Lawman

Absolutely. One of the best pieces of mentoring I ever got was a senior Warrant about to retire saying that as much as you love this job it ends. The family you have left at the end of that is what's important.

Currently drinking a McEwans Scotch Ale. It was a replacement for another Scottish ale I was looking for but couldn't find. Very good flavor. Almost has a caramel/malt flavor to it but not in a way that you forget your drinking a beer.

3 CABs on the chopping block.... Fuck yeah let's stand up an aircraft that will require multiple new MOS's not to mention a whole new shitload of infrastructure to support. It'll be operational ready to go in.... Maybe a decade optimistic. If everything goes right we can cut our already overextended Rotory wing assets to the bone so we can fund this boondoggle. This is just dumb every time I hear this rumor/joke out of anybody civ/military/whatever. It's not our job to do CAS. And nobody realizes the monumental shit show it would be to make it our job unless we literally take the entirety of the AF A-10 community and support and just have everybody change uniforms. Even that would be ugly at best.

<br /><br />The fact that the entire rifle is a milled piece of aluminum. Saves weight and keeps strength but that's a lot of waste your paying for left on the floor of the Machine shop.

I was flat told they won't pay for my masters degree. And I'm one of the few Warrants who had a Bachelors when I showed up. What pissed me off about it was being told by a CW5 who sat on he board that me having a bachelors prior to Army service kent the same to him as no Bachelors at all. And I asked... They won't pay for a 2nd more useful non basket weaving bachelors degree either.

Stick it to the man!

Going to the AOR..... For fuck sake just give them beer on Xmas. It'll be cheaper and it will make them less likely to suck start an M9 than watching 15 bad singers grind out a shittier version of Lady GaGa songs.

Army -1 Air Force - 12378

That we are ######ing up if we think replacing a 6 million dollar light scout mission with 40 million dollar E model gunships is gonna somehow be cheaper in the long run. The cost per hour alone don't make any sense. Either way ground force commanders are gonna want iron in the air all day long. If you have to do it with more expensive aircraft it doesn't take a genius to determine what will happen. Edit. Anybody making that comparison for A-10 being axed though remember your talking about using multiple multirole that already exist or are in development picking up a specific mission and putting it into the toolbox. The Apache/Kiowa situation would be more akin to somebody saying hey lets ground the 130s and just use C5s to move all our Cargo.

"We support our nations national interests in ...blah blah blah" Translation "Hey how the hell do you expect me to pay my mortgage if there aren't a half dozen Captains to rent my shitty properties too!"

But there are a lot more levels to war then full up open conflict war. I see what China is doing in japan a lot like what the Soviets did in Cuba. They sense (and probably rightly so) that we have a president who will back down when bullied by the big bet at the poker table and an American people who will do anything to avoid another war. Look at the amount of trouble we went through to avoid being the driving force decision makers behind action in Libya or the back peddling from the Red Lines that ended up not being Red lines in Syria. They see what Kruzchev saw in Kennedy a weak man with no real resolve more concerned in being liked than making hard decisions. Kruzchev was wrong in Kennedy but he was going off of not having the benefit to watch him be pushed into a corner. The Chinese have he luxury of seeing Obama act the opposite way when pressured. They don't think we will call so they are bullying us off the table with the big bet. Problem would be if Japan and them start slinging rocks over the issue are we gonna abandon our Ally and just pack our stuff and go home.

I'm curious as to where they got those numbers. Something about the Pave Hawk costing nearly triple what I've heard the Black Hawk quoted for seems weird. If they are accurate though... How the heck does a Gulfstream cost more per hour than a Viper... Make the Generals buy their own damn Scotch.

You can write that off on your taxes as charity right?.... If there is anything we don't need to be doing in the Army it's showing off our "average" female soldiers....

I don't think Iraq had any interest in fighting a war over Kuwait, but damned if they didn't do it. China wants to take over as the primary regional power in heir back yard, they don't want to have to fight the US or Japan to do it. They are playing the role of bully hoping that nobody on the table will call them on it, but it's not like they are holding a weak hand here. We want to maintain as the Worlds first power which means saying dominant in every region, but we don't want to fight wars to do it either. If we back down though because we are to weary they will push us out of he Pacific or at least make the West Pacific a Chinese Lake.... If neither side is willing to back down on this there will be a fight about it. War is a continuation of politics through other means... This is a perfect example of the opening stages of that scenario.

Ballsy.... Stupid but Ballsy I will give you that.

There would be ways to go about it but the planning to succeed with it would need a lot more vetting then just giving over the keys and the mission. The Army does have a lot in the way of organic support ability as far as setting up FARPs or providing guns to support when required. But I agree I would hate to see the mission just get folded into the standard CAB METL. Way to easy for assets to find themselves retasked, kinda why we maintain a specific medevac element so they don't get used to haul ass and trash around in the "off time." It would have to be treated as a separate entity to the theatre commander, not OPCON to some CAB commander whose first thought is his divisional support requirement and everything outside of that is extra. It would need to almost be its own entity within the JSOC/160th side of Army Aviation.

See you say that but... https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-strike-fighter If they are bailing on it they are a bit late. The new Defense Secretary reversed his predecessors decision to go with C models. And I've read that article, the same guy is calling for Raptors to the Marines which don't fit the plan anywhere.

Except your way further down the road on this than Comanche was. When they killed he RAH-66 it had flown less than 500 hours in testing, less then 100 of that with it's intended engines. It wasn't even a production version yet just a concept demonstrator and prototype like the X-35. The Army said screw this we will tank it and build a cheaper replacement, that option isn't available for the 35B because there is no cheaper replacement. If we were talking about the A or C model well heck yeah we just leverage the money to silent Eagle or more Raptors and Rhinos... Options to choose from. The JSF is now 10k hours in, into low rate production, conducting weapons and other full rate tests. The time to kill it was a decade ago if that was the plan. But either way he point of the F-35B getting a Harrier replacement still needs to be funded. And you have to pay off the Brits and any other partners for their participation in the program. Somewhere he money to buy 350 4th or better gen aircraft to replace Harrier and pay off partners has to come out of that program. So any savings by canceling the program is gone.

Semantics. 58 was an OH because that's what the naming convention at the time was using for the role. No different the he U-2 and SR-71 are both spy planes. Or the F-117 not having any fighter capability. We were calling the last 58 replacement the ARH-70. Doesn't make it a gunship. The Comanche for all it's glory was a ridiculous example of a program running away from the intent with a lot of "hey you wanna add his too?" Good idea varies running amuck too long. Meanwhile after 12 billion we had 2 aircraft to show for it whose gun didn't work without melting, couldn't fit the versions of the Hellfire we wanted, and had a lot of systems (radios etc) that didn't exist yet. All while replacing the smallest community of Helicopters in the Army and eating 60% of the Aviation budget...

Everyone is a winner, some people are just bigger winners then their peers....

Comanchee was never multi role though. It was and always would have been a scout. It wasn't going to replace anything but the 58D and wouldn't have turned into what it is if they had left it alone doing that. Longbow was still on, lift upgrades because our stuff was all early Panama vintage or older for lift. But we still haven't put any money into our scout program so now we are severely limited by the shortcomings of the 58. It isn't to ugly in low intensity but we will be marking targets with burning scouts if we go into anything else with it.

Had a Experimental Test Pilot in flight school that had been on the program. More things wrong with that aircraft then right, and it's smaller then the Zulu Cobra as far as gas and guns it brings to the fight. It could perform the eyes forward recon/screen ops needed, but it's still gonna be much to short in standoff capability and overwhelming Firepower to be much help against an Enemy main body. It has an amazing flight envelope for a helicopter, it's just not a hitter. And as far as cost goes...When we cx'd the program the money the Army saved paid for the M model Blackhawks, the F model Chinook upgrade, and the retiring of all the A model Apaches from Active and are units.

Don't get me wrong on saying it needed to be 5th Gen. If you could get a real 4.5 gen replacement for Harrier that does its job just better (gas, bombs, sensor, bring back, etc) that would have been good enough. But replacing a fast jet that is limited capable with a prop plane that is even more limited for anything but low threat is not the way to go. Problem is we folded the 4th gen harrier replacement into the Navy/AF 5th gen program... So now it has to be LO otherwise you guys would have had to get on board with another 4th gen aircraft. Which works out fine for the AF just buy more Raptors... But he Navy is a big partner in this. And yes he AF is there... Now... Without a decade of peace dividend cutting into your capability to stage like you can now. Does anybody remember how poorly set AMC was before we bought a billion C17s?Your talking about cutting tankers, cutting fighters, cutting basing in Europe, moving the Armor home (no Abrams in Europe anymore) cutting long range bombers like B1... But your expecting to meet commitments that are already painfully complicated when you have a dozen different options to skin the cat. So it's cutting into the numbers available to put up a constant support element, increasing the log time to get the Marine relief in heavy Army units in place, and the tankers to get either in place quickly. It gets more likely the Marines need that firepower then less doing that. Do we need super T's in the inventory... Absolutely. Buy 120 of them and the second the president flies to an AO under a mission accomplished banner swap them in for all the thoroughbred race horses and let them pull the plow for the next decade. Make it a joint unit open to anybody with a tactical background as a tour like FAC. Be a hell of a lot better use for those guys than RPA's and you keep the community fresh and not burned out on constant 1to1 deployments. If somebody had he forethought to have walked in Embrear at the start of stability ops with 2 billion and just told them "he next 150 off your line are mine!" We would all be better off. Then you wouldn't need sections of 40 million dollar jets and me flying 35 million dollar gunships around at 90ktas trying to be a flying QRF or nearly as many farps and dollars to support that nonsense.

Except there is no quantity limit 4-6 5th gen birds. Look at Iraq, they put 20 Harriers on a Boxer class boat and used them as Close Air Support overhead of the Marines. Because they needed more fixed wing CAS. As I brought up before the Air Force has the new Expeditionary Raptor option. 4 Raptors into an AO with parts to go through to sustain. That's a game changing maneuver element. So is having a half dozen 5th Gen deploy 50km from your beach with a cycle rate that allows hat GFC to exploit the attack. Need more, wait a dozen days for the Air Force to get enough Raptors out to Guam or Hornets to Wake etc, or just get the tankers to get a dozen F-35s out to that boat that's already there with parts and and fuel and a base and close by so they can be more useful. Can't do that without VSTOL. Yeah there is a lot of AF in Korea, but your gonna have 99 problems, and he Marine MEU is gonna be 1 of them. Now he capability of that MEU hinges on an outside source, that's exactly counter to their design and doctrine. Same as if they had no Abrams or 7 tons or Heavy Lift. They need a handful of all the elements for Unified Land Ops. The Marines are not The 911 force as long as it's not a scary enemy. And dude I've been involved in Army Movement operations.... Outside the 82nd unit that's on QRF it's worse than I'm implying. Go read about Task Force Smith and our self deploy debacle into Kosovo if you wanna see a great example of us reinventing the wheel in the middle of having shit to do. If you told my Brigade tomorrow to pack their shit and be in Kuwait we'd need 3 months just to get our shit packed. And we're supposed to be the forward positioned CAB for the Army.

Your argument negates he need for 5th gen fighters at all. Your leveraging everything on us staying and doing a lot of low intensity with the tiny possibility of high intensity. Is your memory so short we've forgotten he last 5 real high intensity conflicts that happened in the last 20 years (about as long as a fighter development program). You have stated it's not the Marines job to send the MEU in to be a miniature self contained force capable of holding a foothold (beach, airport, harbor, etc) while the Air Force and Army get their shit together and assemble an offensive capability. Thats exactly their job! And we have used them for that job (reference Marines deploying in Gulf War I). What do you think their job is gonna be in a Korea scenario? Launch SEAD for the Osprey with the Super T's? We got rid of the Bronco because of that exact scenario. It went to the gulf... And we lost more of them than any other fixed wing aircraft because it was he Marines primary FAC aircraft. We got rid of it and started using D model Hornets instead because survivability was an issue to address. Now your saying hey it's cool that's not gonna happen again bro, what we need is a long time persistent turboprop that can provide enough firepower to stop a Convoy TIC or support SOF doing a hard knock. You can call the scenario as unlikely as you want, fact is it has happened before, it will happen again. Same kind of crap people talk about tanks because when is the last time we rolled Abrams against T72s.