Blogger’s switched me over to Dano — let’s see if archives work better now.

USS Clueless:

As a general rule, you can tell how good an army is and how well it will do on the battlefield by looking to see how much responsibility and authority it gives to its sergeants. And as De Atkine points out: “a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army”. The Israeli army’s sergeants are about the same as ours in terms of level of authority.

I wonder how the Indian and Pakistani armies would rate. Anyone with contacts in the military care to write about this?

I am not sure why presenting an aggregator’s output in reverse-chronological order is the best way to do things.

RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.

Actually, Radio’s aggregator doesn’t present the news in reverse-chronological order either: it presents it in reverse-chronological order ordered by feed. And while the reverse-chronological view may be useful, I am not convinced it is the only show in town. In particular, Radio’s implementation gives me information overload because the News Page bloats massively as I cross about 30 frequently updated or verbose subscriptions. IMHO Syndirella had a much better interface: no-frills, highly keyboard-friendly and geared to minimize visual overload.

Good blogs I’ll queue up in my blogroll real soon now: madhoo.com, ravikiran.com and varnam.com.

Ralph Peters in the NY Post warns that while the war is going well for coalition troops, mistakes have been made:

Despite the warnings – even the pleading – of his generals, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to send as many heavy ground forces to the Gulf as our military planners requested. In many ways an admirable and inspiring leader, Rumsfeld let himself be persuaded by a gang of civilian theorists and by mercenary defense contractors that airpower could win this war and that ground forces would just go in to tidy things up.

So the generals did not get the extra armored divisions they wanted to provide maximum punch on the battlefield and as insurance should unexpected difficulties emerge. Now we have no significant ground reserves in the theater of war, we lack adequate combat units to fully protect our supply lines – and the weary troops at the front must continue the fight by themselves.

Peters’ earlier columns are also worth reading.

Inside Ventura County: Iraqi TV Station was probably destroyed by E-bomb. Earlier, CNN had reported (can’t find a permalink for this) that the TV station was in a predominantly civilian area and that it was previously considered to be a “difficult” target in terms of minimizing civilian casualties.

LT Smash: After work today, a buddy and I grabbed a couple of cold beers, sat down on a park bench, and talked about football while watching the girls walk by. (LT Smash is a reserve officer in the US Military, blogging from the Gulf.)