Will this morning’s links betray my grumpiness?  I hope not but today’s meme that the US and the West are in danger of losing Ukraine drives me a bit crazy.  It wasn’t in my pocket… was it in yours?

Anyhow, the big news out of Washington, DC is about the big defense cuts proposed by SecDef Hagel.  Lots of choices being made, including controversial ones like eliminating the A-10s for a plane that is still mostly air (the F-35) and so on.  How much of this will actually happen?  No idea.  But it has produced some interesting thoughts including Lt. General H.R. McMaster on the fallacies of much current thinking.

Speaking of war, here is a report enumerating the American costs (killed in action and casualties) of Iraq and Afghanistan.  There is much to chew over here, including de-mything the idea that “minorities bled more than the whites” in today’s military, that the ratios of killed to wounded is pretty amazing given historical tendencies–that we are keeping alive those who get hurt far better than in the past (which leads the cynic to ponder–do wounded count politically in the same way as KIA?).  For more comparative numbers, go to icasualties.org.

Doctrine Man, a superhero who dwells in the twitterverse, came up with ten rules of Quartermaster Corps, which reminded me not just of how most campus administration seems to operate but a list of nationalism rules that Stuart Kaufman had in his book.

The loss of Harold Ramis hit many of us hard since we grew up with Animal House, Caddy Shack, Ghostbusters, and Groundhog Day.  The Obama statement was pretty cool, complete with Caddyshack quote.  Of course, Ramis’s most quotable movie is almost certainly Ghostbusters:

We are missing you already.  Thanks for the good times.