West Point Parents' Club
of Oregon & SW Washington
Newsletter -Feb./Mar.'02

Directions for Saturday, Apr. 6th Meeting
a "Hail & Farewell " to our Firstie Parents
McLean House --------------- Telephone (503)655-4268
5350 River Street , West Linn, OR 97068
Exit the I-205 at EXIT 8, West Linn/Lake Oswego.
At the traffic light at the end of the off ramp,
TURN TOWARDS LAKE OSWEGO.
Go about a block, TURN RIGHT ON HOLLY STREET.
(A small residential street just past the yellow Astro Gas Station.)
TURN RIGHT ON RIVER STREET (Holly ends at River Street "T").
McLean house is on the right, at the end of River Street.
This is very easy to find and freeway close.
Executive meeting-noon, General meeting-1:00
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List of Newsletter Articles:
Notice of Apr. 6th Meeting (above)
Midshipmen Space Project
America's Advantage
All Service Academies Ball Group Picture and After Action Report
Tax Time--To Claim Plebe for '01?
Eisehnhower Hall Spring Programs
Official Bicentennial Website:  http://www.usma.edu/Bicentennial/
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Minutes of Meeting - January 26, 2002 at Larsons Family Pizza in Salem.

David Graham opened opened the meeting with the Cadet Prayer.
     The following families were represented at this meeting:   Adams, Adkins, Campbell, Cox, DeVaney, Doyle, Fox, Graham, Hoffmann, Kerr, Klascius, Knutson, and Lushenko.
     We put together boodle bags at the meeting. Each bag contained 17 items; thanks to every family who donated items. Our thanks to Barbara Campbell who packed and mailed the 2 large boxes of boodle to our Cadets. Both boxes have now arrived, but, unfortunately, they became separated in the mail and the two boxes arrived days apart.
     On March 16, the Hoffmanns, our new co-presidents, will be hosting the Executive Meeting at their house. Their hospitality will be greatly appreciated.
     We want to thank Marilyn Fox for arranging our meeting in November at Fort Vancouver. The meeting was enjoyed by all. And, thank you to Barbara Campbell for arranging the January meeting at Larsens Family Pizza. It was an excellent meeting. The location and food were great!
     Lou Fox, our Treasurer, reported that we have $1904.15 in our accounts.
     We considered uses for the All Service Academies Ball proceeds. A motion to increase the funding for attendees of the President's Conference at West Point from $200.00 to $600.00, as well as  to the use of the remaining proceeeds was tabled for further discussion until the Executive Board Planning Meeting in March 16th, with a recommendation to be forthcoming to membership at the April 6th general meeting.
The new Board of Officers are:
President: Jill & Al Hoffmann
Vice President & Historian: Christine Doyle, assisted by Fran Lushenko (marketing & food)
Secretary: Carole Cox
Treasurer: Lou & Marilyn Fox
Newsletter Editor: Patty Klascius
Oregon Liaison: Patty Klascius
Washington Liaison: David Graham

     Barbara Campbell has agreed to handle the mailing of the boodle. We want to remind everyone that each Cadet of member families receives a boodle bag twice a year. If you are unable to bring or send your boodle to the meeting, please send a check to Lou Fox, our Treasurer,  to help defray the cost of shipping and for us to purchase additional items to add to the bags. Everyone's participation makes this an even bigger treat for our Cadets. Please e-mail Carole Cox at carolecoxis@msn.com and Lou's address will be e-mailed back to you so you can send him your check or call Carole at (503) 657-7121.
     Our next meeting will be held on April 6 at 1:00 p.m. at McLean House in West Linn.  Hope to see you there!
Respectfully submitted,
Carole Cox, Secretary

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This was an interesting article about a   Midshipmen Space Project,   reported in the Associated Press.--ed
     Once every 100 minutes, the Naval Academy's bargain basement satellite loops around the earth, sending and receiving signals over antennae made from a metal tape measure. The satellite enables hikers, boaters and campers in remote areas to use mobile radios to locate their positions on earth and send messages back home.   Contacts have been made with the satellite by users in countries around the world, including a group of New Zealanders, 60 and older, who are using it to communicate with family and friends as they hike across their country.
     After 3 months in space, the 25-pound Prototype Communications Satellite is exceeding the expectations of the midshipmen who designed and built it and their aerospace engineering faculty advisers. The fact that it is working as planned is something of a triumph given that the satellite was built at a cost of just $50,000 -- including plane tickets to the Alaska launch site -- using off-the-shelf parts that were not designed to withstand the rigors of space. It is  working well enough that the midshipmen and faculty members involved in the three-year project suspect it may continue to send and receive signals much longer than they had hoped.
     Sept. 29 was Launch Day for the cube-shaped satellite, whichhitched a ride aboard an Athena I rocket that blasted into space from Kodiak, Alaska. Questions whose answers could only be found in space were: Would the satellite safely separate from the launch vehicle at the proper time and go into the correct orbit?   Would the antennae survive the separation? Would the batteries and circuit boards work in space?
     Retired Navy Cmdr. Bob Bruninga, satellite project engineer at the academy, said a few people had been lined up around the world to try to contact the satellite in the first hours after the launch. "They reported in, and we knew it worked," he said.  It was nine hours before PCSat made its first pass over Annapolis and the midshipmen and faculty advisers could see for themselves that their satellite was working.
     The process of designing and building a satellite began three years ago as a research paper by an aerospace engineering student. A team of seniors expanded the paper into a working design the next year and then it was turned over to six students to build the satellite last year.
     The aerospace engineering department got a $50,000 grant from Boeing Co. and submitted its proposal to the Department of Defense Space Test Program, which approved it and put it on a launch list. Midshipmen then set to work designing and building a satellite on a limited budget. A metal tape measure not only provided a cheap material for the antennae, but offered another advantage as well-- itsnaps back.   Other types of metal could be permanently bent and even break during handling, launch and the separation process. Inexpensive, rechargeable batteries were chosen for the power packs. Midshipmen designed circuit boards and then orderedthe boards from a supplier over the Internet.

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And this (edited) article entitled "America's Advantage"
from the Ottawa Citizen shows a perceptive look at recent world events, and the United States' role in the world today.--ed.

     In a sense, Afghanistan has been a "classic" colonial war. The United States has been sparing of its own troops, instead taking sides and choosing local allies as its proxies, while using its own incontestable technological superiority to help them quickly win. The resemblance to the way the British took India in the 18th and 19th centuries -- one tribal patch or princely state at a time -- ends there. The Americans have no long term plans to rule the place, and are happy to let anyone else send "peacekeepers".
     This is what the Europeans and Canadians turn out to be good for, this time around. We have the equipment, the manpower, and the budgets, to do sentry duties. (As a retired Canadian officer told me after the federal budget was tabled Monday, "It's all very well for the Americans to spend a fortune on defense, they have to defend the free world from terrorism. We only have to defend our own smugness."
    Except for the most elite British special forces -- a small handful of men -- help would just get in the Yankees' way.  Moreover, the two per cent or less of the West's Afghan campaign that was offloaded on the British (and a few French special forces, too), was essentially unnecessary. The help was accepted as a political favor, in answer to British and French supplications.  Offers of British and other NATO aircraft were politely declined. They have inferior equipment and pilots, and as the U.S. learned over Serbia, you can't really fight a war while waiting for 19 different defense ministers to sign off on each target.
    What has changed, in the last decade, and especially in the last two years the technological developments since the Balkan campaign in 1999 were greater than those between that and Desert Storm in 1991), is the status of the United States as a military power.  At the beginning of the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. emerged as the world's only superpower. Now it has become what the French call a "hyperpower". It is not only at the top of the international "top ten" in military spending. It outspends the other nine, combined, and can afford to, given the present scale of the U.S.economy. Not the British, at the height of their empire, nor even the Romans, contesting with distant Medes and Parthians, enjoyed such military predominance. And yet, this quantitative comparison actually understates the U.S.advantage. For there is a real qualitative difference, not only in American equipment, but in the skills of its troops. The Pentagon made use of the contractions in general manpower through the 1990s, and applied the "peace dividend" to hone a much more skilled and variously specialized fighting force. The U.S. does not employ "grunts" any more, only soldiers who call themselves "grunts" with a certain droll pride.
     At the officer level, Europeans visiting the American military academies have been tremendously impressed by what they have seen, over the last decade. And one may see this for oneself by visiting the various institutions on the Internet. Unlike his European or Canadian opposite number, the contemporary West Point or Naval War College graduate is familiar with Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Fuller, Liddell Hart and with Sun Tzu and Mao-tse Tung for that matter.
     Nor is it just a showy "book-learning", for the courses are designed to make the students apply what they study, consistently and imaginatively, to the circumstances the U.S. might face today. I have myself been tremendously impressed to read theses posted here and there on the net, by young cadets who could obviously skate rings around your average "politically correct" humanities professor.
     On the ground level, in Afghanistan, it has become increasingly evident that the U.S. was able to parachute troops who could speak Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Urdu. They needed these both for making contacts with potential allies, and for interrogating prisoners who fell into their hands. They could also use translators effectively (this is actually a skill), as well as ride fast horses and put pack mules to work carrying high-tech gear.
     A remarkable interview which the Washington Post obtained with Capt. Jason Amerine, an injured member of the U.S. Army's 5th Special Forces Group on his sickbed in Landstuhl, Germany -- gives some hint of the ground capabilities. This was the unit that went into the mountains of Oruzgan to rendezvous with Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's prime minister-designate. (They didn't need Pashto because he speaks fluent English.)  In five short weeks, this little vanguard of less than a dozen men, mostly in their mid-twenties, were able to recruit and organize and (through air drops) equip an Afghan fighting force that liberated the provincial capital, then marched on Kandahar. They also ordered and set up distribution for emergency food and medical supplies for the civilian population, while calling down airstrikes on a Taliban convoy and other positions, almost in their spare time.
     "We could go in there naked with flip-flops, and as long as we have good radios we could do our job," Capt. Amerine said of their survival training. His unit made up for unfamiliarity with the local physical and cultural landscape with a crash course in Pashtun anthropology in the days before going in. Hunks, yes, but these are nothing like Europe's idea of "G.I."s. Indeed the U.S. Marine general force now camping in the Rigestan desert are probably up to the special forces calibre of a generation ago. Technology plays no small part. Some 91 per cent of munitions the U.S. has dropped in Afghanistan have been pinpoint targeted -- compared with six per cent on Iraq. Even gravity bombs dropped from B-52s can now be placed within a few metres of the crosshair, thanks to advances in computer calculation.  And yet the "garage workshop" spirit is kept alive with the invention of weapons like the "Daisy Cutter" -- hand-made with old-fashioned welding tools, and perhaps the most awkward-looking 15,000-pound explosive we shall ever see (it resembles the water-tanks on the roofs of old New York City apartment buildings).
     The U.S. armed forces are thus not only strong, but extremely adaptable. Yet even this is to understate the U.S. advantage, for it is likely to grow in the coming years.  Prior to Sept. 11, the U.S. defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was fighting a nearly impossible uphill battle against Congress to transform the whole organizational structure of the U.S. military. His goals are to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, replace surviving conventional with many more special forces, and vastly increase the capacity of the military to respond to unexpected threats, or recover quickly from unexpected hits. The terrorist strikes on New York and Washington, and his performance since, have vindicated his position, and the overhaul is now proceeding.   The French may have to invent a word for what comes after an
"hyperpower".
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This is our handsome/gorgeous USMA group at the All Service Academies Ball!

