Sick/Defense

Role Reversal:

Doc Russia is in Vegas, taking some well earned time off. I hope he finds time to get by the roulette table for me.

Meanwhile, I've been haunting his usual domain: the emergency room. What I had mistaken for allergies turned out to be a case of severe dehydration. I'm not sure how it's possible that I could have become dehydrated, unless it's just exposure to sun and wind. I drink water by the liter, but obviously not enough liters. I am sure that my attempts to ease what I thought was an allergy attack made things worse rather than better. Drinking some gin and tonic, which has always worked well on allergies, only aggravated the dehydration.

This is the classic mistake that guys like me make. My old jujitsu instructor, Sergeant Ken Caton, very nearly died from appendicitis. His appendix burst, it made him feel awful, and so he decided just to bed down with some whiskey and gut it out. He figured it was food poisoning, just like I figured I had allergies, because it was the thing in his experience that fit the symptoms he was experiencing. I got off a lot better than Ken, who was down for months as a result of the damage his body suffered. All I needed was four liters of IV fluid, and I was back in my own bed by midnight.

I'm not pulling my weight today as a blogger for the above reasons. However, Joe of Winds of Change and Defense Industry Daily has several good posts on the Pentago's procurement scandals. Because I feel terrible, I'm just gong to be lazy and run his email on the topic:

It's just not the Pentagon's week for communications projects. The Pentagon has put Boeing on cancellation notice over the JTRS project, one of the central pillars of U.S. military transformation. Meanwhile, criminal investigations into L-3 Communications Holdings over the CSEL search & rescue radios are not only about to force a massive recall of a key item, they're causing the Pentagon to check a whole bunch of other projects - including its Excalibur GPS-guided artillery shells.

Oy. Double-oy if you have to wade through all this and make sense of everything.

Fortunately, we've already made sense of BOTH of these scandals, explaining the programs, their rationale, what's wrong, and what might be next in terms that even non defense specialists can understand.

* L-3 Criminal Investigation.


* Jitters Over JTRS.

Oh yeah, and the Russians have announced 2 new nuclear ballistic missile subs for 2006, with a new type of ballistic missile that's supposedly resistant to missile defenses, and a new sub class to boot.

It's just one of those days.

Here too, mate. Here too.