I missed the “anniversary” of this in posting days, as the incident discussed here happened on October 2nd, but come the beginning of next year, the same number of years ago, I became involved in the incident where the mid-watch (0000-0400) team on USS SARATOGA (CV-60) made a terrible mistake and launched two NATO Sea Sparrow RIM-7 missiles into the former US GEARING Class destroyer, then the TCG Mauvenet. Some of the details are here.

Three Admirals are named in the Wikipeida notes, two of which I personally worked with during my career, and the third I knew of. One of my shipmates from a training command was working for Admiral Dur that night, and was present earlier in the evening when the SARATOGA Operations Officer came into the Flag Watch Command Center and mentioned they were going to play in the exercise using their NATO Sea Sparrow system (NSSMS). The reported response from Admiral Dur was “Yeah, right!”

RIM-7 Launch from USS BADGER (FF-1071)

The NSSMS was derived from the successful air-launched Sparrow AIM-7 series, brought “down” to serve on ships as a “point defense” system. This means it was designed to be used against threats coming at the platform where the missile system was located. It was by no means an “area” defense system, as it had a very limited capability against “crossing” (read headed for another target) threats. The first installations were Frankenstein like conglomerations of a F-4 Phantom II radar system, mounter on a stanchion for manual aiming and targeting by a sailor on the open deck, which would then fire a missile from an eight celled launcher, adapted from the Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC) system. The system, in this configuration, was the Basic Point Defense System (BPDMS – pronounced Bee-Ped-EMus in verbal reference). It was a start, but the operator, strapped to the send and receive antennas mounted on the station on the open deck, had to be verbally pointed in the direction of the target, then he would sweep the area of sky where the target is supposed to be, while listening to the audible return signal of the radar, which would tell him when he had acquired the inbound target by a change in pitch. He also had the firing key for the system, as he was the only one who had the ability to judge if he was on target or not.

More later, but this will be presented in series, as once I get through the technology involved, then it will be on to the investigation.

Valour-IT isn’t just for Memorial and Veteran’s Day. Our young (and some not so young) citizens, who stepped up to the plate and have been injured can use a little help.

Matt of Black Five reminds us to not forget those who have given so much. There’s the Valour-IT logo on my sidebar, there’s one on my Charities page, or you can click HERE on the Soldier’s Angels site if you feel you haven’t found a link to get to the place to donate a few bucks (or many).

This program, I’m convinced, will not only be a great morale booster to our injured troops, but will pave a road for many disabled, be it in the military or at their job on a construction site somewhere, in and out of the United States, setting a process to model for a long time to come. Join in a be a part of something bigger than you can imagine by helping soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines communicate with their families, their “shipmates” and others in their lives.

Also: Fellow Bloggers, military related or not, please consider passing this info along via your readership. Link here, link to Black Five, link to Soldier’s Angels, but….please just link it!

Thank you for your consideration.

Trackbacked/Crossposted to:
Diane’s Stuff

Capt Lex sent us to the archives for entertainment a few days ago. One of the linked choices was a story about life at sea and the availability of (fresh) water while keeping oneself in a state of good hygine.

He pointed out, in his fine style of prose, that aviators are regularly pilloried for being the ones who waste so much of the water, that others must suffer. He later learned, when assigned as “Ship’s Company” (that means the aviators share the joy of black shoe life, well, at least get a healthy taste of it), and that it is sometimes malfunctioning machinery, specifically the components used in water production or waste steam/heat recovery are the culprits, but, the ‘Shoe Navy has a cabal that always requires pointing the finger of blame at those who would slip the surly bonds of earth. It’s a union thing, I’m sorry, I gotta stick with the homeboys here.

Here’s my “water hours” story. It was a cool November in 1989. We had taken in all lines several weeks earlier in Charleston, SC and sailed east in our plucky little (453′) FFG. Equipped with two evaporators, and carrying a few over 200 aboard, conversing water was not a huge task, but did require us all to be mindful of only using our share. The CHENG and his A Div Officer did a fine job of maintaining the plant, so we weren’t constantly sweating the laod on this topic.

