While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Grandkhan]

But actually, thinking the state of New York can enforce any kinds of demands on foreign countries is still dumb as hell.

Wasn't stuff like this why Mexico got invaded by the French in the 1860s?

I look forward to the upcoming US invasion of Argentina to take Patagonia as repayment.

Honestly countries should just offer their territory as collateral on loans. Greece filed for bankruptcy? Goldman Sachs now owns Crete. Any vagueries of internatiol finances solved.

(My parents actually suggested selling an island as a way to solve Greece's debt problems.)

 

[BSmith1068]

...fixed

LOL. That's actually how I read his post the first time.

 

[Masada]

But actually, thinking the state of New York can enforce any kinds of demands on foreign countries is still dumb as hell.

It totally can since New York based banks handle a lot of international transactions. Interdicting some of those deal that happen to have Argentina as a counter-party is quite simple. Even if Argentina somehow manages to avoid dealing with New York based banks, and I guess US based banks generally given the overlap, the nuisance factor might be sufficiently large to force them to the table. You also need to keep in mind that this will place considerable strain on even banks that don't operate in New York because of the counter-party risk. There's also the risk of being shut out of the New York markets, if one is seen to be facilitating this sort of evasion. This could be formal or informal, it doesn't matter.

 

[Symphony D.]

If Argentina's general response when confronted with nuclear options is to push the button and default, which is the entire reason you want to punish them, then choosing to punish them by playing chicken and daring them to start pushing buttons isn't really a brilliant strategy.

A downward spiral of locking people out and forcing them to assume ever greater burdens to reenter pretty much means they're going to tell you to screw off and not try and reenter, even if it's ultimately a bad move. It's like Psychology 101. They'd hardly be the first economic pariah state.

 

[Symphony D.]

Zombie sieges are in-game events that occur when many zombies spawn in a village. They occur regardless of how well lit or walled off a village is.

Note: From 1.4.7 to at least 1.7.9, Zombie Sieges fail to start. See MC-7432 for more information. However, normal zombie spawning and behavior as of 1.6 can result in very similar activity. Some players say they've seen legitimate sieges as of 1.7.4, but they are likely mistaking normal random spawning or hard-mode reinforcement calling for a siege. Zombie sieges have been restored as of 14w25a.

"Hey, Carl, our game is about building things, ja?"
"Ja."
"How about we include an event that totally invalidates building things?"
"Ja."

Mojang: dumbest game development company, or dumbest game development company ever?

 

[Crezth]

fc and I lost two and a half villages to zombie sieges once upon a time.

 

[Tycho]

It's been awhile since I played Minecraft, but the zombie sieges actually spawn inside of the village even if you wall them off and provide a heavy amount of light to ward off naturally occurring spawns, right? If that's the case, that's poor game design right there into trying to force you into combat to protect the village you are wanting to protect.

 

[Symphony D.]

Protip: the A-10 is actually not a platform really worth saving, even if it is a pretty good airplane at what it does. Don't be one of those people.

 

[talonschild]

Interesting. Please expound.

 

[Symphony D.]

This is pretty instructive:

The A-10’s supporters adopt all manner of spurious arguments to justify keeping it in service.

“Soldiers love the A-10.” Ground troops love the Warthog because they can see it in action during close air support runs, but this means the enemy can see the A-10 too—and target it. Other aircraft that perform CAS, such as the F-15E, F-16, and B-1 do it at higher speed or higher altitude, where the aircraft are less vulnerable to ground fire. In fact, the F-16, not the A-10, has been the primary CAS platform in Afghanistan.

“The A-10 is more cost-effective than other CAS platforms.” This argument fails at both ends. If low operating costs are the goal, the MQ-9 Reaper is also used to destroy ground targets in benign airspace, and is much cheaper to fly than the A-10. Or, if efficiency is desired, the metric should be cost per target destroyed. In that calculation, the B-1 bomber’s huge weapons payload moves it to the top of the effectiveness equation.

“There’s no other fixed-wing aircraft that can do the job the A-10 can do.”This is true in a narrow sense, not in terms of overall mission effectiveness. If the parameters are drawn narrowly enough, you can still rationalize Iowa-class battleships, SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft … and the horse cavalry. When there’s no money, however, the military needs maximum bang for its buck.

