Current Events

Call for submissions

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I need your aviation stories. The anthology will be titled SkyWriting: Essays on the Art and Craft of Aviation. See my website for submission guidelines, and send your flying tales for inclusion. Proceeds benefit Angel Flight, the service that flies kids for medical treatment. Deadline for issue #1 is March 30th, so scribble your story, and send it along. Thank you.

Taliban Capture a War Dog

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The Taliban capture a British dog of war Just before Christmas last year the Taliban in Afghanistan apparently captured a British War Dag and true to form have posted a capture video of it. Now that is going too far.  I wonder if they are torturing the dog and trying to get information out of it.  It would not surprise me if they were.  The dog appears to be a Belgian Malinois, one of the favorite breeds for working dogs because they are smart, diligent, and not easily distracted from their tasks.  There is apparently some confusion as to whether it is a British or American dog. As the article … More after the Jump…

Ooooops… All runways look alike

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Originally posted at The Sky Behind Me blog January 14th 2014.

 

Oooops… Recently (and once again) a commercial airliner landed at the wrong airport. Southwest flight #4013 from Chicago enroute to Branson Missouri landed at a nearby college airstrip instead. This is reminiscent of a cockpit mistake in a similar incident many years ago in Columbus Ohio, my home town. In that episode, a Trans World Airlines 707 landed at Ohio State University’s Don Scott Field, fifteen miles northwest of Port Columbus, the plane’s scheduled destination. Why does this continue to happen? What can prevent it? Here’s one reason it happens, and one way to lower the possibilities.

More after the Jump…

Machiavelli? Try Clausewitz!

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Full disclosure: I consider the NYT to be a gang of flabby, post-modernist girlymen who stroke each other(‘s egos) all day long, and try to get an emotional response out of their dwindling readership. So today I saw a comment on one their articles that fully describes my opinion of what is wrong with America. Who do we want to emulate? A bunch of tribalist beach bums who sing “O Sole Mio” while thinking about how to poison their uncle in order to take over his restaurant, or the Iron Will of Prussian Steel??? Here is the comment from the unworthy-to-read article: Do we really need to be told that … More after the Jump…

“Middle War”: The new normal going forward

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The Center for Strategic and International Studies has just released Beyond the Last War: Balancing Ground Forces and Future Challenges Risk in USCENTCOM and USPACOM.  The report makes for interesting reading.  What I found the most interesting aside from the scenarios considered was the realization that air power and spec-ops troops cannot win wars by themselves.  Conventional military forces will be required into the foreseeable future.  That view alone is a breath of fresh air given the Pentagon’s lamentable tendency over the past few years to tour both types of forces while the simple ground-pounders are out there doing Yeoman’s work trying to make an unstable world more stable.  High profile raids and airstrikes do not … More after the Jump…

Politics and Discourse

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I try to not have my blog be political but sometimes I digress and this post is one of those times.  I have made it no secret that I am politically conservative.  I don’t think I am rabidly conservative but I am conservative nonetheless.  If I had to pigeonhole myself I would describe my beliefs as Constitutionally Conservative with a side order or social conservatism.  Here goes.  Why is it that political discourse has become so dissonant?  This question strikes me occasionally and it hit me again this morning. I comment quite often on the website of the American Thinker (AT), A conservtaive webzine.  This post was precipitated by one of the discussion threads on AT.  The thread … More after the Jump…

Similarities Between the 1920’s and Today?

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I am currently reading The Origins of the First World War (3rd Edition), during a pause in my reading I started thinking about not the origins of WWI but its results.  To say that the peace of Versailles was flawed is an understatement.  Given the unsettled economic situation of the Euro and the recently announced renunciation of deposit guarantees by the government of Cyprus I started to wonder if there are parallels between then and now despite the lack of a just concluded titanic war on the continent.  I think that the economics are similar, even to the extent of the various crises being self-inflicted wounds. There were many things wrong with the Treaty of Versailles but … More after the Jump…

Book Review: The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

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Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, is one of the best economic histories I have read.  It seeks to be a global history of money and does a good job of it.  It is somewhat tilted towards Europe and Western countries but only because that is where the majority of financial innovation has come from, especially in the last 300-400 years.last 400 years. What I found especially interesting were his explanations of the way sophisticated financial instruments actually work.  It often seems as though investment and investing have a language specifically designed to confuse and confound the layman.  Dr. Ferguson’s explanations of derivatives and other financial instruments were understandable … More after the Jump…

The Reality of War – Violent Death

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Today I was reading a selection of articles from Foreign Affairs magazine dealing with modern Counterinsurgency and its perceived success or failure.   One of the things that struck me about the articles and that Bing West brings out in his rebuttal to two critiques of a piece he wrote is the modern predilection for forgetting, either purposefully or not, that war is in essence about man killing man.   What should be the enduring image of war is that of a battlefield strewn with bodies after the armies have moved on such as those below. That is not the image that the modern West has of warfare though.   … More after the Jump…

The Moral Quandary?

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Lately I have been somewhat preoccupied thinking about the geostrategic position the US and even the wider Western world find themselves in.  While I do not believe that the world is on the cusp of some massive catastrophe, it does seem to me that the rise of Militant Islam in the last ten years presents problems that are new or that at least have not been faced on such a scale by Western countries since before the rise of the modern nation state. Essentially, I think that Islam is facing the West with a crucial choice, one the West would rather not have to make as it goes against all … More after the Jump…

Honey or Salt?

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There is an old adage that “you can catch more flies with honey than with salt.” The truth of that adage is being put to the test daily in Afghanistan and being to shown to be false under certain circumstances at least. ISAF is not winning currently, but they are not exactly losing either. At best from what I read, see, and hear ISAF is fighting a delaying action against the inevitable fall of the central government and rise of whatever Islamic extremist group bubbles up out of the morass of internal Afghan politics. I can almost guarantee it won´t be the Taliban, but probably someone very much like them. … More after the Jump…

The Recent Furor over Catholics and Contraception

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I felt compelled to post something about the current furor in the States between the Catholic Church and the Government over the announced mandate to force the church to cover contraception in contravention of church beliefs and doctrine.   I will say up front that I am Catholic and support eh church in its position. Firstly, I keep reading comments on articles about the controversy to the extent that Catholics should shut up and comply because not every employee of Catholic hospitals is Catholic.   To which I respond that accepting a job at any organization is a choice and you cannot convince me that employees of Catholic institutions do … More after the Jump…

Europe and Modern War

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Saw an interesting piece awhile ago on the South African Business Day website called: GIDEON RACHMAN: Threat of war seems unreal in an age of peace. The essential point is that although war seems to have been eradicated in Europe, don’t count it out if the Euro crisis gets as bad as it possibly can. I think it is naive in the extreme to think that because there has not been a major war in Europe for the past 65+ years that one cannot happen.   We should keep in mind that it was 49 years between the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars and the Prusso-Danish war of … More after the Jump…

The Decline and Fall of the United States?

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There has been much talk and discussion both in editorials and on various internet forums about the pending decline of the supposed US “empire” or the USA itself. I was thinking about this on the way back from dropping my wife off at work this morning and the more I think about it, the more I think it could only possibly happen if America lets it happen. The USA is not comparable to the UK prior to their fall from Great Power status post WWII. The disparity between the size of the two nations both physical and in population is too great for their to really be a valid comparison. … More after the Jump…

Book Review: The Age of Total War: 1860-1945 by Jeremy Black

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The notion that a book is “thought-provoking” is often thrown out there for works of non-fiction, and of those that are described as such that I have read most very seldom are.   This book is different, Dr. Black has written not so much a history as a treatise challenging historians, particularly military historians, to reexamine the history of conflict in the examined period with the idea of total war uppermost in their minds.   It seems a counter-intuitive thing to do at first, but he provides plenty of examples of why the wars under consideration were not total or were only partially total at best.   This includes World … More after the Jump…

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