Perhaps I should say, David Ignatius hopes and prays you’re an idiot. This is the way Dave begins his latest column, “America is no longer guaranteed military victory. These weapons could change that.” “The fight against the Islamic State may get the headlines. But it’s the military threats from Russia and China that most worry…
Tag: military spending
The F-35 “Hanger Queen”
I recently stumbled across an intriguing site on the Internet,“War Is Boring”, which featured a necessarily long article—necessarily long because it was titled “Everything Wrong With the F-35”, the F-35 being America’s newest and (of course) most expensive fighter jet. The F-35 is in fact the most expensive weapons project in history, and one that…
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…
Thank you, Mark Perry!
A month ago, Politico ran an exceptionally stupid article by Bryan Bender that probably should have been entitled “The Russians Are Coming! And They’re Ten Fucking Feet Tall!” although (obviously) it wasn’t. I launched a brief riposte “We Suck, says U.S. Army”, saying, basically, that I didn’t believe a word Bryan said. Today, Mark Perry,…
“We suck,” says U.S. Army
Well, that’s the word from a breathless Bryan Bender, over at Politico, citing both a “secret” (more or less) “high-level but low-profile” report on Russian military capabilities and recent congressional testimony from Lt. General H. R. McMaster: “POLITICO has learned that, following the stunning success of Russia’s quasi-secret incursion into Ukraine, McMaster is quietly overseeing…
Pathetic Congress
Back in the day, Dwight Eisenhower, provoked beyond endurance by the right-wing posturing of forgotten California Republican mossback Sen. William Knowland, remarked that “With him there is no final answer to the question ‘How stupid can you get?’” With today’s Congress, there is no final answer to the question “How petty can you get?” Politico…
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,…
When Geniuses Lie
Is Lowell Wood a genius? Totally. You can read his fascinating story at Bloomberg Business, “How an F Student Became America’s Most Prolific Inventor”, just a wee bit of a bullshit title, since Lowell was not an F student for very long. But that’s okay, because Lowell, even though a very real, and very serious,…
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,…
But we were relying on it so heavily!
The U.S. missile defense system, Ronnie Reagan’s beloved Star Wars, has failed again, the second flopperoo in a row, and seventh out of fifteen tries, according to Reuters. “This is a tremendous setback for the testing of this complicated system,” said Riki Ellison, chairman and founder of the Virginia-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance and a…