IIRC the Iranians forced one down. The Russians have managed to jam everything, including GPS, over Syria several times. But in terms of actually hacking the drone, so you can take control of it and use it against it's official owner?
Keep in mind that it's Elon's job to know what he's doing. "Intent" can be hard to judge, but if somebody who knew what he was doing would have known that his actions (ie: the $420 a share tweet, plus claiming that the deal was so done that he only needed a shareholder vote), then the Judge is not gonna be kind to the multi-Billion$ CEO who claims he didn't intend to do that.
There's no evidence they used it for years. Geekwire says it was a "website and planned business called TitleTown Tech Solutions about a month before the Packers’ announcement."
According to the decision, which is quoted in the comments, they registered the domain a month before the Packers announced the initiative. No evidence was presented to the 'panel' (which was one guy) that their business ever existed. So according to the arbitrator, technically they had it before the Titletown initiative was launched but it seemed like somebody leaked the initiative to to them and they were cybersquatting.
Whether this was because Titletown Tech was a family business with no lawyers to show up at the meeting with a bunch of tax documents indicating Dad ha been trying to make a go of his computer business for 15 years...
Back in the 1700s most people's job was farmer. In Europe, villages would be 500-700 acres, and would require dozens of families to farm properly. By the mid-19th century a Homestead (with one family) was 160 acres. These days the cast majority of those have been consolidated. technology has reduced the need for farm work by literal orders of magnitude. We have probably lost more jobs to tractors then any other single technology.
It's possible most office jobs have not been automated, but I doubt it. A lot of functions that used to be done by high school educated administrative types have been automated by the PC. Back then all lawyers had a secretary, and the firm would have employed multiple administrative assistants, law librarians, etc. to keep track of paper. These days the law library is on a computer, and multiple lawyers will share one administrative assistant.
That's $0. There is no global turnover for Altaba.
When Marissa Meyer sold out to Verizon all the actual businesses with revenue went to Verizon. Altaba agreed to pay the fines, and it also kept Yahoo's investment portfolio, which consists primarily of a $10-15 Billion stake in Alibaba.
Alibaba does not pay dividends so Altaba have substantial amounts of money, but no revenue.
If "renumeration" isn't subject to local laws for ex-pats GM would game the minimum wage system simply by shipping in a couple thousand Mexicans anywhere they had openings.
And they'd be able to providing they can get all their Mexican's over the immigration related hurdles that keep them out otherwise. That is a long and arduous process for specialist expats as it is (we got through this a lot where I work) and sometimes it can take months of proving that you're bringing in expats and not displacing local labour. This is something far easier to do with a H1B process than any existing laws.
I suspect you're so high up you actually have a written contract, which specifies that Australian Labor law applies to you, and that your lawyer did not clearly explain to you that the law for you, my globe-trotting friend, is super-special. Couldn't have a fine, upper-middle-class, almost-certainly-Pom-Aussie treated like the Gulf Emirates treat Bengalis and Indonesians.
You flatter me. But no. There are very real struggles to getting people expatted between countries. We have a dedicate HR team who handle just these people in each of the countries we work in, but the restriction is never to do with remuneration. That isn't to say that there aren't overriding local laws like restriction of work hours, but pay doesn't come into it.
I don't think you understand what I mean when I say I don't know what you mean by "renumeration"
I mean I don't know what you mean by renumeration. This not a term in the US so I can kinda sorta guess you mean pay, but in the US your employer covers numerous forms of insurance. Some of which are legally mandated, some of which are tax-advantaged, while others are just benefits.
The US labor cops, and I suspect most labor cops world-wide, would have nothing to say in any dispute that involved pay or any of the insurance packages I mentioned. US tax guys (the IRS) always get involved, but not the labor cops.
Yup. Seems like Fair Work Australia only deals with expat disputes involving Execs making $10k a month who have a specific kind of contract.
You're right about this article, but this applies specifically to contractual negotiations that are an exception. That doesn't say the FWA doesn't get involved in contract negotiations below a certain price point, it just says for a certain type of executive expat contact this is dealt with by the courts. In case of illegal business practices (such as disputes over standard termination of service contracts which don't cover this golden parachute executive bullshit) they still may get involved. But even if they didn't there's one very key part in that article you quoted, to get resolution on your expat contract you go to common law court... in your home country where the contract was laid out, so one way or the other it would be handled by the case in the home country.
So what you're saying is that if you negotiate a contract that says Australian rules apply, then people who are Fair Work Australia will enforce the contract. On the one hand that may be true. It may be true that in Australia the employment cops enforce contracts. This is not an illogical way to set up your employment system, particularly if lots of your employees have written contracts
But not all countries are like that. In many contract law has almost nothing to do with employment protections, and in the US you would generally end up in completely separate Court systems if you were basing your claim on US Labor Law or a contract. Contract law is state level. It could be handled in Federal courts under certain circumstances, but a) they'd be applying state law and b) the employment cops I;m talking abo
Technically Chinese employment laws would have applied.
Not in terms of remuneration it wouldn't have. But yes overriding local laws can apply to expats in terms of things like hours worked.
Don't know what you're talking about.
If "renumeration" isn't subject to local laws for ex-pats GM would game the minimum wage system simply by shipping in a couple thousand Mexicans anywhere they had openings.
I suspect you're so high up you actually have a written contract, which specifies that Australian Labor law applies to you, and that your lawyer did not clearly explain to you that the law for you, my globe-trotting friend, is super-special. Couldn't have a fine, upper-middle-class, almost-certainly-Pom-Aussie treated like the Gulf Emirates treat Bengalis and Indonesians.
It's not like you coulda gone to the local cop and demand he fine your boss for working you more hours than an Aussie is supposed to work
No but I could have gone to Fair Work Australia and demanded they get the company to compensate me for working more than my contracted hours.
Yup. Seems like Fair Work Australia only deals with expat disputes involving Execs making $10k a month who have a specific kind of contract.
I suspect that there would be interesting legal wrangling over your precise status if you tried to use Australian employment cops
For some ongoing working conditions maybe. For remuneration, not. You're a 100% employee of the place listed on the from line on your payslip. If you leave *those* are the laws that apply. On the advice for Brits page most of this would fall under "equally strong connection". But the point here is that it is British law that defines this, not the law of where you're working. While some countries may have laxer laws if you're based overseas that's still the law of the country where you are based.
I've never made AU$123k a year, so I wouldn't know what that kind of paycheck looks like, but the ones I have actually seen do not have a "From" line.
Interesting, I would have assumed UK labour laws to be less employee friendly than those in Ireland*, yet my I know people in Ireland who've been expected to train outsourced replacements.
* I don't know why, maybe it's a "grass is greener" thing
Labor protections are one of those things that only really rich countries can afford. Poor countries that try to have great unions, strong labor protections, and economic growth tend to fail miserably at the last bit. See: India, China before Deng, left-wing bits of Latin America prior to the 90s, etc.
Ireland is relatively rich now, but as recently as the 80s it was one of Europe's poorest states. The way they got companies to build there, and create the wealth they currently enjoy, is by extreme corporate-friendly neo-liberal economic policies.
So I am not at all surprised that they have worse labor laws then the UK. I would be stunned if any aspect of Irish Law was less corp-friendly then British Law. They simply didn't have the negotiating leverage to keep anything from the corporate wish-list out of their statute books if they wanted them to invest there.
Technically Chinese employment laws would have applied. It's not like you coulda gone to the local cop and demand he fine your boss for working you more hours than an Aussie is supposed to work. In some countries the company will actually try to manipulate people into not going to the local employment authorities, but the only way to work in a country legally without gaining the legal protections of that country is be a government employee.
