Lawman

That is one of my biggest “you’re an idiot and here is why” point for the people that look at Ecological impacts and ignore economics. It doesn’t matter how god damned clean you make the planet if the results of your actions cause the mass strife leading to some strong man lunatic in a nuclear power making new craters in Kashmir or something. You will go back on a whole lot of work with some simplistic single metric like axing carbon if you do it while simultaneously making the price of food/utilities unaffordable, amplifying water scarcity impacts by diverting from agriculture, bankrupting governments dependent on fossil fuel income to support their near crazy citizenry, etc. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

So…. Morale and the wiling support of your Sol… excuse me, Airmen isn’t just some farcical concept, it’s an expendable item no different than fuel, or parts on hand, etc. The sooner leadership realizes that pissing away general moral for their own victories in “see I made an order and they followed it!” The better. The military can absolutely order all of us to do a lot of things, some of them stupid/pointless and some of them even lethal in consequence. It could by the very construct of lawful orders also institute draconian curfews and restrict all the personnel to base/post if the leadership really wanted to. We saw a lot of that kind of dumb “I can do this so I will” kind of actions when you had divisional commanders make policy like no you can’t go to a restaurant regardless of vaccination because I said so. We are only know between bad ideas and cover their ass policies understanding that dumb ideas like that are a lousy hill to chose to die on in an organization that disbanded flogging and summery executions long ago so yeah in a lot of ways you issue orders and they obey an oath. That is because the expectation those issued orders are followed is a form of capital (ie morale and support) that is finite. Yes men and women will charge up that hill or go in that no fail mission where they aren’t likely to return without vocalizing questions or stopping, that’s the accepted standard we have between our leaders and their subordinate groups that have to follow them. But they do that because you DIDNT piss away that expendable capital on dumb shit like making people do something dumb thats reasoning is built on shaky justifications because it was the politically required thing to do. Stop spending your finite resource to make your people do something just because you said so as a reason, and acknowledge it is finite. Or at the very least openly say to your people “yes this is dumb, but it’s mandated by the civilians that run this dog and pony show.” Don’t pretend it’s some secret science of risk mitigation that only people with stars understand. That’s as dumb as saying you will all write left handed now for your own safety and if you don’t there will be consequences.

When you are actively shooting as much as 60k rounds of artillery a day, nobody currently has industrial capacity to maintain that. Buying ordnance from North Korean stockpiles isn’t a sign you have this going well for you logistically. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I know a couple oil field experts… So discussion as to “why is big oil recording record profits…” comes from them making a deliberate effort to grow cash reserves that had been depleted over the last few years. A large driver in doing this is the expected drop in leasable well heads and lands to do exploratory drilling under the shift in administrations. The anticipation is that with lower leasable heads the price per well will jump and the company without the free cash to go after them will be left out of the dwindling available US market. The oil companies are literally planning for the rainy day that the admin is telegraphing is coming whether they like it or not, and we as consumers are paying for it. So yes, the President does have a hand in this along with OPEC, taxes by region, and supply lines and every other talking point issue on why gas costs so much. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Like the VA, it’s what we’ve got to go with because it’s the only option provided by the benevolent bureaucracy. That doesn’t mean you need to try and sell us in this fantasy you have they it is somehow infallible or doesn’t have a long demonstration of pissing it away across all sections of its mandate. We are facing a manpower shortage across the services and sticking to the draconian bottom line on this mandate is giving people a way out of enlistment contracts and deployments. But we can’t possibly go back on this because the boss said do it and 19-25 year olds are really the demographic that needed protection… Again… you go explain to us how and why we all needed 6-9 Anthrax vaccines or how those big clouds of burning trash we all lived around weren’t a problem. I mean… the guy with Oak Leafs told us it was ok… so just ignore that smell of burning plastic and get back to work. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Really?…. Given what we know about the first series Anthrax vaccines which were never FDA approved… or the malaria meds that caused brain damage… The fact the military was a major contributor to the opioid epidemic with how it was handed out as the simple solution. You realize that the Go pill used to just be straight Aderol right? They changed the cocktail after the understanding of what Dex did to you expanded. You wanna go back a few decades ago you’ll find plenty of hindsight to justify some reservation that suddenly today the people at the department of no long lasting responsibility might just be phoning in another one. ****pauses to take a sip from the tap in housing ***** We’ve got a pretty decent set of historical lessons learned on why “shut up and take this pill” shouldn’t be the go to for a disease that had prior to the vaccine literally led to the death of tens of service members. We didn’t force our people to get the vax to protect them. We did it because we can’t move our people freely through global commitments with a whole host of countries requiring it as part of the access requirements. If leadership could come out and say that it would go a long way to actually making us believe they had our interest in their mind when they made the decision to force it. Instead it’s the typical “because I said so” justification, because science. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It doesn’t look like your “typical vbied.” Some of the demolition weaponeering guys in SOF have designs for a downward focus cargo van/truck designed to do exactly this. Basically it’s a vbied that uses a large water cell above it to redirect the cutting energy of the blast downward. You still get the big fireball/concussion but it’s designed to cut through concrete in a way that isn’t easily repaired or resurfaced (runways, bridges, etc). Not saying that’s how it was done or anything of the like, but there is absolutely a solution to “how can I cut this bridge span in half with a whole lot of explosives and a couple barrels of water…. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Because given the history across the services of actually acquiring new things vs the number that die in the development process I’m curious what it would look like as an alternate. Look I’m all for new stuff, but the Air Force and Army have a decades long history at this point of spending billions to not get new stuff and soldiering on with stuff our Dad’s used to work/fly on. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This may have come up somewhere before, but given they are operated by some Ally’s… Has there ever been a serious feasibility study in taking a C17 with a roll on expeditionary air-refuel capability? Not the SOLL II, I mean we fix a boom or drag hoses out of it and call it a tanker than can land in harsh locations to displace from the missile sponge locations like Guam. With the number of tails we have or our friends have access to that seems like a capability to be exploited if we apparently have so much airlift we can turn them into cruise missile trucks. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

More harm than good… Without any form of sufficient self defense and early warning, Helicopters are a logistics asset just fast enough and limited in density that they only get used them to move important things and people. Those assets and people go zipping around with no effective means to protect themselves in a mode of transport that goes from everything is ok to catastrophic with little in the middle … and then you end up losing those things getting very important people killed. You could potentially do some work with decompressing medical within the support zone but you wouldn’t really need an abundance of assets to do that and arguably the current 8/17 fleet could be utilized to it since they aren’t exactly doing much forward of the FLOT with RW aviation. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Nobody cares about the middle child… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If you took every square inch of the missile bay and turned it into a fuel tank you’re talking about ~2 million gallons worth of space…. That would never actually be possible with all the other parts and pieces involved in that space. Realistically, you at best get a couple hundred thousand gallons of fuel. That’s not a whole lot when you figure the average aircraft carrier is holding 3-3.5 million gallons of aviation fuel and burns through it in a matter of days in some instances. Not to mention the loss of a strategically more important asset to hold and move gas. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Watching Seattle politics on the homeless was insane. You have an entire spectrum of people who refuse to even acknowledge a connection between addiction and the homelessness up there, and some of them will consider it a form of bigotry to even suggest it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You and others might have a leg to stand on as far as the “ignore the past and let’s do the right thing!” tack had the whole shut our eyes and pretend it didn’t happen gone way outside of just Hillary Clinton. Her entire inner circle and everybody on her staff was negligent and should have lost their clearances immediately following the revelations of what happened. Instead it was a meme joke to the left with “buttery males” while nobody connected to that shit show lost a clearance. You could still look them up in JPAS. Likewise, nobody is calling for Trumps staffers to face any kind of punishment just that they want him jailed like he was sitting in his room tweeting off cell phone pictures of papers from SAPs and STO stuff. The problem with suddenly pretending to be concerned now is that it’s intellectually dishonest to argue that conviction when we’ve seen just how far it will go ignored to not punish anybody on a political side, not just the key Target political bullseye in Clinton or Trump. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

