Curtiss P-40, aircraft of the Flying Tigers

Here's a great video showing a Curtiss P-40C the warpaint of the Flying Tigers--the American Volunteer Group that flew and fought for the Chinese Air Force in the early months of World War II in the Pacific. The video is by "Captain Lou" Costello. Don't you just love the sound of that Allison engine? All right, perhaps you don't, but I am so addicted that I sometimes leave the sound running in the background while I work on mundane chores. It keeps me on the edge of my seat. I also like the fact that the pilot lands the plane on the two main wheels, the way it ought to be done, instead of stalling it onto the runway in a three-polint landing. 

This particular aircraft was one of a hundred or so that went to Russia, and was among those recover after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It bears the name and fuselage number of Erik Shilling, a former AVG pilot with whom I used to joust on the internet newsgroups, and who inspired me to take up flight training twelve years ago, and eventually to get my recreational pilot's certificate. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Let the government pay for it

There used to be a joke about a family arguing over whether to buy a car or a refrigerator. Since they couldn't afford both, they had to sacrifice one, whereupon the little boy pipes up and asks, "Why can't the government pay for it?" This seemed funny at the time, since everyone knew or was supposed to know that the government didn't have any money: it could only take some of yours, deduct twenty percent for overhead, and give it back in the form of services that you may or may not have wanted.

In the Obama household, however, the little boy was evidently a whole lot smarter, and when he piped up it was with a different mantra: "Why can't the rich pay for it?" Now that he is president, he has set out to do just that, by raising the top tax rate to 40 percent and raising the tax on capital gains and dividends to 24 percent--but only on the rich, you understand. (You are rich if you earn more than $200,000 a year, unadjusted for inflation. Recall that the infamous Alternative Minimum Tax was likewise supposed to affect only the rich: it had an exclusion of $40,000 a year. But $40K then is something like $200K today, and schoolteachers and plumbers wind up paying the AMT.)

In the Wall Street Journal today, Alan Reynolds goes through the math and concludes: "In short, the belief that higher tax rates on the rich could eventually raise significant sums over the next decade is a dangerous delusion, because it means the already horrific estimates of long-term deficits are seriously understated." Read it and weep. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Only Thing Worth Dying For III

I don’t usually get a whole lot of comments on this blog, so I think it’s worth noting what readers have been saying about this wonderful book: The Only Thing Worth Dying For. It tells the story of about the Green Berets who inserted Hamid Karzai into Afghanistan in November 2001. (That’s Mr. Karzai with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, posing with the Special Forces A Team—or Operational Detachment Alpha, as it’s now called.)

Anonymous said: Thanks for spreading the word about this book!

Anonymous said: Amazing book. I'm surprised I hadn't heard more about it. Probably the best book I read about Afghanistan.

forrest said: An absolute MUST-READ for anyone interested in the modern style of warfare laughably called 'low-intensity conflict' and the US role in that warfare. As enthralling as I foudn the story, however, I found myself wishing Amerine himself had written the book and not a professional writer because it was a little too slick and seamless for me.

When I was a Special Forces reservist, I had my own experience in Afghanistan 13 years before ODA574 and it was interesting to me that Capt Amerine found the mujahidin to be pretty much the same as I had, meaning their approach to fighting hasn't changed sicne the late, great British Empire thought it could conquer and administer that amazing land.

As to the question the title of Blehm's book asks, the answer is found in the song "How Many Are The Heroes" which asks "And if freedom's not worth dyin', what the hell are you livin' for?" Captain Amerine, I'd like to shake your hand someday; you, too, found something in Afghanistan worth dying for-- yourself.

