Ken Nelson

My son just sent me this picture of a MIG 25 Foxbat that the Iraqi’s buried to try and hide it from us:

Makes you wonder what else they’ve buried in Iraq and Syria….

No Patraeus

I’ve no idea about what kind of man Colin Powell is. He seems to have been an earnest young man who served well in the Army as a young officer.

But from Lieutenant-Colonel on, one things seems to have been paramount on Colin Powell’s professional mind… what’s good for Colin Powell.

So during the 80’s he did the Reagan thing. Then the Bush thing. Then he did the Clinton thing. Then the Bush thing again. Whoever was in power, he was cool with them.

And now that Obama is in power, he feels the need to apologize for Bush.

This article by Michael Wolff thinks Powell is correct now:

He has been wrong about nearly everything that matters, as so many have, but he has, as the result of what seems to be great suffering and some respect for the obvious, admitted it

But is Wolff right about Powell always being wrong until now.

Or am I right about Powell always doing what’s best for Powell, including now, with right or wrong not playing a critical role?

Or are we both right? I’ve agreed with some things he has said over the years, but I’ve never felt I could trust that he believed them.

Powell epitomizes, to me, the ultimate careerist.  And his careerism has had real costs that I don’t think apologies will help. Careerists, whether in the Army or in the Senate, do us all harm.

He should do us all one last BIG favor and just shut up and collect his pension.

BTW: Another general that fits this category is Wesley Clark.

The 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines have gone to war – in Afghanistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14marja.html?hp

For the Marines of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, the assault into the last large Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province was beginning. For almost all of them, this was to be their first taste of war. And an afternoon of small-arms combat was ahead.

The article covers them fairly. Here is their battalion website:

http://www.iimefpublic.usmc.mil/public/iimefpublic.nsf/unitSites/3bn6mar

I wish them well.

No accident a Navy guy support this.

Is it brave to advocate what your boss wants?  Bravery is what the usual media pundits call Admiral Mike Mullen’s support for gays in the military.  But , to me, that is sort of like the Fed Ex ads where everybody likes the idea when the boss says it, cutting out the guy who actually suggested it.

True bravery would be to resign in the face of a decision clearly bad for the military and the nation.

Instead, Mullen  just helps the Obama administration in their attempt to gut the military that they, rightly, view as a threat to the ultimate takeover of the country by the forces of progressivism.

So they want to gut the military and make it something that no parent will want their kids to join.  Turning barracks into bath houses would do just that.

Mullen, a careerist at core, is all too happy to help as thanks for elevating him to the ultimate spot in a military career. Never mind what is good for the military or the country.

Competitors can teach the Army about cool and clean running M16s
Shown: The JP Rifles JP-15 AR.

The NY Times covers the Army’s attempts to build an M4 (shorter variant of the M16) that won’t jam:

Watch the video closely. After several magazines, the barrel smolders. Then it becomes red hot. After 1 minute and 20 seconds the barrel begins to droop between magazines — like a piece of warm licorice. Then comes the catastrophic ending, at 1 minute and 51 seconds and after the 535th round, when the barrel ruptures.

They Army has decided to make the barrel heavier to help avoid the problem:

The barrel gets hotter and hotter, and the heat spreads throughout the weapon. The shooter wears a heat-resistant glove even to pull the trigger. Soon the barrel smolders and glows, but it does not droop and does not rupture. At 2:22 the hand guard assembly catches fire. It burns for about two and a half minutes. But the rifle keeps firing, magazine after magazine, until it stops firing on automatic at 4 minutes and 47 seconds, after 911 rounds.

In my experience fouling, not shooting too much/too fast, causes most M16 jams.  Although I have seen M16 barrels begin to get soft from heat, this was before the introduction of the 3-shot burst automatics the soldiers of today use.

The M16 runs very dirty because the gas used to blast  the bolt back to cycle a new round comes directly back into the receiver depositing all sorts of nasties that collect quickly there.  Shoot a 100 rounds through an M16, or AR-15, then put your finger in there and it comes back black.

Competitive shooters don’t risk their lives due to jams, but they do risk losing, which motivates them to modify the guns to never jam.  Most serious competitors in multi-gun, or 3-gun, shooting (pistol, shotgun, carbine) have moved to a gas-piston system of cycling the action. In this approach the gas doesn’t go all the way back to the bolt, instead it operates a piston that moves the bolt. The action runs clean and cool. You can go a 1000 or more rounds and not have to clean the action (you should clean the barrel to extend its life however).

These systems also typically minimize the bolt slap against the back of the receiver.  Most AR-15’s come back too hard, making recoil much worse than need be.

