In December 2022, Commander Yvonne Gray took the command of HMNZS Manawanui:
Gray, originally an officer in the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, moved to New Zealand in 2012. In 2024 the vessel carried out three deployments to the South West Pacific, including visits to Kermadec Islands, Samoa, Tokelau and Niue. In its final deployment the vessel sailed from Devonport on 28 September, intending to return to port on 1 November.
On the evening of 5 October 2024, the ship ran aground around one nautical mile (1.9 km; 1.2 mi) off Siumu, on the south coast of Upolu island, Samoa, whilst carrying out survey work to a reef in rough seas and high winds. Commander Yvonne Gray gave the order to abandon the ship.
On the evening of 5 October 2024, the ship ran aground around one nautical mile (1.9 km; 1.2 mi) off Siumu, on the south coast of Upolu island, Samoa, whilst carrying out survey work to a reef in rough seas and high winds. Commander Yvonne Gray gave the order to abandon the ship.
Rescue efforts were managed by the New Zealand Rescue Coordination Centre and the Royal New Zealand Air Force deployed a P-8A Poseidon aircraft to assist. The evacuation began at 7:52 pm on 5 October.
Due to challenging weather conditions it took five hours for the lifeboats to reach the shore. One of the rescue boats flipped over during the journey and its occupants walked to shore on the reef.
The vessel caught fire by 6:40 am on 6 October and capsized and sank by 9:00 am.
At least 17 people were injured in the incident, many from cuts and abrasions from walking on the reef, and three received hospital treatment, including one for a dislocated shoulder.
[…]
The vessel is the first New Zealand naval vessel to be unintentionally sunk since World War II and the first to be lost in peacetime.
The French refused to abandon the Fontanone line when the Austrians counter-attacked; soldiers urinated on muskets that had become too hot to handle from the constant firing.
[…]
‘Bonaparte advanced in front,’ recalled Petit, ‘and exhorted to courage and firmness all the corps he met with; it was visible that his presence reanimated them.’
At this point the Austrian Archduke Joseph, Archduke Charles’s younger brother, crossed the Fontanone with his infantry – the sides were too steep for cavalry or artillery. The French failed to dislodge him and his men started building a trestle bridge, covered by artillery firing canister shot which flayed the French brigade sent to stop them. By 2 p.m. Marengo had fallen: the Austrians had brought eighty guns into play, the Fontanone was being crossed everywhere and Gardanne’s division was broken, fleeing the field, though not before it had bought Napoleon 3 ½ hours’ respite with which to organize his counter-attack. Only Kellermann’s cavalry brigade, carefully retiring squadron by squadron, intimidated the Austrians from releasing their numerically superior cavalry force.
[…]
By this point the Austrians were taunting the French, twirling the bearskins of dead French grenadiers around on their sabres.
[…]
Napoleon, who now had only Monnier’s division and the Consular Guard in reserve, had sent desperate word to Desaix at 11 a.m. to return with Boudet’s division as quickly as possible. ‘I had thought to attack the enemy, instead it is he who has attacked me,’ went his message; ‘in the name of God, come back if you still can!’
[…]
The French moved backwards in good order, one battalion at a time, fighting as they went. It was an utter test of discipline not to succumb to the temptation to break ranks under those circumstances, and it paid off. The day continued very hot, with no water, little artillery support, and sustained attacks from the Austrian cavalry, but some units retreated steadily from 9.30 a.m. to about 4 p.m. over 5 miles, never breaking ranks.
Napoleon calmly called out encouragement and exuded leadership ‘with his accustomed sangfroid’, in the words of one of his guards, ensuring that his infantry, cavalry and paltry artillery each supported one another.
‘The Consul seemed to brave death,’ recalled Petit, ‘and to be near it, for the bullets were seen more than once to drive up the ground between his horse’s legs.’
He had now completely used up his reserves, had barely 6,000 infantry across a 5-mile front, with 1,000 cavalry and only 6 usable guns, and his army was exhausted, desperately thirsty, low on ammunition and one-third hors de combat, but he behaved as if victory were certain.
He even managed to be light-hearted; noticing that the horse Marbot was riding was slightly wounded in the leg, he ‘took me by the ear and said, laughing, “You expect me to lend you my horses for you to treat them in this way?”
[…]
‘We have gone back far enough today,’ Napoleon harangued his men. ‘Soldiers, remember it is my custom to bivouac on the field of battle!’
[…]
When the Austrians came forward at 5 p.m., the front of their centre regiments were ripped apart by canister fire from Marmont’s battery. As at Rivoli, a lucky shot hit an ammunition wagon that exploded and caused chaos. The Austrians recoiled sharply and the shock effect was serious, especially once Boudet’s division advanced upon them. Aggressive Austrian charges soon threw Boudet on the defensive, but just as nearly 6,000 Austrian infantry fired a musket volley and then charged with their bayonets, Kellermann unleashed his cavalry, which had moved up concealed by vines in the trees.
[…]
The French army then advanced across the whole front. It was at this triumphant moment that Desaix was struck in the chest and killed. ‘Why am I not allowed to weep?’ a grief-stricken Napoleon said on being told the news, but he had to concentrate on directing the next assault.
Kellermann’s next attacks sent Austrian cavalry charging back into their own infantry, completely disorganizing them and giving Lannes, Monnier and the Consular Guard the chance to complete the victory by moving forward on all fronts. ‘The fate of a battle is the result of a single instant – a thought,’ Napoleon was later to say about Marengo. ‘The decisive moment comes, a moral spark is lit, and the smallest reserve accomplishes victory.’
Austrian troops who had fought bravely all day simply cracked under the shock and strain of seeing victory snatched from them, and fled back to Alessandria in disorder.
[…]
When the news of Marengo reached Paris, government bonds that had been standing at 11 francs six months earlier, and 29 just before the battle, shot up to 35 francs.
[…]
Napoleon had worked his three arms of infantry, artillery and cavalry together perfectly at Marengo, but it was still a very lucky victory, won largely by the shock value of Desaix’s arrival on the field at precisely the right psychological moment, and Kellermann’s superbly timed cavalry charges. The French reconquered a plain in one hour that it had taken the Austrians eight to occupy. The conscript French troops, guided by the veterans, had acquitted themselves very well.
‘After a great battle,’ wrote Captain Blaze, ‘there is plenty of food for the crows and the bulletin-writers.’
Napoleon had made three major errors: in going onto the plain in the first place, in not anticipating Melas’s attack and in sending Desaix so far away.
[…]
Napoleon also invented some last words for Desaix: ‘Go tell the First Consul that I die with the regret of having not done enough to live in posterity.’ (In fact he had died instantaneously.)
[…]
The view of Desaix’s aide-de-camp Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary was that ‘If General Desaix had delayed an hour in arriving, we’d have been driven into the Po.’
