I am sure it is no shock to anyone who reads this blog, but the Osprey which was recently deployed to Iraq, can't maintain combat readiness of more than 80%. Which is unacceptable. Combat Readiness is measured by the availability of the aircraft over time. The CH-47 Shithook Chinook, a multiple decade old helicopter, can maintain more than 85% and I am telling you some of those Chinooks are OLD. Yet this "State of the Art" $16 billion+ dollar troop killer can't seem to maintain even minimum levels required in Iraq.
... daily reports showed that its "readiness rates" had slipped to as low as 40 percent on one day -– 50 percent on two other days. Those lower rates were largely driven by a dearth of replacement parts when Corps officials saw how some components wore out faster in the desert climes of Iraq, where the sand is finer than almost anywhere in the U.S. -- CS Monitor
Two Ospreys were included for the first time in a well-established mission called "aeroscout," a sort of roving raid in which troops aboard helicopters search for insurgents by air. The ground troops commander scrubbed the mission when one Osprey needed to turn back to base because one of its four generators failed -- DallasNews.com
But wait taxpayers, thats not the killer. The flaw that was causing massive problems prior to deployment to combat. (Due to the engine air particle separator (blower) failing and starting fires.) Have been classified a design flaw and a permanent fix to the design of all Osprey is required. Read: 10's of millions of taxpayer dollars. This is separate from the issues coming up in this combat deployment.
DangerRoom blog over at Wired.com reports there is an upside. Due to the fact that no combat troops want to get anywhere near the freaking thing it has become Brass Taxi.
The Ospreys have become a favorite way to fly VIPs, such as generals. -- wired.com
An MV-22 Osprey helicopter caught fire during a training mission and had to land at Camp Lejuene Tuesday night, officials from Cherry Point said Wednesday.
No one was injured in the emergency landing, according to a Wednesday release from Cherry Point. The Osprey’s crew evacuated the helicopter after activating on-board fire suppression systems.
The fire started in the helicopter’s nacelle, a streamlined enclosure for an aircraft engine. Cherry Point authorities said it caused “significant damage” to the nacelle. The cause of the fire remains under investigation. -- DangerRoom
The Pentagon has its thumb up it's ass on these MRAP vehicles. They can't seem to get them bought and deployed. I guess there are not enough retired generals and golf buddies working at these truck makers yet. But they managed to deploy a swarm of Ospreys with forward units. Amazing how quick that shit happened. They only thing Rumsfeld ever did that was of any use at all was quashing this stupid Osprey program. It cropped back up like Afghani poppy production hours after he was ousted.
As the Bell-Boeing guy said when they deployed the Osprey:
"There was a feeling of great excitement and at the same time we were praying for the safety of all the Marines," Leder said.
This man wants to torture Muslims, deport Mexicans (and who gives a damn if they're here legally or not), and absolutely doesn't give a FUCK about black people, except as a way to gain political power by getting the cops to kill them now and then.
Many if not most of the deaths of 9/11 can be laid at his feet, due to his lack of emergency preparation.
Rudy really screwed the fucking pooch.
Like all Bush Republicans, Rudy's most at home telling the BIG LIE.
Take it from one who has actually worked car wreck after bus wreck after shooting after stabbing after beating after rape after home assault after child abuse after murder after motorcycle accident after train v car after helicopter crash after fire after explosion after head crushed in half after head blown off and after it all, one part becomes blindingly crystal clear...
On 9/11 Rudy was in a state of constant panic, being told what to do by his staff, with absolutely no command and control, operating out in the fucking street like a goddamn amateur, winging it.
Pro's DON'T wing it.
Rudy did, because the same radio's which had been for shit were still for shit, his fire department got blasted to hell when they couldn't talk to anyone on the shit radios, and his command center was destroyed in the one location Rudy demanded it be set up (WTC 7), overriding all rational advice and placing C&C in the same complex the bad guys had attacked before and said they'd attack again.
Rudy is running as Mr. 9/11 super-competent.
Rudy is a fake. Rudy is a liar.
