Premo

Yeah the episode I referenced the most during four years of Donald Trump's presidency. Nothing 1984 about those years at all. Oh wait, it started with this guy: Then ended with hair dye dripping down Guliani's face and Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The pearl clutching from the 6-9 baseops/politics regulars in this thread is very entertaining.

Just get the ing shot

Those look like nice targets to me if the Taliban sends any trouble our way again

So are we...finally done in Afghanistan?

In the process of drawing down we would have had to leave Bagram at some point. My question to you and the marine battalion commander is when should we have done that? When was the right time to leave Bagram? Keep it until we got everyone out? The Afghan government asked us not to evacuate while they were still in power. The concern being that it would have been perceived as a loss of confidence and started a rush to the exits/collapse of the ANA even earlier. Fair or not I think that drove much of the rhetoric we heard up to this point about the Afghans being able to hold their own. At this point, I'd imagine we'd be witnessing thousands of people on the roads leading to Bagram stuck in the traffic jam to get out, helicopters and convoys making trips to/from Kabul through Taliban checkpoints. I'm sure nothing could go wrong with that.

Of course it was. The Trump admin. made a deal--don't shoot us as we leave out the back door. They want us gone that badly so they can run the place. To say that 2500 troops could have kept a lid on it is pure fantasy. Past a certain point the Taliban would have gotten impatient, surges would have been needed to bolster the ANA and keep the Afghan govt afloat, and we'd be sucked right back in it again.

“The modern National Security Council, for example, created by Henry Kissinger, had no more than 50 people. It stayed around that level for most of the 20th century, though even so, by 2000 it had crept up to about 100. In the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, it doubled again. Under Barack Obama, it doubled yet again. Donald Trump shrunk it some, but President Biden has brought it back to more than 350, with lots of deputies, layers and complexity.” “New York University scholar Paul Light says that the top five tiers of the Pentagon have gone from 363 people in 1998 to 870 in 2020. At the assistant secretary level alone, the numbers have gone from 193 to 629. There are now 33 layers of bureaucracy at the top of the Defense Department.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/heres-why-us-national-security-apparatus-keeps-producing-failures/

Trending on Reddit right now—Guardian story from 2009.

I thought First Man was good. I'd warn that if you're expecting a movie like others you've seen on the space program, e.g. a docudrama like Apollo 13, The Right Stuff, etc. it's not quite that genre--it's a biopic. That is, it's not as much about the moon landing, the space program or the cold war--it's about the life of Neil Armstrong. I'd say it did that very well and it's clear they made an effort to keep it historically accurate (some creative licence here and there but I don't think any more than Apollo 13 had). The camera work hits and misses. The X-15, Gemini and lunar scenes were excellent (saw it in a dfx theater with really good sound--recommend). For the dialogue scenes though, they overdid the grainy "home movie" style with too many shaky, blurry, zoom-in closeups, really distracts and gets annoying. They shot most of it on film to give it that grainy look, but then switch to IMAX for the lunar scenes--a good call. What I'd heard about the flag controversy was that some pundit didn't like that they weren't wearing the flag on their uniforms....when a simple google search reveals that the original Gemini uniforms had no flag. Manufactured outrage.

How?

I'm still not quite sure what the point of that subplot was in the overall story, other than having screentime for droids in a series about the CIA. 🙄🙄🙄

Anyone seen the new Jack Ryan series on Amazon? Nice to see some off-color 42d patches. Also Creech appears to be a huge B-52 base located somewhere near the Grand Canyon. Quite entertaining.

The Bobs like to avoid confrontation whenever possible. They “fixed the glitch.” They’ll bring in some entry level graduates and the problem should just work itself out.

But then I'm still flying an RPA.