This is from the facebook page of John Ringo. I think it shows that the US military, when left to its own devices, can still carry out all of the missions and roles expected of it and also deliver the message. I almost wrote 'deliver the mail' but if you want to hear men in uniform whining and crying, sit in on any OPLAN meeting where every single service declares that they have no, absolutely zilch, responsibility to deliver or forward mail in the war zone or rear area. They try the same thing with regard to guarding prisoners. "Not our Job, not our circus, not our monkeys."
1. Sov... err... Russians built a bridge over the Euphrates which was the designated 'deconfliction line'. Why? Reasons. 'Commite of Nations' or something.
2. 'Hybrid' force of mixed Russian contractors including multiple non-ethnic Russians (Serbs, Kossack, other non Slavics) as well as local Syrian Army 'commandos' attacked across temporary bridge. The 'Russian' side were 'Blackwater' equivalent mercenaries from a company generally called 'Wagner' which is the nom de plume of the boss. (Like if you called Blackwater 'Prince'.)
3. Unit was partially mechanized, battalion strength. (One thing everyone agrees upon is 'about 600-700 personnel.') Had some towed artillery as well as 't-55 and T-72 MBT as well as armored personnel carriers.' (Type unknown.) Full on 'we're taking that position and you're not stopping us' full court press.
4. Unit crossed bridge, arty deployed.
5. Arty opened fire while most of unit was still in approach column formation. (Normal) One portion moved to flanking positions.
5A. Minute the arty opened fire SHIT GOT REAL REAL QUICK.
6. Reapers took out artillery and most of armor with Hellfire. From the few videos, pretty much before they knew what hit them. There had to be quite a few Reaper drones up or they were feeding guidance to Hellfire from Apaches (see below.)
7. F-15E Eagles came in for clean-up and to check for anti-air defenses.
8. Warthogs showed up just to go BRRRRRRT!
9. AC-130 Spectre started fucking up their day for the hell of it.
10. To add insult to injury, B-52s which, you know, just HAPPENED to be in the area, just minding our own business, just passing by from Diego Garcia which is a few thousand miles away, on our way to... somewhere... nothing to see here... decided to prove they could drop their entire load as precision guided weapons and just more or less DID A JDAM ARCLIGHT ON THEIR ASS. At that point, more or less because CENTCOM said 'Why not? ARCLIGHT is always pretty to watch...'
11. The whole thing being so over it was ridiculous, AH-64 Apaches basically did 'hostile Bomb Damage Assessment' and complained there were no targets left.
12. Oh, and then the Kurds, to just really FUCK with these guys, released water from a dam upstream and broke their bridge. So they had to ford back with their wounded.
This was much less a 'battle' than a message. Towards the end we had to just be pounding ground to make sure they got it.
He then laid out the message delivered by US.
A. Don't fucking cross that river.
B. Hey, North Korea! LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!
C. Hey, Putin, about Donbas... This is what we can do to your 'freedom fighters' (AKA: mercenaries) at any time.
D. To everyone in general: You need to remember who's boss.
The best way to forget a painful memory is to forget it. Of course, you first have to bludgeon it to death and then hope nobody notices. You would not believe how the universe tosses you over its shoulder and invites you to remember.
I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches lying around the house because the mice
might get into them and start a fire. But your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, are always stowed.
Who could sleep that night? Who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe
behind the floral wallpaper gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth? Who could not see him rounding a corner,
the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam, the sudden flare, and the creature for one bright, shining moment suddenly thrust ahead of his time—
now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid illuminating some ancient night. Who could fail to notice,
lit up in the blazing insulation, the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants of what once was your house in the country?
I posted this before, but I like it. Collins has written a number of poems I like. This came up last week in the barbershop when the new guy mentioned that one of our neighbors just sold a new book. A book of poems, if you can believe that. She wondered, "who buys poetry?" and it was a valid wonderment because, nobody buys poetry. Still, it's nice to see it is still practiced, in the dark, behind a tree, away from anybody who could see it in effect and criticize it to death.
I brought this to mind after reading the poem that featured the use of Home. I wanted something else to steer by as I go to bed. This will do in a pinch.
We dropped in on the I Bar at NASNI today. It hasn't changed a bit since the first time I went there.
October 1941 at Naval Air Station North Island (NASNI) a Marine SBD-1 landed on Quarters #56
Would you believe the Marines fixed the plane and flew it home after this 'hard' landing? The Navy repaired the building (BLDG 56) and use it today, 75 years later. The bar was full of popcorn, old old old aviators and a couple of young ones. The youngest was bleating about some milk but they wouldn't let the stroller in the bar.
Democrats hopes and prayers for a sudden flowering of galactic goodwill and wellbeing after the new President took office yesterday were slightly dashed by the festive heavenly show that brought about near complete global extinction. Right wing white cis male thugs to blame for the disaster.
Once again a CIA Director appointed by a Democratic President and enthusiastically endorsed by the Democratic Senate, is bleating about how a bunch of lowlife pond scum dwelling in the Middle East can make weapons of mass destruction. The last time we heard this from the CIA it was Clinton's CIA Director, George Tenet. Naturally, all the social warriors and democrats decided that he was lying. Oh wait. No, no. Last time they assumed that the President he worked for was lying.
I think code pink should race to the bottom of this and get back to us with an appropriate slogan.
It still strikes me as damned funny that Trump enjoys so much support from people like me and that the hapless stupids of the GOPe cannot figure out why he has such massive support over such obviously born-to-the-purple louts like Rubio and Bush. The GOPe still doesn't understand that we are all delighted to finally have a candidate who espouses the kind of policies that we can support. Not all of them mind you, and not all the way, but that is the very essence of politics. You give a little and you compromise but the GOPe morons have continuously defaulted to the democrat position on every single issue and then bargained away our birthright wholesale from that starting point.
Trump at least, has announced that he is prepared to take Paris by making clear his intent to seize the English Channel and overrun the low countries on his way to take London. The dimwits like Boehner, Mitchell, Ryan and McCain made it clear that they were going to stop when they got to the Rhine and maybe, just maybe, Strasbourg.
I think it's gratifying to see the stir this approach has created on the Marxist and Socialist Fronts, the Wall Street Front and even the vile Fifth Column made up of the foul material of the Fourth Estate. There is plenty of time for Cruz to pull out a convincing win but he still has the same problem that Trump has. The party they aim to be the standard bearer for, hates them even more viscerally than democrats hate them.
Good times! :) It is so much nicer to be at the front end of the nomination process and not dragging up the rear with California where you only get to vote for the pathetic idiot left standing after all the other states have winnowed out the decent candidates. If I'm going to be represented by a mean, petty, ignoramus, I'd like to at least get a chance to vote for one who knows how to rend and tear apart my enemies.
In the vast snowy desolate waste of central Florida, Laurentide, the last robochuck probe, scouts the biting cold arctic air to sense the onset of Spring. Electronic hopes dashed, the probe sinks back below the snow and ice and returns to the burrow 10,000 feet below. Spring will not come, again.
The Navy is ordered to find new words to call sailors and the race is on! Let no man call me flatfooted in my efforts to hasten the day when we no longer use such archaic and outmoded terms as helmsman. There is the honor of the fleet at stake.
Helmsman = Shipjockey
Lee Helmsman = Spare
Seaman = Swabbie
Fireman = Firestarter
Airman = Zoomie
Construction man = Tooljockey
Engine man = Dominator- I suppose one could be a Dominatrix
Legalman = Learned Counsel
Fire control man = Miss
Signalman = Flags
Yeoman = Whatever
Jack of the Dust = Jack or Jill
So many ratings have been merged over the last 30 years I don't know if there are any others.
The rookie was aghast and demanded action immediately but the sergeant said no.
"You just saw him attack Rhines and kick the shit out of him~!"
"Yes, but Rhines assaulted the citizen first."
"What difference does that make? He just kicked Rhines in the balls for the 5th time!"
"Rhines went up against a citizen out walking at night in his own neighborhood and attacked him and the citizen employed tactics that Rhines is unfamiliar with and overwhelmed him and beat the shit out of him and why? Ask yourself, why is Rhines lying there by the lake, pantless after a man pulled them off and thru them into the lake along with his official weapon, his backup weapon, his badge and his ID wallet?"
"Who the fuck cares why he did it, that was assault on a police officer!"
