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tragicomic statement: "Carter said in certain circumstances, the Pentagon can consider certain moves to relieve financial pressures, but added he wasn’t “optimistic they’ll consider exceptions to a non-budget.” inside
Carter: Temporary Budget ‘Unfair to Troops,’ Puts Programs in Limbo
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remembering Oct 11, 2016
interestingly USS Mason Fired 3 Missiles to Defend From Yemen Cruise Missiles Attack

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After Yemen Missile Attacks, CO Tells Sailors to 'Be Prepared'
When missiles launched from the coast of Yemen
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, crews had to use precision and speed to execute defenses, including
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that destroyed radar sites where the missiles were believed to have originated.

But the response to at least two separate incidents was part of the workday for sailors as they operated the vessels in international waters, said Rear Adm. James Malloy, commander of the carrier strike group.

"They defended themselves as they are trained to do, as the ships are capable of doing," Malloy told Military.com in a phone interview from the
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, now operating in the Arabian Gulf.

"They operated in accordance with training, and their equipment worked as it was designed to do," he said. "So, continue to do the job and be prepared to handle any contingency out here, that was my only guidance after that episode."

The guided-missile destroyer Mason was first to come under attack, defending itself against two missiles fired from a portion of the Yemen coast controlled by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The ship, which had been patrolling near the Bab Al-Mandab Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, used countermeasures including Standard Missile-2s and a SeaSparrow missile to intercept the missiles and a Nulka decoy to direct it away from the ship.

Another pair of missiles were fired at the Mason Oct. 12 from the same region on the coast of Yemen. The same day, the guided-missile destroyer Nitze, operating nearby, struck and destroyed three radar sites using Tomahawk missiles.

Both the Nitze and the Mason are part of the 10th Carrier Strike Group. Malloy emphasized that the ships stayed put in the region, continuing patrols as part of their scheduled deployment.

"We continue to operate where we operate at the fore, in support of partners in the region and ensuring free flow of commerce through this critical region," he said. "It's one of the main reasons we're out here, and we're continuing that business today."

Some ambiguity continues to surround reports of a third attack, however. On Oct. 16, officials including Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said the Mason appeared to have been targeted by missiles yet again. These reports were later walked back by Pentagon officials, who said the incident and the response by the Mason remained under investigation.

Malloy said officials continued to look into the incident. He also suggested that the Mason had deployed missile countermeasures in response to the suspected attack, a factor also being investigated.

"The
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that these ships field has the capability to do recording much like aircraft do," he said. "All three of those events are being looked at, to see what occurred and also to ensure that our systems are operating at their full capability, which we think that they were. When any instance happens that ammunition is expended like that against a threat, we're about process improvement wherever we can look at it, and that's being looked at right now."

The conclusions of the review would likely be announced by Richardson when they were complete, Malloy said.
source is Military.com
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Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
tragicomic statement: "Carter said in certain circumstances, the Pentagon can consider certain moves to relieve financial pressures, but added he wasn’t “optimistic they’ll consider exceptions to a non-budget.” inside
Carter: Temporary Budget ‘Unfair to Troops,’ Puts Programs in Limbo
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Tell that to your current "Commander in Chief" Ashe Carter, eight consecutive years without a budget???? can you say "B-H-O" boys and girls????

Barack Hussein Obama, "LAME DUCK" from day one on Defense Issues, anybody remember the "sequester", and Ashe Carters not smart enough to figure that out is he???

much better to wait for the "Trump Team" to get back to building and defending our military than to accept a "half arse, half way defense budget",,,,,BHO a loser from day one! sucking the life out of America with his worthless "ObamaCare", that doesn't "care about anybody"??
 

Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
Great ! with a gallery 61 pics :p

The 509 BW have 2 Bomb Sqns with 19 B-2A and also a training Sqn with 16 T-38 use also some B-2A loaned by Bomb Sqns.
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Team Whiteman supports Global Thunder exercise
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Fourth ships !
View attachment 33830


View attachment 33831

Jura and me LOLOL
View attachment 33832

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and on another "stealthy note"??? its here but you really can't see it???

