Lots of good stuff at this week’s Carnival of Space (which seems so far to be a successful venture for Henry Cate), with a focus on ISDC. Lots of new space bloggers out there (including “Flying Singer, the carnival host) that I hadn’t seen before, and should add to the blogroll.
If We Lose The War, Whose Fault Will It Be?
OK, well, the press should take some responsibility, but it will also be the bureaucracy:
Iraq has shown that the DoD bureaucracy is too big, too slow and out of touch with the realities of the modern battlefield.
Up until just recently the military was built for a set-piece battle against like forces. But our enemy does not want to cooperate with the geniuses in the Pentagon who came up with the plans and procured the equipment to execute those plans and developed training platforms to prepare soldiers for those plans.
The bureaucracy–even in combat–is staggering. To get some things done the request has to go through 15! steps of approval.
One Company Commander summed it up like this:
“They trust me with the lives of 100 men, humvees, weapons, ammo, civil affairs negotiations, classified intelligence, radios, everything. But I cannot be trusted with $20k worth of Dinar to hire a crew to build up an IP station?”
Sixty Three Years Later
How would today’s media report D-Day?
SMITH: Rich, there is a growing sense of apprehension here about 40 miles away from what we assume will be the point of attack on the beaches of Normandy either tomorrow or the next day. Mayor Jacque Capituler is with me. Mayor, tell our viewers how you feel about the coming invasion.
CAPITULER: We don’t want to be liberated. We don’t need to be liberated. The Germans have established a perfectly workable government, here. The Americans should go liberate someone else, somewhere else.
RUNDLING: The thorny issue of civilian casualties and collateral damage brought onto our living room screens from right there in France, Thank you Christianne. To … where? Ok, to Edward Smith with the forces of General George Patton in Britain. Edward.
SMITH: Rich, I am here in Kent, England opposite the Pas de Calais just across the English Channel which, if the weather were better, you could see behind me. MCN can now confirm that the activity here in Kent, which has been named “Operation Fortitude” is, for want of a better phrase: A complete fake!
RUNDLING: Fake? Explain, please, for our viewers.
SMITH: MCN can now report that Patton has constructed, literally, a phony army here. The tanks are cardboard. The planes are rubber. The radio traffic is faked. Reports of troop movements are completely fabricated. This operation, clearly, is designed to fool the Germans in Europe and Americans back home into falsely believing that the attack — which we now think will come tomorrow if the weather lets up — will be aimed at Pas de Calais instead of Normandy.
RUNDLING: Excellent reporting, Edward. MCN’s Senior Ethics Advisor Emma Smith will be joining me in the studio to dicuss: What does it mean to the American way of life when their very own government engages in this kind of deliberately false and misleading information? Emma is the author of an exciting new book: “The Soviet Experience; Success, Solidarity, and Stalin.”
[Update at 2 PM EDT]
Here’s a related article: Journalists, you’re in the army now, like it or not.
An Army Of Porkbusters
I’d be willing to help, too. Anything to ease the burden on our busy Congresspeople. Maybe we could think of it as “doing the jobs that Congressmen won’t do.”
Sauce For The Goose
So, if Turkey is doing hot pursuit into Iraq, why is it we’re not going after the safe houses in Syria?
Get Out The Popcorn For Her Campaign
I’ve noted before how amusing I find it that people call me a “Clinton hater” or a “Bush fan,” when I think that my take on both presidents is reasonably objective. When I criticize Bill (and Hillary) Clinton as corrupt, this is the kind of thing that I’m talking about. The Clinton years were this kind of thing non stop, but it was rarely reported, or if it was, the press (who were in love with both of them) bent over backwards to excuse it.
Thoughts On Global Warming
…from Freeman Dyson.
Forty Years Later
And the left continues to attempt to rewrite the history of the Six-Day War. I remember the war, and some of the jokes about it afterward (it was so short because the Israelis were renting their tanks from Hertz), though it was no laughing matter at the time–I had many Jewish schoolmates. And in a sense, of course, the war goes on, because Israel’s enemies refuse to abandon their goal of destruction of the Jewish state.
[Update in the late afternoon]
And predictably, the Arabs blame all their problems on their failed attempt to destroy Israel four decades ago.
Return To The Blogosphere
I hadn’t noticed it before, but apparently Howard Lovy is back, blogging about nanotech.
Without A Fight
What was Sandy Berger hiding when he gave up his law license?
What is at stake is more than what we think and say about Sandy Berger. It is more than the legacy of Bill Clinton and of George W. Bush. It is more than the prospects for Hillary Clinton becoming the Democrats’ presidential nominee and ultimately the President. All of these, of course, are wrapped up in this story.
Our security and vitality of the rule of law in America are at stake as well. That should concern all whose lives and loved ones may be at risk if our nation follows the wrong path, not knowing everything that should inform our judgments. It should concern all who respect the law, all who have labored as lawyers and judges, as honorable government officials and voices for even-handed justice.
Sadly, this story doesn’t interest the Justice Department, which disposed of the criminal charges leniently based in part on false information from Berger. When faced with the fact that Berger had access to original documents on two occasions before Archives’ employees became suspicious enough to start marking documents, the Justice Department declared with confidence that no documents had been taken – they asked Berger if he had taken anything during those visits, he said no, and they let the matter rest.
This is just one more example of either incompetence on the part of the Bush administration, or more of the waging of war on it by the bureaucracy, or perhaps something worse.