Kiwi entrpreneur takes another step forwards

That Kiwi entrepreneur I mentioned at the beginning of this month has now gone live with his website so obviously his project is developing well – more power to him and his idea…this is genuine true blue Kiwi ingenuity in the air so have a look and maybe think about what Hawkeye could do for you – I’d love to see Hawkeye operating in support of the great Southern musters (as brought to you by the Great Southern beer), working by night to locate stock for the next day’s muster…

Thoughts while mowing

I was just mowing the lawns - a time when I can just flick on to auto-mow and just cogitate for a while – and a couple of phrases collided in my mind…the first was one by John Birmingham in one of his blog posts on writing, this one on where the idea for a book or story might come from. In this case, Without Warning is the result of JB enduring some fool prattling on about all of America’s failings… “…he screamed at me the world would be a much better place if we all just woke up one day and they were gone, just gone, every last American in the world. That dumb ass suggestion must have caught like a fish hook in my brain and kept nagging away for years until the idea of turning it into a novel finally occurred to me after a couple of months of frustrating negotiations to settle on the topic for a new trilogy after Axis of Time…“

The quote that rear-ended these lines from JB is one I saw but didn’t really absorb from Neptunus Lex last week on Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Oslo: “…I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity…“

It struck me, as I mowed, that sometimes we should be careful what we wish for – it just might happen…I’ve met a lot of Americans and some of them were real dicks BUT in no greater proportion than those I have endured in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the UK . As much as we might like to take a populist view of America’s ‘failure’ in Vietnam, I was struck by the attitude of the Vietnamese people when I was there some years ago: they despised the French with a true passion (understandable) but considered as America as well-intentioned but misguided “…came to our country with the best intentions but for the wrong reasons…“

We’re all too happy to stand back and let America take the hits…til the Wehrmacht tosses a few warmers across the Channel, or the Imperial Navy steams south; the national daily prayer of France should be ‘Thank you, America’; as it should be in many ingrate European countries – can you say ‘Marshall Plan’?’ Can you say ‘thank God, someone else was able to sort Yugoslavia out’?. Even in our backyard, INTERFET may have been Aussie-led with a Kiwi 2IC but lets NOT forget Peleliu and her sister were there as well – just in case.

When has it ever hurt to simply say “thank you”?

PS. It’s worth reading the whole of the Neptunus Lex post on what it means to be a nation at war – we might need to know one day…

Last Call for 2009

Well, this is probably it for the year – we’re off on holiday from this weekend and aren’t planning on resuming normal services until the first week of 2010 although, if I get time, I may schedule some tuning signal posts over the close down period…

The misuse of the term COIN for the environment we face today has always annoyed and as most will now my preferences are for the more accurate Countering Irregular Threats or, even better, Countering Irregular Activity. There is a great thread developing on Small Wars Journal on The Myth of Hearts and Minds – I’ve already said my little bit and encourage you all to as well…I think this is important as the proponderant focus on COIN in the last four to five years has been a significant doctrinal red herring.

Both Coming Anarchy and Lex Neptunus offer comment on a recent Wall Street Journal piece on the alleged ability of insurgents to hack the feeds from US UAVs (drones are something totally different)…while it is simply so totally unamazing that the bad guys might target a weakness in the us comms hierarchy (you could build a whole doctrine around targeting weakness and call it ‘asymmetry’ – oh, yeah, they did that already…), this is not hacking: it sounds more like it is not much more than tuning into your neighbour’s unsecured wifi connection – more his problem that yours if he is too dumb/lazy/cheap to do the job properly…the Russians must be so upset that this $25 software, developed for legitimate and peaceful use, is being abused in this way…

On The Strategist, there is a note on the Brits punting up the success of their next big push in Afghanistan – before it happens – it’s either a cunning (of weasel proportions) information operations campaign – or just another sign of how much they just DON’T get it anymore and are still hankering for the halcyon days of the British Army on the Rhine where it was all so much simpler, lots of small maps, big arrows and bigger hands…I’m also not sure if you can have “…classic behind the lines fighting…” on the non-contiguous battlefield…?

And, finally, some food for thought from a Blunty of a few months ago: Are we better than them?

Muzzling the Unmuzzlable

Yes, unmuzzlable is really a word, I say so…

Neptunus Lex is making a stand today and so are a number of other Blogs, including this one…you read all about it over at Lexville but the issue is simply one of management of modern information technologies and, what is now considered contemporary, information and communication cultures.

Yes, there is massive risk that soldiers, sailors, airpeople and Marines (of all ranks) could do serious damage to current operations and capabilities through misuse of social media and there will always be a few out of frustration, malice or simple ignorance who will. But implementing another kazillion rules and regulations ISN’T going to help, mitigate or fix this in any way. That is a fact. Short of confining everyone on-base forever and severing all communications links, it’s just not possible and I would suggest that such measures, outside of an operational facility, would do even greater damage to recruiting and retention.

A zero defects i.e. no crap on my watch, approach has never worked and only ever serves to conceal the things that are really broken. When that happens we discover those breaks the old-fashioned way when we cross the start line (not the best time!). Leaders and commanders at all levels should not just accept but actively seek out those things that are not working, even those that are perceived as not working (which could just be issues of perceptional, training or education), and do something about them…it’s leadership and command 101…

In my comments on Lex’s post, I listed four steps that would mitigate the dilemma caused by social media to operations and capabilities. Tomorrow I might list them here but in the mean time, get ye off to Neptunus Lex and read what he has to say…

Starship Troopers

It is quite scary that there are people out there (apparently lots of them too!) who think that Starship Troopers is only a crap movie from the late 90s with a great shower scene…it would be interesting some day to consider the effects of digital media upon the depth of our society’s knowledge…whereas we once read books, we now wait for the movie; once we read the paper over breakfast or at work and got not only the news but insightful commentary, now we scan the headlines on out iPhones in search of the sensational or titillating…

There is a discussion on The Long War, Counterinsurgency Operations, and the Future of the Armed Forces on Sic Semper Tyrannis.  Based upon a short paper of the same name by Adam Silverman, It discusses among other things, the value or not of the draft and of legislative process in going to war (real war with shooting, guns and things, not war on obesity, drugs, poverty or other social ailments). While it is generally accepted that the draft, while nice to talk about, is not a viable option now, it does identify the need for “…A discussion and debate over the nature of service and the nature of what everyone is required to contribute as a citizen in exchange for our rights and responsibilities would be a long overdue public good…” The global  ”me, me, me” society of today has forgotten that the relationship between the elements of Clausewitz’s Trinity is symbiotic and NOT geared solely for the pleasure and comfort of ‘the people’.

The discussion also touches upon the tiers of citizenship upon which Heinlein’s Starship Troopers‘ society is built: there are citizens and civilians – to become a citizen with its attendant privileges AND responsibilities, a civilian must volunteer to serve. Although interwined with Heinlein’s own philosophies on life, politics and society, it is one of his better, less openly satirical reads and strikes on a number of levels. At face value, it is simply a ripping good scifi war yarn; at another, it delves into the relationships between those who serve and those who opt not to. At yet another  level, it provides an aspirational insight into the empty battlefield or distributed operations – IF you have the right combination and level of mobility, situational awareness, firepower and devolved decision-making to avoid simple defeat in detail. I would humbly submit that no military force has attain these goals yet and that those who may be closest are those who we currently face…

So…Starship Troopers…find and read a copy of the book – the whole unabridged version (no cheating with Reader’s Digest)…it is available via Audible so you can ‘read’ while on the commute or cycling/rowing/stepping in the gym…the movie is only good for some lightweight voyeurism, a not bad soundtrack and some cool spaceship designs of which the Rodger Young can be seen being built on Paper Modelers (not 1:1 though…).

Them’s the breaks

One thing that really bugs me about so much contemporary doctrine and writing is the way in which we as the ‘good guys’ are portrayed as inept numpties and the insurgents/criminals/terrorists are painted as unstoppable unbeatable uber-bogeymen. It was so very refreshing, then, to receive this paper by Lincoln  Krause on the mistakes that insurgents commonly make and as suggested in the paper, perhaps a gap in FM 3-24 that might be filled in the next go-round? These are the types of things that we need to be teaching in conjunction with the things that an adversary might do well and advantages that they may have over us, especially if we opt to let them maintain those advantages…

The Dark Side of the Information Militia

And probably the one we are the most familiar with…damn hackers…but the penny openly dropped for me this morning reading this Wired article Hackers Brew Self-Destruct Code to Counter Police Forensics which came in through Linked-In. Of course there is a dark to every light and I should have picked up on this way earlier…

Neptunus Lex calls it a travesty and he ain’t wrong. The rise and fall of a military blogger illustrates the difficulties of trying to restrain modern information technologies with rules and regulations designed for bygone days where paper and the typing pool ruled. no wonder the bad guys are all over us in the cybersphere. There is no way to protect our information now other than through education – the more draconian the rules we implement, the more chinks in the armour will be made – and exploited…In a very brief but uber-broad post, The Strategist links to a couple of articles on the whys and why-nots of taking the war to cyberspace – personally I think that the Guardian article on the why-nots is weak and bordering on pitiful – maybe the author was strapped for an idea and just churned it out to meet a deadline? Those same ‘citizens’ who bleat upon civil liberties are also those who bleat loudest when the fascist pig police don’t divert 100% of their resources to lock up the thugs who tagged their mailbox, and are those who would sacrifice the least for the common good…me, me, me…I agree totally with John Arquilla at Foreign Policy on the whys: so long as we cry about the adversaries’ use of information technologies against us and do nothing about it, we are artificially constraining ourselves and that’s a helluva way to run a war – the COIN Review found that mastering the COE will require us to master information fusion from a range and depth of sources the likes of we have never consider before. More so, as we adopt Michael Scheiern’s concept of individual-based tracking, cyberspace is where we must also find the individuals and track them…

I also agree with Peter’s crystal ball comment re the UK – a la Once Was An Empire which is symptomatic of the decay that is now becoming visible…

On the lighter side of the Information Militia, Steven Pressfield discusses the philosophy of Giving It Away – taking the plunge and not holding out for me, me, me direct physical rewards for one’s labours… looking at the big picture and the long game instead…

I wish WordPress had an Unpublish button as I hit Publish by mistake and now have to complete today’s post ‘live’ as it were….

Islam’s First Heretics

A brief by interesting article on Coming Anarchy

COIN, Training and Education

Small War Journal has a couple of good discussions going on: Counterinsurgency and Professional Military Education; Integrating COIN into Army Professional Education; The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments Feel free to leap in and value add…

Circles, triangles and squares…

It’s all about understanding…yesterday, we worked with the grand-twins and understanding circles, triangles and squares…lots of fun in the sun…I wish understanding COIN, CIT and CIA could be as easy and as much fun…

I seem to have mildly upset some people…in the case of Patrick Lang’s entry on COIN as a failed strategy, I think that we both actually agree – our issue is more other the semantics of COIN than whether COIN has worked in Afghanistan or not; neither of us believe that it has but my stance is that because the current campaign in Afghanistan is not the same campaign as the original OEF that went into deal to Al-Qaeda training bases and cadres. Somewhere along the way OEF evolved from a Direct Action on a large-scale to a pseudo-COIN campaign. I say ‘pseudo’ because there never was an insurgency to counter until the end of the direct action phase of OEF, say, from the end of 2002 onwards. That insurgency was directed primarily against US/NATO forces that had, in the eyes of Afghans, invaded their nation. Thus the ‘logical’ way to neutralise that insurgency would be to remove the cause. Once the Al-Qaeda training camps and cadres in Afghanistan had been neutralised by the end of 2002, anti-terrorism efforts should have continued to pursue Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror’ wherever they may have gone, to apply those resources that have essentially been wasted in Afghanistan against the real threat.

A COIN strategy has been (mis)applied in Afghanistan: it’s not about a struggle for the people, it’s not about hearts and minds and it’s certainly NOT about trying to inflict our culture and values on another society – is that one of the reasons that WE have gone to war to fight against? That bit of unpleasantness 1939-35 spring to mind…for two millennia and more, Afghanistan has been a loose confederation of tribes with a vaguely ineffective central government – the government leaves the tribes alone and vice versa; the only time there is anything remotely resembling a unified Afghanistan is when there is the perception of an invader and no occupation of this country has succeeded in 2000 years.

It all comes down to the same issue in the end: what are the strategic objectives for the campaign in Afghanistan? What are the troops there to do? Those are the two questions that needed to be asked in late 2002. The current campaign will not address historical issues with the border with Pakistan and the tribal areas(next to religion, the most common cause of war in the last century must be British imperial surveyors!!); it will not change the power bases in Pakistan; and it certainly is not going to address issues of Pakistan’s membership of the nuke club. If the aim is to develop a stable governance structure (possibly in lieu of a government) then the Taliban must be engaged with more than small arms and JDAMs: as the force that will (and is) filling the vacuum of control in Afghanistan, they must be encouraged to come to the table. What do we want? An Al-Qaeda-free Afghanistan under a Taliban-controlled/led alliance or another decade of what we’ve got now? The ’secure the cities’ Cursed Earth approach may be sustainable but it brings us no closer to resolution.

So the problem that Patrick Lang identifies is not the failure of COIN as a means of statecraft but the application of the wrong tool for the job. In his post on the historical failure of COIN he uses a number of examples. Malaya and Kenya are written off as failures because of the resources in terms of time, blood and treasure applied for little return, more so since the UK let both nations go at the end of the respective campaigns. He misses the point that both Malaysia and Kenya have, since their independence, been islands of relative stability for the succeeding four decades. From the Malayan Emergency came the establishment of the state of Singapore as a separate home for dissenting Chinese from Malaysia - Singapore is now a prime source of economic, political and security stability across the ASEAN region with strong relationships around the globe. Similarly the 70s campaign in Oman, which led to a number of reforms in that nation, also left an island of regional stability. That there are still ripples in the Cyrean pond are not due to the failure of the British COIN campaign there but to periodic posturing between the ethnic Greek and Turkish populations – but Cyprus has been pretty stable for decades. Northern Ireland is a classic example with few of the advantages that Commonwealth forces had in Malaya like ethnic differences between ‘the people’ and the insurgents, lack of offshore support, etc; others include Belize; East Timor, Solomon Islands and Bougainville;  and Hungary and Czechoslovakia (you do not have to like the Soviet methods but you can not deny their effectiveness).

Did the COIN campaign in Vietnam fail? Only in that, like in Afghanistan, the campaign did not take into account the key issue: in the end, it was not about defending the South against the North: it was about reunification. Perhaps if the reunification of Vietnam had been the primary objective from the first advisor to set foot in that country, it may have worked out so differently. Let’s not forget that Ho Chi Minh originally wanted to align with the US to expel the French (the nation that is REALLY despised in Vietnam) but was screwed over in favour of bolstering the tottering remnants of French Empire. That was when the Communists (franchisers of terror?) stepped into the void. So long as reunification was not on the table as an objective, Vietnam was probably never winnable – what are we really here for? – but is the failure to clearly identify the issues and the eventual erosion of political and domestic support a failure of COIN? We can and will argue about it for years but I am on the side of not – a good workman never blames his tools – and here, as in Afghanistan, the workman is not so much the soldier ( as I inadvertently applied on Sic Semper Tyrannis) but the political arm that decides such adventures are or are not a good idea…the biggest war amongst ‘the people’ is always at home….

This is one of the reasons the COIN Review adopted the USMC term Countering Irregular Threats (CIT) over COIN as a descriptor for the Contemporary Operating Environment: COIN is a subset of CIT. One of the main reasons for this decision was that as soon as COIN is mentioned the two immediate response are “Malaya” and “Winning hearts and minds” and we are off down the slippery slopes of assumptions and misapplied lessons. Exploring the CIT concept further brought us to the British (and they do have some experience in this area, overseas and at home) term Countering Irregular Activity (CIA). This works on the premise that we should be thinking in terms of countering irregularity before it becomes a threat let alone a war and by starting to consider an irregularity before it becomes a threat, we are much more likely to NOT discount non-kinetic courses of action to address that irregularity. When you consider that there are only really two types of operation: stability (what else might you call operations to counter destabilising activities – counter-destability?) and warfighting. Perhaps stability operations should be led by ‘not the military’ in order to be able to consider other options, just as warfighting operations, by definition, should be military-led – both, of course, in support of clearly defined national objectives.

Patrick asked me if I thought that this was just a game played by academics in journals. My first response was denial but it is exactly that. What greater endorsement for a comprehensive approach to the problems of the COE than to be able to have such discussions outside of in-house military think-tanks; to be able to put one’s opinions and thoughts to the world without fear of formal censure (some harsh words perhaps at worst between differers of opinion); and perhaps by virtue of that openness to be able to contribute in some small way to the intellectual horsepower assembled to address those problems. Hence the Information Militia concept: loosely organised; often fractured and factionalised; following a general direction but often only through the sum of a number of tangents – but still useful to have around. There was a post recently on the Small Wars Council Blog entitled Where is Our Kilcullen? that was critical of the Marines for not having developed its own Kilcullen – as a number of posters have pointed out, the US has its fair share of COIN thinkers and one of David Kilcullen’s big advantages was that, as an outsider, he probably had greater freedom to say the unpalatable. But there is no denying that many of these thinkers both exist and exist outside the formal structures of the Army (or Marine Corps, if you have one). It is this rich and robust discussion, that we encourage, foster and nurture that maybe gives us an edge over the takfiri who strive to suppress any and all who don’t agree, conform or comply…how else would our Gants and Wineeras ever get a word in otherwise…?

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I am reviewing the RAAF’s Friends in High Places publication and one of the themes emerging from this an awareness of retaining, because we can, the old single service stovepipes and continuing to do what we do in isolation from other operators in the same environment…becoming dumber as we become smarter. The two posts by MattF and MikeF in the Kilcullen thread proposing that field-grade officers be posted on tours outside their service or the military as part of broadening cultural horizons are good ideas – and again examples of where we may have had a good thing in place once and allowed it to lapse…we don’t know what we don’t know and often the only way to find out is to get out and find out. So as military professionals perhaps we need to be getting out and getting our boots dirty, not in the field where we lead, but in areas of commerce, politics, diplomacy, aid, etc where we do not lead…and by doing so make ourselves better stronger and faster for dealing with irregular activities.

Police and COIN

The other person I have upset a little is one of the chaps from Coming Anarchy – in this case, that was my intention as I think that he had leapt a little before thinking – the whole concept behind COIN (still in a misuse of the term) is that it is solely not a military operation and often, the military might not even have the lead in what is more correctly a CIA (no, not that CIA!!!) campaign in Salinas. Thus the COIN doctrine being employed in Salinas might quite plausibly include no military courses of action at all – and rightly so for a domestic policing campaign. That campaign will probably include a strong element of law enforcement (and regardless of how some might dress, there are not the military), civil aid, political action at the town and possibly state levels, support initiatives from commercial and corporate entities e.g. jobs, etc etc. All these are approaches that can be find in most contemporary Western COIN doctrine – the adoption does not bring the advent of martial law any closer. If anything, the Salinas initiative is an indication that some traditional barriers have been eroded to allow the adoption and implementation of someone else’s good ideas…Equally, there is much that we can, should and are learning from how police operate in some situations…

If there is one major issue arising from the Salinas initiative, it is the one identified last month as “..a tradition of police officers who “love the chase. They get into this business to kick ass and take names, by and large. We’re at odds with ourselves because of the people we hire...” So before we get into any discussion of the rights or wrongs of what doctrine is used, we need to seriously consider who we recruit to apply it…I don’t know but I would be interested to learn how much ethos and values training is included in both formal police entry (recruit) training and also post-graduation on the job…

Up, up and away

I visited Palmerston North the Friday before last and caught up with a mate who is using flight simulation technologies in his work…he took me for a ‘flight’ out of RNZAF Ohakea in a Vulcan B.2, thundering through the valleys around home…only minor thing wrong was that a Vulcan coming out of Ohakea should look like this:

Avro Vulcan B.2, 75 Sqn RNZAF, 1972

So what if…

…we all got together as a planet and deliberately decided to make it worse…?

At Blunty the other day John Birmingham offers comment on the Swiss’ totally mindblowingly stupid decision to ban minarets on buildings…”Switzerland’s Muslims, for instance, are reported to be mostly refugees from the Balkans who had already been thoroughly Europeanized over many centuries and who would have been almost perfectly suited to demonstrating that Islam and Western, secular modernity can live in harmony.” Hands-up any person who wouldn’t be offended and feel victimised and discriminated against after this dumbness…Across Europe, Muslim communities that are decades, sometimes  centuries, old are being isolated and driven into the arms of the jihadists and takfirists – those whose other passion is hate…

I’ve commented before on the Islamic Brotherhood’s stark and blatant reluctance to get involved and sort out problems in its own backyard – if they could get up off their diamond-encrusted backsides to do so – if only 1% of all the aid that Saudi poured into the various Palestinian liberation movements over the decades was invested into modern day Palestine, it would be, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Spread the wealth around carefully and the unemployment, unrest and lack of hope that feeds the jihadists would blink out of existence overnight – Palestine might even become the reborn centre of Islamic study, learning and science as Islam once lead the world before the takfir nutjobs took over.

That Saudi is not interested in helping the Palestinians and is in fact quite happy keeping them marginalised as third class global citizens is quite clear in this article from Coming Anarchy “…As many as a quarter of a million Palestinians live in Saudi Arabia, but they are prohibited to hold or even apply for Saudi citizenship because of Arab League instructions barring Arab states from granting them citizenship in order “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” Yeah, right…The palestinians have been used and abuser by their Arab and muslim ‘brothers’ for decades and they have the balls to refer to the US as ‘The Great Satan”? You really have to wonder if it occurs to OBL and his ilk that if they want the US to butt out of Middle Eastern affairs, the way to do it is to promote STABILITY in the region. They are quite right when they say that Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are Arab/Muslim problems…jolly good, but when it’s time to step up to the plate and do something about it, everybody remembers they had something else to do in their gold-plated swimming pools…of course, when the Saudi water table finally dies, and the gold-plated swimming pool is full of sand, it’ll probably be too late…

Last month The Strategist made comment, as did I in Rattatattatat… on the Salinas Police Department’s request for assistance from the US Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey to assist in countering its gang problem (7 murders in 11 days!!). Coming Anarchy has just picked up on Washington Post article on the same story but instead of recognising the initiative for what it is, Coming Anarchy has disappointingly misused it to leap on its own little bandwagon of police militancy…it’s not hard to see why the planet might be going to hell in a hand basket when simple innovative initiatives like those in Salinas are used as just another excuse to beat the police. The simple fact is that COIN doctrine (from the top to the lowest TTPs) is eminently employable in law enforcement and that not only should that concept be fostered and nurtured but we should be encouraging the military to pass on its lessons from expeditionary COIN campaigns – who knows they might even learn something in return…? How might Jim Gant’s tribal strategy be employed to counter the gang culture? It’s all about stability in the end…perhaps this is an idea for a paper to complement Josh’s one on fighting P in New Zealand? I don’t have a copy of this on hand but will see if I can upload it next week…

