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mlmp08 posted:This. And, even today, Patriot commanders have way too much confidence in just how quickly and well and reliably they can hop Patriot all over theater. They used to do huge exercises where they'd jump sites over and over all over WSMR. They did similar stuff in Europe. Remember, Patriot went all the way to loving Baghdad in OIF 1. and if we're talking Cold War Europe specifically don't forget Nike. The US had systems in service in Western Europe until the early '80s, and everyone else used it until just about the end of the Cold War (I think the last sites were deactivated in the very late '80s)
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Aug 11, 2016 00:53
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Worse, actually. It gave them seizures. yeah there was at least one guy who it did that to hardcore (I'm sure everyone in the thread knows the story but just in case): They were doing a test run, when they stopped they heard a banging noise coming from the back of a C-47 parked nearby. Turns out there was an engineer or someone in there, the sound had knocked him out and then proceeded to drive him into a seizure I've heard it caused miscarriages on Edwards but I don't think anyone's ever proved that to be more than an urban legend and I am still looking forward to the first Pred porn clip of a Gunship lasing some dude
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Aug 12, 2016 04:27
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Godholio posted:"Abu Hajaar what the goat-loving gently caress are you...ABOUD JUST EXPLODED THE AMERICANS ARE HERE!" lol seriously looking forward to the liveleak video, since lord knows we'll still be balls deep in Operation Kill ISIS by the time we get a gunship laser I mean it's probably only 5 or so years away so I'm not being that pessimistic
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Aug 12, 2016 05:12
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Akion posted:Also your depressingly correct, iyaayas01. in all seriousness AFSOC (among others) is throwing some serious money at that particular problem set. There's multiple companies who are significantly involved (GA and LM among them). The Navy has already deployed something operationally. So yeah, an operational directed energy weapon is coming very soon.
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Aug 12, 2016 06:24
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xthetenth posted:There's just enough thrust in Christendom and Judaism to make the fighter you want. lol
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Aug 12, 2016 20:07
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Chinese populace acting like a three year old about but that flag thing is pretty bad lol. It's about as bad as if the US flag had 49 stars or 12 stripes or something hobbesmaster posted:There will be so few F-35s and F-22s available due to budget cut backs that when the current F-16s and F-18Cs are falling out of the sky they'll switch to trainers. lol seriously though given the amount the USAF is buying I'm sure they'll cut a few loose for T-Bird duty when the current Block 52s give up the ghost. But given the fact that the USN is only buying a relative handful of -C models and intend to fly a mixed F-35C/SHornet fleet for some time, I could see them transitioning to the SHornet instead. But yeah, I could see how moving over to T-X's and/or the T-45 might be a very real possibility depending on how things shake out. After all, if it's good enough for the Arrows... also the F-35 really isn't that loud. it's noticeably louder than a Viper, but not obnoxiously so. Now the SHornet on the other hand....I seriously think some of my tinnitus is from spending too much time on the flightline without proper hearing protection during an exercise where a significant portion of the participants were flying some version of SHornet. And if I had a time machine going back to see a T-bird Thud show would probably be in my top 10 things to do.
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Aug 13, 2016 06:21
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Davin Valkri posted:Is there a particular reason for this? I can't imagine Russia looking at Desert Storm (or just late Vietnam) and not going "oh wow, PGMs are useful, time for a doctrine shift", in the same way China went "oh god, Western tanks trash everything, we need to reassess!" and changed up its land military doctrine after Desert Storm. some combination of: - the Ruble has been poo poo, is poo poo, and will always be poo poo - it's not like I'll ever have cause to use them in a war I'm going to fight, clearly my government does not give a gently caress about collateral damage and if you're bombing people in a permissive environment for the purpose of putting down an uprising a stick of unguided 250 kg bombs works as well (if not better) as a couple of JDAMs for like 1/50th the cost - we live in a country where people literally die of alcoholism and/or freeze to death in significant numbers annually - better to spend money on weapons that will serve as showpieces of Russian military might and intimidate the evil imperialists (like bombers employing the best in early '50s tactics to avoid air defenses) as opposed to spending sizable sums of money on boring tiny guided bombs that kill terrorists without slaughtering the entire block
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Aug 17, 2016 07:04
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TsarZiedonis posted:From where I'm sitting, it looks like the regime has not only become a bit more media savvy, but it also extremely comfortable allowing the apparatchik classes to interact more freely with foreigners and vice versa. It appears as if the upper classes of North Korean political society, who may constitute a reasonable proportion of the population, have been granted a decent facsimile of western life and no longer face food insecurity. From some of the recent scholarship I've read on the country, this is apparently because KJU has pumped tremendous amounts of money into the upper track "gift" economy of birth Korea, by which he shores up support for the regime among the middle and upper classes. The main economy for the majority of the population, the "people's " economy, has apparently been drained tremendously by this, and I'd bet those people are still facing food insecurity and malnourishment, but even as a tourist visiting the revitalized urban centers (such as they are) of North Korea, you aren't really likely to see them. Basically they've pulled resources from the rest of the country to prop up a 20-30 mile ring centered on Pyongyang. The rest of the country can more or less get hosed from the govt's perspective (obviously not counting military installations and the like). In most of the rest of the country the black markets that are supplying everyone with whatever food and services that is available are operating in plain sight because that's how little authority the regime has. There's been a couple really good Frontline episodes on the topic over the last couple years, the most recent one featured a bunch of covertly filmed footage that was smuggled out across the Yalu. The one that has stuck with me was of a lady who was operating a black market bus service. Some govt security service dude comes up to her and starts hassling her about her illegal business....as opposed to instantly behaving, or even trying to pay him off, she just starts yelling at him like a scolding mother. Eventually she starts whacking him over the head with some papers...he just let her go on her way. The govt has completely lost control in entire swaths of the country. It's not a matter of if it falls, it's a matter of when. Wingnut Ninja posted:Some of the fun things going on at Fallon lately: "Longer Range".....picture with 2 SHornets.....ERROR ERROR DOES NOT COMPUTE And yeah I think just about every major capability gap has been ID'd, so we've more or less realized the scope of the problem. The problem is we've also ID'd just how far behind the power curve we are and that the amount of investment isn't sufficient to get caught up in a lot of areas
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Aug 20, 2016 18:27
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Sperglord Actual posted:A former US Navy Seal who wrote a bestseller about his role in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden is to pay nearly $7m to the government for violating non-disclosure agreements. hahahahahahaha get hosed it would be nice if they'd also have gone after everyone in the govt who was releasing info in the wake of the raid (prompting Gates's infamous "I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend: WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE SHUT THE gently caress UP" comment)......but this is better than nothing. evil_bunnY posted:That was my point yeah. Also the innermost pylons are semi-permanent fuel tanks IIRC. lol yup, I've seen a couple pictures without fuel tanks hanging off the inner pylons but they are few and far between the SHornet is layers of compromise stacked on top of each other
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Aug 20, 2016 21:30
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Sperglord Actual posted:The documents revealed that White House and U.S. State Department officials were intimately aware of the Argentine military’s bloody nature, and that some were horrified by what they knew. Others, most notably Henry Kissinger, were not. I can't imagine anyone who could be remotely surprised by this. It's been public knowledge for over a decade that Kissinger was well aware of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide as it was occurring and didn't give a poo poo, and that was something that killed millions of people (plus another quarter million or so genocidal rapes) in less than a year 30,000 deaths over the better part of a decade is chump change in comparison. Also I stopped taking that piece seriously when it lumped Sherman and LeMay in with McNamara and Rumsfeld.
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Aug 20, 2016 22:48
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Nebakenezzer posted:
it's worse than that....there were multiple times he supported lovely things without even getting anything to gain for it. The Bangladesh Genocide is probably the worst example of this. It wasn't caused directly by the US, but we stood idly by and continued supporting and arming the Western Pakistani government for months while it waged what was unambiguously genocide against the Bengalis of Eastern Pakistan. We did this because we allegedly needed the Pakistani government to continue working the back channel relations with China that led to Nixon going to China. However, even at the time all this was going on everyone in the US government knew that Pakistani support really wasn't that crucial since we'd already made the necessary contacts and were dealing directly with the Chinese. So we continued supporting the Pakistanis because Nixon and Kissinger hated Indira Gandhi (not for her policies, they just hated her as a person because she was an uppity woman) and because in the words of Nixon, it was just a "bunch of brown goddamn Moslems" killing each other so who cared? Kissinger later tried to justify it by discussing the China piece, but there is multiple documented pieces of evidence from that time directly contradicting this. The vaunted realpolitik brains of Kissinger and Nixon comes down to them hating someone because they were in power and had a vagina and because genocide doesn't matter when it's a "bunch of brown goddamn Moslems" killing each other. It's one thing to be known for making hard choices in your country's interests while not being swayed by morality, it's another when you just allow sexism and racism to determine your actions and then try to hide behind being a supposed IR genius. And yeah, that was the episode I had in mind. I thought they did another one but I think I was getting my wires crossed with a different Korea documentary that was on Netflix or something. The Frontline one has all the high points (the smuggled out footage was what I really found interesting, because that stuff is pretty much the first truly uncensored view we've had of North Korea in decades if not ever)
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Aug 21, 2016 04:28
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So he's all "that genocide serves our geopolitical goals, so let's cause it?"
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This seems like something the thread might be interested in:iyaayas01 posted:so apparently Boeing had a proposal to utilize a Strike Eagle as the first stage of a space launch vehicle....it's like ASAT on massive steroids
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Aug 22, 2016 04:17
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Alaan posted:2006 was also around the time of the brilliant idea of using ICBMs to deliver supplies and/or conventional warheads. yeah that whole project reeks pretty heavily of Prompt Global Strike (I think it's even mentioned directly once or twice in one of the documents)
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Aug 22, 2016 17:37
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Flipswitch posted:I dunno man The juice isn't worth the squeeze. The advantages (maneuverability, very good high AoA performance) don't outweigh the disadvantages (aeroelastic divergence and the composite work to avoid it like Lost Cosmonaut said, increased structural stress, extreme inherent instability, even when compared to designs like the F-16). We're at the point now where you can basically get all of the advantages through thrust-vectoring without any of the disadvantages. Or to put it another way, if you want to know why the X-29 didn't lead anywhere, look two numbers down the line small amounts of forward sweep (like the V-22 or Hansa Jet) doesn't impact the aerodynamics really, so if you need to do it for whatever reason (usually wing spar location or CoG based) it's not a big deal aerodynamically
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Aug 25, 2016 02:12
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Iran I mean the answer to that type of question is always Iran......but in this instance I'm pretty sure it was really Iran.
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Aug 25, 2016 02:56
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Dead Reckoning posted:No. Allegedly there is a list of approved symbols for USAF heraldry; swords, lightning bolts, wingforms, that sort of poo poo. No more Disney cartoons. This is a very real thing. The actual list isn't contained in the AFI but the fact that it states you have to use "accepted heraldic symbols" means you're basically stuck with those generic symbols (swords, lightning bolts, delta shapes vaguely representing aircraft, indistinguished globe-like shapes, etc) for official approval. Stuff like the 493d's skull patch is almost certainly a heritage holdover, because I think you'd be hard pressed to get something with a skull officially approved today. Similarly to how the 90th FS up at Elmo has dice in theirs even though the AFI explicitly forbids anything associated with gambling/games of chance in like 3 different places. Also yeah use of copyrighted material is straight out forbidden, period, regardless of whether or not you have approval from the owner of the copyright. I know all this because I had to wage a separate paperwork war while I was deployed to try and allow my AMU to keep wearing its AMU patch...a new MXG/CC came in and had a hard-on for the AFCENT sup to 36-2903 (uniform/dress and appearance rules) and because none of the AMU patches were "officially approved heraldry" they weren't authorized for wear. Never mind the fact that our patch had been around since the beginning of the MQ-9, or the fact that it was shared between all three CONUS units that operated MQ-9s, or the fact that the MQ-9s had been at that location well before the AEW stood up and would remain there well after the AEW was inactivated. Once we realized it was a losing battle we gave up and figured we'd wait him out....he left a couple weeks after I did, from what I understand as soon as the inactivation ceremony was over everyone ripped off the EMXG patches and put their AMU patches back on. We realized it was a losing battle because after a couple emails with the heraldry office it quickly became clear that "Timetus Mortem" Fear Death and a grim reaper with a scythe dripping blood isn't in "good taste." something something train men to drop fire something something can't say gently caress it's obscene
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Aug 28, 2016 19:24
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