And More Coming

Front trench to the driveway. The rest of the driveway is still a wreck.

Front of the house from the street. Or what passes for a street at the moment…

STILL
DIGGING,
R

Global What?

I can’t hear you over the sound of the snow shovels and snow plows. Did you say you needed warming? There’s hot chocolate on the stove, help yourself…

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Updating…

No more talking, no more hot chocolate, no more cable when the plows finally come through, cables laying in the street. Shut up and keep shoveling.

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Probably the last update for a while…

Same angle as the very top photo…

STUPID
HIPPIES,
R

He’s Doing It Again…

Robert Gates that is, he’s lying about the state of US fighter aircraft.

-From Reuters we have this quote by Mr. Gates…

“The reality is it’s a good airplane. It’s meeting the performance parameters…”

-From the Federal Times we have this quote by Mr. Gates…

“Progress and performance of the F-35 over the past two years has not been what it should, as a number of key goals and benchmarks were not met…”

-Which is it Mr. Gates?

-Also from the Reuters article we have this quote from Mr. Gates…

“Gates also said the Navy faced a shortfall of about only some 100 carrier-based aircraft in 2018 before the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 reached maximum production levels, far less than a shortfall of 243 planes often cited by Boeing backers.”

-Any shortfall, even if it’s only a dozen fighters, is bad in a combat situation. Robert Gates will be long retired when that shortfall hits the US militaries fighter aircraft, so will the current Commander-in-Chief. Will either of them take responsibility for those shortfalls, which affect the US Navy, USMC, and the USAF fighter programs, if and when we find ourselves in a major war?

-Will Robert Gates admit he’s made a mistake and re-open the F-22 line and continue the F/A-18 production? The quote on that from Mr. Gates is, “No.”

-Let’s look at some other quotes from the Reuters article…

“A day earlier, Gates announced that he had fired the program director, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David R. Heinz, and was withholding $614 million from F-35 builder Lockheed Martin.”

-So what performance parameters is the F-35 meeting that would cause the firing of a USMC two-star?

“The F-35 is substantially over budget and behind schedule.”

-Isn’t that one of the exact same excuses, almost word for word that Mr. Gates used to terminate the F-22 production? Well yeah it is, noting this quote from a  July 30th, 2009 article from AP…

“The Democratic-controlled House went along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plans to kill the over-budget F-22 fighter jet…”

-Ayup, we’ve heard that one before and the fact is, cancelling all of the future fighter replacement programs, cancelling all of the current fighter programs, and retiring all of the older fighters will indeed help cure many of the Defense Departments budget and procurement problems. It will also leave the US military with active combat commitments all over the world and not enough fighters to cover any of them and it will leave the US Navy without enough fighters for all of its carriers. Which of course means that Mr. Gates can go ahead and cancel the over budget, behind schedule, and not-meeting-performance parameters CVN-21 Ford class and Mr. Gates can go ahead and retire some of the older carriers ahead of schedule. After all, what’s the point of having aircraft carriers if we don’t the fighters to put on them?

-The Reuters article has a stock quote widget in the top right corner that as I type this shows both Lock-Mart and Boeing stock values plummeting. Cancelling these programes means the loss of thousands of jobs. Potentially (and highly likely) the jobs lost in the defense and related fields will run into the tens of thousands of people put out of work by these “cost-saving” measures.

-I fail to see how this can possibly improve our current economic situation. I fail to see how any of this is of any possible benefit to US troops in combat at the present or in the future.

-We have not yet seen the end of war between men, we will not see its end in our lifetimes.

A
SAD
DAY,
R

Once Upon a Time

We all had our hero’s. Ronnie Peterson was one of mine.

THAT
CHANGED
EVERYTHING,
R

Michael Yon’s Eyes…

Go, look at what he’s seen. Spitting Cobra

M-777,
R

Not As They Appeared to be…in Kabul

BabaTim with the on-scene perspective for clarification (and reminding me to distrust all initial media accounts).

Clearly not as sophisticated an attack as I’d first thought yesterday. And certainly not as well trained an attack group as yesterdays news made it appear. As BabaTim points out…

“The attack on Kabul yesterday was yet another demonstration of how inept the Taliban are at the planning and execution of a simple raid. The attack has been described in the press as “audacious” and “brazen” which is true. All their attacks in downtown Kabul are conceptually bold military moves; but they accomplish nothing. A better description of their performance would be incompetent. Seven heavily armed attackers – one in a bomb-rigged ambulance killed three policemen and two civilians, one of them a child. That is of course good news for the home team, but from the military professionals’ point of view, a dismal performance by an assault team, which had gained complete surprise when they unmasked themselves in Pashtunistan Square.”

I still think, because of the date and the target area, that this was a Haqqani operation, but if they’re still getting support from ISI elements then that support has dropped in quality and quantity by quite a bit.

It ain’t Tet, it’s barely LA bank robbers with explosives.

And I note, the LAPD didn’t stay in their FOB’s.

SWARM
TACTICS,
R

This Ain’t Tet…

…but you can almost see it from here.

Sophisticated complex attacks like this require sophisticated support, reconnaissance, and intelligence work. Somebody is providing the arms, explosives, money, and most of all, finding and training the volunteers. It starts with a P and ends with an ISI.

Todays attack seems to be a repeat of a similar attack last year at almost the same location. It may be days or weeks before we know for certain, but this certainly looks and smells like the Haqqani family business at work again. Like that previous attack none of the Talib’s chosen targets were military in nature or appearance, and of course, none of the Talib ever wear any kind of recognizable military uniform. Which makes both of these attacks (and many others like them) Taliban War Crimes. Will we ever hear that from the Left, the PaleoCon Right, or the MSM in this country? Of course not, it doesn’t fit with any of their agendas.

I have just two words remaining…

PHOENIX
PROGRAM,
R (HT/ To Mr. Bill Roggio as always, and a sideways (Lacuna Coil) nod to GSGF.)

Dream Evil – The Book of Heavy Metal (live)

fuggin ell, yer in my book now DE, nice job.

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They said they would bury us. They said we had no future.

Do your worst. We’ll still be here when you’re done. And then it will be our turn, again.

KILL
YOUR
IDOLS,
R

Hiya Russia!

I see you peeking through my posts from ForumAvia.

You’re correct, the Rosomak doesn’t do as well off road as it does on road. The same is true of the BTR-90. Wheeled vehicles are just not as good as tracked vehicles for off road armored combat. Nothing new or earth shattering there.

Instead of worrying about the relative merits of various light armored vehicles, how about y’all try and explain that Grozny 1994-95 thing to the rest of the world? You can start with the hundreds of tons of White Phosphorus ammo you dumped on that city, and why that is different from the Israelis using White Phosphorus in Gaza.

I’d love to unmoderate your comments, but so far every single one of them has had spam links attached to it. Keep trying…

SAFETY
NET,
R

BabaTim Speaks…

Free Range International

The article can be found embedded in this post at the American Thinker blog. The Vietnam analogy is one I have resisted in the past but I am rapidly becoming convinced that it is becoming a valid comparison. Look at this recent article about the Army Stryker Brigade operating down south in Kandahar Province. The Army Brigade Commander sounds exactly like one of his Vietnam era counterparts – check out this quote from him:

…He outlined how he intended his approach to work. “[W]hen it comes to the enemy, you have leadership, supply chains and formations. And you’ve really got to tackle all three of those,” Tunnell said. “I was wounded as a battalion commander and they had a perfectly capable battalion commander in to replace me very quickly; our supply lines were interdicted with ambushes and they never stopped us from getting any resources, but when you degrade a formation substantially, that will stop operations. And then if you degrade formations, supply chains and leadership near simultaneously, you’ll cause the enemy in the area to collapse, and that is what we’re trying to do here.”

Hate to point out the obvious but that quote is bullshit. General McChrystal can talk about counterinsurgency all he wants but it seems that commanders at the Brigade level pretty much do what they want based on what they know which is killing people. COIN is a tactic – we need a strategy but have none because the National Command Authority continues to vote present. Without a strategy it is impossible to tell how well we are doing or predict when we will be done. We are asking men and women from over 40 countries to fight so Afghanistan can join the core group of functional nations. Somebody needs to be leading this effort by creating a strategy with which we can define an endstate allowing us to estimate how we are doing and when we can leave. That would be the job of our current Commander in Chief – inshallah someday soon he will figure that out.

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As I noted on this blog a while ago, Col. Tunnell and 5th Stryker went looking for a confrontation. They found it, or it found them.

See Michael Yon’s Into Thine Hand I Commit My Spirit as well as Bill Roggio’s Stryker’s Use LWJ For Intel.

PLAN
XVII,
R