busdriver

No we are not. Some of us have a very Army support-centric mission, Hercs being a great example. But the entire reason the AF is a separate service is due to Air Power pioneers that were 180* out from your statement. I think it was ClearedHot who made this analogy but there's a continuum, on one end you have Airpower turning an entire country into a glass parking lot, on the other you have the Army occupying a country with not one aircraft, to include their own. The reality is a mix, but the point is that we're an equal partner contributing to the mission. That said, Big Blue being so self serving and risk averse that it feels it's ok to not allow a C-130 to land in the dirt, knowing full well that only transfers that risk (with a multiplier) to convoy troops facing the IED threat is not only embarrassing, it's down right disgusting.

I know the RFF was for the south, just saying that's how the ball got rolling. The unit's down south don't answer to the Army anymore, but don't have to ask permission for most missions. IMHO the CAOC folks never liked the Army "owning" AF aircraft so dreamed up the new arrangement, CAOC get's us back, in exchange all deployed units become dual role. Whether there's some big blue politicking going on I don't know, could be. Casevac is certainly a mission that can be shown off publicly unlike some other missions. Picking up a trooper at a FOB beneath them? Maybe, or maybe they felt that taking an alert medical asset and using it to pick up a routine patient from a FOB is a waste (ie send a slick). Not saying I agree, we generally held off on all the Charlies until the end of the shift and made a round robin to go get em all. Suspect medicine? Maybe, but the guys with me down south were routinely complemented by the docs at Bastion. Kinda painting a broad brush when you're talking about your experience with roughly 10 paramedics. We're not allowed to run "chase" without CAOC approval, which I think has more to do with the perception that we're then acting as a "gunship" which we've gotten in a lot of trouble for in the past. Gates and CSAR, well the commonly held belief that he's got all AF helos on the chopping block is really only one of multiple directions that review could take.

Jesus, we've thread jacked this thing! Here I go. The original RFF was made by the Army in 2005, which got the Air Force started in Casevac as a primary tasked mission (we've been doing it as a sub-set mission since the 1960's, about half of the "saves" in Vietnam were Casevac). I deployed in 2006 were we had 3 birds Opcon and Tacon to the Army. My understanding is that the Army's dustoff guys needed relief to reset, and now so do we. That commitment never went away. What happened this past year was an increase in theater dustoff requirements due to secdef reducing the time requirement, which I know you are well aware of since it put us and you on a much shorter alert string. The AF's answer was to duel role all AF PR assets as PR/Casevac. As to why the AF would fight back on moving to a different FOB? Well, we still have our doctrinally dictated mission of PR for the Air Component commander. Organizational culture endures even with the coming and going of people. The unit that was at Bagram this past summer is new to the constant deployments that the rest of Rescue is used to. I've heard they did not have a good working relationship with the Army, which is kind of odd as the rest of us have had a rather long tradition of the opposite. In any event, from what I've been told, the unit currently at Bagram has improved that working relationship considerably. Obviously since the Army deploys for longer, your side got to see several different units from the AF, personalities change and you'll get a different opinion. Unfortunately for you guys, longer deployments aren't an option for AF rescue folks, we're close to the breaking point already. I have no idea about surgeons stating we're not capable of certain missions, since our medics (PJs) are considerably more capable than yours (not a jab, just reality) but altitude concerns, especially in RC-E are a legitimate hindrance to our very heavy version of a Hawk. As far as having way more capacity than needed, well I very much agree. Kandahar was much the same. Bastion quite the opposite, the ute rate on the aircraft there was retarded high. For what it's worth, I spent the month of August at Bastion. The concept we were batting around was to leave all that capacity at Kandahar, but use the RQS as a sort of Casevac QRF. We train to forward project as part of our PR mission, so we can pull up our root's pretty easily and move around the AOR as required. So the logistics hub would be Kandahar and Bagram, but we'd bounce around as required to stay near the fight.

dude, the simple answer is yes you should. If you have an interest (and it seems you do) to have a positive influence in the lives of young kids in our world you should absolutely engage.

If that email is real, that guy should have ZERO problem with his suggestion that the medics should ignore the shooter in favor of the victims.

I have a suspicion that alwyn is a typical "internet expert." If he has actual experience, I'll eat my humble pie. But this is not airliners.net, people on this board have no shit actual first hand experience. Arguments between people like brock (who I think is the same as bobbybrock on airwarriors) and myself are significantly different than the typical tripe you'll find on the internet. If alwyn is who I think he is, my best advice is to post less and read more.

Just stop.

You seem awful butt hurt about Rescue flying in support of Medevac, it was an Army RFF that got that whole thing started. As to Dustoff going and picking up aircrew, nothing in OEF is "CSAR" nada, zip, zilch. There is no FLOT to cross, no IADs to plan around, no CSARTF to build, etc. As for the Army going to pick up AF crew this past summer, guess what? Every one of us was glad that happened! Closest asset gets the job done. It's not about protecting my terf, it's about patient advocacy. Yes, we get guys straight out of the school house, they're called co-pilots.

Just because you can hide behind the internet and be insubordinate, doesn't mean you should. There's a fine line between "grumbling troops" and prejudicial to good order and discipline. Something that just popped into my head, not that I think this is what's going on but found it funny non-the less. Sgt Maj from Generation Kill: "Sir, if the morale is low, let me know and I'll stir em up real good with the grooming standards." (paraphrase)

If I am constrained to the 9mm round, I would gladly take the G19 over the M9. If I am not constrained to the 9mm round, I'd go with a .45, Glock or H&K USP or possibly an XD.