This is not an attack on the A-10, which performs an important mission very well. It must also be noted that the Air Force has little desire to retire the A-10. Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, himself a former Hawg driver, recently said of the proposal: “Nobody likes it. Not me, nobody.”

It is not too late to fix this budgetary snafu. Congress can end sequestration and provide the military the money it needs to reposition itself to meet future security needs. Or, the Air Force could be freed from micromanagement and allowed to actually organize, train, and equip its airmen.

Basically, if there's no will to undo Sequestration cuts, there's no reason to keep the plane. Its job can be covered by other platforms, because its job as designed is to survive Soviet road-mobile anti-artillery systems and devastate large-scale tank formations in and around northern Germany circa 1980. That job no longer exists and it's unlikely a similar job will exist in the future.

Even then, it's only successful in that job in a permissive air environment (it was well-armored, yes, but it was cheap and we have a lot of them because it was going to have a high casualty rate); the function of the Air Force is in large part to make that happen, but that's increasingly difficult (again due to budget cuts) and so a system utterly reliant on it makes no sense financially, particularly when it's unlikely to fulfill its original function. Even in permissive air environments, it often isn't deployed, e.g., Afghanistan. An A-10 isn't going to be useful in a full-up conventional war with China, it's not going to be useful in brushfire actions in Africa, it's not going to be useful against Syria or ISIS or Iran or whoever. Nobody wants to fight America in a straight up war like Saddam did twice, because they saw what happened to him, and if they do, their version of mirroring us isn't going to resemble that of the Soviets (countering finesse with mass) in terms of forces.

That's the strategic picture. Tactically, if you want precision, you don't need the A-10's gun, you can get by with SDBs or JDAMs and eschew the depleted uranium. If you want raw killing power, you never use it anyway, you use the B-52, which dropped 40% of the bombs in the Gulf War and psychologically shattered most of the Iraqi units, or the B-1B which has done more or less the same job in Afghanistan.

The Ju 87 Stuka was a good CAS plane too, but you wouldn't have thrown money at keeping it in service in 1973 either if you had better things to spend the cash on.

 

[Perfectionist]

it was well-armored, yes, but it was cheap and we have a lot of them because it was going to have a high casualty rate

The entire fleet was projected to last less than two weeks if the Soviets came through Fulda, and that was the optimistic projection.

Surely, though, the 'it doesn't do anything we actually need' argument - which is perfectly true - applies just as well to the F-35? That, I think, is why people tend to get defensive about it: they see fighter jocks sacrificing something that at least is good at what it's designed to do so that they can keep the trillion-dollar flying white elephant.

 

[Symphony D.]

Surely, though, the 'it doesn't do anything we actually need' argument - which is perfectly true - applies just as well to the F-35? That, I think, is why people tend to get defensive about it: they see fighter jocks sacrificing something that at least is good at what it's designed to do so that they can keep the trillion-dollar flying white elephant.

The F-35 and F-22 do the job of the F-16 and F-15 in environments where the F-16 and F-15 will never survive no matter how much crap is bolted onto them or how much they're improved. That's not to say they're perfect planes, or even great planes, but nobody liked say, the F-4 when it was rolled out and it's still in use in some places. The only way the F-35 isn't vital is if you're literally giving up on multirole fighter/ground-attack as a mission, in which case you're basically giving up on airpower, period.

The fact that the Russians are pushing the PAK FA and the Chinese the J-20 is because that style platform is essentially the fundamental building block for having an air force in the modern environment and going forward for the next 50 years. It's not just a one-off American-being-pants-on-head-******** thing, it's the future. The fact that we started doing it (Fifth Generation) first, using totally untried methods, meant of course there'd be teething problems. There are almost always teething problems.

Making the F-35 multiservice ultimately was a dumb idea and it'd have been cheaper/better/faster to have three different planes, though.

e: Now if you're saying we don't "need" the capability to enter those environments (e.g., Chinese or Russian airspace, etc.), that comes down to policy and luck of the draw on events. The military being functionally a nation-state's insurance policy, and therefore being interested in capabilities regardless of their actual likelihood of usage (e.g., nukes) means that idea of "need" is entirely divorced from their way of thinking, in which yes, we definitely need this and (almost) every other capability. But we need some capabilities more than others, and access trumps CAS every single time.