Falklands ‘47

The actual idea for the title of today’s post came from Paper Modelers…I looked at this aircraft, an indigenous Argentinian redesign of the Mosquito and wondered…what-if the Falklands War had taken place some three or four decades earlier – might we have seen Argentinian Calquins forcing strikes against a small British fleet armed with the latest in naval aviation, the Supermarine Attacker; Sikorsky R-4s conducting early airmobiles; and the Black Buck missions conducted by the original Vulcans (before they did all those horrible things to the leading edge!)…I had thought that this might fit into the Axis of Time Birmoverse model but couldn’t get it to fly with the high tech edge that Allies had at the end of  that WW2…

The 2 Ds…

I really like this post on children at play from The Strategist – Peter I think has turned off the commenting option but I think that the underlying theme in his humour is important enough to offer my own thoughts here: the two D’s of developing children: dirt and danger…if they don’t know it’s OK to get dirty and take risks as children, then they won’t as adults and will always want the nanny-state to be there for them… Yes, yes, yes to all the mindless nanny-statist chorusing the need for supervision…it’s not like we’re proposing that all newborns be left out in the wild to see if they can survive on their own – if we did that, we’d never get a National Caucus together – but let children figure things out for themselves instead of pushing the panic button every time they try to add a bit of dirt and dead bug to their diets…I remember, many many years ago, when Guy Fawkes was still fun, the rich kid up the road made his own nebelwerfer using a milk crate with (holding 5×5?=)25 bottles, each with a skyrocket linked to a  central fuse – ABSOLUTELY spectacular when launched at a 30 degree angle!!! We used to make our own cluster bombs by attaching strings of crackers to skyrockets so they would scatter and explode after the rocket burst…all good clean Kiwi fun…and we turned out OK…

The Dog Show gets a new fan

Sorry it's so dark but it's a pic of a black dog in a dark room and you can only lighten so much in GIMP.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment regarding how dogs think…last night, I had a quick Channel surf after Nightline to see if there was anything worth keeping the TV on for…I didn’t think so but there was a rerun of The Dog Show on TV6. All of a sudden, Kirk and Lulu had not only woken up but were paying close attention to the show. The Dog Show was a local TV hit in the 80s here: it’s certainly not Cruft’s but is a competition about a man, his dogs and some of the dumbest stubbornest sheep on the planet – each episode pits working dogs and their bosses against a  series of challenges to herd a group of sheep through various obstacles and/or into a pen…sounds rivetting, I know, but it actually is quite addictive and gained a mega following down here…

Normally the dogs show zero interest in TV, the one exception being It’s Me or the Dog, a UK show about sorting difficult dogs and owners, along the lines of The Dog Whisperer – but even that never caused the reaction that The Dog Show got last night. Both dogs sat up and watched it the whole way through (so much for short canine attention spans!) and I had to shift Kirk behind the coffee table so that he didn’t try to stick his head through the screen again…

Virtual PC 2007

And speaking of dogs, I tried out a Microsoft product last night and had pretty low expectations, having been in the Microsoft productspace before…but…I have to say that this time the experience was anything but a dog. The problem is that as each generation of operating system come sit, there are always some casualties in the compatibility stakes and these are usually games – a lot of the time, they are not great loss but there are a number of DOS games that remain classics but which just will not fly in a Windows environment. These include Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Megafortress, Wing Commander, the Dynamix sim series (Red Baron, A-10, Aces of the Pacific), Tornado and Falcon 3.0. Fortunately, DOS gamers have been well supported by a DOS emulator called DosBox; the interface is very DOS and command liney but there are a number of Windows GUI interfaces, my preferred one being DFend. Most DOS games work well under DosBox and the programme provides access to modern peripherals like joysticks etc….

