Priory_of_Sion

I'm personally curious about trade-offs concerning range and loitering times against other characteristics. I don't know quite as much about planes as I do armored vehicles, but having aircraft in the air longer or have them being able to go farther seems like it would be just as important as its dogfighting capabilities. 

Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, & Mosul probably was the graves of most of ISIS's fighters if we assume they had fighting strength around 15,000 max at the start of 2017 and haven't been able to replenish with foreign fighters. A good bit might have trickled into Idlib too. It is a remarkable collapse nonetheless. 

HaVE yUo forgEt INDIA ? DRDO ?

3 minutes ago, T___A said:

This is an amazing article:

 

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a13266971/election-2016-behind-the-scenes/

Quote

Evan McMullin, Independent candidate: Our election night event was in Salt Lake City. I was drinking Diet Coke and eating hummus and olives.

4 minutes ago, Belesarius said:

Anyone else think that Saudi Arabia is about a hiccup away from direct war with Iran?  The Crown Prince is known for being impatient and doesn't like Iran much.  And neither does a lot of the US Conservative base.

 

I could see it happening before the end of Trump's 1st term, but not right now. If MbS is that impatient though, who fucking knows. I mean he comes from the place that essentially created ISIS and AQ and is genociding the Yemeni Shia right now so I think anything is on the table, but I don't think his allies (US, UAE, Israel) would green light a war with Iran.

3 minutes ago, Belesarius said:

Game of Thrones, Saudi Edition.

 

http://www.janes.com/article/75456/arrests-and-removals-of-top-officials-strengthen-saudi-crown-prince-s-succession-indicating-shift-from-consensus-based-rule

 

It's an interesting process to watch play out, and this may end up being a large rollback of the extremist sects in Saudi.

 

hold your horses

Saudis have declared that Lebanon has declared war on them? I'm confused, but optimistic that this ends with Hezbollah wrecking the Saudis and meeting the Houthis in Mecca or something.

3 hours ago, LostCosmonaut said:

The shitshow continues; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/brazile-i-considered-replacing-clinton-with-biden-as-2016-democratic-nominee/2017/11/04/f0b75418-bf4c-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.4c1ec7674144

 

Bonus mention of Seth Rich included.

The "America backing Nationalist China" isn't entirely true as many members of the US Govt really wanted to support Mao's communists in China over the rather ineffective and despotic government of Chaing and this essentially went along until Chinese communists started taking full advantage of America's wishy-washy support of the Nationalists by taking over most of the country after the Japanese surrender and killing a handful of Americans along the way to being one of the deadliest regimes in modern history. 

5 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Fifteen to thirty thousand dead is a low level insurgency?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising

 

Coming back a little closer to the present, it's not the DPRK who persistently refuse to negotiate a peace treaty, the simple solution that's been staring the world in the face for sixty years.....Was 2016 the last time America refused to talk, I really do forget?

Compared to the Korean War, yeah. 

Yes, America should negotiate more with the North and could probably remove its forces from the Korean Peninsula without having to worry about the North taking Seoul. That doesn't mean the DPRK is actually the victim or is somehow not a terrible regime that starved its own population to death in the 90s. Also what was the last time America sunk a North Korean naval vessel or shelled a North Korean island? 

The article does have some good points about a war with North Korea being a bad idea, but kindly glosses over Japanese imperialism, the whole repressive Communist government thing, and various acts of North Korean aggression. Blaming the Korean War on America is insane. Conflating the low level insurgency on Jeju Island with a full scale military invasion by the DPRK is near lunacy. 

The anti-war movement is needed in America, but it is mostly just a bunch of weirdo libertarians and far-lefties that get too much into conspiracy theories and bad understanding of how war works and gets a bad rap. Articles like this one is why they get a bad rap. 

lol Shit, I just noticed

An A7V in NYC 

The Russians should send T-26s as is tradition 

Knocked-out Syrian (captured from Israel) M4 in Lebanon 1983

Trump likely to approve arm sells to Ukraine, don't worry though as we're only sending "defensive" arms. 

The "Clinton sells uranium to Russia" thing is really dumb

1 minute ago, Jeeps_Guns_Tanks said:

copy and paste,  they want moneyz

open it in an incognito tab and never pay them a cent 

The Clinton Campaign/DNC paid for the Trump piss dossier 

23 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

On a vaguely related note.....WTF did you guys do to the F1 this weekend? 

 

Damned good race though, gutted for Verstappen. 

 

 

I've only recently started to pay attention to F1 this last summer, but I haven't been able to watch any of the races since Belgium. I'm just keeping track of what's going on, same with baseball. 

I saw a decent amount of Israeli flags being flown in Kurdistan in some accounts, but you can see the Israeli support for Kurdistan as an attempt to weaken Iran and an Iranian-aligned Iraq without too much concern for what the Kurds actually think of Jews. 

Just now, Donward said:

Maybe the Dems shouldn't be dropping tens of millions of dollars in off-year special elections in Trump/Red states on candidates that have no chance of winning if they are having money problems?

Problem: that assumes that the Dems are smart 

1 hour ago, Collimatrix said:

How does Turkey manage to lose to these people again?

Well, they are fighting the PKK that are a fairly decent insurgent force and not the PUK/KDP splintered alliance that doesn't work at all.