Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
I’ve been asked to speak at our university’s annual Veteran’s Day Commemoration next Friday. General theme will be the Cold War (I suggested it after struggling to come up with something I could talk about), but if you can think of anything you’d want to hear someone say on Veteran’s Day, I’d be interested to hear about it.
Comment away!
I am currently watching some shit on the Military Channel themed “what’s the best tank?” And it’s between the M1A2, the Challenger II, the Leopard II, and the LeClerc – this is all so ridiculous! Technology sharing within NATO makes all these weapons just variations on a theme.
The expression “combat shopping” is a wry inside joke in the military family, because there are certain assignments that are well known to be— because of the variety, quality and exoticism of the merchandise, and the comparatively well-paid nature of American military service when compared to local conditions— absolutely a dedicated shopper’s paradise on earth. Even locations where the local exchange rate didn’t particularly favor the American service personnel (most of Western Europe and Japan, in my service lifetime, f’rinstance) there were nice bargains to be had. Size up the local terrain, see the bargain, scoop up the bargain in the neatest and most efficient manner possible; the essence of combat shopping.
At an assignment in Germany, or Italy, or Spain, one was always able to buy locally some attractive and comparatively inexpensive something or other that would cost four or five times as much, back in the good old US of A. (Taking the Williams-Sonoma catalogue as my guide, I could buy an astonishing number of items from it at the Al Campo supermarket, Spain’s answer to Walmart, for about a fifth of the price.) One wouldn’t even have to take a trip to load up on the souvenirs, either: the AAFES Catalogue featured a large assortment of tat.
For exuberantly bad taste, though, the AAFES catalogue paled next to an emporium like Harrys’ of K’Town (Kaiserslautern, to the uninitiated.) Harrys’ stocked elaborate, ornately decorated beer steins as tall as I am, and candles not much shorter, and cuckoo-clocks the like of which had to be seen to be disbelieved. The cuckoo-clock industry in Southern Germany apparently depended almost entirely on sales to tourists: locals had too much good taste to buy such monstrosities. (Although not to much good taste to avoid marzipan pigs crapping gold coins. The good taste thing is probably relative, I think.) Harrys’ memorably featured a cuckoo clock as large as a garden shed, with life-size deer and clusters of dead, turkey-sized doves. You’d need a living room as big as a football stadium to carry it off, and the cuckoo calling the hours was probably audible in the next county. I gave pass to cuckoo clocks, by the way. I bought Steiffel stuffed animals for my daughter, instead.
The base tourism office in Spain were always scheduling day tours to places like Muel— for the pottery, and to the Lladro factory, down near Barcelona, or more extensive excursions to Turkey… Turkey, like Korea in the Far East being The One Place to indulge in serious and prolonged retail therapy. People came back from Turkey with carpets, and brass-work, and gold: from Korea with bespoke clothes, antique furniture and jewelry. Our houses are marked and furnished with unusual items gleaned from tours and TDYs to distant and exotic foreign places. One can almost tell were we have been by looking carefully at the décor… or what we have given to our family as Christmas presents over the years.
And sometimes the phrase “combat shopping” is not entirely a joke: while traveling in a convoy from Kuwait up into Iraq shortly after the liberation, my daughter swapped some MREs for a couple of small rugs from an Iraqi vendor setting up shop along the roadside. Cpl. Blondie was teased by her friends for weeks, for being able to find something to buy, in the middle of a war zone.
As it so happens with so many unfortunate incidents, it came out without much warning, and piece by piece, the first harbinger being in the form of an emergency spot announcement brought around from the front office by our admin NCO. The radio and television station at Zaragoza AB was situated in two (later three) ancient Quonset huts. The radio and engineering sections occupied the largest, which was two of them run together at some long-ago date. (We were never able to get permission to run all three buildings together with an extension— the cost of building such would be more than the real estate value of the three buildings being combined, and so, of course, it couldn’t be done. My heartfelt plea to build extensions to the existing buildings which would take them within six inches or so of the other structures… and let us fill in the gap with a self-help project was routinely and cruelly rejected. Base Civil Engineering can be so f**king heartless, you can’t believe.)
Sgt. Herrera found the radio staff in the record library: a small, windowless room almost entirely filled with tall shelves roughed out of plywood, and filled with 12’inch record discs in heavy white or manila shucks. A GSA metal utility office desk, and a couple of library card-file cabinets filled up the rest of the available space, which was adorned with outrageous and improbable news stories clipped from the finest and most unreliable tabloids, Far Side cartoons, and current hit charts from Billboard and Radio & Record. The morning guy was putting away the records that he had pulled for his show, the news guy was using the typewriter, and I was supervising it all, and prepping my playlist for the midday show.
“The SPs want this on the air right away, “He handed the slip of paper to me. “The dogs are real dangerous.”
I looked at the announcement: a couple of stray dogs had been reported in the base housing are and everyone was asked to call the Security Police desk if they were spotted. Under no circumstances was anyone to try and corner the dogs. Hmm, I thought. This was curious. There was supposed to be a pack of feral stray dogs on base— they were rumored to have occasionally menaced the lonely jogger on the more remote reaches of the base— but venturing into the housing area?
“What did they do?” I asked, idly.
“They killed a dog in the housing area.”
Ohhh… well, that was nasty and unfortunate. I assured Sgt. Herrera that we would have it on air at the top of the hour, typed up the spot announcement into the proper format, and finished, just as the buzzer alert went off, in the corner, over the desk. Half-past, time to run into the studio for the changeover. In ancient radio days, the programs were recorded on 12-inch disks, 27 minutes of program on each side… meant that at about 32 minutes past the hour, the on-duty board op had to make a dash into the studio and catch the out-cue, and start the second record player, in order to ensure an uninterrupted flow of “Charlie Tuna” or “Roland Bynum” or “Gene Price” or whatever.
When I came back to the library, TSgt. Scott, the program director, was there.
“You got it? The announcement about the dogs?”
“Yeah, I’ll hit it, at the top of the hour, over the fill music. So, what’s the story?”
TSgt. Scott coughed, slightly.
“They mauled and killed a dog in the housing area.” For some reason, TSgt. Scott was trying to hold a somber face.” A pet… an old, half-blind toy poodle… let out onto the terrace to take a leak… the two stray dogs crashed through the hedge, and just ripped it up, and ran off.”
“OK,” Obviously there was something more going on here. “OK, that’s awful… but what’s the story.”
“It was Colonel G—–‘s poodle.”
All four of us thought about that for a couple of moments.
