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Military/Veterans (General/Chat)

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  • Reclaiming history Restoration project receives grant to improve Mountain View Officers’ Club

    03/17/2018 4:12:56 AM PDT · by SandRat · 5 replies
    Sierra Vista Herald ^ | Lauren Renteria
    SIERRA VISTA — The Mountain View Officers’ Club on Fort Huachuca was a bustling banquet hall and social center for African-American soldiers more than 70 years ago. Today, it sits vacant, and faced threats of demolition for years. However, the historic building could receive a facelift in coming months. After gaining the Army’s approval to restore the building to its original facade in December, national preservation groups are one step closer to getting the project off the ground. Arizona State Parks & Trails received a $500,000 grant earlier this week to help restore the old building. Funding for the grant...
  • North Korea Could Launch a Swarm Strike Using Tech Straight out of World War II

    03/17/2018 3:03:20 AM PDT · by BBell · 43 replies
    http://nationalinterest.org/ ^ | 3/16/18 | Sebastien Roblin
    The North Korean People’s Air Force is predominantly composed of Soviet jet designs from the 1950s, or at least their Chinese clones, plus a smaller number of aircraft from the 1970s and 1980s. However, the most numerous aircraft in North Korean service is even more antiquated: a single-engine biplane transport that first flew in 1947. North Korea operates over three hundred An-2 and Y-5 biplane transports in at least six regiments, and they play a key role in its military strategy.How could these chunky biplanes pose a threat to adversaries fielding guided missiles and supersonic stealth fighters? North Korea has...
  • Mike Pompeo statements on China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Syria

    03/16/2018 6:45:19 PM PDT · by GoldenState_Rose · 10 replies
    CNBC ^ | 14 March 2018 | Nyshka Chandran
    U.S. foreign policy toward adversaries such as Russia, North Korea and Syria may turn more aggressive if CIA Director Mike Pompeo becomes secretary of state. Pompeo has lambasted Moscow's aggression toward the West and other countries: January 2018: "I continue to be concerned not only about the Russians but about others' efforts as well. We have many foes who want to undermine Western democracy. So there's this Washington-based focus on Russian interference. I want to make sure we broaden the conversation." North Korea October 2017: Pompeo said Pyongyang was would soon be able to threaten a U.S. city with nuclear...
  • Changing responsibilities Fort Huachuca welcomes new command sergeant major

    03/16/2018 6:16:01 AM PDT · by SandRat · 2 replies
    Sierra Vista Herald ^ | Alexis Ramanjulu
    Facebook Twitter Email Print Save FORT HUACHUCA — As one chapter comes to an end, another begins. On Friday, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence and Fort Huachuca will host a change of responsibility ceremony between Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas J. Latter and Command Sgt. Maj. Warren K. Robinson. Maj. Gen. Robert P. Walters Jr., the post’s commanding general, will host and review the ceremony. Latter will be leaving Fort Huachuca and retiring later this month. As for the incoming leader, Robinson just finished his tenure as talent manager in the Sergeants Major Management Division, Human Resources Command at...
  • 10 Greatest Military Operation Names

    03/16/2018 5:35:30 AM PDT · by C19fan · 25 replies
    Military.com ^ | March 15, 2018 | James Barber
    "7 Days in Entebbe" (now in theaters) tells the story of Operation Thunderbolt, the daring 1976 rescue of 94 Israeli passengers and 12 crew members from an Air France grounded in Uganda after a hijacking by German PLO sympathizers. Inspired by the movie, we've got a list of the ten greatest operation names in military history. The Entebbe raid was an enormous story back in 1976, so big that is wasn't totally overshadowed by the fact that the raid took place on the American Bicentennial on July 4, 1976. The popular fascination with the successful raid inspired two better-than-average, all-star...
  • Trump: ‘We Have the Air Force. We Will Have the Space Force’

    03/15/2018 9:16:09 AM PDT · by re_tail20 · 31 replies
    The Washington Free Beacon ^ | March 13, 2018 | Paul Crookston
    President Donald Trump said Tuesday he wants to create a military force for outer space during an address to members of the U.S. Marine Corps at Miramar Air Station in California. Trump said he has developed a national strategy for space that recognizes it is a "warfighting domain." He likened his proposed space force to other branches of the U.S. armed forces. "My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea," Trump said. "We may even have a space force." "We have the Air Force. We will have the...
  • The Dynamite Cruiser Was Nearly as Dangerous to Her Crew as the Enemy

    03/15/2018 5:58:26 AM PDT · by C19fan · 20 replies
    War is Boring ^ | March 15, 2018 | Robert Beckhusen
    On June 13, 1898, the cruiser USS Vesuvius crept within one-mile of the Cuban coastline and began launching explosives from her monstrous compressed-air cannons — quietly, as far as the Spanish soldiers ashore in their fort knew until the shells landed. The nighttime shore bombardment targeting Santiago was Vesuvius’ first combat mission. She still remains one of the strangest warships of the modern era. A custom-built “dynamite gun cruiser,” Vesuvius had a unique arrangement of three 15-inch pneumatic cannons capable of launching 550 or 200-pound shells with a jolt of compressed air. Fascinating from an engineering perspective, Vesuvius’ cannons penetrated...
  • Navy Medics Get Prepared for Combat—With Tour of Duty in Chicago

    03/14/2018 9:04:08 AM PDT · by DUMBGRUNT · 22 replies
    WSJ ^ | 14 Mar 2018 | Shibani Mahtani
    CHICAGO— Konrad Poplawski, a 22-year old Navy hospital corpsman, is about to be deployed as a battlefield medic with the 2nd Marine Division, which has served in deadly battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan. But first, he is making a pit stop at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital, which the Navy says is among few places here in the U.S. that provide experience treating the types of wounds they will inevitably see on the battlefield... ...The 14-bed unit treats over 6,000 trauma patients yearly, many of them with penetrating, life-threatening wounds akin to those on the battlefield.... “Corpsmen are not routinely exposed...
  • Vietnam POW 40th Reunion News Coverage

    03/13/2018 11:25:18 AM PDT · by V K Lee · 9 replies
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemllfcAY8A ^ | n/a | Richard Nixon Foundation
    On May 24, 1973, President and First Lady Nixon hosted American Prisoners of War held captive in Vietnam for the largest dinner ever held at the White House. 40 years later, the Richard Nixon Foundation hosted what was perhaps their last reunion gathering. The following is a collection of television and print news coverage.
  • The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?

    03/12/2018 7:10:45 AM PDT · by RoosterRedux · 52 replies
    WaPo ^ | March 9, 2018 | Christopher Mellon
    In December, the Defense Department declassified two videos documenting encounters between U.S. Navy F-18 fighters and unidentified aircraft. The first video captures multiple pilots observing and discussing a strange, hovering, egg-shaped craft, apparently one of a “fleet” of such objects, according to cockpit audio. The second shows a similar incident involving an F-18 attached to the USS Nimitz carrier battle group in 2004. The videos, along with observations by pilots and radar operators, appear to provide evidence of the existence of aircraft far superior to anything possessed by the United States or its allies. Defense Department officials who analyze the...
  • Question to Law Enforcement FReepers

    03/12/2018 6:42:30 AM PDT · by George Rand · 39 replies
    Myself | Today | George Rand
    Quick, simple questions to our law enforcement members here. Realistically, if you were gradually tasked with confiscating firearms from citizens, how would you react? Additionally, what is your take on how your precinct as a whole would react?
  • New VA electronic record-keeping plan alarms experts

    03/11/2018 5:31:58 AM PDT · by SandRat · 23 replies
    Sierra Vista Herald ^ | Tom Philpott
    Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, returned from a recent visit to Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington, alarmed that the Department of Veterans Affairs might have made a bad decision last June. That’s when to replace its legacy electronic health record system, VistA, with the same commercial off-the-shelf system the military is adopting, starting with Pacific Northwest bases. “I came back blowing the bugle,” said Roe, a physician, who saw staff at Fairchild’s hospital frustrated at the MHS Genesis system in ways that recalled for Roe his experience years earlier shifting paper to electronic medical...
  • Footage of mysterious object above ocean stuns military personnel

    03/11/2018 5:16:43 AM PDT · by McGruff · 45 replies
    NY Post ^ | March 10, 2018 | Dean Balsamini
    Newly-released video of a mysterious object streaking over the Atlantic Ocean shows the Pentagon needs to take UFOs seriously, a researcher says. The sensational two-minute clip captured by a camera aboard a US Navy F/A 18 jet flying at 25,000 feet wowed military personnel. “What the f— is that thing?” shouted the pilot in the video posted online by the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a private research company.
  • Yarosh pondered the seizure of the Kuban and Voronezh

