First it was the Combat Endurance Course, now its Hikes...USMC Infantry Officers Course because a Disneyland ride...

via Marine Times

Faced with towering attrition rates, the Marine Corps has steadily modified its grueling Infantry Officer Course ― changes that top Marines say are not attempts to water down standards, but to more accurately replicate today’s real-world requirements.

Recent changes include the number of evaluated hikes required to pass the course, and the removal of the physically demanding Combat Endurance Test as a strict requirement to graduate.

Under the new requirements, only three of those nine hikes will be evaluated, and Marines will have to pass all three evaluated hikes in order to graduate.

Story here. 

A boot Lt had one thing he could hang his hat on.  He left IOC as a PT God.  He would hit deck and he would be able to out PT anyone in the unit.

Now?

Dumb ass Lts can't PT and don't know shit?

What good are they?

Open Comment Post. Feb 22, 2018

The SU-57.

Supposedly the Russians deployed it to Syria.

Meanwhile we have the usual idiocy, stalling, cheerleading and outright lies about the F-35 in US service.

Sensor node?  You can use a UAV to act as a sensor node.  Advanced sensors? Put an AESA on anything that flies and you get the advanced sensors of the F-35.  Fusion?  A computer program and SAAB has it down better with the Gripen.

The only "5th" Gen capability the plane has is freaking stealth and that's becoming a non-factor.

Our military leadership miscalculated.  They thought they had a 20-30 year lead on the competition.  That lead got whittled down to where 5 years ago they thought they had 10 years.  Today?  They talk about potential threats being equal in tech and ahead in some fields.

We deserve better!  Get out of your normalcy bias.  Authority is to be challenged, not worshipped!

The Russian Stealth Fighter, the SU-57 Deploys To Syria!

Didn’t see that coming!!#RuAF deployed today few numbers of their fifth generation fighter jet the Su-57 in #Khmemeim #Syria

Along with
4 Su-35
4 Su-25
1 A-50U pic.twitter.com/2W9ZLPNAOs

— Wael Al Hussaini (@WaelAlHussaini) February 21, 2018

THANKS TO MY READERS (especially Asmi!)...MISSED WHAT YOU GUYS WERE TELLING ME!

Just plain wow.

They did what my vaunted Marine Corps would not.  They sent their stealth fighter to an active war zone.  We have ours in the Pacific instead.

How long do we crawl before we run if we're being told that the F-35 is combat capable now????

30mm Stryker ICV-D

CHECK IT OUT: Live ammunition firing with the new 30mm Stryker ICV-D! #WeaponsWednesday #AlwaysReady #StrongEurope @usarmy @usarmyeurope @deptofdefense @gd_landsystems

A post shared by "Always Ready" (@2dcavalryregiment) on Feb 21, 2018 at 9:22am PST

USAF putting the brakes on F-35 ramp up.

via Aviation Week

The U.S. Air Force has decided to buy Lockheed Martin’s F-35 more slowly than planned because the program still has not completed several critical milestones and the service is concerned about snowballing retrofit costs, 

The rest is behind a paywall.

So there you have it.  The USAF basically admitted that EVERY JET THEY'VE BOUGHT will need to be retrofit and they're on the hook to do it.

So to save costs they're buying fewer.

Which is why our allies are buying slowly.  They don't want to rush things and get stuck with expensive jets that need to be redone either.

The only question I have is WHAT THE HELL IS NELLER AND THE USMC THINKING!!!!

They're not saving a dime and are putting jets that aren't capable in the field now.  To get them up to speed means an expensive retrofit in the future.  That does NOT sound like the fiscally responsible service that I was taught the Marine Corps claimed to be!  It's hardly the bargain for the country that every Commandant from Conway back always said it was!

As we've discussed they have two years of fat budgets and then the chances of things going back to sequestration increase.  Which means that these mistake jets might end up being parts bins in the future (assuming its found that upgrading them isn't cost effective).

The F-35. The HIV of the combat aviation world.  It's gonna make you sick, you just hope it does turn into full blown AIDS and kills ya.

Public Service Announcement. This is the true face of MS-13.

via Washington Post.

Carlos Otero Henriquez told a friend he was a member of the 18th Street gang. On Facebook, he posted photos of himself flashing his gang’s signs. When members of the rival MS-13 gang noticed, the 18-year-old from Leesburg, Va., was targeted for murder.

“We’re always patrolling the area to make sure it’s clean of enemies,” Wilmar Javier Viera Gonzalez, a top Virginia MS-13 leader recently testified in Alexandria federal court. He showed jurors a notebook he kept full of MS-13 codes, nicknames and rules. Among the gang’s policies: To move up, “you must kill a rival.”

-----------

 In court last week, Viera Gonzalez, who formerly held the title “first word” of the VLS, calmly admitted he ordered members of his gang to stab Henriquez to death in May 2016 so they could rise up in the ranks.

“He had no idea that night would be his last,” Assistant U.S. attorney Patricia Giles said of Henriquez in her opening statement. “He had no idea of the horrible death he would suffer.”

----------

 It was an MS-13 hanger-on named Andres Velasquez Guevara who alerted the gang members to the rival, according to court documents. He had become friends with Henriquez early in 2016. Early on, Velasquez Guevara later told police, he asked his new friend if he was in a gang.

Henriquez said yes: 18th Street.

“Here you don’t go around saying things like that,” Velasquez Guevara told police he responded. “Dangerous.”

When he became friends with Henriquez on Facebook in April, he saw the teenager had posted photos of himself making 18th Street gang signs. He passed those photos on to Miguel Gomez, an MS-13 member, according to court documents, who alerted gang leaders in El Salvador.

The message came back to kill Henriquez, Viera Gonzalez said.

----------

 The victim was brought to a van, where MS-13 members waited.

“He was told that we were going to a party . . . where there were girls,” testified Manuel Antonio Centeno, who has also pleaded guilty.

As they drove, Viera Gonzalez said he turned the music up and discussed with the driver where they might kill Henriquez undetected.

They decided on the isolated mountains of West Virginia. On the way there, Viera Gonzalez passed around Heinekens and asked Henriquez questions: Where he was from, how long he had been in the country and whether he was in a gang.

Henriquez said he was in the 18th Street gang. He asked Viera Gonzalez the same questions, noting his tattoos and that he was from San Miguel, a city in El Salvador dominated by MS-13.
No one in this van is in a gang, the MS-13 leader said he responded.

Story here...discuss this amongst yourselves...I'm curious to whether my readers are as outraged as I am. 

Syrian forces enter Afrin. Russian diplomacy will be tested...

via Bloomberg

Syrian pro-government fighters entered the border town of Afrin to help Kurdish forces battle a Turkish incursion, state-run media reported, raising the risk of a direct conflict between the two countries.

With Syrian flags plastered on their armored vehicles, the paramilitary forces set out for Afrin to “defend our people against the Turkish aggression,” state-run Syrian television reported. Turkish troops entered Syria on Jan. 20 to expel Kurdish YPG fighters from the border area, viewing them as an extension of the Kurdish PKK separatist group that Turkey has fought for decades.

Story here. 

Defend our people against Turkish aggression.

Drink that in.

They're using paramilitary forces too.  That means something but I can't put my finger on it.

Doesn't really matter.  It's a chaotic battlefield.  Only by some miracle have we avoided clashes between US/Russian/Turkish forces.  When you have semi-pros involved the chances of mistakes happening increase substantially.

I would bet body parts I highly value that these paramilitary forces will take a shot or two at the Turks.  How they respond will tell us whether this thing turns even messier than it already is.

Now this is a holdout pistol!

Yeah it only fires one shot but what a shot!  7.62x39?  Center mass at 3 feet will get the job done!

What the hell is "Ghouta"??? & The EU is tired of the Ukraine drama...

via Reuters

Pro-government forces pounded the rebel-held district of eastern Ghouta outside the Syrian capital Damascus on Tuesday, in a surge of violence that a war monitor said had killed at least 250 people since Sunday night.

Story here. 

Ghouta first.

I had some readers talking about Ghouta in the comments section and didn't know what the fuss was about.  My reaction was "what the hell is Ghouta".  I didn't dig into it and now we have Reuters all over it.

Seems like the drama in Syria will continue.

This is disturbing.

 I thought we had one policy goal (yep, I'm repeating myself).  Kill ISIS.  The reason?  To stabalize Iraq and to end the massive flow of refugees into Europe.  An added side benefit would be to cut off the flow of terrorists and funding to that group.

That objective has been realized yet we're still playing in that quagmire.  We're doing this to ourselves.  World Wide Game Of Thrones is not a game we appear to play well.  Time to punch out.


via Reuters.

The European Union is shutting down a border checkpoint scheme with Ukraine, deepening doubts about Kiev’s ability to deliver reforms in return for billions in European aid.

The project to upgrade six Ukrainian checkpoints on the EU’s eastern frontier was launched in 2014, after Europe backed Kiev’s pro-Western leaders during the Crimean crisis.

The scheme aimed to help integrate Ukraine’s economy with those of its EU neighbors by building or modernizing checkpoints at crossings with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. According to the EU, the projects were designed to cut border crossing times and improve customs procedures.

They foundered after a series of delays, missteps and cost overruns involving local officials and contractors, according to internal Ukrainian government correspondence, and correspondence between the European Commission and the Kiev authorities provided by a source at a government body.

Story here. 

Another mistake by the Clinton State Dept that we're paying for today.  Why anyone would want to be saddled with a country that is full of Nazis, corrupt beyond belief and a general basket case is beyond me but it appears that they wanted Ukraine in the EU.

Seriously?  Someone was smoking crack.

This is another McCain, Graham, Neo-Con, globalist folly.  I'll never understand the bipartisan love affair with our intervention in Ukraine but Russia slicing off Crimea is not worth our continued investment in that cesspool.

Again.

It's time to punch out.

The Household Division on the Onion Range, Falklands