The Team House - B-1B Bomber WSO (Weapons Systems Officer) | Brian "Sloth" Baker | Ep. 273

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Brian was a B-1B Weapons systems officer and flew in it for 10+ years. He also worked at the Pentagon. He flew sorties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#aviation  #b1bomberBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. We would really appreciate it if you guys went and reviewed us on Apple or Spotify. Those reviews really help people find the podcast and help it get recognized. And, you know, if you've been enjoying the show, we really appreciate your support. Another thing that you can do to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Like probably 15, 20 minutes.

But if it's PQE traffic, three hours, you know, whatever. So, no, I kind of, you know, normal, like, middle-class childhood, you know, played sports. You know, no, my parents weren't in the military. I was the oldest of four. Really had zero, you know, designs or any idea I would actually be in the military. And so I was playing pretty somewhat competitive soccer. Got looked up by a few colleges. So then, you know, I settled on Manhattan College up in the Bronx of all places, even though it's called Manhattan.

I thought I'd be playing D1 soccer up there, ended up redshirting my freshman year, wasn't really a huge fan of the coach. It's kind of like everything in the movies you see when the coach is recruiting you. He's like Mother Teresa. Then you actually go play for the guy and he's, you know, Satan himself reincarnated. So what ended up happening was I looked at some other options to get some money to transfer to schools because, you know, the little money that I did get from this guy was, you know, was not going to cut it at another school.

So I looked at some things like the Marine PLC. I had a buddy playing for a school in Philly. And, you know, basically they didn't have the money to put me on until I was a junior. And so we started looking at different ways of how I could pay for it. You know, grants, scholarships, you know, they asked me if I was part Native American or part something. He said, nope, no dice. So. And then the one guy goes, well, hey, you know, one of my assistant coaches said,

our school here has this thing called Rootsie or Rots something. Yeah, I think it's called Roadsde. I'm like, oh, okay. It turns out your school does too. And so the thought process was to apply for a scholarship at my school and then basically transfer over my junior year and play there. And again, all this is literally just so I can play soccer at some like low-level D-1 school.

So it's crazy the way things worked out. Like I had zero thoughts of what it really meant to become a commissioned officer and enroll. And I thought like, you know, hey, I'll do my four years and get out. And then, you know, sophomore year was playing a little bit soccer, but slowly I started realizing, like, the Air Force thing was kind of become a little more important to me. Soccer really wasn't. But generally playing soccer, I was kind of in decent shape.

So then I decided to get real brave and think, hey, I'll, you know, I'll go try and be a PJ or a crow. And God bless Lieutenant Colonel Russell was his name, was the colonel at my school. I think he kind of looked at me and kind of knew better and said, yeah, I don't really see you as a PJ type, Brian. You probably could do it. It was basically as nice way you tell me, dude, you're soft is not your thing, dude. Like, just be great. Just you have gifts, but it's not in that realm.

So again, I was looking at other things to do. And, you know, it was pretty funny. So now I've gone through boot camp. I come home. You know, it's definitely changed my life at this point. I'm still figuring out what I think I'm going to do in the Air Force. And funny story has, you know, it's probably the fall of my journey year.

And, you know, for you guys for the background, if you want to become any sort of air crew position in the Air Force, you go through a board as a cadet, you apply generally the higher scores, if you will, between grades, pilot aptitude, all kind of stuff, you get a pilot slot. The guys that are sort of like your second and third tier grades-wise, you'll get a navigator spot or like a whizzo spot, which is what I got, and then sometimes intermixing that, the guys who fly AWACs. So those guys, the guys that you see in the movie is sort of doing the air battle management piece,

ABMers. That's another sort of another rated aircrew position. So I had no designs on doing it, mostly because, A, it meant extra time in the service. You know, I was going to do whatever you kid in New York wanted to do. Come right back, go work on Wall Street, be a, you know, downtown dude, live my best Gordon Gecko life. And then, you know, come in one day during a year,

and my commander's like, hey, I just put you in for a flight school spot. And I go, like, what? And I find out is apparently some kid at UMass, because they were literally in the same region as us. I'd gotten caught skiing. So he got disenrolled, and now he had this, like, flight school spot that already been advocated to him.

My colonel just, again, you get lucky. There's a few people in your life over your career that kind of, like, really shape and kind of mentor you, and this guy was definitely my first one. But, so he signed me up for it. And I kind of initially was like, sir, I don't think this is for me.

He goes, dude, you were going to love this. You're literally going to either fly a B1 or an F-15E. And if you don't like it, you just, it's fine. You drop out. and they'll find something else for you. Yeah. So that's my junior year and then senior year.

You know, I'm starting to kind of wind down. And, you know, this was like, you know, late 2000, mid-2001, economy was starting to kind of slow down in New York. A lot of my friends were freaking out about, like, what jobs were going to get everything else. And I kind of had it made because I already had a guarantee job now at this point. And then, you know, but being in New York on 9-11, obviously removed any doubt that I'm going.

where I need to be, if anything, I was a little pissed off because I started doing the math. And probably what a lot of us thought was, you know, I'm a cadet at this point at the best case scenario, I'm at least three years away from, you know, A, getting my wings and B, being certified to fly an aircraft. So we're thinking, like, this fight's going to be well over by its mom commission. Right. Sick joke, right, little did we know. So, yeah, commission in May of 2002. I hung around New York a little bit as an ad lieutenant waiting for my flight school to pop up. From there, I went down to Pensacola Naval Air Station. So this was back when the Air Force, I think, smartly, the two strike school slots,

which were basically Fittini's and B-1s, they let those guys, basically, they kind of offloaded that train to the Navy. So it was kind of a really cool experience where I'm an Air Force officer, but I'm in a Navy squadron, and it's all Marines and Navy guys with me with some other Air Force guys. So that was actually a really, you know, the Navy and the Air Force are definitely different. You know, the Air Force is very anal, like, you will be at work at 7 a.m. You will leave it four.

And if you start flight school on this date, you will get your wings on this date. And there is no, like, middle ground. The Air Force is very regimented that way, which is sometimes good and bad. Navy, God bless him, is like, yeah, dude, fucking serps up, bro. Yeah, you're in this class and you're supposed to graduate around this month, but, you know, whatever, weather and, you know, whatever. Around, you know, they'd give you like a two or three-month waiver. Yeah. The Navy was very like, you know, they would throw 300 cadets at a training pipeline.

And in their mind, like, if we get 150 pilots or nabs or NFO, NFO is the equivalent of with a naval flight officer. So like goose and top gun. Right. Like, yeah, dude, if we get a hundred, if half you guys wash you out, but we actually get 150 guys, like, cool, success. We don't really give a shit. Like, it's, it was definitely like a big boy program.

If you guys are the kind of guys that can go out and get blasted on Pensacola Beach, but you come in and get your work done and you pass your flights, cool. And if you don't, you'll have. fail. Yeah. And, and, like, it was very, so definitely, it was definitely very big boy from day one. And so, so as a, as a, as a, as a, as a widow or, uh, like an NFL, you said NFL, right, do you, do you, is there a pilot training in that for you? Do they want you to understand how? Yeah. So, I'd probably miss this part. So before even going down, so the Air Force had a program where, uh, if you were going to pilot training, you were not going to go to pilot training until you got your civilian license.

Okay. So they called it IFT, intermediate or introductory flight training. And then for guys that were going to be going, that guys that had a pilot school slot, you got your PPL, your private pilot license before you even went. Okay. For the whizzoes or nabs that were going, it was called NIFT, you know, navigator introductory flight training. And really all they gave you was about 20 hours. Okay. And so, you know, at that point, I wasn't really thinking that far ahead. I'm kind of I kicked myself later on down the road because for a discounted price, I probably could have continued on and got my PPL.

Sure. But once the 20 was over, my 20 hours, I did it up in Connecticut. I was like, I'm done. I'm going to enjoy my last few months in New York before I leave for good. Right. So probably a little bit short side of my part. But yeah, to answer your point, at least from the Air Force perspective, you went in with at least a good 20 to 50 civilian hours.

Okay. Yeah. And then as far as the part of your initial curriculum, so for us it was about three to four months of ground school and what was cool about it was everyone did the same ground school Marines pilots Navy pilots Navy NFOs Air Force pilots that were down there like everyone went through the exact same course so once you did that you transition over to the flight line and then for us they've these things have been since retired but not the World War II era T-34 but the modern I say modern 70s 80s T-34 that's

what I started out in and so your first six to eight flights other than basic navigation, there is some flying that was going on there as well. But then after that, it starts ramping up to, you know, fairly complicated navigation,

a lot of land nav, a lot of stuff where there's a hood over you and you got to sort of do just timing, heading, that kind of stuff, see what the winds are doing to you. Uh-huh.

I mean, looking back on it, it ended up, none of it really ended up ever translating into, like, what I did in the real world because there's obviously a jet,

there's a GPS. There's so much else going on on a combat aircraft where, like, you don't have time to, you know, clock chart, ground or whatever that terminology was that I forget but but yeah that was sort of the beginning days of

it um yeah so about three to four months of a prop plane then switched over to the t1 for intermediate uh that's kind of like a business learjet and it's the same thing the air force uses to train up all their heavy pilots and then from there you went to an advanced squadron called vt 86 and you started off in a t-39 saber liner which is like a vietnam era uh it was probably it was actually really crazy. You flew with active duty guys, mostly Navy Marines, but a few random Air Force guys in the T-34.

The T-1 and the T-39 was all being flown by retiree contract pilots. I think literally every single one of them was like a Vietnam era like Navy fighter pilot. Yeah. Like I remember one crazy story where it was one of the few

Air Force guys, still remember his name Lynn Coleman. So he was the retired Eglon Air Force Base Wing Command. and ended up doing a cross-country fight with him. So we're just kind of sitting there BS, and he's asking us where he got commissioned. He was an academy guy, wasn't. And this guy really had some crazy history.

I don't know if you guys are aware who Lance Seijon was. Lance Sejohn was the first ever Air Force Academy graduate to receive the Medal of Honor, and he was a POW, tried to escape multiple times, ended up unfortunately dying in captivity. So Lance Sejohn is a big deal in the Air Force. Lynn Coleman was one of his roommates at the Academy. So there's that story. And then I'm making small talk with him.

And he goes, yeah, I retired as the wing king at Eglin. And my vice was Bud Day. It's like, we're just kind of sitting there in awe. Another Medal of Honor recipient, you know, Bud Day, who was a Marine first, then became an Air Force colonel and, you know, got the Medal of Honor. And he lived. Him and McCain were pretty tight from what I remember. So it was cool.

We had these, like, legends of like Vietnam-era naval and Air Force Aviation teaching us. Yeah. But it was also crazy because part of your state. before taking off was it's you in this 70-year-old pilot in the left seat, you're in the right seat, there's a chance you might get a bird in the face, and what are your actions? And it's like, shit. I've been flying this plane since before you were an itching your daddy's crocs. Oh, yeah.

I mean, some of the stories these guys had were insane. Like one guy with Connie Hoffman, I still remember his name, was a C-130 pilot, I think was a spooky pilot for a little bit before they were gun shifts or AC-47s, I believe. he was telling a story about you know they'd open up the back he'd hey dude co-pilot you got the jet I'm gonna go in the back and see what the low-banser up there he's fucking you know blazing weed

load master like I mean you know really I thought I had done some cowboy shit in my career but some of the Vietnam ever stories were just out of control but yeah kind of in the middle of that program you track select you either go fighter or bombers like everyone else I wanted fighters

that's when I got very intimately familiar with the whole fiscal year concept of the military got called in it's like yeah dude it's uh early september and i'm like yeah it sure is like still nice out yeah you're not hearing me i guess i'm not you're not killing it you're really doing good but you're not like blowing away the the grade curve and unfortunately like we just don't have any more b-school slots for strike eagles and i was i was pretty devastated yeah you know life's not fair what was me kind of shit but again looking back on it like had i gone strike eagles not to be self-deprecating but like i probably

would have maybe been like above average maybe middle the road i really would I do have broken my ass to sort of like maintain because it's a high performing type of environment being a fighter guy backseat or a pilot. Yeah. And the B1 you know I definitely think I found my niche. Like I

So correct me if I'm wrong because it seems as though like on a strike on a fighter the WISO actually has it would seem to me in my mind the WISO has less to do than they would on a bomber. It's like it almost seems like they control the show on a bomber. We do

control the show on a bomber, I would say for the, for the fighter guys, at least I've talked to, and having sat in one, generally if you're a wizzo on a fighter, you're not just doing air to air. And obviously in today's environment, you're mostly doing air to ground. Right. So you're kind of running that show. Okay. I believe, you know, those guys could literally do everything that the pilots could do, I think other than fire and air to air missile. Okay. I could be wrong. But like you, you were still pretty test saturated. And again, if you're a fighter, things are coming a little faster. I mean, the bone, we were pretty maneuverable for a bomber, but we were still a 3G jet limited in combat. And most times to save gas, when we're doing casts, which we'll get into, we were our wings forward to be as gas economical as possible.

So, I mean, we were, those are some rough days where we went off dry on a nine line, and it was a good solid, sometimes three and a half, four minutes to get back over target. So those are some, those were pretty hectic times. So, you know, for us it was

the key on going off hot successfully on the first drop was like life or death in a lot of cases but yeah yeah I mean I would say definitely ran the show a lot more in the bone and it was just like a trade-off you know I mean those guys had less played time did cooler shit we definitely in certain parts of Afghanistan

could hang around for three four hours at a time not leave you know initially our loadouts in OEF and OIF where 14 weapons uh yeah eight and six of 14. Eventually we removed the bait tank and started going up to 20. And so I mean, we would, you know, there were times where we'd be the only jet in country because of weather. And we would, you know, I think my record was four separate ticks that all went hot. Like, we were the only guys in country. Wow.

You know, Vipers couldn't take off from calf. Strike Eagles and Hogs were grounded for weather at Baff. So, like, you know, being the only game in town was huge for us. Sure. Tell us about, you know, moving from this one track, fighter track, to a bomber track. What's that look like? Yeah, so once that happens, this is all changed. The Air Force is kind of redesigned how they do their pipeline, but basically what happens up to that is. So the B-1, the B-1 is a four-person aircraft.

It's an aircraft commander, a co-pilot, and then you've got two wizos, and your dual-qualified is sit either seat. There's an OSO seat, which is the offensive system officer, and then there's the DSO seat, which is the defensive system officer. So if you guys remember Dr. Strangelove, think of the EASO. who's watching the bomb come up, you know, Rangegate pulloff, range gate pull off working. We actually were qualified to sit bold seats, and the reason for that was once you got your

wings in Pensacola, you then went to Randolph Air Force Base for four months of electronic warfare officer school. Okay. Okay, so once that happens, now you're basically legally allowed to go attend the B-1 school at Dias Air Force Base in Texas. Before we did that, you did water survival, and then full-up survival school up in Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington. So I'd say all and all, it's probably about a year and a half process

before you even allowed to go attend Dias Air Force Base to start learning now the specifics of how to fly your jet. And so what that looks like is you show up similar to like flight school where it's a few months of ground school, a lot of Sims, and then eventually get kicked over to the flight line and you start flying the line with the schoolhouse. And it's the FTU, which is the flight training unit. And so the way I describe it is IQC initial qualification course,

that's teaching you how to just safely operate the jet. And then once that happens, there's three combats, B1 squadrons in the world. There's one at Dias Air Force Base, which is the ninth down the road from the schoolhouse. And then there's two up north at Ellsworth Air Force Base, and it's the 37th and the 34th. What was cool about that was the 37th and 34th were part of the Doolittle Raiders. So, like, Jimmy, like, we call the 28th. 8th Operations Group up at Ellsworth, it's called the Doolittle Raiders, because we're direct

lineage from Jimmy Doolittle. Yeah. If you guys go back and look at some of the pictures, and I'll show you. You know, there's pictures of Jimmy Doolittle sitting there on the carrier, and the guy sitting next to him, we're all wearing the 34th Bomb Squadron patch, which is the same one that I wore. Yeah. That was really cool.

Like, you know, for being the youngest service, right, only been around since 47, to be in a squadron and had like a direct reach back to, like, the World War II era. It was actually really cool. Yeah. So did that, again, about a year and a half or so. say to learn the jet and a lot of it was maintenance too the b1 historically was was definitely a maintenance problem child so we got up there and i got up to ellsworth in late o five to join the 34th bomb squadron and kind of similar to what we i'd said before by 9-11 you know at this point now you probably

know better than i do but i'd say 04-05 iraq was still a mess but afghanistan was kind of quiet you didn't really see a lot of the insurgent tactics make their way you're like you know iEDs i think we're pretty much unheard of Afghanistan, you know. In the early days. Yeah, like, we just did, we're not heard of. But, you know, we obviously shifted resources to deal with Iraq. And so obviously the Taliban, we're kind of allowed to regroup, rearm, if you will. So when our sister squadroned in Texas went back to start servicing targets from Diego Garcia, you know, we started hearing like, hey, man, it's starting to pick up again.

Like, it's getting busy. And the problem is, though, back then, bones were launching off at DIGAR, so DiGarcia, and I think this was nuts. You'd take off with a tanker in tow essentially in tandem. They'd get you out to about three hours post launch. They would give you every single bit of gas they had.

They'd go home. So that it was another two hours. So it was taking guys about five hours just to get to Afghanistan. Wow, from Diego Garcia? From DeGar, yeah. That's wild. And that's about if you look at a map, that's about including about 45 to an hour of transit of what we call. It was called the

beach road. Yeah. And it's that southern If you look at the map, you know, Pakistan kind of does that reverse L thing to touch Afghanistan. I'm sorry, touch Iran. And Afghanistan is just sort of north of this thing called the Beach Road. And it's a desolate, unpopulated part of Pakistan. And that was the one area they let us flying because no one really cared. And it's like, you know, pay us, give us our aid. You leave us alone and leave you alone.

So that was, yeah, I mean, I'm lucky I never had to experience this. But yeah, it was guys were already airborne for five hours before we can start in their bowl. That's wild. And just to clarify for people listening, so they're not landing at like CAF or whatever or Bogram. They are actually like flying from Diego Garcia five hours to then prosecute targets. Yeah. And then flying back. Yeah. And you're so you're doing one pre, we call that a pre-vold tank.

You're doing one pre-vall tank. Nine times out of ten, those guys are doing another in-country tank. and then are they way home doing a third. So you're hitting a tanker three times. And I think somebody finally started to kind of do the math and go. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The bone is not runway limited at IUD like the B-52 was. And I think at this point now, the Asian games were either happening in 06-07.

So at the time, the C-FAC, the three-star Air Force airman that was under the Sencom commander, at that point he experimented with, hey, let's see what two jets. Let's split the squadron up a little bit. At this time, it was the Texas squadron the ninth. And so they had sent, I believe, two to three jets to the deed to see what the feasibility was. And once they realized, like, hey, we can actually operate out of here. At that point, the decision was made. Degar is gone.

Bones will now be operating at Alludeed. And you're talking about UD cutter? Yeah, Cutter, sorry. Yeah. And so how far was that flight then from Qatar to Target? Yeah, so this was, I'd say to get to Afghanistan, it was probably a solid hour. to go directly east. You'd fly over UAE.

You'd check in with Muscat control, which was Oman. Once you did that, maybe five, ten more minutes, you checked in with Karachi. And then Karachi really just didn't give a shit about it. You're like, oh, yeah, cool, no, and whatever. Like, we don't care. We hope you die. Yeah.

We know you hope we die. You don't fuck with us. We don't fuck with you. And then we'd basically go tactical, where we'd put our tactical squawk on. At that point, we'd switch everything off of Victor into uniform. And we were basically talking to other military aircraft for deconfliction. And once you got within range, you were really starting to listen in on J-TAC freaks to figure out what was going on in country.

Right. And then, you know, every now and then you'd pass one of the other B-1s going in, and you'd get like a sit-rep where the action was if they had done anything. And then, yeah, I mean, that's kind of how Afghanistan went, I think, for most of my deployment. So when units were doing, like, ground force planning, like operational planning, would they know that you guys would be on station or, Would they just plan their off with whatever was in theater? And then you guys would kind of roll in and say, hey, like, we're here. Does anybody need any bombs?

No, I mean, I think some of that happened in the early days, like some of the cowboy days. Yeah. The, God, it's killing me, I can't remember the name of this now, but there was a process where the J-TACs and the ASOS guys, whether it was big army, whether it was, you know, the combat controllers with the ODA teams, and I think at this point, too, my first deployment,

ODA, CCTs were still supporting the White Steel teams. That eventually changed because they're their own J-TACs. But no, you would put in, oh, ASR, that's what it was called, air service request, and you would submit an ASR prior to the ATO cycle. And, you know, like everything else, the ASOC would rack and stack, what's a high-priority mission, what's general, you know, they had their own sort of algorithm, for lack of a better term, on determining who would get what.

Obviously, distance and geography played a part. You know, we had the legs to get in some fairly remote parts of the country. So that would play a part as well. But, no, it really wasn't, I mean, there was always a plan. Okay. Very rarely would we take off without a, like, basically a JTAC and a killbox to check into. Right. Every now and then, there was nothing really the service.

So you'd do what's called X-Cast. Yeah. The joke was it was extreme cast. Like, you know, they'd give us Kansas Mountain Dukes. It was so extreme. I'm right. Lame joke. But at that point, really, it was just, just be in,

country, God forbid, something happens. And they would position you. You had to be careful where they positioned you because, like, you didn't want to, like, intrude on somebody else's airspace, but you kind of wanted to be, like, at a jumping off point where, like, hey, you know, Kunduz has been pretty hot lately, like, be somewhat around there. Yeah. You know, for a long time on one of my deployments, unfortunately, after 07 and 08 with,

you know, cop Keating and the other cop that got overrun. You know, we had this thing called, we had 100% armed Overwatch where those guys in the Korngal would have a jet overhead 24-7 period dot. And then we actually get a lot of that stuff overnight because we had the legs to do it. We had the gas to do it. And so some of those missions were really kind of tedious and tough. But the cool thing about those things was, you know, we talked to J-Tax afterwards and say, dude, I know it sucks.

I know you've keyed the mic six times total in six hours, literally like checking in. Okay, cool. two hours of nothing checking you off to go get gas okay cool see you come back in if we're getting gas checking out to get gas again so there was there was a few stories where over coringal we'd literally key the mic six times over seven hours and it was like i just described checking in checking out checking out yeah but from what we heard from those guys it all like the fobs like that was the only time those guys could actually get some sleep yeah because us us just making noise generally was at least enough of deterrent yeah yeah guys for shitheads not to like try to pop something

that actually made us feel good. Let me take a quick segue here. I need to pimp out the podcast and remind people that we have a Patreon. And there's a link down in the description. If you guys go and subscribe, you'll get access to all these episodes ad-free. Really appreciate you guys supporting the channel. We do some bonus episodes on there. And YouTube doesn't like YouTubers for some reason recently. So we're trying to transition to the Patreon a bit. And thank you, who already subscribes, we appreciate it. And if you haven't, it's also free just to subscribe to the YouTube and hit the bell icon so you get notified when you go live. Oh, yeah, the AISON episode. Oh, yeah, the AISON is our secondary podcast, which is National Security

Current Events with Jason Lyons and Andy Milburn. So that's on the same channel. So thank you guys. So, Brian, just to back up a little bit, I want to ask you about the quote-unquote traditional or the doctrinal role of the B-1 bomber. I mean, that is, I believe it's our only supersonic bomber. It's a very unique aircraft. Tell us about what that thing's designed for, what it's designed to do, and then how you guys obviously

had to change modalities there to fight a counterinsurgency or a counterterrorism mission. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, the B1, you know, originally was a program in the late 70s, you know, high to the Cold War. And, you know, the original design of it was,

you know, this thing, you know, had a terrain following radar. Still does. We just can't execute it anymore, unfortunately. to try to extend the life of the aircraft. But, you know, terrain following radar. You know, so basically hands off the jet could fly at 200 feet,

flying curvature of the Earth type thing. And the thought process was it was nuclear capable when it was first, you know, designed. And really the mission was 200 feet under early warning radar as in the mother Russia, pop up to a safe release altitude,

you know, release, you know, the shrams or, you know, the nuclear weapons at the time. And, you know, basically pray for the best that you can sort of do out maneuver, not get blinded, and basically make it home safe. Right. That was the original mission.

You know, President Carter killed it based on budgetary concerns and some other reasons. And then, you know, Reagan reignited it. So the jet was only produced in two years, 85 and 86. So whenever you would step to a jet, the tail number is either going to start with 8.5 or 86. That was the only two years it was built. It was originally designed to have 200. That, of course, got cut down to 100. and then I think at its height,

I want to say there was maybe 75 to 80-something jets. So it was kind of a maintenance pig initially. It actually did not play at all in Desert Storm 1. Really? Yeah, you had a lot of angry sort of Cold War warrior types that pretty much felt like they got shut out of it. You know, Gulf War I was a really big, you know, B-52 fight from a bomber perspective. And the 117, I think also made.

its debut then too. So really, you know, the bone really had to kind of search around for a mission for a lot of years. I might be screwing the years up here, but an old wing commander of mine, he retires a two-star, General Tolliver. He luckily was deployed, I want to say I was deployed to England when Northern Watch and Southern Watch were a thing. In 96, we decided to respond, I think, to some incursions by Saddam. And so the first ever use of the B-1, I believe, was for Southern Watch in 96. And it's a cool video. This is also back when we had no GPS weapons. Everything was unguided.

So we were literally releasing, you know, at its height unguided, the B1 could carry 84 Mark 82s. So 84, 500 pound unguided weapons. So that was cool. Kind of like showed that like, hey, we actually have a place here and we actually have a role. Once the jet finally got GPS guided weapons available to it, this is right around the time of Kosovo, so 99.

It also played in Kosovo. with some pretty good success. And so when 9-11 happened, the B-1s were one of the first jets to respond. We sent jets out to Degar to some other areas too, which I can't remember them or my lot to talk about them, but I mean, they're probably a place we've heard of, right? Yeah. So, you know, they were one of the early jets to respond.

You know, I want to say 9-11 happened, and I've talked to guys that, you know, basically by mid-November, we're dropping weapons in country, supporting fifth group in the guys up north. So, yeah, basically they just, you know, we adapted to the role that was required. You know, you could argue that there really is no perfect caste platform other than the A10. And even the A10, and, you know, most A10 weapons school grads will tell you like, that thing was designed to kill tanks in the folder gap during the Cold War.

But it's turned, it's basically made itself essentially the king of cash from a doctrinal standpoint, the fact that it can do type one, I can see the target, I can see the friendlies, like that thing is amazing. Yeah. But, you know, not to sort of paraphrase, you know, Rumsfield. but you go to war with the Air Force you had. So basically, our front line stuff, which was designed for near peer, we all had to sort of figure out how we were going to be an optimal cast platform.

And like I said, before, like we had some pros and cons. You know, we had shitloads of gas, shitloads of weapons, and then really just the issue with us sometimes is we're high, really can only do type 2 control cast, meaning I'm never going to see the friendlies. Maybe if I'm lucky, going to see the bad guys. Yeah. But a lot of times I'm really kind of really kind of. releasing on coordinates only.

But we definitely had persistence and gas to, you know, stay overhead for three or four hours at a time and, you know, be that Overwatch for guys. So, yeah, I would say our role definitely evolved over time to where, you know, we were happy that guys could just execute basic cast in the beginning to, like, three, four years later, like,

you know, we're getting into the nuances of like, you know, you know, do I do this sort of a maneuver after cast for optimal placement? Like, we started trying to get into the finer points of conducting casts, like the fighters and the rotary guys would. Could you take us a little bit through what it's like, you know,

sitting there in the hot seat as a weapons guy and how you're putting those, presumably you're the guy that has to put the weapons on target. So, funny story, so 07, you know, we were still radar only. We had no targeting pod.

Oh, wow. So 07, which was my first deployment, like late 0607, we were literally a radar only platform. Yeah, it was scary. So, which was funny was being at the deed, So being at the deed, even though Iraq at this point was an effing mess, like the early parts of 07, like eventually led into Petraeus coming in, you know, for the reawakening and him kind of turning the tide against this, you know, with the tribal leader piece that he advocated for. But, you know, if you went to Iraq, you knew you weren't dropping unless it was pre-plan because we had no targeting pod and everything there was urban.

Afghanistan was a different story, obviously, a lot more spread out, not as much focus as there as we've talked about. Like, the fight was Iraq. Afghanistan, I'd say it at that point was, you know, was really more of an afterthought. Like, hey, we went there for good and, yeah, we kind of took it off the ball a little bit, like, that's just my opinion. So I'll give you one story where it's my first combat story ever. I'm a little nervous. Hadn't really slept that great. So we check in, we go all the way towards Jalalabad, and I'm sitting in the left side. seat, which is not the weapon seat. And, uh, you know, I kind of tell the, the other whizzo to my right, this guy Otto, uh, and he had been on his third deployment, but because his previous

two deployments were Degar deployments, he never got a single weapon either. So we're both like two neophytes in the back. So we're checking in with the JTAC. Uh, he's not answering, not key in the mic. So we figured like, okay, it's a no show. No big deal. We'll hang out here. So I kind of go to Otto. Like, hey, dude, I really didn't sleep a whole lot, man. Like, I'm going to like wedge my checklist, you know in my ejection seat and kind of like try to like you know homeless sleep it off a little bit he goes yeah dude all good i want to say i got about maybe 15 minute power nap and he cracks me in the i'm like dude we got a tick yeah and you know back then before mcrystal came in and before we really started kind of really tying up how we went kinetic i mean oh six oh seven you said the word

tick it was like the three star like legally letting you drop weapons yeah we we had some situation. I mean, there were definitely some I think instances where we probably abused that authority where guys just dropped the magic word tick. I think I'm threatened. And that was all the excuse you needed to go kinetic. Empty the bomb back to the door. Yeah. Yeah, we had, I'll tell you some, I'll

tell you one or two stories in that, but so I get punched in the arm. You go, right, shit, okay, cool. All right, where are we going? And I'm like, all jazzed up. And then I realize, you know, and I'm at this point now, we're running the math in the back. We're figuring out, okay, if we go point nine down to this tick in Helmin Province,

will show up there in about 40 minutes and we'll still have about two hours of playtime. So you get it amped up and then it's like, oh fuck, like, you know, I'm going from J-bad down to Helman. Right. It's still 40 minutes. Right. But, you know, you get your time

to get your act together, get checked in. And I want to say generally on a uniform freak, we could generally start reaching J-Tax and about if you were lucky, especially if they had an extender on their, I think it was the 172s they were running around with, but around 40 to 50 miles, you can start getting comp to the J-Tax.

And so my first tick ever, I'll never forget it, Widow 7-8, and it was a British J-Tac assigned to the Royal Fusiliers. And I love work with the Brits because, you know, I'd work later on with Americans, and it's hectic and it's cast. The Brits were the most, they could be in a life-threatening situation. It's like, Baron 3-4, it's Widow 7-8. Sorry to be a bother, sir, but we are taking heavy fire from these. Stand-by grid, all right, ready, 4-1, Sierra, Papa, Romeo, and then like, br...

Yeah. And this is back of the... days were like, you know, Sang in province. And obviously Helmand and Kandahar were like the spiritual home of the Taliban. That's kind of what they made their reawakening. And so the Brits that were there really got into it big time. So those guys were costly getting into contact. And it flew by, but I kid you not, we stayed with these dudes for about eight hours.

Yeah. And at the time, we were carrying a bay tank, six GV. 38s in the intermediate bay, which was a 500-pound GPS-guided weapon. And we had 8-31s. And we noticed, we released all. eight two thousand pound weapons. Wow. We came this effing close to go in Winchester.

And I could tell the JTAC was really trying to make it work. Man, I'm really trying here. We think we... You're all dead. You've done too good of a job, but I don't think we can get connected with your loss. Thank you so much, gents. Appreciate it. You know, lighter.

And I blink. I'm like, oh, fuck, dude. We've been airborne for like seven hours. Like, wow, we've been in this tick for seven hours. Yeah. So that was, like, story... That was, like, my first ever drop. And, you know, all that, like, regret of, like, not going fighters, not going eagles.

