Youtube comments of LRRPFco52 (@LRRPFco52).

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  22. The interesting facts about this whole issue to me are: Luftwaffe Chief Karl Müllner supported the German acquisition of the F-35, and was quickly fired after that because of concerns over the loss of German aerospace jobs.  After he got the classified capabilities briefing on some of the things the JSF program is doing, he immediately recommended strongly that Germany become an F-35 partner or customer because of the unfair advantages that come with JSF, like the UK, Denmark, Norway, Italy, and Netherlands are already realizing. Now some email leaks that the Luftwaffe will be buying Super Hornets and Growlers?  This seems like a shot across the bow of the German aerospace industry and parliament to get its act together and increase orders for a newer tranche Typhoon with Air-to-Ground and ISR capabilities, but that puts Germany in the position of cooperating with B61 Tactical Nuclear integration onto the Typhoon. Also, when looking at Boeing, you need to separate Boeing Defense from Boeing commercial airline programs, Boeing Global Services, and Boeing Capital Corp.  Boeing Defense contracts have been increasing with a wide range of major, multi-billion dollar and mid-high hundreds of millions contracts just with several US services alone.  These include Super Hornet Block III, T-7A jet trainers, A-10C re-winging, P-8A Poseidon, KC-46, MV-22 tilt rotor major assemblies, and contracts that make it the 2nd largest defense contractor in the US. This need to replace the Tornados in Luftwaffe service will force Germany into a strange position of appearing even more out of sync with the NATO alliance I think.  It is a very interesting turn of events that could have been avoided if Germany had funded a viable replacement and began the process long ago, but procrastinated on for the past 2 decades.
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  85.  @bigbramel  My family was part of the ongoing international scientific exchange between NATO allies in the aerospace sector, where we left the USAF Flight Test Center and moved to West Germany to work with the Luftwaffe and German/UK/Italian engineers on what would become the Eurofighter. All 3 of those nations had exceptional mathematicians and engineers, but dealing with multiple languages, cultures, work ethics, and parliaments funding the project is a microcosm of the challenges any mutual economic and defense pacts in Europe face. Germany itself is another microcosm of very factional regions with their historic independent cultures and politics. If you look at a UK Typhoon vs a Luftwaffe Typhoon, there are major multirole capabilities integrated into the UK birds, whereas Germany has primarily focused on the interceptor mission profile only. Looking at the Panavia Tornado variants and the multinational Eurifighter project, you realize that even 4 decades ago, a modern tactical combat aircraft for UK, West German, and Italian service required at least 3 nations to combine their R&D budgets in order to just develop the aircraft. In contrast, France and Sweden independently (with US engine technology) developed their own 4th Gen multirole fighters, with the Rafale being an exceptional program that has achieved high levels of systems integration, manufacturing quality, and actual multirole pivot mission set capabilities ranging from networked air superiority to carrier-borne anti-ship and ISR. The biggest factor I see that handicaps European nations in aerospace defense is really coming from their parliaments, who have become something other than traditional assemblies that prioritize defense first. Instead, these parliaments have been populated with people who place more emphasis on domestic programs, social safety nets, and more bureaucracy, under the assumption that the US will continue to carry the bulk of the weight of European defense, which has been true since the 1940s, but is increasingly being questioned by US politicians after the Eurozone has been able to realize high levels of consistent economic growth. This has greatly contributed to the neglect of dealing with the Tornado replacement in Germany, while the UK and Italy have been JSF partners and significant JSF industrial base nodes in JSF manufacturing. This provides tens of thousands of jobs (25,000 in the UK with BAE and subcontractors), a full assembly line in Italy, and billions of Euros worth of economic activity in Europe. The negotiations and legwork that underlies these contracts started over 2 decades ago in some cases, so it's now too late to say Germany should have or could have done this, or done that. JSF has already evolved dramatically and is in multi-year orders now, with the 500th F-35 delivered earlier this year. Nations who were initial F-16 MSIP partners in NATO have already converted to the F-35A and have been developing their JSF squadron capabilities for years, working in conjunction with the UK and US. 6th Gen technologies are already being prepared for testing and integration into upcoming production blocks of the JSF, starting with the ADVENT variable cycle propulsion system, where we will see a 47,300-50,000lb thrust fighter motor in reheat, and well over 30,000lb in mil power. Meanwhile, one of the most capable aerospace and scientific communities in the history of man is talking about upgrading their Typhoons with a CAPTOR-E AESA radar......if they could just get the funding. Germany is way better than this, and something has gone awry.
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  86. ​ @nwj03a "Common defense" means a man and his family able to protect themselves from thieves, murderers, local politicians abusing their power (thieving and murdering), and foreign invasion. One of the only enumerated powers mentioned in the Constitution is "to provide for the common defense". At the time of the Nation's founding, individual able-bodied citizens possessed all types of arms for that purpose, to include firearms, cannons, and naval vessels. They dismantled the standing army to one regiment just in case, which was focused on the Western territories (borderland between the 13 States and the interior, which was the Mississippi River Valley at the time, previously occupied by the French in the mid-1700s, with various indigenous tribes warring with each other. The Progressive Era under Marxists and Organized crime occupying much of US Government since the early 1900s did everything in its power to re-write what the Constitution means: * Income tax with no constraints * Federal secret police working for organized crime * Dewey's Marxist-Darwinist religion disguised as a school system where "teachers are the only true prophet" * Permanent standing armies used to defend Europe and the Pacific from territorial ambitions of adventures dictators at massive expense to the US people via more taxation * Government confiscated/funded Medicare for seniors and disabled * Government/organized crime confiscated retirement plan that has no accountability to those who fund it (Social Security) * Creation of an unconstitutional "justice department" with 115,000 employees and 40 sub agencies/bureaucracies scamming the people out of $29 billion a year. You've likely been taught that the above are legitimate, while your core rights as a human being are subject to the permission granted by government.
