Lawman

Keep in mind the Marines never wanted a 5th Gen Harrier replacement. Harrier was supposed to be replaced by a 4.5 gen program similar to what the Navy did with the Super Hornet but got told to play with the other kids on JSF. And moose don't get stuck on 6 as a hard number. The whole point of a MEU is its modular and small footprint. There have been incidents in the past where the Marines have taken more Harriers and less Cobra etc to get lore legged CAS because the Cobra off the boat is severely limited with where the boat stages from if there is a surface to surface threat.

If you can get it in under 4 lbs I'd be very interested in a parts list. I wouldn't want to subject it to the wear and tear of beating the hell out of it daily on a deployment but it would make a good rifle for light use like driving around a ranch on a Polaris or something.

You didn't mention what your looking to bring this rifle in at fighting weight. You trying to build a speed rig for 3 gun or just an exercise in "what can I build?"

Put it at Wright Patt next to the F-22 that twerked it's self out of service doing the low pass.

I'm not sayin it doesn't make sense, I'm saying all the guard has been doing is fighting this every step of the way and getting their Congressional and Senatorial leadership neck deep into the issue to hijack and hold it off as much as possible (sound familiar?). I went to flight school with a few guard Apache guys and all they have on their Facebook status is sign this petition or Gob'ment trying to take away states right to defend ourselves, etc. The restructure has actually been hampered to crap by this with another round of studies ordered every year or reducing the rate of conversion so it saves no money and they can argue against it. Never mind that the Kiowa is going going gone... I imagine you would see exactly this if not worse if the Active side of the Air Force were to go "Alright hand over all the 15s/16s/10s etc... Your getting 130s, tankers, and UAS."

Bro we are having this exact argument in the Army over why the Guard won't give up its Apaches and take Hawks instead to support state missions and we can maintain the active duty fleets readiness requirements. Don't open this can of worms. It'll make the A-10 retirement fight look pale by comparison.

It's funny you show a picture of the Combat Air Tractor. It amazed me how hard the Phil's were sticking their fingers in their ears to ignore that aircraft while simultaneously copy/paste'ing the requirements for their new turbo prop light CAS aircraft program straight from the Super Tacano's sales brochure.

In other news, CPT Everding to be fired out of a cannon into a brick wall from close range today. A Justice Dept. spokesman was quoted as saying, "F it, I don't even know where to begin on rehabilitating these kinds of people."

Yeah that's the catch 22 with all this that pisses me off. Hours and hours of having it beaten into you that a woman who even looks at alcohol is not culpable for any of her decisions and therefor is not responsible for her actions or capable of consent. But a man who gets drunk... Well he is fully responsible for his actions or misinterpretation that somehow occurred 24 hours after the fact when she decided she was raped. You don't get to have it both ways people. Predators are predators, but stop acting like two young people getting drunk and making a series of bad decisions that leads to sex is anything on the same level as forcible rape.

It's a niche of usefulness that's slowly growing out of control. Here is the problem. To be a useful gunner my front seater needs to be using the sensor on the aircraft and communicating the picture he sees to the Lead aircraft. If I'm lead and AMC I need my tads, plus my wing on TADS and I'm talking to the ground force as well (who is pulling our feeds). If I want to use a UAV I can only see one or the other, I can't do both UAV and TADS. So I'm basically trying to figure out which eye I want to look through I'm not so much building more SA as changing perspective. Boeing wen through the trouble of showing this one particularly perfect usage where you can mass fires in this 1/100000 scenario but that's all it was, something for somebody cashing checks to metaphorically jerk off too. As far as flying it, yeah low threat no problem just send it somewhere and I can look back there when needed but it's a sensor on call for me. It has preprogrammed waypoints and patterns so I can make it do certain stuff. But the ground station stays in the loop so really they can do the same thing and just tell me and I can grab there picture when I want it. High threat... We aren't sending UAVs (and hopefully not helos either) as we will get them shot down with the training level and systems we have at hand.

Many of the same arguments on expeditionary and austere airfields are what is being made for the A-10. The fact if the matter is doctrinally the Marines must have a fixed wing CAS plane dedicated to them due to their lack of Armor/Arty much the same as the Army brigade needs it's own organic rotary wing because it cannot rely on favorable apportionment to accomplish it's day to day mission. What should have happened is the 4.5 Gen Harrier replacement program shouldn't have been shoehorned into the ATX/JAST programs to replace Viper and Hornet. Then you wouldn't have near the headaches from either services needs.

