Author: Matthew G. Saroff

More Russian Aviation Video Pr0n

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We have a video, (6:39) unfortunately in Russian, about the new PAK-FA fighter.

Thankfully, there are a sort of subtitles.

The bullet points:

  • Only 40% composites, but the Russians are very good with Titanium
  • Large AESA array, and size does matter
  • There are “5 radar antennae, 3 X-band (7.0 to 11.2 gigahertz (GHz) in the nose, and 2 L-Band (1 to 2 GHz) in the wings, which implies some ability to detect and intercept narrow band low observable targets?
  • They claim that it is, “Designed to have superior aerodynamics and sensors to counter the F-22,” and my guess is that the former is true, but not the latter.
  • The will supercruise with currently installed engines, and more advanced engines are under development for the production model.
  • The aircraft will be jointly produced with India.

Tanker RFP Released

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The Presolicitation Notice for the KC-X Tanker Modernization Program is online.

I think that one of the crucial changes in this process has been the death of John Murtha, which makes his likely successor on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee is Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Boeing WA) so the EADS/Northrup-Grumman team is in a much weaker position.

Murtha appeared fairly agnostic on the tanker choice, he just wanted it done now, but Dicks is clearly going to make things difficult for anything that does not go Boeing’s way.

Northrop Grumman has been threatening to no bid the RFP, but the basic form of the RFP remains much the same as earlier drafts, in that there is little in the way of consideration for additional capacity, which would be the A330’s strong suit, as it is a larger and more capable aircraft than the 767. (also here)

Gates is still “Very Hopeful” about getting two bids, but I’m not so sure.

I will note that it appears that the impetus for not bidding is coming from Northrop, not EADS, which still appears to be
Seems to come from NG, not EADS.

Most notably, the CEO of NG has explicitly said that their policy would be to pursue profits, and not markets or market share.

Still, this might not prevent a bid, if, as Stephen Trimble observes, EADS wants to go it along:

In the absence of a Northrop-led proposal, what would stop EADS North America from submitting its own bid for the KC-X deal?

I can think of reasons why they would. If price is such a factor in the competition, cutting out the US flag bearer and bringing systems integration in-house might save some money. EADS NA has demonstrated it can win an aircraft contract from the US military. The 100th UH-72 Lakota for the US Army rolls off the assembly line in Mississippi next week. The company believes its solid performance on LUH allows it to compete on fair terms with American-owned companies for other Pentagon contracts.

On the other hand, there’s no question EADS’ chances of victory are smaller without Northrop’s help. Northrop has powerful friends on Capitol Hill and a long relationship with the customer. Moreover, as long as fuel offload requirements for the next tanker are modeled on the KC-135R, the KC-45 is going to be disadvantaged against a smaller aircraft like the Boeing 767. And let’s be honest: The UH-72, despite its success, is not a widebody tanker; it’s a civilian airspace-only light utility helicopter.

An EADS only bid is better for EADS, and for the taxpayer, but not for lobbyists or Congresscritter’s campaign war chests, which is why they teamed with NG in the first place, because if you don’t pay off legislators and lobbyists, you don’t get the bid.

One of the more interesting pieces of information here is the schedule, which looks to a first flight in 2012, and service entry in 2017.

Honestly, I do not see Boeing meeting this schedule, given their generally poor record with 767 tankers for the Japan and Italy, which were significantly behind schedule.

PDF of RFP PowerPoint after the break.

Tanker RFP Final Power Point

Yak-130 Trainer to Enter Service

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Note the auxiliary over-wing engine inlets

The Yak-130 “Mitten” has officially entered service with the Russian air force.

One would think that what it brings to the table, digital avionics, improved reliability, and lower operating cost, will improve readiness.

The obvious difference from the Alenia Aermacchi M-346, which sprung from the same failed joint venture, is the over-wing auxiliary air inlets, and the screens in the main inlets, much like the early MiG-29 and Su-27, in order to operate from rough strips where the possibility of FOD to the engines is non-trivial.

I Say “Meh”

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Pretty pictures, though

In a final gasp on a dead program which has consumed billions of dollars and incurred billions of dollars in cost overruns, Boeing’s Airborne Laser (ABL) finally shot down a missile in the ascent phase:

The target was a liquid-fueled short-range ballistic missile. It was tracked within seconds and shot down within 2 min. during a Feb. 11 test off the coast of California. Photos below show infrared of that event.

There were other targets, “solid-fuel Terrier Black Brant sounding rockets,” which were lased, but not destroyed.

My guess would be that the other targets were not destroyed because they couldn’t be destroyed, a solid fuel rocket motor casing is much harder to burn through than a pressurized liquid fuel tank, because the casing has resistance to heat, and resistance to burn through as basic functions.

This is completely irrelevant, because the chemical laser technology, the a chemical oxygen iodine laser (Coil) is not really deployable. It involves expensive, toxic, and environmentally unfriendly fuel.

Additionally, the range of the system appears to be inadequate: (paid subscription required)

Last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates squelched hopes of producing a design that incorporates lessons learned from the flying prototype. Criticizing the range of the system, Gates told lawmakers that “ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try to use its laser to shoot down a missile in the boost phase. . . . If you were to operationalize this, you would be looking at 10-20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate.”

This implies to me that the range is something under 300, based on nothing more than games I played with Google™ Maps™.

Additionally, there were failures in subsequent tests:

Analysts are still investigating the cause of a “beam misalignment” during a third engagement, which was executed within 1 hr. of the liquid-fueled target shootdown and without landing or replenishing the chemicals on board ABL. O’Reilly says the misalignment prompted a safe shutdown of the system earlier than planned. Although the destruction of this target—a second Terrier Black Brant—did not take place, test objectives were met, he says. They were “to negate a threat-representative short-range ballistic missile in the boost phase followed by the high-energy engagement of a second target to demonstrate the capability to engage multiple missiles on a single mission.”

Also note that this is not the first intercept of a missile by an airborne laser, that happened in 1984, so the idea that this is a technical breakthrough that can be build on is delusional.

Additionally, a relatively simple countermeasure, an ablative coating much like the one that was used on the X-15 A2 tends to mitigate a lot of the potential for damage, as does going with more robust solid rocket technology.

The real reason that this is irrelevant though is because technology has largely passed it by, with the Army testiong Northrop solid state laser in the 100 kW class, it becomes cheaper to go with electrically powered lasers, because if we are seeing 100 kW today, it’s likely that we will be seeing the 1 mW of the ABL in 5 years.

The chief of staff of the Air Force, when he isn’t being a bigoted anti-gay idiot, also notes that this is simply not a technology that can be reasonably deployed (scroll down, the bigoted hand wringing over DADT is in the first few paragraphs):

Rep. Michael Turner, ranking member of the HASC strategic forces subcommittee, raised the recent success of the Airborne Laser in shooting a target. He asked if that would lead the Air Force to increase its commitment to directed energy weapons. Schwartz poured a fair amount of cold water on the Boeing program, calling the ABL test “a magnificent technical achievement” but “this does not represent something that is operationally viable.” The future “coin of the realm” is solid state lasers, Schwartz said, not the chemical laser that Boeing built.

H/t my brother, Daniel “Crescent Lands” Saroff for sending me the link to the first article.

Christopher Dodd Continues to Sell Out

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So Senator Dodd, to be former Senator Dodd in January, continues to audition for his next job as a bank lobbyist:

Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., is expected to introduce new financial reform legislation next week that excludes applying a fiduciary standard to brokers offering investment advice.

The provision was circulated two weeks ago by Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., a Banking Committee member. Rather than classifying certain brokers as registered investment advisers, Mr. Johnson’s proposal would require the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct a study of regulatory standards for brokers and advisers, then propose rules on the issue.

“Fiduciary standard” means that they are required to act in the best interest of their clients, as opposed to the current standard, which is basically that you have to use lube when you anally rape your clients.

The moral of this story: Republicans are mean; Democrats are patsies.

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Taylor Marsh’s take on the latest filibuster kerfluffle, where Jim Bunning told Democrats, “Tough sh%$,” when they confronted him about blocking the emergency unemployment extension:

In a colloquy with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Jeff Merkley, a freshman Democrat from Oregon, was pleading for Bunning to drop his objection, when the Kentucky Republican got fed up.

“Tough s—t,” Bunning said as he was seated in the back row, overheard by the floor staff and others in attendance.

Like I said before, prima donnas and drama queens, and the prima donnas and drama queens always win in the Senate.

Good

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Nancy Pelosi is saying that notwithstanding the healthcare summit, the house will not move until the Senate passes a reconciliation fix:

However, the House can’t act, she noted, until “we see what the Senate will be able to do.”

