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God I love P47s with bubble canopies.
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Nov 8, 2011 05:15
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for MEN only posted:Malcom X: Does he want to be America's Black Hitler? Jesus christ I would loving pay for a "let's read" of the entire run of that magazine.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:50
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iyaayas01 posted:While that stuff is cool, I always get a little twitch in the back of my neck, because poo poo like that is pretty stupid high risk grandstanding with absolutely no value added besides "looks cool." I'm also always reminded of the Thunderhawks whenever I see stuff like that involving tankers. That kind of thing always reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJb08ZzejAA (explody bit at 7:30, full version linked because iyaayas is a nerd) Of course, if you want to go raw expense to taxpayers, nothing quite beats this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=M9hb-OutGAY (fireworks about 30 seconds from the end, the preceding bit is USAF reconstruction stuff that only terrible geeks will really be interested in)
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Nov 21, 2011 16:21
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Blatently stolen from the photo thread, but it fits in with a discussion of obscenely dangerous hotdogging in airplanes:beanieson posted:Also, I finally realized what all this reminds me of: Catch-22, when McWatt is buzzing the beach and mulches a guy standing on it with his propeller.
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Nov 21, 2011 17:36
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NosmoKing posted:You don't exactly need a Hellfire to blow up a panel truck . Need? Maybe not. But who said anything about "need." I'll bet you think no honest man needs more than 10 rounds, too. 
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Nov 23, 2011 19:16
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NosmoKing posted:You're reading it wrong. Says the man who shoots airguns by choice. CHOICE. More money = more boom = more better. edit: I stand by this logic - this is a cold war thread and I'm pretty sure that was the mission statement of arms R&D procurement for both sides for pretty much all of it. editx2: saving money is for people who voted for Mondale Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Nov 23, 2011 |
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Nov 23, 2011 22:41
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*"More boom" may be substituted by "more votes" as needed
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Nov 23, 2011 22:46
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It makes a lot of sense for conflicts where the enemy has no realistic air threat or guided AAA of their own, and you just need something up there to lob guided munitions at the enemy, especially if you're a country on a budget.
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Nov 24, 2011 00:12
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Some video of what happens when munitions don't separate cleanly or do what they're supposed to do after leaving the airplane. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RROr86sqiP8&feature=related
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Dec 8, 2011 01:14
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So here's a question about the USMC that I'd like a somewhat serious answer to. It's mostly directed at Iyaayas, but of course open to anyone who knows anything about this stuff: Why the gently caress does USMC air need V/STOL capability? Why the gently caress does the Harrier exist in US inventories? I know this goes back to some cold war thinking, but I'll be damned if I can puzzle it out. I'm not questioning the existence of USMC air - I get the whole "marines in the air care fore marines on the ground" dick-waving that goes on and pretty much just chalk it up to history, the culture of the branch, pride, and other less than fully logical stuff. If it wasn't for all that stuff USMC Air would have been folded into the Navy's air assets back when the the Army split the USAAF off into the USAF (or folded into the USAF). But they survived the 40s, so whatever. No, what I specifically don't get is why V/STOL is important. The argument I always hear is some kind of WW2-esque fantasy about marines landing on beaches, holding off a bunch of enemy combatants, and the SeaBees being able to hack a 200 foot swath of jungle out of the way under fire in order to begin combat operations with airplanes that are drat near flying out of the forward trenches. Basically, every marine flier since 1942 has been rubbing his dog raw to the Cactus Air Force and Guadalcanal and wants to go do that again. Here's the thing: airplanes have gotten significantly more complex since 1942. It takes a lot more to keep even a relatively old jet fighter like the Harrier airborne than a bunch of Wildcats and Dauntlessness. Between all the fluids, parts, etc. if you are straight up cut off from supply for extended periods your airplanes aren't going to fly - as it's been explained to me, it's not even an issue of needing to cannibalize damaged airframes for spares a la ye olde Cactus Air Force, but of more mundane poo poo like not getting the bajillion gallons of hydraulic fluid and avgas needed to make them move. Assuming that your supply lines are secure enough to allow you to get that poo poo onto the beach . . . why not just park a carrier 100 miles offshore or something and blow the gently caress out of the enemy with Naval air assets? The real kicker is that somewhere between Guadalcanal and today they invented this nifty thing called the helicopter. Assuming you really did need air assets capable of taking off out of a crudely constructed, tiny clearing in jungle canopy for round-the-clock immediate air to ground fire support why the gently caress would you go with a jet rather than an attack chopper? So, people who know - why the gently caress does the Harrier exist in US stocks? I'll be damned if I have ever been able to figure out what it's niche is, beyond being something that lets Marines fantasize about fighting WW2 again.
