Monday, July 1, 2013
UVA student arrested for buying water
Anyway, today's subject is a case in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a coed was arrested for fleeing arrest after attempted apprehension by several plainclothes Virginia Alcohol and Beverage Control (ABC) enforcement agents.
Apparently the ABC agents mistook a carton of bottled water for beer in a darkened parking lot and attempted to apprehend Elizabeth Daly, 20, a student at the University of Virginia. Ms. Daly was fearful the six agents were not legitimate law enforcement officers and were trying to assault her. After all, it was a dark parking lot and she was walking to her car with a carton of bottled water.
She apparently reached her car and got in, where the ABC agents flashed "unidentifiable" badges and demanded she surrender. When she started the vehicle in order to lower the electric windows, the agents became violent, jumped on the car, drew their weapons, and reportedly attempted to break into the vehicle.
At this point, understandably frightened, Ms. Daly drove off, while her passenger literally crawled into the back seat, screaming "go-go-go", in an attempt to escape their apparent assailants.
She was then chased (while she was trying to call 911) by a different ABC agent in a vehicle, who pulled her over with the blue lights. At this point, she realized her assailants were, in fact, public servants, and was profusely apologetic for attempting to flee. The ABC arrested her, charged her with three felonies, and put her in jail.
This was in April. This story only came out this week when the local District Attorney dropped the charges against Ms. Daly, while defending the actions of the ABC agents who threatened, assaulted, and chased her in the first place.
OK.... perhaps at this point you're wondering if you read this all correctly...
SIX Agents of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control surrounded and accosted a 20-year-old coed in a dark grocery store parking lot because they wrongly believed wrongly she possessed a 12-pack of beer.
Does this make any sense to anyone? Is it okay to accost a young woman in a dark parking lot, with overwhelming, violent force, for possession of beer? Don't they have anything better to do?
I suspect there was more going on here - training, someone trying to make some kind of point, some kind of warped out-of-control enthusiasm for enforcement of the drinking age in Virginia, or something.
This young lady was 20 years old. Not many years ago, it was legal to drink beer at age 20 in most states. I don't remember that being a Bad Thing. In fact, the world seemed to be a better place when 18 year old college students could drink beer legally. When a college student having a beer was legal, as opposed to the equivalent crime to using marijuana or cocaine, the world seemed to be a kinder, gentler place.
But the question that really sticks with me is how did the six ABC agents know the young lady walking to her car in a dark parking lot was under age 21? When they couldn't tell what kind of beverage she had in her bag? Did they simply assume she was underage and in possession of beer because she was at the grocery store? If so, is that something we want law enforcement to do? Should they not have had a little more probable cause (since she was, in fact, innocent) before jumping on her car and drawing their weapons?
Ultimately I'm interested about what this case really says about our society. Does a majority of Americans support this sort of thing? By this "sort of thing", I mean hyper-aggressive enforcement of the drinking age. Does criminalizing 20-year-olds for drinking beer really make society better? If so, I'm not seeing it. What I am seeing is a degradation in the legitimacy of the rule of law, especially among the young.
I've seen this before: where young people, confronted with such hypocrisy and contradiction, lose trust, confidence, and respect for many or all public institutions. It isn't a situation we want.
The current generation is very passive - they will generally say and do whatever necessary to get along, then they tune out and do what they want. Time will tell what kind of adults they will be. I'm afraid the example that was set for them, however, is among the worst in modern history.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Women in the Military
While I really do stand by everything I say, overtly, anonymously, or not, there's a big difference between what I want to publish on social media, to all my personal friends directly, and pretty much only to them, vs. what I'd like to throw out to the internet community to stand or fall on its own merits, independent of any explicit attribution.
I guess I'm eager to have anonymous interaction, based purely on the merits of the ideas proposed or circulated, as opposed to having people judge me as a person based on what they read into what I say or post on social media sites. In this sense, I guess I'm saying I like the blogging format better than more intimate social media for serious intellectual exchange. On the other hand, our little blog here has a pretty limited following, as very few of my readers here know me from anywhere other than the internet and I don't associate any of my overt personal social media accounts with my blog posts.
On the other hand, the world has changed. I don't have nearly the time I used to have for writing blog posts, and I miss it. The "blog" community is less dynamic than it used to be, as many people have shifted to other venues for online interaction. That's too bad as it's a great format for exchanging serious ideas.
So... with all that... some actual content...
Today the Department of Defense announced a policy change opening most (maybe all? it isn't clear...) combat billets to women. This announcement was pretty abrupt and surprising - there was no discussion, no hearings, no political debate about it in advance. It is very unclear exactly what it will mean, apparently to everyone, including most of the US military, who did not know it was coming.
The abrupt shift, however, was not without quite a bit of foreshadowing. DOD has steadily evolved its administrative policies on assigning women to combat support roles, in large part because they simply needed women to fill empty billets. Women have served, by all reports heroically, in many combatant roles in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many military units would be rendered non-mission-capable if they suddenly lost all the women in their ranks.
I served many years in the military and had quite a bit of experience with women in the service. There were a number of issues associated with women serving in various positions, most of which were not significantly different from issues faced in the civilian world.
The integration of women into military jobs has pretty closely paralleled their integration into civilian jobs. Before the 1970s, there were few women in "tradtionally male" professions. That changed rapidly after the advent of "women's lib" in the 1960s (ignited by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963), to the point where they today dominate many previously all-male professions, as well as a majority of institutions of higher education. Their integration into the military has lagged a few years behind the experience in the private sector, but the trend is similar.
The military, however, is very different from the civilian world in quite a few major, significant ways. First there is a great deal of personal sacrifice and intimate personal interaction that comes with the territory. The military tortures its own people for training (if you accept the MSM definition of torture), although those training programs have been substantially moderated over the years, since the admission of women. The military routinely (especially in recent years) asks its people to volunteer to sacrifice themselves, often in horrific, and sometimes in senseless ways.
There's nothing to say that women can't be asked to sacrifice themselves horrifically or senselessly, just the same as men, and many have done so in recent years. While there was, until recently, a general social attitude that women should not be asked to sacrifice themselves just the same as men are, that attitude seems to have mostly eroded in western civilization in just the last several years. This is possibly a result of women achieving approximate parity in what were previously male-dominated roles in the civilian world.
Women are, however, often (perhaps usually) subjected to much more horrible treatment at the hands of the enemy than men are, for a variety of reasons. Some of these are cultural, some are political, but perhaps most are just plain human nature, consistent for hundreds of thousands of years. Today, a woman captured on the battlefield can expect, with a great deal of certainty, to be gang-raped before being subjected to even worse abuse. Were I a woman, this would be a consideration for me serving in the military. I do not know if it actually is for any significant percentage of women joining the military today.
At a much more routine level, there are lots of issues associated with women in military units that are significant and don't necessarily have anything to do with women vs. men, but rather with women + men. When you put a bunch of 19-year-old boys and girls together, they're going to have a lot of sex, and a lot of sexual politics, tension, and drama. Trust me: this does not make for a more combat effective unit. It's like a cross between a train wreck and groundhog day. The same boring disasters, over and over again, forever. It's just human nature and it will take probably at least many tens of thousands of years to change, by which time it probably won't matter.
But the US military has been coping with this issue for a good while now, and continuing to succeed. This is what gets us to the real issue.
We keep kicking butt - and don't get confused - we have been consistently tactically successful in all of the wars we have fought in recent years. If you believe we have been strategically unsuccessful, which I think is a worthy topic for debate - it is hard to argue that strategic failure is attributable to battlefield failure at the tactical level. Of course, if you get down into the tactical weeds, you will find few women, or units with significant numbers of women, in key decisive positions on the front lines. That could change, and future results could be different, but it would be tough to say that we've failed anywhere in recent history due to the introduction of women into combat support billets.
But I would also argue that conventional military forces have played a much smaller role in our success in recent conflicts, as opposed to conventional wars of the past. We haven't been in a conventional stand-up fight at the operational level in any meaningful way since the first gulf war. Which gets me to the main point...
The basic nature of warfare has changed, and with it, the relationship between the people and the act of war. This is a bigger factor in the integration of women into the military than the fact that the military needs them to fill billets or that "social justice" demands that women be provided with equal (or, I would argue, greater than equal) opportunities to sacrifice themselves.
Today, the adversaries we fight are primarily unconventional and not associated with a nation-state nor an organized military force. Military operations in the information age are primarily about policing bad guys, not fighting other formal armies. This may not be universally true - there is nothing to say there could not or will not be formal military clashes between nation-states in the future - just that these types of conventional wars are becoming extremely rare, compared to low-intensity conflict against non-state actors.
In such an environment, the expected and implied roles of women are very different. In low intensity conflicts, there are few well-defined "front lines", so anyone involved could find themselves confronting a guerrilla or terrorist adversary. Consequently it's difficult or impossible to segregate the women into non-combat roles. That is the main reality of the most recent policy shift in DOD.
Also, the enemy is inherently weak and there is an attitude that even our little girls, armed with all our modern technology, can defeat him.
