| Friday,
November 14, 2003 Getting ready for COMDEX. I worked until
all hours on Burning Tower. Now I have to do errands.
It looks to me as if Bush has decided to use the
Pournelle Plan on Iraq: change the regime, install another, and get out.
I could wish he had come up with that before we committed $80 billion and
more to it. I'd like to see us use that money to buy energy independence
($40 billion for 40 1000 megawatt nuclear power plants; $10 billion to
develop ways to use electricity for many of the systems that use petroleum;
the rest to develop single or two stage to orbit reusable low cost access to
space and buy a fleet of those ships). I blush to say it, but $80 billion is
real money. But better spend it and get out than continue down the road to
empire.
The IDF hasn't been successful with the slash and burn tactics of
occupation of Judea and Samaria. We won't make it work in Mesopotamia,
either. Neither we nor the Israelis are ruthless enough. Turks, Sunni
Moslems, they can be ruthless. A monarchy could be ruthless. We're just not
built that way, and we don't want to be, either.
Query from someone who knows: I need two numbers.
1. What does it cost today to keep a fully equipped combat soldier in
Iraq? Logistics, pay, support units, the whole cost. In fact it would be
useful to have both the single number and the number given that you have to
rotate him home and replace him so there needs to be another, or part of
another, on standby.
2. What would that cost be for a combat officer? It's not so important to
differentiate that cost from the enlisted soldiers for combat troops.
3. What would that cost be for a constabulary trooper? Constabularies are
equipped differently from our present combat soldiers because not expected
to engage armor at distance. They do not have all the other requirements for
defeating a modern organized military; constabularies need lots of
intelligence, and lots of light infantry firepower, and good tanks but the
tanks need not be Abrams with tank vs. tank capability. The constabulary
tanks need to be able to engage mines, car bombs, light infantry, that sort
of think; but they don't need single shot kill at 4 kilometers. Hussars, not
cataphracts...
4. What would that cost be for a constabulary officer? Officers have to
be U.S. citizens and loyal to the U.S., meaning that they must be rotated
home at reasonable intervals. Constabulary enlisted can be non-citizens
promised citizenship at the end of an 8 or 10 or 19 year enlistment (the
Roman model: citizenship and land on retirement). While you can have
non-citizen junior officers you probably don't want them: the Constitution
makes it easy to differentiate. In the constabulary case in particular
enlisted rank should be entirely dependent on the constabulary officers (see
Cameron's Anatomy of Military Merit for details). One presumes the cost of
constabulary officers would be about twice that of the enlisted troops, and
I'll use that as a first cut.
Anyway, speculation on the above costs from readers who have given this
some thought (I don't need wild guesses; I can make those easily enough)
would be welcome.
=====================
These machines have minds of their own, don't they?
This Morning I went out to buy the Atlantis expansion of Dark Age of
Camelot. Naturally I can't log on to DAOC now. I can't tell you if the
expansion works or not.
I tend to be a fairly linear person (my wife would say compulsive) and
when I set out to do something I want to get it done. Obviously the thing to
do here would be to abandon this and go back to it another time. So
naturally I'll keep trying to get to DAOC to see if the new expansions I
spent my money on actually look good. And if the silly thing works at all.
One thing you definitely have to install the updates that Windows is
insisting on today. Then you have to reset. Why that affects the ability to
get to the on line server for DAOC I am not certain, but resetting the
machine does get me there, and 12 megabytes of download updates to the new
expansion. None of that happened until I reset.
Hah. OK, I am at an activation screen. It demands a number, but naturally
has not transferred the focus to that window so typing anything doesn't
work. Let's see, ok, click on the entry window and I can enter a 50 digit
number...
You have to REALLY BE DETERMINED to play this game, don't you?
Activation successful. New splash screen -- ah. All my characters are
alive and well. Last night's update wiped out my action bar bindings -- yep.
Same this time. Toolbars empty entirely. Well that's fixable.
And it's pretty. I have to say I like it. Now that it is running.
Hmm. SO the GeForce 4 won't render it. Downloading new drivers. I'll have
to put an ATI board in here if the drivers don't work properly. Or change to
a different computer as my games machine.
========================
So the Democrats are calling a black woman judge a Turkey. That ought to
be interesting.
Turkey is she?
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