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Today SECDEF and CJCS gave an update brief on the attack on an Iran's nuclear facilities. A comment by the chairman was epic and deserves it's own thread. "I can assure you there is no beach volleyball at the Air Force Weapons School." – General Dan “Razin” Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, June 26, 2025

Cutting the F-35 buys in this bill bothers me a lot more than anything about the E-7. Maybe it's because across the 4 red flags I've done, the E-3s GAB'd every vul except 3 so I struggle to understand what airborne C2 could even provide me. But slowing production of our most advanced fighter on the promise of some silver bullet dominance platform that is just boeing renderings at this point feels like we're falling into the same trap that netted us 20% as many B-2s and F-22s as we should have right now. We've got 400 F-35s out of a planned order of 1,763. Less than a quarter of the way there and we're cutting F-35 production already for future promises from a company that can't produce a single engine trainer plane on time or a narrow body airliner without band-aid fixes. Long story short: if something doesn't change we are fucked. If we can't tighten the turn circle on making new stuff we at least need to have the patience to produce the stuff we've already developed in significant numbers.

Amen and how about the maintainers getting over half the fleet airborne at the same time!

Great talk by Razin giving an awesome overview of the people and process at the unclass level. It’s awesome he gave a shout out to DTRA. It’s easy to get focused on only the dudes dropping bombs or shooting missiles, but there are a ton of nerds (I mean that in a friendly manner!) out there who love America as much as the warrior does, and they are critical to our success.

If I had to guess…. Like all the other aircraft we have that can deploy a weapon within feet of a point on the earth, but can’t be trusted to fly a GPS approach. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

11Hs can't be as selective as the other 11s.

WTF, she can go fuck herself. How about SCOTUS just shitcans the entire NFA, considering it’s blatantly unconstitutional.

It's not over yet. Senator Clyde introduced an amendment yesterday which would basically end the NFA as it related to silencers and SBRs.

This just in, politicians are shady.....

We could try the elemental approach: Air, Space, Water, Ground Force. Tolstoy: War Force and Peace Force. Spear method: Kill Force and Support Force. J method: Personnel Force, Intel Force, Ops Force, Logistics Force, Strategy Force, C4 Force, Training Force, Medical Force, Cats and Dogs Force. Mental abilities: Normal Force, Special Force. Morality: Good Force, Evil Force. Miller: Tastes Great Force, Less Filling Force, aka Eat Shit Force and Fuck You Force.

Allegedly if the NFA 200$ stamp becomes 0$, the registration can be challenged in court since it's technically a registration for who paid the tax. Or at least that's the R cop-out justification for not fighting the parliamentarians move; I don't believe it'll work & think they're all liars. i think we got played (again) by R leadership who included SHORT not for 2A reasons but rather a throw-away COA they could dump as fake "concession" to show compromise.

Remember this? If my mama said she was going to whip me up one side and down the other. Chuck Norris couldn't survive that.

The land components just lost two wars and are mainly responsible for our Euro-centric defense posture that allows the Europeans to freeload whilst we go broke defending them. Not interested in a damned word the Army has to say...

Being an E-3 Crew Chief for many years, being there getting brand new jets delivered and arriving broke for radar. Seeing many air aborts for mission systems which the acft the day before had flown 12 hours of pilot pro's. Seeing the reengining program cut, if they would have done this the fleet could have been much healthier, changed many TF-33s to see it not even last one mission. Today the TF33 goes to depot and sits on a deadline with no parts to fix it. This acft has been so badly mismanaged by Wing Commanders who only cared about their next job, the knee jerk reaction for the black hawk shootdowns of building additional new crews but not having the acft to certify them. I am so glad that I ended my career on KC-135s.

@Biff_T I'm throwing a flag on this play. You posted AOC in the Next President thread. That's like drawing a pentagram on the floor, a doorway to let evil in. Put that shit in WTF or something. Anybody got a cleansing spell or holy water to hose the place down?

She's easy on the eyes but definitely crazy. Still a dibs as of today.

My understanding of the process is the parliamentarian goes through and throws stuff out that's policy rather than taxes but the majority leader could add it back in. My guess is based on the 51-49 vote, there was one or two "Republicans" that didn't want that included, so it wasn't put back in. Should have put it back in and forced the people to vote. Easy to remove it and vote again but at least everyone knows where their Senators stand.

I hope FL doesn’t end up on the short end of this stick. The last thing any state needs is a bunch of dumbass NYC-ers moving their way.

Finally a relevant Elephant Walk, and not just for a Wg/CC flex or photo op.

Imagine putting all of those AWAC aircrew into one container.

"Color Top Gun white for the rest of the vul and we don't need to hear about any more of your shots."

VID_20250625_183049_081.mp4

Found a recent picture of M2 - looks like he can only afford beans for dinner.

Like many things, it’s also one of those capabilities that would have been phenomenal to have FOC 15 years ago, but a late 2020s IOC just makes it a “meh.” The US acquisitions process is horrible.

ADMIN NOTE: I know this topic can cause some to get emotionally charged, but personal attacks and/or name calling won't be tolerated under any circumstances. I've edited one post because of it, and will taken even greater action if anyone else fails to abide by the rules after this warning. Feel free to contact me via a PM if there are any questions.

