Presented without comment.

H/T to Kevin.

I was discussing some of the places I’ve been, especially when I was in the military, with a friend over the weekend.  His son is considering joining the military, and the recruiters are doing their kabuki dance about the wonderful places he could be stationed.  He wanted the straight skinny, and I gave him my (somewhat dated) experiences and opinions.

Then something occurred to me.

I’ve always had an idea about how the services decide where to put bases:  The Army and Marine Corps seem to put their posts in the worst places they can find, while the Navy and Air Force pick places that are nice, fun, and close to something worth going to.

Here’s a short list of the military posts I was deployed, stationed, or TDY to:

Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri – Army
Presidio of Monterey, California – Army, but really joint
Goodfellow Air Force Base – Air Force, but really joint
Augsburg, Germany – Army
Fort Huachuca, Arizona – Army
Fort Hood, Texas – Army
Fort Bragg, North Carolina – Army
Fort Irwin, California – Army
Fort Lewis, Washington – Army
Fort Drum, New York – Army
Macdill Air Force Base, Florida – Air Force
Norfolk, Virginia – Navy
Fort Meade, Maryland – Army, sort of
Cherry Point, North Carolina – Marines
Naples, Italy – Navy
Stuttgart, Germany – Joint
Berlin, Germany – Army
Frankfurt, Germany – Army
Camp Red Cloud, Korea – Army
Munich, Germany – Joint
RAF Mildenhall, UK – Air Force
Washington DC – Joint
Tuzla, Bosnia – Army
Taszar, Hungary – Army
Misawa, Japan – Air Force

There are a lot more, but those are the big ones.

I see a bit of a pattern.  The Air Force and Navy bases are where they need to be, but tend to be in relatively nice places.  The joint postings are usually almost as nice.  Also, overseas posts tend to be OK, with the exception of Tuzla and CRC.  Then we get to the domestic Marine and Army posts.  To be charitable, they tend to be crapholes.  It’s like in the 1930’s and 1940’s the leadership took a look at a map of the continental United States and sprinkled Army posts and Marine bases in the most economically depressed and isolated areas.  Other than Goodfellow AFB, the Air Force bases all seemed to be good places to take a vacation or raise kids.  Even Norfolk, with all its warts, is better than Bragg or Cherry Point.

Do you veterans concur?  Did the Army and Marine generals put their posts in places that would make their troops hard, or at least pissed off,  and the Air Force and Navy put bases in places where their people would be happy?

Vietnamese officials are reporting that two people have been killed and two more injured when a Vietnam-war era artillery shell exploded.  Apparently, one of the deceased was trying to collect it so that it could be sold as scrap when it went off.

This is one of the sad byproducts of warfare – unexploded ordnance or UXO.  Places like Angola, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Vietnam are going to be reporting similar tragedies for a long time.  Heck, every so often we hear of a farmer in France digging up a shell from World War I, and some German and British cities are still finding large aerial bombs from World War II.  There’s no telling how long the millions of more modern American and Soviet munitions that have been fired around the world in the past 60 years will remain dangerous.

This is one of the reasons that I truly believe that the revolution in more precise munitions is a wonderful thing.  Not only is collateral damage minimized by dropping fewer, more precise bombs and artillery shells, but fewer rounds means fewer duds, which means less UXO left behind to kill the grandchildren of the people fighting the war.

It’s much better to fire one or two terminally guided artillery shells at a target than it is to have an entire battery drop multiple shells in order to make sure you hit the same target.  First, it’s safer for those close to the target, and second it’s less likely that a dud will be fired and forgotten.  If you’re observing an enemy, have a couple of bombs or shells lobbed at them, and one of them hits and sticks, you’re going to report it.  If you drop 25 on them, you probably won’t notice.

And a special prayer goes out every night for the souls who volunteer to go into former war zones to try to find and destroy the forgotten bombs, shells, and mines.  One of the bravest people I ever met was a young Swede who worked with others to clear mine fields with nothing but a flak vest, steel helmet, and a piece of plastic rod in her hand.  Imagine spending days on your knees, poking holes in the earth trying to find something designed to kill someone doing exactly what you are trying to do. Poke the rod down as far as you can reach, pull it out, move over two inches, and do it again.  If you hit something, dig down from an area you’ve already cleared, and see if it’s a rock, a piece of old scrap metal, or a mine.  If it’s a mine, mark it so that the guy with the gun or the explosives can take care of it, and move on.  Makes me stop complaining about having to do TPS reports when I think of that.

On December 12, 1985, Airow Air Flight 1285 crashed just after take off from Gander, Newfoundland.  The crash and resulting fire killed 256 people, including 248 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division.  These soldiers were returning from peacekeeping duty in the Sinai.  Their mission was not one of conquest or nation building.  They placed their lightly armed bodies between two countries that had fought multiple wars so that the Camp David Accords could have time to become a habitual peace instead of a footnote in history.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. — The Gospel of Saint Matthew, Chapter 5, Verse 9

H/T to Blackfive for the reminder.

Chuck Z. is over in Afghanistan, and apparently he’s had a run-in with one of our ‘allies’ in the fight to bring medieval tribesmen into the 17th century.

I had to be pulled out of the combined TOC after I used “fuck-stick” “slap-nuts” and “If you know so much, how come Afghanistan isn’t occupying FOBs in The US?” in one long tirade that (thankfully, in retrospect) wasn’t translated.

Go on over to his place and give him a little encouragement.

Iranian President Ahmadinajad, please pick up the white courtesy phone.  The U.S. Air Force has a message for you.

The Air Force is taking possession of some new ordnance, a bunker buster bomb that’s 5 times bigger than the next biggest conventional bomb.  It’s designed to penetrate facilities that are buried deep underground, with a stated purpose of destroying weapons of mass destruction programs.

Since we’re unlikely to bomb North Korea anytime soon, I wonder what this could be for?   Maybe someone in the Air Force is planning on a little urban renewal in Iran, perhaps?

Honestly, destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities will do nothing other than to delay their program, assuming that we can locate them with enough accuracy to actually target them with conventional weapons. Maybe it’ll be delayed for years, but unless we assist their nuclear scientists and engineers in achieving room temperature, they’ll just dig new, deeper tunnels and continue their march to the nuclear club.  It would probably be more fruitful to find ways to find and eliminate their nuclear staff than to bomb the facilities.  New tunnels can be dug in a couple of years.  It takes decades to create new scientists, even if you are importing them from China, Russia, and North Korea.