Daren Sorenson F15E Pilot Talks CAS And The Benghazi Attack

 @dm8471 Rachel Maddow = weaker than circus lemonade. 

 @majrod As a former AWACS weenie, we dealt with all kinds of fighter jocks.  10's 16's, 15's... the odd 18 or 14.  Yeah there were a few that thought they were special, but in all honesty, most of those dudes were good people.  You can't wave your arms in a fighter squadron without hitting 20 academy grads, so there's that... but once these guys get feet dry, they're smart enough to figure out what's what. 

Mostly good dudes, and amazing pilots.  I love 'em.  when that canopy closes and they're on O2 pulling 3 g's, they're as professional as it gets.  No nonsense and steel on target.

@majrod Concur on the wrong headedness of criticism of new weapons systems. I was in High School when the A-10 was in the 'pipe.' And I lived in Washington DC so the pig fight over the A-10 was in the news constantly. It was too slow, it was too low, it would never survive the modern battlefield...blah blah blah. Fast forward 5 years. I'm in the Navy and we're in a briefing on US and Soviet aircraft comparisons. The briefer holds up a grainy photo of an A-10 going vertical, the pic is grainy, black and white and shows the plane in the look down configuration. The guy goes on about the plane and what it can do and asks for any questions. A guy raises his hand and asks why the photo is so grainy and poorly focused. The briefer tells us that the photo of the A-10 was taken by the Soviets using a long telephoto lense while the plane was training in Germany. Apparently the Soviets used this exact picture to brief their own tank crews calling it the "Cross of Death." They told their tank crews that if they looked out of their periscope and saw an A-10 in the vertical like this they had about 15 seconds to live because that Warthog was going to roll out on top and hose them with that Avenger cannon. If that is what the Russians were telling their people about the A-10 I didn't care much about the uninformed beancounting protests of Congressmen. As for the F-22 there is no plane that hits the inventory without bugs and kinks. It takes years to work them out. All the guys flying around in CH-46's right now in relative safety are doing so because the Aircrews of my generation in the military died in the crashes that debugged those helicopters. That's just how it works. The F-22 will have bugs, people will die in crashes, the planes will get better and better and when and if it ever goes into combat it will save lives of our pilots and be lethal to enemy planes and their pilots.