The day after the battle, Napoleon wrote to the other consuls that he was ‘in the deepest pain over the death of the man I loved and respected the most’.
He took Savary and Desaix’s other aide-de-camp, Jean Rapp, onto his staff as a sign of respect, and he allowed the 9th Légère, which Desaix had been leading when he was killed, to sew the word ‘Incomparable’ in gold onto their standard.
He had Desaix’s corpse embalmed, and a medal struck in his honour, as well as one commemorating Marengo.
All that he said to Kellermann after the battle was, ‘You made a pretty good charge,’ which infuriated him, especially as he had gushed to Bessières, ‘The Guard cavalry covered itself with glory today.’
(Kellermann is supposed to have replied in anger, ‘I’m glad you are satisfied, general, for it has placed the crown on your head’, but it is doubtful that he really did.
Privately, Napoleon admitted to Bourrienne that Kellermann had ‘made a lucky charge. He did it just at the right moment. We are much indebted to him. You see what trifling circumstances decide these affairs.’
[…]
Perhaps the best summing up of the battle was Napoleon’s terse statement to Brune and Dumas: ‘You see, there were two battles on the same day; I lost the first; I gained the second.’
[…]
On June 16 Napoleon offered Emperor Francis peace once again, on the same basis as Campo Formio, writing: ‘I exhort Your Majesty to listen to the cry of humanity.’ In his Order of the Day he claimed the Austrians had recognized ‘that we are only fighting each other so that the English can sell their sugar and coffee at a higher price’.
The use of drones in warfare has its origins in World War II, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):
Joseph Kennedy Jr., President Kennedy’s older brother, died in a secret U.S. Navy drone operation against the Germans. The covert mission, dubbed Operation Aphrodite, targeted a highly fortified Nazi missile site inside Germany. The plan was for the older Kennedy to pilot a modified B-24 bomber from England and over the English Channel while his crew armed 22,000 pounds of explosives piled high in the cargo hold. Once the explosives were wired, the crew and pilot needed to quickly bail out. Flying not far away, a mother ship would begin remotely controlling the unmanned aircraft as soon as the crew bailed out. Inside the bomber’s nose cone were two cameras that would help guide the drone into its Nazi target.
The explosive being used was called Torpex, a relatively new and extremely volatile chemical compound. Just moments before Joseph Kennedy Jr. and his crew bailed out, the Torpex caught fire, and the aircraft exploded midair, killing everyone on board. The Navy ended its drone program, but the idea of a pilotless aircraft caught the eye of general of the Army Henry “Hap” Arnold. On Victory over Japan Day, General Arnold made a bold assertion. “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he said. He was off by four wars, but otherwise he was right.
Well before World War 2, Jacobsen notes, a few visionaries saw the potential of drones:
Nikola Tesla mastered wireless communication in 1893, years before any of his fellow scientists were even considering such a thing. At the Electrical Exhibition in Madison Square Garden in 1898, Tesla gave a demonstration in which he directed a four-foot-long steel boat using radio remote control. Audiences were flabbergasted. Tesla’s pilotless boat seemed to many to be more a magic act than the scientific breakthrough it was. Ever a visionary, Tesla also foresaw a military application for his invention. “I called an official in Washington with a view of offering him the information to the government and he burst out laughing upon telling him what I had accomplished,” Tesla wrote. This made unfortunate sense—the military was still using horses for transport at the time. Tesla’s friend writer Mark Twain also envisioned a military future in remote control and offered to act as Tesla’s agent in peddling the “destructive terror which you have been inventing.” Twain suggested the Germans might be good clients, considering that, at the time, they were the most scientifically advanced country in the world. In the end, no government bought Tesla’s invention or paid for his patents. The great inventor died penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, and by then, the Germans had developed remote control on their own and were wreaking havoc on ground forces across Europe. The Germans’ first war robot was a remote-controlled minitank called Goliath, and it was about the size of a bobsled. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives, which the Nazis drove into enemy bunkers and tanks using remote control. Eight thousand Goliaths were built and used in battle by the Germans, mostly on the Eastern Front, where Russian soldiers outnumbered German soldiers nearly three to one. With no soldiers to spare, the Germans needed to keep the ones they had out of harm’s way.
In America, the Army Air Forces developed its first official drone wing after the war, for use during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. There, drones were sent through the mushroom cloud, their operators flying them by remote control from an airborne mother ship called Marmalade flying nearby. To collect radioactive samples, the drones had been equipped with air-collection bags and boxlike filter-paper holders. Controlling the drones in such conditions was difficult. Inside the mushroom cloud, one drone, code-named Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher than its flight path,” according to declassified memos about the drone wing’s performance there. Fox’s “bomb doors warped, all the cushions inside the aircraft burst and its inspection plates and escape hatch blew off.” Remarkably, the drone pilot maintained control from several miles away. Had he witnessed such a thing, Nikola Tesla might have smiled.
During the second set of atomic tests, called Operation Sandstone, in April of 1948, the drones were again used in a job deemed too dangerous for airmen. During an eighteen-kiloton atomic blast called Zebra, however, a manned aircraft accidentally flew through a mushroom cloud, and after this, the Air Force made the decision that because the pilot and crew inside the aircraft had “suffered no ill effects,” pilots should be flying atomic-sampling missions, not drones.
John Antal composed a nightmare scenario for the US military, The Dictator’s Dream:
A world away, the war in Gaza continued unabated, and after suffering nearly 6,000 Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks in northern Israel, the Middle East had exploded. Israel launched a full-scale invasion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah forces north of the Litani River. Reacting swiftly, Hezbollah launched thousands of missiles towards Israel. A day later, Iran and its surrogates in Yemen launched massive rocket, missile, and drone attacks aimed at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and other Israeli cities and settlements.
Israel’s Iron Dome could not handle the overwhelming attack, and as a result, Israeli casualties dramatically mounted, and towns and villages burned. Hoping to avoid a war prior to the Presidential election, the United States first hesitated and then finally committed military forces to support their Jewish allies. In a massive movement of combat power, the United States military engaged with significant naval and air forces against Iran and its proxies. Consequently, Iran and its surrogates targeted American forces in the Middle East. The United States was now in a shooting war and taking casualties.
[…]
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russian forces were attacking relentlessly, regardless of their horrendous losses in men and equipment. The Ukrainians were fighting bravely, desperately, but the weight of the Russian attacks forced a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defenses. Ukrainian forces fell back in disorder and a mass refugee exodus from Ukraine began. The US and NATO rushed to respond with an emergency resupply operation, but it was proving to be too little, too late. With mounting Ukrainian losses in both manpower and territory, the dictator expected Kyiv to surrender to a triumphant Russia despite American efforts.
As the Americans were contending with a war in the Middle East and a faltering Ukraine, they were experiencing chaos at home. The contentious Presidential election erupted in violence. On November 7, when the winner of the election was announced, riots broke out in major American cities. The dictator’s hybrid warfare forces, already surreptitiously positioned in the US, facilitated, and supported these riots. Sabotage and violent “false flag” killings raged in cities across the US. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries were attacked by explosive laden drones. Forest fires raged across the American southwest, started by the dictator’s hybrid special forces teams and facilitated by drug cartel gangs. America’s national, military, and police forces struggled to maintain order. Sabotage, mass shootings, transportation disruptions, internet and communications outages, and attacks on the electrical grid, along with cyber-attacks from “unknown actors,” disrupted American society. Just in time logistics broke down. Store shelves were soon bare, and looting was rampant. Several major metropolises plunged into darkness. Disorder consumed America at home and abroad.
As this hybrid war played out in the United States, the dictator decided it was time to act against the renegade province that he had sworn to bring to heel. Rather than an outright invasion, his plan was more subtle, involving a siege and an ultimatum for a “peaceful” surrender. First, his military forces imposed a naval blockade, having practiced it multiple times in the prior 18 months during massive “punishment drills.” To increase the seriousness of this blockade, the dictator’s naval and air forces deployed sea mines to block the major trade routes. The dictator then ratcheted up the pressure by imposing a naval quarantine. This included halting, boarding, and detouring every ship sailing into the quarantine zone to the mainland for confiscation. The dictator dared any foreign power to challenge these actions and declared that his air, sea, and rocket forces would only respond with force if provoked.
You can also listen to Antal read the story and discuss it:
“Useful fiction” presents possible scenarios intended to develop creativity and strengthen foresight — solving problems in the short term and creating solutions for the long-run.
The increasing speed of battlefield adaptation requires the U.S. Army to innovate and develop courses of action very rapidly.
American deterrence has been dramatically affected by events in the past several years.
The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened, with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from the suburbs of Los Angeles who’d played the sousaphone in junior high.
And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.
The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife. Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately — and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in through an unlocked side door, and he tied up the couple by himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway, where they were waiting in the car.
Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill everyone. They had only buck knives.
They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator — misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.
[…]
But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months.
[…]
As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of LAPD detectives — one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca — failed to share information, believing the crimes unconnected.
[…]
Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.
[…]
[Susan] Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder — that of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson — and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.
[…]
These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.
They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor — bright buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts.
They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.
In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals — even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared — it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.
A forward defense was the simplest option. If the enemy tried to attack through Wadi Al Sirree, he would have to fight through Davis’s men first. It would require the preparation of a platoon battle position east of the tank ditch to deny the enemy access into the trails. He would have to improve their present fighting positions and antitank ditch with mines and wire, thus blocking the enemy’s advance into the valley. This option would maximize simplicity, mass, and unity of command. Sometimes the simplest plan was the best one.
Davis’s second option was a reverse-slope defense at the eastern edge of the four trails that led into the valley. This course of action called for the entire platoon to reposition to the east, abandoning the hill that overlooked the tank ditch. A reverse-slope defense would deny the platoon clear observation of the enemy as he approached the valley, but it would provide better protection from enemy direct and indirect fires. The concept was to allow the enemy to breach the tank ditch and mines, place obstacles to force the enemy to move along the narrow northern trails, and then destroy the enemy at close range as he entered the valley. This course of action maximized security and economy of force.
The third option was to block the enemy in each of the four trails that led into Wadi Al Sirree. Davis knew that he had more short-range weapons than long-range weapons. He could divide the platoon into antiarmor ambush teams and assign each team a trail that led into the valley. The platoon could engage the attacker’s lead vehicles in selected short-range combat areas along each trail. By fighting a close-range battle in the trails that led into the valley, the platoon could pick off the enemy one at a time. The enemy wouldn’t see the defenders until it was too late. This option would maximize surprise and offensive action.
The author, Antal, also includes this amusing quote:
”You will usually find that the enemy has three courses of action open to him, and of these he will adopt a fourth.”
— Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke
You don’t have long to decide:
”Thus decisive action remains the first prerequisite for success in war. Everybody, from the highest commander to the youngest soldiers, must be conscious of the fact that inactivity and lost opportunities weigh heavier than do errors in the choice of means.”
— Truppenfuhrung, German Field Service Regulations, 1933
Andrew Roberts summarizes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s first few months in power:
In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.
‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders… I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’ Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.
He had ordered the covert formation of a 30,000-strong Army of the Reserve based at Dijon on January 7, 1800:
He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal. Although Napoleon wouldn’t be travelling with elephants, he did have Gribeauval 8-pounder and 4-pounder cannon, whose barrels weighed over a quarter of a ton, to heave over the mountain range. Snow was still thick on the ground in early May, when the advance began, so Marmont devised sledges for the barrels made out of hollowed-out tree-trunks, which one hundred men at a time hauled up the Alps and then down again, to drumbeats. (Since the Italian side is much steeper than the French, they found it harder going down than up.)
Money and supplies were sent ahead to the monasteries and hostelries along the route, and local guides were hired and sworn to secrecy.
[…]
‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.
[…]
In the strategy meeting he allegedly asked Bourrienne where he thought the decisive battle would be fought. ‘How the devil should I know?’ answered his Brienne-educated private secretary. ‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps. It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.
[…]
In all 51,400 men crossed the Alps, with 10,000 horses and 750 mules. They went by single file in some places, and had to start at dawn every day to reduce the risk of avalanches once the sun had risen.
[…]
Napoleon rode a horse for almost the whole journey over the Alps, and a mule (as it was more sure of foot) for the iciest stretch around Saint-Pierre.
[…]
It was at this stage of the campaign that the sheer ruthlessness that helped make Napoleon so formidable a commander revealed itself once again. Instead of marching south to relieve starving Genoa, as his troops and even his senior commanders assumed he would do, he wheeled eastwards towards Milan to seize the huge supply depot there and cut off Melas’s line of retreat towards the Mincio river and Mantua. Ordering Masséna to hold out for as long as possible so that he would tie down Ott’s besieging force, Napoleon outfoxed Melas, who had taken it for granted that Napoleon would try to save Genoa. He had therefore left Nice and marched back from Turin to Alessandria to try to head Napoleon off.
[…]
At 6.30 p.m. that same day Napoleon entered Milan by the Verceil Gate in the pouring rain and installed himself at the archducal palace, staying up until 2 a.m. dictating letters, receiving Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who had run the Cisalpine Republic, setting up a new city government and releasing political prisoners interned by the Austrians, who had used Milan as their regional headquarters. He also read Melas’s captured despatches from Vienna, which told him the enemy’s strengths, dispositions and state of morale.
