And I want to own Buckyball magnets. It's my choice, not the government's. Seems like a tyranny to me. You're the gun owner, get out there and water the tree of Liberty with a little blood.
Howbout doing it the American way? You can google up a source and buy them there. No need to pull out a gun. I'm going to assume you won't put them in your nose or mouth, or swallow them.
For an idea of what kind of heating he could experience, the Concorde apparently got up to around 120 degrees celcius at its nose travelling at Mach 2.
Concorde's crusing altitude was about 55,000 feet, or 17,000 meters. This guy stepped out at almost twice that altitude, with zero velocity.
Statistics have shown that 100% of people without a gun have never shot anybody nor themselves.
If somebody chooses not to own a gun, I'm fine with that. Hey, their choice. It's when they choose to not own a gun and try to extend their choice to me that I have a problem. I choose to own guns. My choice, not yours.
NDA be damned, Dell had 5 solutions for ANY problem. Is it on. Check. Is it installed correctly. Check. Reformat, does it work now? Check. Does the rest of the computer work without it? Check. Replace it. DONE. This is essentially what all their scripts say. Oh sure, there are minor detailed differences, and some small portion of the people they employ to read the scripts even understand the differences. Most do not, never did and never will. They are paid to go through those scripts AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. They are not paid for your satisfaction, and in fact, you can't commend or condone them in any way, because you don't know if you were talking to 'joe' at Dell's Texas headquarters, 'Joe' at the Beaverton Oregon Call center called Stream, or some other third party call center. You can call to complain, and customer service will no doubt apologize, coddle you and then do absolutely nothing.
They want you to go through that script as fast as possible because, if they're a 3rd party support company, they get a bonus check for low average call times. Their employees have 'metrics' they must adhere to, or they get to find another job quick, fast, and in a hurry. That was the way it was back in '00, when I did 3rd party customer support for a national cell phone company when I was still in Colorado.
Pay range for entry level agents in India is $200 - $350/month Where are these cheap Americans that will work for $1.75/hour?
That may be so, but American companies that contract with Indian outsource firms are *certainly* paying more than that.
Yup. The difference, after you subtract out the salaries of the front office workers (secretaries, vice presidents, and others who don't pick up the phone to take support calls), facility lease, phone bills, taxes, equipment, insurance, etc, is called profit. Profit is good. Just ask your friendly local 1%ers.
Pasta (spaghetti, ramen, etc) is cheap. It's also loaded with starches that tend to turn to fat. People end up severely overweight when a burger is 99 cents and a salad is 5 bucks. You eat what you can afford to.
1.6 Billion are not attacking anybody but a signifigant number are trying to establish a new caliphate, impose sharia law, and subjugate all non believers. If the non-believers are unwilling to submit then their religion tells them that they must be killed. At it's core, this is not about how they have been treated by anybody. It is a religious battle for them. They believe they are meant to rule the world just as the Nazis and the pre-WW2 japanese did. Until such beliefs are eradicated there will be no peace.
Depends on what you call a 'significant number'. I've heard numbers ranging from 15-20 thousand to maybe half a million. Compared to 1.6 billion, half a million doesn't even hit the statistical cutoff points. It's about 3 1/00ths of a percent.
Put another way, if garage-built rockets could make it into space, then we'd have orbital, Lunar and asteroid colonies by now.
But one of these days, technology and materials will allow "garage" projects like this. Perhaps the time has come. I wish him luck. It takes cojones grandes to be the first. If he's patient, deliberate, extraordinarily cautious, and more than a little lucky then he can pull it off.
Damn, I hope I live long enough to see 'garage project' spacecraft head for space. That would be so damned cool.
My problem is, I'll be way old to build one for myself.
Those claims of mineral riches in Afghanistan were bullshit. I don't see anyone of note trying to mine there.
