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June
9, 2003
Alex
Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft is Coming!
Lee
Sustar
Is Iran Next?
Agustin
Velloso
Equatorial Guinea: Few Rich, Many
Poor
Gila
Svirsky
Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Human Worth in Bush's America
Michael
S. Ladah
A True Liberation
Ishmael Reed
Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder
Steve
Perry
How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
7 / 8, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
June
6, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Steve
Perry
Greens and
Moore in 04? No
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
June
4, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Federal Judge Blinks; Rosenthal
Walks
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
The Isaiah Crowd: The Threat of Neo-Christianity
Jason
Leopold
Manufacturing the Iraq War
John Chuckman
Blackmail as Policy
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Summit: Peace or Pretense?
Issam Nashashibi
Sharon's Sword of Damocles
Steve
Perry
Wolfowitz of Arabia: the VF interview transcript
June
3, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
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Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive"
June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
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Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
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Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
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Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
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Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert
May
30, 2003
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Tripp
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
Neve
Gordon
The Bad Fence
Todd
Steiner
Endangered Ocean
Robert
Freeman
Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity
Sean
Carter
Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
Daniel
Bacher
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Tariq
Ali
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Steve
Perry
Bush Wars
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May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
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Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
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Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
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Albert
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Hot Stories
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Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
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Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
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Gore Vidal
The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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June
11, 2003
Attack of the Hog Killers
Why
the Generals Hate the A-10
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
It's ugly. It's lumbering and it's old. But the
A-10 Warthog almost certainly remains the best performing airplane
in the Air Force's fleet. The 30-year-old attack plane is safe,
efficient, durable and cheap. GI's call it the friend of the
grunt, because it flies low, showers lethal covering fire and
greatly reduces the risk of friendly fire deaths and civilian
casualties.
While the high-tech fighters and attack
helicopters faltered in desert winds, smoke-clotted skies and
in icy temperatures, the A-10 proved a workhorse in Gulf War
I, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the latest war on Iraq.
Naturally, the Air Force brass now wants
to junk it.
On May 27, 2003 the New York Times ran
an op-ed by Robert Coram describing the Air Force's plot to retire
the A-10. Coram, author of the highly regarded Boyd: the Fighter
Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, revealed that in early April,
Maj. General David Deptula of the Air Combat Command, ordered
a subordinate to write a memo justifying the decommissioning
of the A-10 fleet. Remember, this move came at one of the most
perilous moments in the Iraq war, when the A-10 was proving its
worthiness once again.
Why does the Air Force want to get rid
of its most efficient plane? Coram says that the Air Force never
liked the A-10 because it cut against the grain of the post-WW
II Air Force mentality, which is fixated on high-altitude strategic
bombing and the deployment of smart weapons fired at vast distances
from the target. Indeed, the A-10 was rushed into development
only because the Air Force feared that the Army's new Cheyenne
attack helicopter might cut the Air Force out of the ground support
role, and hence much of the action (and money).
The A-10, built in the 1970s by Fairchild
Industries, skims the ground at lower than 1,000 in altitude,
can nearly hover over the battlefield, and spews out almost 4,000
rounds of armor-penetrating bullets per minute. (These are also
the weapons coated with depleted uranium that have irradiated
so much of Iraq and Afghanistan.) Pilots love the plane because
it is easy to fly and safe: the cockpit is sealed in a titanium
shell to protect the pilot from groundfire, it has a bulky but
sturdy frame, three sets of back up controls and a foam-filled
fuel tank.
Of course, the most damning factor against
the A-10 in the eyes of the generals is the fact that it is old,
ugly and cheap-especially cheap. The Air Force generals are infatuated
with big ticket items, new technology and sleek new machines.
The fastest way to a promotion inside the Air Force is to hitch
your name to a rising new weapons system, the more expensive
the better. When it comes time to retire, the generals who've
spent their careers pumping new weapons systems are assured of
landing lucrative new careers with defense contractors.
So each time the A-10 proves itself in
battle, the cries for its extinction by Air Force generals become
more intense and hysterical. Since the first Gulf War, where
the A-10 outperformed every other aircraft even though the Stealth
fighter got all the hype, the Air Force has been quietly mothballing
the A-10 fleet. During the first Gulf War, the A-10s destroyed
more than half of the 1,700 Iraqi tanks knocked out by air strikes.
A-10s also took out about 300 armored personnel carriers and
artillery sites. At the end of the war there were 18 A-10 squadrons.
Now they've been winnowed down to only eight.
In place of the A-10, the Air Force brass
is pushing the congress to pour billions into the production
of the F/A-22 (at $252 million per plane) and the F-35 fighter
(at a minimum of $40 million per plane). These are planes designed
to fight an enemy that doesn't exist and probably never will.
The generals are trying desperately to
convince skeptics that the F-35 fighter jet can perform the kind
of close air support for ground troops that is the calling card
of the A-10. As Coram notes, the F-35 will be so expensive and
so vulnerable to enemy fire (it can be taken down by an AK-47
machine gun) that Air Force commanders are unlikely to allow
it to fly over hostile terrain below 10,000 feet.
But before they can consign the A-10
to the scrap heap, the Generals must first silence the plane's
defenders, many of them inside the Pentagon. The witch hunt has
already begun.
A few hours after Coram's article appeared,
Lt. General Bruce L. Wright, Vice Commander of the Air Combat
Command, at Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, fired off a
scathing memo ordering his staff to begin a search-and-destroy
mission against the whistleblowers who leaked information to
Coram.
"Please look your staffs in the
eye and offer that if one of our officers is complicit in going
in going to Mr. Coram, without coming to you or me first with
their concerns," the General wrote. "They ought to
look hard at themselves, their individual professionalism, and
their personal commitment to telling the complete story."
General Wright then reminded his directors
that it was their duty to "constantly look at upgrading
our aircraft and weapons systems" and instructed them to
promote the "good news" about the "B-2, F/A22,
the F35 and even the UCAVs."
The problem for General Wright and his
cohorts in the upper echelons of the Air Force is that the new
generation of high-tech planes have returned from the last three
wars with less than stellar records and lots of bullet holes
from lightly armed forces with no functioning air defense system.
Take the Army's vaunted Apache attack
helicopter, which the Army generals are touting as a multi-billion
dollar replacement for the A-10. During the Kosovo war, 24 Apaches
were sent to the US airbase in Albania. In the first week of
the war, two choppers crashed in training missions and the remainder
of the helicopters were grounded for the duration of the air
war.
In Afghanistan, during Operation Anaconda,
seven Apaches were sent to attack Taliban forces in the mountains
near Tora Bora. All got hit by machine gun fire, with five of
them being so shut up that they were effectively destroyed.
In Iraq, according to an excellent April
23 account in Slate by Fred Kaplan, 33 Apaches led the initial
attack on Republican Guard positions in Karbala, where they encountered
heavy machine gun fire and a few rocket-propelled grenades. One
was shot down; it's crew taken as prisoners. The other Apaches
soon turned tail, with more than 30 of them sustaining serious
damage.
But instead of rehabbing the fleet of
A-10s, the Pentagon persists in promoting budget-busting new
systems that are dangerous to pilots and civilians and ineffective
against even the most primitively-armed enemy soldiers.
"For more than 20 years, the Warthog
has been a hero to the soldiers whose lives depend on effective
air support," says Eric Miller, a defense investigator at
the Project on Government Oversight. "The A-10 works and
it's cheap. But for some reason that's not good enough for the
Air Force."
For the courtiers at the Pentagon, the
battles of Afghanistan and Iraq are mere sideshows to the real
and perpetual war: the endless raid on the federal treasury.
It is a war that only the defense contractors and their political
pawns will win. Everyone else, from pilots and taxpayers to civilians,
will be collateral damage.
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
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