Jeeps_Guns_Tanks

American foreign policy these past six years has been rudderless to the point that it makes George W. Bush seem almost Churchillian in comparison.
I am being very kind and circumspect here but it seems the Administration is more interested in style over substance. By meeting with the leader of India it looks like they're doing cool President stuff. Besides, it's all a distraction from social engineering here at home.
In short it is the Cadillac Escalade of diplomacy, lowered with the oversize spinner wheels, ground effects and obnoxious sound system blaring, oblivious of what the other foreign heads of state think. It doesn't matter that it is high-centered and stuck on a speed bump because they all about that swag.
The unfortunate thing is the other players in the game have a good read on our President and have been acting accordingly.

At first I thought this thread was about shoulder launched anti-tank weapons.

The mustache is the most frightening aspect of that uniform. It is the stuff of Stranger Danger nightmares.
 

Yeah. Considering the answer to the question "When are you going to be in a blue backdrop where that uniform blends in with" kind of makes me think OSHA safety orange is a better idea.

Depends how wide the pillars would be. I also am not sure it would help that much. Maybe using tapered pillars would help?
 
Also, does anyone feel that Cowboy Action Shooting is anything but a bunch of baby boomers acting out their John Wayne fantasies in costume?

I was expecting a shield for Calvary horses against arrows, spears, or bullets.

XSB2D Destroyer with groovy top and bottom turrets, but the Navy quickly changed its mind. It wound up becoming the XBTD-2 with mixed propulsion. This was a reasonably popular thing for a bit, adding a jet instead of a rear gunner to provide rear protection by speed.
 

 
XTB2D Skypirate. Designed for the larger later carriers. Fit an R-4360 with counter rotating propellers. Could carry four torpedoes or an equivalent bomb load. Don't let the single engine fool you, the thing could carry as much as four TBFs (and they considered stuffing a jet in the back). It was about the same empty weight and had a longer wingspan than a B-25 Mitchell.
 

 
Grumman XTB2F. Yes that's a proposed carrier torpedo bomber. I'm sure you can see the biggest problem with that idea. But what I'm pretty sure you didn't notice the significance of is yes, that is a 75mm gun, and it would be accompanied by six .50 cals. And that's a radar in the wing because why not at that point. They also had a much more sensible idea for a torpedo bomber, the XTSF-1, which was a F7F modified with a TBF torpedo bay and an air to surface radar in the nose.
 

 
YP-37, an early attempt to fit a turbosupercharged inline in the Hawk airframe. Basically an abortive attempt at what the P-40 was, but with bad visibility and stability.
 

 
The SNC-1, originally the CW-22. A two seat fighter. They took the CW-21, a super lightweight fighter that got good performance at the expense of durability even when compared to the Zero, and added a rear gunner. It rather quickly became a training plane instead because that's not an awful idea.
 

 
The XP-62, the last hurrah of Curtiss-Wright fighter design. Originally promising with a R-3350 providing a ton of power going into a counterrotating prop. Got passed by because Curtiss-Wright was failing as a company with a ton of similar projects cannibalizing each other. Overall a mess.
 
NOT PICTURED: There were attempts to to add a turbosupercharger and intercooler to the P-39. One try was in a belly pod. Top speed dropped 40 mph. The next try was in a saddleback right over the cockpit. Top speed dropped by 45 mph.
 

 
This otherwise unoffensive looking sort is the XP-47H. Yep. It's a thunderbolt, testing the XIV-2220-1 16 cylinder inverted V engine. It didn't work very well. Meanwhile cleaning up and lightening the thing with a radial produced the J, which using a mass-produced engine and propeller cleared 500 mph.
 
 

 
Bell YFM-1 Airacuda. Yep, that's two gunner aimed and fired 37mm guns. To quote wiki: it was an innovative design incorporating many features never before seen in a military aircraft, as well as several never seen again. I wonder why. It'd probably be effective against bombers if it weren't for the minor problem of not being able to catch them. It relied on an independent auxiliary power unit to power both engine fuel pumps as well as all aircraft electrical systems (this is one of those features!) It functionally had three separate engines without any one the plane was a write-off.
 

 
XP-67 Moonbat. In addition to looking frankly super cool, it was supposed to be armed with 37mm cannon as a bomber destroyer. Six 37mm cannon in fact. Unfortunately actually making the thing work right was a bit much for the design staff and it had a severe tendency to overheat to the point of fire. By the time it worked, it didn't perform.
 

 
XP-71. The very definition of big American bomber killers. 82.3 foot span, 39,950 pound weight intended (two B-25s!) with two R-4360-13s with turbos and a pair of eight blade, 13.5 foot diameter contra-rotating props. Intended to climb to 25,000 feet in 12.5 minutes, make 428 mph up there and be able to get to 40,000 feet with a 3,000 mile range. The thing was supposed to be armed with two 37mm cannon and a 75mm cannon. There were only two problems. First, it wasn't really working, it was complex as could be and things were progressing slowly. Second, there weren't any bombers to hunt. Which is a shame, because I desperately wish the B-36 of fighters had been a thing.
 

 
Northrop XP-56. Cool looking plane, all-magnesium, all-welded. Unfortunately it didn't actually work and more importantly couldn't be made to work.
 

 
XF5F. Normally the nose goes in front of the wing, but Grumman does what it wants. The test performance was allegedly excellent, with it pulling away from an XF4U so fast the pilot thought the Corsair had engine trouble. Unfortunately it was a twin engine design and the Wildcat was deemed more practical, and the XF5F was going to need more design time and changes that would add weight.
 

 
Oh come on Vought. Really? This is the XF5U. Basically the idea was that there are good reasons why a wing with super long chord suck, mainly the induced drag at the very long wingtips, but if you cancel them out with the prop wash it'd totally allow for better maneuverability, roll rate and strength. It was promising but development took too long, with vibration problems in particular. They did need to break it up with a wrecking ball, so the strength was a thing that happened.
 
No points if you guessed that I have a handsome book on US WWII "fighter" (and light strike plane) development.

It really sounds like this isn't fixable with wars going on.
 
The part about the guys giving the war crimes lecture at west point and no one raising their hands is really disturbing. 

It's actually worse. I was looking through the comments section for more possible sources on my current investigations of Chris Kyle. One of the commentors said that Kunk in fact got away with scapegoating his battalion and is now a full Colonel.
 
So yeah, not only did Kunk create an environment where war crimes were more likely to happen, he was rewarded for it by dressing down the folks reporting it. Again, this is no surprise to me knowing the culture of impunity around the military and the jilted nature of the US officer corps. Staying in line and maintaining the fantasy of a "clean" army is more important than actually fixing real problems.
 
 
Let me share with you a story from another sniper veteran from Iraq; part of my compilation on Ramadi.
 
This sniper took issue with Chris Kyle's story about shooting a woman with a grenade. He took issue not because "he shot a woman" or any other typical liberal bleeding heart argument. He took issue because Kyle claimed that he might go to prison if he got the call wrong. The sniper, with blunt candidness, instead said that Kyle and no other US soldier would ever have gone to prison because they mistakenly shot civilians. Indeed, the sniper recounted an incident where an intelligence officer ordered them to shoot up an armed column of Iraqis; who could clearly see the American soldiers and yet took no hostile action. The result was a bloody firefight with lots of Iraqi dead, only to turn out all the Iraqis they killed were part of the governor's bodyguard. Was the intelligence officer sent to prison or even reprimanded? Nope, in fact as far as they knew he went up the ladder.
 
And really, knowing that the military practices this kind of culture of impunity, is it really smart to be letting extremists in? What if they start shooting helpless civilians left and right and then misreport it as "enemy combatants" or the CO turns a blind eye because he's so short-handed that he needs even these nutcases. Or, as the above cases show, the rest of the unit is afraid they might get fragged by the psychos in their midst, knowing there likely won't be an investigation? Pat Tillman for instance was killed by friendly fire and it took months for the Army to even admit this. And as far as I can tell, the folks who helped covered it up in fact got promoted while the perpetrators by and large have never been named or punished. 

The problem would be trying to quantify where the tipping point is outside of the obvious when it comes to obnoxious behavior in the military.
When we'd entertain some of guys from my brother's unit at our farm with some light-hearted barbecues/stump pile burning, I noticed one of the guys had a Confederate battle flag in the back window of his lifted pickup.
This isn't an abnormal occurrence in country. The fact that it was owned by a six-foot-five black dude was however. And on that day I was introduced to my first genuine black southern redneck with unique views on race and inhabitants of the inner city.

It wouldn't have manifested if their leadership had been worth a damn.

As noted, the lower limit in the WWII period was 3" shells, which they designed the 3"/50 Mark 22 around as a drop-in replacement for the Bofors (and stuck with them when they turned out overweight) and the postwar attempts at an autoloaded 3" with blistering rates of fire that had to be turned down. 40mm and later 20mm are very firmly Cold War developments.
 
For the 5"/38 Mark 12, VT fuzing reduced the number of rounds fired per aircraft downed by roughly half according to navweaps. I've seen numbers saying that's a 5x increase in overall effectiveness, which given limited engagement windows and so on I can kind of believe but I'd want to do math first.
 
 
Friendly reminder that the US developed AWACS during WWII, complete with a radar that was in active combat use by the British when the Cold War ended and had an operational plan for it. Cold War carrier defense doctrine is so very linked to what they were doing off Okinawa it's funny.

Yes.  People who masturbate speculate about alternate history scenarios where the Germans develop this or that superweapon forget that the Allies had several superweapons, and actually fielded several of them.

I have not seen the film.  I suppose people like a good war film regardless of who it is about.  I will say that I am always slightly suspicious of anything published in the NY Post.  It's not exactly the finest of newspapers.  Still, interesting response.
 
Earlier today I made a facebook post regarding sniper movies.  It was:
 
So snipers have been in the news quite a bit. Guess it has to do with this new Clint Eastwood Movie. Even local steakhouses seem to have an opinion on the matter. Personally, I have not seen the film and I probably won't bother to watch it. If it had been up to me to make a movie about a sniper, it would have been about World War II Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko. I have three reasons for this.
1) She was credited with shooting 309 Nazis. If you are going to shoot 309 people, Nazis are probably your best choice. Those guys kinda had it coming.
2) She became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt.
3) Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her.
I rest my case.

I've actually heard it before then but that is not a parallel I thought of.
 
 
 
This is pretty fair. I'd bring up that whole "totally stands for scout snipers guys" flag scandal regarding seriously sketchy behavior regarding Nazism, but there's a real difference between recruiting for a peacetime military and recruiting for a wartime military. Warning, a decent fraction of this post is going to be drawing on the experiences from Vietnam through the eighties or so, because I'm pulling in large part from the excellent book Prodigal Soldiers (and I was having problems paying attention during the Iraq and A'stan bit of class so I don't remember them as well. Sorry). The wartime stuff isn't going to map cleanly at all and I'm not even going to try other than to make a point or two about volunteer vs. conscript and a little remark about what having to scrounge up manpower can do. On the other hand, I'd say there's a pretty significant difference in recruiting outlook for a peacetime military for genital waving versus regional contenders for hegemony and the military during a war lasting over a decade that has no meaningful impact on the population of the nation unless they know somebody who's in and is getting to the point where stop-loss orders are becoming problematic, with serious increases before Gates ordered a reduction.
 
First, a conscription system isn't going to get recruits evenly from across the nation's demographics. You start giving draft deferments for things like education and so on and the richer parts of society start becoming progressively (or should I say regressively) less involved in the war. There's also the fact that it's a goal to keep the population insulated from feeling the effects and costs of the war. In Vietnam they tried to shift this to people who wouldn't get as much media attention or make as many problems when drafted. Calling up the reserve would cause serious problems, and there was a serious battle to avoid calling them up but still come up with the manpower to expand involvement. The draft was very unpopular but they needed soldiers. This culminated in the utterly reprehensible and totally indefensible Project 100,000, which brought us such lovely things as soldiers who ranged between uneducated and straight up mentally ill and thus took much greater casualties (I want to say twice the rate but it's been a while) and folks like a certain Lieutenant William Calley Jr. of My Lai fame (and incidentally is the answer to my childhood question of why the local homeless all had Vietnam Vet caps). This is the extreme worst case of what happens when the war puts people are under pressure to get more soldiers. The US military during the end of and after Vietnam until roughly 1980 was a disgraceful trainwreck. For example they damned near lost the Kitty Hawk to a fire caused by some seriously problematic training and maintenance issues (the same ship had earlier seen a race riot because 1970s America was a mess). The postwar reaction to the problems and deep unpopularity of conscription led to some fun times as the politicians started trying to deal with the problem of fighting a war the population didn't want to fight, and the military tried to deal with the problem of potentially getting sent to fight without the nation behind it. The latter led to things like Total force trying to ensure that the reserves would be called up in case of war by putting all kinds of key support elements into the reserves. The former and the needs for the higher tech, more capable force of the 1980s led to the modern peacetime American volunteer army.
 
There's a different cast to the real peacetime military once the problems really got dealt with to some degree and the military started repairing itself from the damage suffered during Vietnam. People like General Creech did a great job of making the military competent, proud and appealing again, and the recruiting focus shifted from poor people in inner cities who desperately needed money to educated people with the technical skills to be part of the very impressive 80s military set up against the USSR that eventually made Desert Storm look easy. The peacetime military built to be able to take on a technological foe is the "Be All You Can Be" military of opportunity for people trying to make something of themselves and find real opportunity. The difference between a military truly focused on being able to fight a near-peer competitor with bleeding edge technology and one that's desperately trying to come up with enough infantry to secure everything is massive. I would frankly be surprised if a military trying to make ends meet and come up with bodies to go be infantry didn't go looking for people who desperately needed money and start loosening standards. The overriding motivations for people in the peacetime military are likely not close to the people who joined in late 2001 are likely not close to those joining in the middle of an interminable war, and the people being targeted for recruitment are likely not the same.
 
For the most part American soldiers are trying to make something of themselves, but most isn't all, and wearing the uniform doesn't render you immune to criticism. When discussing lovely sorts like Chris Kyle, it's important to remember that most doesn't mean all.
 
And as far as liberals not enlisting in the military (warning: personal subjective opinion), I think there's a pretty significant disconnect on the axiom that being a soldier is de facto defending the country and fighting in any war anywhere is protecting America, its freedoms and its values. I don't fancy the idea of being on the hook the next time we decide to spend huge amounts of other peoples' blood and everybody's money on destroying things and acting surprised when building turns out to be harder than destroying.
 
Food for thought: If we thank soldiers for risking their lives for us, why don't we thank firefighters as such a major cultural thing as thanking soldiers is?

Again. I'm not going to defend or attack Chris Kyle. The umbrage I take is this comment. "When you go "volunteer" military, you actually get the dregs for the most part" which is rather demonstrably untrue considering that most recruits are high school graduates who come from suburban and rural locales who then use their GI Bill to go on and get a college education, learn a trade or settle down to raise a family after their enlistment is up.
 
Nor do I disagree that there are individuals in the military who are "neo-Nazis". In a governmental bureaucracy that employs hundreds of thousands of individuals, there are bound to be some bad apples that slip through. Hell, they let a damn radical Muslim shoot up Fort Hood, for Christ's sake. So how many neo-Nazis are in the military? One? Four? A dozen? A hundred? Statistically that number falls rather well below the "Dregs for the most part" number. 
 
I also keep track of hate groups on the Southern Poverty Center website and "for the most part", these are organizations that are marginalized and irrelevant and who are lucky if they are able to scrape together a dozen guys to hold a "parade" or hand out flyers. That these groups somehow then have the wherewithal to infiltrate the U.S. military in a Hydra-like plot where "most" of those who serve are secretly neo-Nazis who are one order away from staging a military revolt stretches the imagination.
 
But who knows? Maybe this is actually the case. But given the absurdity of the claim, it behooves the person making that assertion to back it up. And I'm talking more than just a a book whose sole source seems to be a dude who has some pictures of a bunch of guys in their early 20s acting stupid.
 
I hate using the term Occam's Razor but in this case it seems rather more likely that there are a group of folks with a political leaning opposite that of the majority of troops who enlist and who have little actual real contact with military culture. And given that the majority of those who enlist come from congressional districts that are conservative or at least lean Republican, it's no wonder that a large number of (rich) liberals in New York or San Francisco have a loathing of the military and its culture. At any rate, is far easier to throw around terms like "racist" when confronted with someone who has a different opinion.
 
I suppose the real question is why more liberals don't enlist in the military? 

A1 Skyraider is a pretty neat plane, and it had a lot of variants. 

Reading through the articles Zin posted, I found this.  
 
7. Did Kyle’s father invent the ‘sheep, sheepdogs and wolves’ speech?
 
No. The motivational dinner table chat in which Kyle’s father tells him “there are three types of people in the world: wolves, sheep and sheepdogs” has a far longer history - although not in Kyle’s memoir. As Slate point out, Hall made up the scene, but the analogy comes from Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman’s 2004 book On Combat. Grossman claims he borrowed it from an “old war veteran”, and uses the phrase in relation to the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. It’s since been picked up by gun rights groups, military and police circles.
 
         
 
Is it just me or does this sound suspiciously like the Dicks, Pussies and Assholes speech from team America?
 

People are only humans, and thus monkeys besides. Look hard enough, and you can find shit on anyone's hands.

Hell, much more egregious than his denigration of US troops is that he takes Gundam seriously.

Posted on the WOT forums, our very own Zinegata weighs in on the issue:
 
 
 
I wish that the US presidency were a sham institution, concealing a king.  Tell me when elections are suspended and whoever the hell is in the big seat starts having big posters of themselves put up in urban centers and having Congress machine-gunned down.  Twentieth Century history has plenty of examples of what happens when a country slides into despotism, and it doesn't look like this.
 
The US presidency was probably best summed up by that great sage of our times, Hunter S. Thompson:
 
 
The US president is basically a celebrity, with all the prestige and mind-altering amounts of attention that go with it.  He has slightly more say in the legislative process than a typical celebrity, which is itself highly ceremonial legacy institution, but this is barely worth mentioning.  Rather, the president is constantly surrounded by people who act like he is an important individual, and the sort of person who tends to succeed in politics tends not to be the sort of person who's savvy enough to figure out the essentially theatrical nature of the whole thing. 
 
You can tell it's a scam pretty easily.  Nixon campaigned on the grounds that he would "clean up the mess in Washington," only to oversee an enormous expansion of the same.  Nixon had been a hard-line anti-communist as a senator, and would go on to normalize relations with the People's Republic of China.  I seem to recall a certain governor of Texas campaigning for a "humbler" US foreign policy, and I think we all know how that ended.
 
 Clinton may have been an exception, as Clinton was an unusually high-functioning president, but generally speaking the poor dumb bastards don't figure out the scam until it's too late and twenty years have been sucked out of their lives.
 
Twentieth Century history also has plenty of examples of what a country looks like when it slides into militarism, and it's not like this either.  For one thing we'd use all those beautiful nuclear weapons that are just collecting dust. 
 
The US military doesn't decide to go on ill-advised adventures to bring freedom to remote corners of the world that frankly don't want it.  That would be the State Department's job, although within living memory the CIA did this sort of thing also.  The US military isn't a quasi-jail for undesirables who can't hack it elsewhere.  There have been armies that have operated on this model; the Prussians come to mind, and they've all had revolting and horrifying standards of discipline.  See the French and Spanish Foreign Legions for other instructive examples.  Further, the idea that recent combat experience is creating an entire class of dangerously unhinged, traumatized vets is beloved of the media, but not particularly well-supported by evidence.
 
The US military exists primarily to waste money.  This is so it has a larger budget to waste the next year.  Occasionally they do spend money on useful things, but since inflating the budget by wasting money is easier than inflating the budget by buying useful things, a much greater percentage of the money goes towards waste.  In this way it is similar, perhaps indistinguishable, from any other US government agency.
 
The military does have an unusual relationship with the so-called "private sector."  There are basically entire sectors of the American economy that act as the retirement plans for officers.  Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, GDLS and their ilk are the most obvious ones, but speak to any officer in the US military and you'll hear of companies that largely employ officers and make all of their money by selling things to the US military.  They need US military officers to help them navigate the byzantine regulations regarding tendering to the US military, of course.  You may have heard the phrase "self-licking ice cream cone."  This is it.
 
Now, this essentially incestuous relationship is by no means unique among US government organizations; it's just very well developed in the US military (the SEC probably runs a close second).
 
A rather small portion of the military does fighting.  Part of this is reflective of the realities of modern combat; the logistical shaft of the spear is much larger than the spearhead.  Part of this is a result of years of bureaucratic decay; it's easier to waste money arbitrarily than it is to waste money equipping people to go fight.

I learned today not to try even the simplest of car repair projects after being woken up out of a dead sleep when you're dreaming that you're a star of a 1980s John Hughes movie which then morphed into a "Creature Feature" with some anomaly that warped individuals into terrifying killers that resembled the ensemble in Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video.
 

 
Looking back, I think this can be chalked up to my wife making me watch the first Doctor Who reboot episode with Christopher Eccleston and eating copious amounts of homemade cinnamon rolls that she had just baked for that purpose.
 
Yes, I'm a lucky man.
 
I do distinctly remember in the dream saying "Oh, boy, I'm in a John Hughes film. I know all the tricks on how to be popular. I sure hope this doesn't turn into a Creature Feature later on."
 
If you have ever been around me in person, I have a tendency of saying stuff like that in real life...
 
So with that as a back story, you can imagine the state I was in as I stagger down to look at her Ford Escape that had a dead battery. No problem, I'll just push it out of the garage and give it a jump start with my Toyota truck. Out come the jumper cables. Red and black on the red and black terminals on the Escape. Red and black on the black and red terminals on the Toyota.
 
"Don. The cables are beginning to smoke."
 
Boom. I'm instantly awake, quickly switch the now rather hot cables and I begin to survey the damage, all while kicking myself for screwing up on a simple jump start that I have performed dozens and dozens of times.
 
Fortunately, I think the only thing wrong is the 120 amp mega fuse on the Escape which did its job of protecting all the electronic innards from people who do something idiotic like I just did. Although I'll be spending this evening going over the car's electrical system when it gets home.
 
So that concludes my episode of "I Learned Something Today".

Ah. That's where I heard Ginsberg's name. Yeah, I've heard the story about Michael Savage in his formative years with his political opponents making hay about him being a closeted homosexual or whatever. *Shrug*
 
I don't know. A different take could be that Wiener/Savage was a young writer trying to make his way in a new town and was taken advantage of by an older, more powerful individual. This sort of thing happens all of the time - see the Cosby rape allegations - and the victim is frequently shamed into silence. At any rate, if it did happen, it would explain Savage's hatred for homosexuals. 
 
Once upon a time when I was a cub reporter filling in briefly at the Seattle P-I during a labor dispute, one of my fellow scabs from a Hearst publication did all that he could to get me to have drinks in his hotel room. It's an odd experience being a straight man who is being hit on by a homosexual. I did learn that when another man compliments you on your combat boots and asks if you like Dan Savage's writing and then compliments your pickup truck as "butch" that they are tells. 

Oh sure, and spend all day trying to get the pith off the wedges and out from under your fingernails.
Watermelons are easier and better to eat than grapefruit. That should be obvious.

Welcome to the party pal!

FTFY