Karol at Spot On posted some very interesting facts about the year 1975. An interesting perspective on how much we have changed, or not. Do read the comments too.

Posted by: annika at 09:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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This is one of my favorite pictures of Ronald Reagan. With the Statue in the background it's so allegorical, isn't it?

He was, and is, a truly great man.

Posted by: annika at 07:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Without entering the fray on the AWOL controversy, (You probably can guess where i come down on that one, anyway.) i wanted to shed some light on the plane George W. Bush learned to fly back in the day. Kind of a bookend to my famous post on his fatherÂ’s plane (and this gives me an excuse to recycle that link yet again).

Truth be told, the F-102A was almost obsolete by the time George W. Bush began flying them. But in itÂ’s day, ConvairÂ’s Delta Dagger was pretty badass. It was billed as the first supersonic all weather fighter. It first flew in 1955 and began operational service about two years after the Korean armistice. Nine hundred and seventy-five were built by the Convair division of General Dynamics between 1955 and 1960. It was used sparingly in Vietnam. Later, some planes were sold to The Greek and Turkish air forces, and it flew during the Cyprus conflict of 1974.

It was big. If iÂ’m not mistaken, i think it was the biggest fighter weÂ’ve ever had. At over 68 feet long, it was almost six feet longer than the F-4E Phantom, which was no midget itself. But with only one engine, the Delta Dagger weighed half as much as an F-4.

The weight difference makes sense when you consider the mission of the F-102A. ItÂ’s kind of misleading to call it a fighter, because thatÂ’s a term that encompasses a wide variety of planes that were designed to do vastly different things. ItÂ’s more accurate to call the Delta Dagger an interceptor.

To understand the job of an interceptor, as opposed to a pure air superiority fighter, you have to remember what we were afraid of back in the Fifties and early Sixties. These were the early years of the Cold War, before intercontinental ballistic missiles. If a nuclear war happened, it would have been fought by long range bombers penetrating the enemyÂ’s homeland to drop bombs just like in World War II.

To defend against these long range bombers, the superpowers relied on early warning radar to detect an attack and interceptors to stop it. The idea was to shoot down the bombers as far away from the homeland as possible. Early warning radars needed to detect the bombers while they were still far enough away for the defending interceptors to take off and get within range.

Thus, speed was the one overwhelming requirement for a true interceptor. Maneuverability was not so important. These planes were like dragsters, not formula one cars. They needed to get within range of the bombers fast, so they could shoot them down before the bombers crossed into homeland territory or got near their targets. The Delta Dagger had no guns; interceptors werenÂ’t intended for dogfighting.

We had the Delta Dagger, and itÂ’s unbelievably fast successor, ConvairÂ’s F-106 Delta Dart. The Russians came up with the Yakovlev Yak-28 and the huge Tupolev Tu-28 Fiddler. Perhaps since it was the first of its kind, BushÂ’s Dagger was relatively slow compared to the Delta Dart and the Russian Fiddler. The DaggerÂ’s top speed was only 825 mph, while the Dart went 1,587 mph.

The strategy was for interceptor units to be ready to scramble on a momentÂ’s notice, in the event of a nuclear attack. They would race towards the incoming bombers and fire air-to-air missiles as soon as they came into missile range. i would guess that the range of an interceptor was important, but then the range of the air to air missiles would be added to the aircraft range.

i don't want to sound like iÂ’m minimizing the contributions of the brave pilots who flew the F-102A. Those men stood guard so my parents could sleep at night during a very dangerous period of the Cold War. Still, flying the F-102 was not the same as flying a Phantom over Vietnam. Interceptor pilots sort of pointed their plane in the right direction and stomped on the gas pedal. The radar automatically guided the plane into attack position and fired the missiles.

Thankfully, we never discovered whether interceptors would have been enough to stop a nuclear bomber attack. There was a period of time when military planners thought that the wave of the future would be faster and faster bombers. But that ended in the early 1970s when strategic planning had abandoned the idea of nuclear bombers penetrating enemy territory. The new method of nuclear war relied on inter-continental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and submarine launched missiles. Obviously the interceptor was no defense against these newer strategic weapons. The nuclear missile made the long range bomber obsolete. And when the bomber was no longer needed, the interceptors became extinct too.

Although the Delta Dagger remained in service until 1974, the U.S. Air Force began moving its interceptors to National Guard units at the end of the sixties. So by the time George W. Bush graduated from his T-33A trainer into an F-102A at Ellington AFB, his unitÂ’s mission had already begun the transition from air defense on 24 hour alert status to pilot training.

ItÂ’s a tricky thing to try to place a value on one individualÂ’s service in the Armed Forces. Who am i to judge? i have a friend who has the seemingly cushy task of serving on the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman as an administrative clerk. Besides the fact that sheÂ’s sitting in a gigantic floating target, sheÂ’s doing a hell of a lot more to serve her country than i am doing, even if her duties are somewhat mundane. i would never denigrate her service, because she volunteered and every person in the military is there to protect me.

Obviously, flying an obsolete plane in a training squadron is different than driving a boat in the Mekong Delta. Still, they also serve who only stand and wait. Bush had the misfortune (or good fortune, depending on your perspective) of being born a few years too late for his chosen mission. We shouldnÂ’t hold it against him that he became an interceptor pilot at a time when that mission was winding down for reasons he probably was not aware of when he joined. If he had served in the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group a few years earlier, he would have been on the front lines of the Cold War, a far more important and potentially dangerous war than KerryÂ’s Vietnam. i donÂ’t think that lessens the value of his service to our country one bit.

Bonus trivia question: What is the plane in the picture doing?

Posted by: annika at 12:09 AM | Comments (28) | Add Comment
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This piece at Free Republic.com appealed to my love of historical irony so much, i am reprinting it in full here:

We must fact the fact that our Republican president was a DESERTER! He never even served in the REAL military. Instead he was in the Illinois state militia during the Blackhawk War and NEVER saw any combat. Captain Abraham Lincoln even admitted years later that the worst he suffered in the Blackhawk War was a bunch of mosquito bites. Not only that, even though Captain Abraham Lincoln mustered out of the militia on July 10, 1832, there is NO RECORD of a Captain Abraham Lincoln being in the militia (not a REAL army) from May 27, 1832 to July 10, 1832. One can only conclude, despite any facts to the contrary, that Abraham Lincoln was a DESERTER. At the very least he was AWOL.

Contrast that sad military record with that of our great Democrat, George McClellan who bravely faced down Quaker Guns outside Richmond, VA in 1862. McClellan, who is now running for president, is absolutely correct in his assertion that Lincoln is a miserable failure as a president especially since he did not seek the advice and consent from our European allies in the War of Rebellion. I look forward to a political campaign featuring a distinguished REGULAR military officer with a chest full of medals up against a Republican deserter who slacked off in the militia, not the REAL army. One candidate spent the war slacking off and suffering from nothing more than a bunch of mosquito bites and the other candidate is a genuine WAR HERO who did not desert.

This November the choice is yours. VOTE for the Democrat candidate WAR HERO....NOT the Republican deserter.

p.s. Did I mention that the Democrat candidate is a WAR HERO?

Link thanks to Professor Hewitt.

Posted by: annika at 04:38 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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