Now, Pelosi stopped short of saying–as she’s said in the past–that these changes must be made before the House passes the Senate bill. And, in a surprising statement to reporters today, Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said it would “help a lot” if the Senate simply wrote a letter–signed by a majority of members–pledging to make the fixes.

I think that her statement is a strong rebuke to the Senate, as well it should be, it is a body that rewards prima donnas and drama queens.

Still, she is moderating her language a bit, which does make me worry.

Economics Update

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H/t Calculated Risk


That bump is the tax credit h/t Calculated Risk

The big news is the upward revision of US GDP in the 4th quarter, though it should be noted that this delta is all inventory shrinking less quickly than expected, everything else was revised down.

Go to Calculated Risk to see a handy table illustrating this.

Meanwhile real estate is grim, with Freddy Mac reporting that delinquencies in single housings rising 16 basis points to 4.03 in January, and existing home sales falling sharply.

As I have said before, we are seeing the effects of the home buyer tax credit, not any real market recovery.

Meanwhile, in the old standards of energy and currency, people are feeling more sanguine about Greece, which means that they are looking for more return, and less safety, which pushed the dollar lower, and the lower dollar drove crude oil higher.

Columgian High Court Denies 3rd Term Bid By Uribe

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This is a good thing for democracy in Columbia.

12 years is too long.

Interestingly enough, they stopped a plebiscite on this not for broad constitutional reasons, but on narrow procedural ones, “on the grounds that a referendum approved by congress ignored checks and balances and because supporters exceeded financing limits during a petition drive”.

The campaign finance violations are no surprise; he is a darling of the moneyed class in Columbia.

Sally Quinn Demoted to Dirty F%$#ing Blogger

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She’s had a regular column, “The Party,” which was basically about throwing parties, in the print edition of the WaPo, but it’s going online only, or, as Gawker so evocatively states it, “Sally Quinn Relegated to WaPo Ghetto.”

Basically, she devoted an entire article to the horror that is a scheduling conflict between two weddings, and it crossed line between accommodating whatever affection that Posties might have her husband, Ex Editor-in-Chief Ben Bradley, and projectile vomit risking revulsion, so she’s gone, hopefully for good. (No link to Sally, you can get the link at the first link, look for, “enormous turd,” but I don’t link to Sally Quinn)

In any case, one wag had fun with it in an online chat with a Wapo columnist:

Burke, Va.: I’m so confused!

Our ex-boss’ wife (HIS third wife) still writes for the company newsletter. Last week, she wrote a column about how her son’s wedding is on the same day as her husband’s granddaughter’s wedding, on opposite coasts, and nobody can figure out why we’re supposed to care. I guess everybody likes the old man so much that everybody’s afraid to tell his wife that her column is absurd and makes the company newsletter look stupid.

Any suggestions?

Lily Garcia: It sounds like the column, although inappropriate, is basically harmless. You could try suggesting topics that you would like to see covered in the newsletter, but you should stop short of proposing that the ex-boss’ wife be excluded.

In any case, this means that the level of discourse in Washington, DC has improved by a small amount.

Fried in Greece

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So, now it’s time to look at the mess that is Greece.

Greece has been a mess for a very long time, and of the Nato members who joined the Euro, it’s probably the one that should not have joined.

John Mauldin notes, correctly, that the core of the problem is that the terms of joining the Euro block were excessively generous for the less well off nations, basically Germany and France successfully created a mechanism which over valued their national currencies.

This served to both minimize their labor cost advantages with regard to Northern Europe and to provide a market for northern European products:

First, we need to go back to the creation of the euro. Most of the Mediterranean countries that are now in trouble were allowed into the union with an exchange rate that overvalued their currencies relative to the northern countries, but especially to Germany. That meant that Greek consumers could buy products and services that previously may have been out of their reach. Plus, with government debt at low rates, the Greek government could borrow more to finance deficit spending, without the threat of higher interest rates. And Greece began to increase its debt with abandon.

Of course, there was the problem that the debt, and deficits, were exceeding the Euro Zone mandates, but with the use of some clever financial instruments it traded with about 15 banks, most notably that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,* Goldman Sachs, it concealed this debt from regulators:

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.

Athens did not pursue the latest Goldman proposal, but with Greece groaning under the weight of its debts and with its richer neighbors vowing to come to its aid, the deals over the last decade are raising questions about Wall Street’s role in the world’s latest financial drama.

Note also that this was a mess that the Panhellenic Socialist Movement inherited from the right wing New Democracy party:

George Alogoskoufis, who became Greece’s finance minister in a political party shift after the Goldman deal, criticized the transaction in the Parliament in 2005. The deal, Mr. Alogoskoufis argued, would saddle the government with big payments to Goldman until 2019.

Mr. Alogoskoufis, who stepped down a year ago, said in an e-mail message last week that Goldman later agreed to reconfigure the deal “to restore its good will with the republic.” He said the new design was better for Greece than the old one.

It sounds a lot like the mess that Bush and His Evil Minions™ left for us.

One of the problems in dealing with this is that the Germans, remembering the hyper-inflation of Wiemar Germany as if it were yesterday, are suggesting that austerity measures are the way to go, and there are rumblings from them that they want Greece expelled from the Euro and losing voting rights in the EU Parliament.

In response, Greece is accusing Germany of not providing compensation for the stuff that they stole from Greece in WWII:

Athens has accused Germany of failing to meet its World War II compensation obligations following the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1941, a claim Berlin has firmly rejected.

In a radio interview on Wednesday (24 February), Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos criticised Germany’s attitude towards the ongoing Greek debt crisis, adding that Athens had never received adequate war reparations.

“They took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime in the future,” Mr Pangalos told the BBC World Service.

<sarcasm>It’s so nice when you have mature people solving problems.</sarcasm>

One of the problems here is that the prescription by the central bankers is more austerity for Greece, but the reality is that Greece has among the most austere social safety net, and spending in the Euro zone.

The real problem is that because of endemic tax evasion and systemic corruption throughout the bureaucracy, their tax collections are truly pathetic.

One bright side to all this is that a number of people are starting to realize that Goldman Sachs is not simply a banker, but that all roads on most of this corruption lead to the Squid*, most notably those in the European Commission, who are, if Simon Johnson is correct, going to execute a detailed audit of Goldman’s dealings in Europe.

It doesn’t help that Goldman Sachs engaged in similar maneuvers with other European governments:

Greece’s 2001 deal to swap some of its debt using currency derivatives was in line with what other euro-zone countries were doing, Yiannos Papantoniou, the country’s finance and economy minister when the deal was made, told CNBC.com Wednesday.

………

“We took a loan that was to be repaid in 2019,” he said in a telephone interview. “It was public. I know that what we’ve done then was consistent with what was done by many euro zone countries.”

………

Italy, France and Spain were among the euro zone members doing such swaps at the time, he added. Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, has asked Greece for explanations on these debt swaps by Feb. 19.

What’s more it appears that these transactions may have been a part of a fraud perpetrated by the banks on these governments, which is why law enforcement officials in Milan have frozen accounts of a number of banks, “UBS AG, Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Depfa Bank Plc,” as a part of an investigation.

BTW, while we are at it, it should be noted that Bank of Italy Governor, and dark horse candidate for ECB president, Mario Draghi used to work with the Vampire Squid.*

As it stands right now though, it appears that Greece should be able to do its required borrowing for the next 2-3 weeks.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

New York Governor David Paterson Will Not Stand for Reelection

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One of his top aides, David Johnson, has had repeated accusations of physical violence women acquaintances.

Most recently, a woman was seeking a protective order against him, and state police who were members of the governor’s personal security detail pressured her to drop the proceedings, and the day before the hearing, Governor Paterson talked with her on the phone to convince her to drop the matter:

In the ensuing months, she returned to court twice to press her case, complaining that the State Police had been harassing her to drop it. The State Police, which had no jurisdiction in the matter, confirmed that the woman was visited by a member of the governor’s personal security detail.

Then, just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer. She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

………

Through a spokesman, Mr. Paterson said the call actually took place the day before the scheduled court hearing and maintained that the woman had initiated it. He declined to answer further questions about his role in the matter.

That last paragraph sounds suspicious: How does someone get the phone number of the Governor?

Also note that the State Police have no jurisdiction, and ordinarily do not do this.

So the fat lady has sung, and he is not running for reelection.

Truth be told, the fat lady sung over a year ago, when he was polling behind Dick Cheney, but reality has finally smacked him in the face.

This is a good thing, since the next governor will be hip deep in redistricting, and perhaps New York can make things more fair, particularly in the State Senate, which has been Gerrymandered in favor of Republicans for generations.

Do Not Ski Utah

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For that matter, don’t buy anything from an operation in the state.

The state lege has just passed a bill which provides criminal penalties for miscarriages:

A bill passed by the Utah House and Senate this week and waiting for the governor’s signature, will make it a crime for a woman to have a miscarriage, and make induced abortion a crime in some instances.