As we sailed through the Med, enroute Port Said to transit south through the Suez Canal and head for the Persian Gulf. The Chop (Supply Officer), Lt Wayne Aiken, had been on the previous cruise. At the Planning Board for Training the week before the transit of the Canal, Wayne suggested we accelerate the laundry cycle to get all the beding done, then we could make the transit easier on the water use, since you’re not allowed (by Navy sanitation requirements) to make water in enclosed waters, which the Canal certainly was. we copuld then top off the fresh water tanks, and shut down the evaporators at the 12 mile limit off of Egypt, yet still have plenty for food service and normal showers on the 24 hour transit, with reserves while the evaps caught up on the other side of Port Suez. I agreeed and the department heads and the command senior chief went about working up the details.

Over the next few days, the plan went like clockwork. The sheets got done and a few of the divisions got their dungarees taken care off off schedule. Early on the day of our scheduled arrival at Port Said (the north end of the canal), we had launched the helo on a Dawn Patrol, and brought them back aboard before we enetered Egyptian territorial waters (12 NM). I recall being on the bridge and, in addition to monitoring our navigational approach (I was navigator, too), I kept an ear out for the communications between the helo and CIC to make sure we didn’t break boundries.

We headed into the anchorage, the Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW) letting the bridge know the evaporators were “wrapped up” as the Officer of the Deck (OOD) completed the entering port checklist. We anchored about an hour later and the CHENG called up, saying we were losing fresh water fast. Immediately, the chain of command was sent around the berthing spaces, looking for running showers, or other “appliances” in the heads. They all reported back, that nothing was running, and there were no findings of pooled water in the spaces. We were still using water. This was a real problem, more frustrating as we had taken the time to make a plan just to keep a problem like this from happeneing.

More hiking around the ship. Nothing, until the Ops Boss, LT Tom Strother, found a garden hose, draped over the side of the flight deck, running at full output. He also found an airman from the helo detachment, with a long handled brush, dutifully scrubbing down the helo, as was standard procedure, after the flight. The problem was, he was supposed to have a nozzle on the garden hose, so he would only use the water required.

In this case, we lost almost half of our fresh water over the side, courtesy of the well intentioned maintained, keeping the risk of corrosion on the very expensive flying machine of HSL-44 Det 4. Marty Keany and I had an interesting chat a few moments later.

We regrouped, we did make water in the Canal, but it was super chlorinated, which, is it’s own reward.

When I checked off the Command, one of the helo pilots, Carl Bush, was a great cartoonist, drew a cartoon of me. The view was from behind me, sitting at my desk. The 1MC (General Announcing System) was blaring “WATER HOURS ARE NOW IN EFFECT!” and I had a cartoon thinking bubble saying “All RIGHT!” in response. There were other details, like an overflowing In Basket, and an empty Out Basket.

Yes, Capt Lex, it was the aviators this time.

Get them before they sell out faster than Tickle Me Elmo dolls….

Get one for yourself and all your loved ones to prevent the repetitive stress injuries of too many rotations of the wrist late at night….

The story begins here.

The Tidewater Apple Worms (TAW) club opened up an entire new world. They produced a newsletter, bought large quantities of 5 1/4″ floppies, then split them up as people had ordered them. The tutorials were excellent, as members who had owned Apples freely shared their knowledge of hardware and software. Far better than the salespeople in the few computer stores around the area, it was drinking from a firehose, but I gulped as hard as I could, and it paid off.

Byte Magazine was about all there was to read, unless you were a real hobbist in the computer field and built your own “home brew” systems using empty chassis and adding your own processor and interface cards. That was too deep for me, even while on shore duty. Much of the education I focused on was programming the computer, and I spent many hours typing in program listings in assembler and Apple BASIC languages. By entering these listings from Byte and a few other sources, mostly for games, I picked up the programming concepts. In addition to the programming to get some games to play, I also spent time with the EZ Write Pro word processing software. My wife picked up some typing jobs, and was able to make the computer make money, certainly, I wasn’t at the beginning.

I “flew” my first flight sim on the Apple. It prvided an X/Y/Z readout on the screen, as you used keys to steer and accellerate/decellerate, while consulting the map in from a page in Byte. I guess I began “flying” IFR, before progressing the the VFR stuff later, when the still surviving early version of Microsoft Flight Simulator came out.

In EZ Writer, if you wanted to make a part of your text bold, you would “mark” the text with a (I can’t get them to just plain print here) set of characters we now know and love as HTML. Same for italizied and larger print for headings. So, in 1981, I was using HTML, not realizing it would come back to me in 1996, when I was asked to take over webmaster for my company.

I also learned how to *ahem* secure my investments by archiving programs. Copy ][+ and Locksmith seem to come to mind as some programs that were useful. Given there were no well stocked software stores, it was useful to know if a program, despite the writing on the box, would do the job. On the other hand, one of the assets of the TAW was the “public domain” library of programs.

Back in the day, people actually would write software and publish it in the public domain. Read: FREEWARE, and mountains of it. The Washington, DC and Dallas Apple clubs were well developed and also had amassed very large software libraries. The clubs would graciously share their stuff, if you shared yours. It didn’t matter too much that you couldn’t provide the same volume or quality, but if you were making an effort, you got help. There were many programs, some very polished, some that worked fine, so long as you didn’t strike a wrong key, and some that was just plain buggy beyond belief. But, people shared their work and it wasn’t until many, many years later I came across the term “shareware.”

In that first year of ownership of a “PC,” I learned much in the weekly Saturday meetings. I actually felt bad, for I was taking all this help, and really didn’t know enought o reciprocate. Part way thru the year, the newletter editor announced they had to resign. I looked at the spouse and said: We can do that. She agreed. I volunteered us to take the duty.

Next episode: Davy Jones and the Manpower Auditors meet Stoneware

Homework to catch up: Part I of the series.

Not that this was planned, but the current events just point to the ongoing search to find the one locus from which all things can be blamed for all the ills of the entire universe.

This week’s theorized cause of all evil: Mark Foley.

Here’s a thought, as I have presented before on a similar topic, that of the “corruption” of Tom Delay. Back then, in one of my blog posts, I said it would behoove the opposition party to first “check six” and clear their baffles, before taking what they thought was the best shot, for they might find out some of their number had similar issues in their records. Well, in the case of Tom Delay’s situation, it seemed many in Congress had not filled out travel reports 1) in a timely manner 2) disclosing all the sponsors of their trips. Not only was this a reality in the aftermath of the very public charges, later, we found William Jefferson with $90K in his freezer, wrapped in tinfoil (I guess to preserve it’s freshness).

I will, once more, predict (and I’m certainly no oracle), that, as one TV correspondent says last night, they are getting many emails from other pages. It is only realistic to believe, that the subjects being discussed in those emails coming in will include human beings, most likely almost exclusively male, and, there ceratinly may be some Democrats in the bunch. Whether that is disclosed before or after the elections next month isn’t necessarily the issue, but the fact that it’s a human condition in the sexually related society we live in. The “backsplatter” will get those who are making exceptionally bad (and in some cases, illegal) choices, but it isn’t reasonable to brand everyone of their party as participating in the same behavior.

I also don’t think this will cause the conservative Christians to boycott the entire Republican party slate, any more than any other group will get rid of their incumbent congresspersons. With a 95%+ reelection rate over the long term, we love to hate them, and we say we should vote them out, but what we really mean is “you vote out yours, mine did a great job getting me and my family government handouts…” History tells us where that has gone. The shrillness of the calls for punishment, however, might actually energize people to get out and vote out/against those who scream the loudest, seeing the out of control rage as a sign of being, well, out of control in general.

Somehow, I also believe that in all the races around the country for the various House and Senate seats, if the Democrats try to say their opponent, being of the same party as Mark Foley, by implication, is just like him will be a very long stretch and I presume most people with a degree of common sense will see through the preposterous accusations along these lines.

Frankly, I’d much rather put my head down and recount 25 years of personal computer use, and the joys of changing standards, “vaporware,” try before you buy software wars, and having to convert to the “Dark Side” of choices of operating systems.

Final note of the moment: As a self appointed oversight board member for the committee searching for the GUBT, get back to work, you’re being distracted from finding the real root cause of all evil.

Next final note: Democrats – I think you found a crack in the armor, but it’s not big enough for you to get a pry bar in and open the floodgates.

Update 10/5/2006: Geez…it’s a tough day when I can predict the future….It seems that:

• The “child” was 18 at the time of the IMs in question, ergo: No crime, just a really embarrassing story here. Certainly far less of an issue than Gary Studds actually committing sexual acts with a minor page of his in 1983.
• The entire IM thing is a prank gone off the tracks. It seems the IMs were recorded and passed around for entertainment value, and ended up in the hands of someone who wanted to cause pain and anguish. BIG lesson here….

Back many years ago, a man I worked for taught a lesson about writing things. The message applied here. Too bad more Congressional Respresentatives haven’t been reading my blog…:(

Anyhow, it’s not that I have special powers, it’s just the Democrats/leftists are too blinded to see they aren’t thinking. Not fac checking something you have had available for about a year, then deciding to use it as a lever to regain power is, well, the most gracious word, STUPID!

As I’ve ruminated about a few times in the junior blog, and now here: You lefties dishonor the very people with a background that has a prayer of getting you some traction: ex-Military members. War College grads, with battlefield experience could serve you well, but they are just people too stupid to be able to have a real job, so…they don’t darken your doorways to offer their expertise. Just the facts, Ma’am!

“It has to do more than play games” was the admonition from the now Ex.

Two guys in my shop owned Atari computers. One had the 400 and one the 800 model. Sometimes they brought them in and we’d fire them up at lunch and play “Star Raiders.” Even now, for such a small amount of RAM and a slow processor, the graphics were pretty good 3D effects…in B&W, of course. So, I had the bug.

The spouse agreed we could get a computer but, (see opening sentence) it would perform a number of tasks. We began the journey to find the best computer to allow me to stop wandring into game arcades and going thru a handful of quarters, as well as have some money making ability. The options we shopped were: The TRS-80 series, the Atari 400/800, and the Apple ][+. I had no idea there was an IBM PC out there, but a few months ago, seeing a note about the anniversary of the IBM PC, I now realize it pre-dated the Apple ][ series.

Our analysis was:
The TRS-80 was good for business related stuff, but sucked for games (my priority).
The Atari series sucked for business, but was great at games (her priority).
The Apple ][ series, was adequate at both, but not superior at either (seemed like the best bet).

So the Apple ][+ it was, sometime in October, 1981. We found the Byte Magazine, and the local computer stores and began shopping for the best price, knowing Apple was the most expensive choice. We finally bought it and here were the specs:

Apple ][+, 6802 1 Mhz processor, 48K RAM.
We added:
Two 5 1/4″ floppy drives, capacity 134K, unless it was used as a system boot disk, then it held 143K on a single side.
80 Column video card, the Videx Videoterm, specifically for word processing tasks
Zenith 12″ green screen monitor
C.IOTH StarWriter daisy wheel printer with parallel interface.
EZ Write Professional (I may have this title wrong)
and we had a printer interface cable made (I had no clue as to standard interfaces, so I paid $89 for the education).

Total outlay, in 1981 dollars from an O-3’s household budget: $5400.

We still had a free bedroom, one being set aside for the pending arrival of the first born, so the computer was placed then, upstairs and I went to work learning the seeming magic of electronics. We talked to some of the computer store salespeople (most of who couldn’t answer any questions, but would let you go and play with the display models by yourself) and found out there was an Apple club in the area. The Tidewater Apple Worms (TAW) met every Saturday in one of the large classrooms at the Naval Amphious School on the Little Creek, VA base. We wandered in to see how we might learn…..

(to be continued)

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.