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Sanctions Or Not, Iranian Competition Yields Successful UAVs
garymortimer writes with word of the result from a high-tech student competition that doesn't come with sponsorship from DARPA or Mobil — far from it. Instead, the sponsors include "military and non-military organizations" within Iran. "In this competition, participants must provide a UAV equipped with a camera to search a 10 square kilometer area for at least 40 minutes to find 3 square meter marks on the ground with different English letters on them. Finding ground targets and reporting the geo location are criterion for choosing the contest winner." (This article updates another from last year, which gives some more details about the competition.)
I really could give a shit about who likes what. If someone is a threat, they are gonna have to answer to the rest of us.
Typical government lapdog mentality: If we rattle a saber at someone and they don't flinch, they are a threat and must be cowed.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Iran hasn't invaded any nations causing a doubling of overall mortality and the deaths of a million people.
There is a HUGE difference. First of all, when I served in the military, I was greeted with open arms by the people in the country I was "invading". No matter how hard I tried, I was not allowed to pay for anything. Even if I could convince the vendor to take my money, someone would always step up and pay for whatever I was trying to pay for. I didn't buy a whole lot, not wanting to take advantage of my hosts' hospitality and gratitude.
Next, any civilian casualties resulting from our "invasion" was purely accidental. The US and her allies went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, even if it sometimes meant letting the target go. You'll also notice that the US military does not hide behind human shields made of women and children.
So, again, if you think it's the same thing, you are manipulating the facts in your own head to fit what already believe to be true.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
What you say is true, but there is always an unfair implication that the two invasions via Belgium happened the same way implicit in the summarized version of the story. War was a much slower moving affair in World War 1. The entire design of the Maginot Line was supposed to take into account invasion from Belgium or Switzerland. Yes, it was supposed to make invasion direct from Germany very difficult, but it was also supposed to make it much easier to hold the line on the German border with less manpower specifically to free up mobilized forces to respond to the presumably slower offensives that could take place from other borders.
Yes, obviously there was a large miscalculation on how quickly the Germans could advance through Belgium (and in hoping that they would respect Belgium's neutral status), but France's was not the only fighting force to be outmaneuvered by the German Blitzkrieg, and France was highly outnumbered to boot. The whole meme of France learning nothing from World War 1 is way overblown. If the Germans had moved the same way that they had in World War 1, France would have been in great shape. The real problem is that they spent too much effort responding to what they learned from World War 1, and war had changed (despite what Ron Perlman would have you believe).