Okay, a lot of the electorate is uninformed, but even most of the uniformed realize that Obama was an error. No need to rub it in. YOU probably voted for Bush Jr. Oops. Happens to the best of us
I voted for GWB and BHO. Want me to tell you why? Four words: Gore, Kerry, McCain, and Romney. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and pick the least disgusting stall in the public restroom. Stall A has urine on the seat, Stall B has fecal matter, which are you going to use?
At no point has survival as a nation been under threat.
I guess you're too young to remember the Cold War. This nation was less than 60 minutes away from ceasing to exist from roughly the late 1960s until the fall of the Soviet Union. From 1949 to the late 60s we weren't threatened with total destruction, but the Soviets still had the ability to do enormous damage. It wasn't until the late 60s when they caught up and surpassed the US in the ICBM race that they really had the ability to effectively destroy the United States. They retained that ability until the fall of the Soviet Union. Heck, the Russians still have it, though the geopolitical situation is different these days.
Point being, it was a different mentality. The policymakers who were in office on 9/11 came of age during the Cold War and responded to that threat accordingly. They didn't see an isolated terrorist attack on 9/11. They saw an existential threat and responded accordingly. Part of this reaction was scenario fulfillment (Google it if you're not familiar with the term), the other part was pure panic and fear. Days of Fire has an interesting takeaway from one of the many interviews the author did with George W. Bush, something about Bush watching the towers come down and thinking to himself that he just watched more Americans die in a single moment than any President since Lincoln.
You're free to criticize the choices that American policymakers have made over the years, but you'd do well to remember that you've got the benefit of 20/20 hindsight while doing so.
The law allowing the use of the census data was passed in 1942 and repealed in 1947.
I said that the usage of the data wasn't condoned by the laws in force at the time the data was collected. Detailed information provided during the census is supposed to remain completely secret until 70 years have passed from collection. There is no law currently in place that allows exemptions from this confidentiality requirement, nor was there on 7 December 1941. Passing such a law after the data has been collected is a bit of bad faith, wouldn't you say?
I have the same name as a well-known GOPper nutcase so the bureaucrats that run that part of the government that are typically Democrat did not want to give me permission to travel
I'm calling BS on this. I'm holding my DS-82 in my hands right now, just gotta get the photo done before I send it off for renewal. You're compelled to release your SSN when applying for a passport, in part to prevent such incorrect identification. Your passport was probably held up for bureaucratic reasons, I highly doubt there was a deliberate attempt to do you harm.
In my case I don't even have any immediate travel plans, but mine expires in March and I'd like to have it current just in case something comes up. Ya never know.:)
The counter argument is that governments have tended to take information they are given and when the right person is in power, or the right sentiment strikes the public, those programs are expanded and distorted beyond their original intent.
You don't even have to look at surveillance programs to prove this point. My favorite example? The US Census was used to assist in the rounding up of Japanese-Americans for internment. It was also given to General Sherman during the Civil War and helped his Army identify productive areas of the South to destroy during the March to the Sea. Neither usage was condoned by the laws in force at the time the data was collected. The usage to track down Japanese-Americans wasn't even legal at the time and remained secret for decades after the war.
I get my census form and they get one piece of information: X number of people live here. Race? "Other: American"
The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.
Nation-state acts to further its own perceived self-interests. News at eleven!
Oh, I'm sorry, did you want more than a sarcastic one liner? Geopolitics make for strange bedfellows. Democratic Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany during WW2. That doesn't make them Nazis. My country has done some very regrettable things throughout the course of history, some of which were understandable in the context of the times (particularly the Cold War, something few people around here can truly relate to), some of which weren't. Either way, we didn't do anything every other nation-state hasn't done and continues to do.
Realpolitik is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? When you're fighting for national survival you're going to side with the despot that will ally with you over the democracy that won't.
Erwin Rommel's Africa Korps begs to differ. Germany couldn't even keep the supply lanes open in the Mediterranean, an enclosed sea where they had (in 1941-early 1942) air superiority. One could credibly argue that Africa was a sideshow and a waste of resources, but once they committed to that theater they were as dependent on the sea as the Allies were.
Before the Battle of the Atlantic turned, the Germans came close to denying the sea to the Western allies.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not naval warfare.:)
Whether it would have turned with a slightly different scenario, with slightly different technologies available, is a matter of speculation.
It wouldn't have. The disparity in GDP and manpower was too great for the Axis to overcome. Once the United States was fully involved it was game over for Germany. The USA + USSR + UK had 4.5 times the GDP and 5 times the population of Germany. That's without counting the contributions of the rest of the British Commonwealth. Germany was screwed, short of the Allies doing something monumentally stupid. Thankfully Hitler had the monopoly on major strategic blunders, the mistakes that the Western Allies made (Stalin is another matter entirely) pale in comparison, and we had the resources to recover from our screw ups.
Sea denial would have been a very effective strategy for the Germans.
Could have, would have, should have. The basic problem is that Germany has a limited amount of production. Every U-Boat that you commission takes resources away from the Eastern Front, which was Hitler's primary objective from day one. Everything else was a sideshow towards that ultimate objective. One further has to assume that more U-Boats would have closed the Atlantic for a meaningful amount of time, which is a debatable proposition. Remember that the United States never fully mobilized and committed the bulk of our front line naval forces to the Pacific Theater. I would submit that Germany was screwed by her very decision to simultaneously take on the USSR + USA, regardless of how many U-Boats she commissioned.
Hitler's smartest move would have been to publicly condemn Pearl Harbor as a dastardly deed and attempt to play the American isolationist community against Roosevelt. Could FDR have procured a Declaration of War against Germany in the months following Pearl Harbor without Hitler's cooperation? Doubtful. We were already at war with them for all intents and purposes, and "Germany First" was the policy of the FDR Administration, but absent a formal state of war FDR would have remained limited to lend-lease and naval warfare. He certainly wouldn't have been able to send millions of GIs to Europe in time to invade Italy in 1943 or France in 1944.
OTOH US subs sank half of the total Japanese tonnage sunk in WWII
Most of which was merchant shipping. Which isn't to diminish the role of the submarine force by any means, it's just that you can't CONTROL an ocean with submarines. You can DENY it to your enemy, if you've got enough subs and he lacks proficiency at anti-submarine warfare, but you can't CONTROL it. The United States is in the business of CONTROLLING the oceans, both to project power aboard and keep the shipping lanes open. The Chinese seek CVs too, for the second reason (securing their trade and energy supplies) and perhaps even the first depending on what kind of foreign policy they seek in the coming decades.
It's different when both run on nukes (though admittedly the sub is somewhat limited by higher noise at higher speed).
That's the limitation with subs, even nuclear ones. They're best equipped to operate as ambush predators. They can't keep up with a fast moving surface task force. Well, they can, but they'll be running deaf and blind, which is a recipe for getting killed during a shooting war. The newer generation nuclear subs are quieter at speed than the older ones, but physics dictates that passive sonar still loses usefulness at higher speeds due to flow noise, regardless of how quiet your sub is. No passive sonar means you're blind and defenseless. If a sub can't be in position ahead of time it's not much of a threat to a CVBG. Obtaining such position on the open ocean is a difficult proposition at best. Choke points and the littorals are another matter entirely of course, though CVBGs can generally choose when they transit such areas and do so in force.
In any case, the old debate of SEA CONTROL vs. SEA DENIAL is still very much alive. Subs can only do the latter. Surface ships can do both. Nations that depend on overseas trade need the former. Historically attempts at the latter have failed. Has anyone ever won a war thanks to a sea denial strategy?
the F22 and F35 is what kills off the opposing pilots in enemy fighters to give the bombers unopposed air space
That's not what the F35 was billed as. It's capable of the air superiority mission, but not nearly as so as the F-22. The F-35 was billed as a replacement for the F-16 (and the F-22 for the F-15C) but it has a long way to go before that can credibly be said to have happened.
almost 90% of them were lost at sea. for the US and the Germans
Umm, the US didn't lose nearly that many submarines, though it is true that that submarine force had the highest casualty rate out of any American service. The Germans lost a ton of U-Boats, at least 75% of them as I recall. 90% seems overstated though, even for them.
ships were regularly damaged and sunk on both sides despite what were state of the art defences at the time.
State of the art is debatable. No offense to my friends in Britain, but the US Navy was way ahead of the Royal Navy in anti-war warfare at the time. US ships could engage more aerial targets simultaneously than the Type 42s deployed by the British, and this was before AEGIS. Of course, this was a purposeful decision made as a consequence of the Cold War, wherein the Royal Navy was primarily intended to operate as an ASW force to keep the Atlantic sea lanes open.
If the UK had retained a real aircraft carrier with a real airborne early warning platform (the E-2 Hawkeye) they would likely have retaken the Falklands without losing a single ship. Put a US Navy CVBG of the 1980s in place of the British Task Force and the whole affair becomes rather one-sided.
Many large drones are capable of aerial refueling. They can circle the globe without landing.
Even if that's true (and it's not, at least yet) how long does it take to fly around the globe vs. taking off from a nearby airfield or CV? What does the flight time do to your sortie rate? How long do the troops on the ground who need CAS have to wait for it to arrive?
Sure anti-ship missiles such as the Exocet racked up an impressive tally in the Falklands War, but they didn't sink the carriers.
The Exocet (and its American cousin the Harpoon) is a poor choice to take on a carrier. They were originally designed to engage small patrol craft, though they proved fairly effective at taking on larger combatants (the Type 42s the UK lost in the South Atlantic) Against a 100,000 ton carrier though? Or even one of the smaller British carriers sent to the South Atlantic? They'll do damage, but they can't be counted on to get a mission kill (i.e., rendering the carrier unable to engage in flight operations) much less actually sink such a target.
The Russians built supersonic heavyweight missiles with three to four times the explosive power as Exocet and Harpoon for the purpose of taking on aircraft carriers. A US Admiral (I think the Commander of Pacific Command?) recently came out and lamented the fact that the US isn't trying to develop similar missiles for the much ballyhooed "pivot" to Asia. Exocet and Harpoon remain effective in their original roles of taking out patrol craft/small missile boats, but they're outdated if you need to engage a modern warship (never mind a carrier) with modern air defenses.
There are two kinds of naval vessels: submarines... and targets.
Submarines only claimed two of the five fleet carriers the United States lost during WW2, and one of those (USS Yorktown at Midway) was crippled and dead in the water at the time she was torpedoed. USS Wasp was the only carrier outright sunk by a submarine, owing to a combination of bad luck (she caught at flight quarters with her fuel systems in use) and design compromises made to keep her tonnage within the limits of the Washington Naval Treaty. Wasp should never have been deployed to the Pacific in the first place, she just wasn't built with that kind of threat environment in mind, but the Navy didn't have a whole lot of choice given the attrition of the fleet engagements in 1942.
Modern submarines are more effective of course, but a fast moving CV is still a tough target for them.
if one gets shot down, no expensive pilot lost and no embarrassing flag-draped coffins
There's going to be embarrassing flag-draped coffins regardless. Drones can't HOLD ground any better than manned aircraft. Boots on the ground == flag-draped coffins.
It's the same way with aircraft carriers, which are steadily becoming welfare for defense contractors and an easy target for ballistic anti-ship missiles, super cavitating torpedos, etc.
The demise of the CV is overstated. They've still got compelling arguments in their favor, defense systems continue to evolve, and neither of the offensive weapons you mention have successfully engaged a warship of any kind on the high seas. A full thesis on modern naval warfare is beyond the scope of a/. comment, suffice it to say a CVBG is a very tough nut to crack.
DoD has learned nothing from conflicts we've fought, have they? Why has the B-52 seen more action than the B-1 or B-2? How about the A-10? Or drones for that matter. These successful platforms have a few things in common: They're (relatively) cheap, easy to maintain, and they have a high mission capable rate contrasted with their expensive big brothers.
There's a place for the B-2, the F-22, and even the F-35, but what does DoD have in the works to replace the reliable workhorses of the air fleet? Nothing. Not a damned thing. They've placed all their eggs in the F-35 basket, even as costs have ballooned and promised milestones/deadlines have come and gone. Maybe the naysayers (yours truly included) will be proven wrong and the F-35 will go on to be as successful as the F-16. Here's hoping. Even in that optimistic scenario they've still got a huge hole to plug with the pending retirement of platforms like the A-10 and the continued attrition of the B-52 fleet.
Obama's personality was only part of the story, a small part at that IMHO. His candidacy was the perfect storm of favorable timing (the country was sick of the GOP), being more in tune with his party's base than the frontrunner (Hillary), and not having much of a record that anyone could pick at. BHO running in 2000 or 2004 would have ended in a landslide for the GOP. As it was he really should have run up a higher margin against McCain, given the favorable climate and McCain's foolish mistakes (Exhibit A: His instability during the economic meltdown, Exhibit B: Sarah Palin).
As far as this.....
My point was that Obama managed to energize a lot of voters in 2008 that had not been even interested in politics (or probably even voting) up to that point
And where are all those people now? Where were they in 2010? Or 2012? Where will they be in 2014? I would submit that BHO is a bad example. The uniqueness of his candidacy brought out a lot of first time voters, a good chunk of whom never voted again. That's not a formula to build a viable third party.
Politics is timing, first and foremost. If McCain had beaten Bush in 2000 he would have gone on to be President. Ditto Hillary in 2008. 2004 and 2012 may have been up for grabs, but the opposition parties in each instance managed to nominate their least electable candidate, and the hurdle of incumbency proved to be too much to overcome.
Frankly I'm not sure a third party will emerge, because I don't think the Democrats and Republicans are so tone deaf as to allow a third party to steal enough of their ideas to build a winning coalition. There is one issue where it could presumably happen: foreign policy. Polling shows a majority of the American people favor a non-interventionist approach that isn't represented in the mainstream of either major political party. You'll need a few other issues to attach to this if you're going to build a winning coalition though. First you need to identify these issues, then you need to ensure that they can't be co-opted by the Democrats or Republicans. That's the bigger problem. Even for the issue I identified, you may well see non-interventionism co-opted by the GOP in a decade or so, particularly as the remaining Elder Statesman who came of age during the Cold War retire.
If a 3rd party managed to get a candidate with the charisma, connections, and rhetorical skills of Obama in 2008, it certainly could be possible for a party shift to occur like that which destroyed the Whigs 150 years ago.
The GOP didn't destroy the Whigs by electing Abe Lincoln as POTUS. They destroyed the Whigs by slowly and methodically building a party from the bottom up. By the time Lincoln got to Washington he already had GOP Congressmen and Senators to work with. There were already GOP Assemblyman, State Senators, Mayors, Town Councilmen, Justices at all levels of the judiciary, etc.
It's fashionable these days for third parties to try and run for POTUS but that's a fools errand if they can't be bothered to compete for and win at the lower levels first.
Bitcoin’s worldwide computational output is currently nearing 200 exaflops—200,000 petaflops—or 800 times the combined capacity of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
Let's translate that into kilowatt hours and contemplate the wisdom of throwing a tangible resource (energy) into this enterprise, which exists at the sufferance of Planet Earth's nation-states. Please don't play the "Iceland! Hydroelectricity!" card either, because electricity is still a tangible resource even when it has low/zero carbon footprint, a resource that could be allocated to more productive pursuits.
