Your numbers are way off: 400 Candidates - 381 men, 19 women was the starting count.

Actually that did clear it up a little. I wrote the above 3 months ago, so I had to go back and get up to speed on my argument.

I’m not saying he IDEA was trivial - quite the contrary. It’s the execution, as well as integration into overall combat training. I’m not saying Russians are dumb, I’m saying they are poor. They have good ideas, but unless you can maintain and train with these weapons too they are paper tigers.

Funny pic, but I wish you had written out a paragraph the size of the picture!

HAHAHAHAHAHA... ahhh, that’s a great one. I’m going to have to share that with my Indian friend, as he would be surprised if the T 50 was capable of anything. Russia might build 12, which means 2 might be air worthy at any moment.

Except we know what those are like, countries that had recently acquired those craft became NATO countries. So we got a very close look at them, and were able to train specifically against those capabilities. We found it was a neat idea, but not implemented very well. In the end, not the game changing threat we…

Nuclear retaliation is all they have, so it becomes the only thing they can negotiate with. As long as we are not making a run on the cities with an invasion force, they won’t be faced with a true existential threat. It’s not like we are gonna launch anything, even if they do launch a limited strike. There is so…

OK, I will give you the hypothetical: That the new russian planes you mentioned are near equivalent in capabilities - that is still a big IF.

I’m assuming this would be a straight up invasion of Russia, so troops would be in place instead of on the roads. OK, that means they are static targets for our precision air/artillery forces. We don’t even really need to kill them, just prevent them from being useful. It’s not like we are actually going to occupy…

Based on the uniques experience and enculturation of “brats”, I would think this would be an ideal pool to draw from for the Diplomatic corps. Besides the openmindedness, you also have an appreciation for the military that is tempered by the fact that the military is made up of loved ones.

Got a link?

While they certainly had a nuclear weapon program, and plans on how to build a possible weapon... those two things don’t equal HAVING an actual working Nuclear Weapon, let alone lighting one off as JimHall was suggesting.

Yes, there are many ways to test and see if a bomb went off. Namely, radiation. Seismographs would show it as well.

Unfortunately the ground invasion would have not gotten past the border, as they would have had to use roads frequented by Illinois drivers.

It’s a small world after all <crash>

Found the English guy.

Turkey is in NATO. You can’t count on being more of an ally than that. But I see them falling away from that, and making friends with ISIS specifically as proxies against the Kurds.

Wow, it wasn’t a lie. The Dark Side does have cookies.

I did IT at the Great Lakes Naval station N of Chicago. I heard a story about the training simulator for the MK 13 single-arm missile launcher. Aparently, one of the new sailors in training got the sequence wrong, and instead of ejecting nothing off the rail, they ejected their training round through the wall into the…

The problem is there is no one left besides the crazies. The crazies don’t want peace, they want to be in charge. It doesn’t matter if Star Bright and the other Little Ponies come in to bring rainbows and love to their land, they will be opposed through asymetric warfare.