MY COMBAT LOAD

I noticed earlier this weak (sic) that the USMC has derated some of its physical fitness measures of young officer effectiveness. They claim they are only acting out of a higher sense of moral purpose and fairness. Heretofore, young Marine Officers were rated on their ability to hike zillions of miles with their normal combat load.

I thought I would share an image of my combat load as I led my shipmates to victory in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Hold on, it's a brutal image.

Mind you, I did have a .45 hanging in its holster on a hook on the door to my stateroom. Just in case.

THE GREAT SYRIAN TURKEY SHOOT

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.

BABY BOLOS

I ran across these after reading Glenn Reynold's piece in USA Today. Read the two links as food for thought. I always laughed when people came to me in Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command and talked about building and deploying autonomous weapon systems. There are a few insurmountable problems inherent in the design. Besides, with jihadis on the loose, any car or backpack gets weaponized and now they are playing with weaponized RC aircraft. To quote Glenn, all is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Baby Bolos. We had one of these at my school in Fort Bliss long ago

MEET THE REAL NAPOLEAN

Found at Ace of Spades.

I really enjoyed the video. It is how history should be taught.

THE ECHOES OF A CRAVEN FOOL LINGER

It seems that the nasty and shameful legacy of Obama lingers yet on the US body politic. It took the Commander of Central Command to tell Turkey that unlike the spineless Obama administration, this one and the U.S. military have no intention of abandoning areas in northern Syria liberated by us and our allies to the non-existent mercies of the Turks. They may be NATO allies but they are no ally of ours.

Gen. Joseph Votel said the United States has no intention of withdrawing coalition forces from the northern Syrian town of Manbij, as Turkish leaders had demanded this weekend. As Turkish forces continued the assault on Afrin, the lead of U.S. Central Command on Monday urged Turkey and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to recognize each other’s legitimate security concerns but focus on the common enemy of ISIS. 

Senior U.S. leaders across the government have been in constant talks with Turkish counterparts during the Afrin assault, saying that the U.S. recognizes Turkey’s problems with the Kurdish terrorist group known as PKK, but refusing to give up any territory liberated by the SDF, which include Kurds. 

“It’s not our intention right now” to pull back from Manbij, Votel said in Jordan on Monday. He spoke with two reporters traveling with him through the region, including into Raqqa and other parts of northern Syria.

I suspect that the Turkish military knows we'll destroy any attack on us with our air power and we won't give the Turks any room to launch the kind of cowardly sneak attack like they used on the Russians when they shot down a Russian Su-27 attacking ISIS. Erdogan might have to learn this at the expense of a number of Turkish military lives.

I think every military man in the West knows that we lost Turkey to islamic fanatics and won't see it reappear as a western democracy in our lifetime. President Trump knows it too and so does everyone who has been following developments in that place.

We'll know the truth when President Trump announces tonight that we are going to disengage from Turkey and shut down our operations in Incirlik air base and elsewhere in Turkey. To be honest, with the fall of Saddam and the destruction of ISIS, there isn't really any reason to continue to operate, such as we do, out of Incirlik and it's not like Turkey was ever an ally of ours. Some of us haven't forgotten that Turkey's response to our call to rally to US after 9/11 was formally met by Turkish refusal to permit us to use their territory in any way, shape, or form to attack or threaten Iraq's western and northern flanks during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

One has to wonder, just where was the Turkish military when ISIS was ruling the north of Syria and wiping out yet more Christians in yet another Turkish sanctioned holocaust of innocent people? All they had to do was cross the border back then and engage the enemy but I suspect we are all coming to understand that this conflict has become flash point for Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in the War of the West Against the Rest. Turkey hurried to line up on the anti-western side.

It's hard to blame them. They had the weak juice of Obama, Hillary, Kerry and the cowards running western Europe to serve as reminders of the danger of aligning one's country and nation with the weak and contemptible side in an existential war of civilization. However, the Turks chose poorly.

HELL OF A JOB OBAMA

People living in Hawaii got a rude wake up and lesson in shameless Obama diplomacy. They learned for the first time that Obama, Kerry and Clinton all lied when they assured them that Obama had reached a binding agreement with North Korea on missile technology and nuclear weapons that would surely lead to nothing but peace in our time. For 38 minutes many of them got to contemplate the awfulness that will happen if/when the Democratic People's Republic of Korea decides to just go ahead and attack and lash them with bugs and gas and nukes on long range missiles.