Also I'd think that the Korean War, economic sanctions, etc., have done more harm to US - NK relations than these visitors ever will.
You're right. After all, we started a war of aggression, attempting to unify the country at gunpoint. Once we were defeated by the free and brave North Korean people we spent the next half century engaging in terrorist attacks against them. We even sent commandos across the border in an attempt to assassinate their President once upon a time. Heck, just a few years ago a United States Navy Submarine torpedoed and sank a North Korean ship on the high seas, killing dozens of innocent North Korean sailors just to make a political point. That's not the only hostile action on the high seas, one time we captured a North Korean ship in international waters, then held the crew hostage and tortured them for nearly a year before releasing them.
The history of American aggression towards North Korea is truly astonishing. Thank you Anonymous Coward for bravely stating the truth, which shall set us all free!
Japan will wage another massive war against a reunified Korea rather than see Korea become the other dominant force in the area (second to China). Japan is an incredibly racist and fascist State. It pretends that, despite the rise of China, Japan is still 'top dog'. It will NOT allow its old slave colony of Korea to gain greater power than Japan itself, not least for fear that Korea will eventually seek revenge for the deplorable history of crimes against the people of Korea by the Japanese.
Japan has far more to worry about from the PRC than Korea, unified or otherwise.
Population of Japan: 127.6 million
Population of South Korea: 50 million
Population of North Korea: 24.7 million
A unified Korea starts off with less human capital than Japan. That's without accounting for the generations long project of bringing North Korea out of the stone age. It cost trillions of dollars and took more than a generation to bring East Germany up to West Germany's standard of living. North Korea starts out from a much worse state than East Germany. East Germany had a relatively educated population, a decent industrial base, and preexisting trade relationships. North Korea has none of those.
Bottom line, Korea isn't going to overtake Japan in any meaningful measure of power (hard or soft) within the 21st Century, unification or not. Japan has a fairly deplorable history in Korea that they still haven't owned up to, but their actions in China during WW2 were arguably worse, and China actually has the soft and hard power to give Japan a run for her money. Of course, Japan + the United States + Australia + the Philippines + New Zealand + Korea is a different story. Beijing will be contained the same way the USSR was contained, by an alliance of like minded Democratic counties.
Remember how when WW2 began, Russia was an aggressor (and partner of Nazi Germany in the invasion of Poland) and NOT a victim.
The Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, and Lithuanians are sympathetic to this argument. Of course, you've vastly oversimplified matters. Hitler had designs on the Soviet Union before he ever came to power (read Mein Kampf) and one could easily argue that Stalin's ruthlessness towards his small neighbors bought needed strategic depth that saved Moscow in 1941. Germany was coming regardless of Stalin's treatment of his smaller neighbors.
The bigger lost opportunity was the chance the Western Powers had to enlist Stalin in a containment alliance directed against Germany, France tried to make this happen, but the UK was ambivalent about dealing with Stalin for obvious reasons. Whatever slim chance existed evaporated after Munich, when Stalin concluded that the West lacked the backbone to stand up to Germany. Once the balloon went up Eastern Europe was screwed regardless of what happened on the battlefield. The UK couldn't impose its will on the USSR, France was a spent force, and the United States wasn't going to absorb another million battlefield casualties for the sake of Poland and the Baltic States.
The DPRKs atrocities are in the past, they're still doing massive horrible repression, but they've purged all the people they want to purge so the sense of urgency is gone.
You have an interesting definition of "past", given that they JUST purged some poor bastard less than a month ago, continue to hold a US Citizen without charges (though that dumbass voluntarily went there, so I have little sympathy for him, what kind of idiot willingly goes to North Korea?), and have anywhere from 1% to 5% of their population locked away in gulags for political crimes.
I think there's a serious question of where to go from here.
Not really. It will collapse sooner or later, with some subtle help from the South, Japan, the US, and perhaps even China as they tire of the antics of their client state. Since we're talking about Adolf, might as well quote him: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down" (Double irony points: He was referring to another Stalinist state with that quote.)
We need to decouple health care and employers by eliminating the tax break that employers get.
Actually it's not a tax break that employers get. It's a tax break that employees get. The monies that your employer pays for health insurance are a direct benefit to you but they're not taxed as regular income. Additionally, any contribution that you must make towards the premium comes from pre-tax dollars. Go out and buy an individual policy and you'll be compelled to pay for it with post-tax dollars, meaning it effectively costs more than group coverage even if the policies are the same price on paper.
Personally, I would go the other way, make individual policies tax deductible rather than taxing group policies. This seems more fair to me -- why should people pay taxes on something as essential as healthcare -- and it's actually politically possible. Yanking away the tax benefit of group policies would add thousands of dollars to the taxable income of countless millions of Americans, with predictable consequences at the ballot box for any politician that tried to make it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, a lot of the electorate is uninformed, but even most of the uniformed realize that Obama was an error. No need to rub it in. YOU probably voted for Bush Jr. Oops. Happens to the best of us
I voted for GWB and BHO. Want me to tell you why? Four words: Gore, Kerry, McCain, and Romney. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and pick the least disgusting stall in the public restroom. Stall A has urine on the seat, Stall B has fecal matter, which are you going to use?
