| Friday,
January 1, 2010 a fine article about our
splendid Corps
Written a couple of years ago, but still a great read!
David Couvillon Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired.;
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of
the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog
Excellance; Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work
United States Marine Corps
http://www.nationalreview.com/smitht/smith200403110912.asp
By W. Thomas Smith Jr.
Beginning this month, leathernecks from the
1st Marine Expeditionary Force will return to Iraq, replacing elements of
the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. The return of the Marines is surely bad
news for those desperate to undermine the liberation of Iraq.
Not to take anything away from the U.S. Army
— its soldiers have performed magnificently, and will no doubt continue to
do so — but America's enemies have a particular fear of U.S. Marines.
During the first Gulf War in 1991, over 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were
deployed along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti coastline in anticipation of a landing by
some 17,000 U.S. Marines. Terrified by what they had been taught about the
combat prowess of Marines, the Iraqi soldiers had nicknamed them "Angels
of Death."
The moniker — first published by
Pulitzer-winner Rick Atkinson in his best-selling Crusade — carried over
into the second Gulf war, last year, as the 1st Marine Division swept
across the Iraqi plains. Attacking American forces were unsettling enough,
but reports of the seaborne "Angels of Death" being among the lead
elements were paralyzing to many Iraqi combatants. Despite less armor than
other American ground forces, the Marines were among the first to fight
their way into Baghdad. And when intelligence indicated that foreign
troops were coming to the aid of Iraqi diehards, Marine Brig. Gen. John
Kelly stated, "we want all Jihad fighters to come here. That way we can
kill them all before they get bus tickets to New York City."
Typical Marine bravado, some say. But it
works. Best-selling author Tom Clancy once wrote, "Marines are mystical.
They have magic." It is this same magic, Clancy added, that "may well
frighten potential opponents more than the actual violence Marines can
generate in combat."
Fear of Marines is not a new phenomenon, nor
is it unique to Iraqi soldiers. Established in 1775, the U.S. Marine Corps
came of age in World War I during the 1918 Chateau Thierry campaign near
the French village of Bouresches. There, Marines assaulted a line of
German machine-gun nests on an old hunting preserve known as Belleau Wood.
The fighting was terrible. Those Marines who weren't cut down by the enemy
guns captured the nests in a grisly close-quarters slugfest.
The shocked Germans nicknamed their foes,
teufelhunden (devil dogs). "Marines are considered a sort of elite Corps
designed to go into action outside the United States," read a German
intelligence report following the battle. "They consider their membership
in the Marine Corps to be something of an honor. They proudly resent any
attempts to place their regiments on a par with other infantry regiments."
Twenty-four years later as the 1st Marine
Division was steaming toward Guadalcanal, a Japanese radio propagandist
taunted that which the Japanese soldiers feared most. "Where are the
famous United States Marines hiding?" the announcer asked. "The Marines
are supposed to be the finest soldiers in the world, but no one has seen
them yet?" Over the next three years, Marines would further their
reputation at places with names like Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima.
That reputation carried over into the Korean
War. "Panic sweeps my men when they are facing the American Marines,"
confessed a captured North Korean major. It was a fear echoed by his
Chinese allies. In late 1950, Chinese premier Mao Tse Tung put out a
contract on the 1st Marine Division. The Marine division, according to Mao
in written orders to the commander of the Chinese 9th Army Group, "has the
highest combat effectiveness in the American armed forces. It seems not
enough for our four divisions to surround and annihilate its two
regiments. You should have one or two more divisions as a reserve force."
Though costly for both sides, the subsequent Chinese trap failed to
destroy the 1st Marine Division.
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Frank Lowe later
admitted, "The safest place in Korea was right behind a platoon of
Marines. Lord, how they could fight!"
Over a decade later, Marines were the first
major ground combat force in Vietnam. Army Gen. William C. Westmoreland,
who commanded all American military forces in that country, conservatively
stated he "admired the élan of Marines." But despite the admiration, some
Army leaders found their equally proficient units wanting for similar
respect.
In 1982, during the invasion of Grenada, Army
General John Vesey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telephoned
one of his officers and demanded to know why there were "two companies of
Marines running all over the island and thousands of Army troops doing
nothing. What the hell is going on?"
The reputation of Marines stems from a
variety of factors: The Marine Corps is the smallest, most unique branch
of the U.S armed forces. Though it is organized as a separate armed
service, it is officially a Naval infantry/combined-arms force overseen by
the secretary of the Navy. The Corps' philosophical approach to training
and combat differs from other branches. Marine boot camp — more of a
rite-of-passage than a training program — is the longest and toughest
recruit indoctrination program of any of the military services. Men and
women train separately. All Marines from private to Commandant are
considered to be first-and-foremost riflemen. And special-operations units
in the Marines are not accorded the same respect as they are in other
branches. The Marines view special operations as simply another realm of
warfighting. Marines are Marines, and no individual Marine or Marine unit
is considered more elite than the other.
Consequently, newly minted Marines believe
themselves to be superior to other soldiers, spawning understandable
resentment from other branches. But do Marines actually fight better than
other soldiers? Rivals argue it's not so much their ability to fight —
though that's never been a question — but that Marines are simply masters
in the art of public relations. President Harry Truman once stated that
Marines "have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's." Fact
is, while other armed services have lured recruits with promises of money
for college, "a great way of life," or "being all you can be;" the Marines
have asked only "for a few good men [and today, women]" with the mettle to
join their ranks.
Not surprisingly, there have been numerous
unsuccessful efforts — primarily on the part of some Army and Navy
officers — to have the Corps either disbanded or absorbed into the Army or
Navy. Most of those efforts took place in the first half of the 20th
Century But even after the Marines' stellar performance in World War II,
Army General Frank Armstrong proposed bringing them into the Army fold and
condescendingly referring to the Corps as "a small bitched-up army talking
Navy lingo."
As late as 1997, Assistant Secretary of the
Army Sara Lister took aim at the Marines. "I think the Army is much more
connected to society than the Marines are." Lister said before an audience
at Harvard University. "Marines are extremists. Wherever you have
extremists, you've got some risks of total disconnection with society. And
that's a little dangerous."
Of course, the Commandant of the Marine Corps
demanded an apology. Lister was fired. And Marines secretly said among
themselves, "Yes we are extremists. We are dangerous. That's why we win
wars and are feared throughout the world."
Despite its detractors, the Marines have
become a wholly American institution — like baseball players, cowboys, and
astronauts — in the eyes of most Americans. Marines indeed may be extreme,
but America loves them, extremism and all. And fortunately for America,
her enemies in the war against terror will continue to shudder upon
hearing, "the Marines have landed."
— A former U.S. Marine infantry leader, W.
Thomas Smith Jr. is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in a
variety of national and international publications. His third book, Alpha
Bravo Delta Guide to American Airborne Forces, has just been published.
SEMPER FI...AND MAY GOD CONTINUE TO BLESS THE
US MARINE CORPS
============
Chalabi no better than Hussein? I think not.
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
You wrote "Last time we thought we could interfere
with a Middle East country's governance we supported Chalabi against Saddam
Hussein and the Ba'athists, and we all know how well that turned out."
Hm. Frankly, looks fine from here: would that all our
interventions went as smoothly.
By the way, the rap on Chalabi was mostly connived at
by the State Department, who fought tooth and nail to exclude the exiles
from any participation in building a post-Baathist Iraq: of course they
succeeded, and look how well *that* turned out. You can read all about it in
Douglas Feith's excellent book, _War and Decision_, if you care to.
Incidentally, weren't *you* the one who wanted us to
stand up a government of exiles and then get the heck out? And it would
inexorably have involved people--Chalabi and others--who were likely quite
unsavory by our terms.
Of course, given that we're governed by the likes of
Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, the Chalabis of this world might be an
improvement.
Very respectfully, David G.D. Hecht
I have read War and Decision, and my conclusions
are not yours.
I was opposed to both Bush military interventions
in the Middle East, and I continue to assert that the Republic would be
better off if we had done neither, but instead adopted measures to
increase energy supplies to the US using US controlled resources. As a
bonus for not going into Iraq in the era of Bush I, we would not have
turned al Qaeda into mortal enemies, and we would not have set precedents
that involved us in the wasteful and counter productive expeditions into
the Balkans.
Note that the Legions were splendid in the Gulf
Wars. The performance in the Balkans was ugly, but given the political
restrictions on what weapons could be employed and how, that was probably
inevitable.
Given the First Gulf War in which our Legions
restored the Kuwaiti royal family so that they could leave their vacation
in the London casinos and return to "their" country and turned Saddam from
a realistic check on Iran into a mortal enemy of the US, our options after
911 were limited, but had we thought out the situation -- if we knew in
2001 November what the situation in Iraq would be in January, 2010, would
we think of better uses for a trillion dollars and the lives and careers
of our Legionnaires?
Now had we operated in a rational manner after
the second invasion of Iraq it might have come out better; but we didn't,
largely because we didn't know what we wanted to accomplish. Once again I
refer you to Feith's book and also to Bremer's book.
As to State, their incompetence was known: look
at the performance of "the professionals" in the buildup to Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait. In 1990 Hussein and the Baathists were easily
deterred, and were no great threat to Israel or the United States; and the
US had a booming economy, and the military power to be either a competent
Empire or a hegemony headed by a real republic. In 2001 we didn't have
quite so many choices, and while the evidence for Hussein's having nuclear
weapons or being able to acquire them was small, the evidence for his
having chemical weapons was overwhelming. In the First Gulf War he had
attempted to launch missiles at Israel, and we detected precisely zero of
those attempts. The pressure to go in and finish the swinish Hussein was
enormous. The problem was that we had no idea of what to do after we
overthrew him -- and the Iraq adventure doomed the Afghan expedition to
being a sideshow, yet that was the actual punitive expedition. In Iraq all
they did was dance in the streets in certain neighborhoods; something
easily remedied by constructing monuments of desolation in those
neighborhoods, thus killing and maiming far fewer Iraqis and many fewer US
troops while sending an unmistakable message.
Both Gulf Wars were brilliant military successes
and disastrous grand strategic failures; and the US would be better off
today if we had out trillions back, we had our dead and maimed troops home
with their families, and some form of stable government in Iraq; as well
as having delivered the message to Afghanistan that we don't intend to
impose rule from Kabul on your land, but local leaders must understand
that whoever you want to support, you must not harbor the enemies of the
United States. That too is a lesson the Marines could easily have taught:
they are very good at sending the message that the Marines can be your
good friend or your worst enemy: the choice is yours.
If we had chosen to prop up Chalabi as a
successor to Hussein, it might have been done. He might well have been a
suitable client ruler. I don't know. In Afghanistan, incidentally, my
candidate for client king was in fact the exiled King of Afghanistan, who
thoroughly understood that the Khan was first among equals, Grand Sheik of
Kabul and one of the Warlords. Of course we didn't think in those terms.
Indeed, in neither Afghanistan nor Iraq did we have any comprehension of
the conditions we could impose and of those which we wanted. We had this
picture of a liberal democracy and the end of history. As usual we thought
we could immanenitize the eschaton, and as usual reality taught us better
-- although many stil have not learned that lesson.
I do not understand what you mean by "smoothly"
regarding our intervention in Iraq. Smooth might have been going in,
securing the oil fields by any means necessary, and pumping oil to send
home as loot -- the spoils of war. That would have cost far fewer American
and Iraqi lives.
As to Chalabi vs. Reid, Pelosi, or Barney Frank,
I'd rather think about something else this New Year Morning.
============
A teacher's response to the L.A. Times Education
article.
Dear Jerry This is a friends response to the L. A.
Times article you posted about. She teaches Grade 4 in Shreveport, LA.
Please with hold her name if you publish her note.
Douglas
"Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The education disaster continues
Today's LA Times had a disturbing article: there is
a small school district that works. Students are enthusiastic. It isn't a
newcomer to the scene -- in fact it was chartered long enough ago that it
didn't seek to have a High School in the district. Unfortunately, the high
school to which it is supposed to send its students is a disaster, so the
small district tried to add a high school to its charter. That was blocked
by court action from -- well, from the disastrous high school. Now it
seeks to add charter high schools, and that seems to be working, but of
course that is opposed by -- the disaster of a high school." (snip)
Dr. Jerry Pournelle
----
Interesting article but, I wish Dr. P. knew about the
"crazy" checks. Did you know we give money to kids' parents if the kid is
not doing well in school??? If they can get the kid screened for Special Ed,
they will get $400-500 per month! That is one of the real problems we face.
I have a girl who does not do her work because she chooses not to, not
because she can't. I sent her mother a note on Thurs. & Fri. with no reply.
On Mon. I called and she proceeded to tell me how she knows I'm doing the
best I can but that she feels her daughter needs to be in a small group
setting where she will get more attention. I tried to tell her I'm SPED
certified and had taught several years in a self-contained classroom. I told
her I only have 15 kids in the class so she is getting attention, she just
doesn't want to do the work. She laughs because she knows I can't do
anything about her! The next day her behavior was even worse and my partner
called with the same results. The following day, I finally gave up and sent
her to the office. Parents are the real problems with education. Until the
parents decide they want their kids to learn, they won't! As long as we
reward parents with extra money for not helping their child, the education
system will stay broken.
Christine
I am not astonished but it does seem a heck of a
way to run a railroad. The only way education can work is to give teachers
control of their classrooms, and hold the teachers responsible for
results. Private and many religious school systems do that; the results
are obvious. But the purpose of today's schools is to provide employment
for their union officials so that the unions can support the politicians.
Neither teachers nor students count for anything compared to that real
purpose.
===========
Subj: Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii
Remote
http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/
2009/10/29/low-cost-multi-touch-
whiteboard-using-wii-wii-remote/
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
===========
Subj: VESSEL: Virtual Environments for Ship and
Shore Experiential Learning
http://vessel.bbn.com/dct.html
>>Funded by the Office of Naval Research and adopted
by the Navy's Recruit Training Command, BBN's Damage Control Trainer (DCT)
offers trainees an engaging first-person perspective and a supportive,
instructionally rich environment in which they can practice damage control
skills, shipboard communication, and shipboard navigation without the costs
and risks involved with live training. DCT is being developed under the
Virtual Environments for Ship and Shore Experiential Learning (VESSEL)
project. DCT currently includes training on flooding control and fire
fighting. <<
It's built on the Delta3D open-source, cross-platform,
Python-scriptable gaming+simulation engine.
http://www.delta3d.org/article.php?story=20091209201824757&topic=news
http://www.delta3d.org/article.php?story=20041105154425816&topic=about
>>Delta3D is unique because it offers features
specifically suited to the Modeling and Simulation and DoD communities such
as High Level Architecture (HLA), After Action Review (AAR), large scale
terrain support, and SCORM Learning Management System (LMS) integration.<<
http://www.delta3d.org/article.php?story=20051209133127695&topic=docs
>>Direct interface with Crazy Eddie’s GUI. <<
http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
So, who's up for a Damage Control sim for His Imperial
Majesty's General-Class Battlecruiser _MacArthur_? You think the Authors of
the Story would grant a license for that? Or have they sold all the
game-rights already? 8-)
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
I'd love to play that game...
