My pal Al Clark — the Michael Jordan of tactical shooting -
coined the acronym “SGO.” It stands for “s#*t goin’ on.” It’s a
term that fits a lot of circumstances, especially in Washington. As
Senate Democrats and the U.N. work overtime to prevent anyone from
hurting Saddam’s feelings, there’s a lot of SGO in Washington that
will affect our ability to fight, now and in the near future. Many
of these things deserve more attention than they are getting.
Israel — rightly suspicious that the Dems would slow-roll any
development of missile defenses — went ahead at full speed after
the Gulf War, and a version of its Arrow missile defense system is
the result. The Israelis have deployed the Arrow to face Iraq,
which may launch Scud-Bs at them when we begin the campaign to take
out Saddam. Each Arrow battery can fire six missiles at separate
targets very rapidly. Where, you may ask, is our comparable system?
The Patriot “PAC-3” is being tested and deployed, but not bought in
large enough numbers to protect much of anything. And we are still
a very long way from having any system that will defend the
continental U.S. against missile attack. As long as Michigan Sen.
Carl Levin is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, we won’t
get much farther. Pushing Levin should be high on Dubya’s
agenda.
As should firing Tommy Thompson and the rest of the HHS jugheads
who are still fighting against the idea of allowing Americans to
choose to be vaccinated against smallpox. As discussed
last July, smallpox is probably the greatest biowar threat. Not
allowing Americans to get the vaccine is nothing short of criminal
negligence. And the HHS people still don’t believe.
Back at Fort Fumble, there’s bad news on a lot of fronts. Mr.
Rumsfeld sent a 17 September memo to the DoD leadership asking for
a congressional shopping list to relieve DoD of constraints imposed
by obscure laws. Lotsa luck, boss. Congressional micromanagement is
an addiction, and Congress can’t be cured of it until it’s willing
to give up at least a smidgen of its power over the Pentagon. It
won’t happen while the Dems rule the Senate. Accompanying that is
bad news, coming in thick and fast, about a number of weapon
systems, particularly the Marines’ V-22 “Osprey” and the Army’s
“Stryker” armored combat vehicle. And the Navy is about to send its
warfighters — Marines, SEALs, everybody — to war with an
unreliable machine gun.
In January ‘01, my very first column for The American
Spectator Online described some of the problems with the
Marines’ V-22 Osprey. Osprey is a “tiltrotor” aircraft that rotates
its two engines to the vertical to take off and land like a
helicopter, and to the horizontal for flight like a fixed-wing
aircraft. It’s been a’building for decades, and has killed about 30
people — including 23 Marines — in test flights. Last week, the
politicians and lobbyists began beating the drum —again — to push
Osprey into production despite the serious problems that still
exist. Any helicopter that loses power should be able to
autorotate: nose-down and get enough air through the blades to make
them rotate, providing enough lift for a survivable crash landing.
Navy Secretary Gordon England said that the Osprey doesn’t need the
ability to autorotate because it has two engines, and can land on
either. Do you want to bet your son’s life on that theory? I
don’t.
Experts say that Osprey can’t handle what helo jocks call “rapid
multi-axis control inputs” — combinations of rudder, cyclic
(forward movement) and collective (vertical movement) — which you
have to do if people are shooting at you. If the Marines still need
the Osprey — which they may not — they should get it. But not
before the major technological bugs have been worked out. War
approaches, and it is perfectly clear that Osprey can’t be ready.
Congress and Mr. Rumsfeld should bite the bullet and buy more large
helos to meet the Marines’ needs, and take the money out of the
Osprey program if they have to. Defense Undersecretary Pete
Aldridge should do now what I recommended almost two years ago. He
should get a small bunch of no-foolin’ test pilots — people not
employed by the contractors or in the Marine program office — to
scrub the Osprey’s design, fly it themselves, and come back with a
clean report defining what major technological problems exist. Too
many Marines have died for this program already. Time to fix it or
scrap it. Definitely not time to produce it.
The Army’s “Stryker” combat vehicle has so many built-in flaws,
you have to wonder what the designers were thinking. Stryker
doesn’t fit inside a C-130 without being stripped of almost all its
external equipment. What descendant of Werner von Braun designs a
combat vehicle that doesn’t fit into the primary aircraft that will
deploy it? Stryker apparently can’t fire its weapons unless it
stands still. In a recent wargame, the machine gun and grenade
launcher couldn’t be aimed while on the move, and Stryker had to
sit still for an average of two minutes to aim the gun. Add to that
the vulnerabilities of exposed tires and thin armor. Thirteen of
fourteen Strykers participating in the war game were “destroyed” by
enemy fire. Mr. Aldridge should add this to his list of “fix or
scrap” decisions before any more money is spent.
The Vietnam-era M-60 machine gun is the only man-portable
machine gun we have that fires the 7.62 mm round. That round has a
lot more punch than the 5.56mm round fired by the M-16. When it
works, the M-60 provides squad-level heavy fire that otherwise
comes only from the air. But it’s no longer reliable, having been
repeatedly “fixed” with parts that don’t really fit. The SEAL teams
have hundreds of M-60s, but have to deploy three to be sure that
they can keep one working. The Navy procurement weenies are buying
a new man-portable 7.62 mm caliber machine gun. But deliveries
won’t even start until about three years from now. If the Navy can
get a new gun in time, fine. If they can fix the old one, that’s
fine too. But one or the other damned well ought to be done right
now, before some of our people die because their machine gun breaks
in combat.
We have a sacred duty to our soldiers, sailors, airmen and
Marines to minimize the butcher’s bill we ask them to pay. There is
no excuse for sending them into combat with tools of war work that
don’t work, or are more dangerous to our people than they are to
the enemy. Saddam delendus est.
