Starfish PrimeDefence journalism has its biases as well as political journalism? Who knew?
Starfish PrimeTwo years (1974-76), & after all the critical decisions & actions had already been taken. The USA was out of Vietnam (Nixon did that, of his own free will) a year & a half before Nixon quit, & forbidden from doing much in Vietnam by its own laws, passed specifically for that purpose while Nixon was president. So what could Nixon have done in those two years? And given that pulling out of Vietnam was his policy, why would he even try? It’s not as if he would have been standing for election again?
He took office in Jan 1969, he left in August 1974. It’s 2.5 years to be accurate. Viet-Cambodian War started in early 1977.
Nixon left after the Paris Peace Accord with the intention to go back if they invaded the South.
It’s what the NV believed he would do that counts. They waited some time after those laws were passed to enter South Vietnam. There’s also the funding issue.
Starfish PrimeNo, don’t even go there. This is too far, even on a personal level. Many of my very close personal friends are muslims and they have nothing to do with this. Don’t go there. It is a nasty place and nothing good can come of it.
Show me one example of a peaceful Muslim democracy with no human rights abuses. It’s the only common factor. Yes there are some nice Muslims but unfortunately it’s not the nice ones that determine the direction a country takes. Taken as a large group there’s a religious dogma that accompanies them and it’s that dogma which causes violence and oppression, even in peace time.
There’s a reason your Muslim friends aren’t still in a Muslim country, remember that and it’s a hell of a lot worse for non-Muslims in those countries too.
What had China done?
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/09/09/ap-explains-how-uighur-militants-are-affecting-china.html
Starfish PrimeWut!!? pls elaborate, how exactly is this McNamara’s fault?
He was and is one of the most inteligent Defence chief US ever had.The Vietnam war killed his Career for sure, but what could he really do.. he with the rest of administration got sucked into the war, and there was no easy exit.
As allways, all chiefs and ministers get the blame before any President does.And don’t forget, the Pentagon.. their attitude was highly arrogant => -the French didn’t know squat about Jungel warfare in Asia..
There was enough blame to go around for everyone.
You can’t destroy an enemy’s ability to wage war, without destroying their ability to wage war. Commonsense 101. McNamara had everyone bombing below a given parallel. Result – The NV placed key assets above that parallel, like SAM storage facilities, ammunition depots, airfields etc. JFC, the fact the NV were still able to operate planes seven years into the war proves that the bombs weren’t being put in the right places.
Sure, they dropped more bombs than during WWII but they dropped them in the wrong bloody places. I don’t know exactly what the trees had done to offend them, but that’s where they dropped them.
Starfish PrimeThe evidence are spread throughout the world, namely ruins, graves and destroyed lives.
No, Syria became unstable because the US wanted it to.
Turkey never got a free pass from me, I already mentioned what my beliefs about Turkey’s involvement are in another thread. As for Russia, on this one they do, because the whole Syria thing is an effort to undermine Russia’s influence in the Region. Similar with Ukraine. They reacted. Wouldn’t you if someone was messing with your own back yard?
And messing with said back yard was a conscious decision, it didn’t happen by accident.This is a typical false dilemma. The lie that all compromised people hide behind. For some matters it is black and white. It has always been black and white. The false dilemma of ‘truth in the middle’ is a tool to keep the truth hidden.
FFS, have you not noticed that all the surrounding Sunni countries are bankrolling and supplying them?
Russia’s involvement – fine TBH.
You can’t seem to handle the truth. The truth is that the Qu’ran has some very nasty passages in it but many people subscribe to it and wherever they are there’s either human rights abuses or outright death and destruction among other things. The examples are everywhere and none of them good (not one), it’s not just some coincidence arranged by the US. The internet has facilitated and amplified this affect. The mistake the US made was creating the circumstances that allowed these people to ‘be themselves’. It made the mistake of assuming that many of the people in Iraq and Libya weren’t complete lunatics who’d attempt to commit the world’s first auto-genocide. A serious error of judgement, nothing more, nothing less.
Starfish PrimeI went into engineering during the 1950s, and spent the first half of my career there. Having worked on four weapon systems, and a fifth system we won’t talk about here, my experience has been that no chief engineer – no matter how brilliant – carries all the data in his head.
Why? Ballpark figures are good enough for what is essentially a publicity handout. Vympel once published two brochures that give different figures for the diameter of the same missile. I do not suppose that it dented the weapon’s sales prospects.
From what I have been told about the dome-heating problem that ASRAAM faced, that Mach 3 figure looks to be in the correct ballpark.
I advise you to also read the March 2016 Combat Aircraft article on the war against Daesh, an embarrassing read, it’s littered with absolute crap and these are the sort of people who are criticising the F-35 in many cases.
