"What did you do in the Iran War, Daddy?"

 

Luckily, nothing.

For the first time in my adult life I've been completely uninvolved in a U.S. war - or whatever this clusterfuck is - in the global hinterlands. It's given me an interesting perspective.

I didn't think it was possible to craft a geopolitical scheme that combined fairly blatant foreign economic and political opportunism (or, to be more honest, the combined Deadly Sins of Greed and Wrath) with domestic indifference (and a huge helping of cynicism and outright lying and deception) more 1) strategically misinformed, 2) tactically inept, and 3) operationally mismanaged than Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure.

Yet, here we are.

But what feels even stranger to me is the way this is playing out here in the Land of the Big PX.

Which is to say; it isn't.

I thought I'd seen the ultimate in "American Empire" in the complete indifference of the U.S. public to the actual conduct of the wars in Southwest Asia during the Oughts and Teens. Outside of the occasional spasm of reaction to breaking news like the recent USS Abraham Lincoln stories, today the Great Unwashed can't even be bothered with the most performative sorts of yellow-ribbon-magnet "patriotism".

Even with gasoline prices reflecting the effect on petroleum production and processing and the multi-billion-dollar cost of this futile air and sea warring providing the usual Republican scolds the opportunity to discuss slashing public pension programs like Medicare and Social Security, there's been absolutely no public outcry.

I've seldom seen the U.S. military put on such a visible collision of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence since the Fredricksburg Campaign of December 1862.

The public response?

Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. 

Not even when we're smacked in the face with shit like this:

That's...I honestly don't know what the hell to say about this beyond "WTF..!?"

Especially when you combine that with the move to dispatch the USS George Washington group to CENTCOM to replace the Lincoln. The geopolitical incoherence of this combined with Tubby's public backhand to the ROK is pretty stunning.

It removes INDOPACCOM's primary naval power projection piece, and has domino effects through the entire U.S. naval strategic planning setup. There's an internet commenter who blogs as "Empty Bag of Ducks" who put up a fairly thoughtful dive into the Washington/Lincoln move that's worth quoting in full:

 "I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk.  Let’s talk “risk to mission” first.

Risk to mission is pretty much what it sounds like.  In this case, what is the risk to INDOPACOM’s mission for the GW, the only carrier currently deployed in theater, to be transferred to CENTCOM.  As the only forward deployed nuke carrier, the GW clearly has a role in IPC’s mission.

Clearly, a question from Hegseth to the IPC Cdr should have been, can you conduct your mission without the GW?  Or, how do you categorize the risk, and what actions do you recommend to mitigate the risk? This is essence of strategic risk.  We never have everything we need, so we have to make risk informed decisions and decide if the risk is acceptable. Of course, the mitigation actions also have risks associated with them since there’s always a robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the goal is to move down the risk ladder.

Next is “risk to force” which really gets us into the realm of readiness.  By deploying the GW out of theater, what is the impact to the rest of the carrier force (and associated escorts)?  Is one of the mitigations to pull another carrier out of scheduled maintenance early, or defer a carrier? The Ford is an example of what happens when you extend a vessel well beyond a scheduled deployment cycle.  Every decision that you make that is outside the Navy’s force generation model has ramifications leading to decreased readiness.  At some point you have to buy that readiness back.

And to do that you’re likely going to have to accept increased risk to mission at some point by pulling carriers out of service for extended maintenance, repair and overhaul.  Then there’s the impacts to the readiness of the crews and air wings.  Over time, those degrade during a deployment...there’s simply the physical and mental weariness created by operating for months on end in a high stress, high optempo environment.  That’s why the COA of keeping the Lincoln on station was likely not viable.  You can break a unit, and you can break a force.

 Which is to what degree is Hegseth breaking the force (or at least the Navy)?  Resiliency is intrinsically tied to morale, so the experience of the Lincoln should make us wonder what is the morale across the force? hat’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer, but there are plenty of warning signs that should give a true leader, and not a martinet like Hegseth, real pause and cause them to put their senior enlisted leaders and IGs to work exploring.  Good leaders don’t fear the truth."

But, as we've discussed here, the current Secretary of DefenseWar is not that leader. 

MAJ Pushups is locked into a testosterone-fueled roid rage vision of combat-centric videogame-play "leadership" that's all about shooting things and blowing stuff up and not boring details of LOGPACs and supply chains. 

I've read people making fun of Sun Tzu's admonitions to the rulers of medieval China about things like "Remember, soldiers need food", but it's fairly clear that the China of Sun Tzu's time had more than it's share of Hegseths and, yes; they needed to be reminded of things like that. Hegseth doesn't have a Sun Tzu and the effects are showing up in the Gulf.

What he, and his mad king, appear to have managed so far is to:

Lock the United States into a difficult position in the Middle East. The Iranian hierarchy has little motivation to accommodate Trump's need for a "win" (and no reason to trust that he'll keep any sort of "terms" in an agreement short of a full-on capitulation "win"), the Gulf States have little reason to continue providing support for U.S. operations in hopes of some sort of escape from this trap, and the Israel of Netanyahu is always going to keep poisoning the water in hopes of accomplishing Bibi's Final Solution to the Palestine problem, meaning prolonging the fighting to keep the PM out of fucking jail.

Further toxify the relations between the U.S. and former allies in Europe and Asia. No one wants to get dragged into their wingman's stupid brawl, so neither the EU or any of the Asian democracies are or are likely to step up in a way that will appease Trump or aid in his war. Indeed; if I was Poland, or South Korea, or any other former U.S. geopolitical partner with a large, powerful, potentially aggressive neighbor such as the PRC or Russia (or North Korea, for that matter...) I'd be looking hard to make other arrangements for my protection that don't involve the U.S. Even when his death frees us from the Phantom Trump Menace the fact that the U.S. public (combined with it's electoral system) placed this clearly incompetent wannabe-tinpot-caudillo back on the throne means that We the People can't be trusted to do that again with some other gormless (or vile, stupid, and otherwise unfit) idiot.

Make it clear that the competing Powers (including the minor "nuisance powers" like the DPRK) can act with impunity up to some point (and that point seems very poorly defined, so the possibility of one or more crossing it into a hot war or something dangerously close is increasingly risky). 

 

The current Administration's behavior makes it clear to me, at least, that any other polity that looks to the U.S. for assistance needs to be prepared to offer up a massive bribe to have any hope, and the problem with even that is feeling assured that someone as avaricious as Trump will stay bought. 

Go a long way towards destroying the logistical, operational, and managerial competence that was the strength of the U.S. military system. Here at MilPub we've discussed to death the problem with U.S. geopolitical/military strategic thinking (or, more specifically, the lack of it). And I'm not going to argue that the U.S. government has done a terrific job since 1953 in picking it's fights, or figuring out how to accomplish it's geopolitical objectives without fighting.

But when it gets into a fight, the U.S. has - generally - managed the operational, theater-level management, and logistical sides of the conflicts fairly well. 

The Fourth Gulf War may well be the first time since the Spanish-American War that the U.S. has shown a Third World/thug-army (think Saddam's or similar sorts of warlord militaries) level of operational incompetence. 

(As an aside, friend of the Pub Sven asked in the comments on the last post whether this clear showing of the Trumpkins' wholly incompetent ass to "the troops" will shake the snuffies' allegiance to the MAGA Creed. My comment is that it hasn't on the civilian side - the rock-bottom level of support for Trump looks like it's settled above the Crazification Factor into about 30 to 35% - and GIs in general tend to be more "conservative" than the public at large. The GOP is the only "conservative" game in the U.S. political town, so the joes and mollies are likely to grumble but stick with Their Guy. 

Meaning that if Trump orders them to seize ballots in November? They almost certainly will.)

And let's not even go into the whole "catapults will be saved...by steam!" and moving carrier islands forward and Trump "battleships". The examples from the last Great Power whose Leader liked to fiddle-fuck around with warship and warplane and military vehicle design and construction are...not good ones.   