I suspect that there would be interesting legal wrangling over your precise status if you tried to use Australian employment cops. Advice for Brits seems to indicate there'd be lots of arguments over whether you were on temporary assignment or not.
Note that your company is never going to tell you any of this, because a) they tend not to know how to comply with foreign rules, and since b) neither do you, they're figuring that c) if the shit hits the fan and they have to fire your ass you won't know how to fight them.
Apparently these aren't actually Clinton Foundation Docs at all, they're from previous hacks. There also seems to be some deliberate bullshit thrown in.
I'm not a fan of the corporate media, but they do tend to be more reliable then shit created by an ex-spy whose country invented Maskirovska.
Like I said in another section of this thread, the cost-over-runny bits of development are already almost. A squadron of F-35s has just been declared combat ready. done. Thus, to the extent this particular new weapons system has included b$Billion surprises, those have already been sprung. That means all those over-runs the English Majors in the media freak out about are already priced into $85 million, and that $85 Mil price-tag is in the budgets for the next fifty years or so.
Which in turn means that the only way to reduce the order would be to get Congress to reduce defense spending. And specifically, that they'd prefer reducing defense spending by cutting weapons procurement, rather then cutting flight time (Av Gas ain't cheap).
The F22 was supposed to be the expensive air superiority fighter and the F35 the cheap aircraft for close air support after the opposition's airforce and defences were taken out.
F22 was canned because it was too expensive - as you say, ironic because the per-piece price of the "cheap" F35 is now higher.
Pardon my rantiness, but Godmotherfuckingdamnit, would it be too much to ask a single person who is opposing the F-35 to fucking check motherfucking wikipedia to find out whether the blurb he read about this shit a year ago is still fucking true?
If you're talking about the cost of a single plane, you're talking flyaway cost. For F-22 that is $150 million. For F-35 it's $116 million for the extremely expensive Navy variant, for the cheaper Air Force variant it's under $100 million and likely to reduce to $85 million in 2018.
We're talking about whether the weapon will work for the job we bought it for, not whether the US Political system includes anyone who enjoys a fair fight. Which you just implicitly admitted it will work fine, by not countering the point.
And, for the record, since that time George Washington went 0-3 in fair fights in the Revolution; we are extremely proud of never having one. We're not some ponsy aristos, obsessed with adding honor to the family tradition by gloriously dying on the battlefield and making it "forever England." We make the other poor dumb motherfucker die for his country, and let his countryman wax poetic about it.
And if the Air Force informed a Marine captain that his company had to do a job that cost a guy a day in combat conditions would said Marine Captain do his damndest to squirm out?
Infantry guys love the A-10 for the BRRRRRRRP, and in the immediate future (say the next 5 years) this will work fine. But in the long term, manned aircraft as CAS is dumb with a capital D-U-M. 1% a day casualties just is not acceptable. I don't know what will replace them, but I suspect it will take advantage of the fact that a drone base and pilot do not actually have to be on the same continent, and every FOB commanded by an O-3 will have a couple Air Force Lieutenant drone jockeys sitting around the staff room waiting to take over a tough-ass drone, designed on the A-10 model, with the A-10's GAU-8 gun.
Not really. CAS is what happens when you're going 300 MPH, straight over the enemy position, running a cannon. No drone we have in the sky actually does that shit. They do bombs and missiles, but not kamikaze cannon runs.
The A-10 does. AFAIK the only other real close support aircraft in the world is the Russian Grach (altho COIN planes like the Tucano can fake it). Grach gets a bit of a bad rap because various post-Soviet and African states operate them in places with real air defense, so they tend to have that 1% a day casualty margin I mentioned.
Dude, we've already paid for the parts of the project that can go over-budget. We're into production. If Lockheed says "sorry guys, we spent $90 mil building this one" and doesn't have a detailed invoice for every single line that went over Lockheed gets to eat the loss. They'll also need a really good explanation for not calling the Air Force when Pratt and Whitney over-charges for the engine. Moreover, production cost is in the $80-85 mil range, which is cheaper then damn near any modern fighter out there, and cheaper then quite a few whose first flight was before I was born in '81. In fact to my knowledge the only 3.5+g fighter available for less then the 80-85 mil we're being charged is the SAAB Grippen.
So the price is already in the budget. Moreover, if the elites in DC have to choose between a) Medicare and b) the Defense Department do you seriously think there's any fucking chance they won't go for option c) drown in deficit spending?
Like I said, sitting on your ass in the Valley it's easy to say you can do that. Actually doing that, at 50k ft, in all weather conditions, at night, while keeping your eyes in the sky from being blowed up by a cheap-ass drone out of Nevada, is a much different technical problem. Note the night thing? What the fuck you gonna do if I send in 500 F-35s to nail your eye-in-the-sky base at night?
Your solution (networked small, low-power, hard-to-detect, observation units in constant communications with each-other) is actually quite similar to the guys who figured out how to detect our stealth aircraft decades ago. But in in actual combat it's hellishly difficult to pull off because you figure out a way around any single element of the system and it's a boondoggle. Thus, IRL precisely one guy managed to pull that shit off.
Dude, we've already paid for the shit that goes over-budget on F-35.
We're into production, and costs go down during the production run. According to the latest info from the Air Force's accountants, each new F-35 costs less then any opther American fighter currently on sale. Altho we could conceivably save $16 million a pop if we got the Swedish Grippen.
Clearly you're an intelligent and logical human being who has actually thought about these issues because you can name the one time in 25 years it didn't work perfectly.
It should be noted that turning, climbing, and running aren't terribly important if the other guy can't find you, target you, or shoot at you.
Exactly. The F35 will be fine as long as we assume that our adversaries are completely incapable of innovation. The Chinese would certainly never think to stick a $5 optical camera and an ANN in the nose of a SAM and track using visible light.
What would the range on that shit be? With the human eye it would probably be a couple miles, the distance of the horizon is probably a theoretical maximum, but that depends largely on your elevation (at sea level it's 2.9 miles), but let's say that we're at 50k ft, which seems to be the service ceiling. That's 15,240 metres. Wiki's formula is d km= 3.57h m, so 441 or so km. So that works. You got a visual sensor that can tell a 10m by 16m triangle-shaped thing at 441 km from a seagull's tail at 350 km? They're all the same color (gray), on a background which is probably grayish clouds, estimating range with visuals is a huge pain in the ass, etc. I'll gladly agree that the whole F-35 plan is stupid. If your missile shoots off after the seagull it'll but rocket fuel at the rate you usually burn rocket fuel at, and by the time it figures out "shit I'm going for a seagull's ass" you're never gonna get it back.
The point with that isn't that it's impossible they'll figure out a way top track the fucker down. Human ingenuity being what it is, somebody will pull that shit off eventually. The point is that getting that shit to scale to the point you can actually use that militarily is a huge fucking pain-in-the-ass, and not likely to happen for awhile. First-gen Stealth, for example, got cracked pretty much as soon as we invented it, yet in 25 years of service precisely one guy pulled it off in combat.
Moreover, you're missing the best part of the program: we're getting thousands of them (680 Navy and Marines, and 1,763 for the Air Force). That's less planescombat aircraft then every country in the world except China and the Russians. So I will not be surporised if 30 years from now the Chinese have enough toys to deal with a couple hundred F-35s, and the Russians enough to deal with a dozen or two, but 2,443? Hell fucking no.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC the Iranians forced one down. The Russians have managed to jam everything, including GPS, over Syria several times. But in terms of actually hacking the drone, so you can take control of it and use it against it's official owner?
Nope.
Keep in mind that it's Elon's job to know what he's doing. "Intent" can be hard to judge, but if somebody who knew what he was doing would have known that his actions (ie: the $420 a share tweet, plus claiming that the deal was so done that he only needed a shareholder vote), then the Judge is not gonna be kind to the multi-Billion$ CEO who claims he didn't intend to do that.