    The former head of the "Right Sector", the founder of the "Ukrainian Volunteer Army" Dmitry Yarosh said that Ukraine has the potential to seize a number of the territories of Russia. He said this on the air of ZIK TV. To win for Ukraine, according to Yarosh, it is necessary to clean up the Donbass and Crimea from the "anti-state element." "If we touch the Donbas, of course, it is the liberation of the territory and its cleansing from any destructive anti-state element. We must return the Crimea, of course, because without this victory there is no country at least...
  • Singapore Safety Report on USS John S. McCain Aug. 21, 2017 Collision

    03/10/2018 10:52:29 AM PST · by Retain Mike · 18 replies
    U.S. Naval Institue Proceedings ^ | March 8, 2018 | USNI News
    From the Report: In the pre-dawn hours of 21 August 2017, the Liberian-registered Alnic MC and the US Naval vessel USS John S McCain collided in the westbound lane of the Singapore Strait, in Singapore territorial waters about 4.6 nautical miles (nm) from Horsburgh Lighthouse. The collision resulted in 10 fatalities on the USS John S McCain. The safety investigation determined that the USS John S McCain made a sudden turn to Port (left) into the path of Alnic MC because of a series of missteps that took place after propulsion controls were transferred. When the Bridge team of Alnic...
  • Poroshenko promised a swift liberation of Donbass

    03/10/2018 9:05:00 AM PST · by NorseViking · 33 replies
    The details of the closed meeting of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with bloggers became known. According to blogger Martin Brest, the Ukrainian authorities are preparing for a quick power sweep of the Donbass . Brest wrote about this on his Facebook page on Sunday, March 10th.
  • Why 95% of German prisoners of war died

    03/10/2018 3:14:49 AM PST · by NorseViking · 182 replies
    Die Welt ^ | Johann Althaus
    Of the 108,000 soldiers of the Sixth German Army capitulating in the winter of 1943 at Stalingrad, only 6,000 returned home in 1955. What has led to such incredible losses? he attitude of the German soldiers who fought on the eastern front was unequivocal: "Russians do not take prisoners", they believed. This fear of captivity was the result of Nazi propaganda, which was constantly subjected to soldiers - mostly young people. But maybe it was not just this? The facts are as follows: from the Wehrmacht soldiers captured in the Soviet captivity, their number is estimated at a minimum of...
  • Orbital ATK to provide ISR aircraft to Afghan Air Force

    03/10/2018 2:18:25 AM PST · by BBell · 11 replies
    https://www.upi.com/ ^ | 3/9/18 | James LaPorta
    March 9 (UPI) -- Orbital ATK has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Air Force for services in support of aircraft for the Afghanistan Air Force. The deal, announced Thursday by the Department of Defense, is valued at more than $86.4 million under the terms of a firm-fixed-price, undefinitized contract. The agreement between the U.S. Air Force and Orbital ATK will provide the Afghan Air Force with an AC-208 Eliminator, an armed intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft is equipped with AGM-114 HELLFIRE missile payloads. Work on the contract will occur in Fort Worth, Texas, and is expected...
  • China's Air Force May Soon Get More Russian Su-35 Fighters

    03/10/2018 1:58:12 AM PST · by BBell · 9 replies
    Beijing is happy with the speed and quality of first Su-35 delivery, but makes local production prerequisite of more orders Multiple sources within Russia and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force suggest that Beijing and Moscow may have struck a preliminary deal for procurement by the PLAAF of more of Russian-made Sukhoi Su-35 fighters. Hong Kong-based military monthly Kanwa Defense Review reported in February that the second batch of the highly maneuverable aircraft with thrust-vectoring engines had already descended on PLA airbases in southern China. Among those tipped as the likely locations to service and hangar the multi-role air-superiority fighters...
  • The Case for a 21st-Century Battleship

    03/09/2018 11:07:28 AM PST · by Simon Green · 52 replies
    The National Interest ^ | 03/08/18 | Salvatore Babones
    In World War II, the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musahi each mounted nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest naval guns ever deployed, but they never sank a single American ship. In a conflict decided by naval aviation, Yamato and Musahi were used mainly as flagships and troop transports. Despite their huge armaments, they were steel dinosaurs from an earlier strategic age. But how do you sink a steel dinosaur? The answer is: "with difficulty." It took eleven torpedoes and six bombs to sink the Yamato. The Musahi took nineteen torpedoes and seventeen bombs. And at the time they were sunk, both...