To All,
Good Thursday Morning April 27 2023
I hope that your week has been going well.
Regards,
Skip
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
This day in Naval and Marine Corps History April 27
1805 With naval bombardment from USS Nautilus, USS Hornet, and USS Argus, Lt. Presley OBannon leads his Marines to attack Derne, Tripoli, and raises the first U.S. flag over foreign soil. The Battle of Derna was the Marines' first battle on foreign soil, and is notably recalled in the first verse of the Marines Hymn.
1813 A U.S. naval squadron under the command of Commodore Isaac Chauncey supports an attack on York (now Toronto), Canada, of nearly 1,800 troops under Gen. Zebulon Pike during the War of 1812.
1861 - President Lincoln extended blockade of Confederacy to VA and NC ports
1865 - Body of John Wilkes Booth brought to Washington Navy Yard.
1944USS Bluegill (SS 242) torpedoes the Japanese light cruiser Yubari west of Sonsorol Island, while USS Halibut (SS 232) sinks Japanese minelayer off Okinawa.
1952 During the Korean War, USS Samuel N. Moore (DD 747) conducts counter-battery fire against enemy shore batteries off Kosong, Korea. The enemy guns are silenced. Also on this date, USS Waxbill (AMS) is damaged by enemy shore battery off Wonsan, Korea.
1963 USS Daniel Webster (SSBN 626) is launched at Groton, Conn. Commissioned a year later, she serves until decommissioned in August 1990.
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
Today In World History. W
April 27
1296 Edward I defeats the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar.
1509 Pope Julius II excommunicates the Italian state of Venice.
1565 The first Spanish settlement in Philippines is established in Cebu City.
1773 British Parliament passes the Tea Act.
1746 King George II wins the Battle of Culloden.
1813 American forces capture York (present-day Toronto), the seat of government in Ontario.
1861 President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus.
1861 West Virginia secedes from Virginia after Virginia secedes from the Union.
1863 The Army of the Potomac begins marching on Chancellorsville.
1865 The Sultana, a steam-powered riverboat, catches fire and burns after one of its boilers explodes. At least 1,238 of the 2,031 passengers--mostly former Union POWs--are killed.
1909 The Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid II, is overthrown.
1937 German bombers of the Condor Legion devastate Guernica, Spain.
1941 The Greek army capitulates to the invading Germans.
1950 South Africa passes the Group Areas Act, formally segregating races.
1961 The United Kingdom grants Sierra Leone independence.
1975 Saigon is encircled by North Vietnamese troops.
1978 The Afghanistan revolution begins.
1989 Protesting students take over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.
1521…Magellan killed in the Philippines »
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED Thanks to the Bear … Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post
Skip… For The List for Thursday, 27 April 2023… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for 27 April 1968… In the words of the GREAT boxing champion ARCHIE MOORE…incredible words of wisdom spoken 55-years ago… Sadly, his wisdom fell on deaf ears… (Humble Host: Please give Archie Moore a few minutes of your reading time.)…
This following work accounts for every fixed wing loss of the Vietnam War and you can use it to read more about the losses in The Bear's Daily account. Even better it allows you to add your updated information to the work to update for history…skip
Vietnam Air Losses
Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
This one has been around before
WW II : RARE COLOR FILM : AIRCRAFT CARRIER IN THE Pacfic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dR3h2HdnBQ
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
This Day in Aviation History" brought to you by the Daedalians Airpower Blog Update. To subscribe to this weekly email, go to https://daedalians.org/airpower-blog/.
April 26, 1962
At Lake Groom, Nevada, Louis W. "Lou" Schalk Jr. made the first of 13 flights in the A-12, which was the prototype for later versions of the Blackbird, including the SR-71. He reached a top speed of 2,287 mph and altitudes that exceeded 90,000 feet.
April 27, 1939
In Washington, D.C., the Army Air Corps places an order for the first production batch of Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.
April 28, 1919
American Leslie Irvin made the first jump from an airplane using a free-type (to be opened at will by a rip-chord) backpack parachute and landed at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio. The parachute was designed by Floyd Smith.
April 29, 1918
Capt. Edward V. "Eddie" Rickenbacker, Daedalian Founder Member #169, assists downing a German Albatros scout craft over Toul, France and receives half credit for the kill. A former racecar driver, he originally reached France as Gen. John J. Pershing's chauffeur, but volunteered for combat.
April 30, 1917
In Europe, Capt. William "Billy" Mitchell, Daedalian Founder Member #12595, becomes the first officer of the Army Air Service to fly over enemy territory in a French aircraft.
May 1, 1934
Navy Lt. Frank Akers made a hooded landing in an OJ-2 observation biplane at College Park, Maryland, in the first demonstration of the blind landing system intended for carrier use and under development by the Washington Institute of Technology. In subsequent flights Akers took off under a hood from NAS Anacostia, D.C., and landed at College Park without assistance.
May 2, 1923
From May 2-3, 1923, Lieutenants John A. Macready and Oakley G. Kelly completed the first nonstop, transcontinental flight across the U.S. in a Fokker T-2. The mission originated at Roosevelt Field, New York, and lasted 26 hours and 50 minutes, traversing 2,500 miles. They were greeted at Rockwell Field in San Diego by an estimated 100,000 spectators upon arrival. Kelly was Daedalian Founder Member #34. Macready was Founder Member #469; learn more about him HERE.
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
Thanks to Brett
https://victorhanson.com/do-we-even-know-we-are-all-socialists-now/
Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now?
April 24, 2023
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it.
I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind.
Socialism With a Whimper
So it is with our "woke"—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate or even understand.
Socialism is variously defined. The Merriam-Webster dictionary emphasizes the role of the state in near-communist terms: "Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods."
The Cambridge Dictionary more accurately notes that socialism is "the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country's money, or the political systems based on these beliefs."
The latter definition perhaps best sums up much of the operative ideology of the new Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, and its subordinates, both elected and administrative.
But perhaps socialism in America 2023 is even better described as something like "the doctrine of enforced 'equity' by government redistribution of money and power from one 'oppressive' group to another 'oppressed,' with the caveat that the elite redistributors have the right to supersede the law based on their own self-professed superior morality, and the assurance that they will never be subject to the baleful consequences of their own unnatural ideology."
We have been drifting into such a socialist system for decades, but it was accelerated by the eight years of the Obama Administration and has arrived at near fruition with the Biden Administration. Note first that the more socialist we become, the greater the resistance grows, and the more desperate and cruel the socialists become to force down the throats of the public something they otherwise would vomit up.
Under the woke socialist model there are no longer any absolutes, laws, or customs. We are left instead with mere constructs deemed illegitimate and arbitrary, in need of systematic dismantling in the interest of the proverbial people.
Such redistributionist, compensatory and reparative efforts to make us equal on the backside have in common a war against all meritocracy and indeed any accomplishment deemed singular and beyond the abilities of the masses.
The Surrender of the Campuses
Socialism has become not just economic, but political, cultural, social, and even military. Take universities. Most are dropping the SAT and ACT entrance exams not because they fail to calibrate both past achievement and the likelihood of future aptitude, but because too many do too poorly and thus find themselves unequal to those fewer who do too well.
Grade point averages are losing significance, since the achievers succeed supposedly only by advantage and not by hard work, preparation, and talent. Free speech is nonexistent; racist and hate speech is protected if voiced by the "marginalized."
University admissions increasingly have little to do with talent. Or rather talent is described not so much as the ability to think analytically and computationally, to have mastery of language, spoken and oral, or some acquaintance with the referents, historical, scientific, and literary, of our civilization. Instead, qualifications are becoming more a matter of "life experiences," or "community service," or "activities," or commitments to hopey-and-changey "diversity, equity, and inclusion" as the traditional one-third of the application packet absorbed the other two-thirds of grades and test scores.
Under academic socialism, entrance, of course, is merely the first step.
Courses are watered down, grades inflated.
The D and F grades have all but disappeared. The A? It's become inflationary to the point of being utterly meaningless, like a German mark circa 1923.
Everyone knows that current courses on comic books, movies, and social media, interspersed with the proper adjectives, black, queer, and feminist, promulgate not just for ideological reasons of indoctrinating impressionable teen fodder, but to ensure that almost anyone admitted to university can pass such "courses."
In socialist campuses, graduation is almost assured upon and indeed equivalent to admission. "Flunking out" is an anachronism.
A Stanford, Yale, or Harvard Law degree is not synonymous with mastery of American jurisprudence—a fact as known to all as it is out of politeness unspoken.
In the Biden years, the elite socialist universities have done the near impossible: they 1) made it almost impossible for working class white males to go to top schools based on their proven achievement, 2) have taken us back to the anti-Jewish quota years of the 1920s and '30s by radically and deliberately curtailing the presence of high-achieving American Jews on Ivy League campuses, and 3) have reinstated an entire neo-Confederate, unconstitutional set of discriminatory rules to accommodate those admitted without competitive test scores and grades, from racially segregated graduations, dorms, safe spaces, and workshops to one-drop, one-sixteenth Old South notions of racial purity.