All Service Academies Ball After Action Report (AAR)

A grand night!  Wonderful turnout (over 230) of cadets and midshipmen from all five academies and their families and friends, all in their dress uniforms.  Greetings at the curb and door, and presentation of the colors by the Ft. Vancouver Composite Squadron of Civil Air Patrol, who did a wonderful job!  A great setting & lovely displays (thanks to Pearson Air Museum), excellent decorations (thanks to Miss DeVany's ASAB banner, Sylvia Hartzell's stockpile of decorating treasures, Carole Adkins {who brought ten gorgeous poinsettias}, and all those who came to help decorate-Jeanne Bumcrot, Christine Doyle, Marie & Charles Knutsen, Al & Jill Hoffman, Terry & Carole Cox, Cadet Craig Klascius & Britney Seitz; wonderful music (piping by our cadet Sam Wilbourn, two great acapella solos by volunteer Bethany Wheatfield, Richard Lee {who in addition to bringing over 35 guests, cut some special CD's for the event} and our DJ Greg Mathews, a former paratrooper, Gresham fire and now police man. Nice (but long for some) program--toasts by oldest grad {a 1935 USNA grad who brought a 1909 Howitzer, with George Patton, whom he knew, in it!}, cadets and midshipmen from every academy, letters of greetings from each academy's superintendent (except Air Force) read by the senior cadet or midshipman, a short address by Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard (also a former Vancouver Barracks Commander), and six Ft. Vancouver docents (a true Chinook Indian Chief, Hudson Bay Company Chief Factor McGloughlin, 1836 USMA grad Maj. John Hathaway--the first commanding officer for Ft. Vancouver, USMA 1943 grad Ulysses  S. Grant & wife, and Rosie the Riveter) all secured by USMA '80 grad and former Ft. Vancouver Barracks Commander Bob Knight {who also provided table lanterns from the Vancouver Historic Reserve, provided risers for the DJ,etc.}. Tasty sit-down dinner and wine, beer & soft drink bar (provided by our member volunteers Terry & Carole Cox). Great door prize gifts (thanks to the members of each club), plus the poinsettias and commemorative wine glass.  Most of all, good company!  No weather problems, and we ended up making some money, although our primary goals were to: 1) encourage inter-service contact; 2) honor all our cadets & midshipmen; 3) heighten the awareness in our communities of a military presence; 4) have a great family time; and 5) break even.   It doesn't get much better than that, folks.  Thank you all so much!
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Tax Time

After enumerating cadet pay for six months, plus a slightly higher government-paid advance (they really do put a lot into them the first year; uniforms, computer, etc.), and including food, room and board, USMA figures it has put over $25,000 into your plebe for the six months July-Dec. Unless you can clearly document that you put a higher amount into their support in the first six months of 2001, you may (should?) not claim them as a dependent exemption on your (the parents') income tax return. Obviously, it's a moot point the remaining years at USMA and during the pay-back service years.
(This information was extrapolated from a memo dated 5 October 2000, signed by Thomas M Remo, Assistant Treasurer, USMA)

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Eisehnhower Hall Programs (all at 8:00p.m.)
Edgar Allan Poe - Sat. April 6
Dardanus - April 14                                                                           Ray Charles - April 27
Cabaret - May 11                                                                              Arlo Guthrie - May 18

2001 Oregon/SW Washington Club Officers

Liaison Officers-OR & Newsletter Editors/Listserv Moderators:
Al & Patty Klascius (Chad ‘01, Craig '02)  klascius@teleport.com

Ring Weekend, 2002
http://www.west-point.org/service/candidates/

L.O.-WA: David & Mary Graham (Doug '01, Franchesca '04) merovin@halcyon.com

http://www.west-point.org/service/candidates/

**Please feel free to contact any of the above with questions, suggestions,  corrections, or for "free" advice.  Your  newsletter editor regrets any errors, and appreciates notification of such. Thank you.

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