While we didn’t build an island out of scratch we did pretty much the same thing back in the day to declare that a certain piece of ocean as ours:

Unlike in Dubai I don’t think they care about beaches or aesthetics. They look to have built sea walls and filled them in.

Well, a 10m rise would be pretty annoying to have to maintain.

Whether or not you can beat a particular air defense system all you really need to do is run them out of ammo...at less than a million a pop you’re talking $20-30M worth of tomahawks.

So put up or shut up. What are you willing to bet?

Meh...they have a dozen Burke equivalents. We have 62 Burkes.

Or maybe say shale, solar and conservation?

Arguably peace in Europe didn’t occur until after several continental wide wars over those 500 years. Since 1515, ignoring dozens of smaller wars, you have the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697), the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), World War I (1914-1918) and…

In a modern Fulda gap scenario both the F-16 and A-10 are not survivable aircraft. For the A-10 it is vastly outmatched by the Pantsir (SA-22) given it’s one generation past the system that was designed to destroy the A-10 (Tunguska or SA-19).

Except we’ve never really needed the A-10s given the number of F-16s we have. So yes, I’d much rather have 20 more F-22s than 283 A-10s and fewer hours on F-16 airframes.

New F-16V won’t cost much less than new F-16 E/F Block 60/61s and those have a unit flyway cost of around $70m-80m. UAE spent $3B on R&D for their aircraft.

Except to “address any need in the foreseeable future” you don’t need just 4 F-16 but also 4 F-18Gs doing DEAD/SEAD to ensure the F-16s reach the target as something other than flaming wreckage.

The same congress that did the math on the F-22? Those guys?

You mean like calling the F-16 “Lawn Dart” was a real issue?

Funny...there’s more than a couple guys that flew A-10s in the ANG (104 FS) who have said different in the past. I’d take that bet even in the 104th’s ready room.

It’s funny that this article is linked to “Everyone Who Wanted More F-22s Is Being Proven Right” when what cost us more F-22s was congressional (and idiot blowhards like Sprey) support for legacy aircraft like the A-10 and poo-pooing the USAF when it stated it needed more 5th gen fighters for the future.

Tyler: The best fighter for Canada is the F-18.

The USS Iowa is an All or Nothing design. A quick read of any of the BB reference books (Friedman, Conway, Dulin and Garzke) or even a cursory google search would have indicated this.

I think Tyler is most enjoyable when you don’t know the topic he’s writing about.

This is an old post I bumped into but if you want an easy way of making these try doing them in your microwave. The oils in the cheese fries the cheese in about a minute. You’ll have to watch and experiment a few times to figure out the right amount of time to get the desired crispness.