Where does this leave the "rest of us"?

I don't know.

Not in a good place, surely.

The problems that this Administration, and this war, have exposed, are multivariate and difficult to solve. The "guardrails" of unwritten Executive conduct, as stressed as they may have been by former "imperial" Presidencies and undeclared "wars", are visibly meaningless to the current regime. The primacy of the Congress, as supposedly written into black-letter Constitutional law, has proven to be utterly meaningless when the majority Party in the legislative branch cowers in terror of it's own Chief Executive. The notional competence of the Judiciary to reign in Executive or Congressional illegality has been shown to be illusionary when the highest court can be captured by the faction(s) committing those illegal acts (as well as the Executive responding to the slightest check with the Jacksonian "well, let him enforce it..." sneer).

I keep coming back to the conclusion that Bret Devereaux came to months ago; that while it's not possible for both parties to win a war, it is possible for both sides to "lose". Mutual destruction - in the short and long term - is very clearly not just probable but likely the longer the war drags on. Or one side exhausts itself defeating the other to the point where a third power can then defeat the "winner" of the original dispute.

Will we someday look back at the Fourth Gulf War as the United States' Syracuse Expedition, and Donald Trump as America's Alcibiades?

Surely, though...at least the last of the Alcmaeonidae had better hair.

Right? 

(cross-poseted to MilPub) 

War and Remembrance

 Several thoughts about the recent U.S. military in the news:

1) Randomly sinking vessels on the high seas is called “piracy”. Pirates are by definition criminals who are liable to execution when caught in the act.

 

2) Calling it the “War Department” isn’t unreasonable (that’s what it does, basically) and that’s what it was called for decades, so I don’t precisely have a problem with the idea.

 

3) I have a problem with THESE fuckers - Felony Fats and Whiskey Pete - because I think it is a giveaway; that the dumb bastards think “war works” when anyone who’s lived through Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam or studied war (Thuycidides and Clausewitz (drink!) are holding on Line 1) knows that the reality is complicated and very dependent on a deep understanding of and clear-eyed analysis of the ends and means and especially the possible unintended consequences.

 

These gormless fucksticks wouldn’t know “deep” and “clear-eyed” if it hit them on the ass singing “unintended consequences are here again”.

 

So I dread the implications of the rebranding. Handing these poop-flinging monkeys a live grenade is…not a good idea.

 

4) So apparently in 2019 the USN ran a covert operation in North Korea that went bad. Which happens. CO are inherently risky.

 

That said…SEALs, WTF? These guys’ record is iffy at best going back to Grenada in ‘83 when a bunch got dropped too far offshore and drowned and another got caught trying to do a “hostage rescue” thing and had to be rescued themselves.

 

Punta Patilla in Panama, 1989. 

 

Several ugly fails in SW Asia.

 

Seems to me like the outfit needs better strategic (or operational) sense to direct their tactical skills…

 

5) I’m reading that Felony Fats’ Operation Big Balls’ Revenge has prompted the GIs to coin their own nickname for the clusterfuck; they’re now “National Gardeners”

 

What’s NOT funny is that the fucker is playing stupid games with Joe and Molly.

 

His buddy Whiskey Pete isn’t transferring funds to the Guard Bureau to cover the costs, so troops who were activated are now being put on inactive status after returning to their home station.

Depending on their drill and activated time that might prevent them from ringing up a “good year” - that is, one that counts toward retirement.

 

That’s 1) bullshit, and 2) totally on-brand for Fats, who’s Art of the Steal has ALWAYS been “stiff your contractors”.

 

And to think that a perfectly good assassin put a bullet into James Fucking Garfield, a pathetic loser nailed JFK right in the ten-ring, Abe Lincoln’s theater evening went completely to hell and yet THIS shitheel is still wasting perfectly good oxygen…

 

There is no justice in this sorry world.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

Frankly, I can't say it better than Jim Wright did, so instead of wasting your time blathering on about this, my forty-second Veteran's Day, I'm just going to hand you over to him.

I do want to emphasize Wright's point about the politically dangerous business of "heroing" soldiers in a notional democracy.

To lionize the military as we do, to exempt soldiers - because that's what "hero" does; it takes the object of that veneration out of the sordid business of daily living and makes them a shining object of veneration - from criticism and scrutiny is to make them the idols of your society. 

That's not "democracy". It is "militarism", the heart of totalitarian doctrines like fascism and soviet-style-communism.

Like Wright, I'm not vauntingly proud of what I did in the Army.

I did my time, and did it well. I had some good times, some bad time - though not as bad as the troops who had to fight real wars had - had a good laugh and came home sound.

Which is a damn "good war" all things considered.

I'm good with my past.

But I'm concerned for my and my children's future. So I want you to think - just as it made me think - about what Wright says about this day.

For as he has said elsewhere; if you want a better country, you have to be better citizens.

Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen

 So I came across this the other day and it was so odd that I've been fiddling with it ever since.

The grinning MAGAt there is one Ashli Babbitt, the only one of the treasonous mob shot dead on January 6, 2021 in the failed attempt to putsch Tubby off his golden throne and back into the chair behind the Resolute desk.

At the time if just seemed like just another freakish event in perhaps one of the most freakish days in the political history of the United States.

Since then, however, the wingnut Right - meaning the entire GQP - led by Tubby himself has beavered away to make the woman some sort ot True Christian Martyr cut down in the flower of her youth by communism, immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, or some combination of all the above.

In case you're not a student of Nazi iconography, the title of the post is from Die Fahne hoch, also known as the Horst-Wessel-Leid, the official theme song of the original NSDAP, supposedly written by the original Ashli Babbitt, a fightin' Sturmabteilung street brawler who was given a fatal injection of external lead by his Red Front street brawler enemies. So we've kinda been here, seen that. It's now dangerous and scary because it's Nazis; it's dangerous and scary because it's worked in the past.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.

It's that part of the emerging Babbitt the Martyr legend is that she was a veteran of the US Air Force.

Tubby himself has been banging that drum. Dead Ashli was "An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman...” according to the President quondam ex futuris. 

Given the tidal level of tongue-bathing the U.S. public gives veterans of any stripe that's not a bad propaganda ploy. Brand your people as Real American Heroes and suddenly any and everything they do is American and Heroic, right?

So I've been kind of following the whole Dead Ashli Saga with a curious and jaundiced eye for a while now but only just this past week came across these two little related items.

1) Babbit had a total of 12 years time-in-service; four active USAF (2004-2008), two AF Reserve (2008-2010), and six in the ANG (2010-2016), all as a "security" specialist, meaning one of the air cops that pull gate guard and provide perimeter security for USAF installations among other things.

2) Babbitt got out as a Senior Airman (E-4), the equivalent of an Army Specialist.

That is intensely weird to me.

I know that it takes longer - it used to take much longer - to make rank in the USAF than the Army. In the 1980s, when I came in the Army if you weren't at least E-4(P) - meaning on the promotable list for buck sergeant -  by the end of your first term you were a total spud. After a dozen years in? A decently competent troop should have been at least an E-5 and probably an E-6 - Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in the Army, Staff Sergeant or Technical Sergeant in the USAF.

To still be an E-4 after a dozen years in?

That seems pretty shocking. You'd have to have been either passed over repeatedly - meaning that your unit commander would have to find some pretty big reasons for not just 86ing your ass the next time your re-up date came around - or you had to have been promoted and then busted...also not a good reason to keep you hanging around the dayroom.

The endless Wars on Terror have forced the services to body-snatch pretty hard, though, so it's possible that Warm Body Ashli was better than a hole in the MTO&E, so there's that.

Still.

I find it intriguing in a not-good-way that the Wingnut Wessel of 1/6 turns out to have been - as a "military women" - kind of a pretty poor sort of "military woman". 

