It seems Harry Reid, with his vast experience in matters of strategy and the Middle East geopolitical climate, has declared the war in Iraq is lost. Strangely, General David Petraeus, the current military commander for Iraq, has a different view. I think I'll just trust the counterinsurgency expert on this one.
Not everyone is on the popular new bandwagon stating that the war in Iraq is lost. In fact, some people are dedicated to victory in the War on Terror.
The Victory Caucus
Victory PAC
No End But Victory
On a side note, victory in the Long War also requires that we defeat Islamism, (aka Islamic Fundamentalism, aka Jihadism, aka radical Islam) the brutal ideology that fuels Al Qaeda. This is not impossible, and those of an astute mind can turn themselves around. Like this guy.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Victory or Death
Sunday, April 8, 2007
A question of training
As all of the readers for this site likely know, Iran has released the British sailors it took hostage. Many people seem to be quite critical of their conduct, which was rather embarrassing. Not being an expert in such things, I turned to someone more with the subject: Former Spook He is formerly of military intelligence, and ascribes the matter to a lack of training. This is understandable - sailors aren't expected to face capture, just as pilots aren't expected to deal with a hull breach. At least, until now.
As for tactics, it might be helpful to keep a helocopter overhead, especially one with a nice chaingun on it, in order to deter future Persian pirates. Given how close this is to the mainland, a land-based ground attack aircraft might also work.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Another page in the history of the galaxy!
I'm not a fan of anime in general, especially subtitled anime. However, a few stand out as excellent, or at least a pleasure to watch. One of these is Legend of Galactic Heroes. The most important word for this series is Epic. The story is a classic space opera featuring a noble Empire squaring off against the democratic Free Planets Alliance. The story centers around the heroic admirals and other related personnel for each side, especially the Empire's Admiral Reinhardt and the FPL's Admiral Yang. Reinhardt is a paragon of nobility - far from being a villain, he is a man of honor and courage. Yang, a would-be history professor, is a paragon of democracy. He is loyal to the principle of civilian control of the military almost to a fault, and has no love of the military for its own sake. Both the proud noble and the humble professor are amazingly gifted strategists. They are among the literal thousands of characters, each one having a name and story. The story itself is told in a format similar to a historical documentary, with a continuous narration describing the events and proving background.
What prompted this discussion is my friend Silence over at Fortress Iserlohn has begun a project of identifying all of the flagships from the series. He just started, so there are only a few ships up as of yet. In addition to simply pointing any visitor in that direction, I decided to post a few thoughts on the weapons of LOGH. The predominant weapon is the beam weapon. The laser-like beam from the handheld weapon has been shown to go right through flesh, doing little secondary damage. Any heat effects seem to secondary, as the woulds are not cauterized. The small beams can be stopped with little secondary effect by armor or heavy objects. They also react explosively with zephyr particles, an aerosol mixture, resulting in melee units being rather common for a time the far future. This all leads me to the conclusion that the "blue beams" of LOGH are packets of atomic particles accelerated to a relativistic speed. The packet leave a trail of energetic gas behind them, which creates the beam effect. Then again, this is all conjecture.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Welcome to the Skydock!
Ωελχομε το τηε Σκϊδοχκ!
I had been thinking about starting a blog for some time, and it seems quite a few of my friends have taken up the role of blogger, so I decided to yield to the peer pressure. Expect posting to be irregular, covering multiple topics.
