Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Military matters
1. Weapon woes
A lack of body armor may be emblematic of proor provisioning of the troops, but it's hardly the only one. Winslow T. Wheeler, writing in CDI's Defense Monitor notes the following:
* Uniforms rip easily, eyewear fogs up and doesn't fit under helmets, and bad bad boots
* Troops end up buying gloves, socks, Camelbak hydration systems, and weapons cleaning equipment
* 13-20% of soldiers report the M4 carbine jamming
* 54% of soldiers said that M249 machine gun had maintenance problems; 35% said they had no confidence in the weapon
* The 5.56 mm bullet used in the M4, M16, and M249 doesn't have adequate stopping power
2. Dukakis was right. It is about competence.
Hosenball in Newsweek:
In an exhaustive investigation published in January, the Baltimore Sun, the NSA's hometown newspaper, also raised questions about the NSA's management, during Hayden's tenure, of a major classified project called Trailblazer. This project was supposed to modernize the agency's entire system for processing and sorting out “Signals Intelligence” reports - raw, and later, evaluated intercepts of messages collected by the NSA's worldwide eavesdropping network. One intelligence expert told the Sun that Trailblazer was “the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community.” An intelligence official familiar with the program told NEWSWEEK that Congressional investigators now believe that much of the money that was poured into the program was wasted, and that Hayden's successor at NSA has now “abandoned” significant elements of Trailblazer.
Corruption and incompetence are almost always inseparable.
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Corruption and incompetence are almost always inseparable.
That's because the incompetent need to cheat to hide their incompetence.
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That's because the incompetent need to cheat to hide their incompetence.
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