I was happily lit up from the vodka I inhaled at the ritual Folks At The Railroad Track End of the Subdivision Happy Hour.” Two of us from the street were heading out to the Forrestal that night, so the gaiety was slightly muted by the realization that the crushing schedule was beginning to roll […]

It is funny to tread the steps we took to arrive at this place in our national history. There are a variety of issues flying about. One of them is the Deep State and how it works. It is funny to feel some old emotions come back these days. The ones most powerful were about […]

(US Navy image attached of the facility at GTMO, Cuba). There is some commotion out there in the wider world this morning. In Lithuania, the big NATO conference is underway. We don’t recall this much excitement about one of those since the last time the European alliance was blustering about Bosnia, and Russia’s attempt to […]

The Ukrainian President took a moment to observe the 500th day of the Special Military Operation being conducted in his nation over the weekend. The second-string commentators on Fox filled the air-waves both days with stories a day or so out of phase in the re-run stringss of shattered Ukrainian tanks. It made us think […]

There is a little wiggle room this morning in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Not that we are wiggling that dramatically. The Patio Space- once known as “The Lanai,” is not quite ready for that yet this morning, and the excesses of some in the evening hours last night is still playing out on the margins […]

The attachment is a photo dated sometime in 1981. It features the Gang assigned to the US Pacific Fleet’s Ocean Surveillance Information Facility. We knew it as the FOSIC. It was a component of a global system intended to track the motion of Soviet Naval Units worldwide, with emphasis on the ballistic missile submarines that […]

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com

So, we have brushed past some of the interesting ways our government responds to crisis. Our last exposure commenced in the wild response to 9/11. In part of the immediate response, we found ourselves attached to the person of the Cabinet Secretary designated to be the one who would survive the next attack. The means […]

We worked with Mac Showers to talk about his remarkable career in War and Cold Peace. It was fun, and a lot of issues came up. In wartime, he had been a purely military contributor to the war against Japan. In that struggle there were two major components driven by organizational issues back in Washington. […]

There was one of those Deep State Moments last Friday. You may not have noticed, since you were not supposed to. We all know the drill now. Stories that could be inconvenient to the people running things are kept aside by those who monitor Public Affairs and those sorts of things. They are saved for […]