It left many in the SR-71 program confused

Sunday, December 8th, 2024

The CIA’s secret Oxcart program wrapped up, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and the men moved on:

If you are career Air Force or CIA, you go where you are assigned. Ken Collins was recruited by the Air Force into the SR-71 program. Because the A-12 program was classified, no one in the SR-71 program had any idea Collins had already put in hundreds of hours flying in the Mach 3 airplane. “It left many in the SR-71 program confused. It surprised many people when it appeared I already knew how to fly the aircraft that was supposedly just built. They didn’t have a need-to-know what I had spent the last six years of my life doing. They didn’t learn for decades,” not until the Oxcart program was declassified, in 2007.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 1 Comment »

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Jim says:

December 9, 2024 at 8:55 am

Many, many such cases.

Isegoria: Yes, I had many of the same concerns about non-representative samples and range restriction. (It’s good to see you back, Dr. Charlton. I hope this means you find this a blog worth reading.)
T. Beholder: And eventually, you run out of new players. Why? It worked for a while. Until it didn’t. Three years later—1997—TSR collapsed. Well, that, and crappy editors, and crappy management (thus lack of playtesting or in some cases even review by someone numerate). I was the Gen Con coordinator. Oooh. Why wouldn’t he tell us about Gen Con, then? Including its $CURRENT_YEAR state, and so on. Spanked us. Hard. Because Wizards figured out what TSR never did: You don’t win by flooding the market for 7...
Bruce G. Charlton: It all depends on the population that was studied; because simple reaction times correlate with “g” – general intelligence (measured by IQ testing). If the population studied was, for example, college students from a particular university; then this is essentially selecting a relatively narrow band of IQ – and therefore narrowing the range of reaction times to Much less than the IQ range across the world. i.e. IQ of student subjects would be high enough to get...
Mike in Boston: Why do we hear so much about companies like UFC and TSR that, let’s be honest, the world could do without? Maybe it’s because they were created by entrepreneurs with a real creative spark and clear vision. What discourages entrepreneurs like that from creating companies that would actually improve people’s material welfare, instead of distracting them from their sorry circumstances with creative new forms for entertainment? It’s overregulation. The kind of creative...
Phileas Frogg: Pacing and quality matter for sustainability. It’s why the UFC doesn’t push it’s events too far in terms of numbers per year. 46 events in 2014 was the company’s all time high, and since then it’s settled into a sustainable 41-42 events/year, with about 1 marquee event/month. The lesson is clear: Don’t oversaturate your own market, or you’ll get diminishing returns.
T. Beholder: That reality stands in sharp contrast to what the US military demonstrated in Operation Absolute Resolve. [...] The mission concluded with zero American casualties and zero loss of equipment. It was a near-flawless demonstration of a capability that takes decades to build and years to sustain. So, sneaking works well at night, especially when one is allowed to ride in and ride out? Sure. Why would it not be different? That success is even more striking when viewed against earlier US...
McChuck: Night actions are great for raids, but they are not sustainable in a prolonged war, except for specialized troops. Everybody has to sleep sometime.
Bruce: There was a huge sex slave trade for most of human history. That’s bound to affect the last few thousand years of evolution. Where Worthy says ‘hunting’ maybe try ‘sex’? Stalking, Skulking, and Speed/Power.
Jacob G.: The interesting question in my mind is what has been driving the proliferation of blue eye genes in Northern Europe these last few thousand years. Poor reaction time is probably not it. Some theories: 1. The hit to reaction time comes with a better sense of timing as per Morgan Worthy. Based on his positions/eye color correlations I would guess this would select to some percentage of the population and then we would have an equilibrium. His correlations generally show the few having blue eyes...
Bob Sykes: P.S. The Venezuelan operation failed. The Maduro regime is still in power, Maduro is a national hero, and US oil companies want nothing to do with Venezuela oil. There may be some behind the scene payoffs and agreements, but that possibility remains to be seen. The naval blockade is already past its use-by date, and random piracy of oil tankers will achieve nothing other than a world wide tanker war, all against all.
Bob Sykes: Col. Macgregor refers to SOCOM as boutique forces, and rightly so. They can only be used for small actions that have a high probability of success, and low casualties, and under conditions of full spectrum US supremacy. They are tiny, and usually deploy as squad size units. They are on the ground only momentarily, and any actual fighting is at least a partial mission failure. As soon as you want to seize and hold land, you start at the battalion level, and move on up to the army group level.
James James: The Venezuela operation had 7 American casualties.
Isegoria: I’m glad you’re enjoying Morgan Worthy’s eye-color hypothesis, Bruce and Handle — and I’ll definitely keep my eyes peeled for any red-eyed skulkers.
Bruce: Maybe the little soundproofed padded room for listening to rock and roll from ‘Dream Makers’ was safe.
Bruce: God bless Harlan Ellison.
Bruce: Like Handle said. This is great stuff. So Blue-eyed devils are the best ambush hunters, black-eyed demons are the best chase hunters, and to my blooshot hazel eyes it looks like the inbetween eye colors are for skulking, carrion eating bad hunters. Worthy does say that skulkers are a little smarter than the other two, because we have to overcome our crap hunting incapacities. Bram Stoker’s vampires are red-eyed skulkers.
McChuck: I wanted to know how Relativity worked. Along the way, I realized that was the wrong question. So I came up with and eventually solved my own question: “What causes motion?” https://vixra.org/abs/25 09.0012
Adept: “No, the hard part is usually coming up with a worthwhile question.” Oh man, this is not even close. Worthwhile questions are a dime a dozen. The hard part is the transmission step: Selling the solution. One must be a shameless self-marketer, and also psychologically sturdy — perhaps even truly aggressive — for this always seems to invite conflict with dour critics, bureaucratic red tape wielders, opportunistic scammers, and the schoolmarmish gatekeepers of the status quo...
Bill: “…so many people who do well in school never amount to anything.” I have the feeling that this is by design.
Handle: I’ve got to express my gratitude for you bringing this thesis to my attention. It’s fairly rare that I come into contact with a macro biological or physiological concept that I’ve never heard about before and seems novel and intriguing. I’m not yet totally sold on the theory, but there’s enough even in these excerpts to make it seem plausible at the very least.

Isegoria

It left many in the SR-71 program confused

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