[Greased up deaf guy voice] It's great to be back, America [/Greased up deaf guy voice]

Found "The Wild Geese" novel in paperback at the library for a quarter today.

I am rewatching WWZ...The vid store had a special 1 dollar for new movies, but I don't have it for my PC, so I won't be screen capping it

If you didn't get it, you are a disappointment

Nearly half way done with it. If anyone is interested it reading it, PM me. Its terrific!

I got a pretty much brand new copy for like $4 a few years ago

Tom Clancy died...I'm in shock.

Well My Birthday is in a couple of months and I have no clue what to ask for. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have no idea who he is or what show he's in.

His name's Matt. He's from Death Note.

I just called my Congressman and basically told him "that if you let the idiots in the blue suits get rid of the A-10, you are going to have a lot of pissed of Guardsmen in your district."

All this because the DoD has a bloody stealth fetish.

I'm telling you it is petty jealousy on behalf of the fighter mafia guys that run ACC.

They're mad that no one has had limitless MiGs to squander against there pointy nose fast movers and that the only platform to consistently get a real world mission are the Hawg drivers.

Eh, there's issues with the A-10 sticking around if you're not planning to fight people with rusty Soviet castoffs forever; the GAU-8 isn't actually particularly useful against current gen tank armour and against any enemy with fighter cover or a decent supply of MANPADS it's going to be completely useless. I'd agree that the F-35 isn't a decent replacement, but I don't think the Air Force wants to spring for a current-gen A-10 replacement with composite armour and a railgun or something so they're hoping to do everything with JDAMs. Plus everyone is scared of proliferation of the current generation of Russian SAMs and I think they're trying to focus on aircraft that can deal with S-300.

And see there in lies my beef with big blue.

The A-10 and the Predator or the two platforms that reliably supported us on the ground.

Instead of pumping billions into the stealth program, how about pumping millions into an ECM pod to hang off the Hawg so it can continue to loiter if we ever do go to war against an enemy with an IADN.

I swear the USAF just refuses to support any sort of CAS endeavor fully.

They're also gutting AMC because it's not stealth.

And once again AMC has a far more pressing real world mission than that of the Stealth drivers in ACC

Plus no-one told them that AMC is kind of a little bit vital for the Stealth Jockeys to pretend to be doing things. Since without it there's no AAR or spare parts delivery.

Also, what does the Marine Corps brass consider to be of vital importance in this age of austerity and slashed budgets?

Spend $8 Million to buy everyone new dress covers in order to be "gender neutral".

Why can't women just wear the men's caps?

^Exactly. Make them all wear the "male" cover. Problem solved. It's not like the same arguments as gender-specific uniforms apply here (though most female servicemen seem to think these are a waste of time and budget, too), since men and women all have the same basic shape of head.

But that makes too much common sense.

Because the CMC has his head up his arse and doesn't seem to realise that saving money is a good thing.

In regards to why can't the women wear men's dress covers, to quote the girl who works in the Bde PAO shop,

"Those things looking effing' stupid."

I can't believe this is what the Jarheads are worried about immediately following sequestration.

"so “girly” that they would make the French blush."
Somehow, I don't think so.
This is what the French (~=)Marines wear:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...n-IMG_8636.jpg
On the other hand, they also have this uniform, which I think looks fairly snappy;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...y_2008_n2.jpeg

Let's just conveniently leave out the fact that US Army Special Forces took a piece of French women's fashion and turned it into the ultimate symbol of manliness and badassery on the face of the earth.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-935EfbcguN...d-02-02957.jpg

;)

But only because they nicked it from the Royal Marines, who'd already done that.

They made it look much more badass than those USMC wannabes ever could. :p

Still hate the Rangers for stealing the Tan Beret off of the SAS.

Was messing around in Google Earth and thought I'd check out Area 51. Low and behold, look what I find: four black F-16s.

http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/m...pse5ac86c0.jpg

Just for comparison, here's a trio of F-16s sporting the standard "low visibility" grey paint job on the tarmac at Edwards.

http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps4a4df54b.jpg

You can see a visible color difference. I was quite surprised at this find. I'm obviously not suggesting aliens are piloting them or anything, but I'm certainly intrigued. Testing some kind of stealth coating maybe?

Citizen spying on the government? What a twist!

It looks like the same colour as this F-15.

Um... That's not black. That's the standard "Gunship Grey" paintscheme applied to all F-15Es.

Probably. I find the whole "Aliens in Area 51" thing to be total bullshit.

I don't think there is anything special about them. The thing with Google satelite images is that they are taken from a wide range of different satelites using all kinds of different cameras so there will be differences in the quality of the images across the board meaning that they cannot be compared side by side. Looking at the Area 51 images it looks like the colours in the rest of the images are slightly off as well, like somebody has bumped up the contrast too much or something. Also, looking at the shapes of the buildings it appears that this was taken from the side rather than directly above which might make the colours look odd depending on the time of day.

But it has to be something special because it's Area 51, so obviously it's got to be something conspiracy worthy.

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...57/348/5bc.gif

Taking the phrase "popping a cap" to its logical extreme.

...Urgh. YouTube is forcing Google+ integration on to everyone now.

Even better, I have to switch to Internet Exploder to make comments on my own channel because in Firefox it won't let me type anything into the comment box.

I literally cannot get Internet Explorer to open at all on my laptop. It stopped one day out of the blue, so I started using Google Chrome