[…]
Genoa surrendered on June 4, by which time around 30,000 of its 160,000 inhabitants had died of starvation and of diseases associated with malnutrition, as had 4,000 French soldiers. Another 4,000 soldiers who were fit enough to march out were allowed to return to France with the honours of war, and a further 4,000 sick and wounded were transported to France in Royal Navy ships under Admiral Lord Keith, who had blockaded the port but saw the advantage of evacuating so many French away from the theatre of war.
Masséna’s health was broken, not least because he had insisted on only eating what his troops did. He never wholly forgave Napoleon for not rescuing him. Equally, Napoleon – who was never besieged in the whole of his career – criticized Masséna for not having held out for ten days longer, recalling when in exile on St Helena, ‘A few old men and some women might have died of hunger, but then he would not have surrendered Genoa. If one thinks always of humanity – only of humanity – one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan.’
The D-21 drone used a ramjet, just like its Oxcart mothership, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and needed to be launched at supersonic speed:
For public safety reasons, the plan was to launch the triplesonic drone off the coast of California in March of 1966 for the first test, and to prepare his pilots, Colonel Slater had them swim laps each day in the Area 51 pool, first in bathing suits and then with their pressure suits on. “We’d hoist the guys up over the water in a pulley and then drop them in the pool. As soon as they hit the water the first time, the pressure suit inflated, so we had to have that fixed,” Slater recalls. When it came time to practice an actual landing in a large body of water, the Agency’s highest-ranking officer on base, Werner Weiss, got the Coast Guard to seal off a large section of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir of water in the United States, located just east of Las Vegas.
[…]
Both aircraft flew west until they were a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of California. There, the M-21, piloted by Bill Park, prepared for the D-21 launch. A camera in Slater’s airplane would capture the launch on 16-millimeter film. Down below, on the dark ocean surface, a rescue boat waited. Park hit Ignite, and the drone launched up and off the M-21. But during separation, the drone pitched down instead of up and instantly split the mother aircraft in half. Miraculously, the drone hit neither Park nor Torick, who were both trapped inside.
The crippled aircraft began to tumble through the sky, falling for nearly ten thousand feet. Somehow, both men managed to eject. Alive and now outside the crashing, burning airplane, both men were safely tethered to their parachutes. Remarkably, neither of the men was hit by the burning debris falling through the air. Both men made successful water landings. But, as Slater recalls, an unforeseen tragedy occurred. “Our rescue boat located Bill Park, who was fine. But by the time the boat got to Ray Torick, he was tied up in his lanyard and had drowned.”
Kelly Johnson was devastated. “He impulsively and emotionally decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air Force and the Agency,” Johnson’s deputy Ben Rich recalled in his 1994 memoir about the Lockheed Skunk Works. Rich asked Johnson why. “I will not risk any more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare,” Johnson said. But the Air Force did not let the Mach 3 drone program go away so quickly. They created a new program to launch the drone from underneath a B-52 bomber, which was part of Strategic Air Command. President Johnson’s deputy secretary of defense, Cyrus Vance, told Kelly Johnson, “We need this program to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.”
Three years later, in 1969, the D-21 drone finally made its first reconnaissance mission, over China, launched off a B-52. The drone flew into China and over the Lop Nur nuclear facility but had then somehow strayed off course into Soviet Siberia, run out of fuel, and crashed. The suggestion was that the drone’s guidance system had failed on the way home, and it was never seen or heard from again. At least, not for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s, a CIA officer showed up in Ben Rich’s office at Skunk Works with a mysterious present for him. “Ben, do you recognize this?” the man asked Rich as he handed him a hunk of titanium. “Sure I do,” Rich said. What Ben Rich was holding in his hand was a piece of composite material loaded with the radar-absorbing coating that Lovick and his team had first developed for Lockheed four decades before. Asked where he got it, the CIA officer explained that it had been a gift to the CIA from a KGB agent in Moscow. The agent had gotten it from a shepherd in Siberia, who’d found it in the Siberian tundra while herding his sheep. According to Rich, “The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.”
Marc Andreessen recently commented on the popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley:
Charles Manson’s cult introduction method was daily dosing of LSD and speed. Today we do that to ourselves with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA, nitrous and Adderall.
I was never particularly interested in the Manson murders, but enough different people had recommended the book that I gave it a go, and the story is even weirder than I’d imagined.
First, it was an odd time:
Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity.
Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.
This passed me by when I was just listening to it, but reading it I realized I’d never heard of Zager and Evans or their number-one song:
If you go back and revisit the Top 40 from each year, it’s fascinating how many hits have disappeared down the memory hole.
The murderers were an unlikely bunch:
Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”
Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.
In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the witch.”
And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys — a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.
That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe. None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch — whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows — the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson, who had commanded them to take their trip that night.
They all seemed to have developed drug problems before Manson took them to the next level.
I wouldn’t expect any of them to be any good at violence, except Tex.
Another detail that passed me by while listening was the name of the film Roman Polanski was working on overseas when his wife was murdered:
The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
That is perhaps the most late-60s, early-70s movie imaginable — and it did get made a few years later, directed by Mike Nichols and starring George C. Scott.
The attack is premeditated:
Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to jump over an embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver.
I had assumed that the .22 revolver was a small gun, but I looked up what a Buntline revolver was, and it is not small gun:
The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. […] Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12-inch (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns.
In Tombstone, Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) carries a Colt Buntline Special.
The murder weapon was apparently missing its trigger guard:
So many details don’t make sense to me:
At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio. He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!” Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.
Visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse, after midnight, to sell him a clock radio?
I’m curious how Tex cocked the hammer on that single-action revolver, with a buck knife in his left hand, because that first victim might have had a chance to get away with survivable injuries if he’d just floored it before taking all four shots.
Even if you’re in a nice neighborhood, you might want to lock all your doors and windows:
Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
This is where Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood diverges drastically from what happened in our timeline. Hollywood stuntman and tough guy Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), while high as a kite, just handles it:
What really happened does share a few elements:
Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for friends, asked, “What time is it?”
Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.”
Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him. “Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.
In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.
If this were fiction, I’d be baffled that the author threw the Folger’s coffee heiress into the story — but it gets weirder:
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.
On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas.
The Thirteen Chairs (French: 12 + 1; Italian: Una su 13) was released posthumously:
You really, really don’t want to find yourself taking orders from deranged criminals:
In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s, throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.
Sebring struggled to his feet and protested — couldn’t this man see that Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights.
Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”
“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.
Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins, attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground, pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again, with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.
I would expect a guy who’d survived the war in Poland to put up a fight. I’m assuming the 10-day mescaline trip left him impaired.
Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her neck, ran down the hall and out of the house through a side door. She was halfway across the front lawn, her nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take me.”
Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh, bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole, plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.
[…]
Watson came back inside and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.
“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.
Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood. It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.”
[…]
When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly.
Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) in the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.
And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos are really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine…
And it just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.
[…]
A choose your own adventure is just a series of binary choices, maybe a few 3 pronged choices to mix it up. That clearly can’t teach anything.
But Antal’s writing and veteran understanding of the concepts can, and he exploits the format perfectly to REALLY creates painful choices and moments of indecision. Your pre-knowledge of even very broad pop-military concepts, or study of history, is GREATLY rewarded. Your observing the map ever so much longer is rewarded. And your attention to detail is rewarded. Your intuitive understanding of leadership or your having read about the subject, or your complete lack of any such instincts, plays a shockingly impactful role for leading what are static words and binary decisions.
I’m certain there are skilled military officers and professionals who could go in this and get the best ending right, first try… But I doubt it’d be a majority of even actual infantry officers.
Likewise an attentive amatuer or student of history could probably do it…
But I died shot by friendly fire my first read/playthrough, so not me.
[…]
Life isn’t a videogame. There isn’t instant feedback when you’ve screwed yourself and everyone around you. The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back and every subsequent decision is just determining exact conditions and flavor text of how that failure will happen…
And absolutely all of it makes sense, is tied into the core principles Antal is teaching, and has a necessary logic such that once you see it you understand why that could only have ended that way.
I’m being incredibly vague because I don’t want to spoil the book. Failing and getting the bad endings is the real teaching part of the exercise, and if it is “Spoiled” the actual teaching value is greatly reduced.
That’s your cue to get your own copy and run through it.
Preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival-training operations, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but the high-desert survival training at Area 51 felt different — and would involve psychological warfare by mock enemy Chinese:
“I crawled slowly through the brambles, bugs, and mud for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, I hit a trip wire and alarms went off. A glaring spotlight came on and ten Chinese men in uniform grabbed me and dragged me to one of their jeeps.” Collins was handcuffed, driven for a while, put into a second vehicle, and taken to so-called Chinese interrogation headquarters. There, he was stripped naked and searched. “A doctor proceeded to examine every orifice the human body has, from top to bottom—literally,” which, Collins believes, “was more to humiliate and break down my moral defenses than anything else.” Naked, he was led down a dimly lit hallway and pushed into a concrete cell furnished with a short, thin bed made of wood planks. “I had no blanket, I was naked, and it was very cold. They gave me a bucket to be used only when I was told.”
For days, Collins went through simulated torture that included sleep deprivation, humiliation, extreme temperature fluctuation, and hunger, all the while naked, cold, and under surveillance by his captors. “The cell had one thick wooded door with a hole for viewing. This opening had a metal window that would clank open and shut. A single bright light was on and when I was about to doze off, the light would flash off, which would immediately snap me out of sleep.” For food, he was given watery soup, two thin pepper pods, and two bits of mysterious meat. “I had no water to drink and I was always watched. I didn’t know day from night so there was no sense of time. The temperature varied from hot to very cold. The voice through the viewing window shouted demands.”
Soon Collins began to hallucinate. Now it was interrogation time. Naked, he was led to a small room by two armed guards. He stood in front of his Chinese interrogators, who sat behind a small desk. They grilled him about his name, rank, and why he was spying on China. The torturous routine continued for what Collins guessed was several more days. Then one day, instead of being taken to his interrogators, he was told that he was free to go.
But halfway across the world, on November 1, 1963, Ken Collins’s experience was being mirrored for real. A CIA pilot named Yeh Changti had been flying a U-2 spy mission over a nuclear facility in China when he was shot down, captured by the Chinese Communist government, and tortured. Yeh Changti was a member of the Thirty-Fifth Black Cat U-2 Squadron, a group of Taiwanese Chinese Nationalist pilots (as opposed to the Communist Chinese, who inhabited the mainland) who worked covert espionage missions for the CIA. In the 1960s, the Black Cats flew what would prove to be the deadliest missions in the U-2’s fifty-five-year history, all of which were flown out of a secret base called Taoyuan on the island of Taiwan. When the CIA declassified most of the U-2 program, in 1998, “no information was released about Yeh Changti or the Black Cats,” says former Black Cat pilot Hsichun Hua. The program, in entirety, remains classified as of 2011.
Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, the man who would later become the commander of Area 51, remembers Yeh Changti before he got shot down. “His code name was Terry Lee and he and I played tennis on the base at Taoyuan all the time. He was a great guy and an amazing acrobat, which helped him on the court. Sometimes we drank scotch while we played. Both the sport and the scotch helped morale.” Slater says that the reason morale was low was that “the U-2 had become so vulnerable to the SA-2 missiles that nobody wanted to fly.” One Black Cat pilot had already been shot down. But that didn’t stop the dangerous missions from going forward for the CIA.
Unlike what had happened with the Gary Powers shoot-down, the American press remained in the dark about these missions. For the CIA, getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities was a top national security priority. On the day Yeh Changti was shot down, he was returning home from a nine-hour mission over the mainland when a surface-to-air missile guidance system locked on to his U-2. Colonel Slater was on the radio with Yeh Changti when it happened. “I was talking to him when I heard him say, ‘System 12 on!’ We never heard another word.” The missile hit Yeh Changti’s aircraft and tore off the right wing. Yeh Changti ejected from the airplane, his body riddled in fifty-nine places with missile fragments. He landed safely with his parachute and passed out. When he woke up, he was in a military facility run by Mao Tse-tung.
This was no training exercise. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner for nineteen years until he was quietly released by his captors, in 1982. He has been living outside Houston, Texas, ever since. The CIA did not know that Yeh Changti had survived his bailout and apparently did not make any kind of effort to locate him. A second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang would also get shot down in a U-2, in 1965, and was imprisoned alongside Yeh Changti. After their release, the two pilots shared their arduous stories with fellow Black Cat pilot, Hsichun Hua, who had become a general in the Taiwanese air force while the men were in captivity. Neither Yeh Changti nor Major Jack Chang was ever given a medal by the CIA. The shoot-down of the Black Cat U-2 pilots, however, had a major impact on what the CIA and the Air Force would do next at Area 51. Suddenly, the development of drones had become a national security priority, drones being pilotless aircraft that could be flown by remote control.
Drones could accomplish what the U-2 could in terms of bringing home photographic intelligence, but a drone could do it without getting pilots captured or killed. Ideally, drones could perform missions that fell into three distinct categories: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Dull meant long flights during which pilots faced fatigue flying to remote areas of the globe. Dirty included situations where nuclear weapons or biological weapons might be involved. Dangerous meant missions over denied territories such as the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China, where shoot-downs were a political risk. Lockheed secured a contract to develop such an unmanned vehicle in late 1962. After Yeh Changti’s shoot-down, the program got a big boost. Flight-testing of the drone code-named Tagboard would take place at Area 51 and, ironically, getting the Lockheed drone to fly properly was among the first duties assigned to Colonel Slater after he left Taoyuan and was given a new assignment at Area 51.
