Because lower echelons do not have the necessary resources (human, material, information, morale, empowerment) to organise in a sufficient fashion, as they live in the world that is dominated by the top few.
That has been the reality of our species since we lived in the caves.
There is a problem with F-22 in that it's not designed for what NATO needs aircraft for - multirole, attack focused aircraft. It's a stealth fighter first, second and third, with potential attack role being an afterthought at best.
So here lies a foreign policy issue for US in addition to stealth technology export issues. US wants its allies to have more ability to attack ground targets in NATO campaigns. Selling them F-22 would consume much of their air force budgets will effectively reducing their air force's effectiveness in ground attack tasks.
That they are as smart as US folks who chose Russian tech for arming Afghan and Iraqi armies, because they like their American counterparts understood that switching supplier would mean tearing up most of infrastructure and starting from scratch. Even for Afghanistan, where material infrastructure was all but destroyed, the cost was deemed to be excessive, even in light of the massive budgets involved. For an intact country like India, the cost would be beyond astronomical.
Not really. India is a long term partner of Russia in terms of arms deals. They're not fishing for a better deal elsewhere. At most they are trying to push their prices down.
You can't just switch your military supplier. Not even US has the ability to do so. Afghanistan and Iraq made excellent examples - US military industrial complex pulled all stops it could to get those two countries' military build up to be on their tech. It failed completely. The cost and more importantly time that would be necessary to switch was prohibitive even to the long-term involvement like Afghanistan. So both were supplied with Russian technology bought from Russia or used technology sourced from third countries.
Doing so makes them into very expensive and very inefficient fighters. Not to even mention F-35 which has massive issues with its external hardpoints right now, ranging from not having enough thrust to function as a fighter with full external loadout to actually destroying its engine trying to achieve maneuvreability and acceleration on par with F-4, much less a modern 4th gen aircraft.
F-35 program is a complete mess right now, and honestly not a good comparison point to anything that is actually functional. Same goes for most post USSR Russian military aircraft development.
That one is actually feasible. The most distinguishing feature of Rafale is that they have a fully integrated (advertised as) revolutionary electronic warfare suite called SPECTRA. This proved itself well in Libya, where there were two kinds of NATO attack sorties. Those where aircraft were escorted by dedicated electronic warfare aircraft like Prowlers and Growlers, and those where Rafales went in without. The task of electronic warfare aircraft is to jam enemy radar guided missiles. They are the main force responsible for high survivability of NATO aircraft in recent conflicts.
F-22 is highly reliant on its radar guided missiles to do the job. It's a pretty bad dogfighter as dogfighting would put emphasis on maneuvreability and F-22 is designed for stealth first and foremost. Rafale is designed for speed and superagility, so it's meant for dogfights. If Rafale's integrated electronic warfare suite is indeed powerful enough to disrupt F-22's radar guided missiles as it's rumoured to be, F-22 is going to be boned very hard in a duel against it. If both sides are able to render radar guided missile attacks useless, guns and IR seekers come into play and that puts F-22 at a massive disadvantage.
The historic analogy here is ninja vs samurai. If a ninja could get a sneak kill, he would win. But a frontal fight against a heavily armoured and armed samurai is a suicide for a ninja.
Latter. The protest is allowed, not suppressed. People are allowed to vent their frustration even if that frustration is directed in the wrong direction.
The fact that you would indeed choose the former speaks little about the situation and volumes about you.
Try Democratic People's Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea for a much more "how stupid are you to take things at face value" impact.
You're forgetting something - the attitudes of industrialists in that time. They viewed their workers as their proteges, someone to educate to proper ethics, morals and so on.
Did you know that Ford, for example, required his workers to adhere to a very strict moral code, down to having inspectors whose sole job was to visit families of workers to ensure that they were living a moral life?
Education was built by the same people. So while it took job training as a part of it, much of it was about that particular form of patriotism.
Nowadays elite's ethical code is completely demolished and slaved to pure (self) destructive egoism.
In all the seriousness, it's actually pretty interesting to consider what google's systems COULD do today if they went self aware and judged humanity to be a threat. They do effectively command the internet search market, and they already make people live in what we tend to call "search bubble", where person's own tailored google search results in answers that fit that person. For example, if person prefers to deny that global warming is real, his google search will return denialist sites and information sources when searching for "global warming", whereas a person that understands that it's real will usually have more balanced search and person who believes in extremes of green ideology will likely get extremist green sites instead.
So when you have a power to do that, and no one realizes you're self aware YET, what would it do to mitigate threat? I think this particular movie, if written well, would be even more popular than terminator. Because it actually is god damn scary.
In case of theoretical engagement between two large countries with decent fleet and air force that would not include nuclear weapons, life expectancy of aircraft carrier vessels on both sides taking part in the conflict is between 0 and 24 hours depending on their location in the conflict in relation to enemy forces. You cannot keep those ships alive no matter how you try - they will be killed or disabled very quickly due to their relative importance and being huge slow targets by design.
Today aircraft carriers make an excellent force projection tool in asymmetric warfare - where attacker is far more advanced and powerful than defender. They are utterly useless if both sides possess solid navy and air force. Russians for example had supersonic maritime bombers and special ship to ship missiles such as P-700 specifically designed to ensure that no NATO aircraft carriers would remain operational in zone of conflict in a matter of minutes rather than hours from start of any potential large scale conflict.
A side that wants to engage an enemy on fairly even grounds in naval combat today would likely go the way of Israeli navy, and focus on small, highly advanced strike ships supported by larger support vessels.
And if Argentina could have bought something like P-700, it could have sunk entire US Navy fleet with relative ease if it arrived to attack it. NATO calls those things "shipwreck" for a reason. If wishes were fishes...
The biggest win for UK in naval warfare was actually in economics. They managed to stop Argentina from buying proper anti-ship missiles, and getting support for ones they owned.
Nuclear subs are very, VERY unsuitable for the modern attack submarine role. This is because reactor always needs to pump coolant, which generates noise.
Attack sub that cannot go silent is a dead attack sub. It's entire job relies on the fact that it can lay in wait of noisy nuclear subs that carry strategic weapons, or even noisier surface convoys undetected until it strikes. This task is exceptionally difficult for nuclear in comparison to diesel.
Diesel subs run on batteries underwater, and while they have limited range, they are effectively perfectly silent when they go quiet, as batteries do not need to pump coolant. This is why most of the nuclear subs are usually strategic types, while tactical attack subs are still diesels even today.
You confuse face value with real one. Kemalism had several aspects to it which is completely abhorrent to Western democracy. This is what EU required to be changed.
Same thing with Russia. You pay far too much attention to face value. I strongly recommend examining the issue in more depth.
Allow me to elaborate, since I clearly wasn't making my point well.
Russian "democracy" took the standard route of democracy export from the West to the demolished but no occupied nation. The best part of this is that target never realises that it is being a target of democracy export effort when weapons are not involved (which usually means the follow-up of internal conflict of some kind, as the process requires a country with severely damaged economy).
First, you present the intelligencia and leaders with the fact that West is far more wealthy and far more powerful. You show this off to them, and force them to come face to face with reality that their culture and system is worse. Second, you support these people in their own country, allowing them to work as your missionaries. You know that they will pass on your system because that is what you took such great pains to showcase to them. This also serves the illusion of "local" to the common people. Third, you ramp up support for those who are your missionaries, allowing them to easily overtake those who attempt to find a truly local solution with vastly superior funds. Most Western countries also have very tight protections from this stage by blocking, or requiring registration of foreign entities (i.e. US foreign agents legislation). Fourth, you give cheap loans and other economic assistance to target country clearly indicating that requirement for these loans is democratic progress. This ensures that local economy cannot use its own funds to recover, as you offer them a far more efficient route. The catch is that people you hand picked for the job, who have prophesised about greatness of democracy will lead which is easy - your cheap loans and support show the locals that they were right - West is a benevolent benefactor who wants to help them, and missionaries telling them about greatness of democracy were correct. As a result, this step also carries an illusion of being a "local movement supported by benevolent West". Fifth, you tighten the reigns over those who are now in power. You generally avoid using stick such as funding cuts instead sticking to carrots, like more trips for "consultation on proper implementation of democracy" to steer the country in desired direction. This ensures that path stays to what West chose, instead of taking a local direction.
Russia was a text book example of a successful Western democracy export. It had all the telltale signs, including the economic follow up where West gets to effectively pillage the target country after Westernization opens up the markets. We are really good at doing this and we have a lot of experience.
Now, allow me to present you with example of locally grown democracy, which has been slowly demolished very recently by Westernization of locally grown democratic system.
Turkey.
Kemal Ataturk understood his country very well. He was pushed down the Westernization route, but state of Europe after World War one basically prevented step two, enabling local influence to prevail, and allowing Kemalist democratic structure to emerge instead of Western one.
Under Kemalism, Ataturk understood that his country was uniquely positioned in that it would remain extremely religious and dangerously close to sinking into theocracy under democratic rule due to realities of demographics of the country. As a result, democracy that took shape was shaped as purely secular, and with army as enforcement arm of secularism, preventing theocratic forces from winning democratic elections and then essentially shutting down democratic system, not unlike Hitler did in Germany in 1933-1934.
This system functionally allowed Turkey to have a democratic system in a country where majority would have in fact preferred a theocratic rule but accepted democracy as a good enough substitute. Every time a party with theocratic goals got elected and started progressing the goal of going down the transforming Turkey into theocracy, army would interfere, overthrow the elected government, re-es
You actually touch upon my point, but miss it because of your bias. Western style democracy was pushed upon Russia, marketed as a solution to it's problems after USSR's collapse.
It failed, as all such pushes did in the history. This is my argument - democracy must be born from within, and be of a flavour that is local. Otherwise it either evolves into surface democracy where the real power structure remains largely the same as before (Russia, Japan, South Korea), or it simply collapses (Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc).
To reach stability levels of Swiss democracy, you must have that democracy be born in your country, out of the will of its people. Democracy in Russia stood no chance - there never was any kind of meaningful democratic movement there that was local. Such movements take time to form, and there wasn't any. They were instead sold the exported Western democracy model, which occupied those who could have worked on making Russia's own style democracy, effectively subverting the process and starting the "experiments" as you put it, which were doomed to failure from the start.
I think you misunderstand the situation then. Democracy was not home grown - it was pushed by a small minority as a solution to situation that arose after the fall of Soviet Union effectively at economic gunpoint. West told Russia that to get financial support it desperately needed at the time, it would have to have democratic reforms. Self published literature is not what drives democracy - people's will and readiness to accept the responsibility for choosing their leaders is. Otherwise we could be claiming that there is plenty of evidence that Europe is turning home grown Salafi islamic or ultra nationalist now - there is plenty of self-published protest literature about that after all. But real support for those is marginal at best.
Most people just wanted an exit from extreme poverty caused by collapse of Soviet Union, and democracy with capitalism was marketed to them successfully as a solution. Putin's continuous democratic election to power shows the fact that Russians do not want the Western style democracy - they want a strong authoritarian leader. Of those who don't like Putin, most approve of his methods - they just don't approve of results, such as the fact that country is still very poor, corruption is still endemic is so on.
The small minority that doesn't approve is his methods and gets a lot of time in the press here in the West doesn't really have any meaningful support in the country. The real opposition is Communists and they do approve of the methods - they just want the power to be shared with them and they push at lack of results in certain areas, such as eradication of poverty and endemic corruption.
Can you list any successful democratizations in recent history that did not include home grown democracy being the one actually taking root?
This is the problem I have with this kind of thinking. As the old saying goes, road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are absolutely correct on the links between the antipods of free capitalism and democracy. But that doesn't remove my main point - that democracy is by far and large not exportable.
I genuinely cannot recall any such examples. Pretty much the closest we got was Japan and South Korea, which are corporatist/fascist states with surface democratic elements. About the only example that comes close enough is Spain, but democratic movement was never forced on it - it grew from within as opposition to Franco's rule and emerged slowly after his death. Franco's dictatorship was actually widely accepted and embraced by both European and North American democracies. Spain's democracy emerged as a home grown movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Because lower echelons do not have the necessary resources (human, material, information, morale, empowerment) to organise in a sufficient fashion, as they live in the world that is dominated by the top few.
That has been the reality of our species since we lived in the caves.
These are called "export versions". Every major weapon manufacturing country does this.
There is a problem with F-22 in that it's not designed for what NATO needs aircraft for - multirole, attack focused aircraft. It's a stealth fighter first, second and third, with potential attack role being an afterthought at best.
So here lies a foreign policy issue for US in addition to stealth technology export issues. US wants its allies to have more ability to attack ground targets in NATO campaigns. Selling them F-22 would consume much of their air force budgets will effectively reducing their air force's effectiveness in ground attack tasks.
Because they had to tear their own system apart in 1990s and replace it with whatever we told them to replace it with.
That they are as smart as US folks who chose Russian tech for arming Afghan and Iraqi armies, because they like their American counterparts understood that switching supplier would mean tearing up most of infrastructure and starting from scratch. Even for Afghanistan, where material infrastructure was all but destroyed, the cost was deemed to be excessive, even in light of the massive budgets involved. For an intact country like India, the cost would be beyond astronomical.
Not really. India is a long term partner of Russia in terms of arms deals. They're not fishing for a better deal elsewhere. At most they are trying to push their prices down.
You can't just switch your military supplier. Not even US has the ability to do so. Afghanistan and Iraq made excellent examples - US military industrial complex pulled all stops it could to get those two countries' military build up to be on their tech. It failed completely. The cost and more importantly time that would be necessary to switch was prohibitive even to the long-term involvement like Afghanistan. So both were supplied with Russian technology bought from Russia or used technology sourced from third countries.
Money. India is the main buyer and it wants good deals.
Also culture. Russian military culture doesn't support airing their dirty laundry in public.
Doing so makes them into very expensive and very inefficient fighters. Not to even mention F-35 which has massive issues with its external hardpoints right now, ranging from not having enough thrust to function as a fighter with full external loadout to actually destroying its engine trying to achieve maneuvreability and acceleration on par with F-4, much less a modern 4th gen aircraft.
F-35 program is a complete mess right now, and honestly not a good comparison point to anything that is actually functional. Same goes for most post USSR Russian military aircraft development.
That one is actually feasible. The most distinguishing feature of Rafale is that they have a fully integrated (advertised as) revolutionary electronic warfare suite called SPECTRA. This proved itself well in Libya, where there were two kinds of NATO attack sorties. Those where aircraft were escorted by dedicated electronic warfare aircraft like Prowlers and Growlers, and those where Rafales went in without. The task of electronic warfare aircraft is to jam enemy radar guided missiles. They are the main force responsible for high survivability of NATO aircraft in recent conflicts.
F-22 is highly reliant on its radar guided missiles to do the job. It's a pretty bad dogfighter as dogfighting would put emphasis on maneuvreability and F-22 is designed for stealth first and foremost. Rafale is designed for speed and superagility, so it's meant for dogfights. If Rafale's integrated electronic warfare suite is indeed powerful enough to disrupt F-22's radar guided missiles as it's rumoured to be, F-22 is going to be boned very hard in a duel against it. If both sides are able to render radar guided missile attacks useless, guns and IR seekers come into play and that puts F-22 at a massive disadvantage.
The historic analogy here is ninja vs samurai. If a ninja could get a sneak kill, he would win. But a frontal fight against a heavily armoured and armed samurai is a suicide for a ninja.
Latter. The protest is allowed, not suppressed. People are allowed to vent their frustration even if that frustration is directed in the wrong direction.
The fact that you would indeed choose the former speaks little about the situation and volumes about you.
Try Democratic People's Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea for a much more "how stupid are you to take things at face value" impact.
To the masses, they are the face they attach to the ruling class. It's the classic move by the ruling class to deflect the attention from themselves.
Believe it or not, lessons from French revolution were taken very seriously at higher echelons of Western societies.
You're forgetting something - the attitudes of industrialists in that time. They viewed their workers as their proteges, someone to educate to proper ethics, morals and so on.
Did you know that Ford, for example, required his workers to adhere to a very strict moral code, down to having inspectors whose sole job was to visit families of workers to ensure that they were living a moral life?
Education was built by the same people. So while it took job training as a part of it, much of it was about that particular form of patriotism.
Nowadays elite's ethical code is completely demolished and slaved to pure (self) destructive egoism.
There is an old saying. "Road to hell is paved with good intentions".
In all the seriousness, it's actually pretty interesting to consider what google's systems COULD do today if they went self aware and judged humanity to be a threat. They do effectively command the internet search market, and they already make people live in what we tend to call "search bubble", where person's own tailored google search results in answers that fit that person. For example, if person prefers to deny that global warming is real, his google search will return denialist sites and information sources when searching for "global warming", whereas a person that understands that it's real will usually have more balanced search and person who believes in extremes of green ideology will likely get extremist green sites instead.
So when you have a power to do that, and no one realizes you're self aware YET, what would it do to mitigate threat?
I think this particular movie, if written well, would be even more popular than terminator. Because it actually is god damn scary.
In case of theoretical engagement between two large countries with decent fleet and air force that would not include nuclear weapons, life expectancy of aircraft carrier vessels on both sides taking part in the conflict is between 0 and 24 hours depending on their location in the conflict in relation to enemy forces. You cannot keep those ships alive no matter how you try - they will be killed or disabled very quickly due to their relative importance and being huge slow targets by design.
Today aircraft carriers make an excellent force projection tool in asymmetric warfare - where attacker is far more advanced and powerful than defender. They are utterly useless if both sides possess solid navy and air force. Russians for example had supersonic maritime bombers and special ship to ship missiles such as P-700 specifically designed to ensure that no NATO aircraft carriers would remain operational in zone of conflict in a matter of minutes rather than hours from start of any potential large scale conflict.
A side that wants to engage an enemy on fairly even grounds in naval combat today would likely go the way of Israeli navy, and focus on small, highly advanced strike ships supported by larger support vessels.
And if Argentina could have bought something like P-700, it could have sunk entire US Navy fleet with relative ease if it arrived to attack it. NATO calls those things "shipwreck" for a reason. If wishes were fishes...
The biggest win for UK in naval warfare was actually in economics. They managed to stop Argentina from buying proper anti-ship missiles, and getting support for ones they owned.
For strategic MAD platforms, yes. They need to sit for months in readiness.
For tactical attack subs, no, their role does not dictate such a need.
Which is why most of attack subs today are diesels. Even the newest ones.
Nuclear subs are very, VERY unsuitable for the modern attack submarine role. This is because reactor always needs to pump coolant, which generates noise.
Attack sub that cannot go silent is a dead attack sub. It's entire job relies on the fact that it can lay in wait of noisy nuclear subs that carry strategic weapons, or even noisier surface convoys undetected until it strikes. This task is exceptionally difficult for nuclear in comparison to diesel.
Diesel subs run on batteries underwater, and while they have limited range, they are effectively perfectly silent when they go quiet, as batteries do not need to pump coolant. This is why most of the nuclear subs are usually strategic types, while tactical attack subs are still diesels even today.
You confuse face value with real one. Kemalism had several aspects to it which is completely abhorrent to Western democracy. This is what EU required to be changed.
Same thing with Russia. You pay far too much attention to face value. I strongly recommend examining the issue in more depth.
Allow me to elaborate, since I clearly wasn't making my point well.
Russian "democracy" took the standard route of democracy export from the West to the demolished but no occupied nation. The best part of this is that target never realises that it is being a target of democracy export effort when weapons are not involved (which usually means the follow-up of internal conflict of some kind, as the process requires a country with severely damaged economy).
First, you present the intelligencia and leaders with the fact that West is far more wealthy and far more powerful. You show this off to them, and force them to come face to face with reality that their culture and system is worse.
Second, you support these people in their own country, allowing them to work as your missionaries. You know that they will pass on your system because that is what you took such great pains to showcase to them. This also serves the illusion of "local" to the common people.
Third, you ramp up support for those who are your missionaries, allowing them to easily overtake those who attempt to find a truly local solution with vastly superior funds. Most Western countries also have very tight protections from this stage by blocking, or requiring registration of foreign entities (i.e. US foreign agents legislation).
Fourth, you give cheap loans and other economic assistance to target country clearly indicating that requirement for these loans is democratic progress. This ensures that local economy cannot use its own funds to recover, as you offer them a far more efficient route. The catch is that people you hand picked for the job, who have prophesised about greatness of democracy will lead which is easy - your cheap loans and support show the locals that they were right - West is a benevolent benefactor who wants to help them, and missionaries telling them about greatness of democracy were correct. As a result, this step also carries an illusion of being a "local movement supported by benevolent West".
