quote:

Black said he jokes about getting a sense of what America thinks about its military by the movies that come out, and the only decent military movie in recent years, in his opinion, was "Top Gun: Maverick," which he called a "flashback to the '80s." That film was made with heavy participation from the U.S. Navy, which gave filmmakers extensive access to an aircraft carrier and other military hardware.

...

"For parents and influencers, there are concerns over psychological harm," Wormuth told soldiers during a conference last year, adding that she believes the coverage of those issues is creating a warped perception of the service. "Parents see headlines about suicides and sexual harassment and assault in the military."

The enlisted chiefs in their testimony before Congress didn't blame the media, but rather admitted the military has an image problem. They added that the pool of those interested in serving is shrinking, down to its lowest point in 15 years, 9% among youth, according to a poll cited by Grinston.

And just 23% of Americans ages 17 to 24 meet the requirements to serve, largely due to physical fitness requirements and past legal troubles often tied to illicit substances.

"This is not just an Army problem. It's not just a military problem. If we cannot build an Army able to accomplish the missions I mentioned at the beginning, this is an American problem," Grinston said. "We need a national call to public service."

stephenthinkpad posted:

A nordsteam styled mystery tactical nuke going off in Taipei, so the US can make EU join the sanction alliance. A Taiwanese political commentator has already discussed that scenario.

I keep going "too much online" and "insightful armchair strategist" on this guy.

Cerebral Bore posted:

i don't want to be rude or anything, but i feel like circa 1910 isn't "a few years ago" anymore

quote:

Archer Aviation Inc. agreed to build as many as six of its Midnight electric air-taxis for the US Air Force as part of a deal worth up to $142 million. The shares jumped the most intraday in a month.

The deal marks an expansion of a 2021 partnership through the Air Force Agility Prime program, Archer said Monday in a statement. The electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft will potentially provide an alternative to helicopters for personnel transport and rescue operations.

The US military has used Agility Prime contracts to back an array of eVTOL makers, including Archer and Joby Aviation Inc. — providing crucial support as the manufacturers work to raise funds, line up commercial customers and bring their new designs to market. Joby expects to deliver its first aircraft to the Air Force in 2024.

Shares of California-based Archer advanced 17% at 9:35 a.m. in New York, after jumping as much as 21%. The stock has almost tripled this year.

quote:

The US Army is awarding Microsoft with another order of advanced mixed reality goggles designed for combat situations, Bloomberg reports. Microsoft had sent the Army a batch of 20 updated prototype headsets in late July, which were tested by two squads of soldiers in August who responded positively to improvements in its design: namely, they no longer felt nauseous and pained while wearing them.

Microsoft, in the past year, has worked with the US Army to create HoloLens-like mixed reality headsets known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), but initial reports in 2022 indicated it was causing headaches, nausea, and eyestrain in testing. The problematic headsets were part of an order of 5,000 headsets the Army started taking delivery in September 2022.

The newer headsets, now on version 1.2, had “demonstrated improvements in reliability, low light sensor performance, and form factor,” Army spokesperson David Patterson tells Bloomberg. The US Army awarded Microsoft with another contract on September 5th for the new systems and to see if the company could scale production.

The US Army had asked Congress to fund its purchase of 6,900 headsets from Microsoft, but it was denied earlier this year. Instead, Congress reduced the $400 million in funding the Army requested to just $40 million to improve the system. The Army awarded Microsoft that money plus an additional $125 million to continue development.

The US Army plans to spend as much as $21.9 billion on the project, and the headset will undergo testing in 2025 by the Army for use in combat. Microsoft’s HoloLens tech continues to live on in these special military goggles, as the development of the home and work use cases of the headsets seems to have dropped off following layoffs affecting the teams involved in January.

Complications posted:

it's a stealth plane innit

more seriously depending on what happened it might've gone down in the ocean so there'd be no giant pillar of fire marking the crash site

quote:

Most senior special-operations officers, including SOCOM commander Army Gen. Bryan Fenton and Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, opposed the cuts out of fear that the reductions will deprive the command of the flexibility it needs to conduct counterterrorism and training of partner nations.

“It’s why the Ukrainian army has been so lethal against the Russians—it’s undeniable, why would you cut that?” said one person familiar with the proposal. “Anyone can squeeze the trigger, but in order to hit something, you gotta be trained.”

quote:

Forty is the new 30 when it comes to the Air Force and Space Force.

