Tag: military

Lightly Salted Service

FNGs await assignment
Veterans ready for discharge

“If you visit Dothan, Alabama, you might notice a few fun characters standing about 4 feet tall along the side of the road. Actually, you could see around 67 of them around the city if you keep an eye out. These colorful characters are part of a public art project by The Downtown Group of Dothan, and each one is a peanut. After all, Dothan proclaims to be the ‘Peanut Capital of the World,’ with approximately half of the peanuts in the United States grown within a 100-mile radius.”

Peanut Capital of the World? Might want to walk that one back a tad, Dothan. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1030846/major-producers-of-peanut-worldwide/

[More peanut people here.]

The .Gif Friday Post No. 610 – Spook Spazz, Helicopter Boarding 101 & Surf Splat

[Found here, here and here.]

Hybrid Airships

Yep. The past is also the future.

“Hybrid airships are not the blimps of years ago. They have the potential to transform military logistics, command and control, and surveillance and reconnaissance.”

[Source]

Eat A Sheet O’ Meat

VMD and USWs compress hundreds of calories into an MRE about the size of a golf ball.

I want one that tastes like Skyline Chili but I’d settle for a marble-sized eggamuffin.

[Story here.]

Droning

They’re hella bigger than I realized.

An RQ-4 Global Hawk was lost off the coast of southern Spain in June of this year, and the wreckage was recovered only recently. That’s a loss of about $123 million, and the cause of the crash has not been released to date.

[Source]

New Additions to the French Military – Eagles

The eagles are trained to capture small UAVs, aka “drones” that may pose a danger to aircraft or are being used for nefarious activity. They’re raised in captivity and trained as hatchlings to associate UAVs with food. The French program was adapted from one developed by the Dutch.

Royal eagles, which can hunt prey up to 25kg – the size of a deer – are often used by the programme due to their strength.

In the Netherlands, the use of eagles in police work sparked animal welfare concerns among falconers. When eagles intercept a drone, a pressure of 250kg per square centimetre is exerted on their claws.

Dutch police told the NRC daily newspaper that their eagles have so far not suffered any problems from intercepting small drones, but that larger drones may damage their claws. Eagles in the French programme wear kevlar and leather claw coverings as a protective measure.

[Story here, via here, video here, h/t Nancy H.]

USS Porter

ATLANTIC OCEAN (April 15, 2015) The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) pulls alongside the Military Sealift Command dry cargo and ammunition ship USNS Medgar Evers (T-AKE 13) before a replenishment-at-sea. Porter is participating in Joint Warrior, a United-Kingdom led training exercise designed to provide NATO and allied forces with a unique multi-warfare environment in which to prepare for global operations. (U.S. Navy photo by Rohn D. Wallace/Released)

There’s an interesting timeline posted at USNI regarding the missile attack on the Syrian military airbase on 6 April 2017 that I haven’t seen elsewhere, and it gives hints about the strategy behind it… and more.

[Image and caption found here. USNI is updating their post as more information is released.]

%d bloggers like this: