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Fw: General Officer Announcement

Forwarded. We need more GO's
with General Kelly's background.
With more folks like him, making
decisions, there would be very few
Enlisted Persons and Company
Grade Officer's, being thrown under
the bus. "He's been there and Done
That"

Semper fi,
Don Greenlaw
----- Original Message ----- From: Dave Hollenbeck 
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2012 5:35 AM
Subject: General Officer Announcement



  This information has recently been updated, and is now available.

General  Officer Announcement
http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15032


         Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta announced today that the
President has made the following nomination:

          Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly has been nominated for
  appointment to the grade of general and for assignment as commander, U.S.
  Southern Command.  Kelly is currently serving as the senior military
 advisor to the secretary of defense.


==================================================================================================
Lieutenant General John F. Kelly, United States Marine Corps, was the Commanding General of the Multi-National Force—West in Iraq from February 2008 to February 2009. He was promoted to LtGen assumed command of Marine Forces Reserve and Marine Forces North in October 2009. 


[edit]Biography
BGen John F. Kelly (left) testifies in front of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in November 2005.John F. Kelly was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1970, and was discharged as a sergeant in 1972, after serving in an infantry company with the 2nd Marine Division, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Following graduation from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
Kelly returned to the Second Marine Division where he served as a rifle and weapons platoon commander, company executive officer, assistant operations officer, and infantry company commander. Sea duty in Mayport, Florida, followed, at which time he served aboard aircraft carriers USS Forrestal (CV-59) and USS Independence (CV-62). In 1980, then-Captain Kelly attended the U.S. Army's Infantry Officer Advanced Course in Fort Benning, Georgia. After graduation, he was assigned to Headquarters Marine Corpsin Washington, D.C., serving there from 1981 through 1984, as an assignment monitor. Captain Kelly returned to the Second Marine Division in 1984, to command a rifle and weapons company. Promoted to major in 1987, he served as the battalion's operations officer.[1]
In 1987, Kelly transferred to the Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, serving first as the head of the Offensive Tactics Section, Tactics Group, and later assuming the duties of the Director of the Infantry Officer Course. After three years of instructing young officers, he attended the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and the School for Advanced Warfare, both located at Quantico.
Completing duty under instruction and selected for lieutenant colonel, he was assigned as Commanding Officer, 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, California. Holding this command position for two years, Kelly returned to the East Coast in 1994, to attend the National War College in Washington, D.C. He graduated in 1995, and was selected to serve as the Commandant's Liaison Officer to the U.S. House of Representatives, Capitol Hill, where he was promoted to colonel.
Kelly promotion to brigadier general in Iraq. March 2003.In 1999, Kelly transferred to joint duty and served as the special assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in Mons, Belgium. He returned to the United States in 2001, and was assigned to a third tour of duty at Camp Lejeune, now as the assistant chief of staff G-3 with the Second Marine Division. In 2002, Colonel Kelly again served with the 1st Marine Division, this time as the Assistant Division Commander. Much of Kelly's two-year assignment was spent deployed in Iraq.[1] In March 2003, while in Iraq, Kelly was promoted to brigadier general, which was the first known promotion of a Marine Corps colonel in an active combat zone since that of another First Marine Division assistant division commander, Chesty Puller in January 1951. In mid-April, he took command of the newly formed Task Force Tripoli, and drove it north from Baghdad into Samarra and Tikrit. During the initial assault on Baghdad, Kelly was asked by a reporter of from the Los Angeles Times if (considering the size of the Iraqi Army and the vast supplies of tanks, artillery and chemical weapons available to Saddam's forces) he'd ever consider defeat. Kelly's archetypal response was, "Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain't shit." [5]
His next assignment was as legislative assistant to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Michael Hagee In January 2007, Kelly was nominated for major general,[6] and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 11, 2007.[7]
MajGen Kelly cuts the Marine Corps Birthday Cake in Camp Fallujah, Iraq on November 10, 2008. Photo credit: Sgt. Jim Heuston, USMC.Kelly's next assignment, in July 2007, was as commanding general, I Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward).[8] On February 9, 2008, Kelly assumed command of the Multi-National Force–West in Iraq, replacing Major General Walter E. Gaskin.[9] After a year in Iraq, Kelly returned to the States in February 2009.[10]
His son, First Lieutenant Robert Michael Kelly, was killed in action in Sangin, Afghanistan on 9 November 2010. He was on his third combat tour, but his first as a Marine officer with Lima Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines. Robert's brother, General Kelly's eldest child, is a Marine captain.[11][12]
Lieutenant General Kelly is the Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and personally greeted Secretary Panetta at the entrance to the Pentagon on July 1st, 2011, Panetta's first day as secretary. 

 ===================================================================================
"Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima, Baghdad ain't shit." - Major General John F. Kelly to a reporter who asked him if he ever contemplated defeat 


Major General John F. Kelly (USMC Photo)
by The Boys of 3/5 on Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 5:56pm
On Nov 13, 2010 Lt General John Kelly, USMC gave a speech to the Semper Fi Society of St. Louis , MO. This was 4 days after his son, Lt Robert Kelly, USMC was killed by an IED while on his 3rd Combat tour. During his speech, General Kelly spoke about the dedication and valor of the young men and women who step forward each and every day to protect us. During the speech, he never mentioned the loss of his own son. He closed the speech with the moving account of the last 6 seconds in the lives of 2 young Marines who died with rifles blazing to protect their brother Marines.
"I will leave you with a story about the kind of people they are...about the quality of the steel in their backs...about the kind of dedication they bring to our country while they serve in uniform and forever after as veterans. Two years ago when I was the Commander of all U.S. and Iraqi forces, in fact, the 22nd of April 2008, two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9 "The Walking Dead," and 2/8 were switching out in Ramadi. One battalion in the closing days of their deployment going home very soon, the other just starting its seven-month combat tour.
Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one from each battalion, were assuming the watch together at the entrance gate of an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines. The same broken down ramshackle building was also home to 100 Iraqi police, also my men and our allies in the fight against the terrorists in Ramadi, a city until recently the most dangerous city on earth and owned by Al Qaeda.
Yale was a dirt poor mixed-race kid from Virginia with a wife and daughter, and a mother and sister who lived with him and he supported as well. He did this on a yearly salary of less than $23,000. Haerter, on the other hand, was a middle class white kid from Long Island . They were from two completely different worlds. Had they not joined the Marines they would never have met each other, or understood that multiple America 's exist simultaneously depending on one's race, education level, economic status, and where you might have been born. But they were Marines, combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and, because of this bond, they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were born of the same woman.
The mission orders they received from the sergeant squad leader I am sure went something like: "Okay you two clowns, stand this post and let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass." "You clear?" I am also sure Yale and Haerter then rolled their eyes and said in unison something like: "Yes Sergeant," with just enough attitude that made the point without saying the words, "No kidding sweetheart, we know what we're doing." They then relieved two other Marines on watch and took up their post at the entry control point of Joint Security Station Nasser, in the Sophia section of Ramadi, Al Anbar, Iraq .
A few minutes later a large blue truck turned down the alley way--perhaps 60-70 yards in length--and sped its way through the serpentine of concrete jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were posted and detonated, killing them both catastrophically.
Twenty-four brick masonry houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed. The truck's engine came to rest two hundred yards away knocking most of a house down before it stopped. Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was made of 2,000 pounds of explosives. Two died, and because these two young infantrymen didn't have it in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150 of their Iraqi and American brothers-in-arms.
When I read the situation report about the incident a few hours after it happened I called the regimental commander for details as something about this struck me as different. Marines dying or being seriously wounded is commonplace in combat. We expect Marines regardless of rank or MOS to stand their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what the mission takes. But this just seemed different.
The regimental commander had just returned from the site and he agreed, but reported that there were no American witnesses to the event--just Iraqi police. I figured if there was any chance of finding out what actually happened and then to decorate the two Marines to acknowledge their bravery, I'd have to do it as a combat award that requires two eye-witnesses and we figured the bureaucrats back in Washington would never buy Iraqi statements. If it had any chance at all, it had to come under the signature of a general officer.
I traveled to Ramadi the next day and spoke individually to a half-dozen Iraqi police all of whom told the same story. The blue truck turned down into the alley and immediately sped up as it made its way through the serpentine. They all said, "We knew immediately what was going on as soon as the two Marines began firing." The Iraqi police then related that some of them also fired, and then to a man, ran for safety just prior to the explosion. All survived. Many were injured...some seriously.
One of the Iraqis elaborated and with tears welling up said they'd run like any normal man would to save his life. What he didn't know until then, he said, and what he learned that very instant, was that Marines are not normal. Choking past the emotion he said, "Sir, in the name of God no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. No sane man. They saved us all."
What we didn't know at the time, and only learned a couple of days later after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged initially in the blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened exactly as the Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck entered the alley until it detonated.
You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting myself in their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few minutes before: "...let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass." The two Marines had about five seconds left to live.
It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open up. By this time the truck was half-way through the barriers and gaining speed the whole time. Here, the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were--some running right past the Marines. They had three seconds left to live.
For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines' weapons firing non-stop...the truck's windshield exploding into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the son-of-a-bitch who is trying to get past them to kill their brothers--American and Iraqi--bedded down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground. If they had been aware, they would have known they were safe...because two Marines stood between them and a crazed suicide bomber.
The recording shows the truck careening to a stop immediately in front of the two Marines. In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons. They had only one second left to live.
The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty...into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight--for you.
We Marines believe that God gave America the greatest gift he could bestow to man while he lived on this earth--freedom. We also believe he gave us another gift nearly as precious--our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsmen, and Marines--to safeguard that gift and guarantee no force on this earth can ever steal it away.
It has been my distinct honor to have been with you here today. Rest assured our America, this experiment in democracy started over two centuries ago, will forever remain the "land of the free and home of the brave" so long as we never run out of tough young Americans who are willing to look beyond their own self-interest and comfortable lives, and go into the darkest and most dangerous places on earth to hunt down, and kill, those who would do us harm. 



God Bless America , and....SEMPER FIDELIS!"

========================================================================================================

http://abcnews.go.com/News/star-marine-generals-son-killed-afghanistan/story?id=12122030#.TyP5bcVSTI8
The most recent fatality in the Marine battalion that has seen the heaviestcasualties in Afghanistan right now was the son of a Marine three star general.
Second Lt. Robert Kelly, the son of Lt. Gen. John Kelly, was killed Tuesday in a roadside bomb blast during a foot patrol in Helmand Province.
John Kelly served as the top Marine commander in Iraq in 2008 when he commanded the Marine force based in Anbar province. He now oversees all reserve units in the Marine Corps as head of Marine Forces Reserve.
Robert Kelly, 29, was serving with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which has seen 14 of its troops killed during its short five- to six-week combat deployment in Afghanistan. If its casualty rate continues at this pace, it will be the combat battalion with the highest number of casualties ever in the war in Afghanistan. The current top number is 27 killed during a 15-month span.