Part IV

Sorry, I got distracted, but I continue on the journey. Just so you know, along the way between parts Iv and this one, I typed this up: Why We Shelved TASMs. That post details much of what the falout of the report we generated, but also some dealing I had years later, as a result of this exercise 20 years ago this past August.

We arrived back in Norfolk, and returned to our digs on the ground floor of Building “Whiskey-5” (“W5” as the sign on the building said). As usual, our plate was full and I looked at the Ops Boss and asked when we were going to get to work on the tactical analyis. He said he had the next operation to plan (he did) and went back to sorting through the large stack of daily messages. Being the Ops Boss, he owned the two operations types, OSCS(SW) Koch and RMCS(SW) Rumbaugh, and they were put to work. Oh, well, off to the small shared conference room I went, hauling box after box, after box of raido logs, DRT traces, radio-telephone (R/T) logs, weather reports, intel messages and much more. For quite some time, I would sit in there, with charts, dividers, logs and notepads, piecing together engagements from first detection to simulated impact.

I managed to pull a total of 59 complete engagement sequences out of the piles of data. This data not only included the track of the intended virtual, constructive or cooperative target reckoned by the shooters and search aircraft, but the overlay of the actual tracks. While the times of position didn’t always match, I plotted the ded-reckoned tracks to allow some degree of checking apples to apples. For the flight of the simulated TASMs, I plotted the ded-reckoned tracks, based on the engagement plans, printed for final approval by the CO before the simulated firings. During this, I read the tactical signal logs between the shooters and reviewed any other available data.

I don’t recall how many total engagements were run. Some were disgarded for the fact that not all elements of the detection and tracking process were there. Some were not written down, some were not included in the records, most likely to not being packaged up properly. In any case, for 4 dedicated days, an average of almost 15 engagements a day wasn’t too bad for extracting some meaningful info.

In order to manage the data, I hauled in my new toy, a Macintosh 512K, to the office, and ran Excel as my database manager. The data was all kept on 800K 3.5″ floppies, as internal hard drives weren’t a common thing with home computers yet. I seem to recall the printed out data was a 8 page wide by 2 page high form, which I peeled apart (tractor feed paper in an ImageWriter ][ dot-matrix printer) and taped together to show the Commodore. Included in the spreadsheet (which wasn’t even available for the IBM PC yet), was my first serious work in making calculations using spherical geometry. It took a bit of reading in Bowditch, then dusting off the college level trig, and spending quite a bit of time making sure the parenthesis were placed properly to do computations between two fixes. I also did a lot of testing of the formulas, just to make sure I’d get the right answers. This was done so for every fix of the target, I would compare the “miss distance” between the apparent position (from the shooter’s track files) to “ground truth” (the target’s navigational files, which were assumed to be accurate in any case). The speadsheet would indicate the azimuth and distance of miss all along the sequence to engagement.

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From CNN:

First woman pilot with any US flight demonstartion team.

Major Nicole Malachowski is Position #3 with the USAF Thunderbirds.

Message in the bottle: She decided at 5 years old, she wanted to be a fighter pilot. Not only did she do that, she has 200 hours of combat time in F-15 Eagles.

Check this as a philosophy for success:

“People talk about glass ceilings or breaking barriers,” she said. “I don’t even understand those concepts. Those words have actually never existed in my life.”

BZ to Major Malachowski for the following of her dreams and attaining them!

CNN Lou Dobbs reports video is here.

H/T: Black Five

Scanning remarks on Little Green Footballs this morning yielded a link to a blog discussing emotional reactions and how we differ in the “Western world” from those in the Mulsim world.

“Tribal Emotions” is this offering from Elphidelphi. I think Ben (ths contributor) is onto something.

[…] Seneca and Cicero are describing a habit still very much alive today: the control we maintain over our emotions. Indeed, this is an essential aspect of the civilized world. Modern western readers will at first disagree with the idea that their free and open society is marked by the suppression of emotions. Are we not bombarded on a daily basis with appeals to “open up,” to let our emotions out? But those who have lived their entire lives in the Western Oasis often don’t realize that, even at their most exuberant or their most forlorn, they don’t even approach the extremes of unchecked human emotions. […]

I also think, as I read his short essay, that this ties into “opening up” emotionally here in the “West.” There certainly is a place for emotional displays, but, in a civilized society, it certainly is useful to have your moment, and then get back in the game. Unchecked emotions can, as Ben describes (and the media’b’Allah as well) lead to long term problems, which, would pretty much detail why we see peole burning churches and killing nuns because they have their feeling hurt when discuss the violence endemic to their culture.

My take is we are seeing a crack in the wall here in the West with the angry, foul language filled, high volume, shreiking political and cultural discussions. Scan a few of the left wing blogs, if you have a strong stomach and have “heard those words” before and they do not offend you, but the vicious verbal and typed attacks (records for the rest of civilization in archiving engines) are legend “over there.”

The bad news is I suspect the “touchy feely, get in touch with your inner child” crowd is driving the problem. In doing so, they are asking us to do here, what Ben talks about over there: Opening the old wounds and meditating on them. I think, if you’re strong enough to analyse that event well, then it may moderate your daily living. If you’re not, then it’s just one more seeping, ugly issue that you have re-placed on your plate to operate with the rest of your life. Great….

Many years ago, I was told profanity was used because you couldn’t express yourself. I found, while in leadership postitions, the use of profanity in the process actually made things worse, and not better, thereby either causing things to take longer, or getting less than an acceptable job done, if it got done at all. Sometimes it actually takes some personal discipline to hold your tongue and to think of the proper words before you open your mouth, but it always yielded a far superior result.

In both the international and internal political/cultural arenas, this exercise of self restraint would serve all of us well.