Archive for September, 2009
The Air Force has begun radically revising its combat playbook for the F-22 fighter. Instead of employing the Raptor en masse, as previously planned, USAF will use it as a scarce but extremely powerful enabler, deployed selectively in those times and places when it can enhance the performance of the entire combat air force.
Plans call for F-22s, in small numbers, to work in cooperation with more numerous but aged F-15s, which are expected to serve for another 15 years. The two air superiority fighters, old and new, will share air combat duties and hew to employment tactics suitable for a mixed force.
Good read on what the plans for the Raptor are now that it appears that additional planes will not be purchased.
No e-mail. I hope I’m not missing anything important.
Hopefully this will be resolved tomorrow.
UPDATE: E-mail problems resolved, though it appears that some stuff may have been lost. Can’t tell for sure. If you sent Murdoc something important over the weekend (including Monday the 7th) please re-send it just to be sure.
Space Aged: 10 Spacecraft from Decades Past That Are Still Ticking
Slideshow of oldies but goodies.
The moon-landing-hoax believers will never be convinced by anything, let alone something as easily faked as photographic evidence. After all, if NASA faked the moon landings in 1969, just think what they can fake today. Even when an Indian probe confirms it. Whatever.
Apollo 12 landing site photographed by the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter
Expedition 20 flight engineer Nicole Stott participates in the STS-128 mission's first spacewalk as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station. During the six-hour, 35-minute spacewalk, Stott and astronaut Danny Olivas (out of frame) removed an empty ammonia tank from the station's truss and temporarily stowed it on the station's robotic arm. Olivas and Stott also retrieved the European Technology Exposure Facility and Materials International Space Station Experiment from the Columbus laboratory module and installed them on Discovery's payload bay for return. Image Credit: NASA
Murdoc watched part of this on the tele. The daughter thought it was cool that a girl was out there getting it done.
Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story
Smithsonian Channel 2-parter about a WPA project to create state guidebooks. It premiers this Sunday.
In Revolutionary Color
Amazing 100-year-old color photos from Russia.
School speech backlash builds
No backlash here. Murdoc’s kids are homeschooled.
At Last, A Graph That Explains Scifi TV After Star Trek
Not sure about accuracy but is certainly interesting to look at and think about.
Solar Panels Built Into Roads Could Be the Future of Energy
Each mile of interstate could take 500 homes off the grid.
Telegraphs Ran on Electric Air in Crazy 1859 Magnetic Storm
Auroral Current. Cool.
Feral Houses
Overgrown abandoned houses in Detroit.
Canned Tactical Bacon
Yes. Canned Tactical Bacon.
Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age
I can never keep up with whether we’re saved or doomed.
This was the lead item on my Yahoo! home page today: Why Michelle Obama’s Hair Matters
Murdoc’s initial reactions was “It doesn’t matter.”
After reading about why it does, Murdoc has revised his reaction to “It REALLY doesn’t matter.”
Without getting too deep into it, Jenee Desmond-Harris of Time thinks it matters because hair is so important to black women. And therefore it matters enough to warrant press coverage.
You know, if Murdoc wrote something like that on his little site, he’d be instantly labeled a clueless white guy with dumb stereotypes and probably a racist. But in the pages of Time it’s deep insight.
If Michelle Obama’s hair style really matters, it’s over for America. Luckily for us all, it doesn’t matter.
Pakistani military launches operation in Khyber
Bill Roggio:
The Pakistani military has launched an operation against extremists operating in the Khyber tribal agency. The operation was launched after a suicide bomber killed 22 border guards at the Torkham crossing last week.
More than 40 extremists were killed, including two commanders, and another 43 were captured, according to Tariq Hayat, the Political Agent for Khyber. Three “militant bases” were destroyed, according to a press release by the paramilitary Frontier Corps, while an indefinite curfew has been imposed in the region.
From here, it’s always hard to tell how honest of an effort these Pakistani operations are. Let’s hope this one is for real.
Why Obama Will Bail On Afghanistan
Via Instapundit:
This war might still be winnable, but the notion that Afghanistan is somehow quickly going to turn around is a very bad bet. There’s good reason to believe we’ll be lucky to see any progress by the 2010 mid-terms. And anything looking like a successful resolution and a won war by 2012 is probably off the table.
So, does a very liberal Obama with a very liberal domestic policy he desperately wants to see enacted feel like carrying a potentially very unpopular war on his back at the same time?
I’ve always said that Afghanistan is not winnable in the way that Iraq is winnable, mostly because of the environment and the near-total lack of natural resources other than poppy fields. And I’ve always said that we won’t really know if Iraq was really won until 2023 (twenty years after the invasion). We may never know if Afghanistan was won, no matter how much better we manage to make things.
But we can lose in a couple of months.
Because of the difficult, long-term, and uncertain nature of victory in Afghanistan, the temptation is always going to be there to pull the plug. Might Obama’s falling approval ratings provide the motivation to do so soon?
From the 9/1/09 Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
Remember, despite the fact that we’ve all been treated to six years of “Iraq is the wrong war…Afghanistan is right!“, Afghanistan was certainly the wrong war in late 2001 and 2002. Now that things are dying down in Iraq and, for the time being, we appear to be nearly totally victorious, Afghanistan will become a bad war again.
