Starting Over In Defense Acquisition Programs

The Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA) announced last week that they were starting a program to develop a foliage penetrating radar. This is somewhat amusing in that my first job in the defense business I worked for a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who had spent a few years in the early Seventies working on the same sort of project.

I guess it didn't work out to well then and they need to do the same thing thirty years later.

How Do You Prevent Attacks Like Today's In Kabul

Reportedly five Taliban insurgents attacked two guest house in Kabul, Afghanistan popular with foreigners. They used suicide bombs and gunfire to kill at least eighteen people. Presumably that figure includes the dead Taliban.

How hard is it to prevent these kind of attacks? There are two main ways to prevent the attacks from being carried out. First use security to prevent the infiltration of the agents and their equipment into the city. Second use intelligence to identify the plot and those who plan to carry it out so they may be neutralized prior to the actual operation. The first way requires intelligence as well to keep forces on the look out for the agents, their equipment and the methods they use to get into place.

Obviously the level of security in Kabul or the capabilities of the Afghan Government police and military have not reached a point yet where either system will work. These are difficult levels of ability to reach and it will probably take several years as well as a lot of political reconciliation to reach them.

MDA Budget Cut 20 Percent But Can Make New Logo

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) lost twenty percent of their budget in 2010 which was a blow to Huntsville, AL. Their formally premier program of basing missiles in Alaska to protect the United States was halted and their focus shifted to sea based systems. Canceling installation of a radar and missiles in Eastern Europe upset the Poles and Czechs as well. Don't worry though, we can make ourselves a new logo. It is on the top of MDA's public homepage, here.

There are also some pointing out its similarity to the Obama Presidential Campaign logo -- so great minds think alike in logo design, I guess.

It Sucks To Be The Washington Post's Ombudsman

You write a nice little article that could be written anytime about how to get letters published in the Post. That doesn't have to run on this Sunday.

You completely ignore the biggest story in the blogosphere that week involving your pubication. This is how one of your Washington Post online bloggers compared the gentlemen who flew a plane into the IRS building in Texas to the Tea Party protesters. This set off a storm because the online manifesto left by the man included rants against big business, supportive words from Karl Marx and hatred of George Bush. Not exactly "right wing" or conservative values.

To make it worse it looks like the blogger, Jonathan Capehart, deliberately omitted the left wing parts to enhance his case. That is not good journalism practice and might be worth addressing by the Ombudsman.

Nissan GTR Seen In Huntsville

I was at Costco this morning in NW Huntsville, AL and there was a Nissan GTR sitting in the parking lot. This is the first one I have seen. It had Government parking stickers on it so whomever owns it works on Redstone Arsenal. Here is the photo I took:



Here is a video from Motor Trend of a top speed run in the car. He hit 191 on the strait away.

Why Don't I Post?

If you notice I haven't posted but three times this year. Why you ask are the posts down? Not enough time, I say. I work full time and blog for four different sites. Anyway through Posterous and bitly.com I find it much easier to microblog.

My Posterous site is: Inanetaskers.posterous.com.

Bitly.com pushes direct to my twitter feed.

It is a heckuva lot easier to do things this way.

Cultural Impact of Black Hawk Down

Some literature student should analyze the presence of Black Hawk Down (the movie vice the book) in culture. Based on the innumerable videos on Youtube.com setting the movie to various songs seems to fulfill some desire by many different people on different levels.