The great irony of your post is that if policy makers listened then in 20 years time I'd be reading similar posts from US soldiers fighting in some big conventional war complaining that the only available weapons systems were designed for use against a few poorly armed insurgents in house in some third world shithole, not armoured battalions and hostile navies built by large industrialized state bent on occupying a US ally, when if the US had ignored you they would most likely not have had to fight at all.
Yet another failure of reading comprehension, putting words in my mouth. Read my post for content again, please. I never once called for the elimination of strategic air assets. Strategic bombers and air superiority fighters should remain part of the Air Force. My complaint is about the Air Force's apparent distaste for providing Close Air Support and maintaining in inventory aircraft capable of filling that role, which is part of the Air Force's job.
"Bombs away with Curtis LeMay" - pretty much sums up the USAF's attitude, doesn't it?
Roger that! Between the LeMay bomber folks and the Boyd "fighter mafia" gang, close air support has become the red headed stepchild in the whole mess. Nobody wants to push for small, slow, ugly ground attack planes. They're just not "sexy", and also ground warfare is so dirty...
Agreed. It may be true that Mr. Dun Malg and his buddies deserve better close air support than they're getting, but we also have to keep in mind that this is unlikely to be the last war we ever have to fight, and the next war won't necessarily be the same as this one. Given that the world-class B2/F22 aircraft take decades to develop and any future major war is likely to be a matter of months or maybe weeks, I'd rather have the high-end stuff around now, in case we need it later. Not to discount the courage and sacrifice of our current soldiers in this war, but it'll all look like pocket change if another major war happens, especially if we don't have the right gear to fight it when it starts.
I agree completely. I think there's a definite need for air superiority fighters and strategic bombers. I also think there's a definite need for dedicated close air support aircraft, and in my experience that's where the Air Force brass have a blind spot. Being an Air Force, they repeatedly fail to look at things from the perspective of the ground forces. It's a classic case of "when all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails". The trouble with that is, the Air Force seems to have an institutional hammer fetish, when what the Army needs from them (and is legally prohibited from procuring for themselves) is a screwdriver!
"The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet,"
You are wrong about that. The war in Bosnia was ended by a single large bomber mission. Prior to that mission close air support aircraft were attacking single vehicles one at a time. Then the Serb army massed for an offensive but before they could launch it a b2 was re-directed in flight. They lost about 250 men in that one B2 attack. This caused the Serb army to rebel against their government, saying in effect we are not going to fight any more.
That's not the "contemporary battlefield" I'm referring to--- that's a strategic target. They also hit several bridges. Bosnia is an example of an appropriate application of strategic assets. The fact that they were initially attempting to treat Bosnia as a tactical situation when it wasn't has nothing whatsoever to with what ground forces in contact with the enemy need in terms of Close Air Support. A B-2 at 30K feet is not an effective CAS asset. I'm not saying that there's no mission for strategic bombers, I'm just saying that CAS isn't it!
Beg to differ on the B-1. The B-1's current mission in Afghanistan is to loiter in the area, waiting for a call for support from the ground. They can deliver weapons to the target in 10 to 15 minutes.
Point taken. It fits the general theme, though, as the B-1 is a strategic bomber pressed into service in a role it wasn't designed for. Also, putting Mk84's on ANYTHING is stretching the definition of CAS. I wouldn't want to be anywhere "Close" to a 2000 pounder.
i gave you the flamebait; criticizing the other branches for their service to the country is really tacky
Oh, come on, you're reading too much into my rant. My complaint is with the feudalistic, dog-in-the-manger attitude of the military leadership, not with the level of service provided by the real military folks, the enlisted, NCOs, and junior officers of all services that have to do the real work.
Honestly, I'm in the USMC and you should see yourselves from our eyes (assuming you want to continue being viewing each other with closed minded stereotypes)
Shrug. I know what the USMC (stereotypically) thinks of the Army in particular, and the rest of the military in general. Some of it's true, and some of it is bullshit. I have nothing bad to say about the Corps that applies to the rank and file on the front lines. My criticisms are pretty much confined to the actions of gerneral staff, the pencil pushers. I understand that the USMC values its history very highly, even to the point of some members threatening physical harm to anyone who dares suggest that perhaps the United States shouldn't have two separate sets of ground forces. I know it upsets them, but the fact remains that the USMC is administratively and historically a part of the Navy, and that the modern Corps is the result of a pissing match between the Navy and the Army in WW2. The Navy didn't want to just be a "taxi service" for the Army, and managed to divide the pacific theater in two, expanding the Corps in the process to fill the new ground warfare role they'd created for themselves. If you can step away from the personal investment in it and look at it rationally, it's pretty clear that having the Navy run its own miniature army is irrational.
My wifes in the Navy, have had uncles in the Army and National Guard, a father in the Air Force, and cousins in the Coast Guard; everyone does what is right for them. Your complete lack of respect for others services flat out sucks.
You need to separate out my narrow-focus logical arguments from your preconceived prejudices. I challenge you to quote where I disrespected in any way whatsoever the enlisted, NCOs, or junior officers (i.e. the REAL military) of any service. I did not. This is not a case of the usual parochial interservice rivalry, a la "jarheads suck, hur hur hur", or "air force is lame". Sure, I said the Air Force and Navy brass have their collective head stuck in their glory days of WW2. Sure, I said the USMC might be better as part of the Army rather than the Navy. But these are exclusively criticisms of the decisions of fruit-salad and scrambled eggs uniformed jackasses in air conditioned offices in DC. Hell, I could go on at length about the ridiculous bullshit foisted upon the ranks by the Army leadership as well: ACU uniform "here I am!" camo pattern, MOLLE-II, Stryker--- the list goes on forever.
Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more.
Sorry? I thought my entire point was that contemporary warfare is almost entirely tactical in nature.
I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa.
I never suggested that. My half serious, half facetious suggestion was that if the Air Force is so fixated on strategic bombing and doesn't want to provide CAS, maybe it ought to turn over its CAS assets to the Army, which has a strong personal interest in CAS and will make good use of those assets.
The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets.
Indeed. I worked closely with several Air Force forward air controllers in Afghanistan. My views on the problem with CAS and the Air Force are derived mostly from their complaints about their own service!
If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.
Well yeah. The Army already has substantial aviation assets. My arguments assume nothing unusual.
Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc.
Well no, it's distinctly different. The Army already has aviation assets in the CAS role, and the advantage of that is obvious to anyone who's ever seen an AH-64 or even an armed OH-56 in action. Again, I think you've misunderstood my point. The Air Force as described by the 1948 Key West Agreement is so strongly tied to the vision of its de facto founder, Curtis LeMay, that to this very day its leadership has difficulty seeing aviation in terms outside of strategic bombing. The trouble this causes with the Army is that the Air Force is also supposed to provide CAS for ground forces. Being a separate service, the Army has limited means to affect the direction the Air Force goes when questions of budgetary priority come up. CAS assets are routinely marginalized, while strategic assets of questionable necessity are emphasized. The reason the Air Force doesn't need "a private army of its own that [understands] the strengths and limitations of air power" is that the Air Force isn't interested in ground warfare, and that's the problem!
And btw the A-10 is not retired.
Friend, re-read what I wrote. I said they tried to retire the A-10 in the 90's. They were not successful, largely because their "replacement"--- the F-16--- was totally unsuited to the role.
If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story.
I don't need to. I watched three of them fly a racetrack pattern around a ridge in Paktia in SE Afghanistan, putting down ordinance. It's very impressive.
I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops.
See, this is the exactly the problem I'm talking about. Much of the Air Force leadership doesn't seem to understand what constitutes good CAS. It's not putting an Mk82 inside a 10' painted circle on a dry lake bed outside Nellis from 5000' AGL at 600 knots using CCIPP. Good CAS is being able to stay on station for a long time until a "bad guy" finally groundhogs up, at which point the FAC gets on the radio and say, "second ridge, 100 meters above th
Actually, it pretty evenly straddles the line. It has a distinct "body" structure like a BWB, but the "body" is not particularly prominent and it doesn't have distinct and separate wing structures. The B-2 is generally considered a hybrid flying wing
...From the classic B-52 onwards, they do useful things like haul large quantities of high explosives other systems cannot match. Improvements in tactical control mean the folks on the ground can call in tremendous force when needed.
As a dirt-eating infantry guy, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel a rant coming on...
The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet, that'll be here in 14 hours (B-52 from Diego) or worse, 40 hours (B-2 from freakin' Missouri!). There isn't a bunch of factories with static GPS coordinates that can be preloaded by ground crews into GPS guided weapons. It's largely just guys like me, calling on a radio, asking for a couple 500 pounders on the ridgeline 3 klicks away, to get two dozen guys with RPGs and machine guns, NOW!. The B-52, B-1, and B-2 just don't fit into that equation.
Modern air-to-ground warfare doesn't need "big" strategic bombers like that. For the last 50+ years, the US Air Force has been living in a fantasy world, a sepia-toned universe where it's perpetually 1950, where bombers were the strategic "big stick" that brought down the Nazis, and were the Alpha-to-Omega of nuclear weapons delivery. The trouble is, the former is a self-delusional lie, and the latter keeled over with the ICBM and finally died with the USSR in 1990. The Air Force mythology of strategic bombing is based on the largely pointless high-altitude mass bombing of Europe in WW2. The Key West Agreement of 1948 which separated the Air Force as its own service, separate from the Army and forbidding the Army to operate aircraft, centered heavily on the "success" of the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly the crippling of the German ball bearing manufacturing. Funny thing is, decades later when Albert Speer was asked about this, his reply was (paraphrased) "They were trying to bomb our ball bearing factories? If so, we had no idea."
The practical upshot of all this is that the Air Force was founded on a fantasy which continues to hamper its effectiveness to this day. Granted, my view on the subject is heavily colored by my 16 years as a lowly grunt in the Army, hiding in holes trying to get effective close air support from those guys; but I think my view is pretty accurate. There aren't any more superpowers to mount a credible air defense, to put up a serious opposition. The one thing that we really need from the Air Force is the one thing that they've consistently tried to get out of providing: Close Air Support. Air Force brass had the unmitigated gall to try to retire the A-10 in the 90's and "replace" it with the F-16! They constantly push for more air-superiority and high altitude bombing assets when the cold hard reality is that we don't need that. Contemporary warfare is non-linear, against small bands of irregulars operating in primitive conditions. As infantrymen, what we need from the Air Force is all-weather, low-altitude, precision ordinance delivery, but we hardly ever get it!. If I had a nickel for every time I saw the Air Force drop in the wrong place, or worse, "call in sick" because of bad weather, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickels. The military has always been a hotbed of backstabbing, featherbedding, and general power politics, and the Air Force continuing live in its glory days of WW2 is a prime example (don't even get me started on the Navy, they're even worse). The Army has managed to fill some of its air needs via helicopters--- and getting the Air Force to let us have those was a fight--- but helicopters are lightweight, short range assets. We need fixed wing air support, particularly in Afghanistan where altitude and weather make helicopter operations near impossible. Personally, I think the Air Force should turn over the A-10 and AC-130 assets to the Army and let us do our own close air support, and they can go sit around in their giant strato-bombe
You do and I do. But does Joe Everyman really need that much space?
Why do people keep asking this same silly question? We were watching badly digitized porn video at 320x240 back in 1997. Now we're looking at 1-4GB MPEGs, with even bigger hi-def stuff on the horizon. Someone asked me back around 1995 what an average Joe would need a 200MB hard drive for. The simple fact that Average Joe has a phone with more than that now is the answer to the question. YES! Joe Everyman needs that much space! Maybe not right now but soon enough, he will.
Would you rather have a car thats expensive to run or no car at all and have to rely on friends to give you rides?
That'd be great, if it was actually me getting rides in that car. In this case it's my spendthrift brother-in-law joyriding around doing nothing for my benefit, but sending me the bill. I say let him get rides from friends.
That is also why I think that the people making the decisions in our space programs are idiots.
I am sure they see the need for some sort of backup plan for those people on the space station, yet don't think that it would be easy enough to send up one shuttle, and LEAVE IT THERE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
It's always amusing when armchair engineers think they know better than NASA. "Parking" a shuttle in low earth orbit isn't like putting a car up on blocks in your driveway. Every kilogram of material you keep in orbit requires periodic fuel expenditure to maintain that orbit. So no, they're not idiots, they just understand the situation better than you do.
The reason for your vehement criticism is also clear: it displays a very common personality flaw among intellectual males, a belief in one's own intellectual superiority...
Actually, the reason for my criticism is that I didn't particularly like the book. The fact that I believe in my own superiority is not relevant.
I think I've found the answer to my own question within the reviews on Amazon.com:
"The reason for the book's popularity is clear: it panders to a very common personality flaw among young, intellectual males: a belief in one's own intellectual superiority, the notion that one is rejected simply because one is so much "smarter" than others of the same age."
Man, if that doesn't perfectly nail the average Slashdot nerd, what does?
I knew my failure to repeat the context was going to bite me in the ass. We're talking about "kids getting smarter" in general, not the 7-sigma cases holding down the ends of the bell curve.
I would not dare play strategy games against the kids of today.
I was never much of a gamer, so it would kind of suck to get my ass handed to me by a primary school kid.
Sounds like not so much an issue of "kids of today", but rather one of "I am not a strategy gamer". You'd likely have had your ass handed to you by a kid of 30 years ago too. Kids today haven't evolved some magic "strategy gene".
So you attribute the Flynn effect to... agressive parenting? Sure, evolution isn't having any effect on that small of a scale, but I wouldn't say that gains from things like improved nutrition (including maternal nutrition), better access to teaching materials, and parents that have more time to spend with their kids count as pushing kids to learn faster.
No, I'm saying that the Flynn Effect isn't going to lead to a majority of 2 year olds with a grasp of calculus, for example. Nutrition and better educational resources don't make kids read earlier, they simply facilitate it.
Your claim that young kids can't learn about tactics is rather silly. For starters, Ender's Game didn't portray most of the 7 year olds as having a good grasp on combat tactics. The 7 year old students were grunt soldiers that moved in formations (albeit in 3 dimensions). And the abilities shown for the 12 year old leaders were completely realistic. I've worked with a lot of 12 year old Boy Scouts that seemed close to being good enough to be Battle School leaders. If anything, Orson Scott Card underestimated what a well-trained 12 year old could do.
I'm not talking so much about the things the characters did, but rather how the instructors marvelled and wowwed over Ender's greatness. The actual tactics used in the book were pretty transparent and not really even slightly innovative. Card shows a pretty piss-poor grasp of what truly innovative tactics are.
I'd guess the abilities of a normal Battle School leader are only about 2 standard deviations above average for kids raised in a suburban middle class setting, but Battle School was described as way more selective than that.
Well yeah, that's the weakness of Card's writing. You have to gauge the supposed "greatness" of Ender, Bean, et al by the reactions of the adult staff to their performance, not the "learned it the first week of Army training" level of sophistication their tactics actually illustrated.
Hmmm. Do you really think Ender's Game is actually about Ender..?
Well yes, it basically is. If you disregard the pointless idiotic side-plot about Peter and Valentine ruling the world by publishing anonymously online (scoff), pretty much every page is about the Life of Ender.
Why, do you think the book is secretly entirely about Maezer Rackham and all that stuff about Ender is thrown in as a clever ruse to throw us off? Or are you going to spin off into some tired discussion of how this symbolizes Man's Inhumanity to Man, and that symbolizes the perseverance of the human soul? Sure, battle school is essentially Lord of the Flies In Space, but the fact that the "camera" is always on Ender or someone who's talking about Ender is a pretty solid clue the book is about Ender and the terrible things "society" does to him.
Cripes, what's with people's fascination with this book? It's a great little short story badly padded out to book length.
See? Offer a valid logic-based criticism of Ender's Game, and get modded "Troll". Why is Ender's Game such a sacred cow among nerds? Seriously, the short story was decent even with the age silliness, and the book was an interesting enough expansion on the combat tactics and space battle strategy aspects, despite the tedious, superfluous flummery with his siblings' hoo-hawing in irrelevant politics and the tiresome "dream game" thing with Ender--- this stuff's all the more obvious as filler if you've read the short story.
So really, what is it? Why are so many nerds intolerant of criticism of what is only a fair-to-middling book?
When I was 4 years old, preschool consisted of fingerpainting and coloring, maybe a little bit of ABC and number recognition.
My recently-5-year-old finished preschool in May, during which she learned to recognize and write over 2 dozen words (colors, numbers, shapes) as well as basic addition and subtraction.
None of that is surprising. You were not pushed as quickly. 5 years old is about where kids learn to read. That can be pushed back up to about a year for most kids, but no amount of anything is going to result in a 2 year old that can read. Kids aren't changing.
In the near-distant future (200 years? 300 years?) how much further along will kids be? Algebra in primary school?
Kids already learn algebra in private primary schools. Again, you can shift the age a little with aggressive teaching regimens, but we'll never see 7 year olds learning advanced combat tactics.
Don't sell kids short. Unless you have kids of your own, you really don't have enough material with which to reference an evaluation.
Now you're just being silly. Even if I didn't have any children (I have one), that wouldn't disqualify me to speak on the subject of juvenile education.
Except in the universe presented there had been concerted effort to make smarter and smarter children who would be intelligent at younger and younger ages.
Which is what's ridiculous. Physical maturity and adult-level intelligence aren't independent of one another. Childrens' brains are simply not physically developed enough to do the things Card has them doing. If they had found a way in that universe to make them smarter, they also would be physically more mature.
To top it off, he handwaves away the reality of physical maturity too. There one specific passage where 11 year old Ender finds himself developing muscles from all the combat training--- 11 year olds can't develop musculature without showing other signs of physical maturity first! It's just an absurdly long reach he's making in order to fulfill a really lame "think of the children" point. The worst part is that this point is totally superfluous to the real meat of the story, and could have been better made. The tragedy of wasting a young man's life putting him through that rigorous military training his entire young life is actually a greater tragedy if it's 10 years longer and he's a 21 year old mentally destroyed leading the fleets to victory. An 11 year old could plausibly recover.
Cripes, what's with people's fascination with this book? It's a great little short story badly padded out to book length. Well, more accurately, it's a mediocre short story about the belief-beggaring "tragedy" of turning babies into warriors with a great short story about the training and trials of a natural leader buried underneath it. Seriously, 7 to 11 year old children are not physically or mentally capable of the things Card has them doing, no matter what training regimen you put them through. It ruins a perfectly interesting military science fiction story in order to fulfill a stupid and unnecessary melodramatic point. Add 10 years on to all the kids' ages and the eyerolling quotient would have been reduced dramatically.
Slashdot covers a wide variety of very technical topics, they can't be expected to elaborate on them all.
Granted, but is the following too much to ask?
"Intel's Pat Gelsinger recently revealed that the 32 IA cores in Larrabee, Intel's planned multi-core GPU, will in fact be based on Intel's ancient P54C architecture"
It's the difference between being an editor, and being a trained chimp that has learned to click a POST button in exchange for bananas. It has, of course, been long established that slashdot's "editors" run more along the "chimp" side.
So Yellowcake is about as easy to turn into nuclear weapons as raw iron ore can be turned into fighter airplanes
Heh. I'd love to see the airplane you'd make out of iron. Iron is very very heavy. A better way to put it would have been "...as raw bauxite can be turned into fighter airplanes", as they are largely made of aluminum, not iron.
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The great irony of your post is that if policy makers listened then in 20 years time I'd be reading similar posts from US soldiers fighting in some big conventional war complaining that the only available weapons systems were designed for use against a few poorly armed insurgents in house in some third world shithole, not armoured battalions and hostile navies built by large industrialized state bent on occupying a US ally, when if the US had ignored you they would most likely not have had to fight at all.
