There are a whole lot of people out there who could sit in easy, lower-paying jobs, and still pay rent and put food on the table, who don't do that.
Sure, but the reason might be "Well, I have to work anyway so I might as well make as much as I can". With a guaranteed income the first part isn't true anymore, and some portion of the population is going to decide live will be better on permanent summer vacation. I'd probably do it myself.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives.
I don't see much evidence of this. There are a whole lot of people who don't make any effort to move up the employment ladder, for whom a job is just something you suffer through until quitting time. I suspect the Fins will find a sizable portion of the population will be perfectly happy to live on basic income, preferring to spend their time watching television and drinking. How sizable? It will take a few generations to know for sure.
They did have a partial failure in launch 4. The primary payload was still delivered, though.
If I had to choose which of the two was going to loft me into orbit, I'd choose the F-9. Five launches just isn't a long enough track record to have any idea what you're dealing with.
No there isn't. Falcon has had one failure and onepartial failure. By its fifth launch, the F-9 didn't have any failures at all. H2 needs eleven more successful launches before you say it's more reliable.
I always assumed that one would be full of single guys thinking landing a married woman would be easier than what they were experiencing on one of the other dating sites. And I wonder how many of that 4% were actually hookers.
It's an even bigger mistake to think a serious war of the kind which will warrant the use of BVR removal of enemy fighters is not going to be with a nuclear capable enemy, or an enemy with nuclear capable allies.
Of course it would. So what? That doesn't mean it will be a nuclear war.
And they are pretty much uniformly lowering their threshold for using nuclear weapons in a conflict. And if they start losing, even those thresholds are irrelevant.
Who? Who is "lowering their threshold for using nuclear weapons in a conflict"?
Given that ROE in modern engagements include visual identification, and will do so for the foreseeable future...
In the event of a shooting war it doesn't work like that at all. The US military is willing to take risks on peacekeeping-type missions, but if an actual, serious war breaks out the gloves will come off and anything that doesn't register as "friend" on IFF will be attacked from long range.
How many countries have a non-trivial presence? You could make the argument places like Iraq and A-stan aren't sovereign (though I think it would be hard in Iraq since we left when they asked), but even in Korea, Germany, and Japan... are they addicted to our money? Sure. Does it really affect sovereignty at this point? I'm skeptical.
And a biplane was not in any respect on par with the F4, but the F4 in the hands of a capable pilot would be a credible threat to a modern jet fighter in a dogfight.
That depends on the scenario. If the aircraft started right on top of each other... maybe. But if you time warped an F-4 from 1965 to the present and put it up against an F-22 at BVR, barring some kind of unrelated failure in the modern jet, the F-4 pilot has no chance .
The Serbs simply demonstrated that you could use radar equipment from the '70s to shoot down modern "stealth" aircraft.
Three points:
In Serbia the USAF wasn't mixing things up enough in terms of routes. I don't know if that's hubris or if they had some other reason. In retrospect, at least, it should not have been so easy to predict where that plane would be, and without that knowledge they wouldn't have been able to shoot it down.
The F-117 had a flaw the Serbs were able to exploit, which was that opening the bomb bay degraded the aircraft's stealth far more than it should have. That flaw has been fixed in later aircraft.
The stealth features of US aircraft have been getting better at a much faster clip than radars. The F-35's radar cross-section is something like 1/30th that of an F-117, and modern radars are far from being 30x better than that Serbian installation.
But that's not the way air combat works, for the most part. It wouldn't "lose miserably" to either the F-15 or F-16 in real combat, because the older planes would not be able to detect it until missiles were already closing in.
Yes, the F-35 isn't a great dogfighter. Also, it doesn't matter.
That kind of comparison is meaningless. Employing a Russian or Chinese engineer is far cheaper than employing an engineer in the US. Ditto with uniformed military. The only thing that really compares straight across is fungible raw materials. It may be the Chinese are getting more for their $216bn than the US is getting for its $600bn.
There was also the fact that the US wanted to keep the F22 to themselves and then the F35 is allowed to be sold to their allies so that they would keep air superiority. At least that was the theory.
We had a terrible problem with allies not putting enough effort into safeguarding F-15 technology. I wouldn't have have allowed the sale of the F-22 either.
They include guns because the lesson of the F-4 was over-learned. Just because they jumped the gun in 1965 doesn't mean they weren't right
The B and C versions don't have an internal gun - there's an external pod, which I'd be willing to bet will rarely be included in actual combat loadouts.
And yet, in Afghanistan A-10s only accounted for 20% of CAS missions. Morale considerations aside, it's pretty much obsolete at this point. With the latest targeting pods you can paint targets from 50,000 ft, so there's no reason to expose air support to ground fire. Beyond that, the A-10 is just as slow getting to the battle as it is during the battle.
Remember this is an either/or situation. Ammunition is heavy, so the F-35 only carries enough for one or two bursts. So the question is what would be more effective, the gun or another missile.