 

[Perfectionist]

The job's vital, sure, but can the F-35 do it? Yeah, it was sold as the plane to do everything for everyone, replace everything from the A-10 to the Harrier, but my limited understanding is that if you ask people who don't work for Lockheed or DoD they say the plane doesn't fill any of those roles well enough to be worth it. When you do that you've got to compromise on everything, so it's not stealthy enough, not tough enough, not maneuverable enough, too complicated and consequently too easy to break (one caught fire on takeoff just yesterday), doesn't have the range or payload to be effective in any of the places we'll actually need it, and to top it off they can't even keep the damn thing in the air consistently.

 

[Symphony D.]

It was a bit too everything-in-one-package, I'll agree, but I think it'll see some improvement over the remainder of its development and into its deployment, since its lifespan is circa 50 years. At any rate, too much time and money has been invested to throw it away and even if we had the money, we don't have the time, because then we're behind the curve by 10-15 years with old 4th Gen airframes that are nearing the ends of their structural capabilities. Meanwhile, we've gotten our money out of the A-10. These are the beds we've made.

The main thing is making it "good enough," and learning from the mistakes when preliminary 6th Gen development starts, which should be immediately, but it seems like there's not enough money for that either, so.

 

[Perfectionist]

The main thing is making it "good enough," and learning from the mistakes when preliminary 6th Gen development starts, which should be immediately, but it seems like there's not enough money for that either, so.

Good enough isn't good enough, though. The F-35 might not even be as good technically as the Chinese knock-off, since the Chinese didn't have the Marines insisting it be VTOL capable, and you can't count on your code being better forever. We can no longer afford to spend that kind of money on our mainstay fighter and come out with something that's more expensive and not as good as its competitors, and we certainly can't if we're going to be stuck with it for fifty years. Sometimes you've just got to recognize the sunk costs, take the hit, and move on.

 

[Symphony D.]

Good enough isn't good enough, though. The F-35 might not even be as good technically as the Chinese knock-off, since the Chinese didn't have the Marines insisting it be VTOL capable, and you can't count on your code being better forever. We can no longer afford to spend that kind of money on our mainstay fighter and come out with something that's more expensive and not as good as its competitors, and we certainly can't if we're going to be stuck with it for fifty years. Sometimes you've just got to recognize the sunk costs, take the hit, and move on.

That's an extremely misleading lead-in. The three variants are more or less three different planes at three different places in terms of their development, project tracking, and reliability. The conventional take-off one is doing the best in all three regards, and given that all three have quite different form factors, you can't really say the performance of any one of them was compromised excessively at the expense of the others.

The plane has necessarily convinced all three parties that it can do its job, or they wouldn't all be buying it. Conjecturing that all three fighter-operating branches of the military are buying a dud with Daddy Pentagon's blessing that will get everyone who flies it and relies on it killed so they can support their friends in industry is some pretty "9/11 was an inside job" level conspiracy thinking, and of course the people who aren't Lockmart talk crap about Lockmart's product because they're competitors and lost out on hundreds of billions of dollars.

Further, it's not the code, it's the aerospace engineering, and the Russians and the Chinese suck at building exquisite planes compared to us. The Russians are into brute force and the Chinese copy. That's been true for over 50 years and it'll probably be true for the next 50, and it isn't changing overnight at any rate, no matter how many students the latter sends abroad or how many databases they crack. It's already become apparent that both Chinese and Russian competitors are 1. behind, and 2. not as good mechanically, and our edge will continue to take quite awhile to disappear completely, if indeed it ever does.

Lastly, no, we can't afford that either, even if they are behind and our product's not 100%. If you're not buying F-35s, you're buying F-22s. If you're not buying either, you're just done. Renounce global leadership and hang it up. You cannot have a capability gap for a decade even if you're unlikely to need use the capability; that's the whole point of capabilities. When we eventually get our heads out of the sand and retool our nuclear warheads to a long-lasting design instead of patching them, we're not going to take them all down at once for that very reason. Likewise, we're not going to go into the late 2010s and early 2020s without a credible airspace penetration method either. Cash counts for less than credibility.

As far as being a plane that can do the job I'm willing to believe that all the people whose job it is to fight and possibly die in the things are not lying to us about its capabilities, and from what I've seen it looks like it'll do better than plenty of prior planes on entry (like the F-111, F-105, F-104, F-4, P-38...) that ultimately wound up being regarded as classics.

