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This is another look at the sea-based logistics response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010, particularly the port opening and amphibious elements.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere but after decades of poor governance it was starting to pull itself out from that dubious title. The USA had a number of interests in the country; it was a major source of mass migration, had many areas of weak governance that were a haven for drugs transhipment activities and former President Bill Clinton had only recently been appointed UN Special Envoy to the country.

via The Sea Based Logistics Response to the Haiti Earthquake – Think Defence.

As usual, Think Defense does a splendid job of examining an issue, in this case the humanitarian response to the catastrophic earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010.

Our military does logistics pretty dang well, by and large. But the fact is, it does so in a relatively small volume compared to civilian industry. The advantage the military logistical system has is that it is less reliant on infrastructure and degrades more gracefully in the face of failures.

TD takes a look at some of the lesser known aspects of logistics, such as hydrographic survey, that allowed our military to begin to open Haiti back up, and at the shortcomings military logistics face in such a humanitarian challenge.

There are plenty of interesting pictures and graphics.

One interesting thought that I don’t think TD addressed. I don’t know, but I strongly suspect that over the last decade and a half the military has gotten much better at working with other government agencies, and with non-governmental agencies, to integrate operations such as this.

Spill tipped me to this neat slideshow by Harry Hillaker reviewing how General Dynamics (now part of Lockheed Martin) came to configure the YF-16 they way they did.  It is easy to forget just how radical the F-16 appeared when it first flew. Features such as the reclined pilot’s seat and its canopy were considered avant garde. That’s to say nothing of the digital fly by wire system.

Go flip through the whole slideshow.  Most of it is digestible even for the layman. Aviation types will surely enjoy it as well.

We have written a lot over the years about the repeated violations of the Espionage Act by New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. They gave me a lot to work with in 2006. I wrote a January 2006 column for the Weekly Standard, for example, that the Standard titled “Exposure.” (I reposted it on Power Line last year under the heading “Is the Times a law unto itself?” in the context of Risen’s refusal to testify in the Espionage Act case brought against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling.)

Later that year Risen and Lichtblau blew the highly classified SWIFT terrorist finance tracking program in their Times story “Bank data is sifted by U.S. in secret to block terror.” In addition to its illegality under the Espionage Act, in my opinion, the story was an act of wanton destruction with no arguable public purpose.

Senator Tom Cotton was then a lieutenant serving in Baghdad. He copied us on a letter to the editor of the New York Times about Risen and Lichtblau’s June 2006 story blowing the SWFT program. The Times didn’t publish it, but we did.

via Nine years later, Tom Cotton’s letter to the Times | Power Line.

Rolling Stone is rightfully getting pummelled in the news today. But don’t for a second think it is the only mendacious news outlet. Read the rest of the story over at Powerline.

Just as we have seen with African-Americans, women, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, an important piece of the equal rights fight in the United States is allowing people who were previously denied access to the military in — integrating troops, serving in combat and openly being able to serve one’s country.

via Commentary: Give deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans a chance to serve.

Can we just STAHP! with the social engineering for one brief moment?

The military does not exist to provide a social platform for every grievance community. It exists to fight wars.

There’s this fellow in Washington State, who goes by a number of names, but his real name is Hugh Clarence Johnson. Some of his “also known as” monikers are; Hubert Clarence Johnson aka Hugh Clearence Johnson aka Hugh Clarence Johnson aka Hugh Johnson aka Hugh Jonson aka Clarence H. Jonson aka C H Johnson aka Hugo C. Johnson. He was arrested a few months ago for practicing holistic medicine without a license, according to the Whidbey Island, Washington News-Times;

via Hugh Clarence Johnson; holistic phony : This ain’t Hell, but you can see it from here.

I saw this story in the Whidbey News Times, but didn’t really do more than skim it. But Jonn, of course, caught the whole Stolen Valor angle.

As Jonn has long noted, Stolen Valor is a sypmtom, not the disease. It is almost never a harmless crime, as there is virtually always some underlying fraud. This Johnson creep might be one of the more egregious examples, but there’s always something behind the lies.
Oak Harbor (where I grew up) is a Navy town, home to NAS Whidbey Island. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an active or retired sailor. How this dipshit thought he could get away with this, when half the city knows the uniform regulations, is beyond me.

Kudos to OHPD and the Whidbey News-Times (which I used to deliver).

The amenities of civilized life are few and far between for the combat arms soldier deployed to Afghanistan. So it’s no surprise that this platoon doesn’t let a little thing like a Taliban attack spoil their steak grilling.

One suspects that the cook, really is a cook, a 92G.

From the always valuable Funkers 350.