Taylor & Company

Dominion Day 2009

Yes, one hundred and forty-two years ago today, the Dominion of Canada was born.  Strictly speaking, Confederation was achieved on March 29th, 1867 after Queen Victoria gave Royal Assent to the British North America Act.  But the legislation itself did not come into force until July 1st, 1867, which is why we now celebrate that day.

Go on, you may as well go outside and enjoy it, before provincial insularity and parochialism split us up into six or seven itty bitty countries.

ALSO ON THIS DAY

In 1909, an honest-to-goodness Canadian "cold warrior"—Captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier, commanding the government steamship Arctic—trooped ashore at Parry's Rock, Melville Island, and laid claim to the enormous expanse of the Arctic archipelago in a rather straightforward, no-nonsense way that modern audiences will find a bit astonishing.

"I first took possession of Baffin Land for Canada in the presence of several Eskimo, and after firing 19 shots I instructed an Eskimo to fire the 20th, telling him that he was now a Canadian. A similar ceremony was observed on July 1st, 1909, when I took possession of the whole Arctic Archipelago between Canada and 90th degree of north latitude." "Here in Canada we have a rich country, and we should develop every part of it. We want more help, and we will get it when we give the necessary inducements. Look at our mines. Who would have thought 25 years ago that there would be so much wealth on that Transcontinental Railway, which was thought at first to be a white elephant? As you go north it is the same thing; so if the road is opened to Hudson Bay some more territory will be developed, and will bring sufficient revenue to open up that new country. I admit it is very cold up north, but so it is here when you are not properly clothed and fed; but I have been out every day, and have not had a finger frozen."

-- Captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier.  Speech to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, October 7th, 1926.

He also went to some lengths to befriend the inhabitants of the north, and rely upon them for his own survival.  Not surprisingly, Captain Bernier (known to this day by his Inuktitut nickname, Kapitaikallak) remains an enormously popular and iconic figure to the inhabitants of Baffin Island today.

"Kapitaikallak helped in a big way. He taught us about rifles. He showed us that by using the binoculars we can see things from far away. He did help.

"But people did not understand that the land had been claimed by the government. Inuit learned about this much later. He had warned the people of the change that is coming in the following years," Nutaraq Cornelius told Cloutier.

From stories still told in Pond Inlet, Cloutier heard how Bernier treated Inuit as equals and how he respected Inuit for their ability to survive in the Arctic. He wore Inuit clothes, and relied on Inuit guides for assistance.

Bernier left behind barrels of sweet maple syrup when he left Pond Inlet. He was also known for handing out great quantities of pilot biscuits, which helped Inuit get through the hard times.

"We’re in the year 2000," Nutaraq Cornelius told Cloutier. "It’s true, these events happened a long time ago. But even after these many, many years, you can still see the Kapitaikallak isn’t forgotten today. We still remember him. We know about him."

-- Jane George.  "Kapitaikallak’s abiding legacy", Nunatsiaq News, October 26th, 2001.

Sustainment Challenge?

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services airland subcommittee Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Mark Shackelford, the Air Force’s military acquisition deputy, raised questions about long-term sustainment of an F-22 fleet comprising only 187 aircraft. (The actual number, as of today, will be 186 F-22s, factoring the one Raptor lost in a crash. Smaller than the 243 military requirement number recently cited by Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, and much smaller than the original requirement for 381. Asked by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) about the decision to halt F-22 procurement at 187, Shackelford said he believes that that number is “sufficient” for the type of threats Defense Secretary Robert Gates anticipates the US will face in the near future. If the Air Force had a concern about the fleet, Shackelford said it would be in the area of sustainment. While 187 F-22s will provide excellent combat capability, keeping them flying and mission-capable could become more complicated at some point. “To sustain that fleet over a long period of time may become a challenge,” he told the panel, without elaborating. Last month Schwartz did shed some light on this issue, telling the full Senate Armed Services Committee May 16 that “small-fleet dynamics are a significant issue.” He said, for example, the Air Force “might have to use combat-coded airplanes to do training as well,” as opposed to dedicated Raptors. This, he noted, “is not as ideal as being able to rely on a constant throughput for training,” but it is one of “the realities of managing a smaller fleet.” At that same hearing, Schwartz characterized the projected Raptor fleet size as a moderate- to high-risk force.

