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In recognition of the retirement of the venerable EA-6B Prowler, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station is holding an open house.

The base will also host an EA-6B Prowler Sundown event to highlight the naval history of this iconic aircraft.

The open house is set for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, June 27 at Ault Field.

The Navy is retiring the 44-year-old Prowler and replacing the long-range, all-weather electronic attack platform with the EA-18G Growler.

NAS Whidbey is the Navy’s home base for its electronic attack squadrons including a forward deployed Growler squadron in Japan. As with the Growler, all Prowler squadrons — with exception of four Marine Corps EA-6B squadrons — were based and trained at NAS Whidbey.

via Final Navy EA-6B Prowler will fly into history at NAS Whidbey Island open house | Whidbey Crosswind.

“Prowler” and “Whidbey” are virtually synonymous to our mind. We tend to forget about MCAS Cherry Point, since 1. It’s the Marines, and 2. We haven’t been there since around 1970, long before the Marines had Prowlers.

We sure wish we could make it up to Whidbey this summer, either for this or our 30th high school reunion. Sadly, looks like we’ll be busy.

Dad cleaned out a lot of pictures and stuff from his “I love me wall” before moving away from Whidbey. Sadly, one picture he got rid of was the one I wanted to keep, showing the variety of airplanes stationed there in August of ’73, when he reported aboard. Going from memory…

• A-6
• EA-6B
• P-2
• P-3
• C-118
• C-119
• C-1 (might have actually been a US-2)
• HH-46
• UH-1
• C-131

In a repeat of history, the US Navy is poised to re-learn hard lessons from the past. The Department of the Navy has recently ordered the only two naval helicopter squadrons dedicated to Special Warfare support, HSC-84 and HSC-85, to prepare for decommissioning by the end of FY-15 (September 30, 2015).

via Navy Decommissions SEAL Support Helicopters | FighterSweep.

The author presents a well reasoned argument for keeping the SOF tasked squadrons in the fleet.

On the other hand, there’s no money. The Navy only has so much money to support squadrons, and these aren’t event their squadrons, really.

Special Operations Command might consist of people who are legally members of one service or another, but as a practical matter, since SOCOM has its own budget, it is virtually a separate service, from an operational point of view.

And SOCOM does pony up a lot of money for its own helicopters, specifically the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. But that unit is already heavily overtasked.

But SOCOM wasn’t willing to pony up the money to pay for the two HSC squadrons. They too have money issues.

And so, dedicated rotary wing support for Naval Special Warfare will go away. Again.

The 8½-week journey from recruit to airman will no longer end in a regimented march on a Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland parade field.

Beginning March 23, 400 recruits will take part in that rite of passage after 7½ weeks of basic military training — then turn back around for a five full days of interactive classroom instruction focused on character development.

Civilian facilitators and hand-picked military training instructors will lead newly minted airmen through role-playing exercises and real-life scenarios devised to drive home the Air Force core values of integrity, service and excellence.

“What we expect of airmen as professionals can be dramatically different from the life they’ve come from. We’re going to talk about resiliency, sexual assault, professional relationships, ethics, how we treat each other with dignity and respect,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force James Cody said.

via Reinventing basic: Graduation comes earlier; ‘real life’ schooling follows.

The article quotes AF officials lamenting that the pace of instruction is so fast that much of the training doesn’t stick in the enlistee’s minds.

So to address that, they’re going to compress the current 8-1/2 week program of instruction into 7-1/2 weeks.

And don’t forget that the issues with sexual harassment and assault at AF Basic were with the MTIs, not with the trainees. So of course, the AF answer is to take it out on the trainees.

And if the Air Force had enough of a problem with fostering a warrior culture, adding a week of touchy feely talkie stuff at the end isn’t going to help.

The United States does not support Egyptian and Emirati airstrikes against Islamist militias in Libya because the U.S. believes the crisis in Libya must be resolved politically and without outside interference, a Department of Defense spokesman said Tuesday.

Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) carrying out airstrikes in Libya was different from U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant forces in Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby told a briefing, because the U.S. was acting in Iraq, in a “very targeted” manner, at the request of its government.

“This wasn’t some unilateral decision by the United States to strike targets inside Iraq.”

via Pentagon: Egypt, UAE Attacking Islamists in Libya Differs From US Bombing ISIS in Iraq | CNS News.

I’m embarrassed for RADM Kirby having to stand there and utter such stupid inanities.

And again with the political solution meme. There is no political solution in Libya when the factions are committed to a fight to the death.

“We’re killing a lot of them and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians. They’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs…”

via State Dept. Spox on ISIS: “We CANNOT win this war by killing them” » The Right Scoop –.

General LeMay begs to differ.

When even The Atlantic thinks a strategically patient approach to violence is self delusional, you know the bloom is off the Obama foreign policy rose.

Via Ace:

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways….

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature….

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not–cannot–waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam….

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.

The Islamic State, is, of course, Islamic. As noted, virtually everything it has done can be justified easily within the pages of the Koran and the Hadiths. Even were that not so, critically, the Islamic State thinks they’re Islamic.  And self evidently, a great number of disaffected Muslims, flowing to Syria and the region from Europe and elsewhere certainly see the Islamic State not only as Islamic, but as the sole truly Islamic state.  It is the one true Islam.

On the European front, we’ve seen the slow motion invasion of Ukraine, first the Crimea, now the Donbass, by Putin’s Russia. Putin has hardly been shy about proclaiming his intentions to resurrect the empire. Be it tsarist or Soviet, the point wasn’t so much the internal form of government, but the range of borders. Russia has always seen itself as an imperial power, and continues to do so to this day, Putin especially.

Again, the US response to this has been so hamfisted that Germany’s leader, Merkl, has had to take the point with negotiations with Russia to broker a ceasefire to buy time to prevent the collapse of Ukrainian forces.

Ace notes the White House response to the slaughter of Coptic Christian Egyptians in Libya is much the same as his reaction to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine- some rather mealy mouthed platitudes.

This heinous act once again underscores the urgent need for a political resolution to the conflict in Libya, the continuation of which only benefits terrorist groups, including ISIL. We call on all Libyans to strongly reject this and all acts of terrorism and to unite in the face of this shared and growing threat. We continue to strongly support the efforts of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General Bernardino Leon to facilitate formation of a national unity government and help foster a political solution in Libya.

But our opponents, be they ISIS in Syria and Iraq, or their Libyan offshoot, or Putin’s Russia, see no need for a political solution. Why should they? They are achieving their goals by force at a cost that is acceptable to them. Simply engaging in the political process would cost them support from their strongest factions. And to date, both Islamist radicals and Putin have had remarkable success with the use of force to achieve their aims.

We’re big fans of diplomacy and negotiation. Honest, really.

But the fundamental rule of negotiation is that they can only succeed, absent brute force,  when there exists the potential for mutually acceptable compromise. And in these cases, as in with negotiation with Iran, there simply is no acceptable compromise.

There are options beyond simply the use of military force. But the administration instead insists that we must forgo those options, and instead aim for a piece of paper that will, in the end, prove as substantial as that waved by Neville Chamberlain in 1938.