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How a preventable disaster killed six marines

propublica.org

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Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#101

Post by greedo »

cstross wrote: post #100
frank2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are agreeing with GP: the Marines have their own carriers, which they call amphibious assault ships, so they don’t have to rely on the Navy’s carriers the next time the Marines get pinned down like they did at Guadalcanal.

As a reminder? Those Marine "amphibious assault ships" are larger than the carriers operated by most other navies. (Russia, China, and India each have one carrier that's larger than an America -class; the UK has two. The USMC, in contrast, has nine ( Wasp class and America class), to the USN's 11 regular CATOBAR-equipped carriers. Seriously, the world's second-largest carrier fleet, after the USN, is operated by the…

Not to be further pedantic, but in no way does the USMC operate these carriers. They are USN ships through and through. The Marine Corps is a part of the Navy, as much as they'd like to think of themselves as an independent branch.

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#102

Post by greedo »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #27
masklinn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being there quick is not useful when you do nothing of value and leave immediately though.

Experience gained in the last 20yr in the middle east (Afghanistan in particular) indicates that what we traditionally consider "fighter" type aircraft are capable of delivering various guided munitions with sufficient accuracy and that time to location is highly important. Having dedicated CAS aircraft is nice and it's probably wise to keep something of that nature in service at all time but it's foolish to pretend…

The B-1B bomber has performed a larger percentage of CAS missions than any other aircraft. In many ways they are the best airframe for this since they have a long loiter time, incredible load out, high speed to get to the fight. The only downside is no brrrp cannon like the A-10.

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#103

Post by protonfish »

js8 wrote: post #69
protonfish wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it is because we have not found an organizational strategy that does not quickly break down into corrupt hierarchy.

That doesn't explain why people do not massively despise hierarchies in the first place.

Stockholm Syndrome?

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#104

Post by ip26 »

js8 wrote: post #76
StreamBright wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the mode of operation you are suggesting to be used instead? On the top of that, what flaws are you talking about in specific?

Same flaws mentioned in the article - lack of accountability in the upper layers of hierarchy, which resulted in loss of human life. Possible solution is more democratic control (by the people down in the hierarchy) over the people who are in charge, for example an independently elected accountability board with a power to penalize and recall the leaders.

So, some kind of democratically elected commander in chief who is the supreme commander of the US military?

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#105

Post by massaman_yams »

cafard wrote: post #44
thrower123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the Airforce personnel that I've drunk with tell me that a couple minutes on pure oxygen do wonders to clear up a hangover.

Pure oxygen may clear up a hangover, but as far as I know the body metabolizes alcohol at a fixed rate unaffected by oxygen, exercise, etc.

One thing known to speed alcohol metabolization is fructose. That's not to say consuming fructose will make you "sober", though, as the first metabolic byproduct of alcohol - acetaldehyde - also has CNS effects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1854373

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#106

Post by logfromblammo »

cafard wrote: post #44
thrower123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the Airforce personnel that I've drunk with tell me that a couple minutes on pure oxygen do wonders to clear up a hangover.

Pure oxygen may clear up a hangover, but as far as I know the body metabolizes alcohol at a fixed rate unaffected by oxygen, exercise, etc.

Drunkenness is mediated by alcohol dehydrogenase. Hangover is mediated by acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.

As both of those use NAD+ as cofactors, something that may sober someone up faster without causing hangover symptoms is a combination of tryptophan and niacin, but only to the extent that NAD+ availability is a limiting factor in the liver. A dietary sufficiency of zinc is necessary for production of alcohol dehydrogenase. Experiments suggest that 1 g fructose/kg body mass also helps process alcohol faster, but I'm not clear on how, and the research has inconsistent reproducibility.

If you have a healthy diet already, and have a healthy liver, there is very little you can actually do to sober up faster, beyond building up a tolerance, which increases the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase your body produces when exposed to ethanol.

The pure oxygen may counteract some of the symptoms of drunkenness and hangover, but the health effects of hyperoxia can be even worse than ethanol intoxication. It would be less dangerous to intravenously infuse tryptophan and niacin-associated nicotinamides, or use direct hepatic injection, and even that sounds reckless.

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#107

Post by NeuNeurosis »

js8 wrote: post #69
protonfish wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it is because we have not found an organizational strategy that does not quickly break down into corrupt hierarchy.

That doesn't explain why people do not massively despise hierarchies in the first place.

People play lip service to hating hierarchy's but I would argue that they regularly espouse them and value them in almost all aspects of their lives. The ones they seem to hate are the faceless ones that they don't understand how they work, why they exist and who really runs them and has stakes in them. People hate facelessness especially from those in power. But they are more than happy to take orders from someone they think they can relate to, see the hate for Obama or Hilary from the right but their love of anything Trump does.

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#108

Post by jandrewrogers »

dmos62 wrote: post #29
redis_mlc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not just leave all the flying stuff to the Air Force or maybe specialized parts of the Navy? The priorities aka politics of each military branch are different. Canonical example: At Guadalcanal in WW2, the Navy was supposed to land supplies and support the Marines, but when the Japanese Navy showed up, the US Navy weighed anchor and left - with most supplies still aboard. The Marines are still mad about that 75…

> when the Japanese Navy showed up, the US Navy weighed anchor and left I'm not even an amateur pacific theater historian, but I know that this story is more nuanced than that, and your implication that the Navy didn't cooperate sounds naive. It's true that the US armed forces suffer from high division. My canonical example is the retirement of A-10 in favor of F-35.

The A-10 needs to be retired regardless because the airframe cannot be upgraded to survive in a modern air defense environment.

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#109

Post by logfromblammo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #28
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And the F35 is the worst at CAS - high, fast and expensive with no loiter time. True, but it's there quick (compared to the A10, C130 and any helicopter) which counts for a ton. Nobody ever called for air support and didn't need it now.

Isn't the job of getting there quick and delivering fire to the ground best left to missiles?

A high-altitude drone with extreme linger time and a battery of light missiles--backed by an Army artillery position or Navy missile destroyer for delivering the heavier firepower a few minutes later--seems like a better quality solution than humans piloting fighter jets that require carriers or ground runways.

But a human brain in the cockpit of a reusable munitions-delivery vehicle is probably cheaper and more resilient.

Re: How a preventable disaster killed six marines

#110

Post by js8 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #84
js8 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> heirarchy and democracy coexist rather than being mutually exclusive Exactly, that is my point, in the army they are exclusive though. The people lower in the hierarchy have little say in whether they trust the people upper in the hierarchy. > Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises. That is true, but that's my point also. Why d…

> That is true, but that's my point also. Why does it dominate, if we know from our (rather limited) experience with democracy that at least on the state level, it leads to better outcomes? We have almost no experience with non-heirarchical democratic state-level organization. We have experience with heirarchy with democratic accountability and heirarchy without it, and from that we can conclude that: (1) the former…

I think your analysis lacks distinction that not all hierarchies structurally are hierarchies of power. For example, in Linux Kernel development, there is a hierarchy with Linus on top, but the hierarchy has very little actual power over other developers. Anybody can fork a Linux kernel. So even when there is a hierarchy, the power doesn't have to be concentrated in it.

In fact, I consider democracy to be explicitly against power hierarchies. (In this sense, it is very leftist concept.)

From my perspective, the whole problem with holacracy is the lack of rules that guarantee the distribution of power, unlike in democracy, where this is guaranteed by agreement of participants with the decision-making method (i.e. votes of all people are equal).

Finally, you still state that hierarchy is a natural phenomenon, but that still doesn't explain why people insist on it even culturally. Just like the fact that humans evolved on African savannah doesn't mean that they would like to continue do so. But humans are surprisingly insistent on hierarchies of power even in the face of f-ups mentioned in the article.

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