>>64197391
And in Afghanistan too. They straight-up didn't have IR and turning on night-fighting mode was vastly more involved than it should have been. The 'Cat's own laser pods were also constantly on the fritz, and parts stock for them was so low we were having to ship them back to depot-level for remanufacture half the time. Or chase harness faults, or spend 8 man-hours sitting at a bench with a multimeter and an o-scope going through a stack of 10% tolerance components while hand-doing the math to find the one that was in the right part of the spec window to balance out all the other tolerance-stacked garbage on the card. So.. yeah. The poor girls wound up being GBU horses, and it's not a job they're good at.

Kitties are pretty, I'll never say they weren't, and we all love Macross. But goddamn did the romance die for me when we were out on the water. So very glad I got sent to do -18s and test bench repair instead.