, fear, depression, addictions, rejections, and the many other usual suspects. There are 22 military connected suicides every day. That is almost one every hour. Doug wants to help stop those statistics.  

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This is a new social network just for veterans. I joined it and made instant friendships with veterans who want to talk about what I want to talk about. Please check it out. You will be glad you did. 

https://www.rallypoint.com/join/spc-douglas-bolton

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We have just added a fantastic product for people who are suffering from PTSD. I have looked at the video myself. It is a little long, but it is very valuable. Go to   https://sites.google.com/site/v4vweaponspackage/  to see for yourself. It will change your life if you suffer from PTSD. 

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I am sharing the latest news pertaining to veterans today. Some will be good. Some not so good.

1. Government Shutdown Looming: Except for military and emergency services, the federal government will shut down unless Congress passes a continuing resolution by midnight tonight. Whether Congress will be able to put political differences aside is uncertain. Also uncertain is whether a new shutdown would replicate the 16-day shutdown in 2013. The VFW, along with other organizations, have worked tirelessly to shield VA from future shutdowns. That means health care facilities will remain open, new appointments will still be made, disability and compensation payments will be paid, and veterans will still be buried. More information will be known as the day and weekend unfolds.

  • The government shut occurred last night. What this means is the the military will continue to protect us, but without pay! This certainly is not acceptable! It mainly has shut down because each party has their “needs,” that they think should come first. They will not budge to compromise, and get this country going again. Updates on this coming.
  • This Is One Of US Military Planners’ Greatest Fears In A War With North Korea

    on  

    With tensions between the U.S. government and North Korea at a historic high, the Department of Defense spent 2017 deterring an armed confrontation with Kim Jong Un’s regime on the Korean peninsula. The Pentagon deployed three carrier strike groups to the Western Pacific for the first time in a decade; stood up THAAD missile defense batteries in South Korea; and deployed squadrons of F-22 and F-35 fighter jets to patrol  the skies near Pyongyang. All the stakeholders know that, even with overwhelming U.S. might and decades of wargaming, an invasion involving the 28,500 U.S. troops currently stationed in South Korea could bring massive casualties for military personnel and civilians, including an estimated 20,000 South Korean deaths a day from North Korean artillery.

    But according to a series of war games conducted last year at the Air War College on Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the DoD also faces a limited ability to evacuate wounded service members from a battlefield in Korea — an obstacle that could send the U.S. military death toll soaring in an open conflict.

     South Korea Medevac Exercise
    U.S. Army and South Korean military personnel conduct MEDEVAC exercises as Suwon Air Base

    The upshot: United States forces in a conventional ground war with North Korea could suffer an outsize wound-to-kill ratio due to those airlift difficulties, political science professor and war scholar Tanisha M. Fazal argues in today’s Washington Post. While the United States has endured Nearly 7,000 combat casualties  in the course of the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, those numbers have remained relatively low and stable over time due to the DoD’s overwhelming air superiority in the region (an advantage best captured by the massive rise in bombing sorties against militants in the first year of the Trump administration). Under those conditions, evacuation of casualties by air — the fastest method, and hence the key to making injuries more survivable — is a no-brainer.

    Unlike al Qaeda or ISIS jihadists, however, North Korea is ready for an air war: A November 2017 assessment by the Congressional Research Service of the country’s military capabilities conclude that while Pyongyang’s air defenses are relatively outmoded, the North Korean Air Force possesses “a dense, overlapping air defense system of SA-2, SA-3, and SA-5” surface-to-air missile sites and other mobile and man-portable anti-air munitions — and that’s not even counting the Kim regime’s fleet of 1,300 Soviet-era aircraft intent on knocking U.S. assets out of the sky.

    north korea air defenses medevac

    Add it all together, and those air defenses spell trouble for an opposing force’s traditional medevac efforts. “Modern combat medicine has made great advances in stemming blood loss, for example, but those procedures are typically temporary measures, carried out to keep a patient alive until airlifted to a higher-level, trauma-care facility,” Fazal writes. “That was possible in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States had undisputed control of the skies. But it would not be true on the Korean Peninsula, at least at first.”Indeed, a 2012 assessment in Military Medicine found that late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s Air defense command unit was effective enough during the initial months of the 2003 invasion that the U.S. military scrambled to develop forward-deployed medical and surgical teams to stabilize casualties near an injury point.

    It’s difficult to assess the DoD’s overall air evacuation capabilities in the event of war with North Korea, given the different system and structure of each branch’s various medical commands. (Air University and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Task & Purpose). But as part of the the Air War College simulation, the prospect of an aerial medevac for American troops was reduced to near zero through a conventional strike against a U.S. air base in South Korea; that, Fazal observed, forced a radical shift in how medics treat patients.

    “Certain casualties could be saved if air evacuation was possible — but would have little to no hope without evacuation, and thus would receive only palliative care,” Fazal wrote of the simulation. “A base commander would probably require medics to prioritize care for personnel essential to the mission, even if they had less severe injuries than others. Assuming that medicine and medical personnel would not be resupplied, medics would not be able to provide the standard of care to which the U.S. military has become accustomed.”

    Even without a direct strike on a U.S. staging area, air evacuations would remain a challenge. “Lift in the Pacific is always a problem and has been for years, simply because it’s just so big,” Lindsay Ford, a Asia Society fellow and former advisor to the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, told Task & Purpose. “To have the amount of lift you need to cover the tremendous amount of space, there is always a challenge, whether you’re talking about everyday operations or a unique medevac. Just think about that in the context of how many forces we currently have in the region.”

    Ford pointed to the 2006 evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon, in which the Pentagon aided the Department of State in extracting 15,000 people over the span of two months in the largest overseas evacuation in U.S. history. While U.S. Central Command was responsible for extracting 90% of the U.S. evacuees to nearby Turkey and Cyprus, a 2007 Government Accountability Office review of the effort found that Israeli strikes on the Beirut airport and subsequent blockades of coastal ports seriously complicated air and sea evacuation efforts. The evacuations were primarily excuted by U.S. and British naval flotillas, supplemented by contracted commercial or civilian ships; Marine CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters were used only for the most serious medical cases, primarily because Israeli munitions had “crippled airports, seaports and roads in retaliation for attacks by Hezbollah militants,” the New York Times reported at the time.

    “That was just 15,000 [American civilians] evacuated,” Ford said of the Lebanon evacuation. “There are some 100,000 in Seoul, where, once war starts, there will be between 30,000 and 300,000 dead in just a few days.”

    There are two options available to the Pentagon to address this problem. The first simply involves improving medevac capabilities by adding more maneuverable aircraft. The Army is addressing this issue with the Future Vertical Lift project, designed to replace the iconic AH-64 Apache attack chopper and UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter with an aircraft that combines speed and range with versatility and maneuverability. But since 2016, the Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command has also been exploring the potential deployment of unmanned vehicles to conduct quick and relatively safe medevacs. Last March, Dragonfly Pictures unveiled the DP-14 as a potential one-man extraction craft; despite resistance to the deployment of robots downrange, a 2014 USAMRMC report stated that unmanned systems “can potentially conduct extraction and/or retrieval of combat casualties on behalf of the first responder and deliver the wounded Soldier (within a short distance) to a safer location.”

    But even the best aircraft can get held up in the skies or be too far from an extraction site, leaving the standard operating procedure for forward surgical teams as the next best option: Stabilize the patient and wait for the cavalry. The Pentagon has a long-established ground-medevac doctrine utilizing chains of medical outposts that connect a forward operating base to a secure medical facility in the rear. The Army’s Combat Casualty Care Research Program (CCCRP) is working overtime on new tech to accelerate diagnosis and treatment downrange, but the branch admits that “prolonged field care” is the primary capability gap of concern across the entire branch, according to the January/February issue of Army AT&L Magazine.

    “Experts say future battlefields will require medical efforts to be more assertive at the point of injury as opposed to standard forward aid locations,” Army AT&L notes, “a shift that also radically changes the concept of the ‘golden hour’ standard of care, which relies on traditional medical transport to get service members treated within the first hour after injury.”

    Given the nature of defense planning, that shift in downrange medical treatment won’t come overnight, but it’s long overdue. Declassified documents from 1994 published by the Guardian last month showed that, while the Pentagon remained convinced it would eke out a victory in war with North Korea, a ground invasion would leave some 490,000 South Koreans and 52,000 U.S. troops wounded or killed in the first three months alone. After 15 years of air superiority in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, it appears the best strategy to avoid a breathtaking casualty rate in a conventional war with North Korea is the exact same as with a nuclear conflict with Pyongyang.

What Does the 4th of July Mean to our Military

Thanks to all of you who have been joining us here. We help bring change to lives. The response has been wonderful.  We just past 3,994 new subscribers. That was a huge increase in 2016. We only had 1,000 two years ago. In 2017 help us to make it to 4,000.

We are only six away of reaching our goal.  We will be giving a prize to the person who is our 4,000th person to subscribe. Somebody will win in the next few hours. 

Help us make it to 4,000 by subscribing today if you haven’t already. This shows you care for veterans. Just click on the icon right after the title of this post to do that, and the posts will come straight to your inbox.                            ____________________________________________________________

Doug Bolton, the founder of the blog, Signs of Hope, which is at www.dailysignsofhope.com, has written a new book, “Signs of Hope for the Military: In and Out of the Trenches of Life.” It reaches out the many military and veterans who may be battling anxiety, fear, depression, addictions, rejections, and the many other usual suspects. There are 22 military connected suicides every day. That is almost one every hour. Doug wants to help stop those statistics.  

______________________________________________________________

This is a new social network just for veterans. I joined it and made instant friendships with veterans who want to talk about what I want to talk about. Please check it out. You will be glad you did. 

https://www.rallypoint.com/join/spc-douglas-bolton

______________________________________

We have just added a fantastic product for people who are suffering from PTSD. I have looked at the video myself. It is a little long, but it is very valuable. Go to   https://sites.google.com/site/v4vweaponspackage/  to see for yourself. It will change your life if you suffer from PTSD. 

______________________________________________

Time to buy the firecrackers, get the barbeque heated up, and have a great family gathering. It is the 4th of July!

But…is that all the 4th of July really means? Is it just and extended weekend?

Many years ago in 1776, our nation broke away from depending on other countries, and formed our own, by signing the Declaration of Independence.  We decided to walk the path of life alone.

Our great nation has grown through the years. We have prospered, and have a good lifestyle.

The U.S.A. has many freedoms. We have many choices. However, we sometimes use those freedoms, to cause turmoil. We may be the most satisfied nation, but we also may be the most empty.

We expect the luxuries. We expect to be able to choose our own paths. We have become a self centered nation that is having storms within its borders.

Let’s change our thinking now to the men and women who have fought for us to get those freedoms and luxuries. We may well have been taken over by the enemy in past wars if it weren’t for our veterans who put themselves in harm’s way to assure us of those freedoms.

That is what the 4th of July means to me. It is celebrating our freedoms and thank those who have gotten it for us.

We need to give back to these heroes to thank them for their service in the military. That is where Bike 22 comes in. There is a national event that started today. Steve Durgin, the CEO of Victory for Veterans of riding his bike across the great nation of ours to bring awareness of our veterans and the sacrifices they have made. He is heading up the West coast, and then zig zagging his way across this country to end up in Washington D. C.

Steve will be coming through over 80 cities. He will be greeted by thousands of people. Why don’t you join him on his quest to help those veterans who may be suffering from PTSD, TBI, depression, homelessness, war wounds, etc. Show him you care. Show him you want to help out by riding with him or being at one of the events to show support. You can even donate right now on this site to help out.

Here is the information you need to get started. Click on the link and just do it:

 

https://secure.qgiv.com/event/BIKE22

Doug Bolton

Remember this if you are a veteran:

You are never alone.

You are never forsaken.

You are never unloved.

And above all…never, ever, giveup!

There is always 24/7 help at 1-877-995-5247

Satan Starts Working Overtime When you Become a Christian

 

Every Temptation Is an Opportunity to Trust God

 

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

1 Corinthians 10:13

 

When someone becomes a Christian, Satan starts working overtime to try to pull that person away from God. He hates it that one more person has accepted the love of God into their lives. He will do whatever he can to turn the new Christian around, and head him or her back into sin.

We have so much fun each day just trying to make it through the day fighting off temptations. I mean this as a challenge and not as a joke. We face temptations constantly to do what God would not want us to do. He allows a different close encounter to approach us in the form of many temptations going through our mind every day. It could be something small like telling an off-color joke to others in an effort to fit in, or something more serious like deciding to take home a business camera that no one will miss.

Being tempted is part of being human. God does not protect us from temptation. He allows it into our lives so we can learn to depend on Him. The verse above promises that He “will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” It is our chance to build on solid ground for our eternal blessings. We are never free of temptations. It doesn’t matter how long we have been a Christian—Satan will tempt us. When we fall for the temptation, it’s because we have turned our back on the “way out” God has promised.

Jesus was tempted by Satan for forty days. He was offered a great deal of power in the world. He was given a chance to be king over all the kings. He was offered all the land He could see in all directions from the high place He was standing. He was tempted in every way you could think possible. This man called Jesus, who is the embodiment of how we should live on this earth, turned His back on all of the temptations! The way of escape for Him was falling back on the promises of God from Scripture.

We have the same power to not be caught by temptation by calling to mind God’s promises to us.

            We face temptations every day. (I am a sucker for Snickers candy bars, every time I see one in the store.) We need to concentrate on doing what is right each time we face a temptation. There is a very simple way to approach each and every temptation we face. Just ask, “What would Jesus do in this situation?” I mean, we can really ask that question each and every time we are tempted.

Example: Guys, a female friend asks you to help her put up a fence. About halfway through, she invites you into the house for something to drink. When you get inside, you see by what she’s wearing that she has other intentions. She comes close to you, and says that it would be OK to have a little fun. “No one will know,” she promises. What would Jesus do?

There is one thing you should do right away. You should run out of there like Joseph ran from the wife of Potiphar. You should run like you are being chased by a rabid dog looking for someone to bite.

Potiphar’s wife had tried for several days to get Joseph to sleep with her, and he refused. Then when he was close, and no one was around, she grabbed his cloak and ordered him to sleep with her. He broke loose and ran out of the house. He resisted temptation even though Potiphar’s wife tried so hard to seduce him.

Why did he run? Why should you run? It didn’t turn out well for Joseph. Potiphar’s wife became angry because he wouldn’t sleep with her. She accused Joseph of trying to seduce her. Even though he hadn’t touched her, Potiphar put him in prison for several years. Not a good situation for a young man that did everything he could to please God.

But there is a happy ending to the story of Joseph. In Genesis 39–50 we see how God brought Joseph through temptation and made him instrumental in His plan for the nation of Israel, giving him a place of prominence Joseph never could have dreamed would be his. It is one of the most wonderful stories in the Bible and I often wonder if the story would have ended as it did had Joseph not taken the “way out” God provided. Probably not.

Sometimes the “way out” may be simply walking away from temptation. Other times we may have to run as fast as we can.

As a child, I used to go to a movie in the downtown area of Salem, Oregon. It was within walking distance of my home. It was all right going to the movie, because it was still light. But on the way home it was very dark, and bushes lined the sidewalk where I had to walk. I knew there was a monster in those bushes and he was ready to grab me! I think I set some kind of record as I ran by those bushes. I was not about to be caught be some evil demon. I stayed in the middle of the street so a monster couldn’t grab me from either side.

All of us have monsters—real or imagined—in the bushes. Temptations are the real ones that we all face at some time in life. What is important is that each and every time we are faced with some kind of temptation, we ask, “What would Jesus do? What is the ‘way out’ He is providing me?”

 

[God’s grace] teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives.

Titus 2:12

 

Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews 2:18

 

Further adventures

Think before you leap! Always be on alert. Think of life as a war between God and Satan. You are on the good guy’s side. You need to be careful of the attacks from the guy on the other side. He will do whatever he can to destroy you. He will try to convince you that what you are doing is OK just this one time. No one will know. Stop! That is not the good guy talking. That is the enemy! Trust God, and God only. Everything else is the enemy.

 

Something to ponder

Isn’t it funny how some of us never hear the music before the song is over?

 *Excerpt from: Signs of Hope: Ways to Survive in an Unfriendly World