Moonbattery Archives

The Easy Way and The Hard Way

By Lt Col P

Via B5 and MMM, this disappointing cave-in:

A national tour featuring decorated veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan won't be stopping at Forest Lake Area High School today as planned, after school leaders abruptly canceled the visit.

It looks to me like the principal just doesn't want to deal with any controversy at all, or make an even remotely tough decision. How nice. What good life lessons he's imparting to his young charges. And to make it worse, all he's facing is pissy backlash from OTHER AMERICANS.

On the other hand, want to meet a guy who isn't afraid of confronting his (and our) adversaries? He has more on the line than limp-dicked protests and mild controversy. He lives in a place with life and death consequences for dissent. Apparently he's not fazed by it, and if he is, he rucks up and does it anyway.

Now there's a lesson for you.

This Explains A Lot

By Lt Col P

Yep, this is making the rounds, but the more exposure the merrier.

Honestly, it's so over the top that one little part of me says it's a set-up.

BUUUTTTTTT the rest of me says nope, it's for real. Rob Riggle in in fact a reserve Marine, and as for the other stars, well, remember who you're dealing with. Good for the Daily Show for airing Berkley's idiocy.

"Any constitutional scholar with giant hands..." That's still making me laugh.

Pentagon Faces A Battle On Climate Change (?)

By Charlie

So say John Podesta and Peter Ogden, I, however, heartily disagree. This opinion piece in Financial Times is one of the strangest reads I’ve had in a long time, and displays a profound misunderstanding of both the purpose of the military and its real-world commitments and tasks. So here we go:

There are five key areas in which effective military planning can be undermined by uncertainty over when and how the major carbon-emitting countries combat climate change.

First, climate change poses a threat to fragile states that lack the capacity to adapt to environmental shifts. The Pentagon needs to know if the military will be called upon to operate more often in countries that have collapsed or are on the brink of doing so. The risk of a regional conflagration sparked by global warming is particularly severe in east Africa and south Asia . How urgently should the Pentagon begin planning for such contingencies?

Planning for ops in third world backwaters is nothing new, and it is something the military has become adept in executing. That is why we have methods of circumventing infrastructure problems by using staging areas, airlift, and convoys. As far as a risk of a regional conflagration in east Africa , I’m more concerned over the current conflicts there that are driven by ethnicity, religion and a struggle for resources and political power. If you want to play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon here, and link those four major issues I outlined to global warming, have at it, but the Janjaweed militias in Sudan aren’t upset over Darfur ’s carbon emission levels. Next point here, about Pentagon planning: I agree, someone should form some sort of command, and put it in charge of Africa . I’ve even got a great name picked out for it…

OK, sarcasm off, moving on:

Read More »

No Sonar in the SOCALs

By Bull Nav

Well, once again, a court has decided that it knows what is best for the country:

LOS ANGELES (AP) ― A federal judge says the Navy must follow environmental laws placing strict limits on sonar training.

So the ball is now back into the President's court, while our ASW readiness continues to be affected because some people would attempt to protect the environment based on faulty (or no) data (and where have we heard that before?).

ASW - Anti-submarine Warfare - is not an easy game. The primary tool surface ships have is active sonar, which is when you put sound energy into the water and look for a "return" similar to a radar return. In the undersea environment, there can be lots of things that cause false returns: schools of fish, whales, ships, and undersea mountains, just to name a few. When the operators get little to no practice, they will not be ready when a real situation comes along.

Therefore, as I see it, these judges are affecting readiness and the ability of the Navy to do its part, as chartered by Congress, to defend the country. Making decisions based on feelings and a serious lack of data are going to cost us one day in a big way.

These guys need to back off, and let the Navy train the way it needs to train.

Aid And Comfort

By Lt Col P

For the enemy, that is. On our shores. MMM has been following it and has details.

After seeing this pic at SFGate, I have one question though-- who's the dark-green guy giving the hippies a beat-down? A Marine? Former Marine? Incensed patriot? Either way, he doesn't look like he's on their side.

BTW, go sign the petition.

Boycott Whole Foods

By Bull Nav

Yes, incendiary as it sounds, BOYCOTT WHOLE FOODS.

In a nutshell, they fired a clerk this week, a former Marine no less, for apprehending a shoplifter. In the process, they have created an unparalleled criminal empowerment zone.

John Schultz says he lost his job at Whole Foods Market in Ann Arbor after he tried to stop a shoplifter from making a getaway.
Schultz says he had just punched out for a break at 7 p.m. on Sunday when he heard a commotion at the front door of the store, 3135 Washtenaw Ave. He said he came to the aid of the manager who yelled for help in stopping a shoplifter. Schultz, the manager and another employee cornered the shoplifter between two cars in the parking lot.
Schultz said he told the shoplifter he was making a citizens arrest and to wait for the police to arrive, but the shoplifter broke away from the group and ran across Washtenaw Avenue and toward a gas station at the corner of Huron Parkway.
Before the man could cross Huron Parkway, Schultz caught up and grabbed the man's jacket and put his leg behind the man's legs. When the manager arrived at the intersection, Schultz said, the manager told him to release the shoplifter, and he complied, and the shoplifter got away.
Schultz said he was called to the store's office the next day, on Christmas Eve, and was fired because he violated a company policy prohibiting employees from having any physical contact with a customer.

Of course, they have a policy.

Kate Klotz, a company spokesperson, said the policy is clear and listed in a booklet that all employees have to acknowledge that they received before they can start work.
"The fact that he touched him, period, is means for termination," said Klotz.

You work in a store, the manager yells for help, you chase down a shoplifter and get fired? ON CHRISTMAS EVE?

And the manager told him to let the shoplifter go after he was caught!!!

Didn't steal too much, though.

The bag contained $346 worth of food and other products.

We will not be shopping there any more, not that we did that much anyway. It sounds to me that they want low-life thieves and scumbags to come in and clean them out. I do not think that it is going to be very safe.

The company's position is that they don't want to be subjected to lawsuits because their employees touch a "customer."

Which is a load of CYA crap.

If I had been standing there and they said they were chasing a shoplifter, you can guaran-Goddamn-tee I would have joined in the chase. I just can't believe they let him go. Only in Ann Arbor...

What is Mr. Shultz's attitude?

Despite losing his job, would Schultz do it again? "Absolutely, 100 percent yes," he said, calling it his civic duty.

So if there is a Whole Foods near you call'em up and tell them you won't be going to shop there any more and tell them this story.

You can read the articles in the Ann Arbor News here and here.

NBC Re-Deploys, Supports Freedom's Watch

By Charlie

Sensing an imminent public relations backlash, NBC conducts retrograde ops:

WASHINGTON -- NBC reversed course Saturday and decided to air a conservative group's television ad thanking U.S. troops.

The ad, by the group Freedom's Watch, asks viewers to remember the troops during the holiday season. NBC had refused to air the ad because it guides viewers to the Freedom's Watch Web site, which NBC said was too political.

"We have reviewed and changed our ad standards guidelines and made the decision that our policy will apply to content only and not to a referenced Web site. Based on these amended standards the Freedom's Watch ad will begin to run as early as Sunday."

Freedom's Watch Ad Denied

By Charlie

I caught this on the news today - the ads are here. I saw one on Fox, and it was just a bunch of average joe Americans saying "thank you" to the troops abroad for serving. I really don't see anything controversial about it, but I think it does NBC more harm than good in the dust-up over their refusal to air it.

Anti-War Group Protests...um, a ban on Protesting

By John

Anti-War Vets Slam Parade Ban -

LONG BEACH - Iraq veteran Jason Lemieux might not be marching in the 11th annual Long Beach Veterans Day Parade on Saturday.

The Marine, who served three tours of duty in Iraq and is now against the war, was hoping to march as a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a national organization that calls for immediate withdrawal of troops in Iraq.

The group's application, however, was rejected last month because of its political views, parade coordinators said.

"I wanted to march like the rest of the Iraq veterans," said Lemieux, a 24-year-old Anaheim resident. "I served my country. I'm a veteran of a foreign war. I think I deserve that respect."

Iraq Veterans, along with the groups Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out, applied to march together in the parade this year under the entry "Military Patriots."

After reviewing each group's mission statement, the Veterans Day Parade Committee, a non-profit group that organizes the event, voted unanimously to reject the application, said parade coordinator Martha Thuente.

"They do not fit the spirit of the parade," she said. "The spirit being one of gratitude for what the veterans have done. We do not want groups of a political nature, advocating the troops' withdrawal from Iraq."

Mixed feelings on this. One one hand, I'm thinking that anyone who has served (and was discharged honorably) deserves to march in parade celebrating military service. On the other, those guys are being totally obnoxious. I don't know what their intentions are, but their annoying "include me or else!" mentality makes it look as if they're trying to hijack a non-partisan event and use it for their own selfish purposes. Equally irritating is the way they act as if the legitimacy of the entire constitution rests on their right to crash another Bubba's BBQ. Witness:

The rejection has left many veterans and anti-war groups outraged.

"It think it's absurd," said Adrian Novotny, president of the Long Beach Chapter of Veterans for Peace, a national nonprofit that advocates non-violence, VA healthcare and veterans' rights. "It's a violation of Democracy, the whole concept which we are allegedly dying for."

Meh. No one is stopping you from holding your own parade that no one will show up to, Beavis.

HuffPo Yanks Green Zone Series

By John

HuffPo, y'done good.

After this post was published, some commenters and bloggers, especially Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard raised a number of questions about its accuracy. As is our policy, we asked Mr. Sanders to either provide backup for his factual claims or retract them. His response follows. In it, he acknowledges three "flat-out" inaccuracies: Apache helicopters fall under the auspices of the Army not the Air Force; the USS Independence was not, as claimed, headed to the Persian Gulf in 2002 (it was decommissioned in 1998); and Sanders left out the word "battalion" in the sentence, "a pair of Apache helicopter battalions can devour more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night's attack." These have been corrected in the post.

Sanders also raises the issue of jet exhaust that results when "a squadron of F-22s, say, fly sortie after sortie, at fairly low elevations, over a crowded neighborhood in Baghdad." Goldfarb says "an F-22 has never, ever, flown a sortie over Baghdad, let alone at low altitude and in squadron formation." In his response, Sanders disputes this, but Air Force spokesperson Maj. Kristin Marposon told HuffPost that F-22s have not been used in Iraq.

As for the other facts in dispute -- namely the number of jets stationed on aircraft-carrier groups in the Gulf, the number of stealth bombers and US planes in Saudi Arabia, and the number of aircraft carrier task forces stationed in the Gulf -- Sanders offers a detailed explanation of how he arrived at his figures. We'll leave it to you to decide the persuasiveness of his explanation. For us, it confuses as much as it clarifies.

Mr. Sanders feels that the dispute over these details obscures the larger point of his argument. Maybe so, but we are committed to maintaining the highest possible standards of accuracy and transparency. Accordingly, we will not be running the remaining parts of his Green Zone series.

Responsible decision. Goldfarb notes that: ...the Huffington Post has corrected its mistake and, in fact, demonstrated a laudable commitment to accuracy and transparency. Professional journalists--you know who you are--could learn a thing or two about journalism from Arianna Huffington.

He's right. Credit to HuffPo, they acted like real pros here. And yeah, The New Republic could learn a thing or too from Miss Huffington. Instead of saying "hey we screwed up" back in August, TNR has dragged out the Beauchamp affair so long that everyone -left and right- seems to be universally pissed at them for their lack of integrity. Compare that to HuffPo, who effectively killed the Sanders story on the spot. No one is going to remember this affair next week, while TNR is going to be suffering from the Beauchamp scandal for years.

Sanders retraction, by the way, was obnoxious. Read:

The argument about pollution stands; and nothing on the Weekly Standard takes on the pollution numbers! I begin the essay by saying that I write as a lay person--I am not a mathematician, not a military person, not a trained climatologist--and it would be wonderful to put together such a team and reach an absolutely authoritative version of this essay, if such a thing is even possible. At any rate, I feel initiated into this world of blog politics. As a friend told me from the outset, one cannot take on the military in this country, without getting knocked about.

Oh put down the violin dude. I'm not naive enough to think that the military should be immune from criticism. But you made an argument, and people held you accountable for what you said. And, surprise!, some folks even wanted you to defend your position. The fact that you were dumping on the service had nothing to do with your columns getting yanked, it had everything to do with the fact that you phoned in the research. So have a Coke and a smile and knock off the victim crap. This is your fault.

Mr. Goldfarb wants to know about the number of planes in Saudi Arabia. Here's my sentence: "To all that, we must add the 1,000 jets stationed on aircraft-carrier groups in the Gulf, along with 22 Stealth Bombers and another 700 planes in Saudi Arabia. First, the sentence, which perhaps could have been more clear, does not say that there are 22 Stealth Bombers in Saudi Arabia; the sentence says, we must account for them in terms of their pollution, wherever they are hidden.

Quote: In Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia.

First, the sentence, which perhaps could have been more clear, does not say that there are 22 Stealth Bombers in Saudi Arabia...

@(&*)#(()@*%

Let me quote from Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis (p. 141): "Before our withdrawal from Saudi Arabia in 2003, we habitually denied that we maintained a fleet of enormous and easily observed B-52 bombers in Jeddah because that was what the Saudi government demanded." This is the heart of my argument: "So long as military bureaucrats can continue to enforce a culture of secrecy to protect themselves, no one will know the true size of our baseworld, least of all the elected representatives of the American people." The question is how many in a fleet?

One, B-52s aren't stealth bombers. Two, that was 4 years ago. Three, the size of our current force of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s isn't a secret. Four, the location of the bomber force (secret or not) has no bearing on the size of the bomber force.

As to the exact number of planes in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia, again Chalmers Johnson, this time from The Sorrows of Empire, (page 239), says that by January 1991, the Prince Sultan Air Base "started to receive aircraft, and by the beginning of the Gulf War. . .it was capable of housing, servicing, and arming five fighter squadrons of aircraft and their supporting personnel (a typical American squadron consists of twenty-four aircraft.)" A few paragraphs later, he mentions F-15s and F-16s taking off there, after 1996. "In the years leading up to the second Iraq war, the air force flew a total of 286,000 missions from Prince Sultan and other Persian Gulf bases. . . ." I do not think it is possible now to know how many planes we had in Saudi Arabia prior to our leaving in 2003. The point I want readers to keep in mind is the amount of pollution generated by those hundreds of thousands of missions and how little we know about them--type, number, and so on.

Uh, how little you know about them. A symptom that could have been cured with a some basic fact checking.

Punch in Sultan Air Force Base on Google and you get the following: The Saudi base is very large and it has extensive landing and plane storage facilities. It has a 15,000 foot runway. Couple this with the numbers of flight missions from Chalmers Johnson. This was a large operation. I used the figure 700 planes. It sounds to me that it was larger, much larger, than that.

Okay, instead of getting all your information from Chalmers and the internet, a simple phone call to an Air Force public affairs office would have explained that Prince Sultan's primary use was enforcing the UN mandated southern no-fly zone in Iraq. It hasn't been a major hub for US forces since 2003.

Let's now turn to the question of the number of carrier task forces in the Gulf. First, from Reuters: "On January 20, 2007, the USS Stennis set sail for the Persian Gulf as part of an increase in US military presence within the Middle East. The Stennis joined the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the United States Fifth Fleet of operations. On May 23, 2007, the Stennis, along with eight other warships including the carrier USS Nimitz and amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard, passed through the Strait of Hormuz. US Navy officials said it was the largest such move since 2003." (Link)

How many ships does this total? Ten or Twelve? How many "carrier task forces" does that constitute? The web site Global Security (March 9, 2003) reports that "five carriers have been deployed to the region at the same time. . . an unprecedented floating air force. . ." The site says that the Kitty Hawk and the Constellation are already in the Persian Gulf. That's in addition to the Stennis, the Nimitz, and the Eisenhower. "The Lincoln left Everett, Washington. . . and was ordered back to the Gulf." We now have a total of six carriers, and who knows how many "carrier task forces," since each carrier usually travels, according to Global Security, with a "battle group of at least two cruisers, a destroyer and a submarine. Aboard each carrier is an air wing with about 70 aircraft, roughly 50 of which are strike planes." The DoD says that the Stennis actually holds ninety planes. Given the rest of the ships involved, the number is 1,000 or even more.

Does this guy have no concept of time? He's quoting Global Security from 2003 and Reuters from 2007. And even using his screwed up chronology, he still didn't account for the thirteen aircraft carriers which he claimed were all in the Gulf at the same time.

Honestly, his pseudo-retraction only make things worse. HuffPo said that it "confused more than it clarified," which is true effing statement right there. Can you imagine what the other two columns must have looked like?

Had he just said "sorry, I f*cked up. My bad." I wouldn't have got all pissy and wasted my time pumping out this enormous post.

Anyway, go read Qando and Murdoc for more. I'm as donezo as Sanders' tenure at HuffPo.

Huff'Po Knows Military

By John

This is too good to pass up. Mike Goldfarb at The Worldwide Standard braved the fever swamps of the Huffington Post to bring you this precious gem of an op-ed from English professor and apparent military genius Barry Sanders.

You're going to have to read it in chunks, because there are so many factual errors I have to copy the Goldfarb style of deconstruction.

The Green Zone: The Military's Addiction to Oil

Feeding the appetites of these voracious machines, with gasoline or diesel or kerosene, requires intricate logistical planning and support from some 2,000 trucks, a battery of computers, another 20,000 GIs, and, according to an Associated News report for September 2007, as many as 180,000 workers under federal contracts--more contract workers, in fact, than soldiers. Of the twenty-eight private security companies operating in Iraq, the major ones are Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy, Kellogg, Brown and Root, DynCorp International, and the Vinnell Corporation. The largest of them is not even American, but British, named the Aegis Corporation.

DynCorp does aircraft maintenance, logistics work, and provides security guards to deployed locations. KBR helps build operating bases. Vinnell trains the Saudi National Guard. Also, it'd help to learn the definition of mercenary. I know that every since some genius applied the term to Blackwater it's been the latest hot topic. But a merc is a soldier who fights the wars of a foreign government. Think the Hessians during our Revolutionary War or the Swiss Guard. Blackwater provides security for State and other VIPs. That's it. I can't stand the way people try to add a sprinkle of sensationalism to their rants by twisting around words to provoke an emotional reaction. It's dishonest and annoying.

Many of the contract workers are former military Special Forces troops, such as Navy Seals and the Army's Delta Force. The Seals conduct their operations with the philosophy of "spray and pray," a credo which seems to determine a good deal of the behavior of the mercenaries working for Blackwater USA, whose CEO, Erik Prince, left a career appointment in the Seals to start what is now a billion-dollar federal contracting firm, Blackwater USA.

Two paragraphs in and I'm already embarrassed for the guy. "Spray and pray?" SEALs and Delta are the most precise scalpels in our inventory. The thought of either unit running into combat with firing their weapons on full auto without even the courtesy of aiming is just plain idiotic. This also has nothing to do with military fuel consumption, Sanders is just going off on a weird inaccurate rant here.

The Navy uses an enormous amount of fuel for its nuclear and non-nuclear aircraft carriers. The recently decommissioned USS Independence, at its top speed of 25 knots per hour, consumed 134 barrels of fuel an hour, or close to 5,600 gallons an hour. (The ship boasts 4.1 acres of flight deck and a crew of 2,300.) On its way to the Persian Gulf in 2002, a trip that took fourteen days, the Independence went through two million gallons of fuel. Every four days, the ship took on an additional one million gallons of fuel, half of which went to supply the carrier's jets.

Uh, the Indy was decommed in the 1990s. It never steamed to the Gulf in '02. Also, I'm not sure if a carrier needs an UNREP every four days, but perhaps one of our Navy readers can confirm/deny? It's obvious that a conventionally powered boat like the Indy will eat more fuel than a Nimitz class, every four days seems a bit high.

Buckle up for the next paragraph folks, it's a dooz.

According to the 2006 Navy Almanac, at the beginning of 2006, the Navy held an inventory of 285 combat and support ships, along with 4,000 planes and helicopters. The DoD keeps classified the number and kinds of vessels stationed in the Gulf. But, we do know that President Bush ordered the USS Stennis and the USS Ronald Reagan to the Gulf in January 2007 as part of the surge. He also sent a "strike group," led by the nuclear aircraft carrier the USS Eisenhower, along with a cruiser, a destroyer, a frigate, a submarine escort, and a supply ship. Already sitting in the Gulf were ten other "Carrier Task Forces" built around the aircraft carriers Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Chester W. Nimitz, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, Harry S. Truman, and the Abraham Lincoln. Ninety attack planes sit on each carrier's deck, ready at any moment to fly into combat.

That's right. Every carrier in our inventory, plus one that has been waiting to be turned into scrap metal since 2003 (Constellation), was in the Persian Gulf earlier this year. Soak it in folks, military commentary doesn't get much better than this.

Of all the branches, the Air Force uses the most fuel. In 2006, for instance, the Air Force consumed nearly half of the DoD supply, 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel, the same amount of fuel consumed from December 1941 to August 1945, during World War II. Flying machines, like the Apache helicopter, blow through fuel at an astonishing rate. Powered by two General Electric gas-turbine engines, each rated at 1,890-horse power, the Apache gets about one-half mile to the gallon. Just one pair of Apaches in a single night's raid will consume about 60,000 gallons of jet fuel. Any of the large helicopters--the Sea Stallion, Super Stallion, Sea Dragon, or Pave Low III--sucks up five gallons every mile. But that's nothing compared with the fighter planes. With its afterburners fired up, the F-16 Fighter Jet uses 800 gallons per hour, the F-15 about 1,580 gallons per hour. More dramatically, the F-4 Phantom Fighter uses 40 barrels of fuel, or more than 1,600 gallons an hour, each and every hour. But the gas hog award goes to the B-52 Stratocruiser, which has eight jet engines, and zips through an astonishing 86 barrels of fuel, or roughly 3,334 gallons per hour. In one hour of flight--600 miles--the B-52 uses as much fuel as the average driver uses in seven years.

We haven't flown the F-4 in over a decade. How dramatic. Not mentioned was the fact that the Air Force has been one of the most aggressive organizations in the world when it comes to the push for alternative fuel sources. What lacked in accuracy could have been slightly compensated for in honesty, but... whatever.

The Pentagon places the fuel it reserves for supposed international purposes--primarily for the Navy--in a category called International Bunker Fuel. Bunker Fuel--or more accurately called Bunker Oil--remains off the record, ghost stuff, as non-existent as the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, making the CO2 emissions for the military even grosser than anyone's assumptions and calculations. The problem is further compounded by the fact that Bunker Oil contains a higher concentration of sulfur than other diesel fuels, and so pollutes not just with CO2, but with SO2 (sulfur dioxide), as well. The two gases in combination do more damage to the environment, for they form a thicker layer in the atmosphere and hold the heat in more tenaciously. In actuality, then, the military may be consuming twice as much fuel as the DoD suggests, or even higher--perhaps three times as much--and polluting much more--again, perhaps, by a factor of three. Surprisingly, the United States does not figure into its own annual CO2 numbers any of the greenhouse gases that the military generates.

Can we assume that this guy knows about as much about climatology and the science behind global warming that he does about the military? I've read this paragraph three times and I still don't know what point he's trying to make here. Bunker fuel, specifically No.5, is what powers most ships...military and civilian alike. Why is he arguing that it's use is some sort of "off the record" conspiracy? And who the hell ever said that the prisoners at Gitmo were "non-existent?"

Okay so he rambles on about fuels, switching fire to JP-8 fuel which is a component of the Air Force's alternative energy program, and says this:

One of those studies, completed in March 2000 and funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency, says absolutely nothing about the contamination caused by that same jet exhaust when a squadron of F-22s, say, fly sortie after sortie, at fairly low elevations, over a crowded neighborhood in Baghdad.

Uh. We have F-22s at Elmendorf AFB, Langley AFB, and Tyndall AFB. They haven't been to Baghdad, and I can't see any possible reason for a fighter which prides itself on stealth to be flying at "fairly low altitudes." Now I remember doing an FTX in a training area at the end of Tyndall AFB's runway a few years ago where, to the delight everyone, two F-22s buzzed us at about 50 feet as they were taking off. I wasn't gassed by some mysterious noxious emission and -even at the end of a runway at one of our busiest fighter bases- I don't remember the air being the least bit smoggy.

Trying to calculate CO2 pollution for military flying is near impossible. For one thing, if we consider the Stealth F-117, we know nothing of its fuel consumption. We do know, however, that sorties for that plane at the beginning of the Iraq War lasted 1. 6 hours. Flying out of some distant bases raised the average sortie time to 5.4 hours, with some sorties lasting up to seven hours--refueling accomplished in the air. Forty-two F-117s each flew over 1,300 combat sorties.

Hi, I get all my information from Wikipedia.

Forty-two F-117s each flew over 1,300 combat sorties.

Really? Each one flew 1,300 sorties? Not the combined force? Kind of makes this equation:

Using an average of five hours per sortie, at 619 miles per hour, time in the air for just this one type of plane comes to 190,827,000 miles, resulting in an astonishing 26 million tons of carbon. To get some idea of the magnitude of that number, it would take a fully loaded Boeing 747-100, flying from Los Angeles to New York, 328,165 trips to produce that same amount of pollution. On average, 40 flights leave from LAX for JFK daily, so those 328,165 trips, in commercial terms, would take 8,204 days, or almost 23 years. Sixty other kinds of planes flew sorties over Iraq. The total amount of carbon dioxide that went into the atmosphere is not just high--but goes totally unreported.

...seem a bit off, doesn't it?

Anyway, this guy might be a bright English professor, but he is way, way, waaaaay out of his league here. Zero grasp of the subject matter. Not even a basic understanding of the military..."spray and pray," yeeesh.

It's embarrassing.

And it syncs up precisely with an enormous pet peeve of mine, military commentary from folks who know zip about the military. Blind leading the blind. We're fighting two wars and this guy wants the military to stop and form a carbon counting commission. So not only did HuffPo fail to fact check this column, they gave the guy a whole series on the subject called "The Green Zone."

I hope they turn it off. Seriously. I don't have the energy to do this again.

Soak in the Psycho

By John

I *think* it was Steve Green who asked me rhetorically in an email "You know that crazy cat lady who lived down the street from you? Code Pink is what happened when she got involved in politics."

So I submit to this court exhibit A in defense of the Green hypothesis. I can't think of a more ineffective way to get your point (which is...what?) across than to smear yourself in ketchup and shriek gibberish at the Secretary of State. This broad is a half-step up from writing coded messages with her own feces on the chamber wall.

Anyway, Code Pink does this crap all the time.... they're not smart enough to lobby the normal way, so they throw these shrill temper tantrums on Capitol Hill in the hopes that someone gives them the attention they crave. I've seen it a million times before..... with my friends' toddlers.

So crack open an ice cold Bud Light, and be thankful that the anti-war movement is so childish and inept.

And hey, entertaining too!

The New Republic Finally Folds

By John

It's about damn time.

It is now clear that somewhere along the way, TNR stopped acting in good faith and started doing damage control. They cited a Bradley expert who purportedly confirmed that the vehicle could be operated as Beauchamp described. But when Bob Owens tracked down said expert, BAE spokesmen Doug Coffey, he denied making any such statement, saying that TNR had mischaracterized his comments and that the editors had never shown him Beauchamp's stories. He added that having read the stories, they were indeed "suspicious," and that he did not believe the Bradley could be operated as described. TNR never acknowledged Coffey’s later statements or its apparent misrepresentation of his earlier statement.

And then came our report that Scott Beauchamp was no longer standing by his stories. The editors at TNR responded to this report by insinuating that THE WEEKLY STANDARD was not a credible source. They also accused the Army of "stonewalling" and preventing them from speaking with their author. That was on August 10. Bob Owens subsequently reported that TNR spoke to Beauchamp on September 7--the transcript now posted on Drudge--but TNR never returned to the subject, despite their claims of a "commitment to the truth" in that August 10 statement.

Goldfarb keeps thanking the milbloggers for the help in myth-busting this turd, but we're the ones who are grateful. Beauchamp slandered all of us with his S&M military fantasies, all to promote a writing career that wouldn't have gone anywhere even if this crap won him a pultizer (lies aside, he's an awful writer). So thanks to Mike and Bob Owens for their aggressiveness.

I'm expecting radio silence from the anti-war bloggers who so desperately wanted to believe Beauchamp's stories. It's not that I really care about being right or wrong here, I just want them to wise up. Jim Massey, Jesse MacBeth, Daniel Coburn, and now "Scott Thomas".... how many times is the anti-war movement going to be fooled before they catch a clue? Every time one of these idiots crawls out of the woodwork, anti-war bloggers and activists blindly rush to defend them without the slightest consideration for whether or not their stories are true.

So look, I don't care about them admitting they were wrong or apologies or any of that crap. I just want them to stop and acknowledge the fact that they're 0-4... that they've bet on the loser each time... and that next time (and there will be a next time, as long as people heroize these phonies) maybe they could hold back their eagerness to confirm all their fantasies about Bushitler's stormtrooper military, and reserve judgment until someone can actually verify the accusations.

The Things You See on the Road...

By Bull Nav

Driving along I94/I80 west bound tonight on my way to NAVSTA Great Lakes, I saw a billboard by these guys that said

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!

It's just a couple of miles before you get to the new Cabela's in Hammond, IN (and I did not make it in time for the official opening of the store today in case anyone was wondering).

I tell you, I saw that sign and I thought:

HELL YEAH, BRING 'EM HOME NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LET'S GO GET OUR BOYS OUT OF THERE. I MEAN WE'RE ALL PEACEFUL NOW SO GET THEM THE HELL OUT OF THERE. WE ARE SPREADING NOTHING BUT HATRED BY BEING THERE!!!!!

Come on, what are we waiting for?!?!?!?!?!?

Just have our guys immediately drop what they are doing and head on out!!!! Hell, we have lots of experience doing that!!!

And it made everyone like us so much better...

Somalia, Lebanon, South Viet Nam...

While we are at it, let's get out of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, the Horn of Africa, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the UK, Colombia, Honduras, Japan, the Phillipines...let's get out of EVERYWHERE BECAUSE EVERYBODY HATES US AND THAT'S THE ONLY WAY WE CAN BE PEACEFUL!!!!!

YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! GET THEM HOOOOOME NOW! NOW! NOW!!!!!

I felt SOOO inspired!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Idiots.

What is Wrong with the Air Force?

By John

Buckle up folks, this one is a bear.

JERUSALEM, Oct. 13 — A study of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war commissioned by the United States Air Force and to be published this month concludes that Israel’s use of air power was of diminishing value as the fight dragged on because it was used without enough discrimination.

Although the war was widely criticized in Israel and abroad for relying too heavily on the air force, the study argues that air power remains the most flexible tool in fighting groups like Hezbollah, because ground forces alone could not have achieved Israel’s aims. Israel’s error, the study concludes, was insufficient discernment in its airstrikes.

By bombing too many targets of questionable importance for its aims, and not explaining why it bombed what it did, Israel lost the war for public opinion, according to the author of the study, William M. Arkin, an expert in assessing bomb damage. “Israel bombed too much and bombed the wrong targets, falling back upon cookie-cutter conventional targeting in attacking traditional military objects,” Mr. Arkin wrote. “Individual elements of each target group might have been justified, but Israel also undertook an intentionally punishing and destructive air campaign against the people and government of Lebanon.”

If this guy could stick to straight-shooting analysis, I'd have no problem with the Air Force drawing on him as a resource. The problem is, everything that he writes is corrupted by his ideology. His military "analysis" was slanted enough to draw the attention of The Weekly Standard back in 2003:

For starters, he is the scribbler who launched the assault on Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin a week ago by providing NBC with tapes of Boykin speaking in churches, and then followed with a Los Angeles Times op-ed that accused the general of being "an intolerant extremist" and a man "who believes in Christian 'jihad'" (Arkin later admitted on my radio program that Boykin never used the term "jihad").

Arkin also wrote that "Boykin has made it clear that he takes his orders not from his Army superiors but from God--which is a worrisome line of command." This statement, like the "jihad" quotation appears to be pure fiction.

ARKIN TOLD ME he got his tip on Boykin's faith talks from a Pentagon source, which suggests that the general has an enemy inside the Pentagon. But if, as most of Boykin's critics have argued, the danger presented by the general's private talks about his faith is their effect on the Islamic world, then why did Arkin rush to publicize these private, little-noticed talks that he believes will hurt the U.S. abroad?

The answer is best found in Arkin's own speech to an audience at the U.S. Naval War College on September 25, 2002. In this lengthy and vitriolic attack on the Bush administration, Arkin admitted to feeling "cynical about the fact that we are going to war to enhance the economic interests of the Enron class," and declared that "the war against terrorism is overstated." Arkin believed, in fact, that the war "is not the core United States national security interest today." He rhetorically asked the audience: "Aren't I just another leftist, self-hating American?" and condemned the administration for taking "enormous liberties with American freedoms." "The war against terrorism," he said, "if it is a war at all, is not World War II or the Cold War, and it is grasping at empty patriotism to claim that it is." He warned of "our tendency to fall back upon secrecy and government control." And he concluded by warning that our foreign policy "convey[s] the wrong message, which is that we have no values, that we are for sale...."

Arkin caused a national uproar earlier this year when he accused American soldiers of being "mercenaries." So yeah, while he's got the cred to talk about the war, it's pretty obvious that his inability to separate factual military analysis from his strong political convictions makes him completely unreliable as an analyst.

So let's analyze his analysis.

“Israel bombed too much and bombed the wrong targets, falling back upon cookie-cutter conventional targeting in attacking traditional military objects,” Mr. Arkin wrote. “Individual elements of each target group might have been justified, but Israel also undertook an intentionally punishing and destructive air campaign against the people and government of Lebanon.”

So if I'm reading this correctly, Israel restricted itself to "cookie-cutter" aim points against strictly military targets, while they waged an unrestricted air war against the Lebanese people.

Yeah, it confused me too.

This is junior high crap, real armchair general stuff. If the US Air Force is "influenced" by Arkin's report, then the Air Force has bigger problems than its budget. Israel's air war was a highly sophisticated, force-centric campaign. Sophisticated enough, the Israelis thought, to do the job of ground troops. Hence the light grunt footprint back in summer 2006. Which, both Arkin and I agree, was foolish..... although for completely different reasons.

Here's a simplified version of the problem:

Arkin is regurgitating a popular meme in anti-war circles, that the Untied States and Israel indiscriminately use air power in their quest to defeat Islamic terrorists, despite the fact that Hezbollah is clearly the one ignoring the established law of armed conflict. It's become a common trademark with Arkin's military analysis. He disguises his opinion pieces by garnishing them with all the right military language, "target sets" and "precision air campaigns," and his only interest seems to be in pushing his ideology.

So that's that. He's a self professed leftist (not that there's anything wrong with that) and his analysis fits a common leftist narrative.

The bigger question is, why did the Air Force hire a used car salesman like Arkin? Or to paraphrase Michael, the OPFOR reader who sent me this link, "What is wrong with the Air Force????"

The New York Times answers:

While critical of how Israel used its air force, Mr. Arkin defends the flexibility of air power in counterterrorism. Although Israel was retaliating for a Hezbollah raid that captured two soldiers and killed others, he considers the war pre-emptive. He said Israel used the raid as a pretext to destroy most of Hezbollah’s longer-range Syrian and Iranian missiles and launchers, which posed the largest threat to Israel.

In a post-9/11 world, Mr. Arkin said, the likelihood of the United States’ engaging in another ground war like Iraq is very small. A better model is the fight against the Taliban in 2001, he said, emphasizing air power, special operations and covert action. The 2006 conflict was only the second war of “pure counterterrorism,” he said, which is why the Pentagon wanted to study it.

Why did the Air Force hire Arkin? Because Arkin makes the Air Force relevant again. He writes what they want to hear: that air power is critical to a successful COIN strategy, that properly executed air campaigns can win low-level wars, and that technology -not boots on the ground- is the key to winning to the War on Terrorism.

Think it'd piss off Arkin's buddies at Human Rights Watch and Greenpeace that he's one of the biggest advocates of Secretary Rumsfeld's failed Transformation concept?

This is what the Air Force needs to be told, folks. With the Soviet Union dissolved, they have a dozen secondary missions and no primary one. There's no big bad Bear to fight anymore, just a loosely organized confederation of platoon sized cells..... mosquitoes that the Air Force wants to kill with its cannons. They need someone to say that they're still important, so they hired Arkin to say it.

Unfortunately, despite Arkin's expert "bomb assessment," the Lebanon War proved one thing. This war is a grunt war, it can't be won with the "flexible" employment of air power, or any use of air power for that matter. It takes hearts and minds to win hearts and minds folks, something that a PFC running patrols in Mosul could tell you....but William Arkin and impressive academic resume could not.

The New Pledge

By John

Now with 60% more egalitarianism!

I pledge allegiance to the flag and my constitutional rights with which it comes. And to the diversity, in which our nation stands, one nation, part of one planet, with liberty, freedom, choice and justice for all.

Blech. Pledging allegiance to "diversity?" That doesn't make any sense to me, unless you're talking about this painfully awesome poster.

And on that note, I'm positive that the deliberate use of the word "choice" had nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with our right to choose to carry firearms and smoke in public. Right?

Right.

So besides that unbearable "Under God" line, what pissed progressives off about the old pledge?

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Harmless.

And I love references to America as "The Republic." Always have. The flag flies for the Republic, and the Republic stands for strength, justice, and liberty. Who looks at something that poignant and thinks "let's change things up a bit?"

And "one planet?" Whiskey tango foxtrot, over? I can't wrap my head around it, but there's something cosmically stupid about this line. Maybe it's because I can't stand the UN mentality, where all nations and peoples are equal.... so you get folks like Syria sitting on the human rights commission. When I pledge to the flag, to the Republic, I'm also acknowledging that a society of freedom and justice is superior to craptastic hellholes like North Korea.

Not that we're both part of "one planet."

Anyway, keep the panties untwisted.... like most progressive intiatives, this new pledge is just a fantastical concoction of some half-baked dreamer who thinks that, despite a century of failures, communism can still work if only the right people were put in charge. Some asshole will probably incorporate it into one of those lame murals that depicts all the children of the world holding hands and signing, but that's about as far as this socialist wet-dream will go.

As for me? I'll be taking it a step further and lobbying to incorporate "one solar system" instead of "one planet." Because honestly, the favorable carbon based Earth environment isn't any better than the crushing gravity and hydrogen/helium based atmosphere on Jupiter. Who are you to judge, fascist?

Yale Anti-War Noobs PWND!!!

By John

Forgive the title, I've been playing quite a bit of Halo 3 as of late.

Yale Loses Recruiting Battle

Yale Law School suffered a rare loss today in a legal battle with the Department of Defense over the rights of military recruiters to operate within the school. Yale Law had previously rejected the presence of military recruiters based on their objection to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bars openly gay individuals from service. While the federal government contends the university has been up to now opting out of its minimal obligations to the country’s defense, the school complains that recruiters are the only employers allowed who do not comply with its nondiscrimination policy.

The stakes for Yale in this case? The university would stand to lose $350 million a year in federal grants, nothing to shake a stick at – even for the school with the highest rate of growth in its endowment of all private universities. Yale’s Professor Robert Burt, the lead plaintiff in the case, explained Yale’s position succinctly: “We had a choice… We’re not going to bring the medical school and the whole science enterprise to its knees.”

Activists at Yale are hoping their militant anti-militarism holds water. Students plan to stage a silent protest today, as the recruiters move in for the kill – I mean, the Fall Interview Program. After all, there remains something worth fighting for at Yale law: ROTC classes are still not allowed.

If there's a debate in this country that makes me want to yank out bloody fistfuls of hair (someone else's, not mine), it's recruitment on campus.

The whole raison d’être of the "recruiters off campus" movement is to oppose Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Yeah yeah, you don't admit gays, we won't admit your recruiters...fascist pigs! I get it.

Only the military had a whole lot of nothing to do with the policy. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was mandated by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1993. And, for those of you Ivy Leaguers whose 40k a year education hasn't taught you the basics of the civil-military relationship, that means the Pentagon has zippy say in whether or not they admit gays.

Quite frankly, with the Army and Marines trying to expand as rapidly as they are, I think Ace and Gary would've have been given matching pink M4s years ago, had it been up to the brass.

So either Ivy Leaguers are too dumb/lazy to understand Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or they are knowingly manipulating the policy to mask their hatred for the US Armed Forces.

A little of both, says I.... but that's all gravy at this point anyway. Recruiters are back, and I've learned an important lesson: convictions in the Ivy League run only as deep as their pockets.

I do wonder which poor NCO draws the short straw and has to brave academia. I suggested that we reactivate Sgt. Slaughter for the mission, but nobody ever listens to my awesome ideas.

Circus Freaks

By John

It doesn't take much to effectively refute 9/11 conspiracy theories. In fact, just looking at the faces of the Truther movement can grant you more inner peace than 10 years of meditation in a Buddhist monastery.

Anti-War Film "Stuns" Venice

By John

VENICE (Reuters) -

A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.

"Redacted", by U.S. director Brian De Palma, is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition.

Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across.

De Palma, 66, whose "Casualties of War" in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film's images, all based on real material he found on the Internet.

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.

Never trust someone who sells truth with a work of fiction.

Just sayin'.

You want reality? Read milblogs.

Political Statements in Uniform

By Slab

I'm sure everyone by now is familiar with Friday's incident at Yearly Kos. Jon Soltz, a moderator for one of the panels, silenced a soldier who stood up to speak in support of the surge. Why? Because the sergeant in question was in his Class A uniform.

Jon Soltz was right.

He could have handled it better, there's no doubt of that, but according to the basic principles that the military is supposed to follow, he was in the right and the as-yet-unnamed sergeant was not. That soldier had no place attempting to make a public statement in uniform, and by doing so, not only did he violate Paragraph 4.1.1.3 of DOD Directive 1344.10 and Section j of Paragraph 1-10 of AR 670-1, but he set himself up to be silenced by the moderator. If he had attempted to make his statement while wearing civilian clothes and an Army baseball cap, for instance, and Soltz had still shut him up, then conservative bloggers could point out that the moderators were silencing dissenting viewpoints. As it is, we are left with Soltz enforcing DOD and US Army regulations, and the sergeant unable to voice his views because of his choice of attire.

Simply put, if you are a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, you do not make political statements or appear at political conventions in uniform. It does not matter if you are speaking for or against the President's policies. It is not infringement of your right to free speach, it is your responsibility as a servicemember of this great nation. One of the reasons we are "this great nation" is that our military services do not involve themselves in the political process. Individual servicemembers may involve themselves, but not while wearing their uniform, which implies official capacity.

And I've seen the argument that the convention was not political in nature. Please don't attempt to blow smoke up anyone's... well, let's just not kid ourselves. If Kos is involved, it's just as political as the Democratic National Convention. Perhaps even more so.

Some of you may have noticed that I try to keep myself more removed from politics than other milbloggers. That is because I subscribe to the viewpoint that was summed up by a character in Anton Myrer's book Once An Eagle:

When I serve my country as a soldier, I'm not going to serve her as a Democrat or as a Republican, I'm going to serve her as an American.

CAIR Cares

By John

About themselves.....more than they care about the First Amendment, apparently.

I think the first comment over at Hot Air says it all.

CAIR. Pwnd.

You guys really should watch this video.

Those dudes at CAIR? Never been a fan.

Yup

By John

I think W.Thomas Smith sums up the whole Scott Thomas affair rather nicely:

Of course, we know (and it's been said over the past few days) that no officer or NCO would tolerate this kind of behavior from a soldier like the mysterious "Scott Thomas."

But knowing Marines and soldiers as well as I do (and Jim does), I'll tell you what else would happen: If Mr. Thomas were witnessed mocking a female burn victim or running over dogs, he'd almost surely get his "a** whipped" by any number of the rank-and-file. And I'd be willing to put money on that.

Yeah, me too.

Scurrry Airplanes Return!

By John

San Frans want Blue Angels out:

SAN FRANCISCO - The annual aerial show by the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels — a San Francisco tradition dating back to 1981 that pumps millions into the local economy — is running into opposition from three local peace advocacy groups that are calling for a permanent halt to the popular Fleet Week flyover.
CodePink, Global Exchange and Veterans for Peace, Chapter 69, are working with Supervisor Chris Daly on a Board of Supervisors resolution to address concerns over the Blue Angels.

Daly acknowledged he is considering a call to halt the flyovers because, he said, “they seem dangerous and unnecessary.” Daly said he plans on introducing the resolution as early as Tuesday, but is still drafting the language. A resolution is not legally binding, but states a board position.

Which reminded me of this letter the editor from last year's Bay Area fleet week:

Editor -- Thank you, Fleet Week. My preschool-aged daughter, having heard your airplanes overhead all week, is now completely traumatized and afraid to go outside. She just heard a commercial airliner in the sky and ran inside shrieking, shaking, and trying to close all the windows and doors. We tried to have a fun family weekend enjoying free music in our park, but it was ruined by the thundering sound of those hateful airplanes overhead, forcing her (and most of the other children I saw) to throw her hands over her face and cower.

If there is ever an opportunity for me to vote on any proposition keeping this ridiculous event and huge waste of resources from marring the skies of my city again, you can bet I'll be the first in line to get it voted in.

Lex wins the discussion with:

You know, in a way - and no offense to the real people living in and about the bay area, SJBill - this would kind of be a relief. As a city, San Francisco has long ago stopped pretending that they support their military. We could stop pretending that we like San Francisco.

We don’t have to like San Francisco. We get paid to defend them. It’s our job.

The rest of the country?

We’re doing that for free.

Heh. An okay guy, Lex.

Kos is Konfused

By John

Sorry for the millionth, unoriginal iteration of swapping 'c's for 'k's when talking Kos.... it's just so hard not to, y'know?

So anyway, Jeff Emanual pointed me to this silly blog post by Markos, where he gets all huffy over the fact that military members can (and will) be disciplined for participating in political events while in uniform. It's silly because the post, a response to the disciplinary actions taken against an IRR Marine who attended an anti-war rally in uniform, is your prototypical emotional, kneejerk reaction that can only exist in the factless vacuum of the anti-war blogosphere. Kos writes:

So they'll prosecute me if I wear my Army uniforms to an anti-war protest? Really?

But that's not the point. As we've seen time and time again, we see military personnel, in uniform, all the freakin' time as backdrops to Republican pro-war events -- including with Mr. 28% -- and there haven't been any prosecutions of those folks.

Marine Cpl. Adam Kokesh has already been discharged. He has every right enshrined under the Constitution, including those of free speech and peaceful assembly.

And anyone that thinks otherwise, quite frankly, is legitimately and objectively un-American.

So there's two angles to play here. The first is what the DoD regs say about participating in political events in uniform. The second is the Kos line that Republicans "use" the military as props during political rallies.

Jeff decided to do the fact checking that didn't really interest Kos, citing the DoD regs forbidding military members from participating in this type of event. Regs that include members of the inactive ready reserve (IRR). It's a compelling and well-researched read, click here for more.

Now the fact that Republicans like Vice President Cheney and President Bush are often seen speaking at military events is true. Just like it was true for Democrats during the Clinton years. There is a stark difference between a servicemember attending a sanctioned speech at a military base and a servicemember participating in a political rally in uniform. I'd argue that having such poor knowledge of your military and the political process is un-American, but I guess I'll just write that off as conjecture.

All in all, his post is just....wrong. Not ideologically wrong....factually wrong. And it continues with our OPFOR driven-theme that much of the war punditry that you read in a given day is false, incorrect, or misleading.

Do, in large part, to guys like William Arkin and Kos.

Last Time, I Swear

By John

So William Arkin of the Washington Post decided to respond to Blackfive, Badgers Forward, John Donovan, and I after we collectively called shenanigans on his milblogger column (John Donovan was far more gracious than I'm going to be...)

So....besides spelling my four-letter first name wrong, Arkin continues to neglect actual column writing in exchange for crawling from one disasterous point to another. Which gives me plenty of ammo, even though....ugh...I really do know better. I shouldn't stoop, y'know?

But, and this is what prompted me to respond (sigh....again), he completely missed what I was saying when I responded to his column on the military bloggers conference. And he kind of twisted our words around.

My inbox has been filled with comments from Red Sox fans and MilBloggers ever since I attempted to link the two last week. I used the metaphor of sports reporting to observe that Americans would be better off if we paid even a fraction of attention to the military that we pay to baseball. Also attracting comments was my post describing the tension between the YouTube generation's expectation of Internet access and the military's need to control its own.

Red Sox fans essentially said this: Hey, baseball's interesting. As fans, we're a part of something.

MilBloggers said this: War is not fun, and we are not merely fans. In many cases, we are soldiers. The implication was that only they are qualified to comment about their endeavor.

No. Arggh. No, no, no, no....emphatically freakin' no.

My point was that stupid people should not be considered authorities on military and national security. I have no problem with Hippy Joe launching a 4 hour lecture on the role of airpower in the tactical environment, but I do want people to realize that he'd be more in his element if he were discussing the role of water bongs in the campus environment.

Here's a better example. This picture...

...prompted this response from a commenter at Prosebeforehos:

That does not look to me to be an authentic fighting man of United States military. Where is his insignia? What type of weapon is that he is carrying? His cammo pattern appears something less than genuine issue. And, I’m not expert, but his boots do not apear to be G.I. –I think this guy could be a washed up police man who just got himself a life long job working for Halibuton. Can this man’s connection to The US Military be verified?

I don't want the commenter silenced. I don't want his freedom of speech limited, restricted, or infringed upon in any way. And I welcome the fact that he's involved in the national debate. But, it's important to recognize that he is absolutely, certifiably clueless. Card-carrying clueless. The fact that he can't properly identify an American soldier has already spoken volumes on his knowledge on the Iraq War. Now look, he has a constitutional right to voice his skepticism and I recognize that... but I am missing the clause in the Constitution where it says that type of punditry is actually helpful to the national debate.

Arkin is a military idiot. He had four years of experience in a 1970s Cold War military that is so different from today's force that he may as well have spent his time in the Bolivian coast guard. His columns, -"obscene amenities" anyone?- are weekly proof of his intellectual distance from soldiers and the Armed Forces at large, and his understanding of military blogging and milbloggers is just plain embarassing.

Arkin says "as the Iraq war has made abundantly clear, our government -- and our military -- needs the input of more people, not fewer. Thankfully, the Internet is ideally suited to providing it."

In other words, he wants opinion polls to dictate the direction of the war. Thankfully, we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a pure democracy, and mob rule is decidedly not how we run our wars. We trust experts more than we trust popular opinion and trends, from government to technology to yes...the military. But I am grateful to him for making this point, because it fits in beautifully with my narrative that William Arkin is a military affairs writer who doesn't understand the most basic tenets of military affairs.

This is a classic leftist move. The anti-war movement doesn't have the backbone of military expertise that the pro-victory crowd enjoys, so they inject this "everyone's voice is equal" crap into the national debate and pretend as if that's the best way to maintain an intellectually honest exchange.

Everyone's voice is not equal. That's naive. And stupid. My opinion on orbital mechanics is not "just as good" as some NASA egghead's, I'm not more informed on economics than the faculty at Harvard Business School, and I don't know more about flying fighter jets than Lex.

So why does Arkin constantly seek to water down the opinions of the experts (soldiers and milbloggers) while elevating the militarily clueless?

Arkin Redux

By John

He's baaaaack. And hitting the milbloggers. Hard.

I've been wanting to write about the 2nd Annual MilBlog conference (I wasn't invited), and did write earlier about the brouhaha over the Pentagon's supposed new restrictions regarding blogging.

FYI, the journalists who covered the conference (NPR, CNN, WaPo, Fox News, etc) attended on their own initiative. No one was "invited," which makes me wonder why Arkin felt he merited a special invitation.

The MilBloggers got an extra boost of attention after the news about the Army's "crackdown" on blogs, with the overheated claim that the new operations security (OPSEC) and bandwidth rules cut off soldiers from their families and restricting people's freedoms. An extra boost from whom, you ask? From the mainstream media they so seemingly despise -- with various noterati of the MilBlog world being interviewed and quoted regarding the impact of the military's new rules.

As I see it, beyond the social networking and communications functions, the Milblogs have set themselves up as an anti-news media squad. The conference included many discussions of the deficiencies of mainstream press coverage of Iraq. In fact, some people actually believe that, with the availability of worldwide news on the Web and the emergence of military blogs, the Pentagon press corps and even the mainstream news media is obsolete.

No. Milbloggers have focused grievances. Like when certain papers run Abu Ghraib 50 times above the fold without running a single story on our Medal of Honor recipients. Or when they publish the details of a classified program designed to monitor and terminate the funding of terrorists who kill our troops in Iraq. Or when they use doctored photos, stringers with questionable integrity, and axe stories that are "too positive."

We don't simply "despise" the media like bunch of uneducated racists. Or like Arkin despises the military. We back-slap when the MSM gets it right, we criticize when they get it wrong. It's that simple.

But thank you to Arkin for providing us with a clear example of the type of drivel that we so forcefully counteract. Arkin was the only established MSM type to write on the conference without actually attending. It's easy to have such an uninformed opinion when you're too lazy to do the legwork, I suppose.

And even easier when your highest form of commentary is lame similes:

Which brings me back to the Red Sox game -- specifically, Section 15, where I was sitting. I couldn't help but notice that the baseball aficionados felt quite confident about their knowledge and views. Everyone had an opinion on the game; everyone was an expert.

Yeah, it was a pretty dumb analogy. Surely Arkin realizes that milbloggers aren't "fans with opinions," but rather the players on the field. Milbloggers are the one who prosecute the war, we're not in the bleachers watching like Arkin.

So I guess the only pertinent question here is: why does the Washington Post have this guy on their payroll? He's not a very effective writer, his opinions are poorly constructed, his analogies suck, and he seems like....well, kind of an idiot. He's proven that he has very little tangible knowledge of the military and national security (zero knowledge of milbloggers), he's best known for leaking sensitive information and calling our grunts "pampered," and doesn't seem to do much outside of embarrassing his parent newspaper.

Perhaps it's time for the WaPo to consider a National and Homeland Security correspondent who actually knows something about National and Homeland Security?

Other Milbloggers covering:

Badgers Forward
Blackfive and Uncle Jimbo: "We don't despise the MSM Arkin, we just despise you."
Mrs. Greyhawk
Chap

Superb Stupidity

By John

Because sometimes the nutroots hand it to you on a silver platter.

I am speechless

By Bull Nav

As a general rule, I am not so politically inclined. My training (college, the Navy, my job) is engineering. I have not studied politics extensively, such as for a degree program, but I do my best to stay informed.
However, when a congressman or senator does something that...something that...well, words escape me.
I guess "incredulous" could best describe my reaction.

WASHINGTON, May 3 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed Thursday that Congress repeal the authority it gave President Bush in 2002 to invade Iraq, injecting presidential politics into the Congressional debate over financing the war.
Mrs. Clinton’s proposal brings her full circle on Iraq — she supported the war measure five years ago — and it sharpens her own political positioning at a time when Democrats are vying to confront the White House.

I mean, does she think this is transparent to the American people? Now, I realize who this is, who this reverse carpetbagger is, this person who changes positions with the wind. But is this really the type of person to lead this country? Is this the type of person to represent this great land to the rest of the world?
Or is it just to placate the radical fringe that appears to run the Democratic party?

Now, her advisers say, a vote to withdraw authorization would make plain to antiwar and liberal Democrats that she was repudiating her 2002 vote. The hope among her aides was that demands by antiwar voters for her to apologize for her vote would be rendered moot.

Yes, I am left speechless...

The Stupid Rise Up

By John

Looks like "Little Eichmans, the sequel."

The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands. I have not gone to jail to protest the war machine, so I am no better than they and probably a good deal worse because I have given the issue some thought. How many of those parents in the audience hearing the President’s words had elected to Congress men and women who voted for lax laws on gun ownership? How many of those parents in the audience had also voted for legislators who backed the president’s illegal invasion of Iraq? Are we, as a nation, too obtuse to grasp the connection between our “gun culture” policy at home and our militarist policy abroad that murders and mutilates human beings at every turn? Practically any one in America can buy a gun, and abroad, any dictator in the world can buy weapons made in America because we just happen to be the world’s biggest arms peddler.

What kind of a society has America become? Why do we have two-million men in our prisons? Why, in some cities, is every second or third male either in prison or out on parole? Why is the murder rate soaring in so many cities? Why is there on average more than one killing a day in a city like Philadelphia? Why are our own terrorists murdering 30,000 Americans each year and injuring tens of thousands more with rapid-fire handguns of the sort used on the Virginia Tech campus? Do we realize, speaking of terrorists, that ten times as many Americans are being killed by Americans each year as all our troops in Iraq? Osama bin Laden is everywhere in America. He has a thousand faces. They are the faces of our own dispossessed, our own poverty-stricken, our own unemployed, our own underclass, our own idolized gangsters , our own youth who grew up in front of television sets that ooze violence and blood.

Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? It’s not that some of them voted to elect George Bush. Anyone can be deceived, particularly by a notorious liar. But when the president broke the law and invaded Iraq, violating the UN Charter, how many of them protested? Today they are upset that a young, crazed gunman has ran amok on the campus of a peaceful university, but where were they when President Bush defied the United Nations and ran amok in Iraq? Do they know, as Amnesty International reported on the same day as the Virginia Tech murders, the Middle East “is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis” because three-million Iraqis have been “forcibly displaced” by the war the grief-stricken Mr. Bush began? Who do the American people think made this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East if not the American people?

The same parents who weep for their children might consider that they and their neighbors are also spending a half trillion dollars a year so that the Pentagon, just over the horizon from Virginia Tech, can wage a war that is snuffing out the lives of children of other parents just like their own. Thousands of Virginians work for the military-industrial complex. They work for the Pentagon. They work for defense contractors. They work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are in the business of killing directly or indirectly, yet how many of them are haunted by the consequences of their “jobs” in their dreams at night?

All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as “good” people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description.

Vomit-inducing. Seriously, it's that bad. Reminds me of what me and my "angry neighbors" are fighting. The ideology, this corrupt, horrible ideology. And stupid. Incredibly stupid. Incurably stupid.

I love this dude's morals: "Sure, the Virginia Tech shooting was horrible and evil. But guess what, Mr. Churchy McChurch-goer....you're no better."

Really?

There's nothing worse than being insulted by some idiot beatnik who tries to inject iambic pentameter into his writing. Can't you just see him imagining that he's inspiring millions with this crap? Up on the podium, affecting all of us warmongers in some deeply profound way? As if his lame Socratic approach is really designed just to make us think.

Sherwood lives in a cosmos of his own mental construction, where up is down, down is up. The people who he so callously indicts live in the real world. And in that real world, going to church isn't the same as killing 32 people. I know that. You know that. Hell, most thinking people know that. But what pisses me off about this clown is that he represents a large demographic of people who don't know that.

Nor will they ever. You can't fix stupid, y'know?

It should be noted that the extreme right isn't much better than the extreme left.

The families of those killed in the Virginia Tech massacre may not be able to grieve in peace at the funerals of those they lost. An anti-gay religious group known for protesting at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq is planning on appearing at services for those killed on Monday as well.

The Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), which is not affiliated with any national Baptist organization, announced plans to protest at victims’ funerals only hours after 32 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in U.S. histo