Lehman on the "War on Terror"

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman addressed the 130th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on March 31, 2004.  This, in part, is what he had to say:

We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941.  We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism.  In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better.  This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, 'We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg.'  Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us.  And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared.

[...]

We were not prepared intellectually.  Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War.  We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact.  When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was:  Which state did it?  Saddam, it must have been Saddam.  We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world.  This was not state-sponsored terrorism.  This was religious war.  [...]  This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism.  Our enemy is not terrorism.  Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.

[...]

I’d like to say we have fixed these problems, but we haven’t.  We have very real vulnerabilities.  We have not diminished in any way the fervor and ideology of our enemy.  [...]  Today, probably 50 or more states have schools that are teaching jihad, preaching, recruiting, and training.  We have absolutely no successful programs even begun to remediate against those efforts.  [...]  Nobody paid attention.  Presidents in four administrations put their arms around Saudi ambassadors, ignored the Wahhabi jihadism, and said these are our eternal friends.

Sobering, and accurate, observations.  As has been said before, you can't fight a war against terror.  It's like trying to fight a war against windy nights, or against the color blue.  The true enemy is, indeed, Wahhabism, and one of our largest obstacles to being able to fight it realistically and effectively is the delusion that we have any true friends in Saudi Arabia who will remain our friends once we stop buying their oil and selling them weapons.  The Saudis take our money and shake our hands, then they turn around and pass large amounts of that very same money to Wahhabis who use it to make war on us.

And now we have a President who apparently thinks that the proper response to that war is to bow and apologize...

(Further:  The Wikiquotes page citing this goes on to mention that Lehman also spoke of an NSA communications intercept, in the wake of the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing, that was "a total smoking gun" showing that the attack had been directly ordered by the Iranian Foreign Ministry.  Yet, inexplicably, the US did nothing in response.  This was almost certainly a mistake.  On the strength of that intercept and the attack, we should have immediately declared the bombing an act of war and that a state of war now existed between the United States and Iran.)

"Falling ... with style"

Cnews is reporting that a University of Toronto student has built and successfully flown a human-powered aircraft with flapping wings.

Look at the video, though.  It can't get airborne under its own power; it gets off the ground only by virtue of a cable tow from a vehicle.  According to the article,

[...] Reichert climbed aboard, flapped its massive wings through a system of pulleys by pedalling his feet, and took off, sustaining altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, and covering a distance of 145 metres at 25.6 km/h.

Um ... no.  That's not what appears to be shown in that video.  What that video shows is Reichert's "Snowbird" being towed aloft, then, after the tether is dropped, being apparently unable to maintain airspeed (though it is admittedly difficult to judge from this angle) and, shortly, altitude after he runs out of airspeed.  I would venture to bet that a half-decent sailplane designed for speeds that low could have glided further from that initial tow than Reichert's craft was able to stay aloft.

My call?  Sorry, but I see this less as a human-powered aircraft, than as an ultralight sailplane that — once towed aloft — manages to stay briefly aloft not because of, but in spite of its flapping-wing mechanism.

Show me a "human-powered" flapping aircraft that can actually take off — even briefly — under its own power, like the human-powered Gossamer Condor, and then I'll be impressed.  But a "human-powered aircraft" that manages to glide less than 500 feet after being towed to what looks like about 20 feet altitude by a car?  Honestly, a 25:1 glide ratio is pretty shabby these days.  That's 1930s glider performance.  Modern open-class sailplanes, despite smaller wingspans and much greater weight than the Snowbird, can achieve almost three times that.  With 32m of wing and so little weight, Snowbird's glide performance should be phenomenal, not mediocre.

It's a start, and it's closer than anyone else has come yet.  But I won't consider it a human-powered aircraft until it can get itself airborne by human power alone.