"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
There I was at 30,000 feet
In an earlier post, I promised to tell you about our resident spy at Soesterberg Air Base in The Netherlands. His name was Jack van Beek, but we called him Jack the Clock. I honestly don’t know that he was our resident spy, but everyone knew there was a resident spy, and most of us […]
When I told my son I wasn’t going to vote for John McCain, he said, “But he was a fighter pilot. And a POW!” Meaning, I suppose, that McCain just has to be my kind of candidate. I understand the fighter pilot part. Indeed, my ideal candidate would have served in the military. If he or […]
I invited a few F-15 buddies to join me on Facebook, where I started a by-invitation group for current and former military aviators. For the past year or two I’ve been looking for the presence of other F-15 pilots on the net. Just did another quick sweep, and AFAIK I’m the only one. Although the […]
Some thoughts on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ sacking of USAF Secretary Wynn and Chief of Staff Moseley: The nuclear weapons SNAFUs described in the linked article were too serious to excuse, and ample reason to replace senior leadership. I can’t say I saw it coming, but I did wonder, back in 1992, what then-USAF […]
Oh, my. One night in the squadron bar, another lieutenant colonel and I had a long, beer-fueled discussion about fellow F-15 pilots who’d died in crashes. The guys who didn’t eject in time. The guys who flew into the ground or water, or who were instantly killed in mid-air collisions. And we concluded that there […]
Boy, does this make me feel old: In early November 2007, the nose and cockpit section of a Missouri Air National Guard F-15C broke away from the rest of the aircraft during a training flight. The pilot ejected and survived. Here’s a simulation of what happened: Following the mishap, the USAF grounded its entire fleet […]
Gwen, one of my regular readers, alerted me to this story about Pentagon and pharmaceutical industry efforts to create a drug to suppress soldiers’ moral qualms over killing. Psychological Kevlar, in other words, to reduce or eliminate growing mental health problems in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the trouble with traditional methods of overcoming our aversion […]
Is air power the new face of successful war-fighting? Much to the dismay of the boots-on-the-ground zealots … the answer for today’s democracies may well be “yes.” During the summer, while U.S. ground forces in Iraq were distracted investigating potential war criminals in their midst, air power delivered a major success. … When thousands of troops […]