The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.

A triple-bank shot of trouble

The Pentagon loves the number three: think of the nation’s nuclear triad (bombers, subs, and missiles) or the three major military services (Army, Navy, and Air Force). In recent days, each of those services has experienced troubles that shouldn’t have happened. While the specifics vary, the problems are all rooted in the perpetual bane of the Defense Department’s existence: poorly planned programs; too-rosy glasses; poor training and execution. Accountability will largely be MIA when it comes to assessing responsibility. Bureaucracies are far better at removing fingerprints from snafus than dusting for them.

The M10 tank goes belly up

Too bad there’s no Ozempic for U.S. Army tanks. The service blew up its M10 Booker “light” tank program May 1 after it discovered that the nearly 40-ton (!) beast would crack eight of the 11 bridges at Fort Campbell, Ky. Sure, such armor may not sound light, but it is — when compared to its bulked-up M-1 tank cousin, which tips the scales at 73 tons. The Army has long had difficulty developing Goldilocks armored vehicles — light enough to fly to the front, but beefy enough to protect the troops inside once they get there.

The Army awarded a $1.14 billion contract to General Dynamics in 2022 to build the first 96 M10s. It wanted to buy 504 (the service prefers to call such multi-ton tracked machines outfitted with 105 mm guns “armored infantry support vehicles,” but we taxpayers aren’t bound by such Pentagon nomenclatural niceties).

The M10 is “one of the Army’s top modernization priorities,” the service declared in February. Three months later, not so much. “This is not a story of acquisition gone awry,” Alex Miller, the service’s top technology officer, told Defense One. “This is a story of the requirements process creating so much inertia that the Army couldn't get out of its own way, and it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.”

Refreshingly, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll put the M10 out of its misery after GD had delivered 80 of them. “We got a heavy tank,” Driscoll conceded. “We went to the Pentagon leadership and we said, ‘we made a mistake, this didn’t turn out right. We’re going to stop.’”

It's a good start.

One reason why the new ICBM is so costly

The Pentagon has a nearly Pavlovian predilection to assume the best and buy the worst. It’s like that old adage: It’s easier to ask for forgiveness (after the screwup) than ask for permission (when the mission is Permission: Impossible). Take the Air Force effort to replace the aging nuclear-tipped Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles with new Sentinel ICBMs. The Sentinel program’s current price tag of $141 billion — an incredible 81% hike since 2020 — is so high the Pentagon said last year that it is now planning to come up with a “simpler” and “more affordable” plan sometime “around 2026.”

One way the Air Force wanted to save money was to put Sentinel missiles polka-dotted across five states into the existing 400 underground silos now housing the Minuteman IIIs. “Part of the requirements, initially — 10 years ago when this program was started — was to reuse the holes, the missile holes at the launch facilities,” Air Force General Thomas A. Bussiere said April 30. “That was believed to be more efficient, more cost effective, and quicker.” Despite decades of use, and well aware that the Air Force wanted to re-use its ICBM silos, the service recently clutched its warheads and was stunned (wink-wink) to discover they’re too decrepit for the new ICBMs. As Air Force Missileer Emily Litella might have said: “Never mind.”

“As the program continues to undergo restructuring activities, the Air Force analysis continues to confirm unacceptable risks to cost, schedule, and weapon system performance stemming from the original baseline strategy of converting Minuteman III silos,” the service said May 6. “To mitigate this and other risks, the Air Force plans to build new missile silos on predominantly Air Force-owned real estate, which means reusing the existing missile sites but not the 55-year-old silos.”

The Sentinel’s continuing problems have the Air Force considering upgrades so the Minuteman fleet can remain on duty until 2050, 11 years longer than currently planned. Other experts maintain the Pentagon’s nuclear triad can safely be turned into an atomic dyad by amputating its ICBM leg.

It turns out the Sentinel’s problems aren’t so much with the missile itself, but the rotting silos and other ground-based elements of the system, that are driving costs sky high.

Apparently, Air Force dirt ain’t dirt cheap.

Warplanes are designed to dive … but not like this

It’s been a tough tour for the USS Harry S. Truman, the 100,000-ton aircraft carrier whose F-18s have been bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen from the Red Sea. First, one of its F-18s was shot down by mistake by another U.S. warship in December. On April 28, a second F-18 fell off the flattop while it was being towed, after the carrier swerved, apparently to avoid a Houthi drone. A third F-18 ended up in the drink May 6 following a botched landing. Thankfully, there were no serious injuries, except to Navy pride.

The mishaps “have raised questions about the strain placed on the aircraft carrier’s crew,” the Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe reported. Defense Secretary Hegseth has twice extended the Truman’s stay in the region to ensure there are two U.S. carriers in the ‘hood to deal with the Houthis.

THE BOTTOM LINE

There is plenty of blame to go around for all of these snafus. But don’t go looking for finger-pointing. That tends only to happen when those allegedly culpable are no longer around to defend themselves. On May 7, a fourth military service, the U.S. Marine Corps, blamed a 2024 CH-53 helicopter crash that killed five on “fatal controlled flight into terrain.”

Purported pilot error, in other words.

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Backbone of steel

The House passed a bill codifying President Trump’s recent decision to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the Washington Examiner reported May 8.

→ Leave it to cleaver…

Defense Secretary Hegseth is wielding a scalpel when it comes to his ballyhooed Pentagon spending cuts when he should be brandishing an ax, Greg Williams of the Center for Defense Information, here at the Project On Government Oversight, wrote May 7 for Just Security.

→ Read no evil (PDF)

The Pentagon ordered its commanders May 9 to purge their libraries of all books promoting racial and gender diversity. Up next: an order barring all books about how the U.S. military lost its 20-year war in Afghanistan?

Thanks for losing yourself in The Bunker this week. Forward this on to colleagues so they can subscribe here.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the growing Gen Z gender divide. Women are becoming more liberal and less religious, while men are becoming more conservative and more religious. Last week, Vox ran an article about this, suggesting that the increased religiosity among young men is a driving factor in their rightward turn.

It’s a theory. I guess. But I’d argue it’s the opposite. Men are becoming more conservative because they’re mad at feminism, and subsequently becoming more religious as a result. Conservatism, for the most part, requires religion and makes very little sense without it. Social conservatism in particular.

The fact is, young men are currently in thrall to a variety of hyper-religious influencers who promise them that religion can make the patriarchy great again. Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Nick Fuentes are trad Caths (Catholics who like to pretend Vatican II never happened), Charlie Kirk and Joel Webbon are Evangelicals, Andrew Tate is Muslim. I’m not sure what flavor of religious Tim Pool is, but he’s previously tweeted that “It should be illegal not to believe in God,” so …

These influencers are not just making young men more misogynistic or more racist — although they are, Blanche, they are! — they’re also making them more religious.

It’s a thing that’s been going on for years. Many of the men who had initially made a name for themselves as debauched “pick-up artists” started becoming devout religious fundamentalists right around the time women started pushing back against rape culture and feminism started another wave. The more angry men have become about women, the more they’ve turned to men who tell them that God wants them to be in charge of everything and for women to get back in the kitchen.

It’s not rocket science. Nothing makes people more conservative (and thus religious) than having a group of people to hate based on their immutable characteristics.

On the other side of the coin, women — save for those who want to become tradwives themselves — are going to be less interested in a belief system that wants to subjugate them. I’m not saying all religions seek to subjugate women, though it does seem like a fairly common denominator, especially right now.

It’s what I say all of the time: People love you for the way you make them feel about themselves, and they gravitate towards things and people that tell them the story they want to hear about themselves. If you’re a man and you’re feeling bad, and you think things would have been better for you at a time when women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant — which, fair, eliminating competition from half the population would give most people an edge in life — then you’re going to gravitate towards a belief system that tells you it’s the “natural order” for your wife to be subservient to you.

