DaddyBear – It’s Christmas, not the Manhattan Project.

Said during a conversation in which Irish Woman was being cryptic about what she is buying for use as stocking stuffers for the children.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. — Time Enough For Love

Is someone spiking the water at mosques across the world?

Snarfle allergies snurgle read this sniff.

Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man makes a good case that we may be on the downward slope towards either a large regional war or the next world war.  I’m not going to argue about whether or not he’s right.  I certainly hope that he and his sources are being too pessimistic, but I won’t be surprised if they’re spot on.

Let’s say that a regional conflict between the Arab states and Iran spreads to become something that China gets involved in.  Or maybe India and Pakistan finally decide to settle their feud by turning their respective capitols into ex-cities.    Where will the manufacturing capacity be found to provide the stuff needed to equip new formations as well as replace things that are lost, damaged, or just plain wear out?

When the last two world wars happened, the United States was still the largest manufacturing economy in the world.  The tanks, ships, trucks, uniforms, bullets, guns, and all of the other sundry things needed to fight a modern war were made here.  Prior to our entry in World War II, we freely gave war materielle to Great Britain to help her stay in the fight and still had the capacity to build up our own military.

How quickly can we turn the existing manufacturing capacity of the United States towards total dedication to manufacturing war materielle?  Can we even manufacture Abrams tanks, F-18’s, or the ships to convoy them across the big water in the numbers that would be needed?

We’ve sent a lot of our manufacturing capacity overseas in the past 40 years or so, for good and bad.  The good is that products come from a more varied set of suppliers, which brings down costs and stimulates innovation. The bad is that we may have sent so much of our heavy manufacturing away that we do not have the capacity to surge our production of the things we and our allies would need in time of war.  Heck, we can’t even start up the old factories.  If the buildings still exist, the machinery has often been sold for scrap or shipped overseas. If the equipment is intact, where are we going to find the people who are physically and mentally prepared to do heavy manufacturing in the numbers that we would need?

Like I said, I hope that the worries about war are overblown, but I’m a big believer in “hope for the best, and prepare for the worst”.

UPDATE – As usual, if you ask the Internet, someone smart will give you an answer.  Borepatch gives good cause to have a bit of hope that we could once again be the Arsenal of Freedom.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I pretty much summed up my thoughts last year, and I can’t improve on it.

To all the men and women who answered the call after December 7, thank you.

News media are reporting that a cannonball fired by the crew of the TV show MythBusters took a series of unfortunate bounces and slammed into a home in Dublin, California.

H/T to Chris Muir over at Day by Day!

Iran is asserting that it has shot down a stealthy U.S. intelligence drone.  Tehran has made similar announcements in the past, but this time U.S. officials are confirming the incident off the record. 

What seems to have happened, at least according to those who will speak to reporters, is that an RQ-170 Sentinel Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) lost connection to its controllers, ‘strayed’ into Iranian airspace,  then landed in accordance with its programming.

blink
………..
blink

Hold on, let me read that again:

According to a senior U.S. military source with intimate knowledge of the Sentinel drone, the aircraft likely “wandered” into Iranian air space after losing contact with its handlers and is presumed to be intact since it is programmed to fly level and find a place to land, rather than crashing.

Are you freaking kidding me?  You have an aircraft that you haven’t officially released even a picture of, which apparently is built to be less visible to radar, and you program it to find somewhere nice and flat to land rather than crash in unfriendly territory when it can’t phone home?

I’m not going to divulge anything about my past, but I think it’s probably public knowledge that it’s old technology to have a set of coordinates programmed into the control software of a UAV that is its failsafe point to return to when it loses its control link.  Heck, anyone who flies expensive model planes can tell you the same thing.  Why in the name of all this holy would you program a surveillance platform to fly a steady track and find somewhere to land rather than give it a return coordinate or have it assume a vertical flight pattern and gun the engines so that all that is available for collection and exploitation is scraps.

Iran hates our guts, and they know who in the international community is shielding them, Russia and China.  Anyone want to bet on the possibility that this little lost airplane, along with all of its surveillance, communications, and cryptologic equipment, is in a shipping crate on its way to either Beijing or Moscow?

I hope that whoever made the decision that it’s better for a drone to find a place to land than it is for it to return to some arbitrary place for recovery or destroy itself is pilloried.  Since in the event of any conflict between China and the U.S. UAV’s will be the first wave of aircraft to go in for air defense suppression and intelligence gathering, this is a kick to the gut for our abilities.  We just put a bow on one of our most advanced technologies and shipped it to the Chinese. 

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head.

To the people who were shopping in the same store as my family this weekend:

I would like to offer my sincere and heartfelt apology for all of the evil and hateful things I thought while shopping yesterday.  I am sure that very few of you are truly inbred, bucktoothed, anencephalic sons of syphilitic swineherds, and for those of you who are, I hope things turn around for you.

I would also like to apologize for the mean things I thought about you, your ancestors, your descendants, people who are related to you either by blood or marriage, and the doctors who helped to bring you into this world.

Sincerely,

DaddyBear