jice
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Posts posted by jice
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On 4/10/2024 at 11:30 PM, Prosuper said:
Was passing through Kandahar 2012 timeframe and saw NASA WB-57s there. Could only guess what they were doing.
Science, obviously.
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2 hours ago, stract said:
The "why" was pretty apparent from the article. Re-read the second paragraph.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-jets-intercept-4-russian-warplanes-near-alaska-norad/
Thanks. No questions; cleared off.
Anybody *with SA* on the actual advantages to designation as a FIS? (as opposed to a fighter squadron or aggressor squadron that conducts air defense missions, which was a relatively regular occurrence).
Put another way: what follows with the name change in terms of budgets, manning, etc.? Why FIS rather than Fighter Squadron (wrt resourcing, etc.)?
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More local than the DAF re-org…
https://theaviationist.com/2024/04/04/u-s-air-force-18th-aggressor-squadron-redesignated-as-18th-fighter-interceptor-squadron/
Neato. Anyone with SA able to explain the ‘why?’
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1 hour ago, disgruntledemployee said:
So apparently a billionaire that got rich off high interest payday loans put up the bond for Trump, calling it a business deal. Isn't that a red flag for holding a security clearance, ie, beholden to an individual for a large sum of money and thus corruptible?
Neat fact: the President doesn’t require a security investigation or formal clearance while in office.
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8 minutes ago, HeyEng said:
After being retired from the USAF, a handful of aircraft were donated to NASA for use in atmospheric research.
One of the coolest jets around. Slight correction: remain on loan to NASA from the USAF. No danger of them coming back though; it’s manned and therefore cannot possibly be useful for recce in the modern world. /s
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14 minutes ago, Clark Griswold said:
This article is 50% relevant (maybe)…
At that Army General: Tell me you think dozens of miles at a time in a poorly contested EMS without saying you think dozens of miles at a time in a poorly contested EMS.
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4 hours ago, yellerfever said:
The Air Force is once again showing disdain for their hardest working, highest performing people…that have the most options on the outside.
Gotta figure out some way to pay for the $50k bonuses we tricked a bunch of 27-year-old-second-assignment-no-ground-duties bros into taking.
Anybody have previous years’ increments handy?
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10 hours ago, brabus said:
Anyone know if a temporary change to your exemptions and/or W4 will reduce bonus taxes? My idea is adjust those for the month of the bonus payout, then adjust them back to standard afterwards - goal is not give the govt an interest free loan. If this isn’t going to work, any other ideas?
Not a professional; consult one…
Not directly. The payout will be withheld as a bonus, but remember: it’s taxed the same as any normal income. If that withholding is at a significantly higher rate than the rest of your income (unlikely, I’d guess), you COULD adjust to “flatten” that bubble over the rest of the year to hit 0(ish).
Consult a pro & don’t dork up the math. Not worth the pain or risk of messing it up without realizing it… IMHO.
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8 hours ago, brabus said:
That’ll change once they realize how much fatass America is tanking their revenue. What a stupid idea.
Maybe not as dumb as it looks…
It’s Southwest. Open seating; those seats go unfilled anyway 97% of the time, since you can’t physically put somebody there and nobody’s going to insist on lifting a love handle to take their seat. I guarantee you that fat, cheap people aren’t buying two seats en masse with southwest now.
This way they can charge a fee to process the refund (or keep the cash in exchange for travel credit) and they get to put the cash to work between purchase and refund. At an airline committed to open seating, this is how you create a surcharge while winning a PR victory in the community you’re extracting dollars from
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58 minutes ago, raimius said:
If someone says "United States" do you think "POTUS, SCOTUS, and Congress" IS the United States of America? I hope we can define it a little bit larger than just that, otherwise "we the people" have literally become irrelevant.
Yeah man, I think that’s obvious.
I’m saying it’s a complicated topic that people have been trying to figure out for thousands and thousands of years. I’m not able to add anything… We’re all about 60 lifetimes of reading behind as is.
For the purpose of this discussion, re: ‘will to fight’ it’s the folks who have the credible and enforceable authority to order forces to fight on behalf of a state.
Also for the purposes of this discussion, it obviously varies by how you bound things in time (among a billion other ways to frame). For example, in our system the ‘will of the state’ comes down to exactly one human at a singular point in the first few minutes of a full-scale nuclear exchange… but you can zoom out from there to all the factors that put the button in his hand, and farther to the system in which that button exists, ad infinitum.
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9 minutes ago, raimius said:
Very much disagree.
The government represents the country, more or less. (More when democratically elected, less when a dictatorship/oligarchy.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)
I’m sure we’ll settle this over the next few days by blaming team D or team R, but “what is a state” is a worthwhile recurring rabbit hole.
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4 hours ago, tac airlifter said:
Does the logic work both ways? Would you also say Russia has the will to fight despite their forced conscription? Because I hear a lot about Russian forced conscription being symptomatic of imminent defeat, which seems like selective bias.
Yes. Yes. The people who say that are conflating a state’s intent to fight with the consequences of the policies it uses to do so. Those are related concepts but not the same, regardless of form of government.
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4 hours ago, tac airlifter said:
I'm not sure forced conscription counts as "the will to fight."
Is there something I’m missing that makes the Ukrainian draft unethical/illegal? Or are they just drafting people because… Russia invaded them (again)?
Or, in insanity land… you’re right, that greatest generation had no spine because conscription provided 10 million personnel.
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5 minutes ago, hindsight2020 said:
Indeed I have, as well.
The irony of course, when it comes to that insufferable "your entire livelihood...is just my motherhood" attitude, is that the plurality of that demographic's personnel losses rests squarely at the hands of the very mOthErHooD they deride as scutwork. Miscontrol/Loss of control in IMC, spatial-D causal.
Statistically far and beyond mechanical causals, to say nothing of a galaxy's worth of separation from anything resembling enemy action causal. But you can't talk about fight club with that crowd without being shouted down with appeal to authority fallacies. Arrogance is made of such ways, wcyd.
Which demographic are you talking about?
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54 minutes ago, Biff_T said:
My son will fight terrorists like his father. Shit, I bet my grandkids will be fighting in that shit hole called the Middle East. SWA (south west asia) for life!
I would have rather fought in SEA or Europe. I missed out on the good wars.
1) I’m proud of you for not ‘laughing out loud’ for a whole post, Biff. Well done.
2) There’s still a chance!.. depending on how froggy this (and the rest of the world) gets.
…lol
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14 minutes ago, HeloDude said:
Nah…you just can’t have a conversation outside of your own emotions. I used to be that way a long time ago. How was that steak dinner or chicken sandwich the other day?
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Lighten up.
Delicious? I don’t share your belief; don’t see your point.
Like I said, weird hill. If that’s the one you choose to look down on us from, I don’t think many will bother to charge it.
Cheers.
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59 minutes ago, Lord Ratner said:
If you want to have a philosophical discussion, just say so. You aren't coming off as obvious as you think you are.
So... is there a difference between killing a human in a war and killing them to steal their car? Why
Is there a moral difference between killing a deer for food, and drowning a cat in a pond because you like the sounds they make as they die? Why?
Homeslice just wants to drink a beer, fvck his horse, and catch an episode of “will it euthanize.”
Why are we picking on him?
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9 hours ago, HeloDude said:
It’s pretty easy—there’s no such thing as “animal rights”, so if you can kill an animal for fun, then why should it be illegal to allow them to fight each other if they’re your animals? I’m not discussing morals whatsoever…if that were the case, whose morals, and what is ok morally and no ok? I think it’s much worse to abort an unborn child 2 months before birth than to take two dogs you own and have them fight (even though I think that’s also immoral and sick). It’s called hypocrisy if you support the ability to do one and not the other.
So I think I understand you to mean: You strongly believe that animals do not have rights. Therefore, laws that treat animals differently are hypocrisy. For example, if a person supports shooting a coyote (and leaving it to rot, I guess?) but not fighting dogs, that they’re a hypocrite. Therefore your preference is that dog fighting be legal to avoid hypocrisy?
Does this attachment to the idea that animals don’t have rights make your life so much easier to live that you’d prefer a world in which dog fighting is legal?
It’s a strange hill, bro.
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@HeloDude I don’t understand your position in this debate. Could you state it for somebody who’s obviously missing something?
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1 hour ago, Boomer6 said:
Are nukes really on the table for Russia? Are they willing to instigate a nuclear confrontation anymore than we were in Korea or Vietnam. Despite an hyperbolic kremlin rhetoric, is anyone assessing that as a realistic possibility? Maybe outside the scope of an unclass network.
Also, it wouldn’t be the first time Russians shot down a NATO aircraft, to include crewed aircraft. These occurrences were during the Cold War, where I think we can all agree there was a much higher probability of a nuclear confrontation than any other time in history.
Looking at it from another angle. Would the US actual nuke Russia because they participated in a proxy war against us such as this (history says no, obviously). As a military member the idea of this seems absurd. Those of you wringing hands, why does it seem less absurd that Russia will respond in this way?
Are nukes on the table for Russia? Yes. Just like they’re on the table for us. Is it likely to escalate there? Almost certainly not. Many were surprised that we DIDN’T use nukes in Korea.
Maybe the talk about nukes dragged us in a different direction. The point is: if you argue that Russia is concerned about certain actions triggering escalation and assume they are actively managing those risks, you have to consider the increasing possibility of that mitigation failing at some point (human error) as the conflict drags on.
The USSR and US traded aircraft during the Cold War, sure. That was the norm. It is not the norm now, and retaliation in kind would be both justifiable and escalatory should that situation have ended differently.
Would it be WWIII? Probably not. Is there a series of unlikely, unavoidable events that would get us there? Yes.
The folks absolutely convinced that this is the road to the big one are probably nuts. But anybody whose job exists in the security apparatus has to consider it as part of the strategic context.
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48 minutes ago, Boomer6 said:
I don’t understand the hand wringing WRT US/NATO/EU involvement in this war. I don’t see Polish troops crossing the border like it’s the Yalu River to reinforce Ukraine (yet). As far as I know there aren’t any non-Ukrainians flying MiGs and shooting down Russians. Is Russia not bombing specific airfields because they’re afraid of killing U.S/British advisors and sparking a larger conflict? If the answer is yes, I’d say they’re just as concerned about widening the conflict as the rest of us.
Surely these historical connections are obvious. It’s nothing new. The only substantial difference I see is the proximity of the conflict to the super power taking part in the conflict. The larger difference here is that said super power instigated the war themselves.
Open to different points of view regarding these thoughts.
Reference the news about the Brit RJ from a couple pages back… stupid stuff happens in protracted conflict.
The hedge against escalation due to a mistake is escalation dominance, which is achieved by positioning troops to do exactly the thing that your adversary fears and is trying to avoid in the first place. The detectable signatures look a lot like planning an entry to the war… due to the fact that you’re planning a [contingent] entry to the war. What trumps that planning? Nukes. Nobody wants this to go that direction, but there’s a primrose path ready to be walked because of dumb f’kn luck.
It’s a dangerous world out there, and wringing of hands, worry, and being ready to divert that train is 100% appropriate.
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3 hours ago, HuggyU2 said:
It's always been this way... even if it went unenforced for a few years.
Is having to stay on base that big of a deal?
There's a lot of big shit wrong in the AF. This is unnecessary noise.
You’re right. Unnecessary noise… what’s the valid mission need for making life less convenient/pleasant for families?
ETA: if there is a valid need: Great. If not, just follow the rules and let these folks figure out the definition of “suitable” on their own.
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Lots of talk about demo teams in some other threads. Figure I’d revive this one.
11 years later the F-16 and A-10 are back!
Looks like there was a T-6 demo at one point in the early/mid 00s, coinciding with the T-6 coming online. Anybody have experience with that one?
What are your thoughts on a revived T-6 demo team? Seems like high-school football flyovers followed by a “and come see them fly at podunk airshow tomorrow” could be a low-cost way to get young minds thinking about military aviation.
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On 9/3/2023 at 12:52 PM, raimius said:
Already in progress. (Could get worse, but then you are looking at 6-12mo before burning out the entire IP corps.). The former AFSOC min-turn deployment types are already complaining about the ops tempo...
Could you elaborate? What’s ‘high ops tempo’ mean for AETC life?
The Next President is...
in Squadron Bar
Posted · Edited by jice
Edit: Did a little more research. Lease bond isn’t returned. It’s a mechanism to keep the riff-raff out. Rest remains.
The royalties may mean actual money… everything else is budget dust to budget dust. The lease bond is returned after conclusion of the lease, unless there’s an issue—then it becomes budget dust on the insurer’s books.
Probably won’t make gas cheaper, but once the dust settles it likely won’t have a meaningful impact.
Except, as bus driver pointed out: Incentivizing extracting the same product in places where the Public has less of a stake.
This is a nothingburger.