View 333 October 25 - 31, 2004 (original) (raw)
Thursday, October 28, 2004
There is a letter from a Kerry supporter on the ammunition dump issue over in mail. I have written a substantial comment, more on the issue than his letter,but I'll leave that in mail.
I continue to recover in quiet misery.
Thank heaven for
which has allowed me to breathe at night.
More on the ammunition dump: Bush should call the theater commander to the White House, and in the Oval Office, with the general standing at attention in front of his desk, say "I am very disappointed about this. Good morning, General. Dismissed."
The real problem is that no one thought the Iraqi would behave as they have for about a thousand years. It's politically incorrect to assume that once the restraints of order are removed, people will behave like savages. Apparently no one is required to read The Lord of the Flies any more, or pay attention to it if they did. Not to mention much better books on the subject.
When the mob hungers, it burns the bakeries in search of bread.
But I see no evidence whatever that the Democrats understand the situation any better.
The following is a dialogue between me and Fred Reed (Fred on everything) in another conference; published with permission.
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Jerry Pournelle wrote:
That is certainly the view that prevails in the Pentagon. They're coming for us, and we should fight them overseas.
I have yet to have an answer to the question "If they are coming for us, how will they get here if the Navy does any part of its job?"
Fred Reed wrote:
In the twenty years plus when I covered the military, the Pentagon always believed that someone was coming for us and that we were in grave danger. For example, the Soviets were always pulling ahead in crucial technologies and just barely behind in others. They were stealing our technology and would use it to defeat us. They had more weapons and their latest models were better than ours. They seemed to be preparing a first strike.
Having been to Russia, I knew it to be Mexico without the technology or consumer goods, that the computers I very rarely saw in hotels were visibly crummy knockoffs of the Apple II (I think it was). The abacus was the rule. When my junket went to Pravda, I asked to see their computers. French and British stuff. Why, I asked, meaning why not Russian? The answer, so help me, was that Reagan wouln't let them have a VAX. I had talked to the enlisted guys at Aberdeen who drove captured Russian tanks. Junk, they said, hard to drive and broke down constantly. I knew something about manufacturing microcircuity, and knew they couldn't reproduce technology they could have bought at Radio Shack. So far as I know, they still can't make a decent PC. Taiwan spit them out, even then, like golf balls.
Without a threat to counter, the Pentagon has no reason for being. It will always believe in a threat.
Fred
Jerry Pournelle wrote:
There is a great deal to what you say; of course that was our job (I was one of the civilian threat and counter analysts for most of my aerospace career). And the Soviets were able to make some fairly decent armor, and they had tactical nuclear weapons.
A tactical nuclear weapon is one that goes off in Germany. If it goes off in a WTO nation the danger of escalation is too high. Ditto CONUS or FRANCE or NATO. Weapons that go off in those places are not tactical but strategic; But nukes that blow off in Germany are tactical.
We can discuss just how much defense was needed during the Cold War another time; certainly the Berlin Blockade was a pretty near thing as far as WWIII is concerned and most of us thought Patton had been right ("We have to fight them sometime, why don't we do it while we've got a goddam army over here to do it with?")
And you must understand that getting information out of the USSR was pretty hard since most people who told the truth about the place were not allowed back in. The Army sent officers to Cornell and such places, where they were taught that East Germans were happy, by the professorate who could get access to East Germany for their scholarly papers (publish or perish!) only by teaching that the East Germans really liked being a People's Republic. And US Army intelligence officers were taught that as Gospel... It was the same for most other academics.
The United States no longer values EDUCATION and KNOWLEDGE. It now values only CREDENTIALS, and credentials are available only from academic institutions, and the professorate is mostly divorced from reality. So it goes.
Fred Reed wrote:
BTW, I don't suggest that the Soviets were innocuous, or that we shouldn't have opposed them. Having greatly superior weapons has a wholeome deterrent effect and discourages adventurism. Big stick, speak softly. It worked.
As for the quality of Soviet weapons, I understand the difficulty in getting info out of the USSR. Howsomever, the success rate of SAMs over Hanoi was known--poor in comparison to number of sorties over the city. Unless one believed the monkey-model theory that the USSR always had far superior arms hidden and only gave bum stuff to clients, the gear captured indicated poor quality. I spent time in Cuando Cubango with Savimbi's boys. They had captured Soviet trucks but said they overheated and weren't real useful. Belenko presumably had not hesitation in talking about aviation and we had the Foxbat.
Having seen late-model (for then) Soviet tanks and spent days at a time in an M1 (non-tech story for Harper's is on my site) I can promise where the advantage lay. As a small but important example, M1s and of course back-fitted A3s had thermals, while the sovs, said Jane's, had only microchannel photomultipliers which ain't that great. I never got aboard a Soviet sub, but assuming that Jane's was even close, no comparison. I did go to sea once with an 726-class boomer (the Florida, also on site). Holy god. I knew our advantage in computers and therefore in signal processing. Just looking at lots of Soviet subs indicated flownoise. The Florida had the BQQ-6 sonar suite and full torpedo room and was for various reasons astoundingly quiet. Bad ship to hunt, worse one to find.
Etc. And if the Sovs had secretly had advanced electronics etc they would have used it in the general economy to get the money to buy weaponry. Well, they didn't.
Fred
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Also over in that conference, in a discussion of Iraq I had this to say about "real-politik":
"We could have allied with Saddam. It wouldn't have stopped his kids from feeding people to the wood chippers feet first, but it would have kept Iran and Saudi Arabia under control.
"And it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. Taliban gone. Afghanistan gets our major attention so it really shines. Saddam tones down some of the excesses "Come on, Saddam, you can't let your kids DO that sort of thing. At least not where journalists can see it happen."
"And we still have people to shoot at in Afghanistan, and we can deploy some of the regiments on the border of the US. "
My point being that there are political limits to real-politik; can you imagine the political consequences of such a policy?
I'm putting up things I said another time because my head isn't working very well today.