“Oh, dear, “I said, and then… overtaken by the sick humor and canine misfortune of it, all four of us began snickering, guiltily. Colonel G—– was the Wing Commander on Zaragoza. He was a kindly gentleman of Finnish extraction, who came by once a week to record his comments responding to various local concerns relayed to the Public Affairs office— one of our junior troops had the truly outstanding ghost-writers’ gift of writing Colonel G—–s’ remarks for him in words and phrasing that sounded perfectly naturally, coming from him. He had immigrated to America in the late 40ies, after a childhood that was so impoverished it had him and his sister sharing a single pair of shoes and going to school on alternate days. He usually came by the radio station in a flight-suit to record his remarks, on his way to rack up his required flight-time hours, and always gave me the impression of a schoolboy bidden to do one last chore before being loosed to freedom and play. I often wondered how his staff got any useful work out of him at all; I assumed they probably shackled his ankles to his desk, or something. Colonel G —– always seemed so cheerful, blasting out of the radio station, having done that one little Public Affairs chore for the week, heading out to the flight-line for a couple of hours of fun and freedom.
The Wing Commander and the Air Base Group Commander lived in the two largest houses on base— both with generous driveways, and porches and terraces. Oh, what fatal mischance had led a pair of stray dogs to brutally slaughter the cherished pet of the one person on post who could immediately bring all base responses into play! Of course, if someone elses’ pet had been killed, right at their own house, we very well knew that the base forces of law, order, and protection would have been called into play… just on a bit slower schedule. TSgt Scott listened to the morning guy give his verbal impression of what the two stray dogs must be thinking, and the news guy a mock-monologue of Colonel G—– at the controls of an F-16, patrolling the skies over Zaragoza, looking for a pair of stray dogs with merciless intent, and me saying.
“Oh, dear, that was a very bad choice, wasn’t it? And it’s sick and warped to be making fun of it… but, oh, it is kind of funny, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is, “Said Sgt. Scott, “But have your mad moment here. Not a $#@!! word of this on air. Just read the announcement.”
“Of course,” I said. All of us had pets, some of us lived on base, and it was awful indeed. But still: Colonel. Poodle. Feral Dogs. Sometimes, the sick jokes just write themselves. As much as we wish they wouldn’t!
I think the tone has really been set tonight and probably all through the week. We’re here about space, but at the end of the day, we are here about people. And it’s really an honor and privilege to stand here and tell you about the great men and women of Strategic Command, the great men and women of our armed forces.
As a granddad you look at these young men and women and you say, “Where did they come from? How did we do this?” They take whatever you give them, and turn it into something fantastic. They have a sense of pride about a greater whole. Much greater than themselves, and it’s through all of them. It’s not just one or two here or there, the guy that you sneak up to the cameras so he says the right word. You just can grab any one of them, and they just make you so proud, both to be associated with them and that they represent our country and our youth.
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This from Damien Cave at the NYTimes:
SAN ANTONIO – This city has its critics of the war in Iraq and its angry mothers who try to shame recruiters into going home. More than anything, though, it has a powerful patriotism and a deep respect for the military life.
At a time when the divide is widening between the cities and regions that send their children to war and those that do not, San Antonio remains a ready source of what the military needs most: people.
This metropolis – the home of the Alamo and the site of an Army presence since 1845 – is a top recruiting market for every branch of the military. The Army, in particular, which has struggled to sign up new soldiers during the continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, has found the San Antonio area to be a reliable and steady source of recruits.
Nationwide, every one of the Army’s 41 recruiting battalions failed to meet its recruiting goal in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, falling 7,000 soldiers short of the goal needed to refill the ranks, according to Army figures. Not since 1979 has the Army missed its annual quota by so many recruits. And yet San Antonio’s recruiters, covering the city of 1.2 million people as well as the area stretching north to Austin and south to the Mexican border, ranked first among battalions by signing up 2,118 people for active duty, 86 percent of its goal.
The story goes on to credit the city’s high proportion of active duty and veteran population, particularly among school teachers.
OK, Ok, I probably will go to see Serenity, and maybe The Corpse Bride, in the near future, should I have a couple of free days between temp assignments. (Yes, still job-hunting, still temping— this month at a corporate behemoth so huge that it has— I kid you not— a Starbucks concession at each end of the building. It’s even more boring than the overnight TV boardshift, and the daily commute is a killer; I hate it already, thanks for asking – but it is a paycheck)
With Hollywood on this graphic novel/nostalgia/action flick/remake kick, I continue to be ever more amazed that the great adventure comic strip, Terry and the Pirates hasn’t gone all big-screen on us in the last couple of years. Sure, sure, there was a brief movie-serial version, as well as a radio show, at the very height of it’s popularity during WWII, but I’ve always believed that Terry had the potential to knock the socks off Indiana Jones as far as cliff-hanging, non-stop adventure in exotic places, featuring a studly two-fisted hero, and gorgeous, strong-minded women of occasionally ambivalent moral principles. Throw in the bright teen-aged kid sidekick— the Terry of name, and add lashings of lost gold mines, Chinese warlords and freedom fighters, mercenaries of every nationality, colonial officialdom whiling away the afternoon on the verandah with a gin sling and the ceiling fan whirring overhead, pilots and sailors, thieves and bratty kidnapped children, freelance relief workers, glamorous globe-trotting debutants, and the distant rumble of Japanese expansionism across the Far East – oh, what Stephen Spielberg could make of this, if he hadn’t gone all high-toned and meaningful on us, to lofty to meddle with good-humored intrigue, glamour and adventure.
That was always Milton Caniffs’ thing; that and a drop-dead wonderful artistic sensibility. I remember that Steve Canyon, his follow-on strip to Terry & The Pirates was still being carried by the LA Times when I was in grade school. The sheer visual style of that strip, meticulously detailed, complex, almost cinematic, was artistically the most eye-catching thing in the color supplements on Sunday, even though I couldn’t force myself to be interested in the characters and plots. It wasn’t a kid’s comic, I sensed— it was something for grownups— and by the time I would have taken an interest in it, Steve Canyon was gone from the papers. The hero was a military pilot, and like the original GI Joe doll, and like much else military and of the cold-war era, fell out of general favor during the Vietnam War.
