Amergin posted:If you have any articles or anecdotes to expand on this a bit, I'd love to read it in comparison to all of the F-35 hate in the OP (through no fault of Joe's). I urge you to steer clear of too much F-35 chat, partly because it has a dedicated thread and partly because it's a subject that attracts a lot of True Believerism on both sides. I happen to think the object is a complete waste of space (and I know people involved in the project who think so too), but that's just me. Not always for the reasons given - the Panavia Tornado could have been a complete mess but worked out, which I think is a lot about the fact that certain demanding parties in the development process got railroaded. But he's probably referring to the typical political problem of trying to save money on defence by cutting back on new development by continually modernising new designs. Ultimately you get a diminishing return from this process, limit innovation, and destroy capability to immediately build a new thing when you really need a new thing. Sometimes you spend now to save later, other times that logic fucks you in the rear end. Also, designing new planes is such a costly and difficult process that you kind of have to get started on it a long loving time in advance of wanting it.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:43
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Disinterested posted:Yeah, conscription is a loving awful idea. Don't do it. Not if you have an army that is actually called upon to do things other than fill sandbags when floods happen. Being unable to use conscripts is a sign of horrible leadership. Most of the great military leaders throughout history have used conscripts to good effect. It's like demanding all your infantry be special forces operators.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:43
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Panzeh posted:Being unable to use conscripts is a sign of horrible leadership. Most of the great military leaders throughout history have used conscripts to good effect. It's like demanding all your infantry be special forces operators. I was being narrow. You shouldn't be using conscripts to do what America does now, but you can make great use of them in certain situations (although those are also situations of great necessity, often). The Russian military has a ridiculous superabundance of junior officers and NCO's in case it needs to absorb vast numbers of conscripts, after all. Also, war is very different now in a considerable number of ways.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:45
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Disinterested posted:I urge you to steer clear of too much F-35 chat, partly because it has a dedicated thread and partly because it's a subject that attracts a lot of True Believerism on both sides. I completely missed that it had its own thread, thanks for the heads-up/fair warning!
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Dec 30, 2014 00:51
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Amergin posted:If you have any articles or anecdotes to expand on this a bit, I'd love to read it in comparison to all of the F-35 hate in the OP (through no fault of Joe's). As things stand, the 62 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in service in the US Navy were to be replaced starting in five years with 32 Zumwalt-class destroyers, which became 10, which has now become 3. The gap will be filled with 3 relaunched Arleigh Burkes, modernizations of 7, 8 modernized new ones, and eventually another line, which may be itself a fuckup depending on technical issues with its radar, but which will also be replacing the 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers due to be retired in two years. The Arleigh Burke design is almost 30 years old, and initial plans to extend it out to a lifetime of 70 years (which would be like if the USS Wasp was still serving as a frontline carrier today) have been canceled in order to pay for replacing the Ohio-class SSBN by the time it turns 50. In other words, Naval procurement is basically at the opposite of the F-35 without counting the difficulties with the LCS program to replace the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. These are probably branches from the same root- naval development is inherently limited and historically is highly concentrated in specific areas, so it's harder to spread them out. Do note that there have been few difficulties with approving replacement carriers for the Nimitz-class.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:53
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Effectronica posted:As things stand, the 62 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in service in the US Navy were to be replaced starting in five years with 32 Zumwalt-class destroyers, which became 10, which has now become 3. The gap will be filled with 3 relaunched Arleigh Burkes, modernizations of 7, 8 modernized new ones, and eventually another line, which may be itself a fuckup depending on technical issues with its radar, but which will also be replacing the 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers due to be retired in two years. The Arleigh Burke design is almost 30 years old, and initial plans to extend it out to a lifetime of 70 years (which would be like if the USS Wasp was still serving as a frontline carrier today) have been canceled in order to pay for replacing the Ohio-class SSBN by the time it turns 50. In other words, Naval procurement is basically at the opposite of the F-35 without counting the difficulties with the LCS program to replace the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. These are probably branches from the same root- naval development is inherently limited and historically is highly concentrated in specific areas, so it's harder to spread them out. Do note that there have been few difficulties with approving replacement carriers for the Nimitz-class. The Navy seems to be one of the few DoD arms that regularly refurbishes and recycles old equipment, I mean out of sheer neccesity, of course.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:56
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Effectronica posted:Do note that there have been few difficulties with approving replacement carriers for the Nimitz-class. That's partly because the new designs are intended to be more automated, and running carriers with a crew of 5,000 is incredibly expensive. I think they sort of hope to save money on that one in the long run, or at least make it more efficient.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:59
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Disinterested posted:That's partly because the new designs are intended to be more automated, and running carriers with a crew of 5,000 is incredibly expensive. I think they sort of hope to save money on that one in the long run, or at least make it more efficient. That's probably the case within the Navy, but politically, I think supercarriers as symbolic of American wealth and power are more of a factor in that decision-making. The Zumwalt itself is probably only still afloat with its three ships because its railgun capability (and just possibly its huge size too) make it saleable as a battleship.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:04
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Effectronica posted:That's probably the case within the Navy, but politically, I think supercarriers as symbolic of American wealth and power are more of a factor in that decision-making. The Zumwalt itself is probably only still afloat with its three ships because its railgun capability (and just possibly its huge size too) make it saleable as a battleship. Which ships will get the new laser system, if they do deploy it?
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Dec 30, 2014 01:05
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Amergin posted:Essentially, how do you kill a politically-engineered program like the F-35 without losing all of those jobs in the process? And furthermore how do you do it in a way that doesn't get the political representatives kicked out the next election cycle to be replaced by representatives who will go back to the status quo? You can't.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:08
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CommieGIR posted:Which ships will get the new laser system, if they do deploy it? All of them, except some of the LCS and transport ships. The main role of cruisers and destroyers in American naval doctrine is to 1) shoot down missiles before they hit anything valuable and 2) fire their own missiles at things, with 3) sink submarines being a side goal. So the Arleigh Burke modernization, the Zumwalt, and any possible revivals of CG(X) or anything else will get lasers and an enhanced control system. I should also note that the main modernization of the Arleigh Burke is upgrading the computers and adding Ethernet.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:09
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Effectronica posted:All of them, except some of the LCS and transport ships. The main role of cruisers and destroyers in American naval doctrine is to 1) shoot down missiles before they hit anything valuable and 2) fire their own missiles at things, with 3) sink submarines being a side goal. So the Arleigh Burke modernization, the Zumwalt, and any possible revivals of CG(X) or anything else will get lasers and an enhanced control system. So it will replace CIWS?
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Dec 30, 2014 01:17
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Since all the military new fancy weapon spending is both unneeded and unkillable, I don't see why we should care if it doesn't work. We don't need whatever the new thing is for anything, we're literally in the dig-a-ditch-fill-a-ditch make work tiers here.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:30
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CommieGIR posted:So it will replace CIWS? No. Lasers are, I believe, intended to serve as intermediate and long-range interception, while the Phalanx is close-in and will simply be upgraded with better radar and newer guns for a while.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:43
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Isnt the LCS like the naval F-35 equivlanet? Overexpensive, hangar queen, underarmed? Naval stuff is not my forte though.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:50
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One large part of the problem is that nobody acknowledges that the military is in a lot of ways our substitute for a social safety net (including corporate welfare). We have camofare instead of welfare. And the cost of transitioning that system to something actually useful would be prohibitive. Imagine trying to retrain all those grunts to perform, say, public works construction, or shifting all that manufacturing over to . . . What?
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Dec 30, 2014 02:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:One large part of the problem is that nobody acknowledges that the military is in a lot of ways our substitute for a social safety net (including corporate welfare). We have camofare instead of welfare. Well considering we're already building things to destroy, I don't think the replacement industry needs to produce something useful either?
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Dec 30, 2014 02:08
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Mightypeon posted:Isnt the LCS like the naval F-35 equivlanet? Overexpensive, hangar queen, underarmed? That gets into highly opinionated territory, but it is controversial and did have one of the early hulls start dissolving in saltwater. More importantly, I lied slightly earlier. The Navy agreed with reducing the number of Zumwalts because they concluded they're too vulnerable to ballistic missile attack, but the central issue is that the climate is such that instead of designing a new ship which can defend itself, they went with upgrading an old one's electronics and possibly upgunning it at some point in the future.
