Stoker

You know your argument is sound when your best expression of it is that anyone who disagrees with you is stupid.

Can you explain why Britain was right to fight on in a seemingly hopeless war, alone, against a superior power, but the Ukrainians are wrong to do so?

Should Britain have cut a deal with Germany in 1940?

Sure, in a court of law. Not a job application or the court of public opinion. Would you let Gaetz date your daughter?

He may not need confirmation if Trump is able to use a recess appointment (or as Gaetz calls it, a first date).

They started the war with the goal of taking Kiev in three days, and are now celebrating taking Random Tiny Village #47 like they just captured Berlin. And all it cost them was their future.

With that in mind, how long until we tell them "feel free to take the Baltics?" After all, it's their backyard, no point in waiting to get involved in a conflict we couldn't possibly remain committed to.

At the current rate of Russian advance, how many years/decades will it take for them to capture Kiev?

That's basically LORAN, right? We de-commissioned that, because there's no way we'd ever lose GPS capability and it cost like a hundred million dollars a year to operate - which is just crazy money for a useless backup. /s I worry about the security of CPDLC and ACARS though... if bad guys will spoof GPS, why not a message to turn right 30 degrees for traffic?

The question is, what RNP does that in-flight reinitialization give you? If it's still higher than a mile, not particularly useful since you're still heavily restricted. Might as well stick to INUs with GPS updating off.

You can set GPS updating to off, which means you're just flying old school off of INUs, VOR/DME updating (which you can also turn off, though those haven't really been spoofed lately). Which is going to restrict you from certain airspaces, approaches, etc. Current procedure seems to be turn off GPS updating when you notice spoofing, but while there are cues you're being spoofed, it isn't as clear as a Master Caution saying GPS SPOOF. So you fly through it for an hour and get infected INUs. You can't remove the bias from the INUs because they need a solid reference point to start from - an airport, gate, lat long, etc. I don't know of any FMS out there that lets you reenter that reference point in flight - not really sure how you'd do that given the speeds we move at.

GPS spoofing effectively tells the FMS that the INUs are all off by some degree and should correct their position. Once they change to match the bad GPS signal, even once the spoofing ends, they can't go back to their original, correct position, which means that for the rest of the flight you have the FMS interpolating between good GPS and bad INUs for position, so you won't ever get a really good solution. https://ops.group/blog/nat-crossing-after-gps-spoofing/

If I recall correctly from talking to them a few months ago, they want one solid block a month, Sunday-Friday. Sunday and Friday are your travel days, they pay for airfare to the nearest commercial airport not that it helps much if you're attached to Del Rio. Expectations were to complete any CBTs on those travel days. Monday was a CT day, fly student sorties Tues-Thurs.

Could you imagine if we had 80,000 Afghans who fought the Taliban as hard as they fought to get a ride out of Kabul? We'd have won the war in 2005.

Not a fighter guy but I'd imagine that your age and job weigh heavily against you in fighter apps - hard to see you having high participation in the unit in four or five years when every day you show up is real money lost at the legacy. That gets worse, not better, with an enlistment and the at least a couple of years it would take to be eligible to commission. You say you're fighters or bust, so you've probably accepted that that entails a significant risk of "bust," and that your desire to fly fighters outweighs your desire to fly military aircraft overall. Just be sure you know the answer to the question "Will I be happier in 10 years having done a single enlistment and separated, or having found a C-17 unit to join and flown that plane?"

Seriously, if it wasn't for US aid to Ukraine these guys could have been living happily in a Siberian gulag by now, while the country they believed in was ground into dust by a nuclear-armed gas station doing a Soviet Union speedrun.

Certain politicians get really hung up on the Constitutionality of declaring war. We had (have?) a declaration of war after 9/11 - if Congress authorizes the use of military force, is that not them declaring war?

That would only be true if the invasion of Iraq was relatively cheap and wildly successful at improving American security, which it was neither.

Patton was both those guys. We was fining troops in foxholes under active observation for not being clean shaven or not wearing a necktie. He had utter contempt for the citizen soldiers he was leading. If someone whose been wearing the uniform for 35 years can't understand why someone who was a baker's apprentice ten months before isn't as good at soldiering as he is, he isn't a good leader of Americans.

Given how awfully the Germans were at anything approaching strategic thinking, that isn't the compliment you think it is. I admit he had a great PR campaign, he definitely looked and acted like people thought a general should. MacArthur falls into this same category. Patton was just lucky compared to MacArthur in that he didn't have the opportunity to get publicly trounced (twice!) because his enemies actually had the ability to take the initiative.

Was he? Anyone can be a brilliant leader when you have overwhelming material superiority, complete command of the air, and your enemy is so starved for fuel that your flanks are effectively immune from attack. His sole idea for motivating his men seems to be physically assaulting them, and like many of today's military leaders he seemed utterly incapable of understanding that the people he led weren't cut from the same stone as he was.

Parents raising children without interference is great, when the parents don't suck. There's really two kinds of conscription: military slavery as practiced by Egypt, Russia, Eritrea, for example, and that practiced by western countries to either round out a professional force or develop a functioning reserve. The former is unjust, the latter is part of your duty to your society. It's also utterly historically justified - we've been conscripting people in the Americas to fight in practically every conflict we've ever fought, from the earliest colonial wars through Vietnam. The last thirty years are an aberration, not the rule.

Serious question, do you consider compulsory primary education a form of slavery?

Let's make sure to give the Russians back Finland, the Baltics, and Poland as well. They'll be turning over Kaliningrad in the exchange, of course... unless historical land claims only work one way? The US will be handing Texas and California back to Mexico, obviously, and the Kosovars need to get used to being massacred by Serbs on a daily basis. Historical ownership is the key to sovereignty, the will of the people be damned. /s

I feel like the Gripen was well suited for European nations that wanted to say they had an air force, but didn't want to spend the money on actually preparing to fight Russia. Seems like the use case for the Gripen has more or less gone away (except as a "well there's a factory going so you can actually get these rather than wait for F-35s" kind of way).