Is That REALLY What They Think?

Christian Spotlight on the Movies is what is, and I don't have any problem with a few uptight Christians doing movie reviews to help each other avoid seeing stuff that might offend them. Sure, they're occasionally WAY off base (Dragon Wars is a 3-star film?! Negative 3 maybe.), but I suppose it serves a purpose. I really have no opinion about whether or not any given film is good or bad for the Christian soul, but I get the occasional giggle out of checking out the reviews there. Heck, CSotM was the first place I'd ever encountered the term "male upper body nudity" (yeah, that's right a guy with his shirt off) as a potentially offensive bit of content in a movie.

In any event, I happened to read their Iron Man review the other day, and it was...interesting. Don't get me wrong, Iron Man was an awesome movie, and their 4 1/2 star "Moviemaking Quality" rating seems right on the money. The reviewer seems to take the whole "miniature arc reactor keeping Tony Stark alive" thing to be an extended metaphor for Christian rebirth, but hey, whatever. My recent 10-page article about what we can read into the Godzilla films ties my hands as far as complaining about people taking metaphors too far. Really the only bit that bothered me (and keep in mind that very few of these reviews ever do much to actually bother me) was this:

Leftist viewers will be gratified that there is an indictment of American arms manufacturing, that American soldiers are shown being killed with American weapons to illustrate the consequences of American “crimes” overseas, and that Tony Stark renounces the military-industrial complex...In their effort to offend no one and name no names, the writers describe the Afghani terrorists as “foreigners,” completely ignoring the home-grown Taliban who terrorized the country for decades and who just last week tried to assassinate President Karzai, killing three people. The terrorists are called the “ten rings” because they come from ten foreign countries and, in one especially ludicrous moment, one of the terrorists is identified as an Hungarian."

I've added the emphasis. I'm going to address the last bit first because it's shorter. The terrorists in Iron Man are called the Ten Rings because...wait for it...they're the Ten Rings. It's a reference to the main villain from the comics, an evil Chinese dude named the Mandarin, who uses ten magic rings. It was to set up for using him as the villain in the second film. You'll even note that the main terrorist has a big ridiculous looking ring on for much of his screen time.

Okay, now on to the first bit. So political liberals want to see American soldiers being killed? Really? Fuck all, is that stupid. I'm unclear as to why there's this whole cultural myth about how left-leaning folks hate American soldiers. I could make a long argument about how campaigning for an American withdrawal from Iraq would save the lives of countless soldiers versus "staying the course" like so many of my conservative "we support the troops" friends advocate, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to say this: I consider myself to be a relatively moderate (everyone considers themselves to relatively moderate) liberal. I think the current administration is pursuing a wrongheaded course in Iraq and that the actions taken by the administration have for most Iraqis had negative consequences that exceed the (honestly intended) beneficial results that were intended. That being said, on a volunteer basis with absolutely no compensation to myself, I have an active role in helping to train troops that are being sent overseas to the both of the current operational theaters.

It involves long drives to and from, staying at a particular site until late into the night regardless of the weather conditions, and some degree of physical risk. It's also a small sacrifice on my part compared to what American soldiers are prepared to make. These are men and women, many of them even younger than I am, who are preparing to ship out in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days. I have the utmost respect for them. The other civilians that volunteer to help in this endeavor (and there are lots) come from a variety of backgrounds and political affiliations, and all of them feel this same sense of respect and gratitude for the men and women of our armed forces.

So hey, Michael Karounos of Christian Spotlight on the Movies: piss off. There are a lot of people in this country who are willing to put themselves out for our troops, and it may shock you to learn that not all of them are just like you.

Skippy Sees a UFO...

I'm kind of a military nerd. It comes from taking so many classes on international conflict during school and from having two brothers who have spent time working as civilian contractors for the Navy. I especially love airplanes, as some of you might have guessed from the pool of slobber under my post about the A-10. On the other hand, rotary craft aren't quite my thing - for one, I have a heck of a time identifying them by sight. I tend to assume that any winged helicopter that isn't obviously a Hind is an Apache, and as far I'm concerned every twin-rotor chopper is a Chinook. On the other hand, I like to think I'm halfway decent at identifying modern military planes from the ground. (Though for some weird reason I get F-15s and F-18s mixed up.)

In any event, I didn't end up going to the big air show that was in town yesterday because, well, it was 45 and raining. I did, however, end up making a mall run. The mall happens to be in the flight path of the aircraft en route to and from the air show, so I got to see a couple of F-18s (I think...) fly overhead and all was right with the world. Then, while sitting at a red light, I glanced up and saw a blazing bright light far away and high up in the sky. At first I thought it was one of the jets I'd just seen laying on their afterburners, but the light was sustained for far longer than you'd have expected for something like that. Weird...

I then though that maybe it was a plane doing a flare drop for the crowd at the air show, but no, the light wasn't falling from a craft - it was the craft. Ah ha, I thought, it's an aircraft reflecting light from the sun! But what kind? By now the traffic signal has changed and I'm granny-driving down to the next light trying to keep an eye on the aircraft - I'm foaming at the mouth to know just what it is. It had a weird outline for a jet, with what looked like a large bulge jutting up in front of the tail. It was at a funny angle to me, and even after it flew out of the sun glare the outline seemed unfamiliar to me. What the heck kind of fighter jet was this?

Finally it got a little closer to my position and turned its profile to me - It wasn't a fighter jet at all, it was an E-3 Sentry (aka AWACS), a jet-liner sized command and control plane whose back-mounted radar array gives it one of the most distinct profiles in aviation! Having just seen some F-18s at relatively close range, my brain was trying to jam this new craft into a "fighter jets, up close" category rather than looking for larger planes at a greater distance. With no reference points in the sky, I had no sense of scale to show me that I was looking at much large craft than I expected to see. It wasn't that I was seeing something unfamiliar - it was that I was actively trying to see something other than what I was looking at.

I can only wonder how many UFO sightings come from folks under similar conditions. Had I been a UFO true believer confronted with a mysterious craft that not only had a weird body outline but seemed to be ablaze with light I can imagine the conclusions I would have jumped to. (I should know. Once upon a time I was a UFO true believer.) What's most illustrative about the incident is that I absolutely love reading about, looking at, and studying military aircraft. If someone had told me yesterday morning that I'd run into an AWACS and not be able to immediately identify it, I'd have laughed them off. Nonetheless, put into a situation I wasn't expecting, with my mind striving to jam a square peg in a round hole, I had trouble seeing something obvious for what it really was.

Just what, I wonder, would I have been posting today if I were a UFOlogist who had set out yesterday evening to look for intruding spacecraft?

The Complicated Calculus of Conflict...

Well, the Derby is coming up in my neck of the woods, and while I don't care much about the actual horse race itself, I do enjoy the large air show and fireworks display called Thunder Over Louisville that is used to mark the start of Derby Festival. (The month-long series of public events leading up to the actual Derby.) One of the few fringe benefits of my job is that it rests right under the rehearsal area for the air show, so hopefully today and tomorrow I'll be able to see the planes getting ready for their runs on Saturday. Last year I had a splendid view, but this year it's overcast and storms have been predicted, so I may be out of luck.

What does all that have to do with anything? Well, one of the air show stalwarts, and my all-time favorite military plane, is the A-10 Thunderbolt II, aka the Warthog. I'm absolutely fascinated by the things, and it's cool to see one buzzing the city without the pants-wetting terror that would normally accompany the sudden appearance of ground attack aircraft. The A-10 is very nearly a flying tank, with absurd survivability and a weapons payload second only to dedicated bombers and AC-130 close air support planes.

The A-10 can carry up to 16,000 pounds of under-wing ordinance, but what really fascinates me is the A-10's signature weapon - a nose-mounted GAU-8 Avenger 30mm Gatling. Actually, nose-mounted is a poor term, since the weapon only protrudes from the nose. The weapon itself is actually somewhere on the order of 6.4 meters long. The GAU-8 is used to kill tanks, and it does so using a special type of munition, which is what I want to talk about today.

Tanks, as one might guess, are armored. Defeating the armor on modern tanks is no simple task, which has lead to the development of a type of munition called a discarding penetrator, or sabot. Basically, sabots are projectiles that, after being fired, cast off a large part of their mass leaving behind an extremely high velocity slug. In general, penetration is aided by using a dense material. In the early days, high carbon steel was used, then tungsten carbide. In modern times, the most effective material for penetrator rounds is depleted uranium.

So what the hell is depleted uranium? Depleted uranium, or DU, is mostly composed of uranium isotope 238, which is what's left over when uranium is enriched into uranium isotope 235. It's an extraordinarily dense material, it self-sharpens as it passes through other hard materials, and that same self-sharpening action causes it give off pyrophoric dust that can spontaneously ignite. It's nasty stuff, and bullets made from it are great for taking out armored targets. The gatling gun on an A-10 uses DU rounds (specifically the PGU-14/B API round), as does the vulcan on the AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter.

DU is still radioactive, though far less so than other kinds of uranium. You won't get sick from incidental exposure to it in its solid state, but you don't want to breath the dust from it, ingest it, or line your underpants with the stuff. Consumption and very long-term exposure can cause severe kidney damage, and breathing the dust can cause an increased incidence of lung cancer. The primary risk here is for soldiers - vehicles struck by DU penetrators can have large amounts of DU dust floating around in them, and DU-armored vehicles (such as the heavy armor conversion of the M-1 Abrams) can give off clouds of the stuff if they're set ablaze. In general though, short term exposure is unlikely to be dangerous.

The actual radiological risks of DU are negligible, but in some cases the chemical risks may not be. There are concerns that DU can cause harmful effects through the contamination of water. You see, DU deteriorates when exposed to water and can breakdown into toxic soluble uranium salts. The Navy even went so far as to abandon DU rounds as the munition of choice for CIWS defensive guns on its warships because of concerns about large amounts of DU contaminating ocean water. There are also questions about the contamination of ground water resources due to DU rounds that miss their targets and then break down into the water table.

There is some concern that DU contamination may eventually play a role in the future of Iraq. During the first Gulf War, for instance, Air Force A-10s fired 259 tons of DU, in the form of nearly 800,000 DU munitions. It remains to be seen if these expended munitions, along with the munitions that are being expended during the current war, will result in a dangerous increase in water toxicity that could eventually cause detrimental effects in Iraqi civilians. While human tolerance for ingested DU is relatively high, a University of Massachusetts study indicated that significant DU exposure may cause birth defects and other ills, so that's something we should be on the lookout for in the coming years.

In any event, the calculus of war is a complicated thing, and insidious, often hidden factors like the potentially harmful effects of expended DU munitions only compound this complexity. While I don't expect that the DU will prove itself to be as destructive as anti-personnel landmines in terms of post-conflict civilian casualties, epidemiological studies of populations living in areas with relatively high DU exposure should be be undertaken to determine whether there are additional health risks involved with the use of such munitions.

This is especially important in "wars of liberation" like the one being fought in Iraq. The current administration has been quick to hold up the liberty of Iraqi civilians as one of the key reasons for going to war, so it is doubly accountable for their well-being after the conflict is over. While there are obviously much more immediately concerns regarding the prosperity of Iraqi civilians, the matter of depleted uranium munitions is especially illustrative of the varied and often inobvious factors at play.