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"Terrorist War" 2005

We have to be careful of press reporting, but the impression created is that the Moslem public is not opposed to any expression of Moslem rights. I gave up on Moslem residents when none volunteered to join US forces to explain to the middle eastern people how well intended were the Americans.

One solution is to return the draft. People not really part of the culture will leave rather than risk their life for a country they don't love.

Jane Fonda

Even beauty can be ugly. (more

The bitch is back.

"Terrorist War" 2004

V-22A Osprey

A problem had been downdraft was lifting other Osprey's on the deck. Evidently no problems with the aircraft. Good news for the services.

Compensation .

This is one reason why war is expensive. In Vietnam we paid French plantation owners for every rubber tree destroyed in fighting. This is one reason for the resurgence of Japan after WW2, all payments by Japan were banned by MacArthur.

Peacetime War.

Will the bloused trousers and high boots, a'la paratroopers, be difficult to keep all day while working and will high boots require extra time to put on and off and reblouse during the day? Will the loose shirt catch on ship's protrusions and a higher cap blow away? One gets the idea that the designers are concerned with compatible "look" with other services. We could hope the tests are treated realistically : approximately 60 participants, both male and female, officer and enlisted, spread over 20 sites around the world are considered as the test. Is this a total of 60 people (3 per site) or 1,200 total ; only the latter would approach a realistic sample.

Our training is for combat in which we have overwhelming control, where it is safe for AWAC and tankers to accompany the shooters. Training has de-emphasized individual sharpness ; perhaps our pilots were filing environmental impact statements. We know our people will adapt, but the theme permeating this website is that war is a come-as-you-are thing. When 9 of 10 on the first team do not return to tell us what went wrong, it makes it tough on the next team going in. Oh, you say the next war will be fought with unmanned aircraft. Controlled, no doubt, from an AWAC being refueled somewhere safe ; where is that on a battlefield? With losses of 90% per mission, it doesn't take any longer to run out of aircraft than it does to exhaust manpower. Does anyone remember our losses at Midway ? 42% - after 6-months of active combat.

Washington Post

here.

Now we know why the USN was flying reconnaissance missions in the South China Sea and why the Reds took out our Orion.

Does this mean we don't plan a ground war in the North? If that small and obnoxious country does anything overt, it can be taken out with precision. If it can be fast enough to avoid revenge is a question?

Actually the Navy rushed returning ships to readiness for the next battle with terrorism. Shame to let that readiness not be used, and seen; hence, exercises.

Further cost cutting. A reservist costs about 20% of a full timer; the Navy would rather have another man on station then 5 in the hinterlands. One third of troops in Iraq are Guard or Reserve, humm.
Another technique of getting manpower off the books is the conversion of fleet auxiliary ships to civilian manning. I have a collection of war stories of union workers who refused to work in combat, but have refrained from making a web page to avoid disparaging the thousands who did their duty. Never-the-less ... ?

Kitty Hawk

Enterprise

If we fought at Pearl Harbor with 43 year old ships, they would have commissioned in 1898. We often hear how at the beginning of WW2 we had to fight with WW1 equipment. For example, the "old" WWI 4-stack destroyers were built in 1918-20 or about 22 years old in 1941. Today we have the following numbers of 22 year old or older ships in active service : 4 CVN, 2CV, 8 DD, 2 FF, 11 SSN.

Those retirements and a slow shipbuilding rate have shrunk the Navy's combat fleet to 295 ships, the smallest number since before World War I

littoral ships

catamaran

Any new ship design has issues and this totally new design has even more. However, some questions are really dumb -- need high speed?!

In my day these were Commissarymen (CS), and before that, mess cooks. Even then, the food was good and plenty of it.

advance

11Sep01 Unthinkable Thoughts, best summarized as:

Passengers, office workers, heroes coming to their rescue - - all . . . gone.
I want revenge!
Yet we must recognize that killing a terrorist will make his little brother into a terrorist.
Kill 'em all ; let Allah sort'em out.

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News Thu Mar 31 2005 12:39:34 ET
JANE FONDA REGRETS THE "BETRAYAL" HER PHOTO ON A NORTH VIETNAMESE ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN SYMBOLIZED - "60 MINUTES" SUNDAY
Iconic Actress Wasn't "Forced" by Husband Roger Vadim Into Three-Way Sex, But Says "I Went Along With it" in Her First Interview About Her Upcoming Autobiography

Jane Fonda has no regrets about her trip to North Vietnam in 1972 - with one big exception: her visit to a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun site used to shoot down U.S. pilots. She says her appearance there, which earned her the epithet "Hanoi Jane," was a "betrayal" of the U.S. military, its soldiers and "the country that gave me privilege." She regards the event as one of the biggest mistakes of her life. Fonda speaks to Lesley Stahl in her first interview about her upcoming autobiography, Jane Fonda: My Life So Far, for a 60 MINUTES report to be broadcast Sunday, April 3 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

"The image of Jane Fonda, Barbarella, Henry Fonda's daughter...sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal...the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine," says Fonda. She does not regret, however, visiting the enemy capital, Hanoi, or being photographed with American prisoners of war there - despite the propaganda value it afforded the enemy. "There are hundreds of American delegations that had met with the POWs," says Fonda. "Both sides were using the POWs for propaganda....It's not something that I will apologize for," she says.

Nor is she sorry for the broadcasts she made on Radio Hanoi, something she asked the North Vietnamese to do. "Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it, and I felt I had to do anything that I could to expose the lies and help end the war," she tells Stahl. She went on Radio Hanoi at least 10 times, speaking directly to American pilots and criticizing their bombing of North Vietnam. Fonda insists she did not ask the pilots to disobey orders. "I'm asking them to consider [not bombing North Vietnam]," says Fonda. She wouldn't make similar broadcasts in Iraq today, however, saying, "I don't think it's the same situation at all. When I went [to North Vietnam]. . . we had been fighting in Vietnam for eight years. The majority of Americans...[and] Congress opposed the war. It was a desperate time."

Fonda is also candid about her private life, revealing, for example, that she willingly participated in three-way sex at the request of her first husband, Roger Vadim, the French film director. "One night Vadim brought another woman into my bed and I went along with it. . . . I'm competitive...I was going to keep up with the Joneses. It was the 60s and whatever," she tells Stahl, adding that she isn't sure if she liked the mŽnage a trois. But, "I know one thing: it really hurt me...and it reinforced my feeling I wasn't good enough." She went along with the sex, she says, because "I felt that if I said no, that he would leave me and I couldn't imagine myself without him."

Sometimes Fonda solicited the women herself. "Hey, if that's what he wanted, I'd give it to him in spades," she tells Stahl. She says the women she procured for Vadim were call girls and that she used what she learned from them for her Oscar-winning turn as a prostitute in "Klute."

Asked why she would write about such private matters, Fonda responds, "I knew that if I didn't really fess up about how far I went in the betrayal of my heart, that it would not make the journey that I've been on . . . as important and as poignant." < return

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"Terrorist War" 2005

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