A report that came my way: A-10 driver perspective

Friends, this is from a friend of mine, who is a retired Air Force Jet Pilot who saw lots of action in Vietnam in his F-100 and other fighters.  He gets this information from sources in the military that not many of us are privileged to receive. I find it very depressing and I am truly concerned that a continuation of this sort of treacherous and traitorous leadership  puts us in grave danger.  We can not win a war against a foe that is allowed to be casual knowing that we are in the air,  and capable of bombing them, and we don't. How can this happen to us? What is going on here? I am sending this to everyone I know, who I don't perceive is a sympathizer with our leaders.  Unfortunately, there are many of them. If I have made a mistake, and you don't agree with me, please let me know, so that I will remove you from my list . And, if you receive this twice, I apologize.

 

 The squadron is doing fine. Everybody is happy to be here and we are doing some good work.  The A-10s are holding up well and the technology we have have on the jets now (targeting pods, GPS guided bombs, Laser Guided bombs, Laser guided missiles, tactical data link, satellite comms), and of course the gun, make the A-10 ideal for this conflict.  We are killing off as many ISIS as we can, mostly in ones and twos, working with the hand we are dealt. I've never been more convicted in my career that we facing an enemy that needs to be eradicated. 

 

With that being said...I've never been more frustrated in my career.  After 13 years of the mind-numbing low intensity conflict in Afghanistan, I've never seen the knife more dull. All the hard lessons learned in Vietnam, and fixed during the first Gulf War, have been unlearned again.  The level of centralized execution, bureaucracy, and politics is staggering. I basically do not have any decision making authority in my cockpit. It sucks. In most cases, unless a general officer can look at a video picture from a UAV, over a satellite link, I cannot get authority to engage. I've spent many hours, staring through a targeting pod screen in my own cockpit, watching ISIS shitheads perpetrate their acts until my eyes bleed, without being able to do anything about it. The institutional fear of making a mistake, that has crept into the central mindset of the military leadership, is endemic.  We have not taken the fight to these guys.  We haven't targeted their centers of gravity in Raqqa.  All the roads between Syria and Iraq are still intact with trucks flowing freely.  The other night I watched a couple hundred small tanker trucks lined up at an oilfield in ISIS-held northeast Syria, presumably filling up with with oil traded on the black market, go unfettered. It's not uncommon to wait several hours overhead a suspected target for someone to make a decision to engage or not.  It feels like we are simply using the constructs build up in Afghanistan, which was a very limited fight, in the same way here against ISIS, which is a much more sophisticated and numerically greater foe.  It's embarrassing. 

 

Be assured that the Hawg drivers are doing their best.

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[Footnote: The above report might seem confusing until you remember that the President was raised in a Muslim household and thinks kindly of Islamic State. It would be unfair to expect him to think in terms of "Shock & Awe"]