View From The Top, 7 October 2008

I apologize for missing yesterday. Got some tough news over the weekend, and spent yesterday catching up. Anyway... twice the amount of links!

-- So it looks like 2009 will be the "Year of the NCO" for the army. The Secretary of the Army is mandating that every command sergeant major make two media appearances per quarter. Good for the Army. They, of all the branches, seem the most amenable to The New Media.

-- While I've been abysmal at covering the awesome stuff happening in quantum research, that doesn't mean big stuff isn't happening. So, that giddiness I had a few months back about quantum communications? Yeah, not so giddy at the moment, considering a simple laser defeats the encryption.

-- Head over to Defense Tech for some neat posts by Christian about the 60 Minutes "Kill bin Laden" report and the subsequent reaction from the Special Operations community. Fascinating stuff. To boil it down to a few sentences: "Dalton Fury" aka Maj. Thomas Greer, is a retired Delta Force officer who claims now that higher-ups prevented him from killing bin Laden back in Tora Bora. The notoriously tight-lipped Special Forces community is not happy with him blabbing, but no one is arguing to the contrary about Greer's claims. Christian's got some good thoughts as well.

-- Germany will increase its troop support to the NATO ISAF, but will also remove its elite force, KSK. From how I'm reading this, it looks like Germany's firmly behind NATO, but the KSK forces were a straight alliance between Germany and the US outside the purvey of NATO. There are some disheartening quotes further down the piece about many leaders throughout Western Europe thinking Afghanistan is "unwinnable." I bet you they're glad that America didn't feel that way about WWII...

-- One of my new heroes, Secretary Gates, responded quickly to that defeatist talk. (Note how the BBC puts defeatist in quotes). As I told a friend last night: I have a massive man-crush on our current SecDef. It's a shame he won't be able to stay over into the Obama White House.

-- I love, repeat, love this headline: "U.S. Urges Allies To Fight In Afghanistan Or Write Cheque". 'Bout time, in my opinion. It's not an alliance if we're doing all the work.