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Sjurygg posted:They don't take the same kinds of stress and beatings combat aircraft have to endure. That doesn't make them last forever, but at least in part it does explain how they've been kept flying for so long. There's also the very real Ship of Theseus factor. There are shitloads of civilian airframes to cannibalize and refurbish/repurpose for way less than a totally new plane would cost. Unless the P-8 proves to be a resounding cost-saving success with massive pork potential, the KC- and -707 based ISR birds aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
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Jan 1, 2014 21:47
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Waldstein Sonata posted:I have a suspicion as to why your grandfather maybe didn't like talking about his air experience. My maternal grandfather was a B-17 bombardier instructor for pretty much the whole war, never seeing combat. However, between training accidents (such as getting bumped from a flight that ended up crashing on takeoff and killing all aboard) and seeing so many of his students, including those that became his friends, die over Europe, he never talked about it with us grandkids. The only way I knew anything about his experiences is from what my mother told me, and even then she always framed it with how depressed and sad he looked when he talked about it and, when she went through his photo albums from his time in service, nearly all of the airmen in the pictures would get commentary from grandpa like "died over Berlin", "lost in Italy" and so forth. While not viscerally traumatic, like infantry men had to deal with, it had to have been wearying to see so many young men through training and to constantly hear where and when they were lost. Lost 3 of my former students so far between OEF and OIF and another 2 coworkers, poo poo sucks even when it's genuinely unavoidable. It's not just the feeling of failure, but there's a lot of survivors guilt. "Could have been me/should have been me" type thinking ensues even when you just train piddly stuff. It's a hell of a motivator to keep training realistic when it's no longer a matter of IF it happens again, but when.
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Jan 16, 2014 00:51
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tl;dr is no. Jamming is the preferred option these days because it's way more flexible and you don't run out of it.
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Jan 20, 2014 08:28
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Baconroll posted:When was the last time a top of the line current generation fighter or tank (i.e. not an export monkey model) with a fully trained crew fought a similar level equipped/trained opponent ? Hainan Island incident 
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Feb 4, 2014 23:27
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Paris or Farnborough would be 'best' for seeing neat stuff, any number of Doha or Dubai expos or major US market airshows would work too.
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Feb 7, 2014 14:42
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Investing in "traditional" means also sends the message the US is willing to engage on terms other than our own. 's bad for exceptionalism, see?
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Feb 20, 2014 01:11
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Party Plane Jones posted:What exactly can the U-2 do that a drone can't? Turn academy grads into generals.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:42
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Oxford Comma posted:Slim Pickens recitations aside, what does one get to stay alive when you punch out of your burning B52 over the middle of Siberia? Sidearm, radio, mirror, IR strobe, blood chit, (empty) water bladder, survival knife, tyvek map, compass, camo paint compact, plus whatever else life support can cram into a vest and the crew is wearing on their person. There's a crew bag with extra batteries, first aid supplies, spare mags, water filter, signaling devices, and such but there's no guarantee of it surviving. That's more for controlled hard landing scenarios where you have time to grab it. But yeah, condoms are super useful. They can carry water, tie off injuries, and you can do things like stuff your electronics or spare mags into them so they're a bit more water repellent.
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Mar 8, 2014 00:59
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If they wanted to tip someone off, they wouldn't need to release the imagery at all. There's enough plausible deniability in simply saying 'we have reason to believe it's here-ish'. There's no reason to doubt the Chinese at their word, it's not like they're Uganda claiming to have a NIIRS 11-capable GaySat for spotting random acts of sodomy. I'm guessing it's not actual spy satellite footage, but a commercial imagery bird that the government can task on demand through state-owned entities. :e Like this. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iQ3a-aB19zqIxHHTuyh5H4Tql0-Q?docId=c5e7ec45-81b5-4125-a368-56fe63199a33 Propagandalf fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Mar 13, 2014 |
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Mar 13, 2014 00:41
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Koesj posted:PotM right here. Spotted this today. 41.136348, -95.983387 in Bing/VirtualEarth maps. 
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Mar 13, 2014 22:44
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Low-observable?
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Apr 2, 2014 21:03
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Actual RPAs aside, huge portions on the intelligence community were retooled to support SOF/SOF-like actions in permissive environments with near total information dominance. The guys who spent 30 years studying the Russkies and know what the hell they're doing all retired in the 90s or got promoted out of their usefulness.  OMG LISTENING TO UR METADATA means gently caress all next to failing to understand SA-21s and SS-2whatever SCROTUMs. Terrorism is a national security inconvenience, not a threat.Some things F-35's ain't real useful for.
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Apr 10, 2014 01:55
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Count Sacula posted:Can we talk more about SCROTUMS? It's not real, but it could be. The NATO naming convention for Russian missiles all start with S, so SATAN, SUNBURN, SPANKER, etc
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Apr 10, 2014 23:18
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mlmp08 posted:Generally speaking, there is a list of names for the various types of mission. So maybe there are 25 tanker callsigns, 50 CAP callsigns, 50 CAS callsigns, etc. As missions go out each day, the next callsign in line is used for that flight. A name is not reusable until the previous use of that name has landed and ended mission. In this way you might have a "Knight" flight every day, but have it be a different set of aircraft and pilots each time. Using actual callsigns such that you can identify which pilot it is and what kind of plane that pilot flies is bad OPSEC. This is all correct. Davin Valkri posted:So Ace Combat lied to me?! Little of both, there's a few different ATOs that overlap. Callsigns are super overrated from an opsec perspective anyways. Yeah, it's protected information, and that's so dumbasses get the point, but it's also fundamentally disposable information with every expectation that it'll eventually be compromised. If there's a callsign you can't afford to have compromised, you shouldn't be saying it because you should always assume your comms are collected by the adversary. So to offset that, ATOs will change at fixed intervals, or whenever some knuckledragger in a Kiowa lets his rotor downdraft suck his ATO copy off his kneeboard and into the wild brown yonder because he can't be arsed to memorize his own loving callsigns. Against a competent adversary who knows your hardware you're not fooling anyone for very long, doubly so when ISR gets involved, triply so when the shooting starts and people start lighting each other up with intercept/targeting radars. So any serious expectation of security based on callsign alone is long since a thing of the past. Thus the objective of a callsign isn't to conceal identity, it's to conceal it long enough that your identity doesn't matter because the missiles are on the way in. And more often than not, it's crazy conspicuous when they're vague names, kinda like flying around with a false mustache and trenchcoat with eyeholes in a newspaper and calling yourself Mr. Anonymousson von Incognito. Doesn't matter who you are, you're attracting attention simply because your name isn't British Airways 187 or Air Singapore 22 or Fedex 444 or N123456. Go pick up a UHF/VHF scanner, and it's immediately apparent which of these things is not like the other. It works better for heavies and stuff that can otherwise behave like a normal plane or blend in with civilian traffic patterns/profiles so even though they have clearly military callsigns, it's harder to figure out who they are from flight profiles. Sometimes you're just hosed because irrespective of callsign there's no mistaking a slow mover at 60,000 feet for anything but a U-2 or Global Hawk. Nor is there any chance to confuse that pair of small/medium blips going 600kts towards a published refueling track where a very large blip is slowly orbiting for the tanker itself. Unless you're French. A lot of CONUS military birds will just use their classic airframe callsign, so Warthog, Viper/Falcon, Eagle, Dragon, Spirit, etc so there's no small degree of GEFGW in play for daily ops.
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Apr 12, 2014 05:33
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Zokalwe posted:I smell a story here. Care to share it? Couple of Mirages decided to take gas from one of our AWACS, which wasn't squawking anything like their tanker nor was it anywhere near their assigned tanker rendezvous. Turns out the Frenchies controllers were using a day-old ATO and gave them bad vectors on the wrong freqs, but no one challenged them even though they'd been briefed something totally different. It was a snowball of stupid starting with forgetting a critical airspace plan.
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Apr 14, 2014 02:23
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http://static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1969-76v35/pdf/frus1969-76v35.pdf The source document. AZORIAN is pretty fascinating. It was to naval architecture and deep sea operations what the A-12/SR-71 was for manned flight. They were inventing from scratch that which was necessary to do the impossible, but no one cares because boats are boring.
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Apr 16, 2014 04:06
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Each service probably has some Gulfstream or Learjet type thing assigned to a tiny-assed VIP transport or long range medical transport squadron. Does the Navy run King Airs?
