Neptunus Lex

The general power of an efficient market is that “all of us are smarter than any of us.” The more contributors to the market, the better it is able to price out the quality of goods on offer. The exception to that rule seems to be the court of public opinion - one of those few markets whose product quality actually improves even as the contribution pool grows smaller. In a small village, the general opinion of any man’s character tends to be more accurate than what the anonymity of a large city would permit. The same may be said to be true about warships, raised to an exponential factor. Sailors know sailors in ways that even their families do not.

Which lets me off the hook. You see, the cover story in this week’s San Diego Reader was written by a former sailor and aspiring journalist and was entitled “The Confessions of a phony Navy Wife.” It’s just plain, well: Ugly. Kid comes from a good family but tough background, doesn’t instantly get the rating she wants, is asked to do some hard work as a non-designated sailor and essentially decides she’s been used. This product of the self-esteem generation decides that she’ll use right back, effectively entering into a sham marriage with a former shipmate in order to defraud the Navy of $31,000. She gets caught, tearfully admits her fraud and (after having accused essentially all of her fellow shipmates of being serial adulterers) brazenly finishes thus:

There was a time when I was ashamed to be in the Navy. I thought that all the men were lying cheaters and all the women were sluts. I laughed at the thought of marriage and love. I was bitter with the things I had witnessed and bitter with myself. I see things clearly now. Bad people are not in the military. The military brings out the bad in them.

Well, no. No we don’t. We set very high standards, a lot of folks struggle under arduous conditions to meet them, most everyone eventually gets on board and a very few end up blaming the Navy for the ”bringing out the bad in them.”

When it was already there all along, silly.

I was going to really expend some effort on this, but all you have to do is get past the “you go, girl!” comments to hear what her shipmates - those who truly know her - have to say:

My experience with the military was stressful and hard and at times I thought it was unfair, but it was an extremely satisfying experience. I wouldn’t change anything about my time in the Navy. The choices we make and the experiences we go through shape who we are. As the NCIS officer pointed out to you, if you hadn’t joined the Navy “you should have been lying in a gutter somewhere.” So stop complaining about the experience; embrace and build off it.

Oh, there’s a great deal more. It’s not a pretty picture.

By the way, journalism? Great choice.

A long but interesting article on faith, culture and the mating ritual in Saudi.

It might be true that, had your humble correspondent grown up in such a culture, it all would have made a great deal more sense to him. But remembering what he does about his long lost, oft-lamented youth, he rather doubts it.

An SA-7 was fired at a US Apache helicopter over Sadr City recently:

The attack, which had not been disclosed previously, represents the first time that a helicopter has come under missile attack in Sadr City since fighting erupted in the Shiite enclave in March.

The missile missed the aircraft…

The United States military has made extensive use of Apache helicopters to try to stop militias from firing rockets at the Green Zone and to protect American and Iraqi troops in Sadr City from Shiite fighters armed with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and roadside bombs.

The helicopters have taken a heavy toll on the militia fighters. In an effort to blunt the American advantage in airpower, the militias have waited until dust storms have grounded the Apaches to unleash heavy rocket attacks on the Green Zone.

But the attack on Saturday suggests that the militias may intend to make a more determined challenge to the American dominance in the air.

I wonder where the JAM came across one of those? I somehow doubt it has been lying around the Baghdad slum in a packing crate since 2003.

If he can’t do it, it can’t be done:

The head of the U.S. Pacific Command flew into Burma on Monday aboard the first U.S. military aid flight, to press for a full-scale international relief operation for victims of Cyclone Nargis. Facing mounting international pressure to open their country’s borders, Burmese officials promised to consider the request.

In New York, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed “immense frustration” with the pace of the relief effort, slowed by Burma’s secretive military government. After trying for days to get top general Than Shwe on the telephone, Ban said, he sent a letter urging him to facilitate a massive aid operation.

Adm. Timothy J. Keating flew in a U.S. Air Force C-130 from an air base in Thailand that is turning into a staging area for Burma relief. Accompanying him was Henrietta H. Fore, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. At the airport in Rangoon, Burma’s largest city, they conferred with Burma’s top naval officer in the highest-level military contact between the two countries in decades.

Keating and Fore did not go beyond the airport before flying back to Thailand. Fore said she believed that “our discussions were a good first step” toward broader U.S. help.

It’s crazy on a couple of different levels that a four-star COCOM has to practically go begging on his knees to the leaders of a military junta that would rather see many several thousands of their countrymen die in horrible conditions than allow outside help.

This isn’t a country they’re running - it’s a prison ship.

A Vermont firm aims to reduce certain kinds of flight mishaps to a trickle:

(A) Vermont company has come up with a 21st-century solution that replaces unwieldy “piddle packs” and painful waits with a system that pilots can use without unstrapping themselves from their seats.

“Pilots have many responsibilities during a mission, maintaining their sights, monitoring fuel, navigating the aircraft and monitoring their weapons systems — and they gotta go so bad they can hardly think,” said Mark Harvie, president of Omni Medical Inc. “This takes care of that problem for them,” he said.

The system, called the Advanced Mission Extender Device, uses special underwear equipped with a hose linked to a pump the size of a paperback book that drains urine into a collection bag.

The men’s model uses a pouch; the women’s has something that resembles a sanitary napkin.

Would have certainly helped me out, a few years back.

Which reminds me of the story about escorting the female Prowler pilot and her crew up into Iraq’s southern no-fly zone, having to use not one but two (both!) piddle packs on the flight, balancing the “load” from one to the other as herself stepped up in starboard parade to see what the h3ll I was doing in the cockpit there, being cleared for an early recovery to the ship and barely having time to square everything away, only to realize after my overhead break, approach, landing (OK-3 wire, natch), taxi, shut down and climb down from the jet that I hadn’t quite stowed everything for sea.

Franks and beans!

Only it’s true. Kinda.

(CWCID JMH)

TPM Barnett is - as I have pointed out before- a very clever analyst. He makes a good living thinking big thoughts and providing them to important others with insight, panache and humor: Had he taken to sales rather than geopolitical and military strategy, he could have retired by now to his own private island, had the whim struck him. He can maneuver an audience degree by almost imperceptible degree down a logical chain leading to some pretty unfamiliar intellectual territory. To listen to his schpiel live, for example, is to find oneself agreeing with Barnett about the need to ”manage” a rising China rather than help balance it, as has been our traditional policy in the Far East.

While never explaining quite how such a thing might be accomplished, the morality of doing so considering China’s human rights record - a thing that Barnett, as a “realist,” feels no obligation to consider - or what interest China itself has in having its rise managed by anyone else.

I don’t believe that Barnett is advocating  holding China’s robe while it shakes loose a reef or two from the Mainsail of Destiny, but when he heaps obloquy on the DoD acquisition strategy there’s room to wonder at his motivations. I summarized him here:

“We love our China. We love it just like it is…” the potential emergence of a peer competitor helps us frame our military acquisition strategy and defend our large capital budget expenditures.

The only plausible reason for acquiring F-22 Raptors, F-35 Lightnings and FA-18 Super Hornets in Barnett’s view is to have them at hand in case China forgoes diplomacy and attempts to seize Taiwan by force, a course of action that might well trigger a US response and lead to general war between the rising hegemon and the declining hyper-power. Which, per Barnett, must not be allowed to happen. Archduke Franz Ferdinand lives on Taiwan, he jokes, evoking the vision of Old Europe in flames over the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian royal in Sarajevo.

In broad terms of course, he’s quite right. The devil, as always, is in the details. Those in favor of research, development and acquisition of such world-beating weapons systems as the F-22 for use against a peer or near-peer competitor believe, as many have before them, that peace is best assured from a position of strength and that a lack of capability in a Hobbesian international order is provocative.  Barnett clearly disagrees, which is why I am forced to look at his latest article on aircraft acquisition with a somewhat jaundiced eye:

Helicopter losses are the No. 1 cause of U.S. casualties in high-altitude, mountainous Afghanistan and the third leading cause in Iraq. Yet Pentagon R&D spending on tactical aircraft dwarfs the amount spent on rotor craft. In recent years, the total budgeted R&D for helicopters was $2 billion to $3 billion, roughly half of what the Defense Department spends on just one new tactical aircraft and one-quarter of its R&D on missile defense.

Doesn’t that sound out of whack? Spending so much on low-probability future scenarios and so little on today’s real-world operations?

His recommendation is that we spend a great deal more on small war aircraft like helicopters, and less on fixed wing fighters and attack aircraft. But Barnett is certainly smart enough to know two things: First, that fixed-wing dominance enables rotary wing employment while being operationally sufficient in and of itself - the reverse is rarely true - and second, that the physics of rotary wing operations virtually ensures that helicopters will be exposed to a much greater variety and density of threats than their high flying confrères.

Nowhere will this be more true than in an asymmetric campaign with a 360-degree threat sector. Reaction times to surface-to-air missile threats are brutally short when you’re flying low, bullets cannot be deceived or decoyed in any case, and high altitude flight in a rotary wing design by its very nature tests the margins of aircraft performance. Certainly we could up-armor our helicopters, but that isn’t a research and development issue so much as it is a trade-off between self-protection and mission accomplishment: Every pound of armor means one less pound of something else - endurance, range, ordnance, useful load.

Because of our dominance of the full volume of the aerial battlefield, no US ground forces have been subject to aerial attack since 1953 - a fact with enormous strategic and tactical consequences. That’s worth keeping in mind, alongside two other eternal truths: The best way to ensure peace is to prepare for war, and the surest way to lose the next war is to fight the last one.

Baby steps towards actual history rather than the luridly painted partisan tableaux of the day, quotha:

The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we’ve become familiar.

One such narrative is “Bush lied, people died.” The claim is that “neocons,” including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have already concluded. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam’s hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat.

Unfortunately–and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush–the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren’t found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem, rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was.

So radical a strategy in the face of such inveterate domestic political malice required much better oratorical skills than the administration was able or willing to muster. Pity.

Tailspin Tom has an epic collection of World War II-era aviation photos, including this pic of a hangar deck cat shot from an Essex-class carrier.

The cats launched athwartship, and according to the caption, a pilot could be suddenly exposed to as much as a 35-knot crosswind once he left the ship’s windbreak.

Which, gosh.

Time magazine asks whether or not it’s time to “give war a chance” in Burma over the regime’s reluctance to let humanitarian aid across the border:

The trouble is that the Burmese haven’t shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale — and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone’s control. “We’re in 2008, not 1908,” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.” That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma.

As Wretchard points out, the only country with the capability of “invading” Burma that could plausibly be motivated to do so is, well: Us.

Yes folks, the “good old U.S. military” — the same one whose recruiting stations Code Pink wants to drive out of Berkeley; the same one Barack Obama wants to reduce; the same “good old U.S. military” that is reviled as incompetent, perennially defeated when it is killing children by the thousands or bombing baby milk factories. That’s what’s going to do it. Invade Burma, I mean.

There is a school of international policy which holds that the only morally acceptable uses of military force are humanitarian interventions where we have no strategic interest. That is only appropriate to risk the lives of US servicemen when there is nothing to gain.

Look for it soon in a polling booth near you.