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Dec 14, 2011 16:53
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Tremblay posted:LHAs and LHDs. We'll have these ships for quite some time. It would suck if we didn't have any fixed wing air craft that could fly off them. Not that I think that really justifies the whole 35B... From wikipedia: quote:The role of the amphibious assault ship is fundamentally different from a standard aircraft carrier: its aviation facilities have the primary role of hosting helicopters to support forces ashore rather than to support strike aircraft. However, they are capable of serving in the sea-control role, embarking aircraft like Harrier fighters and ASW helicopters. Most of these ships can also carry or support landing craft, such as air-cushioned landing craft (hovercraft) or LCUs. So. . . why do they need fixed wing assets (edit: on the LHAs)? Why do the marines need their own little baby carriers attached organically to their invasion force. What does having a fistfull of harriers on one of these things do that can't either be done with a bunch of helicopters flying off of them (for the small operations with no real enemy air assets and limited need for strike capabilities that a full carrier doesn't need to be tasked to) or by an actual aircraft carrier (for those operations that actually need serious air support, and in far greater quantities than an LHA or two can provide anyways)? Again, it's the bizarro niche thing - I just can't figure a place where the job couldn't be done better by either rotary winged assets or fixed wing Naval assets. Or hell, fixed wing USMC assets operating off a real air base or a handy CV - I'm not even going to begin to open up the "does USMC Air need to be a thing" can of worms. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Dec 14, 2011 |
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Dec 14, 2011 18:45
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Crossposted from the news thread: What was old is new again:
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Dec 15, 2011 17:53
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theclaw posted:China dumping tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into pointless white elephants instead of more effective weapons systems isn't scary at all. Well, it does indicate their desire for a blue-water navy. As has already been pointed out the training hurdle is a HUGE loving Thing, and the fact that they are addressing this with even a lovely carrier indicates which way they're thinking about the future. Even 3 or 4 of these things in 2020 wouldn't be a big deal, but 7 or 8 of them in 2030 would effectively mean that you would have an actual credible threat to the currently unopposed force-projection capabilities of the USN. The whole training issue is also why the Brits decommissioning their last carrier was taken so seriously by defense analysts. It essentially signaled their at least semi-permanent retirement from having any pretense of being able to project force on a global scale without aid from another power. Something like the Falklands, for example, simply wouldn't be possible for the Brits without US support now. It's also worth noting that China doesn't have to be able to take on the USN at sea in some kind of Pacific War 2.0 for their having carriers to be something that we need to take very seriously. Even having 3 or 4 relatively crappy carriers would give them very significant force-projection capabilities in areas that are laughably outside their sphere of influence right now. African politics could get pretty interesting, for example, if a "valued trading partner" of China was able to call on a non-US CVG in a time of deep crisis (civil war, revolution, etc). Not only that, but it also presents a way for them to get involved in discussions that they're currently not a part of. Things change a LOT when someone is able to put warships in an area. Imagine Libya, for example, if the Chinese had parked a single crappy carrier with a couple dozen aircraft on it plus a few escorts off the coast. At the very least they're now part of the discussion over whether NATO should be aiding the rebels or not, and there is always the possibility for them flat out saying that they don't want other people interfering with Gaddafi's civil war (or outright aiding the government forces). It just makes things a lot stickier, and requires a lot of high-level talks to make sure things don't move in directions that no one wants. In the case ofs omething like Libya, where the crisis is very quick moving and situations are changing day to day, that alone can be enough to tip the balance of power and lead to a different outcome. tl;dr - even having a couple really garbage grade carriers would make the Chinese government party to a lot of talks they're not involved in today, and would really end the US/NATO's ability to simply act unilaterally with regards to smaller nations.
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Dec 15, 2011 19:58
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Smiling Jack posted:From what I understand of most of the era of aerial gunnery, nobody ever really had a working gunsight. Not really. Putting reflector sights on aircraft in big numbers in the years leading up to WW2 was a Big loving Deal as far as air-to-air combat went. They worked, and worked well, and removed the need for pilots to line their heads up properly with a mechanical sight. THat's kind of a big deal when you're constantly looking over your shoulder for someone trying to kill you. The tl;dr of the tech is that they basically worked like huge, primitive ACOGs. All the reasons why an ACOG on an M16 is a cool thing apply, only magnified by the fact that it's harder to line up irons when you're concentrating on driving an airplane at 300+ mph. Everyone was using them in WW2 - seriously, only the scrubbiest of the scrubs were still using mechanical gunsights. We're talking the same countries that were still using biplanes and hi-wing monoplanes in 1939. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jan 5, 2012 |
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Jan 5, 2012 00:34
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Crescendo posted:"In 1966, two US Air Force Public Relations officers made a spoof interview of an American F-4 Phantom fighter pilot. A humorous piece of history." Goddamn this is great.
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Jan 6, 2012 17:40
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Slo-Tek posted:Calling the B-17 the most successful aircraft in history doesn't mean it actually was any drat good. This is pretty wrong on multiple levels. First off, saying that strategic bombing "did nothing" is terribly deceptive. That old canard usually comes about from post-war studies that show that German industrial production increased as the war went on. If the total war goods manufactured in 1940 was greater than in 1945, then bombing MUST have been ineffective, right? No. At its simplest, every single country in the world went through a huge industrial boom between 1940 and 1945 due to the wartime demand for, well, everything. Compared to the rates at which nations with comparably sized economies that weren't being bombed nearly as badly (e.g. England, Canada) increased production, German production did not increase at anything like the same rate. I forget the numbers now, but suffice it to say that if an economy is on a trajectory to expand by 10% a year and you hold them to 3% a year then you're doing pretty loving well. Second, even a cursory glance at any targeted industry shows how deep the effects of bombing were, particularly on the production coordination/transportation end of things and on the use of skilled labor. Since we're a gun forum, let's talk about guns. By 1944 you have factories that have been dispersed to multiple, smaller production centers rather than single, central facilities to mitigate the effects of bombing. This chews up a LOT of transportation resources (mostly trains) shuttling gun parts here and there between sub-contractors that could have been better used for almost anything, especially by a country as transportation hosed as Germany. You also have some VERY significant casualties among the skilled machinists etc. who are making the drat things. In some industrial centers workers suffered casualties at about the same rate as combat units. Finally, you DO have factories shut down due to the raw amount of damage they had sustained, which caused all sorts of headaches for the people involved with coordinating the economy. The flattening of the Gewehr 43 production lines at Gustlof Werke II (Buchenwald) is one of the better known examples of this in the world of firearms. They put a lot of time and effort into getting that up and running, and once it got blown the gently caress up they never could get it running again before the war ended. For an even bigger example of how production got hit, look at oil and refined gasoline production during the war - lack of gas hosed up everyone in the German military pretty badly. Third, air defense sucked up an immense quantity of resources. By the middle of 1944 the German Luftwaffe had a million men on AAA duty, most of those deployed to heavy AAA units protecting cities and industrial centers. It wouldn't have turned the tide of the war or anything, but can you imagine what the gently caress even half of that figure freed up to do frontline service would have meant? This is also totally ignoring all the effort that went into developing multi-engined interceptors that were almost universally worthless at doing anything other than being shot down (although a couple of them did have their airframes converted to pretty loving  ground attack aircraft by doing silly poo poo like mounting 75mm anti-tank cannons to them).Finally, you yourself talk about how important destroying the Luftwaffe was. The simple fact is that the Luftwaffe was destroyed in 1943 and the first half of 1944, well before the US had boots on the ground in continental Europe. ONe of the major reasons why things went as well as they did for us was the fact that we had essentially unchallenged control of the air from day one of our ground campaign. From 1943-1944 German air power over western Europe was devoted almost entirely to one thing: trying to beat back the bombers pounding their cities and factories. The large formations of four engined bombers worked wonderfully as bait to draw them out and give the escorting fighters a chance to kill them off. One of the best decisions the USAAF made during the war was when they broke with the old dogma that escorts had to stay with the bombers at all times and allowed them to chase down enemy fighters, including ones that dove for the deck and disengaged from combat. That, coupled with fighter sweeps over enemy airbases before and after missions, utterly decimated the Luftwaffe's pilot corps. By the time the logistical and tactical air campaign over France began a few months before D-Day it was a fairly rare occurrence to have fighter-bombers engaged by anything other than AAA. tl;dr - Read up on Big Week and the casualties suffered by the Luftwaffe trying to oppose the massed bomber formations and the effects of chronic fuel shortages on the German war effort. e;fb - How did I not see iyaayas's response 
Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jan 17, 2012 |
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Jan 17, 2012 16:17
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Smiling Jack posted:Why was the B-29 never deployed in Europe? This came up in conversation the other day and the only think I could think of was that its operational range was clearly more needed in the Pacific theater. BINGO. It would have been pretty much a wasted asset in Europe, and pumping them all into the Pacific allowed us to start hammering japanese cities way earlier than we would have been able to otherwise. There was also the not-inconsiderable issue of having to retrain aircrews and ground personnel who were already on the ground in England on the new platform. Remember: the first B29 raids against Japan didn't start until mid-1944, first from China and then from the Marshals. By that time you had an entire logistical apparatus set up in England for servicing B17s and B24s that, in the case of the B17, had been built up starting in 1942. It was just way easier and more efficient to send the new guys who were trained up on the new equipment somewhere else. This is also why we didn't just switch over to all B29 production - cutting B17 production in favor of the newer, bigger, shinier bomber would have meant taking a big hit to the number of aircraft that were being delivered to the USAAF, and all to replace an airframe that was still doing good work over Europe. These logistical arguments are also the basic explanation for questions like "why did the Germans keep using the Panzer IV (with heavy modifications) for the entire war instead of switching over to making all Panthers all the time." Changing out tooling and production lines is a big loving deal in peace time, and a deal of biblical proportions in wartime.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:04
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Scratch Monkey posted:One tiny nitpick - I have read that a lot of the people used to man AAA guns were not fit for front line service. However I have no hard data on what percentage of these people were invalids, too old, too young, women or some other disqualifying factor. This is basically untrue. The Germans did have "Flakhelfer" which were highschool aged kids that they pressed into service in flak crews, but they were generally just a year or so outside of active duty age and plenty of people that age were in the Wehrmacht. The current Pope was one of these guys, incidentally. There were no invalids on Flak crews. The job involved lots of heavy lifting and the like. Women weren't on flak crews either. There were plenty in auxiliary units, but flak crews were considered combat units and women were therefore ineligible for them. I'm not saying that the men on these crews were necessarily the creme of the crop, and I'll even go so far as to say that they would be distinctly "second line" troops in 1940 or 1942, but by the time you get into 1944 they were pretty similar to what you see in frontline units.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:10
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LimburgLimbo posted:I'm pretty sure that's because the Germans actually did have some NV-equipped Panthers. Not many, but they had them, and it's not like attaching NV would take extensive modifications to a Panther. If the Germans had allocated more resources to making NV equipment (instead of some of the dead-end or questionable projects they did) it doesn't seem at all unrealistic that they could've equipped a few whole units with NVs. The Germans didn't have more functional NV for the same reason the US didn't use more functional NV during the war: it was way bleeding edge tech at that time and loving expensive and difficult to manufacture.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:25
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LimburgLimbo posted:/\/\ Oh I know; I was just saying that it's not really related to the retooling issue, like the guy I first quoted seemed to imply. As far as 'alternate history' bullshit goes, the Germans just making more of something they already had is relatively unoffensive. I suspect that this was mostly due to needing to get the technology at least semi-robust and survivable in the field. I do know that they were doing experiments with infrared spotlight/optic combos as early as 1939 for AAA crews, but even there they had real problems keeping them operational. Basically the same issue that kept reflex sights off of rifles in the US military until relatively recently, despite their being around for a few decades now (well, since WW2 really, but back then it was too big to use in anything but aircraft and AAA). Hell, by today's standards those way early NV devices were fabrige-egg fragile. It's a loving miracle they were employed in combat at all. Also, the war ending didn't help matters either. Remember - the US only ever deployed NV at Iwo Jima, in the very final months of the war, and the Germans only got it mounted to their armor in early 1945 or (maybe) late 1944, depending on which sources you believe.
