Hell no I did not! The Washington Post, not known for its skepticism regarding America’s military intellectual complex—because it’s a charter member!—just can’t stop snickering at the B-21 “bomber”, sounding a hell of lot like me! Noting that Congress has kept the big boy’s budget secret, and that the plane’s recent roll-out was as primly…
Tag: bombers
The new B-21 Bomber? Don’t you mean B-2B?
I have been making fun of the B-21 bomber, under development by the defense firm of Northrup-Grumman, and its bumbling predecessors in uselessness, the B-1 and B-2, for years. Well, we now have gotten our first look at the newbie, shown above, and, wonder of wonders, it looks exactly like the B-2, also produced by…
Another $2 trillion down the rathole
“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion! Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25…
Justin Bachman is confused
Over at Bloomberg, Justin Bachman is confused. *What Keeps the B-52 ‘Stratosaurus’ Airborne?” he wonders. “The Air Force says it sees a mission for the 1950s-era bomber until 2050. How can that be?” I’ll tell you how, Justin, or rather why. Because our other bombers—our “new” bombers, the B-1 and B-2—are crap, that’s why. Worst…
New York Times Obituary Department now wholly owned subsidiary of Rockwell International and U.S. Air Force
Sam Iacobellis, father of the B-1 bomber, the plane that won the Cold War, is dead. Well, that’s what NYT obit dude Sam Roberts tells us, in a stunning outburst of chest-beating Reaganite nonsense. Sam is dead (I guess), so that part of the obit is true, but the rest of it, I strongly suggest,…
The Americans: Flying Home on a Wing and a Prayer
I don’t know if you follow The Americans, F/X’s intense if implausible take on deep-cover Soviet spies in the U.S. during the Reagan Administration. There are several things in the show that are particularly entertaining for me—for example, the spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Mathew Rhys and Keri Russell) live with their two kids in…
Q: What’s the difference between a blimp and a bomber? A: There isn’t any!
If you’re at all blimp-aware, you’re certainly cognizant of the sudden demise of the U.S. Army’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, provoked when one of the two JLACMDENSS blimps went rogue, accidentally shorting out the power to about 20,000 folks before being shot down over eastern Pennsylvania by state police,…
Bombs away? Please, far away!
Remember the B-1 bomber? It was, well, a disaster. President Carter cancelled it, on the rather sensible grounds that ICBMs had made manned bombers obsolete. But Ronald Reagan never let a little thing like obsolescence stand in the way of spending money, as long as it was for something cool, like a useless long-range bomber,…