At no point has survival as a nation been under threat.
I guess you're too young to remember the Cold War. This nation was less than 60 minutes away from ceasing to exist from roughly the late 1960s until the fall of the Soviet Union. From 1949 to the late 60s we weren't threatened with total destruction, but the Soviets still had the ability to do enormous damage. It wasn't until the late 60s when they caught up and surpassed the US in the ICBM race that they really had the ability to effectively destroy the United States. They retained that ability until the fall of the Soviet Union. Heck, the Russians still have it, though the geopolitical situation is different these days.
Point being, it was a different mentality. The policymakers who were in office on 9/11 came of age during the Cold War and responded to that threat accordingly. They didn't see an isolated terrorist attack on 9/11. They saw an existential threat and responded accordingly. Part of this reaction was scenario fulfillment (Google it if you're not familiar with the term), the other part was pure panic and fear. Days of Fire has an interesting takeaway from one of the many interviews the author did with George W. Bush, something about Bush watching the towers come down and thinking to himself that he just watched more Americans die in a single moment than any President since Lincoln.
You're free to criticize the choices that American policymakers have made over the years, but you'd do well to remember that you've got the benefit of 20/20 hindsight while doing so.
The law allowing the use of the census data was passed in 1942 and repealed in 1947.
I said that the usage of the data wasn't condoned by the laws in force at the time the data was collected. Detailed information provided during the census is supposed to remain completely secret until 70 years have passed from collection. There is no law currently in place that allows exemptions from this confidentiality requirement, nor was there on 7 December 1941. Passing such a law after the data has been collected is a bit of bad faith, wouldn't you say?
I have the same name as a well-known GOPper nutcase so the bureaucrats that run that part of the government that are typically Democrat did not want to give me permission to travel
I'm calling BS on this. I'm holding my DS-82 in my hands right now, just gotta get the photo done before I send it off for renewal. You're compelled to release your SSN when applying for a passport, in part to prevent such incorrect identification. Your passport was probably held up for bureaucratic reasons, I highly doubt there was a deliberate attempt to do you harm.
In my case I don't even have any immediate travel plans, but mine expires in March and I'd like to have it current just in case something comes up. Ya never know. :)
The counter argument is that governments have tended to take information they are given and when the right person is in power, or the right sentiment strikes the public, those programs are expanded and distorted beyond their original intent.
You don't even have to look at surveillance programs to prove this point. My favorite example? The US Census was used to assist in the rounding up of Japanese-Americans for internment. It was also given to General Sherman during the Civil War and helped his Army identify productive areas of the South to destroy during the March to the Sea. Neither usage was condoned by the laws in force at the time the data was collected. The usage to track down Japanese-Americans wasn't even legal at the time and remained secret for decades after the war.
I get my census form and they get one piece of information: X number of people live here. Race? "Other: American"
The U.S. has a long history of funding terrorists, supporting coups, and undermining democracies.
Nation-state acts to further its own perceived self-interests. News at eleven!
Oh, I'm sorry, did you want more than a sarcastic one liner? Geopolitics make for strange bedfellows. Democratic Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany during WW2. That doesn't make them Nazis. My country has done some very regrettable things throughout the course of history, some of which were understandable in the context of the times (particularly the Cold War, something few people around here can truly relate to), some of which weren't. Either way, we didn't do anything every other nation-state hasn't done and continues to do.
Realpolitik is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? When you're fighting for national survival you're going to side with the despot that will ally with you over the democracy that won't.
The Germans depended on it very little
Erwin Rommel's Africa Korps begs to differ. Germany couldn't even keep the supply lanes open in the Mediterranean, an enclosed sea where they had (in 1941-early 1942) air superiority. One could credibly argue that Africa was a sideshow and a waste of resources, but once they committed to that theater they were as dependent on the sea as the Allies were.
Before the Battle of the Atlantic turned, the Germans came close to denying the sea to the Western allies.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not naval warfare. :)
Whether it would have turned with a slightly different scenario, with slightly different technologies available, is a matter of speculation.
It wouldn't have. The disparity in GDP and manpower was too great for the Axis to overcome. Once the United States was fully involved it was game over for Germany. The USA + USSR + UK had 4.5 times the GDP and 5 times the population of Germany. That's without counting the contributions of the rest of the British Commonwealth. Germany was screwed, short of the Allies doing something monumentally stupid. Thankfully Hitler had the monopoly on major strategic blunders, the mistakes that the Western Allies made (Stalin is another matter entirely) pale in comparison, and we had the resources to recover from our screw ups.
Sea denial would have been a very effective strategy for the Germans.
Could have, would have, should have. The basic problem is that Germany has a limited amount of production. Every U-Boat that you commission takes resources away from the Eastern Front, which was Hitler's primary objective from day one. Everything else was a sideshow towards that ultimate objective. One further has to assume that more U-Boats would have closed the Atlantic for a meaningful amount of time, which is a debatable proposition. Remember that the United States never fully mobilized and committed the bulk of our front line naval forces to the Pacific Theater. I would submit that Germany was screwed by her very decision to simultaneously take on the USSR + USA, regardless of how many U-Boats she commissioned.