Not til the bullets stop flying, anyways. I heard a rumor that the Russians were thinking of building an oil pipeline through Afghanistan for their Siberian oil. It makes more sense than to pipe it to the (Russian) East Coast. The weather on the Indian Ocean is a helluva lot better than that on the northern Pacific Coast, plus it would be cheaper since it'd save them a couple thousand kilometers of pipeline.
And yeah, the Russians knew about the oil under Siberia back in the 80's. They just couldn't justify going after it without a decent port to tranship it from.
And this differs from labeling every goat herder in the area as an 'enemy combatant' so they can ship him off to Gitmo how, exactly? And this differs from the Northern Alliance selling (yes, selling) Arab-looking goat herders to the Americans for the 'bounty money' how, exactly? Let's not ignore the Old Regime's pecadillos, shall we?
And now you know why I've been bitching all election cycle about the lack of true candidates. And I don't mean Ron/Rand/whoever Paul. Why is it that politicians claiming how much they love America consistently act like they hate Americans? Dude, I want my country back.
The Geneva Conventions are "rules for warfare". That's kind of a sick thing when you think about it
Scary shit, isn't it?
Groups who are outside the Geneva Conventions do not operate according to the Geneva Conventions. They are essentially "outside the law" when it comes to war. To treat these groups and their members as if they were members of the Swedish army is pure poppycock and bleeding-heart liberalism run amok. You don't give protections to those who don't respect the rules. That only encourages people to go outside the rules. Why follow the rules if there're no consequences for not following them?
The Vietcong weren't signatories to the Geneva Convention, but that didn't get Rusty Calley off the hook for My Lai. There are certain minimum standards that apply to prisoners claimed to be part of a nonsignatory power or group. By labeling said prisoners as 'enemy combatants' and then spinning it by further saying 'The Geneva Convention does not cover enemy combatants' is flat out wrong.
Put on a uniform and be part of an organised group fighting somebody, you're an 'enemy combatant' to them. Join a militia fighting somebody, you're an 'enemy combatant' to them. Become a guerilla fighter against somebody and you become an 'enemy combatant' to that somebody. Be a goat herder sitting on a rock while some troops chase a guerilla past you does not make you an 'enemy combatant', you haven't taken up arms against the troops chasing the guerilla.
The Geneva Convention recognises both uniformed and ununiformed opponents, and classifies them seperately. Both groups are accorded certain rights. There is no third classification. And bypassing the Geneva Convention by trying to put everybody into a third classification is illegal under international law. But hey, it's the US, who's gonna tell them 'no'?
What pisses me off about the classic case of GC violations, the My Lai Massacre, is that Calley was given an illegal order by Medina, who recieved it through the chain of command all the way down from MACV HQ. He followed it, because back in those days, you followed any order given you or face court martial for it. The assumption was, your superior officers wouldn't be stupid enough to give you an illegal or immoral order. Calley was convicted by saying 'I was given an order and I followed it'. Medina got aquitted by saying 'I never said THAT, although the records show that that same order was given to him as well. They indicted a bunch of people, but only Calley was convicted.
And yeah, they cited Nuremburg at Calley's trial. And Medina's trial. And Henderson's trial. The difference between My Lai and Nuremburg? At Nuremburg, they actively went after the people who issued the original orders. At My Lai, they firewalled the brass at Calley.
This is the conventional wisdom, but with Muslims this does not apply. Muzzies just kill, rape and murder, whether or not there is a threat.Look at the way they kil Hindus in Pakistan and Copts in Egypt - these people are not sending droids or doing anything else. There really is no down-side in seding drones against Muzzies, they are violent killers anyway.
If all those, what, 1.6 billion 'Muzzies', as you call them, were just running around killing everything they see, there wouldn't BE 1.6 billion of them around, they'dve killed each other off centuries ago. When you get down to sheer numbers, it's about 1/100th of a percent that's the problem, Painting them all with the same brush just makes it easier to sell the US military more helicopters, guns, ammo, drones, and cruise missiles because the American public will stand still for the expense. It's almost like saying all Americans are addicted to and only eat Big Macs and fries all day, every day. Or that we all live and die with the exploits of Snookie and/or the Kardashians. Or that the US is still the Wild Wild West, and if you go further west than St Louis, you're in immenent danger of being scalped by the Cheyennes, who wait behind every bush and rock waiting for the whites to send a wagon train through with a fresh supply of blondes.
