Hooray for our Troops

For lots of reasons, not least for doing a nasty dangerous job in a nasty dangerous place (just ask the Macedonians, or the British, or the Sassanians or the Indians or...). And for doing it while most of us sit in comfort with full tummies in front of our entertainment devices and refuse to even notice that you are out there.

And, of course, for this.

can I have a falafel with that?

Your tax dollars at work

I learned something I did not know today. It was in an article by Matt Taibbi reaming a suborned soi-disant journalist named Lara Logan. You can read his rant here, but this is the part with the new info:

True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth – spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department – but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?

Hope you feel like you are getting your money's worth.

As for the content of the article, read it yourself and keep in mind the obviously forgotten advice of the old battle weary and drunken journalist who once told a rookie reporter:

When you interview someone you always have to ask yourself 'why is this lying bastard lying to me?'

But of course, I am only an historian. We never lie to anyone.

though we may not know what we are talking about.

Balancing the budget: we can't get there from here

Actually, there are not that many ways of doing it without both tax hikes and spending cuts. And at least some of those spending cuts would have to come from the military. If military spending is off the table, then I don't see how it happens. Same is true with entitlements, as far as I can tell.

Here is one Republican commentator's thoughts on our war budget.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not exorbitant drains on the federal budget. Even if the cost of the wars increased 10 times, they are costs the United States must bear, because that is what victory demands.

Victory demands. What kind of victory? How important is it to our national interests? Who cares: send money. Oh yes, spending money on anything else will bankrupt the nation for all time.

Reagan was right: there are simple solutions, just not easy ones.

New use for Google Earth.

Carmen loves Google Earth and all the Google map stuff. Here is a picture from Pakistan in 2006, for example.

And what are those little things parked on the runway? The ones that look like, oh... Predator attack drones?

South Ossetia!!

Never heard of it? Shame on you. Actually there are only three people in America who know the full history of the Ossetian people*. I know all three of them personally. One is retired, one is crazy, and I myself have forgotten all the details.

BUT, South Ossetia is the proximate cause of the Russian invasion, no no- incursion... no, visitation into Georgia by the Russian army, no no - para-military forces - uh, no, custom officials, into Georgia that nearly reached the Georgian capital**.

AND as a public service to any of you who have Russian relatives (or Russian colleagues) demanding to know why the Western press won't tell the truth about the Ossetian mess, here is a brief attempt to tell what might be called the truth (for lack of a better term) in something that passes for the Western Press. Actually, it's Wired Magazine.

No, No. No need to thank me.

*They're Iranians.
** It is a scurrilous lie that McCain demanded to know why we let Russians march through Atlanta. It was Sarah Palin.

Bush's Pentagon in action

The Pentagon seems to have some big problems on its plate but never fault them for lack of attention to detail. Here they are cleaning up the Wikipedia entry of one of our fallen heroes. You know, the ones the Bush administration has so much respect for.

How to fake a really, really big battle

Did you see the opening scene of the attack on Omaha Beach on D-Day in "Saving Private Ryan"? I didn't, but heard that it is gritty and spectacular. So how many extras did they have to get, how many landing craft, tanks, etc?

As it turns out, four guys with uniforms and rifles pretty much did it. Check this out, from a link provided by Andrew Sullivan. I especially like the way they did the explosions.


Update: My mistake. Three guys and some uniforms.

Our Officer Corps

Most Americans, I think, ignore the officer corps of the army. We just don't think of them when we imagine our democratic institutions. But we should, for many reasons.

Anyway, the Iraq war has had a number of unintended consequences, one of which is a growing split between the younger mid-ranks of the officer corps and the generals. Today Lt Col Paul Yingling, a combat leader who has proven his worth in Iraq, publishes a critique of the generals in Armed Forces Journal. There is an article about it in today's WaPo which you can read. Here's a taste of Yingling's conclusions:

"After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public," he writes. "For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq."

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