Granted, Politico dudes, July 5 is generally a slow news day. But did you really have to lead with U.S. military’s newest weapon against China and Russia: Hot air?
Lee Hudson has the, well, breathless scoop:
The Pentagon is working on a new plan to rise above competition from China and Russia: balloons.
The high-altitude inflatables, flying at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet, would be added to the Pentagon’s extensive surveillance network and could eventually be used to track hypersonic weapons.
Uh huh. My mother always told me to cast a cold eye on would/could constructions, and I think that’s doubly good advice in this case, because I can remember another story in Politico, back in 2015, viz., How the Army's $3 billion spy blimp went from boondoggle to laughingstock, written by Austin Wright and illustrated by the exact same goddamn blimp photo for both stories—the exact same goddamn blimp photo now shown above, as a matter of fact.
I ridiculed this boondoggle/laughingstock spy blimp fiasco in two posts, here and here, relying heavily (which is to say entirely) on Austin’s footwork in tracking down the hilarious details of the army’s $3 billion hot-air bust, also known as the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, aka the JLACMDENSS. JLACMDENSS dates all the way back to 1996, costing the taxpayers a cool $2.8 billion and counting while giving birth to a mere two blimps, which were tethered near Baltimore in the hopes that no one would notice them, a move that proved successful until 2015 when a mighty wind sent them both careening over the Pennsylvania state line, where they managed to down power lines, causing the U.S. Air Force to scramble a couple of jets and shoot the fuckers down. Until now.
Austin Wright, in his story reporting the blimp program’s demise, explained why the ludicrous enterprise lasted as long as it did:
In 2010, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, Army leaders sought to kill the program. But top Pentagon officials intervened — including then-Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman James Cartwright, who’s since made hundreds of thousands of dollars as a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.
Cartwright on Wednesday declined to comment.
Okay, I admit this makes Cartwright sound like a jerk, but he’s also active in “Global Zero”, a campaign to eliminate all nuclear weapons, and he was one of 36 retired generals and admirals to endorse the U.S./Iran agreement regarding nuclear weapons negotiated by the Obama administration and subsequently ripped up by Donald Trump. If we could get rid of nuclear weapons, I’d gladly put up with all the blimps the Raytheon folks want to sell us.
Afterwords
Lee Hudson’s July 5 Politico story is behind some sort of paywall, so you can’t read the whole thing for free via Politico, but, for some obscure reason, it is available in its entirety for free over at Yahoo Sports. Who said the Internet ain’t cool?
How do I know so damn much about blimps? Close to 40 years ago, I worked with “Dee”,1 a woman who, in addition to a Ph.D. in French Lit from Columbia, had a serious Jones for blimps, which (somehow) struck me as particularly amusing because I, as a semi-compulsive newspaper reader, could remember reading a number of stories over the years before I met Dee proclaiming “the blimps are back”, each article earnestly “explaining” that while past “the blimps are back” stories hadn’t panned out, this time it was the real deal. All the old problems had been resolved and soon the big boys would be seen floating everywhere.
Except that that never happened. And now, flash forward 40 years, it still hasn’t happened, a phenomenon over which I have gleefully chuckled in several previous posts. On every occasion, the promised blimps never materialized, despite being totally cool in concept.
And yet, for the true blimpophile, hope still springs eternal. The Airlander 10, a 300-foot monster, which has actually flown (a little) is scheduled to go into production, resulting in, appropriately enough, 10 blimps by 2026. And how about the Lockheed LMH-1? That might turn into, well, something? Who knows? And, hey, what about 500-foot Flying Whales? The future is now, baby! Or, at least, a couple of years from now! Know hope! Know hope!
