Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Question of the morning, for your discussion
As security failures go, is it worse to miss an entire multi-carrier task force and leave your planes lined up wing-tip to wing-tip in tight, easily-targeted clusters, or fail to detect a subversive multi-plane suicide attack because we ordered different agencies of the same federal government not to share information with each other? I admit, I go back and forth on that one.
9 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Dec 07, 07:31:00 AM:
A minor point, but the planes were lined up that way because they were easier to protect against sabotage, which was a legitimate concern.
By 
TigerHawk, at
Tue Dec 07, 07:39:00 AM:
Of course! All security has trade-offs, as we learned on 9/11 when the proscribed response to a hijacking totally failed because nobody predicted weaponizing the planes.
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 09:58:00 AM:
I think the big difference between 12/7 and 9/11 is that we made every effort to learn and correct the deficiencies that led to December 7th. I can't say with any confidence that our Government has learned anything from 9/11.
Do those of you that fly feel any safer now than you did 10 years ago?
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 10:36:00 AM:
Feeblemmind gets it right. The people who missed Mohammad Atta and his "Religion of Peace" terrorists knew what happens when you fail to intercept the attack.
The pre-9/11 failure didn't learn enough lessons from what happened before.
However, the politicians and Generals in 1941 didn't learn the lesson from Battle of Port Arthur. Lessons from history are sometimes great indicators of future events.
What do the Muslim Terrorists want? A continuous string of Muslim victories until they rule the world. We better be ready, they haven't surrendered yet. In order to culturally sensitive, we also need to understand that to them surrendering is acceptable in order to prepare for the next victory.
In keeping with my tradition, allow me to include a little family history. My wife's Uncle Bud was on the Antares at the Battle of Pearl Harbor. The fact that the ship was unarmed did not keep it out of the fight. Thanks Uncle Bud for your service to this great country.
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 10:42:00 AM:
Is this another assault on Connie Gorlic? You know, she is very wealthy now and beloved of Obama and the extremists on the left?
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 11:22:00 AM:
Was the sabotage concern in Hawaii due to uncertainty about the local Japanese population?
Present day Taiwan must be thinking about this problem.
1000+ PRC missiles and PRC "tourists".
My first solution for Taiwan: buy Harriers and spread them all over Taiwan.
Kent Gatewood
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 11:41:00 AM:
There were so many failures at Pearl Harbor to "Connect the Dots". The report from the S.S. Luriline on coded short radio messages coming out of the North Pacific. The fact that many on the "sailors" on leave in Japan were actually soldiers in disguise. The coincidental arrival of the B-17s from California that masked the Japanese planes on our radar, and the security slip that let the junior officer know that there were B-17s coming in from Japan. The last one is very important. The officer had been told that when the local radio station was on all night that meant is was being used as a homing beacon for the big 4 engine bombers on their long flight in from California. He should not have known that. When the Japanese planes were picked up on radar, their location was about 1 degree off from the American planes. He knew something he shouldn't have known and failed to raise the alarm because someone talked. Eventually, the bombers path converged with the Japanese planes but by then it was too late.
Gorlick and all of the people in charge of our intelligence gathering should have known the same history, and should have been able to do a better job of connecting all the information together. As I pointed out above, they knew the Muslim Terrorists were going to try again, and we know today that they will keep trying until we make them stop.
Or, there is this:
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”
George Orwell quotes
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 12:49:00 PM:
Both 12/07 and 9/11 were sneak attacks that were foreseeable. In both cases the USA had forewarning of an imminent attack, but didn't know exactly where and how.
An air attack on Pearl Harbor was unfathomable to many in our military in 1941 -- they never read the "memo" Billy Mitchell had "written" back in the 1920s.
I know a few people who expected a repeat of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and planned accordingly. The use of hijacked planes as missiles had been thought upon by many, including the CIA and Tom Clancy wannabees.
I have a pet theory that in August 2001 the CIA was hounding Bush with warnings about bin Laden and Al-Queda in the hope that he'd figure out to call the FBI directly -- something that the CIA was legally prohibited from doing on its own. Bush didn't get the message.
By , at
Tue Dec 07, 04:16:00 PM:
Interesting theory, Ig.
However, since the CIA deals with the outside,and the FBI deals with the inside, there has to be a method of handing off the information when the threat moves from the outside to the inside. If the agencies involved and the previous administration left a system that depended on the next President "getting the message" as opposed to just being told, "you need to call the FBI", that was a seriously flawed system.
