Русский корабль - иди нахуй

[InkaUtexas 26078]

9 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

At the least we should capture the two cargo ships they are using to help the Houthis look for targets.

Operation Praying Mantis 2.0. Iranian Boogaloo 

[atomheartbevo 89779]

Russia struggles to produce the simplest of things and leans on Iran and North Korea for help.  They have produced 26 Su-57’s.

Meanwhile, we just rolled out our 1,000th F-35.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-1000th-f-35-has-been-built

Quote

As of early January, the F-35 enterprise has amassed over 773,000 flying hours, trained over 2,280 pilots and 15,400 maintainers across 14 flying services around the world, and flown more than 469,000 total sorties. There are now 32 bases and 11 ships hosting or capable of hosting F-35 units. As of now, there are a whopping 17 countries participating in the international Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program.

 

[Schulz2.0 29007]

[Schulz2.0 29007]

 

[Schulz2.0 29007]

[InkaUtexas 26078]

22 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

 

"How can we help you?" While the other dude is putting on his own tourniquet.

[Schulz2.0 29007]

 

[KYHorn 17134]

Lol

 

[Hal Finney 174]

2 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

Lol

 

Well, this is dumb. It's clear the guy on the left wanted a solo pic with Sunak and Zelensky took it. It's his hand in the pic on right, not Zelensky. The jacket color matches his.

 

[Viper 12111]

2 hours ago, KYHorn said:

Lol

 

what the hell? I saw this and thought the 3 pictures were done to disprove the Russian claim, but it was actually Russia that posted the pictures that disprove their own claim in the same tweet? 

[Chopper 17244]

8 hours ago, Schulz2.0 said:

So this is the russian bang bus?

[atomheartbevo 89779]

9 minutes ago, Viper said:

what the hell? I saw this and thought the 3 pictures were done to disprove the Russian claim, but it was actually Russia that posted the pictures that disprove their own claim in the same tweet? 

Russia is the aggy of Eurasia.  

On an unrelated note, a friend who flew on AWACS aircraft for a few years mentioned that nobody seems to be talking about who would have been on that Russian A-50. Based on how the Russians do things, he’s wondering if there wasn’t at least a few colonels or even a general on that thing.

[Ten Bears 2483]

On 1/15/2024 at 9:48 AM, Chopper said:

Russian carnage in the morning is the best carnage. A+ explosion and dual camera footage.

 

Username checks out

[TexasEd 8071]

On 1/14/2024 at 6:37 PM, KYHorn said:

What could be behind this uptick in "friendly" fire on Russian aircraft? Is hacking possible? Sabotage, lack of radar or other equipment due to attrition, or an increase in incompetence?

 

It answers the question "What air defense doing?"

[Gatorubet 30294]

On 1/14/2024 at 7:17 PM, atomheartbevo said:

They’ve lost around 3,400 officers since Feb of 2022.  That’s a lot of institutional knowledge when you factor in that Russian junior officers fill in roles that NCOs do in the West.

This is really a good point. I cannot imagine an army without NCO’s.  As an example, my dad was career horse cavalry before he got a tank in World War ll.   I have an old faded copy of the original battlefield commission where my Staff Sergeant dad kept assuming command of the company every time its lieutenant got killed. They got killed a lot. After a while, the army noticed my dad was really good at leading and he received a cavalry battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.   I guarantee you if they had taken my dad out early in the war a lot more men in the ninth armored would’ve died because of his absence. 

Multiply that experience times tens or hundreds of thousands - and the Russian army will suffer many more casualties.   Not that Putler gives a shit.   

[InkaUtexas 26078]

5 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

This is really a good point. I cannot imagine an army without NCO’s.  As an example, my dad was career horse cavalry before he got a tank in World War ll.   I have an old faded copy of the original battlefield commission where my Staff Sergeant dad kept assuming command of the company every time its lieutenant got killed. They got killed a lot. After a while, the army noticed my dad was really good at leading and he received a cavalry battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.   I guarantee you if they had taken my dad out early in the war a lot more men in the ninth armored would’ve died because of his absence. 

