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Interesting leadership style in the RAF these days...
Air Vice Marshal David Walker, speaking to his aircrews...
“Would you think it unreasonable if I ordered you to fly your aircraft into the ground in order to destroy a vehicle carrying a Taliban or al-Qaeda commander?”
Heh. I would. Ask me, perhaps. Hope I'd come to a similar conclusion on my own, okay. Order me to? Heh. After you, Vice Marshal. Happy to follow your personal example.
Apparently the pilots agree with me:
Last night pilots slammed the suggestion as “utter madness”. One — summing up a flabbergasted “After you, Sir” reaction — said: “I’m prepared to give it a go but only if the Air Vice Marshal shows me how to do it first.”Another added: “The idea of officers ordering personnel to commit suicide is disgusting.”
Air Vice Marshal Walker is head of the RAF’s elite One Group and in operational control of all our Typhoon, Tornado, Jaguar, and Harrier fighters and bombers.
The crews he was addressing included newly-qualified pilots of the Typhoon, Britain’s latest state-of-the-art fighter.
Interesting thought problem, Vice Marshal. Personally, I think it was a dumb move. There are those of us who might choose to do that, in the situations posited - but it's quite another thing to be ordered to do it. The official response...
In an official statement to The Sun, the MoD said: “Air Vice Marshal Walker did not say he would order his crews on suicide missions.“He wanted them to think about how they would react faced with an extreme life or death decision — for example terrorists trying to fly an aircraft into a British city, being followed by an RAF fighter which suffers weapons failure.”
Weapons failure followed by a leadership failure.
“He wanted crews to understand that he, too, could be faced with terrible decisions.”
What self-centered tripe. We *know* that. We're in the same business, sir. Sheesh.
Read the whole bit here. H/t, Jim C. -the Armorer
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Kewl! Pay attention to the instructions *and* the warning. -the Armorer
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A term of art from the artillery. Harassment and Interdiction Fires.
Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute.
*Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is*
The UAVs (oops, can't call 'em UAVs anymore - they're now Unmanned Aerial Systems... some Colonel got his Legion of Merit for that change...), er, um UAS's we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now.
I call the post that because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to. It's also an open trackback, so if (Don Surber uses it this way a lot) someone has a post they're proud of, but it really isn't either Castle kind of stuff, or topical to a particular post, I've basically given blanket permission to use that post for that purpose. Another term of art that might be appropriate is "Free Fire Zone".
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