Yet another failure of reading comprehension, putting words in my mouth. Read my post for content again, please. I never once called for the elimination of strategic air assets. Strategic bombers and air superiority fighters should remain part of the Air Force. My complaint is about the Air Force's apparent distaste for providing Close Air Support and maintaining in inventory aircraft capable of filling that role, which is part of the Air Force's job.
"Bombs away with Curtis LeMay" - pretty much sums up the USAF's attitude, doesn't it?
Roger that! Between the LeMay bomber folks and the Boyd "fighter mafia" gang, close air support has become the red headed stepchild in the whole mess. Nobody wants to push for small, slow, ugly ground attack planes. They're just not "sexy", and also ground warfare is so dirty...
Agreed. It may be true that Mr. Dun Malg and his buddies deserve better close air support than they're getting, but we also have to keep in mind that this is unlikely to be the last war we ever have to fight, and the next war won't necessarily be the same as this one. Given that the world-class B2/F22 aircraft take decades to develop and any future major war is likely to be a matter of months or maybe weeks, I'd rather have the high-end stuff around now, in case we need it later. Not to discount the courage and sacrifice of our current soldiers in this war, but it'll all look like pocket change if another major war happens, especially if we don't have the right gear to fight it when it starts.
I agree completely. I think there's a definite need for air superiority fighters and strategic bombers. I also think there's a definite need for dedicated close air support aircraft, and in my experience that's where the Air Force brass have a blind spot. Being an Air Force, they repeatedly fail to look at things from the perspective of the ground forces. It's a classic case of "when all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails". The trouble with that is, the Air Force seems to have an institutional hammer fetish, when what the Army needs from them (and is legally prohibited from procuring for themselves) is a screwdriver!
"The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet,"
You are wrong about that. The war in Bosnia was ended by a single large bomber mission. Prior to that mission close air support aircraft were attacking single vehicles one at a time. Then the Serb army massed for an offensive but before they could launch it a b2 was re-directed in flight. They lost about 250 men in that one B2 attack. This caused the Serb army to rebel against their government, saying in effect we are not going to fight any more.
That's not the "contemporary battlefield" I'm referring to--- that's a strategic target. They also hit several bridges. Bosnia is an example of an appropriate application of strategic assets. The fact that they were initially attempting to treat Bosnia as a tactical situation when it wasn't has nothing whatsoever to with what ground forces in contact with the enemy need in terms of Close Air Support. A B-2 at 30K feet is not an effective CAS asset. I'm not saying that there's no mission for strategic bombers, I'm just saying that CAS isn't it!
Beg to differ on the B-1. The B-1's current mission in Afghanistan is to loiter in the area, waiting for a call for support from the ground. They can deliver weapons to the target in 10 to 15 minutes.
Point taken. It fits the general theme, though, as the B-1 is a strategic bomber pressed into service in a role it wasn't designed for. Also, putting Mk84's on ANYTHING is stretching the definition of CAS. I wouldn't want to be anywhere "Close" to a 2000 pounder.
i gave you the flamebait; criticizing the other branches for their service to the country is really tacky
Oh, come on, you're reading too much into my rant. My complaint is with the feudalistic, dog-in-the-manger attitude of the military leadership, not with the level of service provided by the real military folks, the enlisted, NCOs, and junior officers of all services that have to do the real work.
Honestly, I'm in the USMC and you should see yourselves from our eyes (assuming you want to continue being viewing each other with closed minded stereotypes)
Shrug. I know what the USMC (stereotypically) thinks of the Army in particular, and the rest of the military in general. Some of it's true, and some of it is bullshit. I have nothing bad to say about the Corps that applies to the rank and file on the front lines. My criticisms are pretty much confined to the actions of gerneral staff, the pencil pushers. I understand that the USMC values its history very highly, even to the point of some members threatening physical harm to anyone who dares suggest that perhaps the United States shouldn't have two separate sets of ground forces. I know it upsets them, but the fact remains that the USMC is administratively and historically a part of the Navy, and that the modern Corps is the result of a pissing match between the Navy and the Army in WW2. The Navy didn't want to just be a "taxi service" for the Army, and managed to divide the pacific theater in two, expanding the Corps in the process to fill the new ground warfare role they'd created for themselves. If you can step away from the personal investment in it and look at it rationally, it's pretty clear that having the Navy run its own miniature army is irrational.
My wifes in the Navy, have had uncles in the Army and National Guard, a father in the Air Force, and cousins in the Coast Guard; everyone does what is right for them. Your complete lack of respect for others services flat out sucks.
You need to separate out my narrow-focus logical arguments from your preconceived prejudices. I challenge you to quote where I disrespected in any way whatsoever the enlisted, NCOs, or junior officers (i.e. the REAL military) of any service. I did not. This is not a case of the usual parochial interservice rivalry, a la "jarheads suck, hur hur hur", or "air force is lame". Sure, I said the Air Force and Navy brass have their collective head stuck in their glory days of WW2. Sure, I said the USMC might be better as part of the Army rather than the Navy. But these are exclusively criticisms of the decisions of fruit-salad and scrambled eggs uniformed jackasses in air conditioned offices in DC. Hell, I could go on at length about the ridiculous bullshit foisted upon the ranks by the Army leadership as well: ACU uniform "here I am!" camo pattern, MOLLE-II, Stryker--- the list goes on forever.
Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more.
Sorry? I thought my entire point was that contemporary warfare is almost entirely tactical in nature.
I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa.
I never suggested that. My half serious, half facetious suggestion was that if the Air Force is so fixated on strategic bombing and doesn't want to provide CAS, maybe it ought to turn over its CAS assets to the Army, which has a strong personal interest in CAS and will make good use of those assets.
The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets.
Indeed. I worked closely with several Air Force forward air controllers in Afghanistan. My views on the problem with CAS and the Air Force are derived mostly from their complaints about their own service!
If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.
Well yeah. The Army already has substantial aviation assets. My arguments assume nothing unusual.
Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc.
Well no, it's distinctly different. The Army already has aviation assets in the CAS role, and the advantage of that is obvious to anyone who's ever seen an AH-64 or even an armed OH-56 in action. Again, I think you've misunderstood my point. The Air Force as described by the 1948 Key West Agreement is so strongly tied to the vision of its de facto founder, Curtis LeMay, that to this very day its leadership has difficulty seeing aviation in terms outside of strategic bombing. The trouble this causes with the Army is that the Air Force is also supposed to provide CAS for ground forces. Being a separate service, the Army has limited means to affect the direction the Air Force goes when questions of budgetary priority come up. CAS assets are routinely marginalized, while strategic assets of questionable necessity are emphasized. The reason the Air Force doesn't need "a private army of its own that [understands] the strengths and limitations of air power" is that the Air Force isn't interested in ground warfare, and that's the problem!
And btw the A-10 is not retired.
Friend, re-read what I wrote. I said they tried to retire the A-10 in the 90's. They were not successful, largely because their "replacement"--- the F-16--- was totally unsuited to the role.
If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story.
I don't need to. I watched three of them fly a racetrack pattern around a ridge in Paktia in SE Afghanistan, putting down ordinance. It's very impressive.
I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops.
See, this is the exactly the problem I'm talking about. Much of the Air Force leadership doesn't seem to understand what constitutes good CAS. It's not putting an Mk82 inside a 10' painted circle on a dry lake bed outside Nellis from 5000' AGL at 600 knots using CCIPP. Good CAS is being able to stay on station for a long time until a "bad guy" finally groundhogs up, at which point the FAC gets on the radio and say, "second ridge, 100 meters above th
The B2 is a blended wing body, not a flying wing.
Actually, it pretty evenly straddles the line. It has a distinct "body" structure like a BWB, but the "body" is not particularly prominent and it doesn't have distinct and separate wing structures. The B-2 is generally considered a hybrid flying wing
...From the classic B-52 onwards, they do useful things like haul large quantities of high explosives other systems cannot match. Improvements in tactical control mean the folks on the ground can call in tremendous force when needed.
As a dirt-eating infantry guy, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel a rant coming on...
The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet, that'll be here in 14 hours (B-52 from Diego) or worse, 40 hours (B-2 from freakin' Missouri!). There isn't a bunch of factories with static GPS coordinates that can be preloaded by ground crews into GPS guided weapons. It's largely just guys like me, calling on a radio, asking for a couple 500 pounders on the ridgeline 3 klicks away, to get two dozen guys with RPGs and machine guns, NOW!. The B-52, B-1, and B-2 just don't fit into that equation.
Modern air-to-ground warfare doesn't need "big" strategic bombers like that. For the last 50+ years, the US Air Force has been living in a fantasy world, a sepia-toned universe where it's perpetually 1950, where bombers were the strategic "big stick" that brought down the Nazis, and were the Alpha-to-Omega of nuclear weapons delivery. The trouble is, the former is a self-delusional lie, and the latter keeled over with the ICBM and finally died with the USSR in 1990. The Air Force mythology of strategic bombing is based on the largely pointless high-altitude mass bombing of Europe in WW2. The Key West Agreement of 1948 which separated the Air Force as its own service, separate from the Army and forbidding the Army to operate aircraft, centered heavily on the "success" of the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly the crippling of the German ball bearing manufacturing. Funny thing is, decades later when Albert Speer was asked about this, his reply was (paraphrased) "They were trying to bomb our ball bearing factories? If so, we had no idea."
The practical upshot of all this is that the Air Force was founded on a fantasy which continues to hamper its effectiveness to this day. Granted, my view on the subject is heavily colored by my 16 years as a lowly grunt in the Army, hiding in holes trying to get effective close air support from those guys; but I think my view is pretty accurate. There aren't any more superpowers to mount a credible air defense, to put up a serious opposition. The one thing that we really need from the Air Force is the one thing that they've consistently tried to get out of providing: Close Air Support. Air Force brass had the unmitigated gall to try to retire the A-10 in the 90's and "replace" it with the F-16! They constantly push for more air-superiority and high altitude bombing assets when the cold hard reality is that we don't need that. Contemporary warfare is non-linear, against small bands of irregulars operating in primitive conditions. As infantrymen, what we need from the Air Force is all-weather, low-altitude, precision ordinance delivery, but we hardly ever get it!. If I had a nickel for every time I saw the Air Force drop in the wrong place, or worse, "call in sick" because of bad weather, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickels. The military has always been a hotbed of backstabbing, featherbedding, and general power politics, and the Air Force continuing live in its glory days of WW2 is a prime example (don't even get me started on the Navy, they're even worse). The Army has managed to fill some of its air needs via helicopters--- and getting the Air Force to let us have those was a fight--- but helicopters are lightweight, short range assets. We need fixed wing air support, particularly in Afghanistan where altitude and weather make helicopter operations near impossible. Personally, I think the Air Force should turn over the A-10 and AC-130 assets to the Army and let us do our own close air support, and they can go sit around in their giant strato-bombe
You do and I do. But does Joe Everyman really need that much space?
Why do people keep asking this same silly question? We were watching badly digitized porn video at 320x240 back in 1997. Now we're looking at 1-4GB MPEGs, with even bigger hi-def stuff on the horizon. Someone asked me back around 1995 what an average Joe would need a 200MB hard drive for. The simple fact that Average Joe has a phone with more than that now is the answer to the question. YES! Joe Everyman needs that much space! Maybe not right now but soon enough, he will.
Would you rather have a car thats expensive to run or no car at all and have to rely on friends to give you rides?
That'd be great, if it was actually me getting rides in that car. In this case it's my spendthrift brother-in-law joyriding around doing nothing for my benefit, but sending me the bill. I say let him get rides from friends.
That is also why I think that the people making the decisions in our space programs are idiots. I am sure they see the need for some sort of backup plan for those people on the space station, yet don't think that it would be easy enough to send up one shuttle, and LEAVE IT THERE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
It's always amusing when armchair engineers think they know better than NASA. "Parking" a shuttle in low earth orbit isn't like putting a car up on blocks in your driveway. Every kilogram of material you keep in orbit requires periodic fuel expenditure to maintain that orbit. So no, they're not idiots, they just understand the situation better than you do.
The reason for your vehement criticism is also clear: it displays a very common personality flaw among intellectual males, a belief in one's own intellectual superiority...
Actually, the reason for my criticism is that I didn't particularly like the book. The fact that I believe in my own superiority is not relevant.
Korea. Starcraft. Need I say more?
Get a clue. The "strategy" found in Real Time Strategy games is vanishingly small. RTS's are an exercise in who can select sets fastest, not strategy.
I think I've found the answer to my own question within the reviews on Amazon.com:
"The reason for the book's popularity is clear: it panders to a very common personality flaw among young, intellectual males: a belief in one's own intellectual superiority, the notion that one is rejected simply because one is so much "smarter" than others of the same age."
Man, if that doesn't perfectly nail the average Slashdot nerd, what does?
I was a two-year-old who could read.
I knew my failure to repeat the context was going to bite me in the ass. We're talking about "kids getting smarter" in general, not the 7-sigma cases holding down the ends of the bell curve.
I would not dare play strategy games against the kids of today. I was never much of a gamer, so it would kind of suck to get my ass handed to me by a primary school kid.
Sounds like not so much an issue of "kids of today", but rather one of "I am not a strategy gamer". You'd likely have had your ass handed to you by a kid of 30 years ago too. Kids today haven't evolved some magic "strategy gene".
So you attribute the Flynn effect to... agressive parenting? Sure, evolution isn't having any effect on that small of a scale, but I wouldn't say that gains from things like improved nutrition (including maternal nutrition), better access to teaching materials, and parents that have more time to spend with their kids count as pushing kids to learn faster.
No, I'm saying that the Flynn Effect isn't going to lead to a majority of 2 year olds with a grasp of calculus, for example. Nutrition and better educational resources don't make kids read earlier, they simply facilitate it.
Your claim that young kids can't learn about tactics is rather silly. For starters, Ender's Game didn't portray most of the 7 year olds as having a good grasp on combat tactics. The 7 year old students were grunt soldiers that moved in formations (albeit in 3 dimensions). And the abilities shown for the 12 year old leaders were completely realistic. I've worked with a lot of 12 year old Boy Scouts that seemed close to being good enough to be Battle School leaders. If anything, Orson Scott Card underestimated what a well-trained 12 year old could do.
I'm not talking so much about the things the characters did, but rather how the instructors marvelled and wowwed over Ender's greatness. The actual tactics used in the book were pretty transparent and not really even slightly innovative. Card shows a pretty piss-poor grasp of what truly innovative tactics are.
I'd guess the abilities of a normal Battle School leader are only about 2 standard deviations above average for kids raised in a suburban middle class setting, but Battle School was described as way more selective than that.
Well yeah, that's the weakness of Card's writing. You have to gauge the supposed "greatness" of Ender, Bean, et al by the reactions of the adult staff to their performance, not the "learned it the first week of Army training" level of sophistication their tactics actually illustrated.
Hmmm. Do you really think Ender's Game is actually about Ender..?
Well yes, it basically is. If you disregard the pointless idiotic side-plot about Peter and Valentine ruling the world by publishing anonymously online (scoff), pretty much every page is about the Life of Ender.
Why, do you think the book is secretly entirely about Maezer Rackham and all that stuff about Ender is thrown in as a clever ruse to throw us off? Or are you going to spin off into some tired discussion of how this symbolizes Man's Inhumanity to Man, and that symbolizes the perseverance of the human soul? Sure, battle school is essentially Lord of the Flies In Space , but the fact that the "camera" is always on Ender or someone who's talking about Ender is a pretty solid clue the book is about Ender and the terrible things "society" does to him.
Ender's Game ...
Cripes, what's with people's fascination with this book? It's a great little short story badly padded out to book length.
See? Offer a valid logic-based criticism of Ender's Game, and get modded "Troll". Why is Ender's Game such a sacred cow among nerds? Seriously, the short story was decent even with the age silliness, and the book was an interesting enough expansion on the combat tactics and space battle strategy aspects, despite the tedious, superfluous flummery with his siblings' hoo-hawing in irrelevant politics and the tiresome "dream game" thing with Ender--- this stuff's all the more obvious as filler if you've read the short story.
So really, what is it? Why are so many nerds intolerant of criticism of what is only a fair-to-middling book?
Kids keep getting smarter.
No they don't. They just push them harder.
When I was 4 years old, preschool consisted of fingerpainting and coloring, maybe a little bit of ABC and number recognition. My recently-5-year-old finished preschool in May, during which she learned to recognize and write over 2 dozen words (colors, numbers, shapes) as well as basic addition and subtraction.
None of that is surprising. You were not pushed as quickly. 5 years old is about where kids learn to read. That can be pushed back up to about a year for most kids, but no amount of anything is going to result in a 2 year old that can read. Kids aren't changing.
In the near-distant future (200 years? 300 years?) how much further along will kids be? Algebra in primary school?
Kids already learn algebra in private primary schools. Again, you can shift the age a little with aggressive teaching regimens, but we'll never see 7 year olds learning advanced combat tactics.
Don't sell kids short. Unless you have kids of your own, you really don't have enough material with which to reference an evaluation.
Now you're just being silly. Even if I didn't have any children (I have one), that wouldn't disqualify me to speak on the subject of juvenile education.
Except in the universe presented there had been concerted effort to make smarter and smarter children who would be intelligent at younger and younger ages.
Which is what's ridiculous. Physical maturity and adult-level intelligence aren't independent of one another. Childrens' brains are simply not physically developed enough to do the things Card has them doing. If they had found a way in that universe to make them smarter, they also would be physically more mature.
To top it off, he handwaves away the reality of physical maturity too. There one specific passage where 11 year old Ender finds himself developing muscles from all the combat training--- 11 year olds can't develop musculature without showing other signs of physical maturity first! It's just an absurdly long reach he's making in order to fulfill a really lame "think of the children" point. The worst part is that this point is totally superfluous to the real meat of the story, and could have been better made. The tragedy of wasting a young man's life putting him through that rigorous military training his entire young life is actually a greater tragedy if it's 10 years longer and he's a 21 year old mentally destroyed leading the fleets to victory. An 11 year old could plausibly recover.
Ender's Game ...
Cripes, what's with people's fascination with this book? It's a great little short story badly padded out to book length. Well, more accurately, it's a mediocre short story about the belief-beggaring "tragedy" of turning babies into warriors with a great short story about the training and trials of a natural leader buried underneath it. Seriously, 7 to 11 year old children are not physically or mentally capable of the things Card has them doing, no matter what training regimen you put them through. It ruins a perfectly interesting military science fiction story in order to fulfill a stupid and unnecessary melodramatic point. Add 10 years on to all the kids' ages and the eyerolling quotient would have been reduced dramatically.
Slashdot covers a wide variety of very technical topics, they can't be expected to elaborate on them all.
Granted, but is the following too much to ask?
"Intel's Pat Gelsinger recently revealed that the 32 IA cores in Larrabee, Intel's planned multi-core GPU, will in fact be based on Intel's ancient P54C architecture"
It's the difference between being an editor, and being a trained chimp that has learned to click a POST button in exchange for bananas. It has, of course, been long established that slashdot's "editors" run more along the "chimp" side.
The three largest "Cities" are: Cheyenne -- 56k,
That's insane. I could get 56K people to yell at me to Turn That Shit Down by simply turning up my stereo and opening a window at 3am...
So Yellowcake is about as easy to turn into nuclear weapons as raw iron ore can be turned into fighter airplanes
Heh. I'd love to see the airplane you'd make out of iron. Iron is very very heavy. A better way to put it would have been "...as raw bauxite can be turned into fighter airplanes", as they are largely made of aluminum, not iron.