In our household there's a meme of sorts that, when one of us doesn't want to talk about what's really bothering me or her, we compliment the ferns.
As in, "Oh look, that's sure a pretty fern arrangement over there." As if we're at Bennigan's, and it's 1979.
We smile, a little tension is released. Or it's not if the other really wanted to address an issue rather than simply avoiding it with a distraction.
That's probably not a bad idea this morning. It's 17 degrees outside, windy, miserable, raw. There's not even a lovely swirl of snow in the air. It's just damn cold, the meteorological bars on the cage in which I've spent the winter. I just can't bring myself to go outside.
But hey, here's a "fern"--it's Read Across America Day! Not so fast, friend. Like everything else, this day supposedly devoted to reading to kids has been politicized, fouled, this time by the left. It seems Dr. Seuss was insufficiently "woke", didn't have enough Lorax's of color in wheelchairs dressed as lady Lorax's.
These are the same people who are merrily renaming schools formerly honoring Abraham Lincoln, because he was patronizing or some such. They have brought us fake outrages such as the racially-charged cafeteria encounter at Smith College that was entirely made up, but no problem. (you can read about it in this morning's NYT).
The right doesn't need to fabricate caricatures--the radical left has a whole buffet table on display.
Meanwhile in MAGA land, talk of secession grows by the day. Half of all Republicans in the old Confederacy think it's a good idea. They are especially excited about confiscating and redistributing the property of Democrats forced to flee.
Donald Trump meets Yuri Zhivago, with not so much as a hint of irony. Fanatics aren't much for irony.
All intractable, all growing ever worse.
Work has always been a reliable distraction, but these days it involves mounds of discovery. I hate discovery. For the non-lawyers reading this, "discovery" refers to those devices of information gathering that the well-meaning authors of the rules of civil procedure could never have anticipated would become the means of harassment and torture, of both parties and their counsel. Ridiculously overspecific questions are answered under oath--here's just one real-life example:
Identify any documents and recordings including, but not limited to, pictures, photographs, PowerPoint presentations for use at trial, demonstrative exhibits, computer generated exhibits, electronically stored data, visual aids, overlays, employment records, plats, visual recorded images, audio recordings, cassette tapes, transcripts of testimony, diagrams and objects relative to the occurrence, the scene of the occurrence, Plaintiff's physical condition or statements made by any party or witness. Identify the substance of the item, the date obtained, what is depicted within the item, and the name and address of the present custodian of each item.
And a typical request might have twenty-five or thirty of those gems. Add to that a forty or fifty item request for production of documents that might result in a poor paralegal scanning and indexing thousands of pages of pdf files, non-party subpoenas written in the same turgid prose, and requests for admission, and you have a recipe for despair.
Once you've lost unrecoverable hours of your life in this wasteful exercise, you're still not done. Folks go out of their way to provide nothing useful in the quest for the truth in any of this, which results in a "meet and confer" between the lawyers, mandated by the courts, as a precondition of asking the court to order the schlub on the other side to answer the damn questions or produce the documents.
I have sixty-something cases going right now, and as we come up on a year into lock-down lawyers are burying one another in discovery because it can be done from home. Boat payments have to be made.
The thought of it makes me want to stick a knitting needle through my eye socket until it pokes out the back. Thank God I finally have a decent paralegal to do the heavy-lifting, emailing me updates on document organization at 1 a.m. on Sunday.
Okay, so work can't be our "ferns" this morning. I guess I'll fall back on my time-honored means of escape from the present.
No, not Jameson's. Way too early.
Instead, let's talk F-15 tactical employment, a topic that was rolling through my head at four this morning.
The basic combat formation for the F-15 was the four-ship, divided into two-ship elements. A big push, such as in the early days of the war, might have entailed eight or even twelve of us in an air superiority role, hunting for adversary aircraft to blow up.
Like every closed community, we had our dogma, our orthodoxy. One article of faith was that the most effective way to employ the Eagle was in a "Wall", with the four jets line abreast, maybe two miles between each and 3-5,000 feet of altitude separation. Each jet had an area of responsibility with his radar, in theory collectively covering the entire airspace in front of the formation. As an enemy formation drew within about twenty miles, we would "sort" the targets, with each pilot calling out on the radio that he was "sorted," as in "Firestone 3 sorted, eastern bandit, 18,000."
The idea here was that four F-15s could bring a lot of firepower to bear in one head-on engagement. Each would launch an AIM-7 Sparrow at his target, a radar guided missile that required the aircraft's radar to stay in single-target track, illuminating the target until it was destroyed by the annular fragmentation warhead buried in the missile. As we watched the clock on the AIM-7 tick down on our head's up display, we would toggle to the AIM-9 Sidewinder, a heat-seeking missile so sensitive it could detect the glow of a jet engine down its intakes. We would look out front, get a tally-ho on a second target, and unleash the Sidewinder to kill the first target's wingman in two perfect little fireballs.
If everyone did his job, that's eight dead bad guys by the time you hit the merge. We figured we'd need that sort of force multiplication if we ever had to fight the Big Red Machine over Germany, given that we were outgunned more than three-to-one.
There was just one problem--the Wall rarely worked. It seems the tactic was developed at the Fighter Weapons School, that Olympian schoolhouse in Nevada where every Eagle driver was in the top 10% of his profession. These guys rarely made mistakes, and their jets usually had fully functioning radars.
Real life, however, was not so kind to the Wall. If I was leading a four ship on any given training mission, I might have a wingman fresh out of F-15 school, a hungover light colonel getting one of his four or five sorties a month while working at wing headquarters, a guy with a broken radar, a guy distracted and going through a divorce. You get the idea. And if one of them, just one, pointed his radar in the wrong place or failed to sort his target, the bandit he missed would often swing merrily behind the formation and call us all dead from an unseen missile shot.
It happened a lot.
I've always had lots of trouble with authority and orthodoxy, and soon found myself among the minority who bucked the Weapons School wisdom for an approach that recognized our pilots were human and our equipment somewhat unreliable.
We called it the "Grinder".
Picture that Wall of Eagles sauntering line abreast into hostile airspace, and seeing a formation of bad guys approaching from sixty or so miles away. We looked just like any other wall until around thirty miles, when one element would peel off and run the other way, dropping like a rock, leaving two jets "hot" and pointed at the enemy. The hot element would sort the best they could, fire, and at missile time-out with two bandits dead pull hard and away, maybe 135 degrees to get clear of the other element that was now turning hot.
As the two elements would pass each other line abreast, the now-hot element would sling two AIM-7s at the bandit formation, turning cold again at missile time-out as the other element turned hot, perhaps popping fifteen thousand feet up to make it harder for the bad guys to keep track of them.
At this point, there are four dead bandits, with maybe two more about to see a bright light and the face of Allah as missiles five and six approach. And we had not ever merged.
This rotating dance of death could not go on forever, because with each cycle the bad guys would get a little closer. But at every turn there were fewer of them; they were slowly being ground down to an manageable number, with no chance to engage us in a visual fight until they were so diminished and demoralized we could eliminate the survivors.
When it worked, it was a thing of beauty. And, at least in large-scale training, it usually worked.
So why wasn't the Grinder a staple of our orthodoxy? Part of it was practical--there were some scenarios in which this high-tech version of Cannae wasn't an option. For instance, if you're escorting a bunch of F-16s hauling iron to go bomb a target, engaging in a counter-rotating ballet would allow the bombers to fly past you and into Indian Country with no cover. Sometimes you just had to sweep in front of them and accept the fact that you might lose some guys.
But I think the real issue was that all this flighty running away seemed, well, unmanly. This was a time in the fighter community when the Air Force Chief of Staff mandated v-neck t-shirts with our flight suits so we could expose a credible tuft of chest hair (true story), and the idea of acknowledging human and technical frailty seemed heretical. I think it was also the "patch wearers" from the weapons school protecting their guild--"if you guys would just do your jobs, we'd win with the Wall of Eagles every time." I heard that bit of certitude enough. Every profession has its ivory tower.
We never found out in combat which worked best, the Wall or the Grinder. The Iraqis almost always ran away, and when they engaged it was never in sufficient numbers to pose the tactical problem of whittling away at overwhelming odds. So my Eagle brothers just engaged them two-by-two, more often than not, and never lost a jet.
Ah, I feel better now. Almost well enough to dive into the raft of discovery waiting on my desk. Sigh.
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