The families of US soldiers who have died in the US-Israeli war against Iran are battling to ensure they receive appropriate pay and benefits for their loved ones.
Libby Klinner, a widow, wrote on social media that the US air force had deemed her ineligible for additional benefits following the death of Major Alex Klinner, her 33-year-old husband, because Congress had not officially declared war.
He was one of six crew members of a KC-135 refuelling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq in March while supporting US strikes against Iran.
An ex-convict gave horrific insight into serving in the Russian army, saying his officers refused to collect the dead bodies of soldiers from the battlefield so that the Russian military wouldn’t have to pay their families, according to The New York Times.
In an interview, the soldier who served in one of the Russian Ministry of Defense’s convict units — who was identified as “Aleksandr” — told the Times he was ordered not to collect the bodies of his fellow troops.
He told the Times that officers could register the men as “missing in action,” meaning their families couldn’t collect compensation for them being killed in battle.
One shitty dictator starting a completely unwarranted war doing the same thing as another shitty dictator running a completely unwarranted war.
Give Putin some credit. He’s doing this much more intelligently. He maintains a plausible pretense to not pay out death benefits while Trump just goes “No”.
Putin’s Ukraine adventure has been an abject failure.
Which is why he needs to weasel out of paying death benefits.
Because he knows Americans will roll over and accept “no” without a fight
And if anyone tries to fight it the MAGAts will fight on his behalf.
There’s a reason Trump loves stupid people.
So?
Put MAGA down.
Might not be a coincidence.
No no!
Russia bad, Murica good! You some kind of islamic or something?Russia isn’t “good” because you dislike the US. It’s not and either/or thing.
You don’t say?
I’ve said it forever: Screwing over veterans is more American than apple pie. We’ve been doing it since the American Revolution.
I can’t imagine President Pedophile being the one to change that. He doesn’t even care enough to pretend.
He actively distains troops and veterans.
He’s a draft dodger himself. They’re only pawns in his scheme to enrich himself and the capital class. It’s been the same with every president since WWII.
This is what happens when you prop your economy up on war and petroleum. You have to fight constant wars to maintain it. You have to keep heating up the planet until it’s unliveable.
The Great Depression proved that capitalism is a bubble that can’t sustain itself without constant exploitation of fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex. The second hit took place with the oil shortages and stagflation of the 1970s.
If it’s not officially a war, what happens if a combatant chooses not to engage?
I suspect they’d be court martialled as if it were refusing a wartime order.
They probably won’t get paid which is the main reason they are there to begin with.
rules for thee and not for me…
Duh!
… That might be the excuse they’re using.
The reality is that they don’t have the money because they spent it on bombing schools for young girls.
fuckers need to fuck right off to the fuckerville composting center.
The reality is that they don’t have the money because they spent it on bombing schools for young girls.
It’s tax payers money, they have plenty of these, they just use money for things that are directly useful to them
I think you are on point here.
Must be why they want to pump even more tax payer money into the un-auditable pentagon.
Ha, just kidding, we’ll hand it out to cronies and make up some story because fuck those corpses’ families
please stop joining the military
I 100% agree. But also, some folks have little choice as it’s the only path they have out of poverty. Could be their only chance for a decent education too.
Edit: I understand the backlash I’m getting. But I also realize that poverty produces desperation, and desperation can push people to extreme decisions. Easy for me to say “don’t ever join under any circumstances” when I’m not the one suffering in extreme poverty.
the “have little choice” is just being able to shift guilt. we 100% know this is a genocidal fascist regime, and i have more support for someone who chooses to be gifted “life’s plan” of hardship over joining this mil.
fyi: this is the plan. the capitalists who profit from war know they can only profit if there is a cohort of poor, hungry, stupid kids they can use for the human parts.
they can use for the human parts.
If you want people to take you seriously, you could make less childish arguments.
explain how this is childish. machines like weapons require people to operate. it’s always been the working class and poor who are scooped up to operate them. “ain’t no war but class war” is not just a bumper sticker.
so: try your reply again.
Are you upset that you can’t refute the 100% accurate point?
The troops are pretty much there to go kill or die for some billionaire’s profits, and Smedley Butler said as much decades ago and it’s only gotten worse since. Once they get the killer robots working, they’ll cut out the troops and not have to worry about people complaining about pay.
I’d rather be poor than murder people 🤷♂️
Are you poor?
I was when I was enlistment age, and I told the recruiter to go fuck himself when they came asking, and then to go find a squadmate to assist if he couldnt follow the directions himself when he didn’t like the first answer.
I had enough combat vets in my life to know what was up. No glory seekers, only people who saw the brutality first hand.
I was when I was enlistment age
So you had other means to escape poverty.
I’d rather be poor than feed my body to the war machine. I’m not well off by any means, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have principles.
I too have always been poor, and had family members who were in vietnam. They told me truths.
I have always carried the idea, I can be poor, this is not a moral issue, but I refuse to carry myself without dignity. I can be poor, doesnt mean I have to be dirty, doesnt mean I have to sign my soul away for a dollar.
Good for you.
yes.
Are most people who join the US military? Answer: no, the contemporary US military is overwhelmingly middle class. The “backdoor draft” isn’t nearly as popular as advertised.
Honestly, if it’s this bad, why is this put up with?
For a country that has spent so much time telling others how free it is, its citizens take a lot of shit
If it’s that bad, no point waiting around any longer, shut the thing down.
All you gotta do is tell people they’re free.
Then you place them in freedom shackles, and give them freedom bucks to trade around inside their freedom cage. Why do you hate freedom so much, don’t you like your freedom slop?
The most cutting scene in Easy Rider. I reference this often, but for a reason.
If the only path out of poverty is killing poor people abroad then I’d rather stay poor.
You’re probably not poor then
Maybe you’d just enjoy killing people even of you had money.
Ignoring my point to use an ad hominem - how typical of Lemmy.
I don’t care how poor you are, if killing people for corporate profits is your way out of it you’re a shitty person.
If you want to find ways to justify killing people for corporate profits then you deserve to be singled out and told that you’re a mass murder apologist.
How typical of Lemmy having to face consequences for you pro-murder takes.
‘No true Scotsman’ but for poor people choosing not to kill strangers for corporate profits.
The US really pulled off a propaganda masterpiece with this military fetish
Easy for you to judge, huh?
Your crappy fallacy? Yeah, I’ll judge garbage fallacies all day.
Becoming a disposable weapon of the state is still a choice, they still have blood on their hands, whether or not the game is rigged to coerce desperate people into becoming murderers or cannon fodder
Sorry i have to kill brown people. Some rape is expected, but i really didn’t have a choice.
The Israeli-US Alliance essentially murdered Iranian schoolgirls.
Essentially?
Id rather see them in poverty than more dead girls abroad. We should start spitting on their faces again.
You may not believe it, but dead nieces sisters and daughters also foments desperation and inspires violence. The sniper who develops ptsd because he killed three generations of men in because he had to do that or be a wage slave is a product of what republicans want. If that guy had a UBI and more socialism in general, guess what? He isn’t ending three generations of men because he has literally no reason to do it now.
Sadly, there is no historical evidence that anyone ever spat in the faces of returning veterans, that’s just a scene from Rambo that conservatives decided was reality.
Its not worth it.
Sorry I had to serve in the SS cuz it was the only path I had out of poverty, for a chance at a decent education too, I 100% hate those Nazis please don’t put us on trial 🥺
The US military isn’t the SS.
You’re right, it’s worse, the SS “only” massacred and tortured Europe, the US Military does it to the entire world, biggest stain on the planet since the Nazis.
Not for the lack of trying.
The military is never anyone’s only choice out of poverty. The military is a career you choose. Just because you were in poverty when you made that choice does not mean you didn’t have other choices.
Officer grades…sure.
Rank and file… Nah. Not if you want OUT of poverty.
TBH mostly middle class people join the military, and a lot of them end up homeless afterwards. Your conception of this situation is basically backwards.
I don’t understand the backlash you’re getting. It’s not very surprising that a poor 18 year old sees the military as a way out of their hardship. I’m not saying it is, there’s a very good chance it is not. But that a struggling teenager can see it that way, and getting drawn in by recruiters isn’t odd.
100% agree with your edit. You’ll see people used as drug mules, not because they’re hardened criminals, but because they’re desperate enough to do something they know is wrong.
I think a lot of the people taking a hard stance against you here haven’t seen hardship up close and dont realise how tempting it would be to do something to get out of it
Lots of people here probably don’t deal with poor people on the regular so they don’t understand. Once I talked to a 40 year old homeless man on a train ride home and he was talking about enlisting. His options were very bleak.
I grew up in an area where that was absolutely the case. A whole lot of people on things like food stamps and so on.
I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say at least one in four males (and not a few females) went into some branch of the military. They are promised a lot and most of it is not delivered.
My parents were pacifists and extremely suspicious of the industrial military complex, and did everything possible to keep the recruiters at bay, while they scrimped and saved and got loans for my siblings and I to get a secondary education or vocational training. They were not rich, but given they were both gainfully employed and very frugal, we were in a more stable home than most in my area.
Many kids did not even graduate, there was a fair bit of teen pregnancy, too. I have the same suspicion of the military my parents had, but I also understand that many of my school mates did not have a lot of options.
Bro. If your only way out of poverty is to murder children, then stay poor.
Also, Americans don’t know what poverty means. You’re murdering people who are actually poor.
and they’ll still vote for pedo-in-chief
And claim they “support the troops” all the same.
They’re not troops anymore once they stop trooping. Then they’re “losers.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/
They support troops, just not soldiers.
And most definitely not veterans.
The pedo-in-chief who kept calling it a war
Think about the bright side: If all countries stop using the term “war”, then we’ve achieved world peace!! /s
You jest, but this is exactly what trump would do.
Would? Doesn’t the “Board of Peace” exist?
Stop testing for Covid and BAM, active cases drop significantly. Science.
Well they’ve already tried making it a crime to say the US is losing in Iran. That’s the old state trick to solving the homelessness problem…by making it illegal
Pentagon & GOP: Fuck you for your service.
Military proceeds to vote GOP
At some point you have to lose compassion for idiots voting for the leopards party
40% of those in the military vote Democrat, do you have compassion for them?
Please recall that most voters voted for Trump, so anyone in any other nation could use your logic to not have compassion for you, the minority.
(if military are idiots because majority voted R, then you are an idiot because US majority voted R).
Military recruits predominantly lower income, under educated people and then proceeds to fall for Republican propaganda - it’s like you sectioned off a control group and said “damn, why are they so control?”
Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make
Imagine joining the US military.
This should not surprise anyone. We’ve known Trump has nothing but contempt for our service members for years. It wasn’t even limited to his comments about John McCain’s five years as a POW either…
Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ published by The Atlantic on Sept 3rd 2020.
Congress can basically make “non wars” into wars for benefits.
OEF and OIF cover post 9/11 up to like 2010 in most of the middle east.
It could be fixed right now, but trump and the Republicans won’t.
But the real solution has always been giving everyone the benefits disabled vets get
they don’t even have the money for payroll right now.
So no, they really can’t fix it overnight.
But we can build ballrooms and arches and multiple attempts at a blue pool. Odd.
Because the other person is wrong. The US budget is basically a guideline and any excess gets carried to the next year.
Trump’s ego is more important than anything.
Better that than benefits to mass murderers that is the US military in Iran (and Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam …,).
Lol please. This president has proven he can do basically whatever he wants with allocated funds and neither Congress or scotus will stop him.
Congress could do a lot of things that they are refusing ro do.
Because Republicans have both majorities and the presidency…
Our system sucks, but it used to be functional, and can be again.
Obviously one of the first things to do once it’s functional, is improve the system and put in protections to stop this from happening again.
Like, everyone complains about the electoral college, but we could just get rid of it and make the presidency a straight popular vote. But the real problem, is a president was never meant to have this much power in the first place. They’re supposed to be an essentially powerless ambassador.
No real power, just the person we said can speak on our behalf in situations where there’s just a single seat at a table for America
one of the first things to do once it’s functional, is improve the system and put in protections to stop this from happening again.
Agreed, that will be critical in trying to regain any level of trust from the rest of the world.
the real problem, is a president was never meant to have this much power in the first place.
Again, you have identified another of the issues that needs fixing.
Between fixing those issues and repairing all the damage Trump (and his acomplices) have done, the USA has decades of work to do.
I hope they are both willing and able to put in the effort.
Between fixing those issues and repairing all the damage Trump (and his acomplices) have done, the USA has decades of work to do.
If you think that, you need to look back on how fast FDR fixed shit, and how the only thing that stopped him from doing more, is people not following up by flushing incumbents holding back progress.
Back then the average person didn’t have the same outreach. Social media means people can actually organize and hear how things are going. That’s why oligarchs keep gobbling up social media and flooding it with bots.
They’re fucking scared.
Remind me in 6 years.
Based on the level of apathy I see from a majority of Americans, I don’t expect much more than surface level changes (re-naming things back to their original names, de-trumping the white house decore etc) and little else.
I also don’t trust that the Americans won’t just elect another complete asshole 4 years after Trump is no longer president.
Then you don’t understand how bad the party was under neoliberalism from 1991-2025, and you just assume that was actually trying or that the party went in a different direction with the 2025 chair election.
Like, if you ignore everything, obviously it’s not going to make sense.
If you pay attention to what happened and what is happening, you wouldn’t spend your free time shitting on the best and only chance to save the country…
Unless you were a trump supporter or neoliberal despite to depress dem turnout to stop progressives
despite to depress dem turnout to stop progressives
I assume that was supposed to be “desperate”.
That aside, I would much prefer the Americans elect a Democrat over a Republican, but I also would prefer the democrats put forward more progressive candidates than they have been.
You also can’t lose a war if it isn’t a war! 😅
That’s how they avoid saying they haven’t won a war since WW2.
Iraq was a pretty clear military victory.
The war so nice they did it twice.
But it just lead to wider conflict and terrorism in the region.
So Iraq being in disarray after defeat somehow implies the US lost the war against them?
And wider conflict? Do you think Iraq was some sort of peaceful neighbor leading up to its demise?
The lack of a victory implies the US didn’t win.
Unfortunately for your hot take, Iraq signed surrender and the US executed their former leader. The US objectively won that war. I get it, in your mind victory or defeat hinges on whether you like the victor or not, but reality doesn’t work that way.
But if it’s any consolation, Iran also defeated Iraq and the US didn’t take on Iraq alone. I personally don’t believe Iraq was a worthy opponent for the US. But saying the US hasn’t won a war since WW2 is factually incorrect.
The US kept bombing them and reinvaded, that doesn’t sound like the surrender ended it.
The first time, yes. The second time proved what history has proven countless times. Killing a bunch of people with a big military is easy. Occupations are really, really difficult.
In its history, the US has only had 2 really successful occupations, (West Germany and Japan after WWII), and both of those were because they occupied nations were cooperating with the US and its allies.
So they are eating slightly more healthy than someone eating boot soles as only meal of the day, they are being deployed for months without rest and they are dying in combat (or combat-related operations) BUT they are not at war so them and their families can’t get benefits from it BUT ALSO they can’t return home because they not at war but they are at war at the same time (which is not a war because the Congress didn’t say so).
Are you trying to piss off the army and make the people with weapons turn against you? Because this is how you piss off the army and make the people with weapons turn against you.
Are you trying to piss off the army and make the people with weapons turn against you? Because this is how you piss off the army and make the people with weapons turn against you.
They’re gambling that the American people, including the soldiers, are too atomised and too docile. Just like unions in other exploitative industries are becoming increasingly rare. I think they’re probably correct, they ain’t gonna do shit but accept it. You’ve gotta be constitutionally a bootlicker to join the military anyway. Those people don’t have it in them to stand up for themselves unless it’s “against” their wife and kids. Maybe you’ll get an occasional guy losing it and shooting up his colleagues, the traditional way to do it.
make the people with weapons turn against you?
LOL that’d be the day.
You need critical thinking for that.
I am not a fan of the military, but man, Hegseth and Trump are driving people away in droves with this kind of crap.
Oh well.
Yeah, this is NOT how you plan for a military coup
He doesn’t have to pretend he cares anymore after you can’t do anything for him.
They’ll keep glazing on this fool
Maybe he put all the personal into a not war to be not in America?
JD Vance gets asked about the widows case and he responds to the journalist “send me her contact info so I can discuss it with her” as if he isn’t the second most powerful person in his country and already has full access to all of the info but doesn’t care. If they have to start paying out benefits to dead soldiers it might become more clear how many service members have actually died.
There are likely more fatalities of American soldiers but they are hiding them behind mission secrecy.
He is always looking for another widow to befriend. Right, Erika?