“Lockheed’s D-21 wasn’t just any old drone, it was the world’s first Mach 3 stealth drone,” says Lockheed physicist Ed Lovick, who worked on the program. “The idea of this drone was a radical one because it would fly at least as fast, if not faster, than the A-12. It had a ram jet engine, which meant it was powered by forced air. The drone could only be launched off an aircraft that was already moving faster than the speed of sound.” The A-12 mother ship was designated M-21, M as in mother, and was modified to include a second seat for the drone launch operator, a flight engineer. The D-21 was the name for the drone, the D standing for daughter. But launching one aircraft from the back of another aircraft at speeds of more than 2,300 mph had its own set of challenges, beginning with how not to have the two aircraft crash into each other during launch. The recovery process of the drone also needed to be fine-tuned. Lovick explains, “The drone, designed to overfly China, would travel on its own flight path taking reconnaissance photographs and then head back out to sea.” The idea was to have the drone drop its photo package, which included the camera, the film, and the radio sensors, by parachute so it could be retrieved by a second aircraft nearby. Once the pallet was secure, the drone would crash into the sea and sink to the ocean floor.
A fighting robot is inherently scary. Robot dogs with weapons will be even worse, even if they are clumsier and less capable than human footsoldiers. An opponent that feels no pain or fear, and who is immune to gunfire, is not like one made of flesh and blood.
But the UGV may be much more than an effective psychological weapon. Unlike aerial drones, the UGV can threaten an enemy position. Driving up and parking a remote-controlled machinegun turret next to them means the enemy have to either destroy the UGV or retreat. This makes it something quite new, an uncrewed weapon able to take ground, and potentially to hold that ground.
At a cost of around $16,000 per unit — as much as six artillery rounds, or a tenth of a Javelin missile — the Ukrainian Lyut UGV is, he explains, entirely expendable.
In the twelfth chapter of Area 51, Annie Jacobsen discusses “covering up the cover-up”:
Jim Freedman remembers the first time he brought up the subject of UFOs with his EG&G supervisor at Area 51. It was sometime in the middle of the 1960s and “UFOs were a pretty big thing,” Freedman explains. Flying saucer sightings had made their way into the news with a fervor not seen since the late 1940s. “I heard through the rumor mill that one of the UFOs had gone to Wright-Pat and was then brought to a remote area of the test site,” Freedman says. “I heard it was in Area 22. I was driving with my supervisor through the test site one day and I told him what I had heard and I asked him what he thought about that. Well, he just kept looking at the road. And then he turned to me and he said, ‘Jim, I don’t want to hear you mention anything like that, ever again, if you want to keep your job.’” Freedman made sure never to bring the subject of UFOs up again when he was at work.
In the mid-1960s, sightings of unidentified flying objects around Area 51 reached unprecedented heights as the A-12 Oxcart flying from Groom Lake was repeatedly mistaken for a UFO. Not since the U-2 had been flying from there were so many UFO reports being dumped on CIA analysts’ desks. The first instance happened only four days after Oxcart’s first official flight, on April 30, 1962. It was a little before 10:00 a.m., and a NASA X-15 rocket plane was making a test flight in the air corridor that ran from Dryden Flight Research Center, in California, to Ely, Nevada, during the same period of time when an A-12 was making a test flight in the vicinity at a different altitude. From inside the X-15 rocket plane, test pilot Joe Walker snapped photographs, a task that was part of his mission flight. The X-15 was not a classified program and NASA often released publicity photographs taken during flights, as they did with Walker’s photographs that day. But NASA had not scrutinized the photos closely before their public release, and officials missed the fact that a tiny “UFO” appeared in the corner of one of Walker’s pictures. In reality, it was the Oxcart, but the press identified it as a UFO. A popular theory among ufologists about why aliens would want to visit Earth in the first place has to do with Earthlings’ sudden advance of technologies beginning with the atomic bomb. For this group, it follows that the X-15 — the first manned vehicle to get to the edge of space (the highest X-15 flight was 354,200 feet — almost 67 miles above sea level) would be particularly interesting to beings from outer space.
Two weeks after the incident, the CIA’s new director, John McCone, received a secret, priority Teletype on the matter stating that “on 30 April, A-12 was in air at altitude of 30,000 feet from 0948-106 local with concurrent X-15 Test” and that “publicity releases mention unidentified objects on film taken on X-15 flight.” This message, which was not declassified until 2007, illustrates the kind of UFO-related reports that inundated the CIA at this time. In total, 2,850 Oxcart flights would be flown out of Area 51 over a period of six years. Exactly how many of these flights generated UFO reports is not known, but the ones that prompted UFO sightings created the same kinds of problems for the CIA as they had in the previous decade with the U-2, only with elements that were seemingly more inexplicable. With Oxcart, commercial airline pilots flying over Nevada or California would look up and see the shiny, reflective bottom of the Oxcart whizzing by high overhead at triple-sonic speeds and think, UFO. How could they not? When the Oxcart flew at 2,300 miles per hour, it was going approximately five times faster than a commercial airplane — aircraft speeds that were unheard-of in those days. Most Oxcart sightings came right after sunset, when the lower atmosphere was shadowed in dusk. Seventeen miles higher up, the sun was still shining brightly on the Oxcart. The spy plane’s broad titanium wings coupled with its triangle-shaped rear fuselage — reflecting the sun’s rays higher in the sky than aircraft were known to fly — could understandably cause alarm.
The way the CIA dealt with this new crop of sightings was similar to how it handled the U-2s’. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, Area 51’ s base commander during this time, explains “commercial pilots would report sightings to the FAA. The flights would be met in California, or wherever they landed, by FBI agents who would make passengers sign inadvertent disclosure forms.” End of story, or so the CIA hoped. Instead, interest in UFOs only continued to grow. The public again put pressure on Congress to find out if the federal government was involved in covering up UFOs. When individual congressmen asked the CIA if it was involved in UFOs, the Agency would always say no.
On May 10, 1966, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, hosted a CBS news special report called UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? To an audience of millions of Americans, Cronkite announced that the CIA was part of a government cover-up regarding UFOs. The CIA had been actively analyzing UFO data despite repeatedly denying to Congress that it was doing so, Cronkite said. He was absolutely correct. The Agency had been tracking UFO sightings around the world since the 1950s and actively lying about its interest in them. The CIA could not reveal the classified details of the U-2 program — the existence of which had been outed by the Gary Powers shoot-down but the greater extent of which would remain classified until 1998 — nor could it reveal anything related to the Oxcart program and those sightings. That remained top secret until 2007. In Cronkite’s exposé, the CIA looked like liars.
