Thursday, March 24, 2011

Media amusement

According to US Army (R) Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who was just spotted on FOXNews while flipping through the channels on the TV, TLAM is a term meant to describe "putting iron on target". Seriously? He just described TLAMs and Tomahawks being used "to strike 20 targets" in Libya. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, TLAM is Tomahawk Land Attack Missile. Translation: it's a Tomahawk used to target ground targets, as opposed to the UGM-109B TASM, or Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile. It's not a big deal, but I did find it funny. Maybe next time it'd be a good idea to ask someone more likely to have a clue what they're talking about to deal with current operations. What a terrorism expert can offer about direct action between nation states is beyond me, and in this case it was very little. The best part is that not five minutes later a reporter accurately referred to TLAM Tomahawks!

So, the lesson for today is to take whatever you hear from an "expert" with a grain of salt. I'm not removing myself from that category either; if you found me describing something outside my own fields of study, I'd expect to be treated the same way.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of the old dictum: "Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt". Tony was in a good situation, being thought of (probably correctly) as a victim of a corrupt and arrogant bureaucracy, covering up for their own incompetence. Going on TV to talk about things you don't really know much about cannot possibly improve his public image.