…but…

…the losers so far in this game have been those games that will only run under Win95/98 and which spurn later versions of Windows (maybe they know something we don’t?). I was gutted when I ‘upgraded’ to XP that favourites like Interstate ‘76, USAF and the Close Combat series (and they are even made by Microsoft!!) no longer worked. On a whim the other night, I Googled again for Win95 Emulator and after sifting through a kazillion blogs and threads bemoaning the lack of compatibility with older games, stumbled across Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 – yep, it’s been available for over two years!! Ignore any messages that it doesn’t work on XP Home – it does – the download is just over 30Mb, 90 minutes or so on the trusty dial-up (cheers, Telecom – NOT!), installation is painless and the setup for a virtual drive is intuitive and painless. You do need to have the installation disk for the OS you want to virtualise AND the verification code that goes with it – I had a moment of panic re the code but located it in the puter drawer (big thumbs-up to Carmen’s file system). When installing Win98, I felt the cold hand of total informational terror clutch my heart when the window said “Formatting Drive C: 2% complete” but everything in the Virtual PC window IS airgapped from your real C: drive…in 1995, OS2 Warp reformatted by drive and that’s how I lost every file I had from my early computing days and study at Waikato. Game installation and play has been simple and very painless. The only problem has been trying to find a MPEG-2 driver for Win98 so that the video segments of Wing Commander III will play. Retro gamers out there, check it out…!

The fortnight in food

Time for a break from all this contemporary related stuff and back into the kitchen…when I created the Food category, I had visions of contributing to it at least once a week – monthly is probably closer to it, which is kinda strange as Carmen is away at the moment and I am spending a lot more time in the kitchen.

Last night I had forgotten to defrost any meat for dinner so did a quick Google for something simple and fishy, settling on a fish loaf which wasn’t much more than a couple of eggs, a tin of fish, herbs, milk and breadcrumbs. You can’t get much simpler than that and it came out pretty good. Next time round though, I think that I could make it better by either replacing the breadcrumbs with cooked rice and/or adding a topping of mashed potato and kumara on a layer of peas with significant quantities of grated cheese on top.

The rain over the last fortnight has kept the temperatures down and last week I really felt like something spicy to warm me up a bit. I found through the power of Google, a South African mince and potato dish with loads of herbs and spices, including apricot jam and chutney for extra flavour. It made a surprising quantity + was very filling with rice so it lasted three nights, evolving into a stir-fry rice dish on the third night with any other leftovers in the fridge. Definitely a keeper.

I do a lot with sausage when I am on my own because they are cheap, simple and don’t (normally) involve much mess – also because you can do some much with the humble sausie…fried with veges and greens, the meat in a salad sandwich, curried with beans and rice, roasted with veges…I like to buy a big bag, syphon off some for now and toss the rest in the freezer for those times when planning has left a bit to be desired or when it is simply juts late and I’m hungry…I did do roast beef three weeks ago but while it came out OK – and lasted four days – the coord skills for when to toss in the veges still has me stumped – there’s at least one more left in the freezer so will have to study up some more before I have a crack at it.

Not too much on desserts because I’m more of a savoury than a sweet tooth. I do a mean self-saucing butterscotch pudding but it’s kinda boring when I am on my own so the only dessert I have had recently has been a Fruju from the freezer, although if fresh fruit counts, I have been known to finish off dinner with an apple or a banana…

The twins are here for the weekend so that will keep me on my toes – it’s real easy to work out their preferences at the table: if it’s on the floor, it’s off the list!!

Reality

According to Phillip K. Dick, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

My reality today is that the sun is finally out, things are drying out and I can finally dig down and fix the storm water feed into the water tank – realities of rural life are than it is not cool to run out of water in summer…happy reality is that we now have four chicks that have survived at least one night in the unshelled world and were last seen stepping out of their coop with mum to enjoy some sun as well…

When I visited on Friday, the Air Power Development Centre loaned me some reading in the form of a collection of recent RAAF papers and my mission when the sun goes down (that’s me, the doctrinal vampire that only comes out after dark or when it is raining…) is to devour the first paper and start to form some thoughts on air power, COIN/CIT/CIA and the COE…I think that it is very interesting that the aircraft shown is not an F/A-18, F-111 or even the F-35O but the trusty Herc; similarly the ground vehicle is not an M-1 or ASLAV but the less glamorous Bushmaster…is this a deliberate statement? If so it is a very powerful one when evolving to meet the realities of the complex environment…