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Jan 17, 2012 17:41
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Myoclonic Jerk posted:I More importantly, North Vietnam didn't have much of an airforce, and certainly not one that was a credible full-time threat to USAF and USN tactical air. We operated for most of that war with the basic assumption of air superiority. Strategic bombing really shines (well, in a non-nuclear role) when it's essentially bait to lure enemy air assets up to be destroyed. Once that's done your own tactical aircraft can basically have their way with the enemy ground assets.
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Jan 17, 2012 19:38
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As Iyaayas already said a LOT of the reason why strategic bombing in vietnam was so mega-hosed was that they were applying cold-war escalation theory. Basically "don't do this or we'll blow your poo poo up." Pulling punches to be able to threaten that if they don't cut that poo poo out right now you'll blow up whatever doesn't quite work when the government in question straight up gives no fucks.
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Jan 17, 2012 23:10
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LP97S posted:I'm not saying it's that loving simple, but how the hell do you think the thing got built in the first place? Uh, you understand that when things are designed these days they generally aren't just thrown together on blueprints by an engineer and then some other engineer figures out how to put it together, right? Usually it's a whole process of basically designing the finished product and the industrial processes and tooling to build it simultaneously. If it's something fairly simple like a stamped and welded SMG this boils down to just designing the stamp forms and cutters and jigs etc and then using existing lines to crank it out. If it's something complex like a goddamned jet fighter using composite alloys and other crazy material science poo poo, then you have a much more complicated process to just design the build process.
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Jan 19, 2012 05:18
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Forums Terrorist posted:I don't think the F-35 is fast enough or has the range for proper missile defense. Not to mention one advantage of the 747 is that it would have a real loiter time. I don't think those F35 ideas were supposed to be permanent shields to prevent someone from using missiles. If you're worried about that sort of thing generally there are diplomatic options that make a launch more or less a non-issue. As I understand it, the real issue is medium to small states getting theater-level missiles tipped with something nasty in the NBC family and using them as a way of guaranteeing that the US will never try to forcibly destabilize the regime. Basically the North Korea problem - we could crush them militarily, but if they have even a single crappy low-yield nuke on a glorified scud it becomes politically impossible due to no one wanting to see Seoul turned into a glowing crater. Put some anti-missle lasers on fast jets, however, and you re-gain the ability to punitively strike some rear end in a top hat dictator with a limited non-conventional arsenal. It's less about being able to defend ourselves, and more about being able to keep small countries away from the grownups table of MAD diplomacy.
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Jan 19, 2012 17:18
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Forums Terrorist posted:Well I guess that takes the F-35 from "utterly worthless waste of money" to "A modern day Voodoo". Plus ça change. . .
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Jan 19, 2012 17:28
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wdarkk posted:Wouldn't North Korea have a much easier time delivering its nuke in a shipping container? Infiltration is their game after all. I doubt it. There's the whole issue of a mega-secured border/DMZ to deal with, plus the fact that any cargo coming out of the DPRK seems to be watched pretty carefully. Think of that boatload of small arms and scud parts they were trying to sell a few years ago as an example. As much of a pain in the rear end as getting their nuke design down from "truck bed sized" to "balistic missile nose cone sized" would be, in the long run it would probably be MUCH easier and more feasible for them to lob a short range missile at Seoul than to try and smuggle anything anywhere.
