Pournelle CAS Fail

Surprise! Old Army Vet and SF writer thinks like a 'Grunt'. Jerry Pournelle's 'abolish the AF crap' is bad enough (based upon some 'conversations' he once had and a selective picking over of Carl Builder's [1] Masks of War), but the uncritical regurgitation of the standard 'Army' A-10 fanboi theme was too much.If you've read much of Pournelle's work, you'll often find a lot of brute force military action up close and personal (very 'Army'). So in a way this is kind of to be expected. But one would think an accomplished SF writer would have a little more imagination than having the A

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Reuters & Lockheed Martin: Pick a Headline, Any Headline

Separate the Hacks from the Pros'Reuters': Hacktastic I did my usual Google for F-35 news this AM and spotted a Reuters article about LockMart's quarterly earnings. Fine. What caught my eye first was the graphic:  I noted the title only in passing.This evening I repeated the search, and saw the same graphic, only there was also a different headline attached: I went looking for the first headline and found it at Business Insider with a short blurb instead of an article (source of the first graphic above) but still attributed to Reuters::Here's a bigger shot of tonight's art

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Loyal Babblers, Pawns, Fellow Travelers, and the Old Guard Losers of the ‘Military Reform Machine’

How to tell who the Faux Military Reform Players are and the name of the ‘Show’… Since they won’t give you the REAL program.Like many, I frequently begin the day perusing the web over coffee. One of the things I often check for these days is ‘breaking news’ about the F-35. My main interest in keeping on top of the F-35 story has little to do with my past or current associations with the program (contrary to the Crack Circumstantial Ad Hominem Suicide Brigade’s belief). I expect soon I will be shifting to the next big ‘target’ of anti-defense crowd: the Next Gen LRS program just because it wil

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Tyler Rogoway on F-35 Fuel Trucks

Sometimes,.... when it’s really, really hot..., you don’t want to heat soak your fuel trucks. So What? Hat tip:KamenRiderBlade at F-16.net Tyler Rogoway writes for a living. He’s got to write about something, and the latest ‘something’ is all about telling the American, nay, The World’s Low-Information crowd that not only the Air Force has found out that in really, really hot, weather, it doesn’t want to 'heat soak' the fuel trucks servicing your F-35s, but also that this development is, apparently in Rogoway’s opinion, a ‘BAD!’ thing.His ‘article’ is about what we've come to expec

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U.S. Navy ‘Non-Receptive’ to the F-35?

 Where did that come from? Source of original photo: US Navy Where did the idea that the “Navy” has been less than enthusiastic about the F-35C come from? I think I know, and can trace it back two or so years to a single statement made by the incoming CNO in an article for the USNI ‘Proceedings’. That single article gave such hope to the anti-JSF crowd that it gained far more audience and credence that it would have ever otherwise received, certainly more than it ever deserved. Today, with the successful-to-date F-35 sea trials of the CF-3 and CF-5 aircraft operating off t

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F-35C Makes First Carrier Traps

Hat Tip:  'Raptor_Claw' at F-16.net.Today, the first two carrier landings by F-35Cs were accomplished. One more check box checked.The first trap (landing, catching the cross deck pendant, or 'wire') caught the 3rd (of 4) wires --exactly as it is preferred. U.S. Navy Video:Screen captures from this event show some interesting things going on. I'd say the pilot positioned the jet about as well as any man or UAV software could have done it. The objective is to catch the '3- Wire', and the optimal touchdown area is 95%+ between the 2nd and 3rd wire. The pilot could not have bought hardly any

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Lt General Bogdan: F-35 Noise “Good to Go”

F-35 No More Noisier Than Other Fighters the VANG Has FlownHat Tip Spazinbad @ F-16.netIn fact, the F-35 will very often be quieter taking off than the F-16s it is replacing because afterburners will not be required for the F-35 under more weight, operational, and environmental (density altitudes) conditions than the F-16.From AF Magazine's website (Google cached) :F-35 Noise “Good to Go” —John A. Tirpak  10/31/2014 Studies of F-35 noise relative to legacy fighters will be released Friday, and will show that “on the ground, at full military power,” which is full power without a

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