The Army, IMHO, would be better served moving to a clean running, lower recoil, gas-piston variant of the M16/AR-15.   The guns would jam a lot less.  And valuable soldier time wouldn’t be wasted cleaning the weapons.

I’d note that soldiers given a choice, usually in Special Ops or other specialties, generally prefer the gas-piston systems. Reliability plus less maintenance and lower recoil… you can have it all!

Brian and I toured the U.S.S. Torsk in Baltimore and a found memorial to a St. George resident:

Joseph Grant Snow was the only member of the Torsk crew to die during World War II. He was lost when he didn’t get below decks during a training dive in 65 years ago today.

Here is his page at OneEternalPatrol.
And here is the Torsk log from the day he died.

"This weekend in Prague," he said, "I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons."  
Barack Obama

Some would say “admirable goal but unrealistic”.  And they would be stupid.

Some would say “admirable goal and we should do it”. And they would be dangerous.

Why?  Because there will never, again, be a world without nukes. Even if successful getting rid of the weapons, the world would never be more than a week or two from having them again. Such a world would be dangerous, unstable, and prone to rapid preventive escalations.

I have to wonder, is Obama just naive? Or is there some underlying ill will he has against the world and our country?

Isn’t it sad I have to wonder such questions.  300+ million people in our country, and THIS is the best we can elect? Sad.

To the stockade with you!

An Army Major General in command in Northern Iraq will soon have his hat handed to him, but I admire his effort. The general, sick of losing skilled soldiers to pregnancy, intends to put a little teeth in his efforts to stop the losses by court martialing both the woman, and the father, if they are on active duty.

‘I’ve got a mission to do, I’m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them,’ Maj Gen Cucolo said.

‘So I’m going to take every measure I can to keep them all strong, fit and with me for the twelve months we are in the combat zone.’

Married soldiers on active service should either put their love lives on hold or take precautions. It was a ‘black and white’ issue, he said.

I like it.  His command loses more soldiers to pregnancy than the enemy and he puts a reasonable measure in place to stop it. Good thinking.  While some of these pregnancies are inadvertent, many aren’t. When I was in, I heard more than a few female soldiers say they would use pregnancy to get out of a deployment or assignment they didn’t want to do. Now they have some consequences to consider.

Alas, he should prepare to retire as a Major General. But hey, career is over rated.

Personally, I’d promote him and put him in charge of the whole war. Sounds like he knows how to achieve a mission.

Navy Seals

Review by Brian Nelson, age 12, as a home school daily writing assignment.

In October 2009 my Dad and I attended the Army Marksmanship Unit/MGM targets Junior Shooters Camp at Fort Benning, Georgia.  The camp lasted three days but Dad and I had never been to Georgia, so we stayed the rest of the week. At Fort Benning we visited the new National Infantry Museum, an innovative hands-on museum detailing the history of the United States Army Infantry from its founding in 1776 to the present day.

The Museum has been designed around a military saying that "the last 100 yards of the battlefield belong to the Infantry. The first thing you see upon entering the Museum is actually called "The Last Hundred Yards". The exactly 100 yard gallery contains mannequins dressed in authentic uniforms portraying one major battle in every war the U.S. has fought in. All the exhibits in the Last Hundred Yards are made with soil from the actual battlefields. As you enter each battle scene, an immersive sound system plays sounds of battle, bringing each scene to life. You can hear the shouts of the colonial soldiers,charging redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown, confederate rifle fire at Shiloh, the carnage of 225 Rangers landing at Point Du Hoc, the sounds of paratroopers and gliders hitting the ground at Luzon, the rotors of the 7th Air Cav UH-1 Huey helicopter, landing at LZ X-ray in the Ia Drang Valley, and the rumble of the Bradley Fighting vehicle, rolling through the outskirts of Baghdad.

After exiting the Last Hundred Yards, The sound of marching boots and shouts of drill instructors lure you into the Fort Benning gallery. Here videos teach about Drill Instructors, Basic Combat Training(BCT), and Army Ranger School. A laser range filled with m16a2 rifles outfitted with laser units and pneumatic recoil gives visitors a chance to qualify just like BCT recruits do.

Then down the stairs you go to take your pick of the rest of the galleries. Dad and I did them all in chronological order, starting with the Philippine insurrection and World War One gallery. This gallery ends in a simulated WW1 trench, where simulated bullets whiz overhead and artillery shells make the ground shake.

After leaving the trenches we moved on to the World War Two gallery. This exhibit contains sand tables of every key battle in every theater of the war as well as several artifacts, including a Jeep made in 1940 and numerous firearms.

The following gallery, the Korea and Vietnam gallery, ends in a Vietnamese jungle walk. Complete with simulated land mines, encased pungi sticks, and one Vietcong ambush, the jungle walk may be scary to some people, so there is an option to walk around.

The final gallery, titled "a sole superpower", deals with the fall of communism, Operations  Just Cause and Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The National Infantry Museum also houses a gourmet restaurant, IMAX theater, and a gift shop full of actual military surplus like uniforms and inert grenades.

I have never seen a museum better than the National Infantry Museum. I like the way the museum takes you to the front lines of history, not tell about it on a plaque.

Only an hour or so south of Atlanta, I recommend this museum to anyone that is passing through Georgia, or anyone deeply interested in military history.

Learn more at http://www.nationalinfantrymuseum.com/

  
Nagasaki… ruined by a honeymoon

Leslie Groves initially picked Kyoto to be destroyed by the first war-time use of the atomic bomb. So why was Hiroshima blasted instead?

His wish to destroy the city was overruled by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had honeymooned there.

Wow – close call for Kyoto, and Nagasaki wouldn’t have been touched.

Read the wiki page for Leslie Groves – he got things done.

THE PATRIOT MICRO CHIP is intended to be implanted in terrorists. 
The implant is specifically designed to be installed in the forehead. 
When properly installed, it will allow the one implanted, to speak to God. 

It comes in various sizes:

The exact size of the implant will be selected by a well-trained and highly skilled technician.  The implant may or may not be painless. Side effects, like headaches and nausea, are temporary. Some bleeding or swelling may occur at the injection site.

H/T e-mail from Rob M.

Did survivors and their kids squander their sacrifice?

Last week my brother recommended I catch up with the History Channels ‘WWII in HD”.  It shows new footage of World War II, much in color, and in high definition.  The show is excellent, and I’ve watched 7 of the 12 episodes… but I stopped.

Why?

I couldn’t bear to watch the effort, suffering, misery, and anguish knowing what lay ahead. I felt so bad that the World War II’s generation that survived and their kids had screwed up so badly what the folks I was seeing had fought for.

I’m curious as to what the surviving veterans think of the state of the country they fought for now?  When I talk to them, as I do to most I see wearing a Veterans jacket or hat, they don’t seem particularly thrilled.  I’m not sure if the negativity is a function  of where I live (conservative southern Utah), or if it applies across the board.

In England, an enterprising younger person, asked WWII veterans to write him about this topic:

But was it worth it? Her answer – and the answer of many of her contemporaries, now in their 80s and 90s – is a resounding No.

They despise what has become of the Britain they once fought to save. It’s not our country any more, they say, in sorrow and anger.

England is further on the path to ruin than we are, especially with regards to poor immigration policies – which was a common theme of what the veterans wrote about.

Anyway, maybe I’ll get back to WWII in HD…. eventually.  Right now, it is too hard to view.

Something tells me his decision angst is more about the political risk to him, than wanting to get the decision right for the nation’s security.

It sucks that troops that risk all every day are “led” by a man unwilling to risk a small drop in his polls.

"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)”

On the wall of my office is my commission as an officer in the United States Army.  In order to get it I had to swear an oath (above)  to defend the Country and the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic and to swear true faith and allegiance to the same.

This was given to me long ago and I never really gave much thought to anything but the foreign enemies part. Nor did we receive training in anything other than how to deal with foreign enemies (violently but with certain rules).   I had no training in identifying or defending against domestic enemies. And I had no training on what it meant to defend the Constitution.

I’m going to leave the Commission on my wall, because it reflects an achievement I’m proud of.  But if asked to accept it again, I’d be tempted to say “Gosh… I’m not willing to defend the Constitution as currently written, and I think you are a domestic enemy, is one out of three okay?”. 

Oh sure Ken, you say, you don’t like Obama so you call him a domestic enemy. I despised Clinton, but I would have accepted a commission from him.   I believe that Obama is a domestic enemy. I do not believe he likes or respects this country and I think he actively works against our interests and the good parts of our Constitution. I believe he and others in  his government have long term plans to subvert the freedom parts of our Constitution.

Not all parts though. I think there is one part he really likes.  And that leads me to the other reason I’d have a problem accepting a commission today… there are parts of our Constitution I would not be willing to defend.   In particular the 16th amendment – the right to tax us any darn well the Government wants to.   Put it in context with the other amendments, which detail what the Government can’t do, the 16th amendment is the most “unconstitutional” amendment one could imagine other than “this document is nullified”.

The 16th amendment led to the growth of government that threatens our rights and economic freedom and security.  Why defend it?

This is not to disparage any serving today. If I were younger I’d probably be serving as well – we clearly have foreign enemies that are actively fighting against us.

But… I’d do so with a sour taste in my mouth as I knew I’d only be willing to do a third of the job.