“They survived the combat, came back and – within two months – died on a motorcycle”

The Army is training soldiers in motorcycle safety to curb the high number of cycle fatalities that have occurred since 2005.  An Army spokesperson said that “motorcycles are a great tool to release adrenaline” and that one possible reason for the fatalities is the “aggressive soldier mind-set”.    First of all, motor vehicles shouldn’t be tools to “release adrenaline”.  Second, it seems that the “aggressive soldier mind-set” point to a deeper pathology within military culture and are symptomatic of the human costs of war.   The Army should look into the death that occurs inside soldiers who experience combat. This may be the real cause of many of the motorcycle fatalities.

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Soldiers learn cycling safety

By Darin Moriki

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 20, 2009

About 250 soldiers are participating in a supplemental motorcycle training program instituted because there have been 16 Army cycle fatalities since 2005.

“Many of them were killed soon after returning from combat,” said Bill Maxwell, U.S. Army Garrison-Hawaii transportation safety manager. “They survived the combat, came back, and – within two months – died on a motorcycle. We want to reverse that trend by providing them every bit of education that we possibly can.”

Maxwell said the Army pilot program was adopted from the Marines after it was found that “they have been having some positive results.” He explained that the free program is essential for motorcycle riders in light of the high number of Army motorcycle deaths.

One possible reason for the fatalities is the “aggressive soldier mind-set” that some may have, Maxwell said.

“We prepare them for combat, they go into a very high-stress situation, and they come back here,” Maxwell explained. “Motorcycles are a great tool to release adrenaline. Unfortunately, we have quite a bad history with motorcycles.”

The Honolulu Police Department reported that 12 of the 38 traffic fatalities this year involved motorcycles. Riders were wearing helmets in only six cases.

For a soldier to operate a bike on military installations, he or she must go through a basic and experienced rider course offered through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. However, Maxwell said that these courses “provide the basic skills” and are “limited in size.”

“What we wanted to do here is expand the area and bring the speed up to get them a little bit closer to the operational speeds that they encounter out there on the road,” Maxwell said.

The training program, which began Monday at Wheeler Army Airfield, covers eight half-day courses that allow smaller groups of about 25 people.

The Los Angeles-based California Superbike School said the course is meant to boost a rider’s confidence with conditions that they may experience on the road.

“If the rider is unsure of himself, he’s going to panic,” said California Superbike School instructor and project manager Dylan Code. “What we want to make is a confident rider at this point.”

Each course included 30 minutes of classroom instruction before riders were taken out on an obstacle course. It was on the obstacle course that the real instruction began, where instructors – stationed at three checkpoints on various corners of the course – corrected mistakes that a rider made.

Many of the soldiers who attended the motorcycle training course left believing that they were more informed.

“The fundamentals that I learn here can be something that I can use out there on the streets,” said Cpl. Tyler Bridgeman, who has been riding about seven years. “This is one of the best courses that I have been to.”

“I left with a little bit more knowledge, but the knowledge that I left with was extremely important,” said Lt. Col. Rob Howe, who has been riding for 28 years. “I don’t know what I don’t know, but they told me what I needed to know.”

Source: http://www.starbulletin.com/news/20090820_Soldiers_learn_cycling_safety.html

USS Port Royal grounding details emerge

Posted on: Sunday, July 12, 2009

Navy ship grounding detailed

By William Cole
Advertiser Columnist

Here are a few more details of the Feb. 5 grounding of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal in 14 to 22 feet of water off Honolulu International Airport’s reef runway.

The Advertiser ran a story Tuesday about the grounding circumstances based on the Navy’s Safety Investigation Board findings on the accident.

The 567-foot ship was under way at 8:45 a.m. on its first day of sea trials after $18 million in repairs in the shipyard. The fathometer, for determining water depth, was broken, according to the safety board.

At 12:01 p.m., the Voyage Management System’s primary input at the chart table was shifted from a forward Global Positioning System to forward Ring Laser Gyro Navigation.

