The entire Third Infantry Division is being deployed from Hunter Army Airfield and Fort Stewart. This kind of massive deployment hasn't happened since the Gulf War in 1990. . . .Last night the Army announced that the 101st ABN DIV at Fort Campbell was also beginning deployment, though how much of it would deploy was not specified.
Military officials are not releasing where these troops are being deployed to at this time.
Tuesday, December 31, 2002
3d US Infantry Division begins deployment. Military writer Thomas Holsinger of StrategyPage.com emailed me this story:
Weird things of 2002 are summarized by today's Washington Post. My favorites, with my italicized introductions:
He's a real nowhere man:
TEHRAN -- Iranian police were on the lookout for an alleged sorcerer who conned a man into believing he was invisible and could rob banks.
Proper gun control is hitting only what you aim at:
AMMAN, Jordan -- The groom spent his wedding night in jail after accidentally shooting dead two guests while firing his automatic rifle to celebrate his marriage.
Maybe it was part of Total Information Awareness:
OXNARD, Calif. -- An Oxnard man was charged with animal cruelty and being under the influence of amphetamines after allegedly torturing and dissecting his daughter's pet guinea pig because he thought it was a camera-equipped robot placed in his home by government agents.
It takes one to know one:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The Rhode Island State Senate unanimously passed a bill to issue automobile license tags honoring the 50th anniversary of Mr. Potato Head.
I refrain from relating jokes that start out, "A Wake Forest frat brother walked into a bar with a pig under arm . . . "
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- Members of a Wake Forest University fraternity were charged with animal cruelty and abandonment after their pet pig was found drunk, dehydrated and sunburned in a local park. Frat boys haven't changed since I graduated there.
That's why it's called the longest mile:
LIVINGSTON, Tex. -- Convicted killer Rodolfo Hernandez, who has only one leg, demanded that the Texas prison system supply him with an artificial limb to aid his 50-foot walk to the death chamber.
No, she was the Gatekeeper, Bill Murray was a god:
ATLANTA -- The Georgia parole board issued a stay of execution for a killer so delusional that when he is off his medication he believes that actress Sigourney Weaver is God.
No, dummies, you roast the cocoa beans, not the chocolate:
ZURICH -- A fire at a Swiss warehouse destroyed 4 million chocolate Easter bunnies.
Another reason to hate voice mail:
TICONDEROGA, N.Y. -- A man who called police to brag that he couldn't be caught was arrested while still on the phone.
The continuing trauma of World War II leads reader Richard Heddleson to make some thoughtful observations. He cites Glenn Reynolds:
Back when I was practicing law, one of my clients -- the president of the American subsidiary of a European company, a Pole who had lived through World War Two under circumstances that would make a good thriller/tearjerker movie -- said that he thought Europe was suffering massive psychological trauma from the world wars, and that it would take a century for it to recover, if it ever did.Then Richard says:
It made me think about the fact that the only European country from which we get support is the UK, the only European combatant notI have little to add except that in October 2001 I wrote,
conquered and occupied in devastating fashion in either war. They had the blitz, which was not a picnic, but also not the same as being overrun. Spain too was not occupied in either war, but they were somewhat and very careful collaborators as were the Swedes.
It also made me think about the American South. It seems to me, as a Yankee, that the South was not fully reintegrated back into the country until after the civil rights struggle eliminated the Jim Crowism that survived into the 60's. Also a century, as the Polish gentleman said. I think that was one reason Lott's comments, however oblique and unintentional, were immediately unsupportable to almost everyone. I heard a deafening silence from his Southern colleagues. No one wants that wound, finally but barely healed, to be re-opened.
The U. S. has gone pretty far down the learning curve on occupation and seems to now do it well, at least in western countries. And that is the one thing that bothers me about the talk of the Iraq occupation. It seems we will have to be there for at least 25 years to do it right. But everyone is talking 2-5 years. Maybe that's just because they think they can't sell anything longer up front. Realistically, our commitment needs to be much greater than that. Our value add should be sufficient that even after 25 years Iraq is not clamoring for our withdrawal, as Germany and Japan do not after 50 years.
What I worry about most is that in the immediate conflict we will not defeat those in and out of Iraq sufficiently to allow us to occupy and rebuild it without effective guerilla resistance, something we never had in Germany or Japan because of our total victory. We will then leave under pressure, prematurely, with the job undone as we did in 1991. Only after another, yet greater, conflagration, grows from the fire we failed to fully bank will we then send a Sherman to the Middle East and be able to pacify an utterly devastated region. I sure hope we have the patience to do it right the second time, because it will be a lot more expensive the third.
Peace may be the hardest part of war.
Almost everywhere in the world where international terrorism grows we find poverty and human oppression, especially toward women. Tribalism and ethnic hatred also remain strong. We Americans are more free of these oppressions than almost any other people. We and our western allies must lead the way out for those people. It will take a new kind of national commitment. It will cost a fortune. It will require new kinds of armies, armies not of soldiers but of engineers, agriculturalists, financiers, administrators and educators.
It will take decades and there are no guarantees. But the alternative is to fight culture and religious wars generation after generation.
Monday, December 30, 2002
What we have got and they have not. What has the Battle on Omdurman in Sudan, 1898, got to do with a potential new war in Korea? Bear with me.
In Sept. 1898, British troops under Sir Herbert Kitchener destroyed the Islamic Dervish army in Sudan in the Battle of Omdurman. The battle was exceedingly one-sided. The weapons and tactics of the Dervishes could not compete with British supply, weapons and tactics. (The Dervishes were the successor to the army under the Islamic Mahdi, which had driven the British out of Sudan 14 years earlier.)
Winston Churchill, who fought in the battle, wrote that after the fighting, Sir Kitchener concluded the Dervishes had been given "a good dusting," so he ordered the British troops to break off the engagement.
It is worth noting that the Dervishes had destroyed a British army under General Charles Gordon 14 years before at Khartoum. In fact, they had even beheaded Gordon and placed his head on display. (Gordon had been ordered by the Prime Minister to withdraw, but he refused, saying that he was honor-bound to the Sudanese people, whom he had promised to preserve from slavery under the Islamic Mahdi.) England finally sent a relief column, but it arrived two days too late. It then reversed march and left, leaving Sudan bereft of British presence.
In the 14 years between Khartoum and Omdurman, the Royal Army made a technological quantum leap, not least of which was the adoption of the Maxim gun, the invention of American Hiram Maxim. Maxim's first model, 1885, had a cyclic rate of fire of 500 rounds per minute. An improved version was adopted by the Royal Army in 1889. The Brits also made improvements in artillery that would both outrange Dervish guns and make rubble of Dervish forts, unbeknownst to them.
In short, the British Army spent 14 years improving its technology, weapons, tactics, training, communications and supply. The Dervish army (successors to the army led by the Mahdi, who had died a few years after Khartoum) had not.
To which I say, "No." In fact, I have already said that North Korea is a paper tiger - in conventional arms, let me be specific. When it attains a nuke or two, the paper teeth will have some bite, unfortunately. But in conventional arms, the South and the US are quantitatively superior to the North.
I served in the 2d US Infantry Division (2ID) in Korea from 1977-1978, in 1st Battalion, 38th Field Artillery. The battalion was then equipped with 18 105mm towed howitzers, M102A1. Today it is equipped with 27 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) vehicles, an exceptionally powerful rocket artillery system.
2ID then resembled a World War II division more than it did its present configuration. We did not then consider ourselves a "speed bump." The technological advances since 1978 have increased the division's combat power exponentially. I do not claim that 2ID can defeat an invading North all by itself. I certainly do claim that those who write the division off, saying that it would be destroyed, are just wrong.
In the 50-odd years since the Korean War, the US Army has been well funded most years, has fought in several wars large and small, and has been the direct beneficiary, and sometimes the engine, of the revolution in computerization. The Army's history since 1953 has been dynamic. Capabilities in conventional munitions have been so improved that tactical atomic weapons are not necessary to achieve effects against enemy soldiers or installations. In fact, a single MLRS launcher is more destructive than a 155mm atomic projectile, and at longer range.
There have been enormous improvements in training and the systems and equipment used for training. Intensive combat simulations ("war games" being a hopelessly inadequate term) are now used that integrate vehicles, simulators, communications, computers, aerospace assets and ground/naval units in ways never before possible, linked worldwide.
In contrast, the North Korean army has done none of this. In particular, they have not been required to stretch their doctrine because they have not fought a war since 1953. They have read and studied, of course, but they have had no chance to test whether their theoretical doctrine is any good. Their millions of soldiers are far from uniformly effective. (Of the five million men under arms the North is said to have, about three-fourths are reserves with little regular training.)
None of their services have the combined arms operations skills that US and Southern forces have. They rarely conduct large-scale maneuvers, and when they do, the maneuvers are scripted. Free-play exercises are not done. Their air force does not fly near the hours that US and ROK air forces do, and with nothing like the training intensity. They do not have stealth aircraft. Their most numerous fighter plane, the MIG-19, dates from not long after the Korean War.
That NK troops could cross the Military Demarcation Line can't be denied; doing so has been the main focus of their military for, lo, five decades. (When I served on the DMZ, US and ROK engineers were blowing up tunnels that the North had dug under the DMZ; at least one could handle trucks. There are certainly tunnels we have not discovered.) But it is highly likely that they have no real imagination for doing anything much more than making the initial assault, except for taking Seoul. (Seoul is only 30 miles from the DMZ.) In short, their whole operational model has been their previous invasion of 1950, when they drove all the way to Pusan. But in 1950 they did not face a well-prepared defense in depth, manned with well-trained troops. Nor had Northern troops and their families suffered from decades of communist oppression and literal starvation. Neither had the inherent corruption of the communist system yet destroyed the integrity of their officer high command.
If the North invades again, from the beginning Allied forces will enjoy --
By no means would such an invasion be easily resisted. As I said in my previous post, casualties would be high on both sides, but much higher for the North. Probably more South Korean civilians would die than ROK troops. NK special ops forces would be of serious concern and would spearhead an invasion, operating well south of the DMZ. They would commit sabotage, assassination and special attacks. The North almost certainly has fairly modern UAVs that would be used as a "poor man's cruise missile." Some analysts think that the North would launch nonpersistent chemical agents at Seoul, intending to kill as many Southern government workers as possible; that many ordinary Seoulians would die also is of no consequence. Steven Den Beste has said that civilian refugees fleeing the battle would constitute major mobility problems for Allied forces, and he's probably right.
While the North's army slugged its way south, American air power would be devastating North Korea's lines of communication, ports, installations and infrastructure. The North's air force would pretty quickly be dispatched. Military and government buildings in Pyongyang would be leveled. I think US commanders would show much less restraint against North Korea than they did against Iraq in 1991.
In short, the North can invade the South, but it cannot win. The ensuing war would be disastrous for the South in terms of human loss, also for the North unless the war ended with the South's suzerainty over the North. But even so, the North Korean people would suffer very greatly until then.
The problem, though, is not that the North could win such a war. It is that its isolated, self-justifying oligarchy might think it can win. And with its impending development of atomic weapons, it may think that all the more.
In Sept. 1898, British troops under Sir Herbert Kitchener destroyed the Islamic Dervish army in Sudan in the Battle of Omdurman. The battle was exceedingly one-sided. The weapons and tactics of the Dervishes could not compete with British supply, weapons and tactics. (The Dervishes were the successor to the army under the Islamic Mahdi, which had driven the British out of Sudan 14 years earlier.)
Winston Churchill, who fought in the battle, wrote that after the fighting, Sir Kitchener concluded the Dervishes had been given "a good dusting," so he ordered the British troops to break off the engagement.
Meanwhile the great Dervish army, which had advanced at sunrise in hope and courage, fled in utter rout, pursued by the Egyptian cavalry, harried by the 21st Lancers, and leaving more than 9,000 warriors dead and even greater numbers wounded behind them.British poet Hilaire Belloc famously summed it up,
Thus ended the Battle of Omdurman - the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the space of five hours the strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed and dispersed, with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk, and insignificant loss to the victors.
[Editor's Note: The Dervish Army, approximately 52,000 strong, suffered losses of 20,000 dead, 22,000 wounded, and some 5,000 taken prisoner--an unbelievable 90% casualty rate! By contrast, the Anglo-Egyptian Army, some 23,000 strong, suffered losses of 48 dead, and 382 wounded - an equally unbelievable 2% casualty rate, thus showing the superiority of modern firepower!]
"Whatever happens we have gotSir Edward Arnold observed that heretofore, it had been the dash, skill and bravery of the officers and troops that had carried the day, but the Battle of Omdurman was won by quiet, scientific gentlemen living in Kent.
the Maxim gun and they have not."
It is worth noting that the Dervishes had destroyed a British army under General Charles Gordon 14 years before at Khartoum. In fact, they had even beheaded Gordon and placed his head on display. (Gordon had been ordered by the Prime Minister to withdraw, but he refused, saying that he was honor-bound to the Sudanese people, whom he had promised to preserve from slavery under the Islamic Mahdi.) England finally sent a relief column, but it arrived two days too late. It then reversed march and left, leaving Sudan bereft of British presence.
In the 14 years between Khartoum and Omdurman, the Royal Army made a technological quantum leap, not least of which was the adoption of the Maxim gun, the invention of American Hiram Maxim. Maxim's first model, 1885, had a cyclic rate of fire of 500 rounds per minute. An improved version was adopted by the Royal Army in 1889. The Brits also made improvements in artillery that would both outrange Dervish guns and make rubble of Dervish forts, unbeknownst to them.
In short, the British Army spent 14 years improving its technology, weapons, tactics, training, communications and supply. The Dervish army (successors to the army led by the Mahdi, who had died a few years after Khartoum) had not.
Whatever happens we have gotIn all the hue and cry over North Korea's increasing bluster and threats, I have detected in my web readings near-panicky assertions that the North has overwhelming superiority over the South and the American forces stationed in the South. Some commentators have claimed that the 2d US Infantry Division there is nothing more than a speed bump and that if the US has significant forces engaged against Iraq, the South is as good as lost.
MLRS and they have not.
To which I say, "No." In fact, I have already said that North Korea is a paper tiger - in conventional arms, let me be specific. When it attains a nuke or two, the paper teeth will have some bite, unfortunately. But in conventional arms, the South and the US are quantitatively superior to the North.
I served in the 2d US Infantry Division (2ID) in Korea from 1977-1978, in 1st Battalion, 38th Field Artillery. The battalion was then equipped with 18 105mm towed howitzers, M102A1. Today it is equipped with 27 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) vehicles, an exceptionally powerful rocket artillery system.
2ID then resembled a World War II division more than it did its present configuration. We did not then consider ourselves a "speed bump." The technological advances since 1978 have increased the division's combat power exponentially. I do not claim that 2ID can defeat an invading North all by itself. I certainly do claim that those who write the division off, saying that it would be destroyed, are just wrong.
In the 50-odd years since the Korean War, the US Army has been well funded most years, has fought in several wars large and small, and has been the direct beneficiary, and sometimes the engine, of the revolution in computerization. The Army's history since 1953 has been dynamic. Capabilities in conventional munitions have been so improved that tactical atomic weapons are not necessary to achieve effects against enemy soldiers or installations. In fact, a single MLRS launcher is more destructive than a 155mm atomic projectile, and at longer range.
There have been enormous improvements in training and the systems and equipment used for training. Intensive combat simulations ("war games" being a hopelessly inadequate term) are now used that integrate vehicles, simulators, communications, computers, aerospace assets and ground/naval units in ways never before possible, linked worldwide.
In contrast, the North Korean army has done none of this. In particular, they have not been required to stretch their doctrine because they have not fought a war since 1953. They have read and studied, of course, but they have had no chance to test whether their theoretical doctrine is any good. Their millions of soldiers are far from uniformly effective. (Of the five million men under arms the North is said to have, about three-fourths are reserves with little regular training.)
None of their services have the combined arms operations skills that US and Southern forces have. They rarely conduct large-scale maneuvers, and when they do, the maneuvers are scripted. Free-play exercises are not done. Their air force does not fly near the hours that US and ROK air forces do, and with nothing like the training intensity. They do not have stealth aircraft. Their most numerous fighter plane, the MIG-19, dates from not long after the Korean War.
That NK troops could cross the Military Demarcation Line can't be denied; doing so has been the main focus of their military for, lo, five decades. (When I served on the DMZ, US and ROK engineers were blowing up tunnels that the North had dug under the DMZ; at least one could handle trucks. There are certainly tunnels we have not discovered.) But it is highly likely that they have no real imagination for doing anything much more than making the initial assault, except for taking Seoul. (Seoul is only 30 miles from the DMZ.) In short, their whole operational model has been their previous invasion of 1950, when they drove all the way to Pusan. But in 1950 they did not face a well-prepared defense in depth, manned with well-trained troops. Nor had Northern troops and their families suffered from decades of communist oppression and literal starvation. Neither had the inherent corruption of the communist system yet destroyed the integrity of their officer high command.
If the North invades again, from the beginning Allied forces will enjoy --
What the North does have is troops - lots and lots of troops. But "hording" as a combat tactic will result in the Allies enjoying something close to Omdurman-type victory. 2ID is armored and mechanized. The US M1A1 Abrams tank outshoots and outruns anything the North has. The North has perhaps 3,500 main battle tanks, but how many of them run is another matter. And how many crews are trained is yet another. The vast preponderance of Norther troops are foot soldiers who would perish in untold numbers to American artillery and Air Force weapons.communications dominance, position advantage, clear firepower superiority, better weapons and equipment, better trained units, staffs and procedures, better combined arms integration, air superiority, then air supremacy, better tactical and strategic intelligence, better round-the-clock combat capability.
By no means would such an invasion be easily resisted. As I said in my previous post, casualties would be high on both sides, but much higher for the North. Probably more South Korean civilians would die than ROK troops. NK special ops forces would be of serious concern and would spearhead an invasion, operating well south of the DMZ. They would commit sabotage, assassination and special attacks. The North almost certainly has fairly modern UAVs that would be used as a "poor man's cruise missile." Some analysts think that the North would launch nonpersistent chemical agents at Seoul, intending to kill as many Southern government workers as possible; that many ordinary Seoulians would die also is of no consequence. Steven Den Beste has said that civilian refugees fleeing the battle would constitute major mobility problems for Allied forces, and he's probably right.
While the North's army slugged its way south, American air power would be devastating North Korea's lines of communication, ports, installations and infrastructure. The North's air force would pretty quickly be dispatched. Military and government buildings in Pyongyang would be leveled. I think US commanders would show much less restraint against North Korea than they did against Iraq in 1991.
In short, the North can invade the South, but it cannot win. The ensuing war would be disastrous for the South in terms of human loss, also for the North unless the war ended with the South's suzerainty over the North. But even so, the North Korean people would suffer very greatly until then.
The problem, though, is not that the North could win such a war. It is that its isolated, self-justifying oligarchy might think it can win. And with its impending development of atomic weapons, it may think that all the more.
The Army won't let me back on active duty. I perused the Chaplain subsite of the GoArmy web site, and sent this email to the email link on the site:
I retired in 1995 as an Army artillery officer. I have since completed my M.Div. and have been ordained an elder in full connection in the UMC.In only two days I received an answer from Mr. James Griffiths, Cyber Recruiter, United States Army Recruiting Command:
Is it possible for me to return to active duty as a chaplain?
I am sorry but since you have retired from the Army I was told that you cannot return to the army as a chaplain. Sorry we could not do anything for you. If you have any questions you can email me.I think this just stinks.
We're short on staff this week. I took the Command Sgt. Maj. to the airport at oh-dark-thirty this morning. She is doing some TDY to visit family in NC. I'll post some stuff during MNF tonight, and maybe before. In the meantime, please read Little Green Footballs today, and be afraid, be very afraid.
Saturday, December 28, 2002
Saddam's most dangerous failure was my topic back on Sept. 23. I explained why one kind of comparison of Saddam to Hitler was apt: he, like Hitler, has no vision for his country that outlives him.
I've been catching up on David Warren's work this evening, and found his essay, "Scorched Earth," of Dec. 21. David echoes pretty much the same theme. Read them both and see whether you agree.
David ends on a note I have not seen before. Because Saddam knows we are coming, and approximately when, the possibility for massive civilian casualties (caused by Saddam but blamed on the US) is high. Thus, the lesson of the Second Gulf War for the US may be that,
I've been catching up on David Warren's work this evening, and found his essay, "Scorched Earth," of Dec. 21. David echoes pretty much the same theme. Read them both and see whether you agree.
David ends on a note I have not seen before. Because Saddam knows we are coming, and approximately when, the possibility for massive civilian casualties (caused by Saddam but blamed on the US) is high. Thus, the lesson of the Second Gulf War for the US may be that,
. . . the U.S. must in future act unilaterally, destroying such other enemies as Iran and North Korea entirely without consultation, and totally by surprise.
As the shape of the future battlefield emerges, it becomes easier to imagine a situation, in which humanity demands the end of all diplomacy, except what can be done to patch things over "after the fact".
Speaking of North Korea, David Warren writes,
The argument that President Bush's "axis of evil" speech provoked their present behaviour I would have thought too silly for anyone to believe, but as I write I'm listening to the BBC. I am reminded of George Orwell's old truism, that there is nothing you can say so demented, that you will not get a choir of intellectuals singing along.David writes a lot more on the NK problem, sadly but accurately ending with, "If there is a peaceful way out of this impasse, I do not know what it is."
Here's a good reason so much mainline journalism is junk - reporters can't do math:
"Math in newspapers isn’t so much doing arithmetic calculations, it is having a sense of numbers and proportions," said the Toronto Star science reporter, Peter Calamai. "It is having a detector that tells you, this just doesn’t add up. It is not that you have to be able to solve quadratic equations or do long division in your head or be able to work out square roots. It is that you need enough familiarity with things like relative size and proportion that you think, as you would if you were an expert in political science ‘Well that doesn’t make any sense.’ "Instead, they enter other career fields, then some become bloggers. I wonder whether numeracy, or mathematical literacy, is one thing that draws more and more people to read and write blogs, and whether it's a reason so many mainline media feel threatened by blogs.
It boils down to this: "Numerate people, as a rule, do not choose to be journalists. If they like numbers, if they like analyzing data, they can make better money in a whole range of other careers than journalism," said Bruce Little, reporter for the Globe and Mail.
Best of the Web Today on Friday asked what I had been wondering, too. Namely, why the Powerball lottery, or any other lottery, is worth a jot ot a tittle opf news coverage:
A Lotto NonsenseYep!
At least the clone story is more interesting than yesterday's big news. We refer, of course, to the lottery jackpot a West Virginia man won. This story was unavoidable if you were watching TV news yesterday; CNN even aired a press conference by the winner. Why is this news? It's not unusual for someone to win a lottery; indeed, the way lotteries are set up, it's a mathematical certainty that someone will eventually win. The jackpot the fellow won is a lot of money--a shade over $100 million--but it's not exactly of Bill Gates proportions. When someone becomes worth $100 million through a lifetime of honest work, that's not big national news. Why all the fuss over someone who got rich by indulging in a vice?
All this media attention to lottery winners serves only to glorify gambling. And the lottery is a bigger rip-off than any other form of legalized gambling. Innumeracy.com ran an experiment to see what would happened if it made 10,000 random selections and entered them in each of 479 drawings in the British lottery. Result: An "investment" of £4,790,000 returned just £1,375,082, which means that each £10,000 "invested" would have cost the player £7,129.
A lottery, Innumeracy.com notes, is "a tax on the poor and the stupid." The next time some liberal journalist complains about "tax cuts for the rich," consider how his colleagues in the media help enable the government to soak the poor.
I will move off Blogspot's servers come January 1. I have rented server space at Cornerhost.com and bought the web address of DonaldSensing.com. I will still call the site One Hand Clapping, but its address will be www.donaldsensing.com. I will also still use Blogger for blog writing, so everything will look the same.
Rumsfeld ramps it up by signing mobilization orders for Reserve Component (Guard and Reserve) forces, "heavy on the logistics side," according to one official.
As of Dec. 24, there were 53,217 RC troops on active duty, according to the Dept. of Defense, actually a couple thousand fewer than the week before. And if you read the detailed tables of this DOD document, you'll see that Special Forces and Mobilization detachments are over-represented in those called to active duty.
Look for callups to begin in earnest in January.
As of Dec. 24, there were 53,217 RC troops on active duty, according to the Dept. of Defense, actually a couple thousand fewer than the week before. And if you read the detailed tables of this DOD document, you'll see that Special Forces and Mobilization detachments are over-represented in those called to active duty.
Look for callups to begin in earnest in January.
Friday, December 27, 2002
I've been in a drug-induced stupor since Christmas afternoon, so that's why posting has been virtually non-existent. I awakened Christmas morning at three o'clock in excruciating pain. My back felt as if someone was stabbing it with steak knives on the right side just below the shoulder blade. Luckily, my sister-in-law is a nurse practitioner, and she kindly called in a prescription for relaxant and pain killer to a pharmacy that was open Christmas Day. By Christmas afternoon I had abandoned the arms of Father Christmas for those of Father Morpheus. I only began to feel normal again this afternoon. But I am way behind on my real work, so posting will be light until next week.
Thursday, December 26, 2002
Military Christmas Days since the end of the Cold War are listed by columnist Austin Bay, who kindly emailed me the link.
Anyone who has ever worn a uniform and spent the Christmas holidays guarding the motor pool, flying a mission or dodging bullets cannot help but recognize our soldiers' sacrifice and applaud their commitment.Yes, indeed.
The personal burden is real. At the moment two friends of mine are deployed in Kuwait. Another recently completed a tour in Afghanistan. A couple of Decembers ago I received a letter from a friend who mentioned that her brother-in-law, an Air Force air rescue pilot, was on his way back to the Balkans. She wrote: "My brother-in-law spends probably 70 percent of the year away from home." . . .
There are a many Americans spending the holidays flying missions, clearing mines, doing the tough tasks in the hard corners. This Christmas and New Year's, let us salute their dedication.
Iraqi army will "distract" the US Army "by using light and medium weapons," according to the Iraqi army's newspaper, Al-Qadissiya, according to the Associated Press. The wire service said the Iraqi army has held exercises in central Iraq to practice fighting in "rural and populated areas."
Now read this Washington Times report and ponder whether "light and medium weapons" will be very effective. When our enemy defensive plan is to "distract" us, rather than defeat us, it means they know they are beaten.
Now read this Washington Times report and ponder whether "light and medium weapons" will be very effective. When our enemy defensive plan is to "distract" us, rather than defeat us, it means they know they are beaten.
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Monday, December 23, 2002
If you get the cockpit there safely, all is well! Here is video I shot from the back seat Saturday of my 15-year-old son landing a Beech Commander - with assistance from a flight instructor, Glenn. Glenn is an airline pilot and certified flight instructor presently flying an Embraer 145 for American. Last May I conducted his wedding to a member of my church; Angie met him when she started taking flying lessons and he was her instructor. My son is not taking lessons, but is really interested in going to the US Air Force Academy, so Glenn agreed to donate an hour of instructor time to give my son a feel for flying. My wife and nine-year-old daughter occupied the back seat most of the hour, then my wife and I swapped seats so I could tape from inside. My daughter said flying in a small plane (her first time) is "better than Disney world!"
I learned to fly at the Fort Sill flying club back in 1977, but transferred to Korea before I took my FAA exam, and never picked it back up afterward. I did fly an ultralight in Maryland in 1994, once, and that was really a lot of fun.
I learned to fly at the Fort Sill flying club back in 1977, but transferred to Korea before I took my FAA exam, and never picked it back up afterward. I did fly an ultralight in Maryland in 1994, once, and that was really a lot of fun.
The history of smart weapons is explained in this Washington Post article. Interesting reading, but it dfoes not mention that the Germans invented PGMs in World War II (and I think there was an early American PGM tested then, too). Thanks to Joe Katzman for the link!
A little bit of prophecy is found on Geitner Simmons blog. He cites a review of Norman Podhoretz's new book, "The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are."
According to the review, Podhoretz says in his book that the Hebrew and Jewish prophets have been misread, lo, these many centuries:
The review also cites Podhoretz's examination of the test in Isaiah that presumedly prophecies birth of the Messiah to a virgin (quoted in the Gospel of Matthew), and concludes that Isaiah was not actually referring to a virgin, but a young woman. Now, this is not news - see my own posting on the virgin birth. But Geitnmer says that a Christian friend of his emailed him that Jesus did claim another Isaiah prophecy as referring to him specifically. Luke 4 records that Jesus read a passage from Isaiah 61 that everyone in Jesus days understood to be a messianic prophecy. Jesus told the people that the prophecy was now fulfilled in their hearing. Says Geitner's correspondent, erroneously:
According to the review, Podhoretz says in his book that the Hebrew and Jewish prophets have been misread, lo, these many centuries:
They [the Hebrew prophets] were, he concludes, not chiefly interested in predicting Christianity, or in propagandizing for secular social justice; they were, rather, engaged in a very this-worldly struggle against the particular challenges of idolatry in their own time and place.I agree with his point, but I disagree that this is news. In my seminary and personal studies I never heard or concluded that the prophets of the Jewish scriptures were predicting Christianity or the Church. There were substantial prophecies of a Messiah, but Christians and Jews have not agreed on what or who exactly was being prophesied, and neither have modern scholars.
The review also cites Podhoretz's examination of the test in Isaiah that presumedly prophecies birth of the Messiah to a virgin (quoted in the Gospel of Matthew), and concludes that Isaiah was not actually referring to a virgin, but a young woman. Now, this is not news - see my own posting on the virgin birth. But Geitnmer says that a Christian friend of his emailed him that Jesus did claim another Isaiah prophecy as referring to him specifically. Luke 4 records that Jesus read a passage from Isaiah 61 that everyone in Jesus days understood to be a messianic prophecy. Jesus told the people that the prophecy was now fulfilled in their hearing. Says Geitner's correspondent, erroneously:
As further proof that Jesus knew the implication of what he was saying, the people in the synagogue became very angry and drove him out of town and up to a cliff where they planned to throw him down.But that is the kind of textual misreading of the sort that Podhoretz seems to be writing against. In fact, Jesus' hearers were not the slightest bit upset that Jesus claimed messianic identity, as Luke makes clear:
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. "Isn't this Joseph's son?" they asked.As I explained in a sermon about this passage:
At first, his hearers are not angry like they are at the end. "Wow!" they say. "This is Joseph's son! Who'd-uh thunk it?" Then they wait for Jesus to perform the same sort of miracles in Nazareth he had performed in Capernaum. That was the custom back then--when the local boy made good, he always went home and shared his good fortune and accomplishments with his hometown people. The clan, you see, was everything. The notion of leaving home, making one's fame or fortune and then staying away just wasn't part of the picture. So Jesus' hometown friends and family were waiting for Jesus to get to wonder working so they could vicariously share his fame. They had something of a religious inferiority complex anyway, since according to the gospel of John everyone knew that no prophet had ever come from Galilee.
In short, the townspeople heard Jesus' declaration as his promise of special favor to them. Jesus didn't go for it, though. He quoted more scripture to turn the tables on them. He points out that Elijah went to a Gentile widow during a great drought where he received aid and support, despite the fact that there were ample numbers of Jewish widows available, if widows were what was needed. Also, during Elisha's time, none of the Jewish lepers got healed, only the Gentile Syrian, Namaan.
What infuriated Jesus' hometown people was not that he apparently was claiming to be the Messiah or at least a messianic figure. They had seen that before. None of the other messianic pretenders had succeeded in doing what the Messiah was supposed to do, but they had all been good, devout Jewish men with the proper patriotic, Jews-first attitude. So if Jesus wanted to go along that route, that was okay. Maybe he would succeed, maybe he wouldn't.
What made them madder than fire was Jesus' insistence that he wasn't going to be the Messiah just for the Jews. Clearly, Jesus indicated that his saving works were going to be for Jews and Gentiles. He would accept Gentile hospitality and minister to the Gentiles. It suddenly became clear that the year of the Lord's favor was not going to be exclusively for the Jews. And that put Jesus' listeners over the top.
So this crowd of worshipers was suddenly transformed from a congregation into a mob. They ran Jesus right out of town and chased him up a hill, then grabbed him to pitch him off a cliff. But Jesus got away and left town.
Saturday, December 21, 2002
The liberation of Iraq won't be a Gulf War style operation. Tom Holsinger emailed me his response to my posting about his StrategyPage article, "The Invasion of Iraq Has Probably Begun." Says Tom,
Nonetheless, there will still be a D-Day, because during the first quarter of 2003 we will have to force the decision one way or another. President Bush will not wait infinitely for sensible Iraqis to fish or cut bait. The US will retain the initiative. So Bush will give the execute order to begin the decisive phase of the overall operations plan to - do what? So far, the president has not announced national strategic goals for Iraq. We know he wants Iraq disarmed, he has said so. But other than that, a cipher except for occasional nods to regime change.
Unless the Iraqi military and Republican Guard depose the regime and invite us in, the decision will have to be reached by force of American and British arms. I agree with Tom that there will not be a period of intensive aerial bombing prior to decisive ground action - everything will happen at once, as Tom says. (That's how we took down Panama in 1989, with 27 major objectives being hit simultaneously. Most major objectives were really collections of objective sets.)
If Iraq does not collapse from within (possible but unlikely), I still believe that there will be a period of very intensive attacks against it as I described in my earlier post. Simultaneously or nearly so, fast-moving Army units will move to seize key terrain and objectives within Iraq. Intensive "information dominance" efforts will also blanket Iraq with psyop-related messages and warnings.
Between now and then, though, I think Tom is right. We will see more frequent and more destructive US/UK attacks in the no-fly zones. But when Bush says to lower the boom, the boom will really be lowered.
However, the real bottom line is that we do not know what Plan A is, and therefore do not know what the overt/decisive phase will look like. Below are three plan possibilities:
Cause a collapse from within, with the US suddenly moving in to occupy a vacuum of power, brought about by nudges of continued overt US military action that is not much more intensive than what we are doing now - gradually "boiling the frog," as Tom Holsinger puts it. Unless I have seriously misunderstood Tom, this is what he envisions.
Cause a "rot" within that leads many or even most Iraqi military elements to abandon the regime, but which is triggered by short, very violent US attacks on selected targets by all arms, designed to force a rapid decision. (Many Iraqi key players won't make up their mind until American angry iron flies in earnest.) This is what I envision.
A much more conventional plan, "Gulf War Again," that calls for traditional phasing: buildup, bombing, then invasion. Tom and I are in agreement that this is unlikely.
As things come to pass, events will certainly not dovetail so neatly into any of these three possibilities. They are broad categories of overall likelihood rather than specific predictions.
One more note: You may remember that the day the bombing campaign started in January 1991, the White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, took to his podium to announce to the assembled correspondents, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun." The definition of when the overt (I'd rather call it the decisive) phase begins will be the day that the president orders it to begin. And we will announce it has begun soon afterward. An American president cannot begin conquering another country without telling the American people. That is also when he will announce the US national strategic objectives for the operation.
IMO the first notice many or even most senior Iraqi officials/officers might have that the overt invasion has started, if one is necessary, could be a phone call telling them to step outside with their hands up.For things to work the way Tom envisions, the primary Allied plan would be to inculcate conditions inside Iraq that basically lead to military mutiny and perhaps civil unrest. And that may well be the plan. We may be covertly forming a rump Iraqi government that will declare itself the legitimate government, order Saddam and certain other figures to be arrested, then conveniently invites the US/UK military to come and in stabilize the country, in which case the US/UK invasion of Iraq may be relatively non-violent. Maybe so.
I doubt there will be an overt pre-invasion air bombardment as such - rather targets will be serviced slowly and selectively over the next month a la boiling a frog. There won't be an overt air phase followed by an overt ground phase - both will be simultaneous. I expect some to a lot of the overt heliborne assaults to be launched from nominally "secret" bases inside Iraq.
IMO the overt phase, as opposed to mopping up operations (mopping up includes Al Qaeda resistance, which I feel will likely be the only significant resistance) would last 2-7 days total. My definition of overt ends with official Iraqi surrender. The definition of when the overt phase begins will likely not be generally agreed on until some time afterwards. My working definition right now is when both sides publicly say it has begun. They haven't yet, which is why I chose my current column's title.
Nonetheless, there will still be a D-Day, because during the first quarter of 2003 we will have to force the decision one way or another. President Bush will not wait infinitely for sensible Iraqis to fish or cut bait. The US will retain the initiative. So Bush will give the execute order to begin the decisive phase of the overall operations plan to - do what? So far, the president has not announced national strategic goals for Iraq. We know he wants Iraq disarmed, he has said so. But other than that, a cipher except for occasional nods to regime change.
Unless the Iraqi military and Republican Guard depose the regime and invite us in, the decision will have to be reached by force of American and British arms. I agree with Tom that there will not be a period of intensive aerial bombing prior to decisive ground action - everything will happen at once, as Tom says. (That's how we took down Panama in 1989, with 27 major objectives being hit simultaneously. Most major objectives were really collections of objective sets.)
If Iraq does not collapse from within (possible but unlikely), I still believe that there will be a period of very intensive attacks against it as I described in my earlier post. Simultaneously or nearly so, fast-moving Army units will move to seize key terrain and objectives within Iraq. Intensive "information dominance" efforts will also blanket Iraq with psyop-related messages and warnings.
Between now and then, though, I think Tom is right. We will see more frequent and more destructive US/UK attacks in the no-fly zones. But when Bush says to lower the boom, the boom will really be lowered.
However, the real bottom line is that we do not know what Plan A is, and therefore do not know what the overt/decisive phase will look like. Below are three plan possibilities:
As things come to pass, events will certainly not dovetail so neatly into any of these three possibilities. They are broad categories of overall likelihood rather than specific predictions.
One more note: You may remember that the day the bombing campaign started in January 1991, the White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, took to his podium to announce to the assembled correspondents, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun." The definition of when the overt (I'd rather call it the decisive) phase begins will be the day that the president orders it to begin. And we will announce it has begun soon afterward. An American president cannot begin conquering another country without telling the American people. That is also when he will announce the US national strategic objectives for the operation.
Tom Holsinger has responded to my post about his essay I cited here, entitled, "The Invasion of Iraq Has Probably Begun." I'll post his return comments later today - soon I am going to my daughter's basketball game, then this afternoon I will go flying with my son.
Friday, December 20, 2002
More on prepositioned combat equipment. I said a few posts ago that the US has prepositioned large military stocks on the Persian Gulf area over the last several months. Here is a Washington Post article that provides details.
During the Cold War, the Army prepositioned complete sets of vehicles and other equipment in Germany that were tailored to specific units in the US. If the balloon went up, the stateside units would deploy only their troops by air, roll the equipment out and go straight to war. The prepositioned gear was called POMCUS - Prepositioned Overseas Material Configured in Unit Sets. I'd be surprised if the same thing wasn't done for the gear already prepo'd in the Gulf area.
With the US Fifth Corps headquarters already deployed to the region, all that will need to be done is fly soldiers from Germany; they can leave their equipment behind.
In Washington, defense officials said there was far more heavy equipment in the region than has been reported, even with the Pentagon acknowledging the presence of about 60,000 troops and 400 aircraft at bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain. Two 62,000-ton cargo ships, the USNS Watson and the USNS Charlton, sailed into the Gulf without fanfare within the past 10 days, another official said.This is an excellent summary article and bears all the hallmarks of the Post receiving a lot of official information. Pretty obviously, the details that the article presents are ones that DOD wants to be known.
Statistics provided by the Pentagon show that cargo ships have moved almost 1.6 million square feet of materiel from the United States and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to the Persian Gulf since Oct. 1, including 1,290 20-foot containers loaded with ammunition, 18,130 tons of ammunition not in containers, tanker trucks, helicopters, bridge sections and watercraft. . . .
The prepositioning that has taken place to date, another defense official said, was designed to reduce the time necessary to assemble an invasion force from four to six months to four to six weeks or less.
During the Cold War, the Army prepositioned complete sets of vehicles and other equipment in Germany that were tailored to specific units in the US. If the balloon went up, the stateside units would deploy only their troops by air, roll the equipment out and go straight to war. The prepositioned gear was called POMCUS - Prepositioned Overseas Material Configured in Unit Sets. I'd be surprised if the same thing wasn't done for the gear already prepo'd in the Gulf area.
With the US Fifth Corps headquarters already deployed to the region, all that will need to be done is fly soldiers from Germany; they can leave their equipment behind.
Iraq war not inevitable, says respected military analyst Tony Cordesman in this news report.
. . . many observers feel there is still wiggle room left for Iraq to avoid a war, despite the seeming finality of the U.S. ultimatum. One widely discussed possibility is a coup that removes Hussein from office before the start of military action. Another is a "deathbed conversion" in which Hussein acknowledges that he does indeed have weapons of mass destruction, and cooperates in giving them up. . . .I discussed the possibility of coup here. I think the chance of Saddam suddenly coming clean is less than the chance of me winning the Powerball, and I haven't bought a ticket.
"It just isn't true that war is inevitable, and it's never been true throughout political and military history," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If Iraq does something truly dramatic in this period, the administration will have to respond."
Bush administration's anti-Iraq effort is well coordinated, says Howard Kurtz, media critic for the Washington Post. He indicates that Bush & Co. are playing the media like a violin.
Iraq is already being gradually conquered, says Tom Holsinger, and all it will take to topple Saddam will be a short, violent nudge. Since Glenn Reynolds provided the link, almost everyone has probably already seen the article, so I'll not excerpt it. But Tom puts into words what I have been mulling for some time.
I have pointed out before that all the invasion scenarios we have read about in the WaPo and other media almost certainly bear little relationship to the actual operations plans formulated by US Central Command and the Joint Staff. The reason is that the people who know aren't saying. So I am skeptical that the various scenarios we've read about are anything but coincidentally corresponding to Gen. Franks' actual plan.
But I think that Holsinger has some excellent points. The Iraq takedown will not simply be reprise of the Gulf War. It will be done by unconventional forces to a very significant level. Holsinger thinks that SOF troops are already guiding USAF bombs in Iraq. We've known since October that Special Forces have been operating in western Iraq for some time. (A British officer said then that no British SFs were in Iraq, but that they would go in "once it's clear there's going to be an invasion," meaning that by now they are surely there.)
Thus, one media report that seems credibly related to reality is one carried in the WaPo back on July 31 (I don't know whether the link is still good). Among some think-tankery speculation, it offers this nugget:
The main thrusts of American psyops are, I think:
create reluctance on the part of low- and mid-ranking Iraqi army officers to engage American forces.
make rank and file troops willing to surrender.
cause colonels and above to de-link their personal survival from Saddam's well being while convincing them that loyalty to Saddam means death or prison. I think that the US and UK have been communicating with officials close to Saddam for a few months, at least, and have been sending signals that a coup against him will be rewarded. (Ari Fleischer endorsed the idea in October.)
remove from the Iraqi people their FOTA – "Fear of the Alternative" of a regime change, that is, to give them hope for a better future than the status quo.
persuade Iraq that Saddam must be delivered dead or alive into American hands in order for peace to be attained.
argue that treason against Iraq is defending Saddam; loyalty to Iraq is overthrowing him so that the Iraqi people can prosper and control their own destiny.
And last, but certainly not least, persuade all segments of Iraqi military and civilian society that American victory is certain, and that their interests are served by capitulating sooner rather than later.
Like Holsinger, I don't see even the Republican Guard putting up much of a fight. I don't think they have the will because their privileged place in the hierarchy has always depended on Saddam himself. Once the RG's commanders conclude that their resistance is futile and that Saddam is going down no matter what, I think they will cave. On the other hand, there are tribal ties between RG commanders and Saddam, and tribal loyalty may make them fight on no matter what. But on the whole, even if the RG is determined to resist, they can't. They are too poorly armed and too poorly trained to defy US forces successfully. (Please, no claims that the Republican Guard is "elite!" It isn't.)
In September, I posted a three-part series on toppling Saddam's regime without war (really, without conventional war, since I ascribed a strong role to Special Operations Forces). My thrust was toward teaching and aiding the Iraqi people to begin mass demonstrations and other measures to bring down Saddam. Based on Holsinger's insights, I can easily envision something stouter than I described being done, yet still less than conventional invasion. But I also said that effective resistance by the Iraqi people needed a "trigger event" to mobilize them together. At the time I didn't see what such a trigger event soul be.
But, following Holsinger's lead, the introduction of US/UK heavy armored and heliborne units into key points in Iraq could be the trigger event. Could it be that covert work by CIA, MI-6 and SOF units inside Iraq have almost lined up enough Iraqi resistance cells, especially within the armed forces, that are prepared to move against Saddam when the allies begin military operations? Yes, this is highly speculative, but would make sense. It would also explain why the administration recently announced the decision time to move against Iraq will be the end of January. That does two things: it advises potential resistance members when to be ready and warns the fence sitters that they don't have long to make up their minds. Coming publicly from the White House it carries much more weight than if it had simply been relayed to them through operatives.
So here is one possible scenario, and I'll be the first to admit not the only one:
Overt Allied action against Iraq will begin with furious aerial pounding of Iraqi army and RG units not already identified as neutral or "friendly." Unlike the air campaign during the Gulf War, these strikes will target actual military units almost exclusively and not infrastructure. Command and control facilities, though, will be hit hard. The Iraqi air force will be entirely destroyed. Very intensive efforts will be made to prevent the Iraqis from using chemical and biological weapons; related locations and units will be the first to be attacked and will be destroyed without mercy.
Allied SOF units inside Iraq will provide Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) for defected Iraqi units. Commanders of these units will be used to appeal to resisting units for surrender. If they don't, they will be destroyed.
A heavy division, or reinforced brigade at the least, drives from Kuwait toward Baghdad, heavily air covered. Holsinger also says that air assault (helicopter) operations could reach Baghdad or its environs. Heliborne or even airborne operations would be oriented toward seizing airfields so that future operations could be logistically supported by aircraft and follow-on troops can be flown in. The 82d Airborne Division could mount such assaults directly from its post at Fort Bragg, NC. (During the 1980s, when I was stationed at Bragg, the division practiced to seize European airfields by launching from neighboring Pope AFB.)
Prepositioned combat equipment in Kuwait can be hauled over-road to the airfields, to be met by crews flown in from Europe, the USA or elsewhere. The US Army has decades-long experience in doing this in Europe with REFORGER exercises and PREPO stocks kept there. Conversely, the crews for the PREPO equipment could be flown straight to Kuwait and enter Iraq from there. The Army has prepositioned combat vehicles in Kuwait since the end of the Gulf War; various news reports, including one today, over the last several months indicate that those stocks have been considerably enhanced.
Iraqi coup plotters, if any, would have to act quickly. They might carry out a coup like this.
Holsinger says that active resistance to Allied invasion would be about two days, after which Allied forces would move into Iraq in high strength to occupy the country. I'm not so sure. If we rely on significant numbers of defecting Iraqi units to make the conquest of the country short and relatively bloodless, then we won't have the luxury of installing a military government unless the Iraqi army agrees to it, and they won't. Gaining their prior assurance of cooperation will take more than threatening them with military destruction otherwise. So what the immediate days after cessation of hostilities would look like are fuzzy to me at this time.
Sun Tzu wrote that the height of the general's art was to be victorious without having to fight, but that if fighting had to be done, to attain the conditions of victory before joining the battle. Some commentators and bloggers have complained that Bush and company have been doing nothing but playing diplomatic games for several months. On the contrary, I believe that the administration has conducted a well-integrated campaign of preparation on multiple levels to remove Saddam. The diplo-dancing has accomplished at least three valuable things:
gave us time to prepare for a conventional invasion of Iraq, including planning, staging area and basing preparation, relocating US Central Command HQ to Qatar, pre-positioning combat and tactical vehicles and related equipment, and logistic stockpiling. To do these things mostly "below the radar screen" required several months. gave us time to work unconventionally within the country so that a conventional invasion would not be necessary except on a small scale, and
achieved political legitimacy on the world stage for taking down Saddam. This is crucial, although some folks apparently think it does not matter. But they are wrong.
Like Holsinger, I foresee a pretty brief campaign. I don't imply a cakewalk; we will take casualties and perhaps significant levels of them. But the Iraqi army knows the difference between fighting for their country and dying for Saddam. They will do the former but not the latter. Toppling Saddam will be the simple part, compared to securing the peace afterward.
I have pointed out before that all the invasion scenarios we have read about in the WaPo and other media almost certainly bear little relationship to the actual operations plans formulated by US Central Command and the Joint Staff. The reason is that the people who know aren't saying. So I am skeptical that the various scenarios we've read about are anything but coincidentally corresponding to Gen. Franks' actual plan.
But I think that Holsinger has some excellent points. The Iraq takedown will not simply be reprise of the Gulf War. It will be done by unconventional forces to a very significant level. Holsinger thinks that SOF troops are already guiding USAF bombs in Iraq. We've known since October that Special Forces have been operating in western Iraq for some time. (A British officer said then that no British SFs were in Iraq, but that they would go in "once it's clear there's going to be an invasion," meaning that by now they are surely there.)
Thus, one media report that seems credibly related to reality is one carried in the WaPo back on July 31 (I don't know whether the link is still good). Among some think-tankery speculation, it offers this nugget:
The Special Operations Command in particular has suggested some "tactically innovative" approaches that combine "precision strike and information dominance," said a Pentagon official."Information dominance" is psychological operations. Psyops is absolutely essential and is has been clearly underway at the strategic level for some months. Now we know that it has been underway for several weeks at the tactical level since the announcement that American psywar aircraft are broadcasting directly to the Iraqi people.
The main thrusts of American psyops are, I think:
Like Holsinger, I don't see even the Republican Guard putting up much of a fight. I don't think they have the will because their privileged place in the hierarchy has always depended on Saddam himself. Once the RG's commanders conclude that their resistance is futile and that Saddam is going down no matter what, I think they will cave. On the other hand, there are tribal ties between RG commanders and Saddam, and tribal loyalty may make them fight on no matter what. But on the whole, even if the RG is determined to resist, they can't. They are too poorly armed and too poorly trained to defy US forces successfully. (Please, no claims that the Republican Guard is "elite!" It isn't.)
In September, I posted a three-part series on toppling Saddam's regime without war (really, without conventional war, since I ascribed a strong role to Special Operations Forces). My thrust was toward teaching and aiding the Iraqi people to begin mass demonstrations and other measures to bring down Saddam. Based on Holsinger's insights, I can easily envision something stouter than I described being done, yet still less than conventional invasion. But I also said that effective resistance by the Iraqi people needed a "trigger event" to mobilize them together. At the time I didn't see what such a trigger event soul be.
But, following Holsinger's lead, the introduction of US/UK heavy armored and heliborne units into key points in Iraq could be the trigger event. Could it be that covert work by CIA, MI-6 and SOF units inside Iraq have almost lined up enough Iraqi resistance cells, especially within the armed forces, that are prepared to move against Saddam when the allies begin military operations? Yes, this is highly speculative, but would make sense. It would also explain why the administration recently announced the decision time to move against Iraq will be the end of January. That does two things: it advises potential resistance members when to be ready and warns the fence sitters that they don't have long to make up their minds. Coming publicly from the White House it carries much more weight than if it had simply been relayed to them through operatives.
So here is one possible scenario, and I'll be the first to admit not the only one:
Overt Allied action against Iraq will begin with furious aerial pounding of Iraqi army and RG units not already identified as neutral or "friendly." Unlike the air campaign during the Gulf War, these strikes will target actual military units almost exclusively and not infrastructure. Command and control facilities, though, will be hit hard. The Iraqi air force will be entirely destroyed. Very intensive efforts will be made to prevent the Iraqis from using chemical and biological weapons; related locations and units will be the first to be attacked and will be destroyed without mercy.
Allied SOF units inside Iraq will provide Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) for defected Iraqi units. Commanders of these units will be used to appeal to resisting units for surrender. If they don't, they will be destroyed.
A heavy division, or reinforced brigade at the least, drives from Kuwait toward Baghdad, heavily air covered. Holsinger also says that air assault (helicopter) operations could reach Baghdad or its environs. Heliborne or even airborne operations would be oriented toward seizing airfields so that future operations could be logistically supported by aircraft and follow-on troops can be flown in. The 82d Airborne Division could mount such assaults directly from its post at Fort Bragg, NC. (During the 1980s, when I was stationed at Bragg, the division practiced to seize European airfields by launching from neighboring Pope AFB.)
Prepositioned combat equipment in Kuwait can be hauled over-road to the airfields, to be met by crews flown in from Europe, the USA or elsewhere. The US Army has decades-long experience in doing this in Europe with REFORGER exercises and PREPO stocks kept there. Conversely, the crews for the PREPO equipment could be flown straight to Kuwait and enter Iraq from there. The Army has prepositioned combat vehicles in Kuwait since the end of the Gulf War; various news reports, including one today, over the last several months indicate that those stocks have been considerably enhanced.
Iraqi coup plotters, if any, would have to act quickly. They might carry out a coup like this.
Holsinger says that active resistance to Allied invasion would be about two days, after which Allied forces would move into Iraq in high strength to occupy the country. I'm not so sure. If we rely on significant numbers of defecting Iraqi units to make the conquest of the country short and relatively bloodless, then we won't have the luxury of installing a military government unless the Iraqi army agrees to it, and they won't. Gaining their prior assurance of cooperation will take more than threatening them with military destruction otherwise. So what the immediate days after cessation of hostilities would look like are fuzzy to me at this time.
Sun Tzu wrote that the height of the general's art was to be victorious without having to fight, but that if fighting had to be done, to attain the conditions of victory before joining the battle. Some commentators and bloggers have complained that Bush and company have been doing nothing but playing diplomatic games for several months. On the contrary, I believe that the administration has conducted a well-integrated campaign of preparation on multiple levels to remove Saddam. The diplo-dancing has accomplished at least three valuable things:
One senior defense official said the Pentagon had been moving heavy equipment for months as part of a buildup that was kept low key to avoid alarming the international community and creating the impression that the Bush administration had prejudged the U.N. arms inspection process.
Like Holsinger, I foresee a pretty brief campaign. I don't imply a cakewalk; we will take casualties and perhaps significant levels of them. But the Iraqi army knows the difference between fighting for their country and dying for Saddam. They will do the former but not the latter. Toppling Saddam will be the simple part, compared to securing the peace afterward.
"The trouble with the Left" is elegantly explained by Paul Greenberg.
The trouble with the left in American politics is that its first, instinctive resort is to power rather than persuasion, to government rather than to liberty.He has a long and perceptive list.
The trouble with the left is that it may love The People, but not the individual, who might make choices the government would not approve.
The trouble with the left is that it has run out of ideas and has decided to settle for causes.
Tennessee boy to make good. With the resignation of Trent Lott as the Senate Majority Leader, the buzz now is that Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee will be the next majority leader. Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico told Fox News that he will ask for Frist to be elected by acclamation. He also said that the Republican caucus meeting, now set for Jan. 6, should be moved up to meet as soon as possible.
Thursday, December 19, 2002
New WTC designs are PTSD embodied, says Jeff Jarvis, who says he simply hates the designs announced this week.
: Other designs -- and other aspects of the designs [cited and linked] above -- are chaotic to the point that they are disturbing. My son looked at one and said, "That looks dangerous." He's quite right. I looked at the frightening, falling angles and could only think once again of people falling to their deaths there. They are disturbingly insensitive.I think he's right.
United Architects' design is such a nightmare: It is post traumatic stress syndrome in steel and glass.
War to come in February, if it comes. The Washington Post reports,
The Bush administration has set the last week in January as the make-or-break point in the long standoff with Iraq, and is increasingly confident that by then it will have marshaled the evidence to convince the U.N. Security Council that Iraq is in violation of a U.N. resolution passed last month and to call for the use of force, officials said yesterday.No, I won''t say it, I won't. You know.
In a boost to the administration's position, Hans Blix, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, plans to tell the Security Council today that Iraq failed to account fully for chemical and biological bombs and warheads it had assembled as well as materials it bought that could be used to produce more of them, U.N. and administration officials said.
"Putting the brakes on bloggers" is not too bad an idea, according to Norah Vincent. Commenting on an Australian court's decision to let Barron's be sued in Australia for an article published in America, Vincent says that while Big Media might be able to fend off such challenges, poor bloggers don't have the resources. After making small compliments to personal web sites, such as the one you are reading, she shows her real cards:
Ms. Vincent, not even professional journalists abide by the "common journalistic standards" you hold so dear. Just think of CBS's "60 Minutes," the most biased "news" show ever. The op-ed pages of most daily papers are no less opinionated and no less frequently wrong than blogs.
It's hard for me to read your tirade wiothout concluding that you really have a hard time thinking the First Amendment protects everyone, not just "professional" journalists. So you look to the courts as your white knight, to save you from true free speech, because we just can't have that, can we?
Aha! The problem with bloggers is that they are unregulated, you know. We certainly can't have true free speech running rampant. Vicent admits she has an axe to grind, saying she was the victim of bloggers' lies and slanders herself:
As much as the blogosphere is full of brave and vital input, it's also full of the careless, mad and sometimes vengeful ravings of half-wits who will say anything, especially about established journalists and writers, just to attract more attention to their sites. This can get ugly when content is unregulated.
This happened to me when I integrated four words from a Jackson Browne song into a piece I posted on my blog. Another blogger accused me of plagiarism, and the unmerited charge spread across the Web at frightening speed. . . .Can you believe Vincent's paternalism? She says that we (who is meant by "we"?) should "protect" "scrupulous" bloggers. And who will decide which bloggers are which? Vincent? You betcha.
So when bloggers willfully defame those with professional reputations to defend, that is a serious breach for which they should be held accountable.
Blogging is one of the best things that has ever happened to freedom of expression and the press, and we should make every effort to protect its scrupulous practitioners. But freedoms come with responsibilities. Common journalistic standards of accuracy and fair play exist for good reasons, and bloggers, like the rest of us, must abide by them. By drawing attention to libelous Web content, the Australian case may force them to.
Ms. Vincent, not even professional journalists abide by the "common journalistic standards" you hold so dear. Just think of CBS's "60 Minutes," the most biased "news" show ever. The op-ed pages of most daily papers are no less opinionated and no less frequently wrong than blogs.
It's hard for me to read your tirade wiothout concluding that you really have a hard time thinking the First Amendment protects everyone, not just "professional" journalists. So you look to the courts as your white knight, to save you from true free speech, because we just can't have that, can we?
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Is North Korea really just a paper tiger? Personally, I think so, taking rare issue with Steven Den Beste, who has a long post comparing the two nations of the peninsula and discussing the politics of, well, everything - it's a long post. But here's what I will discuss:
I don't want to write a long essay on this myself, so I'll summarize thus: the South and the US are modern and the North is not. The South and the US are free and democratic and the North is totalitarian. It is doubtless true that the North's oligarchy would gladly sacrifice their troops by the carload lot, but the real question is this: Are the North's troops willing to be sacrificed? Absolutely not. Not any more.
Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet tank company commander and a GRU operative who defected in the 1970s, said that when he served on the Soviet General Staff one of the concerns Soviet generals had about attacking West Germany was the fear that masses of Soviet troops would defect at first opportunity. Now consider: the North Koreans are starving except for the elites and the military, but the millions of men in the army have relatives who have suffered terribly from hunger and other socialist benefits. They know that there is no salvation for the North except from the South.
The North's army is ripe for psychological warfare. Steven says the South's defenders would have to kill five for every one they lose. Actually they will achieve a much higher ratio than that, and they won't lose doing it, although there will be high casualties and civilians will suffer greatly. When North Korean soldiers see their comrades die in droves against the South's and Americans' firepower, they will be low hanging fruit indeed.
The tighter communism squeezes its subjects, the more eager they become to escape and the more willing they are to risk death to do so. The North Koreans have been squeezed as tightly as you can imagine.
Excursus: Our advantage of firepower during the Korean War was less than now, but still substantial. As military historian T. R. Fehrenbach documented in his seminal history of that war, This Kind of War, American artillery and air power killed massive numbers of NK and Chinese troops. Remember that American presence on the ground in S. Korea when the North invaded was virtually nil. General MacArthur rushed a battalion task force, TF Smith, to the South to slow the NK advance. It did, for about four hours. The story of the early American resistance to the NK army in 1950 is sad, but when troops began to arrive in number, the worm turned. By the end of the year, US forces had swept all the way north to the Yalu river and literally looked at China.
China entered the war then and drove the allies south. But it's doubtful that China would enter a war on the North's side today unless we just up and invaded the North, which we are not going to do. If the North invades the South, the North will be on its own.
By 1951, American forces were killing Chinese at the same astonishing rate they had previously killed N. Koreans, but President Truman was unwilling to take full advantage of American military capability. Result: stalemate for two years.
South Korea has more than twice the population of North Korea, and more than 40 times the GDP. The situation is not comparable to 1950; the South Korean military is big and powerful and quite modern and well equipped, and would be no pushover. There would be no "Pusan Pocket". But when you're facing a massive horde of armed men being driven against you by leaders who don't care about losing them, then even if you kill five for every man you lose, you're still going to lose heavily. Even if nothing else they've got works, a million men armed with AK-47's is not something to ignore if their leaders are willing to sacrifice them to hurt you.I disagree for many reasons. The North is outclassed in every arena except sheer number of men under arms, and even that might be unimportant.
I don't want to write a long essay on this myself, so I'll summarize thus: the South and the US are modern and the North is not. The South and the US are free and democratic and the North is totalitarian. It is doubtless true that the North's oligarchy would gladly sacrifice their troops by the carload lot, but the real question is this: Are the North's troops willing to be sacrificed? Absolutely not. Not any more.
Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet tank company commander and a GRU operative who defected in the 1970s, said that when he served on the Soviet General Staff one of the concerns Soviet generals had about attacking West Germany was the fear that masses of Soviet troops would defect at first opportunity. Now consider: the North Koreans are starving except for the elites and the military, but the millions of men in the army have relatives who have suffered terribly from hunger and other socialist benefits. They know that there is no salvation for the North except from the South.
The North's army is ripe for psychological warfare. Steven says the South's defenders would have to kill five for every one they lose. Actually they will achieve a much higher ratio than that, and they won't lose doing it, although there will be high casualties and civilians will suffer greatly. When North Korean soldiers see their comrades die in droves against the South's and Americans' firepower, they will be low hanging fruit indeed.
The tighter communism squeezes its subjects, the more eager they become to escape and the more willing they are to risk death to do so. The North Koreans have been squeezed as tightly as you can imagine.
Excursus: Our advantage of firepower during the Korean War was less than now, but still substantial. As military historian T. R. Fehrenbach documented in his seminal history of that war, This Kind of War, American artillery and air power killed massive numbers of NK and Chinese troops. Remember that American presence on the ground in S. Korea when the North invaded was virtually nil. General MacArthur rushed a battalion task force, TF Smith, to the South to slow the NK advance. It did, for about four hours. The story of the early American resistance to the NK army in 1950 is sad, but when troops began to arrive in number, the worm turned. By the end of the year, US forces had swept all the way north to the Yalu river and literally looked at China.
China entered the war then and drove the allies south. But it's doubtful that China would enter a war on the North's side today unless we just up and invaded the North, which we are not going to do. If the North invades the South, the North will be on its own.
By 1951, American forces were killing Chinese at the same astonishing rate they had previously killed N. Koreans, but President Truman was unwilling to take full advantage of American military capability. Result: stalemate for two years.
If Rumsfeld brought back the Whiz Kids, we're in serious trouble. For the first time I have a pessimistic uneasiness about the course of the impending Iraq war. Buried deep in the Washington Post column I cited next post down is a sentence that is very disturbing sentence if it is correct:
I am beginning to detect the rancid stench of whiz-kiddery in Rumsfeld's staffers.
Notice that the uniformed US military commanders are already being set up as the blame carriers for potential American failure in Iraq. “They’re not on board,” “They won’t be innovative,” and so forth are the way bureaucrats are keeping their rear ends clear. How long before we hear some unnamed six-checker tell the Post the dilettantes’ favorite shibboleth: “The military wants to fight the last war.” I never cease to be amazed at how many civilians consistently think that American military officers are fundamentally ignorant about their profession.
Civilians in government almost always think that “the right plan” can result in lightning victory and low casualties. But as military officers have observed since the Trojan War, “no military plans survives contact with the enemy.” In Afghanistan the US suffered few casualties, but only because we used the Northen Alliance as a proxy ground force, and they took plenty of casualties. But the Iraqi National Congress cannot serve as a proxy military ground force in Iraq. A proxy government maybe, but not a fighting force.
It is the US Army who will have to win the fight on the ground, along with a small force of Marines. And that means lots of troops.
The influence of the Joint Chiefs on military policy appears to have diminished under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld . . .What on earth could Rummy have replaced the Joint Staff with? Nothing except wishful thinking and overeager civilian dilettantes. During LBJ's administration, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara brought in a bunch of academically-oriented systems analysts who became nicknamed the Whiz Kids. They too thought they had a lock on how to be innovative, imaginative and successful in modern war. They pushed the military professionals aside and did their thing. Their thing was called Vietnam. 'Nuff said.
I am beginning to detect the rancid stench of whiz-kiddery in Rumsfeld's staffers.
At a July 10 meeting of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, one of the subjects discussed was how to overcome the military reluctance to plan innovatively for an attack on Iraq.This sounds tragically familiar. “The military reluctance to plan innovatively” is probably referring to the military’s reluctance to be drawn into a high-casualty quagmire and be the fall guy for it.
Notice that the uniformed US military commanders are already being set up as the blame carriers for potential American failure in Iraq. “They’re not on board,” “They won’t be innovative,” and so forth are the way bureaucrats are keeping their rear ends clear. How long before we hear some unnamed six-checker tell the Post the dilettantes’ favorite shibboleth: “The military wants to fight the last war.” I never cease to be amazed at how many civilians consistently think that American military officers are fundamentally ignorant about their profession.
Civilians in government almost always think that “the right plan” can result in lightning victory and low casualties. But as military officers have observed since the Trojan War, “no military plans survives contact with the enemy.” In Afghanistan the US suffered few casualties, but only because we used the Northen Alliance as a proxy ground force, and they took plenty of casualties. But the Iraqi National Congress cannot serve as a proxy military ground force in Iraq. A proxy government maybe, but not a fighting force.
It is the US Army who will have to win the fight on the ground, along with a small force of Marines. And that means lots of troops.
Bunkum reportage: Army and Marine chiefs unhappy with Iraq war planning and caution that the Iraq war could be very nasty, unlike what some Pentagon planners apparently think. The US Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, and the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James L. Jones, are both reported to have voiced concerns that the conflict could be protracted and bloody and that not enough attention has been paid to worst-case scenarios by Pentagon planners.
The debate's public side was apparently kicked off when Gen. Jones said at a dinner "that he and other senior officers did not share the "optimism" of others about the ease of fighting in Iraq," although he did not specifically say he differed with other Pentagon planners, just "folks around town."
Let me say here that no one in the public record knows what is being planned. As I wrote here, the people who really do know what is being planned don't talk about it.
Having worked in operations in the five-sided puzzle palace, I can tell you that the building is much less autocratic than outsiders imagine it to be, even with Rumsfeld kicking tail (and Rummy strikes me as a pretty autocratic guy). So I don't think that the reservations presumed to be had by the Army and Marine chiefs are all they are cracked up to be.
Unless . . . .
One of the perennial thorns in the side of military professionals is the insistence of inexperienced dilettantes that a magic "lightining stroke" can topple a whole enemy army, or innthis case, an entire regime. Such people almost never have an inkling of the vast resources and logistics needed to fight modern war. They think we can send a flying column of armor "to charge across Iraq until they run into armed opposition and then engage in combat," as ther Post put it. Now we have dilettantism merged with Errol Flynn - dashing forward to victory, logistics be darned!
What do you call tankers who outrun their supply line? (Choose one:)
A. KIA.
B. WIA.
C. MIA.
D. All of the above.
In fact, any tactics that cannot be logistically supported are bad tactics. Read about the campaigns of Mr. Dashing Tanker himself, Gen. George S. Patton. You will discover he personally spent hours poring over maps to determine where the railheads were. Then he would plan his advances.
Logistics is everything, especially if the intelligence officials who think Saddam will scorch Iraq as we move in are right.
The debate's public side was apparently kicked off when Gen. Jones said at a dinner "that he and other senior officers did not share the "optimism" of others about the ease of fighting in Iraq," although he did not specifically say he differed with other Pentagon planners, just "folks around town."
Let me say here that no one in the public record knows what is being planned. As I wrote here, the people who really do know what is being planned don't talk about it.
I can hear the screams of protest already. What about all those plans such as invasion from the south, invasion from the north, the small war plan, the big war plan, the inside-out plan, blah blah blah. Go back and look the coverage up. Those fantasies didn't originate from people who really have a clue and their source is never actually identified anyway. Such "scenarios" are dreamed up all the time by self-employed Washington "analysts" or think tankeries who make money from publicity.At this point, all reporters have are very indirect attribution that the two generals are unhappy with the planning so far. You can bet that the two chiefs concerned are not going to issue a statement or tell an interviewer that they think the planning is inadequate, even if they think it is.
The number of war plans that we were told were sure fire, insider, secret, real-deal plans that appeared in the media before Desert Storm in 1991 was amazing, but not one such "leaked" plan was even close to the plan that was actually implemented.
Having worked in operations in the five-sided puzzle palace, I can tell you that the building is much less autocratic than outsiders imagine it to be, even with Rumsfeld kicking tail (and Rummy strikes me as a pretty autocratic guy). So I don't think that the reservations presumed to be had by the Army and Marine chiefs are all they are cracked up to be.
Unless . . . .
One of the perennial thorns in the side of military professionals is the insistence of inexperienced dilettantes that a magic "lightining stroke" can topple a whole enemy army, or innthis case, an entire regime. Such people almost never have an inkling of the vast resources and logistics needed to fight modern war. They think we can send a flying column of armor "to charge across Iraq until they run into armed opposition and then engage in combat," as ther Post put it. Now we have dilettantism merged with Errol Flynn - dashing forward to victory, logistics be darned!
What do you call tankers who outrun their supply line? (Choose one:)
A. KIA.
B. WIA.
C. MIA.
D. All of the above.
In fact, any tactics that cannot be logistically supported are bad tactics. Read about the campaigns of Mr. Dashing Tanker himself, Gen. George S. Patton. You will discover he personally spent hours poring over maps to determine where the railheads were. Then he would plan his advances.
Logistics is everything, especially if the intelligence officials who think Saddam will scorch Iraq as we move in are right.
Iraq will suffer mass destruction in a war is what some American intelligence officials conclude, saying it is highly possible that Saddam will. . .
. . . destroy [Iraq's] own oil fields, food supplies and power plants and blame America for the devastation in the event of war, U.S. intelligence officials said Wednesday.This is not surprising. As I wrote three months ago, Saddam has no vision for Iraq that outlives him and has has proven that he is quite willing to sacrifice Iraqi lives wholesale to achieve his own megalomaniac desires. Once Saddam sees his own end nearing, he will use any means possible to strike at his enemies.
The officials, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said they have evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein intends to wreck his own infrastructure to create a humanitarian crisis that could stymie any U.S. advance and turn international opinion against the war.
Someday Saddam will die, whether by US action or natural causes. Anyone who thinks he will not do everything he can to strike America and Israel before death robs him of the satisfaction is simply living in cloud-cuckoo land.Yes, as the first article I cited in this post says,
The crisis point will be when Saddam knows his death is reasonably imminent. He envisions no future beyond the end of his own life, and therefore will not be dissuaded from striking the US by threats of retaliation against Iraq. The fate of the Iraqi people means nothing to him except as they are able to serve him personally. Does anyone seriously doubt that Saddam would be willing to sacrifice countless more Iraqi lives to strike America, especially if he knew that his own end was near whether he did so or not?
If Saddam ever obtains deliverable WMDs, he can be deterred only as long as he thinks his health is holding up. That is why we must act now.
The intelligence officials also predicted Saddam will use his biological and chemical weapons if he believes he is about to fall. His primary targets: any U.S. forces in Iraq, as well as Israel and Kuwait, the officials said.Yet.
Iraq can deliver these weapons with Scud and other missiles, aircraft-mounted sprayers and artillery shells, the officials said. They expect Iraq to use disease weapons like anthrax, poisons like botulism and ricin, and mustard gas. He is not believed to have any nuclear weapons.
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. President Bush has decided that there will be no military campaign against Iraq until next year, if there is one at all.
The White House said Wednesday there were serious omissions and problems with Iraq's weapons declaration, but President Bush decided the violation of a U.N. resolution was not an immediate cause for war.
Instead, advisers said Bush decided in a meeting with his foreign policy team to chart a deliberative course that would push the prospects for military action into the new year, said senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Guns and freedom is the subject of a very long post and comment series on Rachel Lucas' web site, pointed to by Glenn Reynolds. Citing at leangth another writer, Rachel makes excellent points. Almost as excellent (if I do say so myself) as those made here.
What I want for Christmas is Italian. It's a Beretta AL 391 Target SL 12-gauge, automatic shotgun. Now all you have to do is click here to help make my dreams come true! Or just click on the shotgun below! (snivel on) Please, please, please! (snivel off)
Lott will be gone in just days from his post as Senate Majority Leader, says US News. I wonder what bribes the other Republican senators will offer him to get him to step down. Look for Lott to have another powerful position such as a key committee chairmanship.
"95,000 tons of diplomacy" is how the UK's Sun describes the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. The Sun says that 300,000 troops will be used to topple Saddam and that for Britain, "the build-up to war will be launched by the Ministry of Defence TODAY." HMS Ark Royal will join four American carrier battle groups. (Ark Royal is not a flat-deck carrier as its world War II namesake was or US carriers are today. It has a "ski jump" deck used by Harrier jump jets and also launches helicopters.
Update: Thomas Ricks, a knowledeable defense-issues reporter for The Washington Post wrote today,
At least 600 Green Berets will be on board the assault ship HMS Ocean when she leaves as part of the Ark Royal battle group in early January."Firepower exercise," eh? Yeah, I'll bet! My longer-term readers will recall that I have said since last spring that if war comes, it will most likely start from mid-February to the end of March.
Officially, the group is part of a firepower exercise due to begin in February.
Update: Thomas Ricks, a knowledeable defense-issues reporter for The Washington Post wrote today,
. . . more signs point toward forces being ready to launch a wide-ranging, highly synchronized ground and air attack in six to eight weeks. Psychological operations, such as leafleting and broadcasting into Iraq, have been stepped up lately, and there is talk at the Pentagon of large-scale troop movements or mobilizations being announced soon after the holidays. [italics added]
US military broadcasts directly to Iraqi people, according to this Foxnews story.
A sample psyops message broadcast:
Transmitted five hours a night from American planes flying Iraq's southern no-fly zone, the broadcasts are the first of their kind since those used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War when Iraqi forces were ousted from Kuwait, defense officials said.I urged this tactic back on Sept. 30, but it didn't take stellar insight to do so. We have known since 1991 that we can win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and we have the technology to reach them directly.
The broadcasts of Arabic music and anti-Saddam messages began Thursday, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Daniel D. Hetlage. But the program only became known Monday when the Central Command said it had dropped 480,000 leaflets over the southern no-fly zone in Iraq, including some alerting the Iraqis to radio frequencies and times to tune in to the American broadcasts.
A sample psyops message broadcast:
"People of Iraq ... the amount of money Saddam spends on himself in one day would be more than enough to feed a family for a year," said an English translation of one radio broadcast released by the U.S. Central Command. "How much longer will this corrupt rule be allowed to exploit and oppress the Iraqi people?"Well, that last question is one we are all asking now.
Monday, December 16, 2002
I'll be at the Monday Night Football game tonight rooting for the Titans to beat New England, the defending Super Bowl champs. Tennessee has had lousy luck its last couple of Monday night games, but needs this win to stay in first place in AFC South; because Indianapolis won yesterday, it is a half-game ahead of Tennessee as of this morning. But the Titans beat the Colts twice this season, so if they beat the Patriots, they'll move back into division first place.
My very good friend Don Lofstrom is hosting me; he was my boss when I was in the computer business between retiring from the Army and receiving my first clerical appointment. Now he sells Lindal Cedar Homes, which are absolutely gorgeous custom residences.
Don's seats are in the north end zone, a few rows up from the turf. When the action is in the north end of the field, it can be almost like being on the field. Titans stadium has a reputation for being one of the loudest in the NFL; can attest that it really is loud, loud, loud, and having been an artilleryman, I know what loud is.
Don has graciously invited me to at least one game per season since the Titans began playing in Nashville. Monday night games have a certain panache all their own. The ABC cameras roam the stands, looking for weird people to put on camera. Howard Cosell sits just a few rows down and over from Don's seats. That is, there is a man who is almost a dead ringer for Howard who enhances the resemblance with a Cosell-style hairpiece and a yellow ABC Sports style coat. He holds up a sign saying something like, "Hey Al! I want my job back!"
There are several cheerleaders nearby, too. No, not the female Titans cheerleaders, who are really dancers rather than leaders of cheers. The cheerleaders I refer to are a few guys (never gals) whose purpose in life is apparently to get Tennessee into the playoffs. They are very serious about it, no fooling. I am sure every section has a few guys like that, who really do put a lot of effort into getting the crowd to make noise to "support our team!"
Then there is the usual set of fruits, flakes and nuts, of course, who paint their faces and other parts of their anatomy and paint their hair orange and generally just act loony. They're harmless, just very, very strange. And for some reason, MNF at Titans stadium attracts Elvis impersonators. I don't know why. The genuinely obnoxious fan is really quite rare, though, in my limited experience.
I remember that at the last NFL game I attended I was struck with how very TV-staged the games are. Watching on TV, it seems as if you are viewing a game where the TV cameras happen to show up and broadcast, but in person it is apparent that the games are timed, managed and run from start to finish for the benefit of television coverage. I remarked to Don last year that the head referee really should wear a Hollywood beret and jodhpurs and sit in a director's chair, because he's the key figure in making sure the TV people get what they want.
At most breaks in the game, such as just before kickoffs or after long plays, the network cuts to ads or planned chatter and the players have to wait for the TV people to finish. You may think that an timeout's length is governed by rule, but it really lasts until the TV people say they're through selling beer or Al and John have finished their scripted banter and jocularity. The players know all this, and sometimes they are lined up, ready to play, but waiting for their literal cue. The linemen and backs on both sides stand there are chat with one another, making jokes and slapping each others' backs. Then the referee gets the word. He blows his whistle and just as they've been taught, the players start snarling at each other to look appropriately vicious when the game goes live again. Then another whistle and the referee yells, "Action!" Okay, no he doesn't yell, "Action!" but he should.
All in all, MNF live and in person is a superfine way to spend a Monday evening. I'll post my impressions of tonight's game later this week.
My very good friend Don Lofstrom is hosting me; he was my boss when I was in the computer business between retiring from the Army and receiving my first clerical appointment. Now he sells Lindal Cedar Homes, which are absolutely gorgeous custom residences.
Don's seats are in the north end zone, a few rows up from the turf. When the action is in the north end of the field, it can be almost like being on the field. Titans stadium has a reputation for being one of the loudest in the NFL; can attest that it really is loud, loud, loud, and having been an artilleryman, I know what loud is.
Don has graciously invited me to at least one game per season since the Titans began playing in Nashville. Monday night games have a certain panache all their own. The ABC cameras roam the stands, looking for weird people to put on camera. Howard Cosell sits just a few rows down and over from Don's seats. That is, there is a man who is almost a dead ringer for Howard who enhances the resemblance with a Cosell-style hairpiece and a yellow ABC Sports style coat. He holds up a sign saying something like, "Hey Al! I want my job back!"
There are several cheerleaders nearby, too. No, not the female Titans cheerleaders, who are really dancers rather than leaders of cheers. The cheerleaders I refer to are a few guys (never gals) whose purpose in life is apparently to get Tennessee into the playoffs. They are very serious about it, no fooling. I am sure every section has a few guys like that, who really do put a lot of effort into getting the crowd to make noise to "support our team!"
Then there is the usual set of fruits, flakes and nuts, of course, who paint their faces and other parts of their anatomy and paint their hair orange and generally just act loony. They're harmless, just very, very strange. And for some reason, MNF at Titans stadium attracts Elvis impersonators. I don't know why. The genuinely obnoxious fan is really quite rare, though, in my limited experience.
I remember that at the last NFL game I attended I was struck with how very TV-staged the games are. Watching on TV, it seems as if you are viewing a game where the TV cameras happen to show up and broadcast, but in person it is apparent that the games are timed, managed and run from start to finish for the benefit of television coverage. I remarked to Don last year that the head referee really should wear a Hollywood beret and jodhpurs and sit in a director's chair, because he's the key figure in making sure the TV people get what they want.
At most breaks in the game, such as just before kickoffs or after long plays, the network cuts to ads or planned chatter and the players have to wait for the TV people to finish. You may think that an timeout's length is governed by rule, but it really lasts until the TV people say they're through selling beer or Al and John have finished their scripted banter and jocularity. The players know all this, and sometimes they are lined up, ready to play, but waiting for their literal cue. The linemen and backs on both sides stand there are chat with one another, making jokes and slapping each others' backs. Then the referee gets the word. He blows his whistle and just as they've been taught, the players start snarling at each other to look appropriately vicious when the game goes live again. Then another whistle and the referee yells, "Action!" Okay, no he doesn't yell, "Action!" but he should.
All in all, MNF live and in person is a superfine way to spend a Monday evening. I'll post my impressions of tonight's game later this week.
Clinton says Democrats exploit blacks. No, not a joke, he really did say it, except it is black columnist Clinton LeSueur, not Bill C.
Lott's remarks are no reason to dump him, says Dick Morris.
Update: The thought occurs to me that Lott's accommodationist record is really the reason that conservatives have been going for his jugular. If he had a record of fighting the Democrats as hard as the Democrats fight the Republicans, conservative voices, including those of the blogosphere, would never have raised this ruckus and would have defended him stoutly if necessary. Lott is being beheaded by his own side, only putatively for his remark at Thurmond's 100th, but really because the right knows that Lott will fritter away the advantage of having the Senate majority. That's his real sin in their eyes, but they can't say it. (Purity runs knee-deep in the streets of Washington, D.C.)
He is no racist. There is not a racist bone in his body. That's why one third of Mississippi blacks vote for him, year after year.All of which may be true, but all of which is irrelevant. I insisted from my first post (of only a few) on this subject that what Lott said is not the point of whether he should continue as Senate Majority Leader for the Republican Party. His Thurmond gaffe is not a reason for him to lose the job, but it's a darn good excuse. Why? Because Lott rolls over and plays dead for the Democrats.
He took the lead in doubling funding for historically black colleges in Mississippi, sponsored the bill to make racially motivated arson a federal crime, broke the filibuster to get the Africa Free Trade bill passed and brokered the deal that led to a vast increase in federal Title I education aid and earmarked it for poor schools.
And he helped get the Congressional Gold Medal voted for Rosa Parks.
Update: The thought occurs to me that Lott's accommodationist record is really the reason that conservatives have been going for his jugular. If he had a record of fighting the Democrats as hard as the Democrats fight the Republicans, conservative voices, including those of the blogosphere, would never have raised this ruckus and would have defended him stoutly if necessary. Lott is being beheaded by his own side, only putatively for his remark at Thurmond's 100th, but really because the right knows that Lott will fritter away the advantage of having the Senate majority. That's his real sin in their eyes, but they can't say it. (Purity runs knee-deep in the streets of Washington, D.C.)
Disarming the Germans didn't work and neither will disarming Iraq, says George Will. In 1918, the allies imposed dracinian weapons inspection and disarment regimes on the defeated German nation, but you know what happened only 21 years later. The reason weapons inspections didn't work after the Great War was the disarming Germany was not the real problem - demilitarizing Germans was.
If you think that today the Europeans are too compliant with Iraq, reflect on this old joke that dates to the early 1920s:
At a German army barracks allied army officers periodically drop by to inspect the arms to ensure that the German battalion there has no machine guns, only rifles. The German captain explains what happened to his superior officer. "Herr Oberst," he began, "the French officer arrived. I greeted him warmly and begged him to pause for some excellent Rheinwein before beginning his inspection. He accepted and before long we had finished the whole bottle and had become fast friends. I assured him we had no machine guns. As a fellow comrade in arms, he accepted my word and departed.
"Later an English officer came to inspect. I greeted him with absolutely correct military courtesy and asked him to help me toast the King's health with some fine English brandy. He was delighted and accepted. Then I toasted the British Army, the Navy, the Royal Marines, the Royal Air Force, the Empire, and before long we were sharing war stories together. Finally he said, 'Look, old chap, you don't have any machine guns here, do you?' Of course not, I replied, and being a gentleman, the British officer accepted my word and departed.
"On Friday an American officer came. I asked him to sit down and have a beer with me, which he accepted. When he finished the beer I started to pour him another, but he said, 'Sorry, Mac, I gotta be going." I promised him I did not have any machine guns. Unlike the friendly Frenchman and the honorable Englishman, the American cowboy refused to take the word of a German officer. He stood up, walked into my office, kicked down my closet door, and took away my machine guns!"
Plus la change. . . .
The victors vowed to destroy German militarism using 337 inspectors in a country that then was about the size of today's Iraq. The numerical results were these: 7,000 factories placed under supervision, 33,384 cannons destroyed, 37,211,551 artillery shells destroyed, 87,240 machine guns destroyed, 920 tons of poison gas cylinders destroyed.Later, the allies, fighting World War II, looked back on how they had failed to ensure peace at the end of World War I.
German militarism was not destroyed.
A 1944 study of the problems of post-World War I disarmament of Germany stressed the impossibility of disarmament-by-inspectors when the government to be disarmed is uncooperative. After 1918 the inspectors' greatest difficulty was procuring reliable data, because the German government connived at concealment. This difficulty "could have been surmounted only by a complete and prolonged military occupation."Which is exactly what Germany got beginning in 1945 (and still has in siginificant respects, by the way).
If you think that today the Europeans are too compliant with Iraq, reflect on this old joke that dates to the early 1920s:
At a German army barracks allied army officers periodically drop by to inspect the arms to ensure that the German battalion there has no machine guns, only rifles. The German captain explains what happened to his superior officer. "Herr Oberst," he began, "the French officer arrived. I greeted him warmly and begged him to pause for some excellent Rheinwein before beginning his inspection. He accepted and before long we had finished the whole bottle and had become fast friends. I assured him we had no machine guns. As a fellow comrade in arms, he accepted my word and departed.
"Later an English officer came to inspect. I greeted him with absolutely correct military courtesy and asked him to help me toast the King's health with some fine English brandy. He was delighted and accepted. Then I toasted the British Army, the Navy, the Royal Marines, the Royal Air Force, the Empire, and before long we were sharing war stories together. Finally he said, 'Look, old chap, you don't have any machine guns here, do you?' Of course not, I replied, and being a gentleman, the British officer accepted my word and departed.
"On Friday an American officer came. I asked him to sit down and have a beer with me, which he accepted. When he finished the beer I started to pour him another, but he said, 'Sorry, Mac, I gotta be going." I promised him I did not have any machine guns. Unlike the friendly Frenchman and the honorable Englishman, the American cowboy refused to take the word of a German officer. He stood up, walked into my office, kicked down my closet door, and took away my machine guns!"
Plus la change. . . .
Dumping Trent Lott will snowball, warns Wesley Pruden.
If Trent Lott is forced from his job as majority leader, as now appears likely, the Democrats will be foolish to stop there. They can demand that he resign from the Senate as well ("erase the Mississippi stain on the heaving bosom of the fair Republic"). Does anyone believe the Republicans won't cave on that, too? Ronnie Musgrove, the Democratic governor, would appoint his successor. Voila! The Senate is deadlocked again.Meanwhile Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, "told ABC-TV interviewers that Mr. Lott had been weakened 'to the point that he may jeopardize his ability to enact our agenda and speak to all Americans'" - the opening salvo, methinks, in the process that will see Lott removed from Senate majority leadership.
Jettisoning the anti-war dead weight is what John Stryker says the anti-war movement needs to do.
As it stands, the anti-war movement does more to help the government than curtail it by being a court fool everyone can point to and laugh at. If it ever wants to be taken as a sober and serious movement capable of attracting reasonable people to its ranks, then it'll have to jettison the dead weight and start anew.Problem is, the organizers are the dead weight.
"A moose once bit my sister." As I was channel surfing last night's movie offerings on cable while waiting for the Sunday night NFL game to start, I ran across AMC's enhanced broadcast of The French Connection. That means that they show a wide-screen version and instead of the black blanks top and bottom, they move the picture all the way to the top and fill the bottom blank with mindless trivia. Whenever an actor appears AMC runs tidbits about his/her career and such. After while it started to remind me of the silly stuff Monty Python ran onscreen during the titles of The Holy Grail. "Moose bites can be very serious."
The evening of Dec. 22, AMC will show the best baseball movie ever made, The Natural.
The evening of Dec. 22, AMC will show the best baseball movie ever made, The Natural.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
I HAVE BEEN SWAMPED WITH WORK since Wednesday and am home only briefly until I return to work this afternoon. I will try to post again this evening while I watch Sunday Night Football on ESPN.
As you might imagine, December is the busiest month of the year for those of my vocation, but not only for the obvious reason of Christmas-related events; it is a month when people become ill, too. I conducted two funerals this week, on Friday and Saturday; I remember a funeral-home owner once said that people die "when the sap rises and when it falls."
(I notice that Glenn Reynolds took yersterday off, so there's a lot of "busy-ness" going round.)
As you might imagine, December is the busiest month of the year for those of my vocation, but not only for the obvious reason of Christmas-related events; it is a month when people become ill, too. I conducted two funerals this week, on Friday and Saturday; I remember a funeral-home owner once said that people die "when the sap rises and when it falls."
(I notice that Glenn Reynolds took yersterday off, so there's a lot of "busy-ness" going round.)
Friday, December 13, 2002
Trent Lott is "The Internet's First Scalp," says John Podhoretz. He says the outrage over Lott's endorsement of Thurmond's Dixiecrat platform began in the blogosphere and has been driven by it.
The drumbeat that turned this story into a major calamity for Lott, and led directly to President Bush's welcome disavowal of Lott's views yesterday, was entirely driven by the Internet blogosphere.
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Honduras is a deadly place to fly, as five American soldiers tragically discovered Wednesday evening. They were flying in a US Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter when the craft went down on a mountain 85 miles north of the nation's capital. Tegicigalpa. All five died. Peacetime is dangerous, too.
I spent a tour in Honduras in 1989 and went all over the country, mostly by helicopter. It is very mountainous except in the southeast, where it is flat jungle. I flew from on a Black Hawk from one end of the jungle to the other one day to visit a Honduran military base on the Caribbean coast. It was a fantastically clear day. For a long time, from horizon to horizon there was only the solid green jungle canopy. If we had gone down for some reason the jungle would have swallowed us like a crocodile gulping a frog.
US forces in the country are headquartered on the Hondurans Air Force Base, Soto Cano. There are no US-only installations in the country as there are in Germany, at least when I retired in 1995, and I am 99 percent certain that nothing about basing arrangements has changed since then. The US and Honduras have no agreement for permanent basing of US troops, meaning that families of US troops don't go with them, there is no Status of Forces Agreement, and with only a few exceptions, all US troops there are assigned for temporary duty, TDY is military parlance, rather than a Permanent Change of Station, or PCS.
When I was assigned to Joint Task Force Bravo in 1989, there were about 1,200 US Army and Air Force officers and enlisted troops, the majority being Army. We had a few folks stationed in Tegucigalpa, about 90 miles away as I recall, including a captain who worked for me. He was an Air Force officer who worked out of the US embassy. The Special Forces Military Assistance Teams fell directly under embassy supervision, not ours.
JTF-Bravo is dependent on helicopters for its mobility because roads in Honduras are so few and generally poor. During much of the 1980s, the major project the Army carried out there was to build a modern, high-capacity highway from the interior north to the port of San Pedro Sula. The road would hasten the economic development of the country once completed. Surely by now it is complete, but I haven't checked. The construction was carried out mostly by US National Guard units who spent their two weeks ADT there, road building. Especially during the summer there were many Guard units rotating in and out all the time.
They would bring their own aviation assets and pilots. I remember one North Dakota ARNG Huey pilot with whom I flew most of two days. His civilian job was the governor's personal pilot. He had a gazllion hours as command pilot, and I have never seen anyone who could make a Huey do things he could do. He was the smoothest pilot I have ever seen; riding with other Huey pilots afterwards felt like riding on an off-balance washing machine.
Not long before I arrived, a JTF-B CH-47, a big cargo chopper with two enormous twin rotors, front and rear, dropped straight down from 5,000 feet one day and killed all three crewmen. No one else was aboard. The two big rotors overlap, synchronized by a mechanism with a connecting rod that runs from the front transmission to the rear one. On this unfortunate helicopter, investigation revealed that the rod broke. Instantly the synchronization was lost, the rotors splintered each other to shards, and the chopper dropped like an anvil.
During my tour there was a signal station set up on a remote mountainside (all mountains in Honduras are remote, actually). A Huey flew in to drop off rations, mail, water, stuff like that. There was no place to land, so the resupply choppers would hover over a cleared stretch of mountainside and drop the stuff off - strictly routine flying, really, for terrain like that. This Huey suffered LTE at the worst time of helicopter flight, during the transition. LTE means Loss of Tailrotor Effectiveness, a euphemistic way of saying that the tail rotor spun off the tail boom into thin air. Transition is the part of the flight when the helicopter is, well, transitioning from forward flight to hover, or vice-versa. Aerodynamically and inertially, it is the worst time to suffer LTE.
The tail rotor prevents the chopper from spinning around the main rotor's axis in the opposite direction of the main rotor. Mr. Newton's laws are absolute in helicopter flight. The rotor goes one way round and the rest of the bird goes the other, unless held in place by the tail rotor.
For LTE at full forward speed, pilots know to point the nose toward the ground and keep the airspeed above 100 knots. Aerodynamic pressure on the tail boom keeps the bird from spinning like a top, it just wobbles back and forth rapidly until the pilot piles it onto the ground in a barely controlled crash landing, with emphasis on the crash. It can be done, and has been, and crew have even survived it, but it's an awful thing to have to do.
But the alternative is worse, and that's what happens when you suffer - and I do mean suffer - LTE during transition, as the helicopter concerned did. There's insufficient forward speed to keep the tail boom in place. Instead, the chopper immediately spins. This one spun like a top and veered down the mountainside. It smashed into the ground 40 meters or so downhill from the signal station, whose detachment was observing in horror.
The main rotor exploded into a thousand pieces and the bird rolled down the mountain. It was lightly wooded there, scrub brush mostly, ending in thick growth at the base about 750-1,000 feet down. After a few revolutions on the ground the tail boom flew away, leaving the basic fuselage, which is shaped like a fat football.
The chopper, of what was left of it, kept rolling and bouncing all the way to the bottom, where it disappeared into the growth. It took detachment troops 40 minutes to make their way down the mountain, expecting to find only pieces of wreckage and pieces of bodies.
Instead, they found the pilot, the co-pilot and the crew chief sitting on tree trunk that the chopper had knocked down, drinking coffee and sucking on unlit cigarettes, the risk of fire being too great to light them. They were unhurt and too numbed to speak.
Other helicopters came in to evacuate them and the remains of the Huey. It had impaled itself on a four-inch-thick tree that drove through the floorboard and out the top. When I last saw the wreck, the tree was still there, except the parts that had extended outside the fuselage, of course, which had been sawn off. It had barely missed the crew chief.
Near the end of my tour, a Columbian 727 airliner flew straight into a fog-shrouded mountain while trying make Tegucigalpa's airport. As I recall, about 300 people died. I had flown that same approach a few months earlier in similar weather en route from Panama on a Tennessee Air Guard C-130. My two pilots let me sit in the cockpit on an upended tool kit when I told them I was a Tennessean also.
We flew across Costa Rica and then out over the Pacific to avoid overflying Nicaragua, which was communist in those days. being jokesters, the two pilots thought it would be great fun to tease the Sandinista air defenses. The internationally-recognized territorial limit was three miles from the coast, so they flew three miles and, oh, 10 feet out. All up the coast they showed me the air defense radar warnings on their avionics. One color light for detection radar, another color for targeting radars that actually guide the missiles. For some reason they thought it was pretty cool to watch the different colors come on and off.
We cranked into a vertical turn over Tiger Island, owned by Honduras but claimed by El Salvador and Nicaragua. The three countries converge at Tiger Bay, in which sits the island. To stay in only Honduran air space was tricky since the margin of error was tiny. But they did it perfectly; we just had to fly Chinese for awhile - Won Wing Lo. Nobody shot at us.
Tegucigalpa is surrounded by mountains. There is not even a railway to the city because the terrain is too rough. From the south the air approach's glide path to the runway is parallel to the descending slope of the mountains; you lose several thousand feet of altitude while remaining 400 feet above the ground the whole way. The you land and jam on the brakes because at the other end of the runway is a cliff. It's no problem for a C-130, but for 727s, the largest plane the airport can handle, pilots have to waste no runway and hit reverse thruster and brakes immediately. It's the closest thing to carrier landings in commercial aviation.
Honduras has some beautiful country, but it can be a treacherous place to fly.
I spent a tour in Honduras in 1989 and went all over the country, mostly by helicopter. It is very mountainous except in the southeast, where it is flat jungle. I flew from on a Black Hawk from one end of the jungle to the other one day to visit a Honduran military base on the Caribbean coast. It was a fantastically clear day. For a long time, from horizon to horizon there was only the solid green jungle canopy. If we had gone down for some reason the jungle would have swallowed us like a crocodile gulping a frog.
US forces in the country are headquartered on the Hondurans Air Force Base, Soto Cano. There are no US-only installations in the country as there are in Germany, at least when I retired in 1995, and I am 99 percent certain that nothing about basing arrangements has changed since then. The US and Honduras have no agreement for permanent basing of US troops, meaning that families of US troops don't go with them, there is no Status of Forces Agreement, and with only a few exceptions, all US troops there are assigned for temporary duty, TDY is military parlance, rather than a Permanent Change of Station, or PCS.
When I was assigned to Joint Task Force Bravo in 1989, there were about 1,200 US Army and Air Force officers and enlisted troops, the majority being Army. We had a few folks stationed in Tegucigalpa, about 90 miles away as I recall, including a captain who worked for me. He was an Air Force officer who worked out of the US embassy. The Special Forces Military Assistance Teams fell directly under embassy supervision, not ours.
JTF-Bravo is dependent on helicopters for its mobility because roads in Honduras are so few and generally poor. During much of the 1980s, the major project the Army carried out there was to build a modern, high-capacity highway from the interior north to the port of San Pedro Sula. The road would hasten the economic development of the country once completed. Surely by now it is complete, but I haven't checked. The construction was carried out mostly by US National Guard units who spent their two weeks ADT there, road building. Especially during the summer there were many Guard units rotating in and out all the time.
They would bring their own aviation assets and pilots. I remember one North Dakota ARNG Huey pilot with whom I flew most of two days. His civilian job was the governor's personal pilot. He had a gazllion hours as command pilot, and I have never seen anyone who could make a Huey do things he could do. He was the smoothest pilot I have ever seen; riding with other Huey pilots afterwards felt like riding on an off-balance washing machine.
Not long before I arrived, a JTF-B CH-47, a big cargo chopper with two enormous twin rotors, front and rear, dropped straight down from 5,000 feet one day and killed all three crewmen. No one else was aboard. The two big rotors overlap, synchronized by a mechanism with a connecting rod that runs from the front transmission to the rear one. On this unfortunate helicopter, investigation revealed that the rod broke. Instantly the synchronization was lost, the rotors splintered each other to shards, and the chopper dropped like an anvil.
During my tour there was a signal station set up on a remote mountainside (all mountains in Honduras are remote, actually). A Huey flew in to drop off rations, mail, water, stuff like that. There was no place to land, so the resupply choppers would hover over a cleared stretch of mountainside and drop the stuff off - strictly routine flying, really, for terrain like that. This Huey suffered LTE at the worst time of helicopter flight, during the transition. LTE means Loss of Tailrotor Effectiveness, a euphemistic way of saying that the tail rotor spun off the tail boom into thin air. Transition is the part of the flight when the helicopter is, well, transitioning from forward flight to hover, or vice-versa. Aerodynamically and inertially, it is the worst time to suffer LTE.
The tail rotor prevents the chopper from spinning around the main rotor's axis in the opposite direction of the main rotor. Mr. Newton's laws are absolute in helicopter flight. The rotor goes one way round and the rest of the bird goes the other, unless held in place by the tail rotor.
For LTE at full forward speed, pilots know to point the nose toward the ground and keep the airspeed above 100 knots. Aerodynamic pressure on the tail boom keeps the bird from spinning like a top, it just wobbles back and forth rapidly until the pilot piles it onto the ground in a barely controlled crash landing, with emphasis on the crash. It can be done, and has been, and crew have even survived it, but it's an awful thing to have to do.
But the alternative is worse, and that's what happens when you suffer - and I do mean suffer - LTE during transition, as the helicopter concerned did. There's insufficient forward speed to keep the tail boom in place. Instead, the chopper immediately spins. This one spun like a top and veered down the mountainside. It smashed into the ground 40 meters or so downhill from the signal station, whose detachment was observing in horror.
The main rotor exploded into a thousand pieces and the bird rolled down the mountain. It was lightly wooded there, scrub brush mostly, ending in thick growth at the base about 750-1,000 feet down. After a few revolutions on the ground the tail boom flew away, leaving the basic fuselage, which is shaped like a fat football.
The chopper, of what was left of it, kept rolling and bouncing all the way to the bottom, where it disappeared into the growth. It took detachment troops 40 minutes to make their way down the mountain, expecting to find only pieces of wreckage and pieces of bodies.
Instead, they found the pilot, the co-pilot and the crew chief sitting on tree trunk that the chopper had knocked down, drinking coffee and sucking on unlit cigarettes, the risk of fire being too great to light them. They were unhurt and too numbed to speak.
Other helicopters came in to evacuate them and the remains of the Huey. It had impaled itself on a four-inch-thick tree that drove through the floorboard and out the top. When I last saw the wreck, the tree was still there, except the parts that had extended outside the fuselage, of course, which had been sawn off. It had barely missed the crew chief.
Near the end of my tour, a Columbian 727 airliner flew straight into a fog-shrouded mountain while trying make Tegucigalpa's airport. As I recall, about 300 people died. I had flown that same approach a few months earlier in similar weather en route from Panama on a Tennessee Air Guard C-130. My two pilots let me sit in the cockpit on an upended tool kit when I told them I was a Tennessean also.
We flew across Costa Rica and then out over the Pacific to avoid overflying Nicaragua, which was communist in those days. being jokesters, the two pilots thought it would be great fun to tease the Sandinista air defenses. The internationally-recognized territorial limit was three miles from the coast, so they flew three miles and, oh, 10 feet out. All up the coast they showed me the air defense radar warnings on their avionics. One color light for detection radar, another color for targeting radars that actually guide the missiles. For some reason they thought it was pretty cool to watch the different colors come on and off.
We cranked into a vertical turn over Tiger Island, owned by Honduras but claimed by El Salvador and Nicaragua. The three countries converge at Tiger Bay, in which sits the island. To stay in only Honduran air space was tricky since the margin of error was tiny. But they did it perfectly; we just had to fly Chinese for awhile - Won Wing Lo. Nobody shot at us.
Tegucigalpa is surrounded by mountains. There is not even a railway to the city because the terrain is too rough. From the south the air approach's glide path to the runway is parallel to the descending slope of the mountains; you lose several thousand feet of altitude while remaining 400 feet above the ground the whole way. The you land and jam on the brakes because at the other end of the runway is a cliff. It's no problem for a C-130, but for 727s, the largest plane the airport can handle, pilots have to waste no runway and hit reverse thruster and brakes immediately. It's the closest thing to carrier landings in commercial aviation.
Honduras has some beautiful country, but it can be a treacherous place to fly.
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