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Definitely agree! But you know as well as I we aren't going to do that.

Getting back to what we have… VC-25B was selected for 4-engine redundancy, it was a program requirement for systems and survivability reasons. Electrical generation is a part of the requirement as well. As such that narrows the program down to some variation of the 747, or the A380 or Il-96 and obviously those two aren’t happening. The two aircraft in the process of conversion right now, are both used airframes that were leased to a Russian airline (Transaero?) briefly, but I’m not sure if they ever took delivery/saw service beyond storage at VCV or MZJ. Make whatever jokes you want about Boeing, or the absolute shit state of the DoD acquisitions process (turn DoGE loose there, geez), but there’s a reason that conversion takes a very long time and Boeing is losing substantial money since it was negotiated as a fixed-price contract…not that I feel sorry for them. It’ll be ready when it’s ready, and it’ll be interesting to see how Sierra Nevada fares with converting their acquired second-hand 747-8i airframes as the E-4B replacements as they have similar EMP shielding/power generation/communications requirements. So getting to this Qatari FreeCee-25…yes it’s another low-time 747-8i, this one a BBJ from the outset rather than a conversion, but other than luxurious interior appointments it lacks much of what makes up a VC-25, converted properly to US Head of State requirements it will take just as long as the other two already purchased. So even if it indeed is ‘free’ there’s substantial cost still involved, and oh btw you do need two of them operationally so other than being a third airframe for use, having just one really doesn’t help. Yes the 742s are very long in the tooth, there’s a reason the replacement process has been in motion for like 10 years now (and the E-4 program now as well), but this is just further appeals to impatience and vanity and ego for the gold toilet guy. Or it’s yet another red herring.

Any update on the -135/-46? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oct 7 eliminated the possibility of the two state solution for the next 35 years. The odd part is that was about how long the Israelis kept offering it to the refusal of Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leadership. At this point, you’ve demonstrated for greater than a half century your inability to govern yourselves, so now the offer is assimilate or die in your open air prison. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Speaking of beef. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/05/14/entertainment/takeaways-cassie-diddy-combs-trial Pee Diddy.

So there I was: One of my last TDYs was to a small range for gun training. The last night of the trip, we cleared the range and checked in with the range controller. As a helo, we were typically below radar so the controller relied heavily on our position reports for SA. We were all fatigued from flying multiple sorties that day and night. During the process of setting up the first gun pattern, one of my gunners noticed the targets were moving (they weren't supposed to be). Turns out they were cattle. Due to my shitty navigation, I turned down the wrong split in the river and we had accidentally flown to some dude's ranch. We almost slaughtered a few cattle behind some poor unknowingly rancher's home. Not a moose but there would have been plenty of beef. Helicopters baby!

JRT at SVN back in the 80s. Pave Low landing in a farmers field for a piss break and stealing watermelons.

Shed hunting from a helo - I’m in! As long as @Biff_T is flying and approves a 30 rack in the back.

Well, you see, uh, the Israelis had a blockade, so, uh, all that money *had* to be spent on building terrorist tunnel networks that civilians weren't allowed to use for shelter, and, uh, lavish penthouses in Qatar. Because it's like if you and your neighbor had dogs, and... The extent to which people will go to draw equivalence between any two groups of people is astounding. But seeing this new wave of neoconservatism embrace moral relativism is fascinating... I understand it from the socialists, everything is about power hierarchies and their entire philosophy requires people to have no agency or moral worth. But if the Palestinians and the Israelis are on some sort of equal moral footing, or even more hilariously, if the Israelis are somehow *more* responsible for the bloodshed than the monsters holding the machete and gleefully raping a woman before she dies, why concern ourselves with right and wrong at all, ever? Sure, if you took a Palestinian baby and raised it in an Israeli household, that baby would almost certainly grow up with no hatred of the Jews and a western Outlook on freedom, morality, individual agency. Now, aside from the fact that that premise *supports* the strategy of occupation and forced relocation, what does it matter? People don't exist as individuals, they exist as part of social communities. And social communities have unique characteristics that make some better than others. For example, since the enlightenment the West has had a historically unique appreciation for individual sovereignty and rule of law. That makes our culture *better* than say, a group of cannibals living on the Amazon. Or for example, a society motivated to rape and slaughter their neighbors based solely off of religious history and guidance from their political and spiritual leaders. It's perfectly reasonable to suggest the US shouldn't be involved in the Palestinian conflict. But to suggest equivalence is bananas. It's like saying we are no better than the Taliban. Somehow this entire twisted philosophy requires accepting that any mistake by the West justifies any response by our adversaries.

Whoops!! 3 Montana National Guardsmen Charged in Elk Antler Trespassing Case Via Helicopter "McMullen, the landowner, confirmed a conversation with a high-level National Guard official had taken place." "A lieutenant colonel said..." 🤣🤣🤣

Duke City standard. Family probably made some bullshit excuse. From local news: “The sheriff’s office says the boys are OK. They’re getting therapy, family services and juvenile probation. Their parents are also getting therapy and legal representation.” 🫣 Theres a very good reason the area around the base is known as “the war zone” and ABQ has a Shot Spotter network like we had on FOB’s in Iraq and AFG…

The Palestinians voted for Hamas in 2006 - they can blame themselves for their shit sandwich.

“Deputies had been called to the boy’s house 50 times.” If there ever was enough data to get CPS involved, it was somewhere less than the 50th time.

There’s also an assumption here that he’s spent some huge amount of time on this topic. I doubt he’s spent much time at all on it, and therefore all these statements of “he has bigger things to spend time on” are just pissing into the wind. I don’t think it’s realistic to think he personally has spent shitloads of time at a desk solely devising plans and then executing them himself. That’s not how it works.

It wouldn’t need SecDef energy if his predecessors hadn’t wasted time on it.

Anyone starting IPT in Aug in Mesa, AZ?

What happened to the billions of dollars poured into Gaza the last few decades? That place should be thriving..... oh wait

Reminder: You get what you pay for!

Tit for tat? 😂🤣 Bro you have no idea what you're talking about. Just another Westerner with no concept of how other cultures think. Ironically, this is the same misinterpretation of Islamic fundamentalism that brought us the forever-wars you seem to be (incorrectly) comparing this to. If only the Palestinians weren't under a blockade, there'd be peace! Thanks for the chuckle.

You need senior talent to have "senior talent impacts."

Thank you for the productive disagreement. I agree that Hamas hasn’t done a single thing in good faith ever but I would argue those actions aren’t in a vacuum and Israel hasn’t behaved in a productive manner toward Gaza/Hamas either. It’s really easy to point to how radicalized Hamas is but the nuance comes from coming to terms with the conditions those people have been subjected to that contributed to their radicalization. Also AIPAC is just an objectively very powerful lobbying group. I don’t think it’s invoking some grand anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to say that US and Israel interests are not always aligned and AIPAC more often than not lobbies for the Israeli interest.

See this analogy fails because it does what tons of Israel fans do by assuming Oct 7th is the first and only important event to consider when thinking about this conflict. A more apt analogy here is as follows: You’ve been neighbors for 70 years. You’ve been trading tit for tat dog attacks for that entire time. You have blockaded your neighbor’s house and won’t let him go to the grocery store, receive mail, or otherwise interact with the outside world. You randomly encroach on his property claiming portions of his yard as your own. THEN his dogs get out and kill your kid. So you go kill his dogs, his wife, his kids, him, burn down his house, and burn down every surrounding house in a 2 mile radius.

Guys I think the only logical solution here is to forcibly displace these people from their claimed ancestral and religious homeland and then re-settle them into like-minded Muslim countries. Definitely won’t result in fertile ground for more terrorist cells surrounding Israel on all sides. If I’ve learned anything from 20 years of terror wars it’s that it super easy peasy to squash Islamic fundamentalism and imposing our will on them never blows up in our face. Guess we just really have to make a middle eastern Monaco in Gaza. It’s literally the only logical thing to do 🤷🏻‍♂️

The Generals and Admirals are the cheapest C-Suite operatives of any company in America. Bar none. Secretary Hegseth has no idea the mistake he’s making. This policy is going to have senior talent impacts for decades.