Codename Duchess

Generally with larger aircraft you have lighter tones underneath for concealment against the sky and darker ones on top to conceal from above. It's surprisingly effective.

I think ours was the last class (I didn't finish with them) before they fully opened combat arms to females, so she's in a support unit somewhere. She was a math major though, hence the accuracy. Yup that's it! Although I swear ours was a lot larger. I had a video on my blackberry of it. Well sorta, an enlisted guy bet me $20 I couldn't stay facing it. The flames were so intense when it went up that we all ran away screaming in pain/excitement. I lost $20 and the video is terrible lol. I remember at the end of the day we had like way too much ammo left, so they called in a 50-75 round fire mission. It was pretty cool watching the gun crews operate at max RoF. The gun captain could barely talk by the end of it.

That was a concrete bomb, if it had been live that tank would have been toast. But you can see that the KE alone of that would have ruined a tank. When we drop on armor we use tail fusing for the bomb, which will kill it very dead, including ex-Iraqi Abrams. I'd chock the "miss" up there to most likely being the EOTS on that F-35 being out of calibration, or just standard CEP stuff. This discussion reminds me of my own cadet war story though from when I did Army things. The second summer at USMA is a month in the field ("Buckner), meant to be more tactical and also expose you to the various branches of the army (it was a lot broader in the past with cadet vs cadet tank fights at Ft. Knox). One day is Field Artillery day where you rotate through the FDC, gun line, and actually on a hill calling in 5-7 round 105mm missions on old tanks. There was a female in my platoon, maybe 5'2" and never speaking more than a sentence per week. Most of us were pretty lousy at our first ever fire mission but she gets up there and the first spotting round emits a loud "PING" Garand style as it bounced off the top of the M60 or whatever she called it on. We all kind of revered her in awe after that. She got to set the pile of excess propellant bags on fire too which was the hottest fire I've ever seen (like burned my face from 100 yards hot).

He is aware of CMBS, maybe he has it already.

There are a lot of drone operators, but it's far away from a majority. They're short fighter pilots though because they have a terrible career pipeline. Meanwhile the Navy has like no drone operators (I'm aware of fire scout and Triton but they are a percentage of a percentage) and our pilots love our lives. But that's none of my business

Did you by chance record that?

USN aircraft used to have dump fuel and bombs before advances in arresting gear and aircraft design means we don't have to, usually. Thing is it shouldn't be SOP to dump to a point of no return/no safe alternate, or there should have been a tanker airborne. He should have immediately been sent to land if he was that fuel critical. If that wasn't possible then it's a massive institutional no-no to make it SOP where you have 0 alternatives.

I couldn't say. I know in US Naval Aviation there are few cardinal sins, but poor fuel awareness is right at the top of the list.

USNI is reporting via a translation of a Russian press release (linked in that article) that the lost MiG-29 suffered dual engine failure while in holding for a foul deck to be cleared after the second of three planes broke an arrestor cable (it happens). Probable cause is fuel starvation. That should not have happened. Why wasn't their a tanker airborne, or provisions for the fighter to divert to Syria or even Cyprus?

That is wildly out of date information.

Not as hard as you'd guess. There's not really a guard. The handle just sits there between your legs. I've never come close, but I try to avoid freaking out about how easy an unfortunate series of events could make it happen.

I don't doubt that your pilots are good, but the fact of the matter is you need A LOT of flight time to be proficient at carrier landings and you guys just don't really have the ability to compete with the US in terms of hours or facilities, including actual at sea time (it's a lot different than a practice landing on a land based field). That's a no brainer, but the fact is you're going to see a higher mishap rate (our own mishap rate is up lately due in no small part to reduced flight hours from sequestration). If the reports that it turned back to the carrier shortly-ish after takeoff are true then it is likely a technical issue. That should raise some eyebrows because this is one of your newest aircraft at the beginning of a very high profile deployment. These things don't just happen, someone somewhere screwed up. It's just lucky that the pilots weren't killed.

I don't know anything that hasn't been posted online via USNI, The Aviationist, and Combat Aircraft. More will likely come out in the coming days as the group is being watched heavily by NATO forces. I am legally required to get 150 hours of flying time per year (which I doubled last year) with a very heavy focus on remaining current in all capabilities of the Super Hornet, especially Carrier Landings. During a deployment, every pilot will fly every day during flight ops, so you get a lot of practice. I shared beers with an Indian Navy MiG-29K pilot. He said they get 20 hours a year, and I've heard comparable numbers for the Russians (all branches). If you combine hours like that with the infrequent sailings of Kuznetsov as well as the low amount of aircaft (~20 each of the -29K and the Su-33), you're going to have serious training deficiencies in a very demanding job. Like everything you've heard about landing a jet on a carrier is true. It's hard. Russia apparently struggles to keep a well trained cadre of carrier aviators on hand. That said, official sources are saying this was a technical fault, and that the plane went down several kilometers out while attempting to land. That raises a couple of flags to me as it's a twin engine aircraft so more reliable and one of the newest aircraft in the Russian armed forces on a very public demonstration. Anything can happen, but this is alarming. Also of note, Kuznetsov sailed with just 4 MiG-29Ks and 6 Su-33 (which supposedly were transferred to a land base as soon as the ship got on station) so this is a serious blow to their onboard complement.

