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I pilot I have mentored since he was 14 is a TPS grad and stationed there as an IP. As late as Thursday the wreckage was still on the runway. He mentioned they got back to flying and he decided to go to Palmdale rather than do patterns and see the wreckage on every pattern. It's been tough on the entire test and bomber community, I think there legacy will live on because they touched so many lives.

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

Dibs on the trash can, or on the orange and blue corrugated metal mesh waste receptacle?

I don’t agree with everything Pete has done but in terms of worst SecDef ever…

Everyone has to retire at some point. Guy was a 4-star general with 34 years..where the fuck was he supposed to go from here? COCOM, CSA, or Chairman. Also it’s been well known for some time that USAREUR is downgrading to 3 star command similar to USAFE. Not everything has to be some major conspiracy. Dude probably didn’t see a path forward and decided it was time to hang it up.

Fingers crossed. Then do magazine capacity.

.. so we need to escalate in order to.. encourage Europe to recapitalize their energy independence, so that in some future hypothetical war that’s a foregone conclusion (in your head) our allies will be stronger? Guys these justifications are getting more and more convoluted and nonsensical. Talk about a goalpost shift.. I thought this was about an “imminent nuclear threat” to the US homeland

This is beyond tragic. I can't claim to have known any of the crew but I'm confident I've crossed paths with atleast a few during my occasional trips to KEDW. I don't want this thread to dissipate so fast, like how the rest of the websphere has a ten second attention span. We need to keep these bros in our thoughts & prayers as long as possible.

KEND 26-12AF F-35 F-16 T-38 FAIP B-52 AFRC F-16 Bulgaria

DIBS since biff dont want it!

My biggest fear for situations like this is that the cops realize they effed up and drop a bag to justify everything and avoid making him a millionaire. Again, the presence of cameras has helped mitigate that in modern times but still.

Anyone who was paying attention always knew AFFORGEN was simply a force presentation model to be sustained in competition only; in crisis - all bets are off. Y’all keep acting like Trump just started this war out of the blue. We have been in conflict with Iran since 1979 with more Americans having died indirectly from Iranian actions than from any other country. Not to mention the impact to global commerce through not just the SoH but through the Red Sea and the funding of Houthis. We just finally had an administration willing to do something about it. This escalation was bound to happen at some point. We can debate the timing of said escalation but this is far from “Trump’s war”. Now I agree that we may have missed and opportunity and I wish we had finished the job when we had them on their heels early April; too early to call it a shit deal when we don’t even have a deal yet. We can reassess after the 60 day mark. Yes our military is sadly smaller than in the 1990s; blame generations of shitty leaders and politicians who ignored the clear need to modernize and recapitalize our military.

By far the best news I’ve heard come out of DC in a long time… https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-assault-weapons-ban-ar15-a362863265ba8630e71068fe5b75bb8e

All? I'm just talking to you. You haven't presented one particularly interesting thought in months. If there's a spectrum of intelligent, novel thinking, Clark Griswold is all the way on the right side of the spectrum, and you are fairly close to the far left side. You wonder why nobody responds to you positively, yet you don't seem to realize that the "cheerleaders" on this forum (CH, brabus, Fourfans, viperman, me, etc.) aren't here to beat the other team. We're here to discuss with similarly experienced humans with similarly matching values things that are going on in the world. If our goal was to prove our own intelligence to ourselves by going up against a couple dozen antagonists, we wouldn't be here on a mostly conservative leaning forum of mostly old vets. It's also why guys like negatory and Day man and NS player and 17D Guy end up rage quitting in a huff. They didn't see a bunch of like-minded people discussing issues from different perspectives in the same neighborhood, they saw some sort of den of conservative malignancy and made it their righteous duty to stand on behalf of "the other side." Bottom line, they were here to prove people wrong. Sure, Cleared Hot gets a little Fox Newsish from time to time, and I use big words that Boomer6 has to sound out each syllable to understand, but none of the conservatives come to this site thinking it's time to prove you or the other token liberals wrong. Hell, it's not like you've said anything that you believe that anyone can address, but even if you had, I'm not particularly interested proving you wrong. You say you don't understand my view, and so I explain. I never said you had to agree with me, and like I said you're obviously not at a point yet where you can accept the existence of a philosophy that might disprove your own. I don't mind wasting the time because my daughter is taking a nap and I have nothing to do right now. It would be nice if baseops was what it used to be, a repository forum primarily for military flyers to get information about life and work in the military. But technology evolved and web forums that aren't hyper-specialized hobbyist groups are basically dead, so a few dozen Ghosts of Air Force Past come here to chat amongst themselves, show off their guns, and occasionally respond to one of you guys who seem to have decided that of all the places on the internet you can go to battle with people of the opposite ideology, this is where you'll make your last stand. I mean my God, look at Negatory. The dude is still here with a new username that reminds you every time you look at it that he literally could not pry himself away from fighting with a bunch of online strangers. It's an addiction. 🤷‍♂️

One saved round: Remember that time I said we were heading down the road of irreversible stupid escalations and everyone called me a TDS libtard pussy? Well now here we are talking about how we need to bomb Kharg island so that WW3 starts on our terms 🤷🏻‍♂️ Can’t make this shit up

Let’s not forget another, Les Aspin and the Blackhawk Down fiasco.

KDLF 26-12AF F16 B1 F35x2 T-38 FAIP F-22

All yours brother...all yours.

Yep, pretty much. The major, unforced error was starting the ceasefire back in April, stupidly thinking diplomacy would “totally work this time” with Iran, then combining that effort with, as you put it: short cuts, threats, mean tweets. Turns out none of those things worked worth a damn with Iran. The momentum was solid, the ass beating was large, and then we just stopped and have subsequently created the proverbial shit sandwich. As someone said earlier, tactical ass whooping without the foresight/capability to see it through to a strategic victory.

Too old (T38) Gotta move on, just for all the decision makers lurking here, hedge, get an interim / second advanced trainer

Trump started a war of consequence without the support of Congress or the American people and changed a status quo that favored the US to a status quo that favors Iran. Iran has been a problem for a long time, but maybe previous administrations didn’t “do something about it” because there was a high probability or a poor outcome.

@Biff_T This is where you chime in and say “Save the fat one for me”. 🤮

The way I see it, this is the best SCOTUS we’ve ever had in modern times…even with the some of the recent disappointing rulings. And the vast majority of 2A rulings have been quite favorable over the last couple decades, so now’s the time because I don’t necessity see the court getting better anytime soon, and more than likely it will get worse. While my money is on a positive ruling, if in the event it goes the other way, we’re no worse off than we’ve been wrt progressive states becoming more tyrannical—they were going to ban guns they don’t like anyway.

If anyone isn't already reading the HAF Daily Current Ops Update on SIPRNET on a daily basis, I'd strongly encourage them to do so! There's a link to it on the BaseOps Intellipedia page (yes, BaseOps has an Intellipedia page!), just search for 'Air Force Operations Group'. I just added the direct link to the briefs.

I had no idea I have so thoroughly destroyed you lmao.

Wow, crazy thread. Stumbled on it by accident. I worked for Foglesong when he was a mere O3 flying T-33s. He was detachment commander; I think we had 4 pilots counting Bob. We didn't really have a lot of drama with him in those days tho there was some noise about friction between him and his ops officer. I guess authority went to his head tho because some of these stories...just...holy crap. We figured he was on some sort of fast track when general Creech showed up for a looksee at our little operation. Seemed highly unusual. Bob left soon after to fly F-15s. I lost track after that.

austin was a terrible sec def

F that guy. Seriously. Literally give one of the worst testimonies to Congress I've ever seen by a member of the DOD.

Louis Johnson in my book with McNamara a close second.

Bombing's back on the menu - https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2222408/trump-launches-new-strikes-iran Has this ever worked without deep intel assets ready with a replacement, a la our forays into S. America? We just need to burn the rest of the world's economies to the ground and ours will be fine. K.

Quibbling. We took it from a bad situation to a much worse situation in which our adversary has significantly more geopolitical influence than they did a year ago. And now they know that we don’t have the capability or intent to do what is necessary to stop them.

This war of totally not unilateral presidential direction did accomplish one objective, the media isn’t wasting their time talking about those pesky Epstein files anymore.

There’s another future millionaire, I hope.

Parts of the building DID need to be turned upside down. Firing caustic people like Slife and Cat-5 were among the good things, but bro went off his rocker with a Stalinistic purge of anyone who he thinks doesn't conform. That being said, previous administrations were not exactly angels when it came to promotions and pushing certain groups. The shenanigans with the promotion lists for women and minorities are completely unsat and if you scroll some of my others comments you will find I've already pointed that out. I think his damage goes far beyond the purge, the Anthropic deal is unreal.

If our president wasn't obsessed with using the stock market as his favorite indicator of his administration's success, we could end the Iranian problem forever. Just a few sorties to Kharg Island and it won't matter anymore. We keep trying to avoid a global economic catastrophe that is unavoidable, but the longer we push it off, the weaker our allies become through their own suicidal policies.

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.

I’d certainly offer it to boom operators. They talk on the radio, learn approach plates, and are already trusted to not carve their initials into 5th gen paint. I’d rather have instuctor boom E-5 — E-8s become warrant CFIs than civie CFIs teach LTs how to fly. If that’s a choice I’d ever have to make.

Where do these prior-rated E's come from? Certainly not the USAF. Army helos maybe?

I was a courseware author on the KC-46, and I'm currently a F-16 Flight Manual Manager. I've worked with a lot of retired military pilots in both airframe programs who had no desire to fly for the majors because they didn't want to bag drag through airports as an FO in the 40s-50s. A lot of fighter pilots don't want to go to the airlines and work at Lockheed with me because they like doing "fighter pilot shit" and not flying an ILS all the time.

Well, I just bought an EOTEC set worth well more than the rifle, nice now having a 5X magnifier. Windham Weaponry 5.56

I don't want to throw Biff under a Frontier Airbus but, holy moly, I've never had a car stolen or broken into and describing those issues as "comes with the territory" is a sad summation of civilization in a once great state.

That’s a hell of a way to put it. Read a book, get in a vault - inform yourself.