F-35B with Weapons Bay Doors Open

F-35B test aircraft BF-3 flies with weapons bay doors open in March 2012.

First Flight of F-35B BF-9

Lockheed Martin test pilot Bill Gigliotti takes off from Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base for the first flight of F-35B production aircraft BF-9 on March 6, 2012

British Special Forces active in Nigeria.

Via Sky News.

Two hostages - a Briton and an Italian - have been killed by terrorists in northern Nigeria in an attempted rescue operation.

The effort to free Chris McManus, from the North West of England, and his colleague Franco Lamolinara was launched by British special forces and the Nigerian army.

Sky sources say there were no fatalities on the British and Nigerian forces' side but there were several fatalities among the hostage-takers.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the pair appeared to have died at the hands of their captors, either before or during the course of the rescue bid.

Sky sources say it is believed there was a fight and during the assault the UK and Nigerian forces could not get to Mr McManus and Mr Lamolinara in time.
"It strongly appears that the hostage-takers shot the hostages," the sources said.

Read the rest at their news site.

Time to check Google Earth and see how many British aircraft I can count  in Djibouti. 

F-35A Takes Flight at Eglin AFB

They aren't worth our sacrifice.

KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan-Corporal Joshua Brooks, a Marine serving with Team 3, Civil Affairs Detachment 11-2, greets students as they arrive for school here Feb. 25, 2012. The Marines of Team 3 provided guidance to the local government here to help them construct a new school. Brooks said visiting the school is the highlight of his deployment. The current school is made of mud and mortar, is overcrowded and only has enough capacity to hold up to sixth grade. The new school will have up to eighth grade and have more than enough room for students and teachers. Brooks is from Terre Haute, Ind., and is serving under Regimental Combat Team 5 and alongside 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in Helmand province., Sgt. Michael S. Cifuentes, 2/25/2012 9:38 AM

 

I always wondered why the Marine Corps continues to post pictures like the one above.

Its relentless.

It seems almost sappy.

And then I got it.

They realize that many (me included) understand that the Afghan people are not worth our sacrifice.  They're piss poor allies and we should wash our hands of them.

Their leader is a criminal (well that just makes them like everyone else), their society is corrupt and to be honest I see nothing redeeming about them at all.

That's why the keep posting pictures of Marines with children.

They know that after all is said and done, they only have this card left to play.

Except for me, even that's not enough.  Time to leave.  Let the Afghan people do whatever it is they do.  We have our own country to rebuild, enough wasting lives and money on theirs.

Marines rush to the sound of chaos.

Marine Corps Recruiting Command is scheduled to release its latest advertising campaign, Toward the Sound of Chaos, during the Big 12 Championship game on ESPN, Mar. 10. The campaign is designed to highlight Marines roles as elite warriors and compassionate humanitarians.

Enlarge this photo. 

My only complaint is that the words are more inspiring than the photo. 

Interesting. Not military related...just interesting.

via Odee...

The thief who returned terminally ill woman's camera

Jami McElrath got her camera stolen when a thief broke into her car. When the thief found out that Jami was terminally ill, he had a change of heart and returned the camera. McElrath, who has inoperable cancer, was collecting photos to place in a scrapbook for her children so they could remember her after she was gone. The camera had belonged to her father, who had died of a heart attack two years before. The woman told her heart-wrenching story to Dallas-area news station WFAA TV, appealing to the burglar to return the camera.

Then something remarkable happened. A few days after the story aired, WFAA reporter Jim Douglas got a call from a man who told him to look behind a red car in the station's parking lot. The caller didn't leave his name; he said only that he felt bad about the incident and wanted to return the camera.

(Link | Via)

Desert Warfare? We've had it easy.

Just a thought about the wars we've been in....

We've had it easy.

We've fought in the deserts...and we excel at fighting in deserts.  Think about it.  Ft. Irwin for the Army.  29 Palms for the Marine Corps.  Red Flag for the Air Force.

All wide open spaces that bring our full technological might to bear on an unsuspecting enemy.  We've trained to fight in those conditions for years and simply modified our way of war to meet some local variations on the theme.

To be quite honest the only thing that caught us by surprise in the last 10 years of warfare has been the enemies use of IED's.

Other than that, we've been fighting in our area of strength.

But what happens when those conditions flip?  What happens when we have to fight in jungles, or the arctic?

We better hope that we're still friends with the Royal Marines and the Australian Army.  Our experience in those places of warfare has waned. 

We have an excellent mountain warfare course in Bridgeport and the winter package is a nice primer on arctic warfare.  The Northern Training Area in Okinawa was/is a great introduction to the jungle.

But we need to do more.  Both the Army and Marines.

Time to stick our heads up out of the sands and get ready for warfare worldwide.  That means jungle and arctic training.  Copying the Brits by establishing Mountain Leaders in every Battalion would be a good start for taking care of the cold part of the equation and going back in history and re-developing a Jungle Expert Course would take care of the warm part.

We can and should do this ricky tick quick.

Marines Welcome the F-35B to Eglin AFB

General Dunford nails it.

Now lets roll sleeves again.

They're all following the script.

DoDBuzz has the story up about the abbreviated flight that the F-35 took down at Eglin.  Read it here.

I won't even bother to quote from it.  Its just a bunch of mush about the short flight...how it represents the problems that the program has been having...yada, yada, yada.

It makes the critics smile but the only reason why this story is on my radar (besides getting tired of seeing it regurgitated all over the internet) is the fact that many outstanding defense reporters are missing the larger, more important story.

Someone, somewhere has accelerated this program. 

We will see flight training at Eglin this year.

Pilots will start getting checked out on this airplane THIS year.  

That's the real significance of the flight yesterday.  And no one in the mainstream media gets it.

That's just unreal.

Lex is gone. He will be missed.

Lex is gone.

USNI has a fitting tribute to the man.  And ID does a good job too.  Read them here and here.


His passing disturbs me.


I never met the guy, I only read his blog but this unsettles me.


I can't figure out why.

Prayers go to his family...his wife, daughter and son.

He will be missed. 

Winglets coming to a C-5M, C-130J or a P-3 near you.

According to a 2011 Department of Defense report, the US armed forces consumed nearly five billion gallons of fuel of all types in military operations in 2010. Those gallons cost $13.2 billion, a 255 percent increase over the fuel bill in 1997. “Saving even one percent of those five billion gallons is a huge amount of fuel and a big reduction in cost,” said Chuck Hybart, who headed the fuel efficiency studies program for the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, the company’s advanced technology development organization. Winglets, such as shown on a C-130J in this artist concept, is one major way to improve fuel efficiency.

Winglets are one promising option that turned up on the C-130, C-5, and P-3. Winglets are the upturned wingtip devices that improve the efficiency of fixed-wing aircraft by reducing drag through partial recovery of the vortex energy created by the airstream as it goes over the wingtip. These devices also increase the effective aspect ratio—that is, wing length-to-chord—without materially increasing wingspan. A combination of CFD studies and actual wind tunnel testing was conducted for both the C-130 and P-3. This is a computer-generated version of a C-130J with winglets.