-- Marc V. Schanz.  "Sustainment Challenge?" Daily Report, Air Force magazine, June 11th, 2009.

If this is a potential problem for a fleet of 186 Raptors, then it is also an existing problem for the Air Force's fleet of 20 B-2 bombers.  How big an issue is this for the B-2s, and how is the Air Force trying to mitigate it?  Whatever they're doing for the B-2s could probably be applied, on a larger scale, to the F-22 program.

How to be a drama queen

Celebutard blogger Perez Hilton allegedly got into an altercation with security guards and Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas.  All of them being here in Toronto for the MuchMusic Video Awards.

Here are some of his tweets concerning the incident.

-I’m in shock. I need the police ASAP. Please come to the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel now. Please.

-I was assaulted by Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas and his security guards. I am bleeding. Please, I need to file a police report. No joke.

-Still waiting for the police. The bleeding has stopped. I need to document this. Please, can the police come to the SoHo Met Hotel.

-I spoke to my lawyer. I really need to talk to the authorities. Please come to the SoHo Met Hotel. Have called the police. Need them here.

I don't know how big an idiot one has to be, to be an able-bodied adult with functional knowledge of how to use the telephone, but not enough knowledge to look up the number of the local police in the phone book.  Or even to call the frickin' concierge of the hotel you're staying at, and ask them to call the police.

This reminds me of the time my grandmother got chest pains in the middle of a weekday, and thought she was having a heart attack.  First she called her daughter, who was not home.  Then she called her granddaughter, who also was not home (people generally being at work at this time).  Finally she called a friend, and related her troubles.  The friend spent a half hour trying to convince her that it would be best to call 9-1-1, if one truly thought a heart attack was imminent or underway.  My grandmother was too nervous to contact the authorities herself, never really having much exposure to them.  So the friend ended up calling 9-1-1 instead.  Ridiculous.

You may have guessed by now that it wasn't actually a heart attack.

Now of course Grandmother got thoroughly lectured on how it is best to call emergency services directly if one thinks an emergency is underway, but it has made absolutely no difference.  She still calls everyone but the medics if she thinks she's experiencing some calamity.  Although she sits no more than fifty yards from a nurse and has "attendant call" devices at her fingertips, she still calls every relative on speed dial first, and it's up to one of us to call the nurses' station and brief them on the situation.

Seems like Perez Hilton has a similarly impractical approach.

Saturday What is this Crap?!

Just heard this on the radio, might as well spread the poison.

Navy LaWS smokes several drones

This is pretty cool:

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), with support from Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren, for the first time successfully tracked, engaged and destroyed a threat representative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) while in flight at Naval Air Warfare Center, China Lake, Calif., June 7.

A total of five targets were engaged and destroyed during the testing, also a first for the U.S. Navy. Members of NAVSEA's Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems (DE&EWS) Program Office and NSWC Dahlgren fired a laser through a beam director on a KINETO tracking mount.

Two additional UAVs were engaged and destroyed in flight June 9, with two more UAVs shot down June 11. These recent evolutions continued a series of progressively challenging tests using the prototype version of the Surface Navy Laser Weapon System (LaWS).

-- Naval Sea Systems Command Office of Corporate Communications.  "Navy Laser Success Key in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research, Development", June 19th, 2009.

Also a good reminder that present-day UAVs may seem like hot stuff while operating in uncontested airspace versus a 7th century enemy armed with 20th century weapons.  But they need a little help against an OPFOR that can detect and shoot at air targets.

Shorter Gilles Blackburn

It's my fault for being a moron, skiing off-trail at a resort I had never been to before, and carrying no navigation or survival gear; but it's your fault for not coming to bail me out before my wife died.

...

You know, for 300 bucks you can buy a GPS with 25-hour battery life, and for a hundred more you can add to it a digital topo map of the Canadian West.

For a lot less than that, you can get a paper topo map, a waterproof case for it, and a good compass.  And maybe matches.

If there is negligence involved in this case, one tends to think it is on the part of the unfortunate fella who took his bride off marked trails into a backcountry area where he did not know the local geography.  And did so without any basic navigation or survival equipment.

Having lived in Alberta or B.C. thirty years ago and skiied the Rockies a few times is no surety against getting lost.  The Rocky Mountains cover some 991,691 square kilometres across the continent.  No single individual is going to know every nook and cranny of such a vast area.

If you're heading into what is for you unexplored terrain, good preparation and information from knowledgeable locals are not just a good idea, they are an absolute requirement for survival.

On Iran

Ben's been following the Iranian election saga fairly aggressively, and it has piqued my interest.  I'll reprint an excerpt from one of my comments there by way of summary.

While the media with its perennial ADD likes to portray Mir Hossein Moussavi as a reformer, it is worth remembering that he was formerly Prime Minister throughout the bulk of the Iran-Iraq War, supported death threats against Salman Rushdie, backed the taking of American hostages, and doesn’t recognise Israel’s right to exist any more than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does.

Moussavi is a reformer only in the sense that he would centralise more law-enforcement power in the office of the President (rather than that of the Supreme Leader, where it currently resides). And he would like to see the creation of privately-owned media.

Moussavi is essentially right-hand man to the architects of the 1979 Revolution, very much an insider. He was editor-in-chief of one of the revolution’s propaganda organs in 1979, and was a senior member of the Republican Islamic Party. He was rewarded for his competence and service by being the Islamic Republic’s very first foreign minister in 1980, until he was elevated to Prime Minister a year later. He served until the post was disestablished in 1989. Even his wife was an advisor to former President Khatami.

Ahmadinejad was the real outsider, with no close ties linking him back to the founding of the Islamic Republic—his main prior claim to fame was being a well-known mayor.

There will be change, all right. Just not the sort that anyone is really hoping for. More like solid, boring leadership that still maintains the clerics’ stranglehold on political life.

On the one hand, it is tempting to believe that what we are seeing is the wellspring of a genuine democratic movement in Iran.  On the other hand, I can't quite see how the mullahs could pull of an audacious plan involving the discrediting of Ahmadinejad, the anointing of Moussavi as the people's "reform" choice, and the whole thing not collapsing into something genuinely seeking reform, with or without Moussavi.

Nor can I see how Moussavi, a man with impeccable old-guard credentials, could plausibly decide to break—in a real and consequential way—with the clerics and system he helped bring into power.

Part of me would like to take this nascent rebellion at face value, and the realist part of me says there is no way the mullahs would permit it to escalate beyond their control.

The Soviets died out because contrary to Marx' predictions, the socialist states of the Warsaw Pact stagnated while the capitalists grew stronger.  Governmental legitimacy was still (in theory) derived from the people, even if the people were brutally repressed and largely isolated from the decisionmaking process.  However, empirical evidence of the failure of Marx's model was plainly evident in the privation and subjugation inherent in daily Soviet life.  The people were clearly not happy with the way things were.  The ruling class lost their nerve, and were no longer willing to spill blood to preserve the October Revolution.

I can't see Iran's Guardian Council of the Constitution falling prey to similar loss of resolve.  These are clerics who see their right to rule mandated by heaven and justified by their submission to a self-defined brand of Islam.  Rebellion of the populace in this mindset doesn't indicate a loss of civil confidence so much as a lack of conformity to the Council's Islamic principles.  There are no external factors that would demonstrate a failure of the Islamic model, short of Mohammed returning from heaven on a flaming Harley to tell them to lay off.  Their solution, then, would not be to abandon the people to their own selfish ways, but to continue to impose Islamic governance until the people's submission is made more perfect.

So I gauge the odds of Iran imploding (without massive violence) as low.  Honestly, though, no one (aside from the Council themselves) know how the mullahs intend for this to play out.

Uh huh-huh huh-huh huh... you said MILF

Air Force pounds MILF lairs with rockets

(Via Wired's Danger Room)

Unfortunately it's nothing like what you're envisioning.

Even hundreds of miles away, a storm can give you a bad day

With Air France 447's experience in heavy weather front of mind, it's important to recall that aircraft at cruise altitudes are not normally put in peril by a storm front along their route of travel.  They tend to be most dangerous to aircraft that are in the takeoff or landing phase, when the aircraft are travelling the slowest and aircrews have the greatest amount of workload.  An Air Force C-130 narrowly avoided a Colgan 3407-like stall on approach through quick recognition and fast action by the aircrew.

"We were on our initial approach into Al Asad," said Capt. Andrew Gillis, a 737th EAS C-130 aircraft commander and native of San Jose, Calif. "We were the third aircraft to go in. No one else reported any issues. In the middle of our approach, it started getting real rocky, and our air speed indicator ended up bouncing up and down plus or minus 20 knots."

Falling back on countless hours of training and simulations, Captain Gillis advanced the throttles to max power to break off the descent and go around again. There was only one problem.

"We had absolutely max power from the airplane," Captain Gillis said. "There's a specific escape maneuver, and we were in the process of doing that maneuver, but the airplane was still sinking."

-- Staff Sgt. Thomas J. Doscher.  "Quick recognition, action saves C-130 aircrew, soldiers", 386th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs, June 3rd, 2009.

Ouch.  Throttles firewalled at 1,800 feet AGL, and still going down; not a good situation to be in.  What is really remarkable is that between problem detection and problem resolution, the aircraft lost just 800 feet of altitude despite being in a remarkably perilous situation for over seven miles. And 1800 feet is not a lot of room to play with when we're talking about a stall or high sink rate situation.  It is a good thing the crew diagnosed the situation so rapidly and took corrective action.

Even more interesting, the high winds they encountered were actually caused by a large storm front several hundred miles away.

With the winds making a safe landing impossible, the crew headed for home, enduring another 30 minutes of intense turbulence. 1st Lt. Jeff Stanek, the aircraft's navigator, said the wind shear and turbulence were caused by a massive storm front hundreds of miles away.

"There was a huge storm front the size of California that moved over Turkey," said the native of Marlboro, Md. "And it moved faster than anticipated. We were clear of the actual storm, but the gust front in front of the storm is what we hit."

Bravo zulu to the whole aircrew; you guys saved 45 passengers (as well as yourselves).

Don't tell me your problems

US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates spent some time in Singapore, pleading with Asian allies to contribute to the fight in Afghanistan.

"I know some in Asia have concluded that Afghanistan does not represent a strategic threat to their countries, owing in part to Afghanistan's geographic location," he said. "But the threat from failed or failing states is international in scope, whether in the security, economic or ideological realm."

The secretary cited examples of terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia, and said some are inspired and supported by terrorist groups operating along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"Failure in a place like Afghanistan would have international reverberations, and, undoubtedly, many of them would be felt in this part of the world," Secretary Gates said.

-- Fred W. Baker III.  "Secretary Gates calls on Asian partners for help in Afghanistan", American Forces Press Service, June 1st, 2009.

The first thing this tells us is that the SecDef does not know how to tailor his presentation to a particular audience.  I am reasonably certain that if you polled the nations within PACOM's area of responsibility and asked them what the three biggest security challenges of the region are, their list would look something like this:

1.  China
2.  North Korea
3.  China and North Korea

And maybe

4.  Pirates in the Strait of Malacca

Afghanistan and Pakistan register only on the radar of Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, all of whom have forces committed to ISAF.  India and China would likewise be concerned about Pakistan's outcome because of shared borders.  Everyone else is, no doubt, a lot less interested in what is troubling America, and a lot more interested in how America can keep a lid on the local crazies in AsiaPac.  Unfortunately, America's looking for handouts.

"The challenge in Afghanistan is so complex, and so untraditional, that it can only be met by all of us working in concert," Secretary Gates said. "All must contribute what they can to a cause that demands the full attention of the international community."

I don't know, I don't think Afghanistan is so complex that it couldn't survive without Singapore's twenty guys.  Which is not to belittle their contribution, but let's operate in the realm of reality.  It's not the presence of extra-regional allies which will make the difference, it is the quality and quantity of effort exerted—whether done by Americans, Singaporeans or Turks.

I am sure that the military, diplomatic and civil resources of the United States and several key NATO allies could resurrect Afghanistan as a functioning state, much as they did with Germany after the Second World War.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the United States is also busy spending many dollars and men defending other places.  Like Europe.  And Asia.  Asking Asians to flood money and resources into Afghanistan seems counter-intuitive.  Wouldn't it be simpler and easier to ask them to defend themselves?  Why shouldn't Europeans defend Europe, and Asians defend Asia?  Thereby freeing up Americans to do what they want in Afghanistan.

Hell, Japan and Australia have seen the writing on the wall, and are looking to be a little more independent in the security department.

It's not rocket science.