Shotgun not flying one of the helicopters "mimicking" the US fleet.
Believe it or not there have been sufficient volunteers for such flights in the past.
"The Wild Weasel mission was to precede strike flights, sanitizing the target area of radar guided Surface-to-Air missile threats, leaving the threat area last, which sometimes would result in 3.5-hour missions, before returning to base. This was achieved by turning toward the air defense site in a threatening manner, firing radar homing missiles at the site, or visually locating the site to dive bomb it. These tactics were attempted while under attack by MiGs and anti-aircraft artillery." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel
Not saying that shutting down the straits wouldn't have an impact, but I don't know that life would grind to a halt in two weeks, either.
That's not the claim that I was trying to make. I was trying to educate a silly person that the global flow of oil is not about corporate profit, its about far more personal things like getting food from farm to city. That is why the US Navy escorted convoys of oil tankers in the past when Iran made similar threats.
That and its sad that we are addressing the same threat as 30 years ago. When "Pickens Plan" advocates talk about switching heavy trucks to natural gas and mention "national security" this is the sort of thing they are implicitly referring to. I'm not claiming this is the best plan out there but its certainly better than the current situation.
"The Pickens Plan is an energy policy proposal announced July 8, 2008 by American businessman T. Boone Pickens. Pickens wants to reduce American dependence on imported oil by investing approximately $US1 trillion in new wind turbine farms for power generation, which he believes would allow the natural gas currently used for power generation to be shifted to fuel CNG trucks and other heavy vehicles. Pickens thinks that his plan could reduce by $300 billion (43%) the amount the country spends annually on foreign oil.... Although vehicles powered by combusting natural gas instead of gasoline would still produce CO2, they would produce about 25% less for the same amount of energy. Combustion of gasoline also produces much larger amounts of nitrogen oxides (NOx, which cause smog) and other air pollutants than combustion of natural gas." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickens_plan
instead of other people dying for your enjoyment and corporations' profit
That's quite naive, you are more vested in keeping the sea lanes open than you might initially think. When the oil stops then so do the trucks that deliver food to your local grocery store.
Yes it would be great if we got off foreign oil and delivered food using local or renewable energy but that's not what is going to happen in the next two weeks, and IIRC two weeks is about all there is in the local stores and distribution centers on average.
As designed by the Pentagon and deployed in Vietnam the F-4 was a horrible fighter.
As designed by the Pentagon (well, its predecessor) the P-51 Mustang was a horrible fighter using your logic.:-)
Using that "Top Gun" line to try to explain away the F-4's problem is dubious at best.
What "Top Gun" line? I learned about failed Sparrow missiles, the pure missile concept, ROE requirements for visual identification negating long range missiles, the lack of formal ACM training (and pilots doing off-the-books training), etc from far more serious sources than Hollywood. Note many of these problems are not aircraft specific.
The F-4 had to undergo a major redesign...
"Major" is highly debatable.
... and it was still never very good.
Many Vietnam era F-4 pilots disagree.
It was big, heavy and the smoky engines made it extremely easy to track visually.
The smoke trails were an engine issue and that engine was not F-4 specific.
The disasterous performance of the F-4 lead directly to the F-15 which was a very good fighter. They did learn from their mistakes with the F-15 a decade later.
"Disasterous" is also highly debatable. And the F-4 was not the motivation behind the F-15, the true motivation was the rumored performance characteristics of the Mig-25. It was typical cold war era leapfrogging of aircraft designs, the F-4 being designed almost a decade earlier than the Mig-25.
If you want to discuss a team that learned the lessons of the history or aerial combat then the F-16 team would be a far better choice than the F-15, smaller, simpler, more maneuverable, less expensive...
The only number I find online is: "During one short period for which data are available, the summer of 1972, air-to-air combat resulted in the loss of 12 MiG-21s, 4 MiG-17/19s, and 11 F-4s, yielding a kill-ratio of about 1.5 MiGs for every Phantom shot down". 1972 was near the end of the war, long after the F-4E was deployed with an internal Vulcan gun. I think the F4-E was deployed in 1968.
Those numbers may be including AAA kill. That 1.5:1 ratio post F-4E introduction is very suspicious given the stats for the entire war. 14% of AF kills were by gun.
Given the US withdrawal in Iraq, engaging in a war with Iran won't be easy or popular. Lately they've managed to capture drones and threatening the shipping will let them achieve their own goals with the least risk of provoking a US response. I guess the real question is, what will the US do if it is attacked? In all likelyhood, they will be buzzed by Iranian boats without actually being attacked. But how close will they let such boats approach?
