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Agree LR. So many here don’t know (too young) to understand about “Going Downtown”. Lost a few friends flying Thuds on Route Pack 6. Finally, LineBacker 2 brought NV to talking after they had exhausted their SAMs. Unfortunately, many Buff crews suffered. But ended it at a cost. And Desert Storm we lost 75 aircraft. As for the MIA crew member. Hopefully, the best outcome, like the rescue of Roger Locker after 23 days evading. Good friend, Dale Stovall, flew the furthest mission into NV to rescue him. Chased down by 2 MiGs that fired Atolls at him. Time will tell. Check 6, SHFP

The got him 🇺🇸 To the CSAR community 🍻 TOML!

Godspeed to all in harms way tonight. Lots of reports about the Iranians sending forces to disrupt and they got pummeled.

What I am told is they landed two MC-130Js with 2 X Little Birds each. Both MC-130Js got their nose wheels stuck in the sand. The little birds launched and one picked up the WSO. At the FARP they tried unsuccessfully to get the MC-130J's "unstuck" so they called in other assets from a supporting agency to pick up everyone. 3 X other smaller platforms came in and picked everyone up. USAF aircraft then bombed the 2 X MC-130J's and 4 x Little birds. We lost a couple of Reapers as well. True team effort.

All good now

Some of the guys on this site are getting hysterical…..I remember when we attacked Gaddafi and the usual weak sisters were decrying how Libya would obliterate us and start WW III. Fox News just announced that they weren’t reporting on the rescue efforts/results for security reasons, Not MAGA reasons like some of the TDS afflicted posters stated.

13,000 DMPI's hit in 30+ days of combat ops flying many hundreds of sorties per day with two aircraft damage (that we know of), and ONE shot down. China and Russia are likely shocked at the data.

In a stunning course reversal the USAF announced it’s abandoning its planned FUPT program in favor of a crowd sourced plan from a website called Baseops. The man originally responsible for the FUPT program, Gen Leard, is quoted as saying, “those guys on baseops really know what we need so we changed everything based on their posts and are now working with them to fix UPT” As of this post, the Air Force has decided to buy 375 PC-21s, 175 PC-24s and 50 T-54s to recapitalize the UPT enterprise. Congressional representatives were contacted and assured funding was to be approved in a week. More details on this breaking story to follow A new trainer being delivered to the 69th FTW at Jellystone AFB

Just popping in for the friendly weekly reminder that at no point leading up to this stupid boondoggle did our own intel community assess Iran was developing a nuke. 2025 DNI report saying as much is linked a few pages back. But please don’t let inconvenient facts like that interfere with fear mongering about it. There’s some pretty bad faith comments in here to the point that it’s honestly gotten tiresome. This might sound strange to some of you but it’s perfectly possible to disagree with the policy and strategy underpinning a war without being a “scaredy cat” or “against the troops” or “rooting for failure.”

She can now motorboat her husband.

Hey Boss, I was just getting some hover and terrain masking practice in. I was just as surprised as WO2 Bagonuts to see some redneck standing there giving me a salute.

In a word, no. That EO, and the whole series it's part of, don't restrict the DOD. They restrict the intelligence community. Nothing stops the military from targeting a head of state - or literally anyone else - if they are declared a legal target / combatant. Not sure where this whole "the military can't kill certain people" idea has come from. Probably news organizations like CNN, NBC, ABC, et al who just clip one-liners from EOs and use them to promote narratives which support their own motives.

When the Italians give us military advice, we'd better listen. I mean its not like they've lost every war they've ever fought in the last 1500+ years.... oh wait, they have.

We're getting close to the "put up or shut up" phase of the operation. We've set back the Iranian war machine decades. We've killed the leaders who targeted our people. We can still take the oil island, I'm fine with that, but it's not realistic to actually extract resources from Iran, it would just be another form of crippling economic pressure. Pretty soon we need to leave and let the people of Iran earn their reputation. If they do, then they can welcome us in as partners to help rebuild. They have enough oil and gas to make it worth our efforts. If not, then we pull back and give Israel whatever they need to keep mowing the lawn while the regime withers away.

Wasn't this the whole point of the Osprey?

I stand corrected

"Iranian media" is almost as credible a source as the War Thunder forums...though the forums have more accurate tech data... Do you genuinely believe the the air-to-ground curb stomping Iran is receiving is on par with the failed all-out invasion a next door neighbor by Russia? Tell me again how you aren't disgruntedemployee's troll account.

As he well should be. Flight discipline is the bedrock of everything we do.

Everyone was doing it.

Updated

Agreed. The phrasing of the War Powers Act is pretty vague and I think that was intentional. While obviously not the same thing, when a contract is written vaguely, the wiggle room is generally interpreted more liberally towards the party that did not write the contract, or so my lawyer told me. Since Congress wrote the War Powers Act and did so in vague language, it seems reasonable for the Executive to be able to use all the wiggle room Congress seems to have intentionally given. As far as Constitutional questions, the modern Federal government has gone so far beyond the Constitution that it can't even be seen in the rear view mirror. It would be comical to suddenly draw a WAY more restrictive line when it comes to the Commander-in-Chief employing the military. Individual officers must be able to recognize and not obey illegal orders. Extending that same responsibility to the entire war seems to be a bit of a stretch to me. If the President ordered the invasion of Bermuda because he said he wants a better vacation home, that would be different, but this is a war on a country that has directly caused American deaths. An officer saying that's illegal because it's been XX days and therefore in his mind should have Congressional approval seems absurd.

Because as an officer, it is quite literally his job to understand the legality of orders before carrying them out. One of the unique and saving graces of the US military: The officers swear no allegiance to the president, but rather to the constitution, and specifically in the oath, are required to follow lawful orders.

The MC-130 community trains to this extensively; the 160th is one of our primary customers. I've worked Little Birds on both prepared strips and dirt LZs; the community as a whole is proficient at both. -130s get stuck from time to time, it happens even in training, especially at strips that haven't been used much. I had a colleague almost get stuck doing Little Bird Infil at Red Devil LZ in CO during a Bi-Lat, was a close thing. The CV discussion is a valid one but people are missing the most likely reason those guys weren't playing on this one (open kimono, I'm speculating). It's probably was a logistics issue. It takes quite a while to deploy Ospreys; they usually have to go by boat if deploying from CONUS. If you fly them any serious distance the TAAR requirement is significant. If you have them do gas and gos you'll leave a trail of broken -22s to your FSB; they just break a lot. Their logistics footprint is also quite large, read a lot C-17 flights to move their support tail. They also aren't a great fast rope/hoist platform and they have pretty serious weight limitations at high DAs.

Nope. Very simple. Been doing it for a long time.

Awesome everyone extracted safely. I sure hope a lot of lessons learned come out of this as I finished my taxes yesterday. Assuming it was one SA-6 that's a lot of bang for the bad guy's Rial 2 × MC-130J Commando II aircraft 4 × MH-6 “Little Bird” helicopters 1 × F-15E Strike Eagle 1 × A-10 Warthog 2 × Reapers

WSO's new call sign should be Matt Damon, because in 2x movies where he's stranded in space, billions in resources are spent to rescue him. And he can claim some Borne for evading.

Same pilot, great American.

WSJ confirmed. Praise God and get that dude/dudette a beer.🍻

No way to know if true yet, but perhaps some hope for the missing F-15 crewmember.

I remember that as bipartisan second guessing which got us to the Patriot Act. But maybe my memory is bad

Don't kid yourself, plenty of fighter guys have been with BQZip's mom...

Why are they not using Apache escorts.

A-10 crashed as well, pilot rescued.

Yes, this conflict has been a tactical success so far. The Joint Force has shown that rhetoric matches reality. However, tactical success must convey strategic meaning, as Colin Gray would write. I'm not sure we can have strategic success if the objectives keep changing and the Administration cannot convey the necessity of this conflict to the body politic.

Don’t be talking with any sense now… People here want this to fail and all our troops to fail and highlight that only.

From a geopolitical stance yes. We've shown we can't defend our bases abroad against drones or balastic missiles. A curbstomping doesn't cost us multiple strategic aircraft. It doesn't cost us billion dollar radar arrays. It doesn't cost us American lives. It has Displayed our weaknesses to China. We've shown the degree to which we've ostracised ourselves from our allies with most of Europe refusing over flights. We've shown that we lack any long term planning capabilities or forethought by rushing into this without having a plan for keeping the strait open. We've put iran in a stronger position as they have gone from a theoretical to actual control of the straits. Rising oil prices are increasing the funds in both Iran and Russia's pocket to continue their fight. Iranian leadership may be dead but clearly they're working decentralized ops well. There's no scenario in which we walk away from this in the near term with any meaningful victory. Blowing stuff up doesn't equal winning on the global stage. Oh and no one trusts on the world stage trusts us to negotiate anymore seeing as it was never serious and used as a pretext to prepare strikes. We had a solid deal that this admin tore up the first time. We've messaged to the world "get nukes ASAP or you're next." For the photos. A few more have come out plus some vids of a herk and Blackhawk allegedly conducting sar over Iran. I don't trust everything but there's some decent amount of reports coming out and unfortunately our propaganda arm is just as unreliable. SAR ops vids: https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2040044384951922868?s=20 https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/2040059365189722249?s=20b

https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4450527/hegseth-authorizes-off-duty-service-members-to-carry-private-firearms-on-instal/

Why the heck is this age restricted? It looks like a 3 stooges episode.

Finally some out of the box thinking.

Anyone have any friends at Pendleton hocking secondhand ammo and anti-tank missiles? Asking for a friend…..

While I do agree with you, in theory, here are some argumentative points. If the Framers’ intent to limit the authority to exercise the military by the president/CinC, then they would’ve written the Constitution to do so. The main reason for Congress to declare war is due to the “power of the purse.” It took Congress until 1973 to create the War Powers Resolution, which one could argue is still vague outside of the president briefing Congress before troop deployment and submitting a report within 48 hours of a deployment. Congress does decide the will of the people, which one could argue since they haven’t done anything to amend the War Powers Resolution since it was signed into law or impeached and removed a president since the resolution was created, then the current construct seems to be supported by the majority of the people.

What’s important to remember about executive branch scope creep and abuse of power is that its only bad when the other side does it. When your own side does it, it’s just an unfortunate reality/status quo of the times we live in.

Actually, I've dealt with numerous graduates from the AQIT course, and they know their shit. That said, I'd avoid acquisitions like a burrito from Taco Bell! And at least they don't have the word 'weapons' in their name!