I don't see it as a no disco belt=no food issue at all. I see it as a symptom of a cancer. The cancer is combat leadership not focused on combat operations. If there are so many people who have the time to enforce simple rules with wide sweeping draconian measures, maybe it's time to send people home and reduce the ops tempo. Maybe, just maybe if we did that, we'd be able to sustain the long term war effort we seem to be faced with. We're our own worst enemy.

No, unless you are SOF (and probably only tier 1) you cannot carry a G19 in combat. God knows, I wish I could. I hate the damn M9.

I've briefed this occasionally. The biggest reason I see is that when the weather is really close to the limit at night (helo guys are on NVGs, and we can cut the vis requirements in half) there is a really good possibility of re-entering IMC after calling "visual." If my co has remained on instruments the whole time, he will have a much less difficult time transitioning back to instrument flight. In other words, it's not the transition from instruments to visual that's the problem, it's the "oh shit" we're inadvertent IMC and have to transition from visual to instruments. If you look at accident trends, helos that go inadvertent IMC have a poor record. At least that's my thought process on the technique.

The problem as this Capt see's it is that MX effectiveness is driven by metrics that describe "health of the fleet." In other words how ready to go to war are we right now. That same metric describes rated effectiveness. The problem is those are competing interests, flyers need to fly as often as possible to be as ready as possible, which means we break aircraft, which means we need more maintainers for a reduced fleet. Personnel costs are what drove the recent "RIF," think that affected the MX force? Air-power is a force multiplier, but much like SOF it isn't cheap and there are no short cuts. Dear Boss......??

IF the 73rd ends up embracing all the missions that are thrown their way, I predict it will be a squadron that will forever chase currencies, believe it.

I don't take it as such, an outsider's question got a straight forward answer, thanks. This isn't the order I read for Harvest Hawk, which is why I went that direction. I assumed (we all know where that leads) the AF and MC would be playing nice given the similar intentions. This I fully understand given the limited role we play in ECAS and my more recent experience actually shooting.

Any argument that deals with Pred pilot morale or adds a non-combat mission to an undermanned and over tasked community will fall on deaf ears.

CH, while I tend to agree that they'll probably put a lot less emphasis on TF once they start shooting, do you see any difference between the type of shooting the Whiskey guys will be doing compared to what you do? If the Whiskey guys are gonna be outfitted anything like the Harvest Hawk program, don't you think there's a bit of a difference between dropping some PGMs based on coords provided by a JTAC or "area suppression" from a 30mm and actually shooting? From an outsider looking in, it just seems like the Whiskey isn't gonna be doing the same type of CAS as a Spooky/Spectre. I'm sure I'm missing something, but if you can teach a Tomcat driver to drop JDAMs, why can't you teach a TF 130 guy how to drop a similarly GPS guided munition?

If I lived in the states I'd go build a potato gun in your honor brother, catch you on the flip side.

Ref what OverTQ was talking about: Most of what he was talking about is probably limited to helo guys. Due to the design of the flight controls and seats, we (pilots) are forced into an non-ergonomic seating position. We're basically all hunched forward and leaning to the left. Add to that, the normal cruise attitude is 3-5 degrees nose low (speaking 60 specific now), so your center of gravity is even further past your butt. As a result the spine is not in it's normal curvature. As a result of that plus helo vibrations, one of two sets of nerves tends to get pinched and the nerve bundle "casing" gets inflamed. Either the nerves that leave your spine for your arms, or the bundles leaving for your legs. The resultant tingling/numbness in the arms or legs is basically the same thing as tennis elbow, some road bike riders also experience this in their arms. The problem is that long term irritation of that nerve "casing" can result in permanent damage. The backenders tend to have similar problems due to leaning out the window while kneeling in the back, same problem due to spine position. Adding weight to the head exacerbates the problem but isn't the root cause. I haven't had any problems, but I do know a guy that had to have help getting out of the cockpit after a long sortie since his legs were numb. Good flexibility and core muscle strength can help (those pesky little muscles that keep the spine in position) as can lumbar support seat pads, but I think some guys are just more prone to problems than others.

I'm 100% positive there is no such rule, but I have nothing to back that up. That said if you fly enough goggle hours, and are not in very good shape, you'll probably end up with some minor neck problems after a career. But the hours count to do that is much higher than 150.

I've always hated wearing glasses when flying. They always gave me hot spots. This past summer I basically had to start wearing something. The dust would make it nearly impossible to get my visors to lower after only 12 hours post cleaning, and not having eye protection when you're flying with no cockpit doors just isn't an option. Got issued a set of the new M-Frames, the temples are pretty low profile and were comfortable enough. I flew with a set of Wiley-X Airrage that I bought at the BX in the day, both worked well. I did have to be careful with the Wileys as they're polarized and it made it impossible to read the ARC-210's display.

Dude, I completely agree. I was just throwing it out there. I have a stag AR-15 that has a 1:9 barrel and haven't shot any "heavy" bullets through it. Partly because cheap ammo tends to be 55gn stuff and partly because I was under the impression that it was a lost cause. Given this new input, I am probably going to give it a try with my current set-up and heavier bullets just to see. Who knows?

While traditional logic will tell you a 1:9 twist won't allow you to shoot heavier bullets a recent magazine test of the Ruger SR-556 has its best accuracy with 77grn match ammo. That match ammo gave the tested Ruger rifle 1 MOA accuracy with 77 grn bullets.

More press about the CSAR guys in Helmand: Pedroes at Bastion