What is flying in real combat like? What do fighter pilots face when they’re sent into harm’s way? What’s in the heads of the men and women our governments send into a real threat environment?
Listen to the interviews conducted by John Waters on his podcast, The Afterburn Podcast, with F-16 pilots from Shaw AFB who flew during Operation Rough Rider over Yemen and then into Iran during Operation Midnight Hammer. It’s dense with fighter pilot speak, and unless you live in our world, you will miss some of the context. But you will certainly understand how little stability there was in the plan going into the Iran mission, the very real risk of someone being killed, and the certainty that they were facing a lethal threat. It’s especially poignant that as 4th Gen F-16s, they had no low observability to help them stay invisible and undetected. And as SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) assets, they were pre-emptively firing HARMs (Highspeed Anti-Radiation Missile) into the arena — likely provoking the enemy to come out of hiding.
I read a lot of opinions on what a fighter is expected to do in the modern battlespace. But so few people have heard it from the pilots themselves — from the theatre where jets are sent where the enemy is trying to kill them. This series is relevant, recent, and worth the time. Great work by ‘Rain’ Waters for conducting these conversations, and real credit to United States Air Force for allowing them to be published, so the public could grasp just how complex and dangerous these missions were. And for Canada and Royal Canadian Air Force — a nation whose fighter force has been sent on first-strike missions — this is a window into why lethality and survivability are paramount when selecting a fighter jet.
This is awesome. I don’t get everything that is brought up, however there is enough to understand these different mission aspects. Keep them coming please.