ClearedHot

Draco has done many incredible things through the years, much of it unrecognized. A toast to them for some much deserved recognition.

SpaceX continues to advance the ball down the field. A few minutes ago they successfully launched Starship. It appears Starship reached space and will continue around the glob before re-entering near Hawaii. The booster was not so lucky as it had a "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" after the hot stage separation. SpaceX continues to outpace the traditional defense government sponsored primes.

He currently is the HAF/A3....BUT has been nominated to be VCSAF. Waiting on Tuberville and the Sentate.

True but thank god she has that fine ass IYKYK)...especially given the history of the B-2 and her rear end. One ass hat senior general fell on his sword saying the B-2 "might" have to go low which led to a complete redesign, years of delay with massive cost overruns and a paltry fleet size of 21.

Your link is bad and might not be the SOAR. The NYTimes article says MH-60 and special forces but the U.S. Navy operates a small fleet of MH-60R/S helos that support ASW and SOF. Regardless, a sad day.

They owe Jimbo $76M which they will likely negotiate down a bit but still a nice payoff to be an asshole, hell I do it for free everyday on this forum. I am all about loyalty, in sport and in life and watching Jimbo and Kelly do two programs dirty was sickening...even though I can't stand either program. Football coaches shaped my life and helped my success, I know everyone wants to get paid but at what cost to everyone else. Jimbo will be paid out by private donors so it won't hurt the school except for recruiting and another 5 years of mediocrity while they try to rebuild and suffer as you noted above.

Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and Machiavelli all share rule #69 - "Never fight a land war in Asia."

Everyone hates a dynasty with five Natty's.

Cool story Bro. I see both side stomping but keep the hate alive, it will keep you warm at night. Break Break... In other news, while I am not an FSU fan they are a marquee program and did not deserve the Jimbo Fisher clown show. Karma is reaching out with a big ole kick in the dick today. It took Texas A&M years (and a lot of money), to realize what a clown Jimbo really is and now he is getting kicked to the curb. Brian Kelly should be next but he will win just enough to string it out another couple of years.

SEAL of the Sky berets.

LOL... The "Rep" was swag and brought the hate along with five Natty's. For the record, the fight was started by FIU which is why 18 of their players were ejected along with 13 from Miami.

How are they the dirtiest? Anyway... Sympathy is not the ask, simply enforce the RULES uniformly.

F-35C would be my bet...

I hate it when the refs decide a game. Even AFTER a review this was somehow NOT called a safety (by NCAA rule the entire ball has to be forward of the goal line), but we have special rules for FSU. If that isn't enough apparently FSU can have a big return, SPIKE the ball ON a Miami player and there is no foul. And to finish it off, FSU broke Miami's Quarterback's arm. IMG_5011.MOV

I knew you'd check it...

Nothing like lumbering up to the KC-10 on a Pacific crossing and taking gas to "165ish"...throttles bent, toboggan immediately, gimmie the second pump!

It has been my limited experience that "30 minutes of straight misses to eventually have an MQ-9 do it", does not typify the gunship community I was a part of for 20+ years. You are certainly entitled to use your observations and experience to form an expert opinion, kind of like when I heard about the C Model dude screwing his Crew Chief at Kadena, that obviously means all Eagle Drivers (past and present), swing the other way... I like you bro but the plank holders from your community are old friends (many from my community), and they hold the #1 moniker. As you can see below I've given you a more appropriate designation. It is one of the most maddening observations one can make if you dedicate your life to this endeavor, as good as we are we constant run to the latest crisis and in haste we forget the lessons of the past. 14 short years after the great aerial battles of of WWII the mighty F-4 launched on it's first flight, sans a gun. As a reward for forgetting that history the lads initially paid a heavy price over Vietnam. The AIM-7 had a sub 10% kill rate, in total 452 Sidewinders were fired during the Vietnam War, resulting in a Pk of 0.18. Years of gun pods to get them through until the E model came along with a gun...we will never repeat that mistake right...here we are in 2023 and Fat Amy Charlie does not have an internal gun. I am guessing you don't know how this went down. This whole thing started not because the SOCOM masters wanted out of the CAS business (quite the opposite), but because Slife was harvesting manpower from Ops squadrons across the command to man his pet project. When Slife tried to cut the gunship crew further he was stonewalled by the Gunner union and A1. Keep in mind that community already paid a price when another herbivore was at the helm (Wurster), and convinced Congress he could cut the gunship crew from 13 to 7 in order to replace 8 H models with 16 J's and keep it manpower neutral. Think I'm kidding, go look at page 23 of the 2009 QDR, actual airframes and numbers are rarely called out in a strategic document but it is there in black and white. When the union said "No" to Slife he immediately replied, "Ok, get rid of the 105MM". There was no analysis on employment history, just a shoot from the hip response. There is much more to the story, I feel bad for the folks that continue the day to day in that toxic HQ building. Keep in mind, this was NOT a Big Blue decision. I REALLY wish the system worked as you think it does but SOCOM is a different animal. In the history of the command there as been exactly one Airman running the show. Slife badly wanted the job but was denied and sadly survived long enough to worm his way into the VCSAF job (god help you all). Because this was a SOCOM decision and the CC is a ground pounder, the boss looks to his air power experts to shape his decision. Keep in mind the proposal is coming from his air power component commander so he turns to his USAF aviator SOCOM/CV for expert advice and validation. Said SOCOM/CV is a Slife's puppet, he is an herbivore who wants the AFSOC/CC chair next (and gets it), does understand kinetic airpower and most certainly does not push back. Again SOCOM is different and components get a vote so when this idea surfaced the component commands representing the ground parties pushed back VERY hard, but if you know SOCOM you know the components fight each other for resources. The Purple Pot battles get ugly and if you think USASOC is gonna give AFSOC support, especially when the TF is fighting to resource 160 rotors of their own that are running around with guns and rockets...they will quickly stab a brother in the back to get $. Big Blue could give a rat's ass, they are completely focused on China so there was no debate or actual thought put into the impact this decision will have. Well done, but as pointed out above just a bit different from the fight I was in. I would also point out that because last days of AFG differs from the early days does not mean fights like the early days will never happen again...thus I would actually prefer to have BOTH options. The gunfight I ended up in was far more typical of Al-Fallujah, supporting a team fighting a crap ton of bad dudes literally across the street. Chaos everywhere as the bad guys tried to flank, got on the roof to throw hand grenades, popped in and out of windows, doors and alleys. Thank god both guns were humming and we were able to shift fire in a second or two to stop every attempt to over run the good guys. PGMs would and the time it takes to employ them would have been useless in that particular fight. Point and click CAS is cool and offers another tool in the container but it has limits and dangers all it's own. Professionally I would ask you keep in mind the actual definition of CEP...it means HALF of your munitions will fall within those parameters, there are consequences when they land outside that circle. 26 years of flying and a little bit of combat time, the most focused and SCARED I've ever been (including two MANPADS guiding on me at the same time), was when I pushed that button that close to the friendlies. 8 seconds TOF felt like an eternity and I will freely admit some quite moments of reflection the next morning over some bootleg brown liquor. There was no chest thumping, just a quiet thanks upward that I didn't F it up...and I say "I" because it was me that had the A code, it was my decision and my responsibility. I recall a training sortie as an O-6 when I was flying with the W's working AGM-176 employment on movers. Obviously I won't get into tactics but it was an exercise in frustration as we tracked farmer brown driving his truck around Clovis. Numerous turns over a 10 minute period repeatedly tumbled gyros tumbled as the crew rode the struggle bus trying to reset the LAR. I could not watch them hump the bowling ball anymore and finally said "Shoot TWO if you want a high Pk, but for the love of god shoot something before he gets away." Point being, there is a benefit of deep magazines. A couple Griffins is cool, a crap ton of candy corn is even cooler and useful in big fights. I am not trying to be a dinosaur, I was actually an early adopter and advocate for SDB and incorporation on on the gun pig, but as a whole I see USAF and AFSOC forgetting our history and drifting away from core capabilities like CAS. I have great concern when we take away the 105MM (and maybe the 30MM...yes it has been discussed), and retire the A-10...the two greatest CAS platforms that have existed, all in the name of a pivot to peer near-peer. God help us if we do these things and end up in another dark night over Jalalabad and all we have is Fat Amy with 181 rounds and some PGMs.

You win the internet today! Love my wife, but preach brother!

Tell me you don't do CAS without telling me you don't do CAS. "Hammering away"...I don't even have words other than thanks "SEAL of the Sky" for your input. Removing the 105MM is nothing more than moronic payback from two herbivore AFSOC/CC's that hate the gunship community. There is a story about how this all started and it had NOTHING to do with anything related to combat, rather Slife wanting to harvest manpower for a pet project and being told no because they had to keep X number of gunners on the AC-130J to man the 105MM. As a dude who has shot bad guys 27 meters form the friendlies, advocating for BVR CAS is one of the dumber things I have ever read on this forum. Slinging a Small Cruise Missile (SCM), at GPS coordinates is not CAS, doing it in a dynamic fight is Fing stupid and dangerous. As for "accuracy not being as good as folks think"...the advertised unclassified accuracy of the AC-130 is two mils. Again as a person who flew it once or twice, techniques like two-shot bring that much lower. The hammering away and they keep running scenario mentioned above is a function of poor employment or training, not the damn gun. Come on over some time, I'll pour you a glass of brown liquor and show you a couple hours of video 33 pound projectiles filled with 6 pounds of Comp B pissing-off all the virgins in Jannah because thanks to me "hammering away" with the 105MM, they are about to be overrun with business. Rather than guard core capabilities AFSOC leadership is grasping at straws trying to remain relevant in this pivot to peer/near-peer, the Air Force is feeding that mantra as we slowly walk away from what should be a fierce dedication to those on the ground, reference insert A-10 retirement as further proof. I am not opposed to adding SCM to the gunship arsenal, it would add a great stand-off capability to suppress semi-permissive threats in CORE SOCOM mission sets, but if having 30 gunships with SCM is the key to the fight against China, we've already lost.

I've worked in the same circle several times. Having 50,000 positions that require Senate confirmation is ludicrous and obviously part of the problem. Judges represent many of the vacancies and that needs to be addressed because of the impact it has on our judicial system (particularly with regard to immigration cases). The Air Force nominate 20-25 Colonels to become Generals each year...the other services have about the same number. The Senate has a DUTY to review those nominations and 100 a year is not asking too much. There should be a a heavy review when making O-7 and another look for O-9 and above.

It is feasible and THIS is part of the problem. If you have to be confirmed by the Senate why just accept the blanket approval of each service. This practice only reinforces the broken process and continues to promote some of most acidic leaders we have ever seen.

The fight in Gaza is going to be a slog...