Was Obama a mistake?

[skyhook77sfg]

obama's prize doesnt quite take the cake...

that honor goes to two others in a photo finish tie...

henry kissinger for peace

lobotomy inventor Muniz for medicine.

obama does get the prize for best imitation of a progressive though.

[Endovelico]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Joao Paulo]

Mr. Perfect is right; when democrats go to war, they do it better than Republicans.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Simple Minded]

[Tinker]

[Demon of Undoing]

[~]

[AzariLoveIran]

[cincinnatus]

Actually, one of the constraints on the U.S. President in guiding the massive beast of the executive branch is "bureaucratic inertia" (Donald M. Snow, United States Foreign Policy, 2004 ed.). In effect, this is very close to the train tracks analogy AzariLovesIran described.

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

[cincinnatus]

[AzariLoveIran]

[CgDs]

[Tinker]

Actually Cinci, I took that stuff into account. I was thinking of the air force in terms of satellites drones and cruise missiles at the end of it. Im not saying I knew the detail you shared but I grew up next to an afb and was the sort of kid who read Janes for fun.

As for the Navy, I am aware that it runs largely on petrol. My point was about reducing the footprint overall.

As for the Marines. Who has superior armor? Seriously what country poses a threat with armor? I know the Marines are a fast attack strike force. We should not be in the business of occupstion at all. So yea a realignment of political priorities is needed. Id give the Marines power armor and Halo drop them from suborbital ramjets. Scifi I know but so is launching a stealth fighter from a boat. Power armor can be a reality within 20 years and is better suited to urban or Mountain assault than a tank.

Our priorities shiuld not be based around big bases around the wirld, but around being able to place a force anywhere in the world. I am serious drop mechanized Marines from fucking orbit. It will be cheaper than maintaining bases in hostile countries.

[Demon of Undoing]

It's not going to be long before C5s become bomb trucks ( why so zippy ? Kick 1k JDAMs out the back ) and tge best anti air CAP can be run from an airship. Paradigm change is coming , and we need to get ahead of it. We don't want the finest fleet of battleships right before Pearl Harbor.

[Tinker]

[Mr. Perfect]

I guess more neocon adventures ahead.

Remember when neocons weren't Democrats? Seems like not that long ago.

What you Democrats will learn is that if you are going to go ahead and govern like a neocon, the country may as well elect the actual neocons.

[cincinnatus]

Demon, Tink,
One point you two in particular miss about the unmanned aircraft is the airframe itself may be cheaper than a manned aircraft, but they have a larger ops & support footprint on the ground that has to be added to the total cost (and I'm not talking about maintenance and ammo troops). Specifically, "drones" are remotely piloted, so you have to build the command modules, the satellite up link stations, launch and control specialized commo satellites, send pilots through under-graduate pilot training, specialized pilot training, and build the same thing for the mission crews (the DGS structure that exploit real-time the full-motion video, and other sensors). If you add that entire infrastructure and manpower costs, they don't look so extravagantly cheaper than a manned F-15E that can drop more bombs, survive against another fighter and SAM, and provide ISR support with it's targeting pod too. Plus, none of the existing or even planned remote piloted aircraft (RPA is the new acronym that replaced UAS that replaced UCAV and UAV....guess a Colonel needed a performance report line) can even get to the target in a contested environment (a freaking MIG-21 and a MIG-23 shot down Predators in Iraq). They're great though when there is no air threat, unless your a ground unit that got ambushed from three sides and call in a troops in contact alert, and because of collateral damage can only employ 20mm cannons versus bombs. Just like in life, there is no free beer (to borrow the Good Berzerk Savant's phrase).

RE Marines Armor, read their doctrine. They're the ones who identify what can hurt them (and believe it or not, there are still several...easily a dozen...nations that own armor--both modern tanks, and APCs with anti-tank guided rocket launchers--that could go toe-to-toe with an Abrams and our own APCs and MRAPs, especially if it was their turf, and they had both numbers, and attack helos and at least 4th Generation combat aircraft (upgraded MIG-21s, MIG-23/27s, all the Flankers, Fulcrums, the French F-1s and 2000-5s, Typhoons, Grippens, F-10s, F-8IIs, etc....). Sure, they could handle the small-scale short-duration conflicts (Libya), but they'd be hard pressed against even a 2003 Iraq. They simply couldn't handle even one of the major OPLANs alone (but, in the spirit of our agreement that all these ideas would be implemented after drastically reducing the responsibilities of the U.S. Military, maybe we wouldn't need to build OPLAN time-phased deployment lists anymore). I'm all for holding back on most procurment, allowing us time to R&D the really SCIFI shit that would make Michael Bay blow his load, but I doubt, no, I KNOW some POTUS would be enticed by the Siren call of either domestic or international pressure to "do something" when some nation goes nuts, and we'd be thrown in, not "with the Army we'd like to have, but with the one we have..."


Sorry to have taken this soooo off topic YMIX.

[Demon of Undoing]

1) The whole idea is to not have a force ready to hand that can do Livya or either Iraq incidence. You want a war , go to Congress.

2) There will be a coming generation , , whose aircraft will not be just RPVs , but fully unmanned. The tech already exists to take a human completely out of the loop. That will accelerate whether we like it or not. We need to push that. Eventually and not far off , it's all robots. An unmanned dirigible with 200 AAMRAMs using satellite AWACS will be running top cover for my brother's sons before their career is out. They will join within five years.

Nobody is being truly visionary on this.

[Mr. Perfect]

I guess then there are no cost breakdowns readily available on any of this?

[Demon of Undoing]

[Tinker]

We should never build autonomous killing machines. There lies extinction.