The Voyage Management System, a digital navigation system that does away with paper charts, dead-reckoned the ship three times and replotted the Port Royal 1.5 miles from its previous position. Ring Laser Gyro is an inertial navigator.

Ship logs indicate a position error between GPS and the Ring Laser Gyro for the duration of the ship’s time at sea. The Voyage Management System plotting was based on the inertial navigation and not the required GPS, and the error was not noted by any watchstanders, the report states.

“The quartermaster of the watch continued to plot fixes as satellite fixes when (Voyage Management System) was aligned to receive (Ring Laser Gyro) input,” the safety board said. “The bridge team did not recognize the input difference on the (Voyage Management System) display, and relied on VMS without question.”

The report said that when the input was switched, the Voyage Management System “indicated numerous positional difference alarms that were not addressed.”

Why or how the navigation system was changed is not addressed in the report, which notes a 3,600- to 3,700-yard ship position shift to the east.

That evening, small boats were operated to return aviation assessors to shore.

At about 8:03 p.m., the Port Royal was soft aground, with its bow’s underwater sonar dome on the reef, the report said.

The safety board report said there were several factors that led to a Ring Laser Gyro position error, including no evidence of a 72-hour calibration, and the fact that the last reset was four days earlier, meaning the system was not getting new GPS data. There was a “large position error” with the GPS interface not enabled, the report said.

The board, however, rejected navigation equipment error as the cause of the mishap.

“Other means were available to assess the ship’s position,” the report said. Those included “distinct visual aids” such as the airport control tower. Or, as one commentator on the earlier Advertiser story put it: “There is no substitute for the Mark One Eyeball.”

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090712/COLUMNISTS32/907120367/Navy+ship+grounding+detailed

USS Stennis port visit to Pearl Harbor

Updated at 3:44 p.m., Thursday, May 28, 2009

USS Stennis arrives at Pearl Harbor

Advertiser Staff

The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis arrived at Pearl Harbor this morning for a port visit after a four-month deployment to the Western Pacific.
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The Stennis, with nearly 5,000 crew and air wing members, is based out of Bremerton, Wash.

Stennis left Bremerton on Jan. 13 for what was supposed to be an approximately six-month tour. It picked up Carrier Air Wing 9 during a stop in San Diego.

The regularly scheduled deployment is part of the Navy’s Fleet Response Plan, which is designed to allow the Navy to rapidly respond on short notice.

A sailor on the Stennis died April 24 while the carrier was moored at Changi Pier in Singapore when he was crushed between a small boat and the ship’s hull, the Navy said.

The sailor was conducting a routine procedure to secure drains from the ship’s catapult system at the time, officials said. Stennis had arrived in Singapore on the same day.

The Navy also relieved of duty the ship’s executive officer five days later in an action that was unrelated to the death of the sailor, the Associated Press said.

AP said Cmdr. David L. Burnham was relieved of duty by the commander of the carrier strike group for undisclosed personal misconduct.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090528/BREAKING01/305280008?GID=LpZUTk6tqzsmGQcSGjeexzekk/BgBsOtI3S0f+p3wtc%3D

Another story on chopper crash in Wahiawa

Posted on: Thursday, May 28, 2009

Army helicopter crash at Hawaii base kills 2

Two-seater was landing after maintenance flight, Army says

By William Cole
Advertiser Staff Writers

WAHIAWA – Two Army pilots whose unit is preparing for deployment to Iraq died yesterday after their helicopter crashed during a training flight at Wheeler Army Airfield, officials said.
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One soldier was pronounced dead at the scene, and the second died at Wahiawa General Hospital.

The two soldiers were the only people aboard the helicopter, a two-seat OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter belonging to the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade. They were conducting a general maintenance test flight when it crashed in the base airfield and hangar area, the Army said.

The soldiers’ names are being withheld until 24 hours after their families have been notified.

A Hawai’i National Guard member who was at the scene said he could not readily identify the type of helicopter that had crashed because the damage was so severe. The helicopter appeared to have burned, although Col. Matthew Margotta, commander of U.S. Army Garrison Hawai’i, could not confirm there was a fire.

The cause of the accident is being investigated, the Army said in a news release.

“Our prayers and condolences are with the families of the pilots,” U.S. Army Garrison Hawai’i said in the release.

The 34-foot-long Kiowa helicopter is one of the smallest in the Army inventory. It is used primarily for reconnaissance but can fire missiles, rockets and machine guns.

Margotta told reporters at Wheeler that the helicopter was on “a routine maintenance test flight” and was landing when it crashed about 3:30 p.m.

“The pilot still had control of the helicopter when it landed,” Margotta said.

Both pilots on board were killed, he said.

No other information about the flight was disclosed.

Asked to talk about risks in flight operations, Margotta said, “Obviously when you fly helicopters and these guys are trained to go to combat and that’s what they’re preparing to do right now. So there are certain risks that’s inherent in what they do and they accept those risks.”

The active duty 25th Combat Aviation Brigade, with its 2,400 soldiers, is preparing for a fall deployment to Iraq and many of its members are returning from training at Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island and at the National Training Center in California.

The aviation brigade flies the scout attack Kiowa Warrior, UH-60 Black Hawks and twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook helicopters.

The aviation brigade had about 100 helicopters from Wheeler in Iraq on a deployment that ended in September of 2007.

In final preparation for their deployment to Iraq later his year, the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade trained throughout the Hawaiian Islands and at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., from April 25 through May 3.

Col. Michael Lundy, who commanded the aviation brigade, said soldiers conducted more than 669 flights flying over 2,200 hours.

The Hawai’i Army National Guard has 10 CH-47 Chinooks at Wheeler. It also has some OH-58 Kiowas, but they are based out of Hilo along with Black Hawk helicopters.

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090528/NEWS08/905280339

Helicopter crash kills two

20090528_nws_crash2

CARROLL COX / SPECIAL TO THE STAR-BULLETIN

The wreck of a U.S. Army Kiowa Warrior helicopter lay on the tarmac at Wheeler Army Airfield yesterday after a crash that killed both pilots. Army officials are investigating the cause of the accident, which occurred while the helicopter was performing exercises above the main runway.

Copter crash kills 2 pilots

A maintenance test flight ends in fiery explosion on the tarmac

By Gregg K. Kakesako and Leila Fujimori

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, May 28, 2009

Two 25th Infantry Division aviators were killed yesterday afternoon when their OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter crashed in flames at Wheeler Army Airfield near Schofield Barracks.

Watch video about this crash.

TRAINING FATALITIES
There have been two other major 25th Division helicopter crashes on Oahu:

» March 5, 1996: The pilot and co-pilot of an AH-1 Cobra gunship were killed at Schofield Barracks when the craft’s engine failed.

» Feb. 12, 2001: Six soldiers were killed and 11 injured when two Black Hawk helicopters collided during a night training exercise over Kahuku in Hawaii’s worst Army training accident.

They were the only two soldiers aboard the two-seat, 42-foot-long helicopter when it executed a “hard landing” about 3:30 p.m. while conducting a general maintenance test flight, Army officials said.

A civilian worker from the airfield who spoke on condition of anonymity said he was inside an office when he heard two explosions and went outside and saw the helicopter on fire.

Honolulu fire Capt. Earle Kealoha said firefighters responded to a call of a downed aircraft at 3:34 p.m. But when they arrived four minutes later, federal fire crews already had the fire under control.

The names of the two soldiers were withheld pending notification of relatives. Helicopter pilots are typically officers or warrant officers.

It was the third fatal helicopter crash at Schofield Barracks since 1996. The cause of the accident is under investigation, the Army said.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the two pilots,” said Col. Matthew Margotta, commander of Army Garrison Hawaii.

Margotta characterized the incident as a hard landing because “the pilots still had control of the aircraft when it landed.”

When asked if hard landings usually end up this way, he responded with a firm “No.”

The crumpled wreckage, the rotors bent from impact, lay on the east end of the airfield about 350 yards from Kamehameha Highway, visible in the distance to passing motorists. Foam that firefighters apparently sprayed remained visible, indicating that a fire had broken out.

