There are days when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates makes you glad there's a guy in that office who's at least trying to keep Dick Cheney and the Crazies in their box. Other days, Gates says stuff that makes you want to scream. When he warned recently against a risk of "creeping militarization of some aspects of U.S. foreign policy," I wanted to scream "Yo, Rip van Winkle! Eisenhower told us all about it 47 years ago."

In apparent response to Defense Secretary Robert Gates's complaint that the Air Force isn't providing Central Command with enough unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the Navy is working on a developmental version of the discontinued Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) that it's calling the Naval Unmanned Combat Air System (N-UCAS). What makes N-UCAS different and far more special than J-UCAS is that N-UCAS can operate from aircraft carriers, which the Navy has and the Air Force doesn't.

There's no special reason that any version of the UCAS needs to operate from an aircraft carrier, but that's no never mind. The money's in the pipeline to develop N-UCAS; so damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!