Posts by Psyx 2549 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2010
"They literally cannot be arsed"
Are they anally retentive to the point of their sphincters growing over?
"... to try and enforce usage based on meaning."
I now dearly want to live in a society where uniformed and jack-booted officers working for OED enforce proper word usage at gunpoint.
"The obvious solution is to, uh, enlarge the feet. This would also obviate the need for weapons at all; The enemy would laugh themselves to death."
Simply maths dictates that a relatively small enlargement of the boots would double the surface area and half the ground pressure. So even if the suit weighs as much as the person in it, it's still not an issue.
" this suit wont protect from the biggest problem, IED's."
It'll protect just fine if they're based more on fragmentation than blast.
""I've been trying to imagine scenarios where a this suit would be a clear advantage, and the only thing I can come up with is urban combat, house-to-house,"
So... the same thing that dismounted infantry is useful for. Funny that.
"As with Iraq and Afghanistan amongst many others the US has failed to win hearts and minds; an essential ingredient in consolidating an occupied territory. American grunts in the armour they already wear with their mirror shades and inability to speak the local language are intimidating just by their presence."
So says the blithe opinion of an armchair reader. All of your points bear little relation to reality.
Hearts and minds has been a cornerstone strategy in both operational areas. And it kinda worked eventually in Iraq. Unfortunately it didn't stop some elements still hating their countrymen.
mirrorshades? Citation needed. Not ideal eyewear really are they: Actual mirrored glasses. But sure: People fighting in dusty, bright countries wear *tinted* goggles because it's stupid not to (and a yellow tint is good for contrast). Likewise they take them OFF when talking to people because it's patiently stupid to leave them on (FFS: There was even a British Army recruiting advert on TV a DECADE ago that specifically referenced doing so).
Inability to speak the language? Well yes: Not every grunt can be trained to learn the local language. That's why troops are encouraged to learn some basics and have people with them who can speak the language.
"If I was a local faced with occupying forces like this I would go out of my way to find ways of breaking them."
Stop press: Foes deliberately try ways to attack weak points of stuff. What is your point?
You've simply stated a number of non-truths based on the preconception that a million-strong army is too stupid to have thought of the things you have.
They have.
"It seems to me the only justified use for expensive enhanced musculature is to allow a grunt to carry really heavy body armor that can withstand hits which would penetrate the current armor in use. "
That's a flawed premise. By definition, infantry have always had too much s**t to carry. Even if no additional armour is mounted, being able to carry more ammunition or even to reduce the fatigue in carrying a modern combat-load is a good thing.
You're also missing the non-tooth applications: Loading and transferring arty and tank ammunition in the combat zone, for example.
There's more to the idea than just power armour.
"2 years ago the US military admitted the use of actual troops was over and done with...the drone and smart bomb use in Libya recently is where we actually are on troop use...RS."
No they didn't and no they won't.
Only infantry can take and hold ground. In any conflict where you need to take and hold ground, you need PBIs.
"Coca-Cola's plethora of drink options means that one third of Coke products these days are low or zero calorie. One third. Basically the choice is yours. If you WANT a Coke Classic, go ahead, but as is true with everything, all things in moderation."
Oh goodie: I can f**k my liver up with Aspartine and pay for the opertunity instead!
(or I can turn on a tap!)
"oh really?"
Yes, really. The accusation from the poster was that coke was a sugary drink that has no food value that is contributing to obesity. They're right and it is.
A tin of coke is a not-inconsiderable amount of one's calories per day. And nothing else of worth. All sugar, and nothing decent. That's pretty poor considering you could have a glass of water instead. And an apple.
As for aspartine: I'll pass. I don't need that Coke taste enough in my life to bother with it. For me, Coke is and always will be simply something to put with JD.
I know people who cheerily glug 4-6 cans a day. Not only is that a habit that's on a par with a mild smoking habit, it's not far off being as unhealthy, given what pouring sugar into you does for health.
"The line is crossed when you move from "equality under the law and equal value as a person" to "you must accept all my actions as being morally ok.", and "we are going to teach your children not just to accept people as equally valuable, but that all sexual activity is has equal moral validity."
So straight sex is more morally upstanding than gay sex? That infers that there is something grubby and wrong about gay sex. Why do you feel that way?
"I suspect there are interesting evolutionary arguments for suggesting that homosexuality is a disorder which is suboptimal compared to heterosexuality."
So you're just putting that out that based on guesswork. You might as well say "I suspect there are some interesting arguments for suggesting that Asian people are genetically inferior"
[And given there are about 6 Billion of us too many around here, I would say that frankly the best thing that we can do for the planet is to all turn gay!]
"the lobby had to push for the word "marriage" to be legally redefined."
Don't make it sound like this was just the lobby. I'm straight and it's marriage to me and should be. The concept that we need to have a special word for legal gay partnerships is not something a lobby dreamed up; it's common decency and sense to most of us.
"Don't call it "marriage" though. Homosexuality is not heterosexuality so why call the relationship between people of the same gender the same as between two people of different genders? If oranges are not the only fruit, don't call all fruit "oranges." "
That's pretty backwards. About fifty years by my reckoning. Marriage is marriage: Two people legally bound together and forced to give money to lawyers if they split up. Gender is only important if we start quoting the bible. And the bible doesn't get a say in how the lives of people who don't want to follow its teachings are run.
You have a very transparent belief that gay relationships are not as equal as straight ones: morally, ethically, and by very definition. Hopefully things will change and your children will grow up in a world where that view is as rightly consigned to history as it deserves to be.
"The only good that would come of an inquiry would be..."
To keep a bunch of parasitic civil servants and lawyers in work for two years, for zero benefit.
" ...to keep the bugger in charge from buggering up something else."
Unless the crazier conspiracy theorists are right and a lizard runs the show, I don't think the same person is running Five as it was 50 years ago. Although, if the claim is true then MI5 are clearly very opposed to having buggers in charge...
"That said, I read a theory that his death was accidental, and that he'd accidentally got cyanide from his home laboratory on to the apple (apparently he was quite careless in his lab and had been electrocuted several times, plus his friends suggested he was in good spirits at the time and he had been off the court mandated medication for around a year)"
I was under the impression that he tried to make it look accidental to some degree, and wanted it to at least be viable that it was accidental rather than suicide in order to give his own family a little bit of solace.
"What's funny (in a stomach churning only hurts when I laugh kind of way) is so many fellow brainwashed countrymen still think the US government is the good guy."
No, we all know that the British are the Bad People, with all their imperialism and stuff, and sticking their noses into other nations and starting wars. Right? That's why all the bad people in Movies are British.
"Looks like anybody that serves a large amount of content over the internet needs to watch out. Looks like managing your resources effectively is criminal nowadays......"
C'mon: Are you really and with a straight face trying to tell me that they didn't know that the content was mostly other people's, but they were happy to stick their fingers in their ears and reap in the profits of piracy?
I would maybe be a bit more included to swallow it if Kim had the balls to say "Yeah, we're doing it because we think that the information wants to be free and copyright is horse-shit", but he's not making a point: He's just a fat guy who made a lot of money out of it and is now doing his best Manuel "I know noooothing" routine while gloating over how many X-Box Ones he owns.
"Seriously. Have these "Boffins" have nothing better for doing that working out how a fictional character would perform based on his penchant for drink? IT'S FICTION! ESCAPISM! It doesn't have to make sense!"
Yes they have, but they thought it would be more fun to read every James Bond book with a pencil and a tally-pad on-hand. I really don't have a problem with that. And if they've got their name in every newspaper and every UK media outlet and bought a few drinks for their efforts then frankly: good work!
Have you not ever played a drinking game while watching a film, or read a book and then discussed it?
"**Each unit is roughly half a pint of beer or one pub measure of spirits. If you as a man have one large/normal gin-&-tonic or one lonely beer on five days each week, for example, that's your lot. You cannot have any more booze than that - according to the government."
I assume that you're mid-research, drinking heavily, and hence counting each finger twice.
1 pint = 2 units (fairly mild stuff). x5 days = 10 units (call it 15 if you have decent beer). That's rather less than the recommended amount. Likewise, it would be 5 Units if you just had a 25ml G&T. Indeed, you can drink a pint of fizzy lager stuff AND a single G&T every day of the week, and you'd be then hitting the recommended 21 Units, or just stick to proper beer and still neck a pint every single day and be inside recommendations.
"I do have to agree with you: it's not only the tactics that is the problem. It's the lack of strategy in Washington that is the real problem."
Lack of strategy isn't the issue; it's lack of clearly defined goals and end-points and a consistent way of getting there. Without those it doesn't matter what strategy is in use. The *military* *strategy* I don't have enough oversight of to fairly judge, and via mainstream media would not be a good way to gauge it. However, at the *operational* level and *tactically* there is nothing unsound in play, as on the whole those are well established and what wasn't has been developed.
"They, and I explicitly include their government, rely too much on technology to fight a war."
Umm: Good. Technology wins wars and always has. Every major technical advancement gives an advantage and those force multipliers have been shown to multiply rather than add linearly... which was why the allies delivered such a massive kicking to Iraq in 1992, far in excess of expected casualty rates.
What else would you like to win wars? Numerical superiority? That's a poor force multiplier, but the US has that too. Better training, morale, fitness and quality of officers and troops? Yup: The US has that too. Better C3? Yup: Got that. What asset is it that the US is *not* leveraging to gain advantage? Would you like them to stop spending on new weapons and just throw more warm bodies at the issues instead?
"Eight years in Iraq, do you consider it victory?"
Militarily, yes. Because it was. It also resulted in Sodding Insane being removed from power and friendly Gulf State oil reserves secured, with no further threat from Iraq. All with the added bonus of lots of stuff to rebuild and debts to US companies to be racked up. Granted, the country itself is a shit-pit, but as far as the goals of America (rather than the Iraqi civilian population) are concerned, it was a success. And as far as the military goes it was a success too - unless you want to claim that US military strategy should be responsible for stabilising the nation forever more... which frankly is not the job of any army.
"Twelve years in Afghanistan, do you consider that a victory?"
Trickier. On one hand, nobody has blown up anything big in the US for a while, which is the logical goal for a 'war on terror'. Militarily it's not been a huge cock-up, either. However, the next generation of Afghan warlords are still ruling their anarchic little bits of turf, churning out opium, so it failed to change things there. But that's nothing new: The British didn't change that a hundred years ago, nor did the Soviets when they tried. 'Stan will always be the same place.
"The hollow victory of Desert Storm I mentioned because since then they believe in "blitzkrieg" - a tactic that obviously didn't work ever after."
When you tell me that " "blitzkrieg" - a tactic that obviously didn't work ", can you cite where it was employed as a strategy in 'Stan/Iraq and how precisely it would be useful to use a mechanised force to break through and exploit a weak point in the line *when there isn't a front line*.
Blitzkrieg is a strategy or operational plan, NOT a tactic. Obviously it doesn't work when there isn't a front line to break through, and obviously it isn't applicable when you can't use mechanised forces due to terrain. It's not that it 'didn't work' in 'Stan: It's that it wasn't applicable, so was never tried. You don't see a screw and use a wrench on it. You don't see someone using a screwdriver on it and tell them they are a failure because their wrench won't work on it, either.
"What do they want to achieve in the Near/Middle East? Peace obviously doesn't appear on their menu. It's more like if I come to your place, have a crap, and then I claim your house is mine."
It's about stabilising the region for the people who sell us cheap oil and buy our planes. Those people live in Saudi, UEA, Kuwait and Bahrain. Those people are no longer worried about Iraq invading and have stopped putting up the price of oil. It's about leaving the offending nations in such a state that they aren't a threat and will buy stuff to rebuild, putting money in the pockets of Halliburton and the likes. It is about money and oil. Don't for a moment believe that we do it for the welfare of the people there. Obviously that's a shit thing and I don't like it as much as you don't, but that's the real truth of it, sad to say. Empires do not ultimately conquer and exploit far-off lands for the benefit of anyone but themselves. Rome didn't subdue the Gauls to give them stuff, but to take it.
" the only way the USA sees in the mentioned conflict zones is the way of war."
Not true. I'll wager you've never head of Captain Patriquin, which means that you're not fully equipped with a picture of what the mid-game US military strategy was. The man contributed to an evolution in strategy that moved in the other direction to the out--right war that you assume it was.
And of the other conflict zones which is stays out of, or deals with via aid or diplomacy? The US is not entirely a war machine and does employ other tactics.
"A word regarding the military capability to fight WW3. The US is currently involved in two middle-sized long-term conflicts and already at its limits of personnel resources. WW3? My arse."
Two? Where?
I don't see that any of the US strategic reserves are committed to conflict. Carrier Battle Groups: Not commited. ICBM: Still pointed at people who have nukes. Strategic nuke-carrying bombers and indeed the vast majority of the USAF: Not busy with anything right now. Vast numbers of MBTs that would see use in large-scale conflict: Not tied up in mountainous Asia. The US has a lot of ground pounders and relatively tactical assets deployed, but not the big guns. And if you think the US wouldn't just up and leave 'Stan in a heartbeat if WW3 kicked off, you'd be mistaken: We'd all load up, ship out, and not give a toss.
In summery, there is a perception that the US military is stupid and over-committed. It's not. It doesn't just rely on tech-toys, but on being better in *every* way.
"The blind spot in your knowledge about lasers"
Umm, yeah. We know.
And laser blinding weaponry (or rather weapons designed to permanently blind as their prime function, rather than an accidental by-product) was banned about a 20 years ago.
Here's one the Chinese built:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZM-87
If you go on a patrol in 'Stan you'll also note that many troops carry low powered laser-pointers to their primary weapons, just to dazzle and intimidate anyone dicking around.
"Are they still trying to fight guerrilla with cold war big army tacticts?"
'still'? Can you cite to me an example of this happening in the last decade?
Are you seriously suggesting that our army is still rolling around in MBTs using cold war tactics, while even someone who can't spell the word has figured out that they don't work? It's kind of crucial for Officers to be able to understand conflict and use the correct tactics. If you have figured it out, then they (what with being there and all) figured it out a long time before you.
A very long time:
We've been doing quite well at anti-insurgency warfare for quite a while. The British caught onto the concept sometime near the end of the 18th Century when they got caught with their pants down a bit, and although America didn't learn about it all until Vietnam, they caught on quite fast.
Just because we have a military capable of fighting WW3, it doesn't mean they can't fight the war they have just spent ten years fighting, too. People and organisations can do things in more than one way you realise?
"Can't help feeling that an awful lot of people have been killed by rocks, basically, over the years."
Citation required.
Trebuchet and catapults are siege weapons, predominantly used for shooting at walls. Infantry in the way would be more of a bonus than the object. Such weapons simply don't fire fast, accurately or far enough to use against dispersed infantry (or even infantry at all really, outside of Hollywood blockbusters). They don't have much range, either. If you are close enough to launch a rock, you have somehow rolled your siege machine well within the effective range of an assault rifle.
"Phew. That's good new. People who can shoot someone from 2Km are indeed pretty rare. "
There are six of them, and all of them are on our side.
"Except in Afghanistan, where they've been driving up the kill range to over 2Km. An anti-mortar system is fairly useful but (ant I know this would be rather unsporting) what if you're enemy attacks when your laser system is in the "park" position? By the time the cover comes off it's all over."
Well Sod's Law dictates that will be when the mortar is disassembled, so it'll be a no score draw.
Seriously though; you're missing the point. The system is for Force Protection not front line use. And probably against people not as well tooled up. That means it gets parked up next to a runway, encampment or other base, protecting things more expensive than either itself or a few grunts.
Luckily, not many base commanders are stupid enough to surround their bases with barriers that snipers can see through at ground level (otherwise snipers would shoot at people, instead of your enemy just plopping mortar rounds inside the walls, which is what the actual threat is), and are equally unlikely to fail to emplace their defences. Nor are such bases typically surrounded with enough cover that snipers can crawl up to them, or cited conveniently where snipers can over-look them. And it's not like people patrol around bases and over-fly them with drones equipped with IR cameras on the off-chance that a two-man team with a 30kg AMR are planning on sneaking up to them and somehow hitting a 10cm target from the kind of range that you're talking about, either.
The military isn't entirely stupid in its purchases. Laser anti-mortar/rocket base defences are being purchased because our enemies like to lob mortar bombs into established bases. It's a solution for an existing problem, not a pipe dream. And a few of these in police/army bases would have saved a bit of bother during the Troubles, too.
"So it keeps mortar rounds from exploding, but what if the enemy dispenses with the explosives and just uses the mortar as a more advanced catapult and starts flinging the modern equivalent of rocks and cannonballs?"
Then rocks land near your infantry and they say "What idiot is using an already inaccurate weapon system which relies on fragmentation to throw rocks at us?" and then they ask their nice friends with counter-battery RADAR to drop a few 155s on the mortar position and maybe mount a patrol to see if they can find any mangled flesh.
Artillery is a killer. Fragmentation was responsible for about 75% of casualties in both world wars. Comparatively few people were killed by being directly hit by shells. Solid shells have no place in an anti-infantry/materiel role.
"A decent reflective surface will reflect over 95% of the incident energy "
A very expensive lab-made silver/gold mirror surface might. A bathroom mirror doesn't approach that level of reflectiveness.
Are you suggesting that a viable countermeasure would be to coat every arty shell and mortar bomb with a high-reflective finish? Do you know how many artillery shells a battery can get through in a day? And how old our existing supplies are and how large?
These are the same highly reflective mortar bombs that are going to be carried by grunts in a battle zone, right?
Do you want to be the one handing them out to the mortar platoon and asking them to keep them nice and shiny?
Of course that reflective coating is going to completely coat the munition, so there won't be any handy stencilled lettering left to tell you anything about what you might be firing.
Mirrored mortar bombs are a nice armchair general solution, with zero grounding in practicality.
"One was/is mounted inside a transport aircraft, and maybe we have others that are in orbit that we know nothing about. My other post says the rest."
If you mean the anti-missile laser, the project was cancelled last year, on the grounds that it didn't work, couldn't hit, cost too much, was toxic, couldn't blow a missile up and was 10 years too late. And the minute it did work it could be countered by slapping an asbestos coating under a missile's skin and by imparting a spin of it to de-localise the thermal spike.
"I believe that the US military, and probably Britain's too, are using technology which is so advanced that we would call it science fiction. "
So you're saying that it's a great dream of yours that the military-industrial complex is twenty years ahead of civilian/medical/humanitarian applications and that they can keep such things successfully hidden from every taxpayer who foots the bill, even to the point where every sub-average IQ grunt who is trained to use it can be convinced to keep utterly quiet about it for a decade.
I'd call that a fucking crime.
"How do you know they don't already have laser weaponry"
They do, if you consider targeting applications. Field-portable anti-personnel lasers have also been around for over a decade, but are thankfully banned by Convention because it's frankly seen as too easy to permanently blind humans from 3km away.
"Now what? Were you right or wrong about Reagan's SDI?"
They were right. What Reagan was talking about was stupidly expensive, stupidly ahead of it's time and...kinda stupid. Thirty years on and we couldn't even shoot down a missile from a nearby aeroplane.
What Reagan achieved by pulling the program was also an essential part in the negotiations and posturing which ended the Cold War.
Let me spell that out: Because SDI was never put in place, we no longer have a Cold War.
I am glad of that, and anyone who isn't glad to see the back of the Cold War probably works for Raython, is insane, or hasn't seen enough mangled corpses to have developed an aversion to killing yet (you'll find that quite a lot of people in the military are a lot more adverse to war than people who sit on their sofas and call anyone who doesn't look forward to killing burglars a soft liberal).
You also appear to have confused the word 'Liberal' with the term 'someone who does not agree with me'.
"True, but you have to admit that the enemy has a pretty poor record of taking out our commo nets since early WWII."
They weren't trying very hard, nor from a position of anything approaching equality or air superiority (or even hotly contested airspace!)
We used to happily park FFR Landys on hill-tops on FTX or when feeling safe, but had the Soviets rolled through West Germany, every Sigs unit would be cowering in valleys and every hill-top glassed by Soviet arty.
"but it is COMMON SENSE to follow the advice and not leave your valuables on display."
And the penalty for that is the inconvenience of losing them and making an insurance claim. The penalty should not be that the criminal is removed of any responsibility for the crime.
Justice should protect stupid people just as much as it should smart people.
"I have no sympathy for people that get convicted for running such sites, but my sympathy for the victims is tempered a bit by the thought they were fudging stupid to have such pics in the first place."
So you have no sympathy for people who get divorced and get shafted in the courts either, for financially exposing themselves to such a risk? Because they - like people with nudey pics - didn't think the person they were in a relationship with and cared about was going to screw them over as much as possible, either.
"I'm fine with him doing time for the extortion and blackmail, but charging him with a "crime" committed by tabloid newspapers the world over is a little galling. Simply hosting them and profiting from advertising revenue is functionally so similar to printing them and charging a modest fee for the newspaper, that I'd aquit him of that one charge were I on the jury."
Yes, but how about we force the media to raise it's bar as regards legality, rather than allowing everyone to get away with what the tabloids do?
And remember: Lots of tabloids pay out quite a lot of money in Settlements out of court. So they don't quite get away entirely scott-free.
That said, the bastards still deserve to be physically beaten every time they ruin someone's life or career with a BS story.
"Seems you favor mollycoddling the little batsards then."
What: Because someone doesn't agree that execution is acceptable penalty for theft and depriving people of HD pr0n for 48 hours they are molycoddling? Bit black and white that one for you, eh?
I doubt if my business was down for a week that I'd be demanding a head on a stick, but I guess you're psychotic/sociopathic/psychopathic. Because demanding death because you lost some money isn't normal human behaviour
"but criminals already start off being less bright than the average bear. "
No they don't.
Only the ones who get caught do.
Which are the ones you hear about, which causes perception bias.
There are just as many smart criminals as stupid ones. They're the ones earning more in a night than we do in a week and *never being successfully prosecuted*.
"No, the law works on the basis that a criminal conviction must be evidenced _beyond reasonable doubt_."
And despite the barrack-room lawyering, the authorities -who are equipped with the full facts and actually know the law better than either of us- believe they have a case.
"You are talking about suspicion: your fellow with a balaclava might be arrested for suspicion of intent to commit burglary, but unless they can prove that beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law then he gets away scot free."
See the other poster's comment. In short: No they don't.
"...then she wins."
No she doesn't, because she's still paid for her defence. Y'know... assuming they win.
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