When you don’t have a good argument, you then go to vulgar name calling.

innovative and effective (also cheap) ways to kill each other. Respect the innovation but loath how we’re still obsessed with killing each other (not to get too preachy).

Yeah sorry I was mostly being tongue in cheek about the E-3 and how broken they are. I've flown with a wedgetail in integrations with the aussies and it was shit hot. Mostly I have just completely lost faith that we can actually acquire and field new airplanes on a reasonable timeframe, so even if we did get the E-7 I'm skeptical it would make it to IOC before the big fight where we need it.

I'm with you that the F-35 cuts bother me to as we desperately need mass. However, I think your Red Flag example is off, it would be similar to saying that because it'd be hard to find a use case for the F-4 in a modern Red Flag, that we should just scrap the fighter force. The problem is the E-3 is an old bird and should have been sent to the boneyard 15 years ago and we should have gotten the E-10 or E-7. Unfortunately as far as C2 platforms go, the JSTARS was actually the most advanced platform we had but buying them second (or fourth) hand led them to an early grave with no capability to replace it. Personally as an ABM, I believe if we cancel the E-7 the Air Force should blow up the C2 enterprise as it's evident no one wants to pay for it (not saying get rid of it, but we don't seem to want any Tac C2, but we also don't want to staff the AOCs).

Lol; I grew up in a suburb. I usually lead off with I'm from Chicago, unless they're familiar then we can get more specific. I sure as heeeeelllll don't say I'm from Englewood.

OA-1K can't fly IMC yet so they aren't ready to be a tanker...

Not sure this has been posted in the thread but Victory Aviation in a modified Thrush 510 doing AR https://www.victoryspecialmissions.com/military Is there any proposal or capability to do this with the OA-1K?

Nope, we’re thinking of the exact same scenarios. I understand how to get sensors in range to accomplish jobs while staying within ALR if it’s aggressive enough. You keep referencing WW3; does your scenario stop short of the point where multiple orbits have been attacked with nuclear weapons? If America has built an asymmetric (but vulnerable) advantage in space and is using it to attack, only economic interests are stopping a nuclear-armed dictator from letting them fly. Personally, I don’t believe in nuclear winter or EMP that much and plan on fighting after the exchange. I hope we still have something PMC with a chair in it or else I’ll be relegated to third string KP duty. China also believes in non-LO airplanes; that’s why they keep building them. They also have a luxury we don’t: they can actually build stuff on timelines and deliver capabilities before they’re OBE. The real issue with the E-7 is that regardless of funding we still wouldn’t deliver one (and it’s just one) for 2 more years still even though it’s a 20 year old existing jet.

I do have some inside info, a sim site manager is being hired at the end of this year, instructors spinning up in 2026, and they should start getting their jets around then. Look at UPT drops to be 2029-2030 (I thought it would be less than that).

KEND 25-12AF (T-38) F-15E SJ F-22 Langley Eurofighter Germany KC-135 McConnell T-38 FAIP

Just wanted to check to see how this post was doing… Oh, and here’s something else: We’ll continue to see the market rise and fall, as it always does, regardless of who is President. But to those who were cheering for it to lose for the whole sake of making Trump look bad, well, I guess your emotions got the better of you.

I’m curious what differentiates manned ISR from UAS in the “zero game” assessment. What difference does one having a human in it vs. the other not make? Attritable assets don’t have more game; they’re just cheaper to lose. And once you invest in making something ‘survivable’ in the way I think you’re using the term, it is likely not attritable anymore. UAS also introduces a data logistics tail (assuming you want to task and receive the collect) that is as costly to guard as it is to create; it’s been a long time since we’ve shot down or lost a manned airplane because the pilot refused to listen to commands like ‘come home.’ Agree though, maybe we’re all thinking about different scenarios… but this is a VERY common trap people fall into, usually precipitated by somebody saying “you have a problem you don’t know you have. Don’t worry I have a solution, at cost plus.”

Nah. I've had a buddy who dropped the 46 to Travis a year and a half ago.

Maybe you don’t know how that can work, but I do.

Who picked the Op name?!?

Buddy, the idea that peace is attained and maintained through abstention from kinetic acts is the most childish view of the world one could possibly have. Peace has never, and will never come from peaceful actions. It always and forever will be the product of extreme violence. And even then, it relies on the good guys (a rare phenomenon in human history) to want peace as the product of their ruthless and thorough dissemination of death. If Trump follows these bombings with the Marines storming the beaches of Iran, I will agree with your shallow suggestion. Until then, just give it a rest with this utopian bullshit, please. Whining like a baby about Trump putting targets on your buddies' backs is especially hilarious when the people he just fucked up had actual targets on the backs of your friends. Or have we become so weak and pathetic that we forget who our actual enemies are, the ones who have been killing us for years?

I'm not so sure anything in space is safe if shit really kicks off

Yup. But since not everything in the universe is correlated to everything else in the universe, I'll need you to expand a little bit more. There are also examples of countries that severely punish drug use, and as such have wildly lower usage rates. Again, that's not me endorsing the punishment, but to deny the reality that it *can* be controlled is silly. And there's a whole separate conversation about whether or not something becomes pointless just because it cannot be pursued to perfection. Just because you *can* get meth doesn't mean we should legalize it. Fewer meth heads is a societal good. But we can start another thread on the inanity of libertarian purism if we want to continue that discussion.