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I’ve heard the same

A TXARNG UH-60 involved in Guadalupe River flood rescue operations near Kerrville was forced to make an emergency landing after being struck by a privately operated drone on 7 July 2025. The drone was reportedly flying inside a TFR established to protect SAR aircraft working the catastrophe. The Black Hawk landed safely, but officials said a critical emergency-response asset was removed from service pending inspection and repairs.

So who thinks the Iranians are going to overplay their hand and piss Trump off into another 60-day AUMF bonanza?

Maybe I've got long covid, but who was the president in 2020? If there's one area that you and I will be in violent agreement on, it's that Donald Trump is a fierce critic of globalization and the destruction of American manufacturing. But he's been that way for decades, like a few other largely ignored voices, and it wasn't until a global pandemic erased the narrative surrounding just-in-time inventory that the Chips act was able to grow, let alone pass in 2022. Now, if I'm wrong and the pandemic had nothing to do with it, which is laughable given the numerous auto factory shutdowns during late 2020 and early 2021 that slammed everybody in the face over and over and over with semiconductor supply chains, but even so. The only other explanation is that the phenomenon is wholy and entirely attributable to Donald Trump, The first Republican and really first president of either party to dare to question the gospel of the free market. Personally I think he is a benefactor of timing rather than cunning, but if that's the route you want to go, sure. It is quite cute to hear someone attribute Chips to a democratic administration. If the supply-chain-wrecking pandemic that started before the chips act was drafted can't be responsible, I'm a bit perplexed as to how the Democratic administration that started after the act was drafted is somehow the champion. You can go back and forth on whether or not the Republicans or the Democrats get any credit for passing the thing. The Republicans were for it in isolation, but then the Manchin betrayal happened and everybody on the right went ape shit. It's not like the Republicans get much credit here, they've been shoving their head in the sand about globalization for decades. I'll give you the Russian invasion gaff. I was crossing wires between chips and energy. It's not frustrating, it's just boring. I understand that it's not necessarily some Grand strategy. You are in a vast majority of conservatives here, so there is more that you disagree with than you agree with, and only limited bandwidth to waste here (hopefully), and so you can spend all of your time trying to prove something wrong instead of just saying what you think is right. A contrarian has a contrary point. Not just "that's dumb let's just do all the good stuff without any of the bad stuff happening." I mean... You literally said that The point about harassing you to run for office is to illustrate that you are obviously either hilariously arrogant, which I doubt, or you just haven't considered how many hundreds/thousands of people exactly like you with exactly your ideas have tried and failed to get anywhere near the levers required to "do all the smart stuff ... But don't do all the really stupid parts." I could get that kind of policy prescription from the kids at my daughter's daycare. If it's so easy, why hasn't it happened? And if you know why it hasn't happened, and it's none of the things that I've said, then how do we get it done? I can't remember a single time that you have answered that question or even come remotely close to answering it. Your foreign policy basically boils down to finding a magic wand as far as I can tell. I'm no big fan of the political class, but there are some incredibly intelligent people throughout and none of them have been able to crack the egg. So what's your solution? What's your projection? You called it a straw man to say that you don't think there will be a giant war ever again. So when? Do you believe as time goes on we will be more or less prepared for that war? Do you believe we are more or less prepared than we were 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Is our preparedness for this type of conflict trending upward or downward over time, and do you believe it will continue in that direction? Of the things we need to do to be prepared for that type of war, what should we be doing, and why do you believe we would do it despite the fact that for the last 30 years we have done the exact opposite? A lot of people have put a lot of time into a lot of very insightful posts about what they think is happening, why, and what to do about it. I don't mind explaining my contribution to that conversation, but if it boils down to: you are a utopian and I am a realist, well, like I said, that's just boring. At a certain point any belief system must rely on an element of faith at the foundational level, and when you get all the way down to that level, you've exceeded the capabilities of debate and discourse. Despite my best efforts, I can't seem to find anything from you that isn't just an article of Faith. One of my volunteer gigs at the union was moderating the union message board. We dealt with a lot of the same few dozen people who couldn't pry themselves away from the keyboard, despite it obviously being in their best interests. Every once in awhile one of them would message me in private asking me to ban their access, because they just couldn't let go of the endless battle over nothing, no matter how many times they tried to block themselves or delete their account. They always came back.

When someone dies is usually when changes occur. Usually*. One of the fire bombers from the LA Palisades fire hit a drone on the wing leading edge. Oops said the operator. He plead out, $65K restitution, 150 hrs community service ISO wildfire efforts. In 2011 a Herc (Niagara I think) hit an RQ-7 Shadow, which wikapedia says is 250-450Lbs and 14ft wingspan. Herc landed, Shadow crashed. Not getting into the gritty on who was responsible, just showing the potential damage. *DCA

I found this funny. Go to https://deathbyclawd.com/ and enter Iran. Says the sun's implosion will likely be its cause of death as its been existing for the last 2500 years. Then try Trump, which issued the quote, "A brand so loud it somehow convinced people chaos itself needs a subscription plan." Funny stuff right there. And @Lord Ratner , the liberal minds that quit BODN probably did it due to some of the toxic shitheads lobbing personal attacks upon them. You call it rage quitting, I call it flipping birds, peace, out. Haven't you enjoyed the ping pong match with Negat0ry, giving you purpose to post? You need that liberal like a morning cup of coffee.

The way I see it, this is the best SCOTUS we’ve ever had in modern times…even with the some of the recent disappointing rulings. And the vast majority of 2A rulings have been quite favorable over the last couple decades, so now’s the time because I don’t necessity see the court getting better anytime soon, and more than likely it will get worse. While my money is on a positive ruling, if in the event it goes the other way, we’re no worse off than we’ve been wrt progressive states becoming more tyrannical—they were going to ban guns they don’t like anyway.

Sorry, these are essentially no-brainers; and the SCOTUS should be looking at repealing the NFA and GCA if its worried about Second Amendment violations! The fact the same court rebuffed a series of cases over restrictions on guns for young adults under age 21, declining to hear an issue that’s sharply divided lower courts in recent years doesn't give me much hope!

If anyone isn't already reading the HAF Daily Current Ops Update on SIPRNET on a daily basis, I'd strongly encourage them to do so! There's a link to it on the BaseOps Intellipedia page (yes, BaseOps has an Intellipedia page!), just search for 'Air Force Operations Group'. I just added the direct link to the briefs.

I had no idea I have so thoroughly destroyed you lmao.

Googles: When did the chips act start being drafted? June 2020 When did Russia invade Ukraine February 2022. But sure it was probably Covid.. because everyone’s prime concern during Covid was the microchip supply. Couldn’t possibly be that a democrat admin did a proactive domestic thing in alignment with their foreign policy. We’ve already established it’s impossible for anything smart to happen without first punching oneself in the face. More broadly speaking though, I don’t want you to get frustrated with me. I’m asking genuine questions and soaking in your points and calling out the parts I think are silly. I’m here for a friendly and lively debate and yes enjoy being the contrarian in a den of mostly aligned war hawks. I will give you your ideas have a unique flavor and honesty here and it’s not just the predictable Fox News word vomit. I admit I definitely have never heard the #GETHARD (David Goggins ™️) strategy of foreign policy strength through self-sabotage before. Regardless I look forward to monitoring the situation and debating more with you dudes

Fingers crossed. Then do magazine capacity.

By far the best news I’ve heard come out of DC in a long time… https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-assault-weapons-ban-ar15-a362863265ba8630e71068fe5b75bb8e

Just had to hit this one since it's the funniest part of your post. Was the pandemic not a... global calamity? You think after approximately 30 years of our advanced microchip manufacturing ability declining to zero, it's a coincidence that we suddenly decided we want to make chips in America at the same time a pandemic crushes supply chains and Russia invades Ukraine?

All? I'm just talking to you. You haven't presented one particularly interesting thought in months. If there's a spectrum of intelligent, novel thinking, Clark Griswold is all the way on the right side of the spectrum, and you are fairly close to the far left side. You wonder why nobody responds to you positively, yet you don't seem to realize that the "cheerleaders" on this forum (CH, brabus, Fourfans, viperman, me, etc.) aren't here to beat the other team. We're here to discuss with similarly experienced humans with similarly matching values things that are going on in the world. If our goal was to prove our own intelligence to ourselves by going up against a couple dozen antagonists, we wouldn't be here on a mostly conservative leaning forum of mostly old vets. It's also why guys like negatory and Day man and NS player and 17D Guy end up rage quitting in a huff. They didn't see a bunch of like-minded people discussing issues from different perspectives in the same neighborhood, they saw some sort of den of conservative malignancy and made it their righteous duty to stand on behalf of "the other side." Bottom line, they were here to prove people wrong. Sure, Cleared Hot gets a little Fox Newsish from time to time, and I use big words that Boomer6 has to sound out each syllable to understand, but none of the conservatives come to this site thinking it's time to prove you or the other token liberals wrong. Hell, it's not like you've said anything that you believe that anyone can address, but even if you had, I'm not particularly interested proving you wrong. You say you don't understand my view, and so I explain. I never said you had to agree with me, and like I said you're obviously not at a point yet where you can accept the existence of a philosophy that might disprove your own. I don't mind wasting the time because my daughter is taking a nap and I have nothing to do right now. It would be nice if baseops was what it used to be, a repository forum primarily for military flyers to get information about life and work in the military. But technology evolved and web forums that aren't hyper-specialized hobbyist groups are basically dead, so a few dozen Ghosts of Air Force Past come here to chat amongst themselves, show off their guns, and occasionally respond to one of you guys who seem to have decided that of all the places on the internet you can go to battle with people of the opposite ideology, this is where you'll make your last stand. I mean my God, look at Negatory. The dude is still here with a new username that reminds you every time you look at it that he literally could not pry himself away from fighting with a bunch of online strangers. It's an addiction. 🤷‍♂️

lol so in order to make smart choices we have to intervene in the hard/soft cycle by intentionally making hard times for ourselves 😂 So just to be clear we have to Intentionally be dumb in the near term to make hard times because we’re just such sober realists we’ll never make a smart choice unless absolutely forced. I’m curious, how far can we take this principle.. does it work like the dumber we are now, the harder the times we’ll create, and therefore we’ll emerge from those even harder men? Then what’s stopping us from being as dumb as possible right now? Why not nuke Kharg island, or Tehran? Why not nuke ourselves? If the goal is creating the hardest times possible so we get SUPER HARD (giggity) I can think of a lot of ways we could do that more severe and immediate than some pinpoint strikes on the other side of the world.. You can pretend we’re all naive idealists but this line of thinking is just plain dumb and falls apart when subjected the most basic critical thought. We didn’t need a global calamity to pass the chips act to revamp domestic chip manufacturing. We didn’t need global calamity for Reagan to build up the military and bankrupt the Soviet Union. In your personal life you don’t need to experience calamity to know you need to make smart decisions and plan for the future. Turns out avoiding calamity is actually a really good incentive too. We can and should expect our government to be proactive and do things that make sense without needing to shoot ourselves in the dick first.

This is really the Crux of the whole thing. No, we can't. We hypothetically can do all of those things without doing the things you find illogical, but history and reality suggest otherwise. You still seem to be in the part of your ideological journey where you think societies and the politicians they produce will make hard choices without going through hard times. I do not. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the generation that endured world war II started to lose political power, we started making all the same mistakes that lead towards the conflict I believe to be inevitable. This isn't some wacky theory I came up with on my own. You've heard it before in one of its many various wrappers. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times. Hard times create hard men. Hard men create soft times. Soft times create...

I'm hearing they're looking to retire the -146. I've heard the school house is closed/closing and that they're moving to the Dassault Falcon 900? Not sure how reliable that info is.

… uh what? yes it absolutely does. What is this argument? If you piss away your stockpile which will take years to replace, you are measurably weaker, right now. Can’t believe I have to actually spell this out, but your current inventory and your ability to produce more… both matter. If current inventory was irrelevant how can we maintain a nuclear deterrent even though we haven’t built a new ICBM since 1978 and we haven’t manufactured a new nuke since 1992. We can literally do all of this without needing to bomb Kharg island 😂 idk why common sense national defense/fiscal policy and bombing Kharg island are suddenly and inextricably linked in your mind. And as I’ve said many times before, I don’t know why you do this weird thing where you say “well if you’re so smart why don’t you run for office and fix everything.” We’re debating in a forum. The onus isn’t on either of us to fix the whole world. But if you do want my policy prescription that badly it’s basically: do all the smart stuff you listed in your comment but don’t do all the really stupid parts.

To be clear, this sentence, read fully, says that bombing Kharg Island wouldn't start a war. You might call it: So... Anyways Because it doesn't matter about what you do with the munitions you have right now. All that matters is how many munitions you can continue to produce/source. In a perfect world we wouldn't need these wars and catastrophes to motivate future-oriented behavior. But we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a human world. If it hasn't become abundantly clear that the developed nations of the West will absolutely not maintain their industrial or military capacities, then you simply aren't paying attention. Jesus just look at what they've done to pilot training. And the only way that it could have been done without war/disaster was with international trade policy that incentivized "reshoring" and "friendshoring," But everybody lost their fucking minds when Trump tried to put just a fraction of the tariffs that will be required to get it done. So instead, we're going to use government spending and the inflation tax to end up with the very same effect. To be fair, Trump went about that tariff policy about as stupidly and childishly and erratically as you could possibly imagine, but stupid childish erratic leaders are just a fact of life these days (Gavin Newsom, Ken Paxton, Mandami, MTG, etc). I did not invent the Fourth Turning framework. Ray Dalio calls it the Big Cycle. Niall Ferguson says it already started as Cold War II. Even Jaime Dimon is calling for rearmament. Anyways. After Russian oil and gas was permanently disrupted thanks to the war in Ukraine, the Europeans reclassified nuclear power as green energy after decades of championing decommissioning. They adapt like everyone else, they just do it slowly and they lie through their teeth about the justification. I've said it plenty 🤷‍♂️. Look I wish anything you would do was possible. I'd love to see America stay out of messy wars, increase spending on military readiness, ensure that critical business sectors like drug production, semiconductor manufacturing, and resource mining were domestically stable, control unproductive spending on social programs for the elderly, enforce immigration policy without rioting and chaos, stop spending at deficit levels measured in trillions rather than billions, etc. As I've said before, I can't wait to see your candidacy for public office. We need someone who's smarter than Trump and knows exactly how to fix all this. Please, we need you. But that's not the world we live in. We live in the one where we will destroy ourselves for cheap TVs and the dream of global peace. Removing Iran from the chess board would be a solid enhancement for Team America. And it hasn't escalated yet, despite your suggestions. It has simply dragged-on. It definitely hasn't gone the way the administration hoped (or how I hoped, for that matter), but there's been no escalation.

Only one anecdote, on arrival into DFW maybe a year ago, aircraft ahead of us reported one at about 7000’ MSL and about a mile off his right wing, we both continued arrival to RWY36L, uneventfully. Never saw it. Funny you mention this, I’ve wondered when some idiot, maniac, terrorist, saboteur, etc… was going to fly one into an airliner, or a train, bus, ferry, etc…

Big increase in drone encounters with commercial aviation. On Monday a Jet Blue flight hit a drone on approach to JFK, a helicopter reported one in the area on the same day, and a United Flight reported a near miss (100'). I personally have had two encounters in the last year: 1. About six months ago I was flying from the PCola area down to Boca in my airplane. Passing just north of Tyndall I encountered a medium-sized drone mostly stationary north of the base at about 5000'. A friend was with me and she saw it first. No ADSB and not talking to anyone. I called approach and they did not have it on radar, a plane in trail of me reported it as well. 2. About 8 months ago departed Charleston Exec Runway 9. Approach turned turned me north then west and climbed me through the Class C. Passing 5000' My passenger and I both saw very large drone 1000' below us and clearly inside the Charleston Class C. It clearly had a gimbal payload. I called and they were not tracking it...they clearly got very worked up. Whether it is hobbyist or something more nefarious, there does seem to be an increase and it seems like a easy asymmetric attack vector towards the airline industry. What are you airline folks seeing out there?

IDF about to head into Iran. All part of the plan.

One saved round: Remember that time I said we were heading down the road of irreversible stupid escalations and everyone called me a TDS libtard pussy? Well now here we are talking about how we need to bomb Kharg island so that WW3 starts on our terms 🤷🏻‍♂️ Can’t make this shit up