 

[Shadowbound]

Hilarious story about the time we sold some planes to China, after we took out all the avionics. They literally have no idea how to replace those and are now in the possession of multi-million dollar paperweights that they can only use for photo ops.

 

[Symphony D.]

The state of the art in Chinese bomber design:

 

[Perfectionist]

That's an extremely misleading lead-in. The three variants are more or less three different planes at three different places in terms of their development, project tracking, and reliability. The conventional take-off one is doing the best in all three regards, and given that all three have quite different form factors, you can't really say the performance of any one of them was compromised excessively at the expense of the others.

Yes, you can. 80% of the plane is the same across all three versions - that's a major selling-point, remember - and they use the same engine, the same fuselage. The big differences on your chart are because the B has a lift fan that takes up fuel space, and the C has slightly larger wings for the low speed carrier approach; that doesn't markedly alter the plane's cross section or wing load. I mean, the reason it's got one engine rather than the two that Navy and Air Force would have liked is precisely because such compromises had to be made.

The plane has necessarily convinced all three parties that it can do its job, or they wouldn't all be buying it.

Oh, come on. That's buying into military mythology to a preposterous degree, and you're too smart to believe that. DoD is a bureaucracy, and a particularly huge and unwieldy one at that, and consequently susceptible to all the usual failings of bureaucracies. More susceptible, really, because DoD can't go out of business and it's been fifty years since there were any real stress tests - and hell, that last real stress test showed that DoD's bright boys had been barking up the wrong tree in a bunch of ways, from BVR to their fancy rifle with all the bells and whistles. It's like saying that the Edsel must have been good, because otherwise it wouldn't have convinced Ford to put so much behind it.

Lastly, no, we can't afford that either, even if they are behind and our product's not 100%. If you're not buying F-35s, you're buying F-22s. If you're not buying either, you're just done. Renounce global leadership and hang it up. You cannot have a capability gap for a decade even if you're unlikely to need use the capability

So you'd rather have a capability gap from 2020 until 2050ish? Cause that's what you're going to get: if you stick with an F-35 that's not 100%, you're stuck with an F-35 that's not 100%.

Cash counts for less than credibility.

That's something dying empires always tell themselves. They're always wrong.

The state of the art in Chinese bomber design

We still use the B-52, which is almost exactly the same age. Meanwhile we don't yet know what the Xian H-X - the thing that's actually going to be the state of the art in Chinese bomber design - looks like, though something like the B-2 is a pretty safe bet.

 

[Symphony D.]

Yes, you can. 80% of the plane is the same across all three versions - that's a major selling-point, remember - and they use the same engine, the same fuselage. The big differences on your chart are because the B has a lift fan that takes up fuel space, and the C has slightly larger wings for the low speed carrier approach; that doesn't markedly alter the plane's cross section or wing load. I mean, the reason it's got one engine rather than the two that Navy and Air Force would have liked is precisely because such compromises had to be made.

Yeah, because there are no good single engined planes that do a job similar to the F-35's multirole mission, and good planes have never resulted from processes involving compromises. You're right, horrible failure on all counts based on those criteria regardless of any other considerations. Write it off immediately. Impossible for it to ever be a quality product. Bob at Boeing said so.

Oh, come on. That's buying into military mythology to a preposterous degree, and you're too smart to believe that. DoD is a bureaucracy, and a particularly huge and unwieldy one at that, and consequently susceptible to all the usual failings of bureaucracies. More susceptible, really, because DoD can't go out of business and it's been fifty years since there were any real stress tests - and hell, that last real stress test showed that DoD's bright boys had been barking up the wrong tree in a bunch of ways, from BVR to their fancy rifle with all the bells and whistles. It's like saying that the Edsel must have been good, because otherwise it wouldn't have convinced Ford to put so much behind it.

If you're talking about the M16, that was McNamara and the Whiz Kids (rivaled in their incompetence only by the Vulcans) whom nobody at the Pentagon liked deciding that putting chrome in barrels destined for jungle warfare was an awful idea not worth literally pennies on the dollar to do (the M16A3 and M4 carbine, well known for their reviled status by US infantrymen everywhere in 2014), and if you're talking about Sidewinders and the F-4, sure, it was too early for an all-missile fighter, because they were trying to implement it as soon as it was technically possible and it went into an environment it wasn't ever envisioned for. (Guess what, aerial combat is mostly all BVR now, it's almost like they were right and just ahead of their time or something!)

The idea that DoD is always wrong though is itself incredibly wrong. I mean yeah if you deliberately ignore all the times that the military delivered on the things it promised and only focus on all the times it messed up (no Bradley program mention? for shame), then it's really easy to pigeonhole the military as a horribly incompetent suicidal bureaucracy that can't do anything right and deliberately wants to get itself and by proxy America killed by serving the dark lords and masters of the defense industry, who totally don't ever care about product quality because capitalism is a sham and Glorious China Will Restore the Middle Kingdom.

Aside from all the times that's not at all an accurate description of what happened or of most of the systems it's purchased, with most of them being world-class warfighting equipment proven in countless imperialist actions across the globe. (Also if our defense establishment is so crap, yet is the best, then pretty much every other defense establishment would logically be worse. Hmm.)

Also, the Gulf War, totally not a stress test with a six month leadup deployment time against the 4th largest military in the world at that time wherein people were predicting 10,000 US casualties. Continuously sustained air operations over Iraq from 1990 to 2014 that literally broke air frames from flying hours and burnt out certain aerial components of USAF? Not a stress test of air assets. Nope, Vietnam was the last real war guys, totes. Not at all stilted view of history you're showing whatsoever.

DoD is clearly in the wrong about the future of warfighting, which is why literally every other country on the planet with a credible military wants to emulate its capabilities and future direction as much as possible! Nailed it!

So you'd rather have a capability gap from 2020 until 2050ish? Cause that's what you're going to get: if you stick with an F-35 that's not 100%, you're stuck with an F-35 that's not 100%.

So, in your view of the world, China and Russia, countries that dedicate far less funding to defense than the US, will somehow overtake the US in quantity or quality of air assets or anti-air defenses, and the US will do absolutely nothing whatsoever to modify its own assets in any way, despite the fact the horribly incompetent US military bureaucracy has a history of continuously modifying its assets to meet evolving threats? Which is why most of its say, planes, have some sort of letter after their designator serial, like F-16E/F Block 60?

Oh, yeah, also China and Russia, being much more bureaucratic and centralized states than America, with even cushier relationships between their armaments industries and defense establishments, which are generally even less dynamic and innovative than their American counterparts, are totally immune to the suicidal acquisitions malaise affecting America and only the Pentagon makes bad acquisition decisions and even though China and Russia want the exact same systems they won't mess it up or have any pitfalls whatsoever and will totally own us.

Okay, sure, Perfectionist. Would you like to make some more Thomas Friedman-esque predictions? Can we expect a future shattered America NES timeline anytime soon?

(Protip: there has never been and will never be any weapon system that is 100% at anything right out of the box, or even after endless refinement, because weapon systems are always and forever capability and cost tradeoffs. It's almost like we don't live in a perfect world or something.)

That's something dying empires always tell themselves. They're always wrong.

~OooOooOOOOOo spooky generalizations~

We still use the B-52, which is almost exactly the same age. Meanwhile we don't yet know what the Xian H-X - the thing that's actually going to be the state of the art in Chinese bomber design - looks like, though something like the B-2 is a pretty safe bet.

And we also have the B-1B, and the B-2, and the upcoming LRSB, and the 2037 Bomber, and the B-52 has had a much more sustained and routine upgrade program, and the idea of China making something even remotely as capable as the B-2 that isn't actually just a fiberglass mockup and actually gets fielded and is operational in the next 10 years is laughable since their industry and military experience with strategic bombers is basically zero, just like with their joke of an aircraft carrier program that will probably be at US Navy standards maybe by around 2050. I hesitate to make it that early because the US at least had carrier experience before transitioning to jets and also the PLA is itself a joke, so probably more like 2060 to 2075.

...

I'm sorry, I can't take you seriously when your entire argument hinges on hearsay from people who have every (monetary) reason to want the F-35 to fail, a (permanent and unshakable) conviction that the people in a position to know only ever lie and have no self-interest or self-preservation despite any and all evidence to the contrary including obvious cases of prior success, and the apparent belief that only American government (ever) makes mistakes. Your position is inherently such that nothing I say will actually convince you of anything, so whatever.