November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

The X Styles

(Page 2 of 2)

May - June 2008
by Keith Goetzman 
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“There’s this unbelievably raw imperial vision in that image,” he says.

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Despite the military’s dark corners—or perhaps because of them—Paglen thinks we would all do well to pay closer attention to our country’s armed forces.

“It’s a very, very big part of American culture, and I think a lot of us who are not in the military think it’s something that it isn’t,” he says. “This society is really bifurcated, and the military is a part of that bifurcation, especially with the wars going on now. So it’s interesting to see this part of the country that you wouldn’t otherwise see.”

Captions:

He’s got the whole world in his claws: a program patch for the National Reconnaissance Office, a U.S. space agency whose existence was declassified in 1992. “Dragon” is a code name used in a reconnaissance satellite program.

The whirlwind character on this patch recalls the Tasmanian devil, a phonetic allusion to the TSSAM (Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile) program.

If you have to ask what NOYFB stands for, then don’t: a patch for the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron at Travis Air Force Base in California, which sometimes delivered classified aircraft.

The first letters of the phrase “Nitwits, Rubes, Oafs” spell out NRO, the acronym for the National Reconnaissance Office. “Setec Astronomy” figures prominently in the 1992 film Sneakers, in which the phrase is an anagram for “too many secrets.”

Minotaur is a classified program undertaken by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs Division, the Skunk Works.

The Vindicator was a highly classified 1980s project built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. This mascot for the program holds a laser used in an aircraft’s velocity indicator, or v-indicator.

This patch comes from an Air Force Special Projects Office that worked on the F-117A stealth fighter program. “Semper en Obscurus” means “Always in the Dark,” and the mushroom, which grows in darkness, symbolizes the office’s secrecy.

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