Trent Telenko

Saigon in Baghdad — Iraq’s Corruption-Based Collapse

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While the media has made much of both the Iraqi government’s request for air strikes on the Al Qaeda aligned fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the Obama Administration’s refusal to do so, few people have bothered to look at what airpower was available to the Shia dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In fact, the Iraqi Air Force has had light gunships based on the Cessna C208 Caravan capable of firing Hellfire missiles since 2011 that should have been fully capable of dealing with the ISIS “technicals” — armed light trucks — seen in many photos recently.

Iraqi AC-208B Fires Hellfire
This is an Iraqi ATK AC208B Cessna “Combat Caravan” Light Gunship with laser guided Hellfire missiles.

See this link and text:

http://www.defenseworld.net/news/3837/ATK_delivers_3rd_AC_208__Combat_Caravan__Aircraft_to_Iraqi_Air_Force

Alliant Techsystems has announced delivery of a third AC-208B “Combat Caravan” aircraft to the Iraq Training and Advisory Mission in Kirkuk, Iraq. To date, ATK has delivered 11 modified C-208 aircraft in support of U.S. Government contracts for rebuilding the Iraqi Air Force: three reconnaissance aircraft, five trainer aircraft and three AC-208B aircraft. The AC-208B Combat Caravan aircraft is a specially modified Cessna Grand Caravan that incorporates an electro-optical targeting system with integrated laser designator, Hellfire laser guided missiles, an air-to-ground and air-to-air data link and aircraft self-protection equipment.

See also this link and ATK press release photos:

http://defensetech.org/2011/10/26/atks-ac-208-combat-caravan-gunship/

The AC208B “Combat Caravan” light gunship in ATK Press Release Photos.

Whether the current Iraqi government there has any left in operable condition is a very different question. I very strongly suspect that most of the 30,000 Iraqi Army troops that deserted in the face of the ISIS attack had not been paid in months, with most of their weapons, radios and vehicles either being sold or deadlined from issues of corruption.

What we are seeing with the Iraqi government is a collapse from corruption. If the CIA had any capable human agents on the ground outside the Green Zone — ones that were paid attention too — none of that would have been a surprise to the Obama Administration.

Now we have “Saigon in Baghdad,” with a President that has all the bad features of the Nixon Administration and is isolationist to boot.

CANTOR DOWN! — Why the Death of the Tea Party Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

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Republican Majority Leader Cantor, and next in line to replace the current House Speaker, lost his Republican primary by 10%. The following voter turn out numbers pretty much say it all as to why.

In 2012 Majority Leader Cantor won 79% of a total of 47,037 votes cast in his Republican primary election, 37,369 for him.

Yesterday there were 65,008 votes cast in the VA 7th District Republican primary and Cantor’s opponent got 56% or roughly 36,500 votes.

College professor David Brat both brought in approximately 18,000 more new grassroots Republican primary voters, while he also pulled a small number of Cantor’s 2012 voters to win.

This is why Cantor’s pollster was so wrong. With all the modern polling tools that $5 million and a 10-to-1 money advantage can buy, all polls are built upon a “turn out model,” an educated guess really, as to who will show up on election day based on past data. If the guess is wrong, so is the poll…and so is the media coverage based upon those “insider candidate polls.” Cantor’s pollsters, McLaughlin & Associates, just didn’t see the small town’s worth of new primary voters the Tea Party brought to the table in Virginia’s 7th House District primary election coming.

Establishment Republicans have just been delivered the very stern lesson that when you “do a #2” on your primary base voters in a “safe Republican district,” they can and more importantly *WILL* return the favor…be the issue amnesty or anything else.

History Friday — Books to Read for the D-Day 70th Anniversary

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After a hiatus, for the birth of Mindy’s and my third child Clyde, this “History Friday” column returns to mark the 70th anniversary of the Normandy D-Day landing with reviews of three books that, IMO, shatter many of the myths of June 6th 1944. Myths established in and often repeated from “the big three” Normandy campaign authors Hastings, Ambrose, and Keegan.

These books, in author alphabetical order, are the following:

o The 2009 book “Cracking Hitler’s Atlantic Wall: The 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers on D-Day” by Richard C. Anderson.
 
o The 1989 book “Beyond the Beachhead: The 29th Infantry Division in Normandy” by Joseph Balkoski, and
 
o The 2013 book “The Devil’s Garden: Rommel’s Desperate Defense of Omaha Beach on D-Day,” by Steven Zaloga.

Each book has important points from original research in primary source material and they can be seen as Anderson, The planned Allied attack; Balkoski, the infantry fighting; and Zaloga, the planned German defense.

Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, rush toward the shelter of amphibious tanks at the water’s edge of Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach, on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Left and right in the foreground are M4 Sherman tanks with wading equipment. The troops in the photo, expecting weak defenses, are loaded down with food and equipment for several days of combat. Most of which was discarded on the beach in their desperate fight for survival. Source: Britannica Online for Kids, http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-40275

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Operation Chronicle and Airspace Control in the South West Pacific

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Air space control was one of the themes of my previous, April 4, 2014, column “Unit Conversion Error in the Pacific War” when it looked at the issues of coordination between military services over how to use Radar in terms of units of distance and grid type versus polar type reporting of Radar position data in order to control air space around air fields and naval task forces.

Expanding on that theme, today’s column is one about a forgotten lesson of World War 2 (WW2) global warfare from the South West Pacific Area in 1943 that was repeated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the “Operation Allied Force” Air War over Kosovo in 1999. How it happened requires returning to a theme from my previous Pacific War history columns, namely, that you don’t know a thing about how a military theater in WW2 fought without knowing how they used their Radars. That’s because changing electronic technology in the form of Radar revolutionized things like airspace control, gunnery and weather forecasting simultaneously in the middle of a World War, and its deployment and use were very uneven between military services and allies based on that theater’s overall priority. Something very similar happened in 1999 with the uneven deployment of digital technologies between American military flying services and those of its European NATO allies.

In WW2, issues arising from those Radar based changes often wound up affecting decisions at the strategic and political policy levels of military theaters, hidden unnoticed for decades under layers of classification and post-war institutional reputation polishing. The role of air space control in the South West Pacific Theater’s June 1943 Operation Chronicle was a perfect example of this. Specifically how units of the same military service — US Army Air Force in the form of General MacArthur’s 5th Air Force and Admiral Halsey’s 13th Air Force — in two adjacent military theaters differed so greatly in how they controlled their air space they couldn’t talk to one another. These “hidden from history by post-war institutional agenda” differences in 1943 Global Coalition War reemerged in NATO’s 1999 Kosovo War Air Campaign with a vengeance.

SETTING THE STAGE
The figure below is from the foremost institutional history on Operation Chronicle, John Miller’s “Cartwheel: The Reduction of Rabaul” from the US Army in WWII “Green Book” Histories.

Map 5 Operation CHRONICLE Area 30 June 1943 -- Source: US Army in World War 2, "Cartwheel: The Reduction of Rabaul"
Map 5 OPERATION CHRONICLE Area 30 June 1943. Note the distances listed from the island on the right of the map. — Source: US Army in World War 2, “Cartwheel: The Reduction of Rabaul”

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History Friday: Unit Conversion Error in the Pacific War

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In previous History Friday columns and comments I have laid out that a great deal of the institutional and academic histories we have of the Pacific Theater of World War 2 are deeply flawed. These flaws are from both the post WW2 political and budget agendas of those governmental institutions and from the lack of understanding of the significant on-the-ground details by more recent academic and general histories.

Following that theme, this week’s Pacific War History Friday column is the first of several that will deal with the concept of “engineering measurement unit conversion error” as it applied to the fighting in World War 2’s Pacific theater. By “engineering measurement unit conversion error” I mean problems similar to the one that destroyed the 1999 NASA Mars Climate Orbiter. NASA engineers missed an English system to metric system measurement unit conversion which caused the Orbiter to be lost. See this article “The Quick 6: Six Unit Conversion Disasters” for that and other examples.

What does the 1999 NASA Mars Climate Orbiter have to do with the Pacific Theater of WW2? Quite a lot, as it turns out!
What does the 1999 NASA Mars Climate Orbiter have to do with the Pacific Theater of WW2? Quite a lot, as it turns out!

It turns out that there were two major “engineering measurement unit conversion error” issues between the US Army and US Navy that affected Radar, gunnery and general topographic map making between the US Military services in the Pacific.

The first issue was that the US Navy used nautical miles while the US Army used statute miles. The way this issue was dealt with was to give performance in a unit of measure both services could agree too — namely yards for gun performance and for Radars involved with naval fire control, anti-aircraft and coast artillery.

See Joint Chiefs of Staff document: “U.S. Radar – Operational Characteristics of Radar Classified by Tactical Application” FTP 217, 1 Aug 1943.

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