"Son, I don't see a man with a badge lying on the ground anywhere around here do you?"
The poor little lambs can't help themselfies. What makes North Carolina a home to Mangums and pseudo-rapists and out and out school fraud? Some might blame sports but I learned something on a cold winter day almost 30 years ago in a house I was renting in Newport, Rhode Island along with 2 other Ensigns and LT Mike Lemieux, and the lesson was so simple.
It's the piano's fault.
I cannot recall who sent me to his little tiny house in the woods to see if he would like to share a house in Newport with us. We were young and newly commissioned and unmarried and looking for someone to share the price of a place while we attended Surface Warfare School. Mike was finishing up a Master's Degree in Chemistry at Penn State. I sought him out, knocked on the door of a tiny little house (I mean really really really small) and asked if he would join the two of us young Ensigns in a few days of house-hunting leave in Newport since I had been informed that he was heading to Department Head School when he graduated and I thought we could use his help with rent.
He was interested. I was struck by his little house in the woods. It was, no kidding, a little tar paper shack about 12 feet by 15 feet. It was packed with woodwind instruments, guitars, and the most ridiculously expensive stereo equipment on the planet which he bought in Japan when he was on USS Worden.
I started keeping a journal back then because I wanted, in the morning, most of all, to know where I left my car the night before. We threw some epic parties, living as we did at 14 Annandale Road, by Cliff Walk and blocks from Salve Regina Girls College, but we followed a code and it was a simple one. Nobody ever left our parties drunk at the wheel of a car. I would walk home from other people's parties and bars or get a ride, but never ever drive home from the bars after too much and I usually had too much. I used to leave my car in the oddest places and Mike would give me a lift to get it in the morning on the way to Coasters Harbor Island.
Mike could play anything beautifully and he had an extensive library of what I called Irish Revolutionary Tunes.
A few moments to remember. One meets so many people. The Navy being the Navy, I kept running into Mike over the years. One often does that with good people. I have never seen again the people I despised in the Navy. They just vanished or went to live in Norfolk.
No officer, that's not a bloody knife in my hand....
Whenever something like this happens to an idyllic tropical paradise there is only one thing to blame: the people. It makes you wonder whether or not all people can wear a democratic or republican form of government or if there are some who must labor on under the kind of rulers that don't have to pander to the stupidest people. People who really don't understand that even governments can run out of money.
One of the messes George W. Bush inherited was the Puerto Rican Island of Vieques. In the waning years of the Clinton Administration, protesters demanded the U.S. Navy abandon the bombing and naval gun fire exercises there. It became a leftist cause. Liberals bumped into each other to fly to Puerto Rico and get arrested: Al Sharpton, Robert Kennedy Jr., Edward Olmos, Mrs. Jess Jackson, just to name a few.
Mrs. Clinton, running for Senate, played to the Puerto Rican population of New York and criticized the Pentagon for not caving, which here husband then did, ordering a phase-out of the facility. The Bush Administration reluctantly decided to close the range contrary to the recommendations of the Navy. So last week marked the Navy’s final bombing exercises.
Protesters showed up waving Puerto Rican flags and shouting, “Navy Get Out!” Well, they’re getting out. In fact, now Navy officials are talking about closing the major support base. That’s right; there goes the Roosevelt Roads Naval Air Station, one of Puerto Rico’s largest employers, estimated to pump $300 million dollars into the local economy ever year.
Suddenly, the governor says, “Wait a minute! The people of Puerto Rico don’t have any interest in the closing of the Roosevelt Roads base. The government of Puerto Rico is interested in that base staying in Puerto Rico for all the Economic benefits.” “No doubt, Madam Mayor,” Admiral Robert Natter, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet says. “Without Vieques there’s no way I need the Navy facilities at Roosevelt Roads. None.”
You almost have to wonder how a place could get $70 billion in debt. That's a lot of money. Where did it all go? What did they piss it away on?
We need a mandatory course on the impact of socialist political/economic policy on every place that fell into that trap. Good job Puerto Rico, you show up on the syllabus right under Cuba and Haiti.
The only thing that would make it worse would be if the little one was a navy ship and the Officer of the Deck was summoned forth by a demon at his Court Martial and asked why he hadn't taken prudent prior measures to avoid or mitigate this mishap.
