Bush Flew Fighter Jets During Vietnam

Subject: Bush Flew Fighter Jets During Vietnam
From: ojunk (Steve Mellenthin)
Date: 7/14/2004 10:13 AM Pacific

Flak is not related to commitment. It is statistical happenstance that
controlled the skies over Germany.


Arthur Kramer

Maybe for WWII. Are you saying that it took no commitment to fly over that
"statistical happenstance that controlled the skies over Germany"?.


Not at all. If you were highly commited (eager beaver) you had no better
chance of survival than someone who was less eager. The flak didn't care who it
killed. It was an equal opportunity executioner.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

If he gets fooled by the Bush administration, should we let him represent us
in dealings with truly professional diplomats and world leaders?


"C J Campbell" wrote in message
...

"Foster" wrote in message
...
Or, think of it this way. Bush is an incompetent moron; Kerry isn't.
Bush's incompetence and ego got us into a war we shouldn't be in; Kerry
didn't.

Actually, Kerry has not made any such claims and for good reason: he has
gone on record too many times saying that Bush fooled him on various
issues.
Kerry would probably just as soon his supporters did not make such a big
argument that Bush is stupid; it makes Kerry look even dumber than Bush.
It
makes his supporters look even dumber than that, but of course they are
too
stupid to realize it. :-)

Not at all. If you were highly commited (eager beaver) you had no better
chance of survival than someone who was less eager. The flak didn't care who
it
killed. It was an equal opportunity executioner.


Arthur Kramer

I don't relate being an eager beaver to being committed. That's not
committment, its stupidity ina combat environment..

Subject: Bush Flew Fighter Jets During Vietnam
From: ojunk (Steve Mellenthin)
Date: 7/14/2004 10:59 AM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Not at all. If you were highly commited (eager beaver) you had no better
chance of survival than someone who was less eager. The flak didn't care who
it
killed. It was an equal opportunity executioner.


Arthur Kramer

I don't relate being an eager beaver to being committed. That's not
committment, its stupidity ina combat environment..



Well I was an eager beaver totally commited to the job to be done. So I guess I
was stupid.



Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

ArtKramr wrote:

Flak is not related to commitment. It is statistical happenstance that
controlled the skies over Germany.

Given the difference in operating flotillas of bombers, unable to
deviate from their chosen path or altitude in order to avoid flak, and
operating smaller flights of more maneuverable jets with very different
weapons delivery parameters and limitations, Art's point is well made.

The fighters seem to have had similar stats in other wars, in that those
pilots who lived through the first dozen or so sorties tended to have
much better survival rates thereafter. For bomber pilots it's much more
a roll of the dice on any given mission, with survival rates changing
only slightly as the number of missions survived increases.

Did Buff pilots fly enough sorties over well defended targets in SEA for
a statistically significant comparison?



Jack

In '68 (not '72) public sentiment was divided.

Probably: by '72 it wasn't. You had a few hardasses and Birchers and
whatnot and everyone else was for getting out. I grew up in a
middle-sized town and one that was overwhelmingly 'AuH2064':yet even
the rednecks had serious questions by '72. Men in uniform-and even
then, although it was understood they were noncombatants, the
occasional female-were certainly not disrespectfully treated, but it
was expressed that we hoped the war would be over shortly -either way.


Bush got his training
slot when production for UPT was as high as it had been historically
since WW II. UPT was expanding from eight to eleven bases and capacity
at each site was increased. We were up to more than 5000 per year
input to UPT from all sources. (I was director of ATC Student Officer
Rated Assignments from 1970 to April 1972 and managing the program.)





My Presidential vote isn't going to count anyway since my state is
not remotely up for grabs and it's a winner-take-all state.

Since 48 out of 50 states are "winner-take-all" Electoral College
votes, your reasoning should get everyone to give up voting.

It would seem to this political scientist (BS, MPS, MSIR) that the
closeness of the last election in so many states would indicate that
the value of every citizen's vote is critically important.

Ours wasn't close. And this one will unquestionably be farther
apart-Kerry will do worse than Gore.


They both suck. If I voted on pure principle I couldn't even vote
Libertarian-although they're closer. Kerry might really screw things
up so bad people would have to pull their heads out and in the long
run, like a dope bust,it might be beneficial for an addict.

If you can't differentiate between the basic ideological positions of
the two parties, you shouldn't vote. Good choice.


I am aware of what their platforms say. I concede some may consider
them fundamentally different. I consider them basically similar in
that they both seek to encode their politicoreligious notions in the
law. In one case it's a recognized religion, the other is an implicit
one. In practice, they differ only by amount, not by real principle.


Dr. Joe Bagadonutz, the wealthy proctologist buys a Mustang or even
a
MiG-17 and successfully takes off and lands. He isn't, by any stretch
of the imagination, a fighter pilot. He isn't really, even that
lesser
level, a pilot who flies fighters. He's simply an accident waiting to
happen.

He's equally likely to kill himself in a Bonanza for that matter.

The initial post was about flying "fighters". Yes, Bonanzas are
notorious for applying the principles of Darwin to doctors.

Actually some doctors are pretty good, even excellent, aviators.
Several aerobatic champions have been doctors. Same with other
professions. It is possible to become an excellent stick and rudder
pilot through civilian training if you have the time, money, and
drive. About the only thing you won't be able to learn as a civilian
is weapons delivery.


The phrase far predates that book. It was the grinder call in the 50s
era USAF and I can remember my uncle-who went through the air cadet
program in the 50s-talking about it. Hated the culture of USAF where
Fighter Pilots were gods-he was a C-133/C-130 pilot who dropped dead
six weeks after retiring from TWA at 60 as a four striper.

With all due respect to your uncle, we never won a war by hauling
more
trash than the enemy. Trash haulers help, but only because they
provide the warriors at the pointy end of the spear with the bombs,
beans and bullets to kill the enemy.

He was no fighter pilot, but he was a good guy and he's missed. He'd
planned to get involved in the EAA Young Eagles program and had signed
up for a soaring rating when he dropped dead-not a heart attack per se
but an electrochemical heart problem. The ambulance got there five
minutes too late but the doctors said he might have been
brain-impaired anyway, so "maybe it was for the best."


Haven't seen Mason't book, but if he thinks the "Tiger" attitude got
replaced by something less, he's sadly mistaken. Warriors are
professionals, but they'd better have a healthy dose of attitude.


Mason's book-wriitten for young adults (young male adults-it was
fifteen years before females wore USAF wings)-portrays the USAF air
cadet programs as basically unalloyed aggressiveness designed to crank
out winning fighter jocks-at the expense of a certain casualty rate,
and notwithstanding that most grads went to tankers, transports,
bombers, helos, or ocasionally directly to IP school. As I remember
the big change_according to Mason_ was that flight training "later on"
took in people who were already officers, not needing the boot camp
mentality, and was vastly less tolerant of accidents. Also the T-38
Talon was a big challenge for people whose total experience consisted
of under 200 hours in the T-37.

This agrees with accounts of flight training by many other writers,
including Richard Bach and several of the early astronauts, who went
through 50s era USAF flight training.

Bottom line as far as politics- I personally don't like Bush, right
or wrong, and I can't support a Kennedy, which Kerry as well may be,
nor would I vote for someone that liberal even if he is an active
pilot. (In general I tend to prefer Reps to Dems, provided they are
not so fundamentalist they can't separate church from state.) I don't
agreee with everything John McCain says but I'd work for his election
over Kerry. Voting third party expresses my dissatisfaction, and if it
clearly throws the election either way so much the better.

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 14:36:09 -0500, Jack
wrote:

ArtKramr wrote:

Flak is not related to commitment. It is statistical happenstance that
controlled the skies over Germany.

Given the difference in operating flotillas of bombers, unable to
deviate from their chosen path or altitude in order to avoid flak, and
operating smaller flights of more maneuverable jets with very different
weapons delivery parameters and limitations, Art's point is well made.

The fighters seem to have had similar stats in other wars, in that those
pilots who lived through the first dozen or so sorties tended to have
much better survival rates thereafter. For bomber pilots it's much more
a roll of the dice on any given mission, with survival rates changing
only slightly as the number of missions survived increases.

Did Buff pilots fly enough sorties over well defended targets in SEA for
a statistically significant comparison?

AAA fire comes in a lot of flavors and flak was not exclusively a WW
II Germany phenomenon. Heavy gun flak at altitude is a scary thing,
and as you mention, the ability to maneuver helps to defend against
it.

But, there's flak and there's flak. Some is aimed fire, some is
barrage. Some is optical and some is radar guided. Anti-aircraft fire
ranges from small .30 and .50 caliber automatic weapons up through
huge guns at 100 or 130MM.

Optically guided flak can be defeated by jinking, random changes in
heading and altitude that destroy the lead computation of the gun.
Barrage flak simply fills a block of airspace and the best option is
to simply expedite your passage through the area.

Modern defense systems integrate multiple weapons, as Art can attest.
Guns and enemy aircraft are better than either one alone. Add some
SAM's in radar or IR flavors and you compound the issue further.

As Steve mentioned, the stats in SEA were that your first ten or
fifteen missions were your most vulnerable. It also turned out that
for a mission count tour, the last five or ten were equally dangerous.
The beginners were likely to make mistakes while the end-of-tour guys
often began to feel invulnerable and sought to win the war
single-handedly.

BUFFs only went into the heavily defended areas of North Vietnam
during Linebacker II. During the eleven days of Christmas they lost
fifteen (and a couple of others crashed on recovery outside of the
target area.) According to Michel in "Eleven Days of Christmas", the
B-52s flew 795 sorties of which 372 went to Hanoi. The loss rate was
1.89 %. All 15 of the losses were within a 13 mile radius of Hanoi and
the loss rate there was 4.3%


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

(ArtKramr) wrote in message ...
Subject: Bush Flew Fighter Jets During Vietnam
From: (Fred the Red Shirt)

The more missions you fly, the more times you get wounded the slimmer the
chances of survival are. But you know that, don't you?

Guess it is all a matter of how committed you are and how important you
think
the job is you have been assigned to do

It has nothing to do with any of that. The more missions you fly the worse the
odds of survival. How commited you are is irrelevant.

I think this is patently, demonstrably false. The more missions you
fly, the more experience and maturity in the role you gain. And thus,
the more likely you are to avoid making the mistake or error that can
compromise your survival. That's why veteran fighter pilots would
regularly make mince out of rookies sent out to take them on. That's
why you take your experienced soldier, sailors, Marines, and pilots
and put them into training roles to impart some of that knowledge into
the empty heads of their trainees, so that maybe the learning curve
for the new ranks won't be as steep.

And it's definitely a matter of commitment. A committed soldier or
pilot learns more, trains harder, and works more to ensure the
survival of the unit, and therefore himself.

The fighters seem to have had similar stats in other wars, in that those
pilots who lived through the first dozen or so sorties tended to have
much better survival rates thereafter. For bomber pilots it's much more
a roll of the dice on any given mission, with survival rates changing
only slightly as the number of missions survived increases.

Did Buff pilots fly enough sorties over well defended targets in SEA for
a statistically significant comparison?



Proabably starting a new thread here.

The BUFFs in SEA in Linebacker II had some moderate losses at the startof the
campaign but I believe it is pretty well accepted that the tactics were wrong
and not all planes had the right equipment. Once that was changed the losses
dropped off.

Well I was an eager beaver totally commited to the job to be done. So I guess
I
was stupid.



Arthur Krame

You made it. You must have been a smart committed eager beaver rather than a
dumb one. I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.