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By lex, on January 25th, 2012
Your host is back on the Crossfit track, the time which he has for such activities having been expanded by his more frequent absence from domestic duties. Also, something really had to be done about our creeping senescence, and this is after all a new year – a time in which it is customary and usual to start beneficial things anew, or renew good things once abandoned, or abandon things malignant. I’m rather too fond of my vices to give them up entirely, so getting back in the gym seemed a reasonable compromise. The combination of which inspired has inspired me to various and divers loaded functional movements over the course of the last cuppla, which have left me aching and sore in all the usual places, reminding me no doubt about why I had given the whole thing over in the past, not once but several times.
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We do not only do air-to-air training here in Fallon, Nevada, but also a significant portion of air-to-ground training. Some of which must be conducted in close proximity to friendly forces, and which therefore require the assistance of a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), also known as a FAC (Forward Air Controller) to those of us who grew up hurling ourselves at the dirt before “Joint” became pretty much de rigueur in all things. Because of the jointness in it.
Our Beloved Corps has a quaint habit of rotating front-line flyers from the cockpit to serve as FACs in the trenches, the better to work along side those who may from time to time require and desire aerial fire support, delivered with exacting precision in close proximity. It is no doubt thought that this service simultaneously prevents the Wings of Gold set from taking on airs, so to speak, while providing a cautionary example to others of their cohort. Some of whom might otherwise be tempted to hit the pickle button on a Close Air Support mission without reasonable assurance that the weapon in question doesn’t do more harm than good. After all, it very might be you on day on the receiving end, fly boy. So mark your targets well.
The blue suited side of the Blue/Green team will train aerial observers for this role, the thinking being that one controlling aerial fires from above might have a cool detachment from those delivering those fires in the heat of the fray. But if you want to speak to someone from Navy who calls in fires wearing muddy boots, the odds are that you’ll wind up talking to a SEAL team member, who got his own JTAC training right here at NAS Fallon.
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It may not surprise you, therefore, to learn that you can scarcely swing a dead cat around here without knocking the cover off a naval special warfare operator. Which fact argues strongly against any latent ambition you might have had to swing dead cats, lest you join poor Felix in his fate. Nowhere, apart from perhaps the classroom or the field, is the likelihood of such an encounter greater than in the gym on base. In consequence of which I have taken to leaving whatever dead cats I might possess in the car, to prevent some fatal misunderstanding.
They are easy to spot, whether in uniform or civilian clothes. Their BDUs are certainly not the blueberries one sees everywhere else, nor the woodland cammo of the old days, nor yet the patterns worn by the other services back in CONUS, but rather – I suspect – the relatively new MultiCam pattern designed by the Army for wear exclusively in Afghanistan. Atop this they wear t-shirts covered by khaki fleece sweaters, and their heads are often topped by a khaki watch cap pulled snug over the ears. Their gait is relaxed and athletic, but their bearing otherwise decidedly un-military – hands are routinely stuffed into pockets. No one ever seems to call them on it, and as a contractor I don’t feel like it’s my place to set them straight. Nor am I all that well insured.
You’d think it would be a little harder to suss them out in civies, but it’s not. There’s just something in the way they carry themselves, a sense of latent potency and self-assuredness. When two or three are together, you can add the fact that all of them are in superb physical shape. I don’t know how it is in the other services, but if you put three sailors together – or three of their officers, for that matter – the odds at least one among them showing evident need of dietary counseling is abundant. Not so with a pack of operators. And in the gym, well.
One fine way to encourage a man of a certain age to greater exertions in the gym – or at least to suck his belly in – is to place a lithe young beauty in spandex in close proximity. I find that working out alongside a SEAL instead inspires me mostly try to stay out of his way while he gets his frogman on.
Which is a ludicrously self-absorbed way of introducing the trailer to something coming out of Hollywood that just might be good, for once: Act of Valor. The story may be fictional – even if loosely based on real-world events - but many of the “actors” are anything but. You owe it a look, the theatrical trailer as well as the short video on the making of the movie.
I like movies, and generally sort the ones I want to see into one of two bins, “big screen” for spectacles, or “DVD” for those I am content to wait for and watch in the comfort of my own hooch. This one definitely goes into the big screen category.
Update: Wow, talk about topical. It’s hard for Hollywood – or anyone, for that matter – to keep up with these guys.
Update 2: Given the uncharacteristically militant braying and chest thumping in the left-wing blogosphere about the Somalia operation, one is almost tempted to “question the timing” of this operation, which completed very shortly before the president’s SOTU address last night.
We don’t much go in for that sort of thing around here, because contemplating the possibility that a sitting executive with no military experience whatsoever would place good men in danger for personal political gain leads to some very dark places.
