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The Iran Nuclear Deal
Welp, chalk up another stunning foreign diplomacy victory for the Obama administration. He’s successfully negotiated with a country we’ve been unable to deal with diplomatically since 1979.*
Of course, the problem is, the Obama/Kerry foreign policy brain trust reached this historic agreement with Iran by simply capitulating to virtually every Iranian demand.
Worse still, our own Republican controlled United States Senate has jiggered the rules to make it virtually impossible for the Congress to halt implementation of this agreement.
One of the first effects of the deal will be the lifting of sanctions on Iran, which will result in an immediate cash infusion of about $100 billion dollars into the Iranian economy. You’ll note that the administration claims this money will go solely to improving Iran’s economy. Well, yeah, maybe. Some will undoubtedly go to funding terrorist proxies that are fighting the US and its allies. And of course, the secondary effects of an improvement in the Iranian economy include increased internal stability in Iran (lo for the days when the US might have actually supported the nascent Green Revolution and weakened or overturned the ayatollahs regime) and of course, since money is fungible, the already existing outlays by Iran to support terror will have even less domestic impact on their economy. That is, if they can afford to support terror while under economic sanctions, how will improving their economy make it harder for them to continue to export terror?
Europe, of course, is willing to go along with this, as they suspect that a fair percentage of these billions of dollars will be spent buying from Europe. And Europe is so desperate to support their own social welfare programs that taking Iranian money makes sense to them, particularly as they labor under the misconception that the United States is and perpetually will continue to be the guarantor of their security.
Iran for its part, once in possession of nuclear weapons, need not actually employ them to achieve their foreign policy goals. Much as Pakistan and North Korea intuited, mere possession of a valid nuclear force renders any possibility of invasion moot. Far from this agreement steering Iran to enter the fold of the nations of the world, it gives Iran a shield from behind which to further attack its neighbors and adversaries.
Of course, a nuclear armed Iran poses an existential threat to many nations in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia. A nuclear arms race is virtually guaranteed, and we already know that Saudi Arabia is likely to simply purchase weapons off the shelf from Pakistan, whose program they are widely thought to have helped finance in the first place. Other nations in the Gulf might similarly procure weapons. And as anyone who has studies nuclear proliferation and nuclear war strategy quickly finds, the risk of a nuclear power making a decision to use a nuclear weapon goes up very quickly as the number of possessor nations increases. Sooner or later, instability or poor strategic decision making leads a “player” in the nuclear game to the conclusion that using nuclear weapons is a better option than not using them. When that eventually comes to pass, there will be no telling where it may end.
But hey, Obama and Kerry get to tout a major foreign policy accomplishment, establishing an enduring legacy of accomplishment. And that’s really the important thing here.
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Tu-95 Bear Bomber Crashes Near Russia’s Border With China – USNI News
A Russian Air Force strategic bomber has crashed outside the city of Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border, according to a Tuesday statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense via local media.
The Tupolev Tu-95MS Bear bomber went down during a training flight about 50 miles away from the headquarters of the Russian Eastern Military District, according to the statement provided to the TASS wire service..
“On July 14 at 9:50 A.M. Moscow time [2:50 EST] the Tu-95MS aircraft crashed while performing a scheduled training flight some 80 kilometers from Khabarovsk. The crew ejected,” the ministry said.
“According to preliminary information, after a report by the crew’s commander about an emergency situation, the flight control head ordered the crew to leave the plane by parachutes. The search and rescue groups are looking for the plane’s crewmembers.”
via Tu-95 Bear Bomber Crashes Near Russia’s Border With China – USNI News.
The Russians have always had an atrocious safety record, in both civil and military aviation. And they’ve certainly not recovered from the devastation of the forces in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
That’s not to say they have no combat capability, but they certainly don’t have the capability they once had. Even with the increased operational tempo of the last couple years, training in the Russian Air Force is far below the standards of most Western forces.
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Offensive Aerial Mining
The Air Force was sending a bit of an obvious message to Russia. The Baltic nations are a tad nervous about the expansionistic foreign policy of Russia right now. Russia probably has the capability to overrun the Baltics. But Russia also has some vulnerabilities, such as its dependence on the Baltic Sea for commerce and defense. And the Baltic Sea is particularly vulnerable to interdiction by an offensive mining campaign.
Aerial delivery of mines in World War II was practiced by virtually all sides, particularly in Europe, with Germany attempting to interdict British ports, and Britain similarly attempting to shut down German U-boats.
Possibly the most effective mining campaign in history was the use of B-29s to shut down Japanese shipping in its home waters near the end of the war. Operation Starvation laid a series of minefields around Japan that accounted for an astonishing 670 ships sunk or damaged for the cost of only 12,000 or so mines, and the loss of only 15 B-29s.
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The Dunker
Pave Low John and I got to talking about underwater egress training for helicopter crews.
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One of the dozens of training courses that rotary-wing aircrew have to endure during their career is underwater egress training, also known as the infamous “Dunker Training”. The initial course is usually a day of academics and pool training, with annual refresher training scheduled once a year, usually at the base swimming pool. The reason this training is so important is because a helicopter crew that crashes into the water will almost always survive the actual crash. It’s during the egress from the sinking helicopter itself that most crewmembers are killed. I used to fly with an older flight engineer named Pat Hogan who was the sole survivor of an Air Force HH-3 Jolly Green that drifted back into the ocean off Okinawa during night water operations. He doesn’t even remember how he got out, he just got lucky. So crashing in the water, especially at night, was a situation that crews needed to be trained and equipped to handle.
With regards to equipment, the Air Force provided LPUs and HEEDS bottles for any aircrew that planned to fly beyond autorotational distance from shore. If you flew from a base next to the ocean, though, you wore them on every mission. LPUs were collapsible water-wings that were inflated by CO2 cartridges when you pulled a lanyard. They were bright orange and would keep you afloat even while wearing all your flight gear. However, you had to wait until you actually egressed the helicopter before you activated your LPUs or you would most definitely go down with the sinking aircraft. The HEEDs bottle was nothing more than a miniature SCUBA bottle with a mouthpiece regulator that fit in a holster on your survival vest. If you hit the water, you placed the HEEDS bottle in your mouth and it would provide at least a minute or two of air while you got untangled and exited your newly converted submarine. With a HEEDS bottle, you stood a much better chance of getting out of the helicopter. However, all of this required that you not panic and stay calm during a very stressful situation. Hence the one-day block of hands-on training in a semi-realistic environment.
This video, titled “Seconds to Live”, was the official training video that the USAF has been using as long as I can remember for aircrew underwater egress training. I suppose the Army and Navy have their own videos, but this is the only one I saw during my twenty years as an aviator. There are plenty of other videos on Youtube that show aircrew going through the training in a controlled pool environment. The “Dunker” itself is just a giant beer-can with seats in it that is lowered into the water while it rotates upside-down (helicopter are top-heavy, due to the main gear box and the engines, and roll over as they sink). It wasn’t until I attended initial training at NAS Jacksonville that I realized that most people dreaded the “Dunker”.
Being lucky enough to grow up next to a lake in NC, I had grown up swimming, jet-skiing, water-skiing, white-water rafting, you name it. Outside of being a water-polo player, I was about as comfortable in the water as one could be. However, some of the people in my class were not very comfortable in the water (we even had a bunch of helicopter mechanics from Ft Rucker in my class that flat-out admitted they joined the Army because they didn’t like swimming. Oops). Let’s just say it is a good thing they have divers on duty in the pool to pull people out if they start panicking or they would have killed half the class. You have to do five egresses and the last two have to be with the lights off to simulate a night ditching event. I didn’t have any problems but I saw some folks absolutely freak out when they dropped the big can into the water with the lights out. They make you keep doing it until you pass, so everyone passed, in the end.
The refresher training for us was much milder, you sit in a floating cage made of PVC pipe and just unlock your simulated harness and get out of that, all in your friendly local base pool. I had heard that the Navy made their guys use the underwater egress simulator a lot more, being overwater to a greater extent than Air Force rotor-heads. The Air Force probably should have done that as well, but remember, we are talking about the Air Force here. No reason to make it too painful, right?
All in all, I kind of enjoyed “Dunker Training”, it was the kind of stuff I imagined doing when I was growing up and dreaming of being a military pilot. However, I can definitely see why people that were not strong swimmers would dread it and I commend everyone that went through the course without tapping out, even as they hated every second of it.
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XBrad- It’s a very real world problem. Here’s a scenario. An H-46 conducting Vertical Replenishment from the USNS Spica loses an engine while lifting a sling load and in hover out of ground effect. It’s able to immediately ditch the sling load, and get over the water, but settles into the water. The normally amphibious Sea Knight should have been able to move forward into translational lift, but the failure of the belly hatch meant the cabin filled with water. Watch just how fast the helo sinks.
In this case, all crewmen escaped (using both their LPUs and HEED).
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US soldiers evaluate potential upgrades to Bradley fighting vehicles – Army Technology
US Army soldiers with Company A, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Armoured Brigade Combat Team, and 1st Cavalry Division, have evaluated a new capability that enhances the situational awareness for crew members of the M2A3 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.
Designed by the Army Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), the capability will be installed into existing armoured vehicles to provide troopers inside a 360° picture of their surroundings.
Currently, soldiers riding in the back of an M2A3 Bradley are exposed immediately to threats as soon as they dismount.
via US soldiers evaluate potential upgrades to Bradley fighting vehicles – Army Technology.
Back in the Stone Age when I was a dismount, there simply was zero situational awareness for the dismount squad in the back of a Bradley. Theoretically, there was an intercom system that the dismounts could plug into to talk to the vehicle crew. In practice, plugging more people into the intercom led to a loss of signal, and made crew communications difficult. At best, when the vehicle came to a stop, the Bradley Commander would duck down and shout into the troop compartment whether to dismount to the left or the right.
There are half a dozen or so vision blocks in the troop compartment, but their field of view is terribly limited at best, and often blocked by equipment strapped to the outside of the vehicle.
Of course, the addition of tablets like these to improve the situational awareness of the dismounts comes at a cost. First, it’s one more thing to have to learn to operate, and to maintain. The troop compartment is exposed to temperature extremes, excessive dust, and severe vibration. The troop compartment is also bumping up against volume constraints- it’s not very big back there. That’s to say nothing about the limits of electrical generation available on the vehicle. There is very little room for growth left on the Bradley.
Still, this seems to be a viable method of increasing the capability of the vehicle and its symbiotic relationship with its dismount squad.
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F-35B Begins New ‘Operational Readiness Inspection’ This Week Before IOC Decision – USNI News
PENTAGON – The Marine Corps added one final test before deciding whether to declare initial operational capability for the Lockheed Martin F-35B Joint Strike Fighter (JSF): a first-ever Operational Readiness Inspection.
The ORI for the first F-35B squadron, Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 121, is scheduled to begin today and will last four or five days. An inspection team – with members from Headquarters Marine Corps, the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1) school and the Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron (VMFA-T) 501 – will “assess them from a maintenance perspective, a sustainment perspective and an operations perspective,” deputy commandant for aviation Lt. Gen. Jon Davis told USNI News on July 8.
“We have a team of about 12 people going out to assess everything from maintenance to NATOPS (Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization) knowledge,” he said.
“There’s 10 items on a Commander of Naval Air Forces inspection, maintenance inspection; we’re going to go out and out of those 10 say, give us these five. And then we’ll look and if there’s problems with those five we’ll go deeper.”
via F-35B Begins New ‘Operational Readiness Inspection’ This Week Before IOC Decision – USNI News.
This isn’t really an inspection of the F-35, but rather the squadron itself, VMFA-121. Are the people trained to do their jobs? Does the squadron have all the people it needs? Can they maintain the aircraft? Do they have a spare parts inventory?
And ORIs, or similar variously named inspections, are a regular feature of military life. Some are more realistic than others, but all are geared toward finding the real readiness level of a unit to fulfill its mission.
One of the things about introducing a new platform into operational service is that no matter how much testing you put into a system, it isn’t until it reaches the fleet that the tactics, techniques and procedures that will be used to fight it can really be developed. Most of the testing of a platform before it reaches the fleet is technical. It is the fleet squadrons that have the wide user base coupled with experimentation and innovation that find the best practices for using a system.
Does that mean initial operations will be easy? Or even fully successful? No. Most platforms, even after exhaustive testing, suffer some shortcomings in initial service. We’re talking about extremely complex systems that are operated and maintained by guys in the late teens and early twenties. There will always be problems.
I’m aghast at the stupendous cost of the F-35B, and Marines insistence on a STOVL variant fundamentally compromised the entire JSF program. But for all that, I strongly suspect the F-35 will continue to evolve into an effective attack aircraft.
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Woosh!
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“…I didn’t belong in their neighborhood because I was white…”
ABC Local carried the story. Which, with the skin color reversed, would be weeks in the national headlines. But it is just whitey. So…. nary a peep from the Race-baiter in Chief, or from the Justice for Michael Brown Department. Or from Al “Tawana Brawley” Sharpton.
Police say two people were arrested and charged, but Susan Pedersen says several dozen people were involved in the attack that left her two children covered in broken glass. They were in the back seat of the vehicle, which was left dented with the rear glass shattered.
“I’m very scared, very anxious, nervous. Just fearful,” she said.
Broken glass littered the pavement at 60th and King Drive across from Washington Park, where the attack took place around 9 p.m. Thursday night. Pedersen says she had just dropped off a friend at the University of Chicago when she stopped at a red light and found her car surrounded by several dozen young people.
“They were walking around both sides of the vehicle – in the front, in the back – and as they were walking across, they were hitting my car, using racial slurs and telling me that I didn’t belong in their neighborhood because I was white,” Pedersen said.
The group, all African-American, she says, kicked the vehicle and shook it violently. Her children were screaming from the back of the vehicle.
Racism? Dat only be dem white folk. Had that been a black woman with her children and had that happen in a “white” neighborhood, Bath House Barry would have taken time out from pandering to Iran and the Islamists and ensuring transgenders are allowed into the Armed Forces to lecture us all from on high about race. The usual suspects and paid protesters would be in those streets in mob fashion, destroying property and threatening lives and livelihoods. All somehow justified, in the eyes of Obama and the “black community” for such an egregious affront.
But, since it is a white woman, nary a peep. Since Obama’s children don’t look like that. Despicable hypocrites, all. ALL of them, white and black, who search for outrage to blame on racism, and invent it when necessary. I spose we can look on the bright side. There is a good chance that those bullying and bigoted punks will end up dead. And they will be killed by other blacks. Good enough for them. Karma. It’s a bitch. Even with your drawers around your knees.
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New Horizons rendezvous with Pluto
Tomorrow is the close encounter between the New Horizons spacecraft and the ninth planet. I read that this mission was inspired by the 1991 space exploration stamp series.
Stamps were 29 cents back then. Nice to know this is outdated in more ways than one.
This is a flyby like the Voyager missions, not an orbiting mission. A computer glitch a few days ago has been resolved, and more pictures are being sent back to Earth.
This is the far side of Pluto, from 2.5 million miles away.
What we know so far:
New Horizons was launched in 2006 and is moving at an Earth-relative speed of 36,373 mph. It is 31.9 AU or approximately 3 billion miles away from home, and it takes the signal four and a half hours to reach Earth.Pluto’s newly estimated size [1,473 miles (2,370 kilometers) in diameter] means that its density is slightly lower than previously thought, and the fraction of ice in its interior is slightly higher. Also, the lowest layer of Pluto’s atmosphere, called the troposphere, is shallower than previously believed…
Nix and Hydra were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005. Even to Hubble, they appeared as points of light, and that’s how they looked to New Horizons until the final week of its approach to Pluto…Nix is estimated to be about 20 miles (about 35 kilometers) across, while Hydra is roughly 30 miles (roughly 45 kilometers) across. These sizes lead mission scientists to conclude that their surfaces are quite bright, possibly due to the presence of ice.
Other NASA craft are supporting this mission, including Cassini, Kepler, the SOFIA airborne observatory, and the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes.
Because of the sheer amount of data and the number of spacecraft using the Deep Space Network, it will take a year for all of the data from the flyby to reach Earth.
New Horizons will continue on to the Kuiper Belt, heading in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.
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Is the F-35 the worst fighter ever? | Fighter Sweep
Just under two weeks ago, we talked about a poorly-translated test report that gave critics of the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II ammunition to suddenly declare it the worst dogfighter ever.
In the time since that article, you can’t find an aviation-oriented website that hasn’t put its two cents in, declaring the F-35 everything from an F-4 clone, to an F-105, and even going as far as calling it a BVR failure.
via Is the F-35 the worst fighter ever? | Fighter Sweep.
TLDR- No.
But go ahead and read the whole thing.
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