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Nenonen posted:Bild am Sonntag reports that Saudi Arabia is looking to buy up to 600-800 Leopard 2 MBTs from Germany. Earlier they were looking for 300 Leopards while other option was US M1 Abrams, which the Saudis already have 373 of. So now they seem to have decided on Kraut Panzers. Lots of them. It is also possible that this is a negotiation ploy in order to get a better price for more M1s. I'm sure the kickbacks and back-alley deals will flow like a river before this is decided.
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Jun 17, 2012 19:11
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Kombotron posted:More bad news. Sabre rattling, Stupid sabre rattling. How can they possibly think making a statement like that will improve things, or even impress anyone?
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Jul 20, 2012 22:09
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Nenonen posted:Is this news, though? To "instruct the military to increase its intelligence preparations and prepare what is needed so that ... (if necessary) ... we will be able to consider carrying out an operation" means nothing in practice. Every military on earth has plans. The United States has a plan to invade Canada. Spain has plans to defend against a French attack. Italy has plans to defend against a Swiss incursion. The US probably has extensive plans for an intervention if the drug war in Mexico deteriorates further. Smart governments however, do not mention them in press conferences. I understand that they are probably trying to reassure a nervous populace. It's just a heavy-handed way of doing so, and I think discretion is the wiser path. I don't want Hezbollah to acquire chemical weapons either. If such an exchange took place, I would fully support someone taking action to prevent it. Quietly.
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Jul 20, 2012 22:44
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Arrgytehpirate posted:
The attack by Japan was executed by the military of a internationally recognized government. There is no organized body of chucklefucks we can take issue with and declare war on here. This is why the whole "war on terror" is so drat difficult. We need to swat mosquitoes, and all we have on hand are sledgehammers.
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Sep 12, 2012 05:51
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Flagellum posted:I am aware of it. Still don't understand all the violence. Maybe I just don't understand how extremist Muslims think. Like a lot of other extremist groups, they have a persecution complex. But instead of fighting the things that are actually oppressing them, they lash out at petty insults and things that make them lose face. ryan8723 posted:Arrest the filmaker and his backers? Yeah let's just go ahead and start violating the first amendment just because people are loving offended. I think the video was loving retarded, but he has every right to do what he wants so long as no gets harmed. Inciting a riot has never been protected speech. The difficulty in this case would be 1: The riot took place on the other side of the planet, (Jurisdiction issues) and 2: Proving intent. First amendment is rights are not Carte Blanch to be an rear end in a top hat.
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Sep 12, 2012 16:48
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Amarkov posted:Read the article you linked more carefully. Direct incitement is not protected, but everything lesser is, up to and including saying "soon we're gonna have to start getting violent". There is no way that making an inflammatory video would not be protected, no matter how obvious it was that it would lead to a riot. My apologies. I originally had linked Schenck v. United States, but then realized that had been overruled by Brandenburg. Because this is indirect, the people who made this film are in no legal danger. But they are still assholes.
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Sep 12, 2012 17:01
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The best way to stay informed would be to keep tabs on the thread in GBS
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Sep 12, 2012 17:20
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I agree it was probably an excuse, but since when has giving your enemies prepackaged propaganda tools been a good idea? EDIT: GWOT is an Image war. Perception is everything.
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Sep 12, 2012 22:25
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iyaayas01 posted:That's something that I think will begin to get attention in the next couple of days...this was definitely not carried out by amateurs, and in fact short of managing to attack everyone at the consulate before the bulk of the staffers managed to fall back to the safe house I really can't think of any way the attack could have been better executed. I really dislike this, no offense, because it's speculation. Unless we can get accounts by people actually there or footage, I think we can't really say for certain how 'professional' this attack was. Even amateurs get lucky.
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Sep 13, 2012 05:22
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Brown Moses posted:CJ Chivers has written another excellent article for the New York Times, this time looking at the DIY weapons of the Free Syrian Army, Syria’s Dark Horses, With Lathes: Makeshift Arms Production in Aleppo Governorate, Part I. An interesting thing about the .22 blanks they are using as a primer for that artillery piece, these are probably the kind you get at the hardware store for use in powder-actuated nail drivers. Extremely similar a .22 short blank cartridge, but totally unrestricted under most firearms laws, at least here in the US. That cannon is made of stuff you can literally find in any hardware store.
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Sep 19, 2012 19:41
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I don't know, but it apparently has never stopped us doing it anyway.
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Sep 21, 2012 23:38
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Terebus posted:The mention of Americans in turkey caught my eye in this article. Is part of the FSA getting weapons from American sources. I guess they would have a few american made weapons but that would be due to the nature of the arms trade, but they wouldn't get any directly from the American government. The Americans in the article sound, at least to me, like they're government representatives. Is the American government giving resources to the fsa? Not officially. Just like every other conflict.
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Sep 25, 2012 18:55
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By most cold war and later accounts, the CIA mostly does monetary aid. They send a few case officers over with some pallets of cash, and they start giving it out to guerrilla chiefs who are willing to cooperate. The chiefs use this cash to pay their fighters, bribe local officials, and buy equipment. Suitcases full of cash are a lot easier to smuggle than guns, and this way the fighters can use equipment that is familiar to them, easy to resupply, and totally not traceable back to the United States. When the US provides the cash, countries that do a lot of armament export, like the Saudis and Chinese, are always willing to sell.
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Sep 25, 2012 21:16
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Buying them new from one of a variety of sources is a much better plan. Any AKM variant you pick up in Afghanistan or Pakistan is going to be in very poor condition after 30 years of service. China and eastern Europe will sell you all the arms you want, with few questions. Wikipedia has a list of 27 countries that churned out Kalashnikov assault rifles or knockoff clones. Three of them are probably no longer doing so. East Germany (no longer a country), Iraq (shut down when US invaded), and Egypt (shut down when government changed).
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Sep 25, 2012 23:23
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From the SAcyclopedia entry, and his most recent posts (I don't have archives), has anyone ever met Caro in person? To have gone through Libya, and now Turkey, he seems to be at least a functional Schizophrenic. I find it weird that he pours on the crazy when he posts here, yet manages to survive in an active civil war. Perhaps he's one of those quiet types. Pleasant and normal on the outside, nutty on the inside. J33uk posted:It'll be interesting to see what Turkey's redline is before they decide to press for further action. Remember that Turkey is part of NATO, so they will have the rest of Europe trying to keep them from doing anything drastic, lest they call in an Article 5.
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Oct 1, 2012 18:14
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If I may change the subject back to Syria, it appears the coke-loving hipsters at Vice Magazine will be releasing video from Syria by photographer Robert King over the next few weeks. The trailer is here on youtube
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Oct 15, 2012 21:27
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suboptimal posted:I dunno, man. Considering how we're still cleaning up the after effects of the post-colonial days and our supposedly most pressing security threat (Iran) developed as a direct result of our own Cold War misadventures, I'm kind of glad we don't live in those days anymore and don't really want to see them return. Yeah, but that poo poo came back much later. You know, when all the cold warriors were retired and it wasn't their problem anymore.
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Oct 16, 2012 02:45
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CommieGIR posted:I remember during the Libyan uprising there were all sorts of innovators, engineers, and inventors making amazing things with next to nothing. I would be willing to bet  that those two groups overlap more often than you think.
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Oct 21, 2012 01:55
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Brown Moses posted:Here's a rare video of a cluster bomb being dropped and deploying Let it also be noted that it fell off a Hind, which is a dedicated gunship. Videos from earlier showed Mi-8 or Mi-17 Hips, which are transports.
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Oct 31, 2012 21:24
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It sounds like an automated chip-voice to me, the accent is neutral American English, well enunciated, and is not distorted by radio static. My guess is they are using commercial handheld radios for communication, some can be set to eyes-free mode, where they will speak and beep like that.
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Nov 5, 2012 23:50
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Apparently, you can sign up and take it for a test ride using Public US census data. Or there's another public demo here: https://joyride.pfinance.com/welcome/
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Nov 9, 2012 00:40
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Pureauthor posted:I remember that Saddam tried to do the exact same thing back in the first Gulf War by firing Scuds into Israel's population centers. IIRC it almost worked too since Israel actually launched planes twice but never got to the step of actually firing ordnance. It would have made a big strain on the coalition had it succeeded, I guess, but I also don't think it'll be of any real help here. It basically did work. Bush Sr. had to make a lot of promises in order to keep Israel from going apeshit. A significant amount of coalition military resources got diverted from the air campaign and ground buildup to looking for Scuds. Stuff like Tier 1 spec-ops units, entire squadrons of aircraft, and satellite coverage. It put strain on the US, Britain, and French forces who had another mission tacked on to an already large list, but the political cost of losing muslim countries like Syria, Egypt, and the UAE would have been worse.
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Nov 13, 2012 04:29
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Snoop Rocket posted:That's what I was thinking watching that. They must have had issues with damaged tubes in the past or something, since usually (for the bigger systems, at least) the assistant gunner would just follow the round down the tube in one motion and place his hands over his ears before readjusting the mortar/getting ready to fire again. Probably more worried about booby-trapped mortar shells.
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Dec 19, 2012 05:37
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suboptimal posted:No need to be a prick about it, dude. The problem is that the US drone program in Yemen is entirely black, and we don't really get news about it until the US government drops a press release about bagging another Al-Qaeda #2. If you guys can find open sources covering it in more detail, feel free to post them.
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Jan 11, 2013 23:32
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Lawman 0 posted:More french troops for Mali. Important question: Are these regular French Army troops, or Foreign Legion units?
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Jan 14, 2013 23:39
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Adrastus posted:The guy who shot this must be pretty heartless to upload the video of his friend getting killed onto the internet It's entirely possible everyone in the video is dead, and the opposition recovered the camera from their bodies.
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Jan 27, 2013 02:34
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:I've literally never seen step 12. Anywhere. Not in Libya, not in Tunisia, not in Egypt, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere. None of those are legitimate. It's a bit sad. Step 12 is "Rebel groups and warlords squabble over what remains of country, new strongman emerges, go to step 1 in a decade or two."
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Mar 5, 2013 18:00
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Baloogan posted:It could just be one general trying to make some cash on the side... it doesn't need to be "CHINA". I'm going to go with this. Y'all are reading too much into it. China, or one of its many Generals or Arms Dealers wanted to make some quick cash.
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Mar 15, 2013 17:04
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If they wanted to lose something without a paper trail, getting a theft reported by a newspaper seems like a really bad way to do it. Not to mention insurance and criminal investigations.
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Apr 11, 2013 16:23
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Even if they could manage all that, as a rebel pilot I would be more worried about getting shot down by my own side. Anything flying is a target for them.
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Apr 15, 2013 04:03
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Is it a good enough excuse to prompt international investigation though? Perhaps something more than just sitting around and waiting until AP or some guy who watches youtube to get the story?
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Apr 23, 2013 19:45
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I might remind you all that a significant part of the cover for Operation Cyclone was as "humanitarian aid". Just because Obama hasn't done anything overtly, doesn't mean he isn't doing anything. Note that I have no evidence whatsoever to support the previous statements, just going off history here.
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Apr 25, 2013 17:22
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Dusseldorf posted:When people say "boots on the ground" do they mean ground forces or CIA/Green Beret advisors? We mean a Marine Expeditionary Unit, or regular Army troops. Deniable "Black", "Advisory" or secret assets don't count.
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Apr 25, 2013 21:17
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Al-Jazeera just leaked a Pakistani government report on the UBL Raid. I'm only 50 pages in out of 337, but getting the (condensed, filtered) interviews of his family members and his movements since 2001 is interesting. The TL/DR is that the report paints a picture of an incompetent Pakistani security apparatus, (Non-shocker) so the report got buried. Sorry if this is the wrong thread, couldn't find an AF/PAK one.
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Jul 8, 2013 23:03
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Yeah, considering the logistical difficulty, and additional poo poo like security and medical problems you don't usually see pop up in regular towns, 1.5b seems about right.
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Jul 19, 2013 19:34
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Hobohemian posted:I thought members of the CIA were legally allowed to consult for private security/intelligence firms specifically for this reason. I must have heard it on NPR a few years ago so I'm not 100% on the validity, but it makes sense. Nope, but they do have a constant revolving door with contracting corporations. Do a few years with a three-letter agency, then get out with a high security clearance and make significantly more money doing the same job or less with a contractor that replaced you when you left.
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Jul 31, 2013 06:32
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When are we ever going to learn that "Enemy of my enemy" is a fallacy. 
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Aug 5, 2013 01:59
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Who the gently caress thought sending Lindsay Graham on a diplomatic mission was a good idea? 
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Aug 6, 2013 18:41
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I thought he got caught trying to cross the border in turkey, and deported back to San Diego. Then the FBI put out a missing person notice, so maybe he tried again.
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Aug 28, 2013 19:19
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I recall reading that some chemicals like mustard gas can stick to surfaces and be dangerous for weeks or even months. Sarin is a more complex molecule, so it probably breaks down quicker.
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Aug 30, 2013 00:58
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