Author: Vic Socotra

A Place For Iguanas

(US Navy image attached of the facility at GTMO, Cuba). There is some commotion out there in the wider world this morning. In Lithuania, the big NATO conference is underway. We don’t recall this much excitement about one of those since the last time the European alliance was blustering about Bosnia, and Russia’s attempt to […]

A Deep State Week

The Ukrainian President took a moment to observe the 500th day of the Special Military Operation being conducted in his nation over the weekend. The second-string commentators on Fox filled the air-waves both days with stories a day or so out of phase in the re-run stringss of shattered Ukrainian tanks. It made us think […]

On the Beach

There is a little wiggle room this morning in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Not that we are wiggling that dramatically. The Patio Space- once known as “The Lanai,” is not quite ready for that yet this morning, and the excesses of some in the evening hours last night is still playing out on the margins […]

The PACFLT GANG

The attachment is a photo dated sometime in 1981. It features the Gang assigned to the US Pacific Fleet’s Ocean Surveillance Information Facility. We knew it as the FOSIC. It was a component of a global system intended to track the motion of Soviet Naval Units worldwide, with emphasis on the ballistic missile submarines that […]

This Missile Crisis is Easier

So, we have brushed past some of the interesting ways our government responds to crisis. Our last exposure commenced in the wild response to 9/11. In part of the immediate response, we found ourselves attached to the person of the Cabinet Secretary designated to be the one who would survive the next attack. The means […]

Meeting the Deep State (2)

We worked with Mac Showers to talk about his remarkable career in War and Cold Peace. It was fun, and a lot of issues came up. In wartime, he had been a purely military contributor to the war against Japan. In that struggle there were two major components driven by organizational issues back in Washington. […]

Deep State Moment

There was one of those Deep State Moments last Friday. You may not have noticed, since you were not supposed to. We all know the drill now. Stories that could be inconvenient to the people running things are kept aside by those who monitor Public Affairs and those sorts of things. They are saved for […]

Orientating the 4th

Morning, Gentle Readers! This short blurb is inserted in the morning traffic to explain some of the discontinuity in our normally well-disciplined production cycle. We had opened an account of meeting the Deep State a couple years ago which will continue in due course. It launched at an unusual time- early in the evening of […]

Arrias: Independence

As Damon Runyon liked to say (quoting Hugh Keough): “The race isn’t always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” Looking back 247 years, how would odds-makers have called it, what kind of odds would they have given the gang in Philadelphia? Before answering that, consider the […]