Back in the Bad Old Days of the Soviet Union, our enemy wasn't the average Ivan on the streets, it was about 3,000 high level Party members collectively refered to as 'the nomenklatura', 'the List' in English. These are the guys that the US government used to rile up the American people with claims that 'the Russians hate us for our freedom' and it would take a monumental struggle to put them down 'like the mad dogs they are'. When Nikita was getting ignored and shouted down at a conference table, he pulled off his shoe, hammered it on the table to get everybody's attention while screaming 'We'll bury you!' What the American people weren't told was, the phrase 'we'll bury you' was Russian slang for 'we'll leave you so far behind that it'll look like you've been buried'. Yeah, it loses something in the translation, and it was spun hard enough to justify the Vietnam war.
NeoCon theory, as espoused by the prophet Leo Strauss, says that a people must be united, with little if any individuality, or the culture will collapse from the 'corruption of the people'. Another part of his teachings was the theory of myth as culture builder. A culture must believe its myths to remain coherent, and it's the job of the leadership to create and manage them. The big myth doesn't have to have anything remotely resembling the facts, it just has to be sellable, and in the 70's, it was 'Moscow is running every terrorist network on the planet!' By having an ultimate enemy that popular 'wisdom' says is bent on destroying us all, the myth binds us together.
The biggest problem with the end of the Cold War is, it deprived the NeoCons with a ready-made enemy. So we found one in the radical Jihadists. The problem, of course, is the same one we had in Vietnam. These guys don't exactly have a uniform, so identifying them can be a bit of a bitch, but hey, if we call them all 'enemy combatants', scoop up every goat herder in the current conflict zones, pack them off to places like Camp XRay til we can sort them out, at least we can point at it and say 'Hey, we're doing something, ain't we?'
Don't worry. We'll just do like President Clark in Babylon 5: "Redefine the problem so it no longer exists. There are not homeless on Earth. They are simply..... displaced..... persons."
You see the U.S. drones did not miss the target..... everyone in the killzone is defined as an "enemy combatant" even if they weren't. Hence the president can claim zero civilian casualties in his speeches.
Do you ever contribute anything useful? I mean, really. Just bullshit scenarios with no basis in fact and useless hyperbole. That's all I ever see from you.
Um, quick question for you. Where did the expression 'enemy combatant' come from then? It was a legal fig leaf used by the Old Regime to justify putting anybody and everybody they decided they didn't like into Camp X-Ray or shipped off to some former Soviet republic for torture. You see, soldiers in uniform are covered by the Geneva Convention as are guerillas to a limited extent, irregardless of whether or not the enemy has signed it. Nonsignatories are accorded extremely limited rights under the GC, but if the capturing power is a signatory, they still have to play nice. Just not as nice as they would have to if both parties were signatories. 'Enemy combatant' is just an end run around the GC. Change the language, change the spin, you change the perception of the people using that language.
What the article is trying to analyse is whether or not targeted assassinations can actually be effective at tearing apart terror networks.
I'm pretty sure that targeted assassinations would actually be effective at tearing apart just about any organization.
You needed a study to tell you that?
The main problems would be, identifying the right people to target. Obviously, if you whack a nobody, it won't impair the organisation much at all. Case in point, Nicaragua's Sandinistas. The leadership was targetted and pretty much decimated, but the guys behind the scenes, the managers and handlers, didn't get hit, and the Sandinistas stayed in business almost another two decades.
My big problems with this new 'Nintendo warfare' are, what happens if the guidence system of the drone gets hit and it goes offcourse and nails the wrong target? Collateral damage means you fucked up someplace. Oops doesn't cut it. The bandwidth on the cameras of a drone probably aren't the greatest, and if the indigs can jam the signal, the drone is flying blind. In a combat situation, that's unacceptable.
