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Via VA Viper.

In this age of digital media, I still love the plain old paperback.

It’s said that two things about war are insufficiently appreciated by those who, like me, have not known it first-hand: 1) It is, when not terrifying, mostly dull, and 2) it is, like all human enterprises, subject to the operation of the law of unintended consequences. Few aspects of World War II better illustrate both of these points than the Armed Services Editions publishing project. Between 1943 and 1947, the U.S. Army and Navy distributed some 123 million newly printed paperback copies of 1,322 different books to American servicemen around the world. These volumes, which were given out for free, were specifically intended to entertain the soldiers and sailors to whom they were distributed, and by all accounts they did so spectacularly well. But they also transformed America’s literary culture in ways that their wartime publishers only partly foresaw—some of which continue to be felt, albeit in an attenuated fashion, to this day.

Molly Guptill Manning tells the story of the ASEs in the informative if lightweight When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II. All who read it will be awed by the industry of the men and women who published the books, most of whom donated their services for free. (The authors and publishers of the reprints split a one-cent royalty on every paperback copy.)

Our own deployment for Desert Shield/Desert Storm saw lots of reading. While our books were donated by private groups, rather than through ASE, we managed to read everything Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey ever wrote. We read a few bodice rippers, reread the Great Gatsby (which we’ve hated from the first time we read it in AmLit in high school) and a gazillion other titles.

I have no real idea why I found this video interesting. Maybe it’s my ongoing fascination with institutional food, or flight, or whatever.

True story, bro. I’ve only ever been upgraded from coach one time. It was on a flight from  OAK to SFO.

Mabus has a lot of nutty social engineering ideas he’s foisting upon the Navy. And that’s bad.

But he is right on this:

“If you want to look at real money, 20 percent of the Pentagon budget — 20 percent, one dollar out of every five — is spent on the ‘fourth estate'[:] the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the defense agencies, the organizations run by the undersecretaries,” Mabus told the audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Pure overhead. Pure overhead. And they’ve grown far faster than the services.”

“There’s this thing called DFAS, Defense Finance and Accounting Service,” Mabus continued. “They write our checks. We tell them who to write the checks to, we tell them how to write them for, and they write the checks. Last year they charged us $300 million” for that service. (DFAS is a “working capital” agency funded largely by fees paid by other parts of the Defense Department).

The growth of DoD, which really began under McNamara, has turned what used to be a flawed, often wasteful duplication of effort in procurement and sustainment into a sclerotic, flawed, often wasteful duplication of effort in procurement and sustainment.

Of course, Mabus can’t help but Mabus, and defend the LCS against OT&E. Sadly, while OT&E is a mess, on LCS they’re  correct. How the Navy convinced Congress to pay for these things is a mystery.

Much has been made about the ability of ISIS to master social media to recruit and broadcast their victories. But the U.S. Air Force is turning the militant group’s eagerness to share on social media into that intelligence that produces targets.

Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle, head of Air Combat Command, described Monday how airmen at Hurlburt Field, Florida, with the 361st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group, recognized a comment on social media and turned that into an airstrike that resulted in three Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) missiles destroying am Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) headquarters building.

“It was a post on social media to bombs on target in less than 24 hours,” Carlisle said. “Incredible work when you think about.”

Carlisle was careful not to share all of the Air Force’s secrets to include the location of the building but this is how he told the story at the recent breakfast meeting in Washington D.C. hosted by the Air Force Association.

via US Air Force Targets and Destroys ISIS HQ Building Using Social Media | Defense Tech.

The flip side of the coin is, of course, the enemy trying to exploit our troops social media for actionable intelligence. That’s why you have to do that boring training on OPSEC.

USNI News interviews Smashing Pumkins singer Billy Corrigan about his new drive to support veterans issues.

This on regards UPS 1354 that crashed at Birmingham in 2013.

Congress was notified of a potential sale of four Northrop Grumman E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes and supporting equipment to Japan, State Department officials told USNI News on Tuesday.

The four information, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, extra engines and radars are part of a $1.7 billion foreign military sales (FMS) case to add the Advanced Hawkeyes to the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force’s (JMSDF) fleet of existing E-2C Hawkeyes.

via Congress Notified of Potential $1.7B E-2D Advanced Hawkeye Sale to Japan – USNI News.

Japan has an unusually robust Airborne Early Warning and Control fleet. For instance, in addition to the existing dozen or so E-2Cs they fly, they also have four E-767s, which are similar to our E-3C Sentry, but based on the Boeing 767 airliner airframe.