Category: Military

French Armed Forces Chief of Staff Agrees With Captain Kirk

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You can find the full episode, Taste of Armegeddon, on Youtube, but here is Seth MacFarlane doing William Shatner

In a speech, he is suggesting that the extensive use of remotely controlled vehicles in the pursuit of war creates a sanitized war that could become immoral:

Admiral Edouard Guillaud, the French armed forces chief of staff, warned his distinguished audience at the Summer Defense University on September 14 that “there needs to be a fundamental reflection on the idea that there can be zero deaths in war.” Speaking in measured tones Guillaud, who could easily pass for a brilliant university professor, questioned the increasing use of armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) in Afghanistan. “War becomes banal when the aggressor runs no risks,” he said adding that “the growth in technology must slow down because man must be able to master it.” He stressed that this issue of man mastering technology or allowing himself to become a slave to it “is a real question.” He said “this is an ethical question which will eventually lead to some form of legislation.”

It does sound a lot like:

“Death… destruction, disease, horror, that’s what war is all about. That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided. You’ve made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you’ve had no reason to stop it. And you’ve had it for over five hundred years. Since it seems to be the only way I can save my crew, and my ship, I’m going to end it for you. One way, or another.”

Obviously, it’s not immoral to make war in a manner that minimizes casualties, but it’s equally obvious that if the technology results in making war that one would not otherwise make, then there needs to be some real discussion of the what the idea of remote control war, run by remote control, makes war too much of a throw away decision.

So Not Done In Iraq

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More combat action from our troops, notwithstanding the fact that our combat presence has ended:

American military units fired on insurgents while supporting Iraqi troops northeast of the capital on Sunday, Iraqi officials said. It was the second such episode since the United States declared an end to its combat operations in Iraq less than two weeks ago.

There were no American casualties in the fighting in Hudaidy, a village about 50 miles from Baghdad that has long harbored members of the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

They are just, “advisers,” and Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Ruled Unconstitutional

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One of the interesting things here is that the judge, Virginia Phillips, has ruled that, the policy has a, ” ‘direct and deleterious effect’ on the armed services, which will make the overturn at the appellate level more difficult, since appeals are typically based on matters of law, and this is a determination of fact, but note that I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*

The judge will be issuing an injunction against separations, but will be giving the government time to appeal before doing so, so I expect another round of accelerated witch hunts in the Pentagon over the next few weeks.

This is an acid test of the Obama administration’s dedication to gay rights. If they go for a stay, i.e. keep expelling gays from the military, during appeals, they are not merely doing their duty to defend existing laws, as they have previously argued, they are actively and aggressively anti-gay rights.

My money is on Obama making the wrong decision both morally and politically, and going full bore against this decision, because I think that, much like Bill Clinton, there is a level of political, if not personal revulsion, against “te ghay” that drives them to do truly stupid and hateful things.

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

I Want to Vacation in Iceland

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I company called ECA Program is in talks to purchase 15 Su-27 Flankers from Belarus in order to set up a private air-to-air combat academy at Keflavik airport in Iceland.

The primary customer is dissimilar air combat training for NATO forces, but I would really like to get a ride on one of these aircraft, and my guess is that they will make this available to private individuals as well.

Of course, now I just need a few million dollars.

I would also note that there are some differences of opinion amongst the various players in the Icelandic government about the merit of this proposal.

A True American Hero

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Colonel Lawrence Sellin, US Army Reserve, who published a blistering critique of the “PowerPoint Ranger” culture within the military in Afghanistan, and was then promptly fired and kicked out of Afghanistan.

This is not surprising. When one publishes an OP/Ed which contains gems such as this:

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death.

It ain’t good for career prospects.

In fact, the phrase, “Cognitively Challenged Generals,” used in a publicly published opinion piece, is pretty much a letter of resignation for any member of the military.

Still, it mirrors my experience with FCS, were the generals seemed tremendously concerned about the consistency of colors between variants of the manned ground vehicle in the presentations.

If I were SedDef, I would be tempted to place an immediate and absolute ban on the software.

Fire Him Now

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I understand that Marine Corps Commandant is retiring in just a few months, but he needs to be fired right now, and lose his pension:

A senior US general has warned President Barack Obama’s deadline to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan is encouraging the Taliban.

US General James Conway, head of the US Marine Corps, said the deadline was “giving our enemy sustenance”.

Obviously, unlike McCrystal, this isn’t staffers, or the general, denigrating POTUS, this is something far worse. This is a Douglas McCarthur on Korea moment.

