Lawman

No I dont think you guys get it. The world will keep turning with or without the Hawg. There isnt some celebration every time the AMR cell publishes the CAS/Fires portion of an Op Order with the illation of "oh thank god we got A-10s." Your drinking your own Koolaid if guys under fire would care whether it was a Viper, a 15E, or a Sopwith Camel providing them with Air delivered Fires they just want something. Nobody is ever gonna see a situation where a fixed/rotory wing with guns checks in to a TIC and they say "awww no dude its cool we really need the A-10 to do this job." Maybe its the difference in how Army Aviators come into their jobs and the cultural difference between the service, but 80% of the Aviators in our community are prior enlisted dudes that went Warrant. A good size chunk of those guys (especially in the last decade) are Combat Arms (Infantry/Armor/SF/etc) who have actual experience. So its not hard for me to go talk to them about what they think, 3 of them work in my office. Some of them in my battalion are your biggest critics. We are more concerned that your actually able to have the money to come do coordinated excersices with us rather than have platforms with specific jobs that have never coordinated with each other because the money was used to keep different color horses in the stable.

I'm not saying I condone he idea of genoside to further your means.... But I'm starting to see more and more reasons that its happened in the past.

Good it'll fit right in with LCS, Comanche, Crusader, NLos, etc etc etc...... I'm convinced we didn't give awards to the Super Hornet program because it was so amazing a program, but because everybody else punted it into the bleachers so they were all that's left.

Fast forward 10 years after green lighting the program. Aircraft still not in production, costs 4 times what it was supposed to, was delayed over and over again to add something new, and when we try to kill it the company sues.

German Girls... They expect their husbands to pee sitting down. No shit... Ask around you'll find a guy who picked up a "souvenir" and got house broken afterward. But buying a dirndls for your American wife (mine has 2)... Yeah totally living out the beer maid fantasy.

And it's not thy hard to make a weapons processor, Abrams has the same deal does that somehow make it a less effective tank then the M60 it replaced. If having that kind of stuff is a liability then we wouldn't be the platform with the highest effectiveness rate for aerial fires. But your going beyond intent. I never said the A-10 was a shitty platform, I said it may be time to look at replacing the platform. The flip side to the we must always have this gun that you guys treat like its the Death Star is why are other platforms able to do CAS without it. Why does the Harrier (albeit with a list of other shortcomings in life) or the ATARS Hornet get to be to the Marines superior platforms for CAS in their service. One doesn't have a gun and the other doesn't carry it that often. Are they so inferior that the last 30 years of smart munitions development and sensor fused weapons cant offset some of that disparity? And no my gun isn't the mega death ray either. Grunts point on survivability is exactly mine. The Longbows charge of the light brigade was our wakeup call. We got our asses handed to us in 03 because of the need to validate a doctrine. "Deep attacked worked in 91 against the radar sites it'll work here," and did a piss poor planning and execution of it because it had worked at NTC. People (old warrants) in 1st Cav rallied against doing it, and lost when the old man said go do it despite the protests. And then we sent in the A model battalions which had better results.

Me or them? It's an equation so garbage in garbage out, but there are work arounds that do start dwelling into OPSEC. The laser is just my best range source, not my only one. Hoss, for ######ing Christ dude. Everybody gets replaced. The Sandy guys said exactly what ever hog guy is saying when it was their turn. The 111 guys said it about the mudhen, the 14s said it about the Rhino. The A-10 will someday go to the boneyard, the question posed is are you so irreplaceable either directly or by augmentation to make it worth it to keep you or start that process. If the whole world revolves around a gun nobody else has and the ability to get lower and slower and live in the WEZ of half a dozen systems light years ahead of the Gainful and Shilka that were top of the line when you were built then you'd better have something world beating, not just a different way to skin a cat. Standards, I'm a maneuver platform not CAS, different doctrinal standard. Surgical is the pro word of the day, if I shot the way I've observed you and any other strafing fixed wing did I'd go to jail. When you've got JAG and BSOs trying to fry guys because he had rounds land on the other side of a fence it's infuriating to watch hammer pound away at a compound or see you guys strafe the ###### out of a target area and everything around it.

when your round has a 4m burst radius you don't need 300 of them in a beating zone.

Your gun has a wider dispersion at 1200 meters than mine does at 1700 (12m vs 3x3m mean dispersion). You can pull that off open source. It's math dude.

No I'm saying anything physically bolted to the aircraft datum line starts off inherently less accurate than a system with full range of authority in az/el with a weapons processor that makes those compensations for you. Same reason my gun is more accurate than any of my helo brethren. Cobra doesn't have as expensive a Weapons Processor, and DAP shoots the same gun fixed from 1/6 the distance so they can hit accurately. Tell the truth do your gun scores get that way because your system is better than everybody else or because you spend so much more training working on it. And what I'm saying is if people want to leverage the future of the A-10 off all the good it's done in the last ten years, they need to realize there are dozens of other aircraft capable of doing the same job and there are ideas out there OV-10X/A-29/etc that are better suited to this conflict than even the Hawg. The people who think its gonna be pivotal to have the mud fighting down and dirty monster in the next war that has an actual FLOT though really need to go talk to some people about threat systems out there because that method of employment just got ridiculously more dangerous.

Statistics. I can kill a BMP with a 10 round burst from 1500-1700 meters and expect 5 of those rounds to hit the front glasis. Fixed gun iron sights vs a turret with a weapons processor and constant laser range, it's technology man. I'm more accurate than any of my Rotory wing competition either. I've been to Spangdalem and got the brief on how you shoot.... That line up the symbology buddy marking crap.... I'd go to jail if I did that.

Ok as one of those Apache brethren I'm gonna ring in here. 1. Nothing in our current fight reflects any manner of how we would be employed in a fit against any kind of force with near parity in firepower. We are aerial QRF, and so is CAS in theatre. 2. What does the A-10 drop at all of the other horses in the stable don't. Besides that bitchen gun you got, there isn't a weapon you carry that somebody else can't. 3. All this crap on desert storm and the great impact of whatever platform... That fight was 24 years ago. That fight predates 2S6, SA24, Gauntlet, and a host of other deadly ass shit that will literally bend over and rape any platform out there that gets in its WEZ titanium bathtub or no. Standoff, low observability, lots of expendables (which are getting less and less effective) is gonna be critical when you can buy a weapon with 4 fold better Pk than the weapon systems our aircraft were designed to take on. Observations I've had... I've been in the stack with Hawg... Other than that inaccurate (by our standards) gun they don't bring anything crazy awesome to the fight that couldn't be carried on another aircraft or a low cost idea like have been proposed. Your not there any longer because as the tanker orbits get fewer and firer between your on station time is offset by your slow cycle time in the yo-yo. You don't have a sensor that permits any better vid than the other aircraft (similar to how we have better eyes than the 58s). Will you be missed at Air Shows and by people with a place in their heart, sure. But the same is true of the Tomcat, and the sky didn't fall down when it was retired.

Why don't they start with making leadership stop distributing info via white board and see if that improves anything before they murder an hour of the duty day playing kindergarten.

That's unfortunately my problem. If there was a clear delineation of when you can and can't bring a 30 round mag into state lines e it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately when you read those isolated but very painfully stupid articles about somebody entering a state and suddenly finding themselves facing a felony charges because of interpretation by a prosecutor or the local county sheriff.... I just don't want to be that guy. There will be a date on when I came into state and when my property came with me so it's a bit harder to play stupid/coy about it.

I'd really like to see the damn law overturned though. I pcs there in 4 months and after 3 years not having my guns I don't want to leave the fun ones because of some bullshit 15 round limit.

Yeah that was fun to see in his joint speech with the Swedish PM. "This is all a formality because I want them to agree with me, but ill do it anyway." Great well then ###### it just go ahead and own it.

I'm majoring in Art History/theatre!

god dammit auto correct....

Get every ticket you can online before you get there. London is the busiest tourist city in Europe, and when I went on Earth because of the upcoming Olympics.... They have lines to stand in, to get to buy tickets, and then you get in the main line for the attraction. Madam toussards wax museum for example was a 5 hour wait if you didn't have a ticket, 2 hours if you did. Also the city metro pass will get you everywhere fast. Best subway system I've ever seen in Europe or the states.

I've seen a couple younger enlisted soldiers hemmed up for stuff like that including hosting web shows. Usually it's a result of stupid financial decisions and a trash pair of 19 year olds who don't mind her getting up on the pole/spreading on video. It falls in adultery and conduct unbecoming pretty easily so long as the command wants it too.

CIF on every Army post.... Phone call on DSN Me: hi I'm PCS'ing and need to do a partial turn in... retired E8: we only do turn it's by appointment... Me: great when can I set up an appointment? Passed over for E9 dipshit: we don't take phone appointments... Me: so can I just walk in his afternoon? Fungus feeding of the dead corpse of the military civilian work program: No we are closed in the afternoons now because of manning. Me: so when do I actually come in and make an appointment? Asshat who runs his warehouse hovel like he's king of all the canteen cups: We can't see you without an appointment.... And then the room went black from rage.....

If you are ever in Scotland, find an Innus &Gunn. It is quite easily the most amazing beer I've ever tasted. They age it in old whiskey/rum barrels depending on dark or lite and the weakest beer they make is 6.8%.

I don't know why you need a guy whose job is to be the gym towel boy.... Seriously do you guys not have E2s and such in trouble? Additional duty for infractions in discipline short of ucmj action should be more than enough at any base to cover the stupid shit like putting a dude at the gym for safety reasons or keeping the grass cut at HQ. we have 24 hour gyms down range at nearly every major FOB I've been too, and they are always locally "owned."

Roll Tide?

The couple times I've had somebody suggests we just tie down the fleet instead of going through the trouble of hangering them for forecast winds (typically some new E4) I show them a picture on my phone of a pair of wings still chained down with the middle of the plane missing and tell them to go find somebody with a tug license.