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A Bakers Cousin posted:watching that thing test fire each night was pretty neat ngl Now there's missiles/interceptors and also C-RAM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ZJC9gmXyo And a prototype to basically throw the entire M-LIDS systems onto a stryker. It looks very GI Joe toy. 
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Jan 28, 2023 07:06
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cat botherer posted:The Kessler Syndrome sounds badass There’s a Kessler in my Kerman.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:57
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The 1500g is for spies on a very tight budget. 
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Feb 5, 2023 00:45
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Frosted Flake posted:Good thing China wouldn’t use it to evaluate the radar cross section or EW signature of the F-22 or that would have been hubristic of the Americans, eh? There’s basically zero chance the F-22 wasn’t flying with lunenburg lenses installed. And China has had a decade plus of F-22 deployments to the Pacific to go look at them or try to collect on the F-22s radar from fancier and heavier Chinese systems.
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Feb 5, 2023 02:59
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A photoshop, but funny
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Feb 5, 2023 22:53
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paul_soccer12 posted:Thanks you’re welcome
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Feb 7, 2023 00:49
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There are Aegis cruisers deployed right this moment. They’ll probably be retired in a few years though. Some people got confused and thought they were already retired rather than still deployed in strike groups and slated for future deployments. Navy tried to pull a fast one by asking for and receiving funding to modernize one of them, then asking to retire it after modernization was complete rather than ever using it, which pissed off lawmakers.
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Feb 16, 2023 17:56
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Cuttlefush posted:it's like half-orange helps with scurvy
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Feb 16, 2023 18:22
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Real hurthling! posted:one assumes the joint chiefs or whomever go to war college but they are likely also dumb as hell in their own way idk. The joint chiefs have less power than combatant commanders. They are staff advisors. The commanders have a direct line to the SECDEF and command their forces and have a lot of authorities granted via the unified command plan, which congress approves. Not all combatant commands are resourced equally of course. For example USINDOPACOM is so much bigger than USSOUTHCOM (population, size, and assigned forces), that they hardly compare.
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Feb 17, 2023 17:43
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Lostconfused posted:Nice to see the new Ace Combat coming along. It's a pretty good skin, ngl
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Feb 17, 2023 17:59
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Frosted Flake posted:Beside that, British ships were guaranteed to be able to transit Suez in wartime, the straits at Singapore, make calls at Sierra Leone and the Cape, that’s not true today. Yeah, British empire falling apart is and was good.
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Feb 17, 2023 22:18
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Danann posted:speaking of railchat: This chart tells me the Australians took their "road train" idea way too seriously.
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Feb 18, 2023 01:55
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KomradeX posted:Didn't the Aussies buy a bunch of M1s even though they have no way to transport them off Australia? Or was that just an exaggeration? It's not true. At one point, they hadn't yet validated having the Abrams conduct amphibious landings and transport in rougher seas, but they always had the ability to transport Abrams around in ships. The Australian navy has since demonstrated amphibious landings with Abrams. E: Pretty sure they did the standalone testing a several years ago, then did a major exercise that showed it off a couple years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmrfJhUPW7A mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 04:57 on Mar 8, 2023 |
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Mar 8, 2023 04:54
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Frosted Flake posted:and the RAN retired the tank landing ships that could carry them iirc. https://www.navy.gov.au/lhd-landing-craft-llc
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Mar 8, 2023 05:32
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The craft come from the landing ship. LHD Landing Craft is in the name. The Abrams can be transported inside the ship. This is if you need an amphibious landing instead of going port to port on any number of ships. here is a picture for you. 
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Mar 8, 2023 05:44
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Danann posted:I'm more surprised there's specified payment for hypothetical 8-year privates. A private gets booted out if they're still a private at 5 years of service, so that's why the 6 and 8 year scale are the same as the 4-year scale. This booting is retroactive if someone gets reduce in rank. Hatebag posted:Lol median income per capita is like $38k. So destroying your soul by directly participating in an engine of genocide is worth upwards of $10k/year. If a junior soldier gets married in a very low cost of living zip code, they're getting about $18,000 of tax free pay. This in no way incentivizes people to get into unwise marriages in order to get paid more and move out of the barracks. So in a very cheap zip code, a married E-4 with 3 years of service takes home $57,000 a year, but is taxed as if they only earn $35K/year. More in an expensive zip code. An unmarried E-4 takes home only $40,500/year, taxed as if they earn $35K/year, and lives in a barracks. E: technically not linked to marriage, linked to having a dependent, which can mean single parent, caring for an adult, etc. But the most common form is marriage. An unmarried 19-year old PV2 with one year of service is earning about $31K/year and lives in a barracks. mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 01:09 on Mar 11, 2023 |
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Mar 11, 2023 01:06
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BitcoinRockefeller posted:All the local Kwik Trips are hiring at $16, $18 for third shift. Go straight from high school to stocking gas station shelves and make more than a newly minted E5, do it at night and it's more than an E6. One of the troop lobby tricks when looking for raises is to only mention base pay and neglect to mention that for a married E-5, about 35-40% of their pay comes from untaxed income that doesn’t appear in base pay. More in expensive zip codes. Not benefits, cash allowances. For officers, about the top 20-30% of their income is untaxed cash allowances.
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Mar 11, 2023 18:15
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Weka posted:You have answered your own question. Why join the army when you can get a normal job? There is consequently a higher proportion of people to dumb to pass the ASVAB or get a job at a corner store applying to join. No disrespect to those people on account of their intelligence intended. "Passing" the ASVAB to join the army isn't really how it works, because the ASVAB scores are converted into percentiles of the US population taking them. The minimum requirement, without a waiver, is to score a 31%, meaning scoring 31st percentile. That's also why 99 is the highest score, not 100. No one scores higher than 100% of people. Given general bell curve, there might be very little actual raw score differenc between someone who's a score of 45 vs someone's who's a 55, whereas at higher and very low percentiles, the difference in raw performance between percentiles grows larger. The top reason people do not qualify to enlist: overweight. After that, you get things like drug use and lack of education requirements to enlist (High School Diploma. To join with only GED, they raise the minimum ASVAB standard) Other major disqualifiers are drug use and criminal background. If someone has an overall "ok" composite ASVAB score, but just straight sucks or excels at one particular portion of the test, that can block out select jobs and funnel them somewhere where they do better. Like someone who's good at shop/mechanics, but isn't good at writing skills, or someone who can't write well, but is great at arithmetic and logic reasoning. The US army estimate is that about 23% of young people are eligible to join, and most of the reason that it's only 23% is people being too overweight to enlist. The other huge problem is, uh, people just don't want to join, and who can really blame them?
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Mar 12, 2023 00:49
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Recruitment seems rough in general. More and more people are being exposed to how bullshit a lot of wars are, and in some areas (Korea, Japan, China come to mind), the population is going to age a ton without anything close to a replacement of youth, so where will cranky old leaders get young people to throw into grinders? I guess the answer is already there with the confluence of MIC profits (automation, fancy weapons, etc) and simply doing as much as they can not to have quite as large of standing forces around. In 2017, over 1/3 of US army costs were just paying people paychecks and benefits. This percentage is much tinier in forces like the air force, which has less people, and much more expensive equipment.
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Mar 12, 2023 01:47
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Weka posted:Mate, here's the article that kicked this off. I guess this guy knows more about it than you. That is a lower number than I'd expect meeting the percentile requirements. I was pulling from here, where they report that over 60% of applicants are passing aptitude tests with a 50 or higher (army minimum is 31), but it only goes to FY21: https://recruiting.army.mil/pao/facts_figures/ The devil in the details is that you can't have a whole army of the army minimum. Once you fill out slots that only require minimum requirements, there are a bunch of jobs that require well above that minimum requirement. Can't exactly have the artillery fire director or the datalink manager scoring the army minimum. mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 05:21 on Mar 12, 2023 |
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Mar 12, 2023 05:19
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A Bakers Cousin posted:buddy from real life personal experience you certainly can and do When you meet someone who truly, actually was the army minimum, not just someone's who's kind of a dumbass or doesn't care, it can be alarming.
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Mar 12, 2023 05:22
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Frosted Flake posted:There's this thing in defence, I'll take photos at the conference this year too, whenever they try to sell "the weapon of the future" they deliberately make it more angular, including panels that do nothing, and I don't mean angular for armour value either, pretty much to have that effect. You always see it in the concept stages and prototypes of things they are trying to sell. It's really interesting because it has no practical benefit, is nearly always done away with when serial production starts, but part of the MIC now is playing off gullible politicians, and so when politicians are thinking about future (as in temporal) procurement, they are looking for future (as in aesthetic) equipment to buy. The ISV-9 might suck or not, I dunno, but it’s literally a Chevy Colorado ZR2 chassis. The only thing approaching any weird lines are the hood and fenders. The rest of it is just a basic roll cage on a banal commercial truck chassis. It’s surprisingly boring and normal looking, like a budget offroad truck. For weird lines, the new Panther, Armata, or pre-design renders of the US next gen combat vehicles. The renders of NGCV will almost certainly not look like what actually gets bought. It’s rather plain compared to more expensive and hyped things like MATVs or JLTVs. https://www.army.mil/article-amp/259571/production_model_infantry_squad_vehicles_airdrop_tested_for_long_term_ruggedization mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 15:34 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 15:32
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Frosted Flake posted:Some problems with this: Wrong. It is a state issue, and the number of states with blanket bans are small. Many disallow voting for felons actively serving a sentence. In some states, everyone can vote. In others, everyone outside prison can vote. Some (lovely) state laws make it so you cannot vote until court fees are paid. Then there are weird ones like Virginia where the law is no vote at all after felony conviction, but the governor has been granting permission to vote anyway. There has been a lot of movement on this over the last couple of decades. Maps and stuff: https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voter-restoration/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights
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Mar 18, 2023 00:15
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Frosted Flake posted:Seems like a lot of clauses for "service guarantees citizenship". I don’t think so. Would take a tortured and inaccurate reading or lack of knowledge of state and US law to get to that conclusion. Sometimes you’ll see some military guy claim your life is over if you avoid the draft, but the truth is far from it.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:45
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Comrade Merf posted:It’s been wild in the past year since the Ukrainian conflict how everyone I know went from mostly ambivalent on China to excitedly talking about how much they are looking forward to freeing mainland Chynah from the Red Menace now that Russia has been dealt with and how quick and easy that would be. Another thing being US armed forces guys both past and current are more confident in the venture than the civilians! Who do you talk to? I’ve never met a single person who thinks fighting China would be easy or a good “goal” to have, even less so among the military. The closest I’ve heard is the same “their economy must be some kind of sham” rhetoric that’s been going since I was a kid. E: correction, I remember one exceptionally dumb guy IRL who said China would be easy, but he also thinks the US won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Mar 21, 2023 00:46
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Danann posted:It's the same report lol. One of the major assumption of this wargame is having submarines inside the strait not dying lmao. Looked at the report, and they state pretty clearly that US SSNs would be lost, both inside the strait and out. Most wargames project that whoever the winner might be, there would be a really brutal amount of ships sunk in a Taiwan straight scenario (both in and out of the strait itself) where both the US and China committed to combat. Their wargame may be bullshit, but it certainly never made the assumption that US SSNs wouldn't die in the strait. mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 01:07 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 01:05
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I’m around a lot of military and government, and the goal is always “just convince China that militarily invading Taiwan isn’t worth it, because it would suck too much for everyone involved.”
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Mar 21, 2023 01:14
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Oh you can sure as hell lose against someone who is conventionally below the level of a “peer,” as many nations have learned.
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Mar 21, 2023 04:46
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The Oldest Man posted:Explain the difference between a one way attack drone, a suicide drone, and a cruise missile There isn't a good one, but: Suicide drone is kind of a dumb term. I don't care for it. Cruise missile is typically turbofan or ramjet powered and usually pretty heavy, much more so than one-way drones right now powered by RC plane or small aviation engines. One-way attack drone could be electric or an air-breathing gas engine, or could even be a jet, but generally implies smaller than cruise missile. But for planning purposes, safe enough to treat a one-way attack drone like a slower and smaller cruise missile. The "big" one-way attack drones are still a small payload, small body, sometimes longer wings, and slow compared to even a medium-sized cruise missile, though low and slow and small can have its own advantages.
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Mar 24, 2023 22:02
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BitcoinRockefeller posted:IDK how the military accounts for things, but you should in theory be able to have squadrons at 100% readiness without having all the planes working because there should be spares, especially for machines that need maintenance after every time they are used. When aircraft are having spares installed or are down for scheduled maintenance, that counts negatively against a 100% readiness rating. So when an airplane (or generator or tank or whatever) hasn't "broken" at all, but it has come due for a 12 hour or 3 day or 4 week period of maintenance, that maintenance time counts against its availability. If a piece of equipment is due for scheduled services based on miles or hours or whatever unit of use, the equipment is considered "non-mission capable" due to being due for the scheduled service. One way to get around that is doing your services early or precisely on-time, but you still typically count the downtime where the equipment was taken apart for service as non-available, even if it doesn't go on an unexpected failure type report, etc. It's double-edged. A generator that works flawlessly, but has to come down for 8 hours every 100 hours is "unavaiable" 8% of the time. But it also stops someone from saying that equipment works 100% of the time by saying that spending weeks at a time in a depot "on schedule" simply doesn't count against availability.
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Mar 25, 2023 04:51
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Raw Flight Time can be misleading as well. For a while, F-15E squadrons were getting more flight time than anyone, but flying a 5-8 hour missions every other day and zero sim time burning holes in the sky over Syria or Northern Iraq in case ISIS shows up is less useful for major combat training than 6-10 hours of live flight time per month plus training and sim where the flights are training high end conflict and a variety of missions. Yeah, the F-15E crews will be the most practiced in stuff like takeoff, landing, and insurgency-level CAS, but they might be LESS capable when it comes to advanced A2A combat training or SEAD/DEAD or long-range strike compared to crews getting less hours, but training instead for high end combat. F-15E squadrons still deploy to the middle east, but a lot of the focus over the last couple years has been getting them back into training the kind of skills required for a Pacific conflict.
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Mar 25, 2023 17:19
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Filthy Hans posted:the E is the version kitted out for ground attack so maybe being less capable at air-to-air than F-15C pilots isn't such a big deal The F-15Cs are being retired (they're old) and replaced by a mix of F-15EXs and F-35s. F-15Es do air to air as a secondary role, but they have been put on CAP missions before just cause they're around, and they've shot down Iranian drones in Iraq and Syria before. Not all Es have the newer AESAs, but those that do have considerable capability between modern radars and AMRAAMs. The F-15EX will be an F-15 that essentially can do all the F-15C missions and drat near all of the F-15E missions, but with more hardpoints and some improved systems. The only real thing the F-15EX lacks by design is that they cannot carry nuclear weapons, while select F-15Es can. With the new hardpoints, the EX can carry some absurd (and probably terribly inefficient) loads like 12 air to air missiles while still carrying a few cruise missiles.
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Mar 26, 2023 04:55
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Slavvy posted:What you're telling me is that the Americans built the f35 whereas the Russians would've just built the f15ex The Russians would build 10 demo F-35s that they promise will become a real plane "soon" and then maybe the F-15EX. Russia likes a large two-engine multirole these days. The accounting with the F-15EX got weird. Whereas unit cost of the F-35 includes the senors, defense measures, etc for a total unit cost to include everything it needs to actually do missions, the F-15EX accounting cleverly didn't include stuff like sensor pods, defenses, and other components into the unit cost. So the F-15EX, once you add systems required to pull mission, costs more to buy per airframe than the F-35A and costs more per flight hour to fly it. Part of that is just that it's a significantly physically larger two-engine aircraft, but it definitely wasn't pitched to Congress as aircraft for aircraft, more expensive than the F-35A. It has some inherent advantages over an F-35A in some missions, like having a large fuel load and the ability to carry a ton of missiles makes it better for a cruise missile defense mission than an F-35A, whereas an F-35A would be far more survivable penetrating enemy air or SAM threats. Ardennes posted:Yeah, the E is just the newer version, E's are newer than C's, but this isn't really true. E's aren't just a newer version of Cs and were purchased for a different reason. C's are lighter, have less drag, are shorter, and every single C out there has an AESA radar optimized for air to air with significantly less (near-zero) air to ground capability. Some E models have AESA radars, but it is not at all a rule that hey all have that capability. It's somewhat normal a squadron of F-15Es to have a mix of AESA and older mech scan radars. C's all individually have AESA capability. All F-15EXs will have AESA, and all the F-35s do as well. mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 16:28 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 16:16
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The Oldest Man posted:I'm honestly struggling to think of a way that the F35 isn't a pile of garbage. Its flight performance is fundamentally compromised, it doesn't carry enough weapons, its stealth isn't good enough, it's way too expensive to acquire enough of them to make up for its defects, it's reliability is obviously crap so the ones you do have aren't going to be enough, the "parts commonality" pitch for it being a joint aircraft was total fluff, its range is a downgrade from prior systems, and I stopped hearing about the giant helmet causing neck injuries and the sensor fusion HMD giving people migraines but I'm guessing those never really stopped happening. It’s partly because airplanes and militaries in general are graded on a curve. It doesn’t have to be good, it has to be better in some calculus of quantity and capability than opponents. For countering Russian capability, it 100% is better, no question. For China in 10-15 years, ehhhhh…
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Mar 26, 2023 20:07
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Cerebral Bore posted:yea, i'm p sure that a flanker e would outperform the f35 in the somewhat important metric of being able to fly on short notice That’s why you have quantity as well. US manufactures about as many F-35s alone in a quarter as Russia makes fighters in a year and just generally has a much larger and more capable air force and combined strike capability than Russia in general. Russian military industry is really slow and low volume when it comes to aircraft production. That’s part of why they focus so much on SAMs.
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Mar 26, 2023 22:23
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genericnick posted:But that also makes how they deal with SAMs the only interesting question, no? IADS matter, but Russia is a bit of a joke in a conventional fight vs an all-in US vs a smaller poor and country. Russian nuclear deterrent is what matters more for keeping the US in check. Russia also has considerable cyber, undersea, and cruise missile capability. But in the air, they’re a significant margin below US capabilities of today and tomorrow. Yeah, the US could theoretically pick apart Russian air defenses, both aerial and surface, but for what cause? To get a nuclear war on their hands? China is the major threat to the US’s past ability to force their way into other nations’ spheres of influence. China’s advances and training and general strategic approach to their military are a serious challenge to the US being able to influence China’s or intervene in what China considers in principal to be internal affairs, like Taiwan. Conventional Russia vs US air power is no real contest, but there exists no universe where both powers play a massive conventional wargame against each other, so it’s a bit of a moot point.
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Mar 26, 2023 22:50
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Slavvy posted:I think the US would be very dismayed to discover how little their flying artillery counts for. It's very much a force more suited to punishing countries that can't shoot back with total impunity. Which makes sense because that was their experience with Germany in WW2. In a China / US scenario, I think long range strike and air and sea control would matter a lot. Not for stuff like killing individual tanks, but ships, ports, factories, comms, airborne ISR/C2, logistical hubs, etc, harming ability to generate or sustain combat power. A lot of that may well be very long range shots by both sides rather than the close in CAS stuff the US did in Iraq etc. better would be if there is no fight, ofc
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Mar 26, 2023 23:27
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atelier morgan posted:SAMs were capable of downing strategic bombers regardless of altitude even in vietnam in the 70s, against China's actual modern weapons with 50 more years of development high altitude strategic bombing is a thoroughly dead concept Modern bombers largely carry long range missiles they can fore from beyond SAM range, unless just bombing insurgents. In some cases, like the new TU-160 upgrades, they are explicitly called “missile bombers” B-52s, B-1s, B-2s, B-21s are also based around being missile carriers nowadays. Ardennes posted:In the context I was talking about radar systems, since you wouldn’t want to just defend against stealth bombers with SAMs, you need interceptors. Plus, there are range problems for a Chinese bomber and its long-range payloads being capable of reaching the US mainland. In the future, not so much, but it’s a limitation today. Long range aviation is an area where the US and Russia still hold a lot more capability.
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Mar 27, 2023 04:22
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Cerebral Bore posted:no they have since upgraded to newer planes that kill their pilots in far more advanced ways One more area where maybe the F-35 will be more advanced, but it can never catch up to the sheer quantity of pilot death the early Harriers could pull off. So far, zero US pilots have died in F-35s, and one Japanese pilot died (got disoriented during night flight and died from high speed controlled flight into the ocean). mlmp08 has issued a correction as of 14:50 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 14:46
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If someone wanted to hype a type of US ship in contrast with China, makes more sense to hype US undersea capability than carriers. Carriers aren't nothing, but they can be held at serious risk and kept pretty far away. Undersea is one of the areas where the US is still a significant step ahead of Chinese capabilities. And there are a significant number of them, so they're not such a singular huge target.
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Mar 30, 2023 04:26
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