Stealth has a price.

Stealthy aircraft, namely the F22 and F35, no longer carry weapons on under wing racks. Instead missiles are tucked into internal missile bays lest enemy radar get a return off the ordinance. So far so good. Unfortunately the missile bays on F22 and F35 are just big enough to accept AIM-120 "Slammer" air to air missile. They are too small to fit the bigger anti-radiation missiles (HARM) used to knock out enemy radar and SAM sites.
The Air Force is working on smaller anti radiation missiles, small enough to fit, but this is probably a loser long term. An anti radiation missile has to be big to carry enough "bang" to do a ground site, which are more robust than aircraft. I remember the old AGM-45 Shrike we used in Viet Nam. Nice missile but the warhead wasn't big enough to do the job.
Then there is the never fading Air Force desire for a bomber. Every Air Force officer has seen "12 o'Clock High" and wants to have a modern B17. In Viet Nam and Iraq the bombing was done by fighters. The jet fighters carry as heavy a bomb load as the B17's and defend themselves as well. Or at least the old, reliable, but unstealthy F105, F4, F15 and F16 can, the fancy new stealth F22 and F35 may not. Be that as it may, USAF wants a bomber. They haven't decided range, payload and survivability requirements yet, but they know they want a bomber.

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This innocous email turned up this morning. Looks halfway authentic. Except for a couple of things.
1. My email reader pulls all my email off the server onto my very own PC. No way is my mailbox ever gonna fill up.
2. Never heard of RR Mail.
Based on 1 and 2, I decided NOT to click on the link. There are plenty of spammers and worse out there.

Cat shows backbone

Stupid Beast, who is so timid that passing pickup trucks make her hide under beds, faced down a dog this morning. It was a very nice young black Lab who wanted to make friends, but Stupid Beast wasn't having any of that. She did the arch back, fluff up fur and menacing growl bit so effectively that she drove the poor Lab right off the property. The dog was so impressed he failed to even bark.

How have the mighty fallen.

According to Fox Business News, the Caterpillar company will buy the Electromotive Division (EMD) from a pair of vulture capitalist firms for a measly $820 million. EMD is the company that made the diesels that replaced steam locomotives on US railroads in the 1950s. EMD started out in the 1920's making gas electric rail cars. They were what we would call a system integrator today. They bought the car bodies, the electric traction motors, the generators and the Winton distillate engines from suppliers and put them together to make self propelled rail cars. Gas electrics sold pretty well, plenty of railroads had thinly traveled routes that a single car train could serve. Compared to getting down to the roundhouse four hours before train time to light the fire and raise steam, a gas electric was simplicity to operate, you just hit the starter button and it was running.
As the Winton engine people squeezed more power out of the engines, the gas electrics gained enough oomph to pull a trailer car, yielding a two car train. Then in the middle 1930's the Electromotive Corporation built the two prototype streamline trains, the Burlington's Zephyr and the Boston & Maine's Flying Yankee. These were sensational trains, all stainless steel, ultra modern styling, fast, great looking interiors and they gained a lot of publicity. Somewhere along the line, the Electromotive Corp was bought by General Motors and became the Electromotive Division (EMD).
In the late 1930's, just before WWII, EMD introduced the first passenger and freight diesel road locomotives. In 1941, after Pearl Harbor, the War Production Board, faced with endless demands for guns and tanks and aircraft and all the logistics needed to supply American, British and Russian armies, decided that the scarce and high tech diesel engines should go into submarines, landing craft, transportable electric plants and other munitions. The railroads were told to haul the wartime traffic with steam engines. Of which there were plenty, and Baldwin, Alco, and the railroads own shops were all set up to make plenty more. Net result, EMD's road diesels ran through out WWII and by VE day all the bugs had been worked out.
After VJ day, the traditional steam locomotive makers, Baldwin and Alco, along with GE and Fairbanks Morse introduced road diesels, but they didn't stand a chance against the seasoned and debugged EMD models. In less than 15 years the railroads scrapped all the steamers and replaced them with new EMD diesels. That was a tremendous piece of business. EMD, and parent company GM, made money hand over fist doing it, and EMD dominance of the US locomotive market lasted well into the 1980's.
For reasons unclear to me, competitor GE stayed in the locomotive business and gradually pulled ahead of EMD by the mid 1980's. Could be of course that brain dead GM senior management screwed things up, I don't know that story, but it is likely. In 2005, as GM was sliding down the tubes, they sold EMD to couple of vulture capital firms. And now the capital firms sold out to Caterpillar.
I wish the new owners every kind of luck. They have a great name, 33000 locomotives in service, and $1.8 billion yearly sales. Caterpillar bought the place for only 1/2 the yearly sales numbers.

Ratings Agencies, Welfare for Wall St.

Used to be, companies and state and local governments could just issue bonds. You know, written deals that said "You give me cash, I promise to pay it back, with interest over the next umpteen years." If the bond issuer seemed solvent, people bought the bonds. If the issuer was unknown or had a bad rep, the bonds didn't sell.
Then Congress got into the act. To issue bonds now, the issuer must get a rating agency like Standard & Poor or Moody's to "rate" the bonds. You know AAA or ABA or PUREJUNK. This was supposed to "protect" investors from unscrupulous junk bond dealers. Trouble is, the ratings agencies are less scrupulous than the junk bonders. The ratings agencies happily rated sub prime mortgage backed securities AAA. The defaults on AAA rated sub prime bonds caused Great Depression 2.0
Needless to say, this is pure gravy for the ratings agencies which now get a cut on every bond issued. The issuers have to pay the agencies for the rating. Needless to say, the issuers shop around for the best rating. If Moody's won't give me AAA maybe Standard and Poor's will.
It's welfare for Wall St.

A little bit of American Exceptionalism

Was reading John Keegan's book The Second World War. Keegan states that the only place where Japanese conquerors encountered resistance was in the Phillipines. The Americans had established some rapport with the Filipinos before the war. After the 1941 Japanese invasion the Filipinos remained loyal to the Americans in ways that French, Dutch, and British colonies did not. A US submarine bringing supplies to the Filipino resistance was pleasantly surprised to find a solid town dock, all the lights in town blazing, a native band playing on the dock ,and pretty dancing girls, all to welcome the submarine ashore.
Seems like the Americans did things right that other colonial powers neglected.

Deepwater Horizon poorly organized

Friday's Wall St Journal described the chaos and lack of organization aboard Deepwater Horizon when the well blew. A young technician radioed "Mayday, Mayday, We have an uncontrollable fire aboard." The rig skipper reprimanded her for exceeding her authority. To which the technician replied "Sorry Sir." The blowout preventer could not be closed until a committee of the top BP and Transocean executives met and gave the OK. Several workers mentioned a lack of firefighting equipment, pumps, sprinklers, hoses. The explosion put electrical power out.
The sinking of the platform made well control enourmously more difficult. There should have been plenty of fire fighting equipment. There also should be been a watch officer on duty 24/7 with the authority to close the blow out preventer, call the crew to fight fighting stations, maneuver the platform, order abandon ship, and what ever else is needful. No way a committee, woken sudden from sleep, confronted with fire and explosion, can make any kind of decisions, let alone the right decisions until it's much too late.