Smiling Jack posted:

Apropos of nothing whatsoever here is a picture of an overrated plane that was canceled, leaving behind nothing but legions of fanboys who gaze upon its negligible impact and history with the desperate rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia.

VikingSkull posted:

LP97S posted:

If we're going that route (click for fullsize):

VikingSkull posted:

atomicthumbs posted:

Project Excelsior was the coolest

Boomerjinks posted:

Now open the blinds and fall out of your little bucket, and remember to open your drogue chute so you don't spin at 150rpm. Hope you like falling for 13 minutes.

Smiling Jack posted:

Boomerjinks posted:

Now open the blinds and fall out of your little bucket, and remember to open your drogue chute so you don't spin at 150rpm. Hope you like falling for 13 minutes.

VikingSkull posted:

priznat posted:

Kittinger is still alive, AFAIK.. Last I heard he was advising a dude who was going to attempt to break his free fall record, jumping from 120k feet. Sadly it was tied up in court between Red Bull who are sponsoring it and some promoter guy.

The video for Boards of Canada's tune "Dayvan Cowboy" has the jump set to music and it's pretty cool. I don't think Kittinger landed in the ocean and immediately began surfing though, so the video plays a little fast and loose with the facts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2zKARkpDW4

Smiling Jack posted:

Apropos of nothing whatsoever here is a picture of an overrated plane that was canceled, leaving behind nothing but legions of fanboys who gaze upon its negligible impact and history with the desperate rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia.

McNamara posted:

-Anne Morrison Welsh, the widow of Norman Morrison, the Quaker who burned himself to death beneath my Pentagon window, on November 2, 1965, wrote: "To heal the wounds of the war, we must forgive ourselves and each other, nd help the people of Vietnam to rebuild their country. I am grateful to Robert McNamara for his courageous and honest reappraisal of the Vietnam war and his involvement in it. I hope his book will contribute to the healing process."

-Ron Kovic, the paraplegic Marine combat veteran and author of the moving story Born on the Fourth of July, said: "Over the long run, McNamara's book and his comments will promote healing. As Americans, we must all embrace McNamara."

-David Hackworth (Colonel, USA, retired), the most decorated American veteran of the Vietnam war, writing in Newsweek, April 24, 1995, quoted a fellow veteran as saying, when he first heard of the book, he "felt a sense of rage beginning to well up deep inside me, a rage I have worked hard to suppress over the last 25 years." But he ended his article with these words: "McNamara's book is an important step toward understanding what happened, and it may help some of the walking wounded to move further along the healing path of forgiveness. And that's good for America's collective soul."

quote:

I want to put Vietnam in context.

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values.

Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.

quote:

I want Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did, and to learn from them. I hope to say, "Here is something we can take away from Vietnam that is constructive and applicable to the world of today and tomorrow." That is the only way our nation can ever hope to leave the past behind. The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote, "The reward of suffering is experience." Let this be the lasting legacy of Vietnam.

quote:

The day after John F. Kennedy's inauguration was among the proudest of my life. At four o'clock that afternoon, January 21, 1961, I gathered with my nine fellow cabinet nominees in the East Room of the White House to be sworn in. We stood in a semicircle beneath the crystal chandelier facing Chief Justice Earl Warren in his black robes. I took my oath office in unison with the others s President and Mrs. Kennedy, congressional leaders, and our families watched. Then the president stepped forward to congratulate us.

I was now the eighth, and youngest ever, secretary of defense. But even though I was just forty-four, I was not the youngest in the group. The president was forty-three; Robert Kennedy was thirty-five. Like many of these men, I had grown up in the years between the world wars and had served as a young officer in World War II. President Kennedy knew I would bring to the military techniques of management from the business world, much as my Harvard colleagues and I had done as statistical control officers in the war. I was thrilled to be called again to work for my country.

quote:

The company was a pretty rough place. John [Bugas] later told a story about Harry Bennett, a navy prizefighter who had also started as the [Ford] children's bodyguard but had risen in power to where he had a big office in the basement of the main administration building. But that did not change his style. He liked to keep a loaded gun in his desk drawer and, somtimes, when a visitor came to see him, he would shoot into the wall over the visitor's shoulder.

quote:

On Thursday, December 8, 1960, seven weeks after I became president of Ford, I left my home in Ann Arbor early in the morning to drive to my office in Dearborn. I made a stop at the River Rouge Plant on the way, and when I finally reached headquarters at about 10:30 A.M., my secretary, Virginia Marshall, handed me a long list of phone messages. I had directed her to force me to return every call that came in--including complaints--so, without looking at the list, I handed it back and said, "Start down it."

