Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Ruh-roh! IDF cancels all military leave...

Yeah, ruh-roh. The Israeli Defense Force usually lets lots of troops go home for the High Holy Days.

Could be nothing, could be war coming.

You decide, but I'm filling all my jerry jugs...

The small businessman's Evensong

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

I've sold enough to pay for the Keep,

Should I die before I wake,

I pray (why the Hell didn't I finish that bottle of  '03 Ravenswood Sonoma Valley Cabernet)

It's been a good day for WillBoat.

Goodnight Chet, Goodnight Ed, Goodnight, World (and back when those words were uttered on NBC every night, it WAS a Good Night, because USAF General (CinC SAC) Curtis LeMay and his successors saw to it, and stalwart men held the thin nuke line, but it was good enough to keep the USA safe, and still would be (had not Bill Clinton closed out SAC). I was on that thin nuke line late in those days, and I'm proud to have done my part.

No war with Iran over nukes

We SHOULD have gone to war with Iran when their Copper Lance IEDs were killing our troops by the hundreds in Iraq, but we didn't. We should have gone to war with Iran when their proxies, Hizbullah and Hamas, made war upon our ally Israel in the summer of 2006, but we didn't. We should at least consider some form of warfare against Iran for propping up the Syrian dictator Baby Assad with gunboat diplomacy, but we apparently aren't.

Nukes are a different matter. Possessing them at home doesn't make you an automatic international pariah, or it shouldn't, anyway. No war with Iran over nukes.

We need to get this over to Iran: go ahead and build your Mullah-Bomb. Build a nice safe fort to put it in and hold prayers over it every Friday, if you must. Admire it, boast about it, even lie about it's power. Fine, all the members of the Nuclear Club do that.

What we THEN need to tell Iran is that joining the Nuke Club has one itsy-bitsy drawback: if you USE that nuke, you are then subject to nuclear retaliation. Annihilation. Turn your Holy City (Qom) to glass annihilation. On Friday evening during prayers annihilation. Make that promise believable. We USED to know how to make that threat believable, and it held off China and the USSR for years. It seems to have held off the Norks in recent years.

Mutually-assured destruction. Not high-tech, but proven nonetheless. It's a scalable concept, too. Works for one nuke or 10,000 of them.

It would help reinforce the MAD Doctrine if our peacenik President wasn't trying to disarm our own nuclear arsenal, and if the old USAF Strategic Air Command was reactivated, specifically with it's former purpose of being two of the three legs of the Nuclear Triad, but MAD is certainly viable, and even before nukes, the concept of MAD has been useful in international relations at least since the Greeks and Romans.

Small fish's in the cooler, now go for the lunker

The Army prosecutors appear to have the case against WikiLeaks snitch Pvt. Bradley Manning firmly in hand, and as a result of their evidence, seem to have solid evidence linking Manning and Julian Assange.

Why isn't Assange in the stockade, here or in Gitmo?

If we hand the Brits a proper extradition request for Assange, are they going to honor it?

Will Anonymous start to have organized fun and games with the DOD cyber-war folks if the Brits put the habeus grabbus on Assange?

Stay tuned. This one WILL get interesting.

Weekend at Bernie's (Pyongyang Edition)

The North Korean people are starving, so what does the new young-Un leader do? Throw a long party featuring a corpse.

Oops, I almost forgot. That's right out of the standard commie playbook of 1924

Guesses on Korea?

My best guess: young-Un's "advisor", appointed by dead Papa, better have a decent will written...

Young-Un will be pre-occupied for a while discovering all of Papa's porn stashes and sampling the wares in Dead Dad's harem of whores, while his accountants try to round up all the available cash and get it under his control. After THAT, maybe time for some international intrigue, but hey, he's a kid, and hey, there's some strange poo-ying to bed, so I don't think we'll see much of him for a while.

Advice for the young-Un?

Stay off of Nork trains...

Cyber-War discussion in progress...

...and that's a GOOD thing. We are FAR more likely to be hit, badly, by a major cyber-attack than we are to be hit by nuke, chem or bio terror attacks of a nationally-damaging nature. Yeah, its fun to write and talk about all the what-ifs of various terror attack scenarios, but cheap data storage and hugely-powerful computer boards mean that it costs relatively little to assemble the hardware to attack our financial houses, or cripple other important networks, such as air traffic control.

Ya, sure, all you cyber-wallahs in the security bidsnez, and I have several in my clan, will say we're safe, but in your hearts you know we're not.

What retired USMC GEN. Cartwright says here is that we need to introduce the very human element of deterrence into the equation of defense vs. attack, which usually centers on cyber-protecting data exchanges or data-storage.

The General is correct. The human factor of FEAR worked well to prevent a global nuclear exchange when the two big super-powers had the ability and the provocations to get one going.

Fear works, let's use it!

The Caliphate expands...

...and (D) President Obama enabled it, through his military liaisons with NATO.

Remember that next year, when you get ready to choose (D) or (R).

The Sharia Law you enable today will kill or enslave your sons and daughters tomorrow, Mister and Mrs. America, but don't believe ME, ask any devout Muslim.

You DIDN'T read it here first...

AssPress FUBAR #2 (for this ayem)

The B53 Special Weapon is NOT the "most powerful". That title goes to the B41, which had twice the mega-tonnage of the B53 (which your blogger used to sit on nuclear alert with back in the 1960's, a pair of them in the B-52 C or D bomb bay). BTW, the B53 design was also used on the Titan Missile as it's single-warhead, in the pre-MIRV days.

Get your shit straight, AssPress. You might have found an older Air Force bomber puke or missile-man to interview, instead of some young shavetail engineer who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

If you live by the sword...

...you'll probably die by it.

Our military gives big bonus points via the modern testing they do to select soldiers. Those bonus points include some for being cyber-smart.

I guess the military never stopped to consider what the process of becoming cyber-smart involves with the youth it recruits.

Here's a flash for them: it involves playing video games, among other things.

So, you find a soldierly geek and give him/her all the training to make it to the top in the cyber-war field, and pretty soon, they're either using drone-operation software on missions or repairing it. While they are at this job, which has it's dull moments, it's very tempting for them to fish out a personal flash drive and put their fave games on the military supercomputer array, just so see how FAST such a game really is.

If their edition of the game has a virus, now the military super-computer has a virus.

And that, folks, is how our drone-ops computers got infected. Same way the Iranian nuke-centrifuge control computer got infected. We're lucky that it seems to only be a virus connected with the game "Mafia Wars". It could have been something like Stuxnet: Pick a day when armed drones are in the air over the Afghan-Paki border. Now, with the aid of your virus, seize control of several drones, say, at Friday evening prayers, and deliberately fly them or fire their weapons into Paki mosques.

We'd be toast.

Yep, that's a two-edged sword, that geek-love in the military. Cuts both ways. You fix it by instilling more discipline and less geekiness in the troops. GIGO = Garbage In, Garbage Out. It does the military no good at all to have the finest computers if they are infected. It likewise does the military no good to have the best cyber-war troops if they are undisciplined.

An Act of War

The discovery of a plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US by bombing a popular Capitol Hill eatery the gentleman frequents means that a state of War exists between Iran and the USA.

Not a surprise, since Iran performed several hostile acts against the US military in Iraq over the past few years, including arming the insurgents there with Copper Lance IEDs.

Some are calling for a military strike on Iran's leadership, but I don't think this quite rises to that level. I think that a naval blockade would be the perfect response.

We give Iran fifteen days to surrender the guy we've indicted, some Al Quds Brigade intel officer, and when they don't, we blockade Kharg Island. No oil gets loaded from there. No petrodollars, no support for the Mad Mullahs, who will fold within months of having their dinars cut off.

Oh, I almost forgot. Iran has a few quiet diesel subs, and one or two old, noisy nuke boats they got from Russia. They go away on the first day of the blockade, and carrier air takes out any known Silkworm anti-ship missile batteries within range of Kharg Island. We stop any tanker headed for the oil terminal, and give those ships a choice: turn away or be sunk as hostile.

This strategy worked in 1963, an era when Democratic Presidents had 'nads. It'll work again.