XBradTC

So, in my second battle in the Tier III Royal Navy light cruiser, HMS Caledon, I had a lively little fight. And with a great deal of luck, I actually managed to earn the Kraken Unleashed!

Transgender airmen on their way to a new gender have been given the option to opt out of taking physical fitness tests.

A memorandum signed by the Secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, confirmed this change in regulation in the beginning of October.

Transgender airmen -active duty, reserve, and national guard- in the middle of hormone treatment can ask to skip physical training assessments “during their period of transition, prior to a gender marker change in the MilPDS,” if they have failed a test.

via popularmilitary.com

Just shut it down now.

We're done.

In the early 1950s, even as the US Army was working on liquid fueled ballistic missiles as atomic delivery platforms, they were also looking at developing tactical nuclear delivery platforms using solid rocket propellants. The Army’s first tactical nuclear delivery platform, the massive 280mm atomic cannon, simply took far too long to emplace, and had a rather desultory maximum range. A large solid propelled rocket promised to be quicker to emplace and fire, and offered hope of a somewhat longer useful range.

And so, Redstone Arsenal, in cooperation with Douglas Aircraft, developed the Honest John artillery rocket. The Honest John had a maximum diameter of 30 inches, and was designed to hurl a small atomic warhead about 24 kilometers. Importantly, it was quick and easy to emplace and fire.

As the Army shifted its nuclear delivery emphasis to missiles such as the Sergeant, the Field Artillery found itself consistently outranged by Soviet tube and rocket artillery. The long range an improved Honest John began to look very attractive as a general support weapon when equipped with a conventional warhead. Submunition technology was in its infancy, so the Army decided instead to use a unitary warhead with thousands of steel balls for fragmentation effect.

Accuracy of the Honest John out to its eventual maximum range of about 30 miles was surprisingly good, hitting within about 250 meters.

Obviously, such a warhead would have little effect on an armored formation. But against a logistical site, or an artillery battery, it could expect to produce good results.

For all its crudity, the Honest John had a surprisingly long service life, lasting in National Guard artillery battalions well into the 1980s (when it was replaced by MLRS) in in foreign service into the 1990s.

A four barrelled rocket launcher throwing incendiary shells 200 meters? Sure, why not.

Your humble host actually fired one of these way back in 1986.  We were having a series of familiarization fire courses on both US and threat weapons. In addition to shooting various flavors of the AK family, the RPK, the PK, and the RPD, we each got to fire a four round clip of the M202.   I’m not exactly sure where the division stored the launchers, because we didn’t actually keep them in our arms room. But still, fun to shoot.  Just not terribly practical.

As soon as you pull your tank or Bradley up to the firing position, you’re vulnerable. So as soon as you fire, it’s time to scoot back into cover.

Mushdogs sent this tidbit along to us.

On Thursday, the head of Naval Surface Forces Pacific relieved the captain of the USS Freedom of command, the second time this year it has dismissed the master of a littoral combat ship over a propulsion casualty.

Commander Michael Wohnhaas of LCS Crew 106 was the vessel’s commanding officer on the day that a pump seal failed, leaking seawater into her number two main diesel engine.

After the leak, the Freedom continued on to participate in the international Rim of the Pacific exercises off Hawaii. She was not inspected shoreside until August 3, over 20 days after the casualty occurred. Due to corrosion damage, her number two engine was declared a total loss; it will require either removal and rebuilding or replacement. 

Well, he had to be relieved, after that incompetent response. I mean, casualties happen, sure, but the duct tape and bailing wire approach the crew took was just dumb.

Of course, all the LCS commanders are being set up for failure with a complex engineering plant and an engineering department of about 9-10 guys! There simply aren’t the hours in the day to perform routine upkeep, stand watch, run drills, and keep up with General Military Training. And in today’s politically correct Navy, if something has to fall to the wayside, it’s not going to be Sexual Harassment and Assault Reporting, it’s going to be preventative maintenance.

Once in a while, your Ranked Battle Team is really good. Even better, the other team is really bad. And if you’re really lucky, your gunnery skills step up and take advantage of the situation.

The final salvo might be the best single salvo I’ve ever fired in World of Warships.

WASHINGTON — Retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright has been charged with making false statements during a federal investigation into a leak of classified information, the Justice Department announced Monday.

Cartwright falsely told investigators that he was not the source of classified information contained in a book by New York Times journalist David Sanger, according to charging documents unsealed by prosecutors.

Neither the book nor the classified subject is identified in court papers. But Sanger has written about a covert cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the use of a computer virus called Stuxnet to temporarily disable centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.

via www.cbsnews.com

Funny how being lax with classified information seems to get a lot of people into trouble with the Feds.

A lot of people.

But not everyone.

**cough**HillaryClinton**cough**