Smokin

For reference, I flew the Viper for my entire career, so just over 18 years of Viper time after UPT. Neck pain is real and it will be for the rest of your life. For me it is mostly turning my nugget to the side (like checking a blind spot driving or talking down the same side of a table at a party) and then sometimes a constant low level pain after a physical day. Whiskey helps for both. Everyone that has flown fighters for more than a decade will have neck or back problems (back issues are more common in the F-15). It is likely that I will need a spinal surgery at some point due to damage that is calcifying and starting to impinge on nerves. That being said, it is manageable and it has not really ever prevented me from doing anything I want to do. I play full up with my kids, far more than most guys in their 40's. I do tons of physical things from back country hunting to working on the house, again, far more than most guys in their 40's. There are multiple things that are and will continue to mitigate this in the future. As more F-35s come online, they will be the new F-16 as far as force preponderance. The F-35 is not the BFM machine the Viper is and I doubt that F-35 pilots will have neck issues that are anywhere near as bad as Viper guys. I'm sure an F-35 guy is going to cry foul and talk about what a great BFM platform Fat Amy is, but he'd have to be drunk or delusional to think the F-35 is on par with the 16 or 15 in a visual gun engagement because that's not the purpose for which it was built. Another mitigating thing is the AF is finally putting it's money where it's mouth is in regards to pilot health and has started making dedicated physical therapists available just to the fighter pilots. I think this is going to be a huge long term win for guys' necks and backs and will be a huge help as guys start working with them as Lts. Also, you are largely in control of what you do with your neck in a fight. My first two assignments I wanted to win at any cost so if I thought rolling my nugget around to the other side while pulling full aft stick would help me win, I did. After I started to get more neck pain, I got smarter, kept my helmet against the seat more, momentarily let off the g's while moving, etc. More experience let me do a couple things that were not quite as optimal in a fight and still win but kept my neck from hurting as much. I could have done those things earlier and would have had less damage. Finally, I know plenty of people that never flew fighters that have had to have neck surgery. How dumb would you feel if you skipped the opportunity to fly fighters to keep your neck healthy and then ended up having neck surgery anyway? I have lots of physical issues from flying the Viper for my whole career, but if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't change much other than being a bit smarter with my neck when I flew. I don't think I'll be one of those guys on my deathbed wishing I'd done more with my life. I for sure won't be one of those guys looking back wondering if I was good enough to do what I had really wanted to do all along.

If an enemy is really adamant that something needs to stop, that is probably the thing that needs to keep happening.

Ops to Ops for everyone! Sucks to be the last Lt showing up to a squadron right now, 4 years of being the SNACKO and scheduler.

That's valid. I was AD and then ANG and I'll tell you that the guard being used like AD is crushing the guard. Guard fighter guys can make RAP flying less than their AD counterpart and historically it's been because the average guard guy is WAY more experienced than the average AD fighter pilot. No white jet tours, no ALO assignments, etc. A guard baby could spend 30+ years flying combat coded jets non-stop and possibly the same tail numbers. That type of experience is impossible in AD. But you start deploying guard units like they're AD units and suddenly there isn't anyone in the guard with 30+ years of experience because they decided the time away and the loss of income wasn't worth it anymore. No idea if my experience was typical, but I'd bet the average experience level in my guard unit dropped by 690 hours in my 8 years. That's close to two tours in CAF units worth of experience (assuming no circles in the sky deployments). That's brand new wingman to IP loss of experience. That's a big deal. The part timers flying for 30 years straight may not be the tip of the spear in current 3-1 knowledge, but throw them into a crazy situation no one has thought to train to and their experience will bring them through way better than the 700 hour CAF IP that can rattle off all the threat data.

The biggest contributor to that is our total force size. For the guys that weren't born yet: during Desert Storm we had at least one ANG fighter unit in just about every state. In the subsequent no-fly zone patrols, guard units did 30 day deployments and the part timers swapped out half way through. Our CAF is a little over 1/3 the size it was then. Now most ANG units that aren't on the coasts can't even train with other squadrons on a normal basis because they're too far apart for normal training.

Too early to tell. IF money is transferred/released and if those figures are accurate, than it's not as bad as last time as last time was $50 billion. Still not good though. Also, they will likely need to spend a fair amount of that rebuilding all the stuff we blew up. Not trying to make it sound like it's good because it's not. But, in the big picture, it isn't as bad as last time. Hopefully the release of those funds would be contingent on the transfer of the uranium. If that were the case, that would be far better.

Why did the Afghan take his sheep towards the edge of the cliff? So they would push back harder.

The US has not been good at the money/cost side of warfare since Vietnam. We outproduced Germany in WWII in part by making something that is 80% as good as the German equivalent for half the price and then making 4x as many. When we had Cold War defense budgets, we could get away with making a bunch of the most advanced (expensive) weapon we could find, but hopefully this is a bit of a wake up call for our acquisition side (probably should have occurred in the 2005 time frame).

Too bad the US doesn't have an option for "six months hard labor". There are still a lot of ditches that need to be dug and potholes that need filling.

1000%. This is the absolute most un-American thing that is somehow enshrined in American law. I totally get and would support a similar concept IF it were after appropriate due process and the person found guilty, much like what happens to people's trucks and guns after they get caught AND convicted of poaching. But to put the burden of proof on the citizen is completely upside-down and the fact that it hasn't been struck down only proves how far removed the Supreme Court is from actually reading the Constitution and doing it's job. With the qualified immunity removal in some states, legislators that passed that need pass a law to hold themselves to the same standard. If they pass a law that would would meet a similar threshold of 'obviously illegal' (like Colorado's ban on verbal only counseling to help a teenager wondering if they should actually be the other gender that got struck down 8-1), they need to be tried and convicted of violating their constituents' rights. A good starting point would be an identical punishment to what a law abiding citizen would have gotten under their unconstitutional law.

Aren't two threads entirely dedicated to people either bitching or cheering about Trump enough? Talking overall national security policy and such regarding Iran is one thing, but this thread has gone entirely off the rails.

If someone posts a slide with direct comparisons of gas prices under Biden and Trump that factually disproves the implied claim and I call it out, somehow that means I'm claiming that Trump is doing 5D chess? Both the spikes and the averages were higher under Biden than Trump. I said nothing defending or advocating Trump or his policies, I simply called out an objectively incorrect argument. I 100% agree that Trump is far from being a conservative, but that's hardly the point of this thread.

Gas prices are currently around $4/gal nation-wide, which is the peak under Trump's second term. Gas prices peaked at over $5/gal under Biden. Biden's total term average was $3.45 according to your slide. Trumps second term average is $3.06 His first term was $2.57. So please tell me again how gas prices under Trump are so bad?

I figured this was basic to learning to drive, sirens or not. I don't start after a stop sign, red light, or even go through a green light without a quick check that the crossing traffic is actually stopped. They might be at fault if I don't look and have an accident, but it's my kids in the vehicle. Going through a red light or anything else unusual would only make it that much more important.

An Israeli website is saying that he was knocked unconscious during the landing (makes sense if he had to do a PLF in rough rocky terrain), which would help explain the initial delay in contact which likely complicated things greatly. Lucky he didn't break a leg instead. Same website also claims that he evaded for around a dozen miles and ended up climbing a 7K ridge to get away from Iranian forces. That's a great reminder for dudes to keep in shape. You never know when your or your loved ones' survival might depend on it. New fighter pilot PFT; 12 mile evasion ending in a 7k climb with no warning. Ready set go!

Additionally, I would assume that Trump was advised and approved of the targeting. I don't see how one President could unilaterally limit another President with an EO given they hold the same office.

Well, if you're being paid to wear a chicken suit...

When the Italians give us military advice, we'd better listen. I mean its not like they've lost every war they've ever fought in the last 1500+ years.... oh wait, they have.

Agreed. The phrasing of the War Powers Act is pretty vague and I think that was intentional. While obviously not the same thing, when a contract is written vaguely, the wiggle room is generally interpreted more liberally towards the party that did not write the contract, or so my lawyer told me. Since Congress wrote the War Powers Act and did so in vague language, it seems reasonable for the Executive to be able to use all the wiggle room Congress seems to have intentionally given. As far as Constitutional questions, the modern Federal government has gone so far beyond the Constitution that it can't even be seen in the rear view mirror. It would be comical to suddenly draw a WAY more restrictive line when it comes to the Commander-in-Chief employing the military. Individual officers must be able to recognize and not obey illegal orders. Extending that same responsibility to the entire war seems to be a bit of a stretch to me. If the President ordered the invasion of Bermuda because he said he wants a better vacation home, that would be different, but this is a war on a country that has directly caused American deaths. An officer saying that's illegal because it's been XX days and therefore in his mind should have Congressional approval seems absurd.

100% disagree. This line of thought of "I gotta get there right now because its an emergency" is almost certainly a root cause of the pilots' deaths. All first responders should have the first duty to "do no harm" just like doctors. This is not the first time that a fire truck in a hurry has killed innocent people on at an American airport. Fire trucks do not have that poor of visibility and they can see more than the pilots can from the cockpit windows. The lights are a problem, but that should only make them more cautious, not less. Part of the emergency call on the red line is the nature of the emergency. The driver of the fire truck either knew or should have known that this was much more in the lines of an annoyance emergency than a plane on fire.

What a terrible and utterly preventable accident. Based on the go-around call for Delta, it sounds like the audio is the tower freq, so everyone should have been on the same freq. If that is the case, the truck might have been on freq long enough to hear the takeoff clearance. The pilots would have heard the ground controller give clearance for the truck to cross the runway on which they were taking off with plenty of time to reject. And the obvious problem of the controller giving clearance to cross while a plane is taking off. Even if they weren't on the same freq, the truck absolutely should have been looking and seen an airplane on the runway and starting to roll towards them. Would be tough for the pilots to visually recognize the incursion in time to actually stop, especially at night and having a hard time recognizing that the truck hadn't stopped at the stop bars. Anyone know if LGA has the runway status lights? Might have been too late in the takeoff roll to actually stop anyway since it's only a hundred feet or so from the stop bars to the runway center. Seems pretty lucky that only the pilots were killed. I'd have expected a fireball with a plane hitting a fire truck that far down the runway. Maybe they had initiated a reject so they started slowing.

Pictures of one kid (which haven't been included in any article I've seen on it, which also makes me question the legitimacy of the claim) allegedly doing a Nazi salute caused a completely non-affiliated group to write to UF saying they were pulling that clubs affiliation (which was a lie since they weren't affiliated to begin with). Then UF used that as an excuse to shut down the club, likely because they wanted to anyway after the Nazi salute uproar. The club is suing because the shutdown was an incorrect decision based on rules (they were still affiliated) and likely actually targeting the club based on that one member's bad, but protected free speech. Ironic that you're drawing fine distinctions after basically calling all college republicans Nazis...

This is why we need to bring back some Old Testament laws; particularly the one where if you falsely accuse someone then your punishment is what their punishment would have been if convicted. Send both these cops to prison on felony drug charges, see how well they do there.

WSJ is unclear about the last 2 crew members, reporting 4 killed, holding out hope for the last two. Good job by the other crew getting that bird back on the ground.

Lots of possibilities that could lead to something like this that don't include nefarious motives. There are enough US on US frats in training and combat to not need jumping to traitorous motives to explain a mistake like this. That air picture was likely exponentially more complicated than anything he had ever trained. Very possible the dude thought there was a flight of missiles that were minutes or seconds from hitting his country and potentially killing his family and friends. I'd have to imagine that most pilot's frat risk math would change a bit in that scenario.