busdriver

I'm a staff wiener. As Danny alluded to the "staff shit" is important. Having ding dongs here has negative repercussions in the Ops squadrons. You guys want the new hotness? Well if you send a dumb asses to staff, that shit gets fucked up. The Generals who actually make the decisions are informed by Majors and LtCols. I'm actually astonished by how much push me and my Major pears have with respect to requirements and future plans. It's always one fucked up briefing away from tanking a community for years, the way the POM process works, you're looking at affecting an MDS for the next 3-5 years, and it's extremely difficult and expensive to change thing once the ships have sailed.

Seems to me a KC-135 replacement is all about number of booms in the air and available offload. Why are we talking about cargo?

I'm not totally up to speed on the whole thing, but I know ejection seats are part of the problem. Another part is what device do you use, since you need EMI testing/release by specific model as well as security concerns given that multiple ACC aircraft operate at the program level on a day to day basis. Once you put those two things together you have a sustainment problem to consider. Staff work is boring and frustrating....

You're making the assumption that you have to give up vul coverage to get faster transit time. I think that's a false assumption.

Agreed, but having the option is a good thing. I'm not talking about putting the capability on a fucking SR-71.

Divesting EC-130 is actually the right thing to do, but only if the mission equipment is moved to something faster and higher flying.

ACC/A3TV is the point of contact for the EFB process, I'm not sure where it sits right now but last I heard they were fighting with some SPO about qualification to be in the cockpit despite being EMI good to go.

The pilot was apparently burned alive. My emotional response is completely irrational and counter-productive. Some people need to die; if we really want to commit to this, the kid gloves need to come off.

I don't know why they don't just come out and say, we need that money to buy enough F-35s to keep the unit price down so the cost doesn't spiral out of control and get the program killed ala F-22. If I had whole hog bought into the F-35 being the only long term answer I'd be scared shit-less of run-away unit cost.

Dood, you got passed over for Major? That must have been an epic party! That said, you can poo poo the WIC PRF stuff all you want. It's actually difficult to compete when you're in the 57th wing. Not so much just making major, but schools and O-5 is a different animal when you're surrounded by weapons officers and the thunder birds.

30 Jan 1945: The Great Raid Pictures at CNN Executive Summary: Fuck you, it's a good story just read it.

So sidebar story: wearing ABUs/ Camo two piece things enabled working with the Army ground types, they didn't immediately lump me in with their perceived zipper suited sun god view of the Air Force. It doesn't matter that their perception was wrong, I was a communicator, the only thing that mattered is if I was effectively passing the message to the receiver. If I have to change my approach to passing the correct message to ensure my intended receiver understands correctly, that's what I'll do. It's no different than changing your instructional approach to get through to a student. You can bitch and moan that the non-ers are pussies or that Army Infantry officers are fucking idiots, but at the end of the day if you could have made things better by changing your approach, who's really at fault for fucking things up?

Dude, poo poo it all you want. It's human nature. Know your audience, dress appropriately.

Of course, not gonna happen. I'm not sure the JFACC would know what to do with helos if TACON went that way. I know I would certainly get rid of the coordinating altitude. That fucking thing has become a crutch and in some respects a hindrance. But it did make me chuckle when the Army (I assume at the behest of Aviation branch leadership) moved the AH-64s up to higher echelons a couple years back. It's like they realized that air would always be short of demand and that penny packets don't work........ Fuck I just had an ACSC flash back.

Army Infantry leadership is extremely ignorant of the realities of aviation. I listened to an Army Apache O-3 tell a GO about his limited ability to support an operation given limited loiter time and distance to the nearest FARP and the GO's response was: "is that because of your crew rest?" I shit you not a one star thought his AH-64 crews were going to have crew rest issues 2 hours into an op. That telecon infuriates me to this day.

Draining the liquid from the pickled jalapenos is key, drain the jar when you open it then keep it in the fridge. Any cold liquid will reduce the energy in the kettle. Reference the EM chart in the preceding paper...

Current A3TW recipe: Just under 1x Solo cup of corn (top of the ridges) ~.5 cup of oil (ends up being about a 1:3 ratio of oil to corn) enough jalapenos to cover the bottom of the kettle without stacking 1x plastic spoon of jalapeno powder 1x plastic spoon of flavacol Put the oil in the kettle and let it heat up, toss in one jalapeno. Listen for the sizzle. Once you get sizzle, toss in the rest of the jalapenos. Leave the stirrer off and arrange the pepper slices into one layer. In a solo cup mix the dry ingredients. Once the jalapenos start to brown around the edges, dump in the dry ingredients and turn on the stirrer on. Wait, corn is coming End result: spicy corn, jalapeno slices that are crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle, adjust to taste....

Yep the fried Jalapeno slices can be cooked to make them the perfect surprises, while the powder controls the overall corn hotness. Best of both worlds. No need to over cook the jalapenos or overload the kettle to make the corn spicy. Back to that EM diagram concept.

I think JQP is a bit off, I really don't think Gen Post made that remark "knowing that in chilling the civic participation of his subordinates, he made it unlikely any of them would risk his wrath in order to take the actions necessary to manifest a complaint against him." My impression of him at WEPTAC was that he really was just speaking from his perspective. In this case, he just can't fathom that anyone would know what's at stake and still think keeping the A-10 is good idea. In other words a self-righteous a-hole who can't fathom that A-10 bros might actually have some kind of valid argument. I went in thinking his bro-level input from a GO-level was pretty cool, but some of the things said tweaked me a bit. It makes me wonder if a GO can actually provide bro level input at all, it seems all too political.

Agreed, the EM chart is awesome, keep in mind some kettles have adjustable thermostats if you take the kettle apart. That said 1:1 corn to oil is way too much oil. Also: Jalapeno Powder we have this in the shop and it makes adjusting the spicy level very easy, then Flavacol, it's like MSG for popcorn.

The whole thing can be summed up with the comment that we'll accept short term risk in capability to get the damn thing up and running with the hope that we're buying down long term risk.

It's always about the money.

Guy's the point isn't that we need to be able to dominate China with no losses. The point is that we should be able to dominate a place like pick-a-shit-a-stan without resorting to the losses RedFox refers to. If we're forced to accept those kinds of losses to deal with pick-a-shit-stan, we need to get out of the power projection business altogether because it isn't sustainable.

Adding to brabus' point: Algeria Air Defenses I'm not claiming we need to be worried about Algeria, but it makes the point about proliferation of advanced SAMs into what is clearly not China/Russia. I do think the AF has woefully underfunded self protection jammers and EA/EP in general, let's face it the legacy fleet is going to be flying for a very long time before the F-35 has fully taken over. 25 years ago was GF1, that's almost how much into the future we can expect to have 4th gen fighters around. I think a large part of the current thrash is preserving the F-35 timeline. Acquisition delays will drive up cost, and start the project down the rising unit cost death spiral. This is a direct result of learning from the F-22 experience. Or I could be totally wrong, sure as fuck wouldn't be the first time.

I agree, I think the problem is more along the lines of being able to operate in pick-a-shithole when double digit SAMs have proliferated to just about everywhere.