Hitler's smartest move would have been to publicly condemn Pearl Harbor as a dastardly deed and attempt to play the American isolationist community against Roosevelt. Could FDR have procured a Declaration of War against Germany in the months following Pearl Harbor without Hitler's cooperation? Doubtful. We were already at war with them for all intents and purposes, and "Germany First" was the policy of the FDR Administration, but absent a formal state of war FDR would have remained limited to lend-lease and naval warfare. He certainly wouldn't have been able to send millions of GIs to Europe in time to invade Italy in 1943 or France in 1944.
OTOH US subs sank half of the total Japanese tonnage sunk in WWII
Most of which was merchant shipping. Which isn't to diminish the role of the submarine force by any means, it's just that you can't CONTROL an ocean with submarines. You can DENY it to your enemy, if you've got enough subs and he lacks proficiency at anti-submarine warfare, but you can't CONTROL it. The United States is in the business of CONTROLLING the oceans, both to project power aboard and keep the shipping lanes open. The Chinese seek CVs too, for the second reason (securing their trade and energy supplies) and perhaps even the first depending on what kind of foreign policy they seek in the coming decades.
It's different when both run on nukes (though admittedly the sub is somewhat limited by higher noise at higher speed).
That's the limitation with subs, even nuclear ones. They're best equipped to operate as ambush predators. They can't keep up with a fast moving surface task force. Well, they can, but they'll be running deaf and blind, which is a recipe for getting killed during a shooting war. The newer generation nuclear subs are quieter at speed than the older ones, but physics dictates that passive sonar still loses usefulness at higher speeds due to flow noise, regardless of how quiet your sub is. No passive sonar means you're blind and defenseless. If a sub can't be in position ahead of time it's not much of a threat to a CVBG. Obtaining such position on the open ocean is a difficult proposition at best. Choke points and the littorals are another matter entirely of course, though CVBGs can generally choose when they transit such areas and do so in force.
In any case, the old debate of SEA CONTROL vs. SEA DENIAL is still very much alive. Subs can only do the latter. Surface ships can do both. Nations that depend on overseas trade need the former. Historically attempts at the latter have failed. Has anyone ever won a war thanks to a sea denial strategy?
B1, B2, B52 rely on air superiority
???
the F22 and F35 is what kills off the opposing pilots in enemy fighters to give the bombers unopposed air space
That's not what the F35 was billed as. It's capable of the air superiority mission, but not nearly as so as the F-22. The F-35 was billed as a replacement for the F-16 (and the F-22 for the F-15C) but it has a long way to go before that can credibly be said to have happened.
almost 90% of them were lost at sea. for the US and the Germans
Umm, the US didn't lose nearly that many submarines, though it is true that that submarine force had the highest casualty rate out of any American service. The Germans lost a ton of U-Boats, at least 75% of them as I recall. 90% seems overstated though, even for them.
ships were regularly damaged and sunk on both sides despite what were state of the art defences at the time.
State of the art is debatable. No offense to my friends in Britain, but the US Navy was way ahead of the Royal Navy in anti-war warfare at the time. US ships could engage more aerial targets simultaneously than the Type 42s deployed by the British, and this was before AEGIS. Of course, this was a purposeful decision made as a consequence of the Cold War, wherein the Royal Navy was primarily intended to operate as an ASW force to keep the Atlantic sea lanes open.
If the UK had retained a real aircraft carrier with a real airborne early warning platform (the E-2 Hawkeye) they would likely have retaken the Falklands without losing a single ship. Put a US Navy CVBG of the 1980s in place of the British Task Force and the whole affair becomes rather one-sided.
Many large drones are capable of aerial refueling. They can circle the globe without landing.
Even if that's true (and it's not, at least yet) how long does it take to fly around the globe vs. taking off from a nearby airfield or CV? What does the flight time do to your sortie rate? How long do the troops on the ground who need CAS have to wait for it to arrive?
Sure anti-ship missiles such as the Exocet racked up an impressive tally in the Falklands War, but they didn't sink the carriers.
The Exocet (and its American cousin the Harpoon) is a poor choice to take on a carrier. They were originally designed to engage small patrol craft, though they proved fairly effective at taking on larger combatants (the Type 42s the UK lost in the South Atlantic) Against a 100,000 ton carrier though? Or even one of the smaller British carriers sent to the South Atlantic? They'll do damage, but they can't be counted on to get a mission kill (i.e., rendering the carrier unable to engage in flight operations) much less actually sink such a target.
The Russians built supersonic heavyweight missiles with three to four times the explosive power as Exocet and Harpoon for the purpose of taking on aircraft carriers. A US Admiral (I think the Commander of Pacific Command?) recently came out and lamented the fact that the US isn't trying to develop similar missiles for the much ballyhooed "pivot" to Asia. Exocet and Harpoon remain effective in their original roles of taking out patrol craft/small missile boats, but they're outdated if you need to engage a modern warship (never mind a carrier) with modern air defenses.
There are two kinds of naval vessels: submarines ... and targets.
Submarines only claimed two of the five fleet carriers the United States lost during WW2, and one of those (USS Yorktown at Midway) was crippled and dead in the water at the time she was torpedoed. USS Wasp was the only carrier outright sunk by a submarine, owing to a combination of bad luck (she caught at flight quarters with her fuel systems in use) and design compromises made to keep her tonnage within the limits of the Washington Naval Treaty. Wasp should never have been deployed to the Pacific in the first place, she just wasn't built with that kind of threat environment in mind, but the Navy didn't have a whole lot of choice given the attrition of the fleet engagements in 1942.
Modern submarines are more effective of course, but a fast moving CV is still a tough target for them.
if one gets shot down, no expensive pilot lost and no embarrassing flag-draped coffins
There's going to be embarrassing flag-draped coffins regardless. Drones can't HOLD ground any better than manned aircraft. Boots on the ground == flag-draped coffins.
It's the same way with aircraft carriers, which are steadily becoming welfare for defense contractors and an easy target for ballistic anti-ship missiles, super cavitating torpedos, etc.
The demise of the CV is overstated. They've still got compelling arguments in their favor, defense systems continue to evolve, and neither of the offensive weapons you mention have successfully engaged a warship of any kind on the high seas. A full thesis on modern naval warfare is beyond the scope of a /. comment, suffice it to say a CVBG is a very tough nut to crack.
DoD has learned nothing from conflicts we've fought, have they? Why has the B-52 seen more action than the B-1 or B-2? How about the A-10? Or drones for that matter. These successful platforms have a few things in common: They're (relatively) cheap, easy to maintain, and they have a high mission capable rate contrasted with their expensive big brothers.
There's a place for the B-2, the F-22, and even the F-35, but what does DoD have in the works to replace the reliable workhorses of the air fleet? Nothing. Not a damned thing. They've placed all their eggs in the F-35 basket, even as costs have ballooned and promised milestones/deadlines have come and gone. Maybe the naysayers (yours truly included) will be proven wrong and the F-35 will go on to be as successful as the F-16. Here's hoping. Even in that optimistic scenario they've still got a huge hole to plug with the pending retirement of platforms like the A-10 and the continued attrition of the B-52 fleet.
Obama's personality was only part of the story, a small part at that IMHO. His candidacy was the perfect storm of favorable timing (the country was sick of the GOP), being more in tune with his party's base than the frontrunner (Hillary), and not having much of a record that anyone could pick at. BHO running in 2000 or 2004 would have ended in a landslide for the GOP. As it was he really should have run up a higher margin against McCain, given the favorable climate and McCain's foolish mistakes (Exhibit A: His instability during the economic meltdown, Exhibit B: Sarah Palin).
As far as this.....
My point was that Obama managed to energize a lot of voters in 2008 that had not been even interested in politics (or probably even voting) up to that point
And where are all those people now? Where were they in 2010? Or 2012? Where will they be in 2014? I would submit that BHO is a bad example. The uniqueness of his candidacy brought out a lot of first time voters, a good chunk of whom never voted again. That's not a formula to build a viable third party.
Politics is timing, first and foremost. If McCain had beaten Bush in 2000 he would have gone on to be President. Ditto Hillary in 2008. 2004 and 2012 may have been up for grabs, but the opposition parties in each instance managed to nominate their least electable candidate, and the hurdle of incumbency proved to be too much to overcome.
Frankly I'm not sure a third party will emerge, because I don't think the Democrats and Republicans are so tone deaf as to allow a third party to steal enough of their ideas to build a winning coalition. There is one issue where it could presumably happen: foreign policy. Polling shows a majority of the American people favor a non-interventionist approach that isn't represented in the mainstream of either major political party. You'll need a few other issues to attach to this if you're going to build a winning coalition though. First you need to identify these issues, then you need to ensure that they can't be co-opted by the Democrats or Republicans. That's the bigger problem. Even for the issue I identified, you may well see non-interventionism co-opted by the GOP in a decade or so, particularly as the remaining Elder Statesman who came of age during the Cold War retire.
If a 3rd party managed to get a candidate with the charisma, connections, and rhetorical skills of Obama in 2008, it certainly could be possible for a party shift to occur like that which destroyed the Whigs 150 years ago.
The GOP didn't destroy the Whigs by electing Abe Lincoln as POTUS. They destroyed the Whigs by slowly and methodically building a party from the bottom up. By the time Lincoln got to Washington he already had GOP Congressmen and Senators to work with. There were already GOP Assemblyman, State Senators, Mayors, Town Councilmen, Justices at all levels of the judiciary, etc.
It's fashionable these days for third parties to try and run for POTUS but that's a fools errand if they can't be bothered to compete for and win at the lower levels first.
One has to marvel at the absurdity:
Bitcoin’s worldwide computational output is currently nearing 200 exaflops—200,000 petaflops—or 800 times the combined capacity of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
Let's translate that into kilowatt hours and contemplate the wisdom of throwing a tangible resource (energy) into this enterprise, which exists at the sufferance of Planet Earth's nation-states. Please don't play the "Iceland! Hydroelectricity!" card either, because electricity is still a tangible resource even when it has low/zero carbon footprint, a resource that could be allocated to more productive pursuits.
Beria was a scum-sucking asshole too.... that doesn't mean he deserved a bullet to the temple simply to make Khrushchev's life easier.
Ever hear of the Korean War?
You mean the War of Imperialist American Aggression, right? ;)
Also I'd think that the Korean War, economic sanctions, etc., have done more harm to US - NK relations than these visitors ever will.
You're right. After all, we started a war of aggression, attempting to unify the country at gunpoint. Once we were defeated by the free and brave North Korean people we spent the next half century engaging in terrorist attacks against them. We even sent commandos across the border in an attempt to assassinate their President once upon a time. Heck, just a few years ago a United States Navy Submarine torpedoed and sank a North Korean ship on the high seas, killing dozens of innocent North Korean sailors just to make a political point. That's not the only hostile action on the high seas, one time we captured a North Korean ship in international waters, then held the crew hostage and tortured them for nearly a year before releasing them.
The history of American aggression towards North Korea is truly astonishing. Thank you Anonymous Coward for bravely stating the truth, which shall set us all free!
Japan will wage another massive war against a reunified Korea rather than see Korea become the other dominant force in the area (second to China). Japan is an incredibly racist and fascist State. It pretends that, despite the rise of China, Japan is still 'top dog'. It will NOT allow its old slave colony of Korea to gain greater power than Japan itself, not least for fear that Korea will eventually seek revenge for the deplorable history of crimes against the people of Korea by the Japanese.
Japan has far more to worry about from the PRC than Korea, unified or otherwise.
Population of Japan: 127.6 million
Population of South Korea: 50 million
Population of North Korea: 24.7 million
A unified Korea starts off with less human capital than Japan. That's without accounting for the generations long project of bringing North Korea out of the stone age. It cost trillions of dollars and took more than a generation to bring East Germany up to West Germany's standard of living. North Korea starts out from a much worse state than East Germany. East Germany had a relatively educated population, a decent industrial base, and preexisting trade relationships. North Korea has none of those.
Bottom line, Korea isn't going to overtake Japan in any meaningful measure of power (hard or soft) within the 21st Century, unification or not. Japan has a fairly deplorable history in Korea that they still haven't owned up to, but their actions in China during WW2 were arguably worse, and China actually has the soft and hard power to give Japan a run for her money. Of course, Japan + the United States + Australia + the Philippines + New Zealand + Korea is a different story. Beijing will be contained the same way the USSR was contained, by an alliance of like minded Democratic counties.
Remember how when WW2 began, Russia was an aggressor (and partner of Nazi Germany in the invasion of Poland) and NOT a victim.
The Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, and Lithuanians are sympathetic to this argument. Of course, you've vastly oversimplified matters. Hitler had designs on the Soviet Union before he ever came to power (read Mein Kampf) and one could easily argue that Stalin's ruthlessness towards his small neighbors bought needed strategic depth that saved Moscow in 1941. Germany was coming regardless of Stalin's treatment of his smaller neighbors.
The bigger lost opportunity was the chance the Western Powers had to enlist Stalin in a containment alliance directed against Germany, France tried to make this happen, but the UK was ambivalent about dealing with Stalin for obvious reasons. Whatever slim chance existed evaporated after Munich, when Stalin concluded that the West lacked the backbone to stand up to Germany. Once the balloon went up Eastern Europe was screwed regardless of what happened on the battlefield. The UK couldn't impose its will on the USSR, France was a spent force, and the United States wasn't going to absorb another million battlefield casualties for the sake of Poland and the Baltic States.
The DPRKs atrocities are in the past, they're still doing massive horrible repression, but they've purged all the people they want to purge so the sense of urgency is gone.
You have an interesting definition of "past", given that they JUST purged some poor bastard less than a month ago, continue to hold a US Citizen without charges (though that dumbass voluntarily went there, so I have little sympathy for him, what kind of idiot willingly goes to North Korea?), and have anywhere from 1% to 5% of their population locked away in gulags for political crimes.
I think there's a serious question of where to go from here.
Not really. It will collapse sooner or later, with some subtle help from the South, Japan, the US, and perhaps even China as they tire of the antics of their client state. Since we're talking about Adolf, might as well quote him: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down" (Double irony points: He was referring to another Stalinist state with that quote.)
We need to decouple health care and employers by eliminating the tax break that employers get.
Actually it's not a tax break that employers get. It's a tax break that employees get. The monies that your employer pays for health insurance are a direct benefit to you but they're not taxed as regular income. Additionally, any contribution that you must make towards the premium comes from pre-tax dollars. Go out and buy an individual policy and you'll be compelled to pay for it with post-tax dollars, meaning it effectively costs more than group coverage even if the policies are the same price on paper.
Personally, I would go the other way, make individual policies tax deductible rather than taxing group policies. This seems more fair to me -- why should people pay taxes on something as essential as healthcare -- and it's actually politically possible. Yanking away the tax benefit of group policies would add thousands of dollars to the taxable income of countless millions of Americans, with predictable consequences at the ballot box for any politician that tried to make it happen.