This was not an inadvertent slip, this was a deliberate statement made at a Pentagon press conference.

Actually, I would suggest that a criminal investigation of insubordination is called for.

I don’t expect Obama to man up on this one, but the Pentagon has become increasingly hostile to the concept of civilian authority, and this needs to be ended.

An Interesting Point on Moves to Reduce the Size of the General Officer Corps

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Click for full size


It costs a lot, and make you lose wars

One of the areas where SecDef Gates is looking to reduce costs is reducing the level of general officers (general and admirals).

An interesting sideline to this is that history shows that the more officers, particularly general officers, that you have, the worse that your military performs:

Militaries with proportionately large numbers of field [major through colonel] and general grade officers have historically proven to be losers, not winners, in war. At its current levels, the U.S. military is among the worst.

Of course, the voice of officialdom, The Washington Post, notes that an officer’s billet only costs about a ¼ million dollars a year, noting that, “Terminating a single general’s billet might save about $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, barely a rounding error in the Pentagon’s base budget this year of $535 billion.”

This is, rather unsurprisingly, about as completely untrue as one can be without actually making a verifiable lie.

When someone becomes a general, he doesn’t spend his days playing golf waiting for a war, they get a command somewhere.

If there isn’t a command somewhere, then one is created, or the supervision of a task is upgraded from a field officer to a general officer, and the office, staff and budget are increased accordingly.

Once the office has a general officer in charge, there is a bureaucratic imperative for it to become “essential” in some way or another, so it will find things to do, and doing those things, whether needed or not, will cost money.

I would agree to cuts, but I would also suggest repealing the provision of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980, aka “Up or Out”, which make promotions a requirement for continued service.

It creates an incentive for rank inflation, what Robert Gates calls “brass creep” in assigning roles in the services.

As to why these additional costs have not been addressed in their article, my guess is that the Post editorial board thinks that something would be missing from Sally Quinn’s cocktail parties if there were not a few generals in uniform there.

Torturing a 15 Year Old Boy and Using the Confession Extracted Against Him, That’s the American Way

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So says Barack Obama on the Omar Khadr military tribunal:

Military commissions were one of those Bush/Cheney policies which provoked virtually universal outrage among progressives and Democrats back in the day when executive power abuses and rule of law transgressions were a concern. The Obama administration’s claim that the commissions are now improved to the point that they provide a forum of real justice is being put to the test — and blatantly failing — with the first such commission to be held under Obama: that of Omar Khadr, accused of throwing a grenade in 2002 which killed an American solider in Afghanistan, when Khadr was 15 years old. This is the first trial of a child soldier held since World War II, explained a U.N. official who condemned these proceedings. The commission has already ruled that confessions made by Khadr which were clearly obtained through coercion, abuse and torture will be admitted as evidence against him. Prior to the commencement of Khadr’s “trial,” the commission ruled in another case that the sentence imposed on a Sudanese detainee Ibrahim al-Qosi — convicted as part of a plea bargain of the dastardly crime of being Osama bin Laden’s “cook” — will be kept secret until he is released. What kind of country has secret sentences?

I get it. Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ know that this is wrong, but they don’t want to spend the political capital or make the political risks to stop this.

This is worse the Bush and Cheney, because they saw torture and kangaroo courts as an independent good, but the Obama administration is doing this because they are worried about attacks that are happening anyway.

I will repeat what I said earlier, I am so writing in “Howard Dean,” in the 2012 general, and I don’t care if some it’s some recombinant DNA Chimera combination of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, I am voting for whoever opposes him in the primary.

This is just evil, and should this ever see justice in the Hague, everyone in the chain of command today, right to the very top, should be put in the dock.

The Cat Food Commission* is At It Again

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Well, we already know that the Republicans on Obama’s “Deficit Reduction Commission” are marching lock-step against any meaningful tax increases, and now we know that when push comes to shove, they will cut military pay and benefits over any sort of sanity in weapons systems procurement:

A source familiar with the proceedings of the working group on discretionary spending tells TPM that some commissioners, including one military contractor, would prefer to save money by freezing military pay and scaling back benefits, rather than by eliminating waste in defense contracting.

……

According to the source, [Honeywell CEO David] Cote and other members, including the commission’s co-chair Alan Simpson, are focusing instead on “freezing military pay, making military people pay for their health care.”

Because that waste is what this “military contractor” calls his “annual bonus.”

