Prompted by the recent news of Jon Stewart’s retirement. Augie Dannehl, host and production coordinator with WATM talks about the veteran immersion program which allowed interested veterans an inside look at the secrets behind The Daily Show’s greatness.
Gearing up to head out on a vital mission, clearing operation, or standard foot patrol to take down enemy forces comes with a lot of excitement and no shortage of anxiety.
You can’t exactly watch TV to take your mind off things, so music plays a key factor in lifting spirits and keeping Marines hungry for the fight.
Babasoloukian — aka “Babalou” — tells a story that illustrates how easy it is for trainees to fall into traps set by their drill sergeants…or just actually fall…even when they’re told specifically not to fall (common sense would suggest that you wouldn’t have to tell someone that but…boots amirite?)
A genius moment is when one of the enlistees doesn’t know the difference between an Armenian and a Kardashian.
Maybe genius isn’t the right word?
But hey, when it comes down to it, all military personnel are well aware that our great nation faces threats of all shapes and sizes, whether it’s ISIS, al Qaeda, or Kardashian.
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Military scientists have spent more than a modest amount of brain power trying to figure out why they repel women so effectively when they realized that the answer was literally staring them in the face.
Veteran salesman J.P. Connolly brings you Birth Control Glasses. Watch the women stampede in the opposite direction from your face when you wear this specially designed cranial birth control.
Never touch a woman again with these Birth Control Glasses!
Helicopter pilots have it easy in some ways — they do not need runways to take off or land — just a clearing. Well, one look at this video taken on Oct. 26, 2016, showing a Royal Danish Navy Sikorsky MH-60R landing on one of that navy’s Thetis-class oceangoing patrol vessels, will how just how tough a landing can be sometimes.
In this video, the Thetis-class patrol vessel is in the midst of a storm. Note the very expert technique the Danish pilot uses to match the vessel’s speed, and the very deft touch used to keep from slamming the helicopter into the pitching deck.
The MH-60R is a multi-role maritime helicopter capable of carrying Mk 46, Mk 50, or Mk 54 lightweight torpedoes. It also can carry AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles. According to the official MH-60 website, it has a crew of three, a top speed of 140 knots, and can stay up for over two and a half hours.
According to Naval-Technology.com, the Thetis-class ocean patrol vessels displace 3,500 tons, have a top speed of 20 knots, hold 60 crew, and are 369 feet long. The Danish Navy has four of these vessels in service. Two entered service in 1991, two entered service in 1992.
U.S. Airman hugs his daughter goodbye. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Giovanni Sims).
The Secure Families Initiative has produced a compelling 9/11 anniversary video that highlights stories from U.S. military families about what the last 20 years of wartime operational tempo have looked like on the homefront. The video features three story-tellers: one surviving Special Forces spouse, and the spouse and child of a 20-year active-duty Marine. Behind-the-scenes interviews were conducted to include the experience of caregivers and families whose service members died by suicide as well. We hope these stories remind viewers to never forget the hidden scars this community will continue to live with for years to come, and to inform our country’s decisions over war and peace moving forward.
About the Secure Families Initiative: Our mission is to elevate military spouses and family members as uniquely qualified advocates and organizers on matters of foreign policy.
We are a nonpartisan group of proud military spouses, united by our love of country and commitment to service. We understand better than anyone the consequences that decisions over war and peace have here on the homefront. We are ready to make our voices heard.
Too often, military service is leveraged on the political stage to push for aggressive, hawkish policies. Not only is this the wrong direction for U.S. foreign policy, but it does not accurately reflect the sentiment of many of us in the military community.
Sending our troops into protracted conflicts is one of the exacerbating factors that drive many of the unique challenges facing our troops. Veterans suffer from a suicide rate that is double the civilian average. Frequent deployments and a wartime operational tempo mean that care-giving responsibilities fall disproportionately on spouses and partners. Military children are more likely than their peers to receive a mental health diagnosis and suffer from higher levels of stress and anxiety.
No amount of Department of Defense-sponsored family support programming can solve these problems: we must instead focus on tackling the root causes of these issues. We need to end these forever wars and reprioritize diplomacy as our foreign policy tool of first resort.
Fifty years ago, Israel was backed into a corner. Egypt had closed the Strait of Tiran – essentially denying Israel access to the Red Sea. The situation was dire, and Israel knew it had to act.
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched Operation Focus. The objective was to neutralize the Arab air forces, particularly those from Egypt. According to the Israeli Air Force web site, the operation was a smashing success.
You can now see that operation — as well as other parts of the Six-Day War — the way Israeli Defense Force pilots saw it.
During that war, the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes on airfields and other ground targets. They also were in a fair number of dogfights. The best plane the Israelis had at that time was the Dassault Mirage III, a single-seat fighter that had a top speed of 1,312 miles per hour, a range of 1,000 miles, and the ability to carry up to 8,800 pounds of ordnance along with two 30mm cannon.
