Pilot's Log

( Toho War Movie Trailer #1 )

( Toho War Movie Trailer #2 )

( At Least The Jets Are American, If Not The Air Force )

Explanations: Toho Movie #1 is Taiheiyo no Tsubasa/Wings of the Pacific, also known as Attack Squadron and marketed on home video as Kamikaze, which is a misnomer. It's the true story of a Japanese squadron whose commander refused to allow himself or his pilots to be used in suicide missions. One of the actual planes of this same squadron survived the War and is in the collection of the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, FL.

Toho Movie #2 is Ozora No Samurai/Samurai of the Blue Sky about the pilot Saburo Sakai, who became an ace against the Allies during the Guadalcanal campaign but then was wounded in the eye and forced to make an epic flight back to base alone and in horrible pain. While the fight that caused his wound isn't faithfully depicted here, it was the subject of an episode of PBS' Secrets of the Dead last year.

Rounding out the triptych is a video tribute to the F-5E Tiger II in the service of the Taiwanese (Republic of China) Air Force.

As you may know, from previous posts of mine, I've been taking an interest of late in Mainland China's military build-up and how that affects us on this side of the world.

This past week, the Chinese Army staged a very large scale amphibious landing exercize, involving dozens of ships and units from all branches of its armed services. I'm convinced that they are seriously planning a full-scale invasion of Taiwan soon. And they also expect to be fighting American troops when they do.

Recently, the decommissioned French aircraft carrier Clemenceau entered the Suez Canal enroute to India, where it will be scrapped. Environmentalist groups have been opposing the move, as the ship contains large amounts of asbestos and this substance (in their view) could bring about ecological damage. (My view is that the dozens of ships that have already been scrapped at that location make any potential damage from Clemenceau's destruction dwarf in comparison.) The truly bizarre thing about this ship is that once it's in the Gulf of Aden, it will go through waters allegedly swarming with Somali pirates. Can you imagine the idea of pirates raiding an actual carrier--maybe with some likelihood of success?

Meanwhile, the Chinese are scrapping the former Soviet carrier Varyag. Or are they? Could they be refitting the ship for their own navy? Or just using it as a baseline for designing their own navy of the future?

Meanwhile, Boeing is finding itself biting its own afterburners over a little thing called "technology transfer". They have this pet project called the 787 Dreamliner in the works, but many of their engineers have come to the project from that little piece of military technology the B-2 Stealth Bomber. So in order to get the thing built, Boeing has to reverse-engineer items originally invented, by themselves, for the B-2...in such a way as to get around laws Congress put in place to prevent other countries from getting American military secrets. The reason for this reverse-engineering? Some of the major structures of the 787 will be built...in the same Chengdu factory that now produces the J-10 and J-7G fighter jets for the Chinese Air Force. If it later turns out that our Boeing F-15 and F/A-18 jets can't pick up Chinese-made fighters on radar to shoot them down, we now know exactly who to blame.