Military History and Ted Williams

The thought occurred to me that I might want to take a break from military history and read something else. So, at the library, I selected a biography of a famous baseball player, Ted Williams, who played for the Boston Red Sox. Imagine my shock when I opened to the table of contents and found this ...

       Prologue

1     Boston

2     San Diego

3     Minnesota

4     Boston

5     .406

6     World War II

7     Boston 

8     Korea

9     Boston

10   Boston

11   Cooperstown

12   Washington

There it is. Two wars. In a book about the national pastime. I can't get away from it! I'll tell you more about it after I've read the book, but Hall of Famer, Ted Williams took time away from his baseball career twice to serve in the armed forces as a fighter pilot.

I don't think that's the right word

So, I'm at home and my wife is telling me a story about some guy that got caught stealing in a men's clothing store she worked in a long time ago. Not only was the guy taking money, he was giving suits to his buddies as huge unauthorized discounts. 

To this day my wife can't get over the guy's audacity. 

"Yeah," she said, with excitement, "the police came took him out in cuff links!"

"In Your Face"

My early
birthday present

So, Haydin, a rising first grader, sees on the computer screen that we are in the month of April.

"Good," I exclaimed.  "That means next month is ..."  (Sensing a good teaching opportunity, I said to him,) "You know what next month is, right?

"January," he says.

Nope.

"February?"

No.

"March?"

WRONG.

From the next room, someone whispered the correct answer to him.  "May!" he said.

Right, and you know what May is, right?  (He didn't, because his parents, apparently, have neglected one of the most crucial aspects of the young man's education).  May is the month of PaPa's birthday!

This news excited him.

So, I asked him, "Are you going to send PaPa a present?"

"No, I'm here," he said.

What?

"See," he said, as he rushed right up to me, "I'm in your face," he said.  

He meant it one way, but I couldn't help but take it another way.

Preparing for the Next War

General John R. Galvin

"We in the military often are accused falsely of “preparing to fight not the next war but the last.”  That criticism is not well placed: we are not, for the most part, obtuse enough to fight yesterday’s war—but we might be doing something worse still.  When we think about the possibilities of conflict we tend to invent for ourselves a comfortable vision of war, a theater with battlefields we know, conflict that fits our understanding of strategy and tactics, a combat environment that is consistent and predictable, fightable with the resources we have, one that fits our plans, our assumptions, our hopes, and our preconceived ideas.  We arrange in our minds a war we can comprehend in our own terms, usually with an enemy that looks like us and acts likes us.  This comfortable conceptualization becomes the accepted way of seeing things and, as such, ceases to be an object of further investigation unless it comes under serious challenge as a result of some major event—usually a military disaster."[1]

---

[1] General John R. Galvin, U.S. Army, “Uncomfortable Wars: Toward a New Paradigm,” Parameters, Winter, 1986.

 

Guess Who's at My House!

These guys!

Government Contracting References--Short List

Just a short list if because who has time for a long one?

Government Sources

From the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:  Key Facts About Contractors

Army Contracting Command
Army Single Face to Industry (ASFI) Acquisisition Business Web Site
CECOM Contracting Center
FAR Table of Contents
FARSearch
FARSite
FEDBIZOPS
GSA Advantage
Mission and Installation Contracting Command
TRADOC G-8


Private Sources

Center for a New American Security
Contracting in Combat Zones: Who Are Our Subcontractors?

Certified Public Accountants
Hoyman Dobson (Sign up for their newsletters)

Proposal Writing
Capture Planning
Deborah Kluge
The 24-Hour Company

Teamwork: Scheduled Maintenance on an Aircraft Carrier

Just thought this was cool, the way they navigate the carrier into the drydocks.  Talk about teamwork!  It is also interesting since, just a few weeks ago, the Navy was telling us this couldn't happen -- the scheduled maintenance and overhaul of the USS Abraham Lincoln -- because of the sequester.



I wonder if anyone has ever accidently hit the accelerator right at the end instead of the brakes.