January 7, 2014

A Bridge of Boats across Frozen Tigris River, Mosul, 1903

http://www.juancole.com/2014/01/across-frozen-tigris.html

A Bridge of Boats across Frozen Tigris River, Mosul, 1903
By Juan Cole | Jan. 7, 2014



The authors say locals in Mosul told them that the last time the river froze was 1750. That freezing became more rare after that date is significant, since 1750 marks the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and increased coal burning for energy. The period 1250-1850 or the medieval cooling period (often incorrectly called the ‘little ice age’) saw cool temperatures in many parts of the world. By 1850 enough carbon had been put into the atmosphere by human beings to start the world on rapid global warming. Freak cold snaps such as the 1903 freezing winter in Mosul are weather, not climate. The daily weather is complex, but climate is the statistical record of changes over decades.

From M. E. Hume-Griffith and A. Hume, Behind the Veil in Persia and Turkish Arabia: An Account of an Englishwoman’s Eight Years’ Residence Amongst the Women of the East (1909).

January 2, 2014

US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519361/us-military-scientists-solve-the-fundamental-problem-of-viral-marketing/



Network theorists working for the US military have worked out how to identify the small “seed” group of people who can spread a message across an entire network

US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing
September 17, 2013

Viral messages begin life by infecting a few individuals and then start to spread across a network. The most infectious end up contaminating more or less everybody.

Just how and why this happens is the subject of much study and debate. Network scientists know that key factors are the rate at which people become infected, the “connectedness” of the network and how the seed group of individuals, who first become infected, are linked to the rest.

It is this seed group that fascinates everybody from marketers wanting to sell Viagra to epidemiologists wanting to study the spread of HIV.

So a way of finding seed groups in a given social network would surely be a useful trick, not to mention a valuable one. Step forward Paulo Shakarian, Sean Eyre and Damon Paulo from the West Point Network Science Center at the US Military Academy in West Point.

January 2, 2014

U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/nsa-cisco-huawei-china/



NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack
By Cade Metz
12.31.13
6:30 AM

The headline news is that the NSA has surreptitiously “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture” sold by the world’s largest computer networking companies, including everyone from U.S. mainstays Cisco and Juniper to Chinese giant Huawei. But beneath this bombshell of a story from Der Spiegel, you’ll find a rather healthy bit of irony.

After all, the United States government has spent years complaining that Chinese intelligence operations could find ways of poking holes in Huawei networking gear, urging both American businesses and foreign allies to sidestep the company’s hardware. The complaints grew so loud that, at one point, Huawei indicated it may abandon the U.S. networking market all together. And, yet, Der Speigel now tells us that U.S. intelligence operations have been poking holes in Huawei networking gear — not to mention hardware sold by countless other vendors in both the States and abroad.

“We read the media reports, and we’ve noted the references to Huawei and our peers,” says William Plummer, a Huawei vice president and the company’s point person in Washington, D.C. “As we have said, over and over again — and as now seems to be validated — threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources.”

Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale.

January 2, 2014

Top 6 Ways to Burn Taxpayers' Millions in Afghanistan

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/top-ways-burn-taxpayers-millions-afghanistan/story?id=21378579

Top 6 Ways to Burn Taxpayers' Millions in Afghanistan


~snip~



Afghan Police Locked Out of Own $7.3M Facility

In Afghanistan's Kunduz province is a pristine multi-building facility built for $7.3 million for Afghan border police. Too bad the Afghans are locked out of several of the buildings and couldn't find the keys.

~snip~



$36M Command and Control Center Not Commanding or Controlling Anything

In Camp Leatherneck in the Hemland Province of Afghanistan there is a sprawling 64,000 square foot building, constructed for $36 million so far, that SIGAR said "apparently no one wanted or needed."

~snip~

$500M Aircraft Fleet, Planes Sitting on Tarmacs

Back in 2008 the Department of Defense spent $486.1 million to give the Afghan Air Force 20 C-27A aircraft and sustain the medium-sized transport planes. According to a SIGAR letter to the Department of Defense earlier this month, the aircraft are sitting lonely in air fields in Afghanistan and at the U.S. Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

~snip~



$230M in Vehicle Spare Parts May Be Here, Maybe Not

It's not that the $230 million in spare vehicle parts don't exist or have gone missing, it's that no one has any idea where the taxpayer-bought parts might be and, therefore, didn't know when to stop ordering new ones. That was the conclusion SIGAR came to in a report released in October.


--

January 2, 2014

An Illustration of Just How Expensive Military Jets Are

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/12/spike-aerospace-s-512/



First Private Supersonic Jet Promised in 2018 — For $80M
By Damon Lavrinc
12.30.13
6:30 AM

For billionaire executives, a 16-hour flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo is just too damn long to spend out of pocket. The Spike Aerospace S-512 promises to cut that time in half, and it won’t cost more than a measly $80 million.

The Boston-based Spike crew is made up of former Airbus, Bombardier, and Gulfstream engineers, along with a handful of entrepreneurs and investors that have set out to create the world’s first supersonic private jet.

Their goal is to create a new breed of business aircraft that can reach a cruising speed of Mach 1.6 (1,218 mph) and a top speed of Mach 1.8 (1,370 mph). At those speeds, the S-512 is theoretically capable of flying from New York to London in less than four hours, all while carrying up to 18 passengers in the opulence they’re accustomed to.

It’s no accident that Spike is quoting flight times over oceans and not the continental U.S. — the FAA prohibits supersonic flight over land, with few exceptions. But Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and even NASA have been working on ways to redesign supersonic aircraft to reduce the boom when breaking the speed of sound, but to no avail.



unhappycamper comment:

* B-2, $2.2 billion dollars a pop
* B-1B, $318 million dollars a pop
* F-22, $418 million dollars a pop
* F-35, $243 million dollars a pop
and on,

and on,

and on.



Personally, I would rather see our discretionary funding going towards useful things like housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, hiring teachers and firemen, taking proper care of veterans and fixing our failing infrastructure.

January 2, 2014

Mechanical malfunction caused fuel leak that downed B-1B

http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20131231/NEWS/312310012/Mechanical-malfunction-caused-fuel-leak-downed-B-1B



Debris is scattered across at field after a B-1B bomber crashed Aug. 19 in a remote area near Broadus, Mont. The four crew members survived after ejecting from the aircraft.

Mechanical malfunction caused fuel leak that downed B-1B
Dec. 31, 2013 - 04:01PM

~snip~

The $318 million aircraft was destroyed when it crashed on Aug. 19 near Broadus, Mont., but all four crew members ejected safely with non-life threatening injuries, according to the report, which was released on Monday.

January 2, 2014

The All-in-One F-35 Fighter Jet Costs More Than Three Separate Planes

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-all-in-one-f-35-fighter-jet-costs-more-than-three-separate-planes



The All-in-One F-35 Fighter Jet Costs More Than Three Separate Planes
By Derek Mead

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to be the future of manned fighter aircraft for the US military, which—drones notwithstanding—still relies on a complement of decades-old designs. As the plane nears its projected delivery date of 2016, it's become the most costly weapons project in US history, and it still can't pass its performance tests.

Part of this is due to the fact that the F-35 is designed to allow for three variants, one each for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, which means compromises are inherent to its design. The Pentagon initially argued that such a Swiss Army knife solution would cut costs, but according to a new report from the Rand Corp., such an approach is proving to be far more costly—and less effective—than if the military simply designed and built three different planes.

The procurement process for the Lockheed Martin F-35 has already become a well-known disaster. As Bloomberg notes, "the Pentagon projects a price tag of $391.2 billion to build a fleet of 2,443 F-35s, a 68 percent increase from the projection in 2001, measured in current dollars. The number of aircraft the Pentagon plans to buy is 409 fewer than called for originally."

Even then, the question has been whether or not the three-planes-in-one strategy will save on the total life-cycle cost—including R&D, manufacture, and operating and support costs—versus building three separate designs that better fit each branch's needs. The report estimates that while costs will initially be less, nine years after milestone B, higher operating and support costs will contribute to the F-35 program costing some $250 billion more than an alternative. Oh, and the plane's design is still a compromise.

January 2, 2014

Will the F-35 Dominate the Skies?

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/will-the-f-35-dominate-the-skies-9618



Will the F-35 Dominate the Skies?
Robert Farley
December 27, 2013

What are we to make of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF)? Over the past several months, several pieces of good news about the program have emerged. The Royal Netherlands Air Force just became the second partner organization to operate the F-35. While new reports note a deal is not finalized, a South Korean purchase of the plane looks likely and with Japan already committed the plane looks set to soar in Asian skies. Indeed, while several partners have reduced their commitment over the last year, none have backed out fully. The F-35 Lightning II will, eventually, fly in the service of around a dozen major allied air forces.

We’re Stuck

The classic death spiral describes a process in which rising costs cause political and military authorities to cancel part of an aircraft purchase. As the total numbers drop, the price-per-unit appears to increase, as research, development, and startup costs are included in the numerator. The apparent increase in price then produces a political firestorm, producing more cancellations, further cost increases, a reduced fleet, and difficulties with international partners.

But the problem in this case is that the death spiral won’t lead to the actual death of the F-35. The fighter has, effectively, become unkillable. In the wake of negative experiences with the B-2 Spirit, the F-22 Raptor, and several other programs, Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon worked very hard to ensure that no one could kill the F-35. Three US services committed to acquiring substantial numbers of Joint Strike Fighters, with only minimal hedging with respect to alternatives. International partners bought in, often at considerable political cost. The result is an aircraft that perhaps should undergo a “death spiral,” but cannot; no matter how expensive the cheap alternative to the F-22 becomes, it cannot be killed. It is what it is, and we’re stuck with it.

That stark reality aside, what would a wiser policy with respect to the JSF have looked like? The hope that the plethora of existing warplanes could be economically replaced by a single airframe was deeply misplaced; the operational costs of new F-35s will exceed that of older aircraft for quite some time. The F-15, F-16, F/A-18, and A-10 remain more than capable of accomplishing most missions that the F-35 will conduct. Indeed, for many of the missions associated with the modern practice of airpower, A-1 Skyraiders and F-4 Phantom would perform perfectly well. The best hedge against failure of the F-35 program would have been investment in modernized versions of legacy aircraft, which could perform the traditional missions that do not require the specialized capabilities of the F-22 or F-35. Sadly, the attractiveness of this option to Congressional budget hawks meant that the Pentagon had to close the door on it as tightly as possible.

January 2, 2014

(Korea) F-35 purchase to set off air power vacuum

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2014/01/116_149071.html



Lockheed jets too expensive to meet Air Force’s numerical needs

F-35 purchase to set off air power vacuum
By Kang Seung-woo
2014-01-02 16:56

If Lockheed Martin wins Korea’s “next-generation” fighter program for 40 under-development F-35 Lightning IIs, it may entail a vacuum in air power, experts say.

In November, the military decided to buy stealth fighters. Because it was viewed to be the only one with such a capability among potential candidates, it was widely accepted that the Air Force had F-35s in mind.

But the problem is that Seoul is expected to finalize the F-35 order this year, aiming for the first delivery of the stealth jet in 2018.

~snip~

The current budget can secure only 40 F-35s with 8.3 trillion won ($7.8 billion) 60 F-X IIIs, but Lockheed says that amount could secure 52 or 53 F-35s.

January 2, 2014

Blizzard, sub-zero wind chills and foot of snow ready to hit Northeast

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/02/us/winter-weather/

Blizzard, sub-zero wind chills and foot of snow ready to hit Northeast
By Greg Botelho and Holly Yan, CNN
updated 7:32 AM EST, Thu January 2, 2014

~snip~

Boston

By Friday night, Boston should be covered by 5 to 11 inches of snow -- with freezing temperatures as low as 3 degrees below zero.

Citing likely "near blizzard" conditions Thursday night into late Friday morning, the state's emergency management agency warned that 1 to 2 feet of fluffy, drifting snow could accumulate in some parts and that there could be moderate coastal flooding.

The forecast was so bad for Beantown that the city canceled school for Friday two days in advance.

The combination extreme cold, snow and strong winds has homeless shelters at the ready, knowing there may be more people needing their help.