Still here?

I can't imagine why.

I don't know what more there is to say about the kinds of subjects we once so loudly debated here.

Just the past year has been a bughouse of lunatic nonsense emanating from (or inspired by, or the result of actions and/or words issued from) the golden throne currently occupied by the capacious backside of the  47th President of the United States.

We only thought that the Cheney Administration was a sweltering clusterfuck of geopolitical idiocy.

Holy shit, did we underestimate how quickly and thoroughly the American Right would go full-on, bull-goose, pure-D, stomp-down batshit crazy. Rule of law? Hahahah! Laws of war? Pshaw! Fiscal probity? For losers! Geopolitical foresight? LULZ!

Now there's a USN task force farkling around South America exploding dinky motorboats with million-dollar missiles, while here there's tariffs on this, that, and the other...or maybe not, over there are Afrikaaner "refugees" while over here there's masked goons snatching people out of bodegas and drywall jobsites. 

The official "national defense plan" of the United States spends more time gibbering in terror about impoverished immigrants than assessing nuclear-armed peer, and likely rival, nations.

There's supposed to be an Arch of Triumph in D.C. A fucking Arch of Triumph. 

It seems, well, trivial to discuss geopolitics as though any of this made sense, or could be made sense of. It feels kinda like debating grammar inside a screeching loony bin. 

I wish I thought that 2026 was going to be...well, less nuts.

But I wouldn't sure as fuck wouldn't bet on it. 

Radio check

 It's been well over a year since I even looked at this site.

All the original contributors are gone except me, so it's unlikely anyone else has, either.

So I just wondered...is anyone else still here?

It now just seems empty and desperately sad, looking around the empty room and remembering the many boisterous conversations (and disputations, and digressions, and commiserations...) we shared that are now as gone as the smoke from a distant fire.

Aviator Al and Charles Gittings are gone forever.

Ranger Jim is...still somewhere, no longer speaking. 

Lisa, when last seen, was going Full MAGA, which makes me just want to weep.

And the rest of us are living through a time I never thought I'd see, in which a real estate grifter and serial liar is overseeing the gutting of the United States that ruled the last half of the 20th Century.

What is there for a blog about military geopolitics to say about that, other than "that seems like a bad choice"?

As we used to say around here:

WASSSSSSSSSF. 

"We do not torture"

You don't say?

To me the saddest part about this hot mess is that we pretty much all knew all of this all along. We knew what was going on, or, at least, that something fairly awful was going on, and didn't care enough to make a fuss about knowing the details or care enough to stop it. Seydlitz discussed this all here four years ago; the real crimes here were committed by We the People. We knew all of this, and we knew that the whole nonsense about how this was "protecting us" and "fighting terrorism" was nonsense ginned up by people many of whom wanted to see just how far the American People were willing to go into the darkness if distracted enough by fear and foolishness.

And if there was ever any doubt of that distance this report clarifies that there really are no limits to the fear and inertia of the American Public. Provided I can spin a scary enough story, provided I can puff even the thinnest smokescreen imaginable, I can do anything. I can torture. I can kill. I can commit the sorts of war crimes that the Arsenal of Democracy executed people for in the Forties.

And I can do it in all-but-plain-view because the huge unmoving slorg of Public Opinion will be utterly unarsed enough to even bother to ask questions, to so much as slip a letter of reprimand in my 201 File.

Execute me?

Don't make me fucking laugh.

And make no mistake; without punishment this will happen again. And again There's always a good reason for breaking the laws. Smoking guns become mushroom clouds. Not fighting them there means fighting them here. They hate our freedoms. They're coming to kill us.

But then you find that if you cut down the laws to get at the devil, when you catch him you'll find that there is nowhere for you to shelter from the broad highway of evil you've opened up, the laws all being flat.

Update: The always-eloquent Charlie Pierce has more. And worse. And much, much more and much, much worse.

"I no longer take seriously anyone, in or out of government, who talks about "the debate" over whether the United States tortured people. The only debate left is the debate over whether or not it will remain the policy of this nation to torture people, or to outsource the job of torturing people, or to otherwise commit moral and national suicide by euphemism.

Anyone who still believes there's a "debate" over whether or not the United States, using techniques previously used by the Japanese Imperial Army, the Gestapo, the North Korean People's Army, and the KGB, tortured people is an idiot and a coward and I have no time for them. Not any more. Debate's over. We became what they think we are. And worse. This is not debatable and, alas, it is anything but a surprise."

Quis Custodiet?

Key quote from the weekend editorial at the LA Times entitled "What did Edward Snowden get wrong? Everything."

"That's why I find the Snowden controversy so frustrating. I realize many Americans don't trust their government. I wish I could change that. I wish I could tell people the amazing things I witnessed during my 30 years in the CIA, that I've never seen people work harder or more selflessly, that for little money and long hours, people took it for granted that their flaws would be scrutinized and their successes ignored. But I've been around long enough to know that deep-rooted distrust of government is immune to stories from people like me. The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt."

Mossadegh. Diem. Allende. Iran-Contra. The ridiculous overestimation of Soviet capabilities. Lumumba. Castro. The Bay of Pigs fiasco and the catastrophic underestimation of dangers of the Missile Crisis. HTLINGUAL. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident. National security letters. COINTELPRO. The Pentagon Papers.

Where do you want me to stop?

Many U.S. citizens don't trust their government in large part because of the many times their government has been caught by its citizens with its pants down buggering the rentboy and has turned on its citizens with an angry look and shrieked "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?!"

The U.S. government's intelligence and defense agencies have had a pretty damn ugly record of internal and external skulduggery over the past half century. When you add in the times that they've been flat out mistaken, or have ignored or, worse, dismissed the likely blowback from their actions and have cost the U.S. blood and treasure as a result...or the times they have been misused or ignored by unscrupulous men in executive or legislative power...and you get a pretty high stack of reasons that many Americans SHOULD ask their government for a security deposit prior to handing them over the keys to the beach house.

Frankly, I tend to agree with Liepman, the author of the piece, that there is no such thing as "complete transparency" between a government and its people. Every nation does have enemies. Finding out what those enemies are up to, defeating them before matters come to open warfare, is the best possible mission for a nation's intelligence services. Much of that snooping and foiling must be done in secret. To be successful in these silent wars truth must, indeed, sometimes have a bodyguard of lies.

But, I'm sorry, the rest of his screed is some weak shit.

Given what we know the record of U.S. intelligence. Given what we know now about the people then in power when most of these "counter-terrorism" programs were set up. Given what we know of the tendency of any government, of ALL governments, to gather information about their own people and to use that information against those people that antagonize them.

There is no real reason to simply trust "...the lengths to which the intelligence community goes to protect privacy."

At the moment the question isn't really about the size, or shape, or nature of the bodyguard of lies. We will probably never really know any of that, just that the bodyguard is there and is actively seeking to hide the collection of information, some of which is likely to be our own. Intel insiders like Liepman can swear on the highest stack of Bibles ever piled up that they are really, really good people who really, really aren't going to use these programs to help government officials kneecap political enemies or in other unsavory ways such as to evade the legal requirements for evidence collection imposed on domestic law enforcement and their assurances are almost sure to be worthless.

The real question is, simply just exactly how much power over us we choose to give that bodyguard, and who can guard a guard that cannot be seen or heard.

Zerks

OK, I admit it; I picked the title for this post mostly because I've always wanted to use the word "zerk" in a blog post title.

But bear with me, because I do have a cunning plan here.

The origin of this post came from something Ed posted over at Gin & Tacos about a USAF Class A mishap. Seems that the zoomies lost a V-22 "Osprey" tilt-rotor transport down in Florida the other day and Ed was harkening back to the halcyon days of his blog-youth when he called down fire and rain on the V-22 for being a massive boondoggle.

It got me thinking to the military kit I've encountered that smelled suspiciously like the someones involved in getting a hold of it had more in mind than getting there fustest with the mostest.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the M782 GAMA Goat ambulance.

I've never really figured out who thought these big bastards were a good idea. They were ginormous, slow, and clumsy. The motor was decent - a three-cylinder Detroit diesel - but the rest of the contraption was a mechanic's nightmare.

They were supposed to be amphibious, so the entire bottom was sealed outside of a couple of screw-in drain plugs. Which made any maintenance that required access to the bottom of the vehicle a frigging huge pain in the ass. The main wiring harness ran underneath the engine block, so if you ever developed a problem with an electrical line you had to pull the entire fuckin' power pack! To make matters worse it didn't float, really; the rubber seal on the tailgate split or tore within hours of leaving the factory, so the thing was always a danger of going to Davy Jones' Locker, while it "swam" by spinning it's tires as paddlewheels which worked about as well as you'd think.

The thing had no spare (the tires and wheels were too freaking huge to carry one) and if you flatted the idea was that you dragged out this "bridge kit" which locked the back part to the front - though it looked like a truck-and-trailer the Goat was actually one vehicle that had a universal joint in the middle - took off one of the back tires from the tractor to replace the flat, put the tractor in 6WD and drove away.

But damn GAMA Goat's the worst feature was the carrier bearing.

The bottom is sealed, remember? So the driveshaft to the rear wheels ran in a channel in the bottom of the trailer from the universal joint to the rear differential. It had a single bearing between the U-joint and the diff, mounted in a metal housing that stuck down below the trailer floor.

The bearing was just a regular old bearing of no particular distinction, and being underneath a tactical truck it tended to get filthy dirty. It was hard to reach - you had to crawl under the trailer to get to it. So drivers doing PMCS tended to skip lubing the carrier bearing. Even if you took the time to get under the damn trailer the grease fitting - the proper name for those little nipple things are "zerks" - tended to be caked with glaur, or had been banged on something and wouldn't take the grease gun nozzle. So the bearing tended to get dry and crusty. And then...

That was brought home to me in a particularly painfully embarrassing way when the carrier bearing of HQ-52 burned up like a vampire under a sunlamp and locked the entire rear driveshaft up tight just as I was crossing the swing bridge at Pedro Miguel Locks one lovely winter afternoon in 1986.

Well, THAT sucked.

The truck was stuck, and so was the bridge, and the entire crew of the Polish freighter waiting for the locks to open ambled over to laugh at the imperialist Yankee scum and his broken-down Goat. The lock-keeper went berserk in Panamanian, and the convoy commander detailed me to wait with the vehicle until the battalion's five-ton wrecker could drive all the way over from the Westside to tow me home.

Because, you see, military equipment tends to live a hard life; it's called upon to go places and do things no sensible civilian equipment would think of. So it makes sense to try and keep that equipment as simple and robust as possible. The M782's carrier bearing violated that rule. And I payed for it that day. Imagine if I'd been racing to pick up wounded men in combat. It doesn't pay to think about. Men would have died because of that damn carrier bearing, the operators who didn't maintain it, and the people who designed and fielded that vehicle.


Now the MV-22 is a just a VSTOL transport; in effect, a sort of quasi-helicopter. The way I see it the only real advantage it has over the current fleet of USMC rotary-wing aircraft is the in-flight speed.

But in my opinion the in-flight speed requirement is the weakest argument for the aircraft. I don't see that it has ever really been proven to be critical to the design – i.e., the USMC has never really explained why the 100-knot increase in maximum speed over the helos is that important.

Supposedly it's because it allows the V-22 to keep pace with fast movers, but since when in the past sixty-some years have our transport aircraft required fighter escorts?

Seems to me that this is really a macguffin. The guys want this thing because it's just flat-out, stomp-down fuckin' COOL.

And that's when I start thinking about carrier bearings.

Because I think the other issue - the bigger, eventually murderous issue - about the MV-22 that's going to bite the USMC and the aircraft's other users in the ass is that the tilt-rotors are going to prove to be a maintenance nightmare that will become a monster as these airframes age. Mission capable rate is already low – below 60% between FY09 and FY12 for the USMC, and combat equipment gets used hard, and fiddly bits like the tilt-rotors tend to age poorly. The maintenance estimates for the V-22 fleet has just been bumped up over 60%, and IMO this is waaaayyyyy too optimistic.


And that's just now, when everything is all shiny and new and all the grease fittings are clean. The dark days are to come, as these airframes age and the tilty bits in the rotors get worn and need more and more fixing. And we go years and years without a combat mission that required fighter escort for these transports to make everyone wonder why they seemed so important. And the cost of each aircraft goes up and the numbers of the mission-capable units go down and...

In the end it isn't that the USMC and the USAF and their contractors are jonesing for these things. I was a GI, and GIs, even and sometimes especially commissioned GIs, even admirals and generals, get a hard-on for cool shit, and what's cooler than an aircraft that's like a real-life Transformer?

Nope. The thing that rings my bell is that nobody in Congress seemed or seems willing to question the entire NEED for them, or the supposed missions that can't be performed without them.

After all, it's the Congress that's supposed to be the gatekeeper for all things warlike in our country. They're supposed to debate the weighty issues of going to war and making peace, of supplying the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen with the equipment, training, and geopolitical cunning they need to fight and win.

And it should have been the Congress to ask the hard questions; why is this aircraft necessary? What missions can it do that others cannot? Why is THIS aircraft necessary? What makes the need for speed so critical? What does this aircraft provide that another machine, or a combination of others, cannot - as, say, a helicopter can not - that will require the troopers riding in them to hope that everything works as designed and that the designs are good, that the tilt-rotors work just so all the time, every time, and that every single zerk is perfectly clean and shiny and new and smooth and full of grease.