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Normally I would but that lady is a weird type of fat. She looks like a meatball on toothpicks.

Maybe I’m old fashioned or just naive on the wonders of AI, but the side getting strategic wins here is the one with the massive TBM stockpile and control over a critical global trade route, while the side with all the fancy AI tools is getting humiliated on the global stage. Although.. a slightly smarter version of grok could’ve advised us this war of choice was a shit idea to begin with, in which case I’m all for embracing our robot overlords

Short of a dropping nukes or a full ground invasion, I think this conflict has proven we don’t have the firepower needed for Iran to capitulate. It’s not about what the public will or won’t support, because we already proved we’ll go ahead and launch a super unpopular war. I’m talking about the real world limits of our military power. This might be a tough pill to swallow but we had 3x the fighter squadrons we do now when we took down the far smaller country of Iraq in 1990. And in desert storm, airpower was paired with a ground invasion. The notion that we can ramp up to some previously unseen level of air power just isn’t reality. Almost the entire tanker community is deployed already and run ragged with crew rest waivers. We redirected more carriers to the region than at any point in the last 30 years and one of the CSG’s retasked for this thing just completed the longest carrier deployment since WW2. Idk if you guys follow the meme pages but one of the running jokes right now is that big blue basically took the entire AFFORGEN model and threw it in the trash when this kicked off. They just said fuck it and deployed everybody. Now folks are tired and ready to be done with it. There’s no world where we turn this back up to early March levels of strikes, let alone exceed that intensity. We shot our shot, and it didn’t work. And now we’re taking a crap deal to get out of a crap situation. I think this is a super valuable lesson to learn after Venezuela folding like an house of cards got us high on our own supply. If we’re serious about deterring China we need to learn the actual lesson here: we aren’t all powerful anymore. If you want to sustain operations against a determined opponent, you need volume, and a deep bench. We’ve become insanely good at lighting people up night 1 with all the shiniest most expensive toys. But we’ve become terrible at sustaining that pressure over time.

I had T-41 training at the Valdosta airport prior to T-37s and 38s at Moody. I remember my T-41 instructor as a young guy, probably no college, wanted to go on to the airlines. He was a competent teacher and had the patience to put up with my fumbling around. Nice guy. I hope he found his dream. For what the T-41 program was intended for back then, he did a good job.