Musings of a minor megalomaniac
These baby’s used to just rain 500lb dumb bombs on Vietnam. Somebody should remind Pootin our guys play around with this Stuff all day for fun in the USAF. Just stop leaving them sitting on the ramp at Barksdale overnight! Nothing like a half dozen ALCM’s to ruin your day.
I have a flair for stating the obvious: There was alot of hullabaloo surrounding Russia’Ukraine invasion last year. It wasn’t your typically expected Russian invasion, by any stretch. I surmised egregious intelligence failures myself, and now Russian sources themselves have confirmed my suspicions.
“U.S. intelligence appears to have penetrated nearly every Russian military body including the General Staff, the Defense Ministry and the GRU military intelligence agency, as well as the private mercenary group Wagner.”
You might assume taking pictures for a living is a pretty cush job. Probably is relatively so in many cases, but we bring photographers up the hard way in the Air Force. I got to work with the Combat Camera guys in Bosnia, and was ceaselessly impressed by them the whole time. Those guys along with the ones who did the actual jumping out of helicopters on nighttime roundups had it tough.
IMHO, the highest degree of difficulty in finding and arresting PWFWC’s (persons wanted for war crimes). was at the Combat Camera level. They literally flew around at night suspended in harnesses under stealthed Blackhawks recording IR evidence and intel stuff. That’s on my Top 10 list of Badass.
The Rapist-in-Chief was right about at least one thing: NATO is an issue. It’s been a growing problem for thirty years, just not a baby-out-with-the-bath-type thing, as MAGA morons might have you believe. Seeing T-72’s rolling towards Kyiv must’ve made an impression. Wonder how that war in Ukraine would be unfolding now if the aspiring dicktator had managed to assuage Pootin with a NATO coup-de-grace?
“One of these priorities is the protection of the eastern flank of NATO. For us, that means we first set up a fully equipped division by 2025 and adequately contribute to NATO’s Response Force,” he told the Welt am Sonntag.”
Teen’s Make-A-Wish soars from Buckley Space Force Base. This is also one of the things I like about the NFL. Not alot of organizations go the extra mile for this type Stuff.
Undershot this one a bit. In retrospect, I now remember how long the lead times on this stuff are. They were probably already buying parts for GEO-6 when I made that last prognostication. So good – we have a full GEO constellation to work with, going forward.
“The Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit – Satellite-6 (SBIRS GEO-6) was formally transferred from Space Systems Command (SSC) to Space Operations Command (SpOC), March 24, 2023.”
You never know who’s lookin’ on…
…when we hit back. We’ll just add this to the bill. International court issues war crimes warrant for Putin. “There is no purgatory for war criminals, they go straight to hell.”
Here’s one of the crazy stories about what I did in Bosnia:
My Army Staff Sergeant partner was showing me around the MIB compound shortly after arrival for my first day’s work at Butmir. There was a storage area in the top floor of the main building containing among other things, ten brand new high-gain Tac Sat antennas, unopened in the shipping crates. Asked what was up with them, he simply replied: “They don’t work.” More in-briefing included plans for the upcoming week and a road trip ferrying floppy disks around the country by Land Rover, and I already knew what my 1st challenge was going to be.
Inter-service coordination has always been a challenge, but the U.S. sets the example to follow in that military regard, at least as long as I’m the one on the phone. The only reason Tac Sat was not up and running in Bosnia was nobody seemed to be able to figure out how to get crypto and point the antennas. The Army is great at shooting people and blowing stuff up, but satcom was a different story at this location. Their idea of secure comm was us driving floppy disks around with M-16s to protect them. It certainly was one of the more egregious government foibles I’ve disagreed with over the years. Only took about a week to locate the bird (Navy) and get crypto issued out of HQ for the radios.
We spent another week playing around, doing a little training. Started by taking one over behind the gym on the other side of the base and setup one day. I had the Lieutenant transmit a file, making sure not to tell me what was on it and read it back to her ten seconds later over the phone. She said “So you can take those anywhere and do that?” We started taking those antennas with us to the COYS, thankful to leave them and the radios behind, departing with hopefully the last of those HUMINT reports on floppy disks.
Here’s a guy who did some of the real work there before my arrival.
With Prigozhyn portending Wagner’s demise, and the air superiority question remaining unanswered, the booms still get bigger. I was surprised to see these things getting fitted to MIGs. The wiring is probably fairly trivial, so if they can put them on target, the Russians are through – as if they weren’t already.
Keep it up – we have plenty more tricks up our sleeve….
Budget is really the only tool the government wields in these conflicts. As usual, the impact will be to just make it worse. Schedule moves right, cost goes up, quality and predictability go down. It’s an oft-repeated refrain in the defense contracting business and we are doing it to ourselves. Maybe Boeing will think it all the way through this time.
“The Air Force is cutting in half the number of tankers it planned to buy as an interim step, as part of a move to rethink its overall aerial refueling modernization strategy, the service’s acquisition chief said Monday.”
Odds are, some of the earliest data coming down off this bird ended up on a reel of tape I recorded as a newly-minted Airman 1st Class computer operator at Buckley AIr National Guard base in 1983. Now it’s a Space Force Base.
At least not our guys. We can launch these things off carriers if we need to. The new B-21 Raider is named for the Doolittle Raiders who launched B-25 bombers off the Hornet to strike Japan in WWII’s first retaliatory blow in the Pacific.
Crime, Work and Politics – starting to look like a more popular category combo. The Fuckwit was passing out red MAGA ballcaps to the locals with his newest GOP sycophant, Vance. Wonder if they mentioned the regulation rollback executed under his administration is the most clearly identifiable cause of this entirely avoidable tragedy? Biden throwing the workers under the bus in their contract negotiations is no less culpable.
Cocksuckers don’t like spending money on maintenance. Fuck Corporate America.
The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt-II holds a special place in the hearts of many U.S. soldiers and airmen. Count me among them, being lucky enough to get stationed with Detachment 2 of the 81st Tac Fighter Wing at Leipheim Germany in the early 90s. Being one of the few conventional Soviet deterrents at the time, we were also lucky enough to stay behind, keeping an eye on the Russians.
I’m still unsure if those years in Leipheim weren’t the best of all. Living in an idyllic small German town was almost like getting paid to be on vacay. We did get a quite nice little BHA (housing allowance) bump for the local economy. Volksmarching, Oktoberfest – tourist jackpot all the way. I think I put more miles on the bike paths than I did going back and forth to work in the car, just a few miles up the road at the base. Becoming a dedicated beer-a-holic has it’s drawbacks, but there is no better place in the world to do it. The brewery across the street from where we lived in Günzburg sealed that deal.
But the A-10 is why we were there, and I got to know her up close and personal. It’s basically obsolete in all but the most permissive environments now, but every dog has his day. The A-10’s days were long and boring because no Russian tank ever needed shot up with that GAU-8 auto-cannon. Best 1-man aerial gun truck ever.
Remember the government-imposed nationwide rail strike controversy last year? Thanks Joe Biden – now we get to see how another period of shoddy railroad operations unfolds across the country. It’s not looking real good so far, starting with East Palestine, Ohio.
This evacuation zone should probably have been 5-10 times bigger. In the long run, I imagine it will be easier and cheaper to haul out the terminal cancer patients one-at-a-time, some years hence. My hindsight is 20/20 on this topic because I’ve seen it before. We’re seeing it now in vets downed from toxic exposures all across the Middle East.
A small town of 5,000 people in eastern Ohio gets offered $1k/person at ONE MILE RADIUS. Those mutherfucking Norfolk Southern fuckwits belong in jail.
