Lawman

Right and in all these years people were screaming to get into the 2 piece when both were available down range. They weren’t trying to get out of a 2 piece back into the bag. Like I said the morons that want the bag have never worn it in a service run by not pilots. Unless you like the idea of changing uniforms to go to lunch at the main post PX because we treat bags like we treat tankers coveralls... not allowed out in public. (Real policy that existed on Fort Hood at one point) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They hell they do. The people that want the 1 piece back have never tried to take a crap in one during an FTX. 2 piece DCU is still regarded by anybody that wore it the gold standard of flight suits the Army has had. The current OCP is right behind it except for some reason you cannot wear it for more than 2 months of regular use without the crotch blowing out. Now the unit patch.... (worn right side chest above nametape like a squadron patch) that is something those of us that had it would kill to bring back. That went away about 2013 when they decided the flight suit designed to look like a regular duty uniform that isn’t allowed to be used as a regular duty uniform needed to look more like a regular duty uniform.... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Biggest danger is selling ourselves on the belief that a capability exists in this arena that cannot match the paper. The Army leadership wholesale believes that the Apache/Shadow manned-unmanned team is a concept working in practice. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shadows are basically kept and fed by an aviation unit so their operators are more proficiently focused on aviation duties, but they are separate and not equal to the rest of the aviation in the Brigade. We drag them to field problems and gunnery and put together canned scenarios where they “lase” for us but it’s all bull. Deployed, hey are cast off as independent task forces to ground unit X to be used in the same “these are my toys for my never ending TOC porn” way they always have. Meanwhile we’re writing doctrine and war gaming like the cool promo videos of drones being piloted by Apache front seaters to smash the armored advance is a real thing. We have wholesale bought into our own PR campaign. Makes you wonder who those promo videos the manufacturer makes are really for. We know congress is gonna keep buying crap if it’s in their district. Seems we just need the generals to believe that stuff works. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

MD has a few hours in the E model. He was talking about it on another forum. @MD care to answer up? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oh I’ve seen the YouTube videos of the fixed forward 50 cal on Pavehawks. Beating zones the size of a damn football field. Strafing is sexy.... but it’s also dumb in a world of small precision standoff. We are not a bunch of P-47s trying to shoot up the Nazi trains to prep for D-day with nothing but a bunch of 30/50 cal to rely on. Yeah the AH-6’s do it, but there is a reason. They have to ride in on the hip of the assault force dumping rounds into a hot X LZ. Plus they’ve got the silhouette of a Volkswagen Beatle. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This might be a crazy idea.... but maybe stop committing to weapon systems that to properly employ puts you well within the WEZ of every ground based unguided weapon system you can expect to encounter. Seriously... what is it with people thinking getting into an 50 cal vs Dshk/ZPU knife fight is fun. It’s suicidal the second the other guy has any actual training or the number of systems necessary to set up barrage/curtain fire. You’re basically hoping it’s just another dumbass in a man dress who tries to use short burst aimed fire at a 250 knot aircraft. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Great so which Super Power is going to take care of our national defense while we redirect all our money. Seriously how people in our military with more than a 1st person view of how pitiful some of our allies are at their own defense can say “yeah let’s do that” astounds me. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It’s also not for everybody like it’s being sold over here. By 13 you know if you’re going to college or trade school in places like Germany. If you’re family has the money you can opt out and buy an education but the vast majority are told where and what they will be doing. This “you can go to college and the government will pay for it just like in Europe” is nothing more than fancy dressing for an impossibility. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You will learn to embrace socialism.... either on your own or under/after the re-education. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Well you guys kinda own that left over taste for F’ing away what was going to be a 99% SOCOM asset with Spartan. The Army Sherpa/intra theatre transport replacement was going to spend most of its life moving stuff and people for SOCOM. Nobody has forgotten that bad deal on the green side. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It didn’t “repeal” the estate tax. It moved the number which hasn’t changed in decades to reflect the inflated dollar amount of a given value of fortune. It’s also not permanent and expires in 2025 moving back to the old Obama and previous era rate. You can stop acting like this law only effects the Rockefeller’s/Gates/Bezos types of the country whose children will simply live in perpetuity of a fortune like the aristocracy of Versailles. A few million dollars (where the exemption ends) is not a fortune to a lot of independent entrepreneurs. They shouldn’t have their family punished for being successful after taking the risk to make the gains in the first place. But hey “they didn’t build that or anything” or pay taxes on it the whole damn time they made that fortune. F me is there anything some people hate more than success and fortune borne independently of the government. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’d love to see a medium category turboprop like the Dash 7 expound into this role. It could cover a whole lot of gaps between UAS/Gunship/Fixed wing manned in a single package that would be cheap enough to buy more than some low 2 digit number (like Gunships) and be limited by sustainable tails forward. Plus it does something else similar to the C-146 Wolfhounds, not brightly advertise what it is and what it’s doing there. Let’s face it, a small tandem seat turboprop with a pod and F’ing shark teeth isn’t fooling anybody when we aren’t trying to advertise our presence for whatever reason. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If the Ospreys are going that far to get to the X, there is no necessity to base the Light Attack with them. I can potentially outrange the light attack options with a 47/60 thanks to air refuel that they have in the special mission community same as I can outrange the C-12s/U-28s or UAS if launched from the same point.... launch from somewhere else. The more austere capable the better like I said way back earlier. but for that mission I’m gonna have far more assets committed than just the lift and the attack/CAS. So that one problem isn’t the end of the world either. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Every day in college you could find no shortages of idiots advocating Marxist principles handing out some flyer in the student union of my campus... You could not find KKK or Skin heads or any other far extremist idiots doing the same at any point in time. There is an acceptance by the left and academia of what they label “post modernists” which are nothing more than wolves in sheeps clothing advocating for the same stupidity that killed hundreds of millions of people across the 20th century and across swaths of geographic/religious/racial boundaries. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Look I don’t want this to become an issue of shouting over each other because the feel it became personally insulting. Thats not my chosen intent to say “this guy is dumb here’s my internet pecker blargh!” My point was, and this is based off a feeling I’m probably the most intimately familiar person in this discussion with that airspace, there is no clean way out of that airspace and there is little/no unpopulated place for him to have exercised his stupidity. ATC was trying to find the tastiest part of a chit sandwich. Ketron has little/nothing on it mostly due to population vs ferry availability to serve it. Even flying the least dangerous heading he’s gonna go cruising over the most densely populated area of the pacific north west. And say they could have gotten him out over Olympic National park (or even west to the Sanderson field area) would we let him come back? Should we? What do we owe this guy who places whatever/whoever he is near at risk had ATC talked him away from the ledge and he said “alright I want to try and land.” The Cold risk calculation would seem to say that is a horribly dangerous scenario to allow for the sake of some kind of self imposed morality of action. A phrase that came up over and over in the 9/11 commission should come to mind on this. “A failure of imagination....” that phrase was all over because exactly as you said and I agree we don’t have a host of examples of this kind of event to tailor our choices and train to. This one occurred, and like it or not it highlighted a real vulnerability in our response bottom to top with all participants not just the air intercept part of this event. I’m in absolute agreement with the poster above me that the time of the highest immediate danger and the most capable response to stop it was proactively before he pushed the throttles forward and took off. Absolutely let’s have somebody look at this event with a bunch of imaginative figures and say “what could we change to prevent this without committing to crazy overreaction.” I get what you guys are saying that you being a tool of application is a bad deal at best (the whole sledgehammer vs fly analogy) but if that’s the case then I hope and pray that is the message being fed back to the other parties AAR’ing this event because the idea that “everything is copacetic on our end,” is ignoring the real host of possible outcomes. There seems to be a deliberate attempt to make this a match between the hindsight capable best outcome of what did happen vs the worst case outcome of if you had engaged the end result is just terrible. You’re admittedly in a kind of damned either way position but if you could present as you said the scenario where now all the other possible outcomes that didn’t happen on the table and if the even had resulted in this guy hitting a school in Lacey, do you think we’d be arguing with so much resistance to the idea of at least trying to bring him down vs waiting to see where he did it himself?

