perfidy

I got this link from Winds of Change, the blog I was slobbering on a couple posts back. In this post, Caerdroia talks about two of my favorite things. War and Computers. Sad, isn't it? But the article is a very interesting look at how the way we have learned to look at life due to the computer revolution could have a very large and positive influence on how we go about defending our nation - not by voting away all our freedoms, but by sticking to what is at the core of our republic's strength - liberty.

By way of Porphyrogenitus, an idea that will poke a sharp nasty stick into corners of your mind that you'd rather were left, well, unpoked. That is, if your mind is like mine. Which of course it is. You wouldn't want to be...

Nevermind.

Not to suck up, but Winds of Change is my new second favorite blog. Of course, what you're reading right now is my favorite blog. Why wouldn't it be? But go read it. They post long articles with big words about important stuff. No heady weirdness over there. Though they are upright, moral even.

And Trent Telenko linked me. He's just dreamy.

Okay, tooo much heady weirdness. Warrior needs sleep, badly.

Over at Parapundit, there's some ideas for how you can hasten, (if only slightly) the demise of the contemptible North Korean dictatorship.

The idea centers on getting solar power radios into the hands of North Korean citizens, through a variety of means. How effective this will be, I really can't say. It is of course potentially lethal for North Korean citizens just to have a radio, but getting some truth into the hands of the oppressed can't be a completely bad idea. We know that the voice of America broadcasts and BBC shortwave were crucial lifelines for dissidents in the Soviet block. East Germans were not so cut off from their cousins in the west as the North is from the south in Korea - at least the East Germans had radios.

Hopefully, before too long, we won't have to worry about this. While many fear the cataclysm they expect will attend the demise of the Communist rulership, I have to pull out my dusty rose colored optimist shades and say that the pattern of Communist collapse is largely a peaceful one. Throughout Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and even elsewhere, the Commies generally go quietly. The most violent example so far of a Communist regime losing power is Romania, and even that was peaceful compared to the extraordinary bloodiness of Communists taking power anywhere.
 

From Wired News, we learn that Saddam's Vice President has been captured in Mosul. This was the idiot who suggested that Bush and Saddam fight a duel.

This happy news brings to mind the former American VP John Nance Garner's truism that the Vice Presidency wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit. Well in this case, it was the Vice President.

Over at Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher, I found this helpful list of names you can throw at those whose opinions you find exceptionally objectionable:

New terms for "asshat"

Not that it's any less fresh and clever after the first 75 times you use it in a morning ("Your head is up your ass, get it?"), but it's due for a vacation. Give one of these a try the next time you want to make it clear that you disapprove of someone intensely, but you don't want to keep repeating yourself:

bum bonnet
colon chapeau
dookie derby
excretory fedora
fecal fez
intestinal stetson
pooper panama
rearmuffs
sphinc-turban*
yarmul-caca

*Or maybe bowel-towel? No, wait, bowelhead. Bowelhead?

Update: Pete from Virginia adds the following:

turdban
dungbrero
poopy kepi

And Brett D. points out the "how did I miss that?" alternative:

doo-rag

Just remember, we're just trying to help.

The coming close approach with Mars (closest in 50,000 years) has focused attention on Mars exploration. There are two American space probes, spirit and opportunity, en route; as well as a British Beagle-2 probe carried by the ESA's Mars Express and the troubled Japanese Nozumi orbiter. While the NASA probes were launched early this summer with little hassle, the American Space Agency is in deep trouble. The Columbia disaster has grounded the space shuttle fleet, and there seems little doubt that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board will say that the shuttle cannot be flown for much longer. Optimistic NASA estimates that the Shuttle could be flown into the 2030's now seem fantastical.

While more scientific missions to Mars will bring a welcome increase in our scientific knowledge, they do not in any way advance our presence in space. Launched on disposable vehicles whose design histories reach back before the dawn of the space age, the American Mars probes are holdovers from the past. The future of space exploration, if there is to be one, lies with two developments. Truly reusable launch vehicles and heavy lift launchers. I have talked about reusable launch vehicles before here, and they would be crucial in any effort to develop a permanent foothold in Earth orbit, or on the moon. They would be the SUVs of space; reliable, capable of hauling people and small amounts of cargo, and basically travelling back and forth between the Earth and orbital facilities. They would allow us to get people into and back from space cheaply and safely. As such, they should be at the very top of NASA's list for things to do. (That they are not, is criminal.)

[Update] The Russians are designing a nuclear power station for Mars. They apparently have all the design work completed, but trouble looms on the horizon:

"The only stumbling block is how to deliver ready-made building blocks to a construction site 300 million kilometres (186.4 million miles) away from Earth."

That does present a problem, don't it? The solution to this problem is in the rest of this article:

But they are not all that we need. The primary justification for building the shuttle can be seen in the name of the vehicle itself - shuttle. The Space Shuttle was intended as a space bus to allow astronauts to go to a space station and back to earth. Of course, the first space station died before the shuttle started flying, and it took another twenty years to build the second one using the shuttle. Just as the shuttle was not the ideal vehicle for space construction (the size of the shuttle cargo bay imposed numerous constraints on the design of the ISS), a reusable launch vehicle like the DC-X would not be well suited for creating an orbital infrastructure.

To build in space, we don't need a bus, we need a big honking dump truck. Happily, we have most of the pieces already designed and tested. While it might be a good idea to stop flying the shuttle, there is no reason to dispose of the rest of the shuttle system. When you think about it a little, it becomes obvious. The solid rocket boosters, external tank and shuttle orbiter comprise the what NASA calls the Space Transportation System. The STS can put over twenty five tons of cargo into low earth orbit. All well and good. But - the whole shuttle orbiter goes up in orbit as well. Properly considered, the entire orbiter is payload. So, why not get rid of the orbiter?

The shuttle orbiter weighs about 175,000 lbs. Add in the orbiter's payload capacity of 55,000 lbs, and you get 230,000 lbs, or 115 tons. That's a lot of mass. There are two ways to go about disposing of the orbiter in order to create a heavy lift system. The simplest would be to create a dummy orbiter. In a dummy orbiter, the three main engines at the bottom, and all the pumping arrangements to get the fuel from the external tank would be identical to the systems in the orbiter. But the rest of the vehicle would be a light weight shell designed to hold and protect the payload during liftoff. The major advantage of this idea is that it would require no redesign or modification of the other parts of the system.

The dummy orbiter could be designed by a few guys from Lockheed over a long weekend, if we gave them enough pizza and mountain dew. If we wanted to be clever about it, we would design the cargo shell so that it could be immediately transformed into habitable living space - make it airtight, include conduits, airlocks and what have you. Once in orbit, you move the payload out, and then retrofit the space for whatever you need it for.

A more ambitious scheme would involve heavily modifying the external tank. Rather than having the shuttle orbiter with its three main engines, the engines would be moved to the bottom of the external tank, more like a conventional rocket. Atop the external tank would be the cargo module, just like with a ordinary disposable rocket. The real advantage of this change would be that you could easily allow for more solid rocket boosters. Each pair of boosters would increase the thrust of the STS stack by six and a half million pounds of thrust. This would allow truly large amounts of cargo to be lifted into orbit.

(And, while you're redesigning the ET, you can make it easiily convertible to hab space as well. Seeing as the ET is 150 feet long and 30 across, that's a lot of space for free, everytime you launch. Of course, we should have been doing that for the last twenty years. Aargh.)

What it boils down to is that for very little money, and very little time, we can have a heavy lift system that can launch as much into orbit as the old Saturn could. We just need to ditch the orbiter. With that kind of lift capacity, we could easily launch the material needed for a human crewed Mars mission, a lunar base, large orbital telescopes, or an expanded space station.

There are already assembly lines for the external tanks, and for the SRBs. While the shuttle engines would not be reusable in this configuration (unless they were somehow brought back to earth, for example by returning shuttles) they could be reused in space for other purposes, such as earth to moon shuttles, or even for lunar landers. The possibilities are endless, once you have the capability to rapidly move large quantities of mass into orbit

I was watching CSPAN II the other night, and they had a broadcast of a seminar on Whitaker Chambers. Speaking was Dan Mahoney, author most recently of the book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology, and also this good article on Chambers. I did some googling to find more information on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. What I did not know was that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had a long career in baseball.

No kidding? Really?

But not for the reasons that immediately pop to mind.

Seeing as no one was killed in this car bomb attack on the Baghdad headquarters of the UN, I can be facetious and say that it looks like the Iraqis have figured out who their real enemy is.

Michael Ledeen of the National Review has a good one up on the Iranian situation.

The behavior of our State Department has been suspect for the duration of the War on Terror. Deputy Assistant Undersecretaries, lackies, underlings and minions have consistently undermined the effort to fight, or even to mildly castigate terrorists and the state sponsors thereof.

That these ... individuals... would leak these stories in an effort to deter communication with the very people who are resisting the monstrous Iranian government so that careerist State department employees can continue their dialog with the leaders of the "Iranian Democracy" is abhorrent. We need a State Department that supports the war on terror, and moreover is capable of discriminating between a democracy and a fundamentalist islamic totalitarian state.

While President Bush has been relatively outspoken in support for the people of Iran, the rest of the government needs to get on board. As I have said here before, you can predict how much the people of a dictatorial country like America by how we deal with that country's leadership. Standing on principle has real, pragmatic benefits.

On a related note, Trent Telenko had an article. a little while back on what he perceives as the beginning of a campaign against Saudi Arabia. As it happens I agree, not to suck up to much. I've talked about this before, though not with quite the depth on SA that Trent gets into.

I am late in noticing this hilarious parody accurate description post on balloon juice. Go read it, I beg you.

I just recently finished Tom Clancy's new book, Teeth of the Tiger. I was disappointed on many levels. Over most of the last two decades, I have eagerly awaited the next Clancy book. I got suckered on the Op-Center, thing, but once I ruled those out, it was largely a happy process of buy book, read book, happy thoughts. I have read all of his novels, and all of his non-fiction as well. (The non-fiction books are very well done, and remarkable compendiums of military information that you would otherwise have to glean from hundreds of sources.)

Bear and Dragon was the last Clacy novel that I liked unreservedly. Or nearly - the battle sequence was a little too one sided for dramatic purposes, though in all honesty that's probably how it work*. Red Rabbit was interesting, but almost sterile in its lack of action and intrigue. It read more like a report on a book than the book itself. Teeth plots another point on that downward trend.

Without getting into spoilers, the basic idea of the novel is that there is a completely secret, extra-governmental and extra legal covert operations agency that has the mission of killing those who would plan, fund or execute terrorist operations against Americans.

I have several key ojections to the book:

1) The main characters are Jack Ryan's son and twin nephews. Aside from these three, I was never able to distinguish any of the other characters on the "Good Guy" side. The bad guys were nearly as bland. I actually wrote my own dramatis personae just so I could keep track of these two dimensional characters.

2) There is almost no dramatic tension in this book. There are two story arcs that intersect only in perfect hits on terrorists. The terrorists never know what's happening. Through intelligence siphoned off the NSA and CIA, this agency flawlessly tracks, identifies, and kills terrorists. It's like reading about someone who has mastered a videogame describe how effectively he can clear the first level of the game.

3) There is very little real discussion about the morality of the mission they have undertaken. One of the nephews has doubts, but they are resolved in an improbable coincidence. The characters blithely go about killing whomever they are ordered to kill. Now, for all that I have liked Tom Clancy in the past, I know that moral philosophy is not exactly what you expect in a Clancy novel. Nevertheless, in prior novels good guys are clearly working for good - both ends and means, and have little need for moral justification. And more than many authors, Clancy is at pains to give his bad guys a convincing moral dimension. Your average Clancy villain either sees himself as a good guy (good psych, there) or has compelling history that motivates him to do what he otherwise would not. This book is lacking on both sides of the game.

4) And finally, the book ends about halfway through the story.

Wait for the omnibus paperback edition. I hope that Clany has not just gotten lazy, though this book has all the earmarks of just that.

* America against any other armed force in the world presents major dramatic problems. It is manifest that we can kick anyone's ass. How do you give Superman a convincing opponent? The media suffers through this every time we go up against someone, though they are hard pressed to maintain the tension. There are only two ways to do it, though - one is to come up with a scenario that convincingly limits the amount of force that the Americans will bring to bear, and the other is to vastly inflate the competance of the opposing force.

Over at the USS Clueless, Steven den Beste has engaged in typical logorrhea and produced a masterpiece of technical analysis. He details everything that is wrong with the current system, and what must be done to fix it.

He is, of course, missing the point. The correct solution is to put hamsters on treadmills. Mind you, I am aware of the immense breeding project that would have to be undertaken, as well as the cost of creating millions of advanced treadmill generators. But the benefits are enormous. Power generation will become a decentralized, robust network. Power generation will be entertaining. And, in emergencies, hamsters taste like chicken.

The New Scientist is reporting that a new kind of explosive is being developed by the DoD. This miracle explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from an excited isomer of Hafnium. By shooting some xrays at this highly energized form of matter, the nucleus is convinced to emit a large number of gamma rays. Early tests showed a release of energy 60 times that put in, and theoretically this could go much higher.

A shell with one gram of explosive Hafnium-178m2 (the excited, isomer of regular Hafnium) could store the energy of over 50kg of TNT. This means you could potentially have grenade sized shells with the explosive power of a WWII blockbuster bomb. Needless to say, the military has a hard on for this stuff. For the foreseeable future, making energized Hafnium will be expensive - it requires a partical accelerator and other expensive apparatus to pump regular Hafnium with the energy it needs. Costs would be thousands of dollars per kg even in full production, on the order of those for enriched Uranium.

The downside is that this reaction is a "nuclear" reaction. It doesn't involve fission or fusion, it's an isomer decay reaction; but some of the unexploded Hafnium would remain after the weapon detonates, leaving small amounts of radioactive Hafnium behind. When you combine the words "nuclear" and "radioactive" this causes certain elements to salivate. And then to scream bloody murder.

Some will fear that this will erode the barrier between conventional and nuclear weapons. The administration has already authorized studies (not production) of low yield nuclear weapons for use as bunker busters, and to attack bio and chemical stores without danger of spreading those agents by the blast. (Of course, the blast would spread fallout - which kind of defeats the purpose in my book.) The Hafnium explosives, at least from what the article states, would be exceedingly high energy with very little radioactive residue. Most of the danger from conventional nukes is from the Alpha and Beta decay, not the gamma decay which seems to be the sole form of energy that this explosive releases.

This would be useful, then, as a bunker buster. But if these weapons are developed, the potential is enormous, especially if the xray trigger could be sufficiently miniaturized, and the Hafnium residue minimized. How about conventional machine gun rounds with a quarter gram of Hafnium explosive - each bullet explodes with the force of a tank round. Imagine a soldier with a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle, which has an extreme range of two miles. A couple grams of Hafnium explosive in the bullet would have a remarkable effect. Or imagine an Air Force plane dropping a cluster munition, like the CBU-87. Instead of 202 grenade like bomblets, each bomblet has the explosive force of a daisy cutter.

I don't know that this stuff will ever be in the hands of the individual soldier, but integrated into missiles, bombs and artillery shells, its impact would be enormous. One of the biggest problems with explosives is not accuracy but weight. They are difficult to move around. Considering how the average soldier likes to bomb the hell out of the enemy, you can go through stocks of munitions at a frightful rate. If we perfect this technology, there are a couple uses for very large hafnium bombs. But the greatest use would be to create much smaller bombs with the same spread of explosive power as the ones we have now. This would greatly ease the logistical strain of keeping the artillery, air force and navy well stocked with things that go boom. And further, storing the bombs could be significantly safer if an xray trigger is required to detonate them. Just don't put them near hospitals, I guess.

[Side note] The trend for the US Military is toward two things - ever more integrated communications and intelligence, and more and more firepower. This fits right in with that. Winds of Change's Trent Telenko has a very good article up on the communications side of that equation.

We like Lileks. We like him so much, we stole the name of our blog from him. Here is another reason why, from today's bleat:

Just went to nyc.gov - the website leads with a picture of that hapless nanny Mayor. He's about as inspirational and reassuring as a stale blintz. I watched some of the press conference. He's warning people not to eat food from the fridge if it's gone bad. I'm picturing this in 1940s film noir terms - the mayor would have been some tough pol, maybe Broderick Crawford; he'd grip the podium, stare at the press corps with a gaze undeterred by the detonations of the Speed Graphics, and he'd say "Stay home. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Looters will be shot on sight. And don't worry - if all else fails, the sun will come up on schedule."

In the rest of the bleat, he talks about the remarkable calm in Manhattan. No looting. Businessmen sleeping in parks. Patient waiting for power and normalcy to return. There was more violence in Ottawa, where serious looting was reported. Those Canadians are so well behaved.

Compared to the chaos of the next biggest blackout in history, or the one in the seventies that led to chaos in NYC, it seems that everyone basically avoided freaking out. That is a good thing, and makes me feel better about all the people I am forced to share the planet with. But I watched a good bit of Bloomberg's performance, and while the information would certainly have been of some use to the brain dead, the tone was solid, low key patronizing.

"Fellow New Yorkers, in this time of crisis, please remember to keep breathing, no matter what happens. Simply suck in some air, hold it for a second so the oxygen gets in your bloodstream, and then let it out again. Just repeat this as often as necessary. Lack of oxygen is a leading cause of death or injury, so be alert. And if anyone needs help, be there for them, help them breathe, see if they're alright. Together, we can get through this."

I wanted to spew. This milqetoast is much the opposite of Guliani, who could be reassuring without reminding you of the dangers of walking with your shoes untied. 

[Update] Pythagosaurus has seen fit to get rid of his Bloomberg post. But I thought I would rescue this bit, which I liked:

Remember what happened in 1977 when the power went off in New York? You could see the fires in the Bronx for miles. Thousands of people took to the streets to loot and rampage. Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit. So what happens in 2003 when the power goes off? Millions of tired, confused and possibly terrified New Yorkers take to the streets in 90 degree heat and. . . deal with it. The news last night showed hordes of people. . . walking home. Thousands of stranded commuters with no way to get home. . . found a piece of sidewalk. Three guys looted in Brooklyn-- they're with the police now. All in all, a remarkable testament to the ability of humans to show some adaptability. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe would be proud.

Crowds rioted. It was chaos. It was Detroit.

That's fun.

The USS Clueless has a recent series of posts touching on the growing rift between Europe and America, and the underlying reasons. Toward the end of the most recent one, den Beste speculates on what might happen if the economic decline he foresees for Europe's future comes to pass. He concludes that a serious possibility is the rebirth of Fascism, this time in a unitary European Federation.

Some other people have commented on this as well. The Limey Brit makes the point that an essential characteristic of Fascism is nationalism, something that is unlikely to develop in the near future as a pan-European phenomenon. So while he agrees with the coming relative economic decline of Europe, he feels that a more likely end scenario is a wave of 1848 - style revolutions and unrest leading to an intra European war if demagogues seize power in one or more regions.

If (big if) current trends in European economies continue, the European economies will be in big trouble. While the political landscape makes it seem unlikely that the EU or its member states will adopt what to Americans are the obvious solutions to their problems, the Europeans are not irretrievably stupid. If things get bad enough, in all likelihood they will muddle through and make at least enough reforms to allow their economies to recover. Who would have thought that Britain of the mid-1970s would in only a couple years turn to Margaret Thatcher to lead them out of the economic wilderness of socialism? Similar reversals could happen in Germany, or even France.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate about the worst case scenarios. As I mentioned in the comments on the Limey Brit's post I linked above, while Nationalism is unlikely to develop in a pan European sense, that does not mean that you couldn't get a fascist state out of the EU. Napoleon, in the early part of his career, had many admirers throughout Europe. To the progressives in Germany and elsewhere, Nappy represented the wave of the future. Many in Germany welcomed the French army as liberators. Of course, they soon changed their minds - but not after the French had seized control of the vaster part of Europe.

I can easily imagine a demagogue - especially if he is from one of the smaller countries, but yet with a base of power in either France or Germany - mouthing the right kind of cant and moving to the top of the political system. Especially given that the proposed EU government is mostly isolated from any kind of accountability to the people, or even the member states.

At this point, European governments avoid military spending; but a functional dictatorship, backed and implemented by the EU bureacrats in Brussels could easily turn to a military build up to distract attention from economic woes. In fact, this scenario would be more likely just before economic collapse rather than after.

And then, we'd have to go over and kick their ass all over again. 

Here are links to Part One and Part Two.

Assume that the military has taken my advice, and increased the size of the Airlift command, and bought several Mobile Offshore Bases. Now, we can move troops and equipment anywhere in the world, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Many defense analysts, and the Defense Secretary himself, have called for “transformation” of the armed forces. What this means is sometimes a little vague, but the general thrust of their argument is that we should focus on small, high-tech, adaptable and flexible, deployable and above all highly lethal forces. Cold War anachronisms like heavy armored divisions should slowly be phased out in favor of light, mobile, precision guided, networked, brilliant-weapon forces.

In principle, this is all well and good. It is traditionally American policy to sacrifice equipment (money) before the troops. As Patton said, “it’s not your job to die for your country, but to make the other sorry bastard die for his.” I think, though, that we have gone a leetle too far down the quality side, to the point where we are facing serious problems with quantity. The drastic military cuts of the Clin-ton years have forced the military to focus on high tech weaponry because we have no other choice. So to a large extent, Rumsfeld’s emphasis on transformation is putting the best face on a bad situation.

It is not enough to have sufficient forces to deal with x number of threats. You need significantly more than that, so that after a threat is dealt with, those units can return to the United States for rest and refit. That is the problem that we are facing in Iraq. The all volunteer army has done wonders, but if we abuse it, the volunteers will walk away when their terms of enlistment are up.

I believe that we need to change our focus somewhat. We now have the capacity to put nearly infinite force anyplace we choose. What we can’t do is put a lesser but still overwhelming force in two or three places at once. We need to seriously upgrade that ability.

As I mentioned in part one, the core of our lethality is our ability to communicate and coordinate. This should be the baseline for any new divisions. The army is in the process of switching its divisions to digital technology. The 4th ID, which didn’t get to Iraq in time to see action in regular combat, was the first division to go completely digital. The 1st cavalry is next in line, and will be followed by the others in turn. Any new division should start as a digital division. What this means is that they will have the complete set of communications and networking gear that was available to some but not all of the units in Iraq last spring.

C4ISR is the military acronym for this concept. It stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. No one in the world does it as well as we do. Constant and realistic training allows our troops to get the most of this equipment. By starting from that base, we will have highly adaptable, flexible and lethal troops right out of the box. Then, we can equip them to meet projected needs.

The needs that I see coming in the near term fall into two categories – the need to hit hard, and hit quickly, relatively well equipped and decent sized armies; and to occupy the nations that were once guarded by those armies. (By relatively well equipped, I mean something on the order of the Iraqi army in Gulf War I – equipped largely with late soviet era equipment, with a sprinkling of more advanced weapons acquired from France, Germany or China.) Our current line up of divisions doesn’t quite meet those needs.

The Airborne divisions are fast reacting, and can be inserted nearly anywhere. But, they are lightly armed. (Their ability to rapidly and effectively call on Air Force firepower, seen in Afghanistan, mitigates this somewhat.) The 10th Mountain division is in a similar position. The Armored and Mechanized Infantry divisions are not air deployable. We need something in between, both in terms of response time and firepower.

The solution is a light armored division. Instead of the 70 ton Abrams tank, it would be equipped with a lighter, 20 to 30 ton tank. It would have a gun nearly as powerful as the 120mm cannon on the M1, with all the nifty targeting and communications gear of the M1, but with significantly less armor. During the Gulf War, American tanks were engaging Iraqi T72s a thousand yards outside the Russian tank’s effective range. This is likely to hold true in future conflicts. Armor that can protect the crew against small arms, shrapnel and smaller cannon is sufficient. Similarly, a simple 10 ton armored personnel carrier, with good speed and armor to protect the troops from small arms fire and shrapnel, and armed with a bushmaster cannon would be more useful than a Bradley. Speed, coordination and firepower would allow the division to overcome the typically poorly trained and ill-organized third world army.

The Army has already done much of the research for the light tank - the M8 Buford AGS, or armored gun system was tested in the early nineties. Something like that could be put into production easily. For the APC, the old M113A3 should be upgraded with more modern communications and navigation equipment, and given a larger gun.

The vehicles would give the division mobility and firepower that the airborne divisions lack. Yet, with the weights I mentioned, the division would be air deployable. Even the small C-130s could carry two of the APCs, or even one of the tanks if they were on the low end of the weight scale. A C-5 could carry at least six of the smaller tanks, instead of just two Abrams. (A small number of Abrams and Bradleys could stiffen the armored force without drastically reducing its deployability.) While a light armored division could not deploy as fast as the 82nd, it would be a lot faster than the 1st Armored.

The other need is for occupation troops. Again, they would be equipped with all the communications and networking gear as a regular division. They would have armored vehicles, armored humvees, and a few tanks for firepower. But they would train heavily for missions that an occupation force would deal with – urban warfare, counterinsurgency, intelligence and military police roles functions, and military engineering.

Having a division of occupation troops would free up the traditional combat troops for their actual mission. Instead of keeping the troops that did the invasion in country for two years, as soon as they crack the shell and put down major resistance, they rotate back to the states for rest and refit. Then, the occupation troops move in to settle things down. This would allow us to keep a larger proportion of our frontline combat troops ready to fight.

We should keep the divisions we already have just as they are. There is still a need for armored and mechanized infantry. And there certainly is a need for the airborne divisions. The light armored divisions would fill a large gap in our capabilities, and the occupation troops would allow us to preserve the edge of our combat troops, while doing a better job of nation building when that is necessary.

I have thought that another five divisions would get us out of our current mess – two each of the new light armored and occupation divisions, and another infantry division, along with the necessary support troops needed to keep them operational. This wouldn’t put us up to our cold war force levels, but it would make us vastly more able to deal with the threats that we do face, and will over the next ten years or so.

According to the AP, between three and four hundred thousand barrels of oil will begin flowing into Turkey today. This oil will come from the Iraq's northern oil fields. The article did not say when oil would begin pumping from the southern oil fields.

Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo Chinese scientists (natch) have succeeded for the first time in creating a human rabbit embryo. German cannibals will be especially happy, as they can have people and Hassenpfeffer at the same time. The Chinese

"team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed. More than 400 of those new, fused entities grew into early embryos, and more than 100 survived to the blastocyst stage -- the point at which coveted stem cells begin to form.

Crazy, man, crazy. Of course, everyone expected the Chinese to create the dreaded Pandaman hybrid. This rabbit thing was probably intended to confuse and deceive us while they continue work on the pandaman. Or, combining the known reproductive prowess of the average chinese citizen with the rabbit will result in unstoppable hordes of rabbitman chinese armies. 

Only time will tell.