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USA Today has an article that would lead you to believe that a couple of folks all but defrauded the government by taking advantage of a recruiting referral bonus program.

WASHINGTON — The Army paid a Texas couple nearly $4 million for supplying it with names of recruits who may have enlisted without their help, part of a bonus program blasted by a leading senator as a “mind-blowing” waste of taxpayer money, according to interviews and documents.

The Army’s Referral Bonus Program — hatched in 2006 during the darkest days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and buried in 2009 — paid as much as $2,000 per recruit. It mirrored a National Guard program so plagued with kickbacks that more than 800 soldiers have fallen under criminal investigations in the last few years, according to Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the financial and contracting oversight subcommittee.

Military investigators branded the scheme “sleazy but legal,” McCaskill wrote in a letter to top Pentagon officials.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Please note, recruiters themselves were not the recipients of bonuses. Recruiters receive their base pay, allowances for housing and rations, and incentive pay for special duty. They are not eligible for bonuses specifically to remove the temptation to recruit unethically.

In this case, Rene Agosto and his wife Vanesssa were smart enough to read what the bonus program entailed, and, being good entrepreneurs, implemented a business plan that maximized profit for minimal effort. It’s certainly not their fault the US government decided to offer a bonus to people referring others for enlistment.

Was the bonus referral program a good idea? I dunno. In 2006, at the worst of the Iraq War, recruiting was facing some pretty significant challenges. The Army already had to relax standards somewhat to bring in enough manpower.

As to Sen. McCaskill’s claim that the people referred by the Agosto’s would have joined anyway, I have my doubts. One of the greatest challenges recruiters had was developing quality contact information on prospects. Yes, there is already an Army website that does essentially that. How effective it was in the 2006-2009 timeframe, I don’t know. I do know that it was wholly ineffective during my timeframe in my locale. And obviously, the Agosto’s were finding quite a few valid prospects to forward to recruiters, or they’d not have received such a payout.

The Air Force has always treated its helicopter community as the red-headed stepchildren of the service- you know, not real pilots. That is, until a real pilot is shot down and wants someone to haul him back to the O-Club in time for Happy Hour. Riddle me this… how brave do you have to be to fly a lumbering helicopter into the same air defense environment that tagged a supersonic strike jet?

Let us call the roll of national badasses: the 75th Ranger Regiment, USMC Force Reconnaissance, the SEALS, Delta Force . . . James Taylor?

What sort of warriors does a weary nation facing a savage enemy turn to? “The Quiet Professionals,” “Semper Fidelis,” “Death from Above” . . .

via Brigadier General James Taylor? | National Review Online.

I grow weary of critiquing the US foreign policy under the current so-called administration. It’s simply too depressing most of the time. Kevin D. Williamson, however, at least makes the train wreck entertaining.

Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is smashing records at the North American box office, where it topped Friday’s chart with $30.5 million from 3,555 theaters for a debut in the $75 million-$80 million range over the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, well ahead of expectations.

That would mark the largest opening of all time for the month of January, as well as one of the top grosses ever for a non-tentpole, much less an R-rated, modern-day war film.

via Box-Office Shocker: ‘American Sniper’ Tops Friday With $30.5M, Could Approach $80M – The Hollywood Reporter.

How is it that Hollywood is continually surprised that films that are patriotic or portray Americans, particularly servicemembers, in a positive light are highly successful. They’re always shocked that films that trash the military, such as In the Valley of Elah get fantastic reviews, but top out with a box office gross of just over $6 million?

As part of a broader project of land reclamation, beginning in November China started efforts to develop Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands. As of late November the reef had been built up to 3,000 meters long and between two and three hundred wide. This makes it large enough, in the assessment of analysts with IHS Jane’s and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, to argue that China’s first airstrip in the Spratly Islands might be under development. China already has a growing airfield on Woody Island in the Paracels a several hundred miles north, and this would not be the first airstrip in the Spratly Islands; Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysia all have airstrips of their own. If a runway is truly planned for Fiery Cross Reef, what does this mean for the region’s security environment?

via Another Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier.

The addition of fixed wing aviation facilities in the Spratley Islands would indeed greatly increase China’s influence in the region, though with some powerful caveats.

As an ISR and logistical outpost, it would have great value in peacetime, and in times of heightened tensions.

But in time of actual conflict, it would likely quickly become a liability. As the Japanese learned time and again in the Pacific, the great disadvantage of any island airfield is that the attacker gets to chose the time and place of his strike. For instance, in World War II, carrier raids on fixed Japanese installations were a viable tactic as early as February 1942, when the US Navy in the Pacific was at its ebb.

Today, such a raid wouldn’t even come from a carrier. Instead, submarine launched Tomahawk missiles would be used to suppress Fiery Cross Reef. One strike might not render the field unusable, but repeated strikes would quickly render the costs of maintaining it untenable.

Airfields ashore on the mainland suffer some of the same issues, but generally benefit from greater defensive depth, mutual support from other airfields, greater radar coverage and other sensor depth, and greater ability to disperse critical assets.

A lonely strip within range of any naval forces, however, is incredibly vulnerable.

According to many news articles, the Falcon 9 landing on 1/10/2015 was due to running out of hydraulic fluid for the steerable hypersonic grid fins. This was seemingly confirmed the Musk’s tweet “Upcoming flight already has 50% more hydraulic fluid, so should have plenty of margin for landing attempt next month.”

Why, oh why, do the fins consume hydraulic fluid?? Hydraulic fluid is normally used in a closed system that only consumes the fluid via leaks, right? Are the leaks due to temperature changes so bad, and so unsolvable, that the only solution is to just have more in reserve?

via spacex – Why does the Falcon 9 consume hydraulic fluid? – Space Exploration Stack Exchange.

Click through for a lesson on rocket science, and why an open hydraulic system makes sense here, and is actually a fairly elegant engineering solution.