Lawman

Which is the kind of logic this guy is trying to use to just keep all that crap out the infrastructure advantage and move all that combat power to Nebraska and Texas. PrSM is going to be part of the discussion of achieving dominance over the 1st Island chain just because of the fact you don’t need to resupply it at Sea or bring it back to regenerate it. Remember there are more HiMARS in just the 17th FAB than in the Marine Corps. There’s a reason they designed the things to fit in a cargo plane or on a container ship and keep showcasing that capability at exercises across the theatre. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Author is at best an isolationist attempting to hide behind a facade of budgetary justification and frame the argument that US Forces Korea exist behind glass separate of any other conflict or use. The author’s idea that the Army is not present in an IndoPacom fight is demonstrated ignorance of not understanding what that fight will actually look like or what previous historical fights in the Pacific were either. No, there will not be a Tank Division driving across open plains to achieve some sort of armored breakthrough, however the Fires and with it wide area security/control as well as the echelons of intel collection that occur resident to those Army formations will absolutely be at play in a conflict over the 1st Island Chain. And anybody that doesn’t think large scale ground maneuver warfare happened in the Pacific should really go take a look at WWII Burma or Luzon. The Marines will get the press but the reality is the Army will be the one that secures Islands because mass means something when you talk the scale of the pacific, and keeping those elements in 2ID that far forward grants a lot of reaction space and time made up. Same was true of WWII. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

These ever shrinking fleets of non special capability sets have got to be killing us to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep limping them along. The Navy has almost twice as many AB destroyers as the Air Force has B1s…. For an airplane with no nuclear mission. And no amount of “but just think of what we could maybe do with hypersonic!” is going to suddenly make it worth keeping. I’m almost convinced the Air Force has kept a couple of these sacrificial budget lambs (Hawg) around as long as they have because when they threaten to just cut it for something else Congress always orders them to keep it and somehow squeezes more money out of the couch cushions. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Divest now, not over a decade. And when somebody comes out screaming “but IndoPacom!” remind them that Bone is neither the sole means of providing nor the most survivable method of delivering strikes in that scenario. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Bone Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

How many 6000 hour pilots do you think exist in the Army RW community? This is exactly why hour counts as a metric for experience are a crappy way of measuring as a metric. I had half to less than a third of the hours my peer group had following my first deployment, but 80% of my time was in the dark supporting actual missions not flying hardstand to handstand carrying ass and trash. Explain who is more experienced in that regime given those conditions. All bolting hour count to an experience label does is help delay young pilots from gaining valuable experience early as they are limited from participation while the old guys do the hard stuff. There is no way to simply produce a 6000 hour pilot and simply deciding that what was normal 10-15 years ago when we were all doing 12 on 12 off deployments is and forever will be the bar is just ignorant of reality. What was normal in 2007 wasn’t normally in 97 or 87 and somehow nobody had a problem with it. What’s the magic number where we declare a pilot “experienced” by community vote? The drone of attacking experience or inexperience does nothing but deflect conversation from reality which is people with oversight permitted this situation to operate for far too long either due to negligence or ignorance and it only became public when we burned a few aircraft in. A front office stacked with hours doesn’t change the math of the problem here or the negligence in our procedures to predict and review it. And I’d take recency over hour count any day which is a far bigger problem for my pilot population currently. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Where do you think 460 hours as a captain would fall within the current Army aggregate of experience? I got news for everybody, the days of 1000 hours in a deployment have been over for a decade. Her hours are completely in line with the average for her year group as well as the wider seen average across the combined Warrant/RLO company pilot population. There was nothing abnormal about this crew mix and as you said it was entirely procedural produced risk we had learned to live within and normalize. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Somebody find the white paper on the money spent going from F-F/A-F-22. That can’t have been free and it was entirely stupid. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Think about the first time you looked in a helmet mounted sight and saw the wingman or mission participant through link that was way beyond visible. That capability has existed in some form or another for a couple decades. TCAS is older than most of the pilots flying with it and only ten years younger than the oldest people flying commercial aircraft today. Systems like ITDS have demonstrated the ability to see further and through obscurants we can’t see through, and do it constantly but with coding provide queuing to the crew only when it’s relevant. You can take a picture and give it to your phone or social media and it’s smart enough to see faces and even identify them. This would be that principle but doing predictive analysis of other traffic so it can point where the friction will happen and disregard where it won’t. Imagine if you were that hawk crew and you looked up to see 3 bright light sources and didn’t have to guess which one ATC is trying to get you to acknowledge. Augmented reality isnt impossible, but it requires people to acknowledge that “see and avoid,” isnt adequate. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That’s the point we’ve been making to counter. It’s like NVG is the sole solution therefore anything not working well in them is ignored. In this case they were even trying to insist there is a threat to Apache which isn’t flying with NVG as its primary sensor, it’s flying FLIR and doesn’t care anyway. And it has an unaided eye as well… There is no single solution to the issue and it’s one of the arguments we are making in the Army rotary community to fast track ITDS because of the amount of SA it can grant in addition to being a missile warning system. We did testing with seeing the category 1/2 SUAS… damn things are invisible in the day time with you know where they are beyond about 200-300 meters. The human eyeball is not sufficient to the hazards that are out there today, much less in a decade as we democratize the number of airspace participants. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

In my opinion it’s a very overblown problem. Like we’ve got the same “oh my god what about!?!?” going on with some people on our installation because of what seems like sheer boredom more than anything else. Yes it’s a hazard, yes it’s different, but it’s not like the damn things are invisible. What would be great is just standardized across all elements and stop having incandescent and LEDs in the same environment. That would negate most of the problem. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Austin is good people, even if he is an herbivore. I’m glad that somebody gave him the chance to speak on this as well as he did to discuss all the nuances involved. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I’ve heard a lot of napkin theory on merging STRATCOM with Cyber/Space on the grounds that Cyber/Space represent both offensive and defensive threats/capes in line with the strategic nature of Nukes. I think from the outside looking in it’s not a terrible idea in theory. How the commands and staffs underneath that work or overlap I have no idea. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There’s a great podcast discussing the fact we are currently today living with the results of the 90s and our attempts to restore industrial capacity in ship building and maintenance is really more impacted by the loss of skilled generational labor. We are talking about the same issues with large armored vehicles. That’s why the plants building Stryker as much as we don’t want it aren’t immediately shuttered. The PM recognizes that in the meantime of 1-2 years developing something else for them to build the industry would have to be rebuilt from scratch adding 5-10 years to the process. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Somebody should double down on this stupid just to force the boss on it. “Sir the OR rate is what it is, and you see from the training slides we are severely under glide for the flying hour program. Sir, this being Friday I was hoping to conduct an early release of the troops. We did an in ranks inspection and their socks are all the approved color.” Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There is an entire difference between “Standards” and “meaningless hills to die on invented by some shoe clerk to give their career/position purpose.” The inability by senior leadership to even acknowledge that both are going on throughout ranks and services is exactly the kind of shit that causes you and others to stand dumbfounded at your warfighters and tactical leaders not simply toe the line because some anointed E9 from the second group tells you, “we’ve got a problem with discipline.” Stop inventing stupid standards and crush anybody that does so we can spend the energy on enforcement of standards where it god damn matters, Sir. The next time some E8/9 is doing uniform spot checks I’m going to make them conduct a log book recon because that will actually get somebody killed and is the job those crew dawgs are here to do, and they can in fact do it while wearing white socks *gasp/horror. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I mean one of his personalities claims to be a mustang Captain…. But when has anybody given much credence to the words/noises coming out of an O-3 as informed, so the rampant stupidity actually checks on that one. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Random official talks out ass about meeting he doesn’t have front seat for. Go to Powidz right now and see the amount of money being poured into infrastructure on the front end of the EUCOM orbit. Remember this is the president that was celebrating the fact Poland wanted to build “Fort Trump.” That said there is absolutely no tactical necessity to forward base personnel in places with no strategic depth other than to use them as a pretext of “you killed our people! Article 5!” What we were leaving in the Baltics is specifically to telegraph visually and politically. It makes no sense militarily. Likewise to having a Corps headquarters in Poznan. Move that crap where it isn’t immediately needed to be evacuated in a shooting war and actually put it where I can do its job, Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That’s not what will cause a delay in release by the Safety Center. If (and this is currently happening with a couple incidents) there is an attempt at legal action by families naming the Army crew at fault then the tapes will go to a special withholding where they can only be used in evidence of the legal proceeding. The Army safety center will cooperate through the investigation but now have the added issue of releasing delayed for however long those legal proceedings go on. Theres a current tape that’s been held for years now because of a suit against the manufacturer for a fault in design and the associated crew recording and flight recorder data is held as part of the suit. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I had a pilot call in “Im showing no indication.” Tower asked them to fly by and was furious when they realized it. Several ass chewings later, it was still funny. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Cool, tell DAMO-AV. It’s 20-30 million to put it behind the glass, per MDS. That’s what it costs to open the proprietary codes in these old legacy platforms. Foreflight is not a program of record in the Army, and due to the requirement by the wider Army that we use ITN and the TAK architecture that exists we’ve spent a decade with units having to spend millions out of other budgets to get or keep foreflight in action. I love foreflight, but they (Boeing) have for the last several years repeatedly told both the conventional and special ops aviation community “we aren’t doing Apple, you’re a niche customer.” That is only just now starting to come around as a few people transition out, but we’re years away from fielding anything and the priority with all the budget tightening is a warfighter tablet, not something for a VIP unit. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

With current Army hour trends that absolutely tracks within the normal. We don’t have 1000 hour deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as the norm anymore to skew the normal. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The problem is the uneducated idiots spinning narratives will take that and just add it as a log to the big bonfire of “we’re becoming a dictatorship!” Anybody who honestly believes we are positioned or ready to conduct such an operation is outside the room with the current force restructuring and belt tightening going on with the force you would need to actually do it. We are cutting massive headcount’s in our brigade combat teams to make do with the new budgets. You don’t do that preparing for a war/occupation/rebuild that requires bodies and not bleeding edge tech. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Warrants classify into 4 specific career tracks, one of them being Instructor/Evaluator. IP is not an upgrade in the Army, it is a specific career progression. We have made RLO(O series) instructors on occasion, but it is usually tied to specific detail such as the exchange billet with the UK. It is normal, she would log PI even though she has a PIC rating, because she is being evaluated. Same is true of an IP evaluating the commander. The only time you get weird logging of a kind of dual PC condition is an IP conducting a check ride from the control station and a Stands pilot (IP upgrade) conducting a simultaneous evaluation from the bench or jump seat in a 60/47. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

It’s not high, it just isn’t abnormal in a place where we no longer have 500-1000 hour producing deployments. That is her total time, not her time at her check for PIC. We have had a very artificially seasoned force from 2004-2018 or so. That just isn’t possible anymore. That count is absolutely in line with the aggregate average across the Army. Particularly for somebody assigned where she was prior. Right now it isn’t your counts that are the issue, it’s regularity of hours. Her total time means nothing if she was doing what has become all too common across the force and going 59 days between flights or not meeting minimums. That is now the new normal and it has eroded proficiency and slowed progressions. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk