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<\/a><\/p>\nFifty-two F-35s. Get it? Coupled with Trump’s earlier threat to attack 52 Iranian sites “important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” this bit of sword-brandishing was clearly symbolic.\u00a0Fifty-two: one for\u00a0each American hostage taken by Iran and held for 444 days between November 1979 and January 1981.<\/p>\n
Thousands of airmen worked hard to stage this elephant walk: mechanics, weapons loaders, fuels personnel, schedulers, crew chiefs, egress specialists, pilots … I’m leaving out a lot of other specialties. Like, for example, the airman in the cherry picker they parked in front to take the photo. And what\u00a0purpose did\u00a0all this effort\u00a0serve?<\/p>\n
Far be it from me to question the training and readiness benefits of recalling personnel, generating aircraft, loading weapons, breaking out the frag, scheduling and briefing missions, and staging\u00a0a mass launch. That’s a wartime scenario, one we constantly practice for with operational readiness exercises and inspections.<\/p>\n
Except\u00a0OREs and ORIs generally do not\u00a0include\u00a0lining up combat\u00a0assets in orderly rows for publicity photos. Oh, well, at least one Air Force general thought this was worth the enormous expenditure of taxpayer dollars\u00a0and effort, and maybe he’ll get another star out of it.<\/p>\n