XBradTC

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XBradTC

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Thanks, Air Force

So, a friend of ours has been having some arguments about Close Air Support. He’s kindly shared this little gem with me.

So, a friend of ours has been having some arguments about Close Air Support. He’s kindly shared this little gem with me.

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  1. Pave Low John

    Well, there was that one time at the Dare County Range in NC when a four-ship of F-15Es almost hit my Huey with a practice bomb…as I was sitting on the pad behind the range control tower. No shit, the bomb hit the ground about 50 meters off the nose of the UH-1 while we were sitting there at idle. Good job Air Force! (oh wait, I was in the Air Force too…never mind)

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  2. Quartermaster

    USAF doesn’t have choppers. Choppers are not flown by true pilots and the USAF has only true pilots. Just ask them.

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  3. ultimaratioregis

    Close air support is so, so, so….. TACTICAL! (phoo!)

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  4. Pave Low John

    CAS is one of those things that is so easy to screw up, I’m surprised we don’t have more blue-on-blue these days, to be honest. And advanced technology has only made it worse, in my opinion. Some of my buddies did the CASEVAC in Djibouti about ten years ago when a B-52 walked a stick of bombs right between two idling Marine CH-53s that were sitting off the range at the LZ being used by the ANGLICO element. That was a really bad one, they have a write-up on Wikipedia that gives a pretty good synopsis of the whole debacle.

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  5. Pave Low John

    And Quartermaster is absolutely right, only the tools…er, “aviation gods” that fly fighters are the only pilots worth talking about in the Air Force. Although, I must say, when I was flying MH-53Js at Osan Air Base back in the day, the A-10s pilots were the only non-rotorheads that we would invite to our hootch, they were some really cool guys. The F-16 pilots, on the other hand, were a bunch of douche-bags. It was a really stark contrast, comparing the pilots in those two squadrons….

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  6. Casey Tompkins

    Can someone explain to me what I just watched? No, really.

    What was that? Real video from AFG? If so, WTF?

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  7. Pave Low John

    No problem, Casey, I was in the Air Force at a variety of assignments within semi-close proximity to those wonderful organizations known as “fighter squadrons”, here is what happened in that video:

     The Air Force was demonstrating how awesome they were at putting awesomely cool bombs somewhere near, almost besides, and sometimes in the vicinity of, targets being observed by an unappreciated bunch of peasants.....er, I mean, "Army and/or Marine brethren-in-arms".  Ahem.

But, since flying fast and looking cool is sometimes compromised by the demands of something called the Close Air Support mission (really, can't the Taliban field at least a squadron of air-to-air fighters?), the zipper-suited sun-gods in that video really didn't have their hearts in it.

Ah well, such is combat.  Now, back to the O-Club, glorious Knights of the Air!  I heard that there is a crud tournament scheduled for tonight, right after the surf-and-turf buffet...

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  8. Pave Low John

    Oops, meant to say “unappreciative”, not unappreciated, although if there was ever a truer word spoken when it comes to ground-pounder, I haven’t heard it…

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