Monday, March 28, 2016

SHARING ISN'T THE LOADED WORD I'D USE

In the latest update from the front, Oriana Pawlyck of the Air Force Times writes:
The Air Force and coalition partners in the air war against the Islamic State are not only sharing intelligence, runways and strategic plans, they’re also sharing bombs. 
Coalition jets having been taking from the U.S. stockpiles as needed, said Lt. Gen. John Raymond, deputy chief of staff for operations at Headquarters Air Force. “We do have relationships with our coalition partners for those supplies; they are using those weapons as well,” Raymond told reporters Thursday at a defense writer’s briefing in Washington, D.C. 
While the Air Force is not immediately concerned with depleting its stockpiles, “it is something we are managing very closely to make sure … we have the supplies to do what we need to do today,” he said.
The words I'd have used in writing such an article would be, "USAF Gives Away Arsenal of Bombs," or "Ruthless Allies Steal USAF Blind and Take Bombs Whenever."

Can you remember ANY time that one of our allies "shared" ammunition with us? I honestly can't.

Just reading that twit general's words is irritating to me. We once used a broken down K-loader in Qatar after we fixed it up and made it operational enough to actually move to the aircraft and when the Air Force found out they turned around and charged us $17,000 for using it. There were no Air Force people there, the equipment had been abandoned at the airhead and we spent our money fixing it up. It's extremely irritating to read now that the USAF is just giving away $121,000 bombs because it can't find enough aircraft to drop them on our enemy.

3 comments:

virgil xenophon said...

TYPICAL..

virgil xenophon said...

PS:t We used to have a sign over the squadron duty desk at DaNang entitled "FUBB Control." (Fucked Up Beyond Belief--MUCH better than Snafu or Fubar :) )

HMS Defiant said...

I remember having the watch in the Gulf, at anchor, and standing on the bridge wing by one of the machine guns when the XO came up to me and bluntly told me that the CO actually knew what IHTFP meant and didn't like me doodling it during the few meetings I attended in the wardroom when I had time from my other duties.
In two years I had
LCDR "Wild" Bill Snyder
LCDR Robert McCabe
LCDR IHTFP Bruce T. VanBelle
LCDR Jeffrey Kendall Sapp
LCDR Richard Merten
LT Russ Harris
The Cobra
LCDR James Keys
LCDR Michael Moore
LCDR Paul Stanton

as my Commanding Officer. Snyder was the hands down one of the three best men I ever worked for, and with the exception of Sapp, Merten, the Cobra and VanBelle, the rest were good solid professionals. I later worked for Stanton as 36 at NAVCENT when he was N3. Good man. VanBelle came out and used my office for a couple of weeks when he was Commodore of one of the MCM Squadrons based in Texas. We probably didn't speak 2 words to each other in that whole time. I bumped into Mike when he was Chief of Staff at PhibGroup2 just long enough to say "Hi".

Snyder knew how to peg the funmeter to the good side even though, sometimes, it meant lying face down in the grass at MCRD with an M16 muzzle held at the back of the neck by a young Marine, while the Officer of the Day demanded to know, "just who pulled the fire alarm!?"