I was in the open-source intelligence business, and never regarded enthusiast magazines as reliable sources of information – that’s why I stopped reading them some 40 years ago. My prime sources were conferences, one-on-one discussions with a company’s technical people, and a study of the specialist technical publications. For example, if I wanted to know the latest technology on IR or EO seekers, I would read the relevant conference proceedings of the SPIEE, and the appropriate technical papers from MBDA’s conferences on future missile technology.
I was merely illustrating the problems you have in trying to define a range figure for Storm Shadow, not trying to reconcile the two published values which you cited.
I have seen ASRAAMs being built. Watching the missile being assembled is a pretty good guide to what is in it, especially when your escort is identifying each of the individual subsystems of the ‘short’ missile.
And at this point, I’m bowing out of this discussion. One goal of my recent retirement is not having to write/argue about defence topics. As Dr Johnson once said, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
And neither does a PR rep, or a programme manager, who may not even be an engineer.
Pffft….. Not really, they’re inconsistent with each other and so far from manufacturer’s specs that they may as well not have bothered. It’s little better than random number generation.
Please, more absolute BS. BGT had problems with dome heating, which is their excuse for a 127mm missile and a smaller seeker.
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/short-range-square-off-67103/
So is an AIM-120 slower than an ASRAAM? Does a brimstone have the same range as an AIM-120?
Yet we listens to comments disparaging the F-35 written in them all the time.
Well my point was that seemingly official information may not be correct, especially that given at briefings. At BAE SYSTEMS a loads and structures departmental manager told me that the Typhoon weighed 9 tons. I knew he was wrong even as an undergraduate but said nothing.
Oh so now it wasn’t a briefing? You care to change your story any more? Ever thought that one of those subsystems might contain another subsystem in this wide missile? You’re only dealing with partial information, the end.
Starfish Primeworld largest economy made of dealing with western goods and trade does not give any confidence that it can fight wars.
That’s just it. We have an off button for China – NATO + EU + Pacific Allies (Japan, South Korea etc.) cut trade with China and pull out all Western companies, then see how well their hacking works after we put an IP block on China. They’re reluctant to use it but the button does exist. China is literally a duck stuck in a swimming pool that the West is feeding bread to.
Starfish PrimeActually China is an exporter not an importer. Russia is an importer
IMF knows a lot about GDP, but you can go to world bank or whatever site you want to use. Chinese economy is far larger than Russias and that is why Russia always comes to China for help
Russia far more imports Chinese stuff than the opposite
also Russia is a resource economy. a slave to whatever saudi arabia and the US decide to output for oil.
If the US and Saudis decide to change oil prices, Russia can’t do nothing about it
What is that stuff though?
The stuff coming from Russia is the likes of jet engines and planes and the stuff coming from China is the likes of Rice and knocked-off footwear.
Starfish Primeno, Russia cannot survive on isolation. doesn’t have enough resources or investment. thats why they were so desperate for Turkey to come back, and bending over for Chinese investment.
China is the world’s largest economy not by trading just western goods, but they trade everything. Everything is made in China, even most things in Russia.
look at this graph. Russia is invisible
By trade, you mean ‘knock-off’. At least Russia designs its own stuff. On a per capita PPP basis China is worse than Russia.
Starfish PrimeMANPADS nowadays are more sophisticated than that. They don’t just go for a hot spot. They filter out things which are too hot (I recall hearing about the Malaysian army testing a MANPADS against flares & finding that it ignored all of them – exactly as its designers intended), & I think some of the latest have a degree of imaging capability, though less than bigger SAMs or AAMs.
Some MANPADS are not even heat-seekers.
https://www.thalesgroup.com/sites/default/files/asset/document/STARStreak_05_12.pdf
Starfish PrimeSo it depends what you intnd for CAS mission: A-10 is probably too specialized in just it but a modern subsonic attack plane with both good flying characteristic, some armor and a great loitering time (the only real requirement for CAS) would IMHO surely found a space.
When faced with insurrectional ISIS-like army would act like a classical CAS plane against a more conventional menace would instead act as a conventional one striking from afar.
In any environment an A-10 can survive, so can an AC-130 and it’s the latter that scares Taliban more. Now the AC-130 can drop PGMs (some can even fire Hellfires and SDBs from wing pylons) or it can just blast the crap out of everyone. You can even get guided 105s now I think.
Starfish Primea-7, a-6, chinese a-5 are gone
the US still hangs on to a-10s
Russians aren’t really using su-25s in Syria. They are using Su-34s.is the combination of fast moving jets that are now using better precision air to ground munitions, attack helicopters, and drones more useful?
There’s also precision artillery in the mix, a MS-SGP, ATACMS or GMLRS+ can get there well before any plane can. In fact longer range guided artillery is probably being overlooked right now.
Starfish PrimeFlown one = none (as I already explained)
Been in the simulator = you would have to ask Lockheed Martin that question.
But I can comment on briefings. There were at least two F-35 briefing sessions for journalists at this year’s Farnborough air show. We may confidently assume that similar briefings have been held at recent Fbro and Paris air shows.
There were several journalists from the defence press among the audience at a USAF F-35 briefing that I attended last year.
All major F-35 rollouts in the USA would have resulted in briefing sessions for the press. The last time I attended a rollout (admittedly of another fighter), some of the aviation and defence press had already been at the manufacturer’s plant for several days of briefings.
Ask the programme manager of the F-35 how many power busbars the aircraft has, and he will tell you. But it is unlikely that he has ever gone to the aircraft and counted them – he will be citing second or third-hand information. That is now engineers work.
But the technical press is unlikely to place much faith in a briefing from a PR guy, and companies know this. During my visit to the Saab pavilion at Fbro, I found a press briefing under way. It was being given by a senior member of the project team (not by a spokesman or salesman), who then invited the press into a side room where he could continue in greater detail. Any experienced PR man will tell you that this sort of briefing ends with Q&A, folloewd by one-on-one sessions.
You dodged my question regarding how many defence journalists you knew in order to be able to categorise them as ‘old men, retired for years’. Assuming that those who trooped into the room at Saab were representative of the aviation/defence press, I must report that most covered an age span from late 20s to late 40s. Only one was what you could term an ‘old man’.
Missile range is very dependant on engagement conditions, so is at best a ballpark figure. So you cannot expect published figures to agree. For example:
Does the Storm Shadow range include an allowance for the missile flying an indirect course to avoid engagement or betraying its final target?
Does the Storm Shadow range include an allowance for manoeuvring around the target and attacking from the rear?
Does the Meteor speed figure apply to a missile that has flown under full ramjet power all the way to the target, or does it apply to a missile that has throttled back for part of its flight?
You are trying to pin down parameters that are essentially variable.
So basically a bunch of people unqualified to comment doing a lot of commenting. A sort of Picard blog but with a wider audience.
I was actually discussing the ASRAAM. But that’s a detail a programme manager is unlikely to know. A programme manager may not even be an engineer, if you’d ever worked as an engineer for any length of time you’d know that. He would need to ask an engineer to get that information.
You might get lucky at a briefing and you might not. Again, a senior project team member might not have hands on of the technical information and may not even be an engineer. Project managers may even have a degree in Business or Accounting rather than Engineering. I know this because I’ve spend 16 years in Engineering and 10 years in contracting across a variety of companies.
Comment was aimed at Pierre Sprey since he is one of the loudest detractors.
Ha, but one would expect people put in charge of relaying basic parameters to the world to at least be consistent. Even the speeds are inconsistent with each other, e.g. Mach 2.5 for AIM-120, Mach 3 for ASRAAM. It is essentially an indirect briefing and this is the absolute twaddle that you get. I advise you to also read the March 2016 Combat Aircraft article on the war against Daesh, an embarrassing read, it’s littered with absolute crap and these are the sort of people who are criticising the F-35 in many cases.
What sort of route to you need to fly to reduce 560+km to 250km? You would have to fly S-shapes all the way there. Manoeuvring around the rear by 300+km?
The real question is, “does it apply the same logic used to get Mach 2.5 for an AIM-120?”
Nope, it’s all about consistency. Arguing variable figures is one thing but when they come out back-to-front against other weapons the word “incorrect” is what you’re looking for. E.g. Does a Brimstone have the same range as an AIM-120?
So in a nutshell, don’t take your press briefing as Gospel, anymore than a politician-provided press briefing. Could a PR guy forget to mention the data link, or even incorrectly say it doesn’t exist? Absolutely. They get a datasheet cobbled together in haste by the project team engineers so that they can get back to their day job. Datasheet doesn’t say data link, so they say it doesn’t have one.:eagerness: Personally I don’t know, but I wouldn’t take anyone’s word for it unless you get a full subsystems diagram from an engineer.
Starfish PrimeWhat you are saying has deeper implications than you may realise. Of course you can trace the events back to a single point. Always! In any chain reaction there is one event that started the chain. You find who created that event you find the culprit of the entire unfolding.
Mohammed.
/The End
Starfish Primeaircraft speed often limit by intake design
And engine BPR. The F-35’s engines are designed for fuel efficiency ahead of performance. If you wanted to make it go faster you fit ramped intakes and a pure jet engine – 0:1 BPR, but then you lose stealth, increase IR signature and reduce range and have a huge portion of the performance envelope that you’ll never use. At time now, the F-35 is actually 0.1 Mach faster than a MiG-31 because of its glazing limitations.
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