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Jan 19, 2012 18:34
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Armyman25 posted:I thought the already did that. USMC maintenance personnel deploy on CVN's anyway. The USMC is basically the military version of that 20 year old kid who talks non stop about how important it is to be independent, self-sufficient, and free while living in his parents' basement and eating all their groceries.
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Jan 20, 2012 03:19
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movax posted:If this fell, Soviet submarines would go surging into the North Atlantic and go to town on any ship unfortunate enough to be carrying materiel to the EU. Pretty big plot point in Red Storm Rising as well, if I recall. Yeah. . . 1) this isn't 1941. Germany isn't going to take advantage of a fleet still trying to recover from the Depression and a two-ocean war to temporarily push the issue with cheap submarines. 2) Even at the worst stage of the WW2 era ASW war in the atlantic Britain wasn't suffering that much from the "blockade." To see a truly devastating naval blockade you need to look at the one that Britain waged on Germany in WW1 or, to a much lesser extent, the one the US waged on Japan from about 44-45. 3) Tom Clancy is a hack and most of his writings are, at best, thought experiments that give someone else a LOT of bullshit advantages to make them a credible military threat to the US. Most of his books take this so far that he's into the realm of high fantasy. 4) The modern US Navy is HUUUUGE. We're talking ridiculous huge compared to anything else in the world. If we were talking strictly about naval assets we could probably go to war with every other sea-faring nation on the planet and at least stand a credible chance. The basic reality is that the only force on the planet that could even CONCEIVE of executing something as huge as a naval blockade on a country the size of England would be the US. Chumming up to us is the best possible way for the Brits to 100% guarantee that their sea lanes never, ever get dicked with.
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Jan 25, 2012 20:41
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NosmoKing posted:Lesser extent? My understanding of it (hey, you're the historian and may be right) is that the US stopped essentially ANY items entering Japan by boat. I recently read a book about deck gun actions by US subs towards the end of the Japanese blockade and they were sinking junks, pleasure craft, fishing boats, loving ROWBOATS, if they had a suspision that the boat was carrying supplies to Japan or supporting the war effort. Oh, no, you're 100% spot on with that. We sealed that place up loving hermetically for the last year of the war. I only said "lesser extent" because the period where Japan was under that level of blockade was so much shorter than the nearly 5 years suffered by Germany in WW1 that the suffered nowhere nearly as badly on the level of available goods, economic damage, deaths due to malnutrition and preventable illness, etc. If we had opted to just blockade them for a couple of years rather than nukeing them to end it I'm sure they would have gotten there too. Compared to either of those the idea that England was under serious blockade at any time during WW2 is laughable.
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Jan 25, 2012 21:25
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mlmp08 posted:Swiss airpower is loving awesome. I went to a big museum they have on it at an old cold-war era airfield out there and, from what I could tell, their entire reason for being is "do  low level slalom runs through alpine passes" and "practice landing on highways and other Mad Max poo poo."
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Jan 26, 2012 16:46
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Smiling Jack posted:God drat do I need to get to Switzerland. If it wasn't for the fact that the entire country costs double what the rest of the world does, it really would be one of the most perfect places on earth. Seriously, though, $9 pints of beer and $13 fast food combo meals starts to get a bit old.
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Jan 26, 2012 16:58
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kill me now posted:How is it that a company delivered a defective product and is making the purchaser foot the bill? You've apparently never bought a computer or a gun, yet appear to be posting on an internet forum for firearms enthusiasts 
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Jan 28, 2012 18:06
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Koesj posted:I'm doing some research on postwar military aircraft development and there's two 1/1000 reference sheets I've been working on, here's the first: This is really, really neat. Is there any chance you could knock together a version with the names of the fighters (even if just the numeric designation - F16 instead of "F16 Falcon" if space is an issue) under the silhouettes? Because, seriously, holy poo poo that's great.
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Jan 29, 2012 21:26
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Koesj posted:Sure. It would take some time though since the lay-out needs to be tightened. Here's the other one btw. You should also get bored and do similar things for IFVs, small arms, etc. They're actually really neat resources for visualizing what the gently caress is going on with different generations of equipment.
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Jan 29, 2012 22:00
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atomicthumbs posted:I'd love to see the look on the test pilot's face when they told him to get into that and what the *ahem* "take off" procedure was going to be. I'm guessing it was either  or  depending on just how crazy a test pilot he was.
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Jan 30, 2012 17:28
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How the gently caress is it supposed to be cost effective to stop using an airframe that they have a ton of experience with and which is basically just maintenance costs at this point and switching to one that is brand new, has had non-stop teething issues, and which might be prone to god knows what exciting new maintenance headaches down the road? Here's hoping they're at least smart enough to mothball the airframes and not do something colossally stupid like sell them or, worse, scrap them.
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Jan 30, 2012 22:22
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Oxford Comma posted:Do the A-10 and the AH-64 have roughly the same original mission: destroy Soviet tanks? If so, would one platform be superior or should they both be eliminated and replaced with UAV/F-35s? There's probably an argument to be made for exactly that, but you're missing one big problem: A-10 = Airforce, AH-64 = Army To cut them both you would either need to completely/largely eliminate the ground support mission of the AF (greatly bulking up Army Air in the process and giving them fixed wing strike aircraft like the F-35) or gut, either in whole or in part, the rotor-wing strike capability of the Army. Either way, you're facing an uphill political battle on a slope covered in the worst kind of institutional bullshit and defended by some motherfucking entrenched interests.
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Jan 31, 2012 17:01
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Totally TWISTED posted:
Even if the president could do it unilaterally (he can't) there would be the bigger issue of how it's basically his job in our current system to campaign like a motherfucker for his VP in the upcoming election. Basically no one is going to do that because they don't want to gently caress things up for the next guy. You would have to find a president who not only is a 2nd term guy, but who is also either completely checked out from his own party or who is either so loved or reviled that nothing he does at the last minute is going to change how people feel about his presidency or how they feel about voting for his party in the next election. Ironically enough, GW Bush was probably the best candidate for exactly this kind of "gently caress you all, kiss my rear end, buy my memoirs" final act. Of course he'd be just as likely to order a goddamned invasion of the island with a month left in his tenure as actually try to open relations.
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Feb 8, 2012 17:41
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priznat posted:I haven't looked into it, but why are China and Russia tacitly supporting that Assad dickweed anyway? I forget, is Syria friends with Iran or enemies? If friends I guess china wants oil from Iran to continue so that makes sense. Russia, is it just a sphere of influence thing? Russia has a Soviet-era naval base at Tartus in Syria that they still have a lease on. It's their last remaining naval base outside of Russian territory, and pretty important for them as a way to keep a presence in the eastern med. Basically, as long as Syria lets them hang onto that, there's no way they're ever going to agree to any kind of sanctions of any kind, and Syria can go and do whatever the gently caress they want. Since the whole Ossetia thing in the late 2010s Russia has been expanding it pretty massively, and when they're done it will be a major anchorage for them. It's a major security issue for them and I really can't imagine them accepting any political change in the region that didn't allow them to keep and expand that base. This is in addition to all of the more mundane poo poo like selling tons of arms to them and whatnot. They are Syria's major supplier and do a TON of business with them.
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Feb 13, 2012 18:39
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Smiling Jack posted:Plus, don't doubt that China is taking a very long view on this whole thing and has an eye on that naval base. Thirty, forty years from now, Syria could be a Chinese ally state, not a Russian one. Well, with China I suspect it has more to do with their long view on human rights, period. They have a VERY long history of vetoing anything that's done on the basis of human rights violations in general, and crackdowns on anti-government protest specifically. Basically, don't be too surprised when the country that still has "Tiennamen square was totally justified" as a talking point refuses to allow criticism of smaller countries who drive tanks in on crowds of government protesters.
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Feb 13, 2012 18:45
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