I'm like, you know what? This is where I was meant to be. For you guys, do you recall what the danger close was for the 500-pounders and then for the... Yeah, it changed. The initial days in 07, an impact GBU 38 was 305 meters. A impact GbU 31 was 365. And then I'll be honest with you, some of my old students, if they listen to this, are going to be giving me shit for not remembering.

if I went air burst on the 38, it bumped it up by 30 meters. Right, okay. And if I went Airburst 31, it bumped it out to like 405. Okay. Now, after that. For almost 100 extra meters. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. So after that, though, they did a lot more research.

They sort of dialed on them down. And I want to say my last deployment, the 38th, I remember being 265 for impact, 305 for airburst. And I want to say for some weird reason, 315 and 385, or 315. and 365 for 31s. Okay. That's how I kind of like, obviously the air burst, because the spread would go out

on the nose cone, that would generally put it out for about 40, 50 meters on top of it. What was the standard height for an air burst when you guys would drop? So the DSU 33 was 20 feet plus or minus, plus or minus six feet.

Okay. So it'd go anywhere from 14 feet all the way up to 26 feet with the impact point. It's quite a, it's quite a shredder. Yeah, we had a couple of sorters where, uh,

a number one fucker, uh, this was 08. and the call was, we dropped the GV-30 to airburst on this guy. And this guy, I really hope this guy lived and went to go cure cancer or something, but it was not too far from Kandahar. They'd caught him plant an IED. And we literally watched this, our targeting pod screen went poof, like, we hit him.

Yeah. But this guy literally must have survived. They called it like the Cohner survival. Right. The guy literally was underneath and all the frag went out. Yeah. So this guy actually did one of these in the pot and like sprinted off. Yeah.

And we couldn't get cleared for a re-attack. So, yeah, there was a few times there we really advocated for, unless the guy is offset or unless you won't be hitting guys in trees. Yeah. You know, we'd actually tell the J-TACs over the radio, like, hey, copy all, recommend we go impact and we'll connect it. We'll readjust from there if needed. And you're saying because with an impact, it hits and it goes out. With an airbursts, it goes out, which gives you a wider spread. It does.

But there's actually, like, directly underneath the cone. And you wouldn't think it. Yeah. Now, granted, there was a few times where. talking to guys afterwards, they were like, that guy probably is going to die the next day, just based on the, the compression that he's getting off the bomb.

Yeah, yeah. I'll send you guys the video. There's one video, the British J-Taxon 07 would like, this is before iPhones. These are like the Sony digital cams. Yeah. They'd call in strikes from us,

and they'd like, you know, over cover. And there was one where we got the 31, and they were well outside of danger close. But you could hear the guy coughing and hacking because he's talking as the shockwave goes. Yeah. He's like, you know, yeah, fuck if they're in there. You know, the guy, it's like, he's hacking up a lung.

Yeah. Yeah, that overpressure must have been immense, even if you didn't catch any of it. Yeah, there was a few guys where it's like, you didn't want to get in, like, an argument of the ground course commander, but it's like, dude, yeah, he's walking, but, like, that guy's not surviving. He's not. That guy's bleeding from every orifice he has, and probably some that we just created, like, this guy's not going to live. Yeah. No, he's moving. Like, I'm sorry, fuck a dude.

Yeah. We'll drop another 70K for the next by her. Like, why not? Yeah. It reminds me a major pain. It's like, if he's in there, he ain't happy. Yeah, that was a big part of it. Jay Dams for Jesus.

Yeah. But yeah, that was, so I'm kind of getting off on tangency. Oh, no, that's perfect. Great. So, 07 was crazy because, you know, right when, right before, I'd say about a month before we transitioned out, that's when Petraeus came in, and, like, the floodgates of Iraq just opened.

Like, I think Petraeus gave a lot of the Ground Force commanders sort of like license like hey dudes uh there's been something you would mean in the shwack like now's your time yeah so we had we had one story where uh you could usually hit bozra in about 45 minutes the southernmost point the brits were control that but i remember taking off we took off to the north and so like basically we hit iraq in like record time and if you look on a map it was a killbox south of baguette i forget the specific town but we literally was lined up we were hitting an olive grove that was historically like a, you know, insurgent staging area. And I think, I don't think we changed our heading more than five degrees.

We just flew straight for 45 minutes, opened the Bay Doors. We got all 20 weapons off on one pass. Bone 3-4 is Winchester, mission complete. And then, you know, somebody at the talk is looking at their, like, all right, your Winchester, go home. So, yeah, I went Winchester in, like, under four hours and for dropping 20 weapons. And that was just, like, the, like, that, like, month, I think our bomb total, like, like we were on track maybe to drop like 500 over the course of six months and I think by the time

we left in July of 07 we were up to like seven and change wow and that was just Afghanistan was still hot obviously um the spring fighting season was in full force at that point uh and then the iraq just being there for the beginning of the of the awakening of you what the terminology was when petrae showed up that was yeah that was a huge game changer so got home uh went back out then next year I actually went a little bit late uh because I went to uh instructor's school, but that second deployment, we actually had the sniper targeting pod. And everyone had warned us, like, dudes, you're going to drop less with this thing. Mark my word. Like, no, no, no way, man. Like, do you know many targets I could have found if I had a pod? Like, all right, shithead. Okay, fine. You

know better. They were right. You know, we had the targeting pod that's like an appointment. I think we dropped, our drop one down to like 385. Why is that? I mean, a lot of that point now, it's the onus is really on the air crew. And for the, you know, whatever possible, like, it probably should be, right? Like, you're a tool for the, the guy on the ground. You know, the biggest thing, at least I would say from the B-1's perspective, was most guys got it that like, dude, I don't care if we fly a $300 million jet, like, the mission is the guy on the ground? Sure. Is there like a quantity over quality kind of aspect or vice versa that the sniper pod made you more accurate? I mean, that was definitely

a part of it. It was also, I think, I don't want to go back and look and say maybe some the bombs we dropped in 07 maybe were maybe overkill or there was really nothing there. Or you're also working with what you had at the time. Yeah, but yeah, the sniper pod definitely like you could not, some guys got into trouble because you could not definitively tell like what a dot was, right? Sure. And if you looked at the, you know, the John Chapman Medal of Honor MQ1 video, right? Like that, that is about as grainy as effing gets. Yeah. The Lockheed sniper pod was 10 times better. Yeah. But I still couldn't discern, you know, child from man,

woman from man. All I could basically tell is I've got movement. And if I really was starting to stretch the limits here, I have a possible, there were certain cases where if your clarity was good enough, I could see like a shorter blip and an adult-sized blip. And you'd say, hey, dude, I'm not saying definitively, but I've got some half-size returns with some full-sized returns.

Right. I really was up to the guy on the ground to sort of make that judgment call. Right. But, you know, the, pretty much we were there as a sensor and we were there as a tool for them. But for a tick, I mean, with a sniper pod, especially if, you know, the enemies were, and for people who might not know tick, when we say tick, we're talking about troops in contact. So ground force, you know, engagement.

And usually, like, when they call in a tick, it's more than just like a squirder or like somebody shooting pop shots. It's like you're effectively engaged by enemy. Right, right. So what, like, what, not only from your level, but also from the Air Force level, With these sniper pods coming online, what would happen if there were discrepancy between what the J-TAC was saying and what you were seeing on the sniper pod?

I mean, really, you just, you know, guys got into trouble when they sort of thought they were doing leading comm, almost like being like a jailhouse lawyer. You really, and that's a thing, too, like everything's getting recorded. Right. So we would tell our young guys, like,

dude, like, you're not there on the ground. I know that you think you can discern that it's Osama bin Laden underneath his crosshairs, but it's probably not. Right. So just effing tell the guy what you see. Right. And don't bullshit.

Don't, you know. Because listen, the other thing, too, is like, there were times where, you know, guys were using Rover and, you know, forgive me for forgetting the acronym, but, you know, Rover was the link. I think it was remote operated video enhancement, something radio. That's what it was. And Rover was the JTAC's ability to see what my sniper was seeing. Yeah, I remember that.

And there were times where... They used it with drones, too. Yeah, they were drones. If you had, like, the raid cams on a base where... Yeah. And some of the pictures from those things were like, it was like HD, it was amazing. Yeah. But there were times where like guys were convinced that they were staring at the same thing and they weren't. Yeah.

Because, I mean, let's be honest, like every mud hut looks pretty effing similar. Right, right. Most guys are wearing the same style of man jammie, right? There's like two man jammie producers in all Afghanistan, you know, like, you know, like, it's either Calvin Klein or this other guy. Yeah, yeah. There were a lot of times where you really got yourself in trouble if you talk to yourself. I mean, I get it. Like you're sitting in a jet.

you're moving at a mile a minute. You want to keep the guy safe because you'll hear incoming, you'll hear contact on the radio. But when you're on the ground and you're the instructor and you're watching their sniper pod, you're like, ah, shit, I know.

At ground speed zero, you could see where guys from a comms perspective would talk themselves on to like the wrong targets. So the thing we would tell guys is just, dude, it doesn't have to be sexy. I don't care if the comm sounds like garbage,

just tell the guy what you see. Yeah. And then, you know, it sucks in a lot of ways, but if there's any doubt, there is no doubt. Right. because I mean this is kind of hard for us but you know like so 2014

is a perfect example of I can't go into a lot of it obviously because a lot of it still I think classified but you know the frat we had unfortunately to be one on the fifth group guys you know I've listened to some of those tapes and it was I'll just say that there was definitely

I'll kind of dance around it a little bit there were a few comments to the tune of like I'm either going to get a fucking weapon out of you guys or I'll find somebody who will give me it was kind of like dude we're taking fire And I think, you know, unfortunately we sort of let... I know personally some of the guys in that jet, so I don't want to say much more of it,

but like that's an example, I think, of kind of getting browbeaten and doing something normally you wouldn't do at speed zero. So really that's how we would try to keep that at a trouble. Which incident are we talking about? So 2014, and actually... Kudos?

No, it might have been, but it was the one where they interviewed the... He ended up going to Georgetown Law School, the captain of the 5th, group ended up, they did a CBS report. I mean, but you're saying 2014, yeah. I'm thinking, the fifth group, I'm thinking

Jason and the, you're thinking like the B-52 early on in the war. You're thinking 02 where the guy reset his radio. Yeah, 2014. There was a 2014. There was, okay, yeah. If you go back and look, my bad. Like this?

You're all good. Okay. I'll put it up higher. Is that better? All right, cool. Yeah, 24. Summer of 2014, unfortunately, we had a blue-on-blue, and it was basically, you know, dismounts, guys got separated, and, you know, essentially we're firing our each other that didn't know it, and then a bone showed up and responded, and unfortunately, I think we lost four guys. That's just like one example, I think, of... What country was this in?

Afghanistan. Oh, okay. But what sucked up... I mean, again, my personal opinion, not, you know, official Air Force position, but what ended up happening was... CBS did a special on it. And if you read the CBS special, it's B-1s with targeting pods are unsafe. And it's like, it's like, dude, there were some fuck-ups,

don't get me wrong, but there were fuck-up all around. And that's kind of one of those things where as an air crew guy, you don't feel right, sometimes passing judgment on a guy getting shot out on the ground, but it's also like, dude, like,

similar as procedures everywhere. Sure. You know, when I was thinking about Kunduz, I mean, that's where the doctors without borders hospital was hit. Oh, that's another one. There was a number of different things that led up to that and it becomes like the perfect storm.

So it's funny, yeah, that's the comment for guys who've listened to that tape that I do the after action report, you know, obviously, I remember talking to a couple of fifth group guys because for a while there, like, a lot of B1 guys, like if you were around, you kind of didn't let

fifth group dudes know that you were a bone dude because it was definitely a touchy subject. But I met one or two fifth group guys it just kind of like, hey dude, listen, you guys, the one guy actually kind of made us feel really, feel a little better, he goes, I've got two personal stories where you guys have saved my ass, and he goes, it just, it sucks, it wasn't just you.

You know, CBS kind of threw us on the bus a little bit, it was literally like you said, cascading events. Yeah. And it's happened in the past where, like, that was kind of one of the benefits for a long time of us being a four-person jet. Like one guy could cry uncle and go, whoa, dude, something's not sounding right here.

Right. And you'd reassess, oh, fuck, dude, like, I miss, carried the one. I had the wrong grid identifier or whatever. That was just unfortunate one of those stories were like the moon's all aligned in the wrong spot. It's horrible. You know, guys feel terrible about it. It was just the nature of the war. But it's unfortunate because

that sort of fog of war, like it happens on the ground between blue on blue also. So it's not, you know, it's not as if it's something that is solely limited to be ones with sniper pods. And that was the funniest thing about it. was like, dude, it's the exact same sniper pod on every other calf platform.

So like the fact that they were trying to tie it to us, it's like the micro, like the physics of the pod don't change on a fighter. Right. It's still the same micron range in IR. Right. That was kind of where a lot of us cried BS. Yeah.

But it kind of gave us a black eye for a little bit unfortunately. And, you know, for a lot of us again, it's my personal opinion. I think it felt like the Air Force is doing everything their power to justify getting rid of the bone. Yeah. Because we're not nuke anymore. Yeah.

you know, it really had no problem, I think, running us into the ground simply to make, you know, slides look green for cast coverage. Right. But, yeah. And it's wild because, you know, you're talking about the Air Force trying to get rid of the B-1. Meanwhile, we know that, you know, they've tried since Vietnam to get rid of the A-10. They've tried since Vietnam to get rid of the AC-130. Yeah. Like, and these platforms come out and proved to be incredibly viable and important platforms.

in these wars and yet even after these wars the air force is still determined to get rid of us like they have the next greatest and best thing i think luckily at least the rumor that i've heard is again this is just open source but you know i think the b1's gonna probably get a little bit of the stay of execution if you guys saw i'll get him a shot out but my old squadron uh you know unfortunately we lost the uh we lost our three with the drone and an taft garrison well the bone is what responded again and one of my old students texted me to give me to you me grief like yeah dude I broke your record like you the Libya crew had the record for for combat sortie from Conis yeah we just we just killed it like eat a dick like thank you all young

wise one I've taught you well but uh yeah we continue to prove that like right when you think like the old way of doing war is done it's like the old godfather thing just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in yeah we just cannot extricate ourselves from an effing theater it seems like yeah and I also think too like just from a sheer number standpoint you know you know you God forbid something kicks off the Pacific, like it just becomes a number, it literally becomes just basic math, i.e., I've got X number of combat B-52s, they've got X number of weapon station, I've got X number of bones, X number of B-2s,

and then you literally just start doing the math of available weapon station per bomber. How many platforms with what fuel range that can actually reach out? Exactly. You know, I want to get back to sort of your story, but since you brought it up, you know, can you tell us, can we talk about the other sort of bomber platforms and what they're like what advantages they have and why the B1 you know was thought to be outdated but then proven to be so obviously the B52 which again you know there's sort of like a you know bomber rivalry syndrome if you will and I know I just missed that word but you know the thing the thing is a

marvel of aircraft engineering that that thing possibly will fly for 100 years I'd say the edge it has over us right now is it can fly higher it's I don't know this is an advantage per se because I want no part of the nuke mission ever but it is it is nuclear capable it has the ability to carry heavier weapons that we do

as of right now the heaviest weapon that B1 can carry is in the 2,000 pound class B52s can carry 5,000 pound class weapons you know the problem right now is in a near peer fight they'll probably never get close enough to actually drop a 5,000 pound weapon but it has

that ability. So the B532 is definitely very highly versatile and capable. It's just really, really old. And it's also speed limited. Like our standard employment speed generally is 0.85 Mach, which roughly translates into about

510 true. I want to say the B52s are 0.83. And, I mean, but 0.83 is like there are no shit limit. Like, I've employed the jet in combat up to 0.9. Because our door, and we could go faster.

only issue in the B1 is past 0.9 mock the Badoors. It's a speed restriction on the Badors. But I mean, you know, we have the ability to drop weapons and get the F out of Dodge quick. Buffs kind of short and not so much. They have some speed limitations, but they can fly higher. So they definitely can release all their weapons instantaneously. There's some limitations with us doing that. So that's kind of like, I'd say modern day stuff with the B52 in a nutshell. The B2, think of it right now, until the B21 comes online. the B2 is literally like our 9-1-1. Like, you know, there's under 20 now, unfortunately, it's stealth. Obviously, it's still, it's stealth, but like we're talking late 80s, 90s technology.

