America - The Official Thread
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Dotini
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Yeah, going by memory and being brought up in the South (actually Texas), the Crimson Tide has been at or near the top of at least its division in college football for at least 60 years, likely much more. The Birmingham area is at least as populous as Green Bay, so it is fair to question why they've never had an NFL team.
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Joel
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Speaking as a former GTP libertarian who's now a socialist (which I only mention because that implicitly means I should have interest in the kind of things libertarians would be afraid of a long term Democrat trifecta doing) I don't think libertarians should be particularly concerned with even a 16-20+ year Dem trifecta compared to the status quo. They should be "concerned" because they're libertarians and not neoliberals I guess, but I don't think that scenario would be meaningfully worse for libertarians than the succession of Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump was. In terms of social freedoms it would be better than a back and forth with Republicans, and somewhat worse for "economic freedoms" defined by taxes and/or regulations. I think it would be better for business interests than flip-flopping with the exception of very large corporations (who will still do very well, they just won't get the same tax cuts as they'd get from a Republican).
The scariest part for Libertarians would probably be the Democrats becoming the war/surveillance/CIA party and sustaining that in the long term. I certainly don't think Trump is some dove and the GOP is still full of neocon freaks who want to glass Tehran, but I just keep thinking back to that US drone shot down over Iranian airspace in summer 2019. Pompeo/Haspel and the other spooks and warhawks had a big shock and awe attack ready to go. It's possible this isn't what really happened, but reportedly Trump was ready to retaliate until he heard the projected death toll would be 150 on the Iranian side. He decided against it because he rightly recognized it's fundamentally absurd for a country to kill 150 people as retaliation for an unmanned drone, which is an obvious thing for any regular person to think but I have my doubts that either Clinton, Obama, or Bush would have come to the same conclusion.
Same thing with the aftermath of killing Soleimani, Iran's retaliation was a series of missile attacks that were obvious sabre-rattling but didn't kill anyone on the American side. If you're a chauvinist you'd think that proves Iran is a podunk backwater that we should just steamroll and get rid of, but I think there's also a pretty easy reading of "don't even think about it, your carriers will sink in the Strait of Hormuz and we won't let you amass forces nearby like you did to invade Iraq without heavy casualties". Maybe I'm being too charitable to him, but it basically seems like Trump got the message and realized that Iran got their chance to save face and sabre-rattle while the US walked away with no deaths and taking out a top general, and decided to walk away while he was ahead.
Again not to imply that Trump is a dove, he's ramped up drone strikes further and has done nothing about Yemen, but I just really have to wonder if Bush, (either) Clinton, Obama, or a Romney/Rubio type would have let such a big "opportunity" to strike or even invade Iran go to waste. It's the scariest thing about all elements of high society falling in behind Biden. It's just hard for me to come to any other conclusion than there are powerful people who are very upset that Trump let that chance to attack Iran slip through his fingers. The only other thing I can think of is the TPP and slowing global trade, because he's otherwise pretty charitable to big business/MIC interests. I guess we'll see but I'm just very nervous about all the Dem messaging about "letting our allies down" and so on, that all just sounds very hawkish to me.
I think slightly to the right of the Liberal Party of Canada is pretty much the model as the Democrats future if Biden wins and the Democrats manage to consolidate power in the long run. The main difference will be the Dems being much more hawkish than the LPC, but otherwise I pretty much expect the Dems to occupy the space between the Liberal and Conservative parties in Canada and closer to the LPC. They'll still be to the right of the LPC but the strategy and overall branding will be pretty similar. Center-left, pro "globalism" (in terms of UN/NATO/cooperating with Europe and "allies", and so on). They'll make a show of raising taxes on the rich but it won't be significant, and they'll continue to govern to appease the mythical deficit-concerned centrist voter and worry about deficits and so on. Biden will be their last old white guy, Harris will run in 2024 and after that is too far out to project but I think the future young candidates will be more like Buttigieg than AOC.
They'll campaign on old school Keynesianism and talk about infrastructure and public spending, and then sell the USPS to Amazon while Democrat controlled cities defund public transit and privilege Uber/Lyft. They'll be liberal on social issues, you'll probably get nationwide legal weed and some drug decriminalization, and they'll still be selling weapons to the Saudis and ramming pipelines/fracking permits through Native lands. Health care won't happen, you'll get something but it'll be more watered down Heritage foundation stuff. College won't happen either, there will be some expansion of federal grants but fully funding won't happen (and there will be intersectional reasons why it's privileged to campaign on free college but not childcare and then neither will end up getting done because of the deficit).
I think the right wing focus on people like AOC and Ilhan Omar etc is misguided, I certainly hope I'm wrong but I suspect the medium term future is going to be an army of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg type candidates doing bodies and spaces with pride flags on F-35s and the like. This might sound silly but after the blackface scandal didn't swing any votes away from the Liberals to the NDP due to the spectre of the Conservative party here in Canada, I am just extremely skeptical that center-left parties will have to make meaningful concessions to the left to win elections against revanchist cultural conservative parties. There'll be Bernie inspired rhetoric but it'll be mostly toothless and they won't do any of it because of deficits.
Honestly I doubt this. If Biden wins the GOP has two paths, go back to what their base now thinks are "cuckservatives" like Jeb Bush/Rubio/Romney or double down on becoming the catchall "lower class" (in terms of cultural signifiers, this doesn't necessarily mean poor) party in the Bolsonaro/Trump-lite mould. I just don't see them going back to Romneys anymore, IMO that's just not going to work when the Democrats have and will corner the market on branding themselves as a "high status" party. Even if the Republicans came back with a Romney type to run against Harris in 2024 I think there'd just be too much baggage with the Trump/Q faction for them to win back the suburbs and high-status votes they got in 2016 and their base wouldn't be happy.
I think it's hard to project how they'll proceed because for that to work they'd need to have some kind of strongman figure that's genuinely popular. I just can't see someone like Rubio/Cruz making that transition, and someone like Tucker Carlson is too blood and soil ethnonationalist for it to work. I'm guessing a man runs against Harris and loses, and the next GOP president will be a woman.
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I think it's pretty cool that the Air Force has found something to do with all of the F-117s they have mothballed still.
Keef
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I can't do anything but speculate so I'm just going to take a wait a see approach. If we do end up with a single party holding the majority of power my hope is that some kind of splintering force grows faster than their monopoly. Perhaps it would be disagreeing factions in the party itself, or maybe people in the US would become more interested in alternatives if there aren't any to choose from. As long as this movement isn't built on emotion or scapegoating or anything like that should it come about, I'd support it. The libertarian party is great because it's the party that most closely aligns with my views, although my ideals regarding government have expanded a bit over the years. I don't care for party loyalty so if the Libertarian party fades away that's not the end of the world for me. As long as the ideology remains somewhere.
I don't know if anything like what I outlined would happen, and even if it did how long it would take, but I've acknowledged a long time ago that my position isn't popular. If I happened to live at the wrong time and there is no chance of seeing what I want in my own lifetime, I can accept that. It happens. I still have to try since almost nothing is certain, and maybe I can make a difference later even if I'm not around.
The F-117 is the only manned stealth aircraft that has fallen into enemy hands though, it's also woefully out of date in many regards. I don't see any realistic situation where it enters combat outside of total desperation. It makes a lot of a sense as an aggressor. Emerging threats like the Su-57, J-20, J-31, etc are so different from conventional aggressor aircraft that I have to wonder if F-22 and F-35 can effectively train against F-5's and F-16's. The F-117 itself is kind of lacking outside of having stealth since it's a bomber, supposedly weak in electronic warfare, and anything but fast.
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When it comes to training on working out the detection of targets, yeah. The F-117 should provide a decent simulation of a low RCS fighter target. It's less able to simulate a threatening fighter since it has no radar, but maybe some kind of a AWACS guidance could be used depending on the exercise.
Aircraft performance and maneuverability is pretty significant even in BVR though. A decent portion of a missile's kinetic energy actually comes from the launching aircraft. Stealth fighters will use their low observability to provide energy advantages to their missiles by flying higher and faster, which tend to make detection by radar easier and thus riskier for a traditional fighter. The F-117 doesn't have the ability to fly extreme flight profiles, so it can't stand in for a high and fast stealth fighter. Then again, these profiles are demanding on fuel and may necessitate payload restrictions, so it's not like it's the only tactic you'd expect to see from a stealth fighter.
Dotini
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Some of theses advanced fighters like the F-22 have terribly high costs, and due to issues only roughly 50% are available for duty at any one time.
IMHO, massed swarms of very low-cost, low-risk drones is the direction 21st Century warfare is going. Lasers are being added to the arsenal. But due care for their energy needs must be taken at the beginning the plan to integrate them.
IMHO, massed swarms of very low-cost, low-risk drones is the direction 21st Century warfare is going. Lasers are being added to the arsenal. But due care for their energy needs must be taken at the beginning the plan to integrate them.
Joel
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Yes, except I suspect the bolded won't be true for the US and NATO allies, especially if and when drones begin to replace conventional piloted fighters.
It's just too good of a grift to give up. I'm sure there will be reasons we'll end up spending 9 figures per unit on drones for a long time. You wouldn't want to use outdated drone tech would you? And put our safety at risk allowing a drone gap with China?
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killerjimbag
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Well US cities are boarding up as we speak. Good luck my friends.
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Dotini
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Even if the individual units are seven figures, there's still endless upgrade paths, weapons loadouts, countermeasures, spare parts, and so on where there's real opportunity for significant ongoing costs. And they'll doubtless try what they did with the F-35 software where all data collected from partner nations is also phoned home to the US.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/...s/news-story/12b4fafce6b579448cc8416518063d1f
Keef
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I'll never forget flying my little 172 into St. George at night. Me coworker and I were in formation from Phoenix up to St. George and we told the FBO we'd be there at 10 pm. Due to the mountains, it got darker a little sooner than we expected so we ended up flying over the Grand Canyon (the sketchy 10 mile wide part) during deep twilight, just light enough to see a distinct pitch-black dropoff and feel our hearts sink. As we reached the higher north rim we were only 1500 feet above the ground. As we got closer to St. George we heard an approaching regional jet on the radio but luckily we were VFR and could simply divebomb into the valley straight-in to beat the jet. My copilot pulled off the runway just before the RJ touched down. After we did circles on the ramp trying to find parking spots, we called the FBO to ask why the door was locked. Apparently AZ doesn't do DST, so we showed up an hour late. The dude that drove the convoluted route to the airport was not happy with us at all.
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Joel
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Yeah I don't disagree that drones will replace expensive piloted fighters, I just don't think the US/NATO blob will be using swarms of simple drones in the medium term. Well, we might do that but it still won't stop us from also building gold plated mega-drones that cost 50M each for the same reason the KSA still wants to buy F-16s. They're useless against drones, but expensive American weapons are fantastic if you're the KSA and your goal is to keep the US military on retainer in case of a real state level conflict you can't/won't actually fight. Same with the F-35, it's incredibly expensive and inefficient as an actual weapon, but it's a world-historical marvel of engineering if the mission is sucking a trillion and a half dollars of public money out of the US and allied/NATO governments.
Cheap drones are useless at these two tasks so I have no doubt we'll figure out how to build drones that are great at sucking public money out of the US and allied governments, or to sell to gulf states to keep the US military on retainer.
Yeah definitely. My guess is the rest of the world will have a half dozen or more different types of low cost drones that are specialized to be very good at a specific thing at a low unit cost, and they'll make hundreds/thousands of each model. Meanwhile the US/NATO world will instead have hundreds/low thousands of units of maybe two model types. They'll cost ~$50M per unit as jack of all trades drones that end up so bloated and heavy they're a master of none, all while being too expensive to lose. I'm sure we'll have cheap actually useful ones too but weapons contractors will find reasons for us to buy very expensive drones too. Probably expensive ships to put them on as well!