Fifth, you tighten the reigns over those who are now in power. You generally avoid using stick such as funding cuts instead sticking to carrots, like more trips for "consultation on proper implementation of democracy" to steer the country in desired direction. This ensures that path stays to what West chose, instead of taking a local direction.
Russia was a text book example of a successful Western democracy export. It had all the telltale signs, including the economic follow up where West gets to effectively pillage the target country after Westernization opens up the markets. We are really good at doing this and we have a lot of experience.
Now, allow me to present you with example of locally grown democracy, which has been slowly demolished very recently by Westernization of locally grown democratic system.
Turkey.
Kemal Ataturk understood his country very well. He was pushed down the Westernization route, but state of Europe after World War one basically prevented step two, enabling local influence to prevail, and allowing Kemalist democratic structure to emerge instead of Western one.
Under Kemalism, Ataturk understood that his country was uniquely positioned in that it would remain extremely religious and dangerously close to sinking into theocracy under democratic rule due to realities of demographics of the country. As a result, democracy that took shape was shaped as purely secular, and with army as enforcement arm of secularism, preventing theocratic forces from winning democratic elections and then essentially shutting down democratic system, not unlike Hitler did in Germany in 1933-1934.
This system functionally allowed Turkey to have a democratic system in a country where majority would have in fact preferred a theocratic rule but accepted democracy as a good enough substitute. Every time a party with theocratic goals got elected and started progressing the goal of going down the transforming Turkey into theocracy, army would interfere, overthrow the elected government, re-es
You actually touch upon my point, but miss it because of your bias. Western style democracy was pushed upon Russia, marketed as a solution to it's problems after USSR's collapse.
It failed, as all such pushes did in the history. This is my argument - democracy must be born from within, and be of a flavour that is local. Otherwise it either evolves into surface democracy where the real power structure remains largely the same as before (Russia, Japan, South Korea), or it simply collapses (Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc).
To reach stability levels of Swiss democracy, you must have that democracy be born in your country, out of the will of its people. Democracy in Russia stood no chance - there never was any kind of meaningful democratic movement there that was local. Such movements take time to form, and there wasn't any. They were instead sold the exported Western democracy model, which occupied those who could have worked on making Russia's own style democracy, effectively subverting the process and starting the "experiments" as you put it, which were doomed to failure from the start.
That saying refers to the part between the sheets. French are known for passionate promiscuity, not the passionate sex.
I think you misunderstand the situation then. Democracy was not home grown - it was pushed by a small minority as a solution to situation that arose after the fall of Soviet Union effectively at economic gunpoint. West told Russia that to get financial support it desperately needed at the time, it would have to have democratic reforms. Self published literature is not what drives democracy - people's will and readiness to accept the responsibility for choosing their leaders is. Otherwise we could be claiming that there is plenty of evidence that Europe is turning home grown Salafi islamic or ultra nationalist now - there is plenty of self-published protest literature about that after all. But real support for those is marginal at best.
Most people just wanted an exit from extreme poverty caused by collapse of Soviet Union, and democracy with capitalism was marketed to them successfully as a solution. Putin's continuous democratic election to power shows the fact that Russians do not want the Western style democracy - they want a strong authoritarian leader. Of those who don't like Putin, most approve of his methods - they just don't approve of results, such as the fact that country is still very poor, corruption is still endemic is so on.
The small minority that doesn't approve is his methods and gets a lot of time in the press here in the West doesn't really have any meaningful support in the country. The real opposition is Communists and they do approve of the methods - they just want the power to be shared with them and they push at lack of results in certain areas, such as eradication of poverty and endemic corruption.
Can you list any successful democratizations in recent history that did not include home grown democracy being the one actually taking root?
This is the problem I have with this kind of thinking. As the old saying goes, road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are absolutely correct on the links between the antipods of free capitalism and democracy. But that doesn't remove my main point - that democracy is by far and large not exportable.
I genuinely cannot recall any such examples. Pretty much the closest we got was Japan and South Korea, which are corporatist/fascist states with surface democratic elements. About the only example that comes close enough is Spain, but democratic movement was never forced on it - it grew from within as opposition to Franco's rule and emerged slowly after his death. Franco's dictatorship was actually widely accepted and embraced by both European and North American democracies. Spain's democracy emerged as a home grown movement.