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Seeking a new Cold war - the EP-3 Incident 

     Looking for trouble is right...  It looked like we were definitely trying to start something.  Then Taiwan?  What was that about?... Then we accidentally cut off all military ties with China? Huh? What?...  Is their something else we are doing that is really really bad right now to use this as a smokescreen?  Or are we just trying to raise fears to get more money for the military?....

                                                                                                 Bob Opfer

     I just finished reading your article about US spending habits and of course our "provocative" actions in international waters.  So while you lament about 150 US aviators, think about why they gave their lives for freedom.  I'm sure that you do not want accidents happening in the future, that is why we enforce a 12 mile zone around our ships, because we are in international waters, besides, you don't want Hollywood making movies about pirates commandeering potent military ships.  How would you feel if a bunch of mercanariess  threatened Bejing after stealing a US military warship?

     Of course you left out all the agressive actions by the US, because there are not any.  And of course contrary to some beliefs, Iraq is not a soveirgn nation, but a nation subject to the terms and conditions imposed to it by the US, because it lost the war.  I'm sure you don't want Iraq killing all your chinese customers in the middle east, which is surely what he would do if we let him.  Of course the mere fact that you mention support for a person who rules by effectively assinating all of his critics and potential "political competitors", perhaps says something about your own character?
                                                                                     Steven Dix

      I follow China affairs closely, and gave considerable thought to the Belgrade bombing issue.  I have never thought it was an accident.  It seems to me very probable that Chinese military intelligence had electronic surveillance equipment in that embassy, tracking the performance of the new US aircraft flying overhead.  One of the Stealth bombers had already gone down, so the US side must have been very jittery.  After the Yugoslav Army's air defense surveillance capability was taken out, the Chinese embassy began feeding air defense electronic intelligence to Milosevic's headquarters.  I have always thought that someone on the US side took this as de facto violation of diplomatic immunity.  One week after those signals began to come out of  the Embassy, during which there was presumably some warning to the Chinese, the Embassy was hit.

      The Chinese have openly declared that they hope to offset the American technical superiority with "asymmetrical" warfare.  They think they have an advantage because the Americans are not willing to put their people at risk.  So by putting their own people at risk, the Chinese can utilize this human advantage, and apparently there are enough young Chinese ready to martyr themselves on command.  Of course the Chinese thought they had Clinton in their pocket, and indeed Clinton stuck so assiduously to the "accident" explanation that one has to consider the possibility that the putative decision to hit the Embassy came from somewhere below the White House.  

                                                                               Thomas Bartlett

      Congratulations sir, on a job well done.  From the first word to the last in this article, I sensed no bias, unlike the editors from all those major newspapers around the country.  I was born as a Chinese in Taiwan and I really think US is just bullshitting on protecting democracies in southern Pacific first then protecting US interests later.  United States has no sovereignty in Far East yet always meddling those countries' own affairs.  I truly believe without US nosing around, lots of tensions wouldn't have created in the first place.  You don't see Russia or China send their warships to South America just so the trade route of coca to Asia wouldn't be interrupted.
 
                                                                               Dai Lung Liu

      It must be frustrating to you, when you see the US military acting one way, then using PR to misinform.  The official party line can be hard to break through.  I can only hope that our expensive military knows more than we do, and that they have the best interests of the United States in mind.  By the way, I would like to state for the record that the hawks in the PLA would like nothing better than a cold war with the US, and that one possibility is that the pilot of the ill fated Chinese jet was ordered to ram the American spy plane.  The damage to the American plane was more extensive than you stated, and the pilot said (quite convincingly) that when the jet struck his plane: "I thought he had killed us".

                                                                              T MacLeod

Ed. I suspect the pilot thought he was hit by gunfire, so he took the straight wing EP-3 into a tight corkscrew dive, which is the only way to shake-off a fast delta wing fighter for a few minutes, which cannot turn as tightly.

     What a buch of shit!  If you like China so much, why don't yo go there and see how long they would allow you to public this stupid material ...

                                                                                                  Bob Boldt

      I recently read your article, having come across it through Yahoo.  I'm glad that somebody on the Internet has retained their common sense.  After looking at the Yahoo! discussion board, I really start to despair at the ignorance and hatred that comes through in many of the posts. Are we really in the 21st century?
 
                                                                              Maria Luk
 
      You, sir, are a disgrace to this country.  Short and to the point.  I would suggest that if you are so anti-American that you pick yourself up and go live in a communist country.  Your remarks concerning the limitation to tactical remarks is unfair when you, yourself, comment on every remark of our President.  If you had said what you just did in a publication in China....you would be fertilizing their ground.

                                                                            Bob Strong 

     I totally agree with your viewpoint expressed in your G2mil editorial May 2001 "Looking for Trouble".  Like you pointed out, with US media largely controlled by Warmongers, it is difficult to hear voices like yours nowadays.  

                                                                                                Davy Kao

      Carleton, I look forward to meeting you in person so I can rearrange your fucked up priorities.  You are a complete disgrace to the uniform and I'll ensure the troops know it.  Fuck you sincerely.  

                                                                            Phil Cooper

      Loved your article.  I remember President Eisenhower's famous speech warning us about our military industrial complex and it's potentially dangerous influence on the world.  To many people forget that it's all about money.

                                                                               Bruce Smalley

      What are Powell's other 5 steps for deceiving the media?

                                                                           Neal Crispin

Ed. Colin Powell is a master politician so engrained as a Washington insider that he felt no embarrassment about revealing his strategy for handling the media in his co-authored autobiography.

#1 Release facts slowly, behind the pace at which they are already leaking out to the public.
#2 Don't tell the whole story unless forced to do so.
#3 Emphasize what went well and euphemize what went wrong.
#4 Become indignant to any suggestion of poor judgment or mistakes.
#5 Disparage any facts other than your own.
#6 Accuse critics of Monday-morning generalship.

      I loved your site!!!  It is always refreshing to know that there are people out there with a clear vision of what is going on.  

                                                                                        Dax Michaels

      Having read your piece on the P-3, I can say that i will never return to read anything else. This piece of blatant propaganda garbage is even worse than the stuff that we get off of the big 3 networks, and CNN.  This article alone moves your credibility to zero, and I don't think you'll ever be able to recover. 

                                                                               John H. Schneider II
Ed. I received hundreds of e-mails about my editorial.  I try to stick with weapons, warfare, and tactics, but provoking China may cause a future war, and the media coverage in the U.S. was horrible.  Fox News had an insane retired Army Colonel saying we should send a few SEAL platoons to get the hostages out. 

     I had to remind many readers that I didn't write anything good about China, but that it appears the U.S. military provoked this incident.   If some rogue Admiral ignites a war, young servicemen will die, so criticizing warmongers is not "anti-military".  Finally, stalking people has become illegal in the USA over the past few years, it appears that international "stalking" laws are needed to prevent military confrontations caused by uncivil behavior.

Buying 800 747s

     Your idea about using the 747 as a common large aircraft replacement for the many current refuelers, hospital planes, AWACS, and transporters is good, too, especially the multi-year buy.  The one real problem area I see is with loading and unloading cargo for the 200 CX versions.  We've used commercial air freighters since the late 1970s.  I had experience with them when I was in the 101st Airborne.  The KC-10 air refueler has a secondary capability to carry pallets and small vehicles.  Here's the problem.  C-130s, C-141s, C5's and C-17s are all drive on - drive off.  Except for cargo pallets which need forklifts to move to the airplane's back ramp, no special loading equipment is required.        Freighter 747s are designed to move between terminals with specialized handling equipment.  This eliminates the need for expensive modifications to the 747 in civilian service.  Without this airport based handling equipment (even using portable analogs) the loading/unloading process becomes a real bottleneck.  

      The real chance was missed in the late 1980s.  I was at FORSCOM at Atlanta at that time, and Dobbins AFB in Marietta GA was where the C-5 was and C-130 is made.  Lockheed engineers said the Air Force ordered the C-5B tooling DESTROYED to guarantee the C-17 would be bought.  They should have just bought more C-5Bs.  

       I finally got a chance to look at go inside that white elephant recently and talk to the crew.  Turned out as I feared in the mid-80s.  Same price as a C-5B but carries 100,000 less pounds and less outsize cargo.  270k lbs for the C-5, 160k lbs for the C-17.  Besides losing the chance vastly increase the payload of the fleet by buying more C-5s, the USAF lost the chance to simplify the maintenance structure.  Nifty short field capability, similar to a C-130 Herc.  So what?  At $163 mil per copy and its strategic importance, it will never be risked so far forward on such primitive fields.  I put this to the crew and they agreed instantly.  Having spent weeks and weeks inside C-141s, C-5s and C-130s I was interested to look at this one.  The jump seat style passenger seats in the back were less comfortable than the C-141 webbing seats I remember.  Time to kill the plans for more C-17s and take up your 747 idea.

                                                                                         Mark Gallmeier 

Ed. The C-17 was sold on the idea of operating from primitive airstrips, implying dirt strips like the C-130.  However, its jet engines would suck up so much dirt they'd probably have to be replaced after each mission, assuming it could get airborne.  Yes, it can land on shorter hard runways, but not with a full load.                     

Future Infantry Weapons

        Following feedback from my infantry weapons articles I now think that the most practical approach to produce a rifle-hand grenade is to adapt a rifle grenade design to hand throwing. A weapon like the FN Telgren is similar in size to a hand grenade in its un-telescoped state (40 x 190mm). All that is really needed is a pin, safety lever and new fusing mechanism. Since the fuse will need to be changed a multi-option model can be fitted, as has been described.

        40x46mmSR grenades for the M203 could also be adapted for hand throwing. The nose of the grenade could be fitted with a flip-up cap to expose an manual actuator. Such "Pop-top" grenades would fill the mini-grenade role described in my previous article. I can't really claim any credit for this idea -the grenade rounds in the movie "Aliens" had this feature.

        While on the subject of M203 grenades it is worth considering the idea that these rounds could have a composite casing -brass around the propellant charge with an aluminum or polymer casing for the expansion chamber. This will lighten the soldier's load, as well as decreasing the chance of unpredictable fragmentation in the hand thrown mode.

        The disposable Grenade Launcher offers several advantages over both rifle grenades and grenade cartridges, but I was uncertain that it could be adapted to hand throwing. Large components such as parts of the trigger mechanism seemed likely to carry far enough to endanger the thrower. The obvious answer is to design the device so that the trigger unit needs to be detached to arm the weapon for hand throwing. This would just leave the grenade, the launching spigot and the outer case -something about the size of a tin can/offensive grenade.

        There has also been interest in the idea of launching grenades from mortars.  A rifle-hand grenade as described above could easily be adapted to mortar launch by fitting it with a 60mm disc mounting a propellant charge. I doubt such projectiles would have sufficient range for company fire support missions, but for platoon support (in commando mortars) their use would conserve mortar bombs for longer range fire. Grenades adapted to mortar fire would be lighter than bombs, so less of a burden to the unit.

         An idea I forgot to put in the article was that of mounting a disposable launcher like the RPO on a bracket on the outside of a vehicle, maybe in an armoured box. This would be fired by cable or electrical circuit and form a sort of "one shot assault gun"
         A variation of this as a light vehicle tank hunter role is shown at

                                                        Phil West    phil.west@angelfire.com