That gets to the next point: if we were worried about losing any of these wars, the calculus would be very different.
In the classical period, men conducted war by lining up in tight squares, shoulder to shoulder, and ran into each other with their shields, then transitioning to hacking each other to death with short swords. It was unbelievably nasty, brutal, and violent. There wasn't any consideration of having women participate in that type of warfare, for a couple of reasons. The first was that it wouldn't work. A phalanx with women it in would simply lose to one that didn't have women. The second reason was that ancient societies had defined gender roles and there was a social imperative to protect women from the misery and brutality of "men's work".
The reasons for this are not mysterious. Women are smaller and weaker than men. Take an average man and an average woman, absent any social modifying influences, and the man will physically dominate the woman. The woman may be able to use other skills to change the terms of the engagement, but it is an exceptionally rare woman who can physically dominate even a slightly-below-average man.
Scale this basic truth up to 10 men (and women) or 100, or 1 million, and the probabilty of success in a purely physical engagement is directly decreased by number of women involved.
Yet we keep winning, despite having lots of women in significant positions.
The reason is that warfare has really changed. We're just not fighting phalanx battles any more (although hand-to-hand combat certainly has not disappeared). Instead, information is the basic commodity of warfare, and in this environment women are much less disadvantaged. (I would argue that women are still not the equal of men in war, pretty much entirely due to hormonal differences.)
But in technological war, where relative physical weakness is much less significant, women are much more likely to be able to hold their own.
Still: if you had an army of male information warriors vs. an army of female information warriors, where no physical confrontion was involved, who would win? Still the men would dominate. Why? Because men and women are different. Men have more testosterone, and are consequently more aggressive. This aggression manifests itself in many different ways - but war and military service primarily about aggression. The people with more testosterone, physical and mental aggression, physical mass, and strength are always going to dominate.
Marty Van Creveld said in The Transformation of War that societies allow women into their military forces when they perceive it doesn't matter - that the military is no longer needed to ensure the survival of the society, or is no longer a symbol of the strength of the society - when it becomes "just another job". At this point, the opposition to having women participate evaporates and the military's segregation of gender roles becomes just another example of "discrimination".
But........look at the social status and reputation today of our special operations forces: the "Green Berets", the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEALs, etc. They enjoy an elite, almost legendary status in society that other segments of the military once also enjoyed but no longer do, such as Naval Aviation, the cavalry, the submarine force, or going farther back in history, the Roman Legions or the Spartan phalanx. Why? Because they are the most traditional and romantic warriors left in our post-modern military system. They are well adapted to the unconventional and low intensity conflicts we are fighting. They fight as individuals, often at close quarters, hand-to-hand with vicious and lethal enemies. They are more likely to be wounded or killed in direct combat (as opposed to blown up by a terrorist roadside bomb, which has claimed the vast majority of casualties among the conventional forces in the last decade). And there are no women in their ranks (although there are plenty in support roles, staff jobs, etc.)
Those units are doing the majority of the direct fighting in recent history and are much more heavily engaged, in 2012, than the much larger conventional force.
This may change soon - I don't know. I do know that if there is a change, the standards will be lowered to permit women to compete and succeed and consequently the social status and reputation of these elite forces will be diminished. Ordinary men (and women) (including among our enemies) will look at the Green Berets or SEALs and say "if little girls can do it, it can't be all that tough" and the mystique, as well as the effectiveness, of these legendary warriors will be permanently eroded. (As an aside: the Marine Corps is somewhere in between the special operations forces and the conventional military. It remains highly respected and admired, like SOF, and has few or no women in front-line combat jobs. The Marines experimented, in their typical, straightforward way, with allowing women into the infantry and the female Marines reported, straightforwardly, that they were unable to meet the male standards. Not sure what they'll do next.)
The lowering of standards has happened in every segment of the military that has integrated women. It is inevitable. Women simply cannot perform in military roles in the same way as men. If they could, as some of the political proponents of the new policy claim, the NFL would have a lot of female linebackers as well. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we will lose future wars. Our military forces have been so preponderantly dominant in recent years that perhaps we will continue to succeed and win with a fully-integrated military. That probably depends on what kind of wars we will fight, and how formidable our enemies will be.
If our future wars continue to look like police actions - rounding up idiots and bad guys who make trouble but don't threaten the survival of the society - as Marty Van Creveld says they will, then integration of women will likely make no difference.
It is also possible (probably probable, eventually) that we could fight a major conventional war against a dangerous but weaker adversary (such as Iran, although I doubt that one) where we will still succeed with a fully-integrated military. Another scenario, which is probably very, very unlikely, that we'll fight a major world war against a peer competitor who may be stronger than us (e.g. China), in a repeat of the World War II experience. In that scenario, this peer competitor may be likely to have women integrated into its conventional military forces in a similar way to us, so again the integration of women is unlikely to matter very much.
So... it seems that we're as a point where sexual integration of the military is inevitable, and probably irrelevant. It probably says more about the roles of the military in society and women in society than it does about our need to preserve our national security. The military has always been an engine and a laboratory of social change, and this is just one more example. Many military traditions will likely change, but military traditions have always changed over time. Apparently the sense in our society is that our security as a nation-state faces no serious threats - if it did, I believe we would not be having this discussion. Hopefully this situation will endure and we will enjoy our sense of security for many years to come. I'm not betting one way or another, however, on whether it will.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Escalator to Hell
Monday, September 26, 2011
Pan Am - The Series
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Holiday Blues
I’m working my way over to the little alcove where I keep the lawn tractor, the generator, and bags of patchmaster, grass seed and birdseed. The garage would be a large rectangle except that a quarter of it on one side is taken up by a the space for the laundry room and a half bath, but this does not stretch the whole way across the garage, hence the roughly 10 ft by 8 ft alcove.
Now we do have a rodent problem, living as we do at the edge of the state forest, so I have glue traps, snap traps, and live traps all over the damn place. I haven’t caught a mouse since June, so I figured they were out enjoying nature’s bounty in the woods. Imagine my dismay when I find that the bag of birdseed has a giant hole in it, and seed is spilled all over the floor. Damn mice.
I continue to put things on the new shelving unit I just put together, and my son comes out to talk to me. We were bantering about something when I glance ahead to the tractor’s alcove and I see something. Biting back the first ten curse words I think of, I yell for my son to get his little butt back in the house. “Why?” he asks. “Just get back in the house,” I yell, “there’s a … skunk in the garage”. The ellipsis stands for the slight break in my cadence where I censored out the word “fucking” in my mind before talking to the boy. Though I think he heard me yell after he got inside “get out of here you furry bastard”.
But the skunk seemed, if not unconcerned, only minimally perturbed by my presence and ambled over to the wall opposite the wall with the seeds, where he slid behind some plywood sheets I had leaning against the wall. Wonderful. “Get my car out of the garage,” yells my wife. “I’m not driving the kids in to the first day of school in a skunkmobile!”. Yes, dear, thank you so much for your concern about my welfare.
I continued to clean up, then went inside for lunch and to watch Ming practice cello. “Is the skunk gone?” the kids ask when I go back out. “I don’t see or hear him,” I reply. So I continued organizing, setting out recycling, and doing other things. Then it came time to put the generator back in the alcove. As I approach, something scuffles from under the mower deck to hide behind the plywood again, and he’s baaaaack. Fuck.
So. In the immortal words of Chernishevsky, what to do? I’m really not enthused about getting him out, but there is no way my wife is going to let me wait for animal control to get here in a few days. So I get the most powerful flashlight I have and shine it down the tent formed by the wall and the plywood. The skunk gives me a look that seems to say: “Watchoo lookin at?” But I have to do something, right?
My wife expresses the opinion I’m being a chickenshit and am only dealing with a possum. My daughter comes out, peers down the plywood tunner and starts jumping up and down. “I see black and white! It’s a skunk! It’s really a skunk!”. Yes, kid. Get back inside, kid.
So. Well. Yes. I have a long pole, more than 15 feet long, I use to clean hard-to-reach gutters. It seems really long and unwieldy on the top of a stepladder, but now it doesn’t seem nearly long enough, you know what I mean? So. At the back of the alcove, right next to the breaker box, there is a door to the outside. I open it, thinking that every egress is an opportunity for the skunk to run in the right direction – out. But the fuzzy fucker hunkers down behind the plywood. There is a sheet of plexiglass there, too, and only the front half of the skunk is hidden, the business end is sticking out behind the plexiglass. At the end of the alcove wall the garage opens out into the second bay, there is a row of shelving units at a right angle to the wall he’s hiding behind. I can see him making a break for it, making a sharp left turn at the end of the alcove, and me with an entirely new problem on my hands. Since I don’t need him running from his current hiding place to that one, I begin pulling some of the plywood sheets out. Every time I do it spooks the skunk and it jumps until it hits its head on the remaining plywood sheets. Making it even jumpier. Just what I needed.
