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You could buy all the F-35s, scorpions and A-29s you want and pair them with A-10s, RPAs, you name it. Simple fact is, we don't have an objective or strategy to win and without that, we just drop bombs to drop bombs. We would be wasting the resources no matter which jet we are employing so we might as well have F-22s doing ISR at $69k per hour. Oh, and from the rumor mill. Look for F-35s slinging whatever expensive munitions they can load on such targets as tents and parked vehicles soon to get their "combat proven" stamp. Regoddamndiculous at all levels.

I'm no stranger to Air Force programs. If you think I'm getting DG, you should have a chat with my Flt/CC here. And since my promotion board to O-4 will be completed before I finish SOS, it wouldn't do much anyways. I'm doing it because I raged long and hard for years about the title of this thread. Period. They scrapped the original think tank and targeted this one to the CSAF's letter, and I like most others here thought the letter was a spot-on representation of the things we've bitched about for years on BO.net. I'm no fool. I had dreams of unicorns and magic carpet rides when the last CSAF got rid of Blues Mondays. I will not be similarly enraptured by mere letters from the new CSAF. But after being here for only a week and listening to the various levels of leadership at AU talk about the problems, I haven't found much to disagree with. I spent all day yesterday in Destin with a beer in my hand soaking up some significant skin cancer fuel. Friday we ate crappy tacos and watched our classmates hit each other in the face with padded sticks, Thursday we went to trivia night at a bar, Wednesday we ate brats and watched a baseball game. Again, all with a beer in my hand. Classes have been almost entirely focused on leadership theory and application, which pilots often lack based on our limited CGO leadership opportunities. And the geeky "think tank" instructions were to use whatever means and methods we choose to gather unfiltered opinions from across the ranks and figure out how to begin solving (it's only four weeks, after all) the single greatest issue fueling bitch-fests in every flying squadron heritage room AF-wide. Maybe I'm just the luckiest pilot ever to go through SOS, but I gotta say fellas, if this is the experience we've been raging against for so long, maybe we really have lost touch. I wouldn't have turned SOS down three times if I knew it was like this. Anyways, /rant. Not attacking you, Duck, but I've been facing an existential crisis here because I was expecting to be the lone naysayer in an ocean of shoe-clerk Kool-Aid, and even when the SNCO Academy students came over to "cross-talk," we had a hard time finding topics to disagree over. Maybe things are so bad that everyone at the squadron levels, officer and enlisted, are finally aligning against the same malignancy. Or maybe they gave me a Kool-Aid enema on day one and I don't remember it. Either way, I could use the help from the one forum that has done more to articulate the problems we face than any think tank or focus group Maxwell could ever assemble. And all you have to do is click some up and down arrows in a website.

Couldn't agree more. My first fly-in was '76; I was still in the stroller. My grandfather's first fly-in was the first one in '53; he manned the crash crew that the WI-ANG supplied, as he and Paul served together in the 128th. It can't be summer in Wisconsin without Oshkosh. I'll just leave this here; best Oshkosh arrival video I've seen:

I had an experience similar to ranter's. I met some good folks, had a good flt cc, learned a thing or two and graduated with my flight ranked fifth from the bottom. Edit: why do I need a minor in script editing to make posts

I have to agree with WTFAF. And I think a big part of it is the course timeline being cut in half. It's awesome if the senior AU leadership really is finally starting to lean in the correct direction, but that's definitely a new development. When I was there several years ago the discussion in the flight room was great (over half our flight was flyers) and our flight/cc was a reservist who I wish could have been a group or wing/cc on AD. But outside the flight room was some of the worst and most disillusioned leadership I've ever seen firsthand Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Sounds about 180 out from my experience in that shithole. But glad to hear things are much improved for you. Seriously. Although I'm jaded to the point that I'm not sure things will change AF-wide for the better. But I'm willing to suspend disbelief, and check out your work. Keep it up.

Ratner you know that Think Tank is only designed to give the O-6 a bullet point to champion to his bosses right? But at least you will walk away with a DG for your efforts (most likely).

Without getting to into the SIPR realm... All this talk of light attack low cost small footprint is great except for a few issues. We keep talking about "today's fight" but pretending the A-10 isn't massive overkill for that exact fight. 1. In effects driven CAS where 90% of your problems are solved by a Hellfire or at best a 500lbs. We don't need 16k lbs of ordnance or a variety of dumb and non unitary ordnance to stop some tank company from pushing on our Stykers. You need a 114 to kill the IED team or that technical hiding amongst an urban environment. 2. Survivability right now is an issue. Take a look at the beating the Iraqis and Syrians have taken lately. Low slow and light weight are not places we are putting anything we own right now. The Iraqis want to fly their 208s around in that crap they can have at it. We aren't even allowing rotary into risky positions because of the political fall out loosing a bird or having another Black Hawk Down. Given that, we'd be better off buying more armed UAS, spending money to expand the existing crew pipelines for same to combat burnout and last getting more gunships to put in the stacks out there because let's all be honest with ourselves there are two types of fires that are mandatory for all the swoopy missions out there, and stuff that flies fast whether it's got a 30mm or this is one of a half dozen missions it does aren't it. Hell let's look at arming the PGSS balloons. Put DAGR on the damn thing, or a ground launched version of Hellfire/Brimstone with the ability to shoot coded laser from the ballon to provide FOBs with organic immediate fires as a 21st century version of the fire bases we based so much off in Vietnam. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Follow on, probably a point for another forum but the article made me think of this. This article struck a chord in me for the difference in the AF of that era to the AF of today in that they took pilots from all different backgrounds and they re-trained and flew a direct combat mission. They weren't concerned did you track T-38 or T-1, you were a rated officer and there is fight, we will train you and you'll hack the mission. The fight is different, the equipment much more sophisticated, but for mission focus & esprit de corps that could provide to the officer corps and the second order effect that could have through out the AF by seeding mission focus in a much greater swath of leadership I wish a program like that could happen again, a LAAR aircraft being the best chance of that. We did that with the MC-12 mission to some degree and now we should do that with a LAAR program. Think about the cultural effect of pulling heavy & OSA pilots, navs & non-rated recruits from the officer cadre,etc... for a program like this. Actually getting them into the direct delivery of weapons or direct support to the fight, after a few years of this and the experience these officers would have, you would see as they progressed in their careers a wave of leadership that understands from their own experiences the mission is to fly, fight and win not MICT, SAPR and PME. You can be told something but if you discover it thru the experiences of you own life, the effect is much more pronounced, it's a part of you. Yours truly is a heavy pilot but got to support the dudes on the ground in the MC-12, it was an awesome experience and made me a better officer for it, I had no where to go but up from there but that is a different point... if that experience was good, just giving them ISR support then delivering ISR and Light Attack must be great and I think my take away would have been better if it had been in a LAAR. My positive take away as an AF officer I don't think was unique and I think that it would be the usual effect if aircrew from other non-CAF airframes were rotated thru a LAAR program, make it a regular assignment to get enough bang for the buck but make it available to the MAF, SOF, OSA communities. Some would argue the MQ-1/9 does this, I don't, but the fact that it is an RPA makes 50% of the target population for this idea less than enamored with it, so not really a solution. It would not be without some growing pains but if we want the AF as an institution to be more mission focused then more of its leadership will have to have some portion of their careers actually doing the mission (that is really for non-winged officer recruits for CSOs for this program) and if we can have that mission actually putting ordinance on a target, it would be that much better. Just a thought.

The gun on the A-10 is phenomenal, as are the guns on the AC-130s. That being said...what percentage of today's kinetic strikes are direct-fire weapons vs PGMs? I don't have hard numbers (sts), but I know what I've seen on numerous deployments. In a true CAS situation, there is a ton of value in direct fire...when it's HVT whack-a-mole in a permissive environment, it's not really needed or even desired in a lot of situations. Advances in PGMs plus the nature of the fight over the majority of the last 15 years has led to the overwhelming use of PGMs. 6K of hard points is plenty of bang per sortie, especially if using lighter weapons like Hellfire, Griffin, SDB, or even newer systems like SGM or APKWS To me, the potential advantages of the Scorpion, if it's executed properly, are fairly significant. Better FMV sensors than current fighters for ISR and PGM delivery. Long legs for a fighter without needing AR, especially if you use external tanks. Plenty of internal payload for other intel packages that are key in the process of finding HVTs. Enough speed to sprint toward a fight, but stability to fly at very low airspeeds for the endless "Wheel in the Sky" ops. Looking at it for the ONE mission is something I've heard tossed around since it can perform basic intercepts and patrols over CONUS at a much lower cost the the Viper. Obviously the low-intensity fight is what it was designed for, for all the reasons above. Competing in a future T-X, especially with a modified swept wing, is also something I've heard as a possibility. And those are just options for the US. Foreign sales are a primary consideration and some of our allies need the type of capability this jet offers at this price point even worse than we do.

As a fighting pilot/American who has spent significant amounts of my kids' lives fighting low intensity conflict aka terrorist hunting, I'd much rather have the right tools for the job at hand than some gold plated waste of resources being misused. Listening to fighters/bombers getting tasked to do NTISR to eventually drop on a bulldozer for the 9th time is such a frustrating experience. We need to just get pretty much every CAF asset out of the OIR fight and let you guys train for your actual missions. And how many fancy nukes do you want? It was those old piece of shit nukes that kept Ivan from crossing the line and Taiwan full of freedom. I think the hundreds we have now that work are adequate. All this future war planning is funny to me. It's like saying that deck will look great on the house when it's done but not fixing the water heater. Yes, you can still get clean but it's a miserable experience.

Shame on all of you for not asking for pictures first! Have you not learned anything since being here?

More good video and narrative... and Lt Gen "Matic" Otto in an interview. He's a great American and military officer. For those considering a career in the U-2, enjoy the following: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-air-force-reveals-new-360-degree-video-of-u-2-pilot-perspective/

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