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He's not a pilot. His dad was, but he never has been. Given the fact that the "news" outlets reporting the story are all right-wing clickbait sites I'm calling bullshit.

TACP/PJ/CRO/SERE/Cops aren't regularly put in a position of leadership over a wide variety of AFSCs in the same way as zipper-suits are as WG/CC's and higher. Start making Cop officers WG/CC's and if they chose to regularly wear a beret you'd see a lot of the same bitching. I don't really care personally, but the sentiment definitely is there and senior leadership ignores it at their own peril.

I'm too lazy to go dig up the report (I think it may have been mentioned earlier in the thread), but the whole situation was an absolute clown show. The training in question was supposed to be related to AE's job....which as you might expect has nothing to do with hostage negotiation or rescue. Someone with rank had a good idea fairy moment and decided that the training needed "plussing up," so they directed a couple of (I'm assuming Med Group) CGOs and SNCOs who were in charge of the training syllabus to basically call an audible on the last day of training. The CGOs/SNCOs in question had something like less than 24 hours to come up with the "plussing up" of the training. The CGOs/SNCOs had zero training on any real training development process, much less something as fluid as a hostage negotiation and/or rescue, so they were basically winging it. They came up with a plan that involved a climax featuring driving a Humvee in close proximity to a whole bunch of people (my memory is fuzzy but I think it was something about the hostage takers driving into the compound to deliver the hostage back to US forces or something). Unsurprisingly, the mixture of untrained individuals operating heavy equipment in close proximity to a gaggle of personnel in a scenario that was not well designed and loosely controlled resulted in something getting out of whack and someone getting run over. BL the Col in question is probably lucky that no one preferred charges against her because the situation leading up to the death of the SSgt was some serious dereliction of duty shit. The fact that no one had the sense to call knock it off at any point in the process reflects pretty poorly on everyone involved.

A HAF spokesperson confirmed the SAF IG has opened an investigation.

Outside of a couple O&M type contracts that I think are pretty much all owned by GA at the moment, the good deal contracts are basically gone.

Alternatively he's on the way to deliver it to some "freedom fighters"

Because spiral development is a fact of life in any major aerospace acquisitions program these days (and also in a lot of non-aerospace defense programs). There's a plethora of reasons this is the case, and there's plenty of blame to go around for all parties involved (not just LM), but bottom line is getting all your capability up-front simply isn't going to happen. It was true with the Super Bug, it was true with the Raptor, it was true with the Eurofighter, it was true with the Rafale, hell, it's true even with the Reaper and Global Chicken. About the only program in recent memory I can think of that it wasn't true for was the Gripen, and even that's arguably not the case with the Gripen NG. The real question to be asking is why in the hell the Marines are declaring IOC with that limited capability as opposed to waiting for the OFP rev that delivers full combat capability (like the Navy is doing, and like the USAF is mostly doing.) The answer of course is "our Harriers and legacy Hornets are about ready to fall out of the sky because we were too obstinate to buy Super Hornets because we want STOVL so we need to get F-35Bs out into the field just to have some airplanes, even if they can't actually do anything."

This. Also with Army RPAs you run into the nasty little fact that they are all controlled from in-theater as opposed to RSOing in from CONUS (fact of life/design limitation on the Shadow, conscious CONOPS choice with the Grey Eagle). That might not seem like a big deal but it actually significantly limits their flexibility compared to USAF assets...which is just another example of the differences in how the two services utilize/allocate/etc assets with similar capabilities. With the way we operate RSO the same iron stays in the AOR 24/7/365 and is controlled by a variety of units from the CONUS while we rotate people in/out to work the LRE and mx piece (which also means the LRE GCS's and support equipment stay in theater 24/7/365)...and those CONUS units can shift/surge to a different AOR if the AOR they were originally fragged to fly in is down for wx, is deemed a lower priority, whatever. Contrast that with the Army...all the iron (and GCS's, and support equipment, and people) have to rotate every x amount of months because it's tied to a specific unit, and if that area is down for wx everything associated with those assets is sitting idle. The way the Army does things with RPAs may make sense from an Army-centric perspective but it's ing retarded from a "how do we most efficiently make use of a limited number of airplanes" perspective. So basically:

I think the current plan is throw more money at LockMart and hope they can shit out more missiles in a timely fashion. Wait, shit.

-9X integration isn't coming until the Block 3F software, notionally programmed to hit the field in the 2018/2019 timeframe (same OFP build that will give the gun functionality). Until then the only A2A weapon is AIM-120s, period. That would be in contrast to the Raptor which can at least carry -9Ms even if it is still waiting for the next OFP to get -9X functionality. e: I should say -9X internal carry integration isn't coming until Block 3F. They've done some external captive carry with -9X's and I think external carry capability is notionally supposed to be part of one of the earlier OFP releases but I can't say for sure whether or not that's something that got moved to the right to help alleviate schedule slippage. e2: busdriver's point about the thrash being due in part to schedule slippage is pretty accurate I think. Some of it is due to other things or isn't really thrash since it's been designed into the schedule/program for some time, but given the issues that are cropping up with finishing Block 2B testing (particularly with weapons), you can bet that the JPO and LockMart are going to move heaven and earth to ensure they don't bust the threshold for the -B's IOC (Dec '15). Having to explain an APB schedule breach to Congress is the last thing they want to be doing.

Only reason he got his first star is because Petraeus got ordered by the Secretary of the Army to briefly come back from Iraq and head the BG promotion board that year ('08)...if that hadn't happened McMaster almost certainly would've been passed over a third time and would now be a Mr.

While I don't necessarily disagree with you, it's worth pointing out that per the official IOC document released by the JPO on behalf of the Service Secretaries last year, in order to the F-35 to declare IOC one of the mission sets it is required to be capable of conducting is CAS. That is true for all three services/all three variants. I guess this isn't really to disagree with anything you said so much as it is to point out the idiocy and straight out lying inherent from anyone who works in a SPO/JPO.

Well in fairness to Alexander, he "won" if you define winning as "have everyone marry a local and leave your favorite tribe in charge while you cut your losses and head to India." Did better than most of the other people on this list, anyway. Related: http://www.duffelblog.com/2014/12/obama-weds-ahmadzais-daughter/

Hahahaha, holy shit. I don't know why I'm surprised but the idea of not wearing an ISAF patch in Afghanistan is still a little surreal to me. Also in all seriousness, tactical successes added together don't automatically equal strategic success. The Afghan War was an unmitigated strategic failure, period. We lost, period. I know that's painful to hear but unless we start having an honest accounting of what went wrong (and there was a lot, both politically and militarily) we (as a nation) aren't going to learn our mistakes. Hand-waving equivocating to make ourselves feel better doesn't do anyone any good (other than the generals and politicians, who are let off the hook when we refuse to hold them accountable for the strategic failure.)

Defeat is failing to achieve your political objectives in a conflict. If you never have any clearly defined political objectives, you can never be defeated! Someone tell the Pentagon my consulting fee is $50K.