Rudy is directly responsible for hundreds to thousands of deaths.
Watch the videos. Judge good ol' 9/11 Rudy for your self...
Would you really trust him with your life? Your families?
As Freddie Prinze used to say “Es no my job, man!”
In the nation's capital, an increasingly isolated President (“Buh-bye Madame Ridell Size XXL Shoulder Pads”) is finding he has fewer and fewer folks he can count on to do his bidding—outside of the hard-core group of Congressional wingnuts who pathologically can not admit the mistake of backing a petty, pissy fucknut, and their DLC (and shit-scared/accomodationist Dem) counterparts. It's a cold and lonely town for a second-termer in general. And it can get Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” lonely when you go so far as to alienate the career people at various governmental departments via one's idiocy and flat-out mismanagement.
But the news from the State Department that started breaking yesterday, and metastasized today, well...what can you say beyond “Foggy Bottom (The section of Washington D.C. where State Department HQ is located)? We've got a problem.”
A few days ago, the State Department, left with too few volunteers, announced it would to stop asking employees to go to Iraq and start ordering them to go.
Yesterday, State Department officials started pushing back.
Uneasy U.S. diplomats yesterday challenged senior State Department officials in unusually blunt terms over a decision to order some of them to serve at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or risk losing their jobs.
At a town hall meeting in the department’s main auditorium attended by hundreds of Foreign Service officers, some of them criticized fundamental aspects of State’s personnel policies in Iraq. They took issue with the size of the embassy — the biggest in U.S. history — and the inadequate training they received before being sent to serve in a war zone.
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Service in Iraq is “a potential death sentence,” said one man who identified himself as a 46-year Foreign Service veteran. “Any other embassy in the world would be closed by now,” he said to sustained applause.
It appears the Bush administration lost the hearts and minds of Iraqis, and is close to losing the hearts and minds of State Department diplomats, too.
It wasn't just a town li'l ol' meeting featuring fresh urns of Folgers and Sociables cookies. This was some ill-tempo shit that went down as State Department HQ. So ill that at the department's highest levels, they tried to suppress release of documentation of what occured. The “meeting” was broadcast internally only (within government circles), with leaks of what was said and screamed finding its way to the press. When the sun rose and reporters started asking about the fracas, State Dept. officials initially said that the video had already been broadcast, parsing the word broadcast to mean their own internal feed. But as more and more reporters started sniffing around, they had to produce it, as the stonewalling was starting to look pretty damned bad. They hemmed. They hawed. They fudged on the release time, and as the “Death Sentence” quote started to swell and stink on 'em like a dead mackerel, they reluctantly released the footage.
And the proof is in the 15 frames per second pudding...the rank and file wasn't down with it. Seriously.
It's an open rebuke of their boss “Bootsy” Rice, and the Bush Iraq policy in general. Apparently, the corps has come to the conclusion that “What the fuck good is there in going over to a place as diplomats where the government basically doesn't exist, and they can't actually leave the three-mile square area of the green zone to negotiate a tinker's damn with the bloodthirsty local warlords because they'd probably be slaughtered like pigs before cutting the dishwater-weak deals anyway?”
Not an altogether unreasonable conclusion considering the nature of life on the ground there, dontchathink?
A couple of weeks ago, I saw an episode of Hardball where Chris Matthews pretty much asked the question. “Is Condi Rice an utter bed-shit as Secretary of State?” The general consensus was “yes”, but coon-servative Ron Christie got so frantic in his defense of his beloved “Bootsy” that his eyes almost uncrossed. This recent smackdown by her underlings gives lie to Christie's dervishing and quite honestly is an utter embarassment. She didn't even show her face at the “meeting”—instead leaving it to fellow flustered flunky Harry Thomas to helm this bit of rabid cat-herding. He did his best...spluttering, fuming, and condescending before going for the full O'Reilly, when after the “Death Sentence” comment from Foreign Service Officer Croddy and the subsequent applase from all assembled, he said “"Okay, thanks for your comment," and then declared the meeting over.
It's a big-ass deal, this bird flip at Condi, and her boss's little war from these officers—the first to be forced to go into a war theater since Vietnam (That comparison again!), because it signals the continued collapse of the government's departments around an oblivious Bush. He's already lost the Justice Department, post-the Gonzales/fired prosecutors mega-gaffe. A rat locked in a barrel of cats has better morale than the DOJ does now—and now the State Department, already down on Bootsy for her seeming incompetence has effectively—and vociferously turned on all things Bushy with their forced conscription to a place where diplomacy means never turning your back on the fella you're negotiating with—even as you leave the room.
And all across Iraq-addicted wingnuttia, a cry was heard as the cri-ers nervously rolled marbles about in their sweaty, cheeto-dusted hands. From the likes of Tucker Carlson and Rep. Duncan Hunter, it rang as a hiss at the scandalous, mutinous Diplo Corps. “Cowards!”, “Reluctant Nellies!” they groused,—although to my ears it sounded a lot like the phrase “Ahh, but the strawberries! The strawberries!”
Why would the corps react so negatively to going somewhere we're supposedly winning now? I mean...what could they possibly know that we as citizens with only the media to give us the BIG picture, don't know about what's really going on over there? Are they hip to the changes in patrol-technique—namely keeping our people off the fucking streets for awhile that have brought troop deaths down a bit?
I'd say they are. I'd also say that they're pretty clear on who's being pushed to the point, and who will be on point even moreso as they'd be in country. Here are the fearsome fighters being trained to replace our soldiers while these diplomats would be there during that democracy-buttressing transition.
That's not a joke. That's who we're training, and how they're doing.
I do believe those State Dept. folks would sooner work at a desolate 24-hour sub-shop/weed spot in Anacostia than let this crew ”protect” them from so much as a stray milkweed's landing in their hair.
But, hey! Freedom's on the stumble, fall and busting it's lip on the Goddamned curb march, right?
There's more...
Back in February, I took a lot of crap from Star Wars fans when I questioned the usefulness of X-wing fighters’ x-wings. Well, if the travails of the Polecat Aerospace club–and the video of their grand scale x-wing flight experiment–are any reliable indication, my lack of confidence has been vindicated. In the real world, those wings sheer right off. (Found via SciFi Scanner.)
What you see here is perhaps the greatest model rocket project ever undertaken in the name of fanboy pseudoscience. (Found via SFSignal.) Polecat Aerospace built a 21-foot reproduction (about one-half scale) of an X-wing and designed it to fly–rocket style–with the aid of four M-class solid rocket engines. It even had radio-controlled pivot wings and dome-spinning R2-D2.
I am sure you will be a fucking shocked as i was with this news.
BAGHDAD - The V-22 Osprey has arrived in a combat zone for the first time.
It was an epic trip for the tilt-rotor plane, one that took more than 25 years of development and cost 30 lives and $20 billion. Even the last short hop - from an aircraft carrier into Iraq - went awry, U.S. military officials said yesterday.
A malfunction forced one of the 10 Ospreys that were deployed to land in Jordan on Thursday. The Marines flew parts to it from Iraq and repaired it. After it took off again Saturday, the problem recurred, and it had to turn back and land in Jordan a second time, said Maj. Jeff Pool, a U.S. military spokesman in western Iraq. The Osprey finally was repaired and arrived at Asad air base in western Iraq late Sunday afternoon.
Maj. Eric Dent, an Osprey spokesman at Marine headquarters in Washington, declined to identify the problem.
"The nature of the malfunction was a minor issue, but our aircrews are top-notch when it comes to safety," Dent said in an e-mail. "Rather than continue, the aircrew opted to land at a predetermined divert location and further investigate the issue." -- philly.com
Yes.... uhm... "predetermined divert location", yes, its called the ground.
When is congress going to stand up to the Pentagon and put a stop to this death trap?
How many missions will this endanger in country? You can be sure no one will want to have this aircraft provide support for their operation. You can't trust it to be able to safely extract you or your men. I wouldn't fly in the thing and our soldiers shouldn't be forced to.
There's more...