There's a reason we haven't had a gun kill for decades.
You may be right, but it's going to be thirty years at least before dogfighting drones are deployed in any numbers. Even then the USAF may wait until someone else does it before they let go of the fighter pilot mentality.
The problem is they didn't build enough F-22s for that to be a viable strategy. There are only 184 of them, which is a pitifully small number when you spread them over all the potential hotspots. If even a handful are shot down it'll be catastrophic to any plan that depends on them.
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Sure, but the reason might be "Well, I have to work anyway so I might as well make as much as I can". With a guaranteed income the first part isn't true anymore, and some portion of the population is going to decide live will be better on permanent summer vacation. I'd probably do it myself.
I doubt social workers have much contact with those kinds of people.
I don't see much evidence of this. There are a whole lot of people who don't make any effort to move up the employment ladder, for whom a job is just something you suffer through until quitting time. I suspect the Fins will find a sizable portion of the population will be perfectly happy to live on basic income, preferring to spend their time watching television and drinking. How sizable? It will take a few generations to know for sure.
They did have a partial failure in launch 4. The primary payload was still delivered, though.
If I had to choose which of the two was going to loft me into orbit, I'd choose the F-9. Five launches just isn't a long enough track record to have any idea what you're dealing with.
No there isn't. Falcon has had one failure and onepartial failure. By its fifth launch, the F-9 didn't have any failures at all. H2 needs eleven more successful launches before you say it's more reliable.
At five launches the F-9 had a 100% success rate as well.
There's no indication the H2 is safer or more reliable than Falcon.
I always assumed that one would be full of single guys thinking landing a married woman would be easier than what they were experiencing on one of the other dating sites. And I wonder how many of that 4% were actually hookers.
Of course it would. So what? That doesn't mean it will be a nuclear war.
Who? Who is "lowering their threshold for using nuclear weapons in a conflict"?
It's a mistake to think serious war will necessarily mean nukes.
I notice they've included a lot of installations like Incirlik in Turkey, Aviano in Italy, and six RAF bases in the UK.
Those aren't US bases at all.
In the event of a shooting war it doesn't work like that at all. The US military is willing to take risks on peacekeeping-type missions, but if an actual, serious war breaks out the gloves will come off and anything that doesn't register as "friend" on IFF will be attacked from long range.
The vast majority of those "bases" have just a handful of guys. That's not a base.
With good reason, too, which became clear soon after.
How many countries have a non-trivial presence? You could make the argument places like Iraq and A-stan aren't sovereign (though I think it would be hard in Iraq since we left when they asked), but even in Korea, Germany, and Japan... are they addicted to our money? Sure. Does it really affect sovereignty at this point? I'm skeptical.
That depends on the scenario. If the aircraft started right on top of each other... maybe. But if you time warped an F-4 from 1965 to the present and put it up against an F-22 at BVR, barring some kind of unrelated failure in the modern jet, the F-4 pilot has no chance .
Three points:
But that's not the way air combat works, for the most part. It wouldn't "lose miserably" to either the F-15 or F-16 in real combat, because the older planes would not be able to detect it until missiles were already closing in.
Yes, the F-35 isn't a great dogfighter. Also, it doesn't matter.
That kind of comparison is meaningless. Employing a Russian or Chinese engineer is far cheaper than employing an engineer in the US. Ditto with uniformed military. The only thing that really compares straight across is fungible raw materials. It may be the Chinese are getting more for their $216bn than the US is getting for its $600bn.
So when the US doesn't fit the criteria for empire you just change the meaning of the word until it fits.
I hate this kind of pollution of the language.
We had a terrible problem with allies not putting enough effort into safeguarding F-15 technology. I wouldn't have have allowed the sale of the F-22 either.
They include guns because the lesson of the F-4 was over-learned. Just because they jumped the gun in 1965 doesn't mean they weren't right
The B and C versions don't have an internal gun - there's an external pod, which I'd be willing to bet will rarely be included in actual combat loadouts.
And yet, in Afghanistan A-10s only accounted for 20% of CAS missions. Morale considerations aside, it's pretty much obsolete at this point. With the latest targeting pods you can paint targets from 50,000 ft, so there's no reason to expose air support to ground fire. Beyond that, the A-10 is just as slow getting to the battle as it is during the battle.
Remember this is an either/or situation. Ammunition is heavy, so the F-35 only carries enough for one or two bursts. So the question is what would be more effective, the gun or another missile.
There's a reason we haven't had a gun kill for decades.
You may be right, but it's going to be thirty years at least before dogfighting drones are deployed in any numbers. Even then the USAF may wait until someone else does it before they let go of the fighter pilot mentality.
The problem is they didn't build enough F-22s for that to be a viable strategy. There are only 184 of them, which is a pitifully small number when you spread them over all the potential hotspots. If even a handful are shot down it'll be catastrophic to any plan that depends on them.