Don't join the Army (or the Air Force, the Marines or the Navy) expecting to find honor

from mr. fish at truthdig...



full disclosure - i'm a vietnam veteran...

i was invited to a veterans day assembly at my grandson's school on thursday... i went for him only, not out of any particular pride i have in being a veteran...

while it's a fact that my gi bill enabled me to earn both my undergraduate and graduate degrees (for which i'm grateful and without which i would not have been able to repeatedly land on my feet over the years), that i learned a great deal from my experience, that i never had to fire my rifle the entire time, that i came back in one piece, and that my health care provider for the past ten years has been the va (since i can't afford private insurance), being a vietnam vet isn't something i advertise... while i'm not ashamed of it, i am acutely aware of just how much my country is steeped in militarism and that is something i just can't support...

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An Air Force officer gives his unvarnished opinion of the DADT repeal

intolerance won't go away, it'll just go underground...

I also had the distastefull [sic] duty of delivering the mandatory 'Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell' brief, and ensuring documentation of same for 100% of the squadron. Definitely one of those 'salute smartly, and carry out your orders' kind of assignments.

for obvious reasons, i can't reveal the source... i do know, however, that he flies predator drone missions...

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Ender's Game - annihilating real people by video game

in the park where i had my rv set up this summer, the man of the family parked across from me was an air force guy headed off to do drone training... he was a really nice guy despite being a batshit crazy, wingnut, fundamentalist christian, neocon... needless to say, i had to completely ignore all his comments about wicked liberals because i knew if i rose to the bait, only one of us would come out alive and since i'm rapidly entering my dotage, i knew it wouldn't be me...

This year, the Air Force will train more joystick pilots than new fighter and bomber pilots. "If you want to be in the center of the action, this is the place to be," Schwartz says. "It's not a temporary phenomenon. It's a sustainable career path. I've made that very clear." Lt. Col. Travis Burdine, a Predator pilot-from-afar, has gotten the message: "We all joined the Air Force to go flying, but word on the street is that job satisfaction is very high [manning a joystick]. Every day we're doing this, we're in the thick of the fight. We fly 36 [combat air patrols] a day. Where they're happening, the hottest 36 things are going on."

It's not hard now to imagine a time when the dominant combat leaders of the Air Force have no physical contact with airplanes. "We're opening an aperture," Schwartz says. "How do we define a warrior-airman? The definition is expanding." Whatever happens, he says, "the trend lines are inescapable: we increasingly will become less of a manned aviation force." C. R. Anderegg, the Air Force historian, says that just as the generals of the 1950s and '60s were predominantly bomber pilots, and the generals of the 1970s and '80s were mainly fighter pilots, so a lot of the generals in the coming decades may be UAV joystick pilots. "It's going to be pretty hard for a promotion board, picking the next one-star generals, to pick a colonel who hasn't commanded a UAV wing over a colonel who has. The UAV commander has the experience, and he has a larger, less insular view of the battlefield than, say, an F-22 pilot at Langley."

how cool is this...? annihilating people from 10,000 miles away... it's the ultimate video game and nicely fulfills the apocalyptic vision of one of the more popular science fiction bestsellers, ender's game...

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Here's a story presented as a "gee-whiz" technology piece that should make your blood run cold

Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times

imagine looking up and seeing one of these circling your neighborhood... imagine knowing what it can do... imagine living with that kind of terror day in and day out...

this article reminds me of the public-service ads praising the brave men and women who proudly defend our country using only the very latest technology selflessly dished up by our glorious defense establishment that you'd see on tv in the late 50s and early 60s... what it really is, of course, is a continuing glorification of death and destruction, only rendered more horrifyingly anonymous with the shift to hapless paid assassins raining death from the skies as they sit comfortably in barcaloungers in the nevada desert many thousands of miles from their victims... then, after a hard day at the "office," they go home to the wife and kids for dinner and a night in front of the tv...

The Pentagon is preparing to graduate its first pilots of unmanned drones from the elite U.S. Air Force Weapons School -- a version of the Navy's Top Gun program -- in a bid to elevate the skills and status of the officers who fly Predators, one of the military's fastest growing aircraft programs.

The elite flight schools of the Air Force and Navy are most closely associated with smart, tough fighter jocks. But over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the MQ-1 Predator and more heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper craft have become, to many in the Pentagon, the most important aircraft the U.S. has deployed.

[...]

The Predator and Reaper pilots do their debriefings and classroom work at Nellis with weapons school students specializing in other aircraft. They fly the drones from nearby Creech Air Force Base, the control station used to fly drones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

since we're so hot on this new method of killing and destroying, how about using those new teeny-tiny robot drones to film what happens on the ground and then making that required viewing at the conclusion of each pilot's mission...? maybe watching children screaming and dying, bodies being blasted into raw, bloody bits, and buildings collapsing on and crushing their occupants would bring a better sense of reality to the whole affair...

while we're at it, why not include a slaughter-house photo gallery with each neat, shrink-wrapped package of meat in the supermarket butcher case as a reminder of how it came to be there...?

just sayin'...

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$16.2M for the Air Force to create "world class" accommodations exceeding the standards of a regular business-class flight

flying as a passenger in a large military cargo aircraft is no joy ride... neither is flying economy on a commercial airline or a military passenger aircraft... but my response to that is, "tough shit"... i'm a regular long-haul flyer and i have to make do with what i can afford - economy - or what my employer will pay for - economy... if i have work to do, i figure out how to get it done... if i want to sleep, i try to make myself as comfortable as possible and nod off... i don't get the pleasure of the lie-flat beds in first class... i don't even get the pleasure of the fully-reclining seats in business class... the last thing we need is our military leaders even more separated from their troops than they are by enjoying first-class amenities on their travels, particularly amenities paid for by anti-terrorism funds...

from page one of today's wapo...

The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules' carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

[...]

Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.


The Air Force's new capsules, which will
fit in large aircraft, are meant to ensure
that senior military officers and civilian
leaders can travel in comfort.
(Special To The Washington Post)


An Air Force document specified that the
capsule's seats are to swivel such that
"the longitudinal axis of the seat is
parallel to the longitudinal axis of the
aircraft" regardless of where the capsules
are facing.
(Special To The Washington Post)

The effort has been slowed, however, by congressional resistance to using counterterrorism funds for the project and by lengthy internal deliberations about a series of demands for modifications by Air Force generals. One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table's wood be darkened.

Changing the seat color and pockets alone was estimated in a March 12 internal document to cost at least $68,240.

In all, for the past three years the service has asked to divert $16.2 million to the effort from what the military calls the GWOT, or global war on terrorism. Congress has twice told the service that it cannot, including an August 2007 letter from Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) to the Pentagon ordering that the money be spent on a "higher priority" need.

Officials say the Air Force nonetheless decided last year to take $331,000 from counterterrorism funds to cover a cost overrun, partly stemming from the design changes, although a senior officer said yesterday in response to inquiries that it will reverse that decision.

i repeat... tough shit... fly like the rest of us... more importantly, fly like the troops have to fly...

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What's going on here?

i'm not sure i believe any of these official stories... somethin's up... each one of these is big news all by itself but, in every one, the story is either being underplayed or the explanation seems fishy - or both...

why is gates firing top generals...? yeah, i know what it SAYS, but there's more to this than meets the eye...

Gates ousts Air Force leaders in historic shake-up

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the Air Force's top military and civilian leaders Thursday, holding them to account in a historic Pentagon shake-up after embarrassing nuclear mix-ups.

Gates announced at a news conference that he had accepted the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne — a highly unusual double firing.

Gates said his decision was based mainly on the damning conclusions of an internal report on the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads. And he linked the underlying causes of that slip-up to another startling incident: the flight last August of a B-52 bomber that was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

this next one is equally explosive and, natch, hasn't even been covered in u.s. news media...

US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday.

Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.

The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.

Iraqi critics of the agreement say that it means Iraq will be a client state in which the US will keep more than 50 military bases. American forces will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government. American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.

The US had previously denied it wanted permanent bases in Iraq, but American negotiators argue that so long as there is an Iraqi perimeter fence, even if it is manned by only one Iraqi soldier, around a US installation, then Iraq and not the US is in charge.

The US has security agreements with many countries, but none are occupied by 151,000 US soldiers as is Iraq. The US is not even willing to tell the government in Baghdad what American forces are entering or leaving Iraq, apparently because it fears the government will inform the Iranians, said an Iraqi source.

then, there's this last one which only serves to tell me that the financial/economic collapse that seemed imminent only a couple of months ago hasn't gone away...

Banks fear new $5,000bn balance burden

Accounting changes could force US banks to take thousands of billions of dollars back on to their balance sheets in the coming months in a move that is likely to curb further their lending and could push them into new capital raisings, analysts have warned.

Analysts at Citigroup said a planned tightening of the rules regarding off-balance sheet vehicles would force banks to reconsider arrangements and could result in up to $5,000bn of assets coming back on to the books.

The off-balance sheet vehicles have been used by financial institutions to keep some assets off their balance sheets, thereby avoiding the need to hold regulatory capital against them.

i was hoping the article would give me some more information about these "accounting changes" other than broad general strokes... ('course, if it had, i probably wouldn't have understood it anyway...)

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Killing "Bubba" using hi-tech, remote-controlled horror: "Suddenly, the two men explode"

gosh... it's just like a video game...


Photos provided by the U.S. Air Force
Inside the U.S. Air Force's Combined Air & Space Operations Center
in the Middle East

Each [screen] is about 5 feet wide, displaying remarkably clear live footage from cameras mounted on the Air Force's un-manned Predator drones that buzz incessantly above Iraq and Afghanistan. The Predator drones, however, are not filming a raging firefight, or a bridge about to be strafed from the air.

They are stalking prey.

You see a man, walking through a shrub-dotted, dusty field. A small dog wanders behind him. Another screen shows a group of individuals, standing huddled together on a city street, looking like they could be chatting about a ballgame. A third Predator tracks a figure getting into a car, following as the car snakes through traffic. Yet another screen stays fixated on a single squat house surrounded by what looks like a low cement wall, as if someone is about to emerge from the front door.

The scenes look misleadingly pedestrian. The miniature people on the screens do not know they are being watched. "We are looking for individual people," Lt. Col. Walt Manwill says, as he stares up at the massive screens. "Especially when you are killing people, you want to make sure you do it right." Manwill, a blockish former pilot whose call sign is Fridge, is a chief of combat operations here, on what the Air Force simply calls "the floor." He handles one of three eight-hour shifts in a job that runs 24 hours a day.

Targeters here show me recent footage of two men on the ground in Iraq. The two men, far below the Predator drone's gaze, appear to be setting up a mortar on a city street. They are in the shadow of a building just feet away. Suddenly, the two men explode. Everything around the men, including the buildings, looks unharmed. But when the dust clears, the two men are wiped away. A small bomb, tailor-made for hunting single individuals, has done the job.

besides the nightmarish scene described above in which a duo presumably intent on causing death and destruction are exterminated, seemingly by god himself, we have our u.s. air force coming to realizations like this from the comfort of their air-conditioned operations center...

The Air Force learned the hard way that inadvertently killing and injuring civilians or damaging property is counterproductive to the overall cause. "We went back and looked at our procedures -- how we use air, why we use air and under what circumstances," explains [Col. Gary Crowder, the commander of the operations center]. "We changed the way we do business."

"It's just like a business," agrees Maj. Gen. Maury Forsyth, the deputy commander of Air Force operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Every time you have one unsatisfied customer, you have to have nine satisfied customers to counteract that," he says during an interview in his office. "I'll put it this way: All of the military and political benefits of 10 perfect airstrikes targeting insurgent leaders can be lost in a few seconds by one strike that goes awry and causes civilian casualties."

to complete the absolute horror of this hi-tech operation and the characterization of those ordering the killing as "customers", the targets have even been given a nickname - "bubba"...

The technology the Air Force relies on to kill Bubba, but not his neighbors, is mesmerizing. It also makes the process of killing another human being eerily impersonal.

On the floor, once Bubba is up on the screen, targeting officials can quickly call up satellite images of his location. They have at their fingertips high-fidelity images less than 90 days old of nearly every square foot of Iraq and Afghanistan -- a vast amount of data. By overlaying two images of the same location taken from separate angles, and donning a pair of gray 3-D glasses (I wore a pair), a stunning real-life-looking, 3-D image of Bubba's house appears on a computer screen: There is Bubba's yard, the tree in Bubba's yard and so on. Using a mouse to point and click, a computer quickly determines the size, height and precise location of nearby structures.

to say that i am aghast would be a serious understatement... and, as much as i would like to repress it, another thought crosses my mind... this available and highly-sophisticated technology of instant and impersonal death is on the horizon for domestic use... bet on it...

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The nuclear weapons oops: "We are not talking about paintball cartridges or pellet gun ammo"

remember this...?

Last month, six W80-1 nuclear-armed AGM-129 advanced cruise missiles were flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana and sat on the tarmac for 10 hours undetected.

Press reports initially cited the Air Force mistake of flying nuclear weapons over the United States in violation of Air Force standing orders and international treaties, while completely missing the more important major issues, such as how six nuclear cruise missiles got loose to begin with.

well, check this...

from the ft. worth star-telegram via raw story...

Robert Stormer of Chicago is a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, serving with the Navy's Supervisor of Salvage, and was a specialist in weapons retrieval. He is a marine engineer and marine salvage specialist.

lt. commander stormer has some very important questions...

1 Why, and for what ostensible purpose, were these nuclear weapons taken to Barksdale?

2 How long was it before the error was discovered?

3 How many mistakes and errors were made, and how many needed to be made, for this to happen?

4 How many and which security protocols were overlooked?

5 How many and which safety procedures were bypassed or ignored?

6 How many other nuclear command and control non-observations of procedure have there been?

7 What is Congress going to do to better oversee U.S. nuclear command and control?

8 How does this incident relate to concern for reliability of control over nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere?

9 Does the Bush administration, as some news reports suggest, have plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons?

10 If this was an accident, have we degraded our military to a point where we are now making critical mistakes with our nuclear arsenal? If so, how do we correct this?

he concludes with these thoughts...

Yes, heads must roll and careers will end. But let's make sure that this includes the ranks from general officers to noncommissioned ones.

Or is this to be the Air Force version of the Abu Ghraib investigation?

from the moment this story broke, i've felt that it may well be THE smoking gun that brings the house of cards tumbling down... yes, i've said that before about other things and have been wrong, not necessarily wrong about the seriousness or the criminality of the issues in question, just wrong about if or how soon they would blow up in bushco's face... you gotta admit, there's SOMETHING really rotten lurking under this one...

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Air Combat Command day off for "safety" 14 September

A B-52 on a carpet-bombing mission in Vietnam

why is my tin-foil hat buzzing...?

from the air force times...

On Sept. 14, flight lines will be very quiet at Air Combat Command bases.

The entire command — about 100,000 active-duty airmen — is standing down training flights and many other operations as part of a command-wide safety day.

Command boss Gen. Ronald Keys ordered the Sept. 14 safety stand-down in the wake of the Aug. 30 nuclear incident at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., in which six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were loaded onto a B-52H and then flown to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., without anyone on the ground or bomber realizing the nuclear weapons were on the plane. It was not until the B-52H was parked at Barksdale that ground crews discovered the cruise missiles were carrying real warheads.

[...]

Just how serious Keys takes the lapse of regulations at Minot is reflected in the fact that the safety stand-down is the first command-wide safety day in recent memory.

(thanks to casey at open your mind's eye...)

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The "gay bomb" - truly, THE most bizarre story I've ever read

when i first read this on americablog, i thought it was a spoof... sadly, no...

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

[...]

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

words fail me...

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