I can’t say I discovered Caniff’s most famous cartoon predecessor to Steve Canyon when doing historical research in the CSUN newspaper archives, since I already knew of it: Mom had been a fan, like just about every kid in the late Thirties, and there were excerpts in various books about the comics, or media that I had run across, one way or the other, but when I started my history project, I had a chance to read the whole run of Terry, over a decade’s worth of daily newspapers, starting in 1935. It was cartoonish and kind of sketchy, early on, but in about 1938 or so, Caniff hit an artistic stride and it just got better and better. The Dragon Lady, the beautiful Eurasian gang-leader turned freedom fighter— was she an ally? Sometimes she was, and there was this love-hate thing she had going on with the ostensible hero, soldier of fortune Pat Ryan. And then there was the mysterious torch singer, Burma, a blond bombshell and fugitive from the law — for what was never made quite clear, but her signature tune was the St. Louis Blues. Then there was the lovely Normandie, hounded by bossy relatives into marrying someone other than Pat, and the dashing Raven Sherman, fearless doer of good deeds in the dark world of war-torn China. Raven earned a small footnote in the history of the comics for being a major character and dying in the line of duty, thrown off the back of a truck during a hairbreadth escape. (The daily panel of this is entirely wordless.) Fans turned east for a moment of silence and mourned, and Caniff got black-edged notes on the anniversary for years afterwards.
The death of a fictional character occurred a bare two months before an event in real time that shook up the real, and the created world— the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Curiously enough, Terry had fans in Japan during the 1930ies, and in deference to American neutrality, Japanese forces were referred to only as “the invaders” up until that point, even though Caniff’s natural sympathies were with the long-suffering Chinese nationals. After Pearl Harbor, all neutralities were off. The character of Pat Ryan shifted off-screen; Mom always said that Caniff had written him into Singapore in early 1942, and the real-life fall of the city put Pat into a corner, while Terry— the kid who had grown up over the last six years of the series— joined the Army Air Corps and took center stage as far as adventure and romance was concerned. Caniff had always done a lot of research for the strip, and with a military angle, he acquired even more. Like a proto-blogger, he took tips, suggestions and corrections, and carefully read what news coverage of the Far East generally was available. One account has it that he was questioned once by the FBI, because a story-line he had concocted for the Terry strip— suggested by a mention in an obscure newspaper story— came altogether too close to an actual classified wartime operation.
The difficulty of doing a proper Terry movie is— aside from the intellectual rights to it all— is the one that would send the PC set screaming in the opposite direction. That is, the fact that some of the major Chinese characters, besides the Dragon Lady herself, would just not past muster today, not without changing them beyond recognition or eliminating them entirely. Big Stoop, the mute and fearless giant might be able to pass muster, but the comic relief, fractured- English-speaking cook and houseboy Connie – oh, dear, how to turn that 1930ies pigs’ ear stereotype into a proper 21st century politically correct silk purse? That would be a challenge to whoever would want to take it on – and seeing how Hollywood is doing with portraying our enemies in this war, I would assume it is one they are not up to accepting.
Pity— Terry and the Pirates would make a very nice movie. I’d pay money and go to it in the theater, which is more than I can say for most of the drek out there, these days.
Implicitly, I’m sure most of us knew the claims of (mostly Democratic) pols, principally New York’s Charlie Rangel, that our military draws an inordinately large portion of its ranks from those of limited economic opportunity, was pure bullshit. Now Mark Tapscott gives us the hard facts:
A must-read post from Alexander The Average, framed around this quote from von Clausewitz:
Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war…
Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions…
This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather…
Read the whole thing
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Complete the following:
“A _______ for SAC Is a __________ for freedom.”
“You call, We _____” is one of the mottoes of ________ units.
The U-6A, formerly designated the ________ is a __________ type aircraft,
powered by a ___________ engine, and was manufactured by the
__________ Aircraft Company.
The B-52 was first flown in _______, and is affectionately (until you skin your
knuckles working on one) known as a __________. )Please, the “nice” version!
What was the most common method of calling home from bases in the far east
during the Vietnam conflict war?
Try these, and I’ll see if I can come up with a few more goodies. Kevin, you
probably know all the answers!
Here’s an interesting question for the Strat-Sim people: HMS Victory vs. USS Constitution – who comes out the winner? And before you jump to conclusions, given that the American vessel has only 6/10s the firepower, think of the British victories in 1588 and 1805, where Drake and Nelson used tactics, over absolute firepower, to gain advantage. And that the Constitution is lower, faster, more maneuverable, and has a FAR stiffer hull than the Victory.
An interesting question, indeed: Super Frigate vs. Ship of the Line.
I did my very last TDY at the little Naval station in Gulfport ten years ago to the month. It was a charming, sleepy place, flat as a pancake inland— as near as I could tell with my hill-bred senses—all around and between Gulfport and Biloxi. The highest bit of real estate anywhere around seemed to be a great artificially built ridge on Gulfport Naval Station, called the “Bauxite Mound”. We were sent there, and set up there, for a vast aerial war-game, involving the ANG camp by the airport, Keesler AFB, and an assortment of other units and bases.
I was there for two weeks or so, tasked to sit in a trailer on the Bauxite Mound, and hit “play/record” and “stop” on a videotape recorder twice daily. The VTR was connected to a Hi8 camera bungee-corded to a vantage-point in a mobile radar trailer, and focused on a radar screen. At the end of a two-hour exercise scenario session, I popped the tape out of the machine, another Combat Camera TDY expert did the same with the VTR that she monitored (from another camera, bungee-corded in another trailer) and we put them both in a padded envelope, and a runner with a security clearance came to collect them. I think they were Fedexed somewhere, for after action review and analysis. For this onerous duty twice daily for two weeks, the DOD paid airfare, travel and per diem. (Your tax dollars at work, people… the peacetime military had certain discrete charms.) Most of the unit videographers were on a real combat doc assignment elsewhere— those on this one were stray broadcasters, and a couple of engineers— I think they sent the unit graphic artist as well. The unit was essentially emptied of everyone but the commander and the admin NCO. We joked that they might as well pull down the blinds, turn on the answering machine and pretend that no one was home.
For all but the four hours or so that we were needed at the exercise, Monday through Friday, we were free. We had the use of a couple of rental vans, though, and by careful scheduling and cooperation, were also able to amuse ourselves in a mild way in what passed for the fleshpots of the Mississippi Gulf Coast— although I ought to make it clear that my own excursions were to a fabric store, services at an Anglican congregation in Gulfport on Sunday, and to funny little nursery and pottery where I bought some concrete and pottery animals for the garden.
People who don’t know better claim that Texas is a southern state. It isn’t. I found that out the first evening, a van full of us buying groceries at the largest upscale grocery in Gulfport. At six of an evening on a weekday night, it was all but deserted. Maybe one clerk, and a couple of other customers besides ourselves. At that time of day, that time of week, grocery stores in San Antonio are jumping. No, Texas hustles… Mississippi was lazy and languid and mellow. Except for the casino barges all along the coast to Biloxi, the sidewalks all rolled up at about 4 PM. (A clerk in the Navy Exchange told me that she had to finally take the afternoon off, when she wanted to buy a car. By the time she got off shift in the late afternoon, all the dealers were closed.)
Every local I met, on post or off— they were gracious, friendly, languid, unhurried. I was too much, I realized, the energetic and keyed-up Yankee to feel comfortable with that over a long period of time, not unless there was something mellowing in the water. I knew that otherwise, I would eventually snap and grab a local citizen by the shirt-front and begin screaming “Wake up! It’s the poppies, I tell you! Snap out of it!!” But since I knew that I would be going home long before I reached the exasperation point, I could accommodate the laid-back and casual attitude— well, for two weeks, at least— and enjoy the differences.
Back of the ocean front, the land seemed to be very flat, and lushly wooded, threaded by slow-moving creeks, ditches and canals. I loved to run a circuit around the back-forty of Gulfport NS, which featured a golf course and a picnic ground with a large lake. Turtles the size of soup plates basked in the sun, plopping hurriedly into the water almost as soon as I saw them. Egrets and other water birds haunted the woods and the tangle of canals, and one day I saw what I thought first was just a pathetically skinny, reddish little stray dog, grooming himself on the grass verge between a ditch and a paved road. But no, it had a sharp little muzzle and pointed ears edged in black; every time it looked down for a bit more grooming, I stepped closer to the fox. It would turn, and look at me uneasily, I would hold very still… and reassured, the fox would resume grooming, until I was almost close enough to touch it. I wouldn’t, of course. Besides fleas, parasites and rabies, it also had very sharp little teeth— but I had never seen a real fox, not up so close.
The coast between Gulfport and Biloxi was beautiful— not because the beaches were scenic like Big Sur—but because they were white sand, and the sea always smooth and calm, and Highway 90 was a four-lane motorway with a landscaped median that paralleled the shore, sweeping around every gentle curve and headland. On the inland side of it a graceful series of large and small houses overlooked the road and the endless beach. We drove along that highway a number of times, but the one that sticks in memory was coming back from dinner at one of the Biloxi casinos (the pirate ship one— I won $5.00 on a slot machine). It was just about sundown, daylight fading out of the sky. All along the coastal road, the beautiful homes sat, with their windows and curtains drawn open to the sea breeze, lights on inside the rooms. It was like looking into the windows of a series of elaborate doll houses, but ever in the back of my mind—even then— was the thought of how close the water was, how flat the country and how fragile those beautiful mansions and cottages would be, in the eye of a storm.
The news reports have the storm surge that hit Biloxi as being 30 feet, and I am wondering, without any way of ever knowing, how many of the lovely houses that I admired, and how many of the places that I spent my TDY money at, and how many of the people I met in passing— at the nursery, at the church service, or ringing up my groceries— are OK, and alive. Thirty feet of water, all at once…We think of our world as solid, immutable, but it is not— it has its own whims.
In response to my recent posts, concerning the F-14, and the movie Top Gun, reader Mike Williams sends this interesting email:
I started flying F-14s in 1973. I was an engineering test pilot at the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, MD. I went on to a department head tour in one F-14 squadron, and to an XO/CO tour in another.
When you compare Navy and Air Force fighters, it’s a little apples and oranges because of the Navy’s carrier suitability requirements. And it’s not just the extra weight in beefed up structures for carrier takeoffs and landings: you also have to take into account the comparatively limited space available on even Nimitz-class carriers for maintenance and storage of spare parts.
As you probably know, the F-14A was originally designed to use the same engine as the F-15A. In fact, if memory serves, the number 7 F-14 was a “B” model with the F-15 engine. I forget the exact designation, but it had considerably more thrust than the “A” model’s PW TF-30, which was a variant of the F-111’s engine.
What some people forget is that both the TF-30 and the F-15A engines were high-energy afterburning turbofans, and that while the TF-30 was operational in the F-111, the F-15A engine was at that time pushing the state of the art. Certainly the F-14A was underpowered for a front-line fighter, and guys like me began referring to it as the twin-tailed turkey. I was a lieutenant (O-3) at the time, but that didn’t stop me from venting my frustrations with the rear admiral who was the F-14 program manager at the Naval Air Systems Command. He listened politely to my rants, and then he said this: You’re right, of course, but when the F-15A engine blew up in afterburner on the test stand for the third time at less than 100 hours, I had to make a hard decision about waiting for the engine to catch up, or getting the F-14 out to the fleet on time.
The difference here is that where the Air Force has the hangar space to yank engines every 100 hours for hot section inspections and to store replacements, aircraft carriers don’t.
Now, as you and some of your readers have pointed out, the Air Force flew the F-111 more as a bomber than a fighter. Not so the Navy with the F-14A. Pilots routinely pushed it to the edges of the envelope – and beyond. And initially we had a lot of compressor stall problems with the TF-30 engines that the F-111 pilots didn’t encounter. It took a while, but over the years we managed to engineer enough upgrades to work these problems out. The downside was that there wasn’t enough money left over to upgrade to the F-15A engine when it finally got beyond 100 hours for a hot section inspection.
I can tell you from experience that the F-14A was a very forgiving fighter. Many is the time I’ve run out of airspeed and ideas in a dog fight, often when the jet was pointed nearly straight up. The problem here was that the F-14 has an unrecoverable flat spin mode, and that an engine stall at high angle of attack increases the susceptibility. The spin axis is somewhere between the NFO’s cockpit and the vertical stabilizers, and the transverse G’s during the spin are enough to incapacitate the pilot. So, if you got into a flat spin, your only alternative was to eject, and you were dependent on the NFO (who was not incapacitated by the transverse G’s) to initiate a command ejection.
The NFO’s concern was the canopy: the command eject sequence was the canopy, the NFO and then the pilot. Because you wanted your pilots and NFOs to survive carrier takeoff and landing mishaps, the time intervals were fairly compressed. Unfortunately, the canopy tended to hover over the aircraft during a flat spin, and there was a chance that the NFO would strike it during ejection – a guaranteed fatality.
To be sure, all the fixes to the TF-30’s compressor stall problem weren’t just for air combat. A compressor stall on a combat-loaded F-14 during a catapult takeoff could also be a big problem. The engines are far enough apart so that with one stalled, and the other blazing away in full after burner, enough roll-to-yaw could be generated in short order to put you on your back. Those Martin-Baker seats might have been zero-zero, but as the airplane rapidly rolled from wings-level to inverted, your odds of surviving an ejection decreased exponentially.
Now about Top Gun. During Vietnam we were focused primarily on MIG-17s and MIG-21s. It turns out that the A-4 is a very good MIG-17 simulator, and the F-5 is a very good MIG-21 simulator.
But let’s digress here a minute and talk about the air war in Korea. At the start of the war, the MIG-15 was the superior air-to-air machine, even compared to early versions of the F-86. But later on, the US put bigger engines in the F-86 and bolted up the leading edge slats. Then the F-86 ruled the skies.
The same thing happened to the Top Gun A-4’s: The Navy bolted up the slats and installed big engines. The durn things were small and hard-to-see, had a thrust-to-weight close to 1:1, and could turn on a dime. In an F-14A, you could get in real trouble in a knife-fight with one of those hopped up A-4s. So – you tried to set the fight up to play to your strengths – which were your radar and missiles – and his weaknesses (but you always conceded GCI, which for him was like radar and an extra set of eyeballs).
We’ll I’m sure you’re bored by now with an old man’s reminisces. In closing, my advice would be to let bygones be bygones, and to look to the future. The F-22 is deploying to Langley AFB as we speak, and Russia and China are partnering up in defense technology. The JSF is coming along, and you could reasonably conclude we’re in another Cold War-style arms race. The GWOT is critical right now, but it’s not the only game in town.
On last night’s HBO Real Time With Bill Mahr, our principal claimed boldly that National Guard members signed up only to “play paintball on weekends.” I dare him to go to Iraq, and say that (without a security entourage) to ANY NG squad.
BRAC hearings will concentrate on AFBs today. C-SPAN2 is covering it gavel-to-gavel.
In further news, I can’t believe the todo about the closing of Walter Reed. It’s really not being closed; it’s being merged with Bethesda. And the new, expanded facility will be called Walter Reed.
A very good Chicago Sun-Times article from Mark Steyn:
They’re not children in Iraq; they’re grown-ups who made their own decision to join the military. That seems to be difficult for the left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as “children.” If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the broadloom in Bill Clinton’s Oval Office, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year-old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee “child” who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.
I get many e-mails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes like she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in ”Sex And The City.”
The infantilization of the military promoted by the left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that “of course” they “support our troops,” because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.
[…]
Casey Sheehan was a 21-year old man when he enlisted in 2000. He re-enlisted for a second tour, and he died after volunteering for a rescue mission in Sadr City. Mrs. Sheehan says she wishes she’d driven him to Canada, though that’s not what he would have wished, and it was his decision.
For those of you that wrote-off Steven Bochco’s Over There on FX, after the somewhat abysmal pilot, I invite you to take a second look. While still having its share of technical errors and Hollywood silliness, it has gotten MUCH better.
There’s a thing going on the History Channel just now saying the F-14 is currently the world’s fastest fighter jet. Oh, give me a fucking break: Even relitave to the F-14D (Mach 2.4), the F-15C, the F-4, the F-104, the F-106, and particularly the YF-12 (Mach 3.2), in addition to several Russian jets, most notably the MiG-25, are all much faster than the F-14.
Oh, and here’s a claim: The narrator has just proclaimed the F-14 “the world’s most complete military fighter.” Oh, give me a fucking break: Why do you think these tom-turkeys are being retired?
Update: Well, with the switch to the GE motors. many of the costs have been contained. And, while in this era of stealth, the ante has been raised exponenially., for it’s time, the Tomcat was crazy-expensive. And flying them? WTF do you think first named them “Tomcats”?
The Great Raid is a solidly old-fashioned kind of war movie, of the workmanlike sort made during or in the two decades immediately after World War II. Whether you like it or not depends very largely on whether you see this old-fashioned quality as a good thing or a bad thing.
Three linked stories are competently woven together, all taking place over 5 days in January, 1945, as the Japanese occupation of the Philippines comes to a final bloody end. The threads of the story come together at the POW camp at Cabanatuan, where the last five hundred or so ragged survivors of the Bataan Death March, and the siege of Corrigidor wait for death or liberation. Cabanatuan was the central holding camp for POWs in the Philippines, and by this time the fitter and healthier prisoners had been moved to other camps or to Japan for forced labor. Those left are sick, crippled, starving, many barely able to stand, mentally gone somewhere far beyond despair. They are afraid they have been forgotten by the outside world, but they have not been. In Manila, a Catholic nurse named Margaret Utinsky runs a small underground circle which smuggles desperately needed drugs into the Cabanatuan camp. Margaret, although the widow of an American Army officer, holds a passport from a neutral country and manages to stay at liberty and ahead of the Japanese secret police – for a while. The man she loves is in Cabanatuan, desperately ill with malaria. As the Japanese control over the Philippines begins to waver, he and the other prisoners are in danger of being murdered outright.
A massacre of American POWs at another camp sets the third story in motion; a hit and run raid on the Cabanatuan camp to free the POWs there, and spirit them to safety. The liberators will have to walk the last thirty miles, avoid any encounters with the Japanese forces, and pull it off with no rehearsals. The job falls to 120 picked men from the 6th Ranger Battalion, and their bombastic and colorful commander, Col. Henry Mucci. In turn, Col. Mucci assigns one of his company commanders, Capt. Robert Prince to come up with a plan to hit the camp, and to come up with it in 24 hours. Refining the plan, getting information about the camp, doing reconnaissance on the spot, coming up with a means of transporting the sick and unfit to safety, distracting the Japanese guards— it’s all done on the fly, over the next four days, working in concert with two separate Filipino guerilla organizations.
The elements of the actual raid is the most interesting and seemingly the most carefully recreated, a scheme of meticulously organized chaos— counting down to the last minutes as the Rangers carefully take up positions in the dark, just outside camp, and the Filipino guerillas prepare to block access on the road to either side. The moment when they open up is quite jolting, as it follows on fifteen or so minutes of quiet whispers, and the scuffling sounds of men crawling through the weeds. I think I would have rather seen more of the planning of it, rather than the doomed romance, which seems rather jammed in as an afterthought, and a contrivance. I did think it a little odd— since one of the keys to operating a successful underground organization is to be physically ordinary and persistently unnoticeable— that they could cast a dishwater blond actress who stands a head and a half taller than everyone else, as an underground operative in an Oriental country.
Otherwise, the attention given to the Philippine underground, and the guerillas out in the country was very appropriate, and much overdue in movies of this sort. The cast is a solid ensemble, turning in respectable performances; the lack of star power being somewhat of an advantage here. (Only three of the leads: Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielson and Joseph Fiennes are anyone that I have ever heard of, or noticed in a movie before.) The director and producers also hired Dale Dye as their military advisor, and would appear to have paid attention to him, although I am sure that William or any other enthusiastic experts will find small flaws and discrepancies in uniforms, weapons and vehicles. There was also a quiet, unobtrusive nod paid to religious beliefs, which I rather appreciated— another old-fashioned note. And the brutality of the Japanese forces in their treatment of POWs and Filipinos was not softened, or played down in the interests of political correctness; I doubt The Great Raid will play well in Japan, but it will go over splendidly in the Philippines. And if you see it, stay for the closing credits: it opens with what looks like contemporary black and white newsreel footage of the fall of Bataan, the Death March— and closes with the arrival of the transport ship carrying the survivors to a cheering crowd in San Francisco.
I again find myself watching Top Gun on HBO. Not that it’s that great, but it seems like the best thing to go to sleep to right now. 🙂
Anyway, I think we all know about the fictitious “MiG 28” (really an F-5E). But I just caught that phantom narrator line from day one: “the planes you will be flying against are smaller, faster, and more maneuverable.” Well, the A-4 Skyhawk is certainly far smaller than the Tomcat. But they are subsonic, and at a thrust/weight ratio around .5, hardly as accelerative as the Tomcat. And, while certainly able to turn inside the Tomcat at low speeds, they max out at 6g; so at higher speeds, the Tomcat has the edge.
In any event, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Navy’s Top Gun aggressor squadron is now flying F-16s – IMHO, the best dogfighter this country has ever produced.
Oh, and this is another thing that’s always got me: Miramar is a good 30 miles or so from the ocean. And there’s another 50 miles or so of piney woods between it and the desert, where we see them doing their maneuvers (well below the supposed “hard deck”). But then, on day two, Maverick goes into a flat spin, and is “heading out to sea.” Further, in the next scene, we first see that the canopy (a single assembly on the Tomcat) clearly blows, allowing Maverick to eject, and then Goose ejects into it. Stupid Hollywood BS.
Anyway, goodnight.
This discussion over at Boing-Boing got me thinking…
Does anyone have the definitive answer to the question, Where did the tradition of military members “coining” visitors and distinguished members come from?
To: Damian Cave, @ The New York Times
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Some Cheese with that Whine
1. So you are baffled, baffled, I say by the lack of coverage in the major media, to the stories of heroism in Irag and Afghanistan, and wonder disingenuously as to why the names of SFC Paul Smith, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester and Sgt. Rafael Peralta are not right up there in the consciousness of the nation as heroes, heroes on par with Audie Murphy and Alvin York. (My comparison, not yours. Audie Murphy and Alvin York were… oh, never mind. Use a search engine, or read some history books.) Such is your supple intellect and grasp of the obvious that you manage fix the blame anywhere but with your own media culture. “…The military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.”
2. Myself, I grasp the fact that the cluebirds are over your position, but at a very great height. I will do what I can, to bring certain realities within your reach. First, I suggest that you walk out of your office, leave the building, and stand on the sidewalk outside, and look back. (I assume of course, that you are a full-time employee of the paper of record. If you are a free-lancer, skip this paragraph.) Somewhere on the building you have just departed should be the inscription or legend, “New York Times.” Yes, Mr. Cave, you work for a newspaper, a fairly major national newspaper, as it turns out. I would suggest, if you wish an answer to your question as to why there is no attention paid to the heroes of this war, you first ask them of your co-workers at the Times.
3. And it’s not as if the stories have not been told: you know that mouse-clicky thing, to the side of the keyboard in front of the oddly-television appearing monitor on your desk? The stories are there, Mr. Cave, on the milblogs such as this, on Mudville Gazette (among hundreds of others), on various DOD websites, and at military press briefings. It’s called investigative reporting— remember when they covered that at j-school? Other newspapers can manage it, mostly papers in markets located close to military bases. Military bases… you know, those federal reserves, out in the sticks, full of noisy tanks and airplanes and things, and people with very short haircuts and a tendency to all wear the same sort of clothes? All these places have a little office on it someplace, called the Public Affairs office. They’d love to hear from you some time, tell you all about heroes and anything else about their personnel that you’d like to hear. Give them a jingle, they’re in the book.
4. And you expect to be spoon-fed by the White House, or the military, or whomever, about the heroes of this war? You want it tied up in a nice pink bow, or something, after three years of pretty much ignoring anything but the ever-floggable dead horse of Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo. Well, there is no contenting some people. Just do your job, instead of blaming everyone else. Pick up the phone, click on the mouse. I swear, when you go to the men’s room, do you have to have someone else hold your…. Oh, never mind, that’s a question to which I really don’t want an answer.
5. Just do your job. And stop whining.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
(Correction pointed out by Byna… I should not do rants when I am cooking dinner at the same time, from an unfamiliar recipe!)
Update: Full-frontal evisceration of Mr. Cave is here, and a gallery of heroes here.
Last weekend at the radio station, the other announcer had the TV on in the production office, and we caught the leader for this film. I may very well go and pay money to see it in the theater, depending on the reviews. Benjamin Bratt heads the cast list, so I am not holding out that much hope for good reviews… but I’ve been known to be wrong. (My daughter dragged me kicking and screaming to see “George of the Jungle” because she had a mad pash for Brendan Fraser. I resigned myself to having my intelligence insulted for two hours, but surprise, surprise… a damn funny movie. William laughed his ass off when he saw it on video. He liked Rustlers’ Rhapsody, too. You never can tell…)
It may very well turn out to be an over-produced, over-rated, big steaming pile of a movie, (Hello, Pearl Harbor, part Deux!)… but if it is really based on this book it may turn out to be a ripping good story, about the rescue of military survivors of the Bataan Death March, from a POW camp at Cabanatuan, the Philippines in 1945. (Not this raid, which was just as daring, mounted to rescue American and European civilian internees at a camp at Los Banos, also in the Philippines in 1945).
The problem faced by movies dealing with WWII in the Pacific and in the Far East begins at a single starting point, which is that the conflict between the Allies and the Japanese was knock-down and drag out brutal, completely unscathed by any pretense of observing the so-called rules of war; that white flags would be honored, that prisoners and internees would be treated humanely, according to the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross would be respected… all these and a number of other chivalrous conventions were flung down and danced upon, beginning with on Day One— as far as Americans were concerned—- with a sneak attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. Germany may very well have been run by a murderous Nazi gang headed by a demented paper-hanger and failed artist, Germans may have referred to disparagingly as Krauts, and lampooned in the movies and pop music by cut-ups like Charlie Chaplain and Spike Jones, but at least they made a good effort at honoring the rules of war in respect of all the allies but the Russians. In that, they had a certain amount of grudging respect; an enemy but a mostly honorable one. With the Japanese, there was no such mutual courtesy extended, no quarter offered and none given or expected. That, in concert with the poisonously racist attitudes and assumptions of fifty years ago openly demonstrated by all parties concerned, ensures that putting any of this on screen in a realistic fashion is fraught with peril for the movie-maker. (And please take note, the Japanese were more than equal in demonstrated bigotry. Often initially welcomed as liberators from the colonial powers all over south-east Asia, by 1945 they had made themselves so detested for their brutality, the returning Westerners had many local allies who hated the Japanese more than their one-time colonial masters.)
I had read that initially horrifying reports of the treatment of American and Filipino POWs on the Bataan Death March which leaked out through a handful of fortunate escapees were suppressed as a matter of national security, to avoid damaging morale on the home front. It was easier, in those days of written letters, telegrams and a few radio broadcasts, to keep a lid on everything but rumors. And of rumors there were plenty, across the United States, Australia and Great Britain. These countries and a handful of others had thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military citizens— nurses, missionaries, soldiers, businessmen, colonial authorities, expatriates, and their wives and children—all simply vanish into the black hole of the Japan administered Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere upon the fall of Singapore and Malaya, Borneo and the Philippines, Hong Kong and the European enclaves in China. No letters, no contact, no reassurance from the Red Cross that their people were alive, safe and well for more than three and a half years…. Because they were neither alive, and if so, not safe and increasingly as the war ground on to a bitter end, not well, either.
In a museum in Britain sometime in our wandering summer of 1976— was it Carlisle? Salisbury? York, maybe? One of those little local museums, with a case of artifacts given over to the relics of the local regiment, with dusty embroidered colors, and little Victoria sweet-tins, and souvenir hardtack crackers adorned with poems in careful copperplate handwriting. This museum had a long picture of an entire company of men— one of those formal things with four rows of men and officers standing on risers. Everyone who has ever served has been in at least one picture of that sort, but this one had a sad distinction; the entire company, fifty or so, were captured in the fall of Singapore… and none survived to the war’s end. They were sent to work on the Burma-Siam Railway, and among the museum’s relics was a metal measure about the size of a 12-ounce can. It was used, so said the card underneath, to measure out the daily ration of water and rice for the slave labor set by the Japanese to work on the railway. And that was what they got, day in, day out, doing hard physical labor in the tropics… just that little rice and water. The saying about the Burma-Siam railway after the war was there was a man dead for every sleeper laid, the whole length of it: POW, internee, or native civilians pressed-ganged into the service of the Japanese.
POWs and internees were routinely starved, forced into hard labor, denied any kind of effective medical treatment save what internee doctors and nurses could provide, spitefully prevented from communicating with the outside world, or keeping any kind of diary or record at all, subject to the most vicious punishments—up to and including murder in a revoltingly gruesome variety of ways— for the most trivial offenses or often none at all. Transported to Japan itself, to labor in mines and factories, POWs were loaded like cattle, into the holds of transport ships; men went insane, and tragically, died when the ships were bombed and torpedoed by the Allies. There are also stomach-churning accounts of POWs used as guinea-pigs in Japanese medical experiments, and vivisected while still alive, and un-anesthetized. The estimate is that 27% of the Allied POWs held by the Japanese perished in captivity, as opposed to 2-3% held by the Germans. Civilian internees fared hardly better; this account of women and children interned in Sumatra— most of them shipwrecked in the Java Sea while escaping Singapore by sea in the last days before the surrender— estimates about half perished in captivity. American internees in the Philippines fared a little better, although most survivors of Santo Tomas and Los Banos estimate they were about two weeks from dying of starvation when they were liberated. “Thou shalt not kill, “ runs the bitter couplet, “But need not strive, officiously, to keep alive.” Most survivor accounts estimate about the same… that is, if the Japanese didn’t massacre them all first, as they did at Palawan. At best, writer-historian Gavin Daws estimates that life-expectancy of the survivors was reduced by ten or fifteen years, so severe were the health problems resulting from near-starvation, exposure to every tropical and deficiency disease known to medical science, and the psychotic brutality of the Japanese camp guards.
During the war, this was not something much talked about, except in the vaguest sort of way— no spreading despair on the home front. Immediately afterwards, the most popular accounts of captivity, such as Agnes Newton Keith’s “Three Came Home” (1947) give the impression that it all was quite dreadful, but skimmed over the specifics. Many survivors wanted more than anything to just forget, to put it out of mind, and have a normal life again, and many more just could not talk about it at all, save to those few comrades who had been there with them. It is only in the last few years that I have really noticed the horrific accounts being published, historical memory uneasily jousting with political correctness. But what kind of movie this can make… as the major media reporters say, standing in front of a government building… all remains to be seen.
OK, so reading the scathing comments here and there about “Over There”— the drama about the war in Iraq which is supposed to be ripped from the headlines— are amusing enough; Hey, Mr. B, dude, if you are ripping stories from the headlines, let’s rip them from the right decade, ‘kay? The description of one of the main characters as a serious doper, though… An active-duty member of the military today, smoking rope on a regular basis? Yeah, shu-r-r-r-e. Right. I have two words on that for Mr. B.; two words and a Bette Davis-sized eye-roll…. And the two words are “Golden Flow.”
Yes, back in the day, there was a lot of smoking of the eeeevvil weed. There were legends from my early service days, about how to baffle the drug-sniffing dogs by mixing cayenne pepper into the floor wax, about small marijuana plants growing among the shrubs underneath the barracks windows, from so many people throwing their stash out the window shortly in advance of a shakedown search. I personally saw the stash kept by one of my tech school classmates under the passenger seat of his POV— so as not to implicate his roommates in the event that someone got off their ass and searched the dorm rooms. One of my own roommates indulged on occasion, although the two of us who did not asked her very nicely to keep her stash out of the room, and us in ignorance of her pot-consuming. Even in the late 1970ies, being busted for possession was grounds for being thrown out. And yes, I know what the stuff smells like, and I had friends who indulged, although Blondie was completely horrified to find out this, she being the product of a Catholic education, DARE and every other sanctioned youth drug-abuse-prevention program, and six years worth of AFRTS substance-abuse spots.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that DOD began landing like a ton of bricks on the consumption of pot and other illegal substances, especially at overseas locations. A part-timer at FEN-Misawa was busted by the Japanese cops with a shopping bag-full of the local stuff, and implicated so many other people when he began to sing like a demented canary that the unit he was assigned to had to shut down operations for a couple of days while everyone in it trooped obediently in to the local gendarmerie to be interrogated. He also fingered half of the FEN staff as well. I wasn’t one of them, fortunately— as MSgt. Rob elegantly elucidated, I was so notoriously clean-cut I probably gift-wrapped my garbage. The stuff grew wild in Japan, and the temptation was too much for some. It was to the point where the base Security Police offered a certain courtesy service: if you had just bought an automobile, they would have the sniffer dogs go over it, just to establish that any traces of dope they found in it could be held against the previous owner.
I am not sure exactly when they began to do regular random urinalysis tests on military personnel, and am too lazy to thresh through the mountains of data to pin down the date, but it must have been by the early 80ies, because I clearly remember being escorted to the hospital at Hellenikon AB, and asked to fill a small plastic cup; the nurse who proctored did so from the other side of a restroom stall door. That courtesy had gone by the board by the mid-80ies, when I was tasked with proctoring piss-tests ordered on members of the unit at EBS-Zaragoza, as the senior female assigned. I had to eyeball the stream of urine as it left the body and filled up the cup. How degrading and personally embarrassing this was for me, and for every female junior troop who worked for me can be imagined. One poor airman had bashful kidneys; we would be guaranteed to spend at least three or four hours waiting in the hospital waiting room, with her swilling soft drinks, and me telling her silly jokes and inwardly fuming, thinking of all the things I had left at work that I should be doing, except that the Air Force thought this was a much more important use of my time. A male Senior Airman at EBS was busted cold by one of these random tests— he was demoted back to E-1 and out of the Air Force in about six months, and the fact that he had been a sterling citizen, and otherwise an ornament to the unit had no effect at all on the mills of justice. He was out. From his account, he had only smoked it once, inveigled by his girlfriend, a fair Spanish maid and in bed after a rewarding evening…. No, it was plain and clear to the most clueless that polluting the temple of your body whilst in service to Uncle Sam with illegal substances was not only ill-advised… but a short-cut to all kinds of unpleasant outcomes, beginning with a bust in grade, dismissal from service, et cetera, et cetera. And the piss-tests were supposed to be legally iron-clad, and very, very sensitive. Hell, I have even been careful about what I baked and took in to work: nothing with poppy seeds. (I really didn’t want to count on the government lab being able to tell the difference between opiate derivatives… and lemon-poppy-seed tea bread.)
The subsequent investigation of anyone busted by a random urinalysis would take in a whole range of other parties; not just their friends, but their unit, known associates, everyone they had ever talked to, or even thought about talking to. This is something that everyone in the military culture post 1980 knows: a doper will be caught, sooner rather than later. When they are caught, they will bring grief down on every known associate, which has the result of dopers being about as popular as child molesters. The military of the late 1990ies was most emphatically not the military of thirty years before; in a lot of ways it was much more puritanical. I cannot, for example, imagine any of the practical jokes the broadcasters played on each other at FEN-Misawa in 1978, being even considered at AFKN-Seoul in 1994.
I do not think the Army has changed their corporate culture all that much in ten years. Sometime in 1994, AFKN pulled an exercise recall of all their staff, at 4 AM, ordering everyone to report for duty at once… and as soon as we signed in, the Readiness NCO handed us a lidded plastic cup and directed us to the lavatory.
“Oh, you sneaky, conniving bastard!” I told him, as I took the cup. They tested every one of us, in one fell swoop. No, I cannot see a doper lasting for more than a couple of months in the military as practiced today. I may have been out for eight years, but the kind of corporate culture instilled for two service generations… sorry, Mr. B. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
It also doesn’t look like anyone in Hollywood reads milblogs. Pity about that. Lots of good stories there, too. I am doing the best I can— you can lead whores to culture, but you just can’t make ‘em think.
David at Oxblog is skeptical about WaPo’s prediction of a massive draw-down in Iraq next year:
There are some huge ‘if’s. I am fairly confident that the political process will head in the right direction, but the Iraqi security forces have a very long way to go. The question then is why the WaPo bothered to make such a fuss over Casey’s statement. This sentence from the Post provides the answer:
Rumsfeld and other officials have rejected making a deadline [for withdrawal] public, but a secret British defense memo leaked this month in London said U.S. officials favored “a relatively bold reduction in force numbers.”
In other words, this is supposed to be a story about hypocrisy in the White House, courtesy of yet another British memo. I have to admit, I was a little nervous when I saw that the supposed pullout had briefly become the top story on the WaPo homepage. But now it seems pretty clear that the headline writers were jumping the gun.
I could see us having somewhere just north of 100K troops in Iraq by the end of next year. But I would think that if any “secret” plans were afoot for a large-scale draw-down in force level, somebody in the milblogosphere would know about it.
This is via Glenn Reynolds, who wonders where our troops will go from here. It looks to me as though the political ground is being softened for a possible move against Syria.
I can’t believe I’ve missed this for over a week. From Conn. Senator Joe Lieberman’s office:
Congress, to the officials of the Bush Administration, and to all Americans to build support for an increase in the size of our army by an additional 80,000 soldiers over the next four years to an end strength of 582, 400. That is what the “United States Army Relief Act of 2005” will do. We take this action because:
We believe that the current pace of troop deployments to Iraq requires too much of the men and women of our Army. Too many of them have been sent there too often and stayed too long and that has had an undesirable affect on their families, their communities, and the capacity of the Army to meet recruitment goals.
We believe that greater Army end strength will give our war fighting commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq the capability they need to surge the number of troops on the ground there if facts on the ground require that.
We are concerned that if other crises occur elsewhere in the world in the years ahead we won’t have the appropriately sized Army trained and ready to go there to deal with these other crises.
And we are concerned that too much of the experienced institutional Army, that part that raises, trains, and supports the combat forces, is being reduced to make up for this combat troop shortage, depriving today’s soldiers of the highest level of training and education and support, and threatening to deprive tomorrow’s soldiers –including particularly tomorrow’s officers–of the knowledge and experience they will need to fight the wars of the future.
Indeed.