From Taxes to Voting
The tax code is socialist. About one percent of households pay 50 percent of federal income taxes—and are damned as greedy for it. That asymmetry is true of most state income tax schedules as well. The antithesis of Reagan's "Starve the Beast"—limiting revenues to force cuts in superfluous spending—is now "Gorge the beast": spend so much indiscriminately, run up such astronomical multitrillion budget deficits, and inflate debt to GDP to over 130 percent, that redistributionist higher and higher taxes become perpetually necessary.
Voting is now socialist inspired. The old idea that each citizen chooses or not to participate in democracy by showing up to vote and presenting identification is considered discriminatory. The socialist answer in many states is to require no identification, and fast-track same-day voter registration, automatically mailed out ballots, and ballot harvesting and curing. The common theme is that if not enough of those deemed oppressed, victimized, and marginalized choose to vote, then the system must be warped to ensure somehow with minimum or no effort their ballots are cast.
Equity Jurisprudence
The law is socialist, or worse in the sense of Lavrentiy Beria's "show me the man, and I'll find the crime." It now operates on the "critical legal theory" idea that most American laws are the manifestations of the powerful and wealthy.
What is illegal is only so because the wealthy never need to break such laws. So why not steal—or rather redistribute—a hair dryer or smartphone that a rich man never does, but makes illegal?
Thus smash-and-grab, looting, shoplifting, and even violent assault increasingly either do not lead to arrest, or to indictment or to conviction or to incarceration. The socialist mind insists laws do not represent natural and ancient ideas of morality—such as thievery is always wrong and assault endangers society—but simply a particular value system of the oppressive rich and increasingly in America the so-called rich white population.
The idea of deterrence is taboo. Socialists do not believe law, order, and calm exist because those who would disrupt them fear the consequences more than the advantage of taking what you want or hurting whom you please.
We talk about "George Soros" public prosecutors. But the nihilist Soros' genius is always to be one step ahead of the game, applying what made him an outlaw in France to our popular culture.
No one anticipated that he would quietly flood rather obscure big-city prosecutorial races with hundreds of millions of dollars to elect hard socialists who were to use their ensuing power to engage in lawfare against conservatives and the prominent and make laws and target enemies that legislatures could not. Without a Soros-funded Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Fani Willis, the nation would now be reduced to speculating whether former president Donald Trump's two-year unauthorized storage of some classified documents at a secure Mar-a-Lago was a worse infraction than former Vice President Joe Biden's unauthorized storage of classified documents at three locations, including his garage, for six years.
Defunding the police is based on the implicit assumption that greater criminality and violence, mostly directed against the most vulnerable, is a small price to pay, given a) the stigmatized criminal is given exemption, and b) the architects of defunding have mechanisms to ensure they are exposed to inevitable spiraling crime rates.
Ditto gun control. The socialist point of neutering the Second Amendment is not just to disarm the populace, much less to prevent shootings. Rather, the aim is to ensure the government has a complete monopoly on arms, so that it can calibrate both the degree and nature of law enforcement, and thus render the citizen compliant and obsequious in order to ensure his protection from both criminals and the state.
Socialist Corruption
One key element of socialism we often forget is its innate corruption. The Castro family, the Chavezes of Venezuela, or the Ortegas of Nicaragua all became rich by taking large bites out of the transfer of money from the rich to the poor, taking bribes from the rich to win exemptions, or doling out concessions of the "people's resources." In other words, they were self-appointed gatekeepers. Socialists are often the very rich or at least become the wealthy when they achieve power; paradoxically, they despise those who make money legally apart from the mechanisms of the state.
Not a moment goes by that Joe Biden does not demagogue about "those who don't pay their fair share"—even as the Biden syndicate is emerging as one of the most corrupt political families in U.S. history, specifically in gathering millions of dollars that apparently were not reported to the IRS. The family leveraged Biden's vice presidency and future likely presidency to win lucrative payoffs from foreign governments, the majority of them hostile to the United States. Just as Hillary Clinton sent soon-to-be National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to push the phony "Russian collusion" hoax among the media and deep state, so the Bidens enlisted soon-to-be Secretary of State Antony Blinken to contact former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell to round up 50 former intelligence cronies to lie that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop was "Russian disinformation." Neither has nor will face consequences for attempting to warp two elections, given they are designated among the "good people."
In fact, socialism has now almost permeated every aspect of our lives, disguised as it is by the rhetoric of "marginalized people" or "people of color" or particular interests who justify their war on rules, customs, meritocracy, and achievement by claiming the greater victimhood, past or present.
Tidbit Socialism
In California, a bill passed the Assembly mandating that power bills be massaged by income levels. The initial—but by no means the final—rewards and punishments schedule seeks to add a flat fee onto energy users, based on their income. The idea came from the power companies themselves both to ingratiate themselves to left-wing California legislators but also to find cash to cover their massive losses incurred by forced adherence to madcap wind and solar mandates. In sum, the more one is liable not to pay for the energy he uses, the cheaper the power bill, regardless how much power he consumes. Fail in business, get cheaper electricity; succeed and pay more.
Indeed, the unelected are the most effective socialists since they can achieve by administrative fiat what a legislator would have to otherwise enact by open debate, media scrutiny, and voter approval. On May 1, new rules governing home loans will go into effect that were advanced by the bureaucrats at the quasi-public Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lending agencies. The Federal Housing Finance Agency is punishing would be homebuyers with excellent credit ratings by forcing them to pay higher mortgage rates and fees.
These surcharges supposedly will subsidize those with bad credit ratings who will pay less per month on their home loans.
Note the socialist ahistorical logic. Aside from the fact that no socialist regime has ever worked, we in America have the 2008 subprime meltdown to warn us what happens when massive home loans are taken out by those without the means or the track record to pay them back. That shock almost destroyed the U.S. economy and wrecked millions of American lives as we went into recession for a near decade. No matter, socialists must break eggs to achieve their supposedly perfect omelets.
Popular culture from publishing to Hollywood to awards are now T-ball socialist in nature. Thousands of gifted authors are denied book contracts because they are deemed a part of the oppressive white male class. Ditto movies as well. Few believe that the Tonys, the Oscars, the Emmys, or the Pulitzers reward the most talented achievement, but are rather predicated on spreading the awards around to the underrepresented and do not necessarily represent the merit of a song, play, film, or book.
Note how socialism despises unauthorized excellence. In our sick world, that means any singular individual who is not committed to the principles of the woke revolution. He is giving hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of free Starlink satellite internet to the Ukrainians, without which they certainly would lose the war. His Teslas sparked the entire notion of a potentially viable electric car. His space projects, not NASA's, are America's best chance to obtain parity with the Chinese in space. He lost $40 billion to reboot Twitter into something the 1980s American Civil Liberties Union would have applauded. And yet he is despised as a leftist apostate, a crime greater than the sum of all his good left-wing deeds.
Any talent who is deemed an enemy of the socialist project by any evidence of apostasy—a Tom Brady, J.K. Rowling, or Matt Taibbi—is transmogrified from hero or genius to Leon Trotsky in a nanosecond.
A final note: the Orwellian police state is central to socialism, since the ideology is contrary to innate human nature and when fully implemented quickly ruins all that it touches and is commensurately despised in its fruition. So to force compliance is a 360 degree, 24/7 project that transcends all our institutions and culture.
That is why the woke FBI goes after counter-revolutionary parents at school board meetings or traditionalist Catholics rather than Pentagon leakers or Islamic terrorists.
That is why the FBI and the CIA respectively tried to warp the 2016 election with the phony Steele dossier and in 2020 probably did so by suppressing the truth about the "bombshell" evidence found on wayward Hunter Biden's laptop.
That is why news disappears off Facebook and the old Twitter. That is why the order of Google search results seems bizarre. That is why Disney or Budweiser suddenly virtue signal their nihilist politics, or why Nike makes the mediocrity Colin Kaepernick a multimillionaire, or Stanford University attempts to purge vocabulary such as "citizen," "immigrant," and "American."
Once socialism takes hold, every mediocrity, every ossified bureaucracy, every constipated careerist, every hack writer and nobody actor, comes out of the woodwork to find his socialist "fair share" of what he lacked in talent or accomplishment.
In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply "The endless war against merit."
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
Thanks to Interesting Fact
The quietest place in the world is a chamber at Microsoft's headquarters.
A desert landscape or deep forest may seem like a good candidate for the quietest place on Earth. But to experience true quiet — thunderous-thump-of-your-heartbeat quiet — requires a lot more technology than you'll find in nature, so it makes sense that one of the world's largest tech companies is host to the ultimate quiet room. Tucked inside Building 87 in Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus is an anechoic ("free from echo") chamber specifically designed to eliminate outside noise in all its forms. Microsoft didn't build the room to earn a Guinness record for the world's quietest place, of course; the chamber is used in part to test how much ambient noise the company's devices emit (think the subtle hum of a monitor or buzz of a charging cable).
