Lawman

Man I’d love to look into the parallel universe where a still President Trump overtly says in the media “we are under no obligation to protect Ukraine,” and then punts it to NATO to make the call on any response. I’m sure that would be totally respected and not met with raging criticism. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This is a guy who was in command of a significant organization in Eastern Germany as the wall came down. He’s on record demanding the military commander in East Berlin use force to put down the groups reunifying the country and was told by the military commander “yeah you’re on your own.” Unfortunately we (Americans) view the guy through meme source only and really think it’s just some shirtless bald dude riding bears and swilling vodka while he runs a broke down superpower. He’s probably one of the most intelligent leaders on the planet, and anybody in the political sphere who recognizes that gets lambasted either as calling up old Reagan policy (Romney) or being in love with the guy (Trump). Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Better question. 1. Could we…? 2. How many times could we do that or start doing that before we are spent? I don’t know if it’s suddenly forgotten but we got to “show the world” our unquestioned airlift superiority in the “greatest single airlift operation in history.” What we really showed to anybody smart is we just spent a shit load of flight hours and build a hell of a backlog MX on the fleet of airplanes that takes time to repay. Anybody with two brain cells knows our world wide rapid response is anchored around our airlift. How many of the great power foes would be smart enough to realize they can chose to mobilize and force our prudent mass movements only to then easily stand down and let us with a few movements through slow attrition lose our ability or at least severely limit it. There is a reason things like aircraft slants and readiness exercises are supposed to be closely held in secret. I’ll be honest the next massive typhoon, earthquake, volcano that comes down on some 3rd world shithole, we park the grey tails and pay fedex/Kallita/etc to haul it and preserve our readiness over trying to win the world opinion race by writing the biggest check. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Picture of the ACARS message about it… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I think in all likelihood the deployment of US troops to Ukraine would be an explainable reason for the political leadership in NATO to walk away from the article 5 commitments. They didn’t start going after AQ when the Cole was bombed, they did it because we took the hit on home turf with no provocation. Losing a chunk of 2nd Stryker deployed out of Rose Barracks across borders into Ukraine isn’t going to motivate the Germans to suddenly commit their paltry forces to avenge us. It’s going to give them the logic they need to tell their populations “this isn’t our war.” Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I mean let’s not lie we are guilty of the same kind of “looks good to me” future progression type of thinking. How often have we seen the chosen son/daughter or one of the anointed favorites of a commander seemingly progress to loftier positions ahead of peers often times more deserving and at the detriment to the long term health of the system. The dangerous ones (both politically and militarily) are the ones with selfish ambition to higher position because of the power it brings and early recognition that they are amongst the beautiful peoples club. Those are the careerists/politicians they scare me, because they’ve figured out how to weaponize the stratification in the system in a way that ceases being a meritorious reward and merely checks all the right boxes in the visual check. And not one damn bit of their motivation to do a job has any override on the desire to merely progress higher up the ladder. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Anybody on the outside of the circle dumb enough to assume some vast greatness was experienced through a single enlistment is an idiot. Think about how much you “knew” at 3-4 years time in service… just enough to not kill yourself or anybody else doing your expected job so long as you listened to the people with 8-10 years and did what they tell you. She was right at the place in life where you assume some level of responsibility for individual decisions because the jar has been filled with enough knowledge water to work on a staff. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I like how they keep suggesting they might go after the operators in the future… Like any person in a cockpit or box is the one accepting and granting clearance of fires in this situation. Somebody with a Star gave the word to execute. If we want heads on a spike start with that one. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Remember… Gerrymandering is strictly a Republican problem… Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

The Army just lowered the aviation credential assistance dollar figure from 4K to 1K for that exact reason. Too many people were using the program to set themselves up for quick transition to an airline job. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Even desert storm was acetate and dot matrix printers… Talk to the old guys running your Sims that lived it. The Navy guy I know was talking about having a dedicated flight every day whose sole job was to fly down and pick up the print version of the ATO/ACO. So here you are in a campaign where we are running sorties with everything available.. and you have available combat power acting as a taxi for what can know be accomplished with an email. Yes they did it, but it’s not because we were just so good at War…it’s because the Iraqis were terrible at it. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That’s the fundamental misunderstanding people have with the whole Cyber war will be part of a multi domain conflict… No Cyber warfare will be the new Nuclear 1st Strike, only it won’t allow you a follow up with any form of response. All the idiots practicing war without computers using wet erase markers, plastic sheet overlays, and paper maps… None of those capabilities are actually going to be allowed, because you won’t even be able to issue the OP Order that brings forces to theatre. We will have things like the “7.2 miles of Combat Power” Fort Hood likes to brag about sitting in those same motor pools, because you can’t even get an email to coordinate the train to take them to port, much less put them in theatre and support them. We need to realize Cyber isn’t going to be some arrow in your quiver to shoot, as much as it going to be your ability to protect your ability to actually do anything in whatever part of the world somebody chooses to then take advantage of our paralysis and conduct follow on actions. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

If you want to see the self licking ice cream cone of debt that Soft “Science” degrees invented for themselves look no further than criminal justice/criminology/justice studies/etc… Go interview at either a major state or federal agency involved in law enforcement with that degree field. It will yield you little to nothing in a field that literally has its name in your BA degree… or right.. it’s not actually a science. The Ohio State patrol awarded rated grades based off certain circumstances to their initial entry exam. Having a Bachelors degree awarded 10 points, a social science like CJ or Psych awarded 15… you know who got 20? The Army Cook who did 4 years and got a 214 with an ASVAB score measured in single digits. Yeah… gotta spend 80k of government money on that program. What a big help. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Which in the end if it did happen would only help their cause. Strategic surprise is one element to consider with being the aggressor, but if they can paint Taiwan as an instigator and get the political narrative running of the, trying to drag us into a war that, “they started,” it’ll only help to keep us out of the fight. It would easily be worth it to lose a few planes or a small patrol ship if it meant not having to worry about the US while they exercised their plans in Taiwan. Most of our understanding of defense treaties is under the premise of responding to attack. We started talking about that method to avoid conflict when it looked like Turkey was gonna start WWIII with the Russians in Syria. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I think a lot of people fail to look at the idea of a reduction in maintenance tasks and how much that multiplies when you are talking about a plane with 8 god damned motors to do oil checks and service inspections on much less fix. That translates to either maintaining troop counts to do other tasks, or reducing the Manning requirement without negatively impacting OR rates. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

If you gets up in the 90s playing video games, you almost certainly had to fight that in one of the Ace Combat games… It’s like all the futuristic airplane covers from Popular mechanics had a baby. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I’d venture their job security is far more cemented in the seniority of their Congressional Representative in a given district/State vs anything that actual occurs in the building. Same as it is for guys in ship building. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I can only imagine how fast your marriage ends when you do what he did… “Honey I know you’ve put up with the moves, the single parent birthdays and holidays, packing the house alone because I needed to do the school enroute, the loss of money and self respect because you took your degree and flushed any hope of ever using it, and countless times of reminding our kids that Daddy wants to be here and they are the most important thing even if I can’t be…. And I just want you to know I pissed all that away and have no retirement plan because I wanted to make a bold public statement on social media. Love you sweetie…. What do you mean you’re leaving and never want to see me again? Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

The president has absolute authority on the understood expectation he is acting in the best interest to protect our country and its citizens… that’s what grants him he authority to order a launch under the current law, and while there has been an effort of late to limit the President from First Strike ability under actual law, there is an important and ignored part of the checks and balances on this…. The Presidents cabinet and the people who would chose to say”dude isn’t fit for office, let’s exercise the 25th amendment” are Senate confirmed positions for that exact reason. The expectation is that the senate exercises that oversight to make sure the room isn’t full of some weird death cult bushido type crazy’s who would follow the president down into the bunker to watch it all burn together. That checks and balances process was eroded when the party in power changed cabinet confirmation (along with others like judicial) to a simple majority… in 2013. Gee…. Wonder if the Democrats wanted that decision back after Trump got elected. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

So long as the Congress is democratically aligned with a sitting Dem president no. And I’d argue the same would be true the other way around. Funny I remember all sorts of loud urgency on the need to collapse the expanded Presidential powers once Trump used the act to take out Solemani. Wonder where that emphasis went… Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Found it particular interesting when he threw the military in front of the bus when asked directly, “who authorized closing Bagram prior to the evacuation?” Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

There is no guarantee we can ever call something a “low threat environment.” That’s the problem with the mindset of some sort of nostalgia/sexy in regards to providing some kind of persistent ISR and Fires capes in the unimproved theatre fight, especially when that nostalgia is single engine. It’s like we completely ignore the repeated lessons of history and the inevitable march of ever cheapening and miniaturizing technology. 50 years ago when the first truly portable Gen I MANPADS SA-7 showed up on a battlefield it effectively ended the reign of the held over WWII/Korea designs like Skyraider. Even with as technologically limited as that system was it would eat the envelope they lived in. We didn’t start making weapons like Hellfire and Maverick because we weren’t effectively killing the bad guys with iron bombs and gun pods, we did it because they started knocking us down at alarming rates with things like Gen I IR SAMs and radar directed AAA. So much has been written about the telephone pole vs strike jet/bomber fight and yet we forget a whole lot of the last 2 years of Vietnam in the low slow ugly aircraft fight we ignore a lot of painfully learned lessons. We live in a world where systems with Verba capes or AHEAD capable systems are very real briefed in country threats. Anybody that remembers early ops a few years ago in Syria remembers how a half dozen systems had everybody in theatre going through all sorts of hoops. That problem only gets worse every day going forward as they proliferate. So to all these companies with 80s era fighter pilot retirees selling us something, yeah show me the crazy/sexy P-51 concept… just do it with 6-9000 lbs of bolt on federated/integrated threat protections like some form of IRCM and a buttload of expendables/jammers because that’s the world it lives in today. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Somebody with an ounce of awareness to current and emerging threats needs to make an updated model of these just to point out how ridiculously vulnerable they would be. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/blinken-denies-taliban-holding-americans-hostage-us-struggles/story?id=79872338 Because if the Taliban is known for anything in particular, it’s their ceaseless commitment to accurate record keeping and the administrative process of running a major airport… Could we get a better example of the press pool being unwilling to push against this admin the way they overzealous went after the last one over anything. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Watching the F’d up relationship State and DOD had both during normal ops and then during a HADR was pretty eye opening. It was like watching a bad marriage at the geopolitical level. That was during the Obama era though where it was clear to everybody in the room who of the two was the favored vs adopted child. Of course none of that would happen under Biden… oh wait no we have a 30 year history to draw from with his statements on DOD and opinions of their ability to contribute during policy shaping are well known. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk