Basically Shallow and Not a Lot to Say...

Does today's post title ring a bell, Gentle Reader? It should...

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Of interest in today’s Air Force Association Daily Report:

Schwalier Injustice Reversed: The Air Force, in a major action, has officially reversed the 1997 DOD "verdict" against Terryl J. Schwalier, restoring his contested second star after a 10-year struggle. USAF Jan. 11 confirmed the action. According to independent sources, an Air Force Review Board recently reached the decision, noting that Schwalier had suffered "an injustice." Further, said the sources, the Air Force soon afterward issued an official order implementing the review board's decision. It is, in a sense, an exoneration of Schwalier, a USAF brigadier who had been scapegoated by the Clinton Administration and some members of Congress for alleged command failures in the 1996 terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The blast killed 19 airmen and wounded hundreds more. Though the Senate had confirmed Schwalier's promotion to major general before the attack, and though critics produced no credible evidence of fault on the part of Schwalier, Secretary of Defense William Cohen in July 1997 stripped him of the second star, alleging the he "could have and should have done more" to defend the Khobar complex. Cohen's action was widely viewed as an attempt to mollify political critics on Capitol Hill. Schwalier suffered another reverse in 2005, when Pentagon lawyers thwarted an earlier board reversal. AFA has long viewed Cohen's 1997 action as an injustice and issued a statement Friday about the matter. The service has already changed the general's official biography to reflect the new situation, giving his new grade, promotion date, and retirement date.

Well, good on USAF. It took a helluva lot longer than it should have to correct the injustice, let alone the fact that it should NEVER have happened in the first place. But, Hey. You just can’t let stuff like this go by without hanging someone, right? I’m thinking the hanging should have taken place a lot further up the food chain…like at the top, given the policies and such in force at the time.

YMMV.

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Another item of interest from today’s Daily Report:

Dodging Space Bullets: Two US satellites had to be maneuvered in the past year to avoid colliding with debris left in space after China's anti-satellite test on Jan. 11, 2007, The Washington Times reports. Ground controllers repositioned the Orbcomm FM 36 commercial communication satellite in April 2007 so that it would not pass "within about 123 feet" of the debris field, the newspaper reported on the one-year anniversary of the Chinese test, citing information provided by the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Similarly, the NASA Earth observation satellite Terra was moved in June 2007 "to avoid coming within about 90 feet of the debris," the newspaper states. The Chinese used a direct-ascent missile to ram one of its old weather satellites, spreading a lingering cloud of debris in orbit. While the United States decried the test, some lawmakers believe that too little is being done in the aftermath to protect U.S. space assets. "It should have been a call to action, yet a year later, our policies and strategies do not reflect our increasing dependence on space," writes Rep. Terry Everett, (R-Ala.) in an op-ed in The Washington Times on Jan. 11. "We need a comprehensive space protection strategy, says Everett, ranking member on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces panel.

Of course, if you read Steeljaw Scribe you already know this. And more.

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Here’s that graphic I spent over an hour looking for yesterday…the ELINT Crow. Big, big thanks and a tip o’ the hat to correspondent Ron, whose googling skills are obviously much better than mine.

Now visualize (until such time as Dan sends a pic of the real thing) the crow with a couple of beer bottles under his arm and you have the Wakkanai variation on the theme.

(Full disclosure: "Raven" is the proper term for the ELINT guys. Some folks might get upset that I've only used the term "crow" in my past postings. But a Raven by any other name is still a crow.)

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Today’s Viral Video is pretty cool…

And Viral Videos is a pretty cool site.