It’s all about someone else taking the hit on this.

On the brighter side, this makes any adoption of any proposals from Cat Food Commission* that much less likely to be adopted, because this is a completely clueless move.

I would also note that the uniformed military personnel levels are near a post WWII low, so the reason that the budget is exploding is not that we have 8 million active duty servicemen.

One wonders though, who is leaking all of this to Brian Beutler, and why are they doing so?

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

The Trippiest Russian Military Demonstrations Ever

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Them Russkies Know How to Drive a Tank


Seeing a tank do motocross jumps is almost as weird as the guys with the flaming helmets

Courtesy of Danger Room.

I do have a couple of geek notes about these displays:

First, look at the main gun: They have a larger bore (125 mm vs 120 mm in the west) and a longer length, which implies to me that, probably for metallurgical issues related to wear, they operate at a lower pressure than the western (German) guns, and make up for it with barrel length and bore diameter.

Also, Russian tank suspension ant track designers take a back seat to no one.

I half expected one of the tanks to throw a track.

Finally, is it just me, or did the tanks curtsy at the end of the top video?

53 Tons? What are They Smoking????

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BAE* has released its proposal for the ground combat vehicle program, it’s a tracked vehicle with hybrid electric propulsion which weighs 53 tons in base configuration, though with bolt on armor, this can get as high as 75 tons, or more than an M-1 tank.

That is more than 10 tons more than a T-80 tank, and about 20 tons more than a Bradley, the vehicle which it is supposed to replace, before you bolt on the extra armor:

The base version is 53 tons. Going into a highly lethal environment? Then commanders may well want their troops to bolt on modular armor and storage pods that bring the weight up to 75 tons. Powering this vehicle that looks an awful lot like a tank, is a hybrid electric drive, technology that worries some in the Army who don’t believe it is sufficiently tried and true yet.

They are promising greater reliability and fuel economy, which is a lie.

The running gear needs to be designed for 75 tons, and the maintenance and fuel needs, even if marginally ameliorated by a hybrid propulsion system are going to be huge.

This is just nuts.

It’s unsupportable, and the logistical trail will be huge.

*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS–MGV† from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).
†Future Combat Systems-Manned Ground Vehicle. These are the ones that are the tanks and APCs. As opposed to the various unnmanned vehicles, networking technologies, etc. that form the full FCS along with the MGVs.‡
‡Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.

Silly Putty™ Armor

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BAE Systems* has developed what it calls a liquid armo(u)r, that is supposed to be proof against bullets:

A liquid armour has been shown to stop bullets in tests carried out by UK scientists at BAE systems in Bristol.

The researchers have combined this “shear-thickening” liquid with Kevlar to create a new bullet-proof material.

The company is keeping the chemical formula of the liquid a secret, but it works by absorbing the force of the bullet strike and responding to it by becoming much thicker and more sticky.

The BAE scientists describe it as “bullet-proof custard”.

In theory, this is fairly simple, it’s a non-Newtonian fluid, and you can see this behavior with silly putty™ or water and corn starch.

Of course in practice, finding the proper characteristics, and my guess is that a lot of this has to do with the peculiarities of the interaction between the Kevlar fibers and the fluid, is the tough part.

Seeing as how a body part won’t be moving at more than about 20 m/s, and a bullet would likely be moving at more than 100 m/s even at the extremes of range, developing a material with the appropriate characteristics is certainly technically possible.

*Full disclosure, I worked on the Future Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle, FRMV, “wrecker” variant of the FCS-MGV† from 2003-2006 at United Defense (later BAE Systems after the Carlyle Group sold me to buy Dunkin Donuts).
†Future Combat Systems-Manned Ground Vehicle. These are the ones that are the tanks and APCs. As opposed to the various unnmanned vehicles, networking technologies, etc. that form the full FCS along with the MGVs.‡
‡Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.

This is Not A Serious KC-X Bid

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Stephen Trimble has their PowerPoint, (the link is no good) and it is simply not a credible proposal.

As you can see, it is a twin turbofan variant of the An-70 quad turboprop transport, and I would note that the rough/austere capabilities shown on slide 8 include a an AN-70 crashed in the snow, which is a pretty good indication of the fact that the bidders are “not ready for prime time”.

Additionally, as I have noted before, a high wing aircraft is 50+ kts slower, which means that getting on station takes more time, and the advantages, austere field capability and the ability to paradrop people and cargo, are not a part of a requirement.