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Now that 2012 has become yet another victim of the oppressive march of time, we can look back on the year as a whole and employ a bit of hindsight to differentiate those things that will have a lasting impact on the gaming industry from those that were just momentary fads that faded away, or perhaps were just ahead of their time – cloud gaming, for example.
It was an important year in gaming, and it may take a few more cycles around the sun to truly understand its impact. Some trends this past year saw a major spike and should continue to influence the industry for years to come, while others could be the harbinger of the end for others. Time will tell.
But for now there are certain trends that are obvious, trends that will color the gaming industry at least through the next year and likely for years to come. Here's a look back at 2012 and the major trends that will have a lasting impact on the industry.
The Rise of Kickstarter
Kickstarter was not the first crowd funding platform, nor did it debut last year, but in 2012 the word "kickstarter" came to be synonymous with all crowd funded projects in tech – just as tissues will forever be genericized as Kleenex, even if they aren't made by the Kleenex brand. This new method of funding wasn't limited to gaming by any means, but the gaming industry may be forever changed by it if this last year is any indication.
In 2012, Kickstarter exploded in the gaming scene and became a legitimate source of funding for relatively big titles being created outside of the established studio system. You won't see the next Call of Duty title being funded by the crowds anytime soon, but the service did provide some intriguing properties. It also became a new source of financing for developers not interested in the current studio system, developers like the legendary, former LucasArts designer Tim Schafer and his upcoming Double Fine Adventures which raised over $1 million in 24 hours, as well as Wing Commander creator, Chris Roberts, who returns to gaming with Star Citizen, the most successful Kickstarter game funding campaign to date, with over $6 million donated by backers. It gives those developers freedom and creative control that they would not receive otherwise, and it also gives them a decent budget to work with.
But the Kickstarter avenue isn't just for independent developments. Until Star Citizen came along, the best funded game honors belonged to Project Eternity, which is being developed by Obsidian Entertainment. The Fallout: New Vegas developer felt that the type of game they wanted to make wouldn't be well received by publishers, so it went to Kickstarter for help, and that isn't an uncommon story.
Of the 10 best-funded Kickstarter projects, seven are directly related to gaming. All 10, however, were funded in 2012. The Kickstarter trend exploded last year, and the results will be felt throughout 2013 and on. There has already been a good deal of success from Kickstarter-funded projects, but 2012 saw a higher level of expectation and money. Many of those projects will be released in 2013, and assuming they are at least moderately successful, there is no reason to think this trend won't continue and grow.
The Kickstarter phenomena even gave birth to a new console of sorts, with the Android-based console, Ouya, due out later this year. Maybe it will succeed, maybe it won't. But it is a direct result of Kickstarter, and a look at the way that crowd-funding is likely to continue to influence gaming in the years to come.
The Growth of Mobile Gaming
This topic has been so well covered, it almost seems too obvious a choice, but the success of mobile gaming over the last year is still worth a mention. Thanks to the rise of smartphone and tablet technology, mobile gaming became a major factor in the gaming industry in 2012.
The numbers are still coming in, but by Q1 there were reportedly over 100 million mobile gamers in the US alone, which would be a 34-percent increase based against Q1 of 2011 – and mobile gaming simply grew from there.
Regardless of what the final numbers end up looking like, mobile gaming was the one sector of the gaming industry that actually grew in 2012. Mobile gaming is like to plateau at some point – and that could happen as soon as this year – but the expansion has proven mobile gaming to be a thriving and legitimate sector. Because of that, even the developers that are traditionally slow to embrace change are likely going to be looking for ways into the mobile gaming side of things. Expect to see even more franchise games make the jump to mobile in the coming year.
The success of mobile gaming in 2012 is also likely to shift the way that gaming is seen in 2013 and beyond. It is no longer just the providence of the hardcore gaming fans, locked into their console or desktop gaming rigs for hours. Instead the industry is expanding to become more encompassing. And as smartphone and tablet technology continues to improve, the mobile gaming market will become more competitive, which means we can expect better games. It could also once and for all help to end the negative stereotype of the traditional gamer, since the new average gamer is a sizable chunk of the population.
The Changing Business Model and The Legitimization of Digital Downloads
The recent recession was a watershed moment for the world, and the tech and gaming industry were no exception. Industries were shattered, and most (if not all) were at least forced to re-examine the way that they did business. There is no "getting back to normal", and manufacturers and developers that work exclusively with products that can be labeled as "luxury items" were forced to change, and, in many cases, downsize as their former customers re-prioritized their budgets.
During a recession, entertainment industries traditionally do fairly well as people are happy for a brief respite from the realities of the economic hardships they face. That proved to be true for movies and music, plus TV viewing figures were as solid as ever, but the gaming industry wasn't quite so fortunate.
That makes sense though, since the gaming industry is inherently more expensive than paying for a movie or an album. A CD or a movie ticket cost between $10 and $15 dollars generally, while a new game runs around $60. Buying an individual song is even cheaper, while purchasing an add-on for a game can start at $10 and go all the way up to equal the original package. The pricing model is completely different, which left gaming far more vulnerable than film or music.
Developers and publishers realized this and have been ramping up their presence beyond the confines of traditional releases. That has led to an explosion of digitally distributed content, and this year some of it has even surpassed in quality what you can find on store shelves. There is also the growing free-to-play genre highlighted by titles like League of Legends and PlanetSide 2, but 2013 is more likely going to be influenced by free-to-play than 2012 was.
This has been a long time coming, of course. The Xbox Live market place was designed for this, as was the PlayStation Network, and other services that don't rely on physical media – like Steam – have all been geared towards this shift. But it is only really in 2012 where things began to pay off in a big way, both financially and critically.
This year saw the digital release of games like Journey and The Walking Dead, as well as countless others. It legitimized the delivery method and showed gamers that you could have exceptionally good games at a lower price point, and that the consistency of good releases available digitally was only going to get better.
It also opened up gaming a bit in terms of creativity. With the budget of AAA games skyrocketing, developers are less likely to take risks on unproven properties and gameplay. That isn't the case for digital downloads. Indie developers now have a greater chance than ever before to excel, and larger teams can use the digital distribution scene as a test ground, both for their own riskier ideas, and to find new talent without having to look too hard. 2012 also saw a huge increase in digital add-ons, including new DLC for games, as well as bonuses for buying the game new at a particular spot. Expect that to increase even more in the next year, and the years coming.
The final numbers of money spent on digital content aren't in yet, but it will be significant. For developers, it is a new business model to explore, but for gamers it is a new way to think about where and how to get their games, all while saving a bit of money.
The Next War Begins
If you have been following the gaming scene, then it's impossible to not know about Nintendo's new console, the Wii U. It is a divisive console among gamers, underpowered and featuring a hard-to-explain new controller as its centerpiece. Yet, the console sold out immediately and demand remains high.
But the system itself is just a small part of what it signifies. The Wii U marks the first step towards the next generation of consoles, and with it the next generation of gaming. This generation of consoles lasted longer than anyone thought it would, with the Xbox 360 celebrating its eighth anniversary this year and the PS3 just a year behind it. And yet, despite the age, there aren't many clamoring for the next wave of gaming tech, at least not in the same way that gamers used to get excited for new hardware.
The systems are advanced enough at this point to offer upgrades in software, which has made them feel fresh. That will likely carry over to the next Xbox and PlayStation, which means the next gen may be in place for several years to come, and the five year cycles will officially be a thing of the past. That all began with the Wii U.
Even if Microsoft and Sony hold off on releasing new hardware (and Microsoft almost certainly won't), the gauntlet has been thrown down, and gamers are poised for yet another shift. Microsoft and Sony will both be closely analyzing the release of the Wii U – both its triumphs and failures – throughout 2012.
The Wii U was the start, and it joined the handheld PS Vita, which was also released last year. The Nintendo 3DS was released in 2011, but it wasn't until 2012 that it really began to gain momentum. Even though it will probably be 2013 that is remembered as the beginning of the next great hardware war, its roots were firmly set in 2012.
The Year of the App
Part of the reason for the delay in releasing new hardware (besides the obvious reasons like cost), is that there is still plenty of potential in the current gen's hardware, specifically the Xbox 360 and PS3. Both Microsoft and Sony realized that hardware was only one part of the potential of their gaming systems, and so in 2012 we saw a massive influx of software that made the gaming systems into far more than they ever were before.
This wasn't something that started in 2012, but last year was when apps on the consoles went from being an interesting bonus to a focus of the system. Microsoft especially has embraced this, and the 360 in many ways became a prototype for the Windows 8 operating system, which is heavily integrated with downloadable apps.
Sony has been a little slower to embrace the app revolution, but with the 360 now capable of playing HBO content, the new ESPN app that features "Monday Night Football" (among other programming), and the ability to search and find almost any media content online to rent or buy, the next generation of consoles will certainly follow suit and make this a staple of each systems' capabilities. Nintendo is well aware of this, and not only offers apps, but native programs that are designed to combine them all and make it easier to use.
From the start of this cycle of consoles, the manufacturers have claimed that their systems are more than just gaming consoles, they are home entertainment devices that anyone could enjoy. Turns out they were right, and the incredible influx of new apps introduced in 2012 – each providing their own libraries full of content – proved that.
Streaming Games and the Emergence of Pro Gaming
Pro gaming is nothing new – just ask the Koreans, who are so far ahead of us on that front that they even have their own match-fixing scandals to go along with the major gambling revenues based on gaming competitions. This last year saw a spike in American pro gaming, though, thanks to several online platforms like Twitch, which not only made it easy to stream any game, but is also being incorporated into some PC titles to make it as easy as touching a button.
With the rise of streaming game content being generated by users came the inevitable monetization of that. Pro gaming is still in its infancy, but there is no question as to whether or not there is an audience for it. With millions tuning in to watch other people play games online for fun, the next obvious step is to watch others play games with some stakes on the line.
It might be years before pro gaming becomes a truly legitimate pastime, but the success of streaming games proved that it can be done from a tech point-of-view, and there is an audience waiting to embrace it. Somewhere out there right now there are several very smart, and very motivated people working on ideas to expand pro gaming into the mainstream. It may take time, but 2012 showed it can be done.
Editors' Recommendations
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- Nintendo will introduce 'full-blown' app store with the Wii U
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- Grand Theft Auto V confirmed, trailer coming Nov. 2


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The Last Ace
American air superiority has been so complete for so long that we take it for granted. For more than half a century, we've made only rare use of the aerial-combat skills of a man like Cesar Rodriguez, who retired two years ago with more air-to-air kills than any other active-duty fighter pilot. But our technological edge is eroding—Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan all now fly fighter jets with capabilities equal or superior to those of the F-15, the backbone of American air power since the Carter era. Now we have a choice. We can stock the Air Force with the expensive, cutting-edge F‑22—maintaining our technological superiority at great expense to our Treasury. Or we can go back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of men like Rodriguez.
Cesar Rodriguez, who retired with more air-to-air kills—three—than any active-duty Air Force pilot, stands beside an F-15.
This article has been corrected since it was published in the print magazine.
Video: "The View from the Cockpit"
Pilots at Alaska's Elmendorf Air Force Base share their views on how to maintain American air superiority.
Over Cesar Rodriguez's desk hangs a macabre souvenir of his decades as a fighter pilot. It is a large framed picture, a panoramic cockpit view of open sky and desert. A small F‑15 Eagle is visible in the distance, but larger and more immediate, filling the center of the shot, staring right at the viewer, is an incoming missile.
It is a startling picture, memorializing a moment of air-to-air combat from January 19, 1991, over Iraq. Air-to-air combat has become exceedingly rare. Even when it happens, modern fighter pilots are rarely close enough to actually see the person they are shooting at. This image recalls a kill registered by Rodriguez, who goes by Rico, and his wingman, Craig Underhill, known as Mole, during the Gulf War.
A special-operations team combed the Iraqi MiG's crash site, and this was one of the items salvaged, the last millisecond of incoming data from the doomed Iraqi pilot's HUD, or head-up display. It was the final splash of light on his retinas, probably arriving too late for his brain to process before being vaporized with the rest of his corporeal frame. Pilots like Rodriguez don't romanticize such exploits. These are strictly matter-of-fact men from a world where war is work, and life and death hang on a rapidly and precisely calibrated reality, an attitude captured by the flat caption mounted on the frame: This is an AIM-7 air-to-air missile shot from an F‑15 Eagle detonating on an Iraqi MiG‑29 Fulcrum during Operation Desert Storm.
A snapshot from the doorstep of oblivion, the photo is a reminder that the game of single combat played by Rico and Mole, and by fighter pilots ever since the First World War, is the ultimate one. It may have come to resemble a video game, but it is one with no reset button, no next level. It is played for keeps.
When Rodriguez retired two years ago from the Air Force as a colonel, his three air-to-air kills (two over Iraq in 1991 and one over Kosovo) were the most of any American fighter pilot on active duty. That number may seem paltry alongside the 26 enemy planes downed by Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I, or the 40 notched by Richard Bong in World War II, or the 34 by Francis Gabreski across World War II and Korea. Rodriguez's total was two shy of the threshold number for the honorific ace, yet his three made him the closest thing to an ace in the modern U.S. Air Force.
This says more, of course, about the nature of American air power than it does about the skills of our pilots. It's hard to call what happens in the sky over a battlefield today "single combat." More than ever, an air war is a group effort involving skilled professionals and technological marvels, from the ground to Earth orbit. But within the world of military aviation there remains a hierarchy of cool, and fighter jocks still own the highest rung. The word ace denotes singularity, the number one, he who stands alone at the top. Its mystique still attracts the most-ambitious young aviators, even if nowadays the greatest danger most of them face is simply flying the aircraft at supersonic speed.
American pilots haven't shot down many enemy jets in modern times, because few nations have dared rise to the challenge of trying to fight them. The F‑15, the backbone of America's air power for more than a quarter century, may just be the most successful weapon in history. It is certainly the most successful fighter jet. In combat, its kill ratio over more than 30 years is 107 to zero. Zero. In three decades of flying, no F‑15 has ever been shot down by an enemy plane—and that includes F‑15s flown by air forces other than America's. Rival fighters rarely test those odds. Many of Saddam Hussein's MiGs fled into Iran when the U.S. attacked during the Gulf War. Of those who did fight the F-15, like the unfortunate pilot framed on Rodriguez's wall, every last one was shot down. The lesson was remembered. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam didn't just ground his air force, he buried it.
That complete dominance is eroding. Some foreign-built fighters can now match or best the F‑15 in aerial combat, and given the changing nature of the threats our country is facing and the dizzying costs of maintaining our advantage, America is choosing to give up some of the edge we've long enjoyed, rather than pay the price to preserve it. The next great fighter, the F‑22 Raptor, is every bit as much a marvel today as the F‑15 was 25 years ago, and if we produced the F-22 in sufficient numbers we could move the goalposts out of reach again. But we are building fewer than a third of the number needed to replace the older fighters in service. After losing hope of upgrading the whole F‑15 fleet, the Air Force requested 381 F‑22s, the minimum number that independent analysts said it needs to retain its current edge. Congress is buying 183, and has authorized the manufacture of parts for 20 more at the front end of the production line, enough to at least keep it working until President Obama decides whether or not to continue building F-22s. Like so many presidential dilemmas, it's a Scylla-and-Charybdis choice: a decision to save money and not build more would deliver a severe blow to a sprawling and vital U.S. industry at a time when the nation is mired in recession. And once the production line for the F-22 begins to shut down, restarting it will not be easy or cheap, even in reaction to a new threat. Each plane consists of about 1,000 parts, manufactured in 44 states, and because of the elaborate network of highly specialized subcontractors needed to fashion its unique airframe and avionics, assembling one F-22 can take as long as three years. Modern aerial wars are usually over in days, if not hours. Once those 183 to 203 new Raptors are built, they will have to do. Our end of the fight will still be borne primarily by the current fleet of aged F‑15s.
When Obama unveiled his national-security team in December, he remarked that he intended "to maintain the strongest military on the planet." That goal will continue to require the biggest bill in the world, but the portion that bought aerial dominance for so long may have become too dear. (The team's lone holdover from the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has not been an advocate for the F-22.) If Obama opts to shut down production on the aircraft, it will certainly be a defensible decision. After all, our impressive arsenals did not stop one of the most damaging attacks in our history seven years ago, mounted by men armed with box cutters. There are various ways of computing the cost of a fighter, from "unit flyaway cost," which is the price tag as the plane rolls off the line, to "program acquisition unit cost," which adds in the cost of the research, development, and testing. The former for the F‑22 is about $178 million, and the latter about $350 million. Either way, the F-22 is the most expensive fighter ever built.
But even reasonable decisions can have harsh consequences. Without a full complement of Raptors, America's aging fighters are more vulnerable, and hence more likely to be challenged. Complaints from the Air Force tend to be dismissed as the laments of spoiled fighter jocks denied the newest, hottest toy. But the picture on Rodriguez's wall reminds us of the stakes for the men and women in the cockpit. Countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea will be more likely to take on the U.S. Air Force if their pilots stand a fighting chance. This could well mean more air battles, more old-style aces—and more downed American pilots.
The impact will not be felt only by aviators. Owning the sky is the first prerequisite of the way we fight wars today. Air supremacy is what enables us to send an elaborate fleet of machinery caterwauling over a targeted nation, such as Afghanistan or Iraq: the orchestrating AWACS ("Airborne Warning and Control System," the flying surveillance-and-command center); precision bombers; attack planes, helicopters, and drones; ground support; rescue choppers; and the great flying tankers that keep them all fueled. This aerial juggernaut enables modern ground-fighting tactics that rely on the rapid movement of relatively small units, because lightly armed, fast-moving forces can quickly summon devastating air support if they encounter a heavy threat. Wounded soldiers can count on speedy evacuation and sophisticated emergency medical care. Accomplishing all this with anything like the efficiency American forces have enjoyed since the Vietnam War depends on owning the sky, which means having air-to-air hunter-killers that can shoot down enemy planes and destroy surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites before the rest of the fleet takes to the sky. Superior fighters are the linchpin of our modern war tactics. Having owned the high ground for so long, we tend to forget that it is not a birthright.
Unless the 21st century is the first in human history to somehow transcend geopolitical strife, our military will face severe tests in the coming years. The United States will be expected to take the lead in any showdown against a sophisticated air force. So it is worth examining the nature of air-to-air combat today, and the possible consequences of not building a full fleet of F-22s.
At the center of this question is that most romantic of modern warriors, the ace.
The skills that make a fighter pilot great have, like aircraft, evolved. Japan's celebrated World War II ace, Saburo Sakai, who shot down more than 60 planes in aerial combat, described in his memoir, Samurai!, the extensive acrobatic training he and his fellow recruits received in pilot school to improve their strength and balance even before they flew. They worked on reducing their reaction time and perfecting their hand-eye coordination by swiping flies out of the air. Balance, coordination, reaction time, a feel for the airplane, gunnery, the ability to calmly perform complex aerobatic maneuvers while under fire, a talent for thinking and acting quickly even while upside down or tumbling or out of control—these were all vitally important. But the paramount skill, Sakai recalled, was something the recruits had at the start: exceptional vision.
All of the young pilots had been selected for their perfect eyesight, but even more important was how broadly they could see, how wide a horizon they commanded, and how quickly they could focus in on the faintest off-center visual cue. They competed to locate stars in daylight. Sakai wrote:
Gradually, and with much more practice, we became quite adept at our star-hunting. Then we went further. When we had sighted and fixed the position of a particular star, we jerked our eyes away ninety degrees, and snapped back again to see if we could locate the star immediately. Of such things are fighter pilots made.
I personally cannot too highly commend this particular activity, inane as it may seem to those unfamiliar with the split-second, life-or-death movements of aerial warfare. I know that during my 200 air engagements with enemy planes, except for two minor errors I was never caught in a surprise attack.
Surprise attack—seeing the enemy before he sees you—is still the killing edge, which is why Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the fighter pilot and author, described dogfighting as less combat than "murder." Getting the jump on an enemy, hitting him before he sees you, is the best-case scenario, or the worst, depending on where you sit. As the air war over Japan turned increasingly one-sided, in 1945, Sakai's eyes kept him alive; only two other pilots in his unit survived.
Today, of course, electronic systems extend a fighter's vision well beyond the range of the most acute eyeball. Aerial combat is no longer a matter of fixing your sights on a dodging enemy. Most of the maneuvering in air-to-air combat today takes place BVR, or beyond visual range. The modern fighter pilot flies strapped into the center of a moving electronic cocoon. His speeding jet emits a field of photons* that can find, identify, and target an enemy long before he will ever see it. At the same time, his electromagnetic aura defends him by thwarting the enemy's radar. American pilots strive to find and shoot down enemy aircraft from outside what they call the WEZ, or "weapons engagement zone," which means safely beyond range of the enemy's missiles. Traveling faster than sound, the fighter pilot is part of a network that can spot an enemy over the horizon, sometimes before he even leaves the ground; that can attack multiple targets simultaneously; and that in an emergency can react to an incoming threat before the pilot is even aware of it. Today's jet is a machine so powerful, so smart, and so fast that the fighter jock's biggest challenge is to safely fly and land it.
Combat in this arena has become virtual in every way except in its consequences. Tactics in a world of dueling electrons can be best understood in the abstract. Pilots speak of the need to extend their "timeline."
"When cavemen fought they had their fists, first of all," F‑15 pilot Colonel Terrence "Skins" Fornof explained to me last year in Alaska. "Then someone came up with the sling, which meant he could attack his enemy before he could get close enough to take a swing. The history of warfare technology has all boiled down to increasing the distance between you and your enemy's fist. Distance means time, and you gain the advantage by extending that timeline. Our goal is the same as it ever was: to kill the enemy before he even has a chance to employ his weapon. War is not fair. You don't want him to even get close enough to fight."
The best flier in the world stands little chance against a superior aircraft, but that doesn't mean just anyone can be a good fighter pilot. The skills required today are related to those of the early aces, but different. Perhaps the best way to explain is to take a closer look at Rodriguez.
A lifelong military man, he is of average height with a bullish torso, a round face, brown eyes, and thinning gray hair. The house in Tucson where the picture hangs has been his home for two years—longer than any other place he has ever lived. He exudes brisk, straightforward confidence, without pretense or misgiving. Asked to name his single most important flying skill, the modern equivalent of Sakai's peripheral vision, Rodriguez struggles for an answer. It is something harder to grasp. It boils down to a talent for processing multiple information streams simultaneously.
"A World War II pilot would look at all of the things going on in the cockpit today, and his first reaction would be, 'You guys have too many things going on here at once.' You know, it is sensory overload," he said when we talked at his home. "When you put one of those old pilots in a modern simulator, he can fly the airplane. The airplane is as easy to fly today as it was back then, maybe actually easier, because now it has aerodynamic features that make it more forgiving from the standpoint of taking off and landing. But they will very quickly say, 'I can't keep up with all the sensors that are buzzing into my brain right now.' And every sensor that talks to you has a different frequency, a different tone, a different format, and some of them you are only picking up audio, others it's a visual, some a combination of the two."
Rodriguez began pilot training in 1981, after graduating from the Citadel. He knew going in that, of the class of 70 pilot trainees, only about five would qualify to fly fighters. Most would graduate and play vital roles in the great air-war machine, but only the cream would win coveted fighter seats. The first wave of washouts came during simple maneuvers on the training jets. According to Rodriguez, "You start maneuvering and they'd get violently airsick. That was the biggest cut."
In the group that reached the next level, the academic workload sorted out the most-intense players from the wannabes. Rodriguez was used to the cloistered atmosphere and grinding academic pace of a military school, so he excelled in that area, too.
Those who excelled with him faced a new test: going acro.
"Suddenly acro was not just a cool thing you'd watch at the air show anymore," Rodriguez says. "You were acro. You were part of it and you had to be able to think on your back, on your head, at zero G and then at high Gs, depending on the maneuver." Avoiding G-LOC, or "gravity-induced loss of consciousness," during aggressive acrobatics is a physical struggle. As the force of gravity intensifies, blood drains rapidly from the brain unless the pilot fights back. The pressurized suit helps, tightening on the extremities and lower body, but the pilot learns to flex his legs, buttocks, and stomach muscles and to control his breath. He emerges from such maneuvers wrung out and drenched with sweat.
It is a literal gut check. Rodriguez was lucky. He had the constitution for it. The only time he ever got airsick was one morning when the flying conditions looked unpromising and, assuming that his flight would be scrapped, he "proceeded to power down on two big, huge breakfast burritos." Then he had to fly after all.
"I was told we were going to go up and actually do some advanced handling, which was a fairly physically challenging event because it was putting the airplane to the extreme aerodynamic limits … falling down and getting into spins and stuff like that, so it was one of those things where I go, 'Okay, stand by one.' I reached down and grabbed my barf bag, filled it up, put it back in my Gsuit, and said, 'Okay, let's keep going.'"
Complex exercises required rapid mental calculations: if you entered a loop 10 knots slower than anticipated, that meant your airspeed would be too slow to complete the entire maneuver, so you would have to make an adjustment, quite literally, on the fly.
"These were the kind of things that you could do sitting on your chair in your room, but when you have an airplane strapped to your back and you're sweating and you're pulling Gs, then it's another matter," he said. "You had to do the math in your head." Needless to say, some people were better at this than others. Some pilots seemed to be able to do it intuitively, by the seat of their pants. Rodriguez was not one of them. But patient instructors and long hours in simulators, combined with a kind of desperation to succeed, eventually earned him a chance to fly the Air Force's hottest jets.
Only then did his real training begin, in Tucson and at Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, and finally at the Air Force's "top gun" school, Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada, where he flew training missions against a faux enemy, a dedicated force of experienced pilots trying hard to shoot him down. Technology is only part of what gives American pilots their advantage. As hugely expensive as it is to design, produce, fly, and maintain vanguard fighters, it takes far more effort and money to hone pilots' skills, to keep squadrons of pilots like Rodriguez constantly flying, practicing, and getting better. Even if other nations had the know-how, few could afford to build a fleet of advanced modern fighters, and fewer still could afford to sustain an up-tempo environment for the men and women who fly and maintain it.
Being the best means learning to fully inhabit that screaming node, high above the slow curve of the Earth, strapped down in a bubble where the only real things are the sound of your own breathing and the feel of sweat rolling down the center of your back. You are alone but not alone. You cope with constant, multiple streams of data, everything from basic flight information—airspeed, altitude, attitude, fuel levels—to incoming radar images displayed on small, glowing green screens stacked in rows before you and to both sides. In your helmet are three or four radio links, with the AWACS, with the ground, with your wingman, and with your flight leader. It is a little bit like trying to navigate at high speed with four or five different people talking to you at once, each with a slightly different set of directions. It is not for amateurs. By the time Rodriguez flew into combat for the first time, he had hundreds of hours of training behind him, and being in the jet was second nature. With him were his wingman, his formation, and the superhuman reach of America's technological eyes and ears.
Hurling a few dozen jets into the sky against this, as Saddam did in 1991, was most unwise.
Rodriguez and his wingman, Craig "Mole" Underhill, confronted their first Iraqi MiG‑29s early on the third morning of the war that took back Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. They were leading a helicopter assault on Saddam's early-warning radar sites on the border with Saudi Arabia, clearing the way for devastating bombing runs on Iraqi airfields.
The air battle in this conflict was brief, decisive, and more intense than most Americans realized. By the time the Pentagon began showing off publicity videos of "smart bombs" pulverizing Iraqi targets, America and its allies owned the sky, but in getting there, 38 allied aircraft were destroyed. On this early sortie, Rodriguez and Underhill were flying out of Tabuk, an air base in northwestern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Jordan. As often happened in this fast-moving arena, they were initially tasked with one objective and then reassigned when they were airborne. They moved out at the head of a 36-aircraft strike force bearing down on a target 40 miles southwest of Baghdad. As they approached, several MiG‑29s came up to challenge them.
The MiG‑29, like the F‑15, is considered a "fourth generation" fighter. (Since the first jet fighters started flying, there have been four great evolutionary advances, each representing a quantum leap in technology.) The Soviets began deploying the MiG‑29 about nine years after the F‑15s went on line, and the plane itself is comparable to its American counterpart. But given all the other advantages enjoyed by the allied pilots, the brave, outnumbered Iraqi pilots launching themselves at the approaching juggernaut might as well have been committing suicide.
"From Western eyes, it's a suicide mission," Rodriguez told me. "From the eyes of the guy being invaded, he's protecting the homeland."
Even greatly disadvantaged, the Iraqi fighters were dangerous, and as it happened the large American force made a potentially fatal mistake that Saturday morning. The incoming MiGs were spotted, of course, but in the confusion of the moment either tactical errors were made by the strikers, or the Iraqi pilots exploited a seam in the American defenses. The AWACS command had spotted the MiGs immediately when they took off, and had handed them off to a Navy formation of F‑14s, which failed to intercept them. When Rodriguez and Underhill were alerted to the approaching threat, it came as a jolting surprise. The MiGs were just 13 miles out and closing at a speed of more than 1,000 nautical mph. Both pilots immediately began evasive maneuvers.
Rodriguez dove steeply, getting below the lead MiG, where he would be harder to find on its radar—pointing down, the radar's signal can get confused by all the signals* bouncing back up from the ground. Then Rodriguez began flying in a low arc, keeping the MiG on his wing line, making himself "skinny," presenting as small a radar target as possible. Within minutes the two fighters would be in a visual turning fight, a situation familiar to many experienced pilots from earlier wars, but one that is not supposed to happen in modern air warfare. The biggest difference between this fight and the old ones was speed. It would unfold not in minutes but in seconds. Rodriguez's posture was strictly defensive: he could not target and shoot at the Iraqi plane, but it could shoot at him.
A cockpit alarm warned him when the MiG's radar locked on him. The threat was still just a blip on his screen; he hadn't actually seen it yet. He was frightened and thinking furiously when in his headset he heard Underhill shout, "Fox!"—the code word for I have just fired a missile.
Rodriguez looked back over his shoulder, following the smoke trail of Underhill's missile, and then, looking out ahead of it, caught his first and only glimpse of the MiG. This is the precise instant captured from the Iraqi pilot's perspective in the photo on Rodriguez's wall. It turns out that the picture does not preserve a moment of personal triumph for him, as I had originally supposed, but one of intense fear and vulnerability. Rodriguez's little F‑15 in the distance was not predator but prey, trapped and awaiting a kill shot that would never come, because in the next instant the MiG became a huge fireball in the sky. The whole encounter lasted a little more than 10 seconds.
"Mole saves my bacon because he kills this guy before he can take a shot at me," Rodriguez said as we sat in his office.
There was no time to celebrate, because the destroyed MiG's wingman was now closing in on them, just seven miles out. Underhill and Rodriguez split their planes wide apart and assumed different altitudes. That way, the incoming MiG might spot one of them, but probably not both, and they improved their chances of eyeballing it. Before shooting at it, they had to make sure it was Iraqi—many planes were in the air that morning—but they wouldn't have time to run the normal electronic matrix used to distinguish friend from foe.
They both saw the MiG at the same time. It had an Iraqi flag painted on it. Rodriguez passed the enemy fighter about 300 feet off its wing.
"He notices that I am there," Rodriguez said. "He also notices that Mole's about 20,000 feet above us. But at no point do I think he correlates the two of us as a formation."
If the MiG pilot went for Underhill, then Rodriguez could shoot him down; if he came for Rodriguez, "then Mole eats him up." Confused, the angling MiG started up, and then down, which gave Rodriguez time to fly inside his turning circle, putting himself into roughly the same attack position the earlier MiG had had on him.
The Iraqi pilot, no doubt hearing an alarm telling him that an F‑15 had locked him in its radar, attempted a classic split‑S maneuver, which is the quickest way to reverse direction in the air. Flying parallel to the ground, he flipped his aircraft upside down and then attempted to fly a half circle, diving down, pulling up, and leveling off to head in the opposite direction. It was the right escape maneuver for an altitude of at least 5,000 feet, but the pilot, in his alarm and haste, neglected to compute one vital bit of data: he was only 600 feet up. He flew his jet straight into the desert floor.
"He had lost his situational awareness," Rodriguez explained. "He was trying to perform a maneuver that he can do comfortably at 5,000 or 10,000 feet, and doesn't realize that the fight, which started at 8,000 feet, had degraded and degraded closer to the desert floor. It's a lack of training, a lack of experience, but given the situation he was in against two F‑15s, my argument is that no one would have done much better. He's already seen his flight lead explode. He might not have hit the desert floor, but he was going to die anyway."
These air kills were among the first by American pilots since Vietnam. An entire generation of fighters had come and gone without encountering an enemy in the sky. Three dozen Iraqi jets were shot down in the war, and Rodriguez was one of six pilots in his squadron who got two.
The second of his aerial kills was what he called "more routine," more typical of modern aerial combat. A week after the first episode, he was flying in what the Air Force calls a "wall of Eagles," a formation of four F‑15s spread out in the sky over roughly five to eight miles at 33,000 feet to maximize their visibility and radar range. Beneath them was thick undercast, a carpet of clouds opaque to their eyes but transparent to electronic surveillance systems. At that point, the remaining Iraqi air force was so vulnerable that the AWACS plane assisting the F‑15s picked up the enemy jets the minute they started their engines, while they were still on the ground. Rodriguez and the other pilots watched three radar blips form on their screens as the MiGs took off and climbed. Rodriguez assumed that the planes were, like the rest of Saddam's air force, escaping into Iran.
"They were basically running scared," he says. "Extremely scared."
It took a few moments to identify the jets as MiG‑23s, and then the wall of Eagles began preparing to launch missiles at them.
"We think we're going to have to stay above the clouds and we're never going to see the missiles do their job, and all of a sudden there's a big sucker hole, an opening in the clouds below," he says. "The F‑15s dove to about 13,000 feet. The fleeing MiGs were hugging the terrain, flying just 300 to 400 feet above the ground, when we started launching AIM-7 missiles at them.
"And, sure enough, the missiles did their job."
The Iraqi flight leader took the first hit. An American missile sliced through his plane, taking out the engine but leaving the shell of the plane intact. Trailing a thick cloud of smoke, the pilot began turning to the north, apparently trying to return to his base. Rodriguez's flight leader fired a Sidewinder, a heat-seeking missile that lit up the sky when it hit, turning the unfortunate Iraqi pilot and his plane into an enormous fireball.
Rodriguez's missile ripped straight through his target. The MiG apparently flew right into it. There was no large explosion. The missile just tore the jet to pieces, turning it into what Rodriguez called "a ground-level sparkler," scattering debris across a wide swath of desert.
Rodriguez's third and last kill came eight years later, on March 24, 1999, when he flew his F‑15 as part of the NATO force attacking Serbian positions during the Kosovo campaign. Rodriguez's squadron was assigned to lead an attack on a Serbian SAM site in Montenegro. On the way they would pass over an airfield in Pristina, Kosovo, where the Serbs had carved hangars for their fighters inside a mountain. No one was sure what kinds of planes, if any, were hidden there.
He took off from Cervia, Italy, on a clear night. As he ascended, Rodriguez could see the Italian coast to the west, lit up like a throbbing discotheque. He was pointed east, toward what was then still called Yugoslavia.
"It was pitch black," he recalls. "You know, here's a region of the world that has been at war, and where every light at night is a potential target. So everything below was just pitch black. You go, 'Man, it's two different worlds here.'"
The plan was for the multinational formation to fly lights-out, but the different levels of training and experience began to tell. American pilots fly black all the time, so when the order came to turn off lights, it was just another night's work. But for some of the Dutch, German, British, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish pilots, this wasn't so easy.
"The first time we tried it, as I looked behind me, I could see a train of fighters spread out over 100 miles behind me, and when the 'lights out' order came, they all went black," said Rodriguez. "Then, sure enough, the comfort factor for some of these guys started to go. They started getting a little antsy and then, all of a sudden, pooh, pooh, pooh, the lights started coming back on. And we go, 'Okay, guys, we really need to do this completely lights-out. If we don't do this, we're not going to be ready.' But we got everybody into the train."
A measure of confusion persisted, however. When the target was reached, the squadron commenced an air assault that would have taken an all-American unit five to eight minutes. This one took nearly an hour. Feeling increasingly vulnerable to attack by ground or air threats, Rodriguez circled and waited, trying to make his flight pattern unpredictable. As Rodriguez and his wingman, Bill Denham, turned back toward Italy, they picked up an aircraft coming up from the airfield in Pristina. At first it bore north, away from them, but then it turned.
The American planes began to conduct the standard series of checks to identify the plane. The F‑15 is equipped with a full range of instruments to, in effect, interrogate an unidentified plane in the air. They were coordinating with an AWACS, working through some language difficulties (the controllers spoke accented English). A process that would normally take 20 seconds took three times as long, which is a huge difference when you're traveling hundreds of miles per hour. Rodriguez and his wingman were rapidly approaching the weapons engagement zone, where they would lose the advantage of their longer-range missiles.
They were on the edge of the WEZ as the ID was completed, and Rodriguez launched an AMRAAM, or "advanced medium-range air-to-air missile," a new element of his arsenal added after the Gulf War. In the Air Force, they call it the Slammer. One advantage it affords is a "fire and forget" feature; because the missile has its own homing and guidance system, the pilot need not stay pointed at the target. He is free to turn and evade the incoming jet in case his shot for some reason misses. Rodriguez stayed with his missile for as long as he could.
"It all went into slow motion, and I felt like the missile and I were kind of flying in formation for a while," he recalls. "It just seemed to stay there for a couple of seconds and then, whoosh! It disappears. You see that glow [the missile's exhaust], and that becomes just a little ember, and then it's gone. And of course at night you can't follow it anymore. The smoke trail goes away. But I could see it start to curve, and I go, 'Okay, it looks like it's doing the right lead-pursuit tracking.' And the missile did everything it was advertised to do. We have a little counter display inside the cockpit that ticks down the time to intercept, and when the counter said zero, I looked outside through my canopy to the general vicinity of where I knew the target was going to be. I mean, that fireball was huge."
Rodriguez said it was as though three or four giant sports stadiums had turned on all their lights at the same time.
"The reason it was so magnificent," he said, "was because everything was covered in snow. So the fireball reflected off the snow, causing an even bigger illumination of the sky and everything around it."
It was the first air kill of the Kosovo campaign, and the last of Rodriguez's career. He gave little thought to the person he had just incinerated.
"I'm sure he had been a Yugoslav air-force pilot, which was a good air force for what they have," he said. "I don't personalize the war. He was doing what I was doing for my country."
Manufactured by McDonnell Douglas starting in the early 1970s, the twin-engine, supersonic F‑15 was the first aircraft built with the understanding that a plane's avionics, or electronic guts, were as important as its aeronautics, its flying capabilities. It was designed and built around an enormous radar disk.
"When it came on line 30 years ago, it had the best radar, the best weapons-employment displays ever, and the best maneuverability of any aircraft out there," Brigadier General Thomas "Pugs" Tinsley told me when I visited him in Alaska last spring, a few weeks before his death. At the time, Tinsley commanded the Air Force's Third Wing out of Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage. "The F‑15's thrust-to-weight ratio was way ahead of anything else, and its flight-control system was much smarter and more stable. It could go out there and just fly circles around the F‑4 [the Phantom, its immediate predecessor] and have its way with MiG‑23s [the Soviets' best fighter], just eat them up."
For more than a quarter century, the speed and sound of a formation of F‑15s or F‑16s has made a commanding statement about American power, as anyone who has ever stood under one can attest. You feel its approach before you can hear or see it, a low vibration that starts in your toes and rises until the gray jets flick past overhead. Only then comes the roar. They are gone before your eyes focus on them, leaving behind the orange glow of their afterburners and a wash of energy that hammers your ears and rattles your spine. As a patriotic display it is impressive, something to stir pride and admiration—but imagine being on the receiving end of such power, to have it shooting at you. It is one of the most convincing arguments ever made for surrender.
Despite the romantic leather-helmet, silk-scarf legend of the fighter pilot, aerial combat has always been more about engineering than flying. Considering that the first tentative Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk took place just over a century ago, the evolution of aerial combat has been astonishing. Inside of 40 years, from World War I to the Korean conflict, pilots went from shooting at each other with pistols from propeller-driven biplanes to dueling with cannons and missiles in jet aircraft moving faster than sound. At the start of World War II, American fighter and bomber pilots were adapting their tactics to cope with superior German and Japanese fighters, and by the end they had aircraft that could fly so high, so fast, and for so long, that few enemy fighters could even get close enough to shoot at them. Sakai noted, sadly, that the B-29 Superfortress was simply "insuperable." By Korea, "air breathers," or jets, had replaced the finely crafted propeller-driven fighters of lore, and aerial duels between American F‑86 Sabres and Soviet-built MiG‑15s were fleeting visual encounters where the biggest challenge was to get close enough to fire.
Today the fight has moved beyond visual range, into the realm of electromagnetic waves*, and involves what fighter pilots call "look-down, shoot-down" capability. The air war is a contest between radar systems, countermeasures, and missiles. American pilots have long enjoyed the advantages of seeing an enemy first, and of having missiles with the range and speed to hit the enemy from beyond the WEZ. But those advantages have gradually eroded. A fighter jet's theoretical "kill ratio" is based on projections of how many enemy fighters it could shoot down before getting shot down itself when faced with an unlimited number of attackers at once. The F-15's kill ratio of 8‑to‑1, which is what it enjoyed throughout most of its history and which reflected more than anything the finite capability to carry munitions, is now closer to 3‑to‑1.
"If the enemy has radar-guided missiles, now we're shooting at each other," Lieutenant Colonel Chuck "Corky" Corcoran told me last year at Elmendorf. Corcoran is a former F‑15 pilot who now commands the 525th Fighter Squadron, the Bulldogs, one of the three F‑22 squadrons just now getting planes. "If those enemy weapons have similar capabilities to ours, I've got to employ some sort of tactic to gain an advantage, whether it's getting higher and faster so I can shoot first, or checking away [shifting slightly off course] to increase his missile's time of flight."
Drawing out that time, even by a split second, can mean everything, because it allows your missile to strike first. Once the enemy's plane is destroyed, its radar can no longer steer his missile.
"His missile is looking for reflected radar energy that he's pointing at you, so if your missile gets to him and blows him up and kills his radar before his missile gets to you, then you are going to live," Corcoran explained.
An AMRAAM missile like the one Rodriguez used over Kosovo was a major step forward because it frees the attacking plane from having to keep its radar pointed at the target. The American plane can launch a missile from outside the WEZ, turn, and kick on its afterburners before the target has a chance to even shoot.
These tools rely, of course, on radar, which can be jammed.
"If you can't match your enemy's technology, you can always subtract from it," says Wayne Waller, a Virginia contractor who designs radar systems for the F‑15. "You may invent something that gives you an advantage, but you can't hang on to it for very long. Our radar used to be difficult to jam, but the capability to do that has improved geometrically. That knowledge is out there. And the jamming advances cost a lot less than improving the radar."
Countries that cannot afford to build fleets of the most advanced supersonic fighters can afford to build pods with clever software to mount on older airframes. This was brought home dramatically in Cope India 2004, a large aerial-combat training exercise that pitted F‑15 pilots from Elmendorf against India's air force, which is made up of the MiG‑21 and MiG‑29, and the newer Mirage 2000 and Russian-built Su‑30. The exercises were conducted high over north-central India, near the city of Gwalior.
"We came rolling in, like, 'Beep-beep, superpower coming through,'" Colonel Fornof told me. "And we had our eyes opened. We learned a lot. By the third week, we were facing a threat that we weren't prepared to face, because we had underestimated them. They had figured out how to take Russian-built equipment and improve upon it."
A small country can buy a MiG‑21 on the world weapons market for about $100,000, put in a better engine, add more-sophisticated radar and jamming systems, improve the cockpit design, and outfit it with "launch and leave" missiles comparable to the AMRAAM. These hybrid threats are more dangerous than any rival fighters America has seen in generations, and they cost much less than building a competitive fourth-generation fighter from scratch. The lower expense enables rival air forces to put more of them in the air, and because the F‑15 can carry only so many munitions, American pilots found themselves overwhelmed by both technology and sheer numbers during the exercises over India.
Today the average age of the F‑15s in use is 24 years, which in the world of modern electronics means they were born several geological ages ago. When the F‑15 started flying missions, Jimmy Carter was president and the Cold War was shaping geopolitics. Most Americans didn't own a home computer. People were still buying music on vinyl albums and cassette tapes. The first F‑15s had roughly the computer capability of the video game Pong. If anything, the pace of innovation is even faster in the military than in the civilian world, and as better look-down, shoot-down capabilities have come on line, they have been systematically layered and squeezed into the aging airframe of the F‑15. This has led to the dizzying complexity of the fighter's cockpit. But no matter how many gizmos the wizards can squeeze into the F‑15, it remains an old fighter.
"If you take a Pinto and put really nice tires on it, it's still a Pinto," Colonel Corcoran says. His choice of the unlovely, pedestrian Ford sedan as a metaphor is telling: pilots like Corcoran see the F‑22 as a Formula One racer by comparison. "You can put a bigger engine in the Pinto, but the frame is not built to handle the higher speeds," he said. "To build a fifth-generation fighter, you have to start from the ground up."
Some of the pilots I spoke to described the F‑22 as such a huge leap in capability that it ought to be considered not a fifth-generation fighter, one step up from the F‑15, but sixth-generation.
"It is really two big steps ahead of anything else out there," Corcoran told me. "All of the data from all the different sensors in the aircraft are fused. The F‑22 has one big display in the middle of the cockpit, so you are kind of sitting in the middle of that display, and all of the sensors run on their own. And tracks show up all around you, 360 degrees, and all of it in color. So the red guys are bad, the green guys are good, and the yellow guys—we don't know who the yellow guys are yet. So without the pilot doing anything, you have this 360-degree picture of the battle space around you. With the F‑15, after a couple of years of training, you might be able to achieve that level of awareness."
Major Derek Routt and Lieutenant Colonel Murray Nance have a unique perspective on the new fighter. They both fly for the Air Force's 65th Aggressor Squadron, mimicking the tactics and capabilities of enemy air forces in war games. I met them last summer at Elmendorf, where they were in the middle of Red Flag exercises—realistic war games carried out every few years—featuring "battling" F‑15s and F‑22s.
"I saw a Raptor just yesterday," Routt said. "It was way above me. I was just being called dead at the time. You usually don't see it until it's done with you, flying overhead, rocking its wings, saying, 'Thanks for playing, fellows.'
"I flew in a comparison test with both the F‑15 and the F‑22," he continued. "You flew against the F‑22 one day, and the next day we took the same profile and flew against the F‑15. I fought both of those, and there was absolutely no comparison. This is not a paid advertisement for the F‑22. You talk to any aviator in the world, ask what they would like to fly, and if they don't say the F‑22, then they are lying. I would kill to fly it."
"It is hard to kill what you can't see," Nance said. "It's eye-watering, the kind of turning it can do."
"Eye-watering?" I asked.
"Makes you cry. I mean, you realize, 'How did he just do that?'"
Last summer at Elmendorf, Corcoran sat me down in the cockpits of both an F‑15 and an F‑22 to show me just how different they are. As the F‑22 is to a modern point-and-click laptop—user-friendly—the F‑15 is to the first clunky personal computers, the ones where you had to type instructions in basic computer language to perform the simplest of tasks. All of the avionics on the F‑22 were designed from the ground up, and are fully integrated. The big central screen makes situational awareness intuitive. Better still, it is linked with all the other Raptors in its formation, and with the AWACS command. There is now only one page, and everyone is on it.
"It's all there in front of you," General Tinsley explained. "Where am I? Where are you? Who is out there? Who is locking on to me? It gives you a God's-eye view that is simply a thing of beauty. I have sensors in the F‑22 that don't just look out the front of the airplane, they are spread all over the aircraft. I can see somebody anywhere. It is easier on the pilot, which makes him a more efficient killing machine."
The improvement is so great that some of the older F‑15 pilots tend to look down their noses at the youngsters flying the F‑22.
"To be good in the F‑15, you have to work at it," Corcoran told me. "It's easier to separate the men from the boys and identify the real talent. But the way I see it, the less time my F‑22 pilots have to spend sorting out all this data, the more time they have to think tactically and react to what is happening around them. That means our entire force, from top to bottom, is more effective."
The F‑22's most remarkable quality is that it is "combat-coated," which means it is painted with material that absorbs rather than deflects the signals* beamed out by the enemy's defense systems, making it virtually invisible to radar. Talking about it, Tinsley grew gruffly animated.
"Now I have stealth!" he said. "The F‑15 is a big airplane; you can see that thing outside of 10 nautical miles. The F‑16 is a little bit better in a dogfight, visually, because it's a smaller aircraft. I might not be able to see it turning until about seven or eight nautical miles. The F‑22, the bad guys can't even see me on their radar, and even in visual range the Raptor is small. My missiles hit them before they even know I am there. And I'm not just talking about air-to-air, I'm talking about air-to-ground."
The biggest threat to American fighters during the first wave of an assault is from surface-to-air missiles. They are much cheaper to build and maintain than a fleet of supersonic fighters, so smaller countries such as Iran have invested heavily in them. Attacking SAM sites in an F‑15 is risky work. But with the F‑22, pilots are back to shooting fish in a barrel.
"The F‑22 avionics allow me to be a better battle-space manager and efficient killer," Tinsley explained. "I have stealth, so I have the surprise piece. And then on top of all that, I can do it at supercruise. I can climb higher than other fighters, I can go faster with lower fuel consumption, so I can cover a larger space. And no one can see me. Now we're getting that 8-to-1 kill ratio I need to maintain superiority."
The Air Force fears that the dominance of U.S. airpower has been so complete for so long that it is taken for granted. The ability of the United States to own the skies over any battlefield has transformed the way we fight. The last American soldier killed on the ground by an enemy air attack died in Korea, on April 15, 1953.
Russia, China, Iran, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and others are now flying fourth-generation fighters with avionics that match or exceed the F‑15's. Ideally, from the standpoint of the U.S. Air Force, the F‑22 would gradually replace most of the F‑15s in the U.S. fleet over the next 15 years, and two or three more generations of American pilots, soldiers, and marines would fight without worrying about attacks from the sky. But that isn't going to happen.
"It means a step down from air dominance," Richard Aboulafia, an air-warfare analyst for the Teal Group, which conducts assessments for the defense industry, told me. "The decision not to replace the F‑15 fleet with the F‑22 ultimately means that we will accept air casualties. We will lose more pilots. We will still achieve air superiority, but we will get hurt achieving it."
General Tinsley suggested that there will be a deeper consequence: other countries will be more tempted to challenge us in the air. The dominance of the F‑15 had already begun to erode before the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991. The last fighter the Soviets produced, the MiG‑29, had similar aeronautic capabilities, and its radar and weapons systems gave it look-down, shoot-down tools on a par with the F‑15's. Today, Russia is equipping its air force with Su‑35s, and has offered them for sale. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is a customer of the plane's close cousin, the Su‑30. These fighters are every bit the match of the F‑15. Combine that with the hybrid threat posed by revamped older fighters, and the fight in the air begins to look fair for the first time in a half century.
It was fashionable in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union to argue that the threat of conventional warfare was no longer relevant, because no other nation could compete with the United States on conventional terms. The attacks of September 11, 2001, underlined that argument; the new threat was "asymmetrical"—small cells of sophisticated terrorists against whom our huge arsenals were useless.
Conventional weaponry may be useless against terrorists, but that doesn't mean the old threats have disappeared. Russia's incursion into Georgia and threatening gestures against the Baltic states; Iran's persistence in pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; North Korea's decision to ignore its agreement to cease building nuclear weapons—all are reminders that the threat posed by belligerent nation-states is still real. If Georgia is admitted to NATO, the United States and other member nations will be obliged by treaty to defend it from Russia. China continues to rapidly expand its air force. Conflict with these nations isn't inevitable or even necessarily probable, but as we become more vulnerable in the air, it may well become more likely.
"What happens when we no longer own that advantage in the air?" Tinsley asked me. "Are our enemies going to feel a little froggy and push the limits? Why haven't we fought that many wars? If America hadn't built the F‑15, would it have been the same story? How much did our fleet of F‑15s keep other countries at bay? If we had been stuck with the F‑4 and someone had come along with a MiG‑29, would they have stepped out and done some damage? We have to replace all the F‑15s with F‑22s."
This is the position you would expect from an Air Force general, whose job was to make sure America continues its unquestioned ownership of the sky. One might just as easily argue that lack of such complete superiority will act as a healthy restraint on American military aggression. After all, the latest big war, in Iraq, was one we started. If we are more likely to bleed, perhaps we will be slower to fight.
But fights will come. The squadron Colonel Corcoran is pulling together at Elmendorf will consist of an elite few. The 525th Bulldogs have a tradition reaching back to World War II, when its pilots flew P‑51 Mustangs and P‑47 Thunderbolts over Europe. Such squadrons are small, close-knit clubs and, especially when based in such remote outposts as Elmendorf, define their pilots' personal, social, and professional lives. Their members sit at the pinnacle of their profession, every bit as much an elite (perhaps more so) as professional athletes, only without the pay or celebrity. Photos of the Bulldog squadron's decorated exploits and heroes line the walls of its bar—or, as one happy pilot told me with a shot glass in one hand and a beer in the other, "Not a bar, a 'Heritage Room!'"—where pilots gather for ritualized bouts of drinking, roasting, and storytelling. There are already two operational F‑22 squadrons at Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, and eventually Corcoran's will be one of two in Alaska. If and when a conflict arises, they will be stretched wide and far.
The good news is that the Air Force has had some success integrating the newer fighter with its older ones. Part of its argument for the F‑22s was that they were too sophisticated to be teamed with older, lesser planes. But early results in Red Flag competitions suggest otherwise.
"When the F‑15s are up doing their tactics, we're kind of back behind them a little bit and helping them out if they have trouble," Colonel Jim Hecker, the operations-group commander at Elmendorf, told me. "If an F‑15 is having some trouble dealing with electronic countermeasures where he can't shoot, that's when we'll go in and get rid of that guy for him. I think the synergistic effect of having a couple of F‑22s in with those fourth-generation fighters is great. Based on the buy, I think we're going to have to do that if we stay at the same number of F‑22s. We simply don't have enough, so we have to find ways to integrate like this to optimize our capability."
So America's fighter fleet is likely to remain F‑15-based, backed up by the F‑22 and F‑35, a fifth-generation fighter that resembles the Raptor but without the same maneuverability and speed. It means that the days when the Air Force's leading "ace" has only three kills may be coming to an end. If more vulnerability means more challenges—and it usually does—then more fighters will be seeing action. If the cost of air supremacy is not paid in dollars, it may be paid in blood.
After 26 years of flying, Rodriguez is no longer in the fight. Pushing 50, he now works for Raytheon. One of his responsibilities is to sell the AMRAAM, an assignment that puts to good use the story of his killer sortie over Pristina, when he lit up the snowy night with that MiG. He hasn't flown an airplane since 2004. After all those years of going acro in the F‑15, it's hard for him to get a thrill in the cockpit of anything else.
"I've relinquished myself to business class," he said.
He's passed the baton. But no matter how different the demands on a fighter pilot have become, Rodriguez is convinced that the job itself hasn't changed that much.
"It's the same person," he said. "He's just introduced to technology. I mean, when you think about it, today kids are growing up exposed to multitasking, multisensory inputs when they play a video game. So that person is going to evolve into someone technically friendly with everything new that comes up. Back in World War I, World War II, the concept of flying itself was a leap, you know, a leap of faith in some cases. And that's the same one that we want flying fighters today, the one willing to take the leap."
Correction: The print version of this piece incorrectly referred to the particles emitted by radar as electrons. Radar's signals are electromagnetic waves made up of photons.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
(UPDATE) Information from the TEPCO/government joint press conference online right now.
A 60-year-old worker doing the decontamination experiment in Shimo-Oguni District of Date City, Fukushima Prefecture was found dead by his co-workers inside the company car at 1:00PM on December 12. An ambulance was called, but he was confirmed dead at 2PM.
The decon work was the first in Shimo-Oguni District in Date City that was planned by the Cabinet Office and was being carried out by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. The government spokesman didn't know the details of the worker, or the details of the decon work being done, or how long the worker had worked before he was found dead. Citizen volunteers were not involved in this decon project, as far as the spokesman knew.
No information about where the worker was from, or whether he had a pre-existing condition. The spokesman did say the government knows the cause of the death, but is talking to the family of the deceased as to whether it is appropriate to disclose the cause.
The spokesman was extremely uncomfortable when he tried to answer the question of the cause of the death. He managed to say the death was not during the decon work.
The information was apparently disclosed by none other than Yasuhiro Sonoda, Cabinet Office official who drank Fuku-I water.
If a person died suddenly as he/she was doing the decontamination work in the area that produced rice with cesium far exceeding the national provisional safety limit, it has to be either the psychological stress in general and/or the pre-existing illness. Right? Right.
Monday, December 12, 2011
(UPDATED) Confirmed: A Decon Worker in Date City, Fukushima Found Dead in a Company Car at the Site
(UPDATE) Information from the TEPCO/government joint press conference online right now.
15 comments:
- Anonymous said...
TEPCO may say suicide due to mental stress from not "smiling and being Happy." Suicide is going to work for TEPCO and being exposed to high levels of radiation and being ignored..company first!
- December 12, 2011 at 4:56 AM
- Anonymous said...
The fact that he died on site is a proof that the death wasn't radiation related. Radiation incapacitates you weeks before it kills you.
- December 12, 2011 at 6:15 AM
- no6ody said...
Perhaps it was a combination of psych stress, a pre-existing illness, being 60 yrs old, and using all that high-tech decontamination gear-stuff like shovels and pickaxes.
Another casualty, another T3PC0 report--maybe it will say that the victim did not smile enough.
The govvie dude would not supply much info...
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." Thomas Jefferson
- December 12, 2011 at 6:25 AM
- Anonymous said...
How many dozens of people have already died at Fukushima? A lot of workers are unemployed folk rounded up from all over Japan with no family. They can be cremated and disappear like magic.
I get a kick out of, "The fact that he died on site is a proof that the death wasn't radiation related." Check out Chernobyl, Chucky!
- December 12, 2011 at 6:46 AM
- Anonymous said...
He died from not smiling and believing baseless rumours...its lethal those unsmiling baseless rumours..
- December 12, 2011 at 7:31 AM
- Andrew Spagnoli said...
Acute radiation sickness incapacitates. We are not dealing with that here. The dangers to the public and decon workers is different. Cesium accumulation in the heart muscle causes sudden cardiac problems, for example... and there are other ways to die suddenly after exposure (especially internal contamination) . That said, I also want to make a second point: suicides ARE victims. If this man DID kill himself he is no less of a victim of this nuclear crime. Ask yourself what you might do if your home, your family, your favorite places, your food and water, etc were deserted poisoned wastelands. Imagine the authorities keeping babies and children in areas just as poisoned as the evacuated ghost towns. Imagine that you are trying to cope with this new "life" and you are feeling fatigue, fighting colds, diarhea, nosebleeds and bruising that nevergo away. What might you do. I hope none of us are faced with that horror... but I also feel it is just a matter of time.
- December 12, 2011 at 8:02 AM
- CaptD said...
Adding to what Andrew said above
ATOMIC RADIATION IS MORE HARMFUL TO WOMEN.pdf
A great link:
===>CHALLENGE: Whitewash that's Hogwash. Nuclear Power, Safety, the WHO & the IAEA
- December 12, 2011 at 11:38 AM
- Atomfritz said...
The spokesman's uncomfortability tells much. We can safely assume that the death circumstances aren't favorable for Tepco/the govt.
Maybe he left a goodbye letter, explaining much?
In any way, we can expect that they'll try to bribe the family to keep the thing secret.
If the family is in financial problems, as to be expected with displaced people, the chances are good that they'll stay quiet in turn for some pecuniary compensation.
This way Tepco coerces even their victims who have lost their income due to Fuku I and have no other choice than to clean up for a living the mess Tepco did.
- December 12, 2011 at 12:06 PM
- Anonymous said...
Acute radiation sickness cause erections in males that can cause heart attacks if not treated...
- December 12, 2011 at 12:16 PM
- Mike said...
I still regularly see comments in English-language publications to the effect that no one has died or been injured as a result of the Fukushima disaster. Of course, most injuries will appear over an extended period of years, and causation may be unclear. Still, casualties and sicknesses seem to be occurring now. Has anyone compiled a list of those who have died, reported cancers, and so on? It would be nice to be able to cite a real number.
- December 12, 2011 at 12:27 PM
- Anonymous said...
Ex-skf must be the only place on the internet where people are cheering for a high death count. Pretty ghoulish if you ask me. There is so much radiation paranoia on this site that people are actually wishing for a high death count so that their paranoia is vindicated.
- December 12, 2011 at 1:53 PM
- Anonymous said...
@anon at 1:53PM, looks like you have some English comprehension problem. "...the only place on the internet"? What a baseless rumor.
Report back to your employer that you've done the job for the day.
- December 12, 2011 at 2:16 PM
- Mike said...
@anon at 1:53 --
No one here is "cheering for a high death count," least of all me. I'm just asking if anyone has compiled a list of the casualty reports which keep coming up. I'd rather rely on real data than the blanket denials from TEPCO, the government, and nuclear industry shills. If people believe those cavalier denials and do not take sensible precautions to avoid exposure, *that* ultimately will lead to a higher death count.
- December 12, 2011 at 4:31 PM
- Anonymous said...
By discounting all the data coming from Tepco, the government, and the nuclear industry, I'm not sure where you are going to find your "real data", unless you count Twitter and the blogosphere as being real data.
@2:16 why is it that anyone who disagrees with the groupthink here is automatically labeled as a shill for the nuclear industry? Never mind, no need to answer. I think I already know.
- December 13, 2011 at 2:50 PM
- Anonymous said...
@anon 2:50
If you'd been paying attention for the past nine months, you would realize that the information provided by TEPCO and the government has been admitted to be wrong, or demonstrated to be wrong, over and over and over again. TEPCO and the government have financial and political incentives to minimize the extent of the contamination and the risk, and have consistently done so, at the expense of the facts. We've seen the pattern repeated: general denial for months, then admission that earlier assurances were false, contamination is worse than reported, different parts of the plant failed, food already sold and consumed was adulterated, and on and on.
As for twitter and blog posts, it seems that non-Japanese speakers are forced to rely on reports from such sources, since the western media is largely ignoring these issues. Then again, if you'd bothered to look around this blog, you would realize that it consists largely of articles translated from the Japanese news media, from press conferences (includes those of TEPCO and government reps), reports from academics and institutions, and not just anonymous rumors as you seem to believe.
- December 13, 2011 at 5:46 PM


text:
Last Tuesday night (8/15), Mike Timlin said: "We've been throwing the ball really well. I'm not calling anybody out, but we haven't scored a whole lot. We're pitching well, we're holding teams down, and they're doing the same to us."
I'll avoid an obvious political crack about claiming things are peachy when they are going down the crapper and simply note that this is very silly. And wrong. Only three Red Sox pitchers have an ERA under 5.18 since the All-Star Game -- and Mr. Timlin, with a spiffy 6.46 (11 runs in 15.1 innings), is not one of them. They are Jonathan Papelbon (1.80), Curt Schilling (4.47) and Rudy Seanez (4.73). That's it.
No one expects any team to get through a six-month season without injuries, but we have missed significant time from many pitchers: David Wells (103 games), Matt Clement (59), Tim Wakefield (31), Keith Foulke (59), Lenny DiNardo (81), David Riske (41), and Timlin (16). The constant shuffling of bit parts to fill these holes has been very difficult. Plus the unexpected (though not exactly shocking) failures of Clement and Tavarez. The younger pitchers have been as good as could be expected (I contend Jon Lester has been better) and we have been too quick to expect them to dominate.
BTW: Did you know that Papelbon is only six months younger than Beckett? Or that Kevin Youkilis is more than seven months older than Coco Crisp?
Among the 15 AL teams, the Red Sox are currently 11th in ERA (NY is 5th), 9th in WHIP (NY 4th), 9th in batting average against (NY 3rd), 10th in on-base against (NY 4th), and 11th in slugging against (NY 5th). ... The good news is that if the pitching can simply be passable, things should be fine if the bats wake up. (Two big ifs in that sentence.)
One thing I have mentioned before is the way Red Sox batters often give away at-bats, as if they cannot concentrate for the entire plate appearance. This seems mirrored in the way Francona will concede certain games about the 6th inning or so. Actually, this has been recurring problem with Sox hitters for several years, and our manager in 2003 used to give up on games all the time, which was one big reason why that club had so many late inning rallies and wins. (The Yankees of 1998-2001 made plenty of outs, they struck out and grounded into double plays, but they concentrated for each and every at-bat, even the scrubs, in a way I've not seen Red Sox hitters do. This pains (and annoys) me.)
So. Right now, the Red Sox are 3rd in the AL in runs scored (7 fewer than NY and 10 fewer than the White Sox), 1st in on-base percentage, 4th in slugging and 4th in extra-base hits. Boston also leads all MLB teams with 518 walks (26 more than the Yankees). ... Since the ASG, Manny Ramirez is hitting .374/.449/.672 and David Ortiz is at .297/.424/.656. ... Mike Lowell is slumping (.228/.295/.360) and Eric Hinske should offer some relief. Whether Terry Francona will sit Lowell now and again is a different matter. Alex Gonzalez is also regressing (.235/.291/.435).
We are currently 39-22 at home (as opposed to 30-31 on the road) and after this weekend and a nine-game west coast swing, Boston will play 18 of its last 29 games at home. So that's a plus.
In summary (though the situation is not nearly as dire):
One. One game. One win. That's all.
Not four, not three, not two.
The game won't start for a few hours, so please enjoy this picture of a puppy:


text:
This post was written by Danielle Gold, the Good Housekeeping Research Institute's summer editorial intern. When not assisting Chris Malloy and Miriam Arond with their work, she studies Media at Hunter College in New York City.
At the Good Housekeeping Research Institute, one of our goals is to help you stay organized and clutter free by recommending innovative products. We know that one of your frustrations is sifting through piles of unsolicited mail and increasingly, the digital equivalent called spam. In fact, approximately 40 billion spam emails were sent per day in June 2011. Here are some tips for keeping your inbox clean.
The simplest way to avoid junk email, whether you use Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM.com Mail, Hotmail or Gmail, is to use spam blocking or filtering features offered by your email provider. If you don't have a spam folder already set up in your email account or if you want to intensify the spam filters, I suggest that you do a quick search in the Help window to locate your spam settings. Most email services also allow you to flag messages that slip through the cracks, allowing you to manually block shady solicitors. Services that censor unwanted email generally work by utilizing a combination of user feedback and a search for bulk mailings and suspicious phrases.
If your email provider doesn't offer filtering or you're particularly inundated with junk mail, you might want to consider using a 3rd party service, which will use its own programming to screen your messages after forwarding them to a secure server. Some services that do this include SpamAssassin, Spam Reader, Spamfence and POPFile.
More From Good Housekeeping
You can also proactively opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial emails from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) with its DMAChoice Program, which will get rid of unwanted email from many national companies. Catalog Choice offers a similar service to help you opt out of unnecessary emails. These sites can also prevent physical junk mail. In general, a good rule of thumb is to limit the sites to which you give your email address. Only enter it on trusted sites that you're sure won't be giving it out for any reason beyond the intended purpose intended. To learn more about how to protect yourself online, see tips from Rachel Rothman.
Most services, regardless of their source, claim to block well over 90% of spam emails. But spam isn't the only source of email disorganization. Check out Amy Robert's advice on how to clean up your inbox.


text:
When the FCC deregulated the local exchange market in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the existing local exchange carriers became known as the Incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs). ILECs are entities that hold a certificate of convenience and necessity (CCN) as of September 01, 1975.
Who Should File: Any entity that held a CCN as of September 01, 1975 and is providing local exchange telephone service, basic local telecommunications service, or switched access service to customers besides itself. Any entity that currently holds a CCN and requests amendments to its existing certification.
When to File: PURA (Public Utility Regulatory Act) Chapter 54, Subchapter B., §54.053 (New or Amendment). The PUC must grant or deny a New or Amendment CCN filing within one year of the date of the filing, unless good cause is shown for exceeding one year.
ILEC Application to Introduce New or Modified Rates or Terms
ILEC (CCN) Application Format for New Certifications and Amendments
ILEC Annual Company Contact Report - Login Required
Migration Contact List - Excel
Affiliated Activities Affiliated Activities Annual Report for CTUs
CTP Quarterly Reporting pursuant to HB 1777
Outage Report Requirement
HUB - Historically Underutilized Business
Workforce Diversity
A ILEC shall file General Tariffs and Informational Tariffs using the filing format required by Substantive Rules 26.207 and 26.208. General Tariffs have a 35-day approval process and Informational Tariffs have a 10-day approval process. Each Tariff filing will receive a new docket number, which will be assigned by Central Records.
Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers - ilec.csv
Corrections to these lists: Please update your company contact information using the PUC Portal and either "ILEC Annual Report" or "Company Contacts", if later than annual report due date. Both are available in PUC Applications.
Substantive Rule §26.101 - Certification Criteria
Substantive Rule §26.131 - CLEC-to-CLEC and CLEC-to-ILEC Migration Guidelines
Technical - David Smithson at 512-936-7156 - email@example.com
Financial - Diane Hopingardner at 512-936-7233 - firstname.lastname@example.com
Tariffs/Price Sheets - Stephen Mendoza at 512-936-7394 - email@example.com
Central Records at 512-936-7180
PO Box 13326
Austin, TX 78711-3326
  Contact Us
Copyright ©
Public Utility Commission of Texas


text:
The Secret Beyond Matter
The Secrets of the Hypocrite
The Approach to Be Adopted Towards Hypocrites
O Prophet! Strive against the disbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them. Their refuge is Hell. What an evil destination!
(Surat at-Tahrim: 9)
The approach to be taken towards hypocrites receives much attention in the Qur'an. In the same way as the believer learns all he needs from the Qur'an, he also learns how to behave in this regard.
The exemplary advice given to believers in the Qur'an is this: that believers should never take hypocrites as their friends, and that they should warn the hypocrites by means of the Qur'an so long as the two remain together. And if the advice given bears no fruit, they should expel the hypocrites from among them. At this point, of course, Allah's messenger must take the final decision regarding the hypocrites. By means of His messenger, Allah enables believers to take the correct decision. Let us now examine those verses concerning the attitude to be adopted towards hypocrites.
1. Not to Confide in Them
You who believe! Do not make friends of people with whom Allah is angry, who have despaired of the Hereafter as the disbelievers have despaired of the inhabitants of the graves. (Surat al-Mumtahana: 13)
As we have seen from the beginning, in the light of the verses of the Qur'an, hypocrites are definitely not the kind of people that one should befriend or confide in. Only those of weak faith or in whose hearts faith is not yet fully established take these people, who fail to befriend Allah and who are in consequence not befriended by Him, as their confidants.
The verses revealed by Allah on this subject encourage believers to be on their guard against hypocrites at all times and never to confide in them. It is a matter of great importance to be on one's guard against hypocrites, who hate the believers and wish them to be dispersed and suffer difficulties.
2. To Rule with Justice Among Them
They are people who listen to lies and consume ill-gotten gains. If they come to you, you can either judge between them or turn away from them. If you turn away from them, they cannot harm you in any way. But if you do judge, judge between them justly. Allah loves the just. (Surat al-Ma'ida: 42)
Implementing the stipulation in the above verse is a matter for the messenger at the head of the people alone. The messenger either rules among the hypocrites, as he desires, or else turns his back on them.
3. To Give Advice if They Will Receive That Advice
Allah knows what is in such people's hearts, so turn away from them and warn them and speak to them with words that take effect. (Surat an-Nisa': 63)
As can be seen from this verse, it is recommended that hypocrites be given effective advice. By this important and effective method, they can come to realize what they have done and regret it. The main thing here is to issue reminders so that they can feel such regret. Someone who fails to heed such advice has declared open war on the religious moral values. Therefore, one must never forget that these people should be spurned, not befriended.
Believers give these people advice in the hope that they will mend their ways. But certainly, every piece of advice increases the suffering in the Hereafter of the hypocrite who turns his back on it. All the advice given to hypocrites is actually a snare, set for them by Allah. By remaining among believers and working in secret, hypocrites imagine that they are being very clever, never realizing that in the Hereafter, they will be recompensed for every piece of advice they received while remaining among believers. In this way they fall into an eternal trap while seeking to set their own snares for believers.
4. Not to Insist on Warning Them if They Refuse to Heed Advice
Enjoining what is good and forbidding what is evil is the responsibility of every believer. Yet there is a limit to this. Allah states that if the person being given advice rejects it obdurately, then nothing further should be said to him:
Remind, then, if the reminder benefits. He who has fear will be reminded. But the most miserable will shun it. (Surat al-A'la: 9-11)
In the event that hypocrites insist in their fanatic denial, further warnings will be of no avail. Believers should leave them to their own devices.
5. To Combat Them and Behave in a Stern, Deterrent Manner
O Prophet, strive against the disbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them ... (Surat at-Tawba: 73)
This is a very important piece of advice from Allah. A harsh and determined approach from believers towards hypocrites, who fail to keep their word to Allah, lie and harbor corruption and rebellion in their hearts, has a deterrent effect. Being on one's guard against the strife they will cause, taking relevant precautions beforehand and identifying them in good time before they can wreak any harm are most important duties for believers. Believers have been charged with being on their guard at all times against the danger from hypocrites, exposing these people who harbor sickness in their hearts, and thereby causing others to avoid them. This is indeed what they do.
Taking all due precautionary measures and at the same time, never permitting them the opportunity to cause strife, acts as a warning to later generations of hypocrites.
6. Not to Allow Them to Struggle Alongside the Faithful
Hypocrites do not actually struggle alongside believers, because they fail to fear Allah as they ought, are devoted to worldly concerns and feel enormous admiration for deniers. Since they remain lagging behind and choose a life apart from that of believers, Allah commanded the Prophet (saas) never to permit hypocrites to struggle alongside the faithful:
If Allah returns you to a group of them, and they ask you for permission to go out, say, "You will never go out with me, nor will you ever fight an enemy with me. You were happy to stay behind the first time, so stay behind with those who are left behind." (Surat at-Tawba: 83)
7. To Remove Them from the Community of the Faithful
He [Musa] said, "What do you think you were doing, Samaritan?" He [Samaritan] said, "I saw what they did not see. So I gathered up a handful from the messenger's footprints and threw it in. That is what my inner self urged me to do." He said, "Go! In this world you will have to say, 'Untouchable!' And you have an appointment which you will not fail to keep. Look at your deity to which you devoted so much time. We will burn it up and then scatter it as dust into the sea." (Surah Ta Ha: 95-97)
The attitude regarding Samaritan, who cased strife among the people of the Prophet Musa (as), is a most effective precaution that should be recommended against all hypocrites, because hypocrites cause strife among believers and to turn them towards denial, in the same way that they themselves have turned in the direction of denial. Even if they fail, they seek to wear believers down psychologically. In such an event, the most rational course is to remove them from among sincere believers.
8. To Refuse to Heed Them
So call and go straight as you have been ordered to. Do not follow their whims and desires ... (Surat ash-Shura: 15)
Obeying or heeding a hypocrite will result in considerable harm. A person who abandons the behavior pleasing to Allah and goes along with hypocrites is actually following the path of satan. Those who go along with satan represent his army and can never attain salvation, either in this world nor in the next. For that reason, Allah warns believers against this danger and forbids them to engage in behavior such as agreeing with hypocrites' suggestions.
9. To Pay no Heed to the Troubles and Woes They Inflict
Allah is believers' Guardian and Protector. In times of difficulty and distress, they seek help from Him, and are patient and submissive. They also exhibit fortitude and submit to Allah in the face of difficulties stemming from hypocrites. They pray for the harm that hypocrites seek to inflict to be visited upon them instead. For that reason, Allah tells believers to pay no attention to hypocrites' actions, since these are all ineffective and invalid:
But because of their breaking of their covenant, We have cursed them and made their hearts hard. They distort the true meaning of words and have forgotten a good portion of what they were reminded of. You will never cease to come upon some act of treachery on their part, except for a few of them. Yet pardon them, and overlook. Allah loves good-doers. (Surat al-Ma'ida: 13)
Turn from them and say, "Peace! You will soon come to know." (Surat az-Zukhruf: 89)
10. To Establish with Them no Ties of Affection or Friendship
As the friends of satan, hypocrites have adopted him as their guardian. Therefore, a believer will avoid hypocrites just as he avoids satan. Since they are the enemies of Allah and religion, believers are also hostile to them as well and feel great anger towards them in their hearts. Indeed, Allah forbids believers to take as friends those who war against them on the subject of religion:
Allah merely forbids you from taking as friends those who have fought you in the religion and driven you from your homes and who supported your expulsion. Any who take them as friends are wrongdoers. (Surat at-Mumtahana: 9)
11. To Avoid Them
Hypocrites engage in a constant struggle against believers, persisting in cunning activities against them so long as they remain in their midst. If they leave the community of the faithful, they carry out these activities from a distance. For believers' security and peace of mind, therefore, it is of the greatest importance to avoid hypocrites as one would satan himself, and to stay as far away from them as one would from the flames.
Allah has promised that so long as believers avoid them, hypocrites will be able to do them no harm:
If something good happens to you, it galls them. If something bad strikes you, they rejoice at it. But if you are steadfast and guard against evil, their scheming will not harm you in any way. Allah encompasses what they do. (Surah Al 'Imran: 120)


text:
Health experts warn against the excessive consumption of saturated fats. At the same time industry marketing groups come up with novel campaigns to increase consumption. The role of government, often, is to mediate between these two contrasting positions.
The New York Times reports on a great example in which the same government department promotes cheese consumption and at the same time sends out messages against cheese consumption.
This would appear non-sensical or counter-productive. But from the perspective of a Hierarchical bureaucracy there isn't really a contradiction. After all, cheese consumption has been promoted in both directions. The more promotion the better, surely…
In some respects this is similar to what government does with tobacco: warn against it but take the tax revenue.
See: The four cultures of marketing ethics
Related Articles
- Ireland Plans Handouts Of Cheese To The Poor (huffingtonpost.com)
- While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales (nytimes.com)
- The Cheese Industrial Complex (talkingpointsmemo.com)