An Israeli Mirage III at a museum. Giora Epstein scored the first of his 17 kills, a Su-7, in a Mirage III. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
The Six-Day War saw Israeli Mirage IIIs take on MiG-21 Fishbeds, MiG-19 Farmerss, Hawker Hunters, MiG-17 Frescos, Su-7 Fitters, Il-28 Beagles, and a variety of transports and helicopters.
The Israelis lost 46 aircraft and 24 pilots, but in return had killed almost 400 enemy planes, and had control of the skies within hours of the conflict starting.
You can see what it was like for Israeli pilots in the video below, taken from the Israeli gun camera films. The compilation starts with the airfield strikes that were part of Operation Focus. Not just bomb runs, but also the strafing passes on aircraft that were caught on the ground.
The gun-camera footage then shows the Israeli pilots as they score kills in dogfights. Finally, the video shows the interdiction strikes against Arab ground forces.
While spies typically try to hide as much of their communication as possible, there is one method of intelligence communication that is literally broadcasted so that everyone for thousands of miles around can listen in to the messages, but no one else can understand the message.
The Secret Radio Stations Used to Communicate with Spies
These were known as “numbers stations,” an apt name since they exist solely to broadcast number sequences to spies operating in the area. Governments dispatch their spies with books of codes, and then the numbers broadcasted are used with these books to assemble messages years after the spy was dispatched.
These are typically done with “one-time pad” encryption where the message cannot be cracked without the book of numbers. The list of numbers is compared to a single line of numbers in the book, and comparing the numbers will give the spy the message intended for them. But, importantly, each line in the book is used a single time.
So, someone listening in cannot piece together messages through careful listening or tracking, only through stealing the book, if they can find it. So, governments can broadcast their numbers in the clear, usually from a radio station bordering the country they are spying in, without worry.
America has suffered spies that listened to these stations, like Ana B. Montes, one of the highest ranked spies in U.S. history. But we’ve also used the method ourselves especially during the Cold War. Our allies in Britain had done so, running a station in Cyprus for years.
Some spies during the Cold War, including some from the U.S. and Britain, were captured with their code books intact. America had its own numbers coup in the 1980s when it turned a source in the Soviet Government that fed them the codes used to instruct communists in the U.S. at the time.
To listen in yourself, you need to live in range of a broadcasting station and to have a “shortwave” radio, a receiver that listens to high-frequency signals. Few places still track the broadcasts.
Officers in the military don’t always have the best reputation.
Company Grade Officers, or “CGOs,” might have it worse — at least there’s some heft behind a full-bird; lieutenants are like wee babes in the wood.
In the four or five years we’re training and partying at frat houses earning degrees, our enlisted peers go on multiple combat deployments and conduct real world operations.
So when you show up as a brand new el-tee with them shiny butterbars, that is decidedly not the time to pull rank; it’s the time to earn the respect the rank commands.
Here are a few ways to do that without being a dirtbag
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” That line from the classic war movie Apocalypse Now ranks as one of cinema’s all-time bests. But just how, exactly, do you make napalm? How do you produce the flammable liquid that, as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore would say, smells like victory?
While the Oxford Dictionary describes napalm as a mixture of gasoline and certain types of soap, the definitive, World War II version used a combination of phosphorous, naphthalene, and palmitate. Modern napalm is a mix of gasoline, benzene, and polystyrene.
An Ecuadorian air force Kfir aircraft drops napalm on a target range during the joint US and Ecuadorian Exercise BLUE HORIZON. (USAF photo)
The mixture is designed to stick to a target and burn hot for a long time. Oh, and it has its own oxidizer, so you can’t smother it and water won’t put it out. As you might imagine, prepping bombs for a napalm strike is a complicated procedure. In some rare cases, the mixture would leak from bombs like the M47, which was the primary delivery system for napalm weapon during the Vietnam War.
According to a United States Army document, the M47 was a “chemical bomb.” Officially classified as a 100-pound bomb, the actual weight depended on what it was loaded with. This bomb could carry a form of napalm known as Incendiary Oil, but it also could carry white phosphorous, mustard gas, or a field-expedient mixture of rubber and gasoline.
Sgt. Jamal G. Walker and Lance Cpl. Carl Feaster tighten the sway braces on a Mark 77 napalm bomb while loading it onto the wing pylon of a Marine Strike Fighter Squadron 321 (VMHA-321) F/A-18A Hornet aircraft. The Mark 77 is the modern version of the napalm bomb. (US Navy photo)
The current “napalm” bomb in the American arsenal is the Mk 77. This bomb replaces the gasoline with kerosene, and it was used during the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Battle of Tora Bora, and during Operation Desert Storm.
In general, the use of napalm has declined as more and more precision-guided bombs have entered service. Still, there is something to be said about dropping napalm on the bad guys.
See how some of the older napalm bombs were prepared and dropped in the video below.