I dare say 99% of the people living in Hawaii never even suspected that one day they would get a nuclear wake-up call. I dare say they're thinking about it now and wondering what all that endless negotiation with north Korea achieved since it is now quite obvious that the goal that the Kim's have been working toward for the last 50 years is now well within their grasp and that an attack on Hawaii has gone from a distant dream to a near certain reality.

On the other hand, the norKs have demonstrated a certain ability to loft missiles into the upper atmosphere and space itself but there is no evidence that they have any targeting capability beyond a rudimentary ability to hit the Pacific Ocean, somewhere. Even that isn't certain since evidence shows that many of the tests end in failure of the reentry vehicle. On the gripping hand, if one is going to shoot for a electromagnetic pulse above someplace, like Hawaii, an air burst high in the stratosphere will do well enough to knock out much of Hawaii's network infrastructure.

It looks like civilization, such as it is in the DPRK, is collapsing. When I was young we believed that the regime was propped up almost solely by its grip on the Army and security forces. The Party was nothing but the bustle to a Kim and followed wherever they led but was a powerless rump. Reading reports of recent army defectors crossing the DMZ who are lousy with vermin, worms and anthrax anti-bodies is a sign that the bastion of the dynasty is crumbling.

As the USSR collapsed and faded away and China relaxed its hard line stance and restarted down the path to success and prosperity one thing we accepted as absolutely true of Kim Jong-il was that he would not go gently into the peaceful night but would take the South and as much of the world as he could reach into the dark with him. Kim Jong-un is very much of the same mold and likely to do the unthinkable.

I think people living in Hawaii now know what the unthinkable looks like and may well be a bit more interested in our diplomatic and military relations with the Korean peninsula. The real concern is obvious to see for those with eyes to see. Japan, Taiwan and the Republic of Korea are probably all well along in their nuclear weapons development and all of them are probably hard at work on making weapons grade fissile materials to build the bombs their engineers could undoubtedly design in a couple of days.

A new dawn in the Far East and mid-Pacific. Thanks Obama, thanks Hillary, thanks Kerry. Kim couldn't have done it without you and Madeline Albright and Bill Clinton.

COLORED WORLD WAR II IMAGES

An interesting look from the Daily Mail.

USS FRANKLIN

DID HE SAY HITLER

I have long been a fan of the modern Saki, but his last column convinces me that he lost his mind after he left Asia.

He got just about every single thing wrong.

Unlike many of my conservative friends, I thought Merkel the lesser evil ("A deplorable vote for Angela Merkel," February 2017). Merkel is an American ally; whoever might replace her will be more eager to cut deals with Russia. Perhaps at some future date the Alternative für Deutschland might become part of a natural majority along with the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, but it first needs to purge leaders like its Vice-Chairman Alexander Gauland, a Putin crony who thinks Americans are "a people thrown together at random without their own culture." There are some very good people in the second-tier leadership of the Alternative party, but they have their work cut out for them.

Amerika finally pulled out of Germany after occupying it for over half a century because it was just so damned ridiculously dangerous and Europeans, by and large, are as flagrantly incompetent as you can get in an era of nuclear bombs and ICBMs. No, read the sentence the way it was written. We left because the Cold War was over.

Angela Merkel, hardline commie ruler right out of East Germany is a "friend" of the United States? When did that happen? More importantly, who cares? Who wants a friend like that?

Somebody else wants to cut deals with Russia? For money?!!!  Call the DNC!!!!!

Spengler has room for doubt. What europeans have been saying for the last 20 years is now starting to drive policy and it is, once again, time for the old policy people who think they have a divine right to rule, to step aside. "They can't," people say, because without the Kaiser chaos will walk the streets.
As it happens, I think people have had enough of the "experts" and Ivy League rulers who know so much more than us.

Yeah, Europe is going to be faced with its perennial problem again in the near future. But if there is one group gauranteed to be able to hide a few million corpses, I'd say europe can. They got good at it the last time we turned our back on them and their little issues.

I DIDN'T KNOW IT

I was pruning my mail stacks and saw this news release. Imagine, London in 1945 responding to the German V2s with anti-missiles and nobody ever told you. I thought that only Israel was under daily attack from the muslim missile hordes. Who knew? Yeah man!! If the shites had the bomb they'd use it in a lunar month or less. It's in their nature to kill and let their god sort them all out.

More to the point, it kind of points out why the crown prince of saudi has suddenly upped the game internally to bring his country to a war-footing and stopped pussy footing around with the hardline muslim losers who have been running the kingdom for the last thousand years. It's about power and nobody in the Gulf cares anymore at all about the wisdom of the god as propounded by a bunch of vicious rabid old men.

TRUTH IN THE WORDS

The words are from a splash of truth found at Breitbart in an article detailing some of the lengths to which some people of the right went in order to foil the idiotic protest of the Trump haters. I used to think that Bush Derangement Syndrome would/could never be matched and yet these new haters proved me wrong.

“But he is protesting a man that has traded a lavish billionaire lifestyle to try and fix the train wreck that has been building over the last 16 years. Just to have his whole family ridiculed. Made fun of. Called liars. Racists.”

When you look at President Trump in that light it's not hard to see why he really enjoys taking the time to mock the pathetic losers and shoot rockets up their asses with his tweets. He has it on solid evidence that doing this can make the heads of those haters literally explode. God only knows how many have stroked out or died of hate-fueled heart attacks in reaction to President Trump gently letting them know what contemptible little rats they are.

I have enjoyed President Trump's tussling with the usual crew of incompetents and idiots who let Jimmy Carter dictate our strategic policy and sent him to North Korea "to negotiate" a final solution to the issue of Nork nuclear weapons. I admire Trump for probably ordering the SS to shoot Carter if he gets on any international flight and revoked his passport in order to keep that simple chump from jetting off to Pyongyang and patting the newest ruler of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea on the head for cheerfully accepting $5,000,000,000 in direct cash assistance from us for a promise to do a better job of concealing his weapons of mass destruction programs and not letting the idiots at the New York Times find out that Carter's fumbling ambitions have once again resulted in a strategic catastrophe on a par with the Fall of the Shah and the Rise of Islamic Fascist State of Iran.

ABOUT THAT WAR

From a network not exactly known for being able to find or tell the truth comes something profound and something that bears thinking about as we move towards renewed conflicts around the planet. You might have seen it around.

It is not often you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in history like Ben Ferencz.  He’s 97 years old, barely 5 feet tall, and he served as prosecutor of what’s been called the biggest murder trial ever. The courtroom was Nuremberg; the crime, genocide; the defendants, a group of German SS officers accused of committing the largest number of Nazi killings outside the concentration camps – more than a million men, women, and children shot down in their own towns and villages in cold blood.

Ferencz is the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive today. But he isn’t content just to be part of 20th century history – he believes he has something important to offer the world right now.

Lesley Stahl: What turns a man into a savage beast like that?

Benjamin Ferencz: He’s not a savage. He’s an intelligent, patriotic human being.

Lesley Stahl: He’s a savage when he does the murder though.

Benjamin Ferencz: No. He’s a patriotic human being acting in the interest of his country, in his mind.

Lesley Stahl: You don’t think they turn into savages even for the act?

Benjamin Ferencz: Do you think the man who dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was a savage? Now I will tell you something very profound, which I have learned after many years. War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.

Trident Missile Launched By Some of America's Best

ON VIETNAM AND WAR

I was no more than a boy when I first read Bing West's book, The Village. My father was stationed at Fort Riley with the 1st Infantry Division and so was the family. I found the book at the main post library where I spent a lot of time reading everything there was to read. I was a voracious reader. The little girl next to me was an equally voracious reader and became a famous writer. So anyway, the post library had a copy or two of Bing West's book and I read it at a tender age. It stuck with me over all these years. I read his other books as they were published.

A Couple of Book Worms Caught in the Act at the Library in Fort Riley

He can put the reader into the moment which is a worthy quality in a good writer. He captures the essence of the real meaning of the Vietnam War in this essay from the Hoover Institute. It's not long and you should read it all because he describes his reaction to Ken Burns' newest propaganda piece broadcasting now on the Peoples Broadcast Network.

The purpose of a film, however, is to stir emotions, not to convey a reasoned analysis. In emotive power, Burns succeeds. An audience with no prior knowledge of Vietnam will come away convinced this war was a colossal geopolitical error, a waste of lives on all sides and absolutely without redemption. Every fact and picture is accurate, and the cumulative process of selecting some facts and omitting others is devastating. 

Burns forsook balance. For instance, my Combined Action Platoon (CAP) consisting of 15 Marines and 30 armed farmers lived for 488 days in a remote village of 5,000 Vietnamese. The two Marines who didn’t fit in were dismissed from the CAP. The rest of us slept in the houses of the villagers, ate their food, fought and died side by side with the farmers. Seven of fifteen Marines were killed in the village.

American combat troops withdrew from the country in 1972. At that time, North Vietnamese units were still positioned in the jungles of South Vietnam. They had suffered staggering losses months earlier in a major assault that had failed after America had unleashed its B-52s to pound the enemy on the battlefield and in Hanoi. As the documentary points out, 100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were estimated to have been killed, nearly all the armor provided by the Soviet Union had been destroyed and the North Vietnamese chief of staff warned another offensive could not be mounted for at least three years.3 The North agreed to a ceasefire and a truce that included the return of American prisoners of war. President Nixon promised to respond with force if the North attacked again. 

Instead, U.S. Congressional legislation in mid-1973 cut off funds for combat “in or over or from off the shores of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.” The intent was to prevent President Nixon from deploying troops, naval gunfire or aerial bombing if the North Vietnamese persisted in attacking South Vietnam. Over the next two years, Chinese artillery and Soviet tanks poured into Hanoi. While we had promised to provide aid to the South Vietnamese, Congress instead cut our aid of $2.8 billion in 1973 down to $1 billion in 1974 and to $300 million in 1975. When the North Vietnamese attacked in 1975, the South Vietnamese forces ran out of bullets. America had quit, plain and simple. 

What, then, should be the peroration for the war? Should it be the Burns’ documentary, “The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable.” 

Or should it be what Secretary of Defense Schlesinger wrote to our two million troops, “Your cause was noble; your dedication was determined. You answered your country’s call.”

I don't think it will be long before Ken Burns turns his eye toward Afghanistan and Iraq and pulls up the poisoned history lens version of ENDURING FREEDOM and IRAQI FREEDOM. At this point I'm prepared to say that all of our ambitions in both places have failed and that none of our hopes have been realized, either in the conquest or the nation building aftermath in either country. Sixteen years of noble sacrifice and we have nothing at all to show for it but the explosion of the Taliban's jihad as it spread out and started attacking the 20th century and Western Civilization everywhere in the world.

ON KOREA

I suspect that people are making some very dangerous assumptions about North Korea and Kim. I think neither he nor they care a rat's patoot about what we may or may not do in some bland sanctioning of N. Korea but we sure as hell have lost sight of what N. Korea can do to us. As another commenter elsewhere noted, in 1939 Americans saw the Japanese as short, buck-toothed, blind idiots and treated them as such when Congress embargoed Japan following the Japanese invasion of China. They learned a potent lesson when the Imperial Japanese Navy, the same one that crushed the Tsar's navy like a bug, attacked and bombed Pearl Harbor. Surprise!

If we sanction N. Korea and embargo their trade and the trade of any country that trades with them then Kim has very little left to sell.....except for Hydrogen bombs. He can sell to the highest bidder, FOB, Pyongyang and leave it to the customer to get the bombs off Peninsula. ISIS or Al Quaeda sound like likely buyers but then so does Erdogan.

We might be a little further behind in the race to renewed hostilities than we think. If I was Kim I'd be as bellicose as I wanted to be if I already had my agents sitting on hydrogen or even atomic bombs in Hawaii, San Diego, LA, San Francisco and Seattle. The US Customs people inspect less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all the shipping containers that arrive in the United States every year and they come from all over the world.

I figure if Kim is smart the bombs are in Pearl Harbor and San Diego. If he's crazy mad and vicious they're going to be in LA and San Francisco. We need to stop getting wrapped up in what we're going to do to Kim and the Norks and consider what he is going to do to us.

Oh, and all that nonsense with missiles, just misdirection for the credulous who still play 3 card monte on the sidewalk or think they know which cup the magician hid the little ball under.

I sure hope the alphabet agencies really do have orbital nuclear detectors that can track a bomb moving across the ocean and pinpoint its location. I'd look to the shipping news to see if there have been any unexplained sinkings mid-Pacific but I don't think their wet work teams are going to leave any survivors to explain that they were just innocent fishermen when they were attacked out of the blue by an LA-688I and ADCAP torpedoes.

AH, HOUSTON, WE HAVE A LITTLE PROBLEM

The news I read is frequently filled with words of praise for the mystical rail gun the USN is going to arm itself with any minute now. It's a wonderf#uckingment of a weapon. It can reach out and touch somebody really really hard. When it works. People used to marvel at the awesome power of the dreadnought and battlewagon but one of the lesser known history whatchamacallits of WWII is that battleships never fired on other battleships. They were mostly destroyed by Billy Mitchell's little devils long before they could get into battle range of the enemy.  There, fixed it.

And so now, the rail gun is going to change naval warfare because, rail gun. You may remember the Russian navy had one of it's frigates and one of its corvettes fire ship killing missiles from almost a thousand miles away and make kills on their targets. What part of thousands of miles of range are we missing out on when we concentrate our research on a weapon that is only good for shooting things within the horizon? You know, that whole curvature of the earth thingie means that the rail guns speedy bullets won't actually hit anything 13 miles away, right? You got that? Shooting over is also called a miss.

Silly naval strategists. The USN doesn't have those kinds of missiles. It might find them useful in a fight.

Speaking strictly as an old fire control officer who thought putting Harpoon missiles in BOL on a snoop tray radar was a good tactic. They may not make it there but they'll die trying.

IT WAS A HELL OF A GOOD DAY

American aircraft fly over USS MISSOURI after the surrender. A tip of the hat to Traditional Vibe

PASSCHENDAELE 100 YEARS AGO

I find it kind of fascinating that we are coming up on 100 year anniversaries of some truly awful battles from the Great War. As a boy and later, I always had a horror of this battle 100 years ago. The numbers of men killed are simply staggering and almost unbelievable to Americans today. We still and hopefully will, read aloud the names of our servicemen and women who were killed in the Global War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other places.

I remember standing in a used bookshop in the Tottenham Court Road about 3 decades ago and looking at the stack of books that came up to my chest. They were all part of a single set of books and all they contained was the name, rank, regiment and place and date of death in the Great War. It was a record of names single spaced in three columns per page in very small print.

There's more about the battle and the human sacrifice at the link. It's well worth reading unless you're already feeling melancholy.

MADNESS RUNS AMOK IN IMPERIAL BEACH

A review board of officers sitting in Imperial Beach, my old headquarters, has voted to retain the disgraceful services of LT Narker. You may recall this officer. He surrendered two fully armed and crewed USN patrol boats to a half dozen pathetically armed dinghies off the coast of Farsi Island. The Commander, Expeditionary Combat Command, stripped him of his warfare qualifications and kicked him out of the navy, but this flaming idiot LT decided, at last, to fight back! He wants to stay in the navy.

At this point, it shouldn't really matter. At six years of commissioned service he doesn't have a warfare qualification and that alone is grounds for dismissal. He surrendered two minor warships to an inferior enemy and then failed to live up to the Code of Conduct while in captivity. Every single thing he did or didn't do had a direct bearing on his capture and subsequent events. He has proven over and over again that he is unfit to be a naval officer.

However, the Board of his peers and superiors at Coastal Riverine Group ONE somehow decided to retain this loser in the naval service. I wouldn't really be so angry about one screwed up officer staying in but this is too much. If his subsequent career is anything like that idiot Dorsey that shot down a USAF Phantom, permanently crippling two Air Force officers who were forced to bail out as their plane was engulfed by fire and breaking up around them could transfer to a noncombat position in the navy and then, years later, be selected for promotion to admiral despite a monumental lapse of judgment, then Narker still stands a chance at retiring as a flag officer.

That is simply unacceptable. This idiot is almost certainly going into Intelligence where his expertise will no doubt be fawned over by the other GURL community, whatever they call themselves today.

GASS'EM ALL

When Trump arbitrarily struck a Syrian Air Force base with cruise missiles the other day he declared war on Syria and its dictator/ruler Bashar al Assad. The reason given for the attack was tenuous at best given the state of play in the middle east. Allegedly, Assad used sarin gas on his own women and children in some cruel but entirely meaningless attack. I don't believe Assad is that stupid. Nor do I believe that anybody at the highest levels in the Syrian military is that stupid. What they are though, is pissed off at Trump and Trump's America.

What would you do if you were bombed for no good reason? What would you do if you were attacked by a regime that has made it policy to topple dictators and turn them over to their islamic enemies and have seen most of your peers murdered by US backed thugs? I know what I would do because at that point one has nothing left to lose. One's life is already forfeit and if the terrorists don't kill you and your family, a cruise missile or a drone launched by Americans will.

Right now would not be a good time to live in the city. If the rising tide of violence doesn't kill you or destroy you, the next muslim attack using sarin gas in our cities will. Assad has no reason not to send a few of his happy Ba'athist thugs to New York or Washington DC and let loose the furies of war here in America. After all, we are waging war on him, his people and his country and he doesn't have anything left to lose now, does he?

PARTING SHOTS

What do snowflakes call anybody they see carrying a gun while wearing a white sheet?  From The Strategy Page.

ON GENERAL MACARTHUR

If you ever wondered why the war in Korea proceeded as it did and why a Congress thirsty for the blood of Truman backed off using his relief of General MacArthur to beat him to death, you might be interested in reading this article from Smithsonian Magazine.

I found it fascinating.