By lex, on January 24th, 2012
When Son Number One got his wings in Pensacola these last months past, I took the opportunity to go down with hizzoner and his sainted ma, for to see the Naval Aviation Museum there. That being one of my cultural touchstones, for ours is a proud history with many fine and honorable heroes who preceded us, to serve as examples.
Eugene Ely it was who first put an airplane down upon a carrier deck, just a little over a hundred years ago. Butch O’Hare shot down three Betty bombers – and damaged two others – who were targeting USS Lexington on the unopposed side, saving the ship and thousands of his shipmates, while earning our first ever Medal of Honor. He was trained by Jimmy Thach, who turned a performance disadvantage into a winning tactic, setting the example for generations of innovators. His soul has gone on to meet its reward, but his spirit is with us still.
Pappy Boyington taught the young kids how to fight in the Solomons, and later paid his rent as a guest of Imperial Japan. Joe Foss got his kills at Guadalcanal, and helped protect the grunts from adding to the butcher’s bill.
Jessie Brown broke the color line to serve a country that didn’t yet deserve him in the Korean War, and paid for it with his life. Thomas Hudner crashed his airplane alongside him, behind enemy lines, trying to save his life. He also earned the MoH. John Koelsch gave his life so that another might live. Clyde Lassen learned his example a decade or so later.
Jim Stockdale earned his ribbon refusing to submit to the North Vietnamese. Mike Estocin understood the concept of being on “government time” over Haiphong. He went missing because of it, his fate known to God alone.
It’s a lot to live up to.
But they all came from somewhere. Ely came from Davenport, Iowa. O’Hare from Saint Louis. Thach from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Pappy from Coeur D’Alene. Foss from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Jessie Brown from the hard hate of Hattiesburg, MS. Hudner from Fall River, Mass. Jack Koelsch from London, England. Lassen from Fort Myers, FL. Admiral Stockdale from Abingdon, IL. Estocin from Turtle Creek, PA.
Flyover country, mostly. Not the kinds of places that send kids to Harvard or Yale. Apart from Koelsch. Who came from the old country for reasons of his own, and gave his life for one of his adopted brothers.
Where do we grow the next crop? How do we reach them?
Well, the Pensacola Air Museum – and its subsidiary, the National Flight Academy - has an idea:
The National Flight Academy is designed to address the serious concerns of declining Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills and standards in our country. The Academy’s mission is to inspire students who subsequently return to their parent schools and seek out the more challenging courses in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
Disciplines will include aerodynamics, propulsion, navigation, communications, flight physiology and meteorology, along with core values, teamwork, and leadership skills development. In addition to the in-residence program, the NFA will offer a web-based Distance Learning Program for both students and teachers.
The National Flight Academy development team currently includes the best and brightest from the entertainment industry as well as leaders in education, simulation and training. Our immersive simulated environment, coupled with the most revolutionary methods in instruction, will foster cooperative learning and inspire young people primarily in grades 7 through 12 to pursue the math and sciences today that open the door to science and engineering degrees and careers of tomorrow. This vision for today’s youth and tomorrow’s leaders is the guiding purpose of the National Flight Academy.
The NFA is a self-supporting, tuition-based educational program. In order to make the National Flight Academy adventure a reality for as many students as possible, we are committed to a financial aid program that enables a demographically and geographically diverse student population to attend. We welcome support from individuals, corporations, and foundations for both our scholarship program and general operation funds.
I toured the NFA with SNO and his mère. They’ve got an absolutely top notch adjunct to the Naval Aviation Museum, an immersive camp experience that will introduce young people to the dream of flight while exposing them to the underlying science, technology, engineering and math that supports it. The facilities are impressive, the sponsorship by industry gratifying, the considerations for safety and well-being comprehensive. There very well might be a young person you know who could profit from it.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
And we are very much in need of fire.
By lex, on January 24th, 2012
So, your host flew a night hop last night and a day sortie today. The difference between the two was, well: Look at the title.
We’d missed some sorties for weather. Gotten kicked out of the brawl when the training rules limited the number of fighters and bandits that could contest the same airspace. No hard feelings, it all made sense. When you’ve got Hornets, or Super Hornets, or F-16s with radars and night vision devices zorching around at one another at high fractions of the number, it makes sense to pad your chances.
But the weather last night was good enough to launch us, not nearly good enough to make us happy. An overcast cloud deck at maybe 3000 feet above the field, about three thousand feet thick. Clear above, for all the good that it would do. For it was an inky dark night, not a trace of any moon and scarcely any reference to the ground. It was, in a word, unpleasant.
