guineapigfury

I associate COIN with "hearts and minds", as opposed to a more killy philosophy of combat. I remember seeing a documentary about it, where some foolish old ###### asked PM Thatcher why they were killing so many people, and Thatcher had the good sense to mock her mercilessly. You are correct that the Falklands are properly British territory, so the Argentines were invaders and not insurgents.

Awesome, I know at least one guy who's escaping. Does anyone have anything on the fate of pilots pulled in recently? Can they expect to go back to a real airplane at their next PCS?

Presumably he's pranking whoever lives in that tent.

Holy ######. They showed up, ruined a sufficient amount of shit and the 3rd Worlders learned who not to ###### with. No dicking around with this COIN nonsense. I wish GWB had a brass pair like Maggie did. She probably did jumping jacks just to hear them clank.

I think the point of the "discovery flight" is to find out if there any dealbreakers now at the cost of about $100, rather than going through years of preparation only to find out you have vertigo/incurable airsickness. If you are hurling all over the inside of a 172 after 1 time through the pattern, probably time to find a plan B no matter how much you "want to wear a machine around the sky and kill people with it."

One of them is a male flight attendant, so there is nothing ambiguous in this case.

THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED:

I think a "cost" we're overlooking here is the payout on the lawsuit/insurance when the first passenger UAV shits the bed and takes 200 people into the ground.

Almost, everyone shows up to UPT wanting fighters, that changes about halfway through T-6s. Some of it is talking to the heavies pilots and thinking "Hey, that sounds kind of cool", and some of it is realigning your desires with what you expect to get at track select. I was the only guy in my class who started wanting heavies, I definitely wasn't alone come track select. I loved flying in the tanker, and you'd be ok in there as a short guy. I swear we had one instructor at Altus who's ethnicity was "leprechaun".

I thought it was sarah palin, I swear.

Definitely an abundance of queep and chickenshit in deployed environments. Awards packages for this and that, having to take a base picture in the middle of a war zone, guys getting pulled off the bus at the end of 12+ hour days to stand in a formation to fluff some dipshit's ego, laser focus on uniform wear. No shit, we had people roaming the base at night looking for people without reflective belts. We had the manpower for this, but not to do something about the rockets hitting the base weekly. That said, being on the road is awesome can be awesome. I remember being TDY to Alaska, not shaving for weeks, getting hammered at 0730 and then taking pictures with a moose.

Define "they". Your fellow bros, the crusty old sergeants in bags, nad the young airmen who have their shit so much more together than you did when you were 20 ... THEY will not let you down. Congress and their star-shouldered bootlicks ... not so much. Fence in, and more importantly fence out.

Ironically enough, this is one of the few parts of college I remember.

Isn't the larger horror not that they might make flight attendants into pilots, but pilots into flight attendants? Can see it now, you do the take off and the autopilot orders you to go hand out ginger ale and peanuts because its the PIC.

Well, we have the inherent awesomeness of Big Blue Procurement combined with the epic helpfulness of congressional oversight. What could possibly go wrong?

Wait, I thought the AirFrance autopilot had you procede direct to the ocean not the forest.

If you have passengers, you have to pressurization, life support, bathrooms, etc. Which is what you have to put in the airplane to have a pilot. So you might as well put in a pilot at that point. And having someone to fly that mother######er never hurts.

Stem Cells ... om nom nom nom. Going to be the beverage of choice for NARAL now.

No love for Jim Beam Rye and we're already 6 pages in?

You are always at BASH severe at or below 2 AGL for all the penguins.

Do they really? If they were serious about un######ing the promotion system, everyone would get a strat so that they and the promotion board would know where they stand. So if you're 69/69, that's what you get.

To be fair, there's probably no eye exam to be a doctor. My almost-insatiable-desire-to-punch-a-noncombatant moment came 3 days in. We had been getting our balls busted all day by the TIs and our upperclass. Hadn't had anything to eat but baloney sandwiches and cereal the whole time. The intercom says "Captain xxxx, you're pizza is here." Ugh.

Here are my 2 favorites from OTS. We were marching to class, probably on the exact same sidewalk, and here comes this chubby major, with half his front shirt untucked. We were almost late so there is nothing to do but salute and say "Good Morning Sir!", he responds with no salute and a "Hi Guys!" Number 2 is the first day for the new batch of COT(OTS for Chaplains, Lawyers, Docs) after we'd been there 6-7 weeks. I enter the latrine and there is a new guy in there in a state of utter confusion. He has his canteen belt on upside down and is trying to get his canteen in there, being defeated by gravity each time. I helpfully point out that he has his belt on upside down, thus resolving the situation. 2 days later I see this dude in the hallway wearing LtCol rank. Hope he's better at being a surgeon than getting dressed.

I figured OSI would track them down off the half license plate, but yeah I could see them going the DogTags route also. Thankfully they'll have the time to do so now as apparently other matters like the Metzger incident and what happened at Dover have already been sorted out.

I know when I was at a certain poo-pond having location last year, all I had to do was go over to the flight doc and ask for some. I had all kinds of trouble sleeping, which could have easily been solved by a ration of 3 drinks, which of course was unavailable/illegal.