Lawman

The hell are you doing on landing? It’s flush with the floor of the aircraft... Getting to hang out with your guys in Al Assad this last time over was eye opening how neither services PM has the complete picture. It’s like can we get them to talk to each other. I’ll trade you guys all the development we’ve made with DONlAIRCM/CIRCM in hostile fire queuing and IR protection if we can get the newest digital versions of APR-39 and any kind of progress on EW/RF stuff (which the Army has ignore since 1992).

I think you guys would be better leaning on them to get you the 5th CMWS sensor but that’s just me.

It’s the basic principle of fire superiority. In the fire-team/squad level fight it’s falling heavily on an automatic weapon guy with a belt fed weapon. That guy is going to empty that first belt almost as the first seconds of the fight. Unfortunate to the nature of aircrew w don’t have that option. Though in the lift world it’s one of the reasons while the 240 lacks the suppression of the GAU or the .50, you can carry the stock group for it and switch from a mounted machine gun into a hand held machine gun which is what our 60/47 guys do as a contingency for the worst. As you said, “set the tone,” and the tone needs to be something along the lines of “I have and will use the means to make you bleed.”

I think you guys are really misunderstanding the realities of a gun fight. Maneuver (IE dudes coming to roll you up) is countered by a volume of fire, not really accuracy or range. We exchange literal thousands of rounds in a simple meeting encounter with small 2-3 man shooter groups on the ground. And we kill little/nothing most of the time because the reality is you rarely if ever hit what you’re aiming at whether it’s aimed well or aimed poorly. That’s why a handgun and a couple mags is a joke. About all the resistance you can be expected to put up with that is suitable for some farmer stumbling on your RAZ and trying to take you to the local authorities because he found out you killed one of his chickens. Look back at Vietnam and Desert Storm, name me any incident where a crew member successfully fought it out on the ground alone and unafraid with a handgun. You need noise, you need ammo, and you need persistence of creating a feeling of “I’d better be F’ing worth it to you Hadj!” Because they will overwhelm you. That is going to happen whether you’re down there with a 9mm, a M4, or a 240B. The only difference is the motivation for them to wait a few more minutes that is provided by a persistent defense. Durant had an MP5K, 4 mags, 2 Delta Snipers with full combat load, and all the left over mags and ammo scattered around the wreckage of that Blackhawk.... all that did was buy them minutes. Even if the DC powered GAU had been working, eventually the horde is gonna come get you.

That last sentence is really the key. Nobody should just have a case of grenades show up in Qatar and be like “well.... pass these out too.”

Only discharge in the cockpit I’ve seen on deployment was our brigade commander.... he shot a W2. You guys fly with pyro/smoke/flares don’t you? Same concept of “don’t be an F’ing moron” applies. Somehow grenades put the fear of god into people to do the right thing too. And seriously given the PR picture over there of what happens if the opposing team gets you in the frantic scramble I think you guys are missing just what a grenade buys you in pause. A guy/two guys in with M9(s) just hoping at holding off guys with AKs stand a few minutes chance before you’re just screwed. When a grenade goes off though there is a sudden recalibration on everything. Same principle with how much ammo we carry in a go bag. 300 rounds sounds like a lot... until you start going 8-12 rounds per minute of sustained aimed fire and realize you’ve bought maybe a couple minutes of fight. A grenade makes people coming to get you go “holy shit! Does he have any more of those!?!”

Have you seen how much crap they make us wear in the Apache? We can’t exactly reach stuff either. My comment was more for those thinking “omg! Loose Explosives!” If your using grenade pouches properly that grenade is far more secure than anything dummy tied to your kneeboard or laying on the dash. It they weren’t we would pass around a pelican case for all the joes every time they got on a Hawk with 2 each and then strap it down to something. Funny thing you guys might notice if you ever get up close to an AH/MH-6... they strap an M320 directly behind the right seat pilots door. When you think of a guy fumbling with grenades to load them and close enough to an enemy to use them in the cockpit that should give you pause.... especially since those grenades don’t have an arm/safe pin and the guy has multiple strapped on the outside of his body armor...

It’s funny to see the stark difference between communities on explosives in aircraft. Grenades are despite reputation relatively benign on their own. We’ve got 19 year old Joes getting in and off aircraft everyday wearing them. Now claymores.... those deserve a healthy respect.

Tammy Duckworth getting in front of cameras to having a “don’t lecture me!” Session was completely BS. Like if anybody sitting in Congress knows what this is doing by simply turning off The continuous cycle of force generation it’s you. You were a LtCol... you sat at the head of the table during battalion staff training calendar development. You know exactly what you voted for when you said “no, I’d rather we shit it down.” The same dipsticks that were months ago screaming about why we didn’t have more help into Puerto Rico are now fine with the guard losing two training days off the Calendar to make a political statement. Guess when the guard in particular trains... the weekend. Guess who we call on to fill sandbags, put up aid stations, and drive aid convoys when the first line is overwhelmed... the guard.

Like I said “come to Jesus scramble.” how anybody with stars on their shoulders could sit through a MSIC briefing from the DE lady and not come out of that thinking “good god we are way behind the curve” is beyond me. But hey let’s spend time/money developing a new PT uniform....

The Army has been in a come to Jesus scramble thanks to what ISIS did in Mosul with drones. DE and EW are going to be the kings of the day and last I saw they already have a Humvee and Stryker mounted bolt on module testing out in the desert.

In 2 ways. 1 - Citi bank playing Fukfuk games even with the card placed on “mission critical” status. After that long it doesn’t matter, and even when it popped on the 7th Infantry Division bad boy list, didn’t get me paid any faster. 2 - I had thousands of dollars in balances leveraged in top of that on personal credit cards trying to balance all the juggling, awaiting the per diem I wasn’t paid. End total for my TDY was 28 thousand dollars. 18 of that was housing... the other 10 grand was money the Army essentially made me front myself and then not pay back for 2 years after the fact. This is what happens when you jump COCOMs for a WIAS tasking, that your COCOM doesn’t want to support/pay for, and at the end of your TDY the command you were deployed for is discontinued so there is no full bird or chief of staff to get a memo from for whatever shoe says your orders didn’t authorize X/Y/Z. That shit show legitimately made me almost get out of the Army, and it was the most rewarding assignment of my career.

It took me 2 years.... no that wasn’t a typo, Years, to get paid for a 6 month TDY that built a 18k dollar balance on my GTC. This night went across 3 commanders and 2 duty stations. In the end Citi and the govt paid me no interest or any kind of compensation for penalties and interests accrued keeping above water and IG could do absolutely nothing about it. This was literally DFAS and DTS playing “Not my problem call the other guy” for 2 years because of how some F’ing shoe clerk chooses to interpret orders. Citi and the GTC places all of the burden of F ups that are entirely the fault of the bureaucracy on the shoulders of the troops we sent to schools/missions and tell them pay for it via this program. They know it routinely takes months to get people paid, but they are issuing charges and fines like these troops have the money in their pocket the whole time. In doing so citi is making billions (seriously) over the decade long period where they own the contract to facilitate and operate the GTC program. They are nothing more than a predatory lender with connections in congress every time they start to look bad.

But again, what do you want a carrier to do and what is it supposed to bring to a fight. the Brits had 3 classes of Carrier in that near term Falklands conflict. Their “big” Audacious class fleet boats were still in the 50k ton range similar to our Midway boats (the ones that couldn’t embark Tomcat or fully laden A-6s). They were gone, but would have brought a fully capable airborne C2 and long range fighter in the form of Phantom, which would have greatly impacted the Argentines getting anywhere near the fleet compared to an air arm with only light close fight capability. Their intermediate boats of the centaur (which one was at the Falklands but only due to lucky timing) wasn’t big enough to have ever embarked F-4 before it was modified to ski jump, but it still had more room for more airwing than the smaller Invincibles which were barely carriers. Looking at carriers in other nations like the Foch or the Kuznetsov it’s the same old problems. Either they embark small airwings of smaller lighter aircraft because of the smaller ships ability to manage finite room, or they embark a paltry Air wing of large capable fighters (like the Kuznetsov) and usually end up operating those aircraft at much lower weights than their land based cousins so the advantage over VSTOL begins to be nullified. Also the reason everybody wants to talk about the Harriers taking on the Mirage is outside point Defence protection, the Brits didn’t have an airwing that could do much else. They with 2 small carriers and the reinforcements that came off the Atlantic conveyor later lacked anything resembling the kick in the door power needed to take port Stanley direct, which is why they came up with a bold and luckily successful end run around that problem with the Para, Commando, and Marines. If it had been asked to do more with its airwing it simply wouldn’t have been able to generate it while conducting its main role of protecting the staging for the task force. The Argentines didn’t really start hurting the fleet until after the Brits had eroded away its own CAP due to simply not having the airwing for sustained ops. The other thing about it is historic requirement for our force across the globe. If you can find a period where it looks like we won’t need these big boats which are seemingly at the limit with the small fleet we currently have great. Given recent trends and the fact it takes decades now to build a carrier, probably not the safe bet. Small decks would be to Naval planners an augmented addition but to the budget planners would be reason to target the big expensive ships because like Army Brigade types a Brigade is a Brigade and a carrier is a carrier.

You guys are the very specific service. honestly I’m all for anything that keeps smaller (read less capable) carriers out of the structure. It would be the same kind of confused self justification to essentially gut the real capability that the Naval strike arm brings in with a big nuclear carrier. The Midways and other non nuclear carriers did that all through the big money Reagan days. To the people holding the purse strings they don’t want to hear arguments on number of sorties it can make, operational times without refuel, etc, they just see a flat top boat with aircraft on it and think a carrier is a carrier. Never mind you had a couple carriers that would have been bringing F-4s and A-7s instead of Tomcats or fully laden Intruders and calling them equal when it was time to pay for it all. To some an LHA is a “carrier” which is just laughable (unless it’s the America which gets no other option). Small deck boats mixed with big boats just make that way too easy to find ourselves in a similar position to the Brits or French thinking “how did we get here?” People like to point at the Falklands as an arguement that small deck can still do the job. What they ignore about that is had it not been for the Courageous sinking the Belgrano and scaring the Argentine Carrier back into port that task force would have come under a hell of a lot worse than what it saw and wouldn’t have had a counter punch too it. It also would would have gone far differently had a heck of a lot more Strike power had the British had even 1 ship in its fleet comparable to any of our 80k+ ton full size carriers.

I doubt Marine leadership would think any differently than Army leadership when it comes to getting more and employing on a wider envelope when it comes to Aviation. The idea of going to the table to fight for a small deck carrier wouldn’t even rate discussion over spending the time arguing about getting a new rifle or artillery or some other toy for the service chief level people. Kinda like how Army Aviation poured all this money into getting Apache on to Link-16 and putting drones into the Aviation Brigade but there is no way in hell the bullet heads in charge would ever change our ownership model to allow us to actually plan and coordinate and exercise it where it’s at all useful.

Ok? If you were to tell any pointy nose state side aircraft unit go across the worlds largest body of water and not have or want to allocate a tanker chain to tow them across what would they do? If you can get C-12s into Afghanistan without taking them apart and stuffing them into the belly of a C-17, getting the 35 somewhere isn’t the impossibility it’s critics would make this out to be. Park a boat or boats for plane guard if you have to for the CRM aspect, if we needed to put 35B’s on Hawaii or Wake or some other far and away isolated location it’s entirely possible to do it. This isn’t the first aircraft with a set of challenges it’s planners have to work around to make the mission happen. That’s every aircraft. And like I said, it’s not like wing tanks aren’t in the works for approval. For the major part part of the forest being missed through the trees... Critics on this point need to answer what is the more likely scenario where a COCOM is screaming for more into their theatre of responsibility to fight a major peer threat? Is it getting 35Bs to Japan in a NK/China scenario or is it to Hawaii or Wake Island or some other far flung off location in the middle of nowhere to fight a giant ocean borne lizard rising out of the sea? Isolated remote locations outside of exercise participation aren’t necessarily the place I’d want to be generating lines for the ATO out of in a real shooting war.

You can thank congress for folding a 4.5 gen Harrier replacement in with everybody else’s program. No doubt the 35 would have been an entirely different aircraft without that funky VSTOL requirement. That said, the Marines screwed themselves walking away from the Rhino. That left them with no bargining room at the tribal council except, give Lockheed whateve they want because we are all in on 35. Still you can’t seriously say that though better stuff shoulda/coulda/mighthave... from the crowd of AV and F/A guys looking at what the 35B will be in a couple years you’ve gotta admit you are getting a whole lot more plane. Unless you’re a two anchor guy, because then you are getting the shaft.

On the 35B 1. Flight testing for clearance will happen. It’s not like the guys in the VX squadrons are done with the plane. It’s not like they haven’t flown the thing with tanks on and discovered it’s unsafe and needs a redesign. 2. Compare the 35 to the plane the Marines replace with it (Harrier). A clean F-35 without tanks isn’t going to have much issue outranging even a ferry configured AV-8B. 3. https://www.stripes.com/news/16-high-tech-f-35b-stealth-fighters-now-deployed-to-japan-1.498071 the Marines just self deployed to Japan so the idea that it’s stuck in one place until it gets those tanks sounds more like 35 haters talking smack than reality.

With all the new wizzbang actually usable tech from 1960s concepts like laser... How good would these systems have to get before the emphasis on building block ways you guys train on the idea of being able to also reach for the contingent circumstances changed. Every time I see the conversation about the gun in ATA with 35 it’s never really about “when we run out of Missiles” that starts the argument but instead “we forgot it in Vietnam with the F4 and it was terrible.” Is anybody really gonna pretend that the tech of the 60s and the tech of today aren’t light years apart in expected performance? I see the possibility of some ideas like DE based defensive/offensive systems as very quite possibly being the magic auto-kill/auto-defeat god mode in the game we have always dreamed of. Like if tomorrow somebody put a forcefield on the jet that could just absorb a flying telephone pole of death that will absolutely kill you without it... how much time and money would you spend on the contingencies to that system. I’m not gonna speak to the idea “you need to do____” for ATA, I’m just curious what point do you think the hold for old cultural norms would still be overriding reality of what you have. Watching the tech fight the culture has been interesting the last couple years with the rotary wing world in the IR MANPADS game. I can only imagine the same fights are existing in other communities.

We talk amongst ourselves about the procurement nightmare caused by generals coming up with continuously updated lists of must haves.... I can only imagine how much compounded suck you get when you then start mixing countries with very different ideas on how and what their Air Force requirements are.

I wonder how pushed in both offensive and defensive DE weapons are going to change what is important to all of us in the Air. Hard kill is growing into about the only option for the RF field for all us slow low people on the battlefield and DARPA is definitely chasing that dragon. I wonder if similarly that was made, proven, and integrated into the High speed end of the spectrum how much would that change you guys emphasis on this stuff above vs managing and processing the information at your use for the greatest efficiency to inflict maximum destruction on the other guy.

Crazier than the pilots of those jets.... the test pilots for them... “Hey Dave your flying this plane we built in 9 months... take it up and see how many was it tries to kill you, then report back so we can tweek it.”

But we can and should have both discussions. 1. Was his sentencing and trial fair.... no. Seriously guns do not just “go off.” His negligence/stupidity led to that weapon firing same as if he was in a car randomly touching stuff and ran her over. It’s pitiful that wasn’t the standard applies. 2. Sanctuary cities and their contribution to the death of the victim. Zarate wasn’t arrested by SF.... he was in Federal Custody. SF actively extradited him to the city to stand for a 20 year old drug Warrant, they didn’t charge him, and then through policy refused to hold him so he could be returned to Federal Custody. WTFO!? How is the city, and the state not called to task for that by the media. Somehow supporters of these policies or the #resist people against all things Trump seem to be ignoring that fact entirely. If I was the families lawyer I would be naming the city, DAs office, and State in a hell of a civil case for setting the conditions which directly contributed to the victims death.

That writing was in the wall 4 years ago when you could walk around the headquarters of the Strike Wing and they already had posters of it in Phil colors up on the wall.