It got worse for the Agency. The Cronkite program also reopened a twelve-year-old can of UFO worms known as the Robertson Panel report of 1953. Dr. Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports program and disclosed that the UFO inquiry bearing his name had in fact been sponsored by the CIA beginning in 1952, despite repeated denials by officials. The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on UFOs in July of 1966, which resulted in the Air Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA. “The Air Force… approached the Agency for declassification,” testified secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown. Brown stated that while there was no evidence that “strangers from outer space” had been visiting Earth, it was time for the CIA to come clean on its secret studies regarding UFOs.
[…]
The year 1966 was the height of the Vietnam War, and the federal government’s ability to tell the truth was under fire. Pressure on Congress to make more information known did not let up. And so once again, as it had been in the late 1940s, the Air Force was officially “put in charge” of investigating individual UFO claims. The point of having the Air Force in charge, said Congress, was to oversee the untrustworthy CIA. One of the great ironies at work in this was that only a handful of Air Force generals were cleared for knowledge about Oxcart flights blazing in and out of Area 51, which meant that to most Air Force investigators, Oxcart sightings were in fact unidentified flying objects. Further feeding public discord, several key Air Force officials who had previously been involved in investigating UFOs now believed the Air Force was also engaged in covering up UFOs. Several of these men left government service to write books about UFOs and help the public persuade Congress to do more.
[…]
Many citizens believed the government was trying to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial beings; people did not consider the fact that by overfocusing on Martians, they would pay less attention to other UFO realities, namely, that these were sightings of radical aircraft made by men.
[…]
In 1942, when the jet engine was first being developed, the Army Air Corps desired to keep the radical new form of flight a secret until the military was ready to unveil the technology on its own terms. Before the jet engine, airplanes flew by propellers, and before 1942, for most people it was a totally foreign concept for an airplane to fly without the blades of a propeller spinning around. With the jet engine, in order to maintain silence on this technological breakthrough, the Army Air Corps entered into a rather benign strategic deception campaign involving a group of its pilots. Every time a test pilot took a Bell XP-59A jet aircraft out on a flight test over the Muroc dry lake bed in California’s Mojave Desert, the crew attached a dummy propeller to the airplane’s nose first. The Bell pilots had a swath of airspace in which to perform flight tests but every now and then a pilot training on a P-38 Lightning would cruise into the adjacent vicinity to try to get a look at the airplane. The airplane was seen trailing smoke, and eventually, rumors started to circulate at local pilot bars. Pilots wanted to know what was being hidden from them.
According to Edwards Air Force Base historian Dr. James Young, the chief XP-59A Bell test pilot, a man by the name of Jack Woolams, got an idea. He ordered a gorilla mask from a Hollywood prop house. On his next flight, Woolams removed the mock-up propeller from the nose of his jet airplane and put on the gorilla mask. When a P-38 Lightning came flying nearby for a look, Woolams maneuvered his airplane close enough so that the P-38 pilot could look inside the cockpit of the jet plane. The Lightning pilot was astonished. Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane — an airplane that had no propeller. The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar, where he sat down and ordered a stiff drink. There, he began telling other pilots what he had definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that what he was saying was an embarrassment, and that he should go home. Meanwhile, the concept of the gorilla mask caught on among other Bell XP-59A test pilots and soon Woolams’s colleagues joined the act. Over the course of the next few months, other P-38 Lightning pilots spotted the gorilla flying the propellerless airplane. Some versions of the historical record have the psychiatrist for the U.S. Army Air Corps getting involved, helping the Lightning pilots to understand how a clear-thinking fighter pilot could become disoriented at altitude and believe he had seen something that clearly was not really there. Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved — and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks — remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.
[…]
One of the more enigmatic figures involved in the Roswell mystery was Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first man to run the CIA. Hillenkoetter was the director of Central Intelligence from May 1, 1947, until October 7, 1950. After his retirement from the CIA, Hillenkoetter returned to a career in the navy. Curiously, after he retired from the Navy, in the late 1950s, he served on the board of governors of a group of UFO researchers called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Hillenkoetter’s placement on the board was a paradox. He was there, in part, to learn what the UFO researchers knew about unidentified flying crafts. But he also empathized with their work. While Hillenkoetter did not believe UFOs were from outer space, he knew unidentified flying objects were a serious national security concern. In his position as CIA director Hillenkoetter knew that the flying disc at Roswell had been sent by Joseph Stalin. And he knew of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s fear that what had been achieved once could happen again. Which makes it peculiar that, in February of 1960, in a rare reveal by a former cabinet-level official, Hillenkoetter testified to Congress that he was dismayed at how the Air Force was handling UFOs. To the Senate Science and Astronautics Committee he stated that “behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He also claimed that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”
Hillenkoetter remained a ranking member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1962, when he mysteriously resigned. Equally puzzling was that the man who later replaced Hillenkoetter and became the head of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1969 was Joseph Bryan III — the CIA’s first chief of political and psychological warfare. Not much is known about Bryan’s true role with the ufologists because his work at the CIA remains classified as of 2011. If his name sounds familiar, it is because Joe Bryan was the man scheduled for a hunting trip with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell’s friend and predecessor at the CIA. But before Bryan arrived that day, on October 29, 1965, Wisner shot himself in the head.
At the CIA, during the mid-1960s, the thinking regarding UFOs began to move in a different direction. Since the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon, in June of 1947, the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs. They were (a) experimental aircraft, (b) the delusions of a paranoid person’s mind, or (c) part of a psychological warfare campaign by the Soviet Union to create panic among the people and sow seeds of governmental mistrust. But by 1966, a faction within the CIA added a fourth line of thought to its concerns: maybe UFOs were real. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring of circumstances in the Soviet Union, which was also in the midst of a UFO sea change.
[…]
But curiously, in 1964, after Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him from power and installed Leonid Brezhnev in his place, articles on UFOs began to emerge. In 1966, a series of articles about UFOs were published by Novosti, Moscow’s official news agency. Two leading scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute not only were writing about UFOs but were split on their opinions about them, which was highly unusual for Soviet state-funded scientists. One of the scientists, Villen Lyustiberg, promoted the idea that UFOs were the creation of the American government and that “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures and aggressions.” A second leading scientist, Dr. Felix Zigel, had come to believe that UFOs were in fact real.
Declassified CIA memos written during this time reveal a concern that if the leading scientists and astronomers in the Soviet Union believed UFOs were real, maybe UFOs truly were real after all. In 1968, the CIA learned that a Soviet air force general named Porfiri Stolyarov had been named the chairman of a new “UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee” in Moscow. After learning that Russia had an official UFO committee, the CIA went scrambling for its own science on UFOs.
