Category: Military

Wes Clark Completely Owns John McCain

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His statement on Face the Nation, “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president,” is both devastating and complex.

  • It plays into the views of most servicemen and ex-servicemen, that the “flyboys” are a bunch of pampered over appreciated folk.
  • It compares to JFK’s statement on his heroism, “It was unavoidable, they sank my boat”.
  • Clark’s position as a general and a soldier allows him to put McCain’s record on the table.
  • It raises McCain’s actual record, which is not so good, he almost made negative ace, which is now on the table.
  • It takes one of the central pillars of his public personae, and challenges it.

After all that, finding out that Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr accusing the Republican Party and John McCain of being lying jackals is sort of an anti-climax, but it’s nice to see him piling on.

USAF May Have Improperly Lobbied Congress on BRAC

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It appears that they lobbied Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI) to insert language allowing the services to veto joint bases decisions made by the commission.

Once again, it looks like the USAF’s real core competency is gaming the federal budget process.

According to the article, it looks like the USAF then used this language to blackmail the other services at joint bases more control and more of the budget.

Where Can I Get Some for My Car?

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A company called Inframat was showing a series of coatings the Eurosatory show that are supposed to greatly reduce the IR signature of objects. So it could be used to hide a tank:

More accurately, it could be used to hide a second tank:

The company also makes IR suppressive fibers that can be used in uniforms and cammo netting, and claims to have an anti radar coating in development that gets you -15 dB to – 25 dB signature reduction at 8.8 – 10.5 GHz. It’s not full stealth, but it would make ECM much more effective.

Well, Now, Isn’t That Special?

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More chocolatey goodness in the FISA bill:

The FISA law currently being debated in the Senate redefines weapons of mass destruction in a very broad way. Jason Sigger looks at Under title VII, section 110:

`(1) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas device that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause a mass casualty incident;

`(2) any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors;

`(3) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as such terms are defined in section 178 of title 18, United States Code) that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death, illness, or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons; or

`(4) any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to release radiation or radioactivity causing death, illness, or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons.’

(emphasis mine)

Two things of note:

  1. Significant number of persons is a very vague term, and a pipe bomb at a bus station might qualify under the law, even though the term was defined in the late 1940s to apply only to those things capable of causing A-Bomb levels of destruction.
  2. It defines an incendiary device as a WMD, which means that a WP 155mm howitzer round or an incendiary bomb are now defined as WMDs, a definition that the US military has been fighting against for years.

China Closing In On Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile

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It’s derived from their CSS-5 intermediate range missile and uses technology similar to that of the Pershing II, which had a CEP in the single digit meter range.

The current version has a range around 1800 km and a nuclear warhead that weighs around 600 kg. I imagine an anti-ship (carrier killer) version would have a similar range and a similar weight warhead.

In any case if one of these hits a flight deck at mach 4 or so, the warhead is guilding the lily.

About Those Gitmo Detainees “Returning to the Fight”

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In the most recent Supreme Court decision on Gitmo, Scalia noted that 30 former detainees had, “Returned to the Fight”.

Well, thanks to Sabin Willett, whose firm has represented some of those detainees, writing in the Boston Globe, we now have a definition of what this means:

It is a serious allegation, so the lawyers looked into it. It turns out that clients of our firm, who were sent to Albania in 2006, were two of the 30. What fight had they returned to? Abu Bakker Qassim had published an op-ed in The New York Times. Adel Abdul Hakim had given an interview. These press statements were deemed hostile by the Department of Defense.

Surely the Pentagon was joking? They weren’t.

So I can’t speak for the other 28, if indeed there are another 28, but for the two men I do know about, giving hostile interviews constituted “returning to the fight.”

The basic institutions of state security in the United States have become very profoundly pathological indeed.

An Interesting Development in Lightweight Armor

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The material is called Dyneema, which is an ultra high molecular weight polyethylene.

I’ve seen high strength polyethylene used for bullet proof garments and butcher’s gloves, where it has a real advantage over Kevlar® in that it does not degrade in a washing machine.

They were showing at a show what happened when a 500g high speed (about 1500 m/s) projectile at it.

It looks like the projectile had a low sectional density, but it’s still impressive.

Here is a test stand with penetration of multiple layers:

With the detail of the final layer stopping the projectile:

Definately neat.

Sarko Runs into Buzz Saw Over Defense White Paper

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Nicolai Sarkosy has proposed a massive restructuring of the French military. He would cut about 1/5 of the military’s manpower, tie the military much more tightly into a pan-European framework, close African bases, and rejoin the NATO integrated military command.

This is a very big deal, and I think that I agree, at least partially, with Robert Fox’s analysis, that a large part of this is about creating a more European framework, which would reduce US influence. (See also here)

This will, however, create a firestorm. The independence of the French military command from the US has been a centerpiece of the center-right Gaullists in France, the center-left Socialists always being more friendly to the US, so he is moving against his base, and the generals are flipping out, having published an anonymous essay in Le Figaro under the pseudonym of Surcourf, “attacked the new defence policy as amateurish, incoherent and full of gimmicks.”

Alain Juppé objected strenuously too, noting that, “Gaullism is not dead, at least in the minds of some people.”

When You Think That They Can Go No Lower

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They continue to surprise…in a bad way.

Everyone’s poster child for mercenaries, Blackwater USA, is now asserting that they bear no culpability for a plane crash in which their under trained and reckless employees killed US soldiers when they crashed into a mountain top in Afghanistan because the law of the land there is Sharia, and “Sharia law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.

Thats right, they are trying to apply religious law to a civil suit.

I have an idea. Let’s send Eric Prince to Afghanistan to stand trial there.

“There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes.”

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So says retired Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the review of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and was then forced out when the report told the truth, in the introduction to the report from Physicians for Human Rights on torture under US detention, which uses, among other things, the roadmap of scars on its victims:

Neither the Bush administration nor the Pentagon commented on the unpublished report yesterday. President Bush has repeatedly said he does not condone torture and allows interrogation techniques that are aggressive but legal.

The report challenges that contention with a detailed physical and psychological profile of each of the former detainees. In two of the cases, the medical investigators had access to the subjects’ recent medical records. All 11 men were given pseudonyms for their protection, according to the report.

The doctors found that “Kamal,” an Iraqi in his late 40s held from September 2003 until June 2004 at Abu Ghraib, has a lesion near his right ear that is “consistent with a healed cut from a sharp-edged instrument,” according to the report. He also had another wound by his left ear, described as “a healed puncture injury” that matches “Kamal’s description of being stabbed with a screwdriver in his cheek by a soldier,” the report states.

Psychologically, “Kamal’s clinical presentation, reported history of abuse, and the result of psychological testing support the presence of several psychiatric diagnoses,” including depression, a panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report.

A subject named “Amir,” an Iraqi in his late 20s held in Abu Ghraib prison from August 2003 to January 2005, “showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick,” the report found.

“Yasser,” another Abu Ghraib detainee in his mid-40s, had scars on his thumbs and irregularities in the contours of his tongue, according to the report. The medical team concluded that the damage supports his contention that his American captors subjected him to electric shocks.

The problem here torture always follows the soldiers home. The people who were ordered to to this will come home, and many of them will end up in law enforcement, where they will do the same to someone who they think is not sufficiently respectful at a traffic stop.

The only answer is accountability at the very highest levels. By this, I do not mean that it stops at Rumsfeld. Bush and Cheney need to spend most of the rest of their lives in jail.

Torture Pushed Despite Legal Opinions

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The Senate Armed Services Committee has reviewed documents surrounding the treatment of prisoners, and it now appears that the orders for torture came from the top down, not from the bottom up, as Rumsfeld and the rest of his merry band of sadists had insisted.

They were aggressively soliciting tortures from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) community, which was created to help US soldiers resist torture, so it’s clear that they knew.

What’s more, the sort of torture that SERE was created to combat was torture that had our servicemen lying, not revealing secrets.

They did not care that torture creates lies. They were not interested in accurate information. They just wanted to torture, because it made them feel strong.

This even shocked the sensabilities of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), though I have little doubt that when push comes to shove, he’ll cover for Bush and His Evil Minions™:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the legal analysis from administration lawyers in 2002 will “go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military and intelligence communities.”

….

In separate memos, the lawyers told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the techniques warranted further study and could be illegal.

Seriously, these people need to go to jail for the rest of their lives.

It Appears that B-2 Crash Info is Worse than Previously Anticipated

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It appears that there is a memo going around suggesting that the problems are more involved than just water in the air data sensors.

Specifically, there is a wheel speed sensor, and you should get a warning at about 60 kts if the wheel and air speed data does not match. Additionally, it appears that you can’t turn on the pitot heat too early to dry out the water, because it would warp the skin in that area, which would compromise the plane’s stealth characteristics.