50 Cal ricochets for literally nothing. And it’s still got a butt ton of velocity in it at the ranges we usually shot it in range setups. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Canadian Air Force guy. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I’m hearing from a friend apparently we’ve always known how to do this. Apparently it was figured out with the Luftwaffe Fulcrums post the wall coming down. Guess somebody just found the old copy of the book. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’d settle for less money and a stop move… Seriously keep the money. I want my feet firmly planted where I’m standing for 5 years, and I’m not even at what most would consider a desirable location I just like my neighborhood and my kids going to the same school for a while. PCSing to chase Busy work deployments and other “opportunities” has been the biggest sap for keeping people in Army Aviation. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Nothing but vapor ware and hope as far as I’ve seen. Keep in mind this was during the same period of time as A6F and A7F were being presented as ideas. So draw a cool picture of an existing plane, say glass cockpit and advanced power plant as many times as you can… The GAO and others lampooned the AV-8B upgrade when it was compared to all the contemporary platforms it was operating along side with. It was a vast improvement from the A, but it was wholly a decade behind the rest of the aircraft in its peer group. Basically a what does this plane bring to the fight outside forward basing and shipboard flexibility, look at all the deficient problems related to performance etc… So the Marines started pursuing a next Gen harrier AV-8E for simplicity of discussion … problem was since the mid 80s the Brits had pretty much washed their hands of seeking any sort of super advance in the Harrier design so the Marines already had finite dollars to pursue anything on their own hence why the AV-8Bs left a lot on the wish list as far as upgrades over the original pursuit. The Marines were exactly nowhere as far as moving forward with a replacement. Osprey was all consuming as far as their budget. Meanwhile the Navy had JAST and the Air Force JFX viper program was coming along well. Marines already fly Navy planes… mash the two together and get on board so to speak. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I mean… they didn’t originally want or ask for it. This all stems back to the people in charge saying make a 5th Gen plane that does everybody’s replacement requirement. The Harrier follow on as conceived was a 4.5 Gen aircraft similar to the evolutionary progression like in the E/F Hornets. A new aircraft yes, but not so much a clean sheet design and damn sure not an L/O driven aircraft. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Not so much an equipment as mission focus point he was making. Talk to guys in Vietnam and the most effective platform for CAS was often times F-100s because that was consistently the mission set those guys spent developing. Hornet when it can on line had a very heavy Attack cadre come over from A7s that drove a lot of the “how we do business” in the community that has largely never left. I’m every conflict some communities focus on particular skill sets and a smart staff recognizes and uses that. Even the Air Force acknowledges that close air support is a concentration same as SEAD or any other “don’t F this up or it’ll really hurt” mission sets. That’s why as part of workups prior to OEF/OIF deployment those Viper units slated to it would spent a lot more mission training sorties on CAS focused mission scenarios. Marine aviation by default understand their position in the universe as there strictly to make the ground side of the MAGTF more effective and tailor their focus to that. At the Joint Planning level that means yes, they are assets to be apportioned, but send them to the missions they train to and they won’t get butt hurt about not getting some other cooler more glamorous mission set. They’d rather be dropping in support of their buddies on the ground than doing the big package to Tehran or something. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Considering the last 8 years of assistance and training, this whole thing should go down as the most effective FID mission ever. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That was probably the biggest shortcoming with Obama as far as foreign policy. Putin tested him, validated where and how quickly he would back off any demand, and the rest of the world knew it too. He was essentially sitting at the poker table with his cards backwards and everybody else knew dead to rights what he had to play. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They actually talk about in a featurette how much they were trying to make that exact formula from RO work and just couldn’t get it right. Apparently that trick set a trend that everybody wants to follow so perfectly. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk