And people why the Navy doesn’t think that 10 carriers is enough. If this doesn’t help explain the need for at least 11 carriers I don’t think that anything will.

There’s still plenty of incentive as all of the profits would still be theirs.

The problem is not with their capabilities, it’s about numbers. We need to have a certain number, in this case 11, so that we’re sure about 2 or 3 carriers and their battlegroups out in both oceans at all times. Just because we have 10 or 11 it doesn’t mean that all of them are out at sea at the same time. Somebody…

The thing is, there would be little job loss if we were to ever buy a major weapons platform from a foreign country because of the Berry Amendment which basically states that anything made for the military must be made here in the US. So if we were to, hypothetically speaking, buy a QE carrier from Britain, it…

That’s true but none of them patrol as far from as we do or probably for as long. Of course, we still have to provide for the escorts but a nuc carrier is one less ship that has to get refueled in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific and that means more gas for the escorts.

To get a better picture of the number of carriers we have you have to divide that number in half since (roughly) half of our fleet will be in the Pacific, the other in the Atlantic which is already twice the commitment of most everybody else since they don’t straddlle two major oceans. Then out of each half you’re…

I think it’s too late for that, the time for cancelling has passed and the best we can do is hope and pray that nothing else goes wrong and once it’s done it’ll turn out to the plane that it was advertised to be. The problem with cancelling it now is that we need a replacement for our legacy platforms real soon and…

On the surface an F-15SE might be good for Canada except for one thing, right now Canada, because of their F-18s, are set up for probe & drogue mid-air refueling while F-15s are set up for the USAF style (don’t know what it’s called) mid-air refueling. I don’t know if Canada is set up for mid-air refueling but if they…

Now a days one of the best ways to get stars is to not rock the boat too much and you don’t get to keep your career once you get your star by speaking up on things, just look at what happened to all of the officers (generals included) who spoke out against cancelling continued production of the F-22.

They may not be getting a dishonorable but a less than honorable is not exactly good either and could raise more than a few eyebrows. Also, you have to look at how old they now, they’re pilots so that means they’re officers, which means college grads so they entered the USAF at at least 23. After that, there’s OCS…

We’re building 3 because we were supposed to be building a lot more but the order got cut down to 3 because of cost overruns. Why then 3 instead of just 1? Because it allows you to do 3 times as much testing, or more like almost near constant testing since one will be on patrol, one will have just returned or is…

That and China was never a British colony, it was never a colony of any European nation for that matter. Sure portions of it, particularly the coastal region was occupied but the entire nation was never colonized and the Europeans ended up only keeping Hong Kong and Macao. The reason China never industrialized and…

Yeah, but it doesn’t even have a tape deck much less a CD player and I don’t see any ports to plug your phone into it either. But I suppose it might be XM ready.

But it does look it comes with a nice stereo, but I don’t see a tape deck, CD slot, or USB port so it seems a bit limited in the music dept. I wonder if gets XM radio though.

I’m sure that there’s plenty that can be improved upon, it is a 40+ year old design after all and there’s been lots of changes and improvements in aircraft design and manufacturing since then. Computer modelling could potentially help come up with an even better base airframe design, improvements in miniaturization…

On paper that sounds great, and it would probably work if the F-35 program wasn’t so far along, as it is now, sinking all of the tech and knowledge into a new platform would just take too long and cost a lot in terms of the costs already sunk into the F-35 program as well as to all of the various international…

You realize that these articles aren’t a part of Jalopnik, they’re Foxtrot Alpha but it’s a part of the Jalopnik family and the powers that be like to cross polinate articles from one Jalop site to others. In the future, if you see an article that’s crosslinked to FA or is written by Tyler you can simply choose to…

While an A-10D(?) might not be bad I just don’t see that as being a cost effective option. Face it, the basic airframe is getting long in the tooth and there’s only so much you can do to extend the life of it as well as making improvements upon it. After so long it’s just going to be better (and cheaper) to build a…

I find it very interesting how different the exhaust coming out Russian jets when compared to American/Western jets. In American jets the exhaust is a different color, less opaque, and, for lack of a better term, neater, not so messy looking. The exhaust from the Russian planes kind of reminds of the turbo effect on…

What would be nice would be to design a brand new A-10, not simply improve it but creating a brand new design from the ground up incorporating everything we’ve learned from building and flying the A-10 all of these years and marry it with modern tech and materials. Just imagine what an A-X would be like, assuming that…