Multiply that experience times tens or hundreds of thousands - and the Russian army will suffer many more casualties.   Not that Putler gives a shit.   

Right there with you. My Dad was also a mustang. Received a battlefield commission in Vietnam and went on to do three more tours. We spend a lot of time and effort on building an NCO Corps. So do our allies.

And yeah, Russia still using WW2 tactics of mass charges just with more modern weapons (some at least!) and hoping they can win by wearing down the enemy.

[MissingInAction 25173]

4 hours ago, Chopper said:

So this is the russian bang bus?

[Schulz2.0 29007]

 

[Parliament 14287]

So does Ukraine have a legit shot at getting air superiority over Crimea?  Because they’re gonna have some F16’s shortly…

[Gatorubet 30294]

On 1/14/2024 at 8:21 PM, 956 Worldwide said:

That A-50 AWACS is (was) a super valuable asset. Russia likely only has something like 10 or so flying. And maybe fewer given the absolute state of the the VKS. 

Which leaves the pregnant question: given that they are rare and valuable - and one just got shot down - in addition to the one shot down by the Wagner group - will Russia will be so worried about losing more they decide not to employ them?  

Which, as you say, would hurt Russian battle readiness. 

[InkaUtexas 26078]

I thought Wagner got an IL-22. Either way fuck em.

[Chopper 17244]

WOW only 2 left of the A50s!?!

[KYHorn 17134]

Great news: jet pack guy is dead!

 

 

[Parliament 14287]

31 minutes ago, KYHorn said:

Great news: jet pack guy is dead!

 

 

 

[Gatorubet 30294]

2 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

I thought Wagner got an IL-22. Either way fuck em.

You are correct.  I went back and checked, and it was five choppers and an IL 22.

[atomheartbevo 89779]

2 hours ago, Gatorubet said:

Which leaves the pregnant question: given that they are rare and valuable - and one just got shot down - in addition to the one shot down by the Wagner group - will Russia will be so worried about losing more they decide not to employ them?  

Looking around, the speculation is they probably only have 3-4 left that can fly. They had one flying in the north and one in the south, and each had a backup (or shared it). Out of the 8-10 or so that were “active” half were older and needed work and/or were hangar queens used for parts.

They could be down to 4-5.   They supposedly keep a couple set aside to monitor China or the Arctic or whatever.

They use these things to control Russian aircraft and to look for Ukrainian drones, missiles,  and aircraft coming in so yeah. They are huge.

[atomheartbevo 89779]

 

[InkaUtexas 26078]

4 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Looking around, the speculation is they probably only have 3-4 left that can fly. They had one flying in the north and one in the south, and each had a backup (or shared it). Out of the 8-10 or so that were “active” half were older and needed work and/or were hangar queens used for parts.

They could be down to 4-5.   They supposedly keep a couple set aside to monitor China or the Arctic or whatever.

They use these things to control Russian aircraft and to look for Ukrainian drones, missiles,  and aircraft coming in so yeah. They are huge.

Could you imagine if we lost an EWAC? Or the Navy's E-2? Hell to pay. In Russia I bet the AF commander is sent to a penis (yeah I wrote it that way) Battalion.

Russia's C&C is like aggy getting a football coach. Pay way to much for the first, then go to the third line. At least Jimbo got paid. Bet the Russian General slips on some windex and falls a few stories.

[InkaUtexas 26078]

So the start? Little shit. Read Russian history pre-Lenin.

Social media footage showed supporters of Fail Alsynov clashing with police - some throwing snowballs - near the court in the town of Baymak.

Alsynov was jailed for inciting ethnic hatred, which he denies.

Large protests in Russia are extremely rare because of the risk of arrest.

Some reports say there are a few thousand people at the demonstration, which has been going on for several days in temperatures of around -20C, and there are reports of several injured.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68006123

[Parliament 14287]

6 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

The Bradley always got a bad rap; even their engine.  Its 903 Cummins V8 was always regarded as a turd by American farmers and truckers.  Seems to be doing OK in the Bradley.

