XBradTC

HONG KONG — A camouflage-clad President Xi Jinping appeared on Wednesday at the joint battle command center of China’s Central Military Commission, where he urged officers to build a command system that was “capable of winning wars,” according to state news reports.

Mr. Xi, who is general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, which runs the country’s armed forces. After his visit on Wednesday, a new title was unveiled in the state and party news media: commander in chief of the joint battle command center.

via www.nytimes.com

Well, that's kind of interesting. There's currently a major reorganization of the PLA underway, in addition to a huge modernization push.

One suspects also, however, that Xi might also be solidifying his own power base within the CCP.

MANILA, Philippines — Four A-10C Thunderbolt IIs and two HH-60G Pave Hawks which remained behind in the country after Balikatan 2016 conducted their first flight out of Clark Air Base this week, the US Embassy in Manila said Thursday.

 

On Tuesday, April 19, the A-10s and HH-60s engaged in a maritime situational awareness operation and flew through international airspace to the west of Luzon. 

 

The aircraft are part of the US Pacific Command’s Air Contingent deployed at the Philippine Air Force base in Clark. They remained in the country after this year’s joint military drills which ended on April 15.

via www.philstar.com

That's certainly an interesting choice of platform. Not too terribly threatening (with its very modest air to air capability), but enough capability to engage small ships to be credible.

Of course, the A-10 doesn't have radar, so any surface search would have to rely on its electro-optical targeting pod. Which, in normal maritime patrol, you cue the E/O pod via the radar. I mean, the ocean is simply indescribably vast.

Of course, the waters in question are quite busy. The E/O pod would be used to distinguish harmless fishing boats from Chinese Coast Guard ships.

And really, the whole point isn't to project credible military capability, but instead to fly where the Chinese don't want us to. They might push any Philippine efforts around, but they don't want to risk too great an escalation with the US.

And yes, I remember that Tom Clancy wrote a scenario with A-10s overflying a Soviet task force.

About the time thermonuclear weapons design achieved a small enough size to be fitted to tactical aircraft, the Air Force put out a request for proposals for a tactical fighter that would carry one weapon deep behind enemy lines.  Republic Aviation responded with what became the F-105 Thunderchief.  A huge single engine fighter with the mighty J75 engine, the Thud featured an internal bomb bay that could accommodate a single B28 nuclear bomb.

Of course, the Tactical Air Command knew that it couldn’t only use the F-105 for the nuclear delivery role. And so the F-105 also was designed to carry a wide variety of other, conventional ordnance, such as bombs, napalm, and rockets. 

About the first video, I damn near cried seeing the target was a B-29.  As to the second video, two thoughts. First, man, look at the take-off performance. A lightly loaded Thud was a pretty good climber. Fully loaded in a hot, heavy day, a Vietnam war Thud might suck up 9000’ of runway, and take forever to begin climbing at more than 500’ a minute. Second, the lack of Multiple Ejector Racks for the bomb racks is interesting . At about the time the film was being produced, the Marines at China Lake were beginning to develop the MER in concert with Douglas Aircraft. The MER would allow a single weapons pylon to carry not just one bomb, but up to six. That would vastly improve the loadout of the Marine Corps’ A-4 Skyhawks, making them much better Close Air Support platforms. And eventually, the MER would find its way to the F-105. A typical loadout for an F-105 during the Vietnam War would be six 750# bombs on a centerline MER, two 450 gallon drop tanks on the inboard wing stations, and one QRC-160 jammer on an outboard wing station, and an AIM-9B on the other.

The controlled chaos on the flight deck is managed by a host of young men and women with an average age of around 19. But the movement of aircraft on the flight and hangar decks is the responsibility of The Handler, usually a Lieutenant Commander. To map out the movement of the aircraft and their status, a scale outline of the flight and hangar decks is used. And upon that outline, each and every aircraft assigned to the air wing is represented by a scaled sized icon, each one marked with the corresponding MODEX nose number.

Ironically, even as the Handler here explains the great advantage that the Ouija board simply doesn’t break down, the Navy is spending millions of dollars to develop a computer based version.

The day after Proposition 30 passed, triggering $6 billion in new annual taxes, Arizona launched a campaign to lure some of California’s top companies.

KCRA 3 has learned that 24 chief executives are flying to Phoenix, Ariz., to explore the land of lower taxes and a much friendlier business environment.

View photos — Ariz. launches campaign for Calif. businesses

“We can deliver the mayors, we can deliver the CEOs, we can deliver the legislative support,” said Barry Broome, president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.

Broome launched his campaign to recruit California CEOs one day after voters in the Golden State approved Prop 30 last November, and the campaign is working.

via www.kcra.com

It's incredibly frustrating that the state of California should still be an economic powerhouse that is leading the nation.

Instead, for decades the government has done everything possible to destroy the middle class, the agricultural industry, and damn near everything besides Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I'm starting to suspect that George R.R. Martin is the author behind 2016</p>&mdash; Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) <a href="https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/723200973926072322">April 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
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So, there’s this:

The US House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces wants to know how much it would cost to resume production of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter and it is even willing to consider export options and foreign partnerships as an offset.

The US Air Force has spent the past year denying it has any interest in restarting production of the fifth-generation stealth aircraft, which entered combat for the first time in September 2014 against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria and Iraq. However, the subcommittee’s markup of the fiscal year 2017 defence policy bill this week notes “interest” within the US Air Force, Defense Department and Congress about “potentially restarting production of the F-22 aircraft”.

The Air Force would be delighted to have another 194 F-22s.

But they will never allow the line to be reopened.

Any restart for F-22 production would be pretty pricey, even under the best of circumstances. Finding the workforce, finding or rebuilding the jigs, reestablishing the subcontractor network, all those things cost time and money.

More importantly, any F-22 buy would almost by definition have to be paid for by undercutting the F-35A purchase. That is, money would come out of the JSF budget. And that would put JSF into a worse death spiral than it is already in, driving up unit costs and shifting the purchase dates to the right, which, in turn would further drive up unit costs.

And the Air Force realizes that while it can muddle through with 187 F-22s, it absolutely must have a large buy of F-35s, or it simply is out of the tactical airpower business. The huge fleet of F-16s is old and aging rapidly. Without replacement, the Air Force is toast.

And so, the Air Force will conduct the study as directed. And they will demonstrate to Congress that restarting the F-22 line will be a fiscal disaster. They will use worst case scenarios to demonstrate that buying the F-35 is a much more attractive option than restarting production of an airplane they really, really would like to have, but simply can’t afford at the cost of F=35s.

The SR-71 was a masterpiece of aeroengineering, the first jet capable of sustained speeds of Mach 3. But as impressive as Kelly Johnson’s design was, it was useless without a poweplant to propel it to those speeds. And Pratt & Whitney really stepped up to the plate when asked to create the engines for it.