wombat_socho

I had a good Christmas. Did a little cooking, did a little baking (the Irish cake had too many raisins so it was super dense) and a lot of Civicrack. 
Also finished The Book of Skaith, which is a damn fine collection of Leigh Brackett's tales of Eric John Stark's adventures on the doomed planet of Skaith. 

Talked to troika for a bit; apparently the fudge hadn't arrived yet but he appreciated the joke. Here's hoping my ex and my cousins do as well. 
Also texted Rob Hansen the other night; he is depressed by the election results and has quit his job contracting for some agency in the IC because he isn't sanguine about working for Tulsi Gabbard and/or whoever is going to be running the agency he was working for. (I don't know & didn't ask.) Sent him a CFA gift card as a token of my esteem. Doug surprised me with a small wooden box marked "Made In Russia/Recycled In Ukraine", which proved to contain a ingot from a T-72 destroyed in the Battle for Kiev. It's a little confusing because the microslab is marked "37 Motorized Rifle Brigade" but is also marked "Military Unit 51460", which corresponds to the 64th Separate Guards MRB out of Khabarovsk, a unit plausibly accused of war crimes in the early days of the war. Regardless, it's a very cool gift and certainly not how I was expecting to ever interact with a T-72, which was something I was concerned about back in the day when they were the New Hotness and the Abrams hadn't yet appeared in USAREUR. 

The package from Wisconsin Cheeseman arrived and I have consumed all of it except for the Dobosh Torte, which I am saving for New Years Eve, and the cheese, which I am going to nibble on over the next few days, I think. I have done shopping at Raley's a few times before and after Christmas, mostly picking up tea and (finally!) eggs, which have been very scarce lately thanks to an outbreak of bird flu in California. Also in the mail today (aside from Doug's surprise package) was the last pack of lebkuchen I ordered and the two packs of cards from the Carmelite Sisters, ditto. I will prepare and send these off to friends along with notes. Also also I got cards from Anna and Andrea, who go to the top of the outgoing card list.

The WGW asks:

I'm talking more about them cutting our military back to the days of WW2 and replacing humans with technology. Good/bad idea? Consequences etc

Cutting back the Defense Department to the size that the Navy and War Departments were in 1945 would actually require a radical expansion of both forces. Consider that at the end of World War II, we had almost 100 Army divisions (infantry, armored and airborne, plus all the men in the Army Service Forces), the same number of wings in the Army Air Force - fighters, bombers and transports - and a thousand ships in the Navy ranging from battleships and fleet carriers down to destroyer escorts, PT boats and all manner of auxiliaries (tankers, transports, landing ships, bouy tenders, etc.) and all of this tied up most of our economy and manpower from 1940-1946. We have been upgrading the technology all along - the nuclear carriers we have today can cruise longer and deliver more destruction than the entire Seventh Fleet in Vietnam, to say nothing of World War II, and that's without taking tactical nuclear weapons into account. The same is true for the Army and Marines: we have the M-1 Abrams instead of the M-4 Sherman, the burst-firing M-4 instead of the single-shot M-1 Garand, and every grunt wears body armor, which was unheard of in WW2.

In the end, though, as our politicians keep having to relearn every decade or two, there is no substitute for a heavily armed, well-trained teenager dug in on the ground you want to hold - or attacking the ground you want to take. See the opening chapters of T.R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War, which are all about the post-WW2 demobilization and its consequences when the Korean War broke out.

On the civilian side, you could definitely accomplish a lot by streamlining the bureaucracy and improving its information technology infrastructure, but all such reforms tend to get tripped up by well-intended civil service regulations that make it nearly impossible to fire anyone and purchasing regulations so onerous in their complexity that only a handful of Beltway Bandits can or want to deal with them. A good start would be to pare back Washington to its original core constitutional functions, but every time that's suggested we get the speeches about feeding dog food to poor kids and throwing Grandma in the snowbank. >_

Sometime over the weekend, it occurred to me that I should probably take a break from writing about my military career, possibly permanently. Most of the funny stories and amusing anecdotes I have from my time in uniform date back to my active duty time anyway, and I've written most of those up already on e2.

The remaining decade or so that I spent in the Reserve and Guard as a weekend warrior didn't have a lot of good times, at least not ones I can stick a place and time and date onto. I spent a lot of time fighting to stay in against various individual and institutional pressures to get my fat butt out of uniform, and not all of those pressures were coming from the Army. Maybe later I'll want to go over that and write it down, for the sake of my own peace of mind or for other therapeutic reasons - but today is not the day, and I don't see that day coming around again for a while.

Part of my reluctance to plod on with this is because of what's been going on with P and Mr. F and their decision to leave e2 and their staff positions on it. P got me into e2, and now that she's not there any more, I find myself less interested in posting there, even though there is a sizable group of people who like my writing, especially when I write about things military and particularly when I'm writing about my misadventures in the 331st. Maybe later. Maybe not. We'll see.

Jean Larteguy's The Centurions: It's coming back into print. - By Sophia Raday - Slate Magazine:

A copy of Jean Larteguy's The Centurions, an out-of-print French novel about paratroopers in Indochina and Algeria, can go for more than $1,700 on Amazon. That's reason enough for its republication this January by Amereon LTD for a list price of $59.95. But when I called the publisher, Jed Clauss, it turned out money wasn't his primary motivation: "Look, I'm an old guy," he said, "I'm at the end of my publishing career. I now only do fun projects. But David Petraeus wanted this republished. So I'm doing it."

I was tremendously surprised by the author's refusal to go down the rather obvious road of bashing Petraeus and McChrystal for emulating the disaffected French paras in Algeria, or more accurately their reaction to being sold out by deGaulle. Maybe she hasn't read The Praetorians, or maybe she doesn't know the history of the war in Algeria. I continue to hope that both books will eventually be reissued in Kindle editions.

