I really don’t see any good that can come of this. At the very best, China will ignore the ships and just silently monitor them. At worst, well, most of you already know that.

And modern AShMs can tear through several meters of armor.

It should stop being nonlethal after the second shock

Except we have seen time and again that destroying he central government and trusting extremists to make a stable secular government has never come close to working.

Thanks for the great write up Tyler. This is in my opinion the most import deciding factor of who should be the future president, and you managed to cover both parties without bias.

Not the Gawker Universe, but the entire universe :)

I have yet to be fully convinced that space transport has enough business to support an industry. The issue is that no only is business scarce, but a single failure could be your company’s demise.

With public opinion of NASA becoming more favorable, I think it just might happen

Yah. Because no matter how “reusable” they are still firing off on an expendable rocket

They did long ago

Commercial pilots don’t have a lot of leeway when it comes to choosing the route. If a pilot had declined to fly the route because it flew over a war zone, and the next plane was shot down, he would have been a hero. If the plane wouldn’t have been shot down, he would have been fired.

That is not even close to the same situation.

Agreed. I don't think anybody using them had much in the way of training. It is really a shame that they didn't close the airspace, this was going to happen, if not MH17, than some other plane.

A truck mounted AA is pretty useless for AA unless you have outriggers or fire control to compensate. The truck will rock more than a boat due to the recoil being absorbed by the shocks.

I think “American Intelligence” is a misnomer.

You knew what's even scarier? What's it going to look like in the next administration? It seems that right or left, there are a bunch of bad ideas going round.

Yah. The U.S. Learned its lesson when all those Iraqis were being executed by M16s in the ISIS videos

Culturally though, it has destroyed us. We have such harsh party lines nowadays that there is pretty much no hope of cooperation

It is actually a very effective way to deploy them. It makes it hard to shoot with MANPADS when they are low and constantly going between objects, and are blowing flares intermittently making tracking them harder. They are very armored, so only a purpose built AA gun in a lucky spot can put them in any real danger.

Actually, they have done a great deal of upgrading. All the choppers have warning systems and can drop more countermeasures accordingly. Also, they have a system (I am not sure if it is deployed in Syria or not) that will determine the direction of the IR guided SAM and fire a volley of flares into it, blinding it.