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OK, now that the yardwork is done, back to blogging. Here it is, February, the dead of winter, and I had to wait for a relatively cool day to do yardwork without the risk of heat exhaustion.

CDR Salamander addresses the recent controversy over at Twitter regarding the suspension of blogger Robert Stacy  McCain. Having recently established the very Orwellian sounding Trust and Safety Council, with members such as radical left wing feminist Anita Sarkeesian, it came as no surprise that Twitter would quickly begin to label all criticism of the radical left as “hate speech” and “threatening.” Worse, Twitter won’t even tell you why you’ve been banned. They just put a bullet in the back of your account’s neck and that’s it. Facebook isn’t as bad as that, but it too has its issues, and has forced our favorite ‘phibian from its shores.

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LMT has withdrawn its complaint to the GAO about the DoD’s selection of Oshkosh as the winner of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle competition. Sadly, it’s become all too common for contractors to look at the complain process as simply another phase of the contracting competition. If you can’t win on performance, win by litigation. Of course, it isn’t always going to work, especially when Oshkosh entered a product that displayed a reliability more than three times greater than the Army/Marine Corps requirement, and five times that of the LMT entry, which failed to achieve the benchmark. 

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War is Boring has an interesting piece on the discrete airlift provided by the 27th Special Operations Wing in some interesting places.

 

In December, the Libyan air force inadvertently exposed a secretive U.S. Wolfhound transport plane on a runway. The passengers — American commandos — had arrived in the country for a covert meeting with the Libyan army. “While in Libya, members of a local militia demanded that the U.S. personnel depart,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Guardian after photos of the soldiers spread online. “In an effort to avoid conflict, they did leave, without incident.”

But the mission was only a glimpse at a fleet of transport planes with far greater reach — and which stays far busier — than previously thought. An official history of the U.S. Air Force’s 27th Special Operations Wing in 2013 shows these aircraft and their cousins operate well beyond North Africa and the Middle East.

It’s not so much that the 27th SOW is flying secret combat missions. It’s that they primarily aren’t flying combat missions. For combat, the Air Force relies upon the other squadrons of the 27th SOW and other SOWs. Using the C-146A, better known as the Dornier Do-328 turboprop airliner, the Air Force can provide operational airlift to units which, while not necessarily classified, we don’t wish to draw attention to. For instance, a major job of the US Army Special Forces is training with the armies of nations throughout Africa and South America. But while many of those nations are quite grateful for the training assistance, for political reasons, they wish to draw as little attention to it as possible. So rather than having a big grey C-130J in obvious USAF markings moving a couple of 12 man A-teams around, a C-146 can do the job, and no one really pays attention to it. Like I said… discrete.

A USAF C-146 Wolfhound- Photo courtesy of Marek Ślusarczyk of www.microstock.pl.

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