In a post-Cole world the "buzzing" of a warship will be considered a hostile act and get you sunk. The US public will not be terribly upset over military action against Iran given that (1) it will seem somewhat justified and (2) there will not be boots on the ground except those air assault units who go in temporarily to destroy nuclear research and processing facilities and then leave. There will be no occupation. Invading countries and blowing the hell out of stuff is actually pretty popular with the American public. Its only the occupation that gets unpopular. You can have the former with the later.
You underestimate the survivability of US naval ships
It's not about navy vs. navy. Iran is threatening to "close the straits". To do this they just have to make a credible threat to the oil tankers, and trade will stop. US naval ships aren't going to be delivering any oil.
This all happened in the 1980s. When the credible threats were made the US Navy began to escort convoys of oil tankers through the straits. Firing on an escorted convoy is equivalent to attacking the escorting warship.
There will be no occupation. It will be more like Libya in the 1980s. Libya threatens navigation. US bombs Libya military bases, sinks Libyan ships, shoots down Libyan aircraft, etc. Although I expect the Iranian militias used to put down rioters will get a few bombs in their barracks as well.
The only boots on the ground will be there temporarily. There will probably be air assaults on the nuclear research processing facilities. Take the ground, blow stuff up, leave.
Excepting the F-4's record as a fighter in Vietnam was horrible and since every service was using it it was horrible across the board, with no fallback when it turned out to be horrible.
Not quite. What was horrible were the missiles loaded on the F-4, 90% failure on some. It wouldn't matter what aircraft launched those missiles. Fixing the missiles, and more importantly adding a gun to the F-4, did wonders. Plus getting back to the "basics" in pilot training and stressing air combat maneuvering once again. Naval aviators got the kill:loss ratio up to 10:1 again.
... the F-35 is insane primarily because some idiot decided to make every service use basically the same air frame for everything... If everyone is using one airplane what happens when it gets grounded...
One basic airframe for all services worked out pretty well for the F-4 Phantom II.
The F-15 is still good enough for air to air for just about everything short of an all out war between the U.S., China and or Russia which is fairly improbable in the nuclear age.
Not quite. The US fought against front line Chinese and Russian aircraft in Korea, Vietnam, Libya and Iraq. Those Chinese and Russian jets are not going to stay in China and Russia, both are desperate for exports and combat jets make good exports.
My thoughts too. If someone thinks they could stand a chance of winning, they might actually try.
Being hopelessly unbalanced is a near-guarantee of lasting peace.
No. Being hopelessly unbalanced is a near-guarantee of lasting war. If the US didn't believe it could easily win the wars in Iraq and Afganistan it would never had started them.
The US didn't start the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan government supported a foreign but Afghan based group that attacked US civilians on US territory, an act of war. The Afghan government then gave shelter and protection to this group after the attack despite US demands to turn them over for criminal prosecution. The Afghan government thus made themselves an accomplice in the attack after the fact.
I think its hard to define 'actual, military need'
I would certainly support slashing the entire military spending by 65%, keeping us on top but not so over the god damned top.
I'm certainly against waste and fraud but 65% sounds like you may be trading blood for gold. Making it an unfair fight saves US lives, merely being on top may be too close to a fair fight.
Just look at Lockheed Martin's F-22 and F-35 programs for sterling examples of why the U.S. is going broke buying weapons we really don't need, that don't work right, cost vastly more than Lockheed said they would when they won the contracts, and are years to decades late being delivered.
For those too young to remember. Those were *exactly* the same complaints made about the F-15 back in the day. You know the F-15, the fighter that has a 150 to zero win/loss aerial combat record.
They might only profit 2% of every device, but the sheer scale of the whole manufacturing industry more than makes up for that.
That 2% figure is somewhat distorted. Here's something from a researcher at the same university as the other authors. Basically the 2% doesn't reflect currency manipulation that artificially deflates the numbers by 40%, it doesn't reflect externalized costs like pollution, it doesn't reflect governments supports like *free* factories, etc.
Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
And what about those who believe in "God's will" as an effective targeting method? Those who welcome martyrdom personally, and believe that those "believers" who die as collateral damage are martyred so their death is actually a blessing? You know the guys who blaze away firing their AK from the hip screaming "God is Great" so that God will guide one of their bullets to the enemy.
Better baseball bat technology has direct and immediate usage as a weapon. Where do you draw the line?
Maybe undirected self replicating weapons would be a good place to draw that line.
How about at the point where the research has no other viable purposes? As I understand it (and I could be way off) this research has a very important use in preventing such things, natural and man-made.
Preventing, no. Dealing with, possibly. However how many outside of the labs doing classified work would be doing such work?
Your argument is quite silly. Politicians are elected by the people they represent and they are often extremely corrupt and act against the interests of those who voted for them. So is union leadership, its often just as corrupt. Many union leaders are essentially professional politicians, not someone who came of the ranks of the trade.
That's not evidence. That was always the call. Corporations aren't people, thus they shouldn't be able to donate. Try again.
Reread. You are missing the important distinction.
A. Only people can donate to campaigns.
B. Corporation can not donate to campaigns
A and B are not equivalent. Under A no organization can donate, including unions. So the movement from A to B is an extremely big change. A change made under the influence of union support of Occupy.
No organization should be able to donate to campaigns. Union interests can be represented by union member donations, corporate interests can be represented by employee donations, organization interests (say the AARP) can be represented by member donations, etc.
errr. okay, I got one detail wrong. It's not like I confused a Polk with a Peabody. Or get the whole details behind Malmedy wrong. Or any number of other things that Billo's gotten just wrong. This false equivalency thing is bullshit. Please stop it.
And none of those things are in the book. *You* picked the book as an example of O'Reilly making things up. *You* claimed the book had been banned. Sorry if your statement was full of it.
Regarding the cherry picked examples presumably from on air comments during the TV show. He seems on par with the President's Navy corpse man, the Austrian language, special olympics bowling, 57 states, etc. Anyone who gives thousands of hours of on air talk is going to make gaffes like the President and O'Reilly. And such on air talk is quite different than a book. It's quite desperate looking for you to make a false equivalency between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Shotgun not flying one of the helicopters "mimicking" the US fleet.
Believe it or not there have been sufficient volunteers for such flights in the past.
"The Wild Weasel mission was to precede strike flights, sanitizing the target area of radar guided Surface-to-Air missile threats, leaving the threat area last, which sometimes would result in 3.5-hour missions, before returning to base. This was achieved by turning toward the air defense site in a threatening manner, firing radar homing missiles at the site, or visually locating the site to dive bomb it. These tactics were attempted while under attack by MiGs and anti-aircraft artillery."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel
Not saying that shutting down the straits wouldn't have an impact, but I don't know that life would grind to a halt in two weeks, either.
That's not the claim that I was trying to make. I was trying to educate a silly person that the global flow of oil is not about corporate profit, its about far more personal things like getting food from farm to city. That is why the US Navy escorted convoys of oil tankers in the past when Iran made similar threats.
... Although vehicles powered by combusting natural gas instead of gasoline would still produce CO2, they would produce about 25% less for the same amount of energy. Combustion of gasoline also produces much larger amounts of nitrogen oxides (NOx, which cause smog) and other air pollutants than combustion of natural gas."
That and its sad that we are addressing the same threat as 30 years ago. When "Pickens Plan" advocates talk about switching heavy trucks to natural gas and mention "national security" this is the sort of thing they are implicitly referring to. I'm not claiming this is the best plan out there but its certainly better than the current situation.
"The Pickens Plan is an energy policy proposal announced July 8, 2008 by American businessman T. Boone Pickens. Pickens wants to reduce American dependence on imported oil by investing approximately $US1 trillion in new wind turbine farms for power generation, which he believes would allow the natural gas currently used for power generation to be shifted to fuel CNG trucks and other heavy vehicles. Pickens thinks that his plan could reduce by $300 billion (43%) the amount the country spends annually on foreign oil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickens_plan
instead of other people dying for your enjoyment and corporations' profit
That's quite naive, you are more vested in keeping the sea lanes open than you might initially think. When the oil stops then so do the trucks that deliver food to your local grocery store.
Yes it would be great if we got off foreign oil and delivered food using local or renewable energy but that's not what is going to happen in the next two weeks, and IIRC two weeks is about all there is in the local stores and distribution centers on average.
As designed by the Pentagon and deployed in Vietnam the F-4 was a horrible fighter.
As designed by the Pentagon (well, its predecessor) the P-51 Mustang was a horrible fighter using your logic. :-)
Using that "Top Gun" line to try to explain away the F-4's problem is dubious at best.
What "Top Gun" line? I learned about failed Sparrow missiles, the pure missile concept, ROE requirements for visual identification negating long range missiles, the lack of formal ACM training (and pilots doing off-the-books training), etc from far more serious sources than Hollywood. Note many of these problems are not aircraft specific.
The F-4 had to undergo a major redesign ...
"Major" is highly debatable.
Many Vietnam era F-4 pilots disagree.
It was big, heavy and the smoky engines made it extremely easy to track visually.
The smoke trails were an engine issue and that engine was not F-4 specific.
The disasterous performance of the F-4 lead directly to the F-15 which was a very good fighter. They did learn from their mistakes with the F-15 a decade later.
"Disasterous" is also highly debatable. And the F-4 was not the motivation behind the F-15, the true motivation was the rumored performance characteristics of the Mig-25. It was typical cold war era leapfrogging of aircraft designs, the F-4 being designed almost a decade earlier than the Mig-25.
...
If you want to discuss a team that learned the lessons of the history or aerial combat then the F-16 team would be a far better choice than the F-15, smaller, simpler, more maneuverable, less expensive
The only number I find online is: "During one short period for which data are available, the summer of 1972, air-to-air combat resulted in the loss of 12 MiG-21s, 4 MiG-17/19s, and 11 F-4s, yielding a kill-ratio of about 1.5 MiGs for every Phantom shot down". 1972 was near the end of the war, long after the F-4E was deployed with an internal Vulcan gun. I think the F4-E was deployed in 1968.
Those numbers may be including AAA kill. That 1.5:1 ratio post F-4E introduction is very suspicious given the stats for the entire war. 14% of AF kills were by gun.
US Navy: 40:7 = 5.7:1
US Air Force: 107:33 = 3.2:1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_II
Given the US withdrawal in Iraq, engaging in a war with Iran won't be easy or popular. Lately they've managed to capture drones and threatening the shipping will let them achieve their own goals with the least risk of provoking a US response. I guess the real question is, what will the US do if it is attacked? In all likelyhood, they will be buzzed by Iranian boats without actually being attacked. But how close will they let such boats approach?
In a post-Cole world the "buzzing" of a warship will be considered a hostile act and get you sunk. The US public will not be terribly upset over military action against Iran given that (1) it will seem somewhat justified and (2) there will not be boots on the ground except those air assault units who go in temporarily to destroy nuclear research and processing facilities and then leave. There will be no occupation. Invading countries and blowing the hell out of stuff is actually pretty popular with the American public. Its only the occupation that gets unpopular. You can have the former with the later.
You underestimate the survivability of US naval ships
It's not about navy vs. navy. Iran is threatening to "close the straits". To do this they just have to make a credible threat to the oil tankers, and trade will stop. US naval ships aren't going to be delivering any oil.
This all happened in the 1980s. When the credible threats were made the US Navy began to escort convoys of oil tankers through the straits. Firing on an escorted convoy is equivalent to attacking the escorting warship.
There will be no occupation. It will be more like Libya in the 1980s. Libya threatens navigation. US bombs Libya military bases, sinks Libyan ships, shoots down Libyan aircraft, etc. Although I expect the Iranian militias used to put down rioters will get a few bombs in their barracks as well.
The only boots on the ground will be there temporarily. There will probably be air assaults on the nuclear research processing facilities. Take the ground, blow stuff up, leave.
Excepting the F-4's record as a fighter in Vietnam was horrible and since every service was using it it was horrible across the board, with no fallback when it turned out to be horrible.
Not quite. What was horrible were the missiles loaded on the F-4, 90% failure on some. It wouldn't matter what aircraft launched those missiles. Fixing the missiles, and more importantly adding a gun to the F-4, did wonders. Plus getting back to the "basics" in pilot training and stressing air combat maneuvering once again. Naval aviators got the kill:loss ratio up to 10:1 again.
... the F-35 is insane primarily because some idiot decided to make every service use basically the same air frame for everything ... If everyone is using one airplane what happens when it gets grounded ...
One basic airframe for all services worked out pretty well for the F-4 Phantom II.
The F-15 is still good enough for air to air for just about everything short of an all out war between the U.S., China and or Russia which is fairly improbable in the nuclear age.
Not quite. The US fought against front line Chinese and Russian aircraft in Korea, Vietnam, Libya and Iraq. Those Chinese and Russian jets are not going to stay in China and Russia, both are desperate for exports and combat jets make good exports.
My thoughts too. If someone thinks they could stand a chance of winning, they might actually try.
Being hopelessly unbalanced is a near-guarantee of lasting peace.
No. Being hopelessly unbalanced is a near-guarantee of lasting war. If the US didn't believe it could easily win the wars in Iraq and Afganistan it would never had started them.
The US didn't start the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan government supported a foreign but Afghan based group that attacked US civilians on US territory, an act of war. The Afghan government then gave shelter and protection to this group after the attack despite US demands to turn them over for criminal prosecution. The Afghan government thus made themselves an accomplice in the attack after the fact.
Both the Russians AND the USA have weapons in space regardless of treaties.
Whoa whoa whoa, what? What weapons do the Russians and the U.S. have in space?
A fixed blade knife in a survival kit maybe?
Well at least one of the American funded (Walmart shoppers, etc) space programs has a plan. Too bad its not the US based one.
I think its hard to define 'actual, military need' I would certainly support slashing the entire military spending by 65%, keeping us on top but not so over the god damned top.
I'm certainly against waste and fraud but 65% sounds like you may be trading blood for gold. Making it an unfair fight saves US lives, merely being on top may be too close to a fair fight.
Just look at Lockheed Martin's F-22 and F-35 programs for sterling examples of why the U.S. is going broke buying weapons we really don't need, that don't work right, cost vastly more than Lockheed said they would when they won the contracts, and are years to decades late being delivered.
For those too young to remember. Those were *exactly* the same complaints made about the F-15 back in the day. You know the F-15, the fighter that has a 150 to zero win/loss aerial combat record.
They might only profit 2% of every device, but the sheer scale of the whole manufacturing industry more than makes up for that.
That 2% figure is somewhat distorted. Here's something from a researcher at the same university as the other authors. Basically the 2% doesn't reflect currency manipulation that artificially deflates the numbers by 40%, it doesn't reflect externalized costs like pollution, it doesn't reflect governments supports like *free* factories, etc.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/china_trade_policy_and_the_fallacy_of_idea-land.html
... at several conferences. Anyone who wants the information can get it. This is RIDICULOUS (coming from a biochemist.)
If they did not attend the conference, how? As easily as looking at a copy of a journal at a library?
Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
And what about those who believe in "God's will" as an effective targeting method? Those who welcome martyrdom personally, and believe that those "believers" who die as collateral damage are martyred so their death is actually a blessing? You know the guys who blaze away firing their AK from the hip screaming "God is Great" so that God will guide one of their bullets to the enemy.
Better baseball bat technology has direct and immediate usage as a weapon. Where do you draw the line?
Maybe undirected self replicating weapons would be a good place to draw that line.
How about at the point where the research has no other viable purposes? As I understand it (and I could be way off) this research has a very important use in preventing such things, natural and man-made.
Preventing, no. Dealing with, possibly. However how many outside of the labs doing classified work would be doing such work?
Your argument is quite silly. Politicians are elected by the people they represent and they are often extremely corrupt and act against the interests of those who voted for them. So is union leadership, its often just as corrupt. Many union leaders are essentially professional politicians, not someone who came of the ranks of the trade.
Again, the idea that they were evicted without notice is false.
Nope. Rulings by judges were adhered to (those that were not overturned by higher courts) and proper notice was given.
Sorry, but you are referring to when the Tea Party became big after it was co-opted, not when it was created.
That's not evidence. That was always the call. Corporations aren't people, thus they shouldn't be able to donate. Try again.
Reread. You are missing the important distinction.
A. Only people can donate to campaigns.
B. Corporation can not donate to campaigns
A and B are not equivalent. Under A no organization can donate, including unions. So the movement from A to B is an extremely big change. A change made under the influence of union support of Occupy.
No organization should be able to donate to campaigns. Union interests can be represented by union member donations, corporate interests can be represented by employee donations, organization interests (say the AARP) can be represented by member donations, etc.
With the exception of the Temasters (terrible union, I was in the Teamsters once) your grandpa is wrong.
Not the teamsters, but it was another very large international union. AFL-CIO affiliated.
errr. okay, I got one detail wrong. It's not like I confused a Polk with a Peabody. Or get the whole details behind Malmedy wrong. Or any number of other things that Billo's gotten just wrong. This false equivalency thing is bullshit. Please stop it.
And none of those things are in the book. *You* picked the book as an example of O'Reilly making things up. *You* claimed the book had been banned. Sorry if your statement was full of it.
Regarding the cherry picked examples presumably from on air comments during the TV show. He seems on par with the President's Navy corpse man, the Austrian language, special olympics bowling, 57 states, etc. Anyone who gives thousands of hours of on air talk is going to make gaffes like the President and O'Reilly. And such on air talk is quite different than a book. It's quite desperate looking for you to make a false equivalency between the two.