Lawman

Thats not the only problem. The bigger issue is we've spent 7 years doing that kind of crap and thanks to the reverse musical chairs that is our enlisted promotion system where we simply have too few people willing to stick around a lot of those problem children now form a good size of our NCO corps.

You should not have to bang a gun into a table repeatedly to get internal parts to line up. There is a difference between strange and just stupid.

Some of his ideas are misplaced. He talks about the inability of he old corps to adapt to the Coin fight. What he doesn't talk about is he generation of "middle managers" we have raised in TOCs around he AO who only operate in an environment of informational saturation and risk aversion via the tactical directive of the week. Think about how many times you've walked into a TOC that looked like a best buy or flown around with a units as small as squads putting up their own UAVs to get eyes on exactly what you described via voice. How many commanders want your rover code the second you check in? Those commanders have no preparation for a real fight. The fight against a peer or near peer force not clubbing seals like we have for the last decade where more thought is put on things like ROE arm chair quarter backing and asking crews to think is engaging the enemy "worth it." Those kinds of officers have found themselves embarrassingly behind the power curve as we switch our training and Eval process back to pre 9-11 focus. So no it's not time to just fire all he old guys. Most of those old guys have good stuff to bang into the heads of all he O3-O4 guys they will be in charge when they leave.

Great shooter but a small nightmare to take down and clean. I just bore snake mine to avoid wanting to grow it through he window trying to put it back together. Weirdest takedown procedure I've ever seen out of a modern handgun.

You think thats crazy, that doesnt even take into account that the majority of the Fleet were originally A models built during the Reagan era that were stripped down and rebuilt as "New" D model birds.

In a lot of ways housing markets get way over inflated by military activity. Example: Enterprise Alabama down by Ft Rucker. I can get the same size house in Colorado Springs for typically 10-20 grand cheaper and not live in the asshole of lower Alabama peanut country. Lots of town homes and other condo type single officer rental construction going on over the last decade. Problem is they cut training class sizes in half and now a lot of rentals are cutting way way down in asking price because of the number of empty units saturating the market. If your thinking of buying a place and depending on other people to pay your mortgage after you PCS I would caution you to look at the local economy in depth. Even wright patt isn't somewhere I'd buy a house just because GM left dayton hanging when they pulled the big plants about 5-6 years ago. Meanwhile an are like Ft Walton is always gonna have a tourism market.

Absolutely. One of the best pieces of mentoring I ever got was a senior Warrant about to retire saying that as much as you love this job it ends. The family you have left at the end of that is what's important.

Currently drinking a McEwans Scotch Ale. It was a replacement for another Scottish ale I was looking for but couldn't find. Very good flavor. Almost has a caramel/malt flavor to it but not in a way that you forget your drinking a beer.

3 CABs on the chopping block.... Fuck yeah let's stand up an aircraft that will require multiple new MOS's not to mention a whole new shitload of infrastructure to support. It'll be operational ready to go in.... Maybe a decade optimistic. If everything goes right we can cut our already overextended Rotory wing assets to the bone so we can fund this boondoggle. This is just dumb every time I hear this rumor/joke out of anybody civ/military/whatever. It's not our job to do CAS. And nobody realizes the monumental shit show it would be to make it our job unless we literally take the entirety of the AF A-10 community and support and just have everybody change uniforms. Even that would be ugly at best.

<br /><br />The fact that the entire rifle is a milled piece of aluminum. Saves weight and keeps strength but that's a lot of waste your paying for left on the floor of the Machine shop.

I was flat told they won't pay for my masters degree. And I'm one of the few Warrants who had a Bachelors when I showed up. What pissed me off about it was being told by a CW5 who sat on he board that me having a bachelors prior to Army service kent the same to him as no Bachelors at all. And I asked... They won't pay for a 2nd more useful non basket weaving bachelors degree either.

Stick it to the man!

Going to the AOR..... For fuck sake just give them beer on Xmas. It'll be cheaper and it will make them less likely to suck start an M9 than watching 15 bad singers grind out a shittier version of Lady GaGa songs.

Army -1 Air Force - 12378

That we are ######ing up if we think replacing a 6 million dollar light scout mission with 40 million dollar E model gunships is gonna somehow be cheaper in the long run. The cost per hour alone don't make any sense. Either way ground force commanders are gonna want iron in the air all day long. If you have to do it with more expensive aircraft it doesn't take a genius to determine what will happen. Edit. Anybody making that comparison for A-10 being axed though remember your talking about using multiple multirole that already exist or are in development picking up a specific mission and putting it into the toolbox. The Apache/Kiowa situation would be more akin to somebody saying hey lets ground the 130s and just use C5s to move all our Cargo.

"We support our nations national interests in ...blah blah blah" Translation "Hey how the hell do you expect me to pay my mortgage if there aren't a half dozen Captains to rent my shitty properties too!"

But there are a lot more levels to war then full up open conflict war. I see what China is doing in japan a lot like what the Soviets did in Cuba. They sense (and probably rightly so) that we have a president who will back down when bullied by the big bet at the poker table and an American people who will do anything to avoid another war. Look at the amount of trouble we went through to avoid being the driving force decision makers behind action in Libya or the back peddling from the Red Lines that ended up not being Red lines in Syria. They see what Kruzchev saw in Kennedy a weak man with no real resolve more concerned in being liked than making hard decisions. Kruzchev was wrong in Kennedy but he was going off of not having the benefit to watch him be pushed into a corner. The Chinese have he luxury of seeing Obama act the opposite way when pressured. They don't think we will call so they are bullying us off the table with the big bet. Problem would be if Japan and them start slinging rocks over the issue are we gonna abandon our Ally and just pack our stuff and go home.

I'm curious as to where they got those numbers. Something about the Pave Hawk costing nearly triple what I've heard the Black Hawk quoted for seems weird. If they are accurate though... How the heck does a Gulfstream cost more per hour than a Viper... Make the Generals buy their own damn Scotch.

You can write that off on your taxes as charity right?.... If there is anything we don't need to be doing in the Army it's showing off our "average" female soldiers....

I don't think Iraq had any interest in fighting a war over Kuwait, but damned if they didn't do it. China wants to take over as the primary regional power in heir back yard, they don't want to have to fight the US or Japan to do it. They are playing the role of bully hoping that nobody on the table will call them on it, but it's not like they are holding a weak hand here. We want to maintain as the Worlds first power which means saying dominant in every region, but we don't want to fight wars to do it either. If we back down though because we are to weary they will push us out of he Pacific or at least make the West Pacific a Chinese Lake.... If neither side is willing to back down on this there will be a fight about it. War is a continuation of politics through other means... This is a perfect example of the opening stages of that scenario.

Ballsy.... Stupid but Ballsy I will give you that.

There would be ways to go about it but the planning to succeed with it would need a lot more vetting then just giving over the keys and the mission. The Army does have a lot in the way of organic support ability as far as setting up FARPs or providing guns to support when required. But I agree I would hate to see the mission just get folded into the standard CAB METL. Way to easy for assets to find themselves retasked, kinda why we maintain a specific medevac element so they don't get used to haul ass and trash around in the "off time." It would have to be treated as a separate entity to the theatre commander, not OPCON to some CAB commander whose first thought is his divisional support requirement and everything outside of that is extra. It would need to almost be its own entity within the JSOC/160th side of Army Aviation.

See you say that but... https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-strike-fighter If they are bailing on it they are a bit late. The new Defense Secretary reversed his predecessors decision to go with C models. And I've read that article, the same guy is calling for Raptors to the Marines which don't fit the plan anywhere.

Except your way further down the road on this than Comanche was. When they killed he RAH-66 it had flown less than 500 hours in testing, less then 100 of that with it's intended engines. It wasn't even a production version yet just a concept demonstrator and prototype like the X-35. The Army said screw this we will tank it and build a cheaper replacement, that option isn't available for the 35B because there is no cheaper replacement. If we were talking about the A or C model well heck yeah we just leverage the money to silent Eagle or more Raptors and Rhinos... Options to choose from. The JSF is now 10k hours in, into low rate production, conducting weapons and other full rate tests. The time to kill it was a decade ago if that was the plan. But either way he point of the F-35B getting a Harrier replacement still needs to be funded. And you have to pay off the Brits and any other partners for their participation in the program. Somewhere he money to buy 350 4th or better gen aircraft to replace Harrier and pay off partners has to come out of that program. So any savings by canceling the program is gone.

Semantics. 58 was an OH because that's what the naming convention at the time was using for the role. No different the he U-2 and SR-71 are both spy planes. Or the F-117 not having any fighter capability. We were calling the last 58 replacement the ARH-70. Doesn't make it a gunship. The Comanche for all it's glory was a ridiculous example of a program running away from the intent with a lot of "hey you wanna add his too?" Good idea varies running amuck too long. Meanwhile after 12 billion we had 2 aircraft to show for it whose gun didn't work without melting, couldn't fit the versions of the Hellfire we wanted, and had a lot of systems (radios etc) that didn't exist yet. All while replacing the smallest community of Helicopters in the Army and eating 60% of the Aviation budget...