Media Mythbusters Blog

Cross-posted at Confederate Yankee:

It smells like… well, you know what it smells like if you’ve ever been on a cattle ranch:

I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.

I asked her why she is telling me this.

Her answer was really amazing.

By all means, please go over and read Maccabee’s post. When you do, see if you can spot what appears to be wrong with the story, and then check your answers against mine. Who knows? You might just catch a few things I’ve missed.

Let me share with you what I found that has that post-digestive bovine aroma.

• Maccabee’s buddy claims:

She started in the Marines and after 8 years her term was up. She had served on a smaller Marine carrier, and found out through a friend knew there was an opening for a junior grade LSO in a training position on a supercarrier. She used the reference and the information and applied for a transfer to the United States Navy. Since she had experience landing F-18Cs and Cobra Gunships, and an unblemished combat record, she was ratcheted into the job, successfully changing from the Marines to the Navy.

That’s a damn interesting trick, as the only non-supercarrier “smaller carriers” I’m aware of are the Tarawa-class and Wasp-class amphibious assault ships. Funny thing about the LHA and LHD classes of ships… they have very small flight decks, and are completely unsuitable for any aircraft that require arresting gear to land. As a matter of fact, they don’t have arresting gear at all, and cannot land F/A-18Cs or any other fighters other than AV-B Harrier VSTOLs as a result. F/A-18Cs only operate from land or U.S. Navy supercarriers. Somebody’s making things up.

• But it gets even better. The LSO also claims:

I asked her about the attack, how limited and so forth.

“I don’t think it’s limited at all. We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets.

Now, can someone please tell me how a junior LSO–by definition, a junior grade officer on an aircraft carrier assigned to landing aircraft as her specialty–would know anything at all about how other ships are being armed? Supercarriers, to the best of my knowledge do not carry Tomahawks, which are cruise missiles fired directly from other Navy ships, and neither stored nor fired from carriers. Such a junior officer, so far removed from munitions work, would simply not be in a position to have this knowledge.

I’m sure Navy veterans can probably pick out more improbabilities in this “LSO Beauchamp” story, but that is what I’ve found so far.

Macranger states that the conversation Maccabee related from the LSO would be treason if true. Luckily for Maccabee, I don’t think that they have yet found a way to give imaginary friends the life sentences or death sentences that real treason requires.

Update: Kind of a “duh,” moment, but as Yardbird notes in the comments, that these ships can’t launch F/A-18s either, because they aren’t equipped with catapults.

Real Navy fighter pilot Lex finishes off this liar here, noting that you can’t become an LSO without first being a pilot.