Category: Military issues

The Washington Times reports that retired generals are using the “climate change” issue to set themselves up for riches with “studies” that point to the junk science as a national security issue;

The report, which the Obama administration immediately hailed as a call to action, was issued not by a private advocacy group but by a Pentagon-financed think tank that trumpets “absolute objectivity.” The research was funded by a climate change group that is also one of the think tank’s main customers.

[…]

The Center for Naval Analyses’ motto is “high quality, impartial information.”

One of the CNA panel’s vice chairmen, retired Navy Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, is president of a private think tank, the American Security Project, whose prime issue is warning about climate change.

The other vice chairman, retired Army Brig. Gen. Gerald E. Galloway Jr., is a prominent adviser to the Center for Climate and Security, a climate change group.

In all, four CNA board members sit on the panel of advisers to the Center for Climate and Security, whose statements on climate change are similar to those found in the CNA report.

In an age when Defense dollars are few and far between, these flag officers are scheming to pocket millions for their own pockets. The Heritage Foundation warns that the climate change misinformation campaign threatens readiness;

Studies have shown that biofuels are more corrosive than regular diesel and can therefore increase maintenance costs within the Navy’s fleet. This would only worsen the current fleet’s dire situation, since inspection failures are already occurring at an alarming rate within the fleet. Increasing average age of U.S. fleet; delayed, deferred, and underfunded modernization; and use of fuels with potentially harmful consequences is a recipe for a fleet readiness crisis.

[…]

Biofuels are disproportionately more expensive than conventional fuels. A gallon of biofuel costs $26, whereas the Department of Defense purchases diesel at about $3.60 per gallon. Many argue that this rate will decrease over time as biofuel production increases, but in the interim, the Navy’s readiness would be further damaged by wasting precious resources on biofuels that are seven times more expensive than the Navy’s conventional fuels—not including the increased maintenance costs.

Of course, this just another example of how the Left sees the military as a tool to advance their liberal agendas and force them down the throats of the taxpaying public. Even the “science community” can’t convincingly influence the public of climate change without padding their numbers. It was a coming ice age in the 70s and then global warming just in the last decade. Now they call it “climate change” because they can’t even convince themselves these days. And these generals don’t really care about the truth as long as they can stuff taxpayer dollars in their pockets like they’ve done their whole lives.

There’s a great article at National Geographic online about military working dogs and their handlers here:

War Dogs
Although I once wrote for Bill Faith’s website, Old War Dogs, may both rest in peace, and visited the dog training facility at Lackland AFB a couple of times on pharmaceutical business, I really didn’t know that much about the dogs’ training and their uses. The recent reading of a police procedural novel, Suspect, by Robert Crais, taught me a great deal more than I had previously known. Crais pairs a PTSD suffering Los Angeles policeman who lost his female partner in a murderous ambush with a PTSD suffering former military working dog who also lost her partner and handler in an equally murderous ambush in Afghanistan. Their partnering makes for a very entertaining read.

What makes this book unique is how Crais devotes a few chapters to detailing events and perceptions from the dog’s perspective. If you’ve ever wondered how dogs are able to detect and differentiate between so many different smells, you’ll learn by reading Suspect.

I once wrote a piece for American Thinker where I referenced dogs riding in autos and pickups with their muzzles turned eagerly into the wind with their ears flapping and their tongues lolling happily as they enjoyed the ride far more than their drivers. An editor at AT spiked that piece telling me that his big-city vet said allowing dogs to ride face into the wind was harmful. I responded that I had lived much of my life in Oklahoma, West Texas, New Mexico as well as fifteen years in the Deep South, where dogs riding with their muzzles in the wind were a common sight, and never once had I heard of any adverse effects.

The AT editor refused to relent, so I didn’t get the piece published; but I did check with my own vet who was raised on a large ranch and whose practice is primarily rural. She, too, said that in her many years as a ranch vet, she’d never seen a single instance of a dog harmed by riding in vehicles except for the occasional mutt who got too carried away with all the fun it was having and fell overboard. She explained that due to a dog’s expansive and hypersensitive olfactory system, a ride with its nose in the wind was the canine equivalent of an LSD trip due to the swarms of scents they were passing through, which explains their exuberant behavior. I reported that to the intransigent editor but he remained unyielding, trusting the expertise of his urban practitioner to that of my ol’ rancher vet.

There’s a very good Wikipedia page on war dogs as well with an amusing bit about the Russian Army’s failure in WWII to turn working dogs into antitank weapons against the German panzer units. Dogs were fitted with mines with extended toggle switches designed to be triggered when the dogs ran under enemy tanks. The program failed because the dogs, trained with stationery Russian tanks, were reluctant to run under a moving tank and when they did, they tended to select Russian tanks like those with which they’d been trained. There’s a treasure trove of such information on that Wikipedia site.

NOT crossposted at American Thinker.