Yes, the public needs to understand this. That unit's [1] task is to provide transportation to senior government officials and security forces around the capital, including to and from that airport. If they didn't train to operate there, then their first time doing so would be with someone like the Secretary of Defense onboard or during some other mission that's critical to national security.
And the aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units. Source: I'm a career Army officer and former Black Hawk pilot.
It'd be normal to have night vision to hand for either a training mission or for a secure VIP transport mission.
It's unclear whether they were being used at the time of the crash, but it'd be part of training.
The reporting to hand ATM makes statements such as:
Earlier in the day, Mr. Hegseth said the crew had night vision goggles. However, it was unclear whether the crew was wearing the goggles at the time of the crash, Army officials said.
> Sure, but if they weren’t in use, why mention them?
Errr, Hegseth is a functioning alcoholic recently parachuted into a job several orders of magnitude past anything in his prior experience.
He's likely to blurt out anything unredacted that he's heard in briefings without any due consideration of consequence.
That aside, these are training missions, they have night vision available, this would have been flagged as one of many possible influencing factors in the absence of a full accident investigation that crawls through everything.
It's unknown (to the public at least, and at this point no one who knows would or should say) whether they were in use for now.
As defrost said, having goggles would be normal (probably even required by local unit policy) for any night flight. Whether they are helpful or harmful will vary with conditions so, yeah, when transiting through a dense urban area with lots of ambient light you might actually flip them up (i.e. out of the way, above your line of sight) to see better.
Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.
Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.
It's a bad idea. That unit's [1] task is to provide transportation to senior government officials and security forces around the capital, including to and from that airport. If they didn't train to operate there, then their first time doing so would be with someone like the Secretary of Defense onboard or during some other mission that's critical to national security.
"Training" here also doesn't imply some 21 year-old flight school student learning to fly. The aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units.
I've lost count of how many times I've heard your sentiment already today, and I'm distraught by the general public's apparent lack of understanding about how things work.
The missions are flown through that airspace multiple times per day, and it's all for national security purposes. You can't put a hold on all commercial air traffic every time, and you need to train the pilots to navigate and communicate through that particular airspace.
Whether the system (i.e. separating rotary-wing and fixed-wing traffic there) can be more safely designed is a question for the FAA. The military aircraft are simply abiding by FAA rules for that airspace. Many more civilian helicopters are doing the same thing.
I disagree with the premise that the US will be totally different tomorrow.
One characteristic of the US that differs from most other countries is the degree to which the states retain a lot of power to govern themselves, and states will continue doing what they do mostly independently of things at the Federal level.
The way that most Americans talk about the president also overstates the actual power of the office. I half-joked earlier today that most Americans seem to imagine this country as an autocracy in which they get to vote for a new ruler every four years. But it's not. Congress still has more power than the average person-on-the-street seems to realize. Part of what makes Trump taking office tomorrow a bigger deal is that he's also getting both houses of congress for the next two years, which isn't always the case, but we're seeing flashes of congressional Republicans being unwilling give up their powers to him.
Anyway, I also agree with the other answers about nuclear command and control and the dysfunction in congress, especially in terms of congress exercising its power to declare war.
The difference is that we have a would be king exempt from any consequences for criminal acts. The Supreme Court granted the office of the President immunity outside of impeachment. They’ve launched shitcoins to fleece the fanbase before taking office, so there’s obviously no hesitation.
All he needs to do is bribe spineless gop senators. No problem.
I'm debating trying to do this. I've seen it recommended by other people who I think are smart. Honestly, I tuned out most of the 2010s after being a political news junkie in the 2000s, and it was probably good for me. I couldn't sleep or concentrate on work for a couple days after this election.
> And in 2 years and 4 years I will go to the voting booth. But I'm powerless until then
What's really depressing is that I'm already happy with my representation in congress, and they'll probably win again comfortably in 2026 and 2028, but they're powerless too.
I've wanted to do this since 2016. It was November of 2015 when I first thought, "How long could I go not knowing if Hillary won or lost?" Eight years later, I've put it into effect, and my mind is so much clearer for it.
My whole life I've believed that "it's important to be informed." I now challenge that. I mean: yes, obviously before the next election I will read up on the candidates and propositions. But apart from that, me being informed has zero effect on the world.
Another forum that I frequent is bogleheads.org (about investing and personal finance), and one of the rules is that discussing politics and proposed legislation is off-limits. But obviously when a new law (e.g. on taxes) is actually passed then discussion of how we're personally affected becomes appropriate and necessary.
That might be a good model for generally striking an appropriate balance: be informed about new major legislation (or executive orders, court decisions, etc.) when they happen, but skip all the day-to-day drama about who said what on the House or Senate floor, or in an interview, or on X in between such things. I've seen it suggested many times that the Wikipedia current events portal is all that one should look at, and it would probably accomplish this.
Yes, and what's even worse to me is Trump's explicit motivation for supporting TikTok now. Like there are some interesting philosophical, moral, and maybe legal arguments against the TikTok ban but what he's seized on is simply that TikTok was a useful tool (as far as he's been told) for gaining votes. Keeping it around just benefits him politically and personally, so that's it.
Yes, I don't have a reference immediately available, but I've read that the DoD has studied this and found that LDS kids join the military at a disproportionately high rate and turn out to be better than average troops. Anecdotally, I've found this to be true too. The Utah Army National Guard also has the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade of linguists which is pretty unique.
But for Gen Z folks, that stuff is ancient history, isn't it? Even the oldest members (using 1997 as a starting point, but some definitions use 2000) were too young to protest or serve in Iraq[1]. By the time the youngest Gen Z folks were starting school in the mid-2010s, the US stock market and unemployment rate had reached pre-recession levels too.
[1] I mean when people cared about Iraq, 2003 to circa 2008. We still have troops there, but I don't think most of America is even aware of that.
I'm pretty sure that only a small minority of Americans, let alone those in the 18-29 age group, can name their senators and representative and anyone on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, most Americans instead seem to imagine this country as an autocracy in which they get to vote for a new ruler every four years.
Probably the most impactful to your own life vote you can cast is the local municipal one. And that has such poor turnout among the youth it is crazy. Even in places where they mail you a ballot automatically and you have two weeks to vote at polls. People just don’t care to be engaged.
I've been fascinated by the shift towards Trump by 18-29 voters in this past election, and I think this is a good explanation that I haven't heard before. Yeah, and Bush 43 was so long ago that his popular image has turned from kind of a villainous "worst president ever" to a favorably remembered elder statesman according to some polls.
Note that it was a shift for Trump, still not a majority voting for him. Exit polls that I've seen still indicated an 11-point lead for Harris[1], but that's much more narrow than the 24-point lead that Biden had in 2020[2]. Anyway, I've been fascinated by this because it kind of broke my mental model imagining that the Republican party would eventually be marginalized as its voters died of old age. I definitely thought Trump was going to lose this age group in 2024 by the widest margin ever.
Racism and mysogeny is still very much alive among the youth and quite a lot of the US lacks any diversity to combat those notions. Or if they do have diversity on paper it might still be somewhat segregated where these communities might be neighbors but don’t overlap in activities. Less a melting pot, more a punchbowl filled with different fruits bumping into eachother.
> Kill all the algos and let me find stuff via regex
I love this. As someone who increasingly feels old and dissatisfied with what computing is turning into, I'm going to start using this along with things like "you'll have to pry local accounts, passwords, and plain text email from my cold, dead hands."
And the aviators assigned to that unit are typically more senior people who've already done a tour or two with more conventional units. Source: I'm a career Army officer and former Black Hawk pilot.
[1] https://jtfncr.mdw.army.mil/TAAB/