GreyOne,

Two posts in a row. I guess I'm yakking too much today.

Once upon a time, I used to work in the SECDEF Office of Drug Enforcement Policy and Support. The counterdrug interdiction war is predominantly a Navy and Coast Guard operation anyway. The Army provides Special Forces troops for training of host country forces in the counterdrug war, Customs has some of its own planes for radar detection and tracking of smuggler flights, and until the Navy left Puerto Rico, a long range radar site watched much of the air smuggling traffic in the northern part of the Southern Hemisphere. (I have no idea whether it is still there today or not). Air Force (and occasionally Marine) ground based radars systems were semi-continuously deployed to track smuggling flights in those days, manned mostly by Guardsmen and Reservists. There was never enough of anything in those days and so there wouldn't be enough during the drawdown (which continued till 2001). I heard about Stop-Loss for the first time while I worked there (AF Navigators were stop-loss'ed for a year around 1997, among others.)

My knowledge is pretty dated, but much of what I read in the papers indicates the methods of smuggling are not all that different today than in 1996. We needed all those assets back then. But based on what we know today, who is the bigger threat? Middle Eastern radicals or South American drug lords? Where should America's limited resources be used to best effect? Should our radars be in Colombia or in Iraq? Should our Special Forces teams be in Peru or in Afghanistan? Should the P-3s be flying on China and North Korea and Iran, or in the Caribbean?

I view this as the chance for Customs, Border Patrol, and Coast Guard to do the task they have always been assigned, but never given the resources to do, and then go back to Congress and insist that they be given what they need to do their jobs, or they will only do what they can currently achieve.

DoD was only assigned this task by Bush 41 to bring order and organizational assistance to law enforcement, to provide assets law enforcement did not have at its disposal, and to show them how to cooperate with each other instead of backstabbing each other constantly. Perhaps it is time we got ourselves out of their business and let them sink or swim. Because they surely weren't weaning themselves away from the big DoD pocketbook when I worked there.

There will be pain before this gets fixed.

Subsunk

I don't know about you guys but my husband barely has time to breath. His career field orientation used to include the divorce rate of 80% and we did that squadron twice.

I am sick and tired of fakes or others stealing my husband's voice. A fake or worse on Polipundit displays a military e-mail, uses www.af.mil for internet access according to "sitemeter" and consistently tore down the Commander in Chief with these "resources". He sent me a threatening pop-up and after leaving a comment that hinted at what he had done my computer crashed within minutes and it took my husband three hours to gain access to his email which he needed before his three hour briefing to the new two star arriving at Nellis. I have been posting on the web since 2003 and these three confluence of events has never happened to me before or since. Yet I am like Monica WITHOUT the blue dress I cannot prove it.

He also has the same name as a retired special ops Air Force officer-and it was embarrassing to admit how long it took me to find on the boards that he was not this individual. He was "pulling rank" on an enlisted fellow and bragging about retiring after twenty years,being on flight status and achieving the lofty rank of Captain. That's when I finally realized he was a loser. A loser because he was pulling rank and let's face it you washed out of UPT or something if you managed to only make Captain. But it was terrifying to wonder what the backwards countdown pop up he sent me was suppose to mean.

The pundits at Polipundit could care less-and this is evident because trackbacks for gambling and selling drugs online have been allowed to fester at that site. This is the only blog right or left that does that and it says that they value ANY traffic and even though they display a "Blogs for Bush" ad they have the most offensive trackbacks and also porn links.

They need to clean it up-and Feingold and McCain might be right about something- blogs are irresponsible.

I know I am just a bottom of the wrung dependant but FAKES stealing MY husband's voice is making this worse than it has to be..

You said you were willing to help the Pentagon with milblogs-you might realize that information warfare is what is going on, and that the temptation for military to use government resources or to cross the line intelligence wise in order to "break" a news story via blogs is TOO great.

Cut the active-duty and their dependents a break.

This guy retired as an Air Force Captain but is now a civilian contractor working at Los Angeles AFB-and therefore has been given the computer and af.mil e-mail which he proudly puts on display at Polipundit-that is unprofessional in and of itself but the law can't keep up with technology.

And either he is a fake or the Pentagon can't keep up with all the loopholes of military vs. civilian contractors and what is considered ethical.

There's nothing wrong with our military patrolling the waterways for drug smugglers so long as they don't have pressing priorities. However the money allocated (and the senior responsibility) should be resourced to DHS and the Coast Guard. On a related note, US soldiers have embarrased the military twice in the past month in Columbia - drug running and arms trafficking. Where there is the tempation of big money there will be transgressions however hopefully the military will tighten the lax discipline of our soldiers in South America.
Go here to read more about these incidents: http://www.thequonsethut.com/?p=287

The P-3C Orions are in use in Afghanistan... where, interestingly enough, they've proven very effective in conjunction with Predator drones. I say "interestingly" because the P-3 was designed to patrol oceans and find submarines. But then, a UAV designed to find Tuna schools is currently in the thick of the fight in Northern Iraq. It's smart to be flexible.

So that's one reason for the reduction.

Another reason is that the P-3 airframes are simply wearing out (like most foods except Twinkies and Ho-Hos, airplanes have expiration dates measured in flight hours). The USA currently has about 196 planes in inventory, but that's dropping as they're forced to retire aircraft. The P-8A Maritime Multimission Aircraft (based on a 737) won't arrive until 2010 at the earlier, and full production will wait until 2013-15.

This is speculation, but it seems that one way to preserve the remaining P-3C fleet is to chop their hours and keep them for more pressing contingencies.