#Marine Corps Exercises

[dendeniel]

Ukrainian artillery shelled Kurakhovo, but the most interesting thing is the interception of the audio message of the rider, indicating that the strike was carried out from Krasnogorovka by Polish mercenaries from the "Crabs" (ACS).

[alex--max]

U.S. Marine Corps F-35Bs sunset takeoff during Exercise Steel Knight 23.2 at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, US.

🎥: By Lance Cpl. Christian Radost

#USMC #marinecorpsaviation #f35b #takeoff #sunset #f35blightningii #marines #lockheedmartin #fighterjet #fighterpilot #stealthfighter #militaryaviation #milavgeek

[niqhtlord01]

Humans are weird: The Reckoning Virus

( Please come see me on my new patreon and support me for early access to stories and personal story requests :D https://www.patreon.com/NiqhtLord Every bit helps)

War with the Interaxie was an inevitable outcome for humanity and the entire galaxy knew it.

Border disputes, clashing rights over trade, subtle threats between delegates and near constant animosity between the two powers all but assured that they would come to blows. Along the entire shared border between the two powers a sense of dread and waiting could be felt on every world as if they could sense the brewing storm just over the horizon.

Yet humanity could not afford to be the aggressors for a change.

Unlike their previous conflicts the Interaxie had a well-organized military and an industrial power base to support them for decades of sustained combat. They had dozens of worlds to draw upon near limitless manpower reserves meaning any conflict could be drawn out into a bloody stalemate. While the humans were not unfamiliar with this style of warfare it was an outcome they did not wish to see realized.

To prevent this outcome humanity put a plan into motion called “The Reckoning”, which when completed would hand them victory in the war within a few months at best.

While the Interaxie were gathering their strength and hiding their growing fleet strength behind ‘military exercises” a series of shipments were being delivered to the core worlds of the Interaxie. They arrived at trade ports and were moved to waiting warehouses as their paperwork was checked only for the shipments to mysteriously vanish. It wasn’t unheard of for a shipment or two to go missing at such facilities, and though on some of the world’s their disappearance was noticed and investigated for the majority of others they were written off as clerical mistakes. The trade network between worlds was after all vast and overwhelmed by bureaucratic red tape so it was not unheard of for a shipment to be mishandled.

Such trivialities were soon overshadowed as the eventual war broke out and trade quickly shut down between the two powers. What had been mild border conflicts broke out into ruthless fleet sized engagements that turned entire systems into orbital graveyards of ships overnight. Human Hammerhead dreadnoughts were taking on entire swarms of Interaxie drone swarms in space while the Terran Marine Corps were barely holding their own against Interaxie armored divisions on the planets of Theta, Primus, and Dollore.

The fighting was intense and just as predicted the Interaxie began to call upon their vast manpower reserves early in an attempt to simply overrun human opposition and claim a swift victory. Legions began mustering on their core worlds waiting for transport to the front when the war took a turn for the worse for the would-be alien conquerors.

Without warning several viral outbreaks began to be reported from the Interaxie core worlds. Infected individuals began showing heightened states of aggression and delirium with the worst cases quickly devolving to bouts of madness and rage. What made it worse was when local officials quarantined an area in hopes of isolating the infected a new series of outbreaks would happen somewhere else entirely leaving containment out of the question.

It did not take long for civil unrest to break out as the virus spread into major populated areas and shortly after states of emergency to be declared. Factories ground to a halt as the workers fled the infection to protect themselves and their loved ones, farms and fields left unattended as their caretakers no lay lost to the grips of the disease leaving shelves unfilled and empty. Fights broke out for what supplies remained and though provisions could have been supplied from off world spaceports were soon overrun by those wishing to flee. When the infected reached a critical state of the virus’s development they began lashing out at anyone and everyone within arms reach resulting in the near total collapse of order on worlds as waves of infected ran through the streets

The legions that had been mustering to be sent the front soon found themselves being redeployed for containment or worse, becoming largely infected themselves and losing all combat effectiveness. Interaxie warriors were forced to put down many of their comrades who had succumbed to the virus leaving them horrified by their actions. It was worse for those deployed as part of containment teams who gunned down thousands of infected civilians on the quarantined worlds, many of which were related to the warriors by blood.

Within a month a dozen worlds had been locked under quarantine with another handful now desperately holding on as infection rates continued to rise, all the while the war with the humans continued. The sudden loss of manpower and war material was certainly noticed on the front and the humans shifted tactics. Every engagement they forced the Interaxie into using whatever reserves they had left as much as possible. Soon it was not uncommon for three Interaxie soldiers to be rationing one power cell for their rifles while their fleets lay in high anchor above their worlds due to lack of fuel to move them out of system.

Unable to meet the current demands of the war and handle the outbreaks spreading through their core worlds, the Interaxie soon sued for peace. The humans were not sympathetic with the Interaxie plight and their demands were steep.

1.       Three border systems would be transferred over to human control.

2.       A DMZ would be established from the newly taken territory and the remaining Interaxie domain which no ship from either side would cross.

3.       The Interaxie would be forced to repay a war debt to humanity in the sum of three trillion credits over the course of the next twenty solar years.

4.       Human monitoring stations would be placed inside Interaxie space to prevent future acts of aggression.

Had it been at any other time the Interaxie would have rather fought on until the bitter end than accept such harsh terms, but with the virus continuing to cripple their military and economy they were left with no choice but to relent and agree to the terms.

With that the Interaxie/Human war came to an abrupt end and the Interaxie redeployed their entire military forces to combat the growing viral outbreaks, all the while Terran Special Services watched from afar and grinned.

Several months prior to the war they had been responsible for shipping a number of unremarkable containers through a series of dummy corporations and unaffiliated alien trade networks until they arrived on the Interaxie core worlds. They bore no human markings and their paperwork was all in order leaving nothing for suspicion. Once they had been moved to the warehouses for processing TSS operatives quietly removed the containers and began distributing the contents across the worlds.

Industrial factories, mining complexes, agricultural farms, super markets, water treatment facilities, power plants; any and all critical infrastructure locations were located and seeded with the contents of the containers before the operatives quickly fled off world.

When war finally broke out a signal was remotely sent and each of the packages cracked open releasing their deadly contents. Swarms of tiny mosquitos genetically bred to carry what was known as the Reckoning Virus were soon released and began spreading the virus with every victim they came into contact with.

It was an ecological disaster of unimaginable proportion. Not only did the insects infect the personnel of the facilities they were placed in, but they also began to spread outwards and begin breeding in new areas. Any source of water soon became a deadly petri dish for them as they reproduced at an alarming rate releasing further swarms of insects. On these alien worlds they had no natural predators and what wildlife did attempt to eat them soon became deadly sick with the virus as well leading to rampant overpopulation of the bugs.

The Interaxie were well aware of the seemingly good timing the outbreaks had been for the humans and long suspected their involvement but could not prove anything as the TSS had planned for such eventualities. None of the devices used were of human origin and even if they could track down how they had arrived on world the series of dummy companies and alien trade networks used to ship them there resulted in a labyrinth of legal networks and commissions needed for even the slightest scrap of information that would lead nowhere.

For almost ten years the virus remained effective before the Interaxie were finally able to find a way to not only cure the virus but also eliminate the invasive species of mosquitoes, but by then the damage was already done. Both their military and trade had been crippled by the viral outbreaks and with several of their primary manufacturing worlds now defunct the flow of goods to the remaining worlds was almost a trickle. Extreme measures of rationing were implemented which only led to further discontent and civil unrest which in turn was brutally put down by military forces. What had once been a galactic power now had been reduced to a third rate kingdom barely able to hold a trade agreement out of their domain let alone ever again extend their power through military force.

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

A U.S. Marine with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, moves through a simulated mine field during Integrated Training Exercise (ITX) 3-23 at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, April 16, 2023.

(Photo by Lance Cpl. Justin J. Marty)

[military1st]

Breaking barriers, securing seas.

U.S. Marine during Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 24, the premier maritime-focused exercise, in Skrunda, Latvia.

The U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Ryan Ramsammy (2024).

[m0tiv8me]

“MAYbe I CAN” Challenge

Hey Tumblr I’m serving up another mental/physical challenge for the month of May.

The Challenge:

Pick something you’ve been wanting to do for your mental or physical well being. It can be something you’ve been wanting to get back to doing or just wanting to try but just never started.

Do that thing for 15 minutes EVERYDAY in the month of May. Just 15 minutes that’s it.

Keep it feasible and within the realm of possibility given your circumstances. But it should also be somewhat challenging and give you a sense of accomplishment.

Here’s some basic Physical or Mental Examples to help get you thinking.

15 minutes of walking or running. Workout or exercise, Meditation or yoga. Reading, crafting, doing a favorite pastime you just don’t make time for anymore and so on. Whatever it is it should have a positive mental/physical effect on your day to day life.

Staying Accountable:

Keep accountable by reblogging and adding onto daily posts. OR journal your own daily updates about what you did in your 15min. Use the tag #maybe i can to make it easier for others to find or tag me @m0tiv8me. If you wish to keep it more private and not post publicly feel free to DM me updates and I’ll respond with some words of encouragement.

Of course anyone is welcome to spend more than 15 minutes on their chosen activity if they wish. But aim for at least 15 minutes each day.

The GOAL:

The purpose of this challenge is to foster healthy habits through consistency and hopefully open the door to long term improved mental/physcial quality of life. Big changes often start small and it’s easy to become overwhelmed in this busy world. Take 15 minutes of time for yourself each day and start to believe “Maybe I Can” do those things I’ve always wanted to do.

What Next:

Simply add a 💙 emoji in the comments if you want in and you’ll be tagged in upcoming posts. Goal report and check in is Monday April 29th. Day 01 post goes up Wednesday May 1st at Midnight. So start thinking of what your 15 minutes will be used for and spread the word and let’s get a community of like minded people helping to encourage and cheer each other on for the month of May!

Any questions? Just ask!

@thoughts-sex-desires @mikelcity @athousandmorningss @joshuamusclefan @perspective24 @marine-corps-strong

[ghostwarriorrrr]

🔴E-2C Hawkeye Land On Nimitz-Class Aircraft Carrier

PACIFIC OCEAN (Aug. 7, 2007) - An E-2C Hawkeye, attached to the squot; Golden Hawks squot; of Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron (VAW) 112, lands on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) after completing a training mission as part of exercise Valiant Shield 2007. The John C. Stennis, Kitty Hawk and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups are participating in Valiant Shield 2007, the largest joint exercise in recent history. Held in the Guam operating area, the exercise includes 30 ships, more than 280 aircraft and more than 20,000 service members from the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jon Hyde

[usafphantom2]

A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III from Joint Base Lewis-McChord and a F-22 Raptor from Hickam AFB sit on the flight line at Marine Corps Base Hawaii during Exercise Rainier War 25A, Oct. 9, 2024. (e. Schoubroek)

@kadonkey via X

[nullnvoid911]

A Norwegian Coastal Ranger Commando (KJK) stands watch on a CB90 assault craft during Exercise Platinum Ren at an undisclosed location in Norway.

Sgt. Tayler Schwamb / US Marine Corps, May 20, 2019

[gatheringbones]

[“The group cheered. I sat up, hugged the men on either side of me, and said I wanted a hug from each man. Everyone stood up and started embracing everyone else. What a sight it was! A whole roomful of naked heterosexual men, hugging each other like big bears, not A-frame hugs but full body hugs with love and acceptance.

When we sat in the circle to talk, John, the minister, thought the experience was “uplifting,” that my sexual warmth had been contagious. Rick was amazed by the difference between his childhood circle jerks and our masturbation ritual, where the objective was communal acceptance of selflove. He felt he’d never been able to caress his own body tenderly because he’d been afraid to like his own maleness. Roger pointed out that men usually countered their fear of liking men with anger and aggression. Sharing orgasms and naked hugs was a radical break from social conditioning. Hank, the only one who didn’t have an orgasm, said watching me was an inspiration to practice loving himself. “We’ll all be better lovers by loving ourselves more,” I answered.

There weren’t any spontaneous group hugs in my next several groups, but I included a group massage ritual that always got the men touching each other. It was even a bigger thrill for me to watch men doing massage together than women. Somehow it seemed more natural to see women touching and nurturing one another. Being with a group of nude husbands and fathers massaging each other made me nearly weep with joy. There was an esprit de corps from the gentle laying on of hands.

Working with men in the Bodysex Groups was a good way for me to confront my own stereotypes about the opposite sex. For example, in one group we did some martial-arts warm-up exercises. I showed the men the “horse” posture, standing with legs apart and knees bent, and had them punching out with fists from the waist. I was flabbergasted to see that a third of the group couldn’t do it. My stupid assumption that all men knew how to punch got blasted away. Still I loved doing the more physical things with them because they were conditioned to push beyond their limits. Women usually stopped the minute they felt any exertion, but men went beyond where they were comfortable. They inspired me to push my own limits.

One of my breakthroughs was allowing myself to act like a marine sergeant. Men knew how to take orders. When I became a no-nonsense disciplinarian, they loved it. I’d grown accustomed to never giving a women’s group a direct order because most women reacted to being pushed by going right into passive resistance. I didn’t have to baby men by making suggestions or easing them into the next activity. I simply stated what I wanted them to do, and they did it. Men had learned a different set of rules through team sports, the military, and the corporate structure.”]

betty dodson, from orgasms for one: the joy of selfloving, 1992

[mariacallous]

The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well.

Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises—an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War.

Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.

But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.

The ancient sources are effectively unanimous that the helots were the worst treated slaves in all of Greece; helotry was an institution that shocked the conscience of Athenian slaveholders. Critias, an Athenian collaborator with Sparta, was said to have quipped that it was in Sparta that “the free were most free and the slaves most a slave,” a staggering statement about a society that was mostly enslaved (and about Critias as a person that he thought this was praise). Plutarch reports the various ways that the Spartans humiliated and degraded the helots, while the Athenian orator Isocrates argued that it was a crime to murder enslaved people everywhere in Greece, except Sparta. Sparta, with both the most slaves per capita and the worst treated slaves, was likely the least free society in the whole of the ancient world.

Nor were the Spartans particularly good stewards of Greek freedom. While their place in popular culture, motivated by films such as 300, puts the Spartans at the head of efforts to defend Greek freedom from the expanding Persian Empire, Sparta was not always so averse to Persia. Unable to deal with the Athenian fleet itself, Sparta accepted Persian money during the Peloponnesian War to build its own, selling the Ionian Greeks back into Persian rule in exchange for humbling Athens. That war won the Spartans a brief hegemony in Greece, which they quickly squandered, ending up at war with their former allies in Corinth.

Unable to win that war either, Sparta again turned to Persia to enforce a peace, called the “King’s Peace,” which sold yet more Greek city-states to the Persian king in exchange for making Sparta into Persia’s local enforcer in Greece, tasked with preventing the emergence of larger Greek alliances that could challenge Persia. Far from being the defender of Greek independence, when given the chance the Spartans opened not only the windows but also the doors to Persian rule. They also refused to join in Alexander the Great’s expedition against Persia, for which Alexander mocked them by dedicating the spoils of his first victories “from all of the Greeks, except the Spartans.”

Instead of a society of freedom-defending super-warriors, Sparta is better understood as a place where the wealthiest class of landholder, the Spartans themselves, had succeeded in reducing the great majority of their poor compatriots to slavery and excluded the rest, called the perioikoi, from political participation or citizenship. The tiny minority of Spartan citizens derived their entire income from the labor of slaves, being legally barred from doing any productive work or engaging in commerce.

And rather than spending their time in ascetic military training, they spent their ample leisure time doing the full suite of expensive, aristocratic Greek pastimes: hunting (a pastime for the wealthy rather than a means of subsistence in the ancient world), eating amply, accumulating money, funding Olympic teams, breeding horses, and so on. Greek authors such as Xenophon and Plutarch continually insist that the golden age of Spartan austerity and egalitarianism existed in the distant past, but each author pushes that golden age further and further into that past, and in any event, archaeology tells us it was never so.

And that lavish lifestyle was clearly very important to the Spartans because they were willing to sacrifice all of their other ambitions on the altar to it. Beginning in the early 400s, the population of Spartan citizens, defined by being rich enough in land to make the mess contributions that were a key part of military and social lfie, began to decline as Spartan families used inheritance and marriage to consolidate holdings and increase their wealth, from 8,000 Spartan citizens in 480 B.C. to 3,500 in 418 to 2,500 in 394 to just 1,500 in 371. The collapse in the number of Spartans who qualified for citizenship had disastrous effects on the manpower available for the Spartan army, causing Sparta’s strategic ambitions to all crumble, one by one. Yet efforts by Agis IV (245-241 B.C.) and Cleomenes III (235-222 B.C.) to arrest the decline were foiled precisely because the Spartan political system denied any political voice to any but the leisured rich, who had little incentive to change.

Sparta is no inspiration for the leaders of a free state. Sparta was a prison in the guise of a state and added little to the sum of the human experience except suffering. No American, much less any U.S. soldier, should aspire to be like a Spartan.

[captain-price-unofficially]

US Marine Corps operates HIMARS in Alta, Norway during exercise Nordic Response 24

[sgtgrunt0331-3]

A U.S. Marine with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, 4th Marine Division, takes position to provide suppresive fire on Range 400 during Integrated Training Exercise (ITX) 4-21 at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California on July 25, 2021.

(Photo by Sgt. JVonnta Taylor)

[military1st]

Forged in the Cold.

The U.S. Marine during Exercise Warrior Shield 24 at Rodriguez Live Fire Complex, Pocheon, South Korea.

The U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Matthew Morales (2024).