…………

The bill passed by legislators amends Utah’s criminal statute to allow the state to charge a woman with criminal homicide for inducing a miscarriage or obtaining an illegal abortion. The basis for the law was a recent case in which a 17-year-old girl, who was seven months pregnant, paid a man $150 to beat her in an attempt to cause a miscarriage. Although the girl gave birth to a baby later given up for adoption, she was initially charged with attempted murder. However the charges were dropped because, at the time, under Utah state law a woman could not be prosecuted for attempting to arrange an abortion, lawful or unlawful.

The bill passed by the Utah legislature would change that. While the bill does not affect legally obtained abortions, it criminalizes any actions taken by women to induce a miscarriage or abortion outside of a doctor’s care, with penalties including up to life in prison.

“What is really radical and different about this statute is that all of the other states’ feticide laws are directed to third party attackers,” Paltrow explained. “[Other states’ feticide laws] were passed in response to a pregnant woman who has been beaten up by a husband or boyfriend. Utah’s law is directed to the woman herself and that’s what makes it different and dangerous.”

In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by “reckless” behavior.

Using the legal standard of “reckless behavior” all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn’t intend to lose the pregnancy. Drink too much alcohol and have a miscarriage? Under the new law such actions could be cause for prosecution.

If the politicians of Utah hate women this much, maybe they should stop breeding.

Better yet, maybe their partners should stop having sex with them, see Lysistrata.

This is Why You Clear the Bush Toadies Out of the Military

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Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld put their toadies in power, and Barack Obama has decided that it’s A-OK with him to keep them in place.

A natural result of this is that General Ray Odierno has officially and publicly requested an increase in the number of combat forces in Iraq after the withdrawal deadline:

In a move that could force President Obama to break his vow to get all combat troops out of Iraq by August of this year, his top commander in Iraq recently officially requested keeping a combat brigade in the northern part of the country beyond that deadline, three people close to the situation said Wednesday.

Gen. Raymond Odierno asked for a brigade to try to keep the peace in the disputed city of Kirkuk, but only got a polite nod from the president when the issue was raised during his recent meetings in Washington, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions. If the brigade in northern Iraq is indeed kept in Iraq past the deadline, there will be a fan dance under which it no longer will be called a combat unit, but like the six other combat brigades being kept past the deadline, will be called an advisory unit. I can imagine the press releases that will follow-“Three U.S. Army soldiers were killed last night in an advisory operation . . . .”

Enough is enough. It’s time to take an action which is reported in the press as “effectively ending his career.”

New Orleans Police Supervisor Cops* Plea on Danziger Bridge Shooting

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I am stunned, because when cops shoot poor people, they generally get away with it, but with Retired New Orleans police Lt. Michael Lohman pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, it looks like these cops will not get away with murder:

Retired New Orleans police Lt. Michael Lohman has pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Danziger Bridge shootings, which left two people dead and four others injured after police fired on a group of civilians trapped in the submerged city days after Hurricane Katrina.

Two men — Ronald Madison, 40, who was mentally challenged, and James Brissette, 19 — were killed. The survivors included a husband and wife, their two teenage children and a nephew.

Lohman, who helped orchestrate an elaborate cover-up of the crime, supervised the investigation and was at the scene on Sept. 4, 2005, according to an 11-page bill of information unsealed today.

According to the document, Lohman was aware that a subordinate planted a gun at the scene. He also wrote a 17-page police report full of lies about the incident and encouraged officers at the scene to remove shell casings.

I am stunned, and pleased, that the “thin blue line” has been broken, and the truth appears to be coming out any day now.

*Pun not intended.

Charles Rangel ‘Admonished’ by House Ethics Committee

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I think that the facts are beginning to catch up with him, which is a pity, because he’s right on the issues:

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat, has been admonished by the chamber’s ethics panel for trips he made to the Caribbean.

The committee determined he violated House gift rules when he accepted the trips to conferences in 2007 and 2008 sponsored by the Carib News Foundation. The foundation received contributions from corporations specifically to fund the conferences, the panel said in a statement.

The committee said yesterday that while it didn’t find evidence Rangel was aware of the funding, members of his staff did and “Representative Rangel was responsible for the knowledge and actions of his staff in the performance of their official duties.”

We are going to be seeing more of this, and I do not expect Rangel to run for reelection in 2012, because by that point, the pile of sleaze will be too high.

I expect a new eruption every few months for the next 2 years or so.