brabus

We have guard guys all over the place, still with their home unit, but doing X: IPs at FTU, staff in DC/Europe, going to school, working in Science and Tech land, operational test, etc. There are quite a lot of opportunities for dudes to branch out if they want to take a break from the “standard grind” at their home unit.

side hustle retirement gig: Flying Space X MiGs…I’m in!

@ClearedHot I’m not as worried about the equipment as I am about the CAS knowledge/culture. But of course you need an MDS or two to keep those alive. If we needed to, we could strap rocket pods, whatever EO/IR sensor pod we wanted, bring tons of bombs to the fight, put some “CAS enhancing” capabilities in the software, etc. in an F-35. It’d be pretty damn good at it…but even in that hypothetical, where’s the CAS knowledge and personal capability of all the pilots who don’t even know how to spell CAS at that point? To me, that continued culture is what we critically need, more so than insert-old-MDS flying to 2050. As an example, shifting CAS to a primary on some ARC F-16 DOC statements could do the trick…it’s not the “perfect MDS,” but it would maintain CAS-focused pilots.

You haven’t been tracking all the pieces, but your statement makes more sense now.

They are backfilled by more capable assets, what are you talking about?

Yep! I mean even as the secondary I’d laugh…tertiary at best.

Eh? The assets that are “backfilling” are accomplishing things that are not achievable by the old assets. And that’s old news, not future hypothesis. It’s pretty simple - things like C models and AWACS (since we’re focused on Kadena) are old and not capable of doing what we need done, so we’re cutting them, replacing them with more capable assets today, and while paying for even better tech replacements coming in the future. Don’t mistake any of this for me thinking our acq process isn’t fucked wholesale (it is), nor am I arguing there aren’t SESs and congressional members fucking it away on the daily, but let’s zoom out a bit and try to understand a much larger picture that frankly doesn’t need to GAF about C-model divesture.

But what is “giving away everything?” I mean, the MDS you referenced above make a lot of sense to get rid of given the current pol/mil and budget circumstances, coupled with better tech replacements (even if the timeline is not ideal). It is logical when taking into account the conditions we are forced to deal with. For example, AWACS - Go away today and I couldn’t care less (not saying I want WD/ABMs to go away, but there are better ways to do that besides the E-3 that has abysmal 21st century capes and MND rates).

Paying UKR teachers’ salaries drives the tide of the war? Sounds like their teacher unions (or equivalent) are just a corrupt and retarded as ours.

I despise the retards in the GO ranks as much as the next guy, but I think the more accurate way to look at it is we’re prioritizing capabilities on a constrained budget. I also want to own 6-9 airplanes, but my wife reminds me I have to prioritize what “mission” I want. This isn’t me advocating for wiping out everything that’s not “west of Taiwan,” but it is prudent to address China as our #1 priority, and that’s going to mean we can’t afford to keep everything we’ve historically had the past 30-40 years.

Correlation = his cousin is a dude

Another poor UAL pilot - just wants to cover his feet with boots. For only a $1/day, you too can help the poors. Sign up today at www.gofundme.com/Huggy

72 virgin…dudes.

Nowadays journalism is about the same as YouTube influencing. I’ll give each of those “industries” about the same level of respect and trust.

And that’s the extent of their AF’s capability.

@HuggyU2 So the short answer is you don’t want to pay for them yourself. Now we’re all going to have to not only Go Fundme sunglasses for you, but also boots!

Nope. Ops tested.

Why does anyone care what some arbitrary list says? Wear what’s functional and comfortable (with exception color matches uniform requirement). Haven’t known one occurrence in my entire career where model of flight boots were questioned.

What a classic email. Although to be fair, I’m not sure a cadet in the back of a strike would actually make any difference in their performance! (I’m just giving you shit strike bros, if it wasn’t apparent already)

I believe you can as the injunction nullifies the ATF ruling. Of course you never know when said injunction may be overturned. In practicality though, even if that happened it wouldn’t immediately affect you - you’d just have to not take that ”now illegal” firearm into public to avoid potential LEO interaction (e.g. a repeat of what already happened pre-injunction).

“To finally make this thing legal” - haha, that would be hilarious (and also maybe not work out in your favor)!

Sure…if we ever actually did a full scale land invasion of China. I’m going to put that probability somewhere around 0.00000000069%. It’s a good point in general terms, but irrelevant to the China proper scenario.

@M2 Please tell me you’re still waiting on that Form 1!

Not a single US fighter? What’s up with that?

I do not understand why AFSOC thinks it’s a good idea to fuck with something that has proven to be excellent for the mission set it’s made for. China is our #1 priority, and that doesn’t mean every piece of hardware/community will play. Gunships are not for China, but they are for a hell of a lot of other scenarios. So what happens when many of us are posturing (or worse, actively fighting) China and some shit goes down in Indonesia, Africa, etc. where we can utilize capes like Gunships. It’d be real dumb to not have them, or have them all loaded up with SDB and sans guns. Bottom line: Some can and should adapt to changing threats, but others will only worsen by just blindly jumping on the bandwagon headed towards something they have no chance of being effective in.