Slashdot Mirror
Military Grounds Stealth Bomber Fleet
Ponca City, We Love You writes "America's entire B-2 stealth bomber fleet, which has played a crucial part in all major US conflicts since 1989, has been grounded after one of the jets crashed near a military base in Guam. The crash — the first involving the B-2 — was the most expensive single aircraft accident in history. (The planes cost $1.2B each.) Officials assume the crash was caused by either mechanical failure or human error, but have grounded all B-2s to ensure there is not some fundamental fault developing in the 21-strong fleet. The crash occurred Saturday morning local time as the B-2 was taking off from Andersen Air Force base on Guam, a US territory south of Japan. An Air Force spokesman said, 'The cause of crash is unknown, pending an investigation. The pilots had ejected safely — no serious injuries. One is mobile, one is still in the hospital under observation.'"
Nobody saw it at all :)
And that is why it is very important to ground the fleet right now.
By grounding the fleet, it doesn't mean that we are somehow left without access to these aircraft. If the need for one of these aircraft comes up, then they can be launched very quickly.
Unlike some other aircraft, these fly directly from the US to the target (refueling on the way). What this means is that unlike a tank, it doesn't have to be in the theater to remain 'ready'.
Grounding these aircraft was a good idea, since as acherrington pointed out, we don't actually have that many of them.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Point taken that "genocide" is a little strong to describe the nuking of the Japanese population. I was thinking that myself after I posted. That said, it doesn't detract from the argument that the US should be criticized for what many people believe was an excessive use of force. I acknowledged that the alleged reason by the military for using it was to shorten the war, but a) Japan was in bad shape militarily at that point, and b) we didn't want the Russians to get a piece of the Japanese pie like they did in Germany after taking Berlin. So it's also possible to argue that not only was it not necessary to shorten the war, but that if the bombing did shorten the war it was at least partially to increase our spoils.
As for the rest of your rebuttal, I find nothing terribly wrong with it except your attitude that the big guys naturally screw over the little guys, and that's the way it should be. Granted we don't know either way whether the countries we messed with would have made it on their own, but it's extremely arrogant to think that without the "help" of the US the rest of the world would be a miserable place to live. If European immigrants to North America can create relatively stable countries, why can't Venezuela or any of those other supposed "shit holes"? Unless, of course, you feel white people (in this case I'm excluding Hispanics even though they are also of European descent) are somehow superior by default.
Listen, I know I'll be modded down for this, and I can kiss my karma goodbye, and it's not popular to say here, and the moderators won't agree, and it's probably flamebait, certainly not insightful or funny, least of all informative, and most assuredly not on-topic, but I just pooped my pants.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.