09 January 2007
Back to the Future
I won't even deign to mention the timing of the last college football game of the year, nine o'clock on a Monday night more than a week into the New Year. I know there are people in Los Angeles who enjoy watching these sorts of things, and the maximum amount of cash needs to be wrung out of the spectacle.
I would consider this to be the actual end of the holidays, which began sometime around Halloween, but I would be wrong. The pro playoffs will trash the weekends, and the zoo that attends the Super Bowl will drag this on through the kickoff on February 4th.
By my estimate, that makes the Holiday Winter Secular Festival something more than 90 days in length, and I think I am behind on my shopping already.
I won't comment on the actual contest, either. The only undefeated major team left is Boise State, from the Great State of Idaho, Famous Potatoes Forever, and they should be the National Champs.
Much as I despise the Buckeyes, their humiliation at the hands of the gleeful Gators only makes my conference look that much worse. It takes me back in history to the great humiliations the corn-fed lads of the Great Midwest suffer at the hands of swifter and more agile teams from places where the sun is more inviting, and the month of December is not so bleak and filled with despair.
Perhaps there is a brighter future out there to go back to, tinged with the glory of the past. But it is going to take some heat to do it. It looked pleasant in the breaking news coverage in Somalia. It was well after dawn there, and the first responders were able to quickly recover the injured and eventually move the dead.
Spooky, the magical aerial gunship, paid a call to southeast Somalia in the night. It for the first time since the ignominious exit to the sea by American forces in 1993. They had been engaged in nation-building, and the unsuccessful search for local kingpin Mohammad Farrah Aideed.
It was a strange time. Invigorated by the successful but ambiguous victory in Kuwait, the new Clinton Administration embarked on an ambiguous and nuanced mission against anarchy in the Horn of Africa. A friend who volunteers for the adventure arrived in Mogadishu and was assigned a working space in a square brick building. It was hot. They knocked a hole in the wall of the “intelligence center” for ventilation, and in the detritus and trash found dozens of ribbons of merit from the old regime, awarded by long-time strongman Muhammad Siyad Barre to his vanished fighters.
My pal brought them back as souvenirs, and I keep the one he gave me as a sort of missive from Ozymandus, to look upon the works of the mighty and despair.
In the more than a decade since “Blackhawk Down,” the adversary has been nothing if not persistent. The steady march of the Islamists, urged on by al Qaeda's fugitive deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, who thought with some justification, that a new bastion on the Horn could be established to support the war against the Crusaders.
With the easy advance of the Islamists, it appeared the Agency had backed the wrong set of horses. The payoffs to the war-lords was to no avail, and Somalia would slip away. As I said to a cab driver who told me he came from Addas Ababa the other evening, “God bless the brave soldiers of Ethiopia.” I appreciate their role in toppling the Islamists, and I hope he agreed with me.
Spooky's nickname has changed over the years. The concept was first dreamed up as the maximum airborne counter-insurgency platform. The North Vietnamese were highly successful in moving war material down the Ho Chi Minh trail at night, and an effective interdiction took needed to be found.
The answer was to take the venerable four-engine C-130 Hercules aircraft and mount a stabilized 105mm howitzer in the cargo bay. Coupled with high-rate of fire mini-guns, the hybrid aircraft bristled with firepower.
It was slow and ungainly, but Lordy, it was effective! The speed and steady profile required for accurate fire meant the system had to work at night for survivability, part of the battle of the darkness in which the Americans gained so much advantage. The howitzer and the squirting burp of the mini-guns had a unique and ominous sound, reassuring to Americans in the field and less so to those that the aircraft were hunting. Grunts would hear the sound, and gesture toward it.
“Spooky Knows where they are,” they would say. “Spooky knows.”
Spooky has gone through several significant upgrades through those days, with service in Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War and Somalia. It now boasts new armor and sensors and infrared suppressors on the engines. It can engage two targets more than a kilometer apart. Another old comrade is involved in mission support, since he has retired from flying fighters, but wants to keep his hand in. I think of him when I hear that Bad Guys have been interdicted, on the high plains of Afghanistan, or in al Anbar, or the Horn of Africa.
He is proud of the latest edition of Spooky, which can be rightly considered to be the most sophisticated slow-moving thing in the air, with well over a half million lines of software code to direct its wrath. It is devoted to the Special Operations Mission, and a wonderful tool it is.
As I was about to turn off the football game in disgust, I was drawn to Spooky's latest mission in Somalia. It looked like there were many casualties, and from the first video that flickered between the gunship and the stretchers and ruined corner of a building, I could not tell who they were, except in a general sense, of course. Nor can the low-light televisions on Spooky, nor the sophisticated IR sensors.
That takes very good intelligence on the ground. There are reports that the Somali Interim Government and the Ethiopians contributed to the targeting, and Langley has close contacts with some of the clans and warlords. The Kenyan Service likewise has no interest in permitting the Islamists safe haven in their north, so this chance to put a cork in the bottle seems irresistible.
Since the Jihadis of the Islamic Courts Union were chased in this direction, it might be one of those moments that Spooky is so effective in addressing. There is a good chance that the ones who died were bad guys. We have been looking for the East African cell that was responsible for the bombings that killed hundreds at the embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998.
Many more Tanzanians and Kenyans died in those attacks than Americans, but a friend was getting coffee in the basement of the chancery in Nairobi in the latter attack, and by the grace of god and a whisker he lived while part of the building came down.
Those responsible should pay, and if the intelligence was good, I hope Spooky collected at least a down payment. It is impossible to go back and correct mistakes.
All you can do is move forward, and hope you do not make them again.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicosoctra.com