Category: Air Force

  • Colonel William R. Jones pleads guilty

    Colonel William R. Jones pleads guilty

    We heard rumors yesterday, but I was waiting for confirmation. According to the Post-Courier, Air Force Colonel William R. Jones pleaded guilty to possessing images and videos of child pornography yesterday at his court martial. We talked about him back in July.

    Jones was relieved of duty as vice commander in 2016. He had become vice commander in 2014. He had been a command pilot and instructor with more than 2,000 flight hours and was reassigned to a desk job as deputy chief of safety for the Ninth Air Force headquarters at Shaw.

    He’s looking at ten years in the slammer.

  • Three airmen killed

    Three airmen killed

    Bobo sends us the link to a story in Fox News that reports the sad news that three airmen were killed in a U-28 single-engine turboprop aircraft which crashed during a training flight in New Mexico.

    The airmen were assigned to the 318th Special Operations Squadron, an operational flying squadron part of the 27th Special Operations Wing, Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico.

    […]

    The 318th was activated in 2008 under Air Force Special Operations Command to provide “battlefield mobility for our special operations forces,” according to then-Col. Timothy Leahy, the former wing commander. The unit is tasked to “fly a variety of light and medium aircraft known as Non-Standard Aviation,” according to a service release. The squadron operates PC-12 aircraft — designated as the U-28A in the Air Force — for intra-theater airlift missions, the release said.

    Because training for war can be as deadly as the war.

  • You say boy or girl, Airman, we’re gonna rip off a stripe…

    That’s certainly the way it looks from this reported edict handed down by as some yet unnamed social justice warrior at high command level in the Air Force. According to this report from Fox News, the high flyers apparently think they’re still doing fruit loops for that clueless fool who sat in the command pilot’s seat for the past eight years.

    Fox News says this:

    The Air Force fears that words like boy, girl, colonial and blacklist might offend people, according to an email sent to Airmen at Joint Base San Antonio.

    And the reality of that is that it might cost them a stripe, a demotion in rank and pay, for nothing more than an inept violation of political correctness.

    The Trump administration has to get up to speed on liberal crap like this obvious holdover politically correct directive from whatever blue-suited twinkle-toes still survives and thrives in the upper atmospherics of Air Force command. Let’s toss his kind off the big plane and sans parachute is fine with this old Airborne soldier. It has to be tempting to the Trump administration to first go after all that loony lesbian, gay baloney that Ray (may his soul sink into and forever tremble in the muck of the darkest, coldest sediment of Earth’s deepest oceanic trench) Mabus inflicted upon our honorable Navy with his shameful naming of ships after queers who served without distinction, other than to survive as homosexuals in the hostile environment of a very virile and masculine United States Navy. But, as this directive should remind Trump’s folks, Obama’s social justice warriors still permeate the command ranks of all the services, a hard reality that calls for a purge of their unpractical kind.

    General Mattis, we who populate the pages of military internet venues beg you to return our noble military to what it once was: a reasonable representation of a real America, a cross-section of small towns and big cities, rural and urban youth, young people whose political beliefs cover the entire American spectrum, and not a social experimentation program for the Democratic Party.

    General Mattis, you must let your NCOs say boy, girl, and all those other politically correct banned words on their way to making responsible adults out of all those confused children liberalism has created. Please, please, rid us of these embedded social justice warriors who would weaken us as a nation with their social experimentation. Perhaps then we will once again become the warrior force, the fighting warrior force, which we have mustered for our nation’s every call to combat since forming into the clumsy ranks that defeated King George’s oh so politically correct forces and made this great nation possible.

    Semper Fi!

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Air Force removes posters at Langley AFB

    Air Force removes posters at Langley AFB

    According to the Virginian-Pilot posters at Langley Air Force Base have been removed after the National Organization for Women and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation complained that they were sexist. The posters read;

    “Men cannot live without faith except for brief moments of anarchy or despair,” one poster read. “Faith leads to conviction – and convictions lead to actions. It is only a man of deep convictions, a man of deep faith, who will make the sacrifices needed to save his manhood. … It is obvious that our enemy will attack us at our weakest spot. The hole in our armor is our lack of faith. We need to revive a fighting faith by which we can live, and for which we would be willing even to die.”

    Initially, the MRFF filed a complaint from 16 airmen because of the repeated testament of “faith”. The Air Force dismissed the complaint because “the display does not endorse, disapprove of, or extend preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief.” So NOW stuck their stupid nose in the controversy, because the 1955 text focused on “men” excluding women.

    “What message does that send to young women who currently serve, or want to serve, in the military?” NOW President Terry O’Neill wrote. “What do you say to the women in your command who make the same sacrifices to protect their country as do men? General, there is simply no compromise when it comes to fighting the bigotry of sexism nor the prejudice of religious triumphalism. Women are just as patriotic, just as dedicated and just as worthy of our nation’s trust as their male counterparts.”

    Of course, the Air Force caved to pressure from the two grievance committees. MRFF calls it a “triumph”. ISIS thanks Mikey for the distraction from the war against terror.

  • Technical Sergeant Anthony Lizana; wrist slapped

    Technical Sergeant Anthony Lizana; wrist slapped

    A number of folks sent us the link to this story about Technical Sergeant Anthony Lizana who was facing 38 years for his misconduct with eight women on four charges with specifications including dereliction, adultery, assault consummated by battery and sexual assault. He was sentenced to three months confinement and one month of hard labor.

    Retired Colonel Don Christensen, president of the not-for-profit organization Protect our Defenders, believes the sentence is very light, especially the confinement.

    “He was convicted of sexually assaulting a subordinate. And considering how much of an issue sexual assault is in the military, to have a superior sexually assault a subordinate and only get three months confinement I think is exceptionally light,” said Christensen.

    “This is the type of sentence we would typically see for an 18-to-20-year-old airman who abused cough medicine,” Christensen added.

    Christensen estimates that Lizana will serve only about 2 months for good behavior. In addition, the dishonorable discharge will have to go through a lengthy appeals process that could take anywhere from one to three years.

    Christensen, who served as the chief prosecutor for the U.S. Air Force from 2010 to 2014, also explained the hard labor process. He said Lizana will likely perform his normal duties under his commander. When he’s done performing his normal duties for the day, he’ll do an additional four hours of work. Lizana will also likely have to come in on Saturdays for eight hours and Sundays for four hours. The extra tasks could include painting or pulling weeds.

    “In a word, it’s a joke,” Christensen said of the hard labor punishment.

    I agree – if the Air Force is serious about preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault, this conviction doesn’t send that message.

  • Master Sgt. Greg Gibbs’ Distinguished Flying Cross

    Master Sgt. Greg Gibbs’ Distinguished Flying Cross

    Master Sgt. Greg Gibbs

    From the Albuquerque Journal comes the news that the Air Force will award Master Sergeant Greg Gibbs of the 512th Rescue Squadron at Kirtland Air Force Base the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions in Shorbak District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan five years ago;

    Gibbs was a door gunner on an HH-60G Pave Hawk during the mission to rescue a squad of Army Pathfinders who had been decimated by improvised explosive devices.

    On the last evacuation, the aircraft lost power, and Gibbs guided the pilots down the valley to land just a few feet outside the minefield. Once the aircraft was operational again, Gibbs calculated that they could fly the patient to higher medical care on emergency fuel.

    When the patient was transferred to the hospital, the aircraft had only five minutes of fuel left.

    I’ll bet he was glad that he paid attention in Algebra class.

  • Air Force’s personnel shortage

    Tom sends us a link to Fox News which reports that the Air Force is suffering severe manpower shortages – 700 pilots and 4,000 mechanics – as well as fighting time with their aging fleet;

    “We’ve got a geriatric Air Force,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula. “We’ve got bombers and tankers that are over 50 years old. We have [training aircraft] that are over 40 years old, and we have [fighter jets] and helicopters that are over 30 years old. So this is a terrible place to be in when you have a world of ever-expanding threats.”

    Air Force officials say they need forces to bolster nuclear, intelligence, space and maintenance jobs.

    Earlier this year, Goldfein called the pilot shortage alone a crisis.

    Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you balance the budget solely on the back of national security. If they had their way, there would be no A-10 to provide close air support to troops on the ground in Syria. The Department of Defense threw good money after bad into the F-35 money pit betting on systems that wouldn’t work.

    And, oh, yeah, the Navy needs more ships, the Marines and Army need more people. The needs don’t disappear just because you don’t want to spend the money.

  • Trump to slash F-35 program

    Trump to slash F-35 program

    F-35

    President-elect Trump sent this Tweet the other day;

    Everyone knows that the F-35 program has been a moneypit. From Popular Mechanics;

    Full-scale production of the F-35 was originally scheduled to begin eight years ago, but this proved to be an overly-optimistic estimate by 11 years-and that’s assuming full-scale production does, in fact, begin in 2019 as projected now. The F-35 will be the most expensive weapons system in history by a significant margin, exceeding $1 trillion in projected lifetime costs. Trump has targeted the program as an area to save money, along with the new Boeing 747s intended to serve as the new Air Force One jets.

    At last count, the Pentagon plans to purchase 2,457 F-35 Lightning IIs to fill the needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and the Navy. The cost per plane is roughly $100 million, depending on the variant, though full-scale production should drive down that cost some in the future. Even so, the concerns about the aircraft have led Canada to cancel their order of F-35s in favor of Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet, and Boeing has submitted a formal proposal to Denmark to consider doing the same.

    Congress and the Pentagon have been overly-optimistic about the F-35 both it’s capabilities and the day it will go into production, and it is time to bring that optimism to an end.