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By now you may have heard that small explosive went off in front of the Army recruiting center in Time Square during the very-early morning hours. Reading through the New York Times coverage of the event left me with a few questions about who the folks were that they interviewed to get some choice reaction statements to the explosion:
“I felt the building shaking, and then a second after, I heard the explosion,” said Mercy Sepulveda, who was visiting on business from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and was staying on the 10th floor of the hotel. “It sounded like a gas tank exploding. And that was it. Ten minutes later I heard the police…”
Admittedly, I don’t spend much time down in Ft. Lauderdale, I can’t really deal with the humidity, but I do have to ask, do they have a large amount of gas tank explosions down there? Enough that Mercy would be familiar with the sound?
Next up we have Maggie from DC:
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Remember when I wrote about the armed robots patrolling the streets in Iraq? Well, it might be time to start worrying about those machines.
Here’s the deal: “Many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger.” Well, one of these robots, owned and operated by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), didn’t quite wait for a human to pull the trigger and started blasting away on its own.
During a shooting exercise, where they were using live ammo, an Oerlikon GDF-005, designed to take down airplanes and other small, low-flying air crafts, went out of control, firing “hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells” which killed 9 and injured 14 others.
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Well, the CIA technically unveiled it last week, but since the project began in 1957, I figure covering the story 4 days after it happens sure beats waiting 50 years to talk about it.
Anyway, last week at CIA headquarters, down in Langley, VA, the A-12 spy plane, codenamed Oxcart was unveiled to the public and put on display.
According to the CIA the A-12 has not been used in a mission since 1968 and was primarily used for spying on the Soviet Union and North Korea. In fact in 1967 the plane snapped some pictures of North Korea proving that they did not have any surface-to-surface missiles and alleviating fears of an escalation and also pictures of the USS Pueblo in a North Korean port 3 days after it was seized.
Although the A-12 was the precursor to the SR-71, many of the technologies it employed proved to be more advanced then the later planes and, although not stated anywhere in the articles, the technology of the A-12 has probably led to innovations currently in use today with modern spy planes (otherwise why would they have waited until 1988 to even acknowledge the program existed and until 2007 to declassify documents related to the program?).
The plane itself was pretty impressive, able to fly at over 3 times the speed of sound, withstand temperatures over 600 degrees and fly above 90,000 feet. From the height the plane was flying it was apparently possible to see the curvature of the Earth, while simultaneously snapping detailed land shots.
Although the plane was meant to replace the U-2 spy plane (which is still being used) it never fully did. Only 15 of these planes were ever commissioned. Of those 5 or 6 (depending on the source) have been destroyed and of the 9 or 10 remaining, one we know is at Langley and another is on the USS Intrepid. You can read some declassified CIA files about the Oxcart here on the CIA website or check out the article published by AFP “CIA unveils Cold War Spy Plane.”
I just thought it was all so fitting with Josh’s post about the cost of fighter planes and fighter pilots. I was also going to comment on the CIA taking 50 years to release any information on the project, but I got distracted and my ranting and criticism got drained out of me.
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One of the latest army rah rah commercials has some young polished pilot talking about how the most sophisticated piece of machinery he’d ever driven at home was a tractor and now, in the army, he’s piloting a multi-million-dollar plane.
These commercials imply that by entrusting these soldiers with expensive equipment, the army holds them in equal worth. “I drive a million-dollar tank/plane/whatever” so I must be worth millions.
Well, that’s certainly idiotic. Army machinery costs so much for a couple of reasons: reliability and greed. There was an episode of the West Wing in which a staffer questions the need of an army ash tray to cost hundreds of dollars. A colonel (guest star Kevin Bacon, I think) smashes the tray and it breaks into a few neat pieces instead of turning into dozens of shards. The point: that these items are made much better than typical retail items in order to save lives.
But in a military whose high-level procurement officers face a simple conflict of interest (the lure of lucrative post-military employment in private industry), it’s not hard to imagine that military equipment is routinely overpriced. That million dollar plane doesn’t mean anything.
Moreover, if one wants to be truly cynical, if you were a government supplier who would you want piloting your plane? A grizzled veteran or some farm boy? The more planes we lose, the more the army will need to replace…
If anybody handed me millions of dollars in hardware to “pilot” I’d be looking around the table to make sure I’m not the sucker. Maybe I’m wrong to find these commercials insulting to the intelligence of impressionable young Americans. I think there are several good reasons to join our armed forces, but the price of the hardware you’ll be using strikes me as an appeal to callow egos…not a good reason at all.
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From Super Soldier we move to Super Spy:
Yesterday was the birthday of one of America’s top female spies, she would have been 95. Monday marked the three year anniversary of her passing.
In 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Julia McWilliams attempted to join the Navy, but was turned down because of her height (at 6′2″, she was deemed to tall). Following her rejection from the Navy she joined the US Office of Strategic Services (the agency that, essentially, gave birth to the CIA).
During her time at the OSS Julia McWilliams worked in DC as a file clerk (she also helped develop a shark repellent), Sri Lanka and China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat. While in the OSS she also met her husband Paul Child, they married in 1946 and moved to France in 1948.
We are all the more fortunate for their move to France, as Julia Child describes her first meal in Rouen as a Culinary revelation. 3 short years later, after attending Le Cordon Bleu cooking school and studying under some master chefs, Child and two of her friends were teaching cooking classes out of their kitchens and working on a French cook book for Americans. Unfortunately it took 10 years before the book got published, but, once it did, she was a hit.
As we all know, Julia Child became a cooking icon, possibly one of the first celebrity chefs, with a plethora of books, cooking shows, magazine articles and guest appearances, almost everybody knows who Julia Child is. Oh yeah, and in 1981 she founded the American Institute of Wine and Food, you know, in her spare time.