Right. It's starting to become less and less stealth, unfortunately. Right. It's not modular in the sense of I can update LRUs and update parts of the aircraft quickly because it's, again, where the thing was designed in the 80s and the 90s. But, again, you know, that thing was built to be able to be launched from the states, hit a target, anywhere in the world and come back safely. Yeah.

So, and it's also nuclear capable. Yeah. I've had a few friends of mine that have transitioned from the B1 to the B2. Okay. So that's, I think, sort of like the, probably like the macro 30,000 foot view on the big difference between us. Yeah. You know, and I'd say if you're going to compare us to them,

depending on the weapon type, if it's a 500-pound smart weapon, the B-2's got us killed, we can only drop about 15 of those. But from some weird, bay limitations, some rack limitations, we can somehow drop 24, 2,000 pounds, which makes no sense. Yeah. You can drop more heavier than less heavier. It makes no sense. And obviously, at least in my personal opinion, we can integrate with a package in fighters

a lot more easily because we're a little bit more dynamic, we're a little bit more maneuverable. And again, the speed piece is not there as well. Yeah. We don't have the speed limitation to be the two does. So, yeah. And yeah, I mean, right now you've got to keep a certain number of B2s on the line that they're ready for anything. B-F2DQ's right now are going through a major upgrade, a major overhaul. So I'd say B-1s right now are kind of back to being like that, like, you know, that 911 response

force. We've got to respond to something within, you know, pick a time frame. Kind of what we just saw with Syria and Iraq like about a month ago. Yeah. What do you think the, I mean, a lot of it's probably public, I imagine. I mean, but what do you think the future is of bombers in the U.S. Air Force? What is the, you know, like right now we're transitioning to the F-35 for fighters and there's going to be another like joint fighter that comes out. What do you see the future looking like for bombs? I mean, I think right now it's pretty open source, but I mean, now this keeps changing, but probably up until a few months ago,

the game plan was, you know, we were going to start sunseting B-1s to then start making room for B-201s, and then the B-2 is next to go. So in a crazy turn of events, literally our bomber force on paper by the year 2035, 2040 is going to literally be B-21s and B-52s. Like our oldest bomber and our non-reli-reli-reli-reli-com. newest bomber. Yeah. And the two little middle children, if you will, the B2 and the B1 are pretty much getting sunsetted. Yeah. Now I think now in an amazing accomplishment, the B21 actually flew on time on scheduled. It looks a lot. The B21 looks very, very similar to the B2, but it's on

YouTube. Like the B21 actually flew. It won't be mission capable, I think, until the end of the decade or so. I don't want to put an exact date on it. But yeah, as of right now, per the Air Force, I mean, your future bomber force is literally the B-52 and the B-21. But like I said, I think, you know, the B-1 might be around for the 10 years now based on recent events. But right now, there's no scheduled, like, intermediate step between the two. No, that's it. You know, like, we went all in on the B-21. I think the difference with the B-21 versus everything else, and even the F-35 is it's designed to be modular.

Like, it's designed to sort of be a lot more software and digital capabilities. So as threats update, as things update, like the thought process is I can pull something out, swap it back in. No worries. That's really a challenge for some of the jets we have now just because based on when they were built and some of the parts and stuff. But as of right now, that is your future bomb force. Yeah. So, yeah, back to your personal experience. Yeah.

Absolutely, no worries. Yeah. I had a curiosity, as a whizzo, you know, you said it on a B1, you've got two. You know, it's one thing when you're the only game in town, but when you're on a really hot op, and there are multiple stacks of air, how are you managing that? I mean, so funny story is generally,

in a lot of those instances, the jet that's got the most weapons and essentially is prosecuting the targets is the mission commander. Okay. So the B1 actually on a lot of ops on multiple strike ops is actually the mission commander. So it's really his job to actually run the show, which is kind of funny,

and a lot of times based on our lack of link connectivity or sort of where we are in the stack, you could argue we had the least essay sometimes and everything else, but it's still, you know, don't care, fix it per doctrine, like that's your job. Really at that point, it ends up... You know, the joke sometimes when you have things like weapon school events and red flag events, it's really called deconfliction flag.

Because, you know, like prosecuting the targets and surviving is almost second to just safely, managing your stack of your craft. Yeah, don't drop a bomb on a plane. Yeah, like, yeah, like, don't drop through someone's altitude. Uh, don't, you know, don't get out of your block. Like, you know, that's that, yeah, really it becomes like, honestly, at that point, it's literally the mission is either going to be accessed or not before you even step to the jet. Like, if you mission planned good, yeah, and you mission planned safely and, you know, the challenge sometimes at bones was, you know, we're at the deed. And we're having a mission plan, say, with, uh, you know,

F-22s and Shragul's at Al Dauphra, you know, F-16s up north. You know, it wasn't really a huge issue in Afghanistan. That thing you just described really became an issue, I would say, during ISIS. Because there were multiple times where, you know, ISIS went back to feeling like, okay, now we're actually training. Like, I wouldn't say near peer, but we're doing things that we have never done in the last 10, 15 years. Yeah. You know, so I guess I'll kind of, I'll kind of skip through some of the next.

08 deployed, you know, first targeting pod one, great. Did not deploy weirdly enough because that was our full year off in between deployments in 2009. And then when we got out in 2010, that was the birth of the whole, quote-unquote, tactical directive. And that was when McChrystal was commisaf and basically Commander of All-Force Afghanistan. And that was, you know, we went from like, if guys were under fire, taking round, it's like, okay, dude, just tell me where.

And you're getting around. Yeah. You know, the tactical directive was literally, you will not go kinetic unless, you know, we're going to lose dudes. You can guarantee that there are no civilians anywhere in the vicinity and or you cannot disengage. Yeah. So it was the first time ever in my life where you're watching indirect, you're seeing the dude shoot. Yeah. But because they were near a structure and we could not verify whether that structure was completely clear civilians, which we know in a lot of cases, they were filled with civilians on purpose, like chained up.

Yeah. I mean, it was eerie. Like, there was, like, our dropping, our weapons release, like, grinded to a halt, that deployment. I did drop once in 2010 before I actually, I got lucky. I got selected to go to, like, you know, the Air Force version of Top Gunas called Air Force Weapons School. And I found out halfway through my 2010 deployment. I got selected to go. But it was really cool was, you know, Balamor Gob became really, really hot, like, 09, 2010 time frame.

I remember there was a few ticks where we'd go up there. I'll never forget this. Prankster was the 80-second Airborne J-Tac. We'd check him with him. We'd try to get clearance to drop. And it's like, yeah, Bone, Ground Commandor, we're not meeting intent. Then, and this is all in the same killbox. I kid you not.

So, wow. So it's like a, you know, our killbox. You guys would sort of usually operate by, you know, district centers, villages, provinces. Air crew for a lot of time just thought killboxes. Yeah. So Balamore Gob was way up in the northwest. I think it was the Turkmenistan.

border and there was one sorty where like you know prankster the j you know prankster was essentially like the large division force on the ground is saying no dice dude like ground force commander's not approving we had a jaguar call sign get on who's a who's a combat controller is attached an oda he's like yeah bone stand by i we're working it but i think and at this point now going kinetic was such a freaking like i think at that point it went all the way up to like the oh six soda dude for that for that for that region right yeah i'll never forget it like as this as this as this as Jaguar is off on Vosip or, you know, Merck chat trying to find somebody. Literally the Marsok dudeops.

I'm like, bone, yeah, we're good. Same on that. I'm like, we'll fucking kill it. So Halo was the Marsock call sign. And, yeah, that was crazy. It was like, you know, my dad says no. My dad says no. My dad's cool as shit.

My dad says, yeah. So go ahead and, go ahead and I ended up probably being a warning shot, but at least it stopped the indirect. Yeah. So that was one. Actually, I lied. I dropped twice. And then my last sortie before I went home, again it was halo who was a marsock team

so they were taken and indirect and we basically we had pretty shitty cloud cover but we recommended we dropped three by GVU31's in a triangle pattern we called the triangle of death but basically we would basically look like a triangle but they were coming down yeah and so unfortunately one of them ended up dutting but you know two six thousand pounds of ordinance going off

essentially did the trick yeah and what was really cool was you know, so I leave, I go through Air Force Weapons School, I come home, and it's March of 2011 now, and we were setting up for, because our biggest problem at times was a lot of these, you know, most of it was the soft guys, and, you know, working with J-Soc was almost foreign to us, because we just never got called to those things, but we really started trying to lean into getting guys up to South Dakota to, like, work hand in hand with us to, like, know how we operate, weird way of doing things, And so we spent like a month organizing an East Coast

MSSAT teaming off to Elsworth. Yeah. So it's the week before they're supposed to come up and then Libya kicks off. And so we're thinking like, all right, we had no idea we were going to play in Libya. And so at the time,

he was the wing commander about a year ago. I think he'll probably be a general someday, but this guy's scab. They decided like, hey, we're going to play a joke on Sloth, who's me. So it's Patty's Day. I'm obviously Irish.

and I'm inviting in the holiday of my people. And so I'm out of party. And, you know, I guess the game plan, well, everyone's in on it. But they're like, hey, dude, when Sloth is really, like, effing, like, housed, I want you to text me. So I'm like, you know, shit-faced. I'm playing, you know, the pose.

And I'm trying to, like, run the DJ set. Nobody wants to listen to Irish music, but, like, I'm fortunate him to. And next you know, like, hey, dude, you got to call, dude. I'm like, oh, yeah, what's up? You know, okay, who's this? And it's, you know, at the time,

he was our wing weapons, Oh, you know, like, hey, dude, it's go time, bro. Like, we're going to Libya. I'm like, fuck. And I'm like, you know, and the whole crowd is like, oh, really? Oh, we're going. You're like, all right. That's it. That's it.

All right. I decided to turn my buddy's bedroom with like a mobile skiff. Like, all right, you're allowed and you're not allowed. I get him to get here. We're going to live in a baby. And let me ramble on for like 15 minutes. And next you know, finally one goes, ha ha, asshole. You're not going to Libya.

That's a Saturday. Okay. Well, you know, jokes on me. I have their laugh. and then no shit that next Friday, the joke's on him, because sure enough, we get called to the skip and we're going to Libya.

Where you like, stop fucking with me, dude, like get the fuck out of here. Well, we kind of thought that, but then when they were like, no, dude, you got to go up to the skiff up at wing headcores. Like, oh, I guess this is happening. Yeah. So you walk in and like, yeah, dude.

They're requesting, we've got a weapons bunker. Air Force is saying no more B2 sort. He's like, we got to go. So, you know, that was a pretty wild. I'll send you guys the pictures of it, but, you know, and I've done interviews on this thing, and, you know, literally our maintenance dudes in, like, sub-freezing weather jended up five green

jets and, like, got four airborne. And we basically took off in, like, zero-zero weather. Out of South Dakota. Yeah. And so the way that works is, basically what happens is you take off, every green jet available takes off, and then the game plan is the two greenish jets by the time you get off the coast of New Finland, those guys take gas from the tankers, and those guys, the ones who cross the pond and are going to execute the mission.

Yeah. So we got four jets to the coast. This could be an entire separate podcast, this, this effing thing. But like, so we, you know, my jet and a buddy's jet, we, luckily, all our weapons are green, both sniper pods worked, good to go. So we take on all our gas. And at that point now, it's about other four or five hours over to off the coast of England. And then at Milden Hall, they've got KC135.

Those guys come out and meet us. Yeah. So now we're coming down. we're going through Gibraltar, we're hanging out in the med. And this is like when Odyssey Dawn's in full bloom. Like there's a carrier strike group there. Guys are launching from Aviano. Like, it's pretty busy.

You know, in every NATO country is playing. So we find out, let me check in. Hey, dude, there's a change to your targets. You're going to hit new targets in that same area. Oh, but by the way, the Brits have already launched weapons at him, so they're kind of aware now. Like, oh, this is really tactically fucking brilliant. Yeah.

All right, well, say, we're ready for your targets. And then we figure out we have the wrong crypto. Oh. So I was telling you guys offline, we got 18 dimpies right off to us in the red. And I said to this day, I said, like, had anyone been listening in, anyone somewhat competent, like, we probably won't be here. Yeah. So anyway, we get our new dimpies. We go feet dry, and we actually have two growlers, two EA 18s, which were, so, you know, as a backstory, you know, the Marines and the Navy both through prowlers.

The Navy retired prowlers and now fly basically in a carlerae in a carol. electronic warfare version of the Super Hornet. Bad-ass aircraft. It's basically a hornet that jams. It's awesome. And it's the first time they've ever done embedded combat with a bomber platform. And so it's basically a four ship going line of breast

into the southernmost part of Libya. And what was crazy was, we thought we had planned everything correctly. And right as we're about to basically go execute, these dudes launch their harms and it's like, hey, Bone, sorry, dude, we're bingo, later. And we're like, what? So we end up going

down into Sebha, we're hitting an ammo dump. And, I mean, we looked outside and AAA's coming up, but luckily it was pretty low millimeter, so it's only topping out at like 15, 16,000. We were above that. But they did launch just based on noise and activity. They did launch a three ballistically at us because one of the pilots saw it. So we do all that, you know, pretty successful. We each both jets go off Winchester, no big deal. We land. Heroes welcome at the deed. It's awesome. And I'm thinking like, oh, this is cool, man. It's like late March. chill here, we'll get my three beers a day. We're rolling into April, get another month of tax-free.

And they're like, yeah, no, no, dude, you're going back tomorrow. Back to the States? No, you're going back to Libya again. You're basically going to do a drive-by. We think we know where Gaddafi's son is. Yeah. So that sortie in the way back was a little hairy because did not go as planned. We thought a five was launching at us.

We had weapons fault. It's like that. We had to actually earn our paycheck that sortie, but that one was pretty crazy as well. So we get back. And I basically left the guy who probably to put the joke on me. Like, you know, hey, dude, like, jokes on you.

I actually did go to Libya. Yeah. So then we end up going to, uh, a normal Afghan sortie that summer. Yeah. That one again was fairly, I'd say the one,

two things out of the ordinary and that's, on that deployment happened to me. One was, uh, you know, they had told us for years. Like, hey, dude, be ready, man.

Like, you know, Somalia can happen at any time. And like, when you're young guy, you're like, oh, yeah, dude, you're, Amped up. You're studying the airspace. By the third or fourth time, you're like, dude, I'm done getting cocked tease about Somalia.

I'm not going. Quit teasing me or Yemen or whatever, right? Yeah. So I'd done a pretty late night, and I'm in bed, and we're getting a pounding on the door. And it's like, no, dude, we have to go. We actually think this is happening now. So we walk into the mission room. And if you guys remember, you know, once bin Laden got killed, Anwar Al-Waki, who was the Yemeni, who was American-born, but he was a Yemeni cleric.

He's the guy that actually radicalized the underwear bomber, the Christmas bomber 09. Well, they had a beat on him. And what was crazy was they had actually parked the Marine LCS off the coast of Yemen simply for the purposes of killing this dude. And weird, you know, whatever agency was tracking them, just the moons aligned. The day that they had a beat on them,

this Marine LCS squadron was down for maintenance. So we got launch out of the deed. And it was a huge cock keys because they could never get a beat on them. but the fact that I got woke up at a bed to it, at that point to go target, the potus is number one objective, was really effing cool. Yeah.

You know, they gave us extra go pills that day because we might be airborne for 30 hours, so it's kind of fun. So that was, that happened on that deployment, and then unfortunately also, uh, this was really eerie. You know, we're on a mission north of Bath,

pretty quiet. Nothing's happening, but, uh, it's August. And, uh, I don't want to get the date wrong because it's a pretty bad date, but, uh, So usually what happens is, you know, you'll check out the JA tag. Hey, dude, sorry, it was quiet tonight, but no work, man.

Thanks for the help. Appreciate it. Yep, phone 3-4. You guys stay safe, switching freaks. Cool. So you check in with essentially, like, the, you know, the combat version of the FAA or ATC, really. So it's, you know, at the time it was either an Air Force or a Marine ground control unit. But so we're clear two, three, five back south.