Anduril has unveiled its Barracuda family of cruise missiles — or “air-breathing, software-defined expendable Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAVs)” — that are optimized for “affordable, hyper-scale production”:
The United States and our allies and partners do not have enough missiles to credibly deter conflict with a near-peer adversary. Our existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight. The problem extends beyond inventory alone, however: existing cruise missiles are defined by limited production capacity, nonexistent on-call surge capacity, and minimal upgradeability when technology and mission needs inevitably change. That is because existing missile designs are highly complex, require thousands of unique tools to produce, demand highly-specialized labor and materials, and are built on the backs of tenuous, brittle, and defense-specific supply chains. We need an order of magnitude more weapons, and we need them to be more producible, intelligent, upgradeable, and flexible.
The Barracuda family of AAVs is designed to rebuild America’s arsenal of air-breathing precision-guided munitions and air vehicles. Barracuda features advanced autonomous behaviors and other software-defined capabilities, and it is available in configurations offering 500+ nautical miles of range, 100+ pounds of payload capacity, 5 Gs of maneuverability, and more than 120 minutes of loitering time. The vehicle’s fast speeds, high maneuverability, and extended ranges are made possible by Barracuda’s turbojets, air-breathing engines that take in air to combust their fuel. The result is a highly intelligent, low-cost weapon system that is capable of direct, stand-in, or stand-off strike missions in line with existing requirements but rapidly adaptable to future mission needs due to its high degree of modularity and upgradeability.
Barracuda-100M, Barracuda-250M, and Barracuda-500M are the most producible cruise missiles on the market today. A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to produce, requires 95 percent fewer tools, and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today. As a result, the Barracuda family of AAVs is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment.
[…]
Barracuda can be produced by the broad commercial automotive and consumer electronics workforce, rather than relying exclusively on the much smaller, over-stretched, highly-specialized, defense-specific manufacturing labor pool required to produce existing solutions.
Every Barracuda variant is made up of a handful of common subsystems to ensure that the missiles can be rapidly optimized based on changing mission needs. New subsystems can be rapidly swapped into live production lines when threats evolve and new technologies emerge, providing warfighters with the agility required to adapt at mission speed. And unlike existing solutions that leverage brittle, defense-specific supply chains, Barracuda’s subsystems are made up of commercially derived and widely-available components that provide supply chain resiliency, redundancy, and surge capacity.
Handle: The cargo ship which rammed until and took out the Key bridge in Baltimore also lost power, but reportedly its electrical systems had been acting up for a while.
doclove: It is amazing no one got permanently mutilated, maimed or killed, and thank God for that.
VXXC: Things have changed significantly due to drones, especially in Ukraine, although it’s been building a generation. That men will not be fighting is an overreach. We have new tools, and that’s all. The best information and developments on this are the soldiers innovating on the battlefield themselves. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been very innovative. Death focuses the mind. The problem for the West, and for that matter the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and the Armor branches and...
VXXC: “The specialist dive and hydrographic vessel lost power and ran aground on Saturday evening while conducting a reef survey one nautical mile off the southern coast of the Samoan island of Upolu.” Lost Power? I’m not a sailor or ship power engineer. WTF lost power? My house has generator backup, along with triple internet and if necessary, a wood stove for heat. How are these ships losing power? Other than yes we get it…yes..but why are these ships losing power?
Jim: In his Order of the Day he claimed the Austrians had recognized ‘that we are only fighting each other so that the English can sell their sugar and coffee at a higher price’. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Phileas Frogg: Despite their obvious differences, one cannot help but note the similarities in the spirit of the moment: https://m.media-amazon.c om/images/I/61o0g+Hfb8L. _AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg History tends to underestimate a good salesman.
Isegoria: “The position overlooked a freshly dug tank ditch. The wide, deep ditch blocked the approaches to the valley. Next to the ditch was a large pile of antitank mines, concertina wire, and metal pickets. Davis’s company commander had told him that an allied engineer unit had dug the ditch in preparation for the arrival of the Americans.” (Yes, its suboptimal position is definitely an essential part of the story.)
Freddo: IIRC the tank ditch was an impromptu effort by an oil company engineering team. (And its suboptimal position of course an essential part of the story.)
Isegoria: I was immediately confused by the tank ditch out in front of the four trails, because my first instinct was to lure the enemy as far into a narrow trail as possible, before springing a trap. The front slope seemed too vulnerable. The rear slope seemed ideal, if we had long-range anti-tank weapons. I thought the deciding factor would be that we had numerous second-rate anti-tank weapons that would only be effective at short range, from above.
David Roman: I’m confused, who is the dictator here? The senile dude widely acknowledged to be unable to be left alone who will sit in the White House for three more months? Netanyahu, unable to win an election, hated by 80% of his electorate and driven to continue war only to save himself from jail? Zelensky, ruling without a mandate for a year now, as the textbook definition of a self-appointed dictator?
Gwern: The gag of quoting ChatGPT was stale 2 years ago.
Jim: Dan Kurt: “The tyranny of the IQ curve strikes again: too many of our youth are going to college.” Bookreading is in steep decline among all classes, cultures, and brain stratifications. We live in a society.
T. Beholder: Hmm. The straightforward is dangerous, but it depends on how well the enemy is prepared for a breakthrough. If those dudes were trained by Soviet “advisors” and actually listened, they may succeed. If they are not familiar with uses of armor other than as cavalry, basic field fortifications covered by a minefield may deter them from even trying if artillery support cannot do all the job. The reverse slope would work the best, but only if there are just the tanks and other vehicles, with very...
Will: It gets worse. Many universities are now creating programs, especially those online, in which they mandate professors are not allowed to use books in their classes. They must only use “open source” documents — and trust me, they do not use journal articles. Students find them far too difficult to read. We are also starting to see newly minted PhDs who grew up never reading, becoming college professors. Naturally, they do not assign books. Academia is morally broke.
Dan Kurt: The tyranny of the IQ curve strikes again: too many of our youth are going to college.
T. Beholder: It’s so much worse than this. Too many game designers make something that confirms their biases and never stop to question their assumptions. Too many game designers make something that they THINK will confirm their biases. Then never bother to analyze what actually goes on and why, until it turns out the result either does not work this way, or is broken outside their pet scenario. Nor even test extensively by people unfamiliar with their notions of how it “ought” to work. The best will...
T. Beholder: Introduction of field fortifications greatly changed the game in this aspect too. The infantryman can compensate for troublesome march with tenacity in defense. That is, the soldiers could run in the open, but as long as cover is not obviously useless, they naturally don’t want to leave it when the situation is bad enough as it is. So it may take much more of motivation to attack, but retreat is also inhibited. Of course, exhaustion on a march still matters. The first iteration of “Defence...
Alex S.: I also noticed that persons that are excessively social stop thinking by themselves. They look like they are part of an organism and not an individual anymore.
Bomag: Probably something here about video overtaking the written word.
