Posts from — May 2005

READ THE FINE PRINT! You sign up for a total of 8 years of combined active and Reserve duty. The military has been calling up Reservists who have completed 4 years of active duty because of their Reserve commitment and are refusing to release people who have completed their entire 8-year term. If you sign the paperwork you belong to the military for a minimum of 8 years, not 15 months.

There was a 12-month National Guard program and many people who were in that are being retained well beyond those 12 months.

You are under penalty of criminal prosecution if you fail to fulfill your part in the agreement, but the government is able to alter their obligations at will. If they lie to you, a court will say that they are bad people, but you are required to do what they tell you to do. They don’t recognize any restrictions on their power.

My Father was kept in service for three years past his retirement date, and finally was allowed to retire for health reasons. If his health hadn’t gone to pieces there’s no telling how long he would have been kept on active duty.

The military is not a good option anymore. It pains me personally to say that, because for a long time I recommended military service to people who needed help to get their life in order and save enough money for a decent education. It was a way out of poverty for a lot of people, but the current regime has changed that.

If you feel inclined to a military life there’s always the Légion Etrangère. At least they don’t pretend to be something they are not. You will need to learn French.

For some reason I don’t think the snarkmeisters will be willing to part with their wages from 8 hours at Wendy’s making chili to read David Brooks a couple of days sooner.

What Rumsfeld has done is pull a page from “business management 101” and moved to implement it. He is going for the merger and consolidation option to reduce costs without bothering to understand why certain functions are dispersed. Having no actual military experience and no imagination, he doesn’t understand why you wouldn’t consolidate everything to eliminate any redundancy in the system. Consolidation saves money in peace time, but it might cause you to lose a war. Redundancy is seen as a problem in business, but it is a virtue in war.

Currently the B-1 bomber fleet is based at two different bases separated by a thousand miles. An aggressor would have to attack both bases to eliminate that threat. Rumsfeld wants to consolidate all of these aircraft at a single base, so a single ICBM can take them all out. It might save money, but at the risk of losing an entire weapons system in one strike. Whatever money it might save the US, there is a definite savings for the enemy.

He is consolidating fighter aircraft, even though the attacks on 9/11 showed that a major problem was the lack of fighter protection for major cities in the event of an aerial attack. Previous closures have eliminated fighter bases closer to New York and Washington. If he wanted to save money on fighter defenses the military could buy cheaper, more efficient fighters designed to defend against civilian aircraft, rather than opposing enemy fighters. A subsonic fighter with an extended flight capability would be better than a supersonic fighter that is out of fuel by the time it gets to an area of concern. If the cheaper planes were flown by National Guard or Reserve units that were guaranteed to stay in place, the pilots could be found. The fuel costs for the 2 F-16s that intercepted the Cessna in Washington DC were probably greater than the cost of the Cessna.

Locally they are planning to add about 2,000 Army Special Forces people to the mix at Eglin Air Force Base. This is a logical move as Air Force Special Operations Command is headquartered at Eglin’s Hurlburt Field. The problem is the lack of any place for these people to live. Eglin has a lot of space, but much of that is devoted to testing ranges and necessary buffer zones. The civilian areas are dominated by vacation and retirement homes that are well out of the price range of military families, even if there were vacancies, which there aren’t after hurricane Ivan. Local governments don’t have the resources to absorb the extra people and their children and cars. The water and sewage systems are already maxed out. Nice idea, but there is no money available to adjust the infrastructure for the change. It will take at least a year for the base to build new housing, and there is only so much you can do without water.

Closing down the Navy facilities on the New England coast looks like a good idea if you don’t know anything about weather or the coastal geography of the US. If you consolidate along the Southern coast you risk having major damage from a single hurricane moving up the coast. There are fewer deep water ports on the South because of the Continental shelf which is why there aren’t more Navy bases down here. In addition you have the basic problem of reducing the number of targets an enemy has to hit to cripple your capabilities.

Frankly I think that in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War too many bases were closed and now the military has problems finding training and testing locations. If we bring back a massive number of people from Korea and Germany, as planned, where are our staging areas and storage locations?

It is all well and good to say that our military requirements are those envisioned by the G.H.W. Bush years, but the reality of the G.W. Bush years don’t match that paradigm. Bush I had a foreign policy that didn’t annoy the rest of the world; that has not been the case for Bush II.

What these guys miss is the experience of people like Elayne who are injured by the “minor” cracks in the “wall” separating Church and State.

Anne and Norbizness jump in based on principle, rather than personal experience.

I remember when every morning started with the Protestant “Lord’s Prayer” and the “problem” at the end when the Catholics joined the Jews in silence while the Protestants continued. Protestants were in the minority in my class, but it was the Protestant version that was used. The message to the other kids: you don’t belong.

You should have heard the roar when a middle-school girl down here decided she was interested in Wicca and wanted to start a club at school to study it. Understand: she wasn’t a Wiccan, nor were her parents, but she was interested in the subject. You would have thought that she wanted to build an altar under the flagpole, displacing the “Christian” prayer circle, and start having human sacrifices. [Insert references to Satan, Halloween, and Harry Potter here as a sample of the rants.]

The Supremes have advanced the concept of “meaningless ritual” to cover their personal desire not to get involved any more deeply than they have to, taking the “Munich” option.

If I thought people wanted to set up a Crèche to celebrate a holiday I wouldn’t complain, that’s the way things used to be, but today the symbols are being used as part of a “war”. If “Christians” are so concerned about Christmas symbols, why doesn’t the Southern Baptist Church put out a public display on their property, instead of asking to use public property? I live in Religious Reich land and they have plenty of displays around town, including a living Crèche at a local shopping center, but churches are bare outside. They may have decorations inside, but nothing in public view. This isn’t about faith, it is about recruitment and pressure. They are using these symbols for marketing and political action, not their belief.

What Matt, Kevin, and Digby miss is that these cases are being brought by people who are tired of being asked to “sit in the back of the bus”, when it comes to their religious views.

Some may have noticed that I try not to spell out G-d. I have friends who find it offensive to spell out that name. They view it as sacrilegious to use that name in vain. They view its use on money to be especially offensive, but they are a minority and are forced to deal with this official indignity. They have dealt with a lot of indignities, beginning before the Diaspora, many of them fatal.

For all those who appreciate the historical perspective on national debate:

The “ancient motto” of the United States:

1864 – the Treasury Department introduces “In G-d We Trust” on the two-cent coin in response to calls from clergymen during the Civil war. It appeared on other coins as they are redesigned. The Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, specified the wording.

1908 – Congress returns the words to coins after President Roosevelt had them removed as “sacrilegious”.

1956 – it become the “motto” of the United States and is put on all currency.

The “Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag”:

1892 – introduced in a youth magazine for use in the 400^th anniversary of Columbus landing in America.

1942 – officially adopted by Congress.

1954 – “under G-d” added to scare the Commies.

National Cemeteries:

1930 – Religious symbols are no longer banned from government-purchased grave markers. [If you don’t believe it, walk through the older sections of Arlington with the standard gravestones.]

The government of the United States got “religion” under Dwight Eisenhower and a Republican Congress.

The “Ten Commandments” monuments are generally the result a publicity stunt by Cecil B. DeMille in association with the Fraternal Order of Eagles for his movie of the same name [you remember, when Moses comes down from the mountain carrying a flintlock musket].

The oldest private universities and colleges in the US and Europe were founded as religious institutions to train the clergy which is why there is so many references to “religious speech” in early documents. Religious orthodoxy was a primary motivator for people escaping from Europe: they were refugees from religious prosecution, which is why they banned it under the new government established in the United States.

The Religious Reich is not defending “old and established custom” they are defending the march towards religious orthodoxy that made a “Great Leap Forward” under the “Red Scare” of fifty years ago. Opposing these new additions isn’t persecution: it is a move to return to the status quo ante.

You cannot negotiate with fanatics because they will not honor any compromise. Their world is black and white, and they deny the existence of gray. These people are not asking for equal treatment; they want dominance.

Blogger is now requiring the “enter these letters in the box below” schtick to post…SIGH

Dave’s Friday Question™

CNN’s report is titled: Rumsfeld: Base closings will save $48 billion and MSNBC’s report on Base Closings follows the same line.

CNN at least gives a subhead that puts in perspective: “Defense chief says savings would be realized over 20 years”.

Rumsfeld talks about $7+ billion per year, but through the first 20 years that will be offset by the cost of cleaning up the bases. Most closed military bases show up on the EPA Superfund list immediately because the military uses a lot of dangerous chemicals and materials that are a minor immediate problem as the public is kept away by fences and armed guards. When the bases are closed and sold, you have to clean them up. People get annoyed when bombs and such are found in their backyards after moving into a new subdivision.

The process is exceedingly expensive as states and localities hire lobbyists to protect their interests. This is going to be a vicious fight and there is no need to do it now. That Rumsfeld is pushing this forward at a time when he should be taking care of the multitude of problems with the wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as rising tensions over Iran and North Korea.

Update:
The recommendations for base closings are out and it is flat strange.

Senator Thune claimed that saving Ellsworth AFB was something he could do and Tom Daschle couldn’t, except he was wrong.

Joe Lieberman’s act hasn’t helped the Groton Sub Base; Texas took a number of hits; they are planning to close Walter Reed Hospital; Trent Lott couldn’t defend Pascagoula Naval Station; Olympia Snow didn’t help Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

They are moving people around and closing facilities at a time when we need to expand the military. They are eliminating National Guard and Reserve centers at a time in history when these forces are being used more and more as active units. This is a plan that was created years ago in George H.W. Bush’s administration by Cheney and Rumsfeld and not updated since then. It doesn’t reflect reality.

Let the blood bath begin, because this will be a nasty fight.

Update 2:
They are moving several thousand people to the local base in my area, and my Mother, ever practical, asks “Where are these people supposed to live?”

We lost hundreds of houses and apartments to hurricane Ivan last Fall. There has been no new low-cost or even medium cost housing built in years, only high-end retirement condos. The base is building a new housing area, but that is to replace the units they lost in the hurricane.

We don’t have the local infrastructure, water, sewer, roads, etc. for thousands of new people. Does Rumsfeld have a “plan” to locate more groundwater?

Update 3:
Cookie Jill at skippy found an Associated Press story confirming the Pentagon wants to close Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC.

[™ Kevin Drum]

Dot Rules!

Fear my power, mortal!

[Edit: Due to a vicious flea outbreak and a totally ineffective product, Dot and Sox spend a lot of time on the dining room table, one of the few flea free areas in the house. I’m getting another product but I can’t risk using it until the beginning of next week, so it has been flea combing twice a day.

Fleas on the inside, fire ants on the outside, and cockroaches everywhere, the joys of the Redneck Riviera.]

Friday Ark

The recent Cessna 150 that wandered into restricted airspace was a prime example of the problem: the F-16s couldn’t slow down and escort or communicate with the Cessna. The F-16s are fine for jet transports, but most general aviation aircraft are designed to fly low and slow with unpressurized cabins and piston engines turning propellers. The military needs different aircraft, and fortunately the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has such military aircraft from the Wright Flyer through the X-15.

Perhaps the military should have a few fighters built that could actually match speeds with small aircraft escort them away from sensitive areas. They could send in the F-16 to identify the threat and then launch a Sopwith Camel or P-51 Mustang as required to deal with it. More radically they could ask a talented aircraft designer like Burt Rutan to build them a few copies of a low speed aircraft capable of staying airborne for an extended period as well as carrying weapons.

This won’t work, of course, because it would be too cheap.

Edit: Corrected the name of the F-22 – I plead Freudian slip.

To have media staying power a story must involve a celebrity or a crime involving a white female: cute if a child, pretty if an adult.

There are a lot of people who go missing every day, but to be mentioned on CNN they must involve white women from middle class families and above. All of the special laws are named for white women and children.

These atrocities happen to boys and non-Whites, but you wouldn’t know that if you watch the national media.

Small wonder people in this country have no idea what’s going on. The Right has inordinate power because they get their messages out, while most people assume that TV news will tell them what’s important.

Yet another corporation is allowed to escape the effects of bad decisions by its millionaires at the top, and the debts they authorized are shifted to taxpayers through a government bailout mechanism, similar to the bail out of the savings and loans after the mistakes and corruption of its millionaire managers.

The Republicans don’t want the middle-class to ever be able to retire. They just altered the bankruptcy law to ensure that there is no escape for people who are not in the seven-figure salary bracket from the interest and fees claimed by corporations, but corporations can still receive forgiveness of obligations when they enter bankruptcy.

Agricultural work should come naturally to people who backs are bent in years in cockpits or cubicles, and there will be work for years picking cotton to supply the Chinese textile industry.