And, you know, at that point now, like, the sortie's over. Even though you're still in country, technically, you're. you're done. So you start kind of doing admin work. We're typing up our misrep on the laptop. You know, guys are stretching, figuring out which movie we were going to play on the way home. Guys are breaking out like, you know, food, whatever. And next you know, we start getting screamed out of regard. Like, you know, bone 3-4, avert, overt, overt, you know, like, so we get the fuck at a dodge. I'm like, what's happening? And, you know, we find out, like, you guys just flew through a hot rise, restricted operating zone. And we're like, yeah, dude,

we'll check the tapes on landing, but like, we got cleared here, dude. Like, you know, my bad, no harm, no foul. So when we land, unfortunately I find out that it's extortion 1-7 that we just blew. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I remember at the time, the guy, it was a team based in the east. So I won't say which base it was at, but when I landed, that one of the team leaders called me screaming at me. Like, basically, like, the gist of it I got was that they either had a beat on the RPG team or,

they thought they had a beat on so either way like in his mind us blowing through his razz it really fucked something up and so I'm sitting there you know he's a 04 I'm in 03 and I'm like sir I'm so sorry I don't know what's happened but like we'll look at our tapes I swear to God like we were cleared and I let's you know not to knock the J-Sot guys but those guys were those guys were notorious for doing pop-up rosas and not telling the rest of the big fight if you know and I get why you know they're generally taking down HVIs objective names right so But they're kind of, I bequeath you, restricted airspace, but not telling anybody else. Yeah, some units were different than others.

This one in particular, I guess, I'd never had an issue with before, but it just, so it's kind of one of those historical things I did not want to be, like, airborne for, but I was. Sure. So that deployment wrapped up, you know, at that point, I was actually select to go back and teach at weapons school. Sequestration, as we remember, happened in 2013. They shut down weapons school. I went and did a ground job up in Kabul up at the airport which was kind of eerie

You know when we saw the pullout I'm seeing videos of like the Thai restaurant on Twitter And the airport like oh shit You know we ate there Yeah shit we took a rocket attack there So I'm kind of fast forwarding And so at this point now like I'm a New Yorker I'm living in West Texas

And I'm kind of like starting to like Okay you know what the cool factor of flying the B1 Is not really compensating for me Not being happy socially Right And so I was kind of ready to like you know jump ship, go to the guard. You know, there's a rescue unit out in Long Island, the 106,

the PJ unit and an H-T-130 unit. I was pretty convinced I was going to jump ship to that unit. And they basically said, dude, just give one more shot. We're going to try and get you back to the East Coast. Just stick with us, too. We're working for you. And so luckily, we did. Okay, I did.

And then I ended up volunteering off cycle for deployment right after the ground one. And, you know, this was like early 25. 14. And so the news wasn't really picking up a lot of the activity in the Middle East yet. Like Afghanistan was cured, right? That's on the downslope. Iraq was Iraq. And so I'm thinking like, you know, I'll get out to the deed. I'll fly once a week. I'll be a wing weapons officer. I'll study for my GMAT or my GRE. And if I don't have an assignment waiting for me when I come home, look it. I'll come here. I'll try to get into a grad school here. I'll work part time. I'll do the

guard thing, whatever. I'll never forget. It's the summer. And my buddy is like, yeah, I do. You might be a little busier than planned. Things are starting to ramp up here. And I said, okay. And then that's when finally the news started picking it up. You know, unfortunately, you know, when the journalist James Foley got beheaded, Sinjar Mountain happened with the Azidis. And so, you know, I got out there two weeks after OIR and Herit Resolve officially kicked off. And so, you know, kind of back to the whole thing, like things happened for a reason. I'm getting ready to launch on my first sortie and I go and check my email and it's like hey congrats you've been selected for an air staff at the time at the Pentagon and I'm like oh dude like guys are high-fiving me like this is great so then now

it's my first ISIS sortie so the way this one works is uh 40 minutes again 45 minutes north barra about another maybe hour to get like northwest of missoul and at this time we had a tanker track literally right inside the Iraqi border you do a preval tank and then you pretty much press in and I'd say for the first three months all we were doing was Kabani because Gabani if you remember was Syria. Yeah. And this is why the Kurds to this day are the bravest

most amazing people we've ever supported why we keep effing them over is beyond me but uh so Kabani was at one area where it's like you know everyone is fleeing Syria everyone's fleeing ISIS's wake and the Kurds were like come at me bro like we're not leaving yeah like you know they got the women and kids out but like the Kabat you know the Kurds that were a fighting age and even their women, they stayed.

Yeah. And it was essentially like trench warfare. Like, they were fighting block to block to block. So my first sortie there, I remember... Now that you mentioned this, I've actually seen footage shot by some of the fighters in Kobani, the Kurds and some of the foreigners that were there with them. Not military, like people volunteered crazy enough to go and do that.

Yeah. But, I mean, it is fucking insane to see, like, air strikes, like, 500 feet in front of them, buildings just being demolished. I'll give you a comparison story real quick after this one, Like so, and as I described before, right, I'm used to like Afghan-Kass. Right. Bone 3-4 contact on two-by movers, you know, in this vicinity, uh, copy 1-3-4 monitor.

And you'd track a guy for a while, see if you're the nefarious, right? That could, that could sometimes turn into an hour, sometimes too. Yeah. Happy to do it. I will never forget, we rip out a two ship of vipers. We do a swap. They do a target handoff into like this area. And it's like, hey, do we saw activity in this block.

So we're, uh, you know, we're searching. And then I was the new guy, so I sat the left seat, not the bomb seat. But I'm running the radio. And, you know, Syria was actually back to the defensive guy there is no longer there just to support the O. Yeah. Like, dude, we're actually, you know, Syrian Air Force is still active. Yeah. The Turks, our friends, every now and then to fuck with us would light us up just because they could.

Right. Because, you know, we're helping the people they hate. Right. So, and they still had an active three. Every now and then the five, the SA5 would go on. So, like, you actually had to be a. DSO. Yeah. Because Syria could pop off at any moment. But, uh, and apparently he was even completely different when the Russian showed up even worse. But so it's funny, like, I'm being the D and I'm watching,

and I'm taking the radio for the guy, because it was weapons heavy. I'll never forget it, you know, talking to the JTAC and it's like, you know, hey, Bone 3-4, contact two by PACs and vicinity 37 zero the alpha. And I, and before I even got the ending grid out, oh, bone 34, they're there. Cool. stand by nine line and I'm just like what what? We're not going to follow these guys for four hours and everyone else in the jet's like dude shut up it's go time it's go time yeah like it was literally like

at that point phase line Broadway I think was the name of the road if you look at a map of Gabani there was like this northeast of southwith running like major highway slash major road and it was called phase line Broadway and for a while if you were southeast of phase line Broadway you were bad

because you were most likely coming off the main road leading from Raqa right because that like they're St. Petersburg for ISIS. Like, oh, you're a new guy. Welcome to the, you know, welcome to our new heavenly state. Get the fuck up to Gabani and, you know, do your job. Yeah. And please come die. Yeah. Thank you. And yeah, that was, that shift of no, dude, this is like no questions asked. Like, there is no tactical directive. There's no coin here. Like, if they're on this grid, they effing die. Right. And for context, you asked before, right, about the danger close. Yeah. Now, granted, a lot of this is also.

because every building in Kobani just seemed to be created with reinforced concrete because sure enough, I found out on another deployment, a future deployment. There was literally a cement factory in the town south of Kobani. LaFrange cement. LCF. So there was the two landing zones, right? There was KLZ, which was Gabani landing

zone after we, you know, cleared it, and then LCF. Yeah, LCF became one of our big bases in the region. Yeah, I was at, I never made the LCF, I made the KLZ once. But so, yeah, but the craziest nine line I ever got was it was like watching a street fight. It was two small buildings with thatched route, not that's route, but like, you know, short roofs.

And we were watching the YPG, the People's Protection Unit, the current organization. You're watching the YPG and ISIS trade shots. And the nine line comes in, and it's literally, you know, line 1 through 3NA, line 4. Elevation was pretty low in that area. You know, line 6, the grid line started with 37-0 to the alpha. No shit. Line 8, west 4-0 meters. And they wanted a 38.

Wow. And I'm like, dude, and we found that afterwards, like, dude, don't ask questions. Yeah. The minute you call inbound, we somehow get word to them. Yeah. And they seek shelter. And, like, basically, like, dude, if you don't drop, they're going to die. Yeah.

So, I mean, that went on, I mean, Kabani was insane. Yeah. And Kabani was a challenge because, you know, we're going up there. Originally, we're going up there with a cast load out. Yeah. So, like, you know, we're all doing, like, air burst on the nose cones, which are great. but like if you're doing buildings with any sort of like structural integrity right those things are eating our bombs alive because we're

moving the hard cone of them yeah so we finally figured out that like do you guys change that on the bird do you guys like dial that in there I can change from impact to airburst but like the physical cone that's on the ground oh interesting so the problem is like even if I'm dropping something impact yeah if it's got a quote unquote flangeable nose cone you've seen those things yeah they look like a like a it's a black little sensor if you're dropping those things on there like it's essentially removing like I hate to say it like part of the structural integrity the weapon on the nose of it yeah so that there were times like their buildings were like eating

our weapons alive yeah and you know it's so interesting that you know I've talked to quite a few military lawyers in the past about like rules of engagement and they've explained that in an American the American military there's basically no such thing as a free fire zone yeah there always has to be some sort of intel that directs you that there's suspected enemy activity here good intel or bad, that's debatable. But it sounds like this is a case where actually, I don't want to use the term free fire, but

I mean, this was declared bad guy land. It was funny. It was probably the closest thing to type 3 casts that I've ever seen. Like World War II. Basically like, level in this place. Yeah, like, you know, if I go back and read, hopefully some of my CCTV buddies aren't listening, but

you know, type 1 cast is you can see both the friendly and the enemy. Type 2 is you've got to see one or the other. Type 3 was literally like that whole area is bad. And type 3 is the one engagement where they don't clear you hot. They go call when engagement complete. Like go engage and you tell me when you're done mopping shit up, right? So you're Winchestering every load.

Pretty close. Yeah. I mean, I still had to get eyes on because there were still Kurds running around. But, I mean, what I think was happening was, so here's the craziest part about it too is I'm getting cleared hot over Satcom by a guy on the East Coast. Right. I'll just say that. So we think we pieced together what was happening. It was either uniform or non-uniform guys on our side, running around the Kurds,

passing intel to guys across the border. That was getting back to, again, a certain area on the East Coast, probably via sat phone. And those guys were literally clearing us hot from some desk somewhere. Yeah, yeah. There were like fire direction centers in Iraq. Yeah. But still a very gnarly, convoluted process. And then it got to the point where, like, we were giving, like, iPads to the Kurds, right?

Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, basically we started doing matching buildings to numbers. Yeah. So the entire, and we did this a lot of Afghanistan, too, but we were creating grid systems based on the buildings. Yeah. Like, bad guys were in building 55 in this grid. Yeah. And then the worst was, you know, there's times where, like, the cloud cover was just, I couldn't see shit.

Yeah. And I'm basically having a release on Maggers grids or, you ever heard of the term piss off? No. Precision strike suite for Special Operations Forces It was basically Mencerated graphics that I could actually derive Cat 1 quartets for to drop Oh like sounds like what we would have called

GRGs back in the old day It was basically a GRG But it was a computer program You could direct exact You could actually derive a cat one cord and office We were using that But yeah it was it was insane Because I think the comment that I made one time was

Those days in Kabani It was interdiv We were basically doing error and addiction, but we were calling it CASS, either for simplicity, because all the air crew in that time were just trained to do CASS. So I was getting, like, you know,

doctrinally speaking, getting cleared hot from a guy 4,000 miles away for a guy that I can't see. Like, that's not CASS. Right. And in a lot of cases, too, like, on objectives, because the cool thing about this, too, was as we're supporting the Kurds,

you know, every now and then, like, you get a guy jumping on your radio from that same organization. Like, hey, dude, you're being redirected. We have objective so-and-so in sight. So that same organization was both doing the support for the Kurds,

but they were also doing their H-VI targeting. And it was that unit that owned that portion of the world. Yeah, right. Yeah, so like those guys were like, and they're all coming from the same op center. I mean, they had some forward guys, obviously, in certain areas, right? But it was a few stories where like...

I mean, back, just to like take us back in time, this is like the 2014... This is literally, this is literally like months, two and three of ISIS. Yeah. So there's, there's really no American uniform service members

in Syria. There's no one wearing, I'll just say this, there's no one wearing flags on the uniforms. Right, for sure. Yeah, I mean,

if we had anyone over there was very, very minimal. Yeah, I mean, that's, like they said, we'd call the JTax to when we land

on a Vosophon, and they were back in the States and, you know, you know how those guys are. Like, if you call one of those fires, you know, fires, this is Chris. Actually,

now that I think about it, the French were over there before us. Oh, I remember for a while, we got better intel, especially in Iraq, because you probably do remember this. Even our tier one units

were restricted from not, they could not get within one click of an active zone. So literally the Canadians, the French, some other countries, I think. Maybe the Brits. I think so. They were the ones.

So we were seeing, well, the crazy thing they saw was, I think he's now the, I know he was in one start of the time, but Carilla, I remember the name. I think he's a four-star now, General Corrilla. He was the one star in the north,

and he wanted a B-1 for a strike, and it was some entrenched thing near Missoule. And I'll never forget, we're in the Kayok, and we see pictures. And it looked like Polaroids, but it was literally the Kansoft dudes, low-crawling it, digital camera shit. And there's one point where, like,

you see, like, the dirt flying over the guy's shoulder in the photo, and it's an ISIS dude digging a trench. Like, those guys got that close. Holy shit. Talk about close-recky. Yeah. So, like, and I think, I think legally we were restricted. Like, our guys couldn't go do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds right about that time frame. Yeah, like, I guess the fall of 14 was like, I mean, Kobani was just like a free-for-all. Like, it was kind of one of those things where, like, if you supported Kobani and came home and only released six weapons, you were, like kicking yourself with just, what was me? Like, what was, like, it was that insane.

Right. Kibani was out of control. And then one of the coolest things, I wish I would have caught this on my pod. You know, this was actually, because it was. if you guys remember like i think the guy kirby was still active duty uh carry was the secretary of state we had said right in the beginning like hey we really can't help these people like they're like we we can't get involved it sucks but like we can't keep coming involved this area and i i think not to presume to know the inner workings of the government but like

i want to feel like between the sinjar mountain thing and james fully getting beheaded that seemed to sort of turn public opinion that's when we got involved and so like kebani went from being like this lost cause to like through like again probably thousands of weapons over the course of four to four months like those guys the Kurds beat those dudes back block by block by block and one of the coolest things i ever saw was the high ground southeast of kibbani was this area called mishton or hill and the strike eagle guys got it on camera i wish i would have but there's this cool video of it's a sniper pod footage where the strike hill is doing like a loop around the you know the village just for like reci and you literally see the white

IPG, storm up the hill, toss the ice. It's almost like Iwo Jima. They throw the ISIS flag off and they plant like the yellow YPG flags. Yeah. Wish I would have flown it. It was really jealous. I wish I would have seen that. But that was that seven months, I would say, like, doing that mission was probably like the coolest seven

months of my life. Yeah. Because that happened you were just pounding the shit out of some assholes. Yeah, it was, you know, Afghanistan, you'd still go over there just to let them know you're still there. But this is 14. I don't think anyone thought Afghanistan would devolve into what it had been evolving into. And then that was the focus, but then also the J-Soc guys really started to, you know,

that was the big rumor for a while was, hey, save all your low collateral weapons because like, Missoules is going to be hot and heavy. The Missoules offensive eventually took like, happened like six months after it was planned, but like, you know, we'd do some recic work in Missou, and it was like, you know, I dropped twice in Missoule, but like you'd talk to like some of the softbirds, like, the youth 28s and some of the other things like and those guys were dropping like the really really really really low collateral precision weapons I mean those guys were doing like assassination missions you mean like health fires not even I'm talking like uh things called like you can Google and

like I'll just say Google the word Griffin I mean these are these are essentially like little pneumatic things pop out of a tube and it's essentially like a 15 or 20 pound warhead yeah the point where like you could be hvI number one I'm hvri number two we're having a conversation next you know, like, I black out and I look up and you're dead. Yeah. Because this like shotgun shell on Roy just went up over your head. Yeah.

Like, yeah, it was sexy to watch. Like, it was a few times I wish I had low collateral weapons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was happy with my 500 pounds or so. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that was, like I said, that deployment alone, I could probably go into a separate, complete hour-long story about some of the stuff we saw there.

But, like, yeah, it was amazing because we were generally the only platform that could get there, hang out for three or four hours at a time and just effing work. The one or two close calls I had was, this is pretty funny. So we're doing work, and if you look at a map of Syria, Darazar, which now was the site of that...

Dara, south. Yeah, so... It was right, it was near the Iraq border. It was like maybe a killbox duel off the Iraq border, so like 60 miles, if that. But that was one of the last places Assad still had a presence there, and he still had an Air Force base there.

So it was one of the last place. one night where we're working, we're going Connecticut a lot, and we're getting ready to get ripped out by a two ship of vipers. And this is what happened every now and they were like, they show up on station and like, Bone, we actually blew a lot of gas getting through some other than get up here. Dude, like, would you mind, would you mind covering the first part of our bowl? Where to go tank? Like, yeah, of course, we'll stay and drop more weapons, of course. So this one night, you know, they go off and get gas. And then next thing you know, we start hearing a bogey call. And so if you, you know,

geographically on the map, like, Kibani, we would always fly solo. The Rootskiskees weren't there yet. They weren't there yet, no. This is still like late 14 or early 15. But occasionally, you'd randomly get like a mig 23, a 29 Al-Assad. Yeah, Assad bird. So, what happens is,

it's kind of tough to describe geographically, but like, you know, Kobani is in like the north, almost like northwest part of the country. I imagine the viper pilots jagging themselves off over this opportunity. Oh, yeah, it was a few of them that were like, I'm just itching for something. The spin said, like, unless you're getting threatened, dude, let them fly. Really?

Yeah. Oh, dude, it was very, there was definitely some behind the scenes, like, cabinet-level conversation probably happened. But, like, from our standpoint, it's like, dude, unless you were getting engaged. You leave them alone. Yeah, like, I don't care if it's a mid-29. I don't care if it's, like, you know, their version of 130. You stay outside of this certain range for the spins.

Like, you are here by ordered, right? Yeah. So, like, so we're flying. We hear a bogey call. And they're like, yeah, boom. we got a boge. You might want to not be in Syria anymore. Like, all right. So like, you know, Darzar is here. We're in Kobani. And it's kind of

setting up one of these things where it's like, uh, you know, bone 3-4, six status of boge. You know, bogey bra. Can you guys you guys? Can you guys? Can you guys the green? Well, this is in the green. But we're talking. Oh, not those guys, no. No. And I don't think the Syrians even listen to guard, right? Okay. So it's like, but I'll never forget, like, we're going. And I'm like, enough of this shit. I'm like, yo, blah, blah, blah, blah. Say status of Viper flight. Uh, Viper flight. Weeper flight. Wee

egress them to Iraq because the bogey. I'm like, and I'm like, so we get this straight. You egress the two ship of fighters because there's a bogey and we're here. And you're there. And I felt bad because I found out later I think it was a lieutenant on the bird. And you hear like the, oh shit. And so we had a decoy on our, we had the ability to launch decoys on our jet. And so I tell the young guys sit next to me, like, go do decoy out. And at this point now, like, I might necessarily, I, the angle cut off, I think we would have

probably beating him into Iraq and been okay. But he started inching up this way and it's like, does this guy know where we are? Like now, and at this point now it's like, dude, we might have to basically run into Turkey crying, like, please don't shoot us, but like you're a NATO ally airboats. That was like in my head, like as the mission commander. Like we might have to literally squawk like emergency.

Yeah. And go like beg for forgiveness in Turkey. Yeah. Would not have gone over well. Probably like a fucking fart in church. But like luckily it didn't happen because it's, some point now, like, the guy eventually just turned away. And then we found out later, like, it was an L-39, like, just doing a night flight.

Like, the night wrecky, like, I don't think you even realize we were there. Oh, okay. So that was a pretty funny, like, close call. Do you, I mean, you're not, you can tell, like, I don't want to ask you something that is restricted classified. But do you guys have any kind of countermeasures? Are you completely reliant on fighters? No, we, so there, on paper, yes.

But there's also just some realities of like, dude, if it's a certain threat with a certain missile, like, we're, you know, speed, speed of running away. Now, the one thing we do have on a lot of fighters is, like, we have gas to blow. And, like, you know, like, those guys trying to chase me down, they're going to go bingo. Uh-huh. I've survived more red flag and weapons school events just by simply running away. Okay. Now, like, generally at an exercise, I would run away and go low to get lost in the clutter. we could not do that in Syria because

they had surface to air the surface to air wasn't really the worry it was the like we ended up getting visual conferred I actually, we wasn't me personally but we ended up getting visual confirmation of an actual man pad in Kabani. Okay. And it was misidentified

initially as an RPG and then I go back and look at the table and like whoa stop dude that's this is a problem is you know we had hogs doing shows of force we had done a show of force and we're like dude there's an effing like SA 14 equivalent thing out there like this is a problem right so after we after we found that out we stopped doing that um but you know yeah like I said the cool thing about it was you know we were integral I think

in you know Kobani went from being sort of like a lost cause to like no we actually beat these guys and liberated it yeah and then you know the next few months after that that I was there was it was like okay now it's the war in the Kobani suburbs like every little feeder town that Issa was using to feed in, we would target those. At some point, too, this was crazy. So the whole time this is happening, right?

Just west of Kobani was the tomb of Suleiman. So it's the tomb of one of their ancient sultans, the Turks. It just happens to now be in what was called, you know, Syria. And this is insane.

That thing was guarded by a contingent of Turk special forces. And at some point, when we were there, they had caught Intel or whatever, like ISIS was threatening to, like, basically invaded and desecrate his body and all this. So, uh, I didn't get to fly this night,

but, uh, the Turks ended up launching like a 60 or 40 vehicle convoy into Syria to take the remains of Sulamon the Great. Is that like the third of the, I forget, I think I'll Google it. Was that when they went into Drobolis? I don't know if that was a specific town, but you can, it's on Wikipedia, like, and I've never seen this thing in the pod,

it looks pretty cool. It's like this, It's a bridge that leads into like this little like miniature peninsula. There's like a gatehouse for like where the soft dudes live. And then literally the tomb of like this dude from like centuries ago. Yeah. You know, but ISIS was claiming to like they were going to come in and like invade it and kill all the guards. And, you know, so I think we did a diversionary strike south there. And one of my buddies was airborne for it.

We stayed away. So I think their bipers came in to provide air cover. Yeah. So we just kind of like, do you guys do what you want? Yeah. We'll be over here actually like, you know, helping the courage. You guys can, you know, take like your George Washington and bring him home. Sure, sure.

Yeah, just the fact that it was just like a weird little cool historical thing. Like there's this weird little like, it's almost like the Vatican. Like there's this weird piece of quote-unquote Turkish land in the middle of Syria that like you guys like protect with like this like contingent of soft dudes living in like Indian country. So that was like I would say the first three or four months of that deployment. And then a lot of stuff started shifting back into Iraq. Like that point I think we. We had a bigger presence. You know, we had a lot more white soft dudes running around with, like, Iraqi soft and Iraqi,

you know, national police, some of those dudes. I got a little dicey at times because you guys remember seeing some of those YouTube clips of, like, you know, the Shia militia guys that were like, you know, the butchers of ISIS. They hate us just as much, probably. Right. I definitely, I can't confirm or deny, but there were definitely a few strikes we took part in that, I think inadvertently helped those dudes. Yeah.

But, like, you know, enemy my enemy is my friend for that time being. type of shit so. Well, I mean, Iran was the same deal, right? Iran was very much against ISIS, but Iran was never on our side. No, and that was, it was funny, because there was that one guy, I remember what his name was, the one guy that had, like, you know, he was a six-tooth bodybuilder, he carried an axe with him, he had some huge, bushy black beard,

he was like, you know, I feel what his name was, but he was like, I guess, the Farsi way they described, he was the angel of death, I think is what his nickname was, but, you know, this guy now? Yeah, like, a roided up dude with a black beard by a pirate. I forget which militia he was a part of But was it J-Shell Shabby It might have been

But I lost track of all You know the jam because the jam came back When I was there The Madi Army came back when we were there But yeah It was actually crazy too because I mean you were a fifth group guy You could probably appreciate this

You number in 07 Unfortunately the The three guys got kidnapped And eventually got you know They were 101st guys They weren't fifth group guys, but there were four Campbell guys. This was those seven in Iraq. Downing like Carbala or something.

Yeah, it was in that, they called it the Sunni triangle. Yeah, yeah. One of those areas. But the first time I really got shot at was the unit out looking for those guys got hit by NID. And I guess the EOD trooper, whoever was, was pretty sharp. You could tell it was a command wire. So the guys were around. So we did one show of force, ICOM, shotter got generated, and then this was really dumb on our part.

we did a re-attack show of force but we came back to the same heading and as we're coming back for the second go around we look over and like you know thankfully it was an RPG but like that was the first time like oh shit like

yeah and then every time we would do shows the force that area like the jam would shoot at us you know the but you know it was kind of funny like we joked at like

every show of force we did we made him piss through their AK bullets because we were literally just shooting up with an AK yeah hoping for a golden BB just following our jet noise yeah meanwhile the things are like

you know hopefully falling out of the sky and hitting him back the rebound so we'll see but yeah that was uh but yeah that was uh i came home june of 15 so i did i missed the russians and then i did uh two more weapons school stories as an instructor and then you know basically became a dirty staff when he after that you know went to the pentagon uh did weapons requirements which is actually a really cool job i was actually able to uh i guess one of my cool stories if you can even really have a cool

story in the pentagon was uh you know we realized after two too many years that, you know, having a hellfire or having a 250 pound SDB is not really, quote, unquote, low collateral. We really needed some sort of a forward firing ordinance. And so BAE actually built this thing called APWS, Advanced Precision Kill Weapon. And what it is is, it's a laser guided rocket on the front of a 275. I'm sorry, it's a laser guidance kit on the front of a 275 rocket. It's actually pretty genius because apparently we have like hundreds of thousands of 275 rockets at our arsenal. And so the Marines were the first to acquire them.

We were kind of trying to beg, borrow, and steal from them. And I'll never forget, for anything to happen in the Air Force, I would probably need, like, a one or two stars approval, right? Right. The guy in the Marines that was controlling this stockpile, he was operating on standing orders from his three-star, like, I can't go below a certain number. But anything after that, dude, you want to hop in front of our production line, feel free.

That's awesome. So I never going down to the bar, because I actually was lucky enough to work in the fighter bar. We got him down to the bar, and Thriller was his call sign Ryan Shill, yeah, Thriller was his call sign

he was a cobra guy and I'll never forget like we actually got the deal done just by me giving him a six pack and we were able to get 30 rockets to bath for the vipers to use on some J-Soc targets

so that was actually a pretty cool like heading on war story and then the next seven years ago you know I just punched the clock and you know did weapons stuff so do you guys like what's the

nature of like electronic warfare because you talk about the Icom chatter did you guys have and we're used to like the EW birds but as EW becomes more advanced and the suites become more compact are they able to squeeze like an EW suite

on birds like yours? That's what we're true. Well I'd say for the legacy stuff in theory yes but the problem is as you can imagine there is like zero appetite to upgrade

legacy systems that are not going to play in the Pacific. Sure. So I would say right now, the one thing that they're going to work on for the Super Hornet is going to be a digitized version of something that can be upgraded modually. You know,

there is, like, there is, there is the ability. The problem is there's just no appetite to spend a few hundred million in NRE, non-recurring engineering, to refurbish basically what is a legacy system. Right. Because at some point,

even if you gave it unlimited power and even if you gave it like the greatest electronic attack techniques at the end of the day if it's not stealth it's a honking huge platform and the threats that are getting developed right now are just to the point where like I don't even think you have a chance

like if you're a fourth generation platform getting within a certain range of something like you're like the PK of them getting a hit on you is pretty high yeah now that being said that's what we sort of trained to yet I think you look

I mean I hate to say but you know even before what's happening right now in Gaza I think the Israelis routinely prove that there is a way now granted the Israelis are flying F-35s and doing some amazing stuff but it's like you know it's there's the on paper capes

and then I guess there's like you know the push to test right like you know you're talking about all these drones that they shot down the other day it's that I'm even talking about like waking up and finding out like they got into like downtown Damascus and downtown here

that are protected by fairly advanced Russian stuff most likely with some Russian Merks offering it possibly and somehow they're still getting through and I don't I'm not ready anymore to that stuff

but it's like I'm wondering how much of it is a combination of the aircraft the weapon types but like you know on paper that really shouldn't be happening but somehow they're proving it to happen I mean look at Ukraine

you know like they worried us for a long time on you know but the Ukrainians are literally with like spit and glue and elbow grease and ingenuity. Like, for instance, I don't know the specifics of it. It was open source though, but like, you know, we gave a bunch of AGM-88's harms that we were going to decommission anyway. Yeah.

They literally jerry-rigged them to work on their migs, which is an American weapon on a Russian fighter. Yeah. It made it work. Yeah. So, you know, there's the capability piece, and then I think, honestly, just the application piece. So, you know, could you mention, like, the chance of age G4,

or Generation 4, like, you know, platform getting to target. Do you think that even with Gen 5 or moving forward, you know, when we look at like hypersonics, when we look at things like that, do you think that there's a point where if it's not like an orbital platform or an atmospheric platform that we're going to move past the idea of bomber? I think we're, I think, and I'm not smart at the kind of this stuff, but like at some point, right, Everything that we're doing right now, let's be honest, it's evolutionary. It's not revolutionary.

So we're adding a few more extra miles on a weapon. We're adding a few more layers of, quote-unquote, low RCS, right? But we're very rapidly, maybe not very rapidly, but at some point, we're going to basically get to, like, the cost curve where, like, it's going to take me in the billions to get you, like, a degree, maybe two of better RCS. It's going to take me in the billions to get, you know, a few hundred more miles. on this missile. Like at some point, like, we're just going to get to, like, this standoff of, you know, a near pier in the Pacific with tyranny of distance is building systems that are going to keep us out, like, basically to Hawaii. Right. And then we're going to spend in the billions to, like,

fight away. So at some point, it's going to be like, like, what do you do here? And that's when I think what gets worrisome is that's when you start seeing this shift to, let's just say, other, like other planes, you know, Leo, this, that, the other thing. Like, that's, that's truly, like, you know, I think a lot of people sort of scoffed, maybe me included when the whole Space Force was created, but, like, I mean, you really,

I think the world is evolving to a level where space, you can no longer have space sort of be a subcomponent of a service. Like, and maybe the first few years until like that, like, I don't think, and even some people in the military probably don't realize, like, what a problem that area is going to be and how contestant it's going to be. so maybe some guys like why do we need a space force

like it's kind of one of those things where like it will probably it will more than prove it's worth I think in the future yeah because you really can't afford to have like why have the air force in the army and the navy and we have a space expertise or a space command of that like that's just not going to cut it like you

you essentially need a dedicated service sure kind of in the same way like the Marines right like you know I can't just have like a specialty part of the army do the amphibious small unit self-contain Mew, meth concept, like, you actually need a service to do that. Right. So the difference between, like, from a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism mission to

fighting, you know, if another global war happens and our stuff that's in space gets shot down, all those modern capabilities we've been describing for the last few hours here are, like, kind of off the table. They go away. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Like, no matter how many times we try to train to it, it's going to be a rough go of it when, if we are truly GPS out, like, we, you know, part of our training syllabus is we

would train GPS out and you know we had an INS inert navigation system we would train how to actually keep that thing working without GPS crack hits going to it every six seconds yeah but i mean there's a difference between doing it on a training mission to check off a training box versus like doing it for real right right i mean and i mean you guys are probably enough to remember like the thomas guys like who like who like who knows how to use a thomas guy now i don't yeah yeah like that i i don't even know how to like do like you think about too like it's one thing doing it like over land or in vicinity of land. Right.

But you look at the guys that have to do like celestial navigation. Yeah, exactly. Your feet wet for six, seven hours. Yeah. That's going to happen. Yeah. And that's the thing sometimes when you describe the current, like the next fight possibly, you hope it doesn't happen.

But, you know, when you try to put it for scale, it's like, dude, imagine trying to go from New York to California over nothing but water. Right. With no frame of reference. Right. And that's like the distances we're talking about when we think we're going to quote unquote operate in that area. Right.

Like, you know, it's. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting, you know, from what I've seen, at least from when I left the service, you know, when I got back from my deployment in 19, it was 2035, 2035, right? And then it slowly started to shift to like, dude, we're not going to get to 35 if we can't fix today in 27 and 30. And then at least now, from the Air Force perspective now, like I walk around all these trade shows and it's like a lot of the young airmen and a lot of the young operators now are all wearing like on their flights to the uniform, they're wearing 2027 pentads. is like a constant reminder like, yeah, dude, this is like around the corner. Yeah. And then to your point about the fourth-gen piece,

like, I think there's probably sometimes a mischaracterization on what we think our force structure is going to look like. Like, dude, even if it's 2030, 20-35, like, A, we don't have the money to do it, and B, we're not going to have the range to just have an entire fifth-gen force. Right. Like, the buff is still going to be here.

It sounds like the B-1 might still be here. Like a large chunk, I think, of our air. aircraft, our combat air force, is still going to be fourth-gen. Yeah. I mean, the Navy, I mean, you know what? Like the Super Horn, it's like that thing is, I mean, you saw a top gun too. Like, that thing, I mean, that thing will probably fly to the 2030s and beyond. Yeah.

Like, just because we, A, I would say the 35 is a little range limited. It's one engine. The load out is not what we needed to be. So, like, you, even again, if money was no object and you gave Lockheed Martin a blank check, like, we, an entire all F-35 force is not the right answer. Right. So that's kind of like the science. You know, it's like an art and a science they say about like, you know, force design planning is like what is the right high or low mix of like fourth to fifth gen stuff?

And that's been like that debate has raged off like the last decade, I would say at least. Well, and I mean, would you, and not being an expert in this field, I would say that things like A10 and AC130s are arguably like third gen, but they still have function. And so many times the services or Congress, like, they outrun their headlights by trying to mothball these things when they still have. You even see Socom getting their little crop duster. Oh, that, yeah, that thing's actually going to be pretty cool to watch.

It's, and it does have a use in a counterinsurgency conflict. It does. And that's the thing. Well, it's funny you bring that up because, you know, for years I was a little bitter towards big, big Air Force, you know, big blues. It's like, you know, we ran our B1 into the ground, right? Like, we just, we beat the piss out of it. It's, we had to get rid of a bunch of jets, you know.

when I went active duty and sort of flying, I want to say we had 62 or 63B1s. We're down to like 45 now because we've had to mothball a lot of them. We had to get rid of the hangar queens to redirect assets of the flying ones. And one of my really good friends, I won't knock him out here, but pretty brilliant dude. And on one of our deployments, just because he was bored, he ran the numbers on, you know, cost for flight hour,

the maintenance call, like, and he goes, the cost in six months that it took to have a bone squadron and an F-15 squadron, that money, you literally could have outfitted, let's say, Harat and Mez up in the north, with like 18 or 12, either AT-6s or Super DeKanos, right? And you could have had fighter pilots doing a six-month tour doing those things. We did with other aircraft. Yeah. And sure enough, we'll end up doing 10 years later.

We bought the Afghans A-29s. Yeah. So it's like we, yeah, I don't. It's like we, you know, the U.S. Air Force and like, you know, in the Navy, like, they were not designed to do coin, right? They're designed to fight a near pier. Right. And, but unfortunately, I think for us is, you know, I don't think any of us thought it would be 20 years of coin. Right.

And it just really bled down these things that we're going to need night one. Yeah. So hit questions for Brian. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, please. So you definitely know about, like, the next generation air dominance. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's supposed to replace F-22, F-15s for the most part, right? In a way, yeah, I think it's going to be a comp, I think A, and I have to kind of unremember some of the, I got men in black, you know, when I left that guy, obviously, but I would just say NGAD is going to be just, the fancy buzz term is this thing called family of systems. I think NGAD is going to be the initial tranche in a family of capabilities, if you will. Like, I don't think it's going to flat out replace anything in all honesty.

like I think when the F when the 22 goes away unfortunately are they going to be more because of money and manning and funding I think the I would kind of equate NGAD in a little this is my opinion I could be wrong but kind of in the way that hypersonics are not going to replace all weapons right they're going to be complimentary

because A we can't afford to be an all hypersonic force it's going to complement an existing force structure does that make sense so I think NGAD is going to kind of come on in small batches and NGAD I think B-21 maybe won't be this that exquisite, but like, those are the things you're going to see, like, I don't even mean like night one.

That's going to be like minute one, hour one. Like those are going to be the things that like literally do like break, like they're going to be like the safe breaker for like the first few hours. Yeah. And it's like, okay. Gad's going to be manned and unmanned, right? That's the thought process. They kind of keep going back and forth on that.

But yes, that that's at least the initial thought. The production line and whatever they're going to use for Engad in theory could eventually be a souped up version of this thing called the CCA, the collaborative combat autonomous thing. The thought process with CCAs is I could have 1F35 force multiplying itself by controlling five or six of these unmanned CCAs

to sort of do its bidding, if you will. It's carrying weapons, it's going forward, it's doing forward launch, and it's sort of being like a loyal wingman to a fighter slaved off to the human operator. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. One thing we talked about, like we talked about sort of the policy

you know the how the close air support and things like that became became a lot more restrictive and we've talked on the on you know to guys like J-Tax before and people who are like yeah I had to have like a free page like a three-page thing prepared to justify a call for fire yeah we've talked about that but one of things that we didn't talk about that I'd love to hear from you is like one of the things that frustrated a lot of ground troops and I think a lot of pilots and air crews with at least the Air Force in the latter parts of the war was like AC130 couldn't fly during the day that there were people in high-level positions

that were placing the airframe above the troops on the ground. Did you guys have any experience with that? We did. So here's like a B-1 nuanced example. The first two or three deployments, when I did shows of force, we were restricted to 5,000 feet over the ground. And it took us like a deployment or two

to convince the leadership, like, you're actually making me a bigger target at 5,000 feet. Like simply from like a trig standpoint, like, and we actually eventually got the GOs to get it down to 1,000 feet in combat. But you think about it, like if I'm, you know, I'm the bad guy and, you know, we want to, you know, scare him,

generate I-com chatter on him, a journey to fix on him like if I'm flying at 5,000 feet it's like the equivalent of seeing like the team house thing that fucker could beat me all day and I think we just assume that all the capable you know SA 7 equivalents like IR man pads were gone by that point but it's like you're actually giving that you'd a better chance to kill me higher than if you let me literally scream up on them at 500 or a thousand feet right so there was that that's like no joke a B1 specific example that was real uh that's one um you know uh trying to think of some other ones.

Like, you know, for a while, if it was in defense of a guy on the ground, like, you know, if my wing happened to clip Pakistan, like, okay, whatever shit happens. Like, my third and fourth deployment, you encroached on Pakistan, like, by a millimeter, you were going home.

Wow. Like, it was, yeah, and I think, I mean, I think some of that's politics, that some of that's around the time of, like, the Torquham Gate incident. Yeah. Where, I mean, again, I've talked to some guys that were involved in that, and I think when you're doing body searches

afterwards and you're finding pack mill IDs on bad guys, you might have had a reason to engage, but you had to kind of eat it because it's a political thing. And you guys remember, like, that actually fucked a lot of the guys in country for a while because, like, they did not, I mean, you can only get so much inbound to Afghanistan via the air. Like, most of that stuff was like the trucks. So when that stuff was cold, that was a problem. Yeah. When they would close the beach road to us

Like that was a problem Yeah Because like at that point now like The guys in country are restricted to like Like anyone that was in country Like that's all you're getting like bones aren't coming Yeah F-15 at that point

It moved to Dauphal like they're not coming Yeah The boat guys aren't coming like so that like That's sort of a different argument I apologize but like yeah But it leads into like You'd almost have to like People want to put your wings on my table going like

Yep cool Send me home take my wings But like that guy was gonna get a weapon whether you like it or not. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one story was, you guys remember Marja, 2010, and that was a McChrystal thing too,

but like, they told us for three months leading up to it, like, you will not drop on night, like you bones, you're there to, like, prevent Somalia from happening, but like, the whole, basically it's like, we don't even want you here, because you're ruining our whole message of, like, people outreach and everything else, but it's like, the war's over, bro.

Yeah. Yeah. And then no shit, sure enough, night one, Marja, Marines took a tick and, like, my buddy was flying. God bless him. And we're like, no, no, you're getting a weapon. And I don't care if I had to give my effing wings up, like, this guy's getting a weapon.

Yeah. And what was nuts about that was, like, because it was such a high profile op, it was literally a single 38. And I think when the time, by the time he landed, there was at least two GOs hanging around, trying to get in his shit. The debrief for a single weapon was like three, four hours. Whereas, like, I've gone Winchester and been in and out in, like, 45. It's fucking ridiculous. I mean, that was, that was, I mean, I think to your point, what you asked was about, about like arbitrary restrictions on the aircraft.

I think the two, like, that I can think of really is like the border incursion shit. And then again, the show of force thing blew us away for a while. It's like, dude, you're painting, you're basically screaming it like, I'm making it easier for you. Yeah. Because now I'm not at $20,000. I'm at $5,000. Like, please come kill me. Like, please fucking take a shot.

When they finally smartened up and let us go down to $1,000, that's when we actually started getting better effects. Yeah. Because I think for years, we had desensitized the enemy to like, okay, cool, the infails are flying. they'll put on an air show, then they'll leave, and then we can go back to doing what we do. Right. And we started doing that tactic. Like, that's when, like,

everything else, so they adapted to that. But there was actually a cool six-month period where, like, the icon got scary again. Like, oh, they're not fucking around. Like, they're letting the infidels come down. Because they thought for a while, like, we were, like, a hog. Like, I could shoot you with a gun. So we let them think that, obviously.

But, you know, there were times where, like, we would change. And you had to give him credit, like, those guys could adapt, like, no water. And we would take, you know. They figured. everything out pretty quickly. It took a, yeah, I never Gates's quote when he was the sect

death, you know, we're being out propaganded by a guy in a cave. Yeah. And we have an entire, you know, billion dollar public affairs machine and messaging and sciops and stuff. So, yeah. Which I don't think was the fault of our guys. It was, it took the first

2006 year training to come in to approve something. Yeah. Meanwhile, the local Taliban, you know, fucking platoon sergeant equivalent was like, yeah, cool, get it out there. Yeah. Yeah. So questions from viewers. What's the story behind Brian's call sign and a sloth.

Oh, shit. Wow, okay. So the way, like, at least in our squad, you know, so a naming ceremony is not like what you see like in the movies, like, it's not like cool call signs. It's usually something dumb and stupid you did. So in my early days, uh, ball duster. Yeah. You know, or, you know, fucker.

Yeah. Or Merkin or something. So what happened was, uh, I would, uh, I had a habit for, uh, in South Dakota, obviously, the elements are not really in your favor if you want to get, smashed and make it home safely sometimes. So I would find some ingenious places to sleep. Mostly it was ATM

dwellings and bank. But I had a gift. I could nap anywhere, any time. So between exhibiting sloth like behavior when they did our ceremony, at the time I was the deputy mayor of our bar and the mayor was chunks. So then somebody

decided to superimpose my face on the sloth from the goonies. So the combination of like slothy animal because I was napping and moving slow all the time because I was you know being a lush and then chunk you know sloth in the goonies baby root

for like about a month I got named I was finding fucking baby roots and like my flight bag my helmet I would love that personally I love some baby roots it was but it was like get on the net hey you guys like when you're in employment you're in meathead mode right

you're not getting in shape you not we're not boozing as much obviously but it's like you know I'm like dude get this fat boy cany way for me yeah i got i got a i have a girl disappointed when i come home i want to like have like a three-pack you know for the appointment so yeah but that's yeah like like like like most aircrew things it's generally like either something you did stupid once or just like a repeated demonstration of behavior yeah between the and this is back before the days of like really good this is like oh six oh seven no it was actually oh five it was oh six

so i remember the guy who did the photoshop it was like rembrand like how he did this photoshop and it was like it didn't look like it was fake Yeah. Like the guy made all the creases work and the coloring. So it's like the guy misses calling. It's awesome. It was what his call sign was. Yeah. But yeah, sorry. I wish there was a better story behind it. Alex, thank you very much. Do you think non-stelf bomber platforms will have a future near-pure symmetrical conflicts in the future? Or will everything be like drones and stealth aircraft? No, I definitely think at least for the next decade or more, I think for two reasons. A, we just,

We don't have a number of jets to do. I think right now drones based from aircraft capability were pretty limited to what we can do with those things. Like I mentioned before, I think the CCA concept is still a few years away. But I would argue from a, well, A, it's, you know what's going to think about too, like the cost of just retiring everything, but then regenerating a new platform from scratch is going to be pretty impossible. Yeah. That's going to create at least a multi-year gap. So yes, but I would say obviously as the threats increase and push you out further, it's going to demand.

So the role I see for fourth generation aircraft, especially bombers, is in the initial phases of a conflict in a near pier, it's probably going to be your cruise missile and hypersonic carrier. That'll probably be the first couple days of the war or whenever they're able to get in. Yeah. And then like most things, I don't really know if we have a good example in recent history of what we can compare what we think the next one would be. but like everything else right like you know iraq was you know iraq was hot and heavy with a traditional iads takedown and then within a few weeks or so like it transitioned into we pretty much own the air their fighters are gone their sams are gone now we're just sort of doing like you know uh air superiority sort of uh complete dominance of the air where i can i can kind of come and go as i

please and just do either hv i takedowns uh systems takedowns like you know kind of like what you know the old Scud hunts in Desert Storm 1. Yeah. But that comes after the initial sort of like door kick phase, right? Yeah. Where we have to kick down their eye ads, make air supremacy. You know, we have to basically have air supremacy. I don't, I think the days of us ever having air supremacy ever again are probably over.

Yeah. I think we will probably have momentary time slices of air superiority for a little bit, but dominance and supremacy probably never going to happen again. It's going to be contested. Might, yeah, yeah. And I think we'll have fleeting moments of it, but then they're going to regroup, regent, and we hope that we've accomplished what we want to target and we get out of Dodge.

Yeah. Bear Holmes, thank you very much. Say China invaded Taiwan tomorrow. What aircraft in the current inventory would be the most important? I want to say it's a loaded question. It's probably because we don't, I would say... It's really good question.

It's tough because, you know, I'm not saying anything. Is the aircraft work in conjunction with one another, right? Yeah, I really probably can't pin it down to one aircraft. Believe it or not, and it's not a sexy answer, but like, some of the most crucial aircraft in this fight are going to be your tankers, your early warning, or your what we call HAVA, and HAVA is HVAA, high value air assets is what HAVA stands for. So really, it's tough to pin it down to one,

because unfortunately, F-35s are not going to have the legs to get there. bones without any sort of protection. I would say right now it's not necessarily the aircraft that's going to determine it. I would say it's going to be the weapons. Because there's nothing in that fight. There's no aircraft that we have that is just untouchable. Right. So really, and we're kind of learning this the hard way.

And I'm kind of dancing around the question. But we learned way too late a long time ago that we've been building amazing fifth and with NGAD and B21, six-gen aircraft, but we've been doing it without a thought of the weapons they're going to carry. So case and point, United Old General one time we said that if you guys are not irate over the fact that a big part of the F-35's loadout is a 70s technology weapon,

GVU38, like you're not angry enough. And that's been our problem, is we've been so heavily focused, I would say, on aircraft development over the last two decades that we've missed the boat in a lot of ways on weapons. We let a lot of the weapons industry atrophy, in my personal opinion. And we didn't really learn the lessons of what other adversaries knowing they can't compete with us, what they're going to do. The whole term third offset, you know, you could argue that Russia realized that they were going to lose that war again. So what they start doing?

They started investing in the really non-sexy stuff. Electronic warfare jamming, comms, dispersion, sciops, rotting us from within with propaganda. Like, you know, we're probably in the midst of the largest counterintelligence campaign in history every day with just like Chinese water torture, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, a little lie here, a little lie there, right? Because they don't operate like us. They don't operate in four-year cycles. Just slowly demoralized people. Like, making us hate our fellow bro. Right.

And the Chinese are the same way. They operate generationally, not like every four years. Yeah, we operate in four-year chunks, eight-year chunks. And anyone that can think out to the 30s things, he's like some sort of master's strategic guys. I'm like, no, dude. China's plan is the 100-year plan. Yeah. Russia just operates like it'll be the same guy in charge forever,

which he probably will be until he dies. But that's unfortunately like, we're the greatest country in the world, but like it's also one of our downfalls. Yeah. We have a democratic system that, let's be honest, it's scary how lately, how easily exploitable it does it feel like. I know how we got off on that topic, but it's kind of sort of related, I would say, in the sense of,

yeah, I think we thought we could get away with just focusing on an aircraft for a long time not really doing the weapons piece. We're starting to catch up a little bit, but I think we're a ways behind. Yeah. So I don't know if I can necessarily say an aircraft. I would argue if you put a gun to my head,

it would probably be one of the bombers, assuming that we could get a hypersonic capability within the next two years. Yeah. That would be my best guess. JK, thank you very much. Thoughts on the bird scene on Alphabet Soups compound calf. Definitely not an RQ 170.

I don't, wait, what was the question? I think they called it like the Beast of Kandahar or something. Oh, that thing. What are my thoughts on it? This is the one that happened in 2010, right? I think it was a drone that they were flying off of Kandahar. Oh, yeah, the Beast of Kandah. Yeah, so the RQ 170, like, what do I think happened there?

I guess he's just asking what you think about it. Thoughts on the bird scene on Alphard. He says definitely not an RQ 170. I think the guy is probably referencing like some black side drone. Okay. I, that I, I'm not even being coy, like I'm actually not, I, I know, I was like, I have no answer for his question. Yeah. The only thing I will tell him is my personal opinion, it's kind of sort of related is how I ran, got their hands on the 170 is I think they had outside help.

Yeah. I think, I think, unfortunately, there was a backdoor, there was a, there was a vulnerability there that they probably did not pull up on their own. And what I found cute about that whole thing is over the last, because that happened, I haven't like 15 years ago now, I think, right? Yeah. What's cute about it is when they put the thing on display, they had this almost like banquet curtain underneath.

If you guys, if you guys, if you look at pictures when the Iranians displayed it, it had this, like, banquet curtain, like underneath it. Like, it was like a, you know, Kinsignere or something. Which leads me to believe is, I think that thing ate dirt big time when it landed, and the undercarriage of that aircraft is fucked. Yeah. So, sorry he's not answering his question.

Yeah. I would just point out there are, are black side drones that are flying operationally and not my area of expertise, but that stuff is out there. It's pretty gnarly. Oh, it's definitely out there. I mean, I'll say that, yeah. Like stuff that has never been revealed to the public. Oh, yeah. And I, so when people say, like, you think there's aliens at 51, like, I don't know there's alien. No, that's where our shit gets built.

Yeah. Like, you know, there's, I'm not the first got to say this, but, you know, the quickest way to go to jail as an active duty Air Force officer is clip the container at a red flag or a weapon school. That thing was like, you got anywhere remotely near that thing. Like, you're done.

Yeah. So, I mean, and I don't think it's for the reasons that people think it is. Right. It's not because they don't want you to see ET. Yeah, like, I'm not saying there's not E.

I just don't think E.T's there. Yeah. I think E.T. If there is an E.T. He's somewhere else. Yeah. Des Moines. Yeah. Or, you know, council,

Denver airport yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah from Danny has any of Brian's fellow aviators ever confided to him about experiencing a UFO encounter

during a flight or mission oh UAPs wow the answer is no and the only reason I would say that is because when you when you read all the reports and I think there's a common

theme when you read the reports right it's all Navy pilots who see it and it's generally all Navy pilots doing it off the water. Uh-huh. So, and again, and some of these guys are pretty credible, and they say, like, you know, I'm an Arrow major from the Naval Academy. Like, things are not supposed to do that.

Right. At that G limit, at that speed. Right. So it really could be something. And again, I'm not playing coy former government worker. Like, it really could be something that cannot be explained. Yeah. My theory also is, is that, you know, you guys right now, if you want it to, you could go

online and look up pictures of, like, stuff we have out in the desert. because there's aircraft watches with better cameras than we have that see these things take off. Yeah. There's only so much secrecy I think you can do with some of our really high-level PID covered programs over land. So I would not be shocked if we are doing some next-level weapons development out of the water.

Right. And it just happens to be at a time where, like, there's a four-ship of Horn that's taken off from, you know... That makes sense. I wouldn't have thought of that. That's just my personal opinion. Yeah. Because it always seems to be...

It always just seems to be the Navy. Yeah. And it always, at least the ones I've heard about, it seems to be over the water. Yeah. So that's just my, and I'm also, if some credible whistleblower comes forward someday and says, like, no, no, they're actually, okay, cool, I guess I'm, I don't, 100% say, like, there's not out there. Right. I just, I think the more realistic near-term explanation is, is that that's probably where we've moved a lot of our advanced development of stuff. It's interesting because, I know that a lot of, like, credible pilots have, or, you know.

reported, like, seeing things that they couldn't explain. Yeah. I didn't know that it was, like, they were prevalent, like, it was Navy, primarily Navy, and that does make sense. Yeah. If I go back at it, I don't want to make a general statement. I could be, because somebody will probably tell me, like, no, no, no, you missed this specific case on this date.

Like, you're probably right, because I actually, it's kind of like almost being in an air show. Yeah. When I get guys come up to me going, like, why don't you know more about, why do I know more at your aircraft than I, then you do? I'm like, I don't know, dude, because I like to go out and party. Yeah. Like, I don't mean, I don't mean, James defense manuals.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, and I don't want to denigrate people who really take an interest in aviation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's like, like, I've definitely been stumped at air shows. Yeah. About shit about my own aircraft.

Yeah. I, dude, thanks for telling me. I'll use it as a trivia nugget now for a young guy. But like, I. That's funny that nerds come out and challenge. But, but I mean, it's the same way as like, like, Star Trek fans. Exactly. More than the actors.

The writers do. Or even like you, like, as a former Green Beret guy. Like, I mean, you know, did you know, did you know about this mission? In 19, I didn't, but thanks for telling me. Absolutely. You earned things all the time. Yeah. So that's kind of point.

So I don't mean to denigree to make fun of anyone. Like, I just, the ET, you know, unexplained vehicle thing, like, I just don't, maybe I should. I just don't take a huge interest in it. Yeah. So it's like, the ones that I can remember off the top of my head, it just always seems to be a Navy guy over the water. Yeah. That's why I say that. Yeah.

All right. One way of saying I don't know. Sorry, bro. We have one more. Oh, go ahead. What are some of the, what are some of the, what are some of the, interesting ways the crew would pass time on a long sortie. That's a really good one.

So kind of like Candy Crush. Bubbles was a great one. We put that game tanks with each other because we could jerry rig our laptops to see each other. Mostly, to be honest with you, it was a lot of iPod, a lot of music, a lot of iPod playing. And it's crazy because like an average OEF combat sortie was anywhere from about 12 to 13 hours. Wow. The vol time, you know, the vol time of you being in country was anywhere from six to eight. So, I mean, really, you had about, a rough wag of it would be like I had two and a half hours to actually get on station.

Yeah. About another two and a half to get home. Yeah. And you mix in some decks, some go pills there just to keep you alert. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, shit, we had one guy. One guy literally complete like his masters just on drone time. Yeah.

That's amazing. For a lot of years, you guys will probably get a kick out of this. Do you guys remember, like, again, because it was the Air Force, because, you know, we have to be the airport. We have to be those guys. Reflective belts. We're like, if you don't wear a reflective belt,

it's the equivalent of like letting an insurgent in the base. Yeah, it's almost a war crime. You scumbed. Yeah, it's almost a war crime. I will flog you. I do you in level rest to me. You filth bag. So it's like, we had one of my buddies.

I'll begin to link to this because I'm shooting, I'm shot him out right now. I was like, it's like the biggest fuck you to leadership. He literally by hand, he took a reflective belt on a jet one time this is actually over the course for a few sorties

and he was cutting out parts he was cutting off pieces of the reflective belt and by hand sewing in Velcro to the reflective belt and so for a while he was like yeah I'm wearing my reflective belt he was making like pencil patch tab reflective belts

that's hilarious but it's like I looked at one time and I'm like dude can you imagine if you just used your powers for good yeah you could fucking cure cancer or like you could invent the next but your hand sewing reflective belt patches just to piss off like the local wing commander honestly I

reflective belts if I remember like started to really become a thing like a bagram maybe around like 2000 was it two 2000 it was yeah

and at that point I was like all right we've already lost this war like when that becomes the thing when that becomes everybody has I remember Fort Benning, they're like, your first line supervisor gets fired if you're not wearing a reflective belt. In Ranger Battalion, there's a lot of angry privates, angry at their team leader. And so there's a joke, like, in the middle of a run, we're all going to jettison our reflective belts.

I wasn't a huge fan of the guy's comedy, but I do remember there was a video of Carlos Mencilla, and he's at one of the, he's at a U.S.o show, and it was either, it was either AUDD or it wasn't like an Afghan or Iraqi base, but he just went off on this tangent, and he was basically like, pointing out like the 06 that was in charge of the policy like calling them a loo like you fucking like and the whole crowd's like cheering oh my god these guys just kind of sitting there like and eat it because it's like all right yeah i'm the i'm the asshole put this policy in place yeah you know big blue wants me too yeah we wrap up tonight yeah do you want to talk about what you're doing today uh what you're up to nowadays yeah so yeah yeah you know uh retired uh active duty from the pentagon

as an air staff officer uh took a job of the defense company it's probably one of the last few remaining ones in the Northeast area, which is really awesome because it gets me got closer to home. But yeah, just trying to learn the, you know, trying to not be your classic sleazy business development or beady guy. But in my space, I'm primarily focused on... You're not a VC guy. It's okay. Yeah, primarily focused on the electronic warfare aspect, even though my background's more sort of weapons. But, no, honestly, you guys probably went through the same thing, right? Like, I'll be about a year in June of sort of being out of uniform. And, you know, it just, it still feels not real. Yeah. So I'm really just trying to

find my way and yeah you know still kind of like you know learn the ways of uh you know what what booze Alan Hamilton yeah not that bad well maybe one day who knows

but like no honestly really just you know just just just trying to get settled back in the area and uh kind of learn the new language of uh and it's really weird at times like it's it's big boy in a really weird way yeah it's like there's been a few times where i've just been like i really kind of wish i had like a a reg or an afi to go back to right now because like i crave that like structure. Yeah. Because some of this shit today is like, ah, yeah, dude,

you had a meeting with so and so and, uh, and just show up. Yeah. Like, wear a suit. Am I like anything else? Like, nah, you'll figure it out. I'm like, I will. Yeah.

There's like money apparently being discussed. Like I don't feel ready. Yeah, I just, just do it. Yeah. So that, that part's a little weird, but, uh, now yeah, so just back in the area doing defense contracting and, uh, you know, trying to be, try to do it for the right reasons, you know, like if my company has the solution for something that we can help.

Great. If not, then, you know, still trying to keep, like, like the guys and gals and bros that are out doing the J.O.B. Like trying to keep them in mind when we pitch stuff. So pretty much that. That's awesome. Two quick things. Barrett Holmes.

Which fifth gen looks the coolest? I got to say the F-22. I think that thing is... I've seen that thing up close. I actually... And a little known story, like the F-22 was active in Syria, like, helping me target ISIS. Like, that fucking thing is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Yeah.

I don't, and it's a shame, we cut it, and we, probably the wrong call at the time, but, like, that, that is the sexiest, most cable thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. It is amazing. Yeah. I think some of the, like, the belt, like, some of the concept helicopters look really, really badass. Yeah, but unfortunately, we just canceled the one, right? Yeah, exactly. I remember being out in, was it Nevada or Arizona, and being out on the flight line and just watching, like, dude, a dozen F-22s just screaming down and taking off, and I was like, that is gangster.

They are the greatest. Yeah, I follow what's his face. The O-A-F on Instagram operator is fuck that guy. He's a former Marine, but it's weird. It's mostly about, like, you know, soft guys and operators, but he just occasionally, I think, like, once a month or once a quarter just happens to get the F-22 demo guy in there. Because, like, you know, what's cool is cool. Like, that thing is amazing.

Yeah. And then, oh, M. Corby, thank you very much. Hit the like button and subscribe. We agree. And thanks, fellas, interesting conversation. Thanks, JK. And next Friday, we will be back with a gentleman who served as an FBI agent. He was actually an assistant director, not once but twice.

We'll have him in studio, really excited to talk to him. It's going to be a fun conversation. Brian, thanks for joining us. Anything else you want to put out? This is awesome. Anything you want to promote or tell people about? I'm just a boring suit wearing BD guy. No, that's great, man.

Like this is, uh, we're all just working slabs out on the streets. I'm just happy to be, I'm just happy to be one now. But no, honestly, like I said, you know, the biggest thing I, I probably didn't mention was, you know, for years doing the cast mission, right? Like, for us, like, the guys on the ground were our heroes. And, you know, so it was, it was cool as, like, the years went on. And you got to meet a lot of those guys, like, one-on-one, like, to get their perspective. Like, no, dude, let's, you know, it's cool that you're a fan boy at times. But it's like, no, like, you really pull us out of some really shitty spots right now.

So it's cool to like how it all comes full circle and I really appreciate you guys sort of bringing on a different perspective and I'm just happy to provide my part so thanks for having me. Yeah, always man. Absolutely, this was exactly like stepping outside of the soft infantry

sort of space that we're off in and talk about some more of the strategic level stuff that goes on. And yeah, and I think, and we, like I've talked about it before, like having cast come on station when you feel like you're fucked, like when you feel like, man, like this is it.

And having cast come on station, it's like it's a spiritual experience. It really is. I'm only mentioning it now because I just saw him recently, but Ski, Goin Besski, who wrote Level Zero Heroes. I hung out with him a little bit at a conference not too long ago. It's funny, ski actually works at the Air Force Academy now. Oh, cool. Like doing something with one of my buddies.

But we always love Ski because, like, when he wrote that book, that was all about BMG, Balamore Gob when we were there. and he was the first guy ever to really, like, we got more, the B1 got more loved from like another service and another perspective than our own FN Air Force. And so like, yeah, it's been a few times where we've seen our name mention of books and whatnot and like it feels good that like, you know, guys,

even if our own service didn't really like us or appreciate us, like the guys in the ground liking us, that's all it mattered for us. So I wish I could have done it more and definitely the highlight of my life. Like the 8-10 guys probably feel the same way. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And those guys, you know, I will say,

to anyone who asks, like, those guys are the Kings of Cast, period. Like, they own the doctrine, the right way of doing it. Everything, like, we take our cues from them, so. Thank you, Brian, again, for coming on the show, coming in studio. Yeah, man, we appreciate it. Yeah, we met Brian at our Christmas party, actually. And, yeah, you came in with Josh, right? Yeah, Josh bring in.

Yeah, yeah. Our friend Josh Lee's, you will have to dig deep, deep into the Team House archives to find our interview with Josh. That's like Teahouse Cannon right there. Yeah, yeah, that's old school. Josh was on with Zach. Oh, wow. Capps, dude.

Yeah. Yeah. And Josh's story about building a water can or gas can village is honestly one of the best stories we've ever had on this show. I'm starting to be convinced that Josh is the world's most interesting, man. He's fascinating. Yeah, he's so much fun. It's actually awesome.

Yeah, he's great. Yeah. So thank you, everybody. Thanks for joining us. and we'll see all of you next Friday. Have your night.