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Apr 17, 2014 03:03
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Rolled homogenous armor. http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/35895-howstuffworks-show-episode-12-rolled-homogenous-armor-video.htm
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Apr 23, 2014 23:47
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Mortabis posted:Do we ever do the same thing to them? Been a while since we did it to the Russians, but we haven't forgotten how. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/11/26/japan-china-senkaku-islands/3746771/ http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/06/us-korea-north-idUSBREA150A320140206
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Apr 25, 2014 22:38
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iyaayas01 posted:This can't be the first time LA Center has had to handle a U-2 at altitude, given its airspace's proximity to Beale (not to mention all the shenanigans that take place at Edwards/Dryden and Plant 42). Yeah I'm not buying that story either. NASA also has space/weather recce and testbed platforms that operate at those altitudes out of that same general area and facilities, and there's all kinds of commercial and recreational rocketry and balloonery(?) that goes on out there.  Someone in the ATC hosed up or freaked out or tried to plug an approach radar into a toaster or something.
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May 3, 2014 22:16
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movax posted:What do 'attrition reserve' jets do? Polite way of saying 'crash replacements'.
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May 29, 2014 02:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Just to play the devil's advocate because I'm in an argumentative mood, removing the pilot does magically make piloting the airframe cheaper. Last I checked training pilots wasn't exactly inexpensive when you add up everything between some pimple faced kid sitting in a recruiter's office and Ace McTopGun strapping into a Raptor. Not really, pilot standards are still the same and then you have obscene per-hour flight costs for remote control bandwidth. In some cases you have two pilots, one flying the mission from Bumblefuck, Nevada, and one more forward deployed dedicated to handle local airfield ops and takeoff/landing. It's loving tricky to land a plane when your view of the runway is 3-5 seconds behind local conditions. E: and then you have poo poo that stays up for 18+ hours, swapping pilots every 4-8, so you need even more drivers to handle that. Propagandalf fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jun 7, 2014 |
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Jun 7, 2014 02:42
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Snowdens Secret posted:Yeah but you can pay intel weenies whatever, it's not like they're going to say "gently caress this noise" and go work for Delta doing intel for a 767 out of Chicago O'hare No, but they will work for Sierra Nevada or Google or a dozen other companies doing geospatial work. Remote sensors and hyperspectral surveying is hot poo poo right now from mineral prospecting to the drug war to counting moose to traditional cartography. iyaayas01 posted:This is actually in all cases. Preds/Reapers don't conduct launch/recovery ops in anything other than line of sight control, and even the Global Chicken (which takes off and lands autonomously) still has a separate LR crew that oversees LR ops. Yeah, but the USAF isn't the only game in town, the ground forces use all sorts of goofy short range poo poo.
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Jun 7, 2014 04:59
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iyaayas01 posted:if we're talking about RPAs that would be useful in anything other than Operation Useless Dirt Welp there goes everything except the -170
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Jun 7, 2014 18:01
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iyaayas01 posted:Yeah, they sort of got kicked out of the club in the '80s and '90s because of the whole "no nukes" thing They were never kicked out, someone created ACGU markings for the cool kid stuff, and ACGU was killed off THIS year.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:17
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:Is that some sort of snow/arctic camo? It's loving awesome whatever it is. That's an aggressor squadron, they pretend to be various flavors of MiG and Su. It's mostly to make them Russian-y.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:01
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iyaayas01 posted:goofy looking airliners that drone around in circles for a couple hours. brb resubmitting 3-1 edits
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Aug 8, 2014 00:17
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It's also a shameless overwrought shining example of obscurant technobabble and obtuse corporatese written by pilots of the relevant ~*%THEATER WEAPONS SYSTEM%*~ to make them sound way more mission critical and un-defundable than they really are.quote:goofy looking airliners that drone around in circles for a couple hours
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Aug 8, 2014 02:05
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MrChips posted:About the only airborne thing an EA-6 can harm is a gondola. 
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Aug 19, 2014 03:00
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Godholio posted:In 3 years after the Maliki government is exterminated to the last man, Russia will be selling MiG-29s to ISIS. More likely the Iranians, Russia has no love for Islamic extremists 
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Aug 29, 2014 06:41
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Unsportsmanlike, Nelson didn't need air support and neither do we.
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Aug 29, 2014 22:08
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Yes, it's still done, if not to such documented degrees. A lot of those functions are done by contractors and locals. I don't think there's a regulation martini anymore, but there are kids siphoned off from the cook schools to become chefs/sommelier/maitre'ds who learn that stuff. You don't want Pvt. Pyle trying to announce the Dutch NATO officers at diplomatic events or planning meals for a defense chief's summit.
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Sep 2, 2014 04:23
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karoshi posted:My reading of GIP confirms this. I'm in the middle of a move, or I'd break out my granddad's old Bluejacket Manuals. I know Boy Scout manuals from the 60s had a whole page dedicated to scrubbing your junk, not sure if the Navy had the same or if it was just the text equivalent of Pvt. Snafu learning about honeypots and such. http://youtu.be/-PbDa-NlX9A
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Sep 2, 2014 22:37
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BIG HEADLINE posted:There's also this one right outside that's way more photogenic: I love the idea of a general purpose bomb, as if it's some sort of Leatherman and not an implement of turning large things into small things. Oh, and it digs holes. See, two purposes!
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Apr 4, 2015 01:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:ITAR? The same rules that block people from selling and exporting replacement parts to North Korean front companies apply to just about anything else the government makes or buys, so you get in just as much trouble for selling fire control radar antennas and hydrazine precursor agents as you do for handing the Huns the secrets of computer mice.
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Apr 23, 2015 02:52
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LingcodKilla posted:The jets then bombed Sanaa airport as the plane was making an approach to land, forcing it to turn back, IRNA said. It said the plane, belonging to the Red Crescent, was carrying food and medical aid to Sanaa. Imagine that, the state owned news outlet didn't admit anything incriminating about the Iranian equivalent of Air America. http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1322.aspx http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl1965.aspx http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/OFAC-Enforcement/Pages/20120919.aspx
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May 1, 2015 02:33
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CLP is gun medicine, x39 is gun food. E: EFPs cure arrogance
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May 1, 2015 03:50
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mlmp08 posted:Every TRADOC document of the last five years: we need to leverage handhold technology like mobile phones, tablets, etc to enable unclassified training and functionality and even just basic admin tasks like inventories. Actual conversations I have had, with corporate and military: "Your next deliverable needs to be mobile compatible." "For which customer?" "Tactical SIGINT." "Do you have any iOS developers?" "Yes." "Do you have any Android developers " "Yes." "How many of them have TS/SCI?" ".............." "And who exactly will be using these devices?" "We will." "Where will we be using them?" "At work." "And where exactly, in the RF secured environment we work, will we use portable electronics?" ".......outside the office." "Let me get this straight. You want us to leave the office, and go outside the secured area so we can use a mobile device to access the content I'm creating for the fixed system." "We'll disable the wireless and USB." "You want us to sit at our desks and use an issued mobile device which cannot interact with mission systems." "Yes." "What exactly will we be using these FOR?" "Training." "What training?" "CBTs. Recurring stuff." "Such as?" "Information Protection." "You want me to rewrite training we don't own that the ENTIRE Air Force does, so a single unit can do CBTs in their spare time, none of which affect mission readiness or CMR status if they fail to accomplish, to be used on devices which cannot leave the country by people who are 270-day-a-year deployers. "You're not a team player." "I want to make a see-through-the-hull geospatial fusion processing engine for Google Glass or Oculus Rift- based HUD for ISR operators to fuse transparent orthorectified imagery with data links and NTI situation picture feed. "Will it work on mobile?"
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May 14, 2015 00:08
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MRC48B posted:I know the audio tour mentions it's a deactivated missile for treaty reasons, but I can't remember if they did that by putting a dummy warhead on top, or replacing the entire missile with a nonfunctioning article. I'll be out that way in a month. Thanks for the heads-up, I'm super excited to see this. SAC Museum has some of the launch control panels, and the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque has a mockup control room. I'll see if I can take some more/better pictures.
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May 18, 2015 03:25
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iyaayas01 posted:This is like the most Army picture ever It's missing the Pfc urinating just barely not out of sight.
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Sep 14, 2015 04:54
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