Rick Perry On War

For the first time since he made his announcement that he was running for President, Rick Perry has gone on record vis-à-vis his thoughts on going to war. He had to, I think, because the speech where his thoughts were revealed was delivered to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Conveniently, they are meeting in San Antonio this year.

So I had to read his prepared remarks, which can be found here at his official governor’s website, and find out where he stands on going to war. And I got the surprise of my life. The surprise was that every one of his points were made by a previous candidate for President of the United States: Barack Obama.

• We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened.
• And we should always look to build coalitions among the nations to protect the mutual interests of freedom-loving people.
• It is not in our interests to go it alone. We respect our allies, and must always seek to engage them in military missions.
• At the same time, we must be willing to act when it is time to act.
• We cannot concede the moral authority of our nation to multi-lateral debating societies.
• And when our interests are threatened, American soldiers should be led by American commanders.

Every one of these statements was uttered, in different words, by candidate Obama.

Making me wonder just who Rick Perry is going to run against should he get the nomination next summer. All of his points are direct shots against his gubernatorial predecessor, George W. Bush. Every one of them. Making me wonder if because he is a neophyte when it comes to foreign policy he has conceded all foreign policy points to Democrats.

If he has, then that’s just fine with me.

GAO Reverses Army Contract

I really don’t know how unprecedented it is, not following these things too closely, but today in its decision over the US Army’s award of a military truck contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh, Corp., the Government Accounting Office essentially told the Army that their decision-making process was “flawed”, and that they should not have awarded the contract to the lowest bidder.

Get that? Don’t award contracts to the lowest bidder.

My question is then, what does that leave us with? Awarding contracts to the squeakiest wheel?

The second-lowest bidder, a British-owned company called BAE, with a plant in nearby Sealy, Texas, lost in its bid to renew its 17-years long lucrative contract to build military trucks, lucrative in that these need to be replaced when they get ruined by IEDs, and cried foul when the lowest bidder, Oshkosh, won.

Losing the contract would have been bad news for the British company and a blow for workers in the Texas plant. After they lost the bid, after mind you, federal legislators from the Texas delegation scrambled to get a mulligan from the feds.

They wanted a do-over.

Because, they said, Oshkosh hadn’t been building these trucks for 17 years, and the Texas plant had.

That’s all. End of story. Nevermind that the Wisconsin company underbid the British company by 10%. Never mind all of that. What matters is not how much taxpayer money gets spent, but who gets to receive the money.

I guess I am mainly amused by these two-faced Texas congressmen and senators who decry spending one dime for a child’s health insurance because that would be fiscally irresponsible, have no trouble spending billions of taxpayer dollars for military equipment as long as it goes to a Texas company (and at that, a wholly owned subsidiary of a British conglomerate).

Because when it’s money that’s doing the talking, hypocrisy can’t be far behind.

It’s Nagasaki Day Again

64 years ago today the United States, still at war with imperial Japan, exploded the second, and last atomic device in anger over Nagasaki, Japan.

Code-named “Fat Man” for its roundish shape, this was the experimental bomb that used Plutonium rather than Uranium. They weren’t 100% sure it would work so they actually tested the first atomic bomb, using Plutonium, a few weeks before they dropped its twin brother on Japanese.

It is said that while the Plutonium bomb had a greater yield than the Uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima, the destruction was more limited – with an elongated area of complete destruction because Nagasaki is surrounded on 3 sides by hills. So while the zone of utter destruction is only 2 km wide in the east-west direction, it is about 6 km long in the north-south direction.

And I still find it curious and odd that the Manhattan Project, inspired by Albert Einstein, a reputed peacenik, who was concerned with German atomic scientists getting a bomb built before America had one, ended up producing 3 bombs, testing one, and dropping the other two not on Germany which never even got close to producing an atomic bomb, but on Japan.

It also sort of makes me wonder what we would have done if the Japanese knew that was all the bombs we had, and that our threat to bomb their islands to a dust heap was a complete bluff.