I think what he means is that if, and that’s a big if, they have any tanks in their posession it would be an old Russian tank like a T-72 or older.

But it wasn’t just those inflatible tanks though. They also regularly simulated the radio traffic that you’d normally associate with an Army, drove jeeps around to generate dust to simulate exercises and vehicle movements, and then assigned Patton to “command” this Army. Then to further reinforce things they tricked…

That may have been something of a factor but the bigger factor was that German tanks starting from the Panther on were horribly unreliable. As I understand it, the Panther got better over time but the Tiger never did and the King Tiger was even more unreliable, this was due to the fact that the engine and transmission…

Because the Luftwaffe inherited a bunch of East German planes when they merged, inlcuding MiG-29s. Tyler actually posted an article written by a former US fighter pilot who actually got the chance to get a little stick time in a former East German MiG-29.

To add to that, the Marine Corps actually runs a mountain warfare school which Marine units go to reguarly for cold weather training. In addition to that, the Corps also runs an annual exercise in Norway called Battle Griffin to practice arctic warfare in realistic conditions because under a NATO agreement, the Marine…

I wonder if the military tests cold weather gear there too, get some “volunteers” to gear up and sit there while they dial down the temp. If the troops don’t turn into popsicles after X amount of time wearing a given company’s gear then they win the cold weather clothing contract.

Not to mention that being 1947 Alaska wasn’t even a state yet, I’m pretty sure that played a role in the decision to build in Florida too.

That’s really debatable. German tanks were pretty good but starting around the Panther they became ridiculously over engineered, mechanically unreliable, and slow and expensive to produce. American tanks didn’t match the later German heavies in sheer firepower but the Russians certainly did, they built more than just…

More like F-22C, the US seems to traditionally use B, D, & F for 2 seater versions of a single seat fighter. So a new upgraded F-22 would be either and F-22A, assuming that the current F-22 isn’t an A model already, or a C.

While I’m as big a fan of restarting the F-22 line as the next F-22 fan I don’t believe restarting the line would be that easy. Aside from restarting the parts chain, unpacking all of the tooling and maching, there’s lots of personel to be hired and trained, and there’s the other big thing, where are they going to do…

It might start off as a baseline F-22 but it probably wouldn’t be too long before we would see slightly upgraded F-22s being produced as Block X variants. After a few years we’d probably eventually see a B or C model as the design matures and more serious changes are incorporated into the design.

While that may be true that’s a bit of an obstacle to overcomes for use as a rolling IED. The key to the success of this sort of rolling IED is being inconspicuous and passing for a regular manned vehicle. Troops manning a check point are going to get pretty suspicious when they see the same car coming close and then…

That might have worked with Al Qaeda but not Daesh, they’re an entirely different beast. They don’t just want the West out of the ME, they want control of the entire ME and spread their form of radical Islam to the rest of the world. Leaving them alone merely gives them a base of operation, an even larger recruiting…

I wonder if the Blue Angels would ever want to fly them? I think that they’d look pretty sweet in Blue.

While we’re at it, they need to develop cargo pods to sling on the 18's hardpiunts so that they can also perform COD duty as well. They could probably even develop some that have cushioning/padding, an O2 system, and a heater so they can carry extra personnel as well.

Yup, I remember back when I was in the Corps on drills in Miramar I’d remember hearing their distinctive engine noise all the time. They didn’t call them Hoovers for nothing.

Which amounts to the same thing. Whose ship, plane, tank or what have you is determined by who it belongs to and is operating it and not the country of origin. So a sub belonging to the Israeli Navy makes it an Israeli Navy sub no matter where it was built.

There’s that and there’s whole thing about all of our tactical aircraft being able to fly off of a carrier of some sort.

Sort of like this?

Gun laws don’t prevent crime, they only prevent or reduce gun crime, the same goes for violence, those laws only prevent or reduce gun violence which is merely a subset of violence/violent crime.