==============
Subject: Further comments on Gerlich & Tcheuschner
Paper
Jerry,
Although I am not an expert on radiative heat
transport in gases, I am an engineer, and thus did read and try to
understand as much of the G&T paper as I could. Based on the parts that I
think I understood, I'm also suspicious of the value of this effort. Points
of concern for me include these:
1) They spend a lot of time showing that warming in a
real greenhouse bears no relationship to the 'greenhouse effect' proposed by
climatologists. This seems kind of pointless since, as far as I can
determine, no serious climatologist would argue that glass covered
greenhouses offer a perfect or useful analogy to what happens in the
atmosphere.
2) They seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
critiquing and refuting explanations of greenhouse warming that were
intended for a popular audience, and published in things like encyclopedias,
elementary textbooks, and PR books (e.g., an inconvenient truth). I'm sure
there is merit to this kind of critique as a way of improving textbooks and
popularizations of science topics. But I don't quite understand its place in
a paper that is supposed to be refuting a highly technical theory. If a
serious physicist wanted to refute the theory of relativity, I doubt he
would start by picking apart Encyclopedia Britannica's explanation of
relativity.
3) Many of the fundamental or theoretical flaws that
he cites against the theory greenhouse warming would seem to apply to any
infrared active component of the atmosphere. Is he claiming to have proven
that water vapor has no impact on the temperature of the atmosphere near the
earth's surface? What about clouds? Even most skeptics of anthropogenic
global warming seem to accept that greenhouse warming from water vapor and
clouds does occur.
4) He is quite critical of the notion that infrared
active gases, upon absorbing outbound thermal radiation, re-radiate some of
that energy back toward the surface, thus warming the surface. He claims
this is a violation of thermodynamics (since the cooler gas is allegedly
heating the hotter ground). However, most engineering texts I look at use a
similar kind of language when describing heat transfer by thermal radiation
between two bodies at different temperatures. In those situations, no one
seems concerned about violations of the second law of thermodynamics. So, as
far as I can tell, this complaint seems to have more to do with the words
used to describe the process, than the physics or math needed to compute the
heat transfer. Perhaps the real sin of many popularizers is to say that
greenhouse gases warm the ground, when they really should say that they slow
down the rate at which heat is lost from the ground.
5) They also devote space to attacking the notion that
one can define a meaningful average temperature of the surface of the earth.
That is certainly a worthwhile discussion to have. But is it essential to
falsifying the existence of a greenhouse effect?
6) His discussion on climate modeling seems to suggest
that unless you formulate your model with the full set of equations that
would satisfy a theoretical physicist, and then solve these simultaneously
without simplification or approximation, using extremely small mesh sizes
for the simulation, there is no way that a model can produce anything
useful. Since no computer can come close to solving a system of equations
like this, we might as well not bother. That left me wondering if any
engineering model (even useful ones) would be acceptable to them.
More generally, I again have to wonder if this
broadside against the impossibility of simulating complex physical systems
is really necessary to the primary point of his paper, which is to falsify
the existence of a greenhouse heating effect.
I'll leave it to others with more relevant expertise
to decide if some of his other, more technical criticisms have merit. If
they do, then I think it is unfortunate that these authors choose to clutter
up their paper with a lot of stuff that doesn't seem particularly relevant
to proving, rigorously, that there is no such thing as a greenhouse heating
effect.
Finally, you say in your own response to Joel Upchurch
that you'd be surprised if these authors had ignored the laws of
thermodynamics. But Gerlich & Tscheuschner are basically charging that every
scientist who has looked at this problem in the last 100 years (and that
must include a significant number of physicists) not only got the
thermodynamics wrong, they got the physics wrong. That would also be
surprising.
CP, Connecticut
I agree that they would be more persuasive if
they restricted their paper to the main subject; refuting the glass
greenhouse fable (I sometimes insert a quote from the late Petr Beckmann:
"Ain't the way my greehouse works" when mentioning the AGW "greenhouse"
argument) is useful but not required. I find point 5 far more
important than you do; until we have some agreement on a model for
generating a single figure of merit for "earth temperature" it is absurd
to discuss changes in fractions of a degree. There are too many parameters
in the definition, and it's easy to get any result you want by playing
with the definition of "temperature." There are no continuous measures
from 1880 to 2000; all have to have "adjustments" and the adjustments are
often larger than the error margins.
