Half Sigma said [1]…

I am not impressed by McCain’s military experience. I worked for the army as a civilian, and it was the most poorly managed organization I ever worked for. Romney, on the other hand, has the proven capacity to run large organizations.

I think that whatever McCain’s failings, earning his wings as a Naval Aviator speaks volumes about young John McCain’s intelligence, adaptability and ability excel. Dummies don’t fly airplanes.

Now, I’m not sure when Half Sigma worked for the Army .. but generally he’s right.

The military is optimized to break things and hurt people. When it’s not actually doing this – and that was most of the time before between 1973 and 2001 – it’s incredibly inefficient.

The reason is that it’s really tough to run a lean military optimized for peacetime and then change stuff around in the span of a few months so you can destroy Iraqi mechanized armies with minimal waste. Or at least minimal waste on our side.

Nobody wants to replay Task Force Smith.

I was in a support role in 1991 and it’s amazing how many wasted cycles .. suddenly were not when we had to pack up people and gear and move them halfway around the world.

Did 3D FSSG need a whole bunch of desert camo in 1990? Going to the Middle East wasn’t our mission so you might think that the cubic set aside in the warehouses were wasted space.. But when we were tasked to send people the guys who went were pretty happy to be able to draw the gear they needed.

Likewise in 1990 3D FSSG didn’t need a DFASC [2] – mainframes in a trailer [3] – but when 1st and 2nd FSSG found theirs were breaking down (AC issues) we were able to ship them ours on a day’s notice.

Sorry for the rant – ignorance irks me.

Via.

[1] A rant is a terrible thing to waste so I’m recycling and editing a comment from another blog into a post.  Some editing for clarity, some to correct a faulty memory.

[2] Rumor had it that we were going to get rid of it someday and in the meantime we didn’t use it – or at least hadn’t in the year and few months I’d been assigned to that unit. After 1991 the mainframe guys routinely dragged them out and operated them on field exercises.

[3] Interesting beasts they were – two semi-trailers per DFASC, one for the mainframe, one for the operators and programmers.  Since my MOS was ‘programmer’ if we’d had to deploy ours I would have been put to work doing ‘programmer’ work.  Since I hadn’t done that since school that would have been interesting.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Our choice for November looks to be either McCain or Clinton.

Seriously?  This is the best that both parties have to offer?

I wonder if I should look at jobs outside the country with a four year contract starting Next January?

In which the author blames multi-tasking for

The Iraq quagmire. The mess in Afghanistan. Failure to capture Osama. A car crash. The breakup with his girlfriend. Problems with his new girlfriend. Sexual disappointment. Failure to obtain cheap airplane tickets to San Francisco. His bosses failure to pay attention during a face-to-face. Enron.

The scientists call this ruinous mental lurching “dual task interference,” or just plain bottlenecking. I call it the reason Keven Federline cost me a cheap flight to San Francisco. (It also explains, perhaps, why sexual threesomes are often disappointing.)

I just wish the military understood the concept. They might understand then why “walking and chewing gum” in Afghanistan and Iraq is no way to catch bin Laden.

Right. ‘Cause we sure ’nuff had problems fighting Japan and Germany at the same time, fifty years ago. For that matter I worked for units that did complicated and diverse stuff all the time. It is as if getting stuff done across the world with hundreds of thousands of troops is just a bit more complicated than pulling a fum-ducker and driving your car off the road while looking a nekkid photo of your girlfriend on your cell phone.

I’m sure it plays well around the campfire with all the scouts nodding wisely and learnedly. But I ain’t buying it.

………..

It is true that when you try to multi-task it becomes enormously more difficult to do anything that requires actual thought.

Adults compensate for this by turning off the phone, not looking at email, setting distractions aside and getting on with stuff.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

http://selenite.livejournal.com/207839.html

I ran into the lovely awamiba at Chikfila

Two things about Texas that I miss that I never thought I’d miss;

Chik-fil-a.

Jack in the Box.

Chik-fil-A for the food – about the best fast food you can find. And the cow advertisements – the idea of sentient cows selling out their fellow livestock (Eat Mor Chikin) tickles me.

Jack In the Box because the food is not at all good for you, it’s damned tasty, and Jack In the Box places don’t have playgrounds or pretend to be doing anything but moving fast food and getting people in and out.  And some of our first meals together were cheap burritos at Jack In The Box.

Mmmm. Burritos.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

The more that the current bunch of Presidential candidates talk, the LESS I want to vote for them.

I liked Thompson. He was a Federalist and had a clear vision of what the Feds should and shouldn’t do. He didn’t talk enough to win any primaries. So he’s gone.

McCain was the guy I wanted as a candidate in 2000. Bush’s folks basically covered him with slime, so he stopped running. He was my second choice this go-’round, but now he’s attacking Romney, who I don’t really like, but McCain’s current volley has me backing away from him.

Romney. He’s way too slick. He sounds good. He looks good. I immediately don’t trust him. He looks like a ’50s Dad coming home from the office. I keep waiting for his wife, with a perfect string of pearls around her neck, to look up at him and say, “Ward, don’t you think you were a little hard on the Beave last night?” It’s not because he’s Morman, although most of the Mormans I meet are the annoying ones knocking at our door just around dinner time to “talk about the bible.” Ummmm, no thanks, I’m going to eat, no, please don’t come back at another time.

Huckabee. This has nothing to do with what he says or what he stands for. I’m simply not voting for a man with a name that sounds like something Jodie Foster chanted in “Nell.” Okay, so the Christmas message bothered me too. Not because there was a cross in the background, but because he tried to pass it off as an accident that it was there. The man’s a preacher. If he’s going to deny that a cross is a cross, where is his conviction?

Giulliani. I just heard that he’s probably going to drop out and run with McCain if he can’t win Florida. I never saw the man running for office that I remember from 9/11. I’m not sure that man ever existed other than in my shocked memory of that day.

Clinton(s). Every time they open their mouths a voice in my head screams “LIAR!” The simple truth is I can’t hear a word they say because of that. I’m told I wouldn’t agree with them anyway. Hillary is a poor speaker with that annoying midwest nasality, and while Bill is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, when he’s in attack dog mode, he comes off as a tired Mel Gibson in “Lethal Weapon.”

Obama. To be honest, based on what I’ve seen in the debates, I’m not sure what he stands for other than to bash at Hillary. This endears him to me. The fact that he’s inexperienced in almost all areas supposedly needed to be President is actually a plus in my book. The “experienced” folks of the past 20 years haven’t impressed me all that much once all was said and done. The fact that Kennedy has endorsed him isn’t helping my opinion of him, but on the other hand, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Edwards. I stopped listening to him when he agreed to run with Kerry. Anyone who’s willing to compromise as much as he did in 2004 simply for the chance at being number two doesn’t have what it takes to be number one. Anything he does say is drowned out by what he did in 2004. The fact that the unions love him makes me shiver as well.  There’s word that he’s trying to strike a deal with Obama that if he drops out, he’ll get Attorney General from Obama. This man is NOT a President.

I still have no idea who I want as our next President. This pisses me off. I should be able to listen to them and become MORE inclined toward them. The more they talk, the less I like them. I hate to admit it, but I’m frightened for us.