About half an hour later, she announced, "Robert Kennedy is on the line." I had never met him (seven and a half years later I was to help carry his casket to the grave site in Arlington National Cemetery) and had no idea why he had called, but heh soon made it clear. "The president-elect would be grateful if you would meet with our brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver," he said.

I told him I would be happy to do so--although I did not know Sarge or have the faintest idea why he wanted to meet. I suggested the following Tuesday.

"No, no," said Robert Kennedy. "He wants to see you today."

I pointed out it was already nearly 11:00 A.M.

He replied, "You set the time and he'll be there."

So I said, "Four o'clock."

At four sharp, Sarge Shriver entered my office. He began the conversation by saying, "The president-elect has instructed me to offer you the position of secretary of the treasury."

"You're out of your mind," I said. "I'm not qualified for that."

"If you hold to that position," said Sarge, "I am authorized to sy Jack Kennedy wishes you to serve as secretary of defense."

"This is absurd!" I said. "I'm not qualified."

"Well, the president-elect at least hopes you will give him the courtesy of agreeing to meet with him tomorrow in Washington," Sarge countered. I could not say no.

mlmp08 posted:

joat mon posted:

quote:

The blue means it is some sort of inert TP round...as far as shape, distinguishing features, etc. it looks about right to be a PGU-15/B round (what it would be if it was A-10/GAU-8 TP) but that 2.5 cm would indicate that it is for a gun in 25mm, like someone in the TFR thread said, so that would be my professional assessment: 25mm TP, for the GAU-12 or Bushmaster cannon or the like. If I had some more experience with 25mm or 30mm I could probably give you a better answer, but my only personal experience is with the 20mm ammo for the Vulcan.

joat mon posted:

VikingSkull posted:

McNamara totally deserves the criticism he gets, and I think he understood that and was ok with it at the end. He gets some respect from me though because he's one of the only politicians I can think of that ended up admitting he hosed up royally, and was vocal about it in the hopes that it doesn't happen again. Of course it did with Iraq, but at least he tried.

The part of Fog of War where he discusses the firebombing of Japan is what turned my opinion of him. He wasn't just upset about his role, he came off as tortured by it. Being an atheist I don't believe in Hell, so if he deserved to go there I think the last part of his life was it.

quote:

The beginnings of all things are small, and the story of my involvement with Vietnam is no different. When John F. Kennedy became president, we faced a complex and growing crisis in Southeast Asia with sparse knowledge, scant experience, and simplistic assumptions. As time passed, we came to recognize that the problems plaguing South Vietnam and its embattled leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, were far more complicated than we had initially perceived. And we remained divided over how to deal with them.

Throughout the Kennedy years, we operated on two premises that ultimately proved contradictory. One was that the fall of South Vietnam to Communism would threaten the security of the United States and the Western World. The other was that only the South Vietnamese could defend their nation, and that America should limit its role to providing training and logistical support. In line with that latter view, we actually began planning for the phased withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1963, a step adamantly opposed by those who believed it could lead to the loss of South Vietnam and, very likely, all of Asia.

quote:

Like most Americans, I saw Communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony. In hindsight, of course, it is clear that they had no unified strategy after the late 1950s. But their split grew slowly and only gradually became apparent. At the time, Communism still seemed on the march. Mao Zedong and his followers had controlled China since 1949 and had fought with North Korea against the West; Nikita Khrushchev had predicted Communist victory through "wars of national liberation" in the Third World and had told the West, "We will bury you." His threat gained credulity when the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957, demonstrating its lead in space technology. The next year Khrushchev started turning up the heat on West Berlin. And now Castro had turned Cuba into a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere. We felt beset and at risk. This fear underlay our involvement in Vietnam.

quote:

It seemed obvious that the Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines during the 1950s. We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements--as they largely appear in hindsight--but as signs of a unified Communist drive for hegemony in Asia. This way of thinking had led Dean Acheson, President Truman's secretary of state, to call Ho Chi Minh "the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina."

quote:

Two developments after I became secretary of defense reinforced my way of thinking about Vietnam: the intensification of relations between Cuba and the Soviets, and a new wve of Soviet provocations in Berlin. Both seemed to underscore the aggressive intent of Communist policy. In that context, the danger of Vietnam's loss and, through falling dominoes, the loss of all Southeast Asia made it seemed reasonable to consider expanding the U.S. effort in Vietnam.

quote:

The irony of this gap was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department--John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent--had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we--certainly I--badly misread China's objectives nd mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh's movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.

quote:

In spite of the incoherence of our approach to South Vietnam during those early months, many of us--including the President and me--came to believe that the problem was such that only the South Vietnmese could deal with it. We could try to help them through training and logistical support, but we could not fight their war. That was our view then. Had we held to it, the whole history of the period would have been different.

quote:

Vietnam was far from the biggest problem in those early months of 1962 as we continued to get then Defense Department into shape. But unlike many issues that I delegated to Ros Gilpatric, I increasingly made Vietnam my personal responsibility. That was only right: it was the one place where Americans were in a shooting war, albeit as advisers. I felt a very heavy responsibility for it, and I got involved as deeply as I felt I could and be effective. That is what ultimately led people to call Vietnam McNamara's War.

As I came into closer contact with South Vietnam during 1962, I came to know its leader, President Ngo Dinh Diem. I participated in several long conferences with him beneath the whirring ceiling fans and gilded cornices of his office in Gia Long Palace. We thought that Diem aimed to move his people towards freedom and democracy. That he had studied at a Catholic seminary in New Jersey in the early 1950s seemed evidence that he shared Western values. As we got closer and closer to the situation, however, we came to learn otherwise. Diem, those around him, and the political structures that he built lacked a connection to the South Vietnamese people; he never developed a bond with them. We totally misjudged that.

Because he was uncommunicative and from such a different cultural background, Diem was an enigma to me and, indeed, to virtually every American who met him. I did not understand him. He appeared autocratic, suspicious, secretive, and insulated from his people.

quote:

Why were my comments about the political system in South Vietnam realistic while, in retrospect, those about military progress were overly optimistic?

The military reports reflected the picture presented by our military leaders at the conferences in Hawaii and South Vietnam. At each, I met with COMUSMACV Gen. Paul D. Harkins. Harkins was tall, handsome, and articulate; he looked and spoke exactly like a general should. He was protege of the scholarly Max Taylor, and while he lacked his mentor's intellectual caliber, he was very straightforward and persuasive.

General Harkins and his staff reported that South Vietnamese forces were pushing back the Vietcong and loosening their grip on the countryside. For example, at Honolulu on July 23, 1962, Harkins told me: "There is no doubt we are on the winning side. If our programs continue we can expect Vietcong actions to decline." I did not then and do not now believe that he or other officers consciously misled me. It went against their training and tradition. Besides, there were other reporting channels I could use to cross-check what the military told me--the CIA, the State Department, and the media, to cite only three.

The reasons for their mistaken optimism lay elsewhere. It is now clear they were receiving very inaccurate information from the South Vietnamese, who tended to report what they believed Americans wanted to hear.

[...]

Like many people, the U.S. commanders also indulged, to some extent, in wishful thinking. Moreover they--as did I--misunderstood the nature of the conflict. They viewed it primarily as a military operation when in fact it was a highly complex nationalistic and internecine struggle.

quote:

At my next meeting with General Harkins, in Honolulu on May 6, 1963, he told me we were continuing to make progress in the war. I therefore directed the military to prepare a plan for phasing out U.S. forces beginning with the withdrawal of 1,000 advisers by year's end.

About that time a political and religious crisis erupted across South Vietnam. Buddhists angry at the Diem regime's curbs on religious freedom launched protests that led to violent retaliation by Diem's security forces. This brutal response provoked more protests, including horrifying self-immolations by Buddhist monks. These events shocked and appalled me and others in Washington, and made Diem's rule appear more troubled than ever.

The situation was still chaotic in late August, when the Joint Chiefs delivered the withdrawal plan I had asked for. They stated their own belief, however, that no U.S. forces should be withdrawn until the crisis subsided. They suggested no decision be made to implement the withdrawal plan until late October.

The chiefs' wish to put off the decision underscored an important difference between two camps within the administration. Both saw our mission as training the South Vietnamese to defend themselves. But one believed we should stay until the South Vietnamese possessed that capability, no matter how long it took. The other thought we should limit our training to a finite period and then pul out. If the South Vietnamese had not learned to defend themselves by then, it would mean they were untrainable. The issue lurked beneath the surface and was never fully discussed or resolved. It was to have an important influence on a major decision by the president on October 2, 1963.

Myoclonic Jerk posted:

iyaayas - I think the problem with Rolling Thunder wasn't so much the fact that it was micromanaged, but that it was based on the flawed conception that the enemy's will to fight could be broken by strategic bombing. I don't deny that it was poorly executed and managed, but the problem was on a more basic, conceptual level. Does that sound right?

VikingSkull posted:

Then there's the "let's use the same attack approach every time we enter the North" aspect that's loving idiotic, and that mentality stayed the same until that F-117 got whacked in Bosnia.

mlmp08 posted:

Ruse posted:

This came in the mail a few days ago:

Thanks to this thread, it's a great read so far!