General "HAWK" Carlisle, is publicly floating the idea that the F-117 Nighthawks that have been maintained in "fly-able storage" be brought back and reconstituted as an official "Red Air" squadron. Simulating Russian and Chinese fifth gen aircraft, in order to give the F-22s and F-35s something to "fly against" that will actually give them an opportunity to train against another actual "fifth gen" or close to it stealthy opponent.

This is a great idea, as F-35 against F-22 might be letting the "cat out of the bag" so to speak???
 

FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
much better to wait for the "Trump Team" to get back to building and defending our military than to accept a "half arse, half way defense budget",,,,,BHO a loser from day one! sucking the life out of America with his worthless "ObamaCare", that doesn't "care about anybody"??

Right, reading it today and thinking it better the ramp up can yet begin with FY 2017 :cool:
 
Nov 11, 2016
Yesterday at 8:02 PM

... as Defense Firms See Bonanza Under Trump Administration

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while
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While the DC parlor game of
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gathers steam (see headline), some outlines of how
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will govern are emerging. Look for two principles to govern much of how Trump initially manages the fundamental truth that people are policy.

First, strong deputies will be chosen to ensure mistakes aren’t made and things get done. Loyal politicians will hold the top jobs, even if they possess scant experience actually running anything larger than a Senate office.

The corollary to that is that Trump will practice what one Trump wag dubbed “performance-based loyalty.” What does this mean, you ask? The example was offered of President Johnson’s first meeting with President Kennedy’s Cabinet after he arrived back from that terrible day in Dallas. Johnson, our source says, told them that whenever they did a good job Johnson would claim credit for it. If they screwed up, he’d fire them. This would be a stark contrast to the most recent Bush administration, when President Bush seemed paralyzed by loyalty at times. For example, most Pentagon watchers believe Donald Rumsfeld should have been eased out of the building a year or more before he finally was pushed out.

Of course, these principles are not immutable. They almost certainly will not hold 18 months or so from now when, as old Washington hands know, the first major
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will force the Trump Administration to make major readjustments to people and practices.

In the meantime, let’s look at the Pentagon Talent pool (get it?) Trump plans to build. Our source is a national security advisor to the Trump campaign:

Former Sen.
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would bring deep ties to Capitol Hill from his eight years as a congressman and six years as a senator, as well as fairly detailed knowledge of China from his two years as a commissioner on the congressionally-mandated
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He also served on the
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that critiqued the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review.

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has extensive experience running large military organizations. His record is not unblemished, since he was famously fired eight years ago by former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, along with then-Chief of Staff Gen. Mike Moseley, after the Air Force lost track of some nuclear weapons for a while. Wynne and Moseley had also opposed Gates’ decision to cap the number of
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bought at 187. He was confirmed in November 2005 for the top Air Force job after serving as undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics and principal deputy undersecretary at AT&L. He worked for General Dynamics for 23 years, ending his employment as a senior vice president, so he knows about the aerospace and defense industries as well.

Prospective Army Secretary
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is a principal at American Defense International, one of Washington’s most respected defense lobbying firms. Perhaps in the face of the criticism of the number of lobbyists being tapped by the Trump transition team, we hear Hipp is likely to sever ties to the company he built and put his assets in a blind trust. As a leader of defense lobbyists, Hipp obviously knows his way around Capitol Hill, the defense business and the press. He served in the Army during Operations Desert Shield and Storm.

Prospective Air Force Secretary Ty McCoy is chairman of the
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, an influential group within the clubby and exclusive world of the space industry. He would be returning to a world he knows pretty well, having served as acting Air Force Secretary and before that as assistant Secretary. For that matter, he’s worked pretty much everywhere someone can work in defense — Capitol Hill as a professional staffer on appropriations, the White House on the National Security Council staff and as a top lobbyist for an aerospace company.
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wow Trump’s CIA Director Wants to Return to a Pre-Snowden World
He’s called for a 'fundamental upgrade' to U.S. spying powers.

Mike Pompeo, the man that President-elect Donald Trump chose on Friday to lead the CIA when he becomes president, has long been a vocal supporter of expanding the government’s surveillance powers.

As Congress
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the National Security Agency’s bulk data-collection program last summer, rolling back one of the secret measures first authorized under President George W. Bush, Pompeo—a Republican representative from Kansas who sits on the House Intelligence Committee—was pushing back.

In
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published in The Wall Street Journal this January, Pompeo argued forcefully against “blunting” the government’s surveillance powers and called for “a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities.” In the piece, he laid out a road map for expanding surveillance:

Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection.

Pompeo co-wrote the piece with David Rivkin, Jr., who worked in the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

In
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published in National Review two weeks earlier, Pompeo assailed fellow Republicans for being soft on national security, accusing some of being “just as weak” as Democrats. “Those who today suggest that the USA FREEDOM Act, which gutted the National Security Agency’s metadata program, enables the intelligence community to better prevent and investigate threats against the U.S. are lying,” he wrote.

“To share Edward Snowden’s vision of America as the problem is to come down on the side of President Obama’s diminishing willingness to collect intelligence on jihadis,” he continued, echoing previous criticisms of Snowden’s disclosures. “No Republican candidate who does that is worthy of our vote.”

Pompeo’s push for more surveillance aligns with Trump’s stated positions. As the journalist Marcy Wheeler
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, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, proposed an amendment to a bill that would reform electronic privacy law, which would have required technology companies to turn over communications if the government says it’s an emergency. The amendment did not pass.

Pompeo is also an outspoken critic of the nuclear deal with Iran, which he called a “disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism”
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on Thursday.

That same day, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper formally announced that he’d resign at the end of President Obama’s second term. Clapper’s resignation, which was was expected, leaves another high-level intelligence post empty for Trump to fill. The job of the Director of National Security is to coordinate the activities of the Intelligence Community, which includes the CIA, NSA, the intelligence branch of the FBI, and 13 other agencies.
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Nov 10, 2016
...
Randy Forbes is the Favorite for Trump’s Secretary of the Navy
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but Analysts: Growing Fleet to 350 Ships Will Be Challenging
Building up the Navy’s battle fleet to 350 ships will not be easy, said two think-tank analysts, because of limitations in budget and in shipbuilding infrastructure.

A build-up of the fleet to 350 ships is an announced goal of President-elect Donald Trump for his incoming administration.

Dakota Wood, a former Marine officer, senior research fellow for Defense Programs and editor of the “Index of U.S. Military Strength” at the Heritage Foundation, and Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain, senior fellow and director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security, addressed the prospects for a build-up Nov. 16 with an audience at the Heritage Foundation on the occasion of its publication of the “2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength.”

Wood expressed alarm about the capacity of the U.S. military in general to successfully wage war on several fronts, noting that it took the entire capacity of the U.S. Army to sustain the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were insurgencies.

The U.S. military is essentially a one-war force,” he said, noting also that the lack of capacity diminishes the deterrent value of the force.

“Deferred maintenance and deferred modernization to maintain this operational tempo demanded by the combatant commanders has put [the fleet] in dire straits,” Wood said. “We believe that, historically, for the past 30 years, shipbuilding funding has been in the $15 billion to $16 billion category. To get from 272 ships today to [the Navy’s current] 30-year objective of 308 [ships], they would need $20 billion in shipbuilding accounts.

“How the Navy, capacity-wise gets from where they’re at to where they need to be is going to be a real challenge for the incoming administration,” he said, noting that shipbuilders would need to hire and train more workers to handle the potential workload. “To dramatically increase the number of ships is a challenge, but I think [the work force can be re-built] through recruiting and training, re-opening up areas that have been minimalized as forces have drawn down.”

“Our ships are at sea a much higher percentage of time from what we’ve seen in the past,” Hendrix said, noting longer deployments and quicker turn-arounds. “Those ships are suffering with maintenance and readiness issues as well. … Today we are seeing ships that are deployed from anywhere from nine to 12 months and under the worst circumstances they are being short-cycled at home and being sent out perhaps before they’ve had their full maintenance availability.

“However, we have a new president-elect and a new number — 350 ships — which equates to a peace-through-strength navy,” Hendrix said. “The last time we had 350 ships was in 1998.”

Hendrix also noted a shortfall of strike fighters in the Navy and Marine Corps of 100 to 120 aircraft.

“That’s an issue for us that causes what we call an aviation death spiral,” he said. “If you get a lower number of airplanes, you use up the wing life at an accelerated pace and you will burn out the birds at a faster rate. As long as you are in a deficit on how many you actually need versus how many you are flying you will use up your inventory [more quickly].”

Hendrix also said that the shortage of ships necessitates carrier strike groups providing cruisers and destroyers to back-fill for independent steaming operations.

“The strike group itself is under increased stress,” he said. “One of the reasons that we look at this 350 number with great excitement is that this gives an opportunity to get back to something where we actually have a balanced force of about 350 that we can begin to deploy this. 350 is the bare minimum that you actually need to provide consistent, credible service to the 18 maritime regions around the world [in which] the United States has announced that it has critical core interests. We have been under-serving most of those regions for most of my naval career.

“By that lack of consistency we’ve allowed the international system of maritime order to begin to fracture and be tested, and we see this occurring in the South China Sea and Eat Chine Sea today,” he said.

Hendrix recommended that the Navy increase the number of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Virginia-class attack submarines; build a total 73 small surface combatants, compared with the 40 littoral combat ships and frigates planned; restore to service the S-3B carrier-based anti-submarine aircraft; fit the F/A-18E/F strike fighter with conformal fuel tanks; and accelerate the MQ-25 unmanned carrier-based tanker.
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Thursday at 12:46 PM
Oct 29, 2016

and now White House to Petitioners: Navy Can Ditch Ratings System

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while The Navy took away sailors' job titles, and now no one knows what to call each other
"Hey... you."

Things have gotten, well, awkward, in the two months since the Navy abruptly eliminated sailor's titles and the shorthand that they used to refer to each other like "GM1," "OS2" or "boats."

During a recent underway on the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima, it was apparent that sailors weren’t having an easy time of it. If you ask sailors what they do, invariably they tell you their now non-existent rating. Others say they're getting in hot water for still using those abbreviated titles, even though they're the fastest way to refer to sailors (and doesn't involve remembering dozens of last names).

What’s clear is that sailors still don’t know what exactly to make of the move, which was rolled out in late September with little detail about the larger career implications.

Some sailors said the decision genuinely upset the more senior sailors in the division. One airman who did not want to be identified to share candid views said his second and first classes were particularly distraught.

“It's a waste," the airman said. "They feel like it takes away from their accomplishments and their identities that they've built over their careers."

Another junior sailor said he had little patience for all the bellyaching over the dumped ratings.

“It does seem pointless but people just don’t like change,” said the sailor, who also asked to remain anonymous. “In some ways though I like the idea of having greater career flexibility.”

Online the conversation around dumping ratings hasn’t died down. On a Navy forum on the link sharing website Reddit, sailors describe the daily annoyances that the ratings execution has brought.

“Does anyone get annoyed being corrected on addressing Petty Officers, etc. by their old rates?”
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, a question that has generated 35 responses to date.

“For instance, I was talking with an officer and without thinking, referred to a Petty officer 1st class as HM1,” Redditor drm4490 continues. “She says, ‘you mean petty officer first class so-and-so?’ I mean, even though she's technically right, it rubs me the wrong way when they actually correct you. I also just find it way easier to say three syllables.”

One Redditor said he disagreed with the change but would just be happy when it's one thing or the other.

“I've been corrected for using both a generic PO1 X as well as (insert rate here) X. The try-hards are offended by the old and the salty ones are offended by the new,” the commenter said. “I'll be happy when everyone gets on board or it's changed back. As nice as it would be to have my rate back, I just want it one way or the other.”

Another sailor said his command has been using the “seaman” and “petty officer” honorifics in formal paperwork but have otherwise ignored the new rules.

“Have yet to see anyone in my command get butt hurt over us calling each other by rate,” the commenter said. “Most of us have put a half-assed attempt at saying Seaman or Petty Officer and mostly use it jokingly. Only our CO, XO, and CMC have put up a real attempt at not using rates. Normally just use SN or PO when writing emails and doing paperwork for formalities.”

One sailor noted that the change is still causing confusion in simple interactions such as telephone calls.

“Talking to a chief on the phone yesterday: ‘I'll get airman... seaman so and so... whatever the f--- this new rate bulls--- is, to come open the door for you,’” the commenter recalled. “Chief clearly isn't enjoying this new game.”
source is NavyTimes
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