The Osprey: 'A Flying Shame' Finally Goes To War, Thugs At Arms & Other Iraq News

A bad aircraft is finally about to take part in a bad war.

Ten V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor planes, which cost 30 lives and $20 billion over a quarter century of development, have been deployed to Iraq.

Repeated efforts to kill the Osprey at the highest levels of the Pentagon, including by Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary, were unsuccessful.

Cheney and others argued that the Osprey was too dangerous and too expensive, but it has been a darling of the influential congressfolk in whose districts the Bell-Boeing aircraft was developed, tested and is finally being manufactured.

The Osprey — which costs $110 million each, including development costs — takes off and lands like a helicopter but tilts its engines forward to fly like an airplane.

Time magazine featured the aircraft on its cover last week in a highly critical article that called it "A Flying Shame."

The Marines Corps is trying to tightly control information about the Iraq deployment by North Carolina-based Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, which is nicknamed the Thunder Chickens. The Ospreys will be transport troops and cargo in western Iraq, which not coincidentally is the safest area of the country.

McClatchey Newspapers reported that the Osprey has been in development for so long that some of the parts suppliers have gone out of business.

This summer, a memo circulated around the Marine Corps about several continuing problems. In several cases, mechanics had to strip parts from some V-22s to keep others in the air.

According to the memo, the Ospreys of the generation sent to Iraq were ready to fly less than 80 percent of the time and had full use of their systems 62 percent of the time.

The Marines plan to buy 360 Ospreys, and the Navy and Air Force intend about 100 more.

THUGS AT ARMS - I

The Army is boasting that it met its recruiting goals for 2006, but guess what? It did so only by enlisted thousands of new soldiers with criminal records and fewer who have earned high school diplomas.

The spike of new enlistees given "character" waivers for fiscal 2007 continues a steady upward trend in the number of recruits with past arrests and convictions allowed into the Army since the start of the war in Iraq.

The Chicago Tribune reports that more than 11 percent of Army recruits needed waivers for problems with the law -- up from 7.9 percent the previous year and more than double the percentage in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Major General Thomas Bostick, commander of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, stressed that a vast majority (about 87 percent) of those allowed in with waivers had misdemeanors for such offenses as joy riding or violating curfew. Most faced little punishment beyond community service for their actions.

But at the same time, the number of enlistees with felony convictions and arrests in their pasts has increased. In 2003, the Army allowed 459 enlistees with felony arrests and convictions into the service compared to 1,620 this past year.

The startling figures come at a time when the Army is trying to grow amid persistent questions about how the armed forces can increase force size during a time of war without significantly lowering the quality of recruits.

THUGS AT ARMS - II

As I have noted early and often, the Iraq war is playing itself out in stops and starts and, to use an old cliché, what goes around comes around.

So it comes as no surprise that residents of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as protecting them from Sunni militants but now resent as plain old street thugs without ideology.

Says The New York Times:

"The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

"The sectarian landscape has shifted, with Sunni extremists largely defeated in many Shiite neighborhoods, and the war in those places has sunk into a criminality that is often blind to sect."

BLACKWATER ON THE WAY OUT?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's initial solution to dealing with the carnage that Blackwater USA bodyguards have wrought on hapless Iraqi civilians was to order that guards guard the bodyguards. (I'm not making this up.)

Now she is said to be considering phasing out or limiting the use of the North Carolina-based security contractor altogether.

The Associated Press says that will be difficult considering the reliance that State has put on Blackwater to guard diplomats and other high-ranking U.S. civilian officials.