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Dec 30, 2014 02:15
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http://pando.com/2014/12/18/the-war-nerd-more-proof-the-us-defense-industry-has-nothing-to-do-with-defending-america/ I think this is a bad article. Let's grant the F-35 is a bad aircraft and the A-10 is a good one- there's very little argument in here, mostly just declarations. Let's take this paragraph for instance: quote:When the USAF realized there were hijacked jets heading for a kamikaze strike on D.C., it was paralyzed, because—and I can’t say this loud enough—it had never given any thought to defending US airspace. There were no jets on patrol, and when a couple of smart pilots cut short their training mission to try to help, they were going to have to ram their jets into the hijacked planes, because there were no air-to-air missiles available to shoot down the hijacked jets on 9/11. The USAF had literally never thought about having to shoot down enemy jets over US airspace, so they didn’t have any missiles, and would have had to order pilots to ram the hijacked planes to bring them down. quote:Within minutes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Air National Guard F-16s took off from here in response to a plea from the White House to "Get in the air now!" Those fighters were flown by three pilots who had decided, on their own, to ram a hijacked airliner and force it to crash, if necessary. Such action almost certainly would have been fatal for them, but could have prevented another terrorism catastrophe in Washington. TheImmigrant posted:Vietnam and Iraq were damaging to US prestige, but not really to US military prestige. Especially in Iraq, the US military accomplished the mission of overthrowing the Ba'athist regime quicker than anyone anticipated. The subsequent fiasco was a political and policy failure by US leadership, not the fault of the military. Using military to accomplish a shifting, unclear mission of nation building is like trying to paint a still-life with a hammer, and blaming the hammer for the lovely results. I disagree- I'm sorry to see a lot of people share your opinion. The colossal errors and arrogance of the DOD, Kissinger, Coalition Provisional Authority, etc., do not absolve the US military of its sorry performance since WWII. I recommend this video- defense journalist Tom Ricks gives an entertaining talk about how tactical excellence and civilian scapegoating has disguised the weakness of American post-WWII generalship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZbhIr04B5g Dilkington fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 04:08
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:One large part of the problem is that nobody acknowledges that the military is in a lot of ways our substitute for a social safety net (including corporate welfare). We have camofare instead of welfare. I disagree that military service is anything like welfare. You have to actually do things like random drug screenings (somehow I'm always in the 10% of the population for these tests.  ), pass physical requirements, education requirements, etc. You don't just show up and collect a check (no matter how much we like to joke about it).
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Dec 30, 2014 04:44
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spacetoaster posted:I disagree that military service is anything like welfare. You have to actually do things like random drug screenings (somehow I'm always in the 10% of the population for these tests. Do you think people on welfare literally sit around and collect checks bucko?
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Dec 30, 2014 04:48
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Nintendo Kid posted:Do you think people on welfare literally sit around and collect checks bucko? A lot of the people I know in my unit think that 
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Dec 30, 2014 04:53
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Nintendo Kid posted:Do you think people on welfare literally sit around and collect checks bucko? Why would you think that, bucko? Do you think that getting welfare is like being in the military, *edit* bucko?
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Dec 30, 2014 05:32
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spacetoaster posted:Why would you think that, bucko? spacetoaster posted:I disagree that military service is anything like welfare.... You don't just show up and collect a check It's amazing how many people lack short term memory these days.
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Dec 30, 2014 05:36
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Military people are the ultimate welfare queens, pretty much every person in my ROTC battalion does it to avoid having to get a job while in college with an assurance of having a paycheck after you graduate. All the military is anymore is a work program that right wingers support.
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Dec 30, 2014 05:46
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's amazing how many people lack short term memory these days. Nice selective editing there.  I was saying it's a joke (that people in the military!) just show up and collect a check. I can't speak about welfare because I don't know anything about it. What are the requirements to get it, and are they as rigorous as what is required to be in the Army?
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Dec 30, 2014 05:50
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take all the money we spend on useless tanks and put it towards funding better ROTC departments and I can assure you we will have a far better officer corp. edit: lol if you think any rigor is required to be in the army, the standards for an ROTC scholarship if you are majoring in stem are laughable.
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Dec 30, 2014 05:52
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spacetoaster posted:Nice selective editing there. You literally said it, the middle part was irrelevant. If you didn't want to sound like a piece of poo poo you shouldn't have written both sentences in the same post. And of course you don't know anything about it. Go consult the proper department in your state because it varies greatly at state level. Incidentally, most people on welfare already work at jobs, or are so disabled it's impossible for them to secure ongoing work outside certain fields.
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Dec 30, 2014 05:55
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Alexzandvar posted:take all the money we spend on useless tanks and put it towards funding better ROTC departments and I can assure you we will have a far better officer corp. You seem to know a lot. How do these army standards compare to what is required to receive actual welfare? Nintendo Kid posted:You literally said it, the middle part was irrelevant. Dang it! I lose another "discussion" to being "a piece of poo poo" again! I'll never learn. 
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Dec 30, 2014 05:55
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spacetoaster posted:Nice selective editing there. can't speak for others, but my SSI disability is obviously not big on the physical requirements, and very big on randomly losing all your documentation and taking months of nightmarish bureaucratic bullshit to get anything fixed. so it's more like the VA than anything else
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Dec 30, 2014 05:58
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I only know about ROTC related things, but generally the army has been cutting costs and it's become much harder to get contracted unless you have something they want, for instance a STEM major.
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Dec 30, 2014 06:02
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spacetoaster posted:You seem to know a lot. How do these army standards compare to what is required to receive actual welfare? Well yeah you loudly shout how much you don't about things and refuse to discuss. This tends to lose arguments, private.
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Dec 30, 2014 06:05
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Small Frozen Thing posted:can't speak for others, but my SSI disability is obviously not big on the physical requirements, and very big on randomly losing all your documentation and taking months of nightmarish bureaucratic bullshit to get anything fixed. Bureaucracy is a heck of a thing. I imagine it's part of the reason why the defense budget is so large and inefficient. People doing very little good are able to justify their budgets by meeting the criteria set by policy that determines what is justified and what isn't. Sort of like the Army physical fitness test is only a 2 mile run, 2 minutes of situps, and 2 minutes of pushups. I know people who train for nothing else because that's the only fitness requirement (besides not being a fat and even that is gamed). Nintendo Kid posted:Well yeah you loudly shout how much you don't about things and refuse to discuss. This tends to lose arguments, private. When I admitted ignorance on that particular issue I kinda thought you'd come in and actually explain it to my dumb self. Instead you went to the ad hominem crap. But that's what I get from D&D. spacetoaster fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 06:10
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That's what you get from Nintendo Kid.
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Dec 30, 2014 06:26
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spacetoaster posted:
There is no ad hominen in stating facts, friend.
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Dec 30, 2014 06:35
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spacetoaster posted:I disagree that military service is anything like welfare. You have to actually do things like random drug screenings (somehow I'm always in the 10% of the population for these tests. Yeah, tell me what you know (actually know) about the American "welfare" system. EDIT: Ok, you admitted you don't know much. There are lots of different programs that combined get generally referred to as "welfare." They all have application processes, certification requirements, participation requirements, etc. For example, to qualify for social security disability you have to prove you're too disabled to work; to qualify for food stamps, you (essentially) have to regularly show that you can't otherwise afford food. There is no program in America that lets you (presuming that "you" are not a member of the 1%) "just show up and collect a check." Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 06:38
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Nintendo Kid posted:There is no ad hominen in stating facts, friend. Right. I'm a "piece of poo poo". Not ad hominem got it. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, tell me what you know (actually know) about the American "welfare" system. Thanks for the information, but I still don't get why people say that the military is welfare though. I said before that the "show up and collect a check" was a joke about people in the military, not intended to be a stab at actual welfare.
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Dec 30, 2014 06:54
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spacetoaster posted:Right. I'm a "piece of poo poo". Not ad hominem got it. I aid you sounded like one, not that you were one. This is a statement about how you appear, I wasn't using it to deflect your (lack of) argument with regard to welfare.
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Dec 30, 2014 06:57
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Nintendo Kid posted:I aid you sounded like one, not that you were one. This is a statement about how you appear, I wasn't using it to deflect your (lack of) argument with regard to welfare. Why would I argue about something I admitted I don't know anything about? Anyway: What disinterested posted about conscription being an awful idea: I have never worked with draftees, but I did work with Vietnam vets in the 90's and they had positive things to say about draftees. Heck, a few of them were drafted and stayed in. Conscription might lower the budget requirement because we wouldn't have to spend so much on incentives to join, but that's a pretty small piece of the budget pie so I don't think conscription would be as helpful as cutting some high cost development programs.
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Dec 30, 2014 07:05
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Joementum, let me ask you this: How many A-10 pilots are elected to Congress, versus how many fighter jocks are elected to Congress? My hypothesis is that there are more jocks in elected office than support nerds, hence AF allocations.
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Dec 30, 2014 07:06
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