[Chad Fuck 17743]

The Bradley always got a bad rap; even their engine.  Its 903 Cummins V8 was always regarded as a turd by American farmers and truckers.  Seems to be doing OK in the Bradley.

Like any modern weapons system. They initial versions come out and have bugs. Neigh sayers throw up their hands and shout “government waste boondoggle!” Then the kinks get ironed out, and the focus turns to the next weapons program. Since a kid I’ve seen this happen with Bradley, Blackhawk, V-22, F-22, F-35 and I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting. With all our foibles, we are still the top weapons maker in the world.

[InkaUtexas 26078]

4 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

Like any modern weapons system. They initial versions come out and have bugs. Neigh sayers throw up their hands and shout “government waste boondoggle!” Then the kinks get ironed out, and the focus turns to the next weapons program. Since a kid I’ve seen this happen with Bradley, Blackhawk, V-22, F-22, F-35 and I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting. With all our foibles, we are still the top weapons maker in the world.

Sir, and then we had the Sgt. York. My dad still gets night sweats over that fucker.

[atomheartbevo 89779]

54 minutes ago, Parliament said:

The Bradley always got a bad rap; even their engine.  Its 903 Cummins V8 was always regarded as a turd by American farmers and truckers.  Seems to be doing OK in the Bradley.

And people don’t realize that the 25mm cannon, while not ideal, can engage tanks - they can shred tank treads and stop them from moving, and can fuck up the rear areas.  Knocking out the treads leaves them vulnerable to larger drones. If they are close enough, they can penetrate some areas - this happened in the Gulf War when Bradley’s got too close to Iraqi T-72s.  

47 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Sir, and then we had the Sgt. York. My dad still gets night sweats over that fucker.

Crusader for me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM2001_Crusader

[InkaUtexas 26078]

Just now, atomheartbevo said:

And people don’t realize that the 25mm cannon, while not ideal, can engage tanks - they can shred tank treads and stop them from moving, and can fuck up the rear areas.  Knocking out the treads leaves them vulnerable to larger drones. If they are close enough, they can penetrate some areas - this happened in the Gulf War when Bradley’s got too close to Iraqi T-72s.  

Crusader for me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM2001_Crusader

M-2's are a beast. And pretty crew centric.

Yeah that was a bad one. Dad was on the review team for SF when they tried to push the York onto SOCOM. He said hell no. Shit was designed to make engineers money.

Now back to Ukraine.

[Chad Fuck 17743]

Sir, and then we had the Sgt. York. My dad still gets night sweats over that fucker.

I thought about including that one but you know, it got axed so didn’t really fit!

[Gatorubet 30294]

2 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

Like any modern weapons system. They initial versions come out and have bugs. Neigh sayers throw up their hands and shout “government waste boondoggle!” Then the kinks get ironed out, and the focus turns to the next weapons program. Since a kid I’ve seen this happen with Bradley, Blackhawk, V-22, F-22, F-35 and I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting. With all our foibles, we are still the top weapons maker in the world.

I remember articles back in the day saying that the Abrams tank was a piece of crap with so many problems it would never be adopted. 

[Parliament 14287]

2 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

Like any modern weapons system. They initial versions come out and have bugs. Neigh sayers throw up their hands and shout “government waste boondoggle!” Then the kinks get ironed out, and the focus turns to the next weapons program.

The Pentagon Wars was a hit piece.

[BehoId, The Underminer! 11669]

2 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

Neigh sayers throw up their hands  hooves and shout “government waste boondoggle!”

 

[Gatorubet 30294]

The Pentagon Wars was a hit piece.

Which is not to say that the military is not one of, if not the most profligate waster of government funds you can find.    
Harry S. Truman as a Senator was put in charge of ferreting out waste and corruption in the military procurement policies of World War II.    As Harry came out of the famously absolutely corrupt Kansas City political machine, he was very savvy as to all the ways money could be siphoned off, and did a great job in protecting the public fisc

[MagicSoccerSpray 1732]

59 minutes ago, Parliament said:

The Pentagon Wars was a hit piece.