I’ve mentioned previously that the current steed is a slippery machine, she yearns to sneak away from you at a moment’s provocation. Could be a look down to check the status of the jamming pod, a manual frequency change or – worst of all – a heads down, over the shoulder change of transponder codes. Which is a trivial thing when the sun is shining down through the canopy and there are a multitude of indications of your attitude, but sore duty when you’re hurtling through a sea of black velvet on a high tempered mare with ideas of her own. It doesn’t much help that the attitude indicator is somewhat lower on the panel than it might be in a more nearly perfect world, and the spot it ought to occupy is instead filled with a really quite lovely Garmin 530 GPS display, which tells you with seductive certainty exactly where you are in space, but not how it is that you come to occupy it. You could be straight and level, in a gentle turn or hurtling towards the unyielding terrain, but you’d know exactly where you are. And nothing else, not if it was ever so.
I flew ground controlled approach mostly through the goo until I had the field in sight, transitioned to a visual approach at about a mile or so and landed with a thump, the runway sneaking up on me like. Wasn’t so much a landing as an arrival, in the words of Ernie Gann, yet any landing that you can 1) walk away from and 2) leaves the machine in running order for the next jock is reckoned something of a victory in such circumstances. It was work hard work, and the price for foolishness would have been awful steep. I slept the sleep of angels last night. Which, if that’s a zero sum game, well, they’ll have to catch up with me after.
The weather was far better today, not least because you could see and avoid it, the sun being in a useable quadrant of the sky and attentive to his watch. No chance of straining in the darkness to catch a tally-ho far above you, and suddenly find yourself wrapped in clouds that – Murphy having his vote – could as well contain terrain as otherwise. We got the jets going pretty good, almost to their maximum Mach number while carrying external stores. In full grunt, the clouds scudding below us, the hunter on the hunt and we the prey, ourselves with a chase in view, or nearly. When you’re flying a little on the cold side of an intercept and your adversary is bringing the heat at 1.1 or so chasing your friends, you have to be careful about your intercept geometry. Those sent to target us were.
We didn’t mind, for that is what we came here for. To see if they could make it happen. To ensure that they could. To test them.
The recovery from the day hop was an essentially trivial affair, although we once again split up for our precision approaches. After the hard work last night – I had a Guinness for strength at the O’Club afterward, and a shot of Jameson’s on the side for courage, just to be sure – it was like third grade spelling.
I spent two decades taking my bite of the apple. Now I mainly serve apples up.
Beats the hell out of working in a cube farm, and you should really see these kids, these days. And maybe thank their parents.
It’s a great country still.
By lex, on January 24th, 2012
It scores a little victory, on a Marine Corps base, of all places.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell
By lex, on January 24th, 2012
Writing in the WSJ, Bret Stephens pretty much wraps up my personal view of the GOP field’s readiness for the 2012 national election:
Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn’t because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant. Nothing commends them for it. If this election is as important as they all say it is, they had a duty to step up. Abraham Lincoln did not shy from the contest of 1860 because of Mary Todd. If Mr. Obama wins in November—or, rather, when he does—the failure will lie as heavily on their shoulders as it will with the nominee.
Our president still seems to the decisive middle swath of the electorate to be a likeable enough young man personally, although his policies and effectiveness have left the country despairing, his allies disappointed, his opponents enraged. It should have been relatively straightforward for the GOP to present a suitable challenger with the right blend of conviction and charisma. They didn’t.
Maybe in 2016.
By lex, on January 24th, 2012
Bill “Shortney” Gortney was one of my instructors at the FA-18 Fleet Replacement Squadron in 1987. He was a (senior) lieutenant when I was a (junior) lieutenant. He’s also one of the guys I (mistakenly, it seems) attributed to a rather high-larious event at around the same time frame. Which if you haven’t read that story, you really orta.
Yesterday I got the news that Mrs. Gortney’s son is all growed up:
President Obama has nominated Vice Adm. Bill Gortney as the next commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, a move that if approved by the Senate would likely occur this summer.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made the announcement Monday.
Gortney, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, would be promoted to admiral and replace Adm. John Harvey, who has commanded what was once known as U.S. Atlantic Fleet since July 2009. Gortney reported to the Pentagon in July 2010…
Naval observers and industry insiders told Navy Times in late December that Gortney appeared to have the inside track on the job, saying he possesses the right combination of experience in preparing ships and aircraft to deploy, knowledge of overseas combatant commander requirements and understanding of wartime fleet operations.
How time passes: Lieutenants together, and he a four-star in charge of train/man/equip Navy-wide while I’m a retired O-6 cooling my heels in the Comfort Inn at Fallon, NV.
But I still get to fly.
Congrats, admiral!
By lex, on January 23rd, 2012
On his way to the White House to learn of the administration’s plans to draw down the Afghan surge, General David Petraeus was asked a question from a retired mentor:
Petraeus had returned to Washington from his command in Kabul for consultations with Obama on the drawdown, and for a Senate committee hearing on his nomination to become the next director of the CIA. On the way from the Pentagon, retired Army general Jack Keane, a mentor and former vice chief of staff of the Army, e-mailed Petraeus with rumors of what he was hearing: The White House was going to recommend 10,000 troops depart by the end of 2011, with the remaining 23,000 surge forces out by the summer of 2012, a far more drastic timetable for withdrawal than Petraeus had recommended.
Keane was protective of his prodigy. Obama’s decision “not only protracts the war but risks the mission,” Keane said in the e-mail, then asked: “should you consider resigning?”
“I don’t think quitting would serve our country,” Petraeus responded. “More likely to create a crisis. And, I told POTUS I’d support his ultimate decision. Besides, the troops can’t quit. . . .”
Undivided loyalty to his own troops and to his civilian chain of command, a concept more valuable to the Republic even than the risk of losing the war in Afghanistan. To channel Rummy, you go to war with the government you’ve got, for better or worse.
It’s all well and good for those who have no skin in the game to ask field commanders to consider throwing their stars on the table in some romantic gesture. But some lesser man will always be found to do the politicians’ bidding, and in the end it’s the troops in the field who would suffer for it.
By lex, on January 23rd, 2012
A rare and unanimous SCOTUS decision that takes us one step back from living in an all-intrusive police state:
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle, voting unanimously in one of the first major cases to test constitutional privacy rights in the digital age.
The government argued that attaching the tiny device to a car’s undercarriage was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored. Thus, the technique was “reasonable,” meaning that police were free to employ it for any reason without first justifying it to a magistrate, the government said.
The justices seemed troubled by that position at arguments in November, where the government acknowledged it would also allow attaching such trackers to the justices’ own cars without obtaining a warrant.
One drug dealer goes free, which is probably a worthwhile price to pay to ensure that in an increasingly connected and digital world, some vestiges of the notion of personal privacy from an all-seeing state remain intact.
A rare victory for the little people, handed down by the elites.
By lex, on January 23rd, 2012
You’re not in Sandy Eggo any more, precious.
Update: Well, that was something of a bust. Got to the field with large wet snow flurries everywhere. Entered the ready room to hear from an F-5 pilot that all of the F-5s, F-16s and, yes – Kfirs – were cancelled from the first launch. But that the FA-18 jocks were not yet off the hook. A quick look out the window towards the runway showed visibility of less than a mile, low ceilings. Not long after came the word that the entire launch was scrubbed.
It was interesting in a way to watch the faces of the assembled aircrew at this pronouncement. It was relief, really. Smiles and jocularity, as though a weight had been lifted. Talk of better skiing up in the mountains. Fled for now thoughts of wing and inlet icing, the white knuckled approach to land in miserable conditions. The weather would not have had to be all that much better for us to pull the trigger on the flight, but as it was you could see a kind of quiet appreciation of nature’s power to carelessly thwart man’s ambitions.
They would have gone, too, if that had been the command. We all would have. Regretting every moment of it.
But that too, is part of the discipline.
By lex, on January 22nd, 2012
Abe Lincoln sailed through the Strait of Hormuz Sunday and absolutely nothing happened:
Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost said the USS Abraham Lincoln entered the Gulf on Sunday without incident to conduct scheduled maritime security operations. Derrick-Frost is a spokeswoman for the Navy’s 5th Fleet, based in the Gulf state of Bahrain.
U.S. warships frequently operate in the Gulf. But when the carrier USS John Stennis departed the Gulf in late December, Iranian officials warned the U.S. not to return. On Saturday, however, Iran indicated that it viewed U.S. naval operations in the Gulf as normal.
The mullahs may be crazy, but they are not obviously stupid.
Possibly related:
ABOARD THE USS ENTERPRISE (Reuters) – The United States will not cut America’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers to help trim the budget deficit, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Saturday, citing tensions with Iran as an example of why the massive ships are so critical to national security…
The Enterprise’s last deployment comes at a moment of heightened tensions with Iran, which has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil shipping lane. That’s something the United States says it will not allow.
“You’re part of what keeps our force agile and flexible and quickly deployable and capable of taking on any enemy, anywhere in the world,” Panetta said, speaking about 100 nautical miles off the coast of the U.S. state of Georgia.
Nice words of course, if you’re a proponent of sea power. But if the US military is to take at least $400b in cuts across the next decade – and potentially as much as $1 trillion, if Congress can’t get its act together, and we remain “fully committed” to the F-35 series, you kind of have to wonder where those cuts are to occur.
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Credo "Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
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