The Roman Empire didn’t exist? The Holy Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire weren’t political decedents of the Roman Empire? Which followed the Roman Republic and the Roman Kingdom before that dating back to around 753 BC? 509 BC for the Republic and you’re as far back as the Zhou Dynasty. And Rome didn’t fall until…

Yep, you are correct, I forgot to include Yugoslavia which is dumb since friends of mine were peacekeepers there.

By that standard the US can trace it’s political history back through the Kingdom of England as the US Constitution drew upon the principles of the Magna Carta (1215) and the US Bill of Rights from the English Bill of Rights (1689).

Oh please.

The US culture is the dominant culture in the world. It has developed just fine in terms of literature, art, music, cuisine and fashion. No one does fusion as well as we do.

To a great extent they are both overestimated (especially range) and underestimated (in lethality ).

The initial Russian difficulties would be like the U.S. having difficulties jamming Patriot batteries we sold someone else.

Good Lord the Russian Trolls are out in force on this one spreading their Putin memes.

There is no mystery on Turkish policy.

Sarajevo (where Ferdinand was shot) to Yayladagi (roughly the same are as the shoot down) is about 2,300 km apart.

Well, given everyone can read a map and everyone (even the Russians) have GPS the fact that they planned the mission with a racetrack loiter over Turkish territory is how you can issue multiple warnings for entering Turkish airspace.

No, to “get it straight” the border is a hot zone where aircraft have been shot down in the past. Syria shot down a Turkish RF-4 in 2012. Hence the Turkish statement that the F-16 “fired in accordance with the rules of engagement” established in 2012.

RIP. Even at home our service members risk their lives since even “routine” training is a much higher risk activity than most civilian jobs.

Nice job Tyler. I know I beat on you a lot but that was nicely written.

Yah, but JASSM is subsonic as well. I guess 2000 lb vs 1000lb was the determinate factor but the range is meh.

ironic_username...pounding down the SNR of this site 20 posts at a time.

1. But was found and killed on his watch in a country that is supposedly our friend. A pussy would have let it go in order not to piss off Pakistan.

We’re not completely ignoring ISIS, we’ve been bombing them. What we aren’t willing to do is put a lot of boots on the ground because Syria is not that important to us. So yes, in terms of realpolitik they are only a slightly larger annoyance to us than say Boko Haram. Who we are ignoring.

We don’t use them anymore but the F-18 can use TER and I think MERs. So the 500lbs load is somewhere between 8 and 24 without using the center station. If we went back to saturation bombing we’d bring these back.

An F-18 carries four 2000lb bombs in comparison to 24 on the B-1. So six F-18s is equivalent to one B-1 for that load out.