It’s really a matter of if you can hit a delivery bus before it’s discarding cargo.
If you can do that, decoys are null & void.

But for decoys: they’re in space where it’s a vacuum and extremely cold. Nuclear warheads,’ highly-enriched payloads are going to glow relatively hot next to any completely-inert decoy. The…

At Patriots’ inception, the ABM Treaty still stood, and it couldn’t have so much capability as to be a true ABM option.
Fast forward to today, and no such compunction has held PAC-3 back, and it’s performance is adequate against scud-like targets.

·The 1st anti-ballistic missile, skin-to-skin intercept was in 1962.
This feat wasn’t a 60's analogue to the GDM against an ICBM-speed target, but the feat was also accomplished with vacuum-tube, analogue computers which required a large room to house:

I just knew by this thread title I was going to have some highly-enriched, weapons-grade bullshit to sink my teeth into.

Smaller carriers start to sacrifice so much.
*If you have a ramp and not a proper catapult, you have neutered fighters, with lower launch weights, shorter reach, etc.
*If you don’t have a large-enough crew compliment on the smaller ship, fighting fires, and damage, could mean otherwise-survivable attacks put the ship…

If only Gulf War 2 doesn’t happen, maybe we have both.

Files story under: one of the millions of reasons Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020 

Better to be judged by 12 than plowed into the side of a mountain.

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…