Well, BO had to go on TV and say he was actually going to support the Iraqis in harms way…
From his expression, he REALLY didn’t want to be saying that, much less authorizing the bombing… Wonder how that crow tasted???
We had a go round at lunch yesterday with the LWL in the office about it (the same one that was all for women in combat, except for ‘her’ precious snowflake of course). She wants ALL of the military pulled from overseas, they aren’t needed, don’t belong, are causing problems, yada, yada, yada… And the children, they need more funding for the children coming in…
Cut the military at least in half, etc…
Well, I can only speak for the Navy, since I do have a bit of knowledge about it…
We have in the neighborhood of 100 ‘mandated’ evolution’s each year in WESTPAC alone, plus others in the North Atlantic, Europe and South America. We don’t have the ships or manpower to meet those now, and the administration is doing NOTHING to reduce/change them. NOTHING!!! These requirements come from/are mandated by treaties, (NATO, OAS, ANZACUS), country agreements (1946 Japan, WWII agreements with France, Germany, Spain, etc.), and UN charter participation (Korea). If the administration is so hard over on this, why aren’t they going back and re-negotiating all these things? Possibly because they don’t care??? The only people being hurt are the military, not them…
The other one she threw up was, “Well we don’t need to fight Russia, they lost. Your war games are wrong.” Um… Not so much… Putin was/is/always will be KGB, he’s dead set on reconstituting the USSR. She and probably most of the public don’t realize we ARE back on a cold war footing with Russia/USSR lite. Bombers off the coast, penetrations of US airspace, Russian missile submarines off our coast, ramping up presence in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean (and the Brits, Dutch and others with no ASW capability are asking for help).
Back in the 90s we dropped the three war scenario and I reminded her that there HAVE been a number of panel reviews of manpower and capabilities leading to a number of base closures and personnel/equipment reductions. The problem is that drawdown has continued thanks to sequestration, to the point it’s questionable that we could actually fight ONE regional conflict and meet other defense requirements.
When systems are not maintained/replaced (not by the new shiny, just REGULAR maintenance), mission readiness suffers and more assets have to be put in the hopper to get that ‘one’ mission out. In the case of ships, one just finished a TEN month deployment. And they are quick turning to go back on deployment soon. So much for OPTEMPO/PERSTEMPO requirements…
The administration has turned the military into a social experiment, has run out actual leaders, sent RIF letters to folks currently deployed downrange, extended deployments (that whole required presence thing), and in a lot of our minds, is purposely doing everything they can to run our military into the ground and make joining the military unpalatable to as many young folks as they can.
Lets say we DO pull back from Korea and Japan (treaties be damned)…
Piracy would skyrocket, China would own Japan and Taiwan in two years, and we would be blocked from going any further west than Guam without Chinese permission or armed escorts. Korea? Jong-un would be attacking as the last airplane left Osan… He’s said that…
I don’t disagree with making others pay their share, but I don’t want to see our kids die because they’ve been hung out to dry, or pushed beyond any sane limits either on the personal or equipment side. And that IS happening… Look at what is now going on in Iraq… Targets… First it was 100, then 300, then 750, now??? And 300 Marines to guard the embassy (but we pulled out)…
The bombing yesterday… Which is what started the whole argument. If we’d pulled the Carrier Strike Group out, I asked her who would have done the bombing…
Crickets…
Then she said to the effect that the USAF could do it from the US… Sigh…
So I asked how many missions could they run a day?
Airily she said words to the effect of as many as they need…
Well, actually… NO… It would take roughly 14 hours from the states to the theater, lets say four hours there, and 14 hours back. So to ‘maintain’ that for a minimum of 48 hours, it would take 24 missions, a ‘minimum’ of 10 bombers (assuming they didn’t break, and 24 crews (pesky crew rest requirement). So a realistic minimum is 20 bombers and 48 crews…
Now according to Wiki (yeah, I know), there are 96 bombers that can ‘do’ the mission (B-52/B-2) and another 61 ‘maybe’ (B-1).
BUT, you also need tankers… There are less than 500 of them world-wide, oh but wait… They are all brought back too… So now we have to have tankers fueling tankers, to fuel bombers… Back of the envelope, ‘roughly’ 70 tankers required and 70 crews, or 140 crews and airplanes minimum…
OR you bang one flight of F-18s off the boat every two hours, they fly a total of 6 hours including two hours onstation. And tank from their own tankers (Texaco). That would take 96 sorties, 48 aircraft, and about 60 pilots/crews. Easily done from ONE carrier… (As was done YESTERDAY and TODAY). But they shouldn’t be there… yada, yada…
Oh yeah, and the first airplane is putting ordnance on the bad guys in two hours vs. FOURTEEN hours…
But we ‘still’ need to gut…er… cut the military???
After she stomped out, one of the guys said she needed to take off the rose colored glasses, stop smokin dope, and actually look at reality… Sigh…
But she and a lot of others never will. It’s for the children…
And I’m not even getting into what would happen if you dumped 300,000 more people on the economy by cutting the military in half, much less what that would do to the business base in this country. And who knows how many civilian/commercial jobs would be lost due to those cuts??? 600,000? A million? More???
