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CAM RANH, VIETNAM – Two Maritime Self-Defense Force warships made a historic port call Tuesday at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

The visit by the guided-missile destroyers Ariake and Setogiri was the first of its kind, according to the Japanese Embassy in Hanoi.

Cam Ranh Bay faces the South China Sea and in particular the Paracel and Spratly island chains, a source of dispute between Vietnam and China.

In Tokyo, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani told a news conference Tuesday he expects bilateral defense cooperation with Vietnam to grow.

via www.japantimes.co.jp

It's not surprising that nations in the region, seeing less than overwhelming US pushback against the Chinese claims to the SCS, are finding ways to cooperate as a counter.

Of course, this isn't *really* the first Japanese port visit to Cam Rahn Bay. Since they occupied the country during World War II.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russian attack planes buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Baltic Sea multiple times on Monday and Tuesday, at one point coming so close — an estimated 30 feet — that they created wakes in the water around the ship, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

The official, who was not authorized to discuss details and so spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Russian Su-24 planes appeared unarmed but on Tuesday flew what the commander of the USS Donald Cook deemed to be a simulated attack profile. The Cook's commander judged the actions unsafe and unprofessional, the official said, but the ship took no action.

via bigstory.ap.org

In fact, these Russian antics are somewhat a sign of weakness on the Russian's part. They really can't do anything to stop USS Donald Cook from operating in their back yard, so they throw a bit of a tantrum.

The Army's first female infantry recruit, a 25-year-old police officer from Louisiana, will report to basic training next year.

Tammy Grace Barnett took the oath of enlistment Thursday at Military Entrance Processing Station Shreveport. She plans to serve in military occupational specialty 11X, one of a series of MOSs that opened to women April 1.

via www.armytimes.com

14 months in the DEP pool is a looooong time. Normally, the Army tries to ship you out in 3 months or less, unless you're a high school senior, in which case the window is up to 9 months.

We simultaneously are appalled at the thought of women in the Infantry, and wish Ms. Barnett the best of luck at Ft. Benning. But if she thinks it's anything like police work, she's in for a bit of a rude shock.

Seeing the public relations success of the movie Top Gun for the Navy, when Hollywood approached the Army about a similar film for Army aviation, the rotorheads signed on. It was… well, less than good.

I’ll admit I didn’t actually know these existed.

One of the challenges when training people in the Army (or Marines) is getting them over the “buck fever” of the first time they launch a man portable missile.  In my day, it was the M47 Dragon anti-tank guided missile.  The Dragon launch environment was, well, energetic, as it were. The Semi-Automatic Command to Line of Sight (SACLOS) guidance system was very sensitive to even the smallest movement of the launcher. Combine that with the loud blast of the launch motor, and the significant shift in weight as the missile left the tube, it was very easy for a first time shooter to accidentally guide the missile right into the ground almost immediately. And since guided missiles are pretty dang expensive, you can never afford to do nearly as many live fire exercises as you might wish. And so simulators and training aids of various types are used to train up troops prior to any live fire.

The Dragon, interestingly, had not one, but two different launch trainers. One had a chamber in the back that accepted a grenade launcher round of 7.62mm caliber (kind of like a superpowered blank round, used to fire rifle grenades from the M14). When it fired, it shifted a weight inside the trainer, that simulated the shift a gunner would feel on a real shot. The trainer was connected to an analog computer that measured how well the gunner tracked a special IR emitting target board for 10 seconds. It was surprisingly hard to do well.

But let’s face it, no 7.62mm round is going to accurately simulate a missile launch. And so there was another tracking/launch effect simulator. It wasn’t used as much, as it was much more complicated, but it was very, very good at simulating the launch environment.

The other LES looked like an empty missile tube. Frangible paper/fiber discs were used to close off the ends of the tube.  Then a careful mixture of MAP gas and oxygen were pumped into the tube. When the gunner squeezed the trigger, a spark plug ignited the gas. Now, I don’t know how much you know about MAP gas, but a wee bit of that and some pure oxygen burns pretty damn fast. Like, virtually instantaneously. The explosion would render the paper/fiber discs to mere confetti, and the gunner was treated to an environment with a whole lot of noise and flame. In fact, the MAP-LES was actually something more energetic than launching an actual Dragon. If you could fire it accurately, the real deal wasn’t a big issue.

Being an old Dragon gunner, I sure wish I’d had one of these instead of the Dragon. More than twice the range, fire and forget, and a very, very small launch signature, meant that you have a very good chance of surviving using a Javelin. Dragon… not so much.