And DaveHays said: Best book ever on the war on terror or afganistan. Tells a great story of what it take to be an officer in todays military. I felt like I knew the guys in the ODA well before the middle of the book. This is a must read for anyone interested in the war, current tactics or just reading about the best of our best. I'm reading mine for the 2nd time.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On growing up in a different world

Just when you think the Good People have stretched absurdity to its absolute limits, the Gray Lady publishes an op-ed supporting the idea that kids need 'recess coaches' to structure what is just about the last unstructured moment in their lives. "Children today are growing up in a world vastly different from the one their parents knew," explains David Elkin, professor emeritus of child development at Tufts.

I was in elementary school for the most part during World War II, in a world vastly different from the one my Irish immigrant parents had known (no electricity, no car, no radio, no telephone, though to tell the truth the automobile and the telephone were sometime things in our family as well). And in turn that world of 1938-1946 was vastly different (no television, no sports teams, no money) from what my daughter would experience. As for my granddaughters, they're growing up on a sailboat in the South Atlantic. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being politically connected

After posting my downbeat comment on politically-connected health insurance (below), I happened to read Tom Ricks’s always interesting blog. It seems he is a great fan of The Vagrants, by the Chinese writer Yiyun Li, recently published in this country:

... it is a great story, beautifully written. It begins in March 21, 1979, with the execution of a young woman who had been a fanatical Red Guard but had lost her faith in Communism and become a determined counterrevolutionary. As she is paraded before being killed, it becomes clear that her vocal cords have been cut, to prevent her from making a final statement. We also learn that one possible reason for her being sentenced to death is that a Party official needs new kidneys, and hers are extracted before she is put to death. It ends about five weeks later, on May Day.

Ouch. Well, never fear! That couldn’t happen here, could it? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

No well-connected child left behind

The Chicago Tribune has a sad story about the way political influence reaches into the smallest corners of our lives:

"While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan.

"Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city's premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list maintained over several years in Duncan's office and obtained by the Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now secretary of education under President Barack Obama."

In the not very distant future, we can expect similar stories about the political mafia and their privileged access to the best doctors and hospitals. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On our need for spies

Writing in (of all places!) GQ magazine, former CIA agent Robert Baer argues that the agency is broken, and that the kindest thing to do would be to put it out of its misery, or at least to rebuild it entirely. The December massacre of a station chief and seven of her staff, he argues, was not just a personal failure but an institutional one. He calls the station chief "Kathy," in deference to her covert status, but he spares her nothing: "She'd spent the vast majority of her career at a desk in Northern Virginia, where she studied Al Qaeda for more than a decade ... she was always slotted to be a reports officer, someone who edits reports coming in from the field. She was never intended to meet and debrief informants." She'd never managed a covert operation, and she didn't speak the language. But there she was in Kost, Afghanistan, greeting a suicide bomber with what amounted to her entire staff plus a few drop-in visitors. The assignment, Mr. Baer argues, betrays the death of the CIA's spy culture and the ascendancy of the computer-savvy analyst. Kathy was an analyst.

Boom. "The fact is that Kathy, no matter how courageous and determined, was in over her head.... She was set up to fail. The battlefield was tilted in Al Qaeda's favor long ago--by John Deutch and his [Clinton-era] reforms, by the directors who followed him, by the decision to drop the paramilitary course from the mandatory curriculum (which would have made Kathy a lot more wary of explosives), and by two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have worn the CIA down to a nub." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being elite

Sarah Lyall has one of those delightful gotcha! stories in the NYT this morning: 'Elections Looming, Tories Put Posh Foot in Mouth'. It seems that Sir Nicholas Winterton, a Conservative MP, doesn't think he should have to ride coach class with the peasants. How impossibly elitist! As Ms Lyall, in the Gray Lady's best non-judgmental prose, puts it: the Tories must shed 'their old chilly image as a stuffy bastion of the elite, the mean-spirited, the entitled and the clueless.'

But half a mo', as the lower classes in England used to say--what American Congressman would ever dream of traveling coach? Or by train, for that matter? Or by public transport, if you rank high enough? Take that gang in the celebratory photo below: It wasn't so long ago that Nancy Pelosi was demanding a larger military jet to speed her travels between Washington and California--one that wouldn't have to stop to refuel midway. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On kicking through the door II

She did it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On spinning the vote

Joshua Keating has a wonderful piece in Foreign Policy online about how the media will spin this weekend's vote on ObamaCare. If Nancy Pelosi succeeds in kicking it through the Congressional door (see below), not only will the government have claimed a fresh new slice of our earnings and our lives, but the punditocracy will have a fresh new "narrative" about the world. 

To stick to the subject of this blog, here's how Mr. Keating sees the media story on Iraq if the bill passes: "The withdrawal of U.S. troops continues on schedule, violence is way down, Iraq's sectarian conflicts are being worked out in Parliament rather than in the streets, David Petraeus is the greatest U.S. miltary commander since George Washington." And if ObamaCare fails? No problem! "The election was marred by fraud, none of the major political disputes have been resolved, the insurgency is biding its time, the U.S. military faces a choice between remaining in Iraq for decades or watching a sectarian bloodbath erupt as it pulls out."

And so it is for Gitmo, global warming, Rahm Emanuel, and other issues of the day--though not a word about Mr. Obama himself. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On kicking through the door

I came across the phrase in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, and it sounded so over the top that I immediately Googled it. Every reference went to a right-wing blog or newspaper (mostly the Washington Examiner), but I finally found the source, which is no less than the Washington Post and its left-wing blogger, Ezra Klein. According to Mr. Klein, this is what the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said on Monday about the pending health-insurance legislation:

"My biggest fight has been between those who wanted to do something incremental and those who wanted to do something comprehensive. We won that fight, and once we kick through this door, there'll be more legislation to follow."

In order words, if she and Harry Reid manage to ram ObamaCare through the Congress by a ploy that is highly unusual and perhaps unconstitutional, then the “public option” (i.e. government health care on the British model) is sure to follow. And who knows what else?

Mr. Klein says that Ms. Pelosi made her prediction “to reporters.” So where was the media on this astonishing story? Why wasn’t it on the front page of the WaPo, the NYT, or indeed the WSJ on Tuesday morning? This really shakes me up. If a Speaker of the House declares that we are about to nationalize health care, and there is no blogosphere to pick up on it, did it really happen? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

On being an invasive species

Yesterday I counted 22 swans off our dock, mostly adults along with a few young’uns. (This is a saltwater bay, and when the weather warms up the swans will fly off to various freshwater ponds, whose taste they prefer.) Which reminded me that, over the past year or two, people have been venting to us about the swans. It seems we’re not supposed to like them because they’re not indigenous—they’re invasive species. (A few years ago, we were in Scotland, where the authorities were tearing up and poisoning whole hillsides of rhododendron because neither were they indigenous.)

But here’s the thing: we’re not indigenous either. Plus we build docks on the water’s edge, and houses a bit farther back, and driveways out to the asphalt roads that lead to town. What swan has ever done anything on that scale? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

All hail to Kim Jong-un!

The always-interesting John McCreary has put together a couple of reports from North Korea, one noting that the Dear Leader and Forever President has stashed $4 billion in secret European bank accounts as an emergency fund, in case the people ever wake up and run him out of the country. $4 billion is real money, even in Barack Obama’s America; in North Korea, it represents a tenth of the country’s total annual output of goods and services.

In other news from Pyongyang, the dictator’s third son is about to have his official portrait released. To Pyongyang-watchers, this means that Kim Jong-un has been anointed as the heir apparent. For further proof, they point to the fact that the personal name Jong-un is now reserved for him alone. You can’t name your kid Jong-un any more, and if that happens to be your own name, you’ve got to change it. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Iraqi takeout

It seems that Iraq veterans have acquired a taste for shawarma, a spicy grilled-lamb sandwich popular in the Middle East. Here the US Marines get a fix at a fast-food stand operated by Crisantos Hajibrahim and his wife. But here’s the thing: Mr Hajibrahim (of Palestinian and Mexican heritage) himself served a four-year hitch in the USMC ... and the family stand is located at Camp Pendleton, California. Only in America! See the story in the Wall Street Journal. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Mistah Kurtz, he blogging

The NYT has a wonderful Rick's Place story in today's paper. ('I'm shocked--shocked!--to find that gambling's going on in here.') It involves a covert operation that supposedly used an innocent hearts-and-minds program to turn up information that was used to track and kill bad guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's all very complex, as such ops tend to be (remember Iran-Contra?), and there are two very funny kinks to it. One is Afpax Insider, a website run by the program. By all means take a look and see your tax dollars at work.

The other kink is the Rick's Place moment: toward the end of the NYT story, we learn that (wait for it!) the Gray Lady herself hired this outfit to rescue one of her own reporters. As it happened, he escaped by himself, but the symmetry is wonderful. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Taking the war to Marineistan

The WaPo has an article that would have gladdened the heart of John Boyd, the advocate of offensive counter-guerrilla ops:

The Marines are pushing into previously ignored Taliban enclaves. They have set up a first-of-its-kind school to train police officers. They have brought in a Muslim chaplain to pray with local mullahs and deployed teams of female Marines to reach out to Afghan women.

The Marine approach -- creative, aggressive and, at times, unorthodox -- has won many admirers within the military. The Marine emphasis on patrolling by foot and interacting with the population, which has helped to turn former insurgent strongholds along the Helmand River valley into reasonably stable communities with thriving bazaars and functioning schools, is hailed as a model of how U.S. forces should implement counterinsurgency strategy.

It all sounds wonderfully reminiscent of the Combined Action Platoons that the Marines so successfully applied in Vietnam--except for one thing. The WaPo article notes that they're building a 3,000-man 'outpost' with 'two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see'. The Vietnam-era CAP contained twelve Marines, augmented by triple their number of local police and militia, and they lived in The Village for months at a time. They took casualties, but they were never overrun, though the Viet Cong tried repeatedly to run them off. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Of Jihad Jane and other nutters

It's hard to miss the glee in Bob Orr's voice as he laments the case of the blonde, blue-eyed, girlie jihadist who wanted to make it her life's work to murder a Swedish cartoonist. (I'm late about this: I missed the excitement because I was skiing in the Maine mountains.) I suspect that half the hooh-hah is just the Fright of the Week that television and the internet thrive on, and most of the other half is routine madness of the sort that creates freeway snipers and schoolhouse shooters. Mr Orr passes over what to me seems a significant remark: 'I'm so bored,' she wrote on her web page, 'I want to scream.' Far from being a devious red herring, that was probably the basis of her flutter with crime. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Soldier of the Lord

Here's a taped rant from that American-born spokesman for al-Qaeda who may or may not have been captured the other day. Like all ideologues, he goes on and on, and even an excerpt is windy, but also revealing:

The year 2009, the inaugural year of a new administration in Washington, ended in a truly miserable fashion for the Crusader West and its intelligence organs, who suffered a series of moral and material blows which culminated in the bloody deaths of at least 8 CIA operatives in a masterfully-planned and executed martyrdom operation inside their clandestine base in Afghanistan. This crushing blow came just a few days after the compromising of America’s supposedly airtight security in a valiant attempt by a heroic soldier of al-Qaida to bring down an American airliner over Detroit. But I would like here to take you back to an earlier event, one whose hero wasn’t a member of al-Qaida or any other Islamic group, but was in fact, a ranking officer of the United States Army, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who, this past autumn, opened fire on a group of American soldiers preparing to deploy to Afghanistan deep within the army’s largest domestic base, Fort Hood, Texas. According to official army figures, at least 13 Crusaders were killed and more than 30 wounded in this surprise attack. Major Nidal Malik Hasan himself was shot, wounded and captured, and has had charges filed against him in a Crusader military court of inquisition in preparation for a summary show trial whose outcome is not in question....

The Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan has shown us what one righteous Muslim with an assault rifle can do for his religion and brothers in faith, and has reminded us of how much pride and joy a single act of resistance and courage can instill in the hearts of Muslims everywhere. The Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan, by the grace of Allah and with a single 30-minute battle, singlehandedly brought the morale of the American military and public to its lowest point in years. The Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan, lightly armed but with a big heart, a strong will and a confident step, again brought into sharp focus the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of America, and again proved wrong those who claim America cannot be hit where it hurts. And most significantly, the Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan is a pioneer, a trailblazer and a role-model who has opened a door, lit a path and shown the way forward for every Muslim who finds himself among the unbelievers and yearns to discharge his duty to Allah and play a part in the defense of Islam and Muslims against the savage, heartless and bloody Zionist Crusader assault on our religion, sacred places and homelands.

If you want more, here it is on Threat Matrix. You will find, among other things, that Norway is in the crosshairs for being complicit in honoring Mr Obama. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Congratulations ...

... to the people of Iraq, who came out in force yesterday to vote in a new Parliament, despite the bombs that were supposed to spoil the election. "The shrugging response of voters [to the spoiling attacks] could signal a fundamental weakening of the insurgency’s potency," notes the NYT. Well, cheer up: Joe Biden can always claim it as a victory for this administration.

... and congratulations also to the foolishly named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which for a change gave its best-film Oscar to a film of some significance, The Hurt Locker. It's a worthy salute to the men whose courage brought Iraq to the point where it can choose its future, and never mind who takes the credit. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

First, let your hair grow

Elisabeth Bumiller has an engaging story in the New York Times about what the US Marines painfully call a Female Engagement Team, which no doubt will be rendered and pronounced as FET. They're training at Fort Pendleton CA for deployment to the 'Stan. The idea--more than eight years after the Marines landed--is that if American women accompany American men into Afghan villages, then Afghan women are less likely to take fright. The Marines think of everything: “If you have a pony tail,” said Marina Kielpinski, the instructor, “let it go out the back of your helmet so people can see you’re a woman.” Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is a worthy film, and I hope it wins the Oscar Best Picture award. Unusually, for a leading nominee, it's already out in DVD--I rented it from Netflix, and the link is to Amazon.com. That's a measure of how badly it did in theaters, while The Avatar packed them in. One sighs for the future of America!

Except for the customary and almost reflexive distaste for the place in which they find themselves ("I hate this fucking country!"), the film and its heroes have nothing to say about the long-running combat in Iraq. In this, it oddly reminded me of Japanese films about that country's long war--not only postwar ones like The Burmese Harp, but also films made during the 1931-1941 entanglement in China. The war is simply there, like the landscape. Even when we ignore it, it continues.

Indeed, so convinced was I that events were simply unfolding in front of me that I never noticed that one of the British headhunters encountered midway was played by Ralph Fiennes. The encounter was improbable, but the long-distance battle that ensued was utterly convincing. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The view from Capitol Hill

Senator Harry Reid, 5 March 2010: “Today is a big day in America. Only--only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good." An even better day will be when Mr Reid loses his. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

The neo-OODA Loop

From the blog Under the Radar. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Years ago Colonel John Boyd, God’s gift to military thought by some measures, came up with the “OODA Loop.” “OODA” is an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act and it’s the basis for Boyd’s process of military outcomes. Well, we’ve recently been informed by an Army major (who’s currently deployed) that the OODA Loop is still in effect, but it’s been modified slightly. “OODA” now means Observe, Overreact, Destroy, and Apologize. Strategists and think tanks make a note, please.

But will the hospital deliver on Saturday?

