Lawman

Hey guys look! somebody who was in he Minnesota guard that actually did deploy to a combat zone. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

It’s serious how the members of Old Guard take that duty. I’ve seen several enter the Army warrant community in aviation and they will all tell you their time as a tomb guard was one of the must solemn moments of their lives performing that job. Bystanders also have no idea who is standing there performing the job because they intentionally don’t wear rank, which permits anybody to include very senior personnel to perform the watch as a Sentinal like the General did. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

PAO winning the war… We’re not sure who the hell they are are fighting for or with but they sure as hell are wining in their own minds. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Mods…. The forum is doing that weird shit again.

Yeah I feel like the Navy is already way ahead of putting an LO buddy tank capability in the field. I feel like there has to be a technological way to get around buddy drogue and making something of smart buddy boom. To me, teaching that unmanned system to follow and refuel off a big wing is easy. If we can teach helicopters to land in the dust unmanned (and we have) teaching it to get on the boom or into the basket is easy. The hard part and really the reason anybody would consider some massive big wing AR platform to be needed is the fact the Air Force doesn’t have a probe drogue refuel system outside its rotary wing… Ok, so a boom needs to happen on an already LO aircraft.Somebody look at programming the B-21 in a less capable mission equipment airframe? Maybe we come up with a package to bolt on a set number of airframes out as tankers after the fact and just buy 20 more? Now it can tow its buddies close, because let’s face it there is nothing really super tactical about a refuel orbit or track. We’re just trying to not get pushed out 1500 miles from the mainland in INDOPACOM. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

What exactly is the end goal of a stealth Tanker? Like whatever follows the 46, let’s make that airline derived bitch Low Observable? That seems kind of insane since by their nature most of our big wing stuff is just adapted civilian aircraft. And if it’s small scale to extend range like the way the Navy does with the SH, that feels like a buddy tanking option would be the more achievable extension operating from some forward AR route and the big tanker operating from sanctuary. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

“Somebody is waiting for you to say you don’t need your money…” That was a very smart statement made by the Army Aviation POE after the decision to cancel FARA didn’t net any improvement to the budgetary constraints is the departments we sacrificed it for. I’m about 60-70% sure FLAARA is going to die both due to mismanagement of its program and to other mouths at the big table of money seeking to shark it for their own needs. Right now Fires in the form of rockets and loitering munitions and Sensors (ie UAS/SUAS/etc) are the big shiny amongst our competing requirements. And there is no defined way for an ear marking of requirement to requirement funnel of money. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That’s kind of the weird half factual argument I’ve seen. Like the guy primary’d… what he didn’t do was go debate. Those aren’t the same thing, but some people want to use it as a qualifier for whether a candidates name can appear on a ballot, but if that’s the way then change the rules for next time. As much as I didn’t want to do 4 more years of nuclear level chaos energy in everything political, dude is elected. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I went to a very liberal college and I’m usually not that petty with some old friends over how these things go, but the condescending attitudes they’ve had on why it happened…. So I sat down and fired this off into the room like a flash bang. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It’s really too bad that with all the existing war stocks that we could give up to the Uke’s to fight, the one capacity that they could use (engineering) is one of those mission sets that just doesn’t have a depth in anybody’s inventory to hand over en mass. They are finally figuring out effective maneuver doctrine and practice, but with only so much capability to conduct a penetration (sts) and breakout they can’t get the full mileage out of that ability. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

It’s absolutely in all the theatre commanders “top 3.” And I’ll say they are absolutely motivated and aware of how far they have to go to be what they need to be. Like lines of effort it is directly discussed not “NATO” interop but Poland specifically and it makes sense when you look at potential and demonstrated commitment. They also have economics to take advantage of that most of the legacy Euro partners don’t. Poland has the potential to become the most powerful land force in Europe and potentially a joint force though id argue that takes a second decade to achieve and doesn’t run concurrently. Problem is they’ve got a decade of culture shift to do to train and equip that force, and until then they really aren’t any better prepared to do anything against a flood of tactical groups coming across their border than the Ukrainians were those first few weeks. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Neither the Russians or then Ukrainians have executed a general mobilization. They still have chips to play in the form of people even with the casualty rates they have taken. What they won’t have is the industrial capacity combined with the personnel necessary to execute any kind of sustained positional warfare. So should they want to execute follow on seizures of land post “Victory” in Ukraine, they will not only need to solve those problems, they will likely need to make an entire shift to their military culture to execute a Decisive maneuver victory over whoever they choose to go after next. While that’s easier to do against the Moldovans or Latvians than say Poland. They are still European. Or even scarier, they could just go sit and wait until we find ourselves occupied in the other side of the world and then pick their moment. Seize parts of NATO territories with minimal fight then wait for the Spanish and Italian forces to dither about whether they are willing to fight Russia over some Baltic farmlands…. Prove the alliance hallow without us making up its main body, then carve off chunks at a time. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Go look at a map of the Baltics and compare it to Ukraine. Also factor in that time thing you’ve left out of any discussion. How many towns and cities can the Russians fumble into ownership of on their worst day while we get V corps ready to go in a fight to take them back. The Russians are not our peers on the ground but that means nothing because our ground forces aren’t in a position to make the argument on day 1 of any conflict. You (and others) seem to be trying to make the conversation about how Russia is somehow this toothless made up boogieman and that’s simply not what any of the rest of us criticizing them are saying. Albeit I was mistaken, your intent wasn’t necessarily that. The Russian Army is the same threat to us as it is to Portugal from the standpoint of actual arms and effects, but we are part of NATO and only as good as our strength to honor our commitments. And one of the ways we (and arguably more importantly the rest of the alliance) don’t have to answer that commitment is to get to keep them at proxy arms length in Ukraine. As to combat effectiveness, An army of peasants and numbskulls with rifles are still fully capable of taking over a swaths of territory, Africa and the Middle East are proof of that. They can be dipshits, but they still have tanks. Dipshits organized into Battalion Tactical Groups which they can manage and equipped with tanks can accomplish a lot when they are left to pick where they seek battle. Right now so long as they don’t take Ukraine and want to stay involved in Ukraine they don’t have that option to seek battle elsewhere. The Russians may not be able to form their ranks into what we would call a reinforced armor division and punch a 300 km whole in the Ukrainian lines, that doesn’t mean they can’t orchestrate the seizure of territory in the Baltics or Poland and upend 70 years of NATO because it is collectively decided that such an event isnt our problem. Not to mention the message it sends to the other hemispheres geopolitical foe. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Countries don’t fight ground wars, formations do. Ukraine has parity above most of NATO in that manner, but they don’t possess the number of formations needed to achieve some decisive breakout. The old “quantity has a quality all its own” mantra. 92nd can’t win a war on its own, and ground maneuver culminates over distance meaning it won’t matter how good or bad they are because they will be spent either way. Russia also achieves near-to-peer parity with a whole lot of NATO in that manner, because while they may be a half dozen regiments full of ass clowns in regards to quality, the formation of the other side of the border is a series of Company’s of Lithuanian professional with about 6 kilometers of strategic depth to give before they are fighting in their capital. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Ukraine has done in 2 years more collective training and maturing of its officer cadre than the rest of NATO combined (including a good chunk of our commands). I mean what did you reference in Kursk… that was a Ukrainian Brigade+ operating under a single unified commanders intent and attacking what were a series of Company and smaller elements acting in a fragmented scheme of defense. That is text book application of offensive ground maneuver. The Ukrainian military from a staff and orders capability right now is head and shoulders above any of our standing NATO partners who may have the kit but lack any of the collective experience employing it. The one place that gets funny is employing enabling capes that they simply don’t have or we won’t give them because we save it for ourselves cough*offensive cyber*cough. The secret to our success over peers on the ground isn’t going to be measured in simple tangible comparisons like tank armor or Rmax of specific artillery systems. It’s going to be in the fact we can execute the MDMP at echelon faster than whoever is sitting in the opponent seat. We didn’t figure out something new, we just got back to the understanding that the Corps is the unit of action in LSCO and the Division is the staff that has to execute that action. We aren’t even that good at it, but everybody else is just really terrible if they’ve even begun considering to think that way. And that’s great and all…. But we only have so much Division frontage and Europe is hella big. We can’t simply sprinkle the US elements piecemeal across Europe, and Europe cant defend all the spaces in between if we mass. That’s the same problem the Ukrainians have, how do you take the stuff you’ve learned the hard way and transfer that experience to the 60k plus troops and elements you’ve got in the pipeline without diluting it too much to keep its effect. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Having just done work with some of our Euro partners, they are absolutely still a threat because while they can’t stand offsides against a US division, they don’t have to. We can’t protect all the frontage. We only have so many units and we simply can’t be everywhere at once. Most of the border spaces have no real strategic terrain so it doesn’t favor the defender except for the occasional water crossing. The only real terrain to split them affects their ability to threaten Czech, but Poland is a parking lot. Our Euro partners are neither unified in what they think is the proper course of action (for instance the Poles will die for every inch of Warsaw because they already had it leveled in memory vs Lithuania which understands Vilnius is gonna be moonscaped if they try to defend it). They (NATO) can’t field large formations of any size, save for a few brigades which aren’t the same size as our idea of a Brigade. For the next decade France is the 2nd most powerful land force in NATO on the wrong end of the Continent to be useful, and with most of our forces still being rotational at best it’s not that we are massively ahead or positioned. You take that one rotational division out of theatre and suddenly the French have more combat capacity than we do by a good bit. 2ACR and 173rd are incomplete units, they are designed to function as a V Corps enabler, not the main body of the Corps. You need 2-3 mech/Armor division for that purpose and without the rotations we don’t even have one. It would take weeks-months to get sufficient ground forces in theatre to recapture and retake whatever ground the Russians were to stumble across and seize. You’ll need to port multiple divisions out of railheads and ports and ship them across an ocean to an ISB. Unless we (NATO)are both equipped and prepared (militarily and politically) to annihilate those ground formations with fires and aviation they would be able to come swinging out of their borders and simply occupy what is largely unprotected. I don’t think for a second somebody like Germany is going to accept the trade of destroying mech formations on the road to Warsaw or Talin for having to absorb Iskander/Kalibr strikes (or worse) in its territory. So we don’t kill them as they swarm out…. Now you’ve gotta be willing to dislodge them once sufficient ground forces (mostly entirely ours) are set, which means shaping their deep (ie bombing into Russia/Kgrad/Belarus proper). Now we’re gonna put a ground force we know they can’t stand against marching in the general direction of their capital. Tell me that’s a less dangerous scenario than allowing them to attrition themselves into oblivion in Ukraine let alone one that doesn’t involve US casualties. The Russians are not a US peer, they are a NATO peer, because frankly non of our NATO partner ground forces can keep pace with our ground maneuver so they can’t be part of any Corps/Army frontage in any offensive action. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Offensive power on the ground maneuver is predicated on the same advantage/disadvantage ratios that have existed since the time of Alexander. Technology can soften those numbers but they never get away from the requirement of say an attacker to employ a 3:1 or better 5:1 advantage to take the ground effectively. What technology does do well is allow you to extend influence over the ground (say as far as indirect fire or drones can range). The Russian Army is not capable of fighting that way because to effectively maneuver an advantage force you don’t really need a body count to body count, you need an element of size vs an element of size, so when we say 3:1 advantage what that means really is a battalion attacks a company, and better yet 5:1 a Brigade attacks a company. Since the Russians are pretty much inept above the size of a battalion task group, Ukraine can field Company+ size elements with reinforcing enablers like fires and drones, and achieve parity with the attacker which is never something that pans out well for the attacker. And that is why the Russians adopt positional warfare, it’s not by choice, it’s by their own inept ability to wield what is largely still an army of convicts and peasants with too few competent officers and no NCO corps to effectively train and use them. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

F-35 Crash Final Conclusions “With your shield or on it” went to some people’s heads. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They are celebrating a “win” that has them 10k square miles short of taking the Donbas much less anything worth while. Positional warfare at its finest. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I always enjoyed having a Jag review our tapes post strike to make sure we used the right phrases pre strike. Gotta justify killing bad guys with words that can be reviewed by some dipshit that just got back from the KAF Chilis who has some innate insight on the PID process. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A lot of that was the 12-13 that they were technically aligned with us. Their 2020 “deployment” wasn’t really anything to say other than it was Covid and we were all doing weird stuff. Go sit in a place so they can say they have Apaches there. We’ve been doing that in CENTCOM for half a decade now. Not really tip of the spear for that. I went through flight school with a half a dozen guys out of that unit well before the wars had been turned down from boil. I think all of them combined have less combat time than any of the active guys in the same class. They just have some seriously old farts in that unit that refuse to go find another job. That said it’s sad to see some 30 year CW5 with all of 3 combat stripes on his sleeve. As I’ve said to a lot of peers in the Air Force Active/Reserve/Guard, the Army has a very different relationship with those entities especially now that we’ve gone back to the Divisional model. An aviation brigade exists to back its specific division because depending on type they fight very differently. Army Guard aviation is supposed to be a harvest point for bodies and aircraft to us to feed the machine, but when we actually try to do that it’s screaming about their organic make up.If they ever deployed a guard division we might give a crap, until then put some aviation dude on mobilization like we do all the other branches (engineering, med, etc). Until then they can shut up and stop pretending, I don’t ever and will never need an organic battalion of guard guys at the cost of having an active unit undermanned. But hey, when it’s time for the big fight the Guard staying home means we can’t be tracked by our link16… because 10th mountain won’t have any. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That unit was so on its ass in maintenance to spool up for a deployment we gave them an entire active duty battalions aircraft out of Forscom so they could go. While on said deployment they had not 1 but 2 inadvertent fuel starvation flameouts (idiots doing idiot stuff) a long with a host of bungling across RC North. This is the unit that tries to sell its self as something special for doing all the quick reaction testing when really that’s a 2 aircraft every couple years requirement to fly canned test scenarios. They don’t deploy often enough and when they do it’s largely a series of small disasters. We should have changed them over to Hawks and kept Idaho or Penn. Yet somehow because of the strength of the guard through its senators that unit is getting brand new EV6 aircraft before active duty units that are deploying with D’s. That last part isn’t unique to them either, for some reason we’re going to let an active Army divisions have their supporting aviation brigades use a lot of old airframes while we upgrade the guard with virtually no deployments on its calendar (the CENTCOM E-Cab always uses an active duty Apache Battalion) to the newest E’s rather than give them the old stuff they are already qualified in. There are anemic D models still flying at Carson and Bliss while these guys pretend to do high altitude gunnery in easier conditions. And one of them that could have been had just burned it in giving an F-35 guy a tour of how the other half lives. Way to go Utah… but again no surprises. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’m sure Kharkiv wasn’t their objective either. He’s still trying to figure that one out (along with most of the Russian Army leadership). Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

FSUs Offensive Line has holes like Riley Reid. It doesn’t matter what talent is on the rest of that team if you’re going to give up whole drives to just bad protection of the quarterback. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

At this point nobody except the Iranians need to worry about the restriction of that straight. Saudi can pipe the oil out the other way. The only reason they don’t is the price per barrel is still low enough to justify shipping it via boat from the old oil ports. Things get hot, Iran effectively isolates its self. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk