Taking aim: Army leaders ponder mix of precision munitions vs conventional
Three four-star US Army generals this week weighed in with their opinions about finding the right balance between conventional and high-tech munitions - but the answers aren't easy.
By   ASHLEY ROQUE
on May 10, 2024 at 1:10 PM
 

WASHINGTON — This week, US Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Darryl Williams kicked off the annual Fires Symposium in Lawton, Okla. with, appropriately, a bit of a bombshell.

“Traditional cannon-based mass fires,” he told the audience, “are still the best solution in an EW environment.”

Williams, a veteran field artillery officer, has had a front row seat for nearly two years assessing some of those challenges and seeing how US provided weapons are working on the Ukrainian battlefield against an adversary with electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Following decades of investments across the US military in precision capabilities, the claim that simpler weapons may be the best for the modern battlefield raises larger questions about whether the Army has been putting billions over billions of dollars down the wrong hole.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/05/taking-aim-army-leaders-ponder-mix-of-precision-munitions-vs-conventional/

The Land That Doesn’t Need Ozempic
By Johann Hari
May 9, 2024 7:00 AM EDT
TIME

In March 2023, the Japanese medical authorities announced that the new weight loss drug Wegovy—which was in staggering demand across the world, causing shortages everywhere—had been approved to treat obesity in their country. It sounded, at first glance, like great news for Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy. But industry outlet the Pharma Letter explained that this would not in fact turn out to be much of a boost. They predicted that these drugs would dominate the market in Japan, but that won’t mean much, for a simple reason: there is almost no obesity there. Some 42% of Americans are obese, compared with just 4.5% of Japanese people. Japan, it seems, is the land that doesn’t need Ozempic.

I wondered how this could be, and if the answer might offer me a way out of a dilemma that was obsessing me. Several months before, I had started taking Ozempic, and I was traveling all over the world to interview the leading experts on these drugs to research my new book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. The more I discovered, the more torn I became. I had learned there are massive health benefits to reversing obesity with these drugs: for example, Novo Nordisk ran a trial that found weekly injections reduced the risk of heart attack or stroke by 20% for participants with a BMI over 27 and a history of cardiac events. But I also saw there are significant risks. I interviewed prestigious French scientists who worry the drugs could cause an increase in thyroid cancer, and eating disorders experts who worry it will cause a rise in this problem. Other experts fear it may cause depression or suicidal thoughts. These claims are all fiercely disputed and debated. I felt trapped between two risky choices—ongoing obesity, or drugs with lots of unknowns.  ...

I glimpsed part of the explanation when I went to the Tokyo College of Sushi & Washoku, to interview the president Masaru Watanabe, who I also spoke with on Zoom on another occasion. He had agreed to cook a meal for me with some of his trainees, and to explain the principles behind it. He told me: “The Japanese cuisine’s [core] feature is simplicity. For us, the simpler, the better.”  ...

In Japan, you are taught from a very early age to only eat until you feel you are 80% full. It takes time for your body to sense you’ve had enough, and if you hit a sense of fullness while you are still eating, then you’ve definitely had too much.   ...

Up until this point, I had seen aspects of Japan’s approach toward health that seemed totally admirable. But next, I saw something that left me with mixed feelings. In 2008, the Japanese government noticed that obesity was slightly rising. So they introduced the “Metabo Law,” which was designed to reduce the negative consequences of a large waistline. The law contained a simple rule. Once a year, every workplace and local government in Japan has to bring in a team of nurses and doctors to measure the waistline of adults between ages 40 and 74. If the measurements are above a certain level, the person is referred to counseling, and workplaces draw up health plans with employees to lose weight. Companies with fattening work forces can face fines. ...

https://time.com/6974579/japan-food-culture-low-obesity/

May 11, 2024
Smells Like ‘68: Foreboding Parallels for Democrats in 2024
By William Sullivan

This election season, there are many parallels to the election year of 1968 on display, and none of it bodes well for Democrats’ chances in November.

It didn’t work out for Democrats back then, certainly, with Republican Richard Nixon handily defeating Hubert Humphrey, and Republicans picking up a net five seats in both the Senate and the House, along with a net gain of five governorships.

Here are a few of these observed similarities.

Radical leftists are again eating their own

The first parallel, which many have already noted, is that the Democratic National Convention (DNC) will be again held in Chicago in August of this year, as it was in a politically contentious 1968.  Recent events signify that the city may again be witness to mass protests outside the DNC, just as when “tens of thousands of protestors swarmed the streets to rally against the Vietnam War and the political status quo” in 1968. 

Pacifying those radicals without alienating the political center will be difficult.  But this is the Faustian bargain that Democrats chose, then and now.

By 1968, there had been an explosion of outrage over American military defense of South Vietnam against the aggression of the communist North Vietnam.  Escalation in this Cold War conflict had occurred over many presidencies, and as such, the communist-sympathizing activists on college campuses viewed this as a systemic result of the American political status quo. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders recently argued that the Israel-Hamas conflict might become “Biden’s Vietnam.”  Politically, he may be right.  America is divided today on the conflict in the Middle East, and in a way that presents something of a catch-22 for Biden’s administration as it did for Democrats in 1968.

In December of 1967, 34% of polled Americans wanted to “get out” of Vietnam.  33% wanted a negotiated peace, while 26% wanted a total victory.  This signifies a slight edge to public support for “full withdrawal” over “total victory” among the public, but that middle ground covers an awful lot of potential dispositions about that war.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/smells_like_68_foreboding_parallels_for_democrats_in_2024.html

May 11, 2024
Voting Shenanigans in Michigan
By Eric Dawe

In the 2022 mid-term elections in Michigan, voters handed control of the Michigan Legislature to the Democrats, giving them a majority in both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan Senate -- something that hasn’t happened for forty years. Since then, they’ve been working hand in glove with our notorious Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, including passing a slew of bills that significantly transform election procedures in the State of Michigan and make it easier to commit election fraud, while at the same time making it harder to uncover it.

A little background on Governor Whitmer for the uninitiated is in order. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Whitmer transferred Covid-stricken seniors to nursing homes and long-term care facilities and prevented the removal of Covid-infected patients from these facilities, thus exposing the most vulnerable segment of the population -- those over age 60 and with pre-existing medical conditions -- to the dangers of this disease.

Thousands of seniors in these long-term housing and care facilities died, but clever manipulation of the statistics hid the magnitude of the deaths in these facilities -- until the Auditor General’s Report released in January of 2022. It documented that Whitmer’s administration underreported nursing home covid deaths by a whopping 42%.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/voting_shenanigins_in_michigan.html

 

Defense Systems Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense
Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense
Last Updated
August 4, 2021
Related Systems
Aegis Ashore
Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) / AN/SPY-6
AN/SPY-1 Radar
Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC)
Defense Support Program (DSP)
Evolved Seasparrow Missile (ESSM)
Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS)
Standard Missile-2 Block II/III
Standard Missile-3 (SM-3)
Standard Missile-6 (SM-6)
The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) System, is the sea-based component of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). It uses the SPY-1 radar and variants of Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) or Standard Missile-6 to intercept ballistic missiles during midcourse or terminal phases of flight. The system is integrated on certain U.S. Navy Ticonderoga-class Cruisers (CG) and Arleigh Burke-class Guided Missile Destroyers (DDG). The land-based variant, known as Aegis Ashore, is currently deployed in Deveselu, Romania as part of the NATO missile defense system.

Aegis BMD is a component of the Aegis Combat System, an integrated naval weapon system that provides air and fleet defense against enemy aircraft and cruise missiles using variations of the Standard Missile-2 (SM-2), Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), and the Evolved SeaSparrow Missile (ESSM), and ship defense systems such as the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS). It also controls the firing of Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.
 
Deployments
As of 2021, there are 90 U.S. Navy surface combatants equipped with the Aegis Combat System: 22 Ticonderoga-class Guided Missile Cruisers (CG) and 68 Arleigh Burke-class Guided Missile Destroyers (DDG). Forty-seven of these ships are Aegis BMD-capable (42 DDG and 5 CG). The Navy projects that the number of Aegis BMD ships will increase to 65 by FY2025.1

https://missilethreat.csis.org/system/aegis/