GySgt Cole

I would edit my post but permissions have been incredibly restricted for people who've dedicated at least 1.5 years to the unit for no reason. Hito/Osbourne - take criticism but remember to have a vision for the story and missions you'd like to create and abide by that vision. I found that readjusting that vision every week to suit task forces or grapeshot critiques/suggestions just made things seem chaotic to the regular guys.

A lot of this behavior in Vanilla AI can be negated by increasing spotting distance and AI accuracy, but I got complaints about how hard the AI were when tested. @GySgt Hito @1st LT Osbourne and any battlecaptains that weren't around when I was: you're never going to make everyone happy, especially if you try to put more focus on driving a story (making a story that an 15 people can interact with is hard, 30 even harder). Everyone else: understand that S-2 is never going to be able to make everyone happy. Find the fun in each mission (talk to your battlebuddies, check houses that probably have zero consequence to the mission), and please be respectful and upbeat when addressing S-2 with criticism. Nothing burns out a zeus more and gets you ignored faster than being whiney about something in game that probably could be chalked up to ground incompetence (which happens all the time), not S-2 personally trying to dick you over (which doesn't happen).

Made this for @SSgt Reeves, congrats on the well deserved promotion

reposting because its relevant again give me back retirements/resignations please

In terms of expeditionary capacity France is really only surpassed by the US. Even the UK relies on US logistics much of the time, where France has developed some of its own infrastructure. Russia and China (demonstrably) pale to the big three of NATO. Plus French SOF is fucking lit

French Milsim unit when?

Time for some NATO Allies since these alliances are incredibly important to our security French special forces in the Sahel region. Polish JWK Operator with a Polish World War 2 veteran. Belgian Special Forces Operators during Belgium's national holiday parade. Brussels, 21/07/2018. German soldiers of the 292nd light infantry bataillon, part of the Franco-German Brigade, on exercise in Lithuania, February 2018 KA M110 SASS. Italian Special Operations Forces engage floating targets from the shoreline during unstable platform training held by the ISTC on the island of Crete, Greece.

Even Connecticut No. 1 Chinese food has to remind me

Man that marking dye is kind of Orwellian. The right to protest is sort of a fundamental American right, I don't think police and military forces should be going to such lengths to build anti-protest capabilities.

Baz brings up a good point. ITC is currently less comprehensive than the ITB class I took when I joined the 13th in August of 2016. If you want to start making things more realistic and professional, that's the place to start. It's honestly a bit of a shit show (and that's coming from an experienced ITC instructor). Also, assessment and selection should probably become that. If someone's a dumbass or new to the game, clearly they don't belong to a professional unit

Boiling down my final thoughts on the matter: 1. Word shouldn't need to come through official channels for Command to pay attention. If people are moaning in the meme thread or in their private discussions, there's an issue. 2. Building on that, I think you missed my point that if people aren't having fun, they're going to leave. If Command is making the conscious decision to make this a paperwork laden, rubric graded unit that's more professional, they should broadcast that more clearly so people can leave without drama and without the pain of burnout. If Command has bumbled into this (which I suspect is much more likely), Command has to play make up, not the members. Like you said - I already made that choice - and I'm not coming back. I do still have friends in this unit however who feel it's going the wrong way, and since they feel the CoC has both failed them and will likely fail them again, I'm throwing out my thoughts in the public thread provided.

HOLYOKE? MORE LIKE POKE YOU FULL OF HOLES YOU LESBIAN happy birthday don't get eaten by mountain lions

I have to disagree on a few points, Captain. I'm retired, so I don't really have a dog in the race other than to say I got completely burned out trying my damndest to keep things fun for my guys and stop the unit from going down a slope I fear it's slipped down quite a bit - and that's a bad thing. I can't speak for the wider unit, but if you polled Viking when I retired I'm sure most if not all of us would have likened the unit more to a pickup league than a professional one. We're in milsim units to have fun, not "work on a skill". Sure, successful missions and getting more cohesive feels great, but if that's not happening naturally and in a fun environment, you have bad leaders, not bad teams. Besides a few hiccups and a few poorly designed missions, Viking always had fun. Part of that, though, came from protecting the guys under from the absolute nonsense above me. The times I corrected an issue through friendly conversation in lieu of a recommended counseling or NJP takes two hands, and the times I said "fuck that, ignore higher and do it this way" I've lost count. Despite that, I'm pretty confident Viking was the most successful team in field and in retention. I didn't need a rubric to tell me what to improve on, and I didn't always make the soundest decisions, but I did what made for the best cross section of fun and sensible tactics. One time, I had a 20-30 minute classroom section before a team training. Three smart, highly proficient members almost left. And they had every right to! I can hear the nagging voice of command "Well if you can't sit through 30 minutes of discussion, you didn't know what you signed up for in a realism unit hurhurhur" - no. Basically everyone in this unit understands the tactics, the cohesion is just not there. You're not going to get cohesion in a classroom environment, and you're not going to get cohesion by comparing team to team. You're going to get cohesion by empowering junior leadership, and introducing the team to varied, fun scenarios that can be achieved. Leadership burnout is not a good way to get new blood in the ranks and open up room for people to step up. It's a good way to get entire chains of command to burnout at once. The fact there are people in command roles in this unit hold the former opinion does not bode well for the health of leadership. Tactical leaders make the game fun, they are the most important building block in the tower. Nobody wants to join of fill in on an element where the element leader is meandering and cracks under pressure, they want to be in an element where the leader stays cool headed and is able to do their job at all times. The same goes for Team HQs. Another issue is posts like this one, and the attitude that comes with them. While some discussion is better than no discussion, doing it after the fact seems like a paradoxical angry groveling. Team HQs should have been notified of the format of the FTX, and when they (probably) disagreed with the notion, they FTX should have been modified to be better. Saying "this is the decision leadership made and if you don't like it, be an adult and hop in your time machine and constructively criticize the decision made without your knowledge or input by the people you can't blame" comes off as childish. People leaving - sure, they may be acting childishly too. But if people are perturbed enough to throw that tantrum, yelling "don't screw this up for us!" back perhaps missing the point people are trying make.

I saw this template and decided to make fun of @2ndLt Wauben

Who the fuck even uses the social function on imgur, it's a glorified image host for reddit Anyways Zietara these look super dope! Keep up the good work.

Hello all, I'm recovering from surgery (all is well) and unable to sleep. In my boredom, I've been reading some old news to catch up since I've been pretty out of it. I'm sure you've all heard of the Space Force proposal that President Trump is floating, and it really got me thinking. What sort of branches could the military have now, or in the future? The military is very resistant to change at a Command level, let alone a Branch level. Adding a new branch means competition for funding and so on, but often it is for the best that new branches be spun off (remember, it took all of WW2 plus the start of the Cold War to get the Air Force created out of the Army Air Forces) To avoid dumb politics, I don't want to talk about the political efficacy of these potential branches, simply the military/geopolitical side of things. I just kind of want to have fun and stir a little discussion. Jokes are fine too, but I'd love to see some serious responses. Curious to see if anyone else every thinks about this too. For my idea, I'd like to combine "Space Force" with another major emerging field that the US has fallen behind in: cyber warfare. Currently, each branch fields cyber warfare forces and (if anyone's interested, I'll link sources) are mostly underfunded and not a priority. As we saw with electoral breaches by the Russians in 2016, and following breaches to power grid and seaport systems, cyber threats aren't on the horizon - they're here. In my eyes, a weapon that could potentially disable the entire infrastructure of the civilian US, and probably much of the government/military as well, shouldn't be left to small groups within the branches and parts of law enforcement/homeland security beaureas, it should have it's own branch. I also think space is a good place to invest military power, but not enough to warrant its own branch (for now - the future may look very different). Potentially, I could see Cyber, Space and maybe Nuclear/other strategic weapons all fall under a new branch: US Strategic Forces. With a focus on defense against potentially world ending weapons (cyber, space based, WMDs and so on), it could let the other branches focus on their specific realms of warfare. Strategic Forces could also assist Homeland Security in protection of critical infrastructure. To take my little fantasy even further, I'm gonna say they'll have a grey theme to their dress uniforms, with blue trim. BDUs could simply be theater appropriate ACUs, and something less useful and more "we're different!" for non-theater use. I'm thinking all grey BDU with grey/black equipment, sort of like Belgian DSU. They'll be protecting Missile Fields and other US based installations, so a "police vibe" like all grey actually makes ton of sense to me.

Yo General Kelly call your boy Tommy Cole I gots ideas

Don't forget that it's not just S-2s job to provides stuff for Aviation to do. Some of my favorite operations were ones where @1stLt Golembesky would put birds on the deck in parking lots, small clearings, etc. One time him and I were separated from the team, and he had a little bird ferry just the two of us back up to the line. During my time as team lead, both myself and my JTACs (Ski and @SSgt (Ret) Derr) tried to utilize aviation as much as possible. Sure, counter insurgency means that you're not going to be calling JDAMs on everything, but use help transport instead of vics. Use fixed wing aircraft to buzz the deck and scare insurgents back into or out of their hidey holes. Rotor should take care to practice tight, fast moving landings. Every pilot should be able to put a Littlebird and Blackhawk in a space not much bigger than their rotor/tail span, and do it quickly with a low approach. Sorry for any spelling/grammar, pretty doped up on post-surgery meds.

Classroom Exercises during FTX Expectation: Reality:

When End User Error causes framerate issues on a specific map, they complain loud enough to fuck up your well planned deployment, and command adds the map back anyways