But, then again...why not? She clearly missed the part in the words she swore every time she re-upped where she was supposed to "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and became, instead, one of those enemies herself and got killed as such.

But the big picture seems to me that, like Tubby himself, wingnut world seems to find some of the sketchiest human beings on the planet to make into heroes. It's taking a street brawling thug and turing him into one heroic martyr, or taking a sad act air force cop and making her into another.

I wonder whether that says more about the heroes, or the sorts of people who make up Wingnut World..?

Chumps, Suckers, and Losers

We're now apparently supposed to be all aghast that the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military thinks that people who get killed wearing a uniform are "suckers" and "losers".

 (pausing here to note that many of these same pearl-clutchers seemed juuuust fine with the same individual when he was raging and threatening any and all of his fellow citizens who happened to disagree with him politically in fine caudillo style. But we're not here for partisanship at the moment...)

Here's the thing.

If you are a GI, or someone who loves or cares for a GI, or just someone who “supports the troops”...at the very least be honest. 

Those of us who wear the tree suit are tokens in the Game of Thrones. I'm not whining about that. That's the nature of the business. We knew that when we took the re-up bonus. When it comes right down to it our job is, at the final throw, to be used - and spent, if need be - gaining or trying to gain some geopolitical thing.

We can hope that those spending our health and lives and futures are doing that wisely, judiciously, frugally, and for only the best and gravest of reasons.

All the while knowing that the opposite is very often the case; we will be thrown away for ignorance, pride, hubris, and foolishness. Our lives, or some portion of them, will often be wasted.

That's what we get paid for. That's our bottom line. That's the bargain we've made.

 And if you don’t like that, or that saddens or appalls, or horrifies you?

You need to be better citizens. Learn the issues. Question authority. Support people and policies...or protest against them! Vote...and vote with your head, not with FOX or Facebook or your old high school buddy’s latest email attachment.

Voting for some trashbag or fool or madman, or not even bothering to vote when there's a chance that trashbag of a human being might be elected, means that you lose the privilege to be shocked, shocked, when that trashbag trashes your precious "troops". 

We are your responsibility. We the People are supposed to be sovereign in this republic. So We the People are the ones who ultimately decide whether our futures are hoarded, or wasted.

If someone you helped vote into power - or someone you're not fighting with all your might to keep from power - is disparaging, or mocking, or wasting your soldiers’ lives?

It’s not their problem.

It’s yours.

Naval Gazing

Good discussion here about what the USS Theodore Roosevelt fiasco shows us about the internal mess that is a now an integral part of "the world's most powerful armed force":

"The response to Crozier’s memo, after it was public, was incoherent. Everybody was saying different things. Modly got on the news and told CNN, We’re working on it, we have a plan in place, which was true because he was in communication with Crozier and his staff at that point. That same afternoon, Modly’s boss, Secretary Defense Mark Esper, got on the evening news and said, I haven’t made any decision and I haven’t read the letter in full. They were nowhere near on the same page. It was the beginning of this massive schism that’s happening right now between civilian and military leadership."

"You see a real difference between how the admirals and the political appointees are dealing with this. The admirals are looking for how to get the sailors off and investigate what happened. But the political appointees, specifically Modly and Esper, seemed like they were completely foundering and looking for a political mitigation tactic that might save them face."

And let's not kid ourselves; it wasn't just the flunkies - this clusterfuck goes all the way up to Head of Grifting:

"Last year, the Navy was roiled by Trump’s call for clemency for Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted of keeping war trophy photographs of himself with a dead Iraqi captive. So there was already this sense, when Modly came to the job, that you need to anticipate what the White House wants and carry it out. I think that’s an understanding most administration hopefuls have reached. It could be seen as a bit of a proximate factor for what happened with Crozier."

So as far as "most powerful" goes, while I do not question the sheer weight of metal that the U.S. military has and will continue to bring in the near future, it's worth noting that the track record of military organizations that are beaten into a sort of permanent cringe...

...by being forced to suck up to the whims of their dictators...

...is not a good one.

Hole in my pocket

One thing that kinda drives me nuts about my Fellow Americans is the ridiculous luuuurve they have for the U.S. Army (and the other uniformed services) that lives only inside their heads.

This isn't the actual Army, the one with the dudes and gals and hosers, the studs and the spuds, the hard workers and goldbricks, the one that can cut you like a knife and then fall over its own feet like a sack of sawdust. You know...the one that is a bunch of Americans wearing the same colored clothes with all the same virtues and all the same vices you see and hear about on the evening news.

This is some sort of shiny, perfect Army populated by heroes and supermen, driving dinosaur-powered tanks that shoot laser beams from their eyes and have the sorts of powers found typically in comic books. This Army is composed of A-students who were the #1 in their Bible Study class and can deadlift 300 pounds while putting all thirty rounds into a two-inch square 300 meters away on full automatic.

I've never once seen this Army, and I kinda wish I could just to see what it'd be like.

I suspect I'd feel completely inadequate.

Anyway, the real Army managed to lose 6.5 trillion back in FY15.

Not steal. Not spend. Not waste. Just...lose. As in "...the fuck? It was...I know I had it. Where...let me look under the desk. Goddamn it..."

The Inspector General's report lays it out pretty clearly; the Army just flat-out has no idea where this jack is, or what it did with it. It wasn't criminal, it probably got put to some sort of use, possibly good use...but nobody knows. The accounting at DFAS and the associated Army financial agencies was bad enough that if a private company had done it that badly it'd have gotten its nuts thoroughly rapped by the IRS.

The IG concludes that due to a waterfall of errors and fuckups:

"As a result, the data used to prepare the FY2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions. Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated deadline of September 30, 2017."

The really frustrating part of all this is that you'd think, with 6.5 trillion just kind of lost somewhere the Army could have slipped a hardworking old platoon sergeant a couple of casual hundred thou. on the downlow. Y'know? Kind of a "thank you for your service" kinda thing?

But, noooooo.

You're Welcome

I got a "friend request" yesterday on Facebook. She's a good person and I like her a lot, and I "friended" her. The first post I saw from her was something "thanking" GIs for their service and I thought, oh, fuck, yeah.

Memorial Day.

And I thought; y'know, I reeeeeeally need to be nicer when people "thank me" for being a GI.

I have a problem with that.

For one thing, I didn't do it for anyone other than my own selfish reasons. I certainly didn't do it for anyone's thanks. I did it for my own fucking entertainment and adventure, had a rollicking good time doing it (peacetime soldiering is kind of like that, if you subtract the chickenshit, the boredom, and the bursts of outright fucking goatscrewlicious fucktardry), was well paid in the process, and my time in the Army had about as much to do with your "liberty" and "freedom" as an extra in the Vivid Video production of Backside To The Future has with the Virgin of Guadalupe.

It's not easy keeping my piehole shut when someone "thanks" me for running around on the government's tab. The sort of reflexive soldier-tongue-bathing that has become customary in the Second Imperial era of the United States kinda gets up my wick.

It's just meaningless words, for one thing, like the "bless you!" after a sneeze, but it's not just the meaningless words. It's that most of the people thanking me - those I know, anyway - do little or nothing to actually thank those men and women whose service has left them damaged, as service in war tends to do. They don't help in VA hospitals, or help out homeless veterans, or seek to comfort the widow and the orphan or bury the dead or succor the living.

They don't try and learn anything about those who have died; who they were, why they served or where they were killed and why.

Don't get me wrong. They're lovely people. They just have other things to be and do and the actual effort to find out who these people were and why they were where they were when they died would be asking a lot of their busy lives.

But they want to "thank" someone without doing all that hard work.

So it's a combination of irritation at the emptiness of the gesture...and irritation at the sense that the person making the gesture is making it instead of doing the hard work to make it less empty.

I want to snarl something like "Don't thank me...I didn't fucking do it for you!" and then I feel like a shitheel for wanting to say that. These aren't bad people. They just don't...know. And I'm not sure I know what to do, either about them, or about the way I think about them

But I have a suggestion.

