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Fuck PCness! I want to thank everyone for another wonderful year of BaseOps, and hope y'all have a wonderful Christmas or whatever you celebrate this year! Hopefully 2021 will be a better year than the dumpster fire that was 2020! Be safe out there!

Merry Christmas everyone. It’s been a hell of a year, so let’s hope 2021 offers a better experience.

Through some luck and timing I was offered and given the Pfizer COVID vaccine yesterday from my civilian job. So far the only side effect I've noticed is my arm being sore. Otherwise I feel fine. It's only 50ish% effective after one dose so I won't change any of my behaviors until a few weeks after my second dose.

Yes, I was aware of his numerous hours. Other than that, I know nothing about this pilot. And as such, I'm unable to judge his "experience" level (hence my "correction" to your quote). That will have to be explained by those that flew with him. My opinion is that "hours" tells me very little as to how hard the pilot worked to become better after each flight. I know pilots with 500 hours in type that are superior to others with 1500 hours in the same type. It goes back to what I stated previously: do you have 5000 hours? Or 1 hour, 5000 times? I'm speaking in generalities and not about this pilot or incident, since the accident report doesn't really shed enough light on how much quality proficiency training he had accomplished in the previous year. A good example I know of is Lee Lauderback. Lee has logged more P-51 time than anyone in history. And Lee works very hard at his craft.... which is why most P-51 pilots go to Lee to learn the Mustang, or go through a recurrency course. I'm told he makes you a much better pilot after every 1.0 hours in the aircraft. The fact that he's also a great guy is just icing on the cake.

Doesn't this belong in the WTF thread? Just in case they ever thought they were in danger of possibly, someday down the road, ever being considered a remote auxiliary to the US military, they go and call themselves "guardians". And the Coast Guard dudes are all jumping up and down; "Yes! Finally a branch of the military that is less military than us!"

I mean in a lot of ways the French 🥖invented modern spycraft, so that doesn't surprise me. We are actually relatively new at it and had no spy services prior to WW2. While technologically we've come very far, I don't think we are as adept at the nuances of it compared to older states.

I did an exchange with the French. They don't try in any way, shape or form to hide the fact they they are constantly collecting information on us. Must be taught in their basic training because EVERYONE did it.

Santa has great taste in aircraft!

And for those of you in or from Texas (God Bless ya!), here's my favorite Lone Star State Christmas card!

You can be a global superpower without an enormous conventional military though. I would argue that China is already there. There are 4 instruments of power and China is already globally leveraging 3 with extraordinary success. Further that with their non-conventional military capes (read Cyber and InfoOps) and they are slowly reprogramming the world to adhere to their narrative. Something interesting happened post Cold War. The worlds 2 largest super powers began using assassination (and still do) to accomplish political objectives. Why is this noteworthy? The taboo against assassination began in after the 16th century Peace at Westphalia. Sovereignty had been established as a political concept and big states realized they could easily exert power over small states with enormous standing armies. The problem with this model though, was a King Slayer could take your billion dollar army and make it worthless by removing the reigns of power overtop it. Because of this, the European Great Powers (as in UN 0.1 alpha) began advocating that assassination was morally evil, that heads of state were inherently civilian, that they only acted in the states interest, and therefore should be protected from the belligerence of war. The point to all of that is, all of that was upended in the Cold War. Nuclear war, by nature, is not conventional. Special Operations Forces, became a thing. Cyber is now a thing. Information Warfare is now a thing. The power paradigm that existed between 1575 to 1945 is shifting. The large, professional, standing army, is losing its appeal as the means of projection. I think China has this figured out. I think Russia is figuring it out now. I think we are REALLY slow to the plate with this. Largely because we have the largest, most impressive standing army in history. We've invested too much in this strategy to began thinking differently now.

I mean, we do this now, there's just not a direct pay-for. Very few programs have that. And at the end of the day money is fungible - if you have a dollar in the bank and you spend a dollar it doesn't particularly matter where that dollar came from or what you had planned on using it for, it'll spend either way. I would rather see universal national service (mil + civ options) for all young people. Re: "excessive adventures," in theory congress should be more responsible and take back warmaking powers from the executive, but it's very hard to get a group of 538 people to be collectively responsible when you can just shirk and let POTUS either sink or swim with the decisions. IMHO if we want to remain a global superpower some level of adventurism and/or significant financial and mil power projection is going to be required, so let's just try to do it the best way we can. Take a look at the UK; TL;DR they for various reasons stopped spending blood and treasure in maintaining a far-flung empire and now no one really gives a shit what they think. Not convinced it's a worse deal for the average Brit, just a different experience than being the hegemon and "indispensable nation." A 20+ year land war in Asia...I heard somewhere that was foolish...

I didn't really disdain Esper. He honestly made a lot of decent changes; and the dude wasn't unqualified. He was an Army officer for over a decade, and took his skills to the worlds largest defense supplier. Given that the US war machine runs on industry, this isn't a terrible perspective to hold. So many people acted like just because he was a Boeing exec he was going to sell out, but the dude never resigned the rank of Major. Are people on here really so jaded that they believe once an officer separates they can't be professional enough to resume their Hippocratic duties if they ever return to the government fold?

Sounds like Knoxville, TN. Tons of lakes, the Smoky Mountains with the App Trail all within 45 mins of downtown. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

It goes without saying that Sim would only post extremely biased, out of context, bullshit. But I went through the trouble of figuring out what was manipulated, so I might as well share it. The context that’s missing is that, immediately before this clip starts, he says “If we can not make significant progress on racial equity, this country is doomed...” He’s saying the country is doomed if the growing minority groups continue to be treated unfairly, and they need to work together if they want to fix it. If you want to check, watch the whole video. This is at ~1:14:30

Okay that's a sampling (n 916) of the 150M or so voters. I understand how stats work a little and I don't know if you can just post a poll from NPR to put this to rest. My personal opinion is that the alleged rampant fraud wasn't in every state but the ones that it was in was enough to overturn the will of the people in those states. A lot of Americans feel the same way. The coordinated radio silence and censorship on the MSM and social media platforms along with big tech (Google, big tech) should be cause for alarm for ALL Americans. Regardless of ideology or background or politics. Of course I think everyone is on the same page with the issue here not being about the candidates, but about a free and fair and open election. Lots of people are arguing that that happened, and I truly think it did in a lot of states. IF however there was enough fraud to overturn the will of the American citizen in some states then I can't understand why everyone wouldn't be on board with getting to the bottom of this. IF that was the case and it was indeed enough to overturn the results of the election then I think that probably marks a point of no return for our republic. Not a huge fan of politics and the only reason this is on my radar at all is because I have in-laws that migrated here from the USSR back in the 1980's who lived it. Their perspective is a unique one that probably few people on this message board have - and only recently have I begun to pay more attention to what they are saying is going on in America. I'm sure some of you guys have been to the museums in the old Soviet Bloc countries and to think that that would be impossible to happen here is pretty naive. It doesn't happen overnight, but there certainly gets to be a point where it's too late to go back. I really hope I am wrong about all of this. I enjoying BSing about flying with all you nerds much more than talking politics.

It's hilarious some people actually think any of this is new...

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