Leaderboard

obviously unsafe. previously the pilot would be shot and a commander fired. now it's celebrated. there's a middle ground to find. acknowledge the mistake, correct it, and move on.

At least the Blue Angels Lead is willing to go on the record and call this unsafe/it’s going to be debriefed and corrected. Any professional aviator (military or civilian) knows the road this is going down. I honestly don’t understand why Hegseth sees the need to insert himself into these discussions, especially given all that’s happening in the world and that lately military aviation has had several crashes, to include the Growler airshow crash.

A few more details as I live here and it has been the main topic of conversation in the news and social media. This was not even a demo flight, it was a fam flight in preparation for the airshow this weekend. The jet that did the flyover was #3, NOT the solo. Important because he was not running down the showline, just trying to do an impromptu flyby as part of the rejoin and he obviously overshot the crowd line. The Boss did a local interview where he stated (paraphrasing), "it was a mistake, it was debriefed, we are moving forward with the show." One of the troubling comments came from another local press interview with #4 who said (again paraphrasing), "we are not backing off, push it up for the show this weekend." A few friends I flew with (all Navs I will point out), told me I am talking like an old guy, it was cool. I simply replied - "there is a reasons I am old guy." I FULLY understand he made a mistake and long ago I adopted the leadership tactic of a senior leader I think a lot of..."we should not electrocute an Airman over a single mistake." This is a debreif item, not an FEB or some other punishment. HOWEVER, we should not celebrate breeches or mistakes and cheer the outcome. As folks like @disgruntledemployee, such actions will only fan the flames and encourage the next guy to go lower/fast/inverted.

First article: Garbage. The headline doesn't match any of the actual quotes in the article. The actual quotes are much more boring. The best you have is "a few Jews at a rally said evil things." Now, if the minister with the flag had said something like "we will kill any Palestinian that prevents us from retaking the Temple Mount" then you might have something. But to try to compare this to even the now-boring "from the river to the sea" is idiotic. Second article: “There’s no such thing as ‘means, intent and ability’ in Gaza,” Vilk says. “No soldier ever mentions ‘means, intent, and ability’. It’s just: a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed. A man aged between 20 and 40.” Nonsense. The article pretends that there was no enemy at all. Just a bunch of refugees looking for food. There's tons of footage of Hamas fighters engaging the IDF. If their repeated, documented use of civilians and civilian disguises made the IDF paranoid and trigger happy, that's a bummer, but entirely predictable. The US soldiers killed a lot of unarmed Germans as we took Europe from the Nazis. Yet no one is stupid enough (except for Tucker Carlson) to claim the allies were the bad guys. Welcome to war. Maybe your military service was so blessedly uneventful that you never saw or heard these very human things happen. Your general philosophy does usually reek of ignorant utopianism. It still doesn't make it even remotely difficult to know who the bad guys are in this situation.

Well you made two false claims and an extremely hyperbolic one. It’s out of character, so that’s why I ask.

Civilian leadership is absolutely setting the conditions to make it nearly impossible to hold blatant and wanton lapses in airmanship accountable. All anyone will have to do is post on social media to garner attention from on high, say, "But the public loved it!" and "What about the Blue Angels", thereby garnering a public pardon of sorts. I would not want to be a commander right now if a true case of buffoonery occurred.

And like clock work the acting clown gives them a blessing.

Yep. The vast majority of those complaining about being tested (like you said, not forced to take anything) are largely the same people who: 1) Supported forcing members to take an unproven and unnecessary vaccine or be disciplined 2) Supported needing “extremism” training because somehow the military is full of white supremacists 3) Believe that boys can suddenly become girls, and that’s it’s ok to have these people with serious mental health issues serve in the military and be told they’re just fine and normal Oh, and one of the first things I asked my civilian PCP after I retired was for a lab test to check my testosterone levels, in addition to many other lab tests the military doesn’t seem to normally do.

And yet here you are defending them. "Human animals" is pretty generous for what those people did on October 7th. No, the children of Gaza did not participate in the rape and massacre, but they also weren't targeted. They were positioned like sacrifices by their parents and their parents' friends to make sure they would die when the Israelis attacked. "Human Animals" does not come close to describing that level of depravity. You can whine and moan all day long about the asymmetry and unfairness of the situation, but there's no amount of poverty or oppression that justifies sacrificing your children. If your moral compass is so defunct that you can't wrap your head around that, honestly it makes the rest of your positions a lot more understandable. It doesn't make them any less wrong, but at least there is an underlying consistency that can be predicted. “We love death like our enemies love life.” - Former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh Killing monsters is never an atrocity (or genocide), no matter how many of them you have to kill, and no matter how many of their children they hold up in front of your weapons. It's ugly and tragic, and an inescapable feature of war for the entirety of human history.

Blue Angels epically trolled the nitwit in Cali who is suing them.