The F-35 has a hot heat signature. It has not got a fully functional afterburner and like all hovering aircraft, it can be flipped upside down with catastrophic results. Sadly, many Democrats will just cancel all weapons programs and not keep the cream of the crop that actually work. Then they lose wars and Republicans get elected and come in, and all of a sudden it’s attrition-based warfare all over again with huge, fat, overdone weapons systems that cost zillions and don’t work unless you deploy a thousand of these tanks of planes or ships and smother your enemy with pure numbers. That’s what is going to happen next year in 2016.
Blog Post Thirteen
I am applying the rules of military engagement to the problems found in how the State tries to get its people to quit getting DWIs… It is tied up in actions of force and Energy Management. Maneuverists think attrition-based warfare is wasteful. Rather than have a huge battle where people mass two huge armies and try to slug it out with a small group of survivors claiming victory, you can outmaneuver the other guy and defeat a big cumbersome army with a nimble mobile force. In DWIs we find huge sums of money being directed at pushing back the alcoholics when smaller sums could be directed at counseling people on concepts other than creating a new religion and having only a 15% success rate. I must not join you in that drink just yet. There is a case to argue. And because it has become a religious case, I only get to participate as a team member of an attrition-based force and as an advocate of cheaper, more effective solutions.
I will be very busy reading on the fighter tactics of John Boyd. He is the hottest thing in war to come out of the Korean War. He rewrote the war college textbooks using Sun Tzu’s work from the pre-Christian Taoist text called The Art of War.
Boyd was called “40-second Boyd” as he could shoot down an enemy plane in 40 seconds or less using energy management. It’s the simple concept of using superior firepower against itself. Boyd said that as a warrior you could create chaos for an enemy and paralyze his thinking and thus paralyze his ability to react. In a way this means intimidation. Audacity and Richard Petty win over and over again.
In essence this is also the philosophy of using Special Forces (shock troops) which is tied to my Marine Corps heritage. Marines have no problems being identified as shock troops. The same is true for Green Berets and SEALs.
Nixon and Reagan were both attritionists. Even when the military creates both Special Forces and special weapons, they are often economic attritionists. Reagan sought to bankrupt the Soviet Union in the Cold War. He succeeded in outspending the Soviets. The attrition-based concept worked but it was shamefully expensive. And it cost the world half of its assets for 46 years. That’s a lot of money for fat cats and Republicans for nearly half a century.
We had poverty and no education for many while a few got gold-plated spy satellites and a Cadillac war machine for both Soviets and NATO. We may need the satellites to see the rockets firing at us from ISIS.
But the end effect is we now have Russia and most NATO countries on the same page. The only threat to peace is a few die-hard militarists of the attritionist type and a few terrorists who are trying their own hand at being amateur shock troops.
We cannot use shock troops in the war on drugs. That war is over and done with, I hope.
But we can use greater maneuverability and a nimble, mobile force in directing our mental health and chemical dependency dollars, rather than just creating a stone edifice of a religious system feeding more and more dollars into a wasteful form of temple for a 15% that loves an AA/NA-based religion, intent on feeding its troops nothing but belief rather than simpler concepts of avoiding drinking and driving.
That religious concept is a problem for chemical dependency, just as it is creating religious fanatic terrorists in the form of ISIS. In those two applications, the god concept is evil.
The so-called Moral War of guerillas and revolutionaries relied heavily on leadership and trust. Now in American war policy we have a fragile hold on such concepts while Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS recruit 1,000 new members every month, and we kill off only 500. Our own war machine is either the stymied efforts of an indecisive Obama or the reckless Trump, and the American people are buying into Trump with a greater enthusiasm than even ISIS can attract. It is our decisions here that will determine whether or not the reckless Trump loses thousands of American troops in an attritionist war or switches to the more Special Forces method of guerilla warfare. Guerillas win wars but often do not win victory parades.
Attritionists win victory parades while small guerilla troops kill off people like Osama Bin Laden.
Boyd’s contribution to strategy was called the Boyd Loop or the OODA Loop. It consisted of Observe, Orient, Direct, and Act. The Orient stage was the data process stage. This took in data and created information.
The police often try to approach demonstrators with force in the form of superior firepower and numbers. They rally legislators, who are elected and in debt to their contributors, and rally treatment professionals, who are in debt to the legislature and police, and in doing so create an impenetrable wall in the law. The drug users are on one side while the police and legislature and treatment professionals are on the other side. Only now, with the legalization of marijuana, is there any stopping this iron curtain, this cold war.
As a population that wants decriminalization of drugs, we all see the value in surrendering our small internal population of people who get charged with drunk driving. As long as we are willing to do that we are safe, largely. That is the only response we owe to the State. We get threatened by the local police and when we serve in the military we get threatened by ISIS, Taliban, and Al-Qaeda. We are surrounded by religious doctrines designed to hinder us.
Currently there is no unified front in mental health and chemical dependency. The greatest benefit to the citizen is the smokescreen of chaos in the bureaucracy. Without that chaos the patients and clients would be completely cut off from funding and benefits. That is the Republican, law enforcement point of view. Consolidate and strangle. But there is now an escape clause in marijuana legalization. The pressure cooker has an escape valve.
Whether it is Gingrich and Jerry Falwell or Al-Qaeda or the AA higher power, it is still just religious extremism taking the world for a wild ride. We need a special missile designed to destroy religious fanatics.
It is said that protest is like asking the powers-that-be to dig a well while direct action is digging a well while stopping the powers-that-be from stopping you.
CASE FILE REVIEW
by James McGregor
“Petition for commercial harvest of planet ten three eighty-eight. Our docket number is three-six-oh-eight.”
“Defense, your honor, makes the statement that this planet is in the Shurian game preserve and is held in reserve from harvest.”
The prosecutor pressed his case. “Here, your honor, is a backward race living on fossil fuels. The bio-mass alone is not being used in a way that reflects galactic needs.”
The judge looked at the case file on his visi-screen. “This looks like a case for intervention and cooperative harvest with the local population.”
“Defense is petitioning for intervention soon. We have had numerous encounters with their air armadas. They are going through a nuclear weapon stage that is savage and could contaminate any bio-mass to be harvested. We feel that intervention is called for.”
Prosecutor Ajin pulled one of his dreadlocks out and tucked it behind the green iridescent antennae coming from his right temple. He spoke. “We have serious needs in our galactic community and turning loose a race of nuclear-era, smog-belching death machines is no way to manage a planet. Currently there is no global government to argue a case with. There are only fractured territorial fiefdoms now. Three are large and should be consolidated. We, your honor, are at the impasse of contact. I feel, and many of our race agree, that this race is young enough to warrant harvest for meat for commercial consumption.”
“MEAT?” Defense
was enraged. “This species has a multi-cycle growth pattern. We harvested some of this planet’s mammals twenty thousand cycles ago and now they are extinct. Some of the aquatic mammals could be farmed or transplanted to an ocean planet. By no means should a nuclear planet be harvested out of spite for its fuel choices.”
The judge asked the defense attorney a question. “Do these proto-citizens have a name for this orb?”
“They call it ‘Earth.’ They call themselves ‘Human.’ ”
“I will order a contact mission. If these barely evolved pond scum can be diplomatic, we may come out with profit for both ourselves and them. We can decide whether or not to eat them later on. At worst we waste a diplomat’s time. Next case, Bailiff.”
The End
WHEN PIGS FLY
by James McGregor
“You can toss a pig out of the back of an airplane, and for about a minute, as that sow plummets downward, you can say ‘Pigs fly’; but the landing may have some explosive qualities,” said Daniels, the stellar ship’s medic, to his orbital cab driver.
“And the point you’re making?” Orton, the launch pilot, said.
“You can engineer anything temporarily.”
“I still don’t read you.”
“If you imprison someone, torture them, and tell them there is no hope of relief for years, then present them with a confession to sign and tell them they can go home after they sign it, they will sign it, if only to move on with their lives. You can dominate and manipulate anything or anyone. Nothing’s immune.”
“So you can capture a star and send it at lightspeed into another just for the sake of your own amusement.”
“Not at all. Shorty can do whatever she wants. She’s the heir to the empire on the world we are headed to. I have known her for eighteen years now, and I am finally getting to a point where I can trust her.”
“So she’s the one who can toss the pig out of the plane. What did she do, inherit a freight company or some mine or plantation?”
“Her tribe owns a lucrative chemical business, and yes, she can afford both the pig and the airplane.”
“So this is about a lover? You never told me that a woman was involved.” Orton smiled and rolled his eyes and whistled. “Ooh-la-la.”
Daniels scanned the cockpit with his eyes. The forward windows would be shuttered closed and dark for the landing. The whole process took a few minutes of skimming through the atmosphere at Mach 12 and decelerating until a speed of less than Mach 1 was attained. From there on the scramjets would carry the launch anywhere it needed to go.
“She is entry level when it comes to over-engineering things. She likes me and says she loves me,” he said. “Desire is present but the poor lass is so powerful that most of her social contacts are cronies who lick boot to get favors. She leads a lonely life in the palace grounds. I have been both suitor and target for her every tantrum and breakdown. The empire weighs heavy on this one. She had me imprisoned just to cap her fear of abandonment. She kept me in town quite adequately. I hope I can make things better for her.”
“Has she had any lovers? Eighteen years is a long time.”
“We have really only had the last six where things were on us. I do love her dearly. She isolates herself so much. I am an extension of that. We met when she was a very young person. I have had lovers who were her age but age wasn’t the key with her. Isolation was. At the age of seventeen she was so socially divorced that it was amazing just to converse with her. Beautiful and skinny with youth she was then. And cloistered. She’d escape from the palace in commoner’s clothes and come drink with us at the port bars. She is still a source of great spirit. Very much a wild animal.”
“Taming on your mind?”
“Taming is not an equation that works well for such a creature. No, no, that would be too artificial and externally disciplined. She needs to meet in the center and share.”
“What has a bum of stellar poverty like you got to share with Miss Nitrous Oxide of this whole stellar neighborhood?”
“All I can offer her is what I carry with me wherever I go. Her family likes me because of the medicine men in my ancestry. She can cut off the top of my skull and peer into my magnificent mind. I think it’s in part because I know how lonely and cold the shadow of greatness and power can be. That’s what she sees in me.”
“You’re really going to do this then. I mean, like, this is it?”
“This is it. Career move and all. I am going to Tarsus Four with the intent of getting along with her majesty.”
“Wow, man, that’s so unlike you. You’ve been a freightlaner since I met you. That was ten years ago.”
“I’ll still travel, just with an extra rider along with. Love for us has had some bizarre moments, but some good ones too. The best ones are both bizarre and fun. She’s a great artist. She’s in the lyre guild and sings wonderfully. I actually am getting to like her poetry. The freight end of her inheritance I can help out on. All the social toys that go with being a princess are hers. I can’t use protocol.”
The window’s blast covers slid into place, and they were blind momentarily. The view screen flickered into life and showed a map of the landing site with an indicator in kilometers of how far away they were. The digital numbers clicked by ever slower. Air brakes deployed and the men felt negative gee in the strapped harnesses they wore, keeping them in their seats. Obeying their launch’s guidance computer, the ship slowed, dropped landing gear, and lined up on the dry lake bed, coming in for a perfect landing.
The door opened and both men left the aerodynamically heated launch’s surface, now distorting their view by superheating the circulating air around it.
In the distance a land car approached, trailed by a rising cloud of dust. A few minutes later it was upon them. It was a limousine.
Daniels turned to Orton and said, “My ride is here. You should be able to get fueled at the town on the north end of the strip. Call them on ship-to-shore. They’ll deliver.”
“I guess this is good-bye then.” Orton reached out his hand to Daniels and shook it. “Good luck with her and the empire.”
Daniels walked toward the limousine as a dark-haired, smallish woman got out and smiled at him. She was very beautiful with dark, glittering eyes and an exotic overall look. Daniels hoisted his duffle over his shoulder and walked to her and met her lips square with his. The kiss lasted through a spate of breeze and finally they relaxed their embrace. “It’s good to have you back,” she said. “What did you say to your cab driver?”
“That’s Orton. We were discussing nurturing love as an engineering point.”
She held the door of the car open for him as he slid his duffle onto the floor and they both climbed in after it.
“Can love be engineered?” she asked.
“When pigs fly. I’ll explain.”
The End
CHAPTER SIX
Tanner had a feeling about the Syntheris that puzzled him. He felt a high he had never experienced before. A general calm.
He remembered losing his right hand in combat. The grenade came in. He reached out to grab it and toss it back, but it went off in his hand and he was the recipient of the Chinese military arms industry in all the wrong ways. His hand was half gone and what remained of his fingers was a lost cause.
Medevaced on a Black Hawk with a tourniquet, he was stateside in two weeks after surgery in Ramstein. The fingers had to go but the wrist was still there. Now it was a great difficulty just to dress in the morning. He learned quickly what belts and zippers would serve his new requirements. A uniform was a difficulty. Medals would come.
No gong on his chest would fully tell the story of such a loss. Campaign medals and a Purple Heart would look good on the mantel in a box, but his life was going to move in ways that would hurt. Wounded Warrior would help but there was no turning back now. He felt trapped.
Now they wanted to drill holes into his skull to attach wires directly to the brain to control prosthetic additions t
o what body parts remained. He would be able to rotate a wrist and grasp a rubber hand.
Just rewards for a military career dependent on four good limbs and a highly trained brain.
They wanted a security clearance for prosthetics. Odd but perhaps they had good plans in mind. A top-secret hand.
There was alcohol. There were some painkiller meds for what remained of the wrist. He was told the Syntheris would have a generally calming effect. It did just that. It mixed well with the warmth of whisky.
He would get a hybrid. A go-between from a full arm. He could get fitted for a claw that he could flex with the muscles of his shoulder.
He could learn to type with his left hand. Learning how to write with the left hand was new.
He learned to keep bottles of alcohol and foodstuff drinks fingertight and not locked into place.
Others had lost all. He had looked at the caskets on the transport aircraft. In Vietnam the drug smugglers had hidden heroin on the bodies being shipped back stateside.
Heroin. The scourge of the Vietnam War. The new kids weren’t getting strung out on the new tide of drugs coming back but the States were flush with the drugs and Tanner suspected that some of it was coming back on military aircraft.
The equation was obvious. CIA plus Taliban, times the number of addicts in New York, remove the dead and multiply by kids in small towns across the USA dying of overdoses. Cruel facts. A cruel equation.
He had been able to spend a long leave as a “recuperative leave.” Still on the payroll but in civilian clothes. He could retire on disability. He was up for a Congressional Medal of Honor. Best not to let the alcohol or other things take hold but perhaps the gentle lift of the Syntheris was not so bad.