William H Evans wrote: > Aircraft carriers and 100 megaton hydrogen bombs do little > to dissuade a small band of terrorists from doing their > dastardly deeds.
I agree on the H-bombs but not the carriers. A carrier group allows us to park what amounts to a floating airbase off the coast of any hot spot. Most of the sorties in the current war have been flown from carriers. I believe the exceptions are some B-2 sorties which originated in the US. Carriers are a critical part of the Reach component of my four R's. > If they had to spend some time wondering if their organization > had been infiltrated by US intelligence (even if it hasn't), > it would at least cause them problems. Agreed. Just the real possibility of infiltration is effective. It causes apprehension and can be divisive. Even better is to get rival groups warring with eachother. We should have resumed support for the Northern Alliance the moment we realized Al Queda and the Taliban were in bed together. And if we had not cut back on human intelligence, we would have known that a long time ago. > It would have been nice if Clinton had taken the savings from > streamlining the military and used them to buy some spare parts > to keep what we already have in operation. D00D, you're talking to a veteran of the Huntsville defense industry. I was working for Sperry on Army training systems when the Graham-Rudman budget cuts hit. The first things cut were training systems and maintenance programs. Can you think of two things that have a bigger influence on readiness than training and maintenance? I don't think so. When we were short of work, they shipped 3 coworkers and I to another Unisys division that was flush with Star Wars money and needed to spend their surplus or they would get less funding the next year. Apparently someone (his initials might have been RWR) decided theoretical SDI research was more important than training and maintenance. Go figure. But hey, at least I got to play with Transputer arrays for 4 months. Does anybode need an Occam programmer? I didn't think so. ;-( BTW, that was in 1987, about 5+ years before Clinton. > The objection to them keeping the polls open in St. Louis was > that they ONLY did it in Democratic districts. There is a substantial overlap between "urban blue collar" and "Democratic" districts in Atlanta and St. Louis. Frankly, I don't see why the polls need to close so early anyway. Is it that important that we call a winner before bedtime? -- Phil Harbison mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this list just send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a BLANK subject line and the single word "UNSUBSCRIBE" (without the quotes) in the body or visit http://www.RollTideFan.net
