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I see many pathways to trouble with the Saudis wanting to send troops to Iraq. This may be a time when Mass might need to take a backseat to politics.
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Iran claims to have shot down a recon drone according to Xinhua.
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Anne Applebaum has a bit in Slate about what to do about Afghani opium. Not sure if I agree. Might be best to buy-and-burn and give incentives to do other crops than to legalize IMO.

The fields themselves are problematic. Can’t remember where, but I do remember reading that aQ/terrorists use the ‘night letter’ method. They kind of push the farmer into doing it----Coalition forces can’t be everywhere at once---- and once the farmer is doing something illegal they feel safer dealing with the terrs than with the Afghani gov’t. It’s not a problem that can be ignored much longer to be sure.

So maybe you do one year of buying the entire output to be put to the torch and then incentive-ize the heck out of growing other crops? Don’t know.

My worry is this: what’s to stop aQ from threatening the farmer to a certain amount of opium just for them? It’s all legalized now so you can’t get into trouble for having it, and photo-recon isn’t going to tell you squat, but the threat of being slaughtered still is. Farmer’s got no real choice. Do it the other way, you might (might I said), have an idea of where aQ’s been/is and who they’re leaning on. Just a (random and proll’y stupid) thought.
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A conversation that showed up in my email box last night:
Attack of the Smart Guys.

Commenter A: (Early 1990s) Use land mines? You've got to be kidding, right? There'll never be another conflict where they could be useful and should be outlawed forthwith. (Flash forward to 2005 and read the link) Sigh. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Wise@55 B: We simply aren't allowed to conduct economy-of-force operations, is all. We all need to have huge armies too, so we can violate Clausewitz's dicta of He Who Would Defend Everything, Defends Nothing.
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ry
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(Pokes hornets nest)
Ehren Watada lost some legal battles and his court martial continues.
--ry
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Christopher Hitchens on how Bush is blowing the war, and Michelle Malkin on how she thinks the war is going...

Hitch:

I got the feeling that I have sometimes had before: the slightly ridiculous but unshakeable sensation that there is some kind of jinx at work. One strives, in other words, to think of a blunder that could have been made and was not.

La Malkin:

I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatibility of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of "grim milestone" and "daily IED count" media coverage that aids the insurgency.

I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve.

Click their names to read their bits. The two views dovetail nicely with mine, after a fashion. Hitchens, who represents the media-driven view of the war, and Malkin, who represents the view of the war I get from my buddies in the box. Both are probably accurate as far as it goes.

Can anyone imagine what *this Congress* would have done after Kasserine, and the misery that was Guadalcanal? Or the retreat from Chosin? -the Armorer

Update: Greyhawk goes into more detail on how the Surge plays out in the press.

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This ought to be interesting: Tuesday marked the first flight of a FedEx plane equipped with Northrop Grumman's Guardian anti-missle system. Although no planes outside of a war zone have ever been shot down by missles, it has been attempted (they missed the plane). Should be interesting to see how the added anti-missle system affects cost, payload and maintenance of the aircraft. Use on commercial passenger fligths is probably 20 years away, so they have plenty of time to work out the bugs. ~AFSis

Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute.

Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is*

The UAVs we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now.

I call the post that because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to. It's also an open trackback, so if (Don Surber uses it this way a lot) someone has a post they're proud of, but it really isn't either Castle kind of stuff, or topical to a particular post, I've basically given blanket permission to use that post for that purpose. Another term of art that might be appropriate is "Free Fire Zone".