Dude should have taken the settlement.
Kinda. It would not be a forever thing, but banned from being a C-level guy at any publicly traded company? Very possible.
Note that he could still be a consultant, or a less-then-C-level-guy, but that's not exactly the kind of role he likes, is it?
There's no evidence they used it for years. Geekwire says it was a "website and planned business called TitleTown Tech Solutions about a month before the Packers’ announcement."
If you actually use it for years, like the Nissan Computer guy you have a much better case.
According to the decision, which is quoted in the comments, they registered the domain a month before the Packers announced the initiative. No evidence was presented to the 'panel' (which was one guy) that their business ever existed. So according to the arbitrator, technically they had it before the Titletown initiative was launched but it seemed like somebody leaked the initiative to to them and they were cybersquatting.
Whether this was because Titletown Tech was a family business with no lawyers to show up at the meeting with a bunch of tax documents indicating Dad ha been trying to make a go of his computer business for 15 years...
That's another question.
Consider agriculture.
Back in the 1700s most people's job was farmer. In Europe, villages would be 500-700 acres, and would require dozens of families to farm properly. By the mid-19th century a Homestead (with one family) was 160 acres. These days the cast majority of those have been consolidated. technology has reduced the need for farm work by literal orders of magnitude. We have probably lost more jobs to tractors then any other single technology.
It's possible most office jobs have not been automated, but I doubt it. A lot of functions that used to be done by high school educated administrative types have been automated by the PC. Back then all lawyers had a secretary, and the firm would have employed multiple administrative assistants, law librarians, etc. to keep track of paper. These days the law library is on a computer, and multiple lawyers will share one administrative assistant.
That's $0. There is no global turnover for Altaba.
When Marissa Meyer sold out to Verizon all the actual businesses with revenue went to Verizon. Altaba agreed to pay the fines, and it also kept Yahoo's investment portfolio, which consists primarily of a $10-15 Billion stake in Alibaba.
Alibaba does not pay dividends so Altaba have substantial amounts of money, but no revenue.
Don't know what you're talking about.
If "renumeration" isn't subject to local laws for ex-pats GM would game the minimum wage system simply by shipping in a couple thousand Mexicans anywhere they had openings.
And they'd be able to providing they can get all their Mexican's over the immigration related hurdles that keep them out otherwise. That is a long and arduous process for specialist expats as it is (we got through this a lot where I work) and sometimes it can take months of proving that you're bringing in expats and not displacing local labour. This is something far easier to do with a H1B process than any existing laws.
I suspect you're so high up you actually have a written contract, which specifies that Australian Labor law applies to you, and that your lawyer did not clearly explain to you that the law for you, my globe-trotting friend, is super-special. Couldn't have a fine, upper-middle-class, almost-certainly-Pom-Aussie treated like the Gulf Emirates treat Bengalis and Indonesians.
You flatter me. But no. There are very real struggles to getting people expatted between countries. We have a dedicate HR team who handle just these people in each of the countries we work in, but the restriction is never to do with remuneration. That isn't to say that there aren't overriding local laws like restriction of work hours, but pay doesn't come into it.
I don't think you understand what I mean when I say I don't know what you mean by "renumeration"
I mean I don't know what you mean by renumeration. This not a term in the US so I can kinda sorta guess you mean pay, but in the US your employer covers numerous forms of insurance. Some of which are legally mandated, some of which are tax-advantaged, while others are just benefits.
The US labor cops, and I suspect most labor cops world-wide, would have nothing to say in any dispute that involved pay or any of the insurance packages I mentioned. US tax guys (the IRS) always get involved, but not the labor cops.
Yup. Seems like Fair Work Australia only deals with expat disputes involving Execs making $10k a month who have a specific kind of contract.
You're right about this article, but this applies specifically to contractual negotiations that are an exception. That doesn't say the FWA doesn't get involved in contract negotiations below a certain price point, it just says for a certain type of executive expat contact this is dealt with by the courts. In case of illegal business practices (such as disputes over standard termination of service contracts which don't cover this golden parachute executive bullshit) they still may get involved. But even if they didn't there's one very key part in that article you quoted, to get resolution on your expat contract you go to common law court ... in your home country where the contract was laid out, so one way or the other it would be handled by the case in the home country.
So what you're saying is that if you negotiate a contract that says Australian rules apply, then people who are Fair Work Australia will enforce the contract. On the one hand that may be true. It may be true that in Australia the employment cops enforce contracts. This is not an illogical way to set up your employment system, particularly if lots of your employees have written contracts
But not all countries are like that. In many contract law has almost nothing to do with employment protections, and in the US you would generally end up in completely separate Court systems if you were basing your claim on US Labor Law or a contract. Contract law is state level. It could be handled in Federal courts under certain circumstances, but a) they'd be applying state law and b) the employment cops I;m talking abo
Technically Chinese employment laws would have applied.
Not in terms of remuneration it wouldn't have. But yes overriding local laws can apply to expats in terms of things like hours worked.
Don't know what you're talking about.
If "renumeration" isn't subject to local laws for ex-pats GM would game the minimum wage system simply by shipping in a couple thousand Mexicans anywhere they had openings.
I suspect you're so high up you actually have a written contract, which specifies that Australian Labor law applies to you, and that your lawyer did not clearly explain to you that the law for you, my globe-trotting friend, is super-special. Couldn't have a fine, upper-middle-class, almost-certainly-Pom-Aussie treated like the Gulf Emirates treat Bengalis and Indonesians.
It's not like you coulda gone to the local cop and demand he fine your boss for working you more hours than an Aussie is supposed to work
No but I could have gone to Fair Work Australia and demanded they get the company to compensate me for working more than my contracted hours.
Yup. Seems like Fair Work Australia only deals with expat disputes involving Execs making $10k a month who have a specific kind of contract.
I suspect that there would be interesting legal wrangling over your precise status if you tried to use Australian employment cops
For some ongoing working conditions maybe. For remuneration, not. You're a 100% employee of the place listed on the from line on your payslip. If you leave *those* are the laws that apply. On the advice for Brits page most of this would fall under "equally strong connection". But the point here is that it is British law that defines this, not the law of where you're working. While some countries may have laxer laws if you're based overseas that's still the law of the country where you are based.
I've never made AU$123k a year, so I wouldn't know what that kind of paycheck looks like, but the ones I have actually seen do not have a "From" line.
Interesting, I would have assumed UK labour laws to be less employee friendly than those in Ireland*, yet my I know people in Ireland who've been expected to train outsourced replacements.
* I don't know why, maybe it's a "grass is greener" thing
Labor protections are one of those things that only really rich countries can afford. Poor countries that try to have great unions, strong labor protections, and economic growth tend to fail miserably at the last bit. See: India, China before Deng, left-wing bits of Latin America prior to the 90s, etc.
Ireland is relatively rich now, but as recently as the 80s it was one of Europe's poorest states. The way they got companies to build there, and create the wealth they currently enjoy, is by extreme corporate-friendly neo-liberal economic policies.
So I am not at all surprised that they have worse labor laws then the UK. I would be stunned if any aspect of Irish Law was less corp-friendly then British Law. They simply didn't have the negotiating leverage to keep anything from the corporate wish-list out of their statute books if they wanted them to invest there.
Technically Chinese employment laws would have applied. It's not like you coulda gone to the local cop and demand he fine your boss for working you more hours than an Aussie is supposed to work. In some countries the company will actually try to manipulate people into not going to the local employment authorities, but the only way to work in a country legally without gaining the legal protections of that country is be a government employee.
I suspect that there would be interesting legal wrangling over your precise status if you tried to use Australian employment cops. Advice for Brits seems to indicate there'd be lots of arguments over whether you were on temporary assignment or not.
Note that your company is never going to tell you any of this, because a) they tend not to know how to comply with foreign rules, and since b) neither do you, they're figuring that c) if the shit hits the fan and they have to fire your ass you won't know how to fight them.
Citations needed.
Which should be trivial, as the top employees of both the DNC and the Foundation are public record.
Doubt it.
Apparently these aren't actually Clinton Foundation Docs at all, they're from previous hacks. There also seems to be some deliberate bullshit thrown in.
I'm not a fan of the corporate media, but they do tend to be more reliable then shit created by an ex-spy whose country invented Maskirovska.
Like I said in another section of this thread, the cost-over-runny bits of development are already almost. A squadron of F-35s has just been declared combat ready. done. Thus, to the extent this particular new weapons system has included b$Billion surprises, those have already been sprung. That means all those over-runs the English Majors in the media freak out about are already priced into $85 million, and that $85 Mil price-tag is in the budgets for the next fifty years or so.
Which in turn means that the only way to reduce the order would be to get Congress to reduce defense spending. And specifically, that they'd prefer reducing defense spending by cutting weapons procurement, rather then cutting flight time (Av Gas ain't cheap).
That shit ain't happening.
Is software ever actually finished?
It's working fine at the moment, so it's unlikely to cause another $4 Billion in cost over-runs.
And yet...
There's more then one comment on this forum that the F-35 should be canned and replaced by the more expensive F-22.
The F22 was supposed to be the expensive air superiority fighter and the F35 the cheap aircraft for close air support after the opposition's airforce and defences were taken out.
F22 was canned because it was too expensive - as you say, ironic because the per-piece price of the "cheap" F35 is now higher.
Pardon my rantiness, but Godmotherfuckingdamnit, would it be too much to ask a single person who is opposing the F-35 to fucking check motherfucking wikipedia to find out whether the blurb he read about this shit a year ago is still fucking true?
If you're talking about the cost of a single plane, you're talking flyaway cost. For F-22 that is $150 million. For F-35 it's $116 million for the extremely expensive Navy variant, for the cheaper Air Force variant it's under $100 million and likely to reduce to $85 million in 2018.
You're changing the subject.
We're talking about whether the weapon will work for the job we bought it for, not whether the US Political system includes anyone who enjoys a fair fight. Which you just implicitly admitted it will work fine, by not countering the point.
And, for the record, since that time George Washington went 0-3 in fair fights in the Revolution; we are extremely proud of never having one. We're not some ponsy aristos, obsessed with adding honor to the family tradition by gloriously dying on the battlefield and making it "forever England." We make the other poor dumb motherfucker die for his country, and let his countryman wax poetic about it.
And if the Air Force informed a Marine captain that his company had to do a job that cost a guy a day in combat conditions would said Marine Captain do his damndest to squirm out?
Infantry guys love the A-10 for the BRRRRRRRP, and in the immediate future (say the next 5 years) this will work fine. But in the long term, manned aircraft as CAS is dumb with a capital D-U-M. 1% a day casualties just is not acceptable. I don't know what will replace them, but I suspect it will take advantage of the fact that a drone base and pilot do not actually have to be on the same continent, and every FOB commanded by an O-3 will have a couple Air Force Lieutenant drone jockeys sitting around the staff room waiting to take over a tough-ass drone, designed on the A-10 model, with the A-10's GAU-8 gun.
Not really. CAS is what happens when you're going 300 MPH, straight over the enemy position, running a cannon. No drone we have in the sky actually does that shit. They do bombs and missiles, but not kamikaze cannon runs.
The A-10 does. AFAIK the only other real close support aircraft in the world is the Russian Grach (altho COIN planes like the Tucano can fake it). Grach gets a bit of a bad rap because various post-Soviet and African states operate them in places with real air defense, so they tend to have that 1% a day casualty margin I mentioned.