Yeah, I know, nobody's reported anything like that yet. But there's no way they would if it does happen. You don't want to encourage the enemy. A spark gap transmitter could probably jam the control signals just like a radar jammer does at a speed trap, and sitting 12,000 miles away, there's not a damned thing the drone operator can do about it.
I also have a problem in that the readouts don't show the reality of what's going on. WW2 bomber pilots and crews never thought much about what was happening on the ground when they dropped their sticks. To them, it just wasn't real. They never saw the end results up close and personal. Drone warfare is the same thing at the next level, moving even closer to feeling like a video game. And let's not forget that it takes boots on the ground to win the hearts and minds. No indig is going to want to be friends with a drone.
Even 100 billion over 5 or 10 years really isn't that much. Vietnam was costing 4 billion a year and more at the peak. The cost of our 3 current wars would turn your hair white.
The original order for Shuttle was what, 8? They cut the funding down to 4 and a pair for testing, then made a big noise about Enterprise as a test bed. It never flew. 8 shuttles could have flown about every 10 weeks with plenty of time to inspect and repair the birds between flights. Just double up on the inspection/repair crews and do all the preliminaries away from the Cape, like they did. The 'Plan A' profile got Proxmired in favor of the ISS, in its weirdassed orbit (to placate the Russians) when the Congresscritters asked themselves 'WFT do we need two space stations for?' This caused a redesign of Shuttle to specifically service that weirdassed orbit. Military satellites tend to be rather small, on the order of 500 kilos each. It's cheaper to hang one in orbit using a standard rocket, and you don't have to wait for a scheduled Shuttle launch if you need a bird in orbit now, plus the time to reshift the originally scheduled load. So, military payloads were pretty much out except for non-time critical experiments.
And all ISS was for was a political tool so the US could say 'See? We do work and play well with others!' With the design constantly changing on all sides, experiments delayed or deleted from the program, is there any wonder ISS is consistently way the hell over budget and way the hell underequiped to do much of anything?
Apollo was actually 'Plan B". The original intention was to build a construction shack/space station in orbit, build a Lunar excursion vehicle there, and fly it to the Moon and back a few times. In the long run, it would have been cheaper, but it would have taken longer. By designing a single stack that threw away 99% to get that 1% to the Moon's surface and back, they saved time.
One of the Shuttle's proposed mission profiles was to cart materials to orbit in order to build that construction shack/lumar excursion vehicle to return to the Moon for long term missions.
"Space travel" represents the peak of our technology, there's nowhere to go. It's done, it's over. It's soooo *not* like the Wright Brothers it's not even funny. The fact that you can't grasp this, as a group, says it all about you.
OK, so our technology has peaked out.
Didn't I see you standing there when Ooog invented the wheel? And wasn't it you that said "What good is this 'wheel' thing you 'invented' that will cause the gods to hate us? Why can't you be reasonable and have your wife pack all your shit on her back like everybody else does?'
'Reasonable' people refuse to rock the boat. 'Reasonable' people embrace and defend the status quo. Status quo means 'freeze in place', nothing moves. Not even you. So, go ahead and stand in place, don't move. The unreasonable among us are moving on.
Space travel at this stage of the game is engineering. We're still developing the engineering to do it cheaper and better. Now, the next little bit is going to take some thinking, so if you wanna take a nap first, that's okay, this comment will still be here when you wake up.
You want clean air, water, land, whatever, there are exactly two and only two options to get it. Option 1 is come up with a way to destroy every piece of technology everywhere on the planet, down to and including the ability to make fire, and turn the entirety of the human species back into a hunter-gatherer tribal society. Downside of this is, the planet cannot support 7 billion people at the stage of hunter-gatherers. It'd be closer to half a million, maybe a million, spread all over the globe. High level apex predators need large areas to hunt in, they can't be supported in small areas. This means there's not a lot of them. And as the current champion apex predator, we're dangerously overextended without our technology.
Option 2 is move all havey industry like metal refining and dangerous chemical processes into orbit and beyond. Get it out of the atmosphere where its poluting byproducts can be blown away by the solar wind. Bonus is, the raw materials are readily at hand, just need a nudge to put them in orbit around Earth where they can be harvested. Again, this is an engineering problem, and like all engineering problems, you solve it by throwing engineers at it.
Go ahead, be 'reasonable'. Fight for the status quo. Fight for decreasing resources increasingly more inaccessible. Fight to keep funnelling what wealth is left into the pockets of the 1%. Just don't complain when us unreasonable blokes run you over on our way to the future.
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Howbout doing it the American way? You can google up a source and buy them there. No need to pull out a gun. I'm going to assume you won't put them in your nose or mouth, or swallow them.
Yeah, if he strapped rockets to his ass and went for a power dive instead of a freefall.
Concorde's crusing altitude was about 55,000 feet, or 17,000 meters. This guy stepped out at almost twice that altitude, with zero velocity.
If somebody chooses not to own a gun, I'm fine with that. Hey, their choice. It's when they choose to not own a gun and try to extend their choice to me that I have a problem. I choose to own guns. My choice, not yours.
They want you to go through that script as fast as possible because, if they're a 3rd party support company, they get a bonus check for low average call times. Their employees have 'metrics' they must adhere to, or they get to find another job quick, fast, and in a hurry. That was the way it was back in '00, when I did 3rd party customer support for a national cell phone company when I was still in Colorado.
Pay range for entry level agents in India is $200 - $350/month Where are these cheap Americans that will work for $1.75/hour?
That may be so, but American companies that contract with Indian outsource firms are *certainly* paying more than that.
Yup. The difference, after you subtract out the salaries of the front office workers (secretaries, vice presidents, and others who don't pick up the phone to take support calls), facility lease, phone bills, taxes, equipment, insurance, etc, is called profit. Profit is good. Just ask your friendly local 1%ers.
Pasta (spaghetti, ramen, etc) is cheap. It's also loaded with starches that tend to turn to fat. People end up severely overweight when a burger is 99 cents and a salad is 5 bucks. You eat what you can afford to.
1.6 Billion are not attacking anybody but a signifigant number are trying to establish a new caliphate, impose sharia law, and subjugate all non believers. If the non-believers are unwilling to submit then their religion tells them that they must be killed. At it's core, this is not about how they have been treated by anybody. It is a religious battle for them. They believe they are meant to rule the world just as the Nazis and the pre-WW2 japanese did. Until such beliefs are eradicated there will be no peace.
Depends on what you call a 'significant number'. I've heard numbers ranging from 15-20 thousand to maybe half a million. Compared to 1.6 billion, half a million doesn't even hit the statistical cutoff points. It's about 3 1/00ths of a percent.
Put another way, if garage-built rockets could make it into space, then we'd have orbital, Lunar and asteroid colonies by now.
But one of these days, technology and materials will allow "garage" projects like this. Perhaps the time has come. I wish him luck. It takes cojones grandes to be the first. If he's patient, deliberate, extraordinarily cautious, and more than a little lucky then he can pull it off.
Damn, I hope I live long enough to see 'garage project' spacecraft head for space. That would be so damned cool.
My problem is, I'll be way old to build one for myself.
It wasn't written by political flacks spinning their own agenda.
Just picking example, I'd have to call the Taliban taking 40 hostages in a hotel last month domestic terrorism.
Keep in mind it's been awhile since they were the rulers of Afghanistan. Back then, they were the 'legitimate' government. Now they're not.
Those claims of mineral riches in Afghanistan were bullshit. I don't see anyone of note trying to mine there.
Not til the bullets stop flying, anyways. I heard a rumor that the Russians were thinking of building an oil pipeline through Afghanistan for their Siberian oil. It makes more sense than to pipe it to the (Russian) East Coast. The weather on the Indian Ocean is a helluva lot better than that on the northern Pacific Coast, plus it would be cheaper since it'd save them a couple thousand kilometers of pipeline.
And yeah, the Russians knew about the oil under Siberia back in the 80's. They just couldn't justify going after it without a decent port to tranship it from.
We never miss, now that Obama has redefined "militant" to mean every military-age male in the strike zone.
Problem solved.
And this differs from labeling every goat herder in the area as an 'enemy combatant' so they can ship him off to Gitmo how, exactly? And this differs from the Northern Alliance selling (yes, selling) Arab-looking goat herders to the Americans for the 'bounty money' how, exactly? Let's not ignore the Old Regime's pecadillos, shall we?
And now you know why I've been bitching all election cycle about the lack of true candidates. And I don't mean Ron/Rand/whoever Paul. Why is it that politicians claiming how much they love America consistently act like they hate Americans? Dude, I want my country back.
Or Luddites blowing up factories.
What? Use a manufactured device to blow up a factory and have my Luddite card revoked? I think not.
I was gonna ask, 'Where the hell are they gonna find a working factory in the US?'
Scary shit, isn't it?
The Vietcong weren't signatories to the Geneva Convention, but that didn't get Rusty Calley off the hook for My Lai. There are certain minimum standards that apply to prisoners claimed to be part of a nonsignatory power or group. By labeling said prisoners as 'enemy combatants' and then spinning it by further saying 'The Geneva Convention does not cover enemy combatants' is flat out wrong.
Put on a uniform and be part of an organised group fighting somebody, you're an 'enemy combatant' to them. Join a militia fighting somebody, you're an 'enemy combatant' to them. Become a guerilla fighter against somebody and you become an 'enemy combatant' to that somebody. Be a goat herder sitting on a rock while some troops chase a guerilla past you does not make you an 'enemy combatant', you haven't taken up arms against the troops chasing the guerilla.
The Geneva Convention recognises both uniformed and ununiformed opponents, and classifies them seperately. Both groups are accorded certain rights. There is no third classification. And bypassing the Geneva Convention by trying to put everybody into a third classification is illegal under international law. But hey, it's the US, who's gonna tell them 'no'?
What pisses me off about the classic case of GC violations, the My Lai Massacre, is that Calley was given an illegal order by Medina, who recieved it through the chain of command all the way down from MACV HQ. He followed it, because back in those days, you followed any order given you or face court martial for it. The assumption was, your superior officers wouldn't be stupid enough to give you an illegal or immoral order. Calley was convicted by saying 'I was given an order and I followed it'. Medina got aquitted by saying 'I never said THAT, although the records show that that same order was given to him as well. They indicted a bunch of people, but only Calley was convicted.
And yeah, they cited Nuremburg at Calley's trial. And Medina's trial. And Henderson's trial. The difference between My Lai and Nuremburg? At Nuremburg, they actively went after the people who issued the original orders. At My Lai, they firewalled the brass at Calley.
If all those, what, 1.6 billion 'Muzzies', as you call them, were just running around killing everything they see, there wouldn't BE 1.6 billion of them around, they'dve killed each other off centuries ago. When you get down to sheer numbers, it's about 1/100th of a percent that's the problem, Painting them all with the same brush just makes it easier to sell the US military more helicopters, guns, ammo, drones, and cruise missiles because the American public will stand still for the expense. It's almost like saying all Americans are addicted to and only eat Big Macs and fries all day, every day. Or that we all live and die with the exploits of Snookie and/or the Kardashians. Or that the US is still the Wild Wild West, and if you go further west than St Louis, you're in immenent danger of being scalped by the Cheyennes, who wait behind every bush and rock waiting for the whites to send a wagon train through with a fresh supply of blondes.
Back in the Bad Old Days of the Soviet Union, our enemy wasn't the average Ivan on the streets, it was about 3,000 high level Party members collectively refered to as 'the nomenklatura', 'the List' in English. These are the guys that the US government used to rile up the American people with claims that 'the Russians hate us for our freedom' and it would take a monumental struggle to put them down 'like the mad dogs they are'. When Nikita was getting ignored and shouted down at a conference table, he pulled off his shoe, hammered it on the table to get everybody's attention while screaming 'We'll bury you!' What the American people weren't told was, the phrase 'we'll bury you' was Russian slang for 'we'll leave you so far behind that it'll look like you've been buried'. Yeah, it loses something in the translation, and it was spun hard enough to justify the Vietnam war.
NeoCon theory, as espoused by the prophet Leo Strauss, says that a people must be united, with little if any individuality, or the culture will collapse from the 'corruption of the people'. Another part of his teachings was the theory of myth as culture builder. A culture must believe its myths to remain coherent, and it's the job of the leadership to create and manage them. The big myth doesn't have to have anything remotely resembling the facts, it just has to be sellable, and in the 70's, it was 'Moscow is running every terrorist network on the planet!' By having an ultimate enemy that popular 'wisdom' says is bent on destroying us all, the myth binds us together.
The biggest problem with the end of the Cold War is, it deprived the NeoCons with a ready-made enemy. So we found one in the radical Jihadists. The problem, of course, is the same one we had in Vietnam. These guys don't exactly have a uniform, so identifying them can be a bit of a bitch, but hey, if we call them all 'enemy combatants', scoop up every goat herder in the current conflict zones, pack them off to places like Camp XRay til we can sort them out, at least we can point at it and say 'Hey, we're doing something, ain't we?'
I do searches all the time. On Google. Not so much on my PC.
Um, quick question for you. Where did the expression 'enemy combatant' come from then? It was a legal fig leaf used by the Old Regime to justify putting anybody and everybody they decided they didn't like into Camp X-Ray or shipped off to some former Soviet republic for torture. You see, soldiers in uniform are covered by the Geneva Convention as are guerillas to a limited extent, irregardless of whether or not the enemy has signed it. Nonsignatories are accorded extremely limited rights under the GC, but if the capturing power is a signatory, they still have to play nice. Just not as nice as they would have to if both parties were signatories. 'Enemy combatant' is just an end run around the GC. Change the language, change the spin, you change the perception of the people using that language.
Freedom fries, anyone?
The main problems would be, identifying the right people to target. Obviously, if you whack a nobody, it won't impair the organisation much at all. Case in point, Nicaragua's Sandinistas. The leadership was targetted and pretty much decimated, but the guys behind the scenes, the managers and handlers, didn't get hit, and the Sandinistas stayed in business almost another two decades.
My big problems with this new 'Nintendo warfare' are, what happens if the guidence system of the drone gets hit and it goes offcourse and nails the wrong target? Collateral damage means you fucked up someplace. Oops doesn't cut it. The bandwidth on the cameras of a drone probably aren't the greatest, and if the indigs can jam the signal, the drone is flying blind. In a combat situation, that's unacceptable.
Yeah, I know, nobody's reported anything like that yet. But there's no way they would if it does happen. You don't want to encourage the enemy. A spark gap transmitter could probably jam the control signals just like a radar jammer does at a speed trap, and sitting 12,000 miles away, there's not a damned thing the drone operator can do about it.
I also have a problem in that the readouts don't show the reality of what's going on. WW2 bomber pilots and crews never thought much about what was happening on the ground when they dropped their sticks. To them, it just wasn't real. They never saw the end results up close and personal. Drone warfare is the same thing at the next level, moving even closer to feeling like a video game. And let's not forget that it takes boots on the ground to win the hearts and minds. No indig is going to want to be friends with a drone.
And yet politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats were allowed to reproduce. You'd think they'd be the first ones chopped at the genetic block.
Yeah, Ooog was cool. He also helped invent dirt.
I told him we shoulda patented it. It was a great idea...
Even 100 billion over 5 or 10 years really isn't that much. Vietnam was costing 4 billion a year and more at the peak. The cost of our 3 current wars would turn your hair white.
The original order for Shuttle was what, 8? They cut the funding down to 4 and a pair for testing, then made a big noise about Enterprise as a test bed. It never flew. 8 shuttles could have flown about every 10 weeks with plenty of time to inspect and repair the birds between flights. Just double up on the inspection/repair crews and do all the preliminaries away from the Cape, like they did. The 'Plan A' profile got Proxmired in favor of the ISS, in its weirdassed orbit (to placate the Russians) when the Congresscritters asked themselves 'WFT do we need two space stations for?' This caused a redesign of Shuttle to specifically service that weirdassed orbit. Military satellites tend to be rather small, on the order of 500 kilos each. It's cheaper to hang one in orbit using a standard rocket, and you don't have to wait for a scheduled Shuttle launch if you need a bird in orbit now, plus the time to reshift the originally scheduled load. So, military payloads were pretty much out except for non-time critical experiments.
And all ISS was for was a political tool so the US could say 'See? We do work and play well with others!' With the design constantly changing on all sides, experiments delayed or deleted from the program, is there any wonder ISS is consistently way the hell over budget and way the hell underequiped to do much of anything?
Apollo was actually 'Plan B". The original intention was to build a construction shack/space station in orbit, build a Lunar excursion vehicle there, and fly it to the Moon and back a few times. In the long run, it would have been cheaper, but it would have taken longer. By designing a single stack that threw away 99% to get that 1% to the Moon's surface and back, they saved time.
One of the Shuttle's proposed mission profiles was to cart materials to orbit in order to build that construction shack/lumar excursion vehicle to return to the Moon for long term missions.
OK, so our technology has peaked out.
Didn't I see you standing there when Ooog invented the wheel? And wasn't it you that said "What good is this 'wheel' thing you 'invented' that will cause the gods to hate us? Why can't you be reasonable and have your wife pack all your shit on her back like everybody else does?'
'Reasonable' people refuse to rock the boat. 'Reasonable' people embrace and defend the status quo. Status quo means 'freeze in place', nothing moves. Not even you. So, go ahead and stand in place, don't move. The unreasonable among us are moving on.
Space travel at this stage of the game is engineering. We're still developing the engineering to do it cheaper and better. Now, the next little bit is going to take some thinking, so if you wanna take a nap first, that's okay, this comment will still be here when you wake up.
You want clean air, water, land, whatever, there are exactly two and only two options to get it. Option 1 is come up with a way to destroy every piece of technology everywhere on the planet, down to and including the ability to make fire, and turn the entirety of the human species back into a hunter-gatherer tribal society. Downside of this is, the planet cannot support 7 billion people at the stage of hunter-gatherers. It'd be closer to half a million, maybe a million, spread all over the globe. High level apex predators need large areas to hunt in, they can't be supported in small areas. This means there's not a lot of them. And as the current champion apex predator, we're dangerously overextended without our technology.
Option 2 is move all havey industry like metal refining and dangerous chemical processes into orbit and beyond. Get it out of the atmosphere where its poluting byproducts can be blown away by the solar wind. Bonus is, the raw materials are readily at hand, just need a nudge to put them in orbit around Earth where they can be harvested. Again, this is an engineering problem, and like all engineering problems, you solve it by throwing engineers at it.
Go ahead, be 'reasonable'. Fight for the status quo. Fight for decreasing resources increasingly more inaccessible. Fight to keep funnelling what wealth is left into the pockets of the 1%. Just don't complain when us unreasonable blokes run you over on our way to the future.
Franco's army was well-funded and well-equiped by Germany and Italy. The POUM militias weren't, and got stomped on as a result.
That doesn't mean Franco's troops had a picnic, cause they didn't. The POUM lost, but their opponents knew they'd been in a fight.