Now that the president has declared himself ready to remodel the U.S. health insurance system through the reconciliation process (now called an ‘up or down vote’), it’s rewarding to see what so recently was the conventional wisdom on this parliamentary maneuver:

• "My understanding of the Senate is, is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and Republicans have to ask the question: Do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?"—CBS interview, Nov. 2, 2004

• "You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with my fellow progressives--and some of these have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion--is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove, where we identify our core base, we throw them red meat, we get a 50-plus-1 victory. But see, Karl Rove doesn't need a broad consensus, because he doesn't believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a sizable majority."--Center for American Progress, July 12, 2006

• "The bottom line is that our health-care plans are similar. The question, once again, is: Who can get it done? Who can build a movement for change? This is an area where we're going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We're going to have to have a majority, to get the bill to my desk, that is not just a 50-plus-1 majority."--Change to Win convention, Sept. 25, 2007

• "You've got to break out of what I call the sort of 50-plus-1 pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory of 50 plus 1, but you can't govern. You know, you get Air Force One--I mean, there are a lot of nice perks, but you can't deliver on health care. We're not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-1 strategy."--interview with the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, Oct. 9, 2007

The speaker in each case is Barack Obama. See the video here. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mission accomplished?

Newsweek is joining the Joe Biden chorus: Iraq is the good war! Who knew? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Keep the change, Congressman!

The contemptible folk who write our laws (and who now want to determine whether, like President Obama, the rest of us are eligible for a virtual colonoscopy) have a particularly unpleasant habit of jetting about the world at the taxpayers' expense. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal wrote about the small-change aspect of these junkets. It seems that the Congressperson gets a per diem allowance, ranging from $28 in Kabul to $214 in Tokyo, to pay for his or her meals. (Actually, it ought to be the other way around: $28 in Tokyo, $214 in Kabul, to encourage the cheapskate Congressfolk to visit the city more important to America's near-term future.)

If you don't spend the money, of course, you're supposed to return it to the Treasury. The Journal managed to find one Congressman who does just that, so two cheers for Senator Arlen Specter, once a Republican, now a Democrat, who has returned $8,500 of the $25,000 per-diem money he was given for 11 trips over the past five and one-half years. But he seems to be the exception. More typical is Representative Solomon Ortiz, a Democrat, who not only doesn't return the leftover money but doesn't think he ought to: "If that was the policy," he told the Journal, "you could never get many members traveling."

I wonder if Mr Ortiz's Texas constituents could get away with arguing that line to the IRS when they fudge on their expense accounts? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Pakistan turns on the Taliban

'LAHORE: In a major policy shift, the powerful Pakistani establishment seems to have decided to abandon the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan by agreeing to launch a massive crackdown against their command-and-control structure, which has already led to the arrest of nine of the 18 key members of the Mullah Omar-led Quetta Shura from different parts of Pakistan, and that too within a short span of two months.'

Thus reports The News of Pakistan yesterday, attributing the change of heart to Saudi rather than American pressure. Of course it's easier to nod to a fellow Muslim than to the blue-eyed devils from across the sea. But whatever the motivation, it's good news if true. In terms of the Vietnam War, it's as if Hanoi had turned against the Viet Cong. Comments the always perceptive John McCreary on Nightwatch: 'Without Pakistan as a safe haven and with the Shura members in custody, several things will happen. The Afghan Taliban will devolve into banditry within a year, though they will not disappear. The prospects for negotiated power sharing improve immeasurably. Pakistan becomes the honest broker among the warring parties and holds the high cards … or high value targets.'

Wouldn't that be nice? Then Joe Biden could claim Afghanistan as another success of 'this administration'. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Back in the cloud

Hello world! I haven't forgotten you. It's only that a species of hurricane came through southern New Hampshire last Wednesday night, taking out our power, telephone, and broadband, along with a good many pine trees. (That's the road to town, above, as it looked on Thursday morning.)

The telephone returned yesterday, broadband this morning. I'm not optimistic about power, given that there are whole stretches of the road where the electric cables are draped like spaghetti after a fraternity food fight.

You'll have to excuse me now. I must go tend the woodstove. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford