Good Evening
Welcome to another Baja Arizona Kossacks Open Thread. It's March, I'm Mad and the Flavor-of-the-Month is Lucky Lime. The Arizona Wildcats are still alive in the NCAA basketball tournament and will play Gonzaga tonight, starting at around 6:40. Another Kossack, a regular reader of The Evening Blues series, linked me to this vid. It features Arizona Head Coach Sean Miller back in his playing days. Miller was a point guard at Pitt and this is his most memorable assist.
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Whither the A-10 ?
If you live in Tucson you're used to seeing A-10s flying around, usually in pairs. I live just north of the base so I see them all the time.They fly over my house from the east and turn left as they go in to land. Back in February Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced his proposed Pentagon budget. The budget calls for a downsizing of the defense establishment and includes plans to phase out the venerable Warthog. Scrapping the A-10 was proposed as a cost-saving measure although the Secretary's budget includes funding for the controversial, and ridiculously expensive, F-35. Tucson benefits from military Keynesianism and business leaders are alarmed at the prospect of losing the Federal funds that D-M represents. Groups like the DM50 and Mission Strong AZ are seeking to mobilize public support for the A-10. The candidates in CD-2 are sparring over the A-10. Both, of course, support continuation of the A-10. Rep. Barber penned a strongly supportive op/ed just days after Hegel's announcement only to be attacked by challenger Martha McSally for not speaking out strongly enough soon enough. I hope these two will do a better job of delineating their differences as the campaign goes on.
The purpose of the A-10 is close air support, or CAS. That means it shoots things on the ground. It was originally envisioned as a tank-killer designed around a gargantuan 30mm Gatling gun called the GAU-8. Military aircraft use Gatling-style guns with multiple rotating barrels because of their tremendous rate-of-fire. Here's a little video of the GAU-8 being test fired:
Here's video of an A-10 attack on a house in Afghanistan:
That seems to like a pretty expensive way to get rid of a Taliban fighter with a Kalashnikov but the soldiers on the ground are said to love the A-10 and there's a debate going on about whether or not the F-35 can replace it. You can sample that debate here ☛ Arizona Daily Star. There's also a fairly eloquent defense of the A-10 in the February issue of Harper's magazine.
Also in Harper's
The current issue of Harper's, April '14, has a depressing little piece entitled Razing Arizona: Will Drought Destroy the Southwest ? It's something that lives in the backs of our minds. We all know that there are too many people in this desert and not enough water but it's not a pleasant thing to contemplate. From the article:
I asked Weisheit about his boyhood in Phoenix. Back in the 1950s, he said, it was a nice little town of orange groves. He had a paper route, and the weather got cold enough that on winter mornings there was frost on the ground. The groves were replaced by subdivisions in the mid-1960s. That cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas—"cities of death," Weisheit called them—had been allowed to grow so big sticking their straws in the Colorado River was for him an affront to common sense, to science, to nature itself. "These cities will someday die from drought, and they deserve to die," he said. "It happened to the Anasazi. It will happen to Phoenix."
In other water-related news, pecan growers south of town are worried that CAP recharge, that's Colorado River water, might raise the water table
too much ☛
Arizona Daily Star and there's a joint US-Mexican effort to resurrect the Colorado River delta. The Colorado no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez. ☛
L.A. Times
OK, that's all I have for today. I've got a lot of Kosmails out, haven't heard back on many of them. Tell me somethin' good ...