Because it’s really not just that men are becoming more religious in general — they’re not out here becoming Methodists or Episcopalians — they’re specifically gravitating towards fundamentalist churches that espouse a patriarchal view of the world. It’s a view that now allows them to proudly and openly say that they do not think men and women are equal, that they don’t think women should be in the workplace, that they think we should stay home and have babies instead. It’s a lot easier to say abhorrent things if you think God is standing behind you, giving you a big thumbs up.

This is not without precedent. In the 1940s, you had women going to work because of WWII. In the 1950s, you had the rise of evangelicalism and a nationwide cultural push to get them out of there and back to the kitchen.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, you had the women’s rights movement and the Civil Rights Movement. One minute later, you had born-again Christians realizing that it was God, actually, who needed to ban interracial relationships at Bob Jones University. It’s also when Protestants decided they were anti-abortion, too, whereas it had previously just been “a Catholic” thing. In the 1990s, there was increased acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, Rodney King, a new Black Power movement, and third wave feminism. Then, in the 2000s, you got purity rings and purity balls and people demanding Creationism be taught in schools.

Donate Just Once!

It’s been a while since I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, but it’s the same idea. It’s just hitting particularly hard this time, due to social media and our lack of a shared popular culture. Part of the reason the fundamentalist nonsense calmed down after a while was because people made fun of it. After all, who wanted to be the Church Lady? But now there’s nothing that everyone watches or listens to, and the Right has been working hard at trying to make its own culture. It has not gone well, obviously, but they’re certainly trying.

How long will this last? Hard to say. Longer than before, probably. I will say that, homophobic as they are, I think the lack of women going along with them might be a problem at some point.

It’s pretty hard to be a patriarch all on your own.

This is a guest post by Matt Guthrie.

In recent weeks I have been talking in Cheryl’s Week in Review posts and some others about Tommy, who walked out of prison on May 1 after 37 years behind bars. My thanks to Dr. Farley and the LGM brain trust for this opportunity to tell his long, sad story more fully.

One day in the summer of 1988, two men who had been hitch-hiking near Barstow were arrested for the killing of a man in a park in Las Vegas the previous day. They were tried separately, and both were convicted. One of the jurors in the trial of the man who actually did the killing was the woman who many years later became my girlfriend. She voted to convict, but then was one of the leaders in the jury room arguing for a sentence of life with the possibility of parole, rather than LWOP or a capital sentence (these were the days when juries decided sentences). Twenty-five years pass, and she flies to Carson City for his parole hearing to tell the parole board “I was on the jury and we voted the way we did so as to give him another chance. Please honor our wishes”. And they did. And he has stayed out of trouble for the decade-plus since his release.

A few years after those events, we began to wonder about the fate of the other man – the one who had been there, but hadn’t actively participated in the killing. What we found was, alas, a microcosm of the randomness, the vicissitudes, and the fundamental unfairness of the American system of punishment.

Tommy had been sentenced to death by his jury, after a trial that lasted less than three days. Think about that for a moment – sentenced to death after a trial that lasted less than three days. After he had spent several years on death row this was changed to LWOP because the original judge had refused to delay the penalty phase of the trial even though family members who were traveling from the east coast to testify on his behalf were delayed and not present.  Because it seemed so fundamentally unfair and wrong that he languished in prison while his co-defendant had been free for a decade we (and by “we” I mean “90% my girlfriend with me providing moral support and occasional assistance”) went to work. We discovered that there was an attorney who had had success in getting LWOP sentences commuted not by re-litigating the cases but by making arguments based upon lack of danger to the community and probability of re-integration, and we retained him (I’ll stick in a word here in memory of Pope Francis – while I’m an atheist philosopher, she is very much influenced in this by her Catholic faith).

Tommy’s commutation hearing was right before Christmas. His attorney presented a letter of recommendation from the prison itself that he said was the best he had ever seen and argued to the Nevada Pardons Board that there would be no risk to the community from paroling him and that the discrepancy in punishment between him and the other defendant offered another reason for clemency. The Pardons Board, including the Governor, who was present, then voted 9-0 to commute his sentence to include the possibility of parole (let’s note that this was only possible because he had maintained a spotless disciplinary record over the many long years with no hope). It then took until now to get the parole granted and to get Maryland  (where he grew up and still has family) to agree to accept him, but he finally walked out of the doors of the prison on the morning of May 1 and we were waiting for him.

Tommy’s 69, and an old 69 (prison is hard on a body). He’s been behind bars for 36 years. Ronald Reagan was president back then, the internet was a decade away from being a thing, the Walkman was the hot new tech device, and if you think the inflation since 2020 was an eye-opener… well. Tommy likes the Ravens (we’ve had a couple of conversations about the NFL) and doesn’t like Trump (figures that the guy in prison for decades sees right through him). He also has the taste to say “what the hell is that?” when seeing his first cybertruck.

When we flew back to Maryland we discovered that he’d never been in an airport before. He’s now got a bank account and for the first time ever a debit card. He’s had an eye exam for the first time in many years and will be getting new glasses this week. He’s sharing a little house just outside his home town with his nephew, and is getting great joy out of cleaning the yard, setting up a bird feeder, and planting some tomatos and squash. His first meeting with his PO went well.

Tommy, of course, came out of prison with virtually nothing. Since I first talked about him here, people have been incredibly generous in donating to the GoFundMe. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be in his shoes and be told “here is some money to help you from people you’ll never meet but who want you to succeed”. “Tell them I won’t let them down” he’s said more than once.

So here is the GoFundMe:  https://gofund.me/41d24587 . Please share with any family, friends, colleagues you have that might be willing to donate. Any gift, of any size, is welcome and appreciated. Thanks again to our hosts for letting me share this story.

The post Tommy appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

paladin-n-cleric:

what are you wearing rn and is it representative of your style

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

I’m trying out something a little different this week: Instead of rounding up four studies per usual, I’m going deep on one lead study followed by a bunch of shorter tidbits. I’m hoping this shift will make for a more streamlined read and also bring a bit more topic diversity into the column. 

With that said, wild horses couldn’t drag me from the main story this week (it’s about wild horses). Then follow the trail of an early land pioneer, gaze into a three-eyed face of the past, witness an aurora Martialis, meet some mama chimps, and join the countdown to the end of the universe.    

You Can Lead a Horse to an Ice-Free Corridor… 

Running Horse Collin, Yvette et al. “Sustainability insights from Late Pleistocene climate change and horse migration patterns.” Science.

Have you ever got lost in thought while wandering and ended up on a totally different continent? You’re in good company. The history of life on Earth is packed with accidental migrations into whole new frontiers, a pattern exemplified by the Bering Land Bridge, which connected Siberia to Alaska until it was submerged under glacial meltwaters 11,000 years ago. 

As mentioned in last week’s column, this natural bridge likely enabled the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex to enter North America from Asia. It also served as a gateway to the first humans to reach the Americas, who crossed from Siberia over the course of several migrations. 

Now, scientists have confirmed that wild horses also crossed the Bering Land Bridge multiple times in both directions from about 50,000 and 13,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene period. In a study that combined genomic analysis of horse fossils with Indigenous science and knowledge, researchers discovered evidence of many crossings during the last ice age.  

“We find that Late Pleistocene horses from Alaska and northern Yukon are related to populations from Eurasia and crossed the Bering land bridge multiple times during the last glacial interval,” said researchers led by Yvette Running Horse Collin (Lakota: Tašunke Iyanke Wiŋ) of the Université de Toulouse. “We also find deeply divergent lineages north and south of the American ice sheets that genetically influenced populations across Beringia and into Eurasia.” 

I couldn’t resist this study in part because I am an evangelical Horse Girl looking to convert the masses to the cult of Equus. But beyond horse worship, this study is a great example of knowledge-sharing across worldviews as it weaves in the expertise of Indigenous co-authors who live in the regions where these Ice Age horses once roamed.

“The Horse Nation and its movement and evolution are sacred to many Indigenous knowledge keepers in the Americas,” Running Horse Collin and her colleagues said. “Following the movement and evolution of the horse to reveal traditional knowledge fully aligns with many Indigenous scientific protocols. We thus integrate the biological signatures identified with Indigenous knowledge regarding ecosystem balance and sustainability to highlight the importance of corridors in safeguarding life.”

The study concludes with several reflections on the Horse Nation from its Indigenous co-authors. I’ll close with a quote from co-author Jane Stelkia, an Elder for the sqilxʷ/suknaqin or Okanagan Nation, who observed that, “Today, we live in a world where the boundaries and obstacles created by mankind do not serve the majority of life. In this study, Snklc’askaxa is offering us medicine by reminding us of the path all life takes together to survive and thrive. It is time that humans help life find the openings and points to cross and move safely.”

In other news….

A Strut for the Ages

Long, John et al “Earliest amniote tracks recalibrate the timeline of tetrapod evolution.” Nature.

Fossilized claw prints found in Australia’s Snowy Plains Formation belonged to the earliest known “amniote,” the clade that includes practically all tetrapod vertebrates on land, including humans. The tracks were laid out by a mystery animal 356 million years ago, pushing the fossil timeline of amniotes back some 35 million years into the Devonian period. 

“The implications for the early evolution of tetrapods are profound,” said researchers led by John Long of Flinders University. “It seems that tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete than has been thought.”  

Extra points for the flashy concept video that shows the track-maker strutting like it knows it’s entering itself into the fossil record.

Blinky the Cambrian Radiodont

Moysiuk, Joseph and Caron, Jean-Bernard. “Early evolvability in arthropod tagmosis exemplified by a new radiodont from the Burgess Shale.” Royal Society Open Science.

What has three eyes, two spiky claws, and a finger-sized body? Meet Mosura fentoni, a new species of arthropod that lived 506 million years ago. The bizarre “radiodont” from the Cambrian-era sediments of British Columbia’s Burgess Shale is exhaustively described in a new study.

Concept art of Mosura fentoni. Fantastic creature. No notes.  Image: Art by Danielle Dufault, © ROM

“Mosura adds to a growing list of radiodont species in which a median eye has been described, but the functional role of this structure has not been discussed,” said authors Joseph Moysiuk of the Manitoba Museum and Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum. “The large size and hemiellipsoidal shape of the radiodont median eye are unusual for arthropod single-lens eyes, but a possible functional analogy can be drawn with the central member of the triplet of median eyes found in dragonflies.”

Green Glow on the Red Planet 

Knutsen, Elise et al. “Detection of visible-wavelength aurora on Mars.” Science Advances.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover captured images of a green aurora on Mars in March 2024, marking the first time a first visible light aurora has ever been seen on the planet. Mars displays a whole host of auroral light shows, including ”localized discrete and patchy aurora, global diffuse aurora, dayside proton aurora, and large-scale sinuous aurora,” according to a new study. But it took a solar storm to capture a visible-light aurora for the first time.

“To our knowledge, detection of aurora from a planetary surface other than Earth has never been reported, nor has visible aurora been observed at Mars,” said researchers led by Elise Knutsen of the University of Oslo. “This detection demonstrates that auroral forecasting at Mars is possible, and that during events with higher particle precipitation, or under less dusty atmospheric conditions, aurorae will be visible to future astronauts.”

Parenting Tips from Wild Chimps

Rolland, Eléonore et al. “Evidence of organized but not disorganized attachment in wild Western chimpanzee offspring (Pan troglodytes verus).” Nature Human Behavior.

Coasting off of Mother’s Day weekend, researchers present four years of observations focused on mother-offspring attachment styles in the wild chimpanzees of Côte d'Ivoire’s Taï National Park. 

The team documented “organized” attachment styles like “secure” in which the offspring look to the mother for comfort, and “Insecure avoidant,” characterized by more independent offspring.

 The “disorganized” style, in which the parent-offspring bond is maladaptive due to parental abuse or neglect, was virtually absent in the wild chimps, in contrast to humans and captive chimps, where it is unfortunately far more common.     

“The maternal behaviour of chimpanzees observed in our study lacked evidence of the abusive behaviours observed in human contexts,” said researchers led by Eléonore Rolland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “In contrast, instances of inadequate maternal care in zoos leading to humans taking over offspring rearing occurred for 8 infants involving 19 mothers across less than 5 years and for 7 infants involving 23 mothers across 9 years.”

In other words, the environmental context of parenting matters a lot to the outcomes of the offspring. Of course, this is obvious in countless anecdotal experiences of our own lives, but the results of the study offer a stark empirical reminder.

Live Every Day As If The Universe Might End in 10⁷⁸ Years

Falcke, Heino et al. “An upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants from gravitational pair production.” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Bad news for anyone who was hoping to live to the ripe old age of 10⁷⁸ years. It turns out that the universe might decay into nothingness around that time, which is much sooner than previous estimates of cosmic death in about 10¹¹⁰⁰ years. Long-lived stellar remnants, like white dwarfs and black holes, will slowly evaporate through a process called Hawking radiation on a more accelerated timeline, according to the study, which also estimates that a human body would take about 10⁹⁰ years to evaporate through this process (sorry, would-be exponent nonagenarians).  

“Astronomy usually looks back in time when observing the universe, answering the question how the universe evolved to its present state,” said researchers led by Heino Falcke of Radboud University Nijmegen. “However, it is also a natural question to ask how the universe and its constituents will develop in the future, based on the currently known laws of nature.”

Answer: Things fall apart, including all matter in the universe. Have a great weekend! 

Unlike others of the art forms commonly known in Mexico as artesanías (or “handicrafts” in English), the carved wooden creatures often called alebrijes have a history recent enough to be mostly traceable.

Pedro Linares López, a craft artist living in Mexico City in the 1930s, first came up with the term, giving it to his papier-mache fantastical figures. Manuel Jiménez Ramírez, another artist from Oaxaca, met Linares and took the alebrijes concept to his home state, where the medium changed to copal wood. Jiménez was from the town of San Antonio Arrazola, which shares the craft of wooden alebrijes with another town called San Martín Tilcajete.

The historical thread gets unclear here, as it is not certain when Tilcajete adopted the alebrijes tradition. Isidoro Cruz Hernández is often considered to have been one of this town's pioneers in the late 1960s. In both towns, alebrijes are usually carved out of wood from the copal tree, valued not only for its ease of use but also for the symbolic importance to the Zapotec people, to whom many carvers belong or trace their heritage. Within this cultural context, many masters of the craft favor other terms over "alebrijes." At the workshop of Jacobo and María Ángeles,  a distinction is made between carvings of real animals (usually based on a "Zapotec zodiac" system which assigns a "spirit animal" to a person) called "tonas;" and the carvings of animal fusions or fantastical creatures, known as "nahuales." The art of the Ángeles is among the most exhibited worldwide, with their decorations featuring on jerseys for Mexican soccer clubs, an F1 racing helmet, and monumental sculptures in the United States.

But before Ángeles, there was Isidoro Cruz. Born in 1934, Cruz is known to have tutored Jacobo Ángeles during his start in the woodcarving crafts. Between the 1960s and 70s, Cruz's works were exhibited in Mexico City and Los Angeles after having caught the eye of Mexico's then-director of the National Tourist Council. Therefore, many of the alebrijes and similar works seen for the first time outside of Oaxaca, were carved by Isidoro Cruz, raising awareness of the craft and establishing the imagery of Oaxacan "artesanías" (handcrafts). Following his passing in 2015, Casa Cruz is his legacy in Tilcajete, one of the many alebrije workshops trading in the town and decorated with a striking mural of the man himself on its outer wall. Casa Cruz is found directly across from the Ángeles workshop, showing how the man's influence continues to shape the alebrijes craft.