Once I’ve pulled some plywood out and blocked the shelving unit off with a makeshift wall of plywood sheets, so he has nowhere to run but straight ahead for a good 20 feet, I go outside with my pole. And, yes, I poke the skunk in the ass with a stick. A very looong stick. Nonetheless, it does not seem quite long enough to me, and I consider that while there may have been dumber things that I have done in my life, but I can’t seem to recall them at the moment. However the skunk simply lifts up his butt and rides the stick like he’s sliding down a banister. So I lift him up. Hey, now he’s a real pole cat, right?
Eventually, he gets tired of the ass lift and the banging of plywood sheets, so he runs for it. As I predicted, he made a hard left, fortunately well clear of hiding places because of the plywood. He runs right across the open bay where my wife’s car was, to the other wall, and down to the end of the garage in the corner formed by the long wall and the little bit of wall that frames the garage door. That little bit of wall is only 18 inches wide. He’s in a corner only 18 inches from the freedom of an open garage door, and once again he hunkers down. There is a large, thin box leaning against the wall there, and in the corner is some road salt and a post hole digger. He ensconces himself behind the post hole digger.
Once again I resort to trying to lift and flip his ass out of the garage with the pole, but skunk hair is deceptive. They only look fat like badgers because they are the Persian cats of the weasel world. Their bodies, at least of adolescent ones like this one, are built like ferrets. So he kept doing rolls around the pole every time I got his ass in the air. Then he turns to run behind the box – towards me and the shelving unit. “Wrong answer, shithead,” I yell as I poke him in the nose with the pole. Back he goes to the corner. The post hole digger is in my way, so I dash forward to do an even dumber thing – grab the digger – which puts me about 18 inches from fuzzy junior there. Fortunately, he was facing me.
With the digger gone, we resume the pole dance until I get fed up. I give him a sharp poke to keep his head down and run to get a shorter, thicker pole - a 1 inch dowel about 7 feet long. Fortunately, he’s still cowering in the corner. Now I try to use the two poles like a pair of chop sticks to lift and toss this little piece of stinky tofu into the bushes. Nothing doing. Now we’re doing the two pole dance, and I am not enjoying the show.
Fed up with this new source of irritation, he runs for the shelter between the box and the wall again. Did I mention about our mouse problem? Did I mention about the variety of traps I have along the wall where mice are likely to run? Did I mention some of them are glue traps? Big glue traps, because once a mouse got its back stuck to a small one and walked away glued to a plastic sheet and I had to chase the damn thing around the garage like a demented mammalian turtle? So. Big glue traps. And the running skunk plants his two front feet firmly in a glue trap. Too close to the edge for me to grab the trap and flip it outside without getting bitten. Oh yes, did I mention that the local paper carried a story about a rabid skunk last week? If you are paying attention, you are probably making up the same bit of doggerel that popped into my head at that moment: “how do I get the skunk unstuck without getting fucked?”
Like a human who has just stepped in dog shit, the skunk picks up one leg and shakes it, with what I swear is a look of disgust. Unfortunately for the skunk, he puts that foot right back into the glue trap to pry the other leg off, so for a moment we have the skunk doing the stick / unstick / stick routine like a demented grape stomper. Finally he gets himself free and heads back to the corner where he cowers. Now I figure I’d better give him some cover to get him comfortable enough to move 18 FUCKING INCHES out the door to freedom. So I dash back to the (firmly shut) door to the house open it up and holler for my wife. She comes down expecting the worst. Not yet, but the night is still young.
Now, I want her to hand me a cat carrier to give it a tunnel to hide in. But she refuses. Refuses. A man in my position, and she refuses. Something about cat carriers costing money, why don’t I use this cardboard box? Well, because I can aim the carrier away from me as I toss it, but the box had a big open lid and the skunk could jump anywhere as I’m throwing it out the door – including backwards onto me. But, you know, I’m not in the strongest negotiating position here, trying to squeeze the skunk with two gargantuan chopsticks and getting a lesson in skunk agility instead. So she tosses me the cardboard box and I go to war with the army I have, not the army I want.
I get the bright dead to leave a gap between the box and the door, and I catch my first lucky break of this while affair. As I poke it in the ass once again, it runs, not into the box, but between it and the door. I give the box a mighty shove with the pole as the skunk rolls over onto its back and power slides onto the driveway and under the bushes. You have not seen a man hit a garage door switch as fast and hard as I hit that one, standing there, pole in hand, in case the skunk decided to double back. But he didn’t.
Afterwards, my wife says “I was robbed.” “Robbed of what?” I ask. “Of the maximum entertainment value of the situation. I didn’t even have to use this brand new jug of tomato juice”. And indeed, she had a gallon of the stuff sitting on the kitchen table. Thanks for the vote of confidence, babe.
And that, friends, is how I spent my Labor Day.
How was yours?
Monday, May 2, 2011
Bin Laden
All day I've been thinking about the subject (as have many people, I would imagine) and have reflected on how poor most of the mainstream media coverage of this gigantic story has been. There have a few flashes of coherence or insight, but most of the coverage has run the gamut from obvious to irrelevant to wrong.
Before I get into that, however, I wanted to share this link: http://goo.gl/NtHdj
Although I understand the emotional reaction to the death of bin Laden, I didn't participate in it. I'm objectively encouraged by the outcome because I think it is a good thing for humanity, but it seems there ultimately is no point in celebrating anyone's death, even the death of someone without whom the world is a markedly better place.
The big thing about this event is the opportunity to exploit bin Laden's elimination to advance the overall campaign against al Qaeda. While the elimination of OBL represents a major blow to the organization, it is not destroyed and remains dangerous. We need to act fast to exploit and act on information collected from the compound in Pakistan and seek to interdict, capture, or kill the remainder of "Tier 0", especially Dr. Zawahiri and Anwar al-Awlaqi, who are the most prominent remaining leaders. By necessity the raid team had to rapidly egress the objective area, but had several minutes (around 30) to exploit the house. They should have been able to gather up essentially all media present there in that time, and that media should provide a treasure trove of information about al Qaeda.
There is essentially no possibility that Osama was living within sight of the Pakistani Military Academy, in a former ISI safehouse, without the knowledge and complicity of the ISI and the Pakistani Army. Some of the best insight I've heard today (from Ralph Peters) was that Osama essentially had to be under ISI "house arrest", held in a (fairly comfortable) jail cell to keep him out of the way as an "ace in the hole" to keep the US $$ flowing and to try to cover up Pakistani complicity in terrorism. Realpolitik does not explain why they would do this - it has to be Islam, and in fact a very specific, extreme form of Islam that would motivate the Pakistani security establishment to ally themselves with al Qaeda. That's a subject for another day.
The CIA probably deserves a lot of credit for the success of this effort. I believe many in the military believed (based on speculation) that bin Laden was dead at various points over the years, including after Tora Bora and again after his rather strange video message in 2007, when his beard appeared dyed, or else the video was made much earlier, and his lips didn't move when he talked. But the CIA, it would seem, kept focused on finding bin Laden when the military seemed to be losing interest or focus on the HVT hunt, in favor of the much more maintream counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A few people have said that we "clearly assassinated" bin Laden, with the implication that this was a Bad Thing. It was not. Reportedly the US team offered bin Laden the chance to surrender and he resisted and was shot. While a better argument could be made that UAV Hellfire strikes (I guess they're also dropping JDAMs these days as well) are properly classified as assassination, this raid most certainly was not. It's a somewhat screwy argument anyway. There is an Executive prohibition on assassination (EO12333) but the President can break his own rules (or those of his predecessors) and since 9/11, Presidents have not been terribly squeamish about using assassination. I wish they would amend or replace EO12333, which was signed by President Ford in response to the Church Committee's expose of the CIA in the 1970s.
There have been many occasions over the years when there was an opportunity to use counterterrorism forces to execute this type of "surgical raid" to interdict some dangerous target - including Osama himself on more than one occasion before 9/11, I believe. But in almost every instance in the past, political decision makers have lacked the will or fortitude to give the final "execute order", and in many cases, badness ensued (President Clinton passed on several opportunities to get Osama before 9/11, I believe). Two previous Presidents have preferred to use the seemingly anonymous and low-risk, but somewhat imprecise UAVs to do their dirty work, rather than "doing it manually". President Obama deserves quite a bit of credit for making the ballsy call on using SEALs vs cruise missiles or precision bombs to get Osama, resulting in a positive ID and more worthwhile outcome, with a probable rich intelligence haul in addition to elimination of bin Laden.
I didn't quite get the emphasis on making a big public point about giving bin Laden a semi-pious Muslim burial (I say semi-pious because I've heard burial at sea is not very Islamic, although I don't really know.) I probably would have said nothing about disposal of his body but characterized him as not a legitimate Muslim, and therefore not entitled to a Muslim burial, because he was a mass murderer. Then I would have conducted an exhaustive autopsy to exploit his body for intelligence about where he's been and what he's been up to for the last few years. The big emphasis on burying him as a Muslim gave him a lot more legitimacy in death than he deserved and highlighted his (improper) status as a martyr.
This operation highlighted the value of Special Operations forces in contending with fourth generation warfare. Although JSOC has a pretty big budget and tend to be major prima donnas, they are still way cheaper than the high-dollar conventional acquisition programs that don't have much relevance to the wars we're fighting lately and seem to usually fail in recent years anyway. The Chinese refer to the fusion of special operations and information operations as "sixth generation warfare" and it was JSOC and CIA's only-recently-learned 6GW tactics that led to the elimination of fourth-generation adversary bin Laden. I don't think they use that term and even fourth generation warfare is a dirty word in the (second generation) conventional US military, but, like many events since 9/11, this one has illustrated the fundamental changes in the nature of society and warfare that have been underway in modern times.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Pan Am!
PAN AM INVENTED IT ALL: FLIGHT ATTENDANTSLately I've been reading a lot of Pan Am memoirs. Most of the more in-depth accounts are from the later years - about Pan Am's decline. One of these days I'm going to get around to a post about Pan Am's slide into obscurity. As I've read more and more, I've started to get a feeling for what happened. The details are many and complex, but they can be condensed down to a couple of things: the world changed, and there was no replacement for Juan Trippe.
But many of the memoirs I've been reading were written by stewardesses. I titled this post "Flight Attendants" to cover the whole history of Pan Am, but most of the good history has been written by stews.
Originally Pan Am's flight attendants were all male stewards. Although I regularly say "Pan Am Invented It All", that isn't true about female flight attendants. I believe United was the first to fly with female cabin crew in the
1930s.
Specifically, Boeing Air Transport, one of the predecessors of United Airlines, first hired a Registered Nurse named Ellen Church to fly on domestic flights in 1930. Miss Church had wanted to be a pilot, but Steve Stimpson, the chief pilot at Boeing's fledgling airline, saw a need for a well-qualified cabin attendant to ensure passenger safety and comfort, back in the days when airline passengers were a superfluous addition, often sitting on sacks of mail (except at Pan Am, of course, where exceptional passenger luxury was already standard).
Following Boeing's (soon to be United's) lead, the other domestic airlines began hiring nurses to see to passenger comfort in the main cabin.
The job of flight attendant was always an elite, competitive position. In the 1930s, newly-termed "stewardesses" had to be Registered Nurses, very attractive, personable, quick-thinking, physically fit, and adventurous.
The training at all the major domestic airlines was rigorous, and the stresses of flying the primitive aircraft of the time were considerable. The stewardesses of the 1930s, however, were legendary for their poise, charm, and
professionalism, and had a huge impact in making flying - dangerous at the best of times in those days - comfortable and safe for the general public.
But not at Pan Am.
In the flying boat era, Pan Am considered aircrew duties to be too important and demanding for women, and did not allow female aircrew at all.
Pan Am stewards in the 1930s had generally been the top of their profession in the Merchant Marine. When other airlines were strapping passengers on top of sacks of mail, Pan Am was flying Consolidated Commodores and Sikorsky S-40s, which were more opulent, although rather less spacious, than the most luxurious
ocean liners of the day.
Becoming a steward with Pan Am meant having years of experience with a major shipping line, then completing Andre Priester's exhaustive training programme in operation of the big flying boats. Originally the stewards were responsible for service only to the rest of the crew - there were no passengers, only mail. Once airborne, the whole crew would change into pajamas to be comfortable on the long overwater flights, then shower, shave, and change back into their Navy-style dress blue uniforms to deplane at their exotic destinations looking like magazine cover models, which, in those days, they often were. (In a charming bit of tradition preserved, I understand the long-haul freight pilots - Fed Ex, DHL, Atlas, etc. - do the same thing today - except for the cover model part, of course.)
Pan Am's stewards were preparing elaborate inflight service on multi-day international flights when the domestic airlines were hiring nurses to help passengers cope with the rigors of flying on aircraft that didn't even have heated cabins. In many ways, the roles of the domestic stewardesses vs. Pan Am's cabin stewards were apples and oranges - and the stewardesses had the much tougher, although far less glamourous, jobs.
This was the status quo until the end of World War II. I believe the term "flight attendant" came about during the war, when the luxuries disappeared from most airline flights, including especially Pan Am, where most of the crews were commissioned into the Navy, but the military needed an appropriate term for the people who were responsible for safety and order in the cabin.
At the end of the war, it was clear things were changing in many ways. The flying boats were gone, replaced by much faster and more efficient land planes that took advantage of all those nice big runways built by the military during the war.
Pan Am changed with the times, buying large numbers of DC-4s (later DC-6's and -7s), Lockheed Constellations, and Boeing 377s Stratocruisers. At the same time they began to hire their first female flight attendants, beginning a wonderfully exciting tradition.
Most of my observations about Pan Am's stewardesses come from Aimee Bratt, who wrote a wonderful memoir called "Glamour and Turbulence: I remember Pan Am, 1966-1991". Her book covers the end of the era, as do most of the more in-depth accounts. Most of the accounts from the early period are much more brief - just snapshots or anecdotes. But Ms. Bratt's book is a classic.
Aimee Bratt was (is) basically a Swedish supermodel, who speaks half a dozen languages, grew up as the globe-trotting daughter of a diplomat, and didn't really have to do anything if she didn't want to. But because she could do anything, she wanted to be a Pan Am stewardess.
And she is about representative of the girls who got to fly with Pan Am.
Pan Am's cabin crew went from being all male in 1945 to all female by the early 1950s. But while international air travel had become more routine and less a matter of exploration, it had also greatly increased in magnitude, becoming a significant part of the world economy and society, as opposed to mainly a way to move mail.
Pan Am's stewardesses were the public face of the institution - the part of the "World's Most Experienced Airline" that passengers actually interacted with.
And the standards were incredibly high. I don't think much of anyone today can conceive of how high those standards were. Most of the major airlines had pretty strict standards for aircrew, but Pan Am's, of course, were by far the most intense.
Just to get in the door, in addition to advanced education, worldliness, language skills, and social connections, aspiring Pan Am stews had to meet strict height-weight standards, and be very obviously attractive. They were
literally the most desirable women anywhere.
Once hired, Pan Am stews were subjected to random inspections - down to their underwear, and including "weigh-ins". A pound overweight and you could be on probation. Miss another weigh-in and you could be fired. Can you imagine an airline in 2005 trying to impose those kind of standards? (Or any kind of standards, as far as I can tell.) The uniforms were ultra-stylish, but not ultra-comfortable or practical, and Pan Am set standards for everything - hairstyles, makeup, fingernails, even girdles.
Aimee Bratt talks about how she was kept in suspense about whether she would be hired by Pan Am for months, only to suddenly be given 24 hours to report for training in Miami - and she was in Teheran. Pan Am was more demanding than the military - and they could afford to be, because the competition to be a part of the legendary "service" was intense. If Aimee didn't show up on time, she would be summarily dropped - because there were 10 more girls like her competing for the slot.
Once through training, the pressure only became more intense, but the rewards were equally as great. Aimee talks about making multi-course meals from scratch in the tiny galleys on the 707. 707s had nearly 200 passengers and were substantially smaller on the inside than the Boeing 314, which normally had
about 40. Pan Am stewardesses routinely wheeled a freshly-prepared prime rib down the aisle, and carved it to order at the passenger's seat. Unlike air travel today, almost all the food (in first and clipper classes, at least) was made (almost) from scratch onboard. Just as the stewardesses of the 1930s at United and American had tougher jobs than Pan Am's stewards, the stewardesses of the 1950s and 1960s had almost superhumanly difficult responsibilities.
But the opportunities were extraordinary as well. Pan Am aircrews were treated like royalty in most parts of the world, and the glamour of flying for Pan Am has probably never been equaled. Pan Am crews regularly circled the globe, with layovers at places that don't even have usable runways in 2005. A little bit of this mystique was captured in the recent Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks movie "Catch Me If You Can", where real-life con man Frank Abignale posed as a Pan Am pilot. But the movie didn't begin to capture what it was really like for Pan Am
crews flying to remote corners of the globe.
Now it's all gone. Aimee Bratt, when she wrote her memoir about Pan Am in 1996, was still flying with Delta, but the changes in the world and the airlines come through loud and clear in her writing. She herself reflects how things have changed and how the fun and romance has gone out of air travel, and seems to have become far less tolerant of any of it - the airlines, the passengers, the stress of travel - after 30 years than she was in the heyday of Pan Am. If you have been on an airline recently, you know extremely exemplary she is of the
flight attendants in 2005. I'm not sure when I last encountered a flight attendant who wouldn't have been fired on the spot at Pan Am.
Sometimes I look at old Pan Am route maps and schedules and reflect on what so many of those old Pan Am destinations are like now. Beirut, Teheran, Monrovia, Leopoldville, Baghdad, Saigon, Havana, Wake Island - places you simply can't go to, or don't want to - but Pan Am flew there every day for decades. There's nothing like it, and almost certainly there never will be again.posted Sunday, 15 May 2005