Pooter

@nsplayr I’ve seen the plans as well and I will tell you at least as they pertain to my community and our readiness, the assumptions going into those plans are pipedreams. China is a peer. Not near peer. A near peer doesn’t debut weapons you don’t have and then you scramble to catch up. I like the attempt to use WW2 lore to justify yet another foreign boondoggle but this is not Germany or Japan. This is a country the same size as us. With a far larger population, and a far larger industrial base, who is already out producing us. And we will be fighting in their back yard. We have another thread on this site about how we can’t train new pilots properly or field a single engine trainer aircraft in a reasonable timeframe. If we can’t do those things I think we need to have a real look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we actually can fight WW3 on the opposite side of the world, on our enemy’s turf. We don’t have to fully abandon Taiwan and we can funnel weapons to them to make the invasion as difficult as possible. But if China really wants it we aren’t stopping them and the faster we realize that the faster we can stop wasting money a hypothetical WW3 we’ll either lose quickly or never fight to begin with.

I don't know if it's turning our backs as much as recognizing these realities: a. it isn't our fight b. even if you can do the mental gymnastics to say it is our fight, we can't project power enough to have a reasonable chance of success c. China gets to decide when it starts, and you can bet they won't pick a time convenient for us d. The longer China waits, the more their production of combat assets outstrips our own. Taking all these into account I don't see how anyone could come to any conclusion other than: China is going to wait until a time that is advantageous to them, and with their military's trajectory plotted against ours, eventually they will have amassed overwhelming force. So we get to decide do we want to fight a losing battle or not fight at all. My point is, why sink more money and resources into a boondoggle that's debatably already out of our control and trending worse?

Not to mention all the civilians we hired to alleviate additional duties now all being offered paid separation.. and their positions will not be able to be backfilled. I'm sure that will be a boon for morale. But I will say, I think we can find some room in the budget if we can be honest with ourselves about our biggest, dumbest, and most expensive mission: the collective delusion that we would actually fight WW3 against China over control of Taiwan.

The VR and pilot training next stuff wasn't originally a problem in and of itself. If you added VR sims to the legacy UPT syllabus us old hats are familiar with, you would end up with a better product. Full stop. I'm all for trying to modernize sims/chairflying and I'm all for auditing the syllabus to make sure we aren't wasting time on things that don't matter operationally, like fingertip takeoffs and landings or serially hooking kids on ELPs. The problem arose when the brass started using the VR and PTN/UPT 2.5 syllabus cuts to mask the fact that they can't generate aircraft. That's when all the newfangled VR and syllabi basically became a trojan horse to cut hours while keeping slides green.

Caveat up front: there are good/bad/disciplined/undisciplined pilots in every community and this is not geared toward any individual. But I'm gonna be the asshole here. In my experience, the army rotary wing community ranges anywhere from lackadaisical to outright dangerous WRT instrument procedures, airspace and traffic awareness, and flight discipline. I've witnessed a 5-ship Army Apache mission brief take place in the lobby of the San Angelo FBO that was basically: "Alright dudes, we're gonna take off, head east, 200A, everybody fall in. Questions?" "Sick. Step complete." I've been in control of a T-6 pattern full of solo students and had to send them all breakpoint straight through (half of them didn't even know what to do) because we had a 4 ship of army black hawks blast perpendicular through our pattern while talking to precisely no one on the radio. The second I saw the news out of DCA my first reaction was "goddammit some army rw clowns got everyone killed." Then I felt bad for jumping to conclusions and not waiting for the report. But after a few weeks, each new piece of data points right back to them and I'm back to being pissed. Why were they off altitude? Why are they dicking around at night in the approach corridor of a major airport? Why are they not on VHF? Why was this even an approved routing for them in the first place? Why were 28 different agencies permitted to fly helos in close proximity to DCA? These were not one-off, swiss-cheese-holes-aligning, mistakes. This was business as usual, proven by the fact there had been multiple near misses at DCA in the recent past including a helo-caused airliner go-around the day before. Obviously an airspace/procedure re-design is warranted, but I think we need to take a look at community-wide culture that was comfortable operating like this in the first place. @busdriver said it best that these procedures are "no-step stupid." The problem with that is if you've been raised in a community of hot dogging and "we'll do it live" you're probably not equipped to make a good risk assessment.

I have zero issues whatsoever with the army response. There wouldn't have been the need for the Army to withhold the name to give the family time for damage control if Trump hadn't painted them into a corner with his completely out of line comments. Everyone else is still trying to get the facts straight and pull bodies out of the Potomac, and we have the leader of the free world talking out of his ass in the least possible productive way during a crisis. DEI is toxic, but even more toxic than that is blaming a crash on DEI less than 24 hours from the accident when you have zero facts to support it.

The O-6's I interact will fully agree all this uniform revamp BS is dumb and a waste of time.. behind closed doors. They just can't publicly say that, so they have to fall back on the tired "get the basics right" refrain

I think it's actually really simple. The GOs see that the air force is falling apart and they know real solutions will be painful and risky to their career advancement/political ambitions. So they focus on things they can easily control like uniform nonsense, and pretend that's the "real" root cause of our issues. Same thing happens in politics. Can't solve any of our real problems.. just do some dumb shit that makes it look like you're addressing problems, like re-naming Fort Bragg or the Gulf of Mexico

Heard recently that the parts contract for T-6's is so f-ed right now that a small fraction of the fleet is flyable. Can any UPT bubbas confirm?

I literally said people are in hysterics online.. it would be ridiculous to expect there not to be. But I couldn’t give two shits what some blue haired gender studies major posts on IG about the election being their own personal 9-11, because there will always be people like that on all sides, and ultimately they have no power in the national conversation. The people who actually do have the power on the left sent an important message: accept the results, and we aren’t going to tear the country apart over an outcome we don’t like. Did they only concede because the results were so definitive? Maybe. Did they only concede because they’re starting to realize they burned all their credibility? Also maybe. But I don’t think we would’ve gotten the same reaction from Trump/Vance had they lost, and I think they primed their die hard supporters to dismiss any election result other than a win as fraudulent. Understandable as that sentiment may be, after decades of democrat fuckery, that attitude is a truly dangerous one for the long term viability of the country.

I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with how the dems have taken this absolute ass whooping. Lots of hysterics online and on the talk shows, but the people that mattered respected the process, conceded in a timely fashion, and honestly did a lot to de-escalate and re-instill trust in our election process right now. Honestly I’m really thankful for this outcome because I’m positive a trump loss would not have garnered the same reaction from republicans, and it would have gotten very bad. The left has shown a shocking amount of maturity and done something I think most of the maga crowd is incapable of right now: accepting election results that didn’t go their way. Having said that.. I’m fully prepared to be proven wrong by the dems as soon as they regroup enough to concoct the next grand conspiracy about the right, probably involving them all somehow being nazis.

I absolutely think the conditions at the time could have drawn tens of millions of extra voters to the polls. -Covid was the first thing for a lot of people where government policy directly impacted them. -how many rioters were there? Idk like tens to hundreds of thousands in every major US city.. seemed like a lot of people to me when it was happening Trump jumped 11-12 million votes from 2016 to 2020 which was a huge anomaly as well. I’d be a lot more suspicious if one side had insane turnout while the other remained basically the same. But both parties had a massive jump in 2020 which tells me something really big in the zeitgeist was happening at the time. … Or somebody faked 1/6th of all of the votes to the tune of 30 million ballots, did it for both sides for some reason, and we still don’t have a single shred of evidence of the largest voter fraud conspiracy in American history.

If you look further back Kamala’s turnout numbers aren’t the anomaly, they’re a reversion to the mean. Hillary got 65M in 2016 and kamala got 68M this year. This just shows how much of an anomaly 2020 was. With the George Floyd riots and covid bringing out tons of low propensity voters and TDS at its peak, 2020 was always going to be a record year for Dems. 20M is a crazy number but it just shows how insane the country was at that point. Everything felt like it was on a knifes edge

I don’t think the B-1s were ever doing SEAD/DEAD in the traditional sense, but if you’ve got 24x 31’s, and you’re going in the MEZ anyway, and a few of them aren’t spoken for, whats a few extra bombs between us friends

problem is he isn’t going to undo shit because he isn’t going to win. 60-70% of voters thought kamala won the debate and trump is only trending more petty and more unhinged. He also doesn’t have coherent policy stances other than: “Weren’t things great in 2016-2019!!” and “if I was in office that never would have happened” Cool dude, Both true. But how are you gonna deal with the problems we have now.