US Navy

I took a couple of weeks off, as Thanksgiving and snow came around (a subject we’ll address in a day or so), but we are all again occupied as lots of things we’ve been talking about either will or won’t come to pass, and it seems like all that’s happening all at once.

Today we’ll take on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT); this because the Pentagon’s top leadership just came out and reported that revocation of the policy, following a period of preparation, would be their preferred way to go.

There will be lots of others who will take on the question of what’s right and wrong here, and exactly how implementation might occur; my interest is, instead, to focus on one little fact that makes all teh rest of the conversation a lot more relevant.

That is the fact that about 70,000 LBGT troops serve in the military today, DADT notwithstanding, and, that if it wasn’t for DADT, almost 45,000 more troops would be serving that aren’t today.

And that one little fact leads to today’s Great Big Question: exactly how much military would 115,000 troops be, exactly?

I have a ton of things on the desk at the moment, and I don’t have the time to really run out this story before Election Day, but I want to bring to your attention something very strange that I found on the 2008 “Christine O’Donnell for Senate” MySpace page.

What it basically comes down to is that the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army are “Christine O’Donnell for Senate” MySpace friends, or that there are persons who have created United States Army and USMC MySpace pages that purport to be official that have “befriended” her candidacy. There’s also a Navy page that appears to emanate from a US Navy recruiting office in California on her ’08 campaign’s “friends” list.

At a minimum, all of this would seem to be a combination of inappropriate behavior and poor management of social media; at worst, you have activity that is “some kind of unlawful”, either on an administrative or civil level.

I’ll make this fast...but I’ll also make it interesting.
Follow along, and you’ll see what I mean.

Dome is reporting today that the NC Attorney General has all but put a nail in the US Navy's OLF coffin.

A letter from the Attorney General's office to U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, a Farmville Republican, indicates the department would enforce laws by which the state would retain some jurisdiction over lands seized for an OLF in counties that do not already have military bases. That would allow the counties to enforce noise ordinances, for example, on the Navy.

We covered this back in April, when the Virginia Pilot reported that the NC General Assembly had passed legislation that would interfere with the Navy's Reign of Error.

U.S. House axes Washington County OLF site.

"The House has taken the Washington County site off the table because it posed a danger to the community, pilots and aircraft," wrote Butterfield, a Democrat from Wilson. "This is a clear message that if the Navy wants to move forward with an OLF it must have the support of the community."

Now we have all 4 big boys saying the Navy needs to have local support before moving forward with their OLF site!

The roster of elected officials opposed to this OLF or stating local support is required:
Camden County board of commissioners
Gates County board of commissioners
Perquimans County board of commissioners
Washington County board of commissioners

Frontpaged by A . . . a much better report than what I wrote. Thanks, Parmea.

Floating flight deck

“You can make it as big as you want,” Khachaturian said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “If what the Navy needs is 2,000 acres, there is no question that is a possibility.”

The proposal may be cost prohibitive. The acre-sized components cost from $20 million to $30 million each, depending on how much weight they are designed to support. Two thousand such components would therefore run the Navy from about $40 billion to $60 billion.

The estimated cost to acquire land and construct the facilities needed for an OLF on land is $231 million, according to the Navy’s draft environmental impact statement released in February.

Once built, the platform could be moored to the sea bed with cables. Computers could be used to position the platform or move it to different locations, Khachaturian said. The system floats optimally in water 1,000 feet deep or more, Khachaturian said.

Frontpaged and embellished (with the photograph) by Anglico. This image is from the company Versabuoy that produces floating platforms. It's very cool stuff. Check out their site.

If you listen closely, you can now hear Do-Nothing Dole whining all the way from the Watergate where she lives. In what feels like a bad script from the Twilight Zone, the Very Senior Senator has this to say to Governor Mike:

"Fooey on you, mean old Governor. It's all your fault that North Carolina has become a ping-pong ball in my sweet little game with John Warner and the US Navy. Nanny-nanny boo-boo. I'm rubber and you're glue. Bounces of me and sticks on you."

That, of course, is my translation, which is amazingly close to what Dole actually had to say, as reported in the N&O today.

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