“The Kiowa helicopter was carrying two pilots,” Margotta told reporters gathered across the highway from the airfield.

“Unfortunately, both pilots were killed in the accident.”

Carroll Cox, who was tending his garden across from the airfield, said someone with direct knowledge of the aircraft told him the helicopter was performing “auto rotating,” which is a simulated emergency landing.

The high-performance helicopter, whose reconnaissance missions can require it to fly terrain-hugging “nap of the earth” routes, is manufactured by Bell Helicopter Textron and had been slated to be replaced by the Comanche helicopter. But the Comanche program was scrapped in 2004.

Unlike earlier versions of the OH-58, which date back to the Vietnam War, the D model is an armed scout.

The helicopter was assigned to the division’s 25th Combat Aviation Brigade, which is preparing for a 12-month deployment to Iraq scheduled to begin in October. The unit flies CH-47 Chinooks, UH-60 Black Hawks and OH-58 Kiowa Warriors.

The unit served an Iraq combat tour in 2006-07 and in Afghanistan in 2003-04.

The brigade just completed a comprehensive training period here and at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert in preparation for deployment to Iraq.

At the Big Island’s Pohakuloa Training Area, the brigade said, it logged more than 2,000 hours, encompassing 669 flights without an accident.

The brigade commander is Col. Michael Lundy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.starbulletin.com/news/hawaiinews/20090528_copter_crash_kills_2_pilots.html

When we almost nuked Savannah

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair05152009.html

May 15-17, 2009

When We Almost Nuked Savannah

The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber’s pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: “A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed.”

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Wassaw Slough was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb’s 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn’t detonate.

The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. “The search for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement.”

There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat, as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10, 1958 classified memo to Congress: “There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. … The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities.”

But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security, safety or ecological problem, than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a joint statement to the press, the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be “scattered” by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the letter downplayed possibility of that ever happening: “The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited.”

In fact, that scenario had already occurred and would occur again.

That’s where the matter stood for more than 42 years until a deep sea salvage company, run by former Air Force personnel and a CIA agent, disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to locate it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents, the disclosure prompted fear and outrage among coastal residents and calls for a congressional investigation into the incident itself and why the Pentagon had stopped looking for the missing bomb. “We’re horrified because some of that information has been covered up for years,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican.

The cover-up continues. The Air Force, however, has told local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing to worry about.

“We’ve looked into this particular issue from all angles and we’re very comfortable,” said Major Gen. Franklin J. “Judd” Blaisdell, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations at Air Force headquarters in Washington. “Our biggest concern is that of localized heavy metal contamination.”

The Air Force even has suggested that the bomb itself was not armed with a plutonium trigger. But this contention is disputed by a number of factors. Howard Dixon, a former Air Force sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that in his 31 years of experience he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane that wasn’t fully armed. Moreover, a newly declassified 1966 congressional testimony of W.J. Howard, then assistant secretary of defense, describes the Tybee Island bomb as a “complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule.” Howard said that the Tybee Island bomb was one of two weapons lost up to that time that contained a plutonium trigger.

Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned bomb was an “Mk-15, Mod O” hydrogen bomb, weighing four tons and packing more than 100 times the explosive punch of the one that incinerated Hiroshima. This was the first thermonuclear weapon deployed by the Air Force and featured the relatively primitive design created by that evil genius Edward Teller. The only fail-safe for this weapon was the physical separation of the plutonium capsule (or pit) from the weapon.

In addition to the primary nuclear capsule, the bomb also harbored a secondary nuclear explosive, or sparkplug, designed to make it go thermo. This is a hollow plug about an inch in diameter made of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (the Pentagon has never said which) that is filled with fusion fuel, most likely lithium-6 deuteride. Lithium is highly reactive in water. The plutonium in the bomb was manufactured at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State and would be the oldest in the United States. That’s bad news: Plutonium gets more dangerous as it ages. In addition, the bomb would contain other radioactive materials, such as uranium and beryllium.

The bomb is also charged with 400 pounds of TNT, designed to cause the plutonium trigger to implode and thus start the nuclear explosion. As the years go by, those high explosives are becoming flaky, brittle and sensitive. The bomb is most likely now buried in 5 to 15 feet of sand and slowly leaking radioactivity into the rich crabbing grounds of the Wassaw Slough. If the Pentagon can’t find the Tybee Island bomb, others might. That’s the conclusion of Bert Soleau, a former CIA officer who now works with ASSURE, the salvage company. Soleau, a chemical engineer, said that it wouldn’t be hard for terrorists to locate the weapon and recover the lithium, beryllium and enriched uranium, “the essential building blocks of nuclear weapons.” What to do? Coastal residents want the weapon located and removed. “Plutonium is a nightmare and their own people know it,” said Pam O’Brien, an anti-nuke organizer from Douglassville, Georgia. “It can get in everything–your eyes, your bones, your gonads. You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there.”

The situation is reminiscent of the Palomares incident. On January 16, 1966, a B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed while attempting to refuel in mid-air above the Spanish coast. Three of the H-bombs landed near the coastal farming village of Palomares. One of the bombs landed in a dry creek bed and was recovered, battered but relatively intact. But the TNT in two of the bombs exploded, gouging 10-foot holes in the ground and showering uranium and plutonium over a vast area. Over the next three months, more than 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation was scooped up, placed in barrels and, ironically enough, shipped back to the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Lab, where it remains. The tomato fields near the craters were burned and buried. But there’s no question that due to strong winds and other factors much of the contaminated soil was simply left in the area. “The total extent of the spread will never be known,” concluded a 1975 report by the Defense Nuclear Agency.

The cleanup was a joint operation between Air Force personnel and members of the Spanish civil guard. The U.S. workers wore protective clothing and were monitored for radiation exposure, but similar precautions weren’t taken for their Spanish counterparts. “The Air Force was unprepared to provide adequate detection and monitoring for personnel when an aircraft accident occurred involving plutonium weapons in a remote area of a foreign country,” the Air Force commander in charge of the cleanup later testified to Congress.

The fourth bomb landed eight miles offshore and was missing for several months. It was eventually located by a mini-submarine in 2,850 feet of water, where it rests to this day.

Two years later, on January 21, 1968, a similar accident occurred when a B-52 caught fire in flight above Greenland and crashed in ice-covered North Star Bay near the Thule Air Base. The impact detonated the explosives in all four of the plane’s H-bombs, which scattered uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 2,000-foot radius. The intense fire melted a hole in the ice, which then refroze, encapsulating much of the debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs. The recovery operation, conducted in near total darkness at temperatures that plunged to minus-70 degrees, was known as Project Crested Ice. But the work crews called it “Dr. Freezelove.”

More than 10,000 tons of snow and ice were cut away, put into barrels and transported to Savannah River and Oak Ridge for disposal. Other radioactive debris was simply left on site, to melt into the bay after the spring thaws. More than 3,000 workers helped in the Thule recovery effort, many of them Danish soldiers. As at Palomares, most of the American workers were offered some protective gear, but not the Danes, who did much of the most dangerous work, including filling the barrels with the debris, often by hand. The decontamination procedures were primitive to say the least. An Air Force report noted that they were cleansed “by simply brushing the snow from garments and vehicles.”

Even though more than 38 Navy ships were called to assist in the recovery operation, and it was an open secret that the bombs had been lost, the Pentagon continued to lie about the situation. In one contentious exchange with the press, a Pentagon spokesman uttered this classic bit of military doublespeak: “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for.”

When Danish workers at Thule began to get sick from a slate of illnesses, ranging from rare cancers to blood disorders, the Pentagon refused to help. Even after a 1987 epidemiological study by a Danish medical institute showed that Thule workers were 50 percent more likely to develop cancers than other members of the Danish military, the Pentagon still refused to cooperate. Later that year, 200 of the workers sued the United States under the Foreign Military Claims Act. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the discovery process revealed thousands of pages of secret documents about the incident, including the fact that Air Force workers at the site, unlike the Danes, have not been subject to long-term health monitoring. Even so, the Pentagon continues to keep most of the material on the Thule incident secret, including any information on the extent of the radioactive (and other toxic) contamination.

These recovery efforts don’t inspire much confidence. But the Tybee Island bomb presents an even touchier situation. The presence of the unstable lithium deuteride and the deteriorating high explosives make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition–so dangerous, in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.

In short, there aren’t any easy answers. The problem is exacerbated by the Pentagon’s failure to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the situation and reluctance to fully disclose what it knows. “I believe the plutonium capsule is in the bomb, but that a nuclear detonation is improbable because the neutron generators used back then were polonium-beryllium, which has a very short half-life,” said Don Moniak, a nuclear weapons expert with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Aiken, South Carolina. “Without neutrons, weapons grade plutonium won’t blow. However, there could be a fission or criticality event if the plutonium was somehow put in an incorrect configuration. There could be a major inferno if the high explosives went off and the lithium deuteride reacted as expected. Or there could just be an explosion that scattered uranium and plutonium all over hell.”

This essay is featured in the forthcoming book, Loose Nukes published by Count Zero Press.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

Sky full of drones?

According to this article by the AP, the military wants to use unmanned drones over U.S. airspace to perform various operations, but the FAA is concerned about the increased risk of collisions. It begs the question, Why is the military so anxious to utilize drones within the U.S.?

Leaps in unmanned aircraft technology have military authorities clamoring to use drones for everything from coastal patrols and border surveillance to tracking natural disasters. But fears of midair collisions are slowing any broad expansion of their domestic use.

Federal Aviation Administration officials made it clear in a recent closed government conference that until the pilotless aircraft gain the high-tech ability to sense and avoid commercial aircraft and other airborne objects, the government is unlikely to allow them to operate much more freely in congested airspace.

For the military, it’s a frustrating limitation. For the FAA, it’s a matter of safety.

NORTHCOM, the first unified military command assigned to defense of the continental U.S., which has begun to blur the lines between military and civilian law enforcement functions and undermine the Posse Comitatus restrictions on the use of the military for domestic law enforcement, held a two-day summit recently on use of UAVs in U.S. airspace:

Military officials raised the firefighting incident as an example of expanded drone uses during a two-day summit at U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., late last month. At the meeting, up to 100 senior leaders from at least 10 government agencies tried to resolve some of the problems that restrict the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, in American airspace.

“I realize that (the Defense Department) has been very comfortable with using UAVs at will in Iraq and Afghanistan airspace,” said John Allen, director of Flight Standards Service for the FAA, during an interview with The Associated Press. “And there is a reality check when they bring them stateside and try to utilize them and realize there are restrictions.”

So, drones may be dangerous in US airspace but not in Iraq and Afghanistan?  I guess when drones can fire missiles at will and kill whole families of Iraqis, Afghanis or Pakistanis, who cares about a few collisions with civilian aircraft in these countries.  In the Empire, those lives don’t matter anyway.

State seeks damages from Navy for USS Port Royal reef damage

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

State to seek claims against Navy for damage to reef off airport

Advertiser Staff

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources said today it has formally notified the U.S. Navy that it has identified substantial coral reef damage caused by the grounding of the USS Port Royal in February.

DLNR said immediate measures are needed to stabilize injured coral and to prevent further damage by widespread debris to other areas of the reef.

DLNR said a letter sent to the Navy yesterday also documents the state’s intent to make a claim for damages that include: the cost of emergency mitigation to prevent further damage; the value of the coral reef substrate damaged by the grounding of the Port Royal and associated attempts to free the 567-foot-long vessel; and other secondary and tertiary damage to the reef ecosystem.

The state will be seeking compensation from the Navy to fund and implement coral habitat restoration projects that will enhance Hawaii’s reef systems and mitigate for loss of ecological services caused by the grounding of the vessel.

“While the state also intends to seek compensation from the U.S. Navy for any damage caused by the grounding incident, the first priority remains protection of the remaining coral reef resources,” said Laura H. Thielen, DLNR chairperson.

“We are asking the U.S. Navy to work with us to achieve the mutual goal of protection of the natural resources and minimization of ongoing damage to the same public trust resources,” Thielen said.

Thielen warned that costs will increase substantially unless the Navy acts to immediately mitigate the primary damage impacts by: assisting in the recovery of injured coral; preventing further secondary damage by removing or stabilizing significant amounts of damaged coral rubble prior to the arrival of large south summer swells; and protecting loose live coral to prevent further damage to public trust resources, in coordination with the State and in compliance with emergency permitting requirements.

Officials from DLNR and the attorney general’s office will meet with Navy officials tomorrow.

On February 5, 2009, the Port Royal ran aground atop the coral reef fronting Honolulu International Airport’s Reef Runway in depths of approximately 14 to 22 feet. The vessel was lodged atop the reef for three full days during which several attempts were made to free it.

The area where the Port Royal ran aground was a complex “spur and groove” fringing reef (outcrops of coral interspersed with sandy areas) with a relatively high biodiversity of live coral and live rock, the state said. Numerous printed resources and the evaluation by various coral reef biologists concur that this area was one of the finest remaining reef habitats on the island of Oahu.

The main reef injury scar covers an estimated area of approximately 8,000 square meters. The documentation of the full area and extent of the damage associated with the grounding has not been completed, but it is estimated to cover an area of approximately 25,000 to 40,000 square meters

“The reef that was injured is an ancient one, full of coral colonies some of which took hundreds of years to reach their present size. A complex reef structure such as the one that was present prior to this injury forms numerous and intricate houses for the myriad of fish, invertebrates and sea turtles that use this reef for shelter and food resources,” Thielen said.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090401/BREAKING/90401076

What does an F-22 cost?

http://original.antiwar.com/wheeler/2009/03/27/what-does-an-f-22-cost/

What Does an F-22 Cost?

Posted By Winslow T. Wheeler On March 27, 2009 @ 8:00 pm In Uncategorized | Comments Disabled

On Wednesday, March 25, an F-22 crashed near Edwards Air Force Base, CA. Very sadly, the pilot was killed. The news articles surrounding this event contained some strange assertions about the cost of the F-22. The tragic event was apparently used to disseminate some booster-baloney.

Possibly based on the price asserted in the Air Force’s “fact” sheet on the F-22 that was linked to a Pentagon “news” story on the crash, the cost per aircraft was typically described in many media articles as about $140 million.

What utter hogwash.

The latest “Selected Acquisition Report” from the Defense Department is the most definitive data available on the costs for the F-22. The SAR shows a “Current Estimate” for the F-22 program in “Then-Year” dollars of $64.540 billion, which includes both R&D and procurement. That $64.5 billion has bought a grand total of 184 aircraft.

Do the arithmetic: $64.540/184 = $350.1. Total program unit price for one F-22, what approximates the “sticker price,” is $350 million per copy.

So, where does the bogus $143 million per copy come from? Most will recognize that as the “flyaway” cost: the amount we pay today, just for the current production costs of an F-22. (Note, however, the “flyaway” cost does not include the gas, pilot, et cetera needed to fly the aircraft away.)

Advocates of buying more F-22s assert they can be had for this “bargain basement” $143 price in their lobbying – now rather intense – to buy more F-22s above and beyond the 184 currently contracted for. That is, they argue, the “cost to go” for buying new models, which do not require a calculation to amortize the early R&D and other initially high production costs across the fleet. It’s what we’re paying now for F-22s in annual appropriations bills. Right?

Hopefully, it will neither surprise nor offend you to say that assertion is pure bovine scatology.

Congressional appropriations bills and their accompanying reports are not user-friendly documents, but having wadded through them for the past 30 years, I know their hiding holes. The F-22 program has many. Let’s check through the 2009 congressional appropriations for the F-22. Most – but not all – of the required information is contained in HR 2638.

In the “Joint Explanatory Statement” accompanying the bill, the House and Senate appropriators specified that $2.907 billion was to be appropriated for 20 F-22s in 2009. The math comes to just about what the Air Force said, $145 million per copy. So, what’s the problem?

There’s more; plenty more. Flipping down to the section on “modification of aircraft” we find another $327 million for the F-22 program.

Switching over to the Research and Development section, we find another $607 million for the F-22 under the title “Operational System Development.”

Some will further know it is typical for DOD to provide “advance procurement” money in previous appropriations bills to support the subsequent year’s purchase of major equipment. In the case of the 2009 buy of 20 F-22’s, the previous 2008 appropriations bill provided “advance procurement” for “long lead” items needed to be purchased in advance to enable the 2009 buy. The amount provided was $427 million.

Here’s the arithmetic: $2.907 + $.327 + $.607 + $.427 = $4.268 billion for 20 aircraft. That’s $213 million each.

Please do not think these data represent an exceptional year. If you check any of the last few annual buys of F-22s, you will find the same pattern: in addition to the annual “procurement” amount, there is additional “modification,” “operational system development,” and advance procurement.

F-22s are costing these days a little over $200 million each. Period.

Well, actually, there’s more. Last November, Acquisition Czar John Young told the press that the first 100 F-22’s built need an additional $8 billion in R&D and procurement costs to bring them all up to their originally mandated requirements. Ergo, the total program unit cost is not $350 million each, it’s $394 million, assuming Young is correct. The annual purchase, “cost to go” (“flyaway”), price will also go up, but just how much is not calculable right now.

For those sticklers who also want to know how much it will cost to maintain and operate the F-22, you can forget all those promises that it would be cheaper than the aging F-15 it is supposed to replace. Data released by the Pentagon shows that for 2008 each aging F-15 C in the inventory cost, on average, $607,072.92 to maintain and operate. Pricey, but to be expected for such an old airplane.

The F-22’s care and feeding is a little more. In 2008, each cost $3,190,454.72 to maintain and operate: that’s more than five time the cost to run a decrepit F-15.

OK, so the F-22 is really pricey and the Air Force and its boosters are full of baloney on the cost, but it’s a great airplane, a real war winner, right?

Oh, please. Consider the source. More on that later.

F-22 fighter crash near Edwards AFB, pilot killed

F-22 Fighter Crashes Near Edwards AFB

Last Update: 12:33 am

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) – One of the Air Force’s top-of-the-line F-22 fighter jets crashed Wednesday in the high desert of Southern California. The pilot was killed in the crash. That pilot, 49-year-old David Cooley, was an employee of defense contractor Locakheed Martin. Cooley spent 21 years in the Air Force before joining the company in 2003.

The F-22 Raptor crashed 35 miles northeast of Edwards Air Force Base, Pentagon spokesman Gary Strassburg said. He had no information about the area where the jet crashed. The jet, assigned to Edwards’ 412th Test Wing, was on a test mission. Calls to the base public affairs phone numbers were answered by recording machines.

The radar-evading F-22s each cost $140 million and are designed for air dominance. The warplanes can carry air-to-air missiles but are capable of ground attack as well. The $65 billion F-22 program is embattled, with some opponents contending that a different warplane under development, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is more versatile and less costly at $80 million per plane.

The U.S. is committed to 183 F-22s, down from the original plan laid out in the 1980s to build 750. Its prime contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., says there are 95,000 jobs at 1,000 companies connected to the F-22.

A spokesman for Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin referred all calls about the crash to the Air Force. Lockheed is trying to convince the Pentagon to buy as many as 20 more F-22s. The military is expected to signal its intentions when the 2010 Defense Department budget is released next month.

The F-22 is able to fly at supersonic speeds without using afterburners. That allows it to reach and stay in a battlespace faster and longer without being easily detected.

The fighter, powered by two Pratt & Whitney engines, is 62 feet long, has a wingspan of 44½ feet and is flown by a single pilot.

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Source: http://www.local12.com/content/breaking_news/story/F-22-Fighter-Crashes-Near-Edwards-AFB/hgaAUgPzikiW8ApjfkuJrQ.cspx