Sounds like a great time to tell “bomb!” to purposely get off.

I would love a $900 office chair.

Trump has quite a ways to go to measure up to Obama’s deportation record.
The only difference between this and deportations of the previous 8 years is a shrill, self-induced partisan panic.

Who cares about ICBM gap? We should retire ours.
1) you can’t use it short of a nuclear war
2) targeting is problematic. If there’s any ABM whatsoever, you cannot know which warheads might make it through and which won’t. So essentially, none of these are great options in the area around Moscow’s ABM shield.
3) Say…

Does anyone know if lasers are even powerful enough to burn through a cloud?

I have a feeling thick water vapor (clouds/fog @ the target level) completely relegates their use to fair weather, but that’s an intuitive speculation on my understanding of the physics of a laser.

To be honest, that’s a good question and I don’t have a clean answer for it, but the authority to remove someone (by nature of it being the military) is always top-down, not bottom-up.

Essentially a commander could be found unfit for duty. Take 1 example:

I’m loathing specifically the distance.
I despise the Chinese dream of making everything out to the 2nd Island Chain a Chinese lake, but holy crap, their cruise missiles & SAM’s will blot out the sun at that range, lol.

That’s “lol fuck that noise” not “lol hilarious.” :D

You’d be surprised just how low a level this is true: essentially at the company level.

Across the DoD all manner of units get their allocated quarterly & annual fiscal allowances, for everything from office supplies, to fuel for training & other supplies.

Sometimes due to personnel change over (leaving a unit, or the…

For anyone that listened, I artculated the precise problem in the A-10 thread.
But because the A-10 is FA’s Holy Cow, the point was lost.

The neglect began proper under Bush 43. By that point replacing aging weapons systems should have been going into production in earnest, with them coming into service this decade.…

I actually said as much last night, but you’re right: I’m calling for the removal of a dedicated CAS for now.* My concern is a well-enough-equipped opponent — the spectrum of opposing fighters & organic air defense assets — make the low and slow approach unsurvivable.

If that proves to be true, this is money down the…

Jeez, this is it’s own can of worms.

I like the idea myself, but I want to say the problem with that is: existing factories esp. aircraft manufacturing plants, get re-tooled for new aircraft. And even if one attempted to preserve institutional knowledge, the skillset of the workers will simply be gone 10 years hence.

I…

I’m not against buying other off-the-shelf options, too, before those are gone.
F-15, -16 & -18 are all still in production IIRC, bring broader capability and are relatively affordable. (though believe it or not, flyaway cost of F-35 is almost the same as a Super Hornet right now)
I just insist we should be buying new…

A military built for a conventional war can be pressed into a glorified police action, counter-insurgency, and what not.

Weapons over-optimized for those purposes are nigh-useless in a full spectrum conflict.

I’m as glinty-eyed as it gets here concerning American military power but I understand defense dollars are…

Agreed which is why my position is it isn’t the end of the world.

Save for the fact that the A-10 is extremely mission ready and they are going through a wing replacement program. The Air Force is now the smallest it has ever been and numbers mean a lot, especially if the loss of one aircraft is the equivalent of losing 3 aircraft. This is why mission specific aircraft make sense.…

The cardinal truism in FA concerning the A-10 — that the only replacement for an A-10 is another A-10 — is an embarrassing article of faith. That other platforms wouldn’t be better at it isn’t my argument — I need only insist that other platforms can be pressed into which aren’t 1-trick ponies.

At 20+ years aircraft start to be maintenance-intensive moneysinks.
Even start ripping themselves apart at Mach 2.

I’m not here to sing the F-35 programs praises, though unit price is finally coming down due to the lessons learned from the 1st LRIP lots. But it is going to be the backbone of the force and something…

Didn’t say it was, the criticism was it can’t do this. Or defend itself properly against a fighter, to boot.

You’re not wrong but it doesn’t make any military intervention look appealing at all.