Good summary of all the various wars, insurrections, revolts, and just downright murderous crap going on around the world, as well as various places which aren't actively at war yet but are pretty damn close. A lot of these places, you probably haven't heard of and wouldn't want to visit for a million bucks.
(Ace of Spades)

I'm not much on encouraging people to donate to charity. For that matter, even during those rare times in my life when I haven't been scuffling and trying desperately to match up incoming pay with outgoing bills, I haven't done a lot of giving to charity, but there are a couple of exceptions to that. One of them is the Salvation Army, since they helped my struggling family when we were dirt poor in Minneapolis, so I try to throw the odd dollar bill or so in the bell-ringers' kettles come Christmas. The same goes for the Marines and their Toys for Tots program. Which brings me to this video by Max Uriarte, creator of the sardonic webcomic (now featured in the Marine Corps Times, of all things) Terminal Lance. Max has something he wants to say:


NOTE: do not send me money! Go to Terminal Lance and hit the PayPal button!

The Military's Deepening Geographic Divide - Richard Florida - Business - The Atlantic:

The map is pretty useless, and the analysis by the mapmakers was brainless.

This comment at the end of the article pretty much sums it up. What kind of wet-brained fool would try to figure anything out about the social origins and culture of the military by looking at where the bases are? Richard Florida, that's who! *facepalm* Honestly, the more I see by this guy, the less impressed I am. Commenters do an excellent job of ripping the article to shreds and suggesting more intelligent ways of looking at the question; maybe you should just read the comments first and skip the article.

Ace of Spades HQ:

So it is more than a little surprising that a Reserve officer has thrown the bullshit flag.

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death.

The ability to brief well is, therefore, a critical skill. It is important to note that skill in briefing resides in how you say it. It doesn't matter so much what you say or even if you are speaking Klingon.

Not surprisingly, COL Sellin has been relieved.

When I left the Army in 1991, the scourge of PowerPoint had not yet arrived, probably because laptop computers weighed damn near as much as a M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun after you added the "tactical" MILSPEC case which also bloated them to the size of steamer trunks. If Colonel Sellin is within the same area code as the truth, no wonder it's been taking so long to squash the insurgents. I've long believed that the military in general has way too many staff officers and support people and not enough guys carrying rifles, and this just confirms that belief.

I probably should have posted this yesterday, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, but better late than never.
The annual whining in the press about the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki leaves me cold, but then, unlike most of the journalists and commentators, I actually know something about the war against Japan. I know that it didn't start with the attack on Pearl Harbor - by the time the Arizona went down on December 7, the The Rape Of Nanking was almost four years in the past. The truth of the matter is that for eight years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the soldiers and sailors of the Japanese Empire had cut a barbaric swath of rape and pillage across Asia from Manchuria to Imphal in India, butchering prisoners of war and civilians alike. They had fought suicidally from New Guinea to Okinawa, burned Manila to the ground with 100,000 civilians trapped in it, and given no indication that they would ever surrender.

Which meant that after the fall of Okinawa, the United States was looking at the very real possibility of having to invade Japan in the same way they had invaded Guadalcanal, Leyte, Okinawa, and a dozen other islands all across the Pacific. From the most recent invasions, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, we knew that the Japanese would be dug in deep, determined to resist to the last man, and anxious to kill or wound every American that they possibly could. American casualties would be horrific, estimated to be in the millions for the first phase, Operation Olympic, alone. From the experience of Okinawa, we could anticipate that the Japanese - military and civilians, although the Japanese plans drew no distinction between the two- would suffer over 90% casualties.

And people wonder why Truman dropped the bomb? What would history say of him had he not done so? As for me, I have no sympathy for the Japanese on this account. They had it coming. There has not, to this date, been a official, written apologies to the Chinese or Philippine nations for what happened at Nanking or Manila; even after those apologies are delivered (if they ever are), I hold that apologizing for the atomic bombing of Japan is unnecessary and stupid.

Unless, of course, you actually think we should have had millions of Americans killed or wounded in the process of exterminating 90% of the Japanese nation. I refuse to speculate whether this is the case with the current Administration.

...or too politically naive to be working in Washington DC.

The General and His Senate Vassals:

Whatever you may think of General Stanley McChrystal and his succession by General David Petraeus, something very sad is about to happen. The Senate Armed Services Committee has already scheduled its hearing for the constitutionally required confirmation of General Petraeus in his new job. Watch that hearing. (It will occur at 9:30 am on Tuesday, June 29 and will be broadcast by the committee's webcast, and surely C-SPAN.) You will observe how useless and ineffectual the Senate Armed Services Committee, among others, has become at performing its most important job.

Wheeler fails to appreciate that the Party requires General Petraeus services to save their ass in Afghanistan, or at least provide an acceptable facade of success that will give Obama an excuse to withdraw the troops. The Party is not about to allow its antiwar loony wing any time to bitch at their chosen general. In this instance, the standard kabuki of Evil Pentagon Generals v. Righteous Social Justice Warriors has been laid aside. As for Lieberman and the Republicans, they're not about to give the new CinC Afghanistan a hard time by asking him difficult questions. The GOP is the Pentagon's traditional ally, and Lieberman is the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats.

Wheeler will have to wait for the traditional "Democrats as steely-eyed critics of defense" kabuki until the GOP is back in control of the White House and/or Congress. Then and only then will the Pentagon and its generals be viewed as bloodthirsty thugs clawing the bread from starving children and the medicine from sickly seniors. i. e. business as usual for the New Left.