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 […]

Morning, Gentle Readers! This short blurb is inserted in the morning traffic to explain some of the discontinuity in our normally well-disciplined production cycle. We had opened an account of meeting the Deep State a couple years ago which will continue in due course. It launched at an unusual time- early in the evening of […]

This is the eve of a great holiday celebrating a special moment in human- not just American- history. 247 years ago some relatively young men argued vigorously in Philadelphia about a new system of government to replace the dictates of a King across the water. They were property owners, but more importantly, they represented the […]

Sorry to intrude on this lengthening but lovely Sunday approaching the holiday week commemorating our independence from the King of England, as he was deemed in those days. This is note is to commemorate the restoration not of the Monarch but the Gnome. We have mentioned him in passing, citing the old black-and-white image from […]

You may have noticed there is some odd stuff going on in our spinning world. There is a major land war in progress on the edge of Europe. That used to be a big deal, since it is being conducted by a nation heavily armed with nuclear weapons among other things, with resistance funded by […]

We are finally done with June, and can move on from being proud about some things and start muttering French phrases to celebrate our Franco-American heritage and the other four things we are supposed to recall until the school-bells start to ring. One of the Salts is just back from a trip to Paris and […]