If you don't fly a fighter jet ...

This is as close as you are likely to come. Click to full screen and select the HD version.



HT: Neptunus Lex

I was accepted into the naval flight training program my freshman year in college, but the Army stepped up and offered me an ROTC scholarship, so I became a soldier and not a naval aviator. Even so, I learned to fly while stationed at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1977. I was not yet married and was collecting TDY pay for the Artillery officer Basic Course. Flying was not expensive then - the Cessna 150 student pilots used rented "wet" (including fuel) for $14 per hour. Yes, you read right - fly an hour for $14, including gas. The instructor charged $7 on top of that, but after you soloed you didn't need the IP very much.

This was at the flying club there, of course. The only place you could learn to fly on the Army dime was at Fort Rucker, Ala.

The .001 percent

It makes me think of how many of the OWS frauds are of an age where they could enlist in the military, or for the college graduates crying about their loans, could apply for officer candidacy. Quite a few, I bet.

I scorn them even more when I recall that Friday, my second son drove 180 miles round trip to take his US Air Force entrance physical in exploration of attending medical school under the Air Force's medical-school scholarship program.

Photo found on American Digest.

Europe’s free ride on the back of Nato is over - Telegraph

Europe’s free ride on the back of Nato is over - Telegraph

Time for NATO's countries to start to look inward and prepare for a post-American alliance.

... In 2000, America’s share of Nato defence spending was around 50 per cent. Today, it has risen to 75 per cent. With peace at home, many European nations have redirected spending towards other priorities, free-riding off the US when it comes to threats overseas. And this problem is set to get worse, since every European Nato member is set for severe defence cuts – including France, whose own equivalent of Britain’s defence review begins next year.

This decline in capability has come about not just because we are spending less, but because we continue to spend badly. Military funding is channelled through dozens of separate national programmes and structures, creating enormous duplication and failing to achieve economies of scale. While Europe has half a million more military personnel than America, it can deploy just a fraction of them overseas.

Nato is also being weakened by changes in US foreign policy: as the then defence secretary, Robert Gates, said earlier this year, his country is starting to look west as much as east. What America sees in Nato is yesterday’s vision of the future: allies with declining capabilities, reluctant to put troops in harm’s way, and an institution ill-suited to addressing US interests – especially with defence cuts looming in Washington as well.

NATO has become militarily worthless not only to the United States but to itself. And it is past time to ask ourselves, "What has NATO done for us?" Well, not much.

And this should make the Brits sleep well at night: The Royal Navy has not even one warship to spare for emergency response within Britain's territorial waters.

Three minutes to live, what would you do?

Thinking He Had Three Minutes To Live, This Air Force Sgt. Tried To Change The World:

We can only stand in awe.

When it was all over Gutierrez had taken a bullet to the upper shoulder, triceps, left chest and lateral muscle causing two broken ribs, a broken scapula, and a softball-sized hole in his back.

And he walked out, more than a mile.

Afghanistan is Vietnam redux

Afghanistan is the Vietnam war all over again. How? Michael Yon explains: "Afghanistan Update: Taliban Losing on Battlefield, But Making Progress in Media War."

The more things change, etc.

Gays who want to blow stuff up

Marine Recruiters Visit Gay Center in Oklahoma - NYTimes.com:

Gays who want to blow stuff up - there's now a place for you in the US Marine Corps!

But looking back at the USMC's recruiting posters, one wonders whether they haven't subconsciously been recruiting those folks all along:

Ya know, I always thought that this guy looked a little light in the loafers.

BTW, news media covering the Marine recruiters at the "Gay Center" in Oklahoma actually outnumbered the (presumed) gays who came in to ask about joining the Marines. Don't really expect a flood of recruits into the military with the end of DADT.

Well, except, you know, the Navy.

Inside Afghanistan’s Deadly Copter War

Inside Afghanistan’s Deadly Copter War | Danger Room | Wired.com:

Chief Warrant Officer John Guffey, one of the former infantryman, remembers the exact moment he decided he would become a pilot. In 2002, he was a passenger in a Chinook transport helicopter that crashed in the Central Valley of Afghanistan, just north of Kandahar. His platoon had taken casualties, and they had been assigned to guard the downed aircraft while waiting for evacuation.

“I’m sitting there, and this Apache [attack helicopter] comes over, and he’s flying real slow,” recalls Guffey. “It’s 120 degrees. My commander walks over and says, ‘I bet you wish you were flying that thing. That’s the only aircraft in the Army inventory that has an air conditioner. It’s probably 70 degrees inside that cockpit.’ I looked up at the Apache pilot and flipped him off … and he puts his arms around himself like he’s cold. Right then, I decided I was gonna be a pilot one day."

Read the whole thing. HT: Blackfive

Bless those snipers!

Taken from my car on a highway in Franklin, Tenn., this week:

Pardon my very sloppy erasure of identifying information of the vehicle.

Why you should tick not off the Navy

The Navy's HDRM material makes this a double whammy.

News: Revolutionary Material Dramatically Increases Explosive Force of Weapons - Office of Naval Research

The Navy has developed a material with the strength of aluminum and the density of mild steel. That means that the Navy can use this material, called High-Density Reactive Material (HDRM), instead of steel to encase high explosive for cannon-launched projectiles or missiles.

So what, you say? Well, HDRM is itself explosive. That means that an HDRM-encased warhead of an anti-aircraft missile will not only shred an enemy aircraft with HDRM fragments, penetrating the airframe just as steel fragments would, the HDRM fragments will blow up once they've penetrated into the plane.

This capability begs the question:  - could you make an entire warhead out of HDRM? Say you want to penetrate the earth deeply to strike an Taliban cave in Afghanistan. Right now we have to use a specially-designed penetrating case to plummet through the earth to reach the cave, where the explosive within then explodes.

The problem is that the casing, to stay intact during the penetration, consumes a huge percentage of the bomb's or missile's weight. That means the explosive charge is relatively small. But what if you don't need to stuff the casing with TNT because the casing is TNT, that is, TNT equivalent?

HDRM won't displace high explosive fillings in large numbers because TNT or Composition B, two of the most common explosive fillers, are so cheap to make and are very powerful. I doubt HDRM is very cheap! But it seems that there would be special uses where the whole warhead could be HDRM that would be superior to conventional explosives.

DOD & Justice told Obama that Libya war was subject to War Powers Act

2 Top Lawyers Lost to Obama in Libya War Policy Debate - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But those lawyers didn't understand what the real purpose of the Libya adventure is. Hint: success in the theater of operations isn't it.

Non-story of the day: troops pay Delta extra baggage fee

OTB:

Earlier this week a group of soldiers who had just returned from Afghanistan were making their way from Baltimore to their base in Louisiana, when they ran into a Delta Airlines baggage policy that said they would have to pay for the five bags per person they were carrying, which including not only personal gear but also equipment.

Read James Joyner's excellent coverage and all the comments. Why is this a non-story? Because every soldier will be reimbursed by the government as usual.

One Gurkha. Thirty Taliban. One survivor. Guess who?

Hero Gurkha handed bravery medal by Queen said: 'I thought I was going to die... so I tried to kill as many as I could' | Mail Online

Corporal Dipprasad Pun defeated more than 30 Taliban fighters single-handedly

Used the tripod of his machine gun to beat away a militant after running out of ammunition

A Gurkha soldier who single-handedly defeated more than 30 Taliban fighters has been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross by the Queen.

Corporal Dipprasad Pun, 31, described how he was spurred on by the belief that he was going to die and so had nothing to lose in taking on the attackers who overran his checkpoint in Afghanistan.

His gallantry award is second only to the Victoria Cross - the highest honour for bravery in the face of the enemy. ...

The soldier fired more than 400 rounds, launched 17 grenades and detonated a mine to thwart the Taliban assault on his checkpoint near Babaji in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, last September.

At one point, after exhausting all his ammunition, he had to use the tripod of his machine gun to beat away a militant who was climbing the walls of the compound.

Yale law professor: bin Laden killing was legal

Jed Rubenfeld, professor of law at Yale Law School and a former U.S. representative to the Council of Europe, in "U.S. justified in killing Osama Bin Laden:"

An "extrajudicial execution," that's what many in the international community are now calling the killing of Osama bin Laden. The U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation. According to a U.N. special rapporteur, if the U.S. commandos were under shoot-to-kill orders and did so without offering Bin Laden a "meaningful prospect of surrender," his killing could have been a "cold-blooded execution." ...

What Prof. Rubenfeld surely realizes, though he didn't write, is that the intention of the U.N.'s "investigation" is not actually to determine whether double tapping OBL met some legal criteria. It is to hamstring American might and hamper our efforts against Islamist terrorists. It is to put the United States into a box.

As Prof. Rubenfeld points out, there is no existing international treaty or Convention on warfare that says that an enemy combatant must be given a "meaningful prospect of surrender," or any opportunity at all. Says the professor,

It is pure foolishness to suggest that by going in on the ground, the U.S. turned its soldiers into policemen required to give Bin Laden "due process," place him "under arrest" and read him his Miranda rights.

I remember very well an incident during 1991's Gulf War in which American media excoriated US forces who observed Iraqi tanks heading toward their position and destroyed them with anti-tank missiles. Why the media fury? Because in the breathless words of a reporter whose face I remember well but can't put a name to it, the tanks were moving toward the American position "with their turrets reversed," that is, pointing toward the tanks' rear. So, the reporter continued, "the tanks were surrendering!" She claimed as well that a reversed tank's turret was a recognized sign of surrender.

Which is just stuck on stupid. First, tanks cannot surrender at all, turrets reversed or not. Only soldiers can surrender. If the crews wanted to surrender, all they had to do was dismount their tanks, casts away arms and raise a white flag (an undershirt would do - so many Iraqis used white undershirts to surrender during that war that Saddam finally made it a capital offense in the army even to possess one). Second, because tanks cannot surrender, it does not matter where the main gun is pointing. You just shoot the tank.

There was a later incident involving Saudi troops who accepted the surrender of a small group of Iraqi soldiers, including a handful of Iraqi officers, who did raise a white ensign and proceed on foot toward Saudi soldiers. When the Saudis went out to meet them, the Iraqis raised weapons and shot the Saudis down. Other Saudis immediately gunned down the Iraqis, of course, but several Saudi men lost their lives. From that day on, that unit of Saudis took no prisoners - any Iraqi showing a white flag was shot. And that was both entirely reasonable and legal. Perfidy of surrender is explicitly forbidden in the international conventions, and once perfidy is done, it is justifiable to expect it will be practiced again.

As Prof. Rubenfeld explains, perfidy has been the hallmark of bin Laden's acolytes. They are,

... enemies who flagrantly violate the laws of war, targeting civilians for death, hiding bombs behind burkas, using children as shields or — yes — faking a Red Cross, upraised hands or other symbolic white flags to perpetrate lethal attacks. ... Even if we imagine Bin Laden actually waving a little white sock on a stick in Abbottabad, there would have been no reason for our soldiers to credit these statements. No soldier had a duty to take the slightest risk to his own life because Osama bin Laden promised to be good from now on.

The SEALs were never under any obligation to do anything to bin Laden except shoot him on sight. As Prof. Rubenfeld points out, "If Bin Laden wanted to surrender, he could and should have done it sometime in the last decade. He could not do it by raising his hands during an attack on his compound."

How the bin Laden raid went down

DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE BIN LADEN RAID Reveals How It Nearly Ended In Disaster:

Where our defense money goes

Most of the countries in the embedded essay below are NATO members. They spend a pittance on their defense budgets. Instead, we pick up their tab. You can't understand the true costs of the US defense budget without understanding how much of other countries' defense budgets are actually being paid for inside ours - without reimbursement and, for that matter, without any reason.

As I have written before, NATO is obsolete and purposeless. It's past time for the US to disengage from NATO. See:

What has NATO does for us?

The pointlessness of NATO

Osama bin Laden mission was Bush's fault!

Osama bin Laden mission agreed in secret 10 years ago by US and Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week's raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

"There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. "The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us."

Brilliant leak! Now if the net outcome of the raid turns negative, Obama can blame it all on
Bush!

Let there be - conspiracy theories!

Ding, dong, Osama's dead - or is he, really?

Via American Digest, I find this post by Cobb, "Because he's not dead yet:"

C'mon. You don't get your mitts on Bin Laden just to kill him, and you don't have 40 SEALs who are too slow to tackle the dude. There's is no picture because he's not dead yet. They're twisting him on a spit and slow roasting him until he's so tender the secrets just drip of the bones. They've got him simmering in pentathol. ...

He's certainly not free or missing, that's for sure. He's never going to see the light of day. But is he dead at this very moment? You will never know.

Which makes me wonder about the bogus death photos that got shown to some members of Congress.

A day after the White House said it will not release the official photo of Usama bin Laden’s body, many are wondering how a handful of lawmakers were duped into believing they saw it. ...

The announcement came after at least three U.S. lawmakers claimed to have seen what they believed was an authentic photograph of Bin Laden, shot in the face and chest during a CIA-led Navy SEALs operation Sunday at a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But those photos appear to have been doctored images sent by an undisclosed source or sources to members of Congress, including Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who admitted Wednesday he’d been fooled into thinking the picture was real.
After telling reporters he had seen an image that confirmed Usama is "definitely dead," Brown later said "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic.

Let us take Cobb's conspiracy theory to its logical limit! I can conspiracy conspire with the best of 'em:

Q: Why did the White house dither so long on whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse and then announce there would be no release?
A: There are no photos of bin Laden's corpse because bin Laden is not a corpse. He was snatched, not killed. The bogus photos that some Members received came from the CIA. They were trial balloons of deliberately faked photos. The "leak" was actually a test of the photos' credibility. It was only after they had been quickly debunked that the White House pulled the plug on using them as "official" photos.

Q: What about the burial at sea?
A: There was no burial at sea off USS Carl Vinson, some of whose officers and crew, including the captain, are part of the conspiracy. As for the SEALs and crews of the Army's 160th SOAR who flew the mission, they won't even tell you what they had for breakfast this morning, much less the respiratory status of a body brought out of a mission objective.

Q: So why the elaborate cover story that OBL was killed?
A: We don't want his successors in al Qaeda to know that OBL, having been waterboarded before 24 hours passed, has spilled his guts just as fully as 9/11's mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did after he was captured.

Q: Wait! Bin Laden was water boarded? I thought that Obama outlawed that!
A: Yeah, right. Remember, there's an election coming up in only, what 550 days or so. You think that not water boarding OBL is going to stand in the way of a second term? Just wait until the three months before November when we are incrementally fed through a thoroughly compliant media story after story of terrorist plots stopped by analyzing the intel info grabbed during the raid.

And stipulating that all Cobb proposes is true ... does the president know? Or does he really think that OBL is chatting it up right now with Luca Brazzi?

Think it couldn't happen? Remember that naval intelligence actually removed FDR from the distribution list of intercepted, decoded Japanese signals in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The problem with all this, of course, is that "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." As Chuck Colson, who did prison time for being part of the Watergate coverup, put it, a conspiracy always gets blown, and the more people there are in it, the quicker.

This is exactly why I still insist that proof of OBLs' death must be made public. Not only will it dampen some (not all) of the conspiracy theories already abounding in Muslim lands, failure to do so will make it more likely that similar conpsiracy theories will start to gain credibility here. This must not happen.

For the record: I believe that the SOF operators went into the compound knowing that there was a high likelihood that OBL was there - but that killing or capturing him was not the highest priority of the mission, though high indeed it was. To repeat myself,

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. ... What the raid did was retrieve enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so.

Even if bin Laden had not been there, the raid would have been a smashing success because of the intelligence goldmine, the capture of which was surely of no lower priority than confronting bin Laden. But OBL was there. The SEALs killed him. Could they have captured him instead? We'll never know. But dead he is at the close-up hands of the US military. And what's even better, the US Congress authorized it.

Little gunfire during bin Laden raid

I speculated earlier today that there was probably not a lot of gunfire during the SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's Abottabad compound last Sunday.

There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to.

Just a few minutes ago, NBC Nightly News reported that there was only a little shooting inside the compound and almost all of it done by the SEALs. The only man who shot at the SEALs was a bodyguard, who promptly went to meet his 72 virgins.

The report also said that the SEALs encountered bin Laden's 19-year-old son on an interior stair and shot him dead. Osama himself peered down the stairs, saw the SEALs and ran back into his room, barely dodging a burst from a SEAL. The SEALs charged into the bedroom, where one shot bin Laden's wife in the leg. Another SEAL shot bin Laden once in the chest and once in the head. That was all the shooting. The rest of the 40 minutes the SEALs spent on the ground was taken up by piling as much material of intelligence value as possible into their grab bags.

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. That's why I earlier wrote that what the raid did was retrieve "enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so."

Did US shut down Pak electrical and comms in Abbottabad to raid bin Laden?

A very titillating tidbit is found in this ABC report:

Residents near the bin Laden compound told ABC News that just before the stealth helicopters arrived, all electricity and cellphone service was knocked out and then came back on right after the choppers left.

If true, this is a stunning report. It would indicate that US Special Operations Command has the ability to do something like an EMP - electromagnetic pulse - that is not a pulse, but a continuous, disabling stream of EM energy that can be turned on and off at will. Frankly, I'm skeptical because the power and transmission requirements for such a device would be enormous. Jamming cellphone frequencies would be of little challenge to signals specialists, but shutting down even part of an electrical grid by non-destructive, non-invasive means would be incredibly daunting.

But there are some interesting other sources: "Making sense of the Osama op through tweets."

There are also references in the tweets of a blackout in the town, roads being blocked, telephones going dead and sirens being sounded. It is not clear whether these things happened during the raid or after the US choppers had left with bin Laden's body.

Even so, the question is begged just why there was not even a Pakistani police response during the 40 minutes that US special ops were on the ground. The answer would seem to lead down two divergent trails:

1. There was secret Pakistani involvement in the raid who stopped Abbottabad authorities from responding. Regardless of what the Pak government's official, public stance is toward OBL or the raid, it may be that there was a level of cooperation that no one wants to talk about. In fact, to take this conspiracy theory all the way, might there have been a "rogue" cell within the Pak military of intelligence service that cooperated with no knowledge by, much less sanction of, the Pak government?

2. There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to. For that matter, special operators have silenced weapons that are not publicized. (In World War II, the OSS developed a pistol so silent that OSS Director Bill Donovan took it into the the Oval Office and fired several rounds into a small sandbag he had brought with him. Roosevelt, who was looking away while he dictated a letter, did not even turn around. This according to Donovan's deputy, Stanley Lovell, in his book Of Spies and Stratagems.)

The tweets from Abbottabad refer to how much noise the helicopters made in and over bin Laden's compound, although the choppers' approaches seem not to have been perceived very much. What gunfire sounds did come from the compound may have been overwhelmed by the machine noise.

Still, the lack or emergency response is more than a little curious. Forty minutes is quite enough time for at least a few police patrols to have reached the compound. Why didn't they? The US government is not asking, and the Pakistanis aren't saying.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Stealth helicopter? What stealth helicopter?

We know that the SOF team that retrieved enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so, flew out of Abbottabad with one fewer helicopters than they went in with.

We also know that the helicopters belonged to the US Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, based at Fort Campbell, Ky.

The 160th specializes in airborne special operations missions. It falls under the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., and includes about 1,400 soldiers, most of whom are based at Fort Campbell.

The 160th has become known as the Night Stalkers because of its capability to strike undetected during darkness.

Tail boom of the US helicopter left behind
at bin Laden's compound

The circumstances of the crash are unclear. It has been reported that the tail boom of the downed chopper, reportedly a specialized UH-60 Black Hawk, struck the wall around bin Laden's compound as it came into land. Photos appearing on ABCNews' site support this conclusion - the photo at right shows the tail boom next to the wall. The SOFs destroyed the rest of the helicopter, leaving it a charred pile of ashes and molten aluminum.

Queries to the Defense Department on the identity and nature of the aircraft are rebuffed with a polite version of, "no comment." Nonetheless, other photos from the compound reveal interesting details of the bird. One of them shows the tail rotor closeup.

Tail boom closeup

The disk at the lower right of the photo is what intrigues. It covers the central hub the tail rotor (the boom is lying sideways) and speculation is all over the place about what it reveals about the rest of the aircraft.

Most analysts say that the disk is mainly intended to suppress rotor noise. ABCNews reports,

But photos of what survived the explosion -- the tail section of the craft with curious modifications -- has sent military analysts buzzing about a stealth helicopter program that was only rumored to exist. From a modified tail boom to a noise reducing covering on the rear rotors and a special high-tech material similar to that used in stealth fighters, former Department of Defense official and vice president of the Lexington Institute Dan Goure said the bird is like nothing he's ever seen before.

There are undoubtedly many other stealthy characteristics of the aircraft. But for nighttime flying, noise suppression is most crucial. The choppers would be flying dark, of course, and very, very low, making their detection by radar extremely difficult. But typical helicopters can be heard coming from kilometers away. Not these, though.

Neighbors of bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, told ABC News they didn't hear the helicopters the night of the Sunday raid until they were directly overhead. The rotor covering, along with a special rotor design, suppressed the choppers noise while inbound, Bill Sweetman, editor and chief of Defense Technology International, said.

Pakistan and China have close military ties. That this tail boom and most of the burned wreckage will wind up in Beijing seems a foregone conclusion. That is not a good thing.