Lawman

Anybody heard from him lately. Been PMing the guy with no response about some stuff he asked me for a few months back. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If we walk away from Article 5 than NATO is unofficially over. Better we kick Turkey out of NATO preemptive to them dragging us into the shit storm rather than avoid keeping our word. Seriously the only thing keeping Russia from pulling a Crimea out in Latvia, Estonia, etc is them wanting to avoid an actual shooting war where the possibility of escalation exists.

Commission ROTC selects via an order of merit. There is no guarantee you will get an aviation branch specific commission. Essentially, do good in school, do good at ROTC, get a degree in something that matters just in case, have a good and current flight medical prior to selecting your MOS, pray for the favor of the gods. I've worked with plenty of ROTC aviation officers in my career so it's not something that doesn't happen. Also unlike say AF ROTC Aviation is the bastard stepchild amongst the combat/maneuver branches so it doesn't have the sex appeal competitiveness like say Infantry with a ranger slot. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The elements in the EU attempting to make this painful are cutting off their nose to spite their face. The attempt is transparent enough to see the whole point is the longer England deals with fallout painfully the more examples for pro-EU elements in countries like Denmark or France to use to hold by the trend of leaving. This isn't Latvia or some other tiny country amongst a list of countries that left, it's the 5th largest economy in the world and the 1st/2nd economy in Europe for 90% of the things you would want to export (tech/cars/etc). European politicians in Brussels seem to have forgotten they aren't the only Buffet table for the Brits to fill their plate at. If I was a business/industry CEO from an EU country I'd be making phone calls to the politicians of my country to remind them of that.... If I was same from outside the EU I'd be throwing everything I could at trying to pick up the market slack that things like punishment tariffs are going to cause. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

So if you don't get your Masters Degree you get force choked? I can only imagine the punishment for F'ing up the Christmas party or hail & farewell. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

All forces evacuated... Ground commanders intent met. Their cot is up. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I literally spent all of May in a craptastic place in the Mojave watching a ground brigade completely f@ck away its entire aviation task force on a daily basis.... And the koolaid drinking people that keep pretending we are anything but a U on all those METL tasks need to be taken out and beaten with a sack full of 1950s toasters.

This. Ground commanders who grew up mostly or entirely in a COIN fight are having to relearn this at NTC/JRTC right now. It is critically apparent with smaller lighter ground units like light infantry and Stryker infantry that they fully expect to just hold air power in their hand like the trump card for when they encounter hostile Armor or are counter attacked. Problem is they have no understanding of threats to our operations and are myopic in prioritizing fires or EW to enable those combat air assets. The other issue people are missing out on is the airspace coordination piece. If you have to get up close and personal with targets ala Hawg with the 30, you are putting yourself into the same area as all the gun target lines and support fire positions a ground force in a near peer/peer fight is going to not only have but need to be using especially if your threat defeat tactic is to get low. Not a lot of that to worry about in Syria/Iraq/Astan with the hybrid SF/Ranger driven fights we are waging. If they have indirect it's pretty limited. A Brigade or Battalion movement to contact is going to have multiple PAAs and transitioning them to perform CAS may actually have a negative effect on the total battle area because we shut down fires or suppression or smoke. It also requires a higher level of knowledge from the ground commanders to make sure they don't F themselves and more importantly you/me in only leaving us options of in/egress that are poor to terrible because they used up all the other airspace for their stuff. No we are not ready to fight a high threat CAS fight, because we aren't ready to fight a high threat Joint fight, because conversely we aren't ready to fight a high threat ground fight. It's that integration on the battlefield and institutional knowledge that's really going to screw us now, not the fact we have point nose fast air planes or ones that carry a bigger stick but go slower. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Translation: "Keep rowing the boat ignore the water filling up around your feet... Chow today will be fecal matter on sourdough with soup." Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Both my father in law, and my dad either spent time o Guam or had friends that did during the 80s. My wife lived there for three years as a kid and her mother who hates any place not south east Texas even enjoyed the experience. Dad almost took Guam but got Italy instead for his overseas tour. Seems like at the time though every family we knew did 1 overseas tour in a career minimum, and it was 3 years remote or 4 years with Family. Seemed the only variable was which Ocean you crossed as my family and a lot of our friends went to Europe where my wife's family and friends did the Pacific to either Guam, Japan, or PI.

Because in the future.... Front plate drag won't exist.... in A Boeing is doing the same thing with the F-15 that Grumman tried to do with Tomcat 21 and other l"ook how cool this could be" models. Only this time it's on YouTube.

I just can't see any country lining up to spend 150ish million on a 35 to not see the 160 or 170 mil on a Raptor and not immediately go for that. Especially with small density fleet upgrades of 8-12 Airplanes like a lot of these outside NATO countries keep getting into. If we did revisit and actively have a Raptor production line though it might get interesting to see how long even our own Air Force towed the company line on the 35 before chopping it's order to some 5-600 planes and going bring on the F-22B and push to replace the Strike with something like that long range strike Raptor concept. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'm just using that country as an example of "only the best" when it comes to buying equipment they neither need nor have the training mindset to effectively employ. For F-35 to truly be the export wonder we want it to be (ala F-16) we are gonna need to sell it to everybody. FMS and the need to keep Lockmart fed and strong will take over and it will end up in the hands of nations currently looking at their fleets and thinking "we need a dozen fighters in the next decade." Having Raptor on the market Muddies the water where right now there is no question that no... Even if you're England or Japan you cannot get Raptors so if you want 5th gen better get onboard the Lightning train. Especially not when partner nations that are receiving their 35s are starting to waiver on totals and Money.

It won't happen because it'll bite in the 35 market share. Countries with more money than brains who really need the hottest sexiest monster to fly around the flag pole (looking at you Saudi Arabia) they would buy Raptors over lightings.

Let's be honest with our goals here for 6th gen.... If it doesn't turn into a 47 foot tall walking robot we failed.

Oh I've trained with them. FN2000 specifically. I don't assume anybody will be as fast or as capable as some guy that runs his 3 gun rig 3 times a week or anything. What I've seen is average shooter with average training means lesser results for an unfamiliar platform, and unless all you train with is bullpups (Israel, Aussie, etc) it's gonna be a weird gun to train to. Like I said too there is a big difference between using a standard pattern rifle like a AR/AK/FAL/etc and a bullpup while wearing body armor or an LBV with mags and other stuff. It's not to say it can't be done, just that there is a reason that you don't see a lot of SWAT teams or better yet CIF teams (who can use whatever the hell they want) going to full barrel bullpups over SBR AR pattern rifles. The common bad habit I saw was guys raising the barrel to get better angle on the mag well, which means in a combat load (pulling a half empty mag with 1 in the chamber just in case) you are now pointing your weapon at the ceiling at not at the threat. Like I said it's not that they have some sort of glaring negative, more that they don't offer any real advantage outside this one particular of keeping high velocity (long barrel) in the 100-200 meter fight when compared to an SBR. It's the unfamiliarity to the design and the lack of available parts or gunsmiths that really turns me off to the commanding price they typically require. I mean looking on a strictly dollar amount getting an alright AUG or other type rifle starts you into the excellent AR class of rifles. For pre bans you're getting into carry it daily life on the line quality contractor rifles.

It's kinda a weird gun idea. The whole purpose of a bullpup is lets get a long barrel on a short rifle, but the trigger group on a bullpup will never be as tight as on a standard rifle. Flip side is ok great well long barrel on a short gun so good for tight quarters type fight... Well they seem to be a lot more controllable under high rates of fire, but they are significantly less easy to reload fast ala combat load on say an AR pattern rifle. And you basically have to come off target to reach the mag well especially wearing body armor and all the other stuff you would want in that kind of fight. So they don't really have an advantage there either. Literally the only thing they do better than a regular rifle is keep velocity and maintain a sight picture/cheek weld to get a shorter rifle to go around corners. So great if your fighting in a house against somebody wearing armor, but not good for the >200m fight and not good for volume of continuous fire.

Pray for Pallawan. There isn't anything at Basa except Cobras and a runway the Phils have been trying to get us to repair for them for a decade. Mactan is just in the middle of nowhere. At least with Basa it's an hour drive to Clark and Angeles City. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

We would do that like crazy when we had to play stupid ROE games with CDE or continuous PID. Joke was always that IED emplacer is going to have a hell of a time figuring out which one is the red wire in a few days.

Yup - the main thing I can't understand is why the fact that it will not need AR support to do an operationally relevant sortie (ISR, CAS, Surgical Strike, or all of them on one mission) is not breaking thru and getting more traction towards acquisition and this coming from a former tanker bubba. Even way back when I was a tanker co I knew that having a two ship of 16's on station with the huge tanker commitment to pass gas to them (and all the other two ships) did not make sense when you had cheaper options given the threats you actually faced, the amount of times we were going kinetic after major combat ops ended and the cost of keeping x number of tankers on station 24-7-365. This is a perfect plane / mission for Guard / Reserve, but like the C-27J and two brothers, if I can't have one he can't have one. Because as I alluded to in my earlier post it isn't as simple as the cost of X airplane vs Y airplane. Hell look at the billion dollar stack put up over every single Swoopy HVI take down. Or the days worth of data collection to build pattern of life before we even do that. Yeah it would probably be cheaper to go in with 1/5 the Intel and an AWT and a predator 95% of the time and get away with it. The problem is that time it doesn't and you lose a bunch of tier 1 asset guys who cost millions each individually in training not to mention a pair or more of 160th crews which cost tens of millions in training dollars. The view is we can stand to absorb the cost of being way way overly conservative better than we can both financially, emotionally, and all too important polotically absorb the cost of a failure to be ready and it's really true. A situation like what happened in Mogadishu where we tried to do something that invested on the cheap resulted in a failure so spectacularly bad it stopped an entire special ops campaign as well as our peace keeping op participation, organized tens of millions of dollars of forces to respond to the 2nd and 3rd level effects, and became the reason we don't do it that way for the next twenty years.

An interesting take but I disagree with your assessment about security costs, esp if you have rotor wing assets forward deployed as nothing drastically changes security wise aside from extra fuel, spares and munitions that need to be shipped to the FOB. What you gain is better support at a cheaper cost. Doesn't the Army always complain about "Where is my air?!?" That's the problem though. Once you start committing ground forces in a number that requires 30 million dollar gunships to provide 24 hour ops (because that's normal in Afghanistan and therefore should be everywhere) you piss away all the savings. Base security and ownership of the battle space becomes this never ending exponential monster. Suddenly the requirements turn into the justification for further requirements until it becomes a giant self licking ice cream cone that serves nothing but its self. That's one of the few times that non ground intensive air campaigns actually look cheaper from a dollars both in the literal and the political impact standpoint.

Unfortunately that's true of pretty much every government agency at this point.

Yup To fly a mission in OIR with a Scorpion Jet assuming a 6 hour mission, assuming $3K per flight hour, is $18K where that same mission performed by a F-16 (keeping it single ship apples to apples comparison) and assuming a $10K per hour cost (very conservative) and then assuming it would need two ARs for ingress-patrol-recovery and a 5 hour tanker mission to cover that at $15K (again conservative) that comes to $135K to fly that mission in a mostly permissive AOR but both by the capabilities of the aircraft, sensors, weapons and their ROE would deliver a weapon or conduct ISR outside the WEZ of most realistic threats so using the high end system to deliver the same effect is of little operational benefit and significant cost. To quote Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC, "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." It is the logistics & costs of these sustained long term operations consisting of not just kinetic military effects but persistent ISR (and the huge PED tail to make any use of what is collected) that should drive the unimaginative AF to adapt and change when the model of how it did things in the past in operations that were quite different is just too damn expensive for what we actually do now and are likely to do a lot more of in the future. Going back to the bar napkin math I dreamed up, you save $117k per mission, assume you fly 25 missions a day with 2 FOLs and you save daily over $2.9 million. That's not even considering the huge savings in logistical footprint by reduction from flying/supporting fewer types, aircraft not needing AR, etc... $2.9 mil a day at one year comes to $1 billion per year, that pays for 50 Scorpion Jets in a year. Not even figuring in the extra costs of the reduced footprint, service life extended by saving hours on fighters by not using them for these types of operations, etc... You save a billion here and a billion there and eventually you save real money in Pentagon terms... then you can buy nice toys. By all accounts the Iraqi AF just lost a Caravan conducting a Hellfire strike to ISIS AAA. Outside of Afghanistan where the biggest gun is probably a And while yes Scorpion and other type airplane's absolutely win the cost to use argument they are virtually useless until after the major fighting is over. That means that while they are extremely well suited to rearming an Iraqi or other type Air Force they shouldn't be looked at as a good idea for us to go launching offensives with. Which is exactly why I fully support money to the AVFID program that does exactly that, get their crappy Air Force to perform its own ISR and CAS under our direction to help them find their ass with an extra hand. The much larger overall unaccounted for cost of putting a small turboprop/jet at airports within the AOR is them requiring a much larger and more expensive security cost. And it's an exponential curve. You need patrols outside the wire to maintain your logistics. You need a QRF that can do something about the 122mm rockets and mortars that keep coming on daily repetition (anybody been to Shank?). The second you start taking casualties on the ground the dollars saved argument dries up much less the loss of an aircraft. When you are talking about half million dollar vehicles lost full of ground bubbas to an IED and the beating to morale that a unit losing guys to ambushes and IDF has to endure the dollars for a couple weeks of having Viper and a Tanker on the ATO look cheap.

I know you're enamored with the idea of re-instituting the warrant officer corps in the Air Force--a whole different rank structure that hasn't existed in the Air Force for decades--but it's not clear how doing so would really help. If E's without college degrees can be made RPA pilots, then it would be much smarter to (1) design an enlisted career path that would reasonably ensure E's entering RPA pilot training would successfully complete the program, and (2) incentivize E's--monetarily and otherwise--to want to be RPA pilots . . . and perhaps more importantly, remain on AD as RPA pilots. Keeping them as E's would help protect the field from getting screwed up by the "everybody is a leader so now we can use warrants outside the role of technical/tactical expert" problem Army warrants are currently experiencing. As noted before though, I personally find it tough to envision an Air Force enlisted track that would set E's (with no prior college experience necessary) up for success in RPA pilot training (which would have to include weapons employment, except for Global Hawk drivers). Furthermore, you'd have to throw some pretty huge bonuses their way, or get awfully creative with non-financial incentives, to get them to remain on AD. I really don't see how the Warrant Officer idea is the panacea you make it out to be. TT Well it's the rub and I'll agree the Army is F'ing up a good thing with warrants same as they F'd up a good thing when we got rid of specialist ranks. The idea of warrants is the same as the idea of non command/limited duty officers like you find in the research engineering corps. It's the only way to get pay with enough incentive to the tasks required which is the big problem a lot of you keep coming back too while at the same time not creating a person who needs all those boxes and career progression requirements checked to stay competitive after 2-4 years. The problem with enlisted/senior enlisted ranks or regular commission officer ranks is their field of promotion isn't specific to their job and there are so many that the guy that stays and specialized and didn't broaden (the original idea behind a warrant) isn't competitive to when promotions come around that guy non selects and now his job field suffers while the total number of say E6 to E7 looks fine and A1 stand around scratching their heads wondering why they can't make and keep enough enlisted UAS guys. The Army is F'ing it up because we are expanding warrant roles in this "everybody is a leader" model where we want Warrants to be 2/3 pay captains in all but name. Either the corps will die and we will all just wake up one day as Cpts and 1Lts or they will figure out this was as bad an idea as making every hard working but non leadership oriented specialist into an NCO.. General Lundy is one of the few flag officers (aviation branch chef) that sees this as a mistake but that's a fight between flag officers to have. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This would be where arguing to institute a warrant officer program would make sense then. Get the extra pay and graduate some E's to a role that doesn't require the 4 year degree to fill the seat, but without all the bullshit broadening and box checking required to be a successful regular commissioned officer when you're trying to promote against peers outside that small community. It would only work though if the head office protected the field to be and do what they are supposed to be/do. Not F it up with this everybody is a leader so now we can use warrants outside the role of technical/tactical expert. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk