[MaxBigfoot]

Forgive my ignorance, sol, but what is a FRIES used for?

If, for whatever circumstance, the helicopter cannot land, fast roping is used to get the men to the ground in the fastest safe manner.  This is used by many different militaries, and Coast Guards.  The insertion part is when you are getting them into a zone that is under enemy eyes/fire/control.  You're inserting them into that zone.  Extraction is the same thing in reverse.

[MaxBigfoot]

Well, I'll do my best...   

[rtpoe]

 

[MaxBigfoot]

 

[solvegas]

Forgive my ignorance, sol, but what is a FRIES used for?

If, for whatever circumstance, the helicopter cannot land, fast roping is used to get the men to the ground in the fastest safe manner.  This is used by many different militaries, and Coast Guards.  The insertion part is when you are getting them into a zone that is under enemy eyes/fire/control.  You're inserting them into that zone.  Extraction is the same thing in reverse.

MaxBigfoot is absolutely correct. Imagine you need to drop off airborne infantry near the enemy, but the terrain is full of huge boulders, scrubland, large angle slope and other obstacles in which the aircraft could not safely land without causing extensive damage to the aircraft. Afghanistan is extensively like this for example. Very mountainous area full of hazardous nooks and crannies. It's also safer than parachuting into such terrain.

[TheZookie007]

Well, I'll do my best...   

My high school martial arts instructor used to tell us at the start of the session: "If you break your leg, don't come running to me."

[TheZookie007]

Forgive my ignorance, sol, but what is a FRIES used for?

If, for whatever circumstance, the helicopter cannot land, fast roping is used to get the men to the ground in the fastest safe manner.  This is used by many different militaries, and Coast Guards.  The insertion part is when you are getting them into a zone that is under enemy eyes/fire/control.  You're inserting them into that zone.  Extraction is the same thing in reverse.

MaxBigfoot is absolutely correct. Imagine you need to drop off airborne infantry near the enemy, but the terrain is full of huge boulders, scrubland, large angle slope and other obstacles in which the aircraft could not safely land without causing extensive damage to the aircraft. Afghanistan is extensively like this for example. Very mountainous area full of hazardous nooks and crannies. It's also safer than parachuting into such terrain.

That makes sense. After all we can't all use the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system every time. Thanks for the explanation, Max and sol.

[Hiram]

The UK only has 1 official language. And it's Welsh.

[MaxBigfoot]

The UK only has 1 official language. And it's Welsh.

What the frack???  Can you please elucidate on this one, Hiram?   

[MaxBigfoot]

Well, I'll do my best...   

My high school martial arts instructor used to tell us at the start of the session: "If you break your leg, don't come running to me."

Nice punny sense of humor on that guy!   

[MaxBigfoot]

They couldn't have taken the gate down??   

* MaxBigfoot facepalms

[solvegas]

The UK only has 1 official language. And it's Welsh.

What the frack???  Can you please elucidate on this one, Hiram?   

Well, the United Kingdom is made up of four countries, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. So technically, if they vote to leave the United Kingdom, they can and they have at present the autonomy to decide if they want an official language or not in each respective country. Canada has two official languages, English and French and Provinces can vote to secede by vote which Quebec almost did in the 1990's. The USA has no official language even though English is the predominant language and thanks to the Americal Civil War, 1861-1865, not only was slavery forever forbidden from ALL the States of the Union but also any of the Territories (colonies) of the USA but another issue that was ended due to the Civil War is the fact that no State can vote for secession either. Abraham Lincoln, 16th President, set the precedent that if any state tries to secede, the Federal Goverment can use whatever force it wants to keep that insurrectionist State within the Union. That is why the Army of the Northern States was called the Union Army and the Southern States was called the Confederate Army.

[TheZookie007]

The UK only has 1 official language. And it's Welsh.

What the frack???  Can you please elucidate on this one, Hiram?   

There's an amount of subtlety here.

There's three considerations when it comes to so-called "official" languages: de facto (i.e., as nationals of the country use them in their day-to-day interactions with officialdom), de jure (i.e., explicit delineation and definition in law or a constitution), or acceptance as a facet of statehood.

The de facto official language of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is English.

However, the de jure official languages of the UK are English and Welsh, with Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic in a de jure and de facto "hybrid" status in their respective parts of the UK.

The paper "Official status of languages in the UK and Ireland" by Daithí Mac Síthigh (Professor of Law and Innovation, Queen’s University Belfast), published in Common Law World Review, 47(1) (2018), pp. 77-102, breaks it down over 26 pages. But the main parts are:

"III.  Legislation on languages
IIIA Provisions regarding Welsh:

The Welsh Language Act 1967 was more extensive, putting in place stronger rights in respect of the court system (at the choice of a party rather than only where necessary) and supporting the validity of official documents in Welsh. However, it did not create new obligations for public bodies or official status, despite calls for such in official reports in the lead up to the Act. Subsequent years saw the question of general language legislation being revisited. The nationalist party Plaid Cymru proposed a new Bill in 1986, without success.  However, a Welsh Language Board was established in 1988, to advise the Secretary of State for Wales on language matters (Ager, 1996: 168), and reviews took place.

The result was a 1992 Bill and then the Welsh Language Act 1993. While the Bill had proposed a formulation that ‘Welsh shall be an official language in Wales’, the Act took a different approach and set out a principle. The principle was that ‘in the conduct of public business and the administration of justice in Wales, the English and Welsh languages should be treated on a basis of equality’. The Welsh Language Board, now placed on a statutory basis, was charged with a duty to advise certain bodies on how to exercise public functions in accordance with this principle."

and

"IIID Provisions regarding multiple languages in the UK

...The most notable, because of its relationship with the important constitutional concept of citizenship, are provisions on naturalisation. The British Nationality Act 1981 provided that a sufficient knowledge of  ‘the English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic language’ is required for naturalisation as a British citizen. Tests satisfying the additional requirement of knowledge of life in the UK can be taken in English, Welsh, or Gaelic; there is also further use of Gaelic and Welsh (and in a different location, Irish) in UK passports. However, although proper provision was made until 2013, current regulations and administrative provisions may contradict the legislative intention, as they set out in detail the ways in which proficiency in English can be demonstrated (through holding certain qualifications), without equivalent provision for the other two languages."

and

"VI.  Conclusion
A simple statement that the UK has no official language or recognises English as its only de facto official language, and that Ireland is a fully bilingual state with constitutional priority given to Irish, cannot accurately reflect the current position of language status and language rights across these islands. Applying Pinto’s taxonomy (Part II, above) points to a convergence around the ‘hybrid’ category, even though the textual position in each component of the UK and in the Republic of Ireland clearly varies in each case. The old idea that granting a legal status to a language is a practice foreign to UK law (Part IIIA, above) is no longer sustainable, in light of the developments in respect of Welsh and Gaelic after devolution, and in a less sustained way at UK level. The collective impact of the Belfast Agreement, the British-Irish Council, and the European Charter for Regional or Minority  Languages is of a greater significance for language issues, even in a constitutional context. As new legislation is debated in the coming years (e.g. the White Paper on Welsh, any new provisions in Northern Ireland if the institutions are restored), the UK itself may need to address what this growing body of status-related legislation means for the constitutional identity of the UK. As Ireland continues to address a longer-term project of constitutional reform, and sees the impact of the evolving commitments under the 2003 Act and the new approach to language planning under the 2012 Act (while also engaging in the debate regarding Northern Ireland through various means), the relationship between constitutional commitments and meaningful status will become more apparent – providing useful lessons for other jurisdictions including those making up the UK."

[Hiram]

The UK only has 1 official language. And it's Welsh.

What the frack???  Can you please elucidate on this one, Hiram?   

To be honest I'm not entirely sure how this has come about but ... we don't have a written constitution, so I guess English has never been recognized as an official language.  Whereas in Wales (past of the UK) Welsh as been. 

I wish they'd have done the same with the Cornish language.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language

[Hiram]

Aberdeen is further North than Moscow and Manchester is the same latitude as Anchorage.