US military advantage has eroded, study says

Errr, no it isn't.

 

And you continue to ignore that the M-16 was designed by an engineer on a draft board using a slide rule.

 

It’s a bunch of ridiculous bullshit how the US effectively bullied the Canadians out of the plane.

 

Wait what about the argument that the USA is spending more than the next few countries combined on the military, and maybe we should lower it???

Well I guess this puts an end to that argument. We spend so much and we just get farther and farther behind. We can't ever cut defense. Just the status quo leads to the deterioration of our advanced military weapons.

 

It got Eugene Stoner an engineering job at ArmaLite a division of Fairchild Aviation.

 

Well, look at what Boeing did a few years ago with Bombardier C serie regional jet. The US aviation industry doesn't want any competition, especially if the product is superior to their own.

And in exchange for scrapping the CF-105 we got the Bomark nuclear tipped AA missile system. A system that was as dangerous to the one firing it as it was for the target...

 

That's an exception not the rule. Most grunts are too dumb to do anything meaningfull after service.

 

The Bomarc was an idiotic system unless you were shooting down massed bombers. An interceptor makes way more sense with the single aircraft infiltration tactics the Soviets used.

 

I already know that the M-16 was designed on a draft board and not by a computer.

The worlds first real computer...

 

So designing stuff on a draft board with slide rules doesn’t make them better or even good pieces of equipment, it just means you used a really inefficient means of designing them. One that you can’t even do for things like modern stealth aircraft.

 

The vast majority of grunts I know who served both in the Army and Marine Corps during the Vietnam War have college degrees today, most BS degrees not BA in the arts and are very successful in the private sector.

One thing about the draft and citizen soldiers, a PFC might have a GCT of 140 and already earned a college degree and was in the bush carrying a M-14 or M-16.

 

Nope. There were other devices to compute before the slide rule.

 

Yeah, his pre-War work experience at Vega Aircraft had absolutely nothing to do with it...

And he didn’t go to work for Fairchild until 1954, after 9 years of work experience in a machine shop of another aircraft company.

 

personal annecdotes does not make a fact.

 

It would help if we could keep our technical secrets from the enemy

But they seem to have free access to all our computers

 

Nonsensical gibberish.

1) There is no military on the planet who compares to the US on a conventional basis
2) With respect to military's on the planet that do matter we will never have a strictly all out conventional war with as if we do have an all out war -there will be nukes involved.

As soon as we start talking "NUKES" the conversation gets dumb and dumber as all the points being made refer to conventional readiness.

"Our troops are not trained properly" Trained for what ? A war with China ?

What training do we propose to give them ?? "Duck and Cover"

This is complete and utter propaganda spin in order to try to maintain funding for the international financiers who own the Military Industrial Complex.

Even if we wanted have a better prepared "conventional" military ... what should we do ? Our aircraft carriers - floating cities of metal which have been obsolete for at least a decade or two in the face of modern missile technology ... technology for which we have had no legitimate defense since the introduction of the Sunburn anti ship missile in the mid 1990's and every military analyst worth his salt knows this.

Solution ? "Lets build more aircraft carriers" Are you friggen kidding me. 15 Billion dollars to build - never mind the cost of operation and the rest of the battle group. You can build a whole lot of anti ship missiles at 1 million a pop for that cost - and that is exactly what the enemy has done.

In the 1990's when the Sunburn came out the Russians were at least a decade ahead of anything we had. Then they started working with China and India on missile technology. India tested a hypersonic missile before we did - for goodness sakes. Even if we do catch up (and we are getting there) .. that does not change the fact that the bulk of our Navy is obsolete.

This all just nonsense however as it assumes Nukes do not exist. We will not be attacking the Russian homeland. We will not be attacking the Chinese Homeland, and they will not be attacking us. Why ? for the same reason that Reagan and the Russians signed the Nuclear disarmament treaties. .. because it is MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction.

The vast majority of our airforce are F-16 era or generation fighters. While these might be useful against Iraq back in the day of Saddam - a nation that had a war a decade earlier having most of its military destroyed - and had a military embargo ever since and an army that did not want to fight. These planes are fish in a barrel against modern missile technology. Israel - who conducted over 200 strikes in Syria - will now only fly F-35's because Russia installed S-300's

We only have 200 or so F-20's and we can't get the F-35's off the ground - and that plane is a lemon anyway. Even so - the Serbs during the war in Yugoslavia were able to both detect and hit 2 "stealth" F 117's using modified 1970's missile technology. Good luck against the S-400.

According to the guy that designed the F-16 and the A-10 (Pierre Sprey) - Stealth is "a scam - a piece of PR spin" - and this what our current strategy relies on. Especially the F-35 which can not dog fight its way out of a wet paper bag.

Again however - all this talk in relation some fictitious conventional battle with a major power such as Russia or China is horse pucky because it is not going to happen. If we were to attempt to attach the Russian homeland, while Russia may not immediately nuke the US homeland into oblivion, they would use nukes against the forces attacking them.

So how do we propose to "Train" against that eventuality ... "Duck and Cover".

 

Questerr, do you know how to use a slide rule ?

 

Perhaps a comprehensive cyber security bill could have been passed rather than a massive tax cut for the rich?

 

No, why would I need to? I can do all of those same calculations on a graphing calculator and do them considerably faster.

 

OJT

 

And had nothing to do with being a Marine.

 

I bet he doesn't know how to use an Abacus either, but come join us in the 21st century if you can.

 

There is no reason we cant do both

But the washington elite in both parties do not seem to care about china computor hackers stealing our latest technology

 

It reminds me of a thread not to long ago where the old guys like Apacherat were decrying how lazy kids are today because one of their nephews or grandsons or something was watching some fashion show on TV because he couldn’t find the remote. And they were all “Lazy kids today can’t get up and change the channel...”

It took people like me to point out to the old farts that A) many modern TVs don’t even have manual controls, and B) most TV’s have a cable box/DVR/streaking device and if you manually change the channel at the TV, you end up watching a blank blue screen.