Should service be required for citizenship?

The issue is debated in the movie cut above but the book is a far better and deeper dive into the issue.

Should service be required for citizenship?

I'm calling it. Africa is going to be a battlefield...the rush for resources has started.

via Shepherd of the Gurneys...

Now, a representative of MSF/DWB is saying there are more dead just in Sierra Leone, than the current reported total of Ebola deaths worldwide.
(For reference, Sierra Leone currently reports 1500 deaths, and the world total is 13,703.)
Barcelona (AFP) - Ebola has wiped out whole villages in Sierra Leone and may have caused many more deaths than the nearly 5,000 official global toll, a senior coordinator of the medical aid group MSF said Friday.
Rony Zachariah of Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, said after visiting Sierra Leone that the Ebola figures were "under-reported", in an interview with AFP on the sidelines of a medical conference in Barcelona.
"The situation is catastrophic. There are several villages and communities that have been basically wiped out. In one of the villages I went to, there were 40 inhabitants and 39 died," he said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) published revised figures on Friday showing 4,951 people have died of Ebola and there was a total of 13,567 reported cases.
"The WHO says there is a correction factor of 2.5, so maybe it is 2.5 times higher and maybe that is not far from the truth. It could be 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000," said Zachariah.
He stressed that "whole communities have disappeared but many of them are not in the statistics. The situation on the ground is actually much worse.""Whole communities have disappeared..."
We're not going to stop Ebola over there. The possibility is long past. That option is toast. And very shortly, the afflicted countries will be too.

Do you get the force of connection here?

Consider.  The UK sent a force to Sierra Leone.  We have heard jack squat from them since their arrival.

Consider.  The US has sent the 101st to Liberia.  We have heard jack squat from them.

If we're seeing this type of stuff from open source materials then those in charge have much better visibility.  Remember.  Our UN Representative just left that region and is now back.

I'm calling it.  Africa is going to be a battlefield.  A disease has removed the thorny issue of what to do with the indigenous people and now the race for resources is on.

The only question is whether China feels confident enough to stop a power play by the US and Western European powers.

One Marine for 11 million illegals?

via AP

A Mexican judge ordered the immediate release of a jailed U.S. Marine veteran who spent eight months behind bars for crossing the border with loaded guns.
The judge on Friday called for retired Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi (Tah-mor-EE-si) to be freed because of his mental state and did not make a determination on the illegal arms charges against the Afghanistan veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a Mexican official who had knowledge of the ruling but was not authorized to give his name.

This is hard.

A Marine is freed and while I'm happy about that I can't cheer.  Why?  Because I get the sense...and no I can't prove it...but I get the sense that this was a move that was made purely for political expediency.

How would it look to grant 11 million (or more) illegal aliens amnesty while one of our own was being held on trumped up charges?

Just like the Bergdahl trade, I think we might have paid too high a price.

Lockheed Martin Havoc. Did they uparmor the thing?

I was re-watching some of the vids put out by the vehicle manufacturers competing for the MPC/ACV/ACV 1.1 (or whatever HQMC is calling the thing these days) and I noticed that extra armor has been applied to the Havoc.

In the swim portion of the vid I caught onto the changes in the swim vane and I guess I was so focused on that portion of the vid that I missed the obvious.

Interesting.

Sidenote.  Real nice how they put an AAV turret on this beast.  The Yat-Yas boys must be happy as hell.  They get easier cross training and almost a plug and play option for crew members if its adopted.  Very nicely done LM MFC.

India vs. China...the fight no one talks about.

I am so glad that the Wall Street Journal is finally covering this issue.  No one is talking about it and even my readers in India down play the dangers...but make no mistake about it.

When China and India finally come to blows it will be a sight to behold and will shake the world.

The thing that people are missing is that both sides are girding for war.  India has formed a Mountain Brigade Corps (a reader informs me that my info is outdated...they will have a couple of divisions facing the Chinese) that might soon swell to a division.  China is doing the same.  Both sides are developing infrastructure to rush forces to the region and weapons are being bought with an eye to fighting on the border.

We might not see full scale warfare but skirmishes will happen and I would bet that the soldiers involved will swear they fought WW3....the fighting will be that intense.

Blast from the past. Corregidor. Temp-plate for future Airborne/Amphibious Assault Ops?

How many of you know about the Battle for Corregidor?

Not that many huh?  Not surprising.  For some reason the US Army emphasizes its exploits in Europe during WW2 but is silent about what it did in the Pacific. The fight for Corregidor should be required reading for both Marine and Army leadership.

If we are going to fight in the Pacific in the future, I believe that the fight will look somewhat like Corregidor...except we won't have as much naval gunfire...we won't have as much close air support...and we'll still lack armored firepower to take the fight to the enemy.

What caught my attention about this fight wasn't the amphibious assault portion of it. No, what made me pause is how the airborne assault was carried out.  Check this out from HyperWar.

In formulating final plans for the drop, planners had to correlate factors of wind direction and velocity, the speed and flight direction of the C-47 aircraft from which the 503d RCT would jump, the optimum height for the planes during the drop, the time the paratroopers would take to reach the ground, the 'troopers' drift during their descent, and the best flight formation for the C-47's. Planners expected an easterly wind of fifteen to twenty-five miles per hour with gusts of higher velocity. The direction corresponded roughly to the long axes of the drop zones, but even so, each C-47 could not be over the dropping grounds for more than six seconds. With each man taking a half second to get out of the plane and another twenty-five seconds to reach the ground from the planned drop altitude of 400 feet, the wind would cause each paratrooper to drift about 250 feet westward during his descent. This amount of drift would leave no more than 100 yards of ground distance at each drop zone to allow for human error or sharp changes in the wind's speed or direction.
The 503d RCT and the 317th Troop Carrier Group--whose C-47's were to transport and drop the paratroopers--decided to employ a flight pattern providing for two columns of C-47's, one column over each drop zone. The direction of flight would have to be from southwest to northeast because the best line of approach--west to east--would not leave sufficient room between the two plane columns and would bring the aircraft more quickly over Manila Bay, increasing the chances that men would drop into the water or over cliffs. Since each plane could be over the drop zone only six seconds, each would have to make two or three passes, dropping a "stick" of six to eight 'troopers each time. It would be an hour or more before the 1,000 or so troops of the first airlift would be on the ground. Then, the C-47's would have to return to Mindoro, reload, and bring a second lift forward. This second group would not be on the ground until some five hours after the men of the first lift had started jumping.

Think about that.

You're conducting a parachute drop and you're basically circling the drop zone dropping six to eight paratroops on each pass?

This is the poster boy operation for a confined battle zone.  I don't know if today's planner are actually considering the type of land that they're going to be sending our forces to fight over but its going to be extremely compact and that will bring difficulties that are not being properly anticipated.

Study Corregidor.  Its the future of the fight in the Pacific....at least for ground pounders.

F-35 News. Can the plane take carrier punishment?

via Breaking Defense.

After several months of uncertainty whether CF-3 and CF-5 would both be ready to fly — complete with new tail hook assemblies and huge amounts of test instrumentation — Bogdan told us yesterday they would both fly to the ship. As Breaking D readers know, thetail hook on the F-35Cs had to be redesigned. The initial design did not reliably engage the cable and wasn’t strong enough. The Arresting Hook System got better damping, changed the shape of the hook and made it and where it connects with the airframe, much stronger. During tests over the last five months, F-35C test pilots had to deliberately land their aircraft on the nose gear to mimic what can happen when pitching seas may drive a carrier deck right up into a plane as it lands. A Navy pilot I spoke with said the physical punishment of such a landing is “pretty impressive” — not to mention the stresses it can place on the plane. I’ll be in San Diego and on the Nimitz all next week covering the tests for you.

If we weren't talking about the future defense of the fleet---and a crazy amount of money....This would be funny.

Do you notice it?  Can you sense the same attempt to generate headlines like they did when the push was on to fly the F-35 to Europe? But what really has me curious and I have yet to hear anyone talk about is the lead that Breaking Defense buried...

A Navy pilot I spoke with said the physical punishment of such a landing is “pretty impressive” — not to mention the stresses it can place on the plane.

Can a stealth airplane take the punishment of carrier landings?

Can the F-35 handle the stress after its been subjected to weight reduction and had so much of it structure "shaved" down?

I just don't know.

What I do know is that this program is setting up an artificial make-or break moment and I don't know why.

Something is going on with this program.  I just can't piece it together.