This is a big one. Air to ground attacks are very scripted in order to deconflict from other aircraft, terrain, artilley, etc. It remains so until after weapons release. There are methods in place that are more hands off while still being controlled, but it wouldn't really be used in an environment you find in CMBS. For a pretty damn good idea, go pick up DCS A-10C. Or at least watch some videos of same. It has AI ground controllers calling in strikes and follows the script pretty faithfully.

In regards to knowing it was civilian vice military: Actually it's very likely that they didn't, assuming that the system was operating by itself and not plugged into a larger ATC network or Air Defense control network (there are no stories from any side that suggest that it was). Military and Civilian aircraft alike use similar transponder codes (There aren't special ones set aside for military, we have different systems alltogether). If an aircraft isn't operating tactically or isn't like a spy plane (and even then), it's probably going to have a transponder on to facilitate ground control. A transponder is like a special radio code that serves as an ID on radar screen. I don't know the specifics, I do know that someone tells me to put 4 numbers into my control panel and I obey. Technology Review sat down with two experts on both electronic warfare and SAM systems. Important quote below, emphasis my own: So it is entirely possible that whoever was operating the Buk, be they seperatists or an isolated Russian launcher supporting the same, had absolutely no idea it was civilians. Therefore it's entirely possible that a Russian crew shot them down without confirming whether or not they were civilians. As for coming from Russia: The rest of the videos in this series, the Official presentation to press from the Joint Investigation Team, are worth watching as is reading the full report, but here's the pertinent one:

Right, dumb bombs work plenty good against large, isolated targets. If they use those on those sorts of targets and GLONASS/LGB guided bombs (or even your big Tomahawkskis) on precision targets, good on you for playing smart. Back to cluster bombs. Human Rights watch documented 47 incidents between May 27 and July 27, 2016. These are backed up by witnesses, photo and video. I implore you to check out the table below Human Rights Watch report I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe only 80% of those strikes "actually happened" and that 50% of them were on isolated rebel compounds (and not say a local fuel market frequented by civilians that killed a child, a journalist, and three first responders). That still leaves over a dozen incidents. The report does it's best to determine when there were confirmed Russian strikes, as backed up by Russian sources, but even if all the rest of the strikes were Syrian, which they weren't, the Russian government is still backing a regime that uses these weapons on civilians. Rest of the media dump below

I have no expectation that Russia will cease operations because of world opinion. I do expect that as long as they use unguided and reckless munitions they will face extra scrutiny in the public eye, like we are doing now. If Russia wants to play big kid games they need to use big kid rules. Or go back to gassing theaters full of kids. I can't guarantee whether it was unguided munitions or not. Some were definitely guided, others were less obvious. But I don't know the capabilities of their PGMs like I know the US ones I've dropped. I just know half of those strikes felt different. Like I've said before, dumb bombs and modern computers work great against big, isolated targets which is what I saw. The difference is modern PGMs let's me pick which road wheel on your shiny Armata you'd like me to rearrange from about 20 miles away with one hand.

Is it wrong to want to reduce civilian casualties? The point I'm trying to make is that if you're going to attempt a US style precision operation, do it with precision munitions. Cluster bombing apartment blocks is anything but. If you don't have the means, don't attempt an operation that can cause unjustifiable risk to civilians. I am aware that Russia has used some PGMs in Syria, but there's just as much footage of them taking off with and dropping unguided munitions. You don't see that in footage of US jets taking off. Also from my own experience, not all of the strikes in that footage were precision munitions. Accurate dumb bombing (a la SVP-24)? sure. But those also seemed to be relatively isolated compounds.** **One thing I always find interesting is the guy who decides to keep driving at the same speed after seeing the house 100 yards down the street get obliterated. I guess I always pictured a swerve, a u-turn, or an acceleration but nope. That guy should be a movie star for his coolness.

Because it's 2016, almost 2017 and Russia is a modern country with modern munitions. Society at large needs to be held accountable, not just the US.

Dude that's like apartment buildings spread over 2-3 blocks in a bigass city. Nevermind that cluster bombs suck against hard targets like buildings, what in the actual ****.

Vlad, unless you're dropping a weather sensing bomb immediately beforehand you are not going to realistically get that accuracy on any sort of day. The US has had standardized dumb bombs with very predictable ballistic patterns for years, and bombing computers EXACTLY like you've described for decades. That doesn't change mother nature, temperature, wind, and all that. For that degree of precision you would need known environmental factors at every foot in that area. You'd also need to fly in an incredibly narrow launch basket that for all intents and purposes is just a huge workload on the pilot. At 20,000' so many things can move a bomb by more than 20 meters (although last I saw you were claiming 5m CEP). Even then, my 500lb bomb might hit the building I want, or it might hit the daycare right next door with a 20m CEP. That's simply unacceptable for urban anti-terorrist warfare. The results of that practice are many, known, and tragic. I cannot comprehend how this is justifiable in any human sense. I know you want to believe in the power of SVP-24, but it's nothing new and nothing perfect. I am sorry, and I'm sorry for the Syrians who fall in the way. As for munitions, cluster bombs were designed for conventional war which this is not. There's a reason why the US has stopped using them, and nowadays we have things like the BLU-129 carbon fiber bomb that doesn't have fragments specifically for these kind of situations. Flip on RT for some strike footage and you'll see.....something else. Honestly I think the Russians are trying to get rid of old stocks. The beauty of our GBU kits is that they bolt on easily to existing weapons, whereas from my understanding the Russian ones are all purpose built from the ground up. I expect that soon we will see the Russians adapt this style, if they haven't already. It really increases flexibility. As it stands now, we're using all sorts of GBU-12 and -38 kits in training because the LDJAM is becoming very prevalent. It's like how all our missile shoots these days are older munitions. As for your mortar example, while I won't say that 100% of the time we wouldn't drop a precision weapon on it (because horrible mistakes have been made), you'd bet your ass that we would avoid it at all costs. I'm not so sure that the RuAF** would have that reservation and I know for sure that the Syrian Air Force wouldn't. **What's the official name these days?

I love these. Is FO planning on a DAR as well?

I believe it's a P-15 FLAT FACE search radar.

Broad, in-depth training is less common from my own experiences but familiarity exchanges happen frequently. You will have times though when say Germans hand Americans G36s at the range and say "have fun" often enough. When I was at USMA I did exchanges with the Royal Military College [of Canada] and the Austrian Army (3 weeks). We carried Austrian weapons, rode in Austrian vehicles, and embedded in Austrian Panzergrenadier squads. It was a great time. We also had exchange students who spent anywhere from 6 months to 4 years with us. Fast forward to the present day, it wouldn't be impossible for me to get a billet flying Rafales off the Charles DeGaulle for 2 years, although annoyingly Big Navy doesn't view it as a favorable move for command (of a US Squadron). On the flip side, there's a full on Luftwaffe training squadron at NAS Pensacola, and a sprinkling of foreign types embedded in Naval Aviation training (I've encountered Dutch, Italians, Saudis, and Indians personally). The Air Force has Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program as well.

Err, you pretty much agreed with everything I said. Muj and Soviets are both liars (and at the bare minimum 100 losses isn't something to ignore). And Pantsir does what I said and is deployed like I said. As for SVP-24, I'm pretty sure we've discussed it before. It's an on board, user friendly ballistic computer, which is neat and accurate compared to like a Nordon bomb sight, but we've fielded similar tech since like the late 80s. That would be CCIP (continuously calculated impact point) and CCRP (continuously calculated release point) bomb modes for those familiar with flight sims. Being intimately familiar with US systems, they're pretty neat for dumb bombs but you cannot possibly achieve the level of accuracy of a dedicated guided bomb. The US computers account for all of the same factors that the Russian one claims to, but for some reason the Russians claim like a sub 5m CEP. That's literally the public CEP for a laser guided bomb. No way in hell a dumb bomb from 20,000 feet has that accuracy and consistency. There is simply too much going on in the world of physics and weather. 50m at that altitude is a lot more reasonable, if a bit conservative. Good for hitting city blocks, not for individual houses. Sorry Vlad. I'll look around for some cockpit footage. Edit: found some I don't speak Turkish, but you get to see what 3 CCIP runs look like on practice targets. When the reticule flashes means a weapon away. CCIP pretty much requires a dive so you can see the impact point, but can be very accurate (~25m depending on parameters). The downside being evident in that video, you have to dive at your target bringing you well within SHORAD range. CCRP is less visually impressive, so I only found simulator tutorials which are pretty accurate. Basically you're given cues to a launch basket to fly into, from which the computer decides the best time to drop the bomb. You can choose just how tight of a parameter you want but that will increase your workload and still doesn't promise high precision. This is a common way to launch guided bombs though because those give you a very large launch basket.