Internet

Starbuck, author of the fine "Wings Over Iraq" blog, recently reviewed contemporary military clichés. People, this isn't a matter of taste: As St. George teaches us, weak or tired writing generally reflects weak or tired thinking.

Starbuck, an observant helicopter pilot, offers up a lot of good examples of milspeak, but my favorite is a Ft. Bragg notice about driving carefully on Halloween because on-base children would be "conducting trick-or-treating operations." (Btw, did you know that the Starbucks coffee chain is named for the first mate of the Pequod in Moby Dick? I didn't until about two minutes ago.)

I also hadn't realized that some fool at the Army's Safety Center (which was about improving the safety of Army procedures and equipment) changed the name to the incredibly vague "Army Combat Readiness Center." For all that tells us, that could be the name of the base day-care center -- if you want today's heavily married force to be able to deploy quickly, give 'em good child care.

Starbuck also speaks much truth in targeting the phrase "full spectrum":

There's also a lot of buzz words we throw about for absolutely no reason. "Full-spectrum" is one of those terms. Try it-count the number of times you see the word "full-spectrum" thrown arbitrarily about in mission statements. Are we really operating across the "full spectrum" of combat? Hopefully not, because that means nuclear war, and baby, I don't do nuclear war.

But my appreciation is as nothing compared to this citation Starbuck received from another Army pilot:

Your motivation to rid the Army of awkward, grammatically incorrect and superfluous writing positively impacted the mission accomplishment of this post. As an integral member of the blogging world, your dedication to your duty has contributed immeasurably to clarifying this pivotal issue. 

The new issue of Army contains a thoughtful set of exchanges from the CompanyCommand website between a mother wanting to help her son as leaves active duty and others who have been through similar experiences.

The mother, whose name is just given as Judy, said that after her son's tour in Iraq, she found him "cold," and "filled with hate for the Iraqis." He shook when other cars on the road were came close. She asked, "Can we help him?"

There were several moving responses. Ryan Neely, an officer just back from 15 months in Iraq, advised:

Treat him like a man... My mother wanted to keep me in the box she felt comfortable with -- her innocent boy, clean cut and no rough edges -- but that wasn't me anymore. I felt belittled and misunderstood and underappreciated for the sacrifices I had made."

Molly Kranc, wife of an Army captain, added that in her own experience, "PTSD is a chronic condition that cannot be cured, only managed." I liked this insight, which is consistent with what I have seen. I was surprised that I hadn't seen this observation before.

Most strikingly, Ray Kimball called on his own experience to recount that after his combat tour, he was teaching at West Point and found himself irritable and short-tempered. But he didn't seek counseling, he recalled, was "when I nearly hit my now-3-year-old child because he wasn't getting dressed quickly enough. The shock of that was enough to force me to come to terms with that fact that what I was doing was not normal."

By the way, I think CompanyCommand and its sister site, PlatoonLeader, are two of the most effective and thoughtful military innovations of recent years. They are worth far more than whatever it costs the Army to operate them. (Fyi, you need a .mil address to get access to these, I think.)   

dok1/Flickr

A nice new blog that I suspect will become essential for those following events in the Middle East: http://el-shimy.blogspot.com/

Full disclosure: I watched this guy in his first softball game ever -- and he got a hit.

The Pentagon's "Early Bird" (a compilation of defense news stories) yesterday carried an item from a blog. This was to my knowledge a first. The lucky blogger was Long War Journal 's Bill Roggio, who deserves the honor. There he was, item 27 of the EB of June 27, 2009. 

A salute to Price Floyd, the Pentagon's new communications czar, for the new policy. I wonder where he used to work?

Lip Kee/Flickr

NightWatch excerpts a summary of a congressional report on Chinese hacking of American computers:

The Chinese cyberattackers -- whoever they work for -- sure are busy bees in cyberspace, according to the report of a Congressional hearing held in April by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was released last week." The report is dated 30 April.

A '... senior fellow at the Technolytics Institute, a cyber think tank, told the hearing that a survey of nonmilitary government outfits that monitor their Internet firewalls reported an average of 128 acts of "cyber aggression" a minute from China in March 2009.'

"That works out to 7,680 aggressive cyber acts an hour or 184,320 a day against non-Defense organizations. The senior fellow said all these attacks came from IP addresses in China but added that he did not know exactly who or what sits behind those IP addresses.'" 

Meanwhile, old Bill Gertz, who has made a full-time job of tracking Chinese misdeeds, passes along a report that a Chinese intrusion recently forced the FBI to shut down one of its computer networks. 

I wonder if the U.S. government has ever delivered a diplomatic note telling the Chinese government to knock it off. It just seems unfriendly to me, and not becoming a great power. Anyone know?

James Sarmiento/Flickr

I emerged from remotest Appalachia to read up on Iran. I learned far more from the blogs (especially Andrew Sullivan, Nightwatch, Juan Cole, and of course foreignpolicy.com) than I did from the newspapers. This isn't because the bloggers are smarter (though they are no chimps) but because they can aggregate material. They also can engage in full-blown speculation without pretending they aren't.

Nightwatch thinks that if the regime cracks down, it loses its mantle of righteousness. Here is his informed commentary:

A massive crackdown signifies the Iranian revolution is no more righteous than the Egyptian "revolution" or the Saudi Kingdom. The crowds are not yet calling for systemic change = revolution, but for an honest vote with the existing political architecture. If the existing political structure proves sclerotic and inflexible, the next step is to replace the people at the top. The step after that is to replace the architecture itself, meaning a revolution.

Iran, then, could be on an escalating staircase, but it is too soon to make that determination. The size of the youth vote has always been a political powder keg in a country that has too few opportunities, too few jobs for so many young people and which is led by a clerisy that is out of step with modern personal technology. 

The situation is not revolutionary yet, but something is seriously flawed when the favorite son of East Azerbaijan fails to carry his own constituency: Mousavi, according to al Jazeerah. The least credible electoral outcome and most persuasive evidence of massive voter fraud is that the Azeris of Tabriz voted for Ahmadi-Nejad by four to one, instead of for Mousavi, who hails from Tabriz. Everyone knows the Azeris are ultra-clannish and always vote for an Azeri. Mousavi is one of their own.

(Read on)

That is exactly what Dena Yllscas' blog continues to do. Above is daughter Eva Yllescas visiting her father's grave on Memorial Day.

Best wishes to Fred Reed, the king of curmudgeons, who is hanging up his online column (Fred on Everything) for at least several months while he leaves his Mexican lair for an American cornea transplant.

I am bereft. Now I will have nowhere to go for well-written, pungent, political incorrectness mixed with smart military commentary and libertarian impulses, topped off with a splash of Third World sunshine and tequila. Fred is the Hunter Thompson of the right, and frankly has more street cred with me. Fred's one of those guys for whom the conversation isn't serious until you get to crew-served weapons.