Lake Life Hubby

I was there! This was when I hosted POTUS at CAFB. I was just to the left out of camera view. twitter.com/cafredtail/sta…

Great story! I did 3 tours at Charleston and 4 tours total in C-17s. When I came back to Charleston as the Wing Commander, I strongly supported our annual large formation packages, usually flown in December. The 2 years I the Wing King, I led a 21 ship and a 24 ship formation, to include low level, formation AR and an airdrop. Good time!

I’ve done a few large formations of big jets. Once, I had very little notice: your mission is to lead 8 KC-10s out of NJ to rendezvous w/ 8 KC-135s out of FL & take fuel from them, radio silent, simulated no electronic emissions, to see how ready we are to support bombers if they had to go to war tomorrow. We hadn’t done it in a long time. Nobody who’d flown something like it was around anymore & while the book explains procedure, how you actually do it is different. It’s also something different to have people in the squadron who have a living memory of what flying such a thing is like, to share w/ others & we no longer had those resources. It was dropped in my lap…”you are the Mission Commander” & “Make it happen”. Just leadership, talking to me, nobody beside me. Shit. Leadership planned it this way & were wise to do so. How will our crews respond if we just task them w/ this kind of thing on short notice…like we may have to do someday? We’d gotten away from that & it hadn’t been done in a long time. A two ship formation was common, a four ship happened rarely, but an eight-ship meeting another eight ship…you couldn’t find people who’d done it still at the squadron or wing level. I surmised there were no real rules beside the conditions we had to fly under, only an outcome. My initial reaction was to set about planning it all myself, then briefing crews…but after a first effort, I realized it was *way* too much. Best decision I made. I called in the best instructors I knew. Called in the crews. Whatever their additional duties were, it could wait. This mission owns you now. I’ll direct conversation, but you’ll plan it & I’ll approve it (the Wing Commander actually approved, but I approved what we’d brief him). I felt like I should have been able to do it all on my own & this was cheating, or being lazy. In retrospect, it was the best thing I could have done. Everyone who would fly the mission was now involved in planning it. They heard the disputes, the reasoning, the rules & were part of making the plan. Nobody told me to bring them in. I just had a tasking…nobody told me I could call people in from their regular duties & give them new tasks, I just said the Wing Commander wants them to (he hadn’t said that, just that he wants this thing to happen, so I assumed some leeway to confiscate personnel). It went…alright. Storms were a problem. Timing got messed up by skirting around them & ATC cancels your “ALTREV” if you deviate from the filed route (long story, didn’t know that beforehand, we had to break radio silence among ourselves to figure it out). You can put a bunch of small fighters together in a formation & it’s not easy. Put a bunch of 500,000 lb jets together & it’s more difficult…4 million pounds of aluminum & fuel trying not to hit each other in clouds. I had to break the exercise rules a couple times to ensure safety. Anyway, that’s me in the picture below, the lead jet turning toward the runway, nervous & internally hoping I don’t fuck this up while I make sure I sound confident to the crew. I made sure I sounded good on the radio, too, talking to ATC, because we weren’t talking to each other…the rest of the formation were to listen & take appropriate action based on the ATC conversation. I’ve always loved this photo. A highlight of my career, but man I was nervous. On return to base, we ran into storms again & it was a clusterfuck. Threw the rules out the window & just did what we needed to. At one point I was using the weather radar to try to figure out where others were (I had them land before me), thought I was clever, then realized I was just assuming random radar returns were other jets. Dumb. Beside bringing the crews in to plan, the second best thing I did was write an account of the entire thing from start to finish, which I hope still survives today. It had all the ugly parts, the thinking, how it actually went & what I’d do differently next time.

@MCCCANM @Hush_Kit C-17 Globemaster III, but we called it the Moose.

@Hush_Kit The T-37: I think officially the “Tweet”, and called the Tweet. Sometimes called the “6,000 Lb Dog Whistle” for the extremely loud whine the engines produced. The KC-10: Officially “Extender”, but called “Big Sexy”, sometimes “Gucci” The T-6: Texan. No alternates I knew of.

Tweet for aircrew/groundcrew only: what is/was your aircraft officially called, and what did you call it?

@SenMarkKelly You. Are. Scum

I’m thankful that the President and others at the correspondents dinner are safe, and for the quick response from law enforcement.

@CalebAUSports Throw it up on a side screen or a tablet. AU baseball and softball both streaming now.

How many of yall are actually “burn a CD” old?

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK Introducing your next Secretary of the Navy. The Honorable Hung Cao 🔥👇

@coachbrucepearl I saw the interview live this morning. Maria Tore. Him. Up.

You're listening to a politician that is lying through his teeth. Whether pallets of cash were unfrozen Iranian assets or not, President Obama air lifted them. And what did Iran do with that money? Create proxy Armys, kill Americans, sponsor terror and are now at War with the USA

𝙏𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙨 🎾 The Tigers are bringing home the crown from the 2026 SEC Women’s Tennis Championship in Norman! 👑 #WarEagle

@NathanKing247 Sounds like our O 1s have some work to do. I'm not encouraged

Jared Smith just picked off Byrum Brown in the red zone on a screen pass. Impressive, athletic play by Smith, but it was a bad decision by Brown and another high snap by center Cole Best.

Alberta is gonna have a hell of a college football program when they join the United States.

Guided-missile destroyer USS Rafael Peralta (DDG 115) directs a merchant vessel to return to an Iranian port as it enforces the U.S. blockade, April 17. Since commencement of the blockade, 19 ships have complied with direction from U.S. forces to turn around and return to Iran. ZERO vessels have evaded U.S. forces during the blockade.

@CynicalPublius Why do we pay NGOs to do anything? We does the fed fund childcare?

Constitutional amendment proposal: No US federal tax dollars can be granted, paid or allocated to any non-governmental organization except in connection with the direct purchase of goods, equipment or services directly provided to and directly used by the federal government.

@CJCarr_17 @coachbrucepearl It's when a politician is speaking to more than one audience

@johnmillander @coachbrucepearl Is poli speak when we make up what we think Trump meant?

The efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon are probably not going to end, unless there is Regime change. President Trump is the leader of the free world and not a politician. He is doing what he believes will keep the world safer. I pray 4more Americans 2support

@CJCarr_17 @coachbrucepearl More like new players in the old regime. I think it poli speak, and I'm a 3 time Trump voter.

@johnmillander @coachbrucepearl Hasn’t Trump said that there already was a regime change?

Crazy idea: Let's split a country in socialist and capitalist halves and check in on them in 75 years.

@CynicalPublius CP--Retired USAF O-6 pilot with 2 tours in the 5 sided wind tunnel. I would very much like to associate myself with your remarks. Spot on!

RE: DC Politics and Senior Military Officers After the Vietnam War, America felt collective guilt over how it had treated our servicemen and women, so as a result the “yellow ribbon,” “Thank you for your service” culture has flourished for decades, with the US military consistently ranking near the top of America’s most respected and trusted institutions in public polling. That is a good thing. However, that does not mean we do not still have some rotten apples in uniform, many of whom reach very high ranks as generals or admirals. It’s time that those very senior generals and admirals not be given automatic, reflexive deference with zero scrutiny by the public. It’s time the public hold them to the same standards we hold our elected officials. What have you done for me lately? Are you honest? Who comes first, your ego or the nation? And you know what? It’s kind of sad that we have come to this point, but the generals and admirals only have themselves to blame. You see, at the level of elected officials, senior political appointees and career senior executive service members, the DC infighting that occurs on a routine daily basis is like Game of Thrones without the dragons and the literal beheadings. DC politics are Machiavellian. They are bloodthirsty. It is a take no prisoners war for power, using all manner of underhanded and devious methods. Many decades ago, the generals and admirals knew these fights were not their domain. Mostly speaking, they were above all of that. But—thanks in large part to Goldwater/Nichols and our unholy addiction to the “interagency”—as we fostered generation after generation of officers with deep experience in The Swamp, those same officers came to believe that the Machiavellian rules of their civilian bosses were theirs to play by too. Slow-rolling initiatives you disagree with? Yup. Playing the Georgetown cocktail party game of scurrilous rumormongering? Check. Running around your chain of command to Congress to get what you want? Absolutely. Being the “anonymous source” in an anonymously-sourced Washington Post article that was nothing more than outright lies and libel? Roger that. The problem is this: WE HAVE GENERALS AND ADMIRALS WHO THINK THOSE GAME OF THRONES RULES APPLY TO THEM. Not only do they think they apply to them, they consider it to be standard operating procedure and a literal requirement of their DC duty position. Well I got some news for you, general. You too, admiral. You are UNIFORMED MEMBERS OF OUR MILITARY SERVICES, and your oath is to the Constitution, not your ego. We expect more from you than we do sleazeball civilian lawyers in positions of power. We expect your integrity to be impeccable, and by playing by DC Game of Thrones rules, you sacrifice that integrity entirely. (See: Courtney Massengale; use your search engine of choice if you do not know.) Pete Hegseth has been given a Herculean task to clean out the Augean Stables at the Pentagon. He has been doing it, slowly but surely, and he is eradicating that corrupt culture at the top of the military food chain bit by bit, piece by piece. So the next time you see Hegseth fire a general or an admiral, consider that one of two things might be true: 1. The general/admiral refused to be a “sycophant” (as the Democrat/Media Complex will claim) and got fired by a meanie SecWar as punishment. -or- 2. The general/admiral didn’t like a lawful order because it went against his/her personal politics, so he/she decided to go around the electoral will of the American people and satisfy his/her own ego to play Daenerys Targaryen DC games, got caught, and got righteously fired as a result. Consider the difference. Clean up your act generals. You too, admirals. You work for THE PEOPLE (you know, like at the top of the Constitution). Do it.

Hit the road and travel to Arkansas with @kyliebrock21 🤳 #WarEagle