Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Fuck him, he will likely get what is coming to him.
Who watches the watchmen?
Show an affirming flame
Wow. That'll win the veteran vote.
Aviation: it's finally official, Rafale-tan is going to the prom!
The India purchase has finally been inked at 36 fighters.
The law in the night
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
FINALLY!!! Rafale Dassault will live on!
Dassault is doing fine, they made a few more deals in the ME IIRC. And they've got plenty of procurement and sustainment work just from France.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Those aren't enough planes anyway. Unless India were to order more (and given the price, that is quite laughable), this is at best a stop gap measure.
rollin' on dubs
- First JSDF F-35, she hopes that F-15sempi will notice her...
- TWO generals were just relieved of duties, one had an affair the other is under investigation. Not a banner day for the Army.
- When troop levels go down, the public is allowed to live on base, but the companies that run on-base housing failed to do background checks [INSERT FACEPALM HERE].
- New Army grenade in case it hasn't been posted here.
So I have a bit of a gripe: My friend's husband is an Army Captain and a JAG. He had an issue with his knee from a childhood injury. An Army doc says he can fix it with surgery. Not only does he not fix it, he makes it worse but none of them (including the doc) realizes it. He and his wife move to a new base in Virginia, where the doc there is dumbfounded that there was a surgery at all...the initial injury wasn't fixable. The worse part though is the medical review that determines if one can stay in the Army or not, and due to the surgery...he's out.
My gripe comes down to this: I get the logic for the review, I really do. But the guy is just a lawyer who has been stuck in the continental US his whole (now very short) Army career.
Anyway, carry on.
rollin' on dubs
He made the mistake of not getting a second opinion on that knee surgery and due to the Feres doctrine, he can't sue for malpractice. The review is to see if your captain friend can take a PT test or do the marching and weapon shooting the Army requires of ALL soldiers. Your friend can still get a Department of the Army civilian job. DA civilian jobs are, by law, open to veterans and have vet's preference. Plus he should get some form of disability, he'd just have to deal with the VA...
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
An F-35A caught fire during warm up. No idea what the cause was but it was in the aft section. The pilot climbed out and the fire was reportedly put out quickly. No idea yet what caused the fire but it is under investigation. The base was Mountain Home.
edited 24th Sep '16 3:45:52 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Hopefully its a problem related to upkeep or the individual aircraft in question. The JSF program really doesn't need another new problem.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
It is like to be more mundane then it sounds. Quite a few of the US aircraft have caught fire for odd ball reasons on warm up or take off over their service life. The F-16 has quite a few incidents of catching fire for multiple reasons. The First F-15 crash was because some part randomly failed and caught fire.
Who watches the watchmen?
The B-29 Superfortress was notorious for engine fires during WWII. By the time the B-50 Superfortress (AKA the B-29D) rolled out, they'd ironed out most of the kinks.
The law in the night
Wasn't the unofficial motto of the B-36 Peacemaker: Two running, two smoking, two burning and two unaccounted for?
Inter arma enim silent leges
I still can't get over how no one, apparently, thought it was bad idea to have one airframe perform three ENTIRELY different roles.
Like, come the fuck on
New Survey coming this weekend!
I mean, its not that different than the multirole fighter model that's been around for decades (and proven in combat). But the three take off variants was probably going over board. And the F-35's CAS capacity is...questionable at this point.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
The law in the night
Also that pun...
Guns and ghee
India is wise to speak softly, but it could do with a bigger stick
TO MANY Indians, their country’s strategic position looks alarming. Its two biggest neighbours are China and Pakistan. It has fought wars with both, and border issues still fester. Both are nuclear-armed, and are allies with one another to boot. China, a rising superpower with five times India’s GDP, is quietly encroaching on India’s traditional sphere of influence, tying a “string of pearls” of alliances around the subcontinent. Relatively weak but safe behind its nuclear shield, Pakistan harbours Islamist guerrillas who have repeatedly struck Indian targets; regional security wonks have long feared that another such incident might spark a conflagration.
So when four heavily armed infiltrators attacked an Indian army base on September 18th, killing 18 soldiers before being shot dead themselves, jitters inevitably spread. The base nestles in mountains close to the “line of control”, as the border between the Indian and Pakistani-administered parts of the disputed territory of Kashmir is known. Indian officials reflexively blamed Pakistan; politicians and pundits vied in demanding a punchy response. “Every Pakistan post through which infiltration takes place should be reduced to rubble by artillery fire,” blustered a retired brigadier who now mans a think-tank in New Delhi, India’s capital.
Yet despite electoral promises to be tough on Pakistan, the Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi has trodden as softly as its predecessors. On September 21st it summoned Pakistan’s envoy for a wrist-slap, citing evidence that the attackers had indeed slipped across the border, and noting that India has stopped 17 such incursions since the beginning of the year. Much to the chagrin of India’s armchair warriors, such polite reprimands are likely to be the limit of India’s response.
There are good reasons for this. India gains diplomatic stature by behaving more responsibly than Pakistan. It is keenly aware of the danger of nuclear escalation, and of the risks of brinkmanship to its economy. Indian intelligence agencies also understand that they face an unusual adversary in Pakistan: such is its political frailty that any Indian belligerence tends to strengthen exactly the elements in Pakistan’s power structure that are most inimical to India’s own interests.
But there is another, less obvious reason for reticence. India is not as strong militarily as the numbers might suggest. Puzzlingly, given how its international ambitions are growing along with its economy, and how alarming its strategic position looks, India has proved strangely unable to build serious military muscle.
India’s armed forces look good on paper. It fields the world’s second-biggest standing army, after China, with long fighting experience in a variety of terrains and situations (see chart). It has topped the list of global arms importers since 2010, sucking in a formidable array of top-of-the-line weaponry, including Russian warplanes, Israeli missiles, American transport aircraft and French submarines. State-owned Indian firms churn out some impressive gear, too, including fighter jets, cruise missiles and the 40,000-tonne aircraft-carrier under construction in a shipyard in Kochi, in the south of the country.
Yet there are serious chinks in India’s armour. Much of its weaponry is, in fact, outdated or ill maintained. “Our air defence is in a shocking state,” says Ajai Shukla, a commentator on military affairs. “What’s in place is mostly 1970s vintage, and it may take ten years to install the fancy new gear.” On paper, India’s air force is the world’s fourth largest, with around 2,000 aircraft in service. But an internal report seen in 2014 by IHS Jane’s, a defence publication, revealed that only 60% were typically fit to fly. A report earlier this year by a government accounting agency estimated that the “serviceability” of the 45 Mi G 29K jets that are the pride of the Indian navy’s air arm ranged between 16% and 38%. They were intended to fly from the carrier currently under construction, which was ordered more than 15 years ago and was meant to have been launched in 2010. According to the government’s auditors the ship, after some 1,150 modifications, now looks unlikely to sail before 2023.
Such delays are far from unusual. India’s army, for instance, has been seeking a new standard assault rifle since 1982; torn between demands for local production and the temptation of fancy imports, and between doctrines calling for heavier firepower or more versatility, it has flip-flopped ever since. India’s air force has spent 16 years perusing fighter aircraft to replace ageing Soviet-era models. By demanding over-ambitious specifications, bargain prices, hard-to-meet local-content quotas and so on, it has left foreign manufacturers “banging heads against the wall”, in the words of one Indian military analyst. Four years ago France appeared to have clinched a deal to sell 126 of its Rafale fighters. The order has since been whittled to 36, but is at least about to be finalised.
India’s military is also scandal-prone. Corruption has been a problem in the past, and observers rightly wonder how guerrillas manage to penetrate heavily guarded bases repeatedly. Lately the Indian public has been treated to legal battles between generals over promotions, loud disputes over pay and orders for officers to lose weight. In July a military transport plane vanished into the Bay of Bengal with 29 people aboard; no trace of it has been found. In August an Australian newspaper leaked extensive technical details of India’s new French submarines.
The deeper problem with India’s military is structural. The three services are each reasonably competent, say security experts; the trouble is that they function as separate fiefdoms. “No service talks to the others, and the civilians in the Ministry of Defence don’t talk to them,” says Mr Shukla. Bizarrely, there are no military men inside the ministry at all. Like India’s other ministries, defence is run by rotating civil servants and political appointees more focused on ballot boxes than ballistics. “They seem to think a general practitioner can perform surgery,” says Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, who has worked as a consultant for the ministry. Despite their growing brawn, India’s armed forces still lack a brain.
Show an affirming flame
That matches up with what I've read in Army and Nation, a study of civil-military relations in India post-independence (focusing especially on the fact that it hasn't ever experienced a coup). The division of the military into separate fiefdoms was a deliberate part of coup-proofing, and while deliberately weakening your armed forces sounds like a bad idea, compared to its asshole neighbor to the north India came out well ahead.
Helps that it was still strong enough to thoroughly defeat Pakistan all four times war was formally declared.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.
rollin' on dubs
At a recent meeting with recruiters in the Northeast, Carter said he was told, "Well, you really ought to take a look at the tattoo policy." Each service has its own tattoo policy, and the secretary didn't cite a specific branch
- Recruits' Ineligibility Tests the Military, More Than Two-Thirds of American Youth Wouldn't Qualify for Service, Pentagon Says
The military deems many youngsters ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high-school diploma, felony convictions and prescription-drug use for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But others are now also running afoul of standards for appearance amid the growing popularity of large-scale tattoos and devices called ear gauges that create large holes in earlobes.
Maybe I'm an old cranky bitch (shut up Mark and Tuffle), but I don't think that the tattoo policy should be relaxed any further. The WSJ article has a cute girl with a neck tat that just looks silly. And yes, only skanks get tons of ink, show off skin and wear clear heels, honey you a ho and you ain't fooling anyone.
Ahem, enough about the skanks idiots post on my facebook feed.
Tats are a choice and sometimes people have to accept that the military will reject them because of too much ink, or ear gauges, or some other body art. Military appearance and all that. SMA Dailey has the right idea. However I can see the Air Force or Navy being tighter.
As for fat and criminal records. Sucks to be them. The felony waivers should go away, the only reason they are still on the books are retards at the Pentagon and in Congress who think that Trading Bars for Stripes does any good. The waivers have been suspended and they should be repealed.
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
I disagree. Most felons have a hard enough time getting jobs as is, and all this does is increases recidivism. Even people who are clean as a whistle are sometimes shitheads who don't belong. You have to take the good and the bad.
Unless I see some statistics from within the last few years that say service members with felonies are disproportionately more trouble than their worth per capita than non-felon service members, I don't buy it.
New Survey coming this weekend!
rollin' on dubs
Court martials, NJP and admin discharges went up with the "surge" as felony waivers were used to fill the ranks when recruiting took a noisedive in 2004. After 2009 a lot of the waivers got harder to get, then dried up.
The military is not the place for felons. There are programs (I even worked at one) for felons who want a fresh start, but the military isn't the place for them.
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Here it is simply. Nothing past the elbows, nothing past the knees and nothing above the neckline. You want to get inked further you can do it in civvie land.
I have to agree the military is not the place for felons. Such a thing has introduced way too much criminal activity including gang related activity directly into the military. There are a few handfuls of felony convictions that might be ok in the military like tax evasion and fraud but most of the others including vandalism of federal property are not exactly for petty offenses or a sign said person would do well in the military.
edited 25th Sep '16 1:16:55 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
rollin' on dubs
Tuffle, marry me...
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
Eh, most "felons" are just in there for weed or something small. I don't disagree but I guess my issue is more with what constitutes a felony than anything else.
edited 25th Sep '16 7:26:45 PM by LeGarcon
Oh really when?
A procrastination in of itself
On white collar criminals being okay, do you relay want people like that to have access to military budgets? That's how you get the money for new body armour pocketed or military equipment sold onto the black market.
A violent fellon might steal a few guns and grenades for his gang buddies, an experienced white collar criminal could shift containers of surpluss to the cartels and make it appear lost.
Violent fellons, ones with gang connections or drug addictions I see the logic in banning, but the guy who got busted once for weed and has done his time?
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio suggests taking "moocher" vets out of the VA healthcare system and putting Congressmen and their staffs onto it.