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Anyone who was paying attention always knew AFFORGEN was simply a force presentation model to be sustained in competition only; in crisis - all bets are off. Y’all keep acting like Trump just started this war out of the blue. We have been in conflict with Iran since 1979 with more Americans having died indirectly from Iranian actions than from any other country. Not to mention the impact to global commerce through not just the SoH but through the Red Sea and the funding of Houthis. We just finally had an administration willing to do something about it. This escalation was bound to happen at some point. We can debate the timing of said escalation but this is far from “Trump’s war”. Now I agree that we may have missed and opportunity and I wish we had finished the job when we had them on their heels early April; too early to call it a shit deal when we don’t even have a deal yet. We can reassess after the 60 day mark. Yes our military is sadly smaller than in the 1990s; blame generations of shitty leaders and politicians who ignored the clear need to modernize and recapitalize our military.

Everyone has to retire at some point. Guy was a 4-star general with 34 years..where the fuck was he supposed to go from here? COCOM, CSA, or Chairman. Also it’s been well known for some time that USAREUR is downgrading to 3 star command similar to USAFE. Not everything has to be some major conspiracy. Dude probably didn’t see a path forward and decided it was time to hang it up.

Parts of the building DID need to be turned upside down. Firing caustic people like Slife and Cat-5 were among the good things, but bro went off his rocker with a Stalinistic purge of anyone who he thinks doesn't conform. That being said, previous administrations were not exactly angels when it came to promotions and pushing certain groups. The shenanigans with the promotion lists for women and minorities are completely unsat and if you scroll some of my others comments you will find I've already pointed that out. I think his damage goes far beyond the purge, the Anthropic deal is unreal.

If our president wasn't obsessed with using the stock market as his favorite indicator of his administration's success, we could end the Iranian problem forever. Just a few sorties to Kharg Island and it won't matter anymore. We keep trying to avoid a global economic catastrophe that is unavoidable, but the longer we push it off, the weaker our allies become through their own suicidal policies.

I think this is more a consequence of lining the halls with Yes Men. Anyone in the Pentagon who said bad idea and backed it with facts, was either ignored, sidelined, or fired. After 1/few of that, the rest just shut up.

My guess is no.

I’d be interested in Russian reactions to this. Nuclear weapons right on the border was a topic that almost caused war between the USSR and the US. Granted, Russia’s ability to project power has been severely diminished after Ukraine but short of them collapsing that won’t always be the case.

Guess you got your wish? Note, not serious on this one. It's just one of the most popular posts I saw when readying M2's newest one. GEN Donahue sounded like an awesome leader. Damn shame.

This kind of touches on where my thoughts are at the moment. I'm curious if the European coalition can stick together. There will be differing national interests and alignments (eastern nations vs western nations, coastal nations vs more land locked, etc) as well as demographic problems. I'm curious if one nation starts down the domestic nuclear program path, does that result in others following suite? Is Russia enough of a boogey man to keep them all focusing in one direction?

Normally I would but that lady is a weird type of fat. She looks like a meatball on toothpicks.

Maybe I’m old fashioned or just naive on the wonders of AI, but the side getting strategic wins here is the one with the massive TBM stockpile and control over a critical global trade route, while the side with all the fancy AI tools is getting humiliated on the global stage. Although.. a slightly smarter version of grok could’ve advised us this war of choice was a shit idea to begin with, in which case I’m all for embracing our robot overlords

The country that gets to AGI first, wins the military game.

Vance

@Biff_T This is where you chime in and say “Save the fat one for me”. 🤮

Short of a dropping nukes or a full ground invasion, I think this conflict has proven we don’t have the firepower needed for Iran to capitulate. It’s not about what the public will or won’t support, because we already proved we’ll go ahead and launch a super unpopular war. I’m talking about the real world limits of our military power. This might be a tough pill to swallow but we had 3x the fighter squadrons we do now when we took down the far smaller country of Iraq in 1990. And in desert storm, airpower was paired with a ground invasion. The notion that we can ramp up to some previously unseen level of air power just isn’t reality. Almost the entire tanker community is deployed already and run ragged with crew rest waivers. We redirected more carriers to the region than at any point in the last 30 years and one of the CSG’s retasked for this thing just completed the longest carrier deployment since WW2. Idk if you guys follow the meme pages but one of the running jokes right now is that big blue basically took the entire AFFORGEN model and threw it in the trash when this kicked off. They just said fuck it and deployed everybody. Now folks are tired and ready to be done with it. There’s no world where we turn this back up to early March levels of strikes, let alone exceed that intensity. We shot our shot, and it didn’t work. And now we’re taking a crap deal to get out of a crap situation. I think this is a super valuable lesson to learn after Venezuela folding like an house of cards got us high on our own supply. If we’re serious about deterring China we need to learn the actual lesson here: we aren’t all powerful anymore. If you want to sustain operations against a determined opponent, you need volume, and a deep bench. We’ve become insanely good at lighting people up night 1 with all the shiniest most expensive toys. But we’ve become terrible at sustaining that pressure over time.

I had T-41 training at the Valdosta airport prior to T-37s and 38s at Moody. I remember my T-41 instructor as a young guy, probably no college, wanted to go on to the airlines. He was a competent teacher and had the patience to put up with my fumbling around. Nice guy. I hope he found his dream. For what the T-41 program was intended for back then, he did a good job.

Found this link showing changes to USAF pilot training over the years. Might be of interest. https://www.aetc.af.mil/Portals/88/Documents/history/AFD-070130-081.pdf?ver=2016-01-12-160015-923

I’d certainly offer it to boom operators. They talk on the radio, learn approach plates, and are already trusted to not carve their initials into 5th gen paint. I’d rather have instuctor boom E-5 — E-8s become warrant CFIs than civie CFIs teach LTs how to fly. If that’s a choice I’d ever have to make.

Unbelievable!

That made me laugh. I recall a 1980s USAF program that put new UPT grads into ANG/AFR units as a first assignment because there were no slots in active duty units. So we put an impressionable 2Lt into a unit of folks who essentially were people who wanted out of active duty for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so much. What could go wrong with that?!

The shit show continues... Top Army General Who Was Last U.S. Soldier to Leave Afghanistan is Suddenly Leaving His Post WASHINGTON — The Army’s commander of its forces in Europe and Africa — who was famously the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan in 2021 — is unexpectedly stepping down from his post after just 18 months in the job, the Army confirmed late Tuesday. GEN Christopher Donahue, commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command, will relinquish his command on July 2, according to an Army statement provided to The Associated Press. He is the latest in a line of nearly two dozen top military leaders to either retire or depart their jobs early under the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has undertaken an effort to thin the ranks of the military’s top brass with the mantra “less generals, more GIs”... More at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/army-general-christopher-donahue-unexpectedly-leaving-post-rcna351524 Other reporting indicates this is a forced departure as directed by Hegseth. Sure, there are a lot of potbellied GOs that need to transition to lucrative consulting gigs, but this guy seems to have a lot of gas left in the tank and it makes me wonder if Hegseth is now targeting generals that can do more push-ups than he can! If anyone has other insights, I'm sure we'd all like to hear them. Speaking of which, remember how the purges ended up going for Stalin?!?

Where do these prior-rated E's come from? Certainly not the USAF. Army helos maybe?

@brabus Thank you so much for this link. I am reading it right now. I have been meaning to give AOPA a call, and maybe I can try to do that on a business day this week. But regardless, I am 99% sure I will have to answer yes to 18v, if nothing else, due to the fact that my driver's license was suspended for 30 days for a driving offense committed when I was 14 years old, even though it involved zero alcohol nor drugs (part 3 of 18v says "even if it involves no alcohol or drugs") I was under the impression that 1: I should NOT immediately first fill out a MedXPress; But I should instead first do a paid initial consultation with AME(s) before I do anything (I have never yet met an AME in-person, nor had a phone call, nor paid any AME(s)). I spoke to one AME office that told me that is not allowed but everybody else says that the office was wrong and full of baloney and that with my crazy set of drama, I should pursue a paid consultation without a MedXPress, to do a game plan. Unsure if the conventional wisdom is to do this with a normal AME, senior AME, and/or HIMS AME I was under the impression that not approaching it via HIMS from the get-go could result in a denial and/or deferral that would make it more expensive in the long run. I was told that a denial can be very expensive to appeal and make your life more difficult. Regardless, I was told that not approaching it correctly, sometimes they say "okay you filled out your MedXPress, you have sixty more days to submit all these documents, and if you don't have your application complete and ready and fully submitted by day sixty, you automatically get a denial". Again, thank you so much

At IPT now… If the goal is quantity, sure. If the goal is quality, there’s a lot to be desired. I’ll leave it at that in a public forum.