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My favorite exchange, helped shape my UPT dream sheet. 🥃

Wonderful response to Kaep seen on Twitter, replying to that brilliant tweet from him - "Relax Colin, Iran ain't signin you either"

Hooking up with the LPA? I mean she looks kinda hott in a MILF sorta way. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

https://www.foxnews.com/sports/soleimani-colin-kaepernick-us-terrorist-attacks-black-brown-people "There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism," Kaepernick tweeted. Now that the NFL has "moved on" from him, maybe he can get back in to the books that he never really did during college. Iran: guess what, Colin? That country is made up of people that are ethnically Persians. You want to put them in to a "racial" context? How about "Caucasians for 800, Alex" ? Farsi: the language of these Persian people. It's an Indo-European language from the same linguistic family as... you guessed it... English. p.s. Nike, I'm still not buying any of your shit. Nor will I ever.

Aside from hooking up with the LPA while lying about it, security violations, a complete lack of tactical knowledge while holding SEFE quals, consistently ranting and screaming at people during her OG meetings. those were just the thing I can 100% confirm as her leadership protected her Combo is the CC the AF deserves at this point

You know, war doesn’t have to mean regime change. Destroying all their shit, making them look inept to their own people, and walking away could effect a lot of internal change.

I just assumed that he got fired for the UEI report that said CBM had the worst FDU wear seen to date.....

What ever happened to the CSAFs "do what make sense" directive?

This! Did a quick peak at the Tyndall and Shaw AFB O-6 bios and they all had pretty much the same amount of hours. I'm sure there are plenty with more hours. I also have plenty of buddies that would say most of their "combat" time was spent boring holes in the skies over Iraq/Afghanistan, just waiting for something to happen. I would say that this would characterize about 3/4 of my combat time. Not defending any of these CCs as I don't know any of them, but Muscle is right...sortie count would be a much better indication. Circa 2013, we had a LTC retire that spent ~25 years straight flying the Viper. 12ish years AD, a few years in a Guard FTU squadron and the remaining years in a standard Guard fighter squadron. He hit 3,000 hours on his fini flight and despite numerous trips to the sandbox volunteering with other squadrons...he never once had the opportunity to employ a weapon on a combat mission. Way back when, a few months after he PCS'd to Luke, his former squadron flew off to WW Desert Storm. Never trade luck for skill.

"Kaepernick's agent did not immediately respond to Fox News' request." I bet. How do you respond to stupid by your client? (Don't answer that). Colin is now in his own little world, perhaps without the ability to play again, and now a confirmed fool. Nike - great choice of spokesperson. //end rant

Got it, so status quo. So long as they have a functioning economy and hate America, this'll never end and they will continue to export violence.

Danger is right; I know some great leaders who, due to poor luck and timing, have a lot of fighter time and no combat time. It is not a reflection on them as pilots or bros, but rather AFPC not syncing them up with deploying squadrons...life isn’t fair. As far as Combo, well she’s avoided Q3s because wing/cc wouldn’t let the SEFE give her one. And then she became a SEFE...zero cred.

Your link looks like it goes to the new guy. Look like he is likely almost out of MLOA...better find a replacement quick!

(Scooter turns off Matlock, picks up iPhone, yells at kids to get off his lawn...) Well, it has been a long time, hasn’t it? IIRC...and my time was only OSW, I never got to do ONW, but I think it was the same: It all depended on where you flew. Tankers and ISR got combat support sorties because we were further back and qualified for Aerial Achievement Medals based on a 20 sortie count. The OCA/DCA/SEAD guys patrolled in areas that should have rated combat time and thus should qualified for Air Medals. Does that help? Any other old guys correct me if I’m wrong.

2 They will likely try an asymmetric attack so before that we should give them and asymmetric show of force demonstration. Basically all the oil they export goes thru Kharg Island and they have other critical points we can apply pressure to if needed. Right at 12.1 NM off Kharg, drop 500+ bombs from a mixed formation of B-2s, BUFFs and BONEs with a 30 ship of fighters generated and just waiting to be cut loose. Not waremongering but saber rattling for right reasons, if you retaliate against us in a way that can not be accepted (i.e. you kill our civilians or other non-combatants or have your proxies commit an act of terrorism against such targets) we will cripple that which funds your government and is the vast majority of your economy. That is the price, no apologies, no dithering, no discussion and no hesitation. We will destroy your oil exporting capability via stand off weapons and we will close the Strait of Hormuz, if others complain about it (left leaning nations of Europe, Asia, etc...) fine, you're own your own for other defense matters (collective security, deterrence, support, etc). Sometimes super powers just have to get shit done. Like or not, a COA was taken that has got us here, strength and resolve is the only way to get all players on an off ramp to lowered tensions. My unsolicited advice, give them an opportunity to save face and destroy another RPA to embarrass the Great Satan but use back channels to let them know we will destroy everything we can of value to their petroleum exporting capability.

Copy. Almost zero combat credibility. I don't want to paint with a broad brush, but those types always seem to not get it.

Acquisitions for the government is done by those inexperienced/ineffective individuals that remain behind while all the experienced and effective dudes/dudettes leave to work for LM, Boeing, etc.

confirmed.

Well, at the end of an 8-10 hr sortie, having an extra grand or two of gas after droning at endurance for 4 of those hrs may actually be worth something and I am not talking about $$$. More offload capability is never a bad thing. Winglets can save 4-6%. When you are burning 100k+ over an 8 hr sortie, it adds up. This is a tanker. Don't we want max offload capability? This is an organization who chose to pay to remove thrust reverses to save a few thousand pounds. This is an organization who chose to remove 4 parachutes from the KC-135's to "save weight". Yeah, I am sure there were some $ and manpower savings not having to maintain parachutes anymore in a jet we'd 99.9% never need or get a chance to use them in, but I think winglets would have made sense. We just don't know how to make deals with defense contractors anymore. https://www.stripes.com/news/winglets-could-save-air-force-millions-on-fuel-1.69425 This article focuses on money savings, but putting winglets on a tanker shouldn't be about saving money. It should be about max offload capability, even if it is only an extra couple of grand in the tanks at the end. I can't tell you how many *very recent* times I have chosen to go below bingo because our receivers got strung out, zig-zagging across the AOR after getting retasked to support multiple TIC's and we followed to support. It was either that or they were going to have to bingo out. With less tails in the air it becomes the only option at times.

Same reason the Air Force took the thrust reversers off of it. They basically don't learn from their mistakes from the KC-135R. They did a study on winglets for the KC-135 decades ago and although there were significant savings during cruise, the Air Force felt it wasn't worth the cost of upgrading 450+ aircraft. Hindsight is 20/20 though and I'd be willing to bet that it would have been very, very worth it at this point.

Uh, not quite. The Sunni portion, maybe, but that's only 1/3rd of the population. You're seeing the vocal minority reaction, not a consensus. I'm surprised it hasn't already occurred and maybe time will temper emotions so that it doesn't, but I'd guess the most likely outcome is the Shiite dominated Iraqi parliament votes to expel us with prodding behind the scenes from the Iranians. At that point we have no legal justification to operate within their borders and the international community won't take kindly to [the inevitable] periodic violations of their territory for our military/intelligence operations. That's when the Iranians move in to fill the void (to a greater degree than they already have after being invited to assist in pushing ISIS back) and transform Iraq in to the same kind of proxy that they've established elsewhere in the region. The Sunnis will be backed into a corner, and insurgency will persist indefinitely along with the increased Iranian influence. This is all assuming that the Iranians play it cool and have more foresight than we seem to have. No guarantee of that. If they go for a spectacular response then this changes and maybe we just embroil ourselves in another 20 years of nation building in the region. But I'm sure our administration considered these possibilities when they chose to strike and has a solid plan to prevent them...I'm sure of it.

I won’t argue that the Iranians didn’t have this coming. They absolutely did. But this was an escalation that may have started (escalated?) yet another open ended conflict in the Middle East. Are we prepared for that? What’s the end game here? I really hope this was part of a well thought out plan that ends with the minimum amount of force/blood/treasure required to accomplish American goals in the region. I fear that in reality this was a rash reaction that will lead to further US entrenchment in the region with no clear idea of what a “victory” actually looks like. Incidentally, isn’t that exactly the sort of conflict that the administration says we should be pulling out of?

At some point you have to escalate. The drone being shot down, the tankers being hijacked, the embassy being stormed... not to include the blood list of service members killed at the hands of Iran-based proxies. The question is whether this is the right escalation. Side note, this really puts a wrench in Iraqi-US relations, but that was coming when they were working with the group that ended up attacking the embassy (allegedly).

While I agree with the general sentiment...they did attack our embassy. I appreciate an armed response compared to what happened in Benghazi.

That's the problem-it's an logistics enterprise issue, not an airlift issue. You can solve the airlift issue relatively easily (it'll take work, but it's solvable). This only solves the tactical problem. The real (operational) problem is how to move and stage people/units/equipment/fuel/etc for airlift/movement.

In other news... KC-135's continue to get $hit done 'round the world...60+ years strong.

He was my Sq/CC at Fairchild and Manas. He made a copilot, who just had testicular cancer, talk about it in front of the squadron. He ordered a copilot in from his two weeks time off after a deployment with his family to have a formal promotion ceremony to Captain. It pissed Rat off that the guy was super pissed at him for coming in to have a promotion ceremony. Later on the guy was supposed to assume alpha alert early in the morning. The night prior he felt sorta ill, but thought he’d feel better in the morning. He woke up and felt worse, went to the flight doc and went DNIF. Rhatigan was so mad at him, he gave him an LOC/LOR for dereliction of duty since he thought the guy was trying to get out of alert duty (which was a god send to do, since you were away from the squadron and Rat). The guy is in the Guard now last I heard. I personally flew with Rat on a deployment sortie when he was my deployed Sq/CC. Since we had three pilots on board, I took my copilot back to the boom pod and let him refuel A-10’s and F-16’s all day. I felt bad for him since the cruise out to the AOR meant Rat was GKing him on all of the various Soviet era airfields between Manas and Bagram. If Rat’s reading this, he was pretty good, but I can’t believe your allowed that to happen being the A-Code! Oh yeah, one more story. Guy that was a copilot/AC at Fairchild was in Rat’s squadron. He ended up going to Kadena and getting into some “TDY Shenanigans” while on a typhoon evac that got him an Art 15. He ended up deploying soon after when Rat was the new OG at the Deid. Rat sends out an email about his “vision” and about himself as the new OG. Guy in question responds with “Hey, maybe we should lunch sometime dude.” Why? Who the knows? He tells me the next day his crew shows up and the ADO tells him that his crew is off the schedule and that he has a personal meeting with Rat. So, he goes and see Rat in his office during meeting time and Rat says “Hey, ###, come on in. Haven’t seen you in a long time.” He walks in, not thinking defensively, and sits down and Rat immediately stands him at attention yelling at him about how he’s a Colonel and how dare he use lack of email professionalism, how he had the audacity to ask Rat to write him a character reference to the Wing King at Kadena when he got his Art 15, etc. The switches tones and says “yeah, we should do lunch with me and your crew sometime, just let me know!” Rat was an English major at USAFA and speech writer for the SECAF. We used to have to select 93 ARS/All distrobox, then manually remove his name from a squadron wide email because he “hated spam.” He used to print out emails that people would sent him on various day-to-day issues, order them to his office, and proceed to pull out a red pen and correct their grammar in front of them in the email. He’s Selva’s boy (was his Wing Exec when he was a Wing King). That is most likely the only reason when as far as he did. The people I personally know who he ruined their careers are doing well in the majors. I’m not really surprised that he isn’t flying for the airlines knowing the amount of black lists he’d appear on.

Fired 7 commanders. Showed up as a herk wing commander having never flown the herk and said on day 1 he wanted to change our culture to get rid of low level below 1000 feet and limit us to 30 degrees of bank during all phases of flight because any more was unnecessary. Had the squadron that had a c130 crash at Shank show up 30 minutes after everyone else on base for the formal safety brief to talk about their issues, and then made them walk in between the rest of the wing to sit down. None of the people he did this too were on the deployment. After watching the safety brief with cockpit audio, he then released everyone out to welcome the crew on the safety brief back from Afghanistan 30 minutes later. Wanted to Q3 crews for not flying their 100% flap approach speed of 145 knots when they were heavy weight since the book said too, but would also Q3 them for going 146 knots which was a flap over speed. At one point he was a deployed commander at the Died, flew on a B-1 sortie, and would tell everyone afterword about his days in the bone and the bombing missions he had logged. I could easily keep going.

Also absent from her bio is a single Air Medal. AAM, yes, but no air medal. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

https://apple.news/Atfh28uaYQoab7iR3ZYAsvw Update is saying 1 US Mil and 2 DoD contractors killed.