If the argument is there is some kind of necessary civil insert of the order to shoot/kill a US citizen, that’s kinda drawing a bit of a false standard. Put this guy in a car trying to breach an ECP on any military base or federal property and we’re gonna shoot him first. We did our due diligence of warning in that case with the big signs and civil authority is already granted. Arguably ATC could transmit the same kinds of warnings if we even viewed that as necessary when a risk is presented. Like I said if this discussion is (and should) in this case be about the standard of ROE than this instance should highlight the vulnerability we have due to time/transmit and speed of reaction of the existing kill chain. If authority/decision making is so far removed it eliminates the timely ability of the guy with the most SA (the interceptor) to effectively prevent or act in prevention than do we continue to operate that way. We asked a similar set of questions after 9/11 for good reason because we had been operating under the mindset that our posture at the time which included unarmed alert aircraft and a posture looking mostly outward was good enough. We changed because of the lesson learned and a re-evaluation. Look I’m not saying I’m unhappy with the results of this particular instance. Fool kills himself and luckily the only cost was a crappy regional turboprop and some disruption to local air traffic. That’s a bargain, but again this should raise attention from those in the room of what could have been and whether our current use of force posture is where we should keep it as far as accepted risk.

And the terribly unfortunate nature of that game is had this gone ugly (dude lands on a preschool or something) or the next time something similar happens it wouldn’t be “they” who have to go in front of the public outcry afterward and say “we acted accordingly.” It’ll be the guys who should be empowered who are left to hold the bag. This whole event should be pushing up the volume on a lot of conversations like ROE/TTPs for the mil side, mental health availability and others the more civil side. Unfortunately because the body count on this was so low it’s mostly just meme fuel. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

For all of Mitch’s faults (and there are plenty), I’m actually really happy to see him maintain the high road on calls from the peanut gallery and Trump to go simple majority in order to “get stuff done.” Doubtful that others would do the same. Especially not after that giant public gavel walk a few years ago with Nancy and pals. It would be retribution plain and simple to which I’d say vendetta is never a sound political policy of discourse. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

What did the original poster I was responding to say, “an unpopulated area.” That is the height of ignorance on exactly what this A-hole was doing and where he was doing it. Again, some of you don’t have familiarity with that area and that’s fine, but stop pretending this guy just being an unqualified aviator in a multi ton airplane wasn’t a risk to a lot of people much less a demonstrated negligent threat while doing aileron rolls over them. Change the venue to something like DC and I’ll bet the conversation on willingness to engage with lethal force isn’t going to have the same threshold/trigger of hostile intent as you guys are calling acceptable in this instance. Why? Because government buildings or individuals are more important? Because of a lasting memory/scar from the last time? His means to do harm doesn’t change in that case, and neither does his actions short of getting on the radio and saying “the hell with Trump” or “Aloha Snackbar.” His intent wouldn’t have mattered in that case, only the possibility of risk he presented. We’re talking about ROE ahead of time acknowledged. And just like every ROE discussion a threshold of pre-accepted risk will always exist just like it does in combat. Some here though seem to want to play with the idea that no real risk existed in this case which is nonsense. Again, we got lucky. Because as you have stated at no point was he at the Threshold that existed the day of the event. If we’re gonna continue to accept that risk fine, but don’t sit here and pretend that our system effectively created the outcome of this scenario being as clean as it was or that there is no value in addressing whether that risk level is the one we want to continue with from here on out. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

See this goes back to my original point, the personal side of it was more to address people who see to have an unfamiliarity with the area. People hear “Washington” or JBLM and think it’s all pine trees and crap. We Got Lucky. That’s the whole point here. Same is if he’d been doing this around NYC/Jersey and put it into the water instead of any of the areas around it. None of the actions of either ATC or the Intercepting eagles really directly contributed to this outcome not taking more lives than his own. They were there and they were monitoring/communicating and had other options available, but there was no real direct threat stance or effort to keep this guy away from all those he was putting at risk. That’s the we got lucky part. Some are so insistently saying the outcome was the process working as it’s supposed to. We could have changed no actions and left it to random chance and he could have hit one of the few houses on Ketron or decided to go one way when he initiated instead of the other and put it down on Tacoma Narrows or Stielacoom, or any of a half dozen other places he was over at the time. The outcome would change (total killed) despite all the correct actions by ATC and the interceptors and people would not be insisting we didn’t get lucky unless they were trying to say “at least he hit a lone house and not the concert venue nearby.”

