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Once Green... Always Green! Here's to the World Famous Highly Respected Triple Nickel. The world's largest distributor of MiG parts.....

The sooner you understand that the Department of Defense is *the* biggest, fastest, most efficient way to spend taxpayer money, and that that's the purpose, the sooner it all makes a bit of sense 😄 Only sorta kidding... If there's a more expensive, more jobs-intensive way to have an effect on the battlefield, gosh darn it we owe it to the U.S. taxpayer to do it that way. Ask yourself this, how can I expend more of my SCL on this operation? Couldn't this CONOP call for more versions/personnel/fuel/airplanes in the stack? Anytime you try to make a DoD mission more cost-effective you're doing it exactly backwards. "Giving" weapons to Ukraine/Israel/Saudi/whomever-the-fuck = middle-class manufacturing jobs in 50 unique states + territories.

FIFY

Haha, this. The U-2 and SR-71 had an old but great Astro-tracker. We flew it on missions that went way north, where there was always overcast (which precluded doing a ground fix update), and before GPS was really integrated into military flying ops. I believe it was maintained by Northrop. IIRC, it tracked 300 stars and gave us around 700' of accuracy. I had an engineer tell me a few years ago that 700' is terrible, compared to modern standards. Unfortunately, airline certification for an Astro-tracker will take decades and cost millions of lives. Too bad. Works great, lasts long time.

Sorry folks. Google Ads had gone full self-aware Terminator on me again. I've gotten it back under control. As a part of the move to the new server I was able to cut some costs (although it'll be more hands-on upkeep). So, I think one small ad at the top of the main page should be enough to cover costs. And hopefully I've fully locked down the Google Ads monster so it doesn't go nuclear again.

Sounds like a win for the military industrial complex!

Reverend! I can't say it felt like #winning as we watched a bunch of ANA/ANP getting overrun by the Taliban because of ROE and chicken shit civilian and military leaders. Felt like a metaphor for our time in Afghanistan. The few employments we had were probably just killing the kids of the guys we killed when I was there a decade earlier. We didn't have any semblance of a gameplan or objective when I was there in 2011...2021 was way worse. If we had taken out OBL at Tora Bora and subsequently pulled out (or left when we finally got him), I might have considered Afghanistan a win. Did we stop a possible terrorist attack on US soil during that time...maybe. Did we create more people who want to repeat 9/11 down the road...absolutely. We did find ourselves with aged jets, a few trillion in debt and more dead/broken soldiers, so we got that going for us...

Rooting for you again, QUAG. DM on IG if you got questions but I know this isn't your first rodeo.