Greetings loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been mulling over how he is going to be responding to recent gay marriage posts. He thinks there are going to really be two posts. The first on the backlash/legislative decision v. judicial decision/slippery slope aspect. The second will likely be more philosophical and abstract.

Since we are speaking about guns here of late, your Maximum Leader read about how the US Army is phasing out the M-16. While this seems to be a good idea overall (your Maximum Leader has always thought the AK-47 is a superior general purpose military rifle), I didn’t know much about the rifle “system” that was slated to replace the M-16. Then I read over Kim Du Toit’s blog on the M-16 and the new “oik” rifle. Your Maximum Leader finds it hard to believe that the US Army is going to go with a 78 pound weapon that appears to as dainty as the M-16. Humm… Not good. As Du Toit alluded, what happened to the days of platoons that had a number of riflemen, one machine gunner, and a solider with an RPG? I agree that it seems to be a bad idea to have every solider perform every role himself. I sometimes worry about our military’s love of all things technological.

And speaking of that, how about this item about drone aircraft. I grew disturbed by the line saying that the F-35 might be the last piloted aircraft for the US Air Force. Am I the only one thinking that all an adversary of the US needs to do is find a way to implement a sophisticated communications jamming system in a regional battlefield to seriously upset the US’ ability to wage war? I remember reading about a war game done within the last five years were the “enemy” team had the typical Soviet era ground forces and air forces array - but one small nuke. The “enemy” team launched the nuke into space and exploded it to have the EMP disable US communications satellites and such stuff. The Pentagon “judges” declared the wargame over immediately after this saying the “enemy” didn’t play fair. The result of the EMP was that the US lost much of it high-tech advantage and was poised to loose on the ground. (I’ve tried for a few minutes to find a link, but had to give up…)

Disturbing trends overall I believe. Perhaps this is also an area in which all contributors to this space might agree…

Carry on.