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Disturbing info from article on the Hunt for Bin Laden..

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dtfl

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 9, 2004
Posts
676
We need to rid Operations of this "Travel-pay" type of thinking - The AF especially, loses sight of the big picture....they would rather stop us and yell that we do not have a reflective belt on, than let us hurry to the Aircraft to make our TOT......it's sad.

From an article in Newsweek on the Hunt for Bin Laden - great article - linked at the bottom..discusses an interview with a former SF team member -

"....Rice was not optimistic about getting timely permission. Whenever he and his men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says, they had to file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who, what, when, where and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters took hours, and if shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To go beyond five kilometers required a CONOP (for "concept of operations") that was much more elaborate and required approval from two layers in the field, and finally the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Baghram air base near Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the permission of a three-star general was necessary. "That process could take days," Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He often typed forms while sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half to make a toilet seat. "We'd be typing in 130-degree heat while we're crapping away with bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar or Baghram would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that you weren't using the tab to delimit the form correctly."


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430170/site/newsweek/page/0/
 
The article has some pretty good examples of bafoonery on the part of higher ups. I will say, that the latest HVT kill in OEF, our brass did a pretty good job of putting together a small and efficient package rather than some clumsy conventional giant.

The only bureaucratic hold up that night was the fat fuels troop who stopped pumping gas when we jumped on the airplane to fire up the mission computers and such.
 
One thing that jumped out in the article to me was the irony of improved comm and data-link has made our system less efficient. We in the fighter world speculate that with Fighter-Fighter Data link, Link 16, SADL, JTIDS, and other gee-whiz stuff, some over-active O-7 sitting in Tampa can watch what's going, think he has the "big picture," and start making real-time "decisions" for the guy in the cockpit half a world away. NOT what it was designed for, but I can easily see it coming to fruiton. Looks like there's some of that stuff going on right now, unfortunately.
 
some over-active O-7 sitting in Tampa can watch what's going, think he has the "big picture," and start making real-time "decisions" for the guy in the cockpit half a world away. NOT what it was designed for, but I can easily see it coming to fruiton

Kinda similar to the old Soviet method?
 
SATCOM is a great thing but having "mom" back home telling you about weaponeering or navigation can get old after a while.
 
It is amazing to see the results that can happen when all of a sudden the radios to higher "stop" working and the JTAC(FAC) uses the phrase "TIC". Just a suggestion.
 

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