Do we really want to give Lockheed another pass here.... "I've heard this song before... It was playing the last time I got fucked."

Man.... FA-50 looks creepily like a Viper, this has definite Eagle traits.... Are we really designing anything new or just letting a graphic designer play with it to fool us into buying the same planes at higher prices.

This Japan building its own airplane from the ground up is just to far at the extreme of what their indigenous Aviation industry is capable of supporting. When your only building 80 planes for an Air Force and not 1800 like Lockheed the R&D costs just cannot be offset without massive foreign sales to pick up the program cost. Same reason the Challenger II tank is such a failure compared to the Leo II series. One is only Army the relatively small Army in one country, the other is outfitting half the countries in Europe. I will give the Japanese one thing though, production from the ground up may be way to much a pill to swallow but their modifications to programs we built that they produce under license are amazing. The UH-60 they have was 10-15 years ahead of what we were flying in the Army at the same time. Again though given the size of the fleet they have to outfit that's far easier to keep moving forward.

We have only very recently started learning that lesson. Army and Marine Helicopter development programs have been a long list of terrible failures with a few notable decent jobs that look like unbelievable successes by comparison. That's why we are still 3 years behind the D model with the E model Apache. Somebody was smart enough to say "no we are not making Comanche II out of this, we work with what we have right now."

I'm curious with this whole "how long will it last" rabbit hole. Anybody talked to any engineers on the feasibility of upgrades and how far or many they would limit out at. I know that was the Navy's big problem with the legacy Hornets, they were literally out of places to put boxes and electricity to power them even if they did. Theoretically F-35D/E/etc could happen but won't need to for decades with lot upgrades and architecture built wi the current standards. I wonder what kind of hell in acquisitions it would be to have Boeing make an A-10D 7 years from now so they could stay in the fight.

Yeah it's probably one of those asinine things that you can't believe are allowed.... Like services not using a perfectly good uniform pattern because one group "patented" it with their logo and then sued the Navy for trying to use a logo-less version.

Hard to gauge numbers like that when FMS programs detail specific levels of assistance in training and supply/logistics with dollar values attached based on a case by case basis. The only accurate true "fly away" cost with no added money in the program is DCS and that's not really reflective of how we buy a plane either.

It's had a lot of issues. For one when the Army bought it they pulled the ECS system out because Pilots don't need A/C.... Then they started frying avionics. Second the aircraft has an incredibly weak tail rotor when compared to other similar class helos. It works fine down in a good chunk of the states but in a scenario like say Mountain altitude SAR in Colorado it gets into loss of tail rotor effectiveness very easily. The French actually stopped flying them for a while because of this. It's only really starting to pay off now and break even with the investment provided it's job as a trainer goes off well. Still the cost per flight hour is going to be significantly higher than a 67 just on the grounds of keeping and feeding two motors. But yeah by comparison of other helo programs like ARH-70, the Marine Y/Z Huey program, and Comanche (our 12 billion dollar pile of shame) it looks like a model of success.

There are two students and one IP in pretty much every TH-67 that flies that day. Everything except Apache is also carrying three dudes. That was the big flub replacing Flat Iron Huey's with Lakota. There was the idea that if you responded to a crash and had 3 ambulatory patients you would get to pick 2. The fuzzy logic of justification being that Flat Iron spends 99% of its time being a taxi for broken airplane crews instead of actually doing Medevac.

The Comanche money was repurposed into the F model Chinook and M model Black Hawk and speeding up the retirement/rebuild of A model Apaches. Lakota was its own terrible program entirely. To buy an off the shelf non deployable aircraft to replace both UH-1 and 58 A/Cs in service and to give the states a more economical helicopter to do SAR/Medevac over the Hawk. But once we got a hold of it we ran it in the most ass way possible... And now it's becoming our primary trainer as we retire the 67 fleet.

Agreed. He/She wouldn't be allowed to compete in the Olympics because that wouldn't be "fair," but to call that out in the military and say women need to be at the same physical standard as men your a sexist.

It does look fun, but ammo is going to be a bear. Belted ammo isn't something people just keep in stock, and while yes you can use AR mags, unless they changed the design from the mil model it will eat the mags you use for it. Plus a 249 on magazine feed is just a jam happy monster from my experiences with them.

I'm guessing you've never seen Iron Eagle III? It was the villan's plane.

I don't think we want to start sending our Airmen into harms way in a plane that can be shot down by a P-38....