 

51 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

Which is not to say that the military is not one of, if not the most profligate waster of government funds you can find.    
Harry S. Truman as a Senator was put in charge of ferreting out waste and corruption in the military procurement policies of World War II.    As Harry came out of the famously absolutely corrupt Kansas City political machine, he was very savvy as to all the ways money could be siphoned off, and did a great job in protecting the public fisc

 

[956 Worldwide 34747]

4 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

Like any modern weapons system. The initial versions come out and have bugs. Neigh sayers throw up their hands and shout “government waste boondoggle!” Then the kinks get ironed out, and the focus turns to the next weapons program. Since a kid I’ve seen this happen with Bradley, Blackhawk, V-22, F-22, F-35 and I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting. With all our foibles, we are still the top weapons maker in the world.

We do this song and dance around everything. These are complicated systems. It’s good to have critical eyes on them to keep us honest, that is the difference between the crap wunderwaffe vapor ware the Russians  build and what we can deliver. 
 

Our capacity and procurement rate is a different question. The peace dividend is over. We need to be on a footing to produce far more high-end systems and we need to shift our recruiting to get people to man them. 

[BehoId, The Underminer! 11669]

2 hours ago, Gatorubet said:

Which is not to say that the military is not one of, if not the most profligate waster of government funds you can find.    
Harry S. Truman as a Senator was put in charge of ferreting out waste and corruption in the military procurement policies of World War II.    As Harry came out of the famously absolutely corrupt Kansas City political machine, he was very savvy as to all the ways money could be siphoned off, and did a great job in protecting the public fisc

Related:  NYT had a fun (Austin-heavy) article today of "how do you fund manhattan project if it is totally secret?"

 

As I sat in a dark, cavernous movie theater in Berlin watching the film “Oppenheimer,” my mind was thousands of miles away.

Like many other people who turned out to see the biopic, I was captivated by Christopher Nolan’s portrayal of the Trinity test and Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the singularly ambitious, then morally conflicted father of the atomic bomb.

But as I watched images of the sprawling nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos flash across the screen, I couldn’t stop wondering: How did the U.S. government pay for the $2 billion project? Did Congress approve the money? And if so, how did lawmakers keep it a secret?

These arguably hairsplitting thoughts nagged at me thanks to my job as a congressional correspondent focused on federal spending. (I was in Berlin for a brief break — so much for that.) The assignment requires me to wade through dense legislative documents — sometimes on the order of thousands of pages — in search of projects and earmarks that lawmakers would rather taxpayers not know they are paying for.

 

 

But this was secrecy on a whole other scale.

I went home and Googled, expecting to find a lengthy Wikipedia entry or an article in a history magazine. But all I found was a snippet from a textbook published by the National Counterintelligence Center. It mentioned that Roosevelt administration officials had sought in 1944 to smuggle money for the bomb into a military spending bill, and were assisted by Congress.

I was incredulous. How could they have possibly hidden so much money? Was there really no resistance from legislators at all? I also knew that Los Alamos was built in 1943, a full year before congressional leaders secretly approved stand-alone funding for the bomb in 1944 — so how had the administration gotten the money for the project in the first place?

What followed, under the guise of what I pitched to my editor as a “fun historical memo,” was an obsessive search to find out the history of how Congress secretly funded the atomic bomb.

 

 

The atomic bomb, which was later used on Nagasaki, being transported on Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands.Credit...Universal History Archive, via Getty Images

 

 

Over the next six months, I would visit the Library of Congress’s reading room, politely but relentlessly bug an archivist at the Sam Rayburn Library in Texas, and mine the diaries and memoirs of top congressional and military leaders, as well as the declassified history of the Manhattan Project commissioned by its director.

 

 

Those documents and interviews tell a story of presidential pressure, congressional complicity and even a touch of journalistic self-censorship. It turns out that when Congress voted to fund the bomb, there was no debate and no discussion. Only seven lawmakers in the entire Congress had any idea that they were approving $800 million — the equivalent of $13.6 billion today — to create a weapon of mass destruction that would soon kill and maim more than 200,000 people, ushering in the atomic age.

‘Do You Have the Money?’

Scrolling through the digital archives of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s library, I began to understand the lengths to which the war’s leaders had gone to keep the Manhattan Project a secret — and how much they worried about paying for it.

In a one-sentence memo in June 1942, Roosevelt wrote to Vannevar Bush, who led the early administration of the project: “Do you have the money? F.D.R.”

 

 

Image

 

Keeping the Manhattan Project funded weighed heavily on the war’s leaders.

 

 

Paging through memos and letters between Roosevelt, his top aides and the Manhattan Project’s administrators, it was clear that by 1944, they had grown more anxious about Nazi Germany’s strides toward building an atomic weapon. To build their own, they concluded, they needed a bigger infusion of funds.

 

 

I knew from a pair of government-issued textbooks that some of those officials, including the war secretary, Henry L. Stimson, met with a handful of lawmakers — once in the House and once in the Senate — to brief them on the Manhattan Project and secure their commitment to secretly slip in hundreds of millions of dollars for the bomb.

Crucially, the books named the lawmakers who attended each meeting — just seven in total, including the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. I wanted to understand what the senators and congressmen invited to those secret conferences were thinking — especially because I could see that the administration was telling one story to Congress and another internally.

For instance, Stimson told lawmakers that the administration confided in them in a spirt of openness and collegiality. “We ought not to go further without taking into our confidence the leaders of both houses of Congress so that they would know the purpose of all these appropriations,” he said.

 

But their thinking was probably more pragmatic. Reading an account by Gen. Leslie Groves, the Army Corps of Engineers officer who directed the Manhattan Project, it was clear that officials shared the secret out of necessity, because only Congress could give them the money they needed.

 

 

Image

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Gen. Leslie Groves in 1945.Credit...Associated Press

 

 

“We realized from the start that this could not go on forever, for our expenditures were too vast and the project was too big to remain concealed indefinitely,” Groves wrote.

 

 

I later learned that Groves had commissioned an official, declassified history of the project, called the Manhattan District History — 36 volumes grouped into eight books.

Even now, about a third of that history remains classified. But from available records I learned that Roosevelt officials had been siphoning money for the project from funds Congress appropriated for the Army Corps of Engineers and another line item that sped the flow of munitions to Europe.

Emails to Austin

Somewhere, I thought, there must be a contemporaneous account of the meeting where lawmakers learned about the bomb. My first hope was that I could find one in letters or memos in the archives of Sam Rayburn, the legendary Texan who served as speaker at that time. That’s how I made the acquaintance of a reference intern named Dion Kauffman at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin, where Rayburn’s papers are kept. Kauffman told me that there were numerous documents pertaining to the atomic bomb, but that the earliest dated to 1945 — in other words, a full year after that the pivotal meeting.

One more folder, labeled “War Department” and cataloged with records from 1944, seemed promising. But the file’s only content, Kauffman found, was a letter “regarding the eligibility, policies and regulations for the award of the Combat and Expert Infantryman Badges.”

 

 

The only first-person account I could find from Rayburn, a 1957 interview from his home in Bonham, Texas, with the historian Forrest Pogue, gave the kind of clipped summary that I was hoping to avoid. But it did explain how lawmakers, who are famously bad at keeping their mouths shut, managed to keep this incredibly juicy secret. The answer is that they didn’t.

Rayburn said he once saw one of the congressmen who had attended the meeting talking to a reporter. The congressman, Rayburn said, “looked funny when I saw him.”

 

 

Image

 

Sam Rayburn, then the speaker of the House, urged a reporter to keep quiet about anything he might have heard.Credit...Getty Images

 

 

“I talked to the newspaperman later and said, ‘You are a good American, aren’t you — you love your country?’” Rayburn recalled. “He said, ‘Of course.’ I said, ‘Then don’t print anything about what he just told you.’ He didn’t, and it was all right.”

My other lucky break was that Stimson, the war secretary, was an avid diarist. At the end of most days, Stimson would record his feelings (“I felt pretty bum all day,” one entry begins), his social outings (“went for a long horseback ride”) — and crucially, his meetings.

 

 

I got access to those diaries thanks to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and learned that it was Roosevelt himself who ultimately gave Stimson the go-ahead to brief a select few members of Congress, just a few days before each chamber was poised to pass the military spending bill.

But I was still looking for an account from a lawmaker in the room — ideally one that could explain how Congress approved all of that spending without realizing it. My progress was plodding because by this time, I was back in Washington covering the actual, live spending fight playing out in Congress and threatening a government shutdown.

A Lawmaker’s Memoir

As I started searching for biographical information about the lawmakers I knew attended the meeting, I learned that one of them — Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on military spending — had published a memoir that mentioned his involvement. The book, called “Forty Years a Legislator,” didn’t appear to be in wide circulation, but I learned that there was a copy just across the street from my desk in the Capitol, at the Library of Congress.

 

 

Image

 

The first atomic bomb at the Trinity test in Alamogordo, N.M, in 1945.Credit...Associated Press

 

 

I got a Library of Congress card and navigated my way through the building’s labyrinthine basement hallways, aware that I was going to a lot of effort to review material that might not even be useful.

 

 

But as soon as I began paging through, I realized I need not have worried. Thomas, after all, was an appropriator, a revered title reserved for lawmakers who have the power to dole out the nation’s dollars. Even now, lawmakers take this responsibility with a seriousness sometimes bordering on pedantry.

Not only had Thomas carefully recorded his own recollections of that secret meeting — he wrote that Stimson said the bomb could “do as much damage as 10,000 tons of any explosive known at that time” — but he had also included the budgetary tables of money spent on the Manhattan Project. He had even written to Stimson and the Senate Appropriations Committee secretaries who served on the panel for on-the-record versions of their stories.

One jumped out at me. Thomas seemed incredulous that, in his memory, the secret had never been shared with Congress outside of those two meetings. Could that have been true?

Appropriations aides wrote back to him: “At no time during the consideration of appropriations dealing with the prosecution of the war, either on the record or off the record, was the atomic bomb ever mentioned. During the war years, we had no knowledge in the committee as to what appropriations were available and used for this purpose.”

 

 

Image

 

Senator Elmer Thomas, left, recorded his own recollections of the secret meeting. He even included the budgetary tables of money spent on the Manhattan Project.Credit...Alamy

 

 

 

(Both Thomas and Rayburn, who were in separate meetings and gave separate recollections of the briefings, recalled that the military requested $800 million; the official accounts written by the military say it was $600 million — a housekeeping difference of about $3 billion in today’s money.)

His account helped me understand why there were so few recorded contemporaneous accounts of the meeting from lawmakers themselves. Thomas was invited to the secret huddle just a few hours in advance — an invitation that came from the Senate majority leader by phone, with a warning.

“He asked that I not advise any person of my whereabouts as there was to be an important conference that should not be disturbed,” Thomas recalled.

The Gadfly From Michigan

It also answered another question I had. I had found textbooks saying that a congressman from Michigan, Albert J. Engel, had gotten wind that there was something amiss going on with respect to the Manhattan Project and had privately made a fuss about it. Thomas provided the back story.

Engel, known as a gadfly, apparently made a habit of visiting military installations to look for instances of government waste and became suspicious in late 1943 when his requests to visit the military construction at Oak Ridge — where scientists were enriching uranium for the bomb — were denied.

 

 

 

Image

 

The Atomic Energy Commission’s administration building in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in 1945.Credit...Getty Images

 

 

He was assuaged years later when, with Roosevelt’s approval, the War Department invited five select congressmen, Mr. Engel included, to finally visit the facility.

The idea of a government-sanctioned field trip to essentially shut up a single congressman so amused me that I spent a lot of time trying to learn more. In doing so, I came across an apparently apocryphal tale that placed Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, the powerhouse from Tennessee and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, in a room with Roosevelt.

In that anecdote, framed as the origin story of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Roosevelt asked McKellar to hide $2 billion in the budget for the bomb, to which McKellar replied, “Of course I can, but where in Tennessee are we going to hide it?”

Thomas’s memoir skewered that story. In his recollection, McKellar — who had not even been invited to the secret briefing in the Capitol — had in fact confided to fellow members of the panel that the government was building something in his state “which he feared might turn out to be a ‘white elephant.’”

 

 

“He stated that the government had secured a very large tract” and “had constructed many buildings and a vast number of residences; that the land was being enclosed with an expensive form of fencing, and that no one, not even the constructors constructing the improvements, had any idea as to what use was to be made of the project,” Thomas wrote.

 

 

Image

 

Hiroshima in September 1945, a month after the United States dropped an atomic bomb there.Credit...Pool photo by Associated Press

 

 

Only one question remained: Where exactly in the budget had the administration hidden the money for the bomb?

Finding a bill that passed eight decades ago is harder than you might think, but after a number of creative searches, I pulled up a record of a Senate hearing examining the bill. Attached was a report breaking down the legislation.

I paged through, stopped and smiled when I saw it. There it was, the innocuous phrase that hid an $800 million secret: “expediting production.”

[Schulz2.0 29007]

 

 

 

[Schulz2.0 29007]

 

[Schulz2.0 29007]

 

 

[Parliament 14287]

2 hours ago, Schulz2.0 said:

 

 

Several of those vids show the Bradley shooting on the move.  Goes to good training I imagine.  

And wailing on that Russian BMP at point blank range is ballah.

[atomheartbevo 89779]

@Schulz2.0 that is insane

 

Ukraine has for the first time used the FrankenSAM hybrid air defense system, created jointly with the USA, - head of the Kamyshyn Ministry of State Industry and Trade Kamyshyn has said

According to him, this system successfully shot down a Shahed drone at a distance of 9 km.

FrankenSAM combines technologies of three anti-aircraft missile systems: the Soviet Buk with American RIM-7 Sea Sparrow missiles, AIM-9M air-to-air missiles combined with Soviet radars, as well as SAMs based on Ukrainian old systems with elements and missiles from Patriot.

LOL:

 

 

Edited January 17 by atomheartbevo

[Bevo 13596]

4 hours ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

Related:  NYT had a fun (Austin-heavy) article today of "how do you fund manhattan project if it is totally secret?"

 

 

That was a long article to say that the House, Senate, and President were all Democrat in 1944. So, it was easy to hide the money - while only have to talk to 7 people. A split congress and white house couldn't have done that. On the one hand, having a split congress and white house leads to much more accountability, but on the other hand, it prevents the president from being able to do whatever the hell he wants.

[BehoId, The Underminer! 11669]

3 minutes ago, Bevo said:

That was a long article to say that the House, Senate, and President were all Democrat in 1944. So, it was easy to hide the money - while only have to talk to 7 people. A split congress and white house couldn't have done that. On the one hand, having a split congress and white house leads to much more accountability, but on the other hand, it prevents the president from being able to do whatever the hell he wants.

i more or less disagree and think that getting war funding passed in the 1940s was probably a walk in the park regardless of what party you're dealing with. 

however, i do think there is something to the fact that they did this with an atomic bomb.  that probably required unity of party control.  it had to have sounded so fanciful -- oh yeah, there is a magic science bomb that can suddenly solve all our war problems if only i'd give you a bazillion dollars and 5 magic beans -- that split parties would fight over.  

[Bevo 13596]

7 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

i more or less disagree and think that getting war funding passed in the 1940s was probably a walk in the park regardless of what party you're dealing with. 

however, i do think there is something to the fact that they did this with an atomic bomb.  that probably required unity of party control.  it had to have sounded so fanciful -- oh yeah, there is a magic science bomb that can suddenly 5 solve all our war problems if only i'd give you a bazillion dollars and 5 magic beans -- that split parties would fight over.  

I read this 5 times, and I know you said that you disagree, but it looks like you agree. Even if it was easier to get funding in the 1940s during war footing, there is no way in hell a divided president and congress could get a bazillion dollars and 5 magic beans to fund new cities in Tennessee and New Mexico in order to build a theoretical bomb.