How many BBQs have you been too in backyards that could look up and see this guy conduct his fuckery? How many of you have spent any time in this airspace at any given altitude, much less where he was where you can look down and see kids playing from where he “posted up.” im just curious, because I have been in some of the yards where he was doing this. DuPont is bacially off post housing for JBLM. It sits next to the Island (which is populated though barely) that he managed to slam it into. You could swim too it if so desired. You’re never going to get a better scenario than lone dude in airplane unless it is an intentional terrorist attack. Again, when he’s flying and talking... hey let’s work the guy down though god knows how that would have gone. When he starts putting that aircraft in what would be a semi controlled condition for somebody that knew what they were doing let alone an F’ing mechanic who stole the keys to it, yeah it’s time to stop playing with this A-hole.

The fact that simply 30 seconds additional time traveling in any direction between his first attempt at a “successful” barrel roll and his second puts him overtop literally any populated area in that region. We got lucky he hit water, because for where he was that’s literally the least likely thing he could have landed on. Outside the JBLM impact area and the little bit of low density you get in the Nisqually reservation area, that places is packed with people and houses. What other kind of thing would he have to have done to demonstrate a clear and ever present threat. If “Allah Akbar” would raise the hairs as it would many for good reason, this guys actions definitely should.

There is 1 direction, About a 300 that this guy could go from where he was toward a non populated area from where he started going off reservation. He didn’t turn that way. Never at any point in the ATC discussion is there any attempt to turn the lunatic making loops and rolls over a major metro area to get him headed that way. They were still steering him to the airfields at JBLM. As I said, when this guy went from “holy crap I stole a plane... now what” to “Ya’ll watch this!” The risk to the public changed entirely. If that wouldn’t force hands to say, yeah take him over the sound before he removes that option from us, then what the hell is the point of even intercepting him with live ordnance on them in the first place. He was in the only place where you could pump two 120s into him and not drop him on a house when he was auditioning for the Thunderbirds 800 feet over some of my friends houses. The second that happen the discussion should have been over. Because the next time he decided to roll it inverted and “see what happens” could have been over any of a dozen cities/suburbs all within short distance of where he abandoned normalcy and demonstrated a threat to the public at large. He escalated the threat beyond rational through his actions in the air, not simply because if were gonna run an intercept might as well run it “sexy.” If we need to change methodology on tactics during the intercept to minimize the time in the kill chain so you can take a fleeting chance like this one (him being over the sound instead of anywhere else) like we would with a similar situation over say Manhattan or something, than war game that and figure it out. It’s not like every chance for this to occur is gonna be lucky enough to happen somewhere over the Arizona desert or desolate stretch of Montana or something. As I and others said.... we got very Lucky he killed himself without taking some poor innocent with his dumb ass.

The guy crashed into Ketron Island. It’s the outer report point for departure out of Gray Army Airfield to the North. If moved a little over a mile south he would have come down in the middle of North Fort JBLM, which is filled with barracks. A mile another direction, Anderson Island. Half a mile or so East and he’s coming down in the middle of Washington University in Tacoma. That area he decided to have an impromptu airshow, that’s the stretch between the Nisqually outflow into the sound (Lacey) and Point Defiance (Tacoma). You go up to 35 seconds in just about any direction from where he was overwater at 100 knots over that thin stretch of water and you’re over houses. He was fine up to a point, and then he was needlessly endangering any of tens of thousands of people. The first “hey look what I can do” should have been it. This wasn’t a guy tooling around while ATC deconflicts traffic needing to be talked down anymore after that. And I’ll caveat this too for the sake of not ever getting full picture. If the Eagles were getting ready with the wheels turning to roll on this guy and we just aren’t advertising it since the outcome made it moot hey cool, I get that. But if this is somehow a “good outcome” for any other reason to us than dumb luck I think we really need to rethink what our expectations of good outcome are and publicly state them, because trough Grace of really luck alone we didn’t have this guy kill a bunch of people in his quest to end it spectacularly. And remember even if he hadn’t been doing his best Bob Hoover impressions, he was also running out of fuel without a lot of water to stay over while he did it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Take a look at how they are backtracking form the reports of the 93 million dollar parade. Mattis comes off the top rope to say “whoever sourced that is smoking something,” and now nothing about the parade in the media. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk