I don’t think the 30 mm could have been relaxed in all honesty. The Marines needed the punch on land and during transit. Additionally, the Navy was actually planning on using the EFV as a form of defense for it’s ESGs.

I think this article would benefit from describing the impacts of the unique procurement strategy’s impacts on the designs that were submitted. It’s a weird phased approach.

Not really. It’s procurement strategy thing. This is ACV 1.1 it’s supposed to be commercially available and “good enough.” ACV 1.2 will come later and be more advanced. Perferably tracked.

My biggest issue with the current ACV is survivability. You gave up a nasty 30mm gun for machine gun. Had the 25 knot speed been relaxed to say 15 knots, than the Marines would have ended up with an affordable vehicle. Although, the engines they had were the best in the business, MTU.

I was referring more to independence from OPEC, what OP was asking about. We’re at a trade deficit for petroleum products, but that’s mostly because NG sector has been stalled (thanks OPEC). The fact of the matter is that the US imports more from Canada than we do all of OPEC. With the former on the rise and the…

“That was the plan in the last two great naval wars.”

I won’t speak to the Zumwalt class, but there are tons of active stabilizing systems available. There’s internal gyros that are used to resist rolling, there’s hull penetrating in water stablaizing “fins”, I even seem that look like spinning tubes in the place of stabalizing fins.

You mean the Expeditionary Fast Transport (EFT), they got renamed recently. I always thought JHSV sounded nice, and EFT sounds too much like EFV.

“A great lesson of naval war has largely been MORE SHIPS, even if they are smaller and weaker.”

This will, more than likely, not be part of a battle group. Ships with extremely high capabilities like the DDG-1000’s and the Ballistic Missile Defense ships tend to travel with one or two of their own escorts so they can perform their highly specialized mission while the other ships “keep watch”.

Sorry, but we get more oil from Canada alone than we do the entirety of OPEC. The only reason we continue to buy OPEC oil is to keep the market balanced. We could easily make up the difference between Canada, Mexico, and domestic production. Also keep in mind that we export quite a bit of petrol products, we’re still…

Bull! The PKK is labeled as such because they’ve committed terrorist acts. Their own ethnic people in Iraqi Kurdistan don’t even like/trust them.

That’s the best case scenario I think. I don’t see Turkey giving up any land to them.

The good news is that this bolsters the chances of an independence referendum by Iraqi Kurdistan succeeding. A year or two ago it didn’t seem like the KRG had any chance of separating from Iraq peacefully. Now Iraq couldn’t stop them if they wanted to.

They’ve sat back and watched ISIS destroy the PKK. They’re quite supportive of the KRG. Those two Kurdish groups have very little beyond ethnicity in common.

What’s your excuse for Libya?

... that happens to be right. Bite me if you can’t counter logically, butkus.

Secondly, Nigeria has a TON millions of barrels of oil and it’s Chad’s main export. I’m not even going to waste any more of my time with you on this reply, butkus. Feel free to try again though.

“Your preposterous narrative is simply stupefying. I’m not going to argue any further with a moron who’s actually citing Fox News to support his own ridiculously convoluted reasoning.”

While I agree with your assessment about a PT test failure, I think you’ll find a necessary hesitancy for commanders to explicitly form and deploy mixed gender units. If it’s done they’ll be EXTRA careful to ensure the women that end up there are overqualified.