Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
GE Healthcare, which is ramping up ventilator production, is using 3-D printing both to make parts directly and to make molds for injection molding. However, the chief engineer for advanced manufacturing at Healthcare says that some of the 3D-printing companies he has been talking to are shut down due to government edicts that deemed their work nonessential.
It sounds like they will get around this barrier…“We have a map of all the companies that have excess capacity, and so we’ll divert whatever print work we need to whatever company has got the ability right now, on top of the equipment we have at GE”…but I expect that there is going to be a lot of this sort of thing. There is no way that local or state officials can understand the supply chain dependencies that exist between a seemingly-minor local business and a major national priority somewhere up a level or two (or more) in the product structure. In some cases, all it might take is a letter from the top-tier manufacturer certifying the importance of the work the supplier is doing, but in many cases I suspect that the only rapid solutions will require Federal involvement.
In the press of events related to the Great Wuhan Coronavirus Pandemic, many anniversaries of the Second World War have been passing by with little notice and less comment. For example, April 1st 2020 was the 75th Anniversary of the April 1st 1945 “Love-Day” landings on the western shores of Okinawa.
Figure 1 – This is the West Point Atlas map of both the 1 April 1945 Love Day landings through 8 April 1945 and initial Imperial Japanese 32nd Army dispositions to defend Okinawa.
The Okinawa campaign in WW2 has often been described as marking the end old style total war. Where “cork screw and blow torch” close combat to the death between American attackers “who fought to live” and Japanese defenders who “died in order to fight” played out its last dance.
Figure 2 – This is a photo of the USMC III Corps Landing beachhead on Okinawa April 1, 1945.
Upon closer examination, as this 75th anniversary article series will demonstrate, Okinawa is far better described as a high tech war for the electromagnetic spectrum between technological peer competitors air and naval forces. A “secret radar war,” if you will, where two opposing command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) sensor networks were directing land, sea and air forces in a series of both combat and logistical moves and countermoves.
And while the less advanced, and organizationally deficient, Japanese military lost Okinawa proper. It still took advantage of the primarily US Navy institutional biases, American military inter-service rivalries, logistical planning weaknesses caused by that rivalry and US Navy’s unwillingness to learn from “non-approved” sources to never the less defeat the US Navy’s original Phase III plan to overrun the upper Ryukyu’s and install island air and radar bases close enough Kyushu to properly provide land based air superiority for the invasion of Japan.
These campaign objective failures were hidden in tales of US Navy destroyer picket heroism in the “Fleet That Came to Stay:…and classified top secret files…because of the coming budget war associated with the pending merger of the War and Navy department’s into the Department of Defense. After 75 years, this series will part the curtains on these hidden histories.
figure 3 – This is a map of the Ryukyu Island chain with Okinawa at the lower center-right. It’s location would allow American airpower to dominate the sea lanes from China and Korea to Japan. Phase III of Operation Iceberg was to capture Miyako Jima at the lower center-left for the RAF Bomber Command Tiger Force as well as Kikaiga Jima, Amami Oshima and Tokuno Shima for USAAF & USMC fighter bases to cover the planned Operation Olympic landings on Kyushu.
Too accomplish that objective, this series will examine the planned goals of the Operation Iceberg campaign against what was accomplished. How various American military institutions, doctrine and planning failed. And why the defeat of the US Navy’s Phase III plans set the stage for an American blood bath of preventable naval casualties during the planned Operation Olympic assault of the Japanese home islands, had the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not made the invasion of Japan unnecessary.
Figure 4 – The yellow highlighted names on this map show islands in the Ryukyu chain that hosted Japanese air bases that were used through out the 83 day Okinawa campaign as staging areas for kamikaze, visual spotter and radar snooper aircraft. These bases were never fully suppressed by American or British carrier air strikes. Three of these air bases were scheduled for invasion and capture in the Operation Iceberg Phase III plans. None of these bases were taken due to US Navy casualties from the fanatical Japanese resistance on and around Okinawa.
The evidence is highly suggestive that the outbreak is associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan. The market was closed on 1 January 2020. At this stage, there is no infection among healthcare workers, and no clear evidence of human to human transmission. The Chinese authorities continue their work of intensive surveillance and follow up measures, as well as further epidemiological investigations.
The Committee believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk. It is important to note that as the situation continues to evolve, so will the strategic goals and measures to prevent and reduce spread of the infection. The Committee agreed that the outbreak now meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and proposed the following advice to be issued as Temporary Recommendations.
The Committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the frontlines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.
The Navy hospital ships promised by President Trump to deploy to New York and Los Angeles arrived on-station as ordered a few days ago. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, presumed for some obscure-to-me reason to be associated with the provision of news to the public, and most recently famed through peddling Russian conspiracy theories regarding Trump’s election for the past three years, had ridiculed the President’s proposed schedule as “nonsense. ” She, or whatever pronoun she goes by, had loudly and publicly claimed that it would be “weeks” before the hospital ships arrived. Instead, the hospital ships arrived more or less to schedule. A lesser news-person would have the decency to be embarrassed over how transparent a prediction-flop this was. Not this Maddow person, it appears. This is not a good thing, and not for the reason first assumed. PBS’ Yamiche “Rolie-Polie-Olie” Alcindor baldly admitted, and in nicer words, that the name of the game for the national establishment news media is “Get Trump!” and anything goes, fair or foul (mostly foul) will serve that end. Well, really those of us who have been paying attention, especially for the last decade and a half (or longer) have known very well that the name of the game as far as the establishment national news media is concerned, is to enthusiastically smear Republicans and their conservative supporters (no matter how mild or harmless) the pretext, and to excuse Democrats and their supporters, no matter how vile the offense and actions. Nothing new here, move along. SSDD, as we used to say in my active duty days. (Same sh*t, Different Day.)
