Lawman

I'm guessing he forgot the cardinal rule of "don't talk to the press.... Ever."

The really F'd up thing about it.... While we sit here and tell our own servicemen and congress that such an aircraft has no place in a low intensity insurgency type fight, we are simultaneously sending guys from the 6th SOS to countries in Africa, SA, and Asia. Where we are having them convince those countries they are exactly what they need and not to piss money away on Vipers or Eurofighters to fight guys camping in the jungle with AKs and making IEDs.

Why? It's obviously working out for me. I mean it's not like there are any women or minorities that outrank me or anything..... Such a crock of shit.

I think you missed my point on precision. Yes you sling low CDE weapons, and caveat from a BSO decision making point of view impressions on CDE have more to do with the decision process than reality, like when they took away our Hellfires because unguided rockets had smaller warheads (no kidding).... But you don't do it any kind of significantly better than a dozen platforms also slinging those weapons. Twenty years ago, when pods and FLIR hadn't matured to where it is today, yeah eye ball to eye ball get the Hawgs in here. But with the stuff on line today and stuff like Hellfire/APKWS/DAGR/Etc... It just makes so many aircraft capable of taking over the fight we keep saying the A-10 makes more sense than the F-35 in. And yes the Hawg per flight hour is cheaper than a 35 but that's not the point. Neither one of these aircraft should be sucking money up to what amounts to airborne QRF/fires, it's overkill. Think about what qualifies as "troops in contact" right now. We don't need Hawgs (or my 40 mil Apache for that matter) to respond to 6 MRAPs taking sporadic small arms fire that happened 30 minutes ago. Yes your postured for the Infantry Bn making contact with a hostile Tank Company and needed armor smash right now but that isn't going to happen in these brushfire fights one side keeps using as proof we need to keep the Hawg around because of "efficiency." When you eliminate that huge chunk of the A-10 making more sense argument you are left with the 10 years from now peer/near peer fight. Combine that with we have money/personnel for one or the other not both and the Hawg starts making less and less sense. And we are back to the yes you can get low slow and under the weather but F-35 can do XYZ/high threat/etc that you can't. I think part of the problem is this fight has become F-35 vs A-10 not A-10 vs the rest of the inventory. And both sides are ignoring anything that hurts their argument. For every story of Hawgs getting in somewhere somebody couldn't you can point to stuff like that Buff in Iraq stopping an armored column as CAS with modern sensor fused weapons from the stratosphere or dudes on donkeys calling in bombs of a B1 because that's what they had available. In a lot of ways you guys are having the same fight we are having in the Army with divesting the Scouts and using UAVs and more expensive gunships to fill share the meat of that role. Are there situations where we will miss the 58 for its low cost efficiency and lower MX requirements, yes. Would we rather see a new scout vs no scout, yeah but there isn't any money for that. But to just fly general support recon like is happening right now the shadow is actually very good. And when it comes time to hit people we have it in gunships.

That's the thing, the tactics and the way the game works have changed. In the fight like Afganistan low CDE and precision while building the "pillars of targeting" are the name of the game. Outside the 3-10 mission or immediate TIC against US troops (and only US troops) dropping ordnance just doesn't equate to all the pros the Hawg has that other platforms don't (low level, low speed, massed gun fire etc). In many ways that 30mm much like the 105 on a Spectre or he higher CDE 500lbs bombs just generates too many unknowns to a Battle space owner whose entire world revolves around preventing CDE over killing bad guys. Right now the push in Army Aviation is getting laser guided rockets up and running because even the little 14 lbs warhead on the Hellfire is seen as overkill to a lot of commanders which is ridiculous. In many ways yes the Hawg is more economical to the situation than say an F-35 or a Strike Eagle but really every tool we have over there is overkill right now. For the mass of aircraft we deploy we only truly need a fraction of them for that once and a while situation (chauk valley in 13 for example) but 95% of the time some long legged loitering Reaper or some turboprop with a couple Hellfires/APKWS or the occasional 500lbs bomb would meet the GFC requirements. More importantly it would stop us from putting mileage on all these thoroughbred race horse fighters that we've turned into mules.

Same could be said for pretty much the whole of the West Coast. Oregon and Washington have some breathtaking places to live... Then you meet people from Portland and Seattle that are the embodiment of the left coast stereotype.

Smartest kid in special Ed..... What are we doing as a military when that is the brass ring we are aiming for.

A fun day trip you can take the kids too and drink... Kruzburg monastery down by Wierzburg. It's in a beautiful area up on a hill in the woods. They have great traditional German food and brew a spectacular dark beer. Great place to spend an afternoon relaxing and eating or walking the paths around it.

If your big on the history WWI battlefields are worth a look to, especially up in Belgium.

For skiing... Don't waste your time in Garmisch. Head to Innsbruck or further into Austria. Northern Italy is great too on the Dolomites, but it's a haul. I'd stay out of Switzerland unless you just hit the lotto that place makes expensive Euro countries look like the value menu.

With where you'll be, your closer to the French/Black Forest/Swiss area than anything else. Will you have your own car? Because while trains are great and all they aren't much cheaper than a rental and you won't have near the flexibility. Strasbourg isn't a long drive, good place to blow the day out and see an old stereotypical european city. Your also close to a few old castles. Burg Eltz is cool and about an hour drive. It's a very weird castle being very tall for its size so it looks like a fantasy novel cover vs the old flat wide castles of England. Black Forest this time of year can be beautiful if you head to the areas heavy with waterfalls. As for cities in Germany, the Porsche and Mercedes museums are in Stuttgart and here is the sino sinsiem museum down that way to. Very cool collection of all things technology so 50s cars, old trains, tanks, gets, the Concorde and concordski.

Worse. It will be a retired E-8 who spends the entirety of the class telling your E2/3s not to do something stupid like use a pay day advance to get rims or live pay check to paycheck, or how you can't bank on the money being there later so invest now. Of course they will have perspective having done all of that and more the entirety of their career and being lucky enough to become part of the paycheck of the month club.

When your embedded to support a unit you actually have to be embedded with that unit. Like I said, it tied a vehicle up permanently to provide trans for 4 guys who didn't want to sleep in a hard stand building and shower in a tent. That led to points where aircraft couldn't get parts expeditiously and slowed down operations because we now have 6 up birds instead of 7 etc. Bn commander finally put a stop to the stupidity but it's still a couple weeks of dumb. If you were an ALO you wouldn't tell your parent Brigade "here is my cell number call me with your questions" because your afraid to go to the field would you?

More just saying we all live in glass houses. No service has the market cornered on stupid yet.

I do feel the need to push a few weights on the blue side of the scale before this becomes an all Army bitchfest... So out at gunnery staying in hard stand buildings and tents for the duration of the month... Our weather detachment of some 3 AF NCOs and a Maj decided that they were above staying in the field with the Army Joes. So they drove off the training site (in their own TMP when the battalion had 3 total so 1 for 4 dudes and 2 for the other 400) and found a guesthouse 45 minutes off the reservation because on post quarters weren't available. This led to repeated moments of things like not having a TMP to go grab vital parts to get an aircraft up or take a guy the 3 hours back to home station when his wife went into labor. And the natural anger of seeing a bunch of freshly washed uniform wearing Airmen getting out of their TMP with bags of Taco Bell or Popeyes because they were above sleeping in the "field" with the unit they are embedded with.

I don't want to see us moved out of the Army. Face it there are just too many holes in the dike for one JFACC to plug "fairly." We also perform duties that are specifically organic to the unit being supported (screen/guard, medevac, assault). The ground campaign would be bogged down if every time these units were getting ready to go somewhere they suddenly didn't have medevac because only so many assets available. What's fucked us up is Afghanistan/Iraq doctrine. Our system is set up to work the way it did prior to everybody getting lazy and forgetting there is a reason we are structured the way we are. The over big crutch we need to get off is everybody gets more and everybody is infantry/ground centric. We send Air commission guys to work at ground elements so they can better understand how to support them, but we don't reverse it. You won't meet an infantry Major working in the 3 shop of a CAB to learn why treating aviation like jeeps and tanks is retarded.

I'm one of the few Army Aviation guys lucky enough to have worked in a Joint SOC environment on a broadening assignment, even there you get a lot of he same dumb grunt questions and stupid statements. We had a briefing and the deputy at a certain COCOM sitting next to a certain 4 star commanding that COCOM said "if you release the bomb are we sure it's going to impact the ground......" We were talking about GBU-49s so yeah pretty damn sure gravity still works and short of a worm hole that was going to happen. Also I was the one guy in the theatre that flew helicopters (seriously we checked). The only one..... Had an Army full bird make me look like a liar and one of our partner Generals who took my recommendation to his bosses look like a moron when he talked to the foreign Air Force commander. Apparently he knew more about helicopters from his time as an infantry commander than I did having flown them most of the last decade. I used to tell the AF guys I worked with, being Army to Army doesn't give us some better understanding or anything from the ground dudes. They ask us to do as much stupid infuriating shit as they ask you, the difference is I don't have an ALO to protect me when I tell them they are retarded. It's like we are the same moths, I'm just way closer to the fire.

The G3 pattern rifles they built were terrifying. I saw one while working at a range that was so misaligned in its build you would have though it had been run over by a car. It wouldn't fully cycle so it was almost a bolt action rifle. Absolute garbage, I only hope the guy they owned it stopped shooting it before it grenades on him.

In fairness to the Marines, between the Navy cherry picking Hornets to get non trapped out airframes, and the lack of money at the depot roughly a third of the Marine Hornets are broke or FMC on paper only. I agree getting them E/F models like the Aussies would have been a smart long term move, even if they were only leased for a few years and then handed over to the Navy afterward.

No offense taken. Like I said it's not hat I see things from the Army's side and it's more right it's that I'm often times not insulated from some of the Army's stupidity toward aviation because of the service name on my uniform not being able to hide behind the blue. We can detach some elements, and you see that but the Army's structure is to have the modular BCT and its assigned CAB be their own entity to themselves. No it's not nearly as efficient as the JFACC divvying up his assets to meet the JFCs intent and the JGFCC's needs. However what it does do is leave any BCT fully capable of supporting its self in all contingencies. The other problem as mentioned before is our deployment model. No offense but nobody in the Air Force (yes I checked with friends) is doing 12 in, 12 home, 15 in, 9 home, 12 in, 15 home, 11 in, 11 home, 10 in.... That is no kidding what an aviation battalion did between Iraq and Afghanistan since 05. So we are sending them, but when your units that are rotating in or out only have a handful of them to begin with it looks like a lot more home than are. And keep in mind in order to certify for deployment a BCT and CAB have to demo their METL at NTC which means they would need their full components for that. Surging everybody forward right now would help meet the requests but your never going meet that request if we are being honest here. And we simply cannot maintain that stance permanently even with 48 BCTs and 13 CABs (a fifth of which we are cutting). GFCs don't understand anything about aviation other than its expensive and it is never giving them all of what they want. No different than you hear the stupid argument of "AF doesn't want to do CAS!" When outside the light grey Eagle community there isn't a Wing in the AF that wouldn't be thrilled to strap green iron onto planes and come drop it on steel and bone for us. Best you can do is just try to ignore the louder screams and point to all the successes you've given them.

Don't get me too off target on this. We have some very tactically knowledgable dudes within the communities. What we don't have is a formal school or structure of authority within the unit like your model. The fighter guy I worked with while TDY was surprised but we also have more of a company identity (flight equivalent) vs a battalion (SQD). If you can imagine a squadron giving general guidance and then individual flights acting very independently that's more what you'd see in an Army aviation battalion. My boss is a senior O-3, I barely talk to the O-5 and I'm a mid level senior guy. The big issue is getting it paid for to start a program. When the ground makes all the air decisions the big question on new aviation ideas is always "well why do you need this now?" And saying "because that's the way the Air Force does it" would go over like shitting on the table. Even amongst aviation a lot of guys look down their nose at the Air Force because they don't know any better than rumors and jokes etc. I'm one of the few guys around in the Army in general and Aviation specifically that's worked in a joint billet for the AF.

Shadows/Hunters are different and way the hell cheaper than a Grey Eagle. There are a crap load of those deployed because they are owned down to individual battalions in some cases. The CAB portion of Shadow could happen tomorrow but since we haven't ditched all the 58s it's not needed yet. But as was stated by others this stuff is owned as organic unit property. No different than Unit A isn't going to give Unit B it's trucks and not train/equip while in the rear they aren't going to just move all the UAS platforms into theatre at the loss to garrison units. You can't just strip a BCT and CAB of all their stuff. But yeah until we get all the CABs fully converted to Full Spectrum CAB the couple of Grey Eagles owned by an individual CORPs isn't going to provide anywhere near the number of eyes in the sky that the current environment enjoys/demands. Same as we don't have anywhere near the number of MC-12/U-28 type platforms and even if we did put max forces forward and forget the Garrison guys who are on the patch chart to go back your still going to be on the hook for a lot of commitment. Yeah unless you've been an ALO you really haven't seen the full lengths of the stupidity of ground leadership making air calls. I like to tell people we aren't any better prepared for it, we are just a lot closer to the fire and get burned a lot more.

No, and it's a fight to get anyone to listen to myself and others in the closest thing to a tactics and employment track because for 12 years we haven't done anything but club dudes in man dresses with impunity. Also we have nothing even resembling 3-1 or a vault to study it in so those of us that know about yours cheat and steal it. Definitely nothing platform specific hour we are trying to push out a generic helicopter 3-1 equivalent in the next 3 years. We can barely get aviators into joint fires or any other kinds of course. Occasionally you will hear of a "Master Gunner" course, but that's not an actual tactics class it's how to design gunnery ranges. There is a push to create some kind of a weapons school for TACOPS as well as giving TACOPS (our closest equivalent) some kind of evaluation power but that is being fought tooth and nail by the IP branch because they are the sole holder of the red pen and don't view TACOPS as a real track but can't find a way to fold this into their realm. Really the Army doesn't put enough emphasis in aviation so we don't have the resources to get where we need to be. I've seen exactly 1 secret level pilots briefing ever, and that was on 429 ROE not threats or tactics etc.

Grey Eagle is being restructured as part of the 58 divestment as part of the "Full Spectrum CAB" model. At the moment, no they don't exist in significant numbers nor will they ever exist in the numbers currently enjoyed by GFCs in our current Stability Ops model. When you have currently 3 CABs in all of Afghanistan that would leave you with roughly 20 GEs in the country to support whichever RCs they are set to cover. However as of right now there is only one full spectrum CAB in the Army. That doesn't even begin to cover the, not really being designed for independent units to attach as needed where needed to SOCOM. Gray Eagle and Shadow are going to form a huge part of our recon element since we are losing our air scouts. Basically each of he CABs 2 Apache battalions (24 ship SQD equivalent) will have a company (6-10x UAS) of one or the other dependent if they are Attack or recon. Rather than having 30 Kiowas in a recon regiment and a single heavy attack battalion of Apaches.

We definitely F'd up on Raptor. Especially when we are 10-15 years down this road from today and don't have a fleet of old A models in the desert and an assembly line to rebuild A's as B/C models and fly into 2050. We have an expectation to fly an airplane for 40 years... That works when you build over 2000 of a plane and only fly 800 of them 30 years later. While all true on cost I think part of this problem is grossly magnified due to a lack of comparison between 1. Other 5th gen fighters (because there is only Raptor) 2. The rapid rise in cost of other aircraft who aren't even 5th gen In a lot of ways we are like the dude that shows up to a car dealership after ten years of vehicles increasing in price and wonders why his payment is so much higher than his 2002 accord cost him. Yeah 35 definitely bloomed more in price than we thought it would but when your talking a min of 65-100 million dollars for pretty much any comparable 4.5 gen fighter some of the fire from the omg it's so expensive argument is put out. At this point I don't think we could build even a simple aircraft for cheap. Super Tacano is almost as much now as we paid for Vipers in the 90s and no way in hell do we get as much airplane for our dollar with that comparison. Same would be true for people screaming "let's make A-10 2.0" I can't see us in a world where a turbo prop plane costs 20-30 million making anything with Hawg like capes and modern tech that isn't also a 50+ million dollar plane. At that point even if you hadn't tried to fold harrier/hawg's jobs into the platform and had a 80 mil 5th gen plane your still buying a 50 mil plane to go with it.