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Fallon Falls

dolman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:36:25 +0000

A lot of passion shows through in the ink spilt over the demise of Fox Fallon at CENTCOM.

A piece by Astropolitics.org reader Dr Gary Schaub appeared as an op-ed in The Montgomery Advertizer, and deserves much wider distribution: The Fall of Fox Fallon (Fall of Fallon.pdf and Fall of Fallon.doc).

Mark Perry’s Comment in the Asia Times Online, “American Icarus Flirts with Fire,” is insightful. Michael Barone’s column in on Indystar.com and today in The Washington Times, “Importance of Fallon’s Fall,” seems wierdly misdirected.

Nanobrains for nanowarriors?

Esotericon — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:48:46 +0000

Having been accused of being a nanobrain myself, I initially took offense… Seriously, this article suggests some very interesting developments—one could use this concept to control a MEMS device that could interact with molecules chemically, but could be controlled both in terms of movement and chemical interactivity, sort of like Fantastic Voyage without Raquel Welch…

Morning has broken …

dolman — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:47:00 +0000

At least the eclipse was nice.

Morning has broken and we are not at war! The Navy successfuly shot down a malfunctioning spy satellite that could have posed a threat to terrestrial (read: living) interests and, astonishingly to the blame-America-first, kill-all-the-humans-but-leave-the-stars-alone crowd, the End of Days is not obviously at hand.

See Jeffrey Lewis’s, Leader of the Doomsday Pack, impassioned plea from yesterday (DON’T FREAKING DO IT!) as an appetizer, then peruse the hand-wringers’ laments: see, for example, “Shooting down satellite raises concerns about military space race” Detroit Free Press. Of course, the Chinese don’t like it, and we wouldn’t want anyone to be mad at us. The Times Online reported this juicy tidbit:

Confirmation that the Pentagon destroyed the spacecraft this morning triggered a fresh diplomatic row with Russia and China.

A Chinese state newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticised Washington for hypocrisy for rejecting a treaty to ban weapons in space proposed by Russia and China and then firing a missile at the spy satellite. Washington claims it had rejected the proposed treaty as unworkable, and said it instead favoured confidence-building efforts.

Let me see if I have this right. America demonstrates hypocrisy after rejecting a proposed ban on space weapons and then using a space weapon, but China is not hypocritical because it proposed and affirmed a ban on space weapons … and then used a space weapon.

Kudos to The Baltimore Sun, “Take that, rogue satellite. China, you watching?”

A Response to Bob

dolman — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:48:53 +0000

Our friend in Washington is the de facto interim editor. I am publishing his quick take on the Scales article preceding as I received it–a great read:

Well, there he goes again. Here’s another propaganda piece (attached) from Bob Scales concerning the need for the nation to concentrate on how to perform close combat better—and get this—with less loss of life. His answer? FIRST, we need better troop-carrying vehicles, to get more of our young people INTO the close fight faster. Second, we need more robots—that’s right, robots—things the infantry can control so that we get into close combat faster. Third, we need more airplanes to perform the logistics mission to support those troops and the vehicles taking them to the close fight. Ah, but first a little “history” of warfare, in which no airplane is mentioned. It is as if they never existed. In fact, the fulcrum of all military history apparently is the infantry! Amazing. The closest to modernity he gets is blitzkrieg, which for some reason has become “tank-on-tank” warfare in Scale’s sanctified imagination of warfare history…so, warfare has lurched between infantry dominance and ground mobility (horse or tank) dominance. And, as luck would have it, in his mind we are back to an infantry-dominated world! (For those of you keeping score at home, I will say it again, “Historians reflexively neglect and denigrate airpower.” Scales is no different, he’s just more of a pure proselytizer for his faith than your average civilian historian.)

But, before we get too far into that theological discussion, let’s take a look at the Army’s favorite game—the blame game. Apparently, the Army and Marine Corps bear no responsibility for what Scales identifies as a terrible national neglect of emphasis on close combat. After all, they are the keepers of the infantry flame, right? If that is the choir you are preaching to, it would be bad form to put any blame on them, so it must be someone else. Right. And they are, of course, the usual suspects. First, you have the American people, who by some sort of historical or hereditary oddity, do not like their young people dying in combat, like, say, the Germans or Islamic radicals or Vietnamese did. Oh, that pain of not having been born in a more courageous, manly society that really, really FAVORs their young dying in combat! Lacking that, we must, in an odd turn of logic, blame them for death itself. So, after a long, extended discussion about death, which is important because it weakens the audience to your point, even if your point now concentrates on dying rather than war, he gets to the other evils—aircraft and ship programs, and the evil contractors and lawmakers whose coffers bulge with big dollars from those programs, robbing the infantry of its due. So, the American people stab the infantry in the back, abetted by evil corporations, the airmen and naval officers who feed them lies, and the lawmakers who only know dollars, not war.

What a terrible, terrible situation we have created for our infantry and the glorious services who speak for them! How do we fix it? What is the goal? To achieve the same kill ratios we have achieved in air-to-air combat—you know, because we’ve given the air guys so much money and attention, and that’s all it takes. Although the cost per infantry soldier has increased exponentially, some orders of magnitude over the past several years, he doesn’t bring that fact to bear, because all the facts do not matter. Only the casualty facts matter when you’re beating someone with your bloody scarf.

The real problem is that if Bob got his wish, and we really did allow our navies and air forces to atrophy so we could concentrate on REAL men—the infantry—he’d lose the game he loves so well. Then, he’d have nobody else to blame for the fact that close combat still kills too many Americans—or that it doesn’t kill enough, and that would take all the fun out of it. When you can be as irresponsible as the Army in neglecting counterinsurgency or even the infantry themselves in THEIR OWN SERVICE, and still successfully blame everyone else—EVEN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE—you are sitting in a place too pretty to be interrupted by accountability. No, Bob, you love things just as they are—you’re making too much money and having too much fun being a Jesuit for your religion to have it all ruined by empiricism or actually seeing dramatic decreases in death from close combat. That would suck the air right out of your system of demagoguery.

I would ask you to consider, based on this tract, why Airmen were placed in such a land as America? Was it to create a world safe for infantry close combat as Scales suggests? He LOVES airpower—you know, drones and airlift and A-10s buzzing over the close combat killing fields, and Airmen to blame after every battle. Given this sort of advocacy environment, what is an Airman to do? To join him? To go with the flow? If war is all about the close fight, then you would be right to take the easy road. But, if it isn’t, and in fact, if close combat actually is something to avoid due to our national humanitarian culture, then what is our role? Bob’s fans are sucking this stuff up—in fact, I got it sent to me by people gushing about how great it is. This article should be a way of examining just what war is, and how America should wage it. The infantry is here to stay, and airpower has a tremendous role in precluding close combat to the extent it can be—when it cannot, airpower has a tremendous role in dominating that environment and extricating the infantry as rapidly as possible from no-win situations. Someone must speak FOR the American people on this issue, not against them. That might be YOUR role.

Best,

Tom

Don’t hate the Playa’ …

dolman — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:21:19 +0000

The hideous little article and a lengthy discussion thread can be found at the American Prospect. Times are tough, and the lashing out continues…

e-Parliament and YOU

dolman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:27:58 +0000

I have been out and about, speaking on space and various subjects, and so apologize for the lack of updates (again).

If you are not familiar with the e-Parliament, you should take a look. The organization is doing some great work by connecting national-level elected legislators from around the world (more than 15,000 are now connected on the web) to discuss global issues.

The last space hearing has some papers of interest, and the most recent meeting in Brussels on space security should have archived podcasts for your enjoyment.

Army Answer in Iraq?

dolman — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:26:46 +0000

(Astropolitics’ good friend sent us this cartoon with additional captions)

The cartoonist missed a couple steps. After we send in even more hunters …

2.       When that doesn’t work, blame the tribal leaders for sending you.
3.       Demand never to be sent to tar pits again (Og say “no more tar pits”) unless you have way more hunters and overwhelming popular support
4.       Homo sapiens come along and figure out that shooting arrows will work, and eat the mammoth at their officer’s club
5.       Neanderthals say that arrows won’t work in every situation and cause too much reliance on technology so you still need more hunters
6.       Embarrassed by arrows working, Neanderthals send more hunters to the tar pits, this time on a “surge”
7.       …and repeat
Oh, and the Neanderthals never become extinct.

Why Now? CIA Comes Clean on UFO’s

dolman — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:10:40 +0000

The current issue of Popular Mechanics has an interesting, if not wholly credible, mea culpa by the CIA. Apparently, they were not telling the truth all along but now are coming fully clean. Right. Someone at the CIA’s department of public interactions figures we will really believe them when they give us an honest, double-dog swear-on-their-mother’s-graves that this time, unlike every other time, they are telling the whole truth.

The Central Intelligence Agency says it has finally come clean about UFOs. To absolutely no one’s surprise, it knew more than it ever let on.

“Over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights,” says Gerald K. Haines, a historian for the National Reconnaissance Office who studied secret CIA UFO files for an internal CIA study that examined the spy agency’s involvement in UFOs through the 1990s.

Why lie about UFOs? “The Soviets could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United States and overload the U.S. air warning system so that it could not distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs,” Haines says.

If Cold War hysteria seems to be a less than satisfactory explanation, perhaps it is because there really is more to the story.

POPULAR MECHANICS has learned from nonclassified sources that the United States had a serious reason for wanting the public to keep believing that the strange lights in the sky were of unearthly origin. The government kept the UFO myth alive to disguise the embarrassing fact that during the hottest days of the Cold War, America’s two most secret intelligence gathering assets–the A-12 and SR-71 spyplanes–flew toward hostile terrain with the equivalent of cow bells dangling from their necks. Read More

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A Green Springtime for Hitler

dolman — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:42:58 +0000

You’ve no doubt seen it, but I am still dumbfounded by the earnestness of the immoderate environmentalists among us. Nature is our most precious resource, to be sure, but …

Check out the spot on analysis by Alex Beam of The Boston Globe, April 12 2007, published in the International Herald Tribune:

BOSTON: In anticipation of Earth Day, everyone wants to do his bit. Leonardo DiCaprio is vamping on an Icelandic glacier for the cover of Vanity Fair, alongside a Photoshopped polar bear. In the same issue, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rants and raves about the un-green-ness of George Bush’s EPA, while he and his family work overtime to scuttle a renewable energy wind-farm project located a bit too close to the family manse on Cape Cod.

Elsewhere, Levi’s is selling “ecojeans,” the perfumer Lancome is supporting reforestation projects, and the private air carrier Cerulean Jets is eliminating its carbon emissions by going out of business. No – sorry. That would be too practical. Instead, the jet-setters are buying carbon “offsets” from a power company in Vermont.

Everyone is doing their bit. Me, I am reading the important book, “How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich.”

I know what you are thinking. I have fallen for a hoax. No one in their right mind would research and publish a book stating, “The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature.” Or: “The Nazis did in fact impact the landscape in ways far out of proportion to the short twelve years they were in power.”

But in fact, three professors – Franz-Josef Bruggemeier of Freiburg University, Mark Cioc from the University of California/Santa Cruz and the University of Maryland’s Thomas Zeller – have done just that.

It is undeniably true that Adolf and his crew were A-number-one landscape-impacters. London got plenty impacted by the Nazis’ environmental outreach program, as did cities like Leningrad, Stalingrad, Dresden and Berlin. According to this book, the Nazis had big plans for spreading their green ideology eastward into Poland, Ukraine and Russia. “In the vast territories conquered in the east . . . they saw the opportunity to create a better, greener, future, combining racist and environmental thinking,” the authors write. How sad that the East European Jews didn’t go along with the program! What soreheads.

It’s incredible that anyone would actually publish sentences like these: “The Nazis, however, were not interested in turning Germany into a tree farm”; “World War II was the opportunity that many modernist landscape architects had been waiting for”; or, “In the end, everyone . . . agreed that it was the wrong moment to embark on any projects with organic farming.”

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.

To be fair, I did learn a lot. I already knew that Hitler was a vegetarian with a taste for nonalcoholic beer, but I didn’t know that SS boss Heinrich Himmler also eschewed meat or that Hermann Goering had a “sincere interest in forest conservation.” The Nazi party secretary Rudolf Hess was a devotee of organic gardening. Did you know that there was an organic herb garden at Dachau? Marvelous! It’s depressing how many historians insist on dwelling on the negatives.

Co-author Zeller directed me to some reviews. ” ‘How Green Were the Nazis?’ is a must for those who want to be introduced to the controversial relationship of Hitler’s regime with the natural world,” says the Web site Humanities and Social Services Online.

Striking a more realistic note, another reviewer comments that “the articles collected here provide little evidence that the Nazis were, in fact, sincere environmentalists.”

No strangers to self-praise, the authors claim that their work “offer(s) a more nuanced and historically richer answer to the question, ‘How green were the Nazis?’ than previous efforts.” I love the word “nuanced,” which, like “layered,” always ends up on the tongues of pseudo-intellectuals. Here, nuanced means “intellectually indefensible.”

But perhaps I am being too harsh. Maybe all of World War II should be re-examined through a green filter. Think of the eco-carnage in the Ardennes forest as General George Patton and his brutish Third Army attacked the German environmentalists with their exhaust-spewing, tree-crushing tanks! Didn’t they know the Nazis were just trying to create a big national park between the Atlantic and the Urals?

How green was Caligula, anyway?