REAL MAN TRUCKWORKS & SURVIVAL
GENERAL TOPICS => Coffee Induced Early Morning Rant => Topic started by: Flyin6 on March 13, 2015, 10:54:59 AM
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A-10 driver perspective
FYSA The squadron is doing fine. Everybody is happy to be here and we are doing some good work. The A-10s are holding up well and the technology we have have on the jets now (targeting pods, GPS guided bombs, Laser Guided bombs, Laser guided missiles, tactical data link, satellite comms), and of course the gun, make the A-10 ideal for this conflict. We are killing off as many ISIS as we can, mostly in ones and twos, working with the hand we are dealt. I've never been more convicted in my career that we facing an enemy that needs to be eradicated.
With that being said...I've never been more frustrated in my career. After 13 years of the mind-numbing low intensity conflict in Afghanistan, I've never seen the knife more dull. All the hard lessons learned in Vietnam, and fixed during the first Gulf War, have been unlearned again. The level of centralized execution, bureaucracy, and politics is staggering. I basically do not have any decision making authority in my cockpit. It sucks. In most cases, unless a general officer can look at a video picture from a UAV, over a satellite link, I cannot get authority to engage. I've spent many hours, staring through a targeting pod screen in my own cockpit, watching ISIS crapheads perpetrate their acts until my eyes bleed, without being able to do anything about it. The institutional fear of making a mistake, that has crept into the central mindset of the military leadership, is endemic. We have not taken the fight to these guys. We haven't targeted their centers of gravity in Raqqa. All the roads between Syria and Iraq are still intact with trucks flowing freely. The other night I watched a couple hundred small tanker trucks lined up at an oilfield in ISIS-held northeast Syria, presumably filling up with with oil traded on the black market, go unfettered. It's not uncommon to wait several hours overhead a suspected target for someone to make a decision to engage or not. It feels like we are simply using the constructs build up in Afghanistan, which was a very limited fight, in the same way here against ISIS, which is a much more sophisticated and numerically greater foe. It's embarrassing.
Be assured that the Hawg drivers are doing their best.
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I love the irony of islamic militants being killed by something named after the source of PORK!
I hate that they have to fight inside a box- >:(
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Give me a little time to get my thoughts together, and ill explain why to a forward (me) the true importance of just how much I come to rely on the warthog.