Archive for May, 2009

Bryan Jones had an opportunity to spend a little time aboard this attack sub and he’s posted a ton of photos.

Aboard USS Toledo (SSN 769)
Bryan Jones Photo

Really great stuff. Highly recommended.

Air Force wants to retire aging jets early

The Air Force this week announced plans to retire 254 combat aircraft next year, 249 of which would be removed from service earlier than scheduled. The equipment affected includes 112 F-15s and 134 F-16s, both tactical fighters, along with three A-10 ground-attack aircraft.

Prior to the announcement, only five fighters had been slated for retirement in 2010.

What could possibly go wrong.

Some of the early retirees will be 15s from Elmendorf in Alaska. This article calls the F-15s “aging relics.”

Matthew Cox in Army Times:

Army weapons officials said Tuesday that soldiers will test out the service’s experimental airburst weapon in the war zone this summer.

The XM25, a shoulder-fired weapon that shoots exploding 25mm projectiles, is “going to be issued to a unit this summer for an assessment down range in theater,” Program Executive Office Soldier commander Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller told an audience at the National Defense Industrial Association’s International Infantry & Joint Services Small Arms Systems Symposium.

This could be a truly revolutionary weapon if the 25mm grenades are effective enough.

This has been a long time in coming, it seems. Murdoc once wrote

Unless the XM25 isn’t performing well, which doesn’t seem to be the case from what I’ve been able to gather, some should be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible for some real-world testing. It’s the only way to be sure.

That was in 2005.

Found at Random Nuclear Strikes:

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.

My guess is that there will lots more like this. Hope and Change, folks.

Victor Davis Hanson:

But it is quite astounding that the mainstream liberal media — NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, etc. — has simply offered no substantive criticism of Obama’s flips on renditions, military tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, Iraq, or — given their past fury over the Bush deficits — the Obama plan to run up more red ink in a year than Bush did in eight.

New theory: There apparently is nothing that Karl Rove cannot do. He got a fake Democrat elected to keep the Bush presidency rolling. Because there is no way that the Hope and Change guy would be doing what this guy is doing.

Federal Budget Surpluses and Deficits

It’s been four months, folks. What’s the place going to look like after four years?

A nice even-handed report on the rising use of prescriptions drugs in the military by Melody Petersen in Men’s Health magazine.

The title of the story is U.S. military: Heavily armed and medicated. The title is a flashy one, to be sure. The story leads off with a Marine who woke up 200 meters from his sleeping quarters and unaware of how he got there.

[Corporal Michael Cataldi's] ordeal was not all that remarkable for a person on that anti-anxiety medication. In the lengthy labeling that accompanies each prescription, Klonopin users are warned against abruptly stopping the medicine, since doing so can cause psychosis, hallucinations, and other symptoms. What makes Cataldi’s story extraordinary is that he was a U. S. Marine at war, and that the drug’s adverse effects endangered lives — his own, his fellow Marines’, and the lives of any civilians unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Now, I certainly don’t want to minimize the issue. It’s clear that our troops have been under a lot of stress for extended periods of time and that problems are not unheard of. But the story notes that 12% and 15% of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (respectively) reported “taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills” and I’m not sure if this number is unexpectedly large or not.

The Marine that led off the story is a mechanic. Not to look down on mechanics, but I’m sure that if the writer had found a sensational story about a machine gunner or pilot wigging out, she would have used that instead. Apparently, nothing exciting enough turned up.

There there’s this:

Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, M. D., M. P. H., a psychiatrist and the medical director of the strategic communication directorate in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, acknowledges that writing more prescriptions for frontline troops was a change in direction for the Pentagon. “Twenty years ago,” she says, “we weren’t deploying soldiers on medications.”

Really? Soldiers on medications weren’t deployed to Panama? I’ll bet at least a couple were.

Tethered to the end of the remote manipulator system arm, which was controlled from inside Atlantis' crew cabin, STS-125 astronaut Andrew Feustel navigates near the Hubble Space Telescope, duing the mission's third spacewalk on May 16, 2009. Astronaut John Grunsfeld signals to his crewmate from just a few feet away. Astronauts Feustel and Grunsfeld were continuing servicing work on the giant observatory, which was locked down in the cargo bay of shuttle Atlantis.

The shuttle has left the Space Telescope. There will probably be one more mission to the Hubble, an unmanned mission to de-orbit the satellite safely. One of the tasks on this mission was to install a docking collar for that sad eventuality.

In the meantime, we’re going to be treated to years of breathtaking views.

Veterans, feeling the pain of Michigan budget reductions, plan to protest in Lansing

A 25% cut in budgets for state veterans organizations is a tough blow.

Refueling tops list of LCS crew challenges

The Navy’s first littoral combat ship, Freedom, is so different from other surface ships that even mundane tasks require a whole new way of thinking.

Take, for example, refueling at sea. A regular warship matches speed with an oiler by syncing up the revolutions per minute of the ships’ propellers. The problem? Freedom doesn’t have propellers.

and

Refueling underway will be critical for all the Navy’s littoral combat ships, which achieve their high sprint speed by gulping fuel like Kool-Aid. A deployed LCS could need to refuel as often as every three days, according to some estimates, making its ability to gas up at sea that much more important. Freedom will need to get supplies via helicopter in vertical replenishments, because it isn’t equipped to accept pallets of supplies zipped over from a Military Sealift Command ship in a traditional unrep.

Additional issues include no helo launches or landings yet and problems with the side launch of the ROV that will be used to hunt subs and mines.