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I don't think there are any.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:09
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Torpor posted:Seriously, did the sailors even notice? I wouldn't be surprised if it started a fire, the steel on a ship like that isn't thick enough to stop the molten copper stream from cutting through.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:11
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Aurubin posted:Isn't the F22 a piece of poo poo? I remember hearing they were phasing it out due to all kinds of technical problems. Good thing they're replacing it with the F35! *cough* You're probably thinking of the V-22 Osprey, which is a tilt-rotor aircraft that was involved in a few high-profile incidents. It's not quite that bad, but it's basically the unholy child of a fixed-wing and a rotary-wing aircraft, and has quite a few of the downsides to both plus some extras thrown in. The F-35 is an alright aircraft that suffered from design-by-committee. Congress got a burr up their rear end that it'd be great if all the services used the same aircraft, or at least the same airframe. The problem is that the requirements are all totally divergent. The AF wants a multirole fighter, basically a F-16 Mark II, light and agile. The Army and Marines want something they can fly off their baby carriers, so it has to have a VTOL ducting system too. Also the Navy refuses to procure single-engine aircraft for safety reasons, so it needs to have a dual-engine system. And that's just the conflict over the airframe. The F-22 has some real problems, but it's nowhere near the steaming deuce that the other programs are because it's a plane designed around a specific, realistic mission. Its "high-durability" stealth coating abrades away if the plane flies in rain, and becomes much less effective if the aircraft maneuvers (as most stealth does), or fires a weapon. The navigation system reset itself the first time it crossed the international date line, leaving the pilots to try and follow their tanker in for a leading. Also the oxygen system silently cut out on a pilot in Alaska and he blacked out and flew into a mountain. Come to think of it, that last one is ringing a bell with the fact that Lockheed got their mainframe hacked by China a while back (suspicions were that they used the authenticator keys they got from RSA). Given all the NSA exploit stuff that's come out recently, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few places you could hit the C3 systems with a virus. Being able to suffocate enemy pilots in their cockpits is pretty desirable. 
Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 23:13
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Aurubin posted:Isn't the F22 a piece of poo poo? I remember hearing they were phasing it out due to all kinds of technical problems. Good thing they're replacing it with the F35! *cough* No, its not. It's easily far superior to the F-35. Production ended due to costs, but the F-35 is quickly ballooning in cost to match the F-22 for far less capability. The F-22 had some teething issues which were grossly exaggerated (and quickly fixed) but the F-35 can't even begin to deliver on its promises.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:15
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McDowell posted:Are we really worried about Assad shooting something down? Haven't the Israelis accomplished several strikes with no casualties?(except their line is 'no comment' I doubt there's even going to be manned fighters flying over Syria. A sure way to escalate is if a pilot is shot down and captured. And we really do not want to escalate.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:19
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) The only real incident we had was the Turkish Fighter Jet - where the pilots thought they were in friendly space.
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Vladimir Putin posted:I doubt there's even going to be manned fighters flying over Syria. A sure way to escalate is if a pilot is shot down and captured. And we really do not want to escalate. Yeah - which is why the US will be using cruise missiles - but it does raise the question of what Israel has been using.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:22
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Paul MaudDib posted:The Army and Marines want something they can fly off their baby carriers, so it has to have a VTOL ducting system too. Also the Navy refuses to procure single-engine aircraft for safety reasons, so it needs to have a dual-engine system. And that's just the conflict over the airframe. Has anyone seen youtube videpos of the F-35 VTOL system? That thing looks like the most complex and fragile thing ever engineered. I can't believe a F-35 could land back on a carrier or wherever in VTOL mode if it took any amount of damage to its airframe. McDowell posted:Yeah - which is why the US will be using cruise missiles - but it does raise the question of what Israel has been using. If it was the Israelis my guess is F16.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:25
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I guess nobody got that the small emotive cough was indicative of the fact that I knew the JSF was terrible. Anyway, a friend on the Hill thinks this is going to die in the House. Anybody wanna bet Obama will go through with it anyway?
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Sep 5, 2013 23:29
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Is there any merit to stories of civilians hanging out near military buildings as a sign of protest in Syria?Aurubin posted:I guess nobody got that the small emotive cough was indicative of the fact that I knew the JSF was terrible. Anyway, a friend on the Hill thinks this is going to die in the House. Anybody wanna bet Obama will go through with it anyway? No way, that would be the perfect excuse to not have to intervene and take no blame for it.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:33
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McDowell posted:Yeah - which is why the US will be using cruise missiles - but it does raise the question of what Israel has been using. Violation of Lebanese airspace mostly. edit: immediately after those strikes, Lebanon was bitching that Israeli planes violated their airspace in the vicinity of the Syrian targets hit, which were very close to the Lebanese border. It's not like Israel would just fly straight down a missile engagement zone in Syria when it can just tell Lebanon to shut up while flying over Lebanon and bombing Syria without even entering Syrian airspace. They try not to throw pilots straight to their deaths when possible. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 23:50
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Aurubin posted:I guess nobody got that the small emotive cough was indicative of the fact that I knew the JSF was terrible. Anyway, a friend on the Hill thinks this is going to die in the House. Anybody wanna bet Obama will go through with it anyway? If the house votes no, Obama will jump for joy and then not do anything. Then he gets to blame the House for it. loving victory for Obama.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:54
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The lines outside today's bipartisan House briefing on Syria. I'm not as confident that this will pass as I was 24 hours ago. The whip count seems to be getting much worse in the House.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:57
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Paul MaudDib posted:The Army and Marines want something they can fly off their baby carriers, so it has to have a VTOL ducting system too. The Army, huh? Didn't know the Army flew F-35s or had baby carriers... quote:Also the Navy refuses to procure single-engine aircraft for safety reasons, so it needs to have a dual-engine system. The Naval variant, the F-35C, is a single engine aircraft. quote:The F-22 has some real problems, but it's nowhere near the steaming deuce that the other programs are because it's a plane designed around a specific, realistic mission. Its "high-durability" stealth coating abrades away if the plane flies in rain, and becomes much less effective if the aircraft maneuvers (as most stealth does), or fires a weapon. The navigation system reset itself the first time it crossed the international date line, leaving the pilots to try and follow their tanker in for a leading. Also the oxygen system silently cut out on a pilot in Alaska and he blacked out and flew into a mountain. Most of this is outdated or exaggerated, and the F-22 has some very slick stealthy weapon firing capability. Also, according to the USAF report, the pilot mostly lost situational awareness because he was distracted by the fact that he couldn't breathe  So yeah, the oxygen system fuckups were pretty horrendous.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:59
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Heh, you think people are bitching about the F-35's costs now, wait till the USAF starts working on it's next-generation B2/B1 replacement.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:02
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mitztronic posted:This isn't true at all. The F-22 does excel in air superiority but it is a multirole fighter (replacing the F117 for precision bombing, i.e. see the GBU-39/53) and it can engage in reconnaissance, which by no means is a full list of it's potential. Correct me if I am wrong, but the F-22 has no way of looking at the ground. It can not carry targeting pods on its external hard points. For some reason it also cannot carry AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles. Also, as far as I know, it cannot carry standoff munitions internally. I suspect for these reasons we will not see the F-22 used in any sort of ground attack or SEAD role over Syria.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:05
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html?_r=0 Fantastic NYT article, but the video being from April 2012 detracts from it slightly.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:06
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Dilkington posted:Correct me if I am wrong, but the F-22 has no way of looking at the ground. It can not carry targeting pods on its external hard points. For some reason it also cannot carry AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles. Also, as far as I know, it cannot carry standoff munitions internally. I suspect for these reasons we will not see the F-22 used in any sort of ground attack or SEAD role over Syria. The F-22 can carry small diameter bombs which are not great for leveling buildings or smashing troop formations, but excellent for destroying small point targets like a radar, parked plane, missile system, etc. AGM-88s and many standoff weapons are very big, which is a problem for an internal bay.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:10
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Turned on the TV just in time to see a video of the rebels executing Army prisoners. Can't wait to be on the "same" side as them.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:15
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Just The Facts posted:Turned on the TV just in time to see a video of the rebels executing Army prisoners. Can't wait to be on the "same" side as them. What do you think happens to rebels taken prisoner? It's a kill or be killed conflict. Not to mention they don't have any adequate facilities to keep POWS in, and any such facilities would be priority targets for the regime.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:18
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Just The Facts posted:Turned on the TV just in time to see a video of the rebels executing Army prisoners. Can't wait to be on the "same" side as them. Too late, we're already providing aid.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:19
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Old video, as in more than a year old.Vernii posted:What do you think happens to rebels taken prisoner? It's a kill or be killed conflict. Depends, http://beta.syriadeeply.org/2013/09/war-economy-my-life-500/ quote:Hassan, a 25-year-old prisoner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), looks depressed as he trades cigarettes with the 15 other men in his detention room in a makeshift jail in Aleppo province. This is actually a fascinating story for other reasons.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:19
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The only caveat is that allegedly, the soldiers captured were accused of rape, court martialed, and executed. So, uh, it depends on your view of on-the-battlefield court martials (and your faith that it actually happened), but I'm not sure that it necessarily was a war crime...