If you see a guy or gal with a service stripe - however you know they've served, and in whatever capacity - first thing; buy 'em a drink and drink to their continued survival. They're making it, day by day, and goddamn if that doesn't deserve a toast, regardless of whether they fought like Chesty Puller or never did anything but shoveled shit in Alabama.

Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead.

Drop around the local VA and see if there's anything you can help with.

Read a newspaper. Hell, read two. Check out a couple of websites - make sure you get a good variety of political opinion - and read up on the places where your country might send your friend, or your neighbor's kid, or the guy at the bus stop to fight, possibly kill, or die.

If you read all that stuff and come to the conclusion that it'd be stupid, bone-stupid, preternaturally box-of-rocks fucking-shoveling-water stupid to send any of those people to fight, possibly kill, or die in those places because of the immense likelihood that their fighting, killing, and dying will do nothing more than fuck up a place that's already fucked up fifteen ways...do something about that:

- Vote against the douchenozzles that try and stampede you and your neighbors into sending those Americans to those places. Refuse to be "terrorized" by nonsense about Islamic headcutters driving their pickups across the Atlantic Ocean to hide under your bed. That'd be stupid. If you want to thank me for my service? Don't be stupid.

- Find out if your Congressperson or Senator has voted for wars and rumors of wars...and at the same time cut funding for the VA, or for things like PTSD treatments, counseling, or military pensions. Find out if they're part of the MICC - the "Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex" that votes funding for ridiculously expensive weaponry or bloated military budgets without inquiring what all this tax money is going for (audit the defense budget? Why, yes, that's an excellent idea...)

- Vote against anyone who tells you that spying and snooping and warrantless searches and "national security letters" are crucial for "defending America". If you believe that what you end up with isn't "America"; at least, not the one the Founders and Framers had in mind.

Run for school board. Defend a banned book. Stand up for things like free speech, even if you don't like what's being said...hell, especially if you don't like what's being said. Insist on things like the freedom from people who want you to write their religion into law, even if it's your religion and you'd like it to be the law. Hell, especially if it's your religion. Church and state, remember..? That tree suit didn't have a cross or a crescent or a wheel on it, and our belt buckle didn't read Gott mit uns. Those were the fucking bad guys. Want to thank me for my service? Thank me by not being a fucking bad guy.

All this stuff is hard, I know. But, hey...you wanted to "thank me" for my service. That service was a lot of things...but it wasn't easy.

So "thanking me" should mean more than just meaningless words. It should mean taking some responsibility for serving your country, too...in all the ways I've talked about. That's not easy, but being a citizen of a republic shouldn't be any easier than being one of its soldiers, and that means you - and I - still have lots of work to do; after all, the reward for work well done is...more work. Right?

You're welcome.

(And, as always on the day-after-this-least-beloved-of-all-holidays (I was busy kid-wrangling yesterday and didn't get to the computer, so today is my Memorial Day post, sorry...): this.)

Down and Out in Schofield Barracks

A friend of mine put this up on her Facebook feed with the observation "This is a good point":

I see some variation of this stuff from time to time and usually just snort and move on. I have no idea why it pissed me off so much this time. Maybe it's that the Portland coppers are in the process of chasing our local homeless people out from under the Steel Bridge, one more round in the endless "We aren't willing to spend money to try and figure out a solution but we're fine with spending money to kick the problem-can down the road again" game we play here in the Land of the Free to Steal Bread and Sleep Under Bridges.

Maybe it was reading Jim Wright's terrific column discussing the whole nonsensical yet fucking insanely irritating obsession of the roughly-one-third-of-my-fellow-citizens who think of all taxes as theft...unless they're going to pay for killing people and breaking shit in which case, hooah!, America, fuck yeah!

But whatever the reason, it really, really pissed me off.

First, because it's a straight-out, brass-faced, fell-off-the-back-of-the-crapwagon bullshit lie.

Because the poor sad little broke GI or Marine (I add "Marine" because that the person that originally posted this thing has some sort of "jarhead 4 jarhead" header) doesn't "just" get paid $8.85 an hour.

Snuffy and Chesty also get free medical and dental care, free housing, and free meals. That's huge. Like, tens of thousands of dollars a year huge. and that's not all.

The poor little fellow's work clothes are paid for. He walks to work, so he doesn't have to have pay for a car, or gas, or insurance unless he wants to. He gets two weeks paid vacation a year and can spend it paying Motel 6 rates at Fort DeRussey at Waikiki Beach of he wants to fly there. And she doesn't even have to pay more then ten bucks for her vacation travel, either, if she flies space-A, a privilege kinda out of reach of Burger McFlipperson.

Poor little underpaid Joe and Molly are also working towards a guaranteed 50% base pay retirement after only 20 years service (meaning an 18-year-old private is only 38 at retirement) when he or she gets a huge veterans preferment for almost every civil service job.

If he makes 30 years he gets 75% of what is a pretty sweet top-three-grade pay and allowances.

Not to mention the fact that most American troops aren't ragged dog faces out in the tules, but truck drivers, IT techs, wing wipers and sailors who sleep in a bed and go to work in an office.

Plus everybody thanks his GI and Marine ass for their "freedoms" even though the last time an American soldier killed anyone for "freedom" was in 1945.

And second and last, this little screed pisses me off as a sad attempt to belittle the working poor, who have it way worse than 99% of the folks who wear a uniform, and that's coming from someone who wore one for 22 years.

This goes back to Jim's point about the nonsensical notion that paying taxes for tanks and aircraft carriers is a "public good" but paying taxes to help prevent a critical mass of your fellow citizens living in poverty and sickness and ignorance isn't. That somehow nations with lots of weapons are "healthy" and "strong"" even though they may be riven with social dysfunction from fostering a permanent underclass and a poorly educated, unhealthy, credulous citizenry.

That's nonsense, of course. Not that I'd expect a "conservative" to see that. But nonsense all the same.

Hey, I love GIs, too. But a lot of those GIs are gonna get out and find that they're going to have to try and make ends meet flipping burgers or making beds or stocking shelves and trying to do that while paying for their food and clothing and rent and aspirins, so being a dick about how poor people should be poor? That's...well, that's just being a dick.

So. As far as I can see the only "good point" this damn screed makes is the one that every GI figured out long ago;

If you crossbreed a "conservative" with a gorilla what you get you get is a retarded gorilla.

Ha! And you thought I was going to make that joke about Marines, didn't you.

April Fool.

Maybe we deserve "President Trump"...

...given the ridiculous proportion of our fellow citizens that believe a military coup would be a solution to the current political process.

"According to YouGov's poll of 1,000 Americans, nearly half of the country's Republicans -- 43 percent -- would support a military coup under certain conditions. About 20 percent of Democrats can picture themselves backing such an effort."

What's sad is that the actual proportion of the populace that believes that sort of idiocy probably hasn't really changed all that much in fifty years. But the willingness of people to SAY so...to admit that they would support a patently un-republican, anti-democratic act by the armed forces...seems to be all of a piece of We the People's willingness to take the Libidinous Visitor and his fellow passengers in the GOP clown car as entertainment and political commonplace rather than an insulting mockery of adult politics.

This'd be almost comical if it wasn't so damn tragic.

Update 9/16: And here's a couple of nice addenda to the whole Trumpism thing.

One of the biggest tells for the complete collapse of the GOP as a "political party" has been the way that Trump has succeeded while completely disregarding the "party's position" on fiscal and economic policy which is, for all purposes, no different than John D. Rockefeller's was back in the original Gilded Age: "The public be damned."

Seriously. The GOP has become, economically, the Party of Plutocracy, in favor of removing any sort of tax that hits wealthy people and/or corporations and "paying for" that (to the extent that they care to bother to pay for the loss of revenue) with reductions in social spending. Aircraft carriers and corporate welfare, fine. Childcare and food stamps, not.

Trump has utterly defied this orthodoxy, because he doesn't need the GOP or its wealthy owners and for all that he's a buffoon he's a buffoon who, like all good grifters, knows the sweet spot in his marks.

And this, in turn, is where the Republicans end up paying the devil his due. Because there aren't enough plutocrats to win elections the GOP has been forced to rely on its orc army of Trump's marks; Christopaths who are all assed-up about queers and uppity wimmen abortin' snowflake babies, old white people who are assed-up about black bucks buying steaks with welfare checks, and assholes in general assed-up about anything the whiffs of anything but God, guns, NASCAR, and Betsy Ross. The sorts of people who donate to prosperity-gospel churches and send away for Ronald Reagan commemorative crockery, the sorts of people who would tell you to get gummint out of their Medicare. People of the earth. You know. Morons.

And these people don't care about tax cuts. Oh, sure, they like not paying taxes, like everyone else and no, they don't understand that taxes are the price of civilization. But a lot of them are on Social Security and Medicare. Many of them are on SSI disability. They also don't like or trust the moneymen who bankroll the party and would be fine with those plutocrats paying more in taxes. So long as Trump is agin the nigras, beaners, and libtards they're just fine with him suggesting that more taxes should get jerked out of hedge fund managers' backsides a nickel at a time.

So the Club for Growth has put its money down against The Donald.

This isn't a bug. As Krugman points out, it's a feature, a feature of the immense cognitive trainwreck that is the modern GOP, the dumpster fire of the vanities that characterizes U.S. "conservatives", an ideology that has lost any semblance of coherent thought in favor of a snakeball of hate, resentment, and fear. Or, in Krugman's words: "Trump isn’t a problem for Republicans; he’s a symptom of the problems Republicans have."

The fascinating collision down the road is going to come when someone has to blink. Either the GOP electorate can be jerked over into the Club for Growth's economic Gilded Age nonsense and The Donald has to toe the Club's plutocratic line...or the orcs rebel in favor of Trump and the Koch Brothers get pulled out of their tower and filleted on the populist scaling table.

It's like watching an airliner crash in slow motion, and if it wasn't such a gawdawful indictment of how thoroughly the GOP has utterly fucked a third of the American electorate it'd just be entertaining.

But the outcome is so potentially awful that it almost makes a military coup look beneficent by comparison. We are, truly, fucked by the navel.

Sons of the Widow

Over at the MilPub, fellow trooper PF Khans bemoans our fellow citizens' indifference to our Army brothers' plight;

"(I)t just really irritates me to death when we as a nation have a discussion about the military without mentioning that yes, we are still at war. There's hell to pay for this sort of behavior. And the cost isn't being distributed at all. The question for me in these sorts of areas is and always has been how long can this last? And when the music stops, how do I get a chair?"

Now I'll be the first one to say that the yellow-bumper-magnet "patriotism" has irked the shit out of me since 2001 and still does.

But.

I've also studied something of the history of war and soldiers. And the history of my country at war. And the sad truth is; what we're seeing now, today, in the vast empty expanse of public indifference and ignorance is by far and away more typical of the "American Way of War".

The thing is, PF and I - and probably you, too - suffer from growing up under the shadow of that immense irregularity, World War Two.

WW2 is almost unique in U.S. history; only the Civil War and, to a lesser extent, World War One, managed to get under the American public's skin to any real extent. Both World Wars because of their sheer size, and because the U.S. had to mobilize the entire nation (to a degree; WW1 "patriotism" was as much about the Wilson Administration's fear that Americans wouldn't hate them on Germany enough as it was genuine kill-the-Kaiser emotion), the Civil War because...well, look at it. It's hard to avoid a war being fought inside your own country. Like love and a cough, it can't really be hidden.

But WW2, that vast one-off, got us thinking of war as something "The People" did; we had a draft, everyone knew someone in the Army, or the Navy, or a Marine. Dad worked for the USO, Mom at the war plant, and Buzzy and Sissy collected old pans to Scrap a Jap.

That carried on into Korea and Vietnam, too.

But no more.

We're back to the way it was in 1845, and 1899, and the Twenties and Thirties, too; back to nameless grunts out fighting imperial war for national policy, and unless you have a brother or a father in the service, or are or were in yourself, nobody back home really gives a shit.

And that's the way empires play that game and always have. The thing that, more than anything else, convinces me that the United States circa 2012 really IS an empire (albeit a very odd sort of one without formal colonies or satraps and viceroys ruling over the lesser breeds without the Law) is the way we're back to playing the imperial game. The British did it for centuries. Do you think the British gentleman, reading about Our Heroic Lads bashing wogs, knew or gave a shit about those Heroic Lads as individuals? As people?

Nonsense. They were props for the Imperial Play; the great pageant of the Rule of The Great and the Good, nameless and faceless myrmidons whose job was to smash the demmed fuzzy-wuzzies or, if defeated, die nobly for Queen and Country so that the outraged Briton could call for the destruction of those frightful wogs (or niggers, or whoever the enemy de jour happened to be...)

Do you think anyone outside the families of the men killed in the yearly "Afghan Expeditions" cared? Or, for that matter, even bothered to know who had died, or lost an arm, or eyes, or had their balls shot away in the friggin' "Expeditions Against The Bizoti Orakzais and Black Mountain Hazaras" in 1869? Or the one against the Dawaris four years later? Or the one against the Dafflaa two years after that. Or...

You get the idea.

I'm sorry, man. But that's the way this game gets played. And you need to look around and realize; if you ain't the one in charge of playing it, you ARE the game.

And that is, and always has been, and always will be the lot of the sons of the widow.

The Last of the Light Brigade

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four!

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabers, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighten the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell"
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call and tell.

"No thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see the next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made__"
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!

Luftpanzer!

I've been reading volume two, The Day of Battle, of Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy".

Atkinson writes well and has done his research; his Army at Dawn was a good summary of the U.S. North Africa campaign. The second volume is equally comprehensive on the campaigns for Sicily and Italy. Makes for a terrible story; you have to wonder what the hell the Allied leaders were thinking ("soft underbelly"? My ass). It's popular history, yes, but well-drawn and (so far as I can tell) sound on the major events and controversies of the place and time.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. It's these guys:

You can't make your way around North Africa, Sicily, and Italy between 1942 and 1944 without stumbling over this outfit, perhaps one of the oddest in military history; an entire armored division owned by an air force.

The Hermann Göring armored division was probably the strangest end-member of the Nazi penchant for empire-building, internal as well as external. The capability of the German ground forces in WW2 - and even the most Allied-biased have to admit that on the tactical level the German armed forces were largely better at their work than pretty much any of their enemies - is fairly remarkable given the almost-Byzantine-level of complexity of the Wehrmacht. Alongside the Heer, the regular Army, you had a completely parallel Nazi Party army in the "armed" or Waffen SS.

And beside them, you had damn near an entire freaking air force army.

You could say that the German military of the Forties did it exactly backwards from the way the U.S. did it; in the U.S. of 1943 the air force belonged to the army. In Germany, the air force HAD an army; 22 Luftwaffe feldivisionen, or "Air Force Field Divisions" That's not even counting the fallschirmjäger; the eleven divisions of German paratroops came under Air Force command (as did everything else that flew than that the Reichsmarschall could get his pudgy fingers on).

But you can make kind of a case for the paratroops (the Soviet paras were part of their air force, and even the early U.S. Army experiments with airborne troops flirted with the notion of slotting them into the USAAF), and the feldivisionen were flat-out a mid-war expedient forced on the Wehrmacht by Der Dicke's political pull and greed for power.

But the Hermann Göring was a whole different critter; a created-from-the-treads-up armored division for the German air force.

And the other odd thing is that, like the paratroopers and very unlike the felddivisionen (which were disasters and probably killed more Germans that their enemies...) the HG turned out to be an excellent combat outfit. Several commentators such as Martin Blumenson have rated it among the best of the German WW2 armored formations. That's pretty high praise, given the competition.

But...I'm sorry; the whole idea is just fucking weird.

There are lots of things about the Nazi period in Germany that are fascinating in a horrible way. But there are some things about that period that are fascinating just because they're...odd. And the notion of an air force wanting their own tank division?

To me, that's just odd. I get it, I understand WHY Fatso wanted one - hard to be a soldier without understanding power bases and military empire-building - but letting him have one?

Odd.

But perhaps I should be careful about name-calling other militaries; at least the Kriegsmarine resisted the impulse to voluntarily form it's own infantry brigade.

Go figure.

Smoking guns and mushroom clouds

The generation of this post came from a headline on my Comcast website (where I go to check my e-mail): "Rare picture of split mushroom cloud found" Here's the pic:

I followed the original article and found a irkingly cryptic story about this picture.

Apparently the "split" cloud over Hiroshima had already been seen in 1945; photographed by observers aboard one of the aircraft accompanying Enola Gay (tagged, by the way, with a terrific name for an implement of mass destruction: Necessary Evil).

Here's that snapshot - note that the upper "cap" cloud has pretty much separated from the "stem":

The thing I couldn't get from either the initial story linked by Comcast or the History Blog post I linked to above was - what was so fucking terrific about this picture?

I mean, was this some sort of truly odd, unusual atomic phenomenon?

Did the split in the Hiroshima cloud indicate that some really peculiar atmospheric condition, or some bizarre anomaly in the detonation, had resulted in this strange cloud formation that was never seen again during the many atmospheric nuclear tests conducted during the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties?

Okay, no.

The photo above is from the "Charlie" shot in the "Buster-Jangle" test series conducted in October and November of 1951. Note the double separations, the upper between the "cap" and "stem" as well as a lower split in the stem.

That led me to further research into the whole "mushroom cloud" business. Seems that these things are not just a nuclear signature. Any sufficiently large explosion will create them. The fireball of the explosion creates the "cap" as it rises, and the low pressure beneath the cap causes entrainment of the surrounding air and the moisture in the rising air condenses.

Not surprisingly, all this rising and condensing is dependent on the ambient air temperatures and pressures, so that if the rising cloud encounters a warmer air layer at altitude there will be no cloud formation, or the water droplets will evaporate again...

So it turns out that the photo itself was the big deal, if big deal it was, not the "split cloud".

And even that was not really all that such of a muchness; the photo had been published years earlier. It was the actual photo print that had been lost for some time and recently rediscovered.

So. No frightful new nuclear revelations, just a tiny bit of historical documentation come back to light.

Well, okay then. Let's dance!

Now I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds.

Bunny Slippers

In a rather entertaining example of "blogging is an odd business", here's how this post developed:

In researching the trope of aliens arriving to chastise humankind I wandered over to the Wikipedia entry for the old Twilight Zone broadcast "To Serve Man" (because I vaguely remembered this as a TV trope from a long-ago viewing of the Simpsons spoof Hungry Are The Damned

Okay, so; having got that far, in the footnotes of the Wiki entry I stumbled across a reference to the whole "tasty, tasty humans" thing as a slogan on the unit patch of the 509th Bomb Wing, the USAF unit that flies the B-2 bomber.

I then ran down this patch, which does, in fact, have an aliens-eating-people connection but doesn't quote "To Serve Man" verbatim. Instead the motto on the unit patch is "gustatus similis pullus", very doggy-latin for the English phrase "tastes like chicken".

Are you with me so far?

The pursuit of this, then, led me here: to a small collection of oddball funny USAF patches. I like all of them, including the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron, whose motto is pretty direct: NOYFB is an acronym for "none of your fuckin' business" which is, one assumes, the attitude that the C-5 jockeys who "...deliver classified aircraft from aerospace plants in Southern California to testing facilities around the country." routinely give when asked what they do for a living.

Which, then, led my mind back to this patch:

Which, when you get past the existential horror of nuclear holocaust, is pretty funny. There's a certain humor value - midnight-black humor, mind you - to the notion of Capt. Joe or Maj. Molly shuffling to the control console in their b-robe and fuzzy slippers, coffee in hand, to put an end to life on Earth.

As an aside, I wonder if there is something about the youthful nature of the USAF that produces these funny patches? Certainly the Army had it's silly slogans and catchphrases but in my experience they tended to be unofficial at best and secretive at worst. We would never have been willing to openly chuckle at ourselves the way these patches do. I have been hard on the USAF in the past and will be in the future, but this is an aspect of that service that I can and do appreciate.

They have a certain perspective of themselves that my own service conspicuously lacks.

So, anyway, there's the destination of all this Internet wandering; tasty fried humans - not as a centerpiece for an alien Thanksgiving but as a result of our own inability to figure out how to solve our differences without a bow and spear.

Not exactly an original thought, but perhaps one to stop for a moment and curl a lip at on the last day of the year.

Battles Long Ago: Clatsop Plains 1942

Clatsop Plains (The Shelling of Ft. Stevens) Date: 21 JUN 1942

Forces Engaged: Empire of Japan - B1-type (Otsu-gata) fleet submarine I-25; 17 x Type 95 "Long Lance" torpedoes, 1 x 5.5"/50cal deck gun, 94 officers and enlisted crewmen under Commander Tagami Meiji

United States of America - Units of the Coast Artillery, U.S. Army., manning the harbor defense guns emplaced at Fort Stevens, Oregon.

So far as I can tell the batteries at Fort Stevens were heavily manned on the night of 21 JUN. The garrison consisted of most of the 1st Battalion, 18th Coast Artillery (U.S. Army) and the 249th Coast Artillery battalion, Oregon Army National Guard in federal service.

C Battery, 1/18th CA appears to have been detached with 4 x 12" railway mortars to Brown's Point further up the mouth of the Columbia River in January, 1942, but the remaining batteries; HHSB, A, and B, 1/18th CA and HHSB, A, B, and C 249th CA (ORARNG) were on duty at Ft. Stevens that night. In addition the cadre of a new Coast Artillery unit, the 267th CA, had arrived on 12 JUN to prepare for the arrival of the remainder of the unit in August.

The strength report for 30 JUN 1942 lists 129 officers, 5 warrant officers, and 2,194 enlisted men. Of these, the most closely involved were the artillerymen manning Battery Russell under one CPT Woods; which unit was crewing the guns I have not been able to determine.

Battery Russell, which faced the Pacific, mounted two M1900 10" rifled cannon on what was known as a "disappearing" carriage. This contraption was basically a set of folding legs that could be lowered to load the cannon and then raised above the emplacement parapet to fire, making the gun difficult to hit with the low-angle, flat-trajectory naval guns typical of the turn-of-the-19th-century when the cannon were manufactured.

The total armament of Ft. Stevens that night consisted of:

Battery Russell's two 10" cannon;
A total of eight 12" mortars: 4 x M1918 mortars mounted on railway cars and another 4 M1890 type emplaced in Battery Clark, and
Battery Pratt's two 6" M1897MI cannon.

The commander of the Harbor Defenses of the Columbia River was one COL Doney, CA...

...and all of this military might was part of the U.S. Army's Ninth Coast Artillery District commanded by MG Wilson far away and safe in his bed on the night of 21 JUN...

The Campaign: It's frankly hard to call the events of 21 JUN 1942 much of a "battle", much less as part of a "campaign". I wanted to tell the story as a curiosity and as a favorite part of Oregon history that is usually forgotten. It was an oddity in an odd moment in the Great Pacific War, but one that was serious enough to the people who lived through it, and so perhaps I should give the moment a bit of historical context.

But here's the problem.

The events of 21 JUN 42 make absolutely no frigging sense to me from a military standpoint.

Let's walk back the spring of 1942 a bit, shall we?

The two enemies had very different strategic objectives, and their military plans reflected that.

The Japanese needed the U.S. Navy off their ass so they could complete the subjugation of the Philippines and the seizure of the "Southern Resource Area" otherwise known as the Dutch East Indies colonies and the lovely petroleum hidden thereunder.

The United States needed to hold off the Japanese in the central Pacific until the Pacific Fleet could recover from the beating the received at Pearl Harbor, keep their lines of supply to Australia open (and that country un-invaded, although the Japanese had no real plans to do so the U.S. couldn't be sure of that), and then figure out how to pry open the Japanese defensive network that the Empire had flung out across the southwestern and western Pacific beginning after the First World War.

The wild card was the U.S. strategic intelligence gathered through various codebreaking schemes, which enabled the U.S. to anticipate the Japanese plan to stage a decisive engagement with the U.S. carriers in the central Pacific. This engagement went off as planned, but as we all know the decision was against the Kido Butai, which lost four fleet carrier decks and hundreds of talented fliers in the course of several days in June.

You would think that a Japanese fleet submarine would have been gawdamn busy in the month of June; scouting for the Combined Fleet, harrying the U.S. convoys supplying it's Midway task forces, sinking American carriers or some damn thing that supported Yamamoto's Operation Mai tactical plan for Midway.

But you'd be wrong, neh?

Instead of hunting Yankee sailors, in June '42 the I-25 and her crew were farkling about off the Northwest coast, because...

Would you believe - the Dolittle Raid?

The most common explanation I've read for the overall mission of the I-25's Third War Patrol was to commit mayhem along the U.S. Left Coast in retaliation for the audacity of the gringos bombing the Imperial homeland.

I'm not sure if I believe it. Except for one thing; the overall strategic fucktardry of the 大日本帝国海軍 (Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kaigun)'s submarine forces.

And that was with a hell of a submersible force at the beginning of the war; the IJN had a total of 63 fleet subs on 8 DEC 41, including some of the most powerful in the world at the time.

Even a web page about Japanese imperial submarines has to admit that "(g)iven their (advantages in) size, range, speed, and torpedoes, Japanese submarines achieved surprisingly little."

The common explanation is that the Japanese had no real idea what to do with their subs other than throw them at enemy warships. And they did a fairly decent job of this in 1942.

But pitting slow submerged submarines (and remember that WW2 subs were really "submersibles" - they were actually pretty damn poor at doing anything submerged outside of running slow and silent for a damn short time until their batteries ran down and fumes and lack of oxygen overcame their crews, not to mention the incredible stench from the bilges where who-the-hell knew what awful swill floated - at least by 1942 most navy subs had actual heads, unlike the WW1 varieties where the crewmen used the bilges for a shitter) against sonar-equipped escorts is a mug's game.

And - remember, the WW2 subs had to spend a LOT of time on the surface - the U.S. naval air arm and long-distance reconnaissance aircraft got real good real fast at pickling off a depth charge or eight on whatever hapless Japanese sub they could find, and they found a lot of 'em.

But for the rest of it, the Japanese widdled their submarine force away in all sorts of pointless missions; resupply, snoop-and-pooping, lurking outside U.S. naval bases hoping to sneak a torpedo up the skirt of some careless Yankee...and, I suspect, this mission.

And the Third War Patrol really was pretty pointless. Listen, here's the itinerary for the I-25's 1942 West Coast Tour;

11 MAY 42: Departs Yokosuka.

27-30 MAY 42: Recons Kodiak, Dutch Harbor and USN units in Alaska in support of the Operation AL, the Aleutian diversion for the Battle of Midway. But the submarine is nowhere near the Aleutians during the actual operation - she's en-route to Oregon

14 JUN 42: On station off the coast of Oregon. I-25 is reported to "have launched a number of false bamboo periscopes to confuse the ASW vessels in the vicinity". Frankly, the bamboo-periscope thing sounds like a piece of slap-a-Jap racism except it's almost too bizarre for that so it may well be true.

Okay, pay attention, here's the odd bit, now:

18 JUN 1942: The web page listing I-25's movements during this time says: "ComSubRon 1 (RADM Yamazaki) orders the I-25 and the I-26 to shell military targets on the American west coast."

Frankly, that doesn't make sense to me if the point of this patrol was Revenge! for the Dolittle Raid. This seems like the kind of brilliant fucking idea some staff pogue comes up with for the combat types to try out. I wonder how the phrase "Trust me! This'll go slicker'n water of a cat's ass!" translates into Japanese? I think this entire operation was some REMF's idea of a killer career move. But that's just me; your mileage may vary. What do you think?

Anyway,

20-21 JUN 1942: torpedoes a British freighter northwest of the mouth of the Columbia, and attacks two other vessels, sinking none.

21 JUN 1942: fires 17 rounds of 5.5" at Fort Stevens on the N coast of Oregon, but inflicts no significant damage. (One dud shell landed near the golf course on Delaura Beach Road and is now a memorial) The Japanese actually intended to shell the "American submarine base at Astoria."

11 July 1942: Returns Yokosuka.

And that was that.

So I'm not sure if there really was much of a "plan" involved here. I think some staff puke attached to Submarine Squadron One got a wild hair up his ass after hearing about the fiasco that was Yamamoto's brilliant Midway operation and wanted one of his guys to kill some Yankees, ANY Yankees, goddamnit.

So Commander Meiji got his orders and the boys at Battery Russell got a rude awakening on a Sunday night.

The Sources: The usual; official records, war diaries, personal accounts, letters, newspapers, all the literary appurtenances of living in a literate society.

Of the written sources in particular I'd like to recommend Panic! at Fort Stevens by Bert Webber; a nice little illustrated account of the night, and probably the single volume specific to the event. Available from the Columbia River Maritime Museum (a pretty terrific place, as well...) here.

There's several good on-line places to read about the night of 21 JUN. The Wiki entry is perhaps the worst place to begin. It's a great example of "bad" Wiki; sparse, missing the Webber primary source, and contains a reference to a supposed B-17 attack that I frankly consider unlikely.

Somebody named Dale Fehrenger has a nice account of the evening featuring quotes from CPT Wood, the Battery Russell commander, and other participants. There are a handful of what look like factual inaccuracies (the B1 submarines are listed at 94 crew, not 108...but, then, wartime units tend to find places for people and equipment they're not "supposed" to have, so, there...)

An outfit called the "Coast Defense Study Group" has a great site for information on Fort Stevens here. Well worth a look, especially the terrific pictures.


The Engagement: The round tale of the night of Sunday, 21 JUN, is quickly told. But indulge me; I want to set the table a little bit.

First, the defenses.

The coastal guns at Ft. Stevens in 1942 - in fact, all around the mouth of the Columbia - were still largely sited and their fields of fire planned with the Spanish-American War parameters of naval architecture in mind.

The forts around the river mouth; Ft. Stevens on Clatsop Spit to the south, Ft. Canby on the south end of the Long Beach peninsula to the north, and the smaller Ft. Columbia just southeast of Chinook, Washington (also on the north bank) were designed engage an enemy force actually entering the harbor. Look at the fields of fire for the active Ft. Stevens batteries. Here's Battery Pratt's 2 x 6" guns;

And here's another pair of 6-inchers, these mounted on Battery Murphy at Ft. Columbia:

The real smashing was expected to have been done by the high-angle fire of the 12" mortars crashing down through wooden decks; as you can see, these weapons had considerably better arc of fire, although their range was not much longer than the much smaller 6-inchers:

(These diagrams are all from an archived 1937 document titled Annexes to Harbor Defense Project, Harbor Defenses of the Columbia viewable at the Coast Defense Study Group website) There is nothing listed in this annex for Battery Russell - since in '37 the battery was officially out of service - but the maximum range for a 10" M1900 is listed as 14,000 yards. So the arc of fire of Russell would have probably looked something like this:

You'll notice the red circle?

That's I-25's 5.5"/50 deck gun. Designed twenty years after the M1900, with half the size it has almost half again the range; 21,600 yards.

We'll get back to that in a moment.

So it must have been a pretty lazy Sunday night for the boys at Fort Stevens. Astoria, Hammond, and Warrenton - the closest towns - were still pretty rural places in '42, lots of fishing, clamming, and crabbing. Some saltgrass sorts of agriculture and dairying. The waterfront bars were known to be tough, and you were likely to get into a fight if you used the wrong look at some Finn pissed off from a long day and no fish. Or a different sort of look at his daughter.

But the lucky few were back from pass, probably telling the usual lies GIs have always told about the drinking and fucking heroics, while the post settled into the early lights-out routines. Sentries shook their heads and squinted into the dark of a June night. The busy day noises died away and the nighttime sounds took over; the distant surf booming and hissing, the sound of crickets and the whine of mosquitoes, occasional sounds of cars or trucks on the Coast Highway out in the eastern darkness.

Out in the greater darkness of the Pacific Ocean I-25 had surfaced some time before 2330. I could find no record of her course or speed, but I suspect that she was probably cruising slowly southwards, for reasons I'll explain later.

It must have been a nerve-wracking moment. The enemy's landmass, presumably loaded with pantsloads of scary dangerous aircraft, soldiers, and sailors lay less than 4 miles to port. The sub had used the local fishing fleet to slip through the sea mines and past the guardships, but there was no disguising the danger. The gun crew presumably had their helmets strapped on tight and their kapok vests over their summer whites as they cranked the cannon around and elevated the muzzle.

The number one man jammed the first round into the breech and the assistant gunner slammed the breech closed. The gun captain probably looked up at the bridge, and someone, possibly even the captain himself, barked 暖炉!

Open fire!

The crewmen said later that they didn't bother to use the 5.5" gunsight; their target was blacked out, anyway, and, besides, it's hard to miss the ground with a shell.

A long tongue of flame strobed the night, the first round spiraled out of the gun muzzle and then the crew waited impatiently until the bloom of fire announced the first enemy cannon round to land on a continental United States fortification since 1865.

Let's let CPT Woods take up the story.

Things went pretty crazy in the first moments under fire. Troops ran to their guns half-dressed or undressed, sirens screamed, one of the searchlight flicked on and raked the water only to snap off after an officer threatened to shoot it out for giving away the emplacement's position. Battery Russell was loaded and ready to fire within several minutes and CPT Woods requested permission to open fire from the central fire direction center at Main Post.

"While waiting for the order to return fire,"

the Fehrenger article runs,

"Captain Wood and his men considered their options. Since they couldn’'t tell exactly where the shots were coming from, they decided to focus on the flashes from the submarine and fire their guns over and under the flashes, like field artillery pieces. If they weren'’t able to hit the sub, that approach should at least scare it away.

Eventually a response was received: “Do not fire. – I say again; do not fire.”

Wood’s men were unhappy. There was grumbling from soldiers at the guns and in the ammunition rooms below. Richard Emery, who was a soldier at Fort Stevens that night, said, “"We were frustrated. There was a lot of anger. We felt that we should have been able to fire back."

Apparently the combination of darkness and a target that consisted of a moving series of flashes had resulted in a poor plot in the FDC; I-25 was plotted as out of range of Russell's 10-inchers, and if Battery Russell couldn't hit her none of the Stevens batteries could.

But given the reported elevation of I-25's deck gun and the strike of the rounds it's likely that the submarine was no more than 13,000 to 15,000 yards away; possibly out of range, but possibly not. The lack of radar guidance for the older cannons was shown to be a critical flaw. The U.S. batteries remained silent.

At 2345 I-25 fired the last of 17 rounds. Her gun crew secured the cannon for dive, and the deck crew went below save for lookouts and the conning party. The submarine turned west, heading out to sea, and back to Japan. She slipped past several small boats, presumably fishermen, and, diesels thumming, began to pick up speed as she headed for home.

The cannonade of Clatsop Plains was over.

The Outcome: Utterly trivial; a minor Japanese tactical and propaganda "victory", if you will, but meaningless outside of an exciting evening for the participants and a black eye for the Coast Artillery Corps.

The Impact: Physical? Well...some craters on the beach, shell fragments all around Battery Russell, including damage to the backstop of a baseball diamond about 100 yards away.

A near-miss on a beach house where three kids peed themselves for the first time since toddlerhood.

A power line was scored, eventually rusted through, and broke.

That powerline, by the way, was on Delaura Beach Road, some considerable distance south of the initial impacts around Russell. See?

Which is why I suspect that I-25 was cruising slowly south as she fired; a random MPI like that doesn't make sense unless she was drifting south, in my opinion. No matter, really, except the site is monumented today:

But emotional?

For all that the actual military damage that I-25 did that night, the real impact of her attack (and the September aerial bombing by her E14Y1 "Glen" floatplane) was in the minds of Americans, who saw one more damn Jap attack after another (given the shelling of oil facilities in southern California in February, and now this...) The shelling probably contributed to the fear that imprisoned thousands of Japanese-Americans all over the West Coast, and helped fan the overall ruthlessness that characterized the Pacific War.

Mind you, the Japanese could do ruthless. And did.

For all that this was just a ridiculous and silly scrap, overall it was a pretty goddamn awful war.

Oh, and interesting - note that in the World's Probably Even Then Worst Newspaper the number of shells is listed as nine. Other U.S. eyewitnesses said eleven; almost no one said 17. Chances are that over a third of the Japanese shells landed in the water, or the soft ground typical of Clatsop Plains and didn't explode.

But perhaps the most significant fatality of that night was the Coast Artillery itself.

The inability of the coastal forts to keep off their insignificant attacker was a painful remainder that the era of naval gunnery was all but over. Aircraft would patrol the coasts from now on, and by 1944 almost all of the old batteries at Ft. Stevens were abandoned.

A pair of newer 5-inch guns were installed and quietly decommissioned within a year.

Ft. Stevens, Ft. Canby, and Ft. Columbia were all leased or sold within the next several decades; there are no active coastal defense installations in the United States.

The Coast Artillery Corps itself, which had been split off from the Field Artillery only in 1907, lived only another eight years and was merged back with the redlegs of the FA. Ironically, several old Coast Artillery posts were used in the Fifties as sites for CIM-10 Bomarc launchers, perhaps the last true heir to the fortified cannon defenses.

In a moment of panic fear of yellow hordes swarming ashore a renewed energy was applied to coastal defenses along the West Coast, however, including another layer of barbed wire entanglements along the beach.

The wire is said to have been buried under sand or washed away within a year and was never repaired or replace as it became starkly clear that the Japanese weren't going to visit.

What did remain tangled in the wreck of the Peter Iredale, however, and is said to have remained a hell of a nuisance for several years.

Ft. Stevens has been turned into a state park, where on nice summer days you can drive around the old concrete batteries and hear about the excitement of the night of 21 JUL. Oddly, the popular attraction of late has become the restoration of the older earthwork, built during the Civil War, and the swarms of black powder reenactors who show up to fight impossible blue-gray battles over weekends in July.

Battery Russell stands empty amid the riot of salal and Oregon grape that has grown up and through the silent flash doors to the magazines.

A plastic and wooden replica of the old M1900 cannon sits in simulated ferocity in the slowly decaying concrete of one of the revetments,

While timber grows from the old formation area, and in defiance of first sergeants long gone the walls are stained and scribbled with names and declarations of love, foolishness, and ferocity.

CPT Woods command post still looks out on the restless Pacific, the only Japanese vessels within its gunsights now the immense slab-sided car carriers bringing Mitsubishis whose intent is purely harmless. In the cool woodlands outside the zeeee of the hermit thrush echoes the whisper of the nightfire of seventy years ago.