Thus the drone comment.
Dude, we've already paid for the parts of the project that can go over-budget. We're into production. If Lockheed says "sorry guys, we spent $90 mil building this one" and doesn't have a detailed invoice for every single line that went over Lockheed gets to eat the loss. They'll also need a really good explanation for not calling the Air Force when Pratt and Whitney over-charges for the engine. Moreover, production cost is in the $80-85 mil range, which is cheaper then damn near any modern fighter out there, and cheaper then quite a few whose first flight was before I was born in '81. In fact to my knowledge the only 3.5+g fighter available for less then the 80-85 mil we're being charged is the SAAB Grippen.
So the price is already in the budget. Moreover, if the elites in DC have to choose between a) Medicare and b) the Defense Department do you seriously think there's any fucking chance they won't go for option c) drown in deficit spending?
Like I said, sitting on your ass in the Valley it's easy to say you can do that. Actually doing that, at 50k ft, in all weather conditions, at night, while keeping your eyes in the sky from being blowed up by a cheap-ass drone out of Nevada, is a much different technical problem. Note the night thing? What the fuck you gonna do if I send in 500 F-35s to nail your eye-in-the-sky base at night?
Your solution (networked small, low-power, hard-to-detect, observation units in constant communications with each-other) is actually quite similar to the guys who figured out how to detect our stealth aircraft decades ago. But in in actual combat it's hellishly difficult to pull off because you figure out a way around any single element of the system and it's a boondoggle. Thus, IRL precisely one guy managed to pull that shit off.
Dude, we've already paid for the shit that goes over-budget on F-35.
We're into production, and costs go down during the production run. According to the latest info from the Air Force's accountants, each new F-35 costs less then any opther American fighter currently on sale. Altho we could conceivably save $16 million a pop if we got the Swedish Grippen.
Yup. In 25 years of combat, that worked once.
Clearly you're an intelligent and logical human being who has actually thought about these issues because you can name the one time in 25 years it didn't work perfectly.
It should be noted that turning, climbing, and running aren't terribly important if the other guy can't find you, target you, or shoot at you.
Exactly. The F35 will be fine as long as we assume that our adversaries are completely incapable of innovation. The Chinese would certainly never think to stick a $5 optical camera and an ANN in the nose of a SAM and track using visible light.
What would the range on that shit be? With the human eye it would probably be a couple miles, the distance of the horizon is probably a theoretical maximum, but that depends largely on your elevation (at sea level it's 2.9 miles), but let's say that we're at 50k ft, which seems to be the service ceiling. That's 15,240 metres. Wiki's formula is d km= 3.57h m, so 441 or so km. So that works. You got a visual sensor that can tell a 10m by 16m triangle-shaped thing at 441 km from a seagull's tail at 350 km? They're all the same color (gray), on a background which is probably grayish clouds, estimating range with visuals is a huge pain in the ass, etc. I'll gladly agree that the whole F-35 plan is stupid. If your missile shoots off after the seagull it'll but rocket fuel at the rate you usually burn rocket fuel at, and by the time it figures out "shit I'm going for a seagull's ass" you're never gonna get it back.
The point with that isn't that it's impossible they'll figure out a way top track the fucker down. Human ingenuity being what it is, somebody will pull that shit off eventually. The point is that getting that shit to scale to the point you can actually use that militarily is a huge fucking pain-in-the-ass, and not likely to happen for awhile. First-gen Stealth, for example, got cracked pretty much as soon as we invented it, yet in 25 years of service precisely one guy pulled it off in combat.
Moreover, you're missing the best part of the program: we're getting thousands of them (680 Navy and Marines, and 1,763 for the Air Force). That's less planescombat aircraft then every country in the world except China and the Russians. So I will not be surporised if 30 years from now the Chinese have enough toys to deal with a couple hundred F-35s, and the Russians enough to deal with a dozen or two, but 2,443? Hell fucking no.