The anechoic chamber in Building 87 was constructed with six layers of concrete and steel, which all rest on damping springs in the floor to eliminate nearby vibrations. Fiberglass wedges cover the walls and ceiling, designed so that sound waves get trapped in their purposeful geometry and dissipate. The result is a room that is -20.35 decibels. Yes, negative. Any sound pressure that dips below the threshold for human hearing is represented as negative decibels. For comparison, the sound of breathing has been measured at 10 decibels, while the sound of air molecules colliding in a gas or liquid (known as Brownian motion) is -23 decibels. (At the other end of the extreme, a rock concert may be 110 decibels.) In Microsoft's chamber, the subtle sounds of the human body — breath, circulation, digestion, heartbeat, joint movement — become undeniably audible, and the rustle of clothes sounds like the roar of the ocean. In other words, inside this anechoic chamber, your body creates its own soundtrack.
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
Thanks to Brett
ON GEOPOLITICS
Shifting Geopolitics Prompt South Korea to Mull Reasserting Its Place in the World
Rodger Baker
Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE, Stratfor
Apr 27, 2023
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol delivers remarks during a U.S.-Korea Business Forum at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on April 25, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's visit to the United States (which started on April 24) highlights his initiative to move the country from a passive to a more active international policy role. Despite ranking as the 10th largest economy by GDP in 2022, South Korea has long played a relatively low-key role in international politics and security. Seoul has instead largely focused on its domestic security (i.e., the threat from North Korea) and allowed the strength of the U.S. regional security presence to focus its attention inward on domestic economics. Yoon's first year in office marked a change in direction for the South Korean government, one that exceeded the initiatives of earlier conservative leaders but has not been without its challenges regionally and at home.
Since taking office in May 2022, Yoon has reinvigorated large-scale defense exercises with the United States, eased strained relations with Japan, and angered Beijing and Moscow with comments on Taiwan and Ukraine. Transitions from progressive to conservative governments in South Korea often see policy shifts aimed at strengthening relations with the United States and reconciling ties with Japan. Yoon, however, appears to be moving further and faster than his conservative predecessors. There is concern in Seoul that, as the U.S.-China strategic competition heats up, South Korea could find itself not only caught in the crosshairs, but also falling behind Japan as a strategic priority in the region.
The Passivity of the Past
South Korea has long played a relatively passive role in both regional and international relations. For much of the past 70 years, Seoul's primary security concern has come from North Korea. Until 1991, when the United Nations recognized both Koreas as sovereign states, Seoul had viewed tensions with the North as both the result of the lingering impact of the Korean (Civil) War, and the exploitation of North Korea by external Communist forces. As a frontline in the Cold War, South Korea counted on the large U.S. military presence to defend the nation. And in return, by the 1970s, Seoul used that security guarantee to focus on its internal economic development, similar to Japan's strategy during much of the Cold War. South Korea continued to play a more active role in its own national defense and in assisting U.S. military operations in Vietnam (unlike Japan). But as its economy grew, its willingness to engage in overseas military activity waned.
Over the past two decades, South Korea has emerged not only as a leader in heavy industry, shipbuilding and automobiles, but as a pioneer in the high-tech industry and, more recently, as a global cultural phenomenon (the so-called Korean Wave). Yet the country has done little to translate economic and soft power into regional influence, much less a proactive global role. South Korea's regional policies have often been couched in terms of how Seoul can help other countries learn to grow economically and evolve as democracies by studying South Korea's example. Even as Japan began taking a more active role in regional security and economic dynamics, Seoul remained largely focused on the Korean Peninsula, comfortable in a more passive role. In some ways, at least as far as foreign policy was concerned, South Korea continued to live under the old moniker for earlier Korean Kingdoms — a hermit.
What's Changed
The intensification of the U.S.-China rivalry has shifted the calculus in Seoul, at least as far as the Yoon administration is concerned. The government is no longer confident it can walk the line between strong economic ties with China and strong defense ties with the United States. Washington's targeting of the Chinese economy, particularly its focused actions against China's high-tech industry, has serious ramifications for South Korea's economic development and opportunities. Companies are being forced to make decisions between the Chinese and U.S. markets, and Yoon appears to be more willing than his predecessors to risk Chinese ire in favor of closer U.S. ties. South Korean companies may even be positioned to gain as the United States constrains Chinese firms and products — as a treaty ally with a free trade agreement in place, South Korean companies can take the place of Chinese suppliers and potentially bypass some of Washington's nascent protectionist policies.
Seoul, however, is driven not only by the broader economic implications of souring U.S.-China relations. It is concerned that Japan has finally broken from its economic malaise and self-imposed pacifism, and is repositioning itself as the regional counterpoint to China and the key U.S. ally in Northeast Asia. From a simplistic perspective, Japan and South Korea occupy nearly the same position: they both sit in Northeast Asia, they are both U.S. allies with large standing U.S. military forces and numerous bases, and they both compete in roughly the same industrial sectors. Both countries also depend on the United States for their national security, and are equally dependent upon the U.S. regional presence to secure key energy import routes and product export routes.
But unlike South Korea, Japan has steadily reshaped its military (officially its Self-Defense Forces) to take a more active role in regional security. In recent years, Tokyo has developed light aircraft carriers (which Japan designates as destroyers), expanded the range of its aircraft, and pursued longer-range missile systems. Japan has also expanded its defense equipment donations and sales, stepped up joint training, and taken a more active and intentional role in using its foreign aid and assistance to shape regional politics. Meanwhile, South Korea's focus on North Korea and fears of antagonizing China have limited its regional engagement, and Seoul's new Southeast Asia strategy remains constrained in concrete ambition. The Yoon administration is concerned that as China takes center stage in U.S. regional attention, North Korea will be relegated to a secondary or tertiary concern (similar to the waning though still present U.S. military attention in the Middle East), leaving South Korea less an ally in broader U.S. strategic interests than a place where U.S. forces are tied down and unable to be used for the broader regional strategy.
Yoon's frequent calls for extended deterrence from the United States highlight this concern that Washington may deprioritize South Korea. His rapid (and domestically controversial) reconciliation with Japan is also being driven by the need to strengthen South Korea's importance to the United States. Washington has long been frustrated by Seoul's apparent reticence to move beyond the era of the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the issue has concretely impacted trilateral intelligence sharing and training.
Yoon's comments to the Washington Post just before his U.S. visit reinforce this idea. In his interview with the U.S. outlet, the South Korean president highlighted the ability of European nations to move beyond World War I and II to work together now and move beyond history, and said he didn't agree with the idea that Japan ''must kneel because of our history 100 years ago.'' Through his actions and his words, Yoon is trying to convince the United States that South Korea has moved beyond history, that the problems of the past will not come back to interfere with trilateral economic and security cooperation, and that South Korea is not only a reliable ally but can also play a more active role in U.S. regional initiatives.
Weighing the Risks
Yoon's strategy is, of course, not without risk. As Australia, Japan and South Korea have already experienced, even small political, economic or security adjustments can lead to significant economic retaliation from China. When Yoon's predecessor, Moon Jae In, went ahead with the deployment of THAAD (an anti-missile system targeting North Korea but raising concerns that its radar system could also target China), it had lingering repercussions for the South Korean economy — from attendance at the Seoul Winter Olympics to the ultimate withdrawal of Lotte, a South Korean chaebol (conglomerate), from the Chinese market.
China is by far South Korea's largest trading partner, accounting for more trade than with the United States and Japan combined. And Beijing has grown adept at using both formal and, more often, informal means to add friction or disrupt market access and company operations. Seoul also risks being drawn into other economic or security conflicts, something it has sought to resist despite its close alliance with Washington (Seoul's reluctance to deploy forces to Iraq led to a small-scale withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea in 2004). Finally, Yoon's policies are not universally popular at home due to these concerns and opposition to his refusal to press Japan for another apology and additional reparations.
Should Yoon be successful, it would mark a significant change not only for South Korean policy, but for the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. South Korea is the bridge between continental and maritime Asia; its economy is large, its soft-power reach is vast and its arms industry is making strides in the international market. For Seoul to live up to a new, more activist foreign policy, it must define a clearer strategy and consider a shift in its military structure and focus, adding impetus to naval and long-range aviation development. While South Korea has long been a U.S. ally, U.S. forces in Korea have been constrained to focusing on the North Korean threat. A change in South Korea's posture could also see a shift in the way U.S. forces are structured and used in the broader Indo-Pacific, changing the composition of forces and equipment. In the long run, it could reinvigorate South Korean support for future unification with the North, as a stronger, more active South Korea feels more confident of its capabilities and future.
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
This Day in U S Military History…….April 27
1805 – After marching 500 miles from Egypt, U.S. agent William Eaton leads a small force of U.S. Marines and Berber mercenaries against the Tripolitan port city of Derna. The Marines and Berbers were on a mission to depose Yusuf Karamanli, the ruling pasha of Tripoli, who had seized power from his brother, Hamet Karamanli, a pasha who was sympathetic to the United States. The First Barbary War had begun four years earlier, when U.S. President Thomas Jefferson ordered U.S. Navy vessels to the Mediterranean Sea in protest of continuing raids against U.S. ships by pirates from the Barbary states–Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripolitania. American sailors were often abducted along with the captured booty and ransomed back to the United States at an exorbitant price. After two years of minor confrontations, sustained action began in June 1803, when a small U.S. expeditionary force attacked Tripoli harbor in present-day Libya. In April 1805, a major American victory came during the Derna campaign, which was undertaken by U.S. land forces in North Africa. Supported by the heavy guns of the USS Argus and the USS Hornet, Marines and Arab mercenaries under William Eaton captured Derna and deposed Yusuf Karamanli. Lieutenant Presley O' Bannon, commanding the Marines, performed so heroically in the battle that Hamet Karamanli presented him with an elaborately designed sword that now serves as the pattern for the swords carried by Marine officers. The phrase "to the shores of Tripoli," from the official song of the U.S. Marine Corps, also has its origins in the Derna campaign.
1944 – During the night (April 27-28), 3 American LST landing craft, conducting an invasion exercise (Exercise "Tiger"), are torpedoed by German E-boats in Lyme Bay. A total of 638 troops are killed. This incident is kept secret for fear of damaging Anglo-American relations.
1953 – Operation Moolah is initiated by U.S. General Mark W. Clark against Communist pilots in the Korean War. Operation Moolah was a United States Air Force (USAF) effort during the Korean War to obtain through defection a fully capable Soviet MiG-15 jet fighter. Communist forces introduced the MiG-15 to Korea on November 1, 1950. USAF pilots reported that the performance of the MiG-15 was superior to all United Nations (U.N.) aircraft, including the USAF's newest plane, the F-86 Sabre. The operation focused on influencing Communist pilots to defect to South Korea with a MiG for a financial reward. The success of the operation is disputable since no Communist pilot defected before the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. However, on September 21, 1953, North Korean pilot Lieutenant No Kum-Sok flew his MiG-15 to the Kimpo Air Base, South Korea, unaware of Operation Moolah.
1972 – North Vietnamese troops shatter defenses north of Quang Tri and move to within 2.5 miles of the city. Using Russian-built tanks, they took Dong Ha, 7 miles north of Quang Tri, the next day and continued to tighten their ring around Quang Tri, shelling it heavily. South Vietnamese troops suffered their highest casualties for any week in the war in the bitter fighting. This was the northern-most front of the North Vietnamese Nguyen Hue Offensive, launched on March 30 when more than 120,000 North Vietnamese troops invaded South Vietnam. The attacks on Quang Tri were followed by attacks on Binh Long province, just 75 miles north of Saigon, and Kontum in the Central Highlands. Hanoi's 304th Division, supported by tanks, artillery, and antiaircraft units, swept across the Demilitarized Zone and routed the South Vietnamese division that had been guarding outlying positions on the approach to Quang Tri. The attackers quickly overwhelmed the South Vietnamese troops, who fell back toward the city of Quang Tri. The North Vietnamese encircled the city and continued to pound it with artillery and rockets. On May 1, the North Vietnamese captured the city as the South Vietnamese 3rd Division collapsed as a fighting force. This was the first provincial capital to fall during the North Vietnamese offensive and ultimately the North Vietnamese controlled the entire province. Hanoi claimed 10,000 South Vietnamese and Allied casualties were captured during the battle for Quang Tri.
1998 – A Pentagon panel said remains of the Vietnam veteran in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery should be exhumed to determine whether they belonged to Air Force 1st Lt. Michael J. Blassie, as his family believed. The remains were later positively identified as Blassie's.
2009 – A low-flying Boeing VC-25, Air Force One, causes momentary panic in New York City, New York, United States. It was intended as a photo opportunity, a showcase of Air Force One alongside the sweep of New York City skyline. Director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, ultimately takes responsibility for approving the mission and failing to notify authorities in New York City. Caldera resigned as a result, on 22 May 2009.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
BURRITT, WILLIAM W.
Rank and organization: Private, Company G, 113th Illinois Infantry. Place and date: At Vicksburg, Miss., 27 April 1863. Entered service at: Chicago, Ill. Birth: Campbell, N.Y. Date of issue: 8 July 1896. Citation: Voluntarily acted as a fireman on a steam tug which ran the blockade and passed the batteries under a heavy fire.
WEISBOGEL, ALBERT (Second Award)
Citation: For gallant conduct in jumping overboard from the U.S.S. Plymouth, at sea, and rescuing from drowning one of the crew of that vessel on 27 April 1876.
FUNSTON, FREDERICK
Rank and organization: Colonel, 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry. Place and date: At Rio Grande de la Pampanga, Luzon, Philippine Islands, 27 April 1899. Entered service at: Iola, Kans. Birth: Springfield, Ohio. Date of issue: 14 February 1900. Citation: Crossed the river on a raft and by his skill and daring enabled the general commanding to carry the enemy's entrenched position on the north bank of the river and to drive him with great loss from the important strategic position of Calumpit.
TREMBLEY, WILLIAM B.
Rank and organization: Private, Company B, 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry. Place and date: At Calumpit, Luzon, Philippine Islands, 27 April 1899. Entered service at: Kansas City, Kans. Birth: Johnson, Kans. Date of issue: 11 March 1902. Citation: Swam the Rio Grande de Pampanga in face of the enemy's fire and fastened a rope to the occupied trenches, thereby enabling the crossing of the river and the driving of the enemy from his fortified position.
WHITE, EDWARD
Rank and organization: Private, Company B, 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry. Place and date: At Calumpit, Luzon, Philippine Islands, 27 April 1899. Entered service at: Kansas City, Kans. Birth: Seneca, Kans. Date of issue: 11 March 1902. Citation: Swam the Rio Grande de Pampanga in face of the enemy's fire and fastened a rope to occupied trenches, thereby enabling the crossing of the river and the driving of the enemy from his fortified position.
QUICK, JOSEPH
Rank and organization: Coxwain, U.S. Navy. Place and date: Yokohama, Japan, 27 April 1902. Entered service at: New York. Birth: New York. G.O. No.: 93, 7 July 1902. Citation: For heroism in rescuing Walenty Wisnieroski, Machinist Second Class, from drowning at Yokohama, Japan, 27 April 1902, while serving on board the U.S.S. Yorktown.
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for April 27, 2021 FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS. THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
27 April
1911: The Signal Corps accepted the first Army Curtiss plane, a Curtiss IV Model D, and the second Army Wright plane, a Wright B, at San Antonio. Both aircraft were pusher-types. (21)
1913: Robert G. Fowler flew from Panama to Cristobal, ocean-to-ocean, nonstop, in 57 minutes with cameraman Raymond A. Duhem. The flight represented the first seaplane flight across Panama, the first seaplane flight in Panama, and the first passenger-carrying flight in Central America. Duhem also shot the first pictures from the air of the Canal and Central America. Panamanian authorities later arrested them when the story and pictures appeared in a newspaper. (20) (24)
1949: At Cleveland, Ohio, Harold E. Thompson flew the Sikorsky S-52-1 helicopter to a world speed record of 129,616 MPH over three kilometers (see 6 May). (24)
1963: A Titan II, launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg AFB, made the first successful flight of intercontinental range.
1972: Twelve USAF F-4 Phantom fighters (8th TFW) used Paveway I laser-guided "smart" bombs to knock down segments of the Thanh Hoa Bridge. Prior to this attack, hundreds of conventional missions had caused only minor damage to the bridge. Eight carried the laser-guided bombs. When the dust of the explosions cleared it was apparent that the bridge had been dislodged from its western abutment, dropping one half into the river.
1977: When the 525 TFS arrived at Bitburg AB with its F-15 Eagles, the 36 TFW became the first unit outside the US to be equipped with these aircraft. (4) (30) Through 30 April, after the Ethiopian government announced the closure of some US facilities in that country, 9 MAC C-141s flew 22 missions and a World Airways DC-8 flew 1 mission to airlift 323 Americans and 692,000 pounds of cargo from Addis Ababa and Asmara to Athens, Greece. (18)
1978: Two KC-135 crewmembers shared the distinction of being the first female navigators to perform alert duty in SAC: Capt Elizabeth A. Koch from the 22 AREFW at March AFB and 1Lt Ramona L.S. Roybal from the 916 AREFS at Travis AFB. (1)
1990: After a scheduled five-month layoff, Northrop's B-2A started flying again. This six-hour, fiveminute test flight above Edwards AFB took the Stealth Bomber to 35,000 feet. It also completed four mid-air refuelings with a KC-10. (8: Jul 90)
1991: A C-141 delivered 15 tons of blankets for Kurdish refugees in the first airlift mission into Iran since 1979. (18)
1995: AFSPACE declared its GPS satellites fully operational. This system provided accurate geographical coordinates. (16) (26)
1999: Operation ALLIED FORCE. To support NATO operations over Kosovo, President William J. Clinton approved a Selected Reserve Call-Up of air refueling resources, including 47 tankers and 2,116 personnel assigned to 4 AMC-gained AFRC units and five ANG units. (22)
2007: Following a 12-minute performance at Langley AFB, Va., Air Combat Command officials gave F-22A Raptor demonstration the official seal of approval for future air shows. (AFNEWS, "ACC Approves Raptor Demonstration," 27 Apr 2007.)
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SkipsList" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to skipslist+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/skipslist/CACTjsm32sY44EU-%3D6mjBQhPjtyxq%3Db8BSqtiZvmhzjP_RKQ77w%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.