Was gonna say, they must’ve reeled it out for the added symbolism. Stuff like Mao suits for China and Nehru coats in India still hold a great deal of cache amongst a large portion of their populace.

Anachronistic indeed, the symbolism of Xi wearing a Mao suit even as China is constantly trying to portray itself modernising.

Cheers. Yeah once I found out what pitot tubes were I had an idea that the protuberances off the front of the F117 must have been something to that effect.

Link-16 really is a lynchpin system in this day and age isn’t it? It sounds like the crux of this network centric warfare being extolled by manufacturers and armed forces alike.

It might be a silly question but it comes after watching air crash investigation. The pitot tubes used to measure pressure on commercial airliners, are they needed on combat aircraft? If so, how do they put them in low observable aircraft? (Again it could be entirely redundant, I just don’t know)

I didn’t say Russia was invincible. I’m just saying it’s still a heck of a lot tougher than some are want to say lately.

Saiyans would sure change the equation. It’d be meta if there was a unit named the saiyans anywhere, maybe just a nickname even.

didn’t know about the original DB5 being stolen but for the Skyfall premier they wheeled in the one they used in the movie. I still remember leaving uni to grab lunch and looking across the street gob smacked not at the red carpet, lighting and big screens being put up outside the RAH but the Aston being slowly,…

Indeed, there’s no doubt the US military has people doing something somewhere all across the globe. It’s a positive feedback cycle almost, more deployments worldwide, more hands on experience, increased competence of the man behind the weapon.

I was aware Spetsnaz was an umbrella term but thank you for the detailed explanation. Really illuminating.

well I try not to get too drawn in to such debates. Sure it’s all well and good when you keep it academic but at the end of the day I have a healthy respect for any specops. Heck I don’t want to be corrected with a taste of knuckle sandwich or cravmaga or some such thing.

Oh wow, that’s interesting. Who knew gold plating aided LO. I still think gold plating the inside of the Mclaren F1 is still my go-to great use of gold, however sketchy it’s actual thermal properties might have been.

This is wonderfully well written.

Well it’s only been that way for the past decade I would say, where the chequebooks been flashed (only for unbearably long um-ing and ah-ing over the fine print of the receipt). God damn rampant corruption is the death of anything worthwhile and ambitious on the subcontinent.

Again that pretty much accurately sums up what I was going for really concisely.

That’s a pretty sweeping generalisation there. Surely if you’re going to paint it in that way, it’s the other way around. Pakistan’s military are tantamount to the existential survival of their nation as they’ve made sure to tell everyone for decades.

Not sure, India’s been making hesitant noises about the whole programme and this is beside the usual inane dithering that accompanies any defence acquisition scheme in the country.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. That’s precisely what I was trying to get at. The fact that they aren’t direct analogues unless they’re a derivative unit. And I only used the Spetsnaz as it’s the oft cited example. Heck I’m sure there’s some higher level SF type unit for the Russians that I don’t know of.

Oh I have no doubt that what we the unassuming general public see is drip fed to us. I remember reading an editorial about how some ex high ranking SpecOps officials had reservations with the changing nature of their role, more to do with how they were becoming the go-to guys for far more than the highly specialised…

When it comes to special forces I actually don’t know. Given the entirely secretive nature I’ll admit I wouldn’t be surprised if one day someone came up to me and said some obscure unit from a country I least expected was the best in the world. That being said I think tags such as the worlds best are difficult. I’ll…