Men and women as old as 42 can now pack their boots and bifocals for basic training, under a policy change that gives the two services the highest age limit for recruits of all the military branches except the Coast Guard.

The previous maximum age for Air Force recruits was 39, a change authorized in 2014, when the service raised its enlisted accessions age limit from 27.

Raising the cutoff by three years aligns the Air Force and the Space Force with the maximum enlistment age allowed by the Pentagon. It also comes amid a recruitment crunch.

The Air Force announced last month that it will miss its active-duty recruiting goal by about 10%, its first recruitment shortfall since 1999. The service fell about 2,700 applicants short of its fiscal year 2023 goal of 26,877.

An Air Force memo dated Tuesday that was posted on the service’s website outlines the policy change for both officers and enlisted members.

Comments posted Thursday on the Reddit Air Force channel poked fun at the idea of “middle-aged” recruits.

“42?! Dudes will be enlisting at the age I’m eligible for retirement!” said one comment.

“Just in time for the mid life crisis Dodge Challenger!” said another.

quote:

The U.S. military is bulk buying Japanese seafood to help offset China's import ban of the products after Japan began releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in August.

...

Details: The seafood bought by the U.S. military will be used to feed soldiers in military facilities and sold in shops and restaurants on military bases, Emanuel said.

The first purchase was about a metric ton of scallops, a fraction of the 100,000 tons of scallops China imported from Japan last year, per Reuters.
The purchases will gradually grow to include all kinds of seafood, Emanuel told Reuters.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Ned_Donovan/status/1717795116188901852?t=qSf7Unlhv7_AfehfAy8xzw&s=19

quote:

The Army will cut as many as 3,000 positions in Army special operations forces despite pushback from key leaders in the SOF community and members of Congress.

“There will be cuts to Army SOF,” Chris Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict said Tuesday at the National Defense Industrial Association’s 34th annual symposium on the topic. “The Army’s in a tough place, not only from recruiting…but they’re trying to transition to a different fight as we all are, and I think one of the impacts of that is requests by the Army to cut some of the Army special operations forces.”

Army Times reported in mid-October that many of the cuts would be to unfilled billets within U.S. Army Special Operations Command and would eliminate as much as 10% of the positions in that command.

...

“I’m being told, ‘oh, don’t be concerned, it’s not to the actual operators, it’s only many of the support personnel, our civil affairs, our intelligence, our logistics,” said Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., in a prerecorded message played at the symposium. “Those are the people that we need to make the trains run. Those are the people that free up our operators to do what they do best. And oh, by the way they have a critical mission in their own right.”

Some of the rationale for cutting SOF, officials said, is coming from a limited view of what the force has done over the past 20 years and what its capabilities are moving forward.

Rep. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said that within the Pentagon SOF is seen almost as a “one-trick pony” that’s focused solely on counterterrorism.

And with the Global War On Terrorism’s end, the idea among top brass is they can now downsize the force to save money and manpower for other conventional needs, especially given the Army’s recruiting struggles in recent years.

“So, when you just simply say I’m going to cut 3,000 out of USASOC and we’re going to be fine, I don’t buy that,” Ernst said. “If we are not supporting SOF they are gradually going to fade into the background and again, once they are gone, once they are diminished, it will take time to rebuild. And we don’t have time on our hands.”

...

quote:

A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence From the Pentagon
Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems. But the military struggled to understand what was wrong.

When Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.

The 21-year-old Marine was part of an artillery gun crew that fought against the Islamic State, and he knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.

A shiver went through him. He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.

...

An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

...

Frosted Flake posted:

Red Bags.

The USMC report said that the artillery in Syria and Iraq were all going to get dehabilitating TBIs because there were not enough gunners for the amount of fire missions they were asked to shoot. Their estimates were 100% lifelong acquired conditions after 2 weeks, at the tempo of operations they demanded. There's a paper on it and everything from the time.

Frosted Flake posted:

Iirc the US promised to have as few boots on the ground as possible, which meant they didn't rotate out troops or spread the load, so each artillery battalion blew right past all of the health and safety guidelines for artillery operations as far as sleep, hearing loss, lead exposure and concussion symptoms go. According to one USMC medical report I read at the time, every single marine in the USMC artillery contingent was injured in some way and unable to return to operations afterwards.

Orange Devil posted:

It's deeply hilarious just how little western leaders care for anyone but themselves.

PawParole posted: