We have an ironic system of taxation, Antonio, in which people who don’t make enough money to pay taxes have something in common with people who make the most money, which is that those folks don’t pay any taxes either. Essentially, our “welfare classes” are the poverty stricken and the immensely wealthy.

Ask not what your country can do for you….wait a minute! We pay taxes!

That Bob; more chevrons and rockers than a Master General Sergeant.

Thanks for the memories

We can always count on you, Antonio, to shine a light upon the darkness.

In response

There are several key factors at play here, Antonio. First of all, the Ghost Army was kept an official government secret until 1996, so that restriction in and of itself held up any possible developments regarding commemoration of this achievement. Additionally, it is not at all unusual for some of the highest awards such as the Medal of Honor to be awarded late and/or posthumously, so there is definitely plenty of precedent for that practice. Finally, major commendations such as this one that are required to originate in Congress take a certain amount of time to work their way through the typical legislative process; this one, for example, took until this year (2022) to be passed by both the House and the Senate. As far as how many Ghost Army members survive to this day, the closest answer I could come up with is that there were still twenty of them alive some four years ago, the last time a WWII veterans census was taken. Since those former Ghost Soldiers were all well into their nineties then, one can surmise that number may well have been pared down, perhaps even considerably so, since then.

How many members are still alive to receive such honor? Seems a LITTLE late to come up with a medal NOW.

Antonio,
The fact that the Ghost Army wasn’t merged into a standard U.S. Army unit classification shouldn’t be thought of as having any bearing on the incalculably valuable service they performed for the Allied Cause from well before D-Day right through to the end of the War. By employing extensive varieties of subterfuge in order to seriously confuse and thereby effectively downgrade the German Military’s warfighting capability the Ghost Army was in fact able to project the placement of “U.S. troops and equipment” where there in fact were none and thus could protect the actual American troops either directly on their flanks or for that matter anywhere else on the battlefield. Considering the disparately outsized difference their relatively small presence made in the Western Front War effort they would seem to be extremely deserving of the Congressional Gold Medal.

So what’s the purpose of the Congressional Gold Medal?