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Sep 6, 2013 00:20
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mlmp08 posted:The F-22 can carry small diameter bombs which are not great for leveling buildings or smashing troop formations, but excellent for destroying small point targets like a radar, parked plane, missile system, etc. AGM-88s and many standoff weapons are very big, which is a problem for an internal bay. Thank you for pointing this out. I didn't know these weird looking things existed. Apparently the F-22 can carry up to eight internally: 
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Sep 6, 2013 00:29
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Paul MaudDib posted:The F-22 has some real problems, but it's nowhere near the steaming deuce that the other programs are because it's a plane designed around a specific, realistic mission. Its "high-durability" stealth coating abrades away if the plane flies in rain, and becomes much less effective if the aircraft maneuvers (as most stealth does), or fires a weapon. The navigation system reset itself the first time it crossed the international date line, leaving the pilots to try and follow their tanker in for a leading. Also the oxygen system silently cut out on a pilot in Alaska and he blacked out and flew into a mountain. The international date line incident wasn't just the navigation system. quote:Maj. Gen. Don Sheppard (ret.): “…At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were — they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. Also, the Alaska incident was not an isolated case. Basically, the F-22 and the F-35 are different flavors of poo poo cake. The F-35 was designed to be everything for everyone and has unsurprisingly turned into an expensive piece of useless junk; the F-22 is a machine designed to kill its pilots. Choose your favorite!
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Sep 6, 2013 00:32
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At least the F-22 is legitimately fantastic in air to air combat.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:40
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mlmp08 posted:At least the F-22 is legitimately fantastic in air to air combat. It's a drat good thing, too, because I can't imagine what we'd do without new air-superiority fighters in an era where the most advanced piece of equipment we've had to fight in the last decade is a Toyota with a cannon bolted onto the back.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:45
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OBAMA CURES ALAWIS posted:Morality aside, is it actually "illegal" in the sense of international law for Syria to use chemical weapons if they haven't signed on to the Chemical Warfare Convention? In addition, is there anything written anywhere that prohibits a nation from targeting its own civilians? In case of uprising, is a government, democratic or not, supposed to do nothing as its legitimacy is challenged? International law is a very vague and subjective thing, which is why there aren't any international lawyers - no amount of appealing to legalism will overturn the central principle of "whatever the major countries say is law". One of the odder things that crop up in international law is that if enough powerful countries have signed onto a treaty, they may unofficially decide that the conditions of the treaty have become an international norm and therefore apply to all countries whether they've signed the treaty or not. It's not really a law so much as "the Convention on the Law of the Sea has become standard among the Great Powers and their vassals, and they like it so much that they're holding everyone else to those conditions too". It's usually applied to the Geneva Conventions and prohibitions on NBC weapons too.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:51
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Main Paineframe posted:International law is a very vague and subjective thing, which is why there aren't any international lawyers - no amount of appealing to legalism will overturn the central principle of "whatever the major countries say is law". One of the odder things that crop up in international law is that if enough powerful countries have signed onto a treaty, they may unofficially decide that the conditions of the treaty have become an international norm and therefore apply to all countries whether they've signed the treaty or not. It's not really a law so much as "the Convention on the Law of the Sea has become standard among the Great Powers and their vassals, and they like it so much that they're holding everyone else to those conditions too". It's usually applied to the Geneva Conventions and prohibitions on NBC weapons too. Yeah, international law is not "law" in the sense people think of it. There is no real book of international laws, there's no real way for things to become international laws. It is not really a coherent question if something is or is not international law, there is no really genuine source of authority to determine the question. At the end of the day international law is nothing more than what people say it is, and whoever is strongest generally wins. The most famous case of "international law" - the Neuremburg Trials - just made it up as they went along and it was law because the victors of WWII said it was. People tend to ascribe more legitimacy to international law than it really deserves because they view it as a way to check the Great Powers of the age. It never is. It's usually those Great Powers proscribing rules for lesser powers, and the only force they have on the powerful nations is a vague sense of embarrassment when they're too openly hypocritical. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 01:05
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quote:Two new national polls indicate the same thing: More Americans oppose rather than favor U.S. military strikes against Syria. That changed quickly http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/03/polls-should-u-s-launch-strikes-against-syria/
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Sep 6, 2013 01:07
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There is international law, there are international law books, there are international lawyers, there are international law courts, there are international law judges. If that doesn't float your boat, treaties ratified by the Senate are the law of the land in the US, so at least international law exists in that sense. To say law doesn't exist unless it can be enforced by an army is horribly reductionist and cynical. euphronius fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 01:09
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euphronius posted:There is international law, there are international law books, there are international lawyers, there are international law courts, there are international law judges. This doesn't address anything that was said about international law at all.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:23
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Alright, this is from yesterday and buried in a section of the Washington Post that I didn't know even existed, but I'm glad somebody called the USG out on the hypocrisy of the chemical weapons stance: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...f19ab_blog.html quote:History lesson: When the United States looked the other way on chemical weapons
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Sep 6, 2013 01:25
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Therefore we should look the other way again, obviously. I know you didn't say that, but I feel like that's the lesson being drawn here. The US didn't respond to chemical weapons usage in the past, so obviously it has no business doing so now. edit: Do we get a citation for this quote:Indeed, Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman’s agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria’s pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism. The West's historical relationship with Syria is complicated, but I suspect this isn't entirely accurate, at least tying it to Israel. Xandu fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 01:28
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evilweasel posted:This doesn't address anything that was said about international law at all. It was a combined response to you and Mainpainframe. Also international law is generally created through treaties and custom, to address another point you made. Treaties are an unquestionable source of international law. I really don't understand your point of view at all really, how could you say there is no way to determine if something is international law. The UN keeps a depository and index of treaties for this very purpose. Of course on the edges it can be hard sometimes to determine, but treaties for one thing are explicit international law. Admittedly custom gets murkier, but it can be readily determined and often is. euphronius fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 01:30
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Xandu posted:Therefore we should look the other way again, obviously. That's not my stance in any fashion. I just wish Kerry or someone would bring up Iran-Iraq and just say something like "It was wrong then and it would be wrong now," but that would imply an actual mistake was made.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:32
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Everyone in the Beltway knows Reagan didn't make any mistakes.Xandu posted:The West's historical relationship with Syria is complicated, but I suspect this isn't entirely accurate, at least tying it to Israel. There's alot of opacity in the region - which is part of the problem. A quieter time would have been better to get Israel/Iran/etc to the table on nuclear technology. But any time would be nice.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:35
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324577304579057262691515176.html posted:Mr. Assad's arsenal of advanced Russian-made weapons systems, including a recent shipment of upgraded Yakhont antiship missiles, has made Pentagon planning for the strikes more difficult, U.S. officials say. As a precaution, the U.S. Navy is keeping its destroyers far from the Syrian and Lebanese coast lines and out of range, the officials say. Lebanon is home to Syria's close ally, Hezbollah, which also has sophisticated antiship rockets. Gotta side with Russia on this one though quote:The Central Intelligence Agency's classified personality profile of Mr. Putin, prepared by the agency for Mr. Obama and other policy makers, says he was bullied in his youth. It also describes Mr. Putin as insecure, according to American officials who have read it.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:44
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Xandu posted:Gotta side with Russia on this one though "Please, I'm not insecure at all. I just feel most comfortable going about my activities, such as hunting, fishing and judo fighting, shirtless and with a posse of photographers."
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Sep 6, 2013 02:11
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quote:President Obama has directed the Pentagon to develop an expanded list of potential targets in Syria in response to intelligence suggesting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad has been moving troops and equipment used to employ chemical weapons while Congress debates whether to authorize military action. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/w...tw-nytimesworld
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Sep 6, 2013 02:41
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Mission creep already
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Sep 6, 2013 02:43
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