As to falsifying the entire greenhouse hypothesis
by examining the underlying physics, I would say that's exactly what
science ought to do. I can't comment on the paper itself without a great
deal more study of the paper than I have time to give it, but I have read
enough to say I do not understand why it ought to be suppressed. If it's
trivial, any good climate scientist ought to be able to show why it's
trivially wrong -- not just say that. The authors have the credentials to
warrant being answered, not merely suppressed. It may be that the answer
is simple. Good. Let's see it other than simply saying "that's so simple I
won't bother" or "that's how the deniers work, they make these absurd
assertions, and we don't have time to answer then because they are so
absurd..."
============
Subject: University Funding
I can understand your view of university funding, but
there are at least a thousand American colleges and universities currently
operating hand-to-mouth, and almost all UK universities are in that
situation. The economic bind these institutions find themselves in is driven
by two factors: most of their expenses are in salaries, and nobody has yet
invented a way to increase the efficiency of teaching more than marginally.
Sure, a university will absorb all the money you throw at it, but the UK has
tripled the percentage of students going on to university over the last 50
years, with no increase in (inflation-adjusted) funding. The following link
is for a book on the subject
http://tinyurl.com/ycrnh5l of turning around fragile academic
institutions.
Here's the Times Higher Education review:
http://tinyurl.com/ybrru46 .
-- Harry Erwin
They take in too many
students. And in California at least there are over a thousand with salaries
of over 200K. That's not poverty... [JEP}
American colleges and universities come in many
different types with different business models and constraints; UK
universities are much less diverse. The problem is finding a delicate
balance between income (tuition, fees, donations, government funding,
endowment income if it exists.) and outgo (mostly salaries). A lot of what a
college or university does has a fixed cost, so the marginal cost of
teaching an extra student isn't that large. In the UK, most universities get
a fixed amount per student, and have the size of their UK student body
capped. The amount per student is fairly small--much smaller than the cost
of the first few students, but greater than the marginal cost--so
universities recruit UK students to their cap and use foreign students
(paying high fees) to cover the start-up costs of programmes. These dynamics
drive the quality of programmes down and class sizes up here.
In the US, there are a wide variety of schools, and
it's much harder to generalise. Tuition fees are higher but usually on a
sliding scale, so the number of students accepted reflects a balance between
the costs of the programmes and total income. The bottom 25% of American
colleges is living hand-to-mouth, and yet there are for-profit colleges that
do OK. The salaries you describe (which I suspect are almost entirely found
in medical schools) are astronomical compared to those paid in the UK--I
could make more teaching secondary school. From my previous experience,
American academic salaries in most technical and scientific fields are also
less than industry pays. Get the James Martin book from the library--it's
very interesting and applies to institutions other than academic.
If you want your public educational institutions to be
efficient, you have to design your funding *carefully* to produce that
outcome, and you have to watch out for end-runs around the funding model.
Look at the best-managed private institutions and try to set up the same
external rewards and constraints. Otherwise, if you want it bad; you get it
bad.
You want your educational system to meet your
day-to-day needs while also providing a cushion of adaptability to black
swan events. The UK currently mismanages the former and lacks the latter.
Harry Erwin
We used to have a very good system for teaching
what about 75% of college students learn. It was called high school.
University level education is useful for 10$ or fewer of the population.
College level for perhaps 10% more. Attempting "higher" education for
larger numbers is futile. Much of what is taught in community colleges is
remedial for high school.
We used to have teachers colleges and vocational
schools. We need to get them back but we have thrown them out in the name
of a false and futile egalitarianism.
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW Friday
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Aristotle, Politics, middle class, and The Republic with comments;
