HeyEng

The last line in my paragraph shows how much faith I have in the system. It’s like those “benefits in name only” the DOD likes to roll out only to never fund or man it!

The only retired military personnel I ever heard of being recalled was doctors and specifically doctors like trauma surgeons and the like that the military could drop back into service with little or no training. One would assume that the DOD maintains some sort of database of skills and some sort of matrix timeline of retirees i.e. someone who separated recently vs. someone who has been out for fifteen years. The database would have to be continuously updated and I suspect that some sort of time cutoff would have to be implemented least the database would grow too large to manage. Or maybe they they just throw darts at a dartboard, I can honestly see either scenario!

Thank God! If I ever had to process a voucher through DTS again I think I would jump off a bridge!

I always wondered what would happen if they mobilized the people who Big Blue separated due to the fit test/force shaping polgrom! I could see the AF making you do a fit test the first day you stepped back on a base after being out for several years!

Yea from what I remember or was told years ago sanctuary was implemented so that the military could not RIF people at the 19 year mark and save money by screwing service members out of retirement once they got close to their retirement date. The law was probably written due to abuses by the government and later expanded to include ARC and other members. There is probably a similar law for civil service retirement.

The guy at Ramstein was much older (or looked older, living on the street can do that to you) with white hair and beard.

And on the topic of military retirees living on overseas bases does anyone remember the homeless guy living on Ramstein? The rumor was he was a Colonel who lost his wife and kind of fell off the deep end? I cannot vouch for the story but I actually did see the guy on base pushing around a shopping cart full of cans and other detritus, I wonder how he managed to fly under the radar living on an overseas Air Base.

So they can ensconce themselves in leather, head to toe from Pop’s!

It looks like a possible loss of pressurization of a Cessna Citation V that was flown single pilot with his family. Two F-16’s intercepted and reportedly used flares to to attempt to contact the pilot.

I actually found a DVD copy on eBay. It was not BlueRay but a nice remastered edition with some extras.

Attempted drone strike on the Kremlin: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-ukraine-attacked-kremlin-with-drones-failed-bid-kill-putin-ria-2023-05-03/

https://warisboring.com/air-force-launches-f-22s-in-response-to-another-balloon-being-tracked-over-us-air-space/?fbclid=IwAR3D2FY_CGNJ1iPSgFTXYWnBRmtvIwNKgUv4UBAmt_cQfQ4LCKQo1gb3AAA

Wording

I was flying a local many years ago with our C-5 AD advisor , who was a LtCol and on his 18th year and he told me his next assignment was going to be working at a prison in Afghanistan. I about leaped out of my FE seat and hit the ceiling! I was more mad than he was. He calmed me down by telling me that he had a bum knee that he was nursing and was going to play the medical card when the time came. I think that was when I realized that Big Blue never really had their head in the game and was more focused things that really didn’t matter! No wonder the whole Afghanistan adventure turned into a boondoggle!

Maybe this is what was shot down over Lake Huron! https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-development/bionic-learning-network/highlights-from-2006-to-2009/airjelly-id_33841/

I guess my analogy of the grunt throwing the grenade was not the best. My point was that a video of a grunt chucking a grenade is the very tail end of a decision tree leading up to a conflict and has zero bearing on what lead up to that decision so classifying said video makes no sense. Contrast this to the first balloon where we have cockpit photos of a U-2 orbiting the balloon which demonstrates capabilities and response and probably should have been classified and well as pictures of the speedy recovery of the wreckage at sea.

Well does that mean that all future shoot downs will (or are) done in secret to protect the National decision chain? By that logic a video of a grunt throwing a grenade in a bunker exposes our decision making process in deploying and mobilizing troops to a conflict. The shoot down was the end product, the valuable intel is the NORAD, AWACS and other tracking assets that of course should remain secret. The AIM-9 were just the bayonet at the end of the whole process.

And that is where the potential for abuse begins when you cherry pick which information you release. I can understand F-35 and maybe F22 video, but we probably have a decade or more of F-16 cockpit and sniper POD videos from our Punic wars so what’s so secret from shooting down a balloon or some sort of lighter than air vehicle. If we are classifying them out of embarrassment because they were commercial balloons then that undermines the whole classification system not to mention denying potential safety of flight information being passed on to aircrews or civilian air traffic. Also I wonder if NORAD have returned their radars back to their original settings to avoid detecting these things!

I’m not the only one to notice the incongruity between the release of the Reaper drone video and the complete lockdown of the three shootdowns. The Black Vault attempted to do a FOIA request and was denied due the the events being classified.

Is that like “pre-crime” as in Minority Report?

DIVADS released video footage (quite quickly I might add) of the collision between the MQ-9 and SU-27. It appears the Russians were trying to dump fuel over the Reaper, probably to induce a compressor stall rather than deliberately run into the Reapers’s propeller (you can see the bent prop in the video) And yet video of the shootdown over Lake Huron has yet to be released and probably never will be!

Anybody read Danish? Apparently a small object has been spotted near the pipeline! https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/nord-stream-ekplosionerne-antenne-lignende-objekt-fundet-taet-paa-roerledningen

The whole thing was very weird to me with the extensive coverage of the first balloon being shot down, pictures of the recovery and shots from a U-2 aircraft to the very confused and contradictory information they were marble mouthing out on the remaining three shoot-downs! The shoot-downs over Alaska and Canada were probably civilian balloons and the one over Lake Huron was some sort of surveillance dirigible that was tracked for a while and had AWACS and tanker support to accomplish this so it was surprising that no Coast Guard vessels were on station on because Lake Huron was sunny, 48° F, and had some “choppy” waves!

I guess the balloon war has been won since there appears to be no more shoot downs or sightings! Despite being able to recover F-35, F-14, SR-71, Russian Submarines, etc from the depths of the oceans, Lake Huron is just too much of a challenge for a DSRV to navigate!

This podcast details how likely these latest “unidentified objects” or “not balloons” (most probably dirigible or some kind of airship) came from central China using predictive wind models from NOAA data.