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  271.  @manofsan  My close friends in Finland (I’m half Finnish) had their close family member in the Russian Foreign Ministry. He was running his mouth bragging about how now that Russia has Putin in office, they are taking back Kazakhstan, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Romani, Bulgari, Poland, Baltics, and Finland. The Russian Foreign Minister told him to shut his mouth and not speak so openly if he wanted to remain healthy. I have lived all over that region of the world and many others, so while it is true that most people suck at geography, that isn’t the case with me. In fact, I like to travel all over different nations and go to places where the people there usually have not gone themselves. None of what I’m telling you is reported anywhere because it is incidental POLINT. Your description of Saddam’s precursors to the invasion don’t match up with any story I have heard so far. Saddam was in violation of multiple UN Resolutions he agreed to, and he wanted the world to think he had nukes. He also had purchased Nigerian yellow cake, so it was natural for the UN and his Arab neighbors to be very concerned about what he was doing. This was a dictator who used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people, so obtaining more WMD was setting off alarm bells. I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, just what the facts were. Only 17% of Ukraine are ethnic Russians. 77.5 - 77.8% are Ukrainians. Your numbers are way off. False flag units acting for Putin initiated attacks on ethnic Russians in Donbas/Donetsk region after Ukraine ousted Yanukovych in Feb 2014, who was a Russian puppet for Putin.
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  335.  @dontworry2379  If I say something on this subject, it's coming from 5 decades in the field, to include institutional knowledge specific to the F-4 and the aircraft that superceded it, while it continued to serve in NATO and Pacific allied air forces for decades. The main reasons we divested of the F-4 in favor of the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 was because a single man crew could do the job with 1970s-forward avionics without needing a RIO, and we moved on to turbofan engines, more advanced avionics, and more fuel fraction. F-4 had turbojets, which don't do well in the low speed, lower altitude regime, but love to be up high and fast (as it was designed for carrierborne BARCAP against Soviet bombers). While designing the F-4's stores carrying layout, they built it around 4 semi-recessed stations for radar-guided missiles, and 2 hardpoints on the wings for 2 more. Those hard points got AIM-9 pylons attached to them on each side, giving it a pretty slick 8x AAM A2A load-out even with EFTs on stations 1 & 9. Additionally, it could still carry MERs or TERs on stations 2, 5, & 8 loaded with bombs without sacrificing any AAMs. It could carry 9-12 500lb bombs in addition to 8x AAMs, which gave it superior self-escort capability to the F-105D. It really set the bar high for what we expected as a baseline during the design and requirements for F/X and TFX, as well as LWF and what became the F/A-18. F-14, F-16, and F/A-18 failed to match the payload mix of the F-4. Only the F-15 and later Super Hornet could do it in US 4th Gen fighters. It also set the bar in payload for the Typhoon and Rafale. It was a very capable platform in this regard, lending itself well to the Wild Weasel mission set with the F-4G in USAF before being replaced by F-16C Block 50/52 with CCIP to HARM Targeting System capability.
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  343.  @jtplays7411  Finnish is 100% phonetic. That’s your only freebie. The rest is a brutal undertaking as an adult. 23 different post-positions rather than any prepositional phrases in English, called astevaihtelut.  Then you have to use a vocal harmony to change the objects to conform to the post-positional phrasing.  There are no articles, which is harder for Finns to adjust to English and other languages with them.  Instead of saying, “I’m going to the house.”  Minä mennen kotiin. (Dictionary house is “koti”.) or “I’m from Helsinki.”  Mina olen Helsingistä. or “I’m going to Helsinki.” Minä mennen Helsingiin. Just when you think you’ve figured out the astevaihtelu and vokaaliharmonia, things change. Seinäjoki the city's astevaihtelu in one form is Seinaäjoelta if someone is "from there", not Seinäjoistä. “H"s are all pronounced as well. 16 cases for nouns in the singular, 15 in plural. English-speaker: "What are noun cases?" 6 different verb types with concepts that don’t exist in English. A Finnish-English dictionary or Finnish-any language dictionary is almost worthless, other than maybe Estonian. The words are not usable in most cases because they haven’t been converted through the astevaihtelu or vokaaliharmonia algorithms. In usage, it means if I give you a newspaper and ask you to translate it with your dictionary, you won’t even be able to get the headline in many instances, let along the first sentence of the first paragraph.
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  344. Hey Megyn Kelly. Any half-decent journalist can look at the events in July of 1993 and start to realize that he was murdered. FBI Director William Sessions, Distinguished Eagle Scout, who refused to resign under pressure from the Clinton's, was fired July 19th after the Clinton's held an emergency meeting that weekend on how to move forward with damage control. Foster was under sealed indictment for espionage, and had been travelling to Switzerland for the Clinton's for many years during the Arkansas Governor days. He was no white knight. He was a career criminal in the employ of the most corrupt Governor in US History. Fox News = no credibility. You guys are a freaking joke. Internet? I was in DC during the Foster investigation, and spent many man hours on it myself. Everything pointed to murder. The defensive injuries on his hands from the barrel-cylinder gap on the throw-away revolver (which wasn't even on the scene when the paramedics arrived), the testimony of Patrick Knowlton who saw the guys who dumped the body at Fort Marcy Park, the tampering with evidence including the body by White House Counsel William Kennedy III, the prevention of the Park Police from entering Foster's WH office, the mention of X-rays in the autopsy report that were never available for the Senate, you name it. The suicide note was written by a woman according to handwriting experts. John Kerry did not believe this BS, and repeatedly demanded to see the X-rays in the Senate hearings on Foster, to which he was told, "There are no X-rays, Mr. Senator." Kerry: "Then why does it say here at the footnotes of the autopsy, 'X-Rays 3'?"
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  376.  @Merecir  Nope. Gripen NG demonstrators stripped clean could barely cruise over Mach in mil power. With the larger, heavier Gripen E airframe, Saab went silent on the matter. Real supercruise was a desire in the mid-1980s set by ATF because they were still thinking about 4th Gen BVR metrics in a stand-off skirmish, where you had mutual detection and whoever saw first and got into parameters first, shot first, then offset preferably from supersonic launch speeds to help the missile pk. None of that really matters for 5th Gen, and actually hurts you in IR spectrum, so it isn’t really relevant for ATF and JSF. It’s nice to have on a 4th Gen so you don’t add more IR bloom to your signature with AB, but none of the Eurocanards can really do it effectively in a true combat configuration, especially the anemic Gripen E/F. I’m basing my statements off of decades of immersion in the US/NATO aerospace community with specific knowledge of certain airframe and sensor characteristics, as well as important weapons metrics relevant to the discussion. The pylons on Gripen add to the drag index, as do the new AREXIS EW pods on the wingtips. If you look at the QRTs, they add a lot of drag on the wingtips and trailing edges of the wingtip rails with more volume that doesn’t help it at all with transonic or supersonic speeds. Combined with the engine’s limited thrust in dry power, the Gripen E won’t supercruise with 4 AAMs, but the demonstrators did with the old rails. Saab went suspiciously silent in this regard once the Gripen E got heavier and bulkier.
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  390. Medical bankruptcy is one of the most inflated claims in the US to generate hype for political purposes, while not having a very significant influence on bankruptcy filings. Bankruptcy filings are a result of multiple factors, and medical bills are nowhere near the top factor according to all the data I have studied. For starters, Elizabeth Warren’s cherry-picked study went to 2005, where there were only 1.45 million bankruptcies filed in the whole US including Chapter 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15. Only Ch 13 is for wage-earners, while Ch 15 represented the largest % of filings. The study expanded the parameters to include if people had missed 2 weeks of work due to sickness, had medical bills over $1000, and mortgaged their home to pay for bills. If bankruptcy filers fell into those categories, it was listed as "bankruptcy due to medical expenses", even if that wasn’t true. That’s less than half a percent of the overall population who even filed for bankruptcy. By adding those parameters, they fudged the data to indicate that 61% of the filers filed because of medical expenses. Another study in 2011 found that only 26% of Ch 13 filers said medical expenses played a role. Some studies said 57.1% while others said more people filed bankruptcy for medical expenses than overall bankruptcy filings, which is egregiously flawed. Not only can’t all Ch 13 filers be due to medical expenses, but Ch 13 can’t exceed all of the types of Chapter filings due to the dominance of corporate and foreign businesses filing bankruptcy each year. Ch 13 is only 27-38% of bankruptcy filings each year. Another thing is that personal bankruptcies are not a constant Y2Y. Personal bankruptcies peaked in 2010 at over 434,000 after the financial crisis, then dropped dramatically down to around 299,000 in 2016, 289,000 in 2019, and 194,000 in 2020. Chapter 13 Bankruptcies in US Year to Year 2008: 353k 2009: 398k 2010: 434.8k 2011: 417k 2012: 375k 2013: 343k 2014: 313k 2015: 302k 2016: 299k 2017: 296k 2018: 288k 2019: 289k 2020: 194k 2021: 117.7k 2022: 149k (.05% of the US population) Anytime someone presents a claim, automatically question whether that claim is even accurate, then do the research and understand the basic math. In the case of medical bankruptcy, it’s an extremely inflated piece of hype used by proponents of massive change to the overall US system, with no numbers to support it. It’s sensationalist hype really.
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  395.  @markb8468  One of the first priorities Putin undertook was assessing the actual nuclear forces status, as well as the warheads and delivery vehicles, support systems, bases, and personnel. Whatever it was that he learned, he launched a nuclear arsenal revival program with the utmost focus, and used multiple intermediaries in Kazakstan, Belorussia, and Ukraine to funnel millions of dollars of donations into Clinton Global Initiative so that Obama and Hillary would bless off on selling Uranium One mining rights to Russia. That’s also a very damning exposé of Russia’s uranium mining capabilities post-collapse. Their submarines, SLBMs, bombers, cruise missiles, and ICBMs were in sh*t state even during the Soviet Times, let alone during the collapse, which has never stopped. A huge mistake people make with recent Russian history is thinking that the collapse happened in 1991. It really picked up momentum in the early 1970s, pushed over the edge in the 1980s, and fell hard after 1991. A lot of the core industrial enterprises owned by the state were abandoned once orders ceased coming in, and those personnel collapsed to the major cities where any sign of economic activity was going on. The US actually bailed Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakstan, Georgia, etc. out with Nunn-Lugar, in exchange for gaining control over many of the nuclear warheads, silos, and delivery systems left from the Soviet Times. That series of events is what triggered the rise of Putin to be one of Yeltsin’s Deputy Prime Ministers, teed-up for the 2nd Chechen War in 1999. Yeltsin resigned on Dec 31, 1999, announcing his retirement and Putin’s new position as President, without any election.
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  396. @A Y EU has encouraged Finland to remain neutral for decades. Finland just wants to be left alone when it comes to conflict, and trade with both East and West while working on domestic problems like population (lack of young workers), aging society, energy, and advanced technology development. Finland has been a reliable trade partner for Russia for centuries. My family’s region, Pohjanmaa, has been exporting bailed hay to Russia since Czarist times, and they’re in the West, opposite side of the border. When I lived in Russia, I saw several Finnish products on the large store shelves like Globus, which is a German attempt to duplicate the combined business models of Wal-Mart and Costco. Russia has enjoyed diversity of grocery, personal care, and household products like never before once the collapse’s initial velocity was reduced, and Western firms saw a huge market of 143 million people who had been excluded from Western trade for 50-60 years. Much of Russia’s domestic construction projects were managed by Finnish, Serbian, and Swedish engineers because the Bolsheviks purged those types of people in the Revolution and Civil War, followed by the horrors of human loss in World War II. Russia focused its remaining engineers, many of whom were injured during the war (Kalashnikov is one example) on military items, taking Western designs where all the RDT&E had been done already, then scaled those designs for primitive Russian and Ukrainian factories. Ukraine had better technical expertise in many areas, including missile and RADAR components, as well as most of the naval yards for construction of wartime vessels. EU has promoted trade with Russia though, since Germany is the core of the EU and Germany relies on exports for its economy. They are the last ones who want to see any warfare in Europe.
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  485.  @fuckadoodle2  If I told you that every assertion you just made was wild inaccurate, how would you respond? Before you do, understand that I’ve been in the aerospace and defense industry since the 1970s, was involved with most of the programs you just mentioned, and watched them develop from infancy to maturity (and retirement) over the course of the past 5 decades. The F-35 weapons bays are larger than the F-111’s and F-22’s. F-35A and C can carry 2000lb class weapons, whereas F-22A can only carry 1000lb JDAMs due to bay depth. F-22 bay depth was designed for the AIM-120. What other fighters have weapons bays? Su-57 can only carry 4 R-77 series missiles in its bays. F-35 is more than multi-role, but Omnirole. Mission sets commonly executed by F-35As: VLO Offensive Counter-Air VLO Defensive Counter-Air VLO self-escort deep penetration strike VLO D-SEAD VLO Airborne Warning and Control VLO Strategic and Tactical ISR VLO Anti-Ship VLO long range networked terminal guidance for Surface-to-Surface and Air-to-Surface weapons launched from other platforms VLO Offensive Electronic Warfare/Attack VLO Defensive EW for 4th Gen strike packages No other platform can currently do all of those mission sets like that. F-22 is the closest, but lacks IR spectrum sensors and weapons bay depth for the 2000lb class JDAMs. Dogfighting has been dead for about 20 years now, but you wouldn’t want to get within visual range of an F-35 in any of the platforms you mentioned. F-35s have vastly-superior fused sensor cueing capabilities for a new generation of HOBS missiles that no other fighter has, along with superior Electronic Attack/EW than the F-22 has.
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  492. Viraqua:  It was actually initiated by the USAF soon-to-be Chief of Staff since the Army was no longer procuring spare parts for the M-1 and M-2 carbines that were used by USAF Security Forces and SPs to defend Air Bases.  The Army stopped M-1/M-2 Carbine spare parts purchasing after the Korean War, and the USAF didn't want to be manning their posts with Garands or M14s slung on their shoulders. After the Army Ordnance Board declared the AR15 totally unsuitable for any military use, the USAF Chief of Staff directed the Pentagon to begin type-classification and standardization of the AR15 to become the Air Force's new service rifle.  When the Army Ordnance Board received orders to contribute to this process, they were incensed, and began further efforts to sabotage the AR15.  Even the sabotaged AR15s out-performed the hand-selected M14s.  You can read all about this in great detail in The Black Rifle, Vol I.  Excellent book on the technical and drama history behind the AR15. When Special Forces, SAS, and SEALs got their hands on the AR15, they wanted it immediately.  Army Ordnance saw that there was a good possibility now that the AR15 would out-shine their baby, the M14, so they worked even harder to destroy any chances of the AR15 being adopted.  Once McNamara and his analysts found out about all this, they inserted themselves into Army Ordnance Board's inner workings and steered much of the program in order to overcome the corruption that was inherent in that team, resulting in the successful adoption of the AR15 for the Army, USAF, and Marines. Then there was further criminal misconduct with the proofing of production rifles using different ammunition than what was being issued after the initial production lots of the correct M193 with extruded powder were expended in Vietnam, and it was replaced with production lots using ball powder that drove the port pressures around 10,000psi higher than the design was engineered for. Like everything, the story is a lot more complicated and requires a lot of research to understand.
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  538.  @seraphm6573  I’m blinded by 5 decades of experience in this specific field of aerospace and defense, where we primarily worked on A2A programs. Missile kinematics and separation aircraft performance has been bread and butter for my family for generations. “Cruising along at Mach .8 and Mach 1.8 don’t make a difference in overall IR signature intensity.” Uh, yes it does. It makes a dramatic difference. You just happen to be conversing with someone who has done extensive analyses on IRST detection ranges on various types of airborne targets in different weather conditions. 90km detection range is for supersonic bombers in optimum atmospheric conditions using 1990s optics. If they’re subsonic, it drops considerably from there by almost half. For small fighters, it drops even more into much closer ranges. For Stealth aircraft like the F-22A and F-35s, you aren’t going to detect them with IRST until on the edge of visual range due to the extensive IR concealment systems they incorporate. Supersonic speed blooms them more, but they are still quite stealthy in IR spectrum. There are some interesting photos of the Rafale’s OSF showing F-22 in burner and not in burner. It’s extremely low contrast relative to the background. Another thing people who never did this kind of work for a living overlook is PID. You don’t just shoot at Unidentified IR contacts. You have to cue other sensors onto them to try to establish PID. Who do you think has worked on IR concealment longer and incorporated those lessons-learned into the F-35 vs J-20? Lockheed has been working on RF Stealth and IR concealment since the late 1950s. China just barely got into the game in the 1990s. That means F-35s will have first-look, first PID, first-shoot. J-20 will be defensive the entire time it spends within WEZ. AIM-120D has far greater range than you listed. It has demonstrated longer intercept range on a live target drone than the AIM-54C ever did. PL-15 is a paper capability until proven otherwise, and its seeker won’t have tracking capability until within maybe 6nm, assuming F-35s choose to not allow the automated EW system to do its job. The short story is China is way behind the power curve in all of these spaces, no matter how many people they bribe and steal from.
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  540.  @heatblast876  F-35s since Lot 4 have had smaller frontal, oblique, and side RCS values than combat-coded F-22As, according to Lockheed’s own leadership and the materials science analysis if you know what you’re looking at.   If you look at the frontal aspect of the Raptor and F-35s, you will see cavity resonance areas between the intakes of the F-22 and its fuselage/nose root area. That’s bad for stealth. F-35s have no such features, because they use Diverterless Supersonic Inlets. F-35s also have newer generations of RAM, coatings, and layerings of the RAM that are far superior to the Raptors’s (both for performance and maintenance). From oblique and side aspects, F-35s have RF transparent materials in the tailplane area, including the booms, h-stabs, v-stabs, keel web, their spars, and cores. F-22 has metallic flat surfaces around the TVC engine nozzles, mostly composite structures for the tailplanes, but with some aluminum spars and cores. Lot 4 and later F-35s (basically the entire production lot minus the initial 6 As, Bs, and Cs) dropped the aluminum spars and structures from the tailplane area to reduce weight and increase strength in order to meet the Key Performance Parameters set by the JPO. F-22 has a lot of titanium construction for Mach 2+ performance and structural integrity for its heavy weight airframe to be able to sustain 9gs. That Titanium construction adds to RF reflectivity. F-35s use a lot less Titanium than the F-22, and a lot more % of carbon fiber/carbon resin epoxy laminates, and carbon Bismaleimide composites. This plus the carbon nanotube RAM contribute to a smaller RCS value set from all aspects. If someone tells you any differently, you can write that source off as incompetent when it comes to this subject. For the Su-57, they are relying on taping off seams and coating after that, which is a nightmare for maintenance. They also failed miserably with their design from the first bulkhead if you look at it. It’s basic VLO techniques that were somehow ignored on a structure than contributes around 33% of your frontal RCS. They decided to make that a reflector instead of a deflector for some reason. China did not make that gross error with the J-20, and they are even incorporating it on the J-10B/C. They also have incorporate this basic stealth design approach on the J-11D. We simply don’t know what the production Su-57 RCS values are, nor do we know the J-20, J-11B/C, or J-11D. For the 4.7 Gen designs, they will still be large due to external stores and other bad shaping and materials. They are not as up-to-speed with this technology set and materials science as Lockheed, and never will be. Lockheed has a head-start dating back to the 1940s, from where they did technical exploration of Nazi Germany’s early stealth systems.
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  591.  @nytrol2138  I’ve been flying since the 1970s. We purposely plan flights taking weather into consideration as #1, starting with winds, then Density Altitude checked against aircraft weight. No other fighter has been tested as extensively for harsh weather as the JSF series. Gripen will fail from wx issues before F-35A ever will, but this is really an uninformed argument people make because the layers of the troposphere and stratosphere are extremely cold, getting down well into -40˚ and below. Every fighter has needed to be cold conditions-hardened even dating back to WWII era. The US has led the way in Environment and Electrical systems to deal with extreme low temps. The engines love cold, thick air. F-35s spend more time in extreme cold at altitude because they don’t need to carry external stores, so they don’t wheeze like 4.5 Gen fighters do up in the higher bands. They average higher speeds for longer durations during their sorties, are able to cruise and refuel without using burner, and have excellent climb rates in their common configurations. Those things change on 4.5 Gen when you configure them with EFTs, FLIR pods, ECM pods, Towed Decoy pylons, and then start hanging weapons. USAF has more arctic operations experience than Norway and Sweden combined. Look at how many Squadrons have flown from Iceland and Alaska for the past 50+ years. USAF and USMC also have been doing deployments for joint forces exercise with Norway since the Cold War, while we maintained permanent-based F-15s out of Iceland for the Iceland ADIZ mission. This is now a joint NATO mission rotation filled by air forces from Europe, several of which who have already sent F-35s there to fill it.
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  617. * 19 trillion in debt * "Affordable Care Act" (raised my family's healthcare 300% which killed our savings) * Killed the F-22 production line, which was supposed to replace the worn-out F-15C fleet, creating a fighter gap * Helped fast-track the Uranium One deal to give Russia access to strategic Uranium mining in the US * Eliminated thousands of tactical nukes from our arsenal while helping Russia revitalize their eroded nuclear fleet * Handicapped and leashed US domestic energy production while funneling millions to Solyndra * Appointed radical anti-American activists to senior government positions and judicial benches * Went on his apology tour against the US, setting off the Arab spring revolt across the Middle East, alienating key allies in the region * Threw away hard-won victories against foreign insurgents in Iraq after the surge. * Fired some of our greatest generals like McChrystal, while appointing careerist identity politics deviants into the JCS who have zero war-fighting capacity * Ousted Qaddafi to steal his gold, then invite MB-loyal terrorists into Libya * Set up some strange operation with Hillary in Benghazi that got a US ambassador killed, then was blamed on a video * Presided over a DOJ that gave us the Fast & Furious gun-running scandal into Mexico, resulting in thousands murdered, including US Border Patrol and ICE agents, a Mexican beauty queen, with people being murdered with the weapons to this day * Supervised radical activist IRS commissioner Louis Lehrner, who targeted conservative political groups illegally with WH protection He was one of the worst Presidents in US history, engaging in high-level crimes directed against domestic and foreign interests of the US as a matter of policy that seems custom-built for Russian interests.
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  624. Someone leaked a Hillary Campaign internal polling document from Benenson Strategy Group, saying that she was weak in enthusiasm, and they had her losing 19% to his 77% Nationally in the polling they did. I actually called Benenson Strategy Group up and asked about their methodology in polling, and they got very guarded with the responses. That was on November 7th. Some of the key words in that document that preface their findings were: "NO SKEWS OR NARRATIVE SCREENS WERE EMPLOYED" They then go on to say: "Executive Overview: Hillary Clinton Flash-Crash to 12% Favorable, Losing 19-77% Nationally At this point Donald Trump has both momentum and enthusiasm. Distrust in the mainstream media is blunting the impact of the collective polling narrative. As Election Day approaches, Hillary Clinton’s favorable ratings have crashed to historic lows (12%) in nonpartisans and Donald Trump is consolidating support (97% of LV Republican-identifying respondents are either enthusiastic or very enthusiastic about voting for Trump). Among independents, Hillary voters who are exposed to any alternative media (73%) are aware of the WikiLeaks emails and find them either disturbing (54%) or deeply disturbing (18%). Among liberal-identifying whites, support is shifting from Hillary (-27 since October 1 st) to Donald Trump (78%) or Jill Stein (21%). For voters who solely consume mainstream media only 28% are aware of the WikiLeaks emails and of those, only 8% are aware of the content. For these voters Clinton leads Trump by +8. Minority voters are less likely to consume alternative media (only 14%) and are less likely to be aware of the email leak (only 18% for males, 9% for females). Even with this group, enthusiasm is down 63 points compared to October 2008. " https://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/benenson-strategy-group-salvage-program.pdf
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  632.  @SumTinWong01  I’ve been shooting and working with AKs since the 1980s. Have fired and broken down multiple variants since that time, to include Norincos, Russian Type 2s, Romanian PM 63s, East German MPI-AKS-74s, AKMs, North Korean AKs, Egyptian Maadis, Arsenals of all types, Yugoslavian M76s, Valmet Rk62s and Rk76s, SAKO Rk92S and Rk95s, Galil ARMs, Galil SARs, Galil 7.62s, Saigas, and a bunch I’m forgetting. The Russian variants can be hit-and-miss like most of the others. FSBs are typically never TDC and are difficult to zero. The pins that retain the piston to the bolt carrier have walked loose and started to score the gas tubes on the Romanian PM63s we had when shooting high volume. East German guns ran really well, don’t recall any issues. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a malfunction with a 5.45x39 rifle. None of them compare well with the quality of the Finnish guns. The Finns simply out-class all the others, but they are boat anchors to carry, even the stamped steel Rk76 has twice the sheet steel thickness you would need. I’m only discussing actual military rifles mostly here, with the Saiga and civilian Norincos being the exceptions. I’ve shot plenty of civilian import WASRs and Arsenals in the US. Romanian guns have gone up and down depending on the time period. I generally avoid them like the plague. As far as assembly methods and materials “quality” among any of the Warsaw Pact guns, the only ones that show attention to detail and upper European hints of quality are the Polish and East German guns. The Czech Vz.58 is a well-made rifle with much better machine work and finish. Basically all AKM variants are trash in Warsaw Pact outside of the Poles and Eastern Krauts. You get the sense that really depressed people who didn’t give a rip cranked the things out, and it shows.
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  682.  @anonymousm9113  I remember my first Company formation. 1SG Howard barked out, "I need 2 volunteers!" I felt myself shoved forward out of my platoon formation along with another private from another platoon as some SPC4 said, "That means you, new dick!" "Congrats studs, you just got the 2 extra tickets for our Company rafting trip!" We went to these rapids in West Virginia, had boat-on-boat wars splashing and capsizing each other, just a great time on some genuine rapids. The only thing that really ruined it was I had an openly-racist black Squad Leader who was a total POS. He came in my room on weekends trying to play Drill Sergeant, and even tore up some of my materials from Church right after I had got back one Sunday. He would talk about violating and beheading our PSG's wife when we were standing in the bus in our blues between jobs, always trying to agitate some type of response from the EMs. Back then, H Co had Recon, Mortars, and Caisson Platoons. Recon was one of the best units I was ever in out of 3 Scout Platoons and LRSC in my career. We just trained and trained at AP Hill, did 8-day demo week, tons of IADs with more ammo, pyro, and smoke grenades than I ever saw until OIF. Of the 3 Scout Platoons I was in, that was the only one with a Sniper section where everyone was B4. They even sent 4 of the guys to Quantico USMC Scout Sniper Instructor Course. Recon Platoon basically got the Regiment's allotment for munitions, including AT4s and other Class V. We did a lot of OPFOR Augmentee or OPFOR duties on-call for other units, which was a blast. If they had kept that Platoon longer, I wouldn't have volunteered to go to Korea. Once we got notice it was being deactivated, I put in the papers and had orders within a week. Smithsonian was renovating the barracks as I left for Korea. Went to 1-506th on the DMZ in Korea which I loved, DROS'd to Fort Lewis in I Corps LRSC, which was a dream job for me, got deactivated, sent to 1-24 Inf Scouts in 1st BDE 25th on Lewis, then went to Bragg.
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  819.  Douglas Jones  F-35s have their own Local Area Network with Line-of-sight data link, not omnidirectional Wide Area Network like 4th Gen fighters have. F-117A combat record: 1271 combat sorties in Desert Storm 850 combat sorties over Bosnia/Serbia 1 shot down 0 combat fatalities It has no radar, no EW, no radar warning, nothing but a good navigation system and FLIR + laser spot tracker hidden in the belly for guiding its Laser-Guided Bombs. They were ordered to fly the same corridor multiple nights in a row. The night in question, the EA-6Bs were down for maintenance, and Russian spotters in Italy relayed what aircraft were taking off. No EA-6Bs with HARM missiles meant SAM sites could search longer, be a bit more bold. Dani's SA-3 crew set their radars to lower frequency against orders, and got a brief glimmer of the F-117As when bomb bay doors were opened, then disappeared. They had to turn around and fly over the same area by orders of Clinton's SECDEF, while SAM batteries were scanning actively. Dani's crew saw them at 13km, manually tracked and fired a Salvo of 2 different SAMs from the site. One missed, while the other proximity-detonated near the F-117, causing a wing to shear off and go out of control. Pilot ejected and went into E&E mode, got picked up by AFSOF CSAR elements. Had that been an F-35, the F-35 pilots would have seen every tiny RF and thermal emission overlaid on high resolution AESA ground-mapping imagery from over the horizon, actively looking for SAM sites to smoke. Totally different ballgame.
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  905.  @katherineberger6329  F-20A would have made a beautiful point defense fighter for really poor air forces in undeveloped or developing nations who can’t afford unit prices over $10 million each in early 1980s dollars. Stack up a small squadron so a dictator/president can look at his shiny new Air Force, send up air defense fighters to rattle the sword a little bit, and actually be able to intercept peer adversaries who step into your airspace. A problem with that for the F-20A at the time though was AIM-7 carriage. Sure, you can hang them on the wings, but the clearance from the ground was unacceptable in practical terms for a squirrely highly-maneuverable fighter that gets blown around like a leaf in the pattern with crosswinds. It’s asking for ground strike with the AIM-7s if you ever see it. It had excellent man-machine interface taken from Northrop’s development of the F-18L, but a tiny search and track radar with roughly half the detection range of the F-16’s APG-66, no volume to support a large radome or back-end power amps, filters, converters, and cooling. And this was still in the era of Mechanically-Scanned Arrays with their susceptibility to low Mean Time Between Failure, no matter what was advertised. Or you could spend a little more, get full interoperability/sustainability with a rapidly-growing global F-16 fleet, full multirole capability including Anti-Ship, precision weapons coming online, AMRAAM around the corner, new avionics already being demonstrated for the C model, etc. To play contrarian to my own train of thought though, many of those F-16AMs in NATO service ended up with at least $103 million in sunk costs per unit after SLEP upgrades.
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  916.  @gsd632  The entire JSF program projected lifetime costs are thrown around without dividing them by JSF-A, JSF-B, or JSF-C. Neither JSF-B nor C are applicable to foreign partners who are only interested in the CTOL variant as a cost liability. To the contrary, the sharing of engines, radars, RF, electro-optical, and other subcomponents between the 3 variants has brought the costs way down for the F-35A, which would benefit nations like Canada. The public opinion and influence on elections in Canada is opposite of what you see in Japan, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, and UK. UK had similar scandal-hungry media, until they realized how many jobs and market share the UK has in every JSF variant, not just the JSF-B used by Royal Navy/Royal AF. The JSF-B costs a lot more per unit as well, but is now lauded in even popular UK media like Top Gear. As you read about the Canadian perspective, it's as if Canadian media is in an alternate reality still. Trudeau campaigned on not purchasing the F-35 and buying something cheaper. There really isn't anything cheaper as you stack the ancillary 4th Gen systems like External Fuel Tanks, FLIR/ECM/Recce pods, and scaled logistics support at the squadron and phase levels. It's very disingenuous or misinformed to claim there is a cheaper option, especially when the "most affordable" Gripen E has higher unit costs and far less capability than the F-35A, with less ability to maintain that station time for the NORAD mission profile, or interoperability with NATO for joint operations Canada has historically partnered in.
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  989.  @rogerpennel1798  Good points. The Gripen was envisioned still during the Cold War to replace the Fighter, Attack, and Recce variants of the Viggens. The Swedish parliament (Riksdag) was very allergic to spending on defense even during the Cold War, and they hated it when they saw the maintenance costs for the different Viggen airframes. Viggen was a very high capability platform for its era with true STOL performance, thrust reverser, real short take-off, nice man-machine interface, and powerful Pratt & Whitney JT8D with a low pressure high bypass fan and an afterburner attached to it. Riksdag didn’t want to fund a Swedish replacement for it because of concerns over cost, but the proposal for a multirole JAS fighter narrowly won by 1 vote if I’m not mistaken. A huge portion of Riksdag was against Saab developing a new fighter. Saab promised to deliver a very affordable, lightweight, multirole JAS fighter that could do all 3 main mission sets being performed by the various Viggens. That’s where the JAS-39 comes from. The problem is they used the F404 motor, which limited performance due to its small size and thrust, so the airframe had to be much lighter than any Viggen. Lightweight airframe with an under-powered motor for its weight really took away the short take-off capability, as well as limited the combat radius and payload, but it was cheaper than building something with thrust-reversers and a 28,000lb thrust motor and heavier airframe. As much as I criticize the Riksdag, I think they were right in wanting a foreign option like the F-16 or F/A-18. Sweden would be in a much better position now having not wasted so much money on the Gripen, and would be like Finland getting F-35As soon to replace whatever they had gone with in the late 1980s-1990s.
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  999.  @destarker1340  The AESA on JSF are not just Radar antennae, but jammers as well, as they are on F-22As, Rafale's RBE2, but things change dramatically on JSF for several reasons. The passive RF sensor suite that you can’t see is embedded all over the JSF airframes, fused with the AESA, the IR spectrum 6xDAS, and EOTS FLIR in the nose. This combined replaces the legacy Radar Warning Receiver and Missile Approach Warning Systems of 4th and 4.5 Gen fighters. DAS is actually an evolution of the F-22A’s MAWS. In legacy 4.5 Gen fighters, programmable defensive electronic warfare has been a thing for quite some time, all the way down to programmable countermeasures responses including expendables and decoys, how many and what type will be deployed when x type of weapon is employed against you, based on what the RWR senses and processes through its own limited threat bank. If you look at legacy RWR symbology, you see shape and alpha-numeric threat codes that are driven by the RF spectrum emissions and signatures from the threat in a clock position display. If you look at the least-discussed 4th Gen fighter and notice that they never/rarely carry ECM pods, then realize they’ve been in service since the 1970s, the F-15 TEWS will become very intriguing to you. In reality, they had a hard time getting TEWS to work like they wanted, and ASPJ became a multi-service self protection jammer/EW system for the teen fighters, including the F-14D, based on lessons from TEWS. The US bomber and spy plane communities have been chasing the EW dragon since the 1950s with small armies of engineers, with extensive test ranges to subject the systems to on a regular basis for continuous upgrades. This technology eventually made its way into fighters once Digital Signals Processors and microchips became more widely-produced. The foundation for EW systems in several types of fleets in US/NATO is well-funded with the world’s best semiconductors, microprocessors, super-computing cards, and now fiber-optic signals connectivity. If we were to have a look into what was already being used by certain aircraft in the 1960s, it would shock many AvGeeks and EEs. JSF is built on lessons-learned generations since then, with huge improvements in antennae configuration and materials science, processing, programmable algorithms, and now near real-time networking. The ability to turn your RCS on and off on JSF is something no 4.5 Gen fighter can ever posses. When you combine that capability with the vastly-superior electronics to anything coming out of Sweden even in the next 15 years, then connect each JSF sensor/antennae node via an LPI MADL link network, it takes EW to a level that the strategic systems haven’t even had or dreamed of. For example, MADL was installed in B-2A as an upgrade now that Global Strike Command (SAC) has seen what it can do. That changes the B-2A and what it can be used for, since it also has an impressive sensor suite. If I were to do a video showing just the basics of all this and put the Gripen E next to it, it would be painfully apparent what a scam the Gripen E program is, and how Saab has been advertising capabilities from real systems as their own, when they really shouldn’t be discussing EW that much. The F-15 community has kept their mouths shut about it for 5 decades. USAF is extremely strict about it, whereas US Navy is a little more revealing, but not too much. Saab is advertising decoy jammer missiles as some kind of new thing that they have, when the first morning of the air campaign of Desert Storm had F/A-18Cs launching those 30 years ago. JSF has been a collaborative program in ways we have never seen, so all the lessons-learned from actual decades of combat among NATO partners and the 3 US services have been foundational to the problem-solving engineered into the aircraft and systems. In practice, F-35s have jammed the F-22’s APG-77 AESA Radar. One does not simply jam the world-class APG-77, which is used for Electronic Attack itself since the EF-111A is long-retired. F-22A can smoke-check the Rafale’s RBE2 in this space, and the RBE2 has already been used to jam Su-35s in Egypt. The JSF sensor/EW suite currently sits high atop the pecking order of EW in fighters over the existing top dog, which has a huge gap over the rest of the pack. JSF adds cyber attack to its capability set, which is something nobody was thinking about outside of the avionics team in the program. JSF makes it very scary to be operating any type of system in a theater where it can reach you with its weapons, which is pretty much anywhere. Did you catch that incident between the Syrians and Russians where the Syrians shot down a Russian Electronic Warfare/ELINT bird? Russia claims Israel tricked the Syrians into doing it with some type of spoofing system, but Israel says all of their F-16Is had already landed at that time the missile impacted the Russian IL-20. The combination of VLO stealth in RF and IR spectrums, Luneberg lenses, real-time networked LPI high fidelity data links, high-speed processing, and powerful emitters with agile beam-steering/waveform manipulation techniques creates something we have never seen in the fighter world. I would be ashamed to even bring up the Gripen E in this setting, other than to show the lower end of the spectrum in Western capability. Rafale is far ahead of Gripen, and is a very distant contender in the order of formidable EW platforms, even with it being a superb one.
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  1038.  @seraphm6573  Open Source updates for F-22A are listed in the Raptor Incremental Upgrade Program and kept very vague, but they have replaced the CIPs at least once with newer generation processors, used the open architecture that was available for 3x CIPs, gone to a newer APG-77(V)1 with unspecified improvements, replaced unspecified sensors with newer ones. No US fighter program has stayed static, so this is normal. You just can’t see from the outside what has changed due to the nature of the design. Supersonic JDAM delivery and separation tests, followed by SDB separation tests were pretty big for the F-22A combat-coded Raptors. It’s a more capable VLO penetration strike platform than anything else except JSF and B-2A currently. That was done with Increment 3.1. They programmed RF digital geolocation for surface target emitters to support its A2G capabilities, along with AESA SAR ground-mapping modes, and made it more interoperable with Link-16 protocols. There was 3.2A with unspecified software-based improvements related to electronic protection, Link-16 receive, and PID enhancements. Increment 3.2B brought in AIM-120D and AIM-9X interoperability, new IFDL, improved geolocation emitter detection/tracking/sharing, and some type of improved Weapon Employment Zone commonality. It’s a much different weapons system than when it was first fielded. The major differences are in A2A capabilities, A2G weapons employment, networking, sensors, PID enhancements, EW, and processing power to support these capabilities.
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  1041. Any modern fighter built in US or NATO is designed to work across the environmental extremes. US aircraft have had to function in Alaska, Iceland, Korea, Hawaii, Panama, Florida, Germany, Norway, Middle East, Philippines, Japan.....for decades. Sweden has far less experience designing and operating in extreme cold compared to the US, and the numbers aren't even close. If you run the numbers from the 1950s to present, the numbers of deployed squadrons, sorties, maintenance, intercepts, exercises, and types of fighters/interceptors employed by the USAF in arctic environments dwarf the Swedish Air Force to the point of almost insignificance. We know more about what it takes to make an aircraft work in the arctic than Sweden will ever know, which is why Sweden buys GE engines for the Gripen from the US. Sweden has historically used British Rolls Royce or US Pratt & Whitney fighter engines on the Draken & Viggen, then switched to the ultra-reliable GE F404 in the legacy Gripen, and GE F414 (Super Hornet engine) for the Gripen E. The very heart of Swedish fighters have always been foreign-produced in advanced economies that have the industrial and technical capacity to actually build fighter engines. You need a very large population to cross that industrial capacity threshold, and only a precious few countries have it. Since the emerging force of Russian fighters are purpose-built to be Eurocanard destroyers, and Finland is actually on the front lines, buying a Eurocanard seems like a really bad choice in 2021. Run some simulations of Gripen E/Saab GlobalEye up against Su-57/Su-35/Su-30SM2/Su-27SM3 networked together with Russian AWACS and drones and see how that works. Now run it with JSF linked to other JSF partners in Europe like Poland and Norway. You will quickly see what a waste of money Gripen E/GlobalEye would be.
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  1104. First mistake: "Limited air to air capabilities of the F-35." The F-35 is one of the 2 most capable air dominance fighters in the world. Indian Air Force said they were easily able to detect and track the J-20 from hundreds of km out. When we saw the airframe of the J-20 & stealth mentioned in the same sentence, there was a loud chuckle across the US aerospace industry from those who have worked on VLO technology for decades. J-20 seems to be more of Potemkin village for Chinese domestic propaganda to give the impression that they are keeping up with or exceeding the US. Have we seen any evidence of supersonic separation testing from the J-20? They also claimed they cracked the code of sensor fusion and interleaving within a few years, while not even having a 5th Gen engine for this aircraft yet. You gotta have the engine before the airplane. China did insert 3 spies as scientists into GE, Pratt, and Rolls Royce to steal as much technology as possible since they've been failing at innovation in jet propulsion for decades. Chinese missiles? Their copy of the Israeli Python 4 should be good, but nations who buy their missiles refuse to use it in combat so far. Our most recent example is the Indo-Pakistan battle of February, 2019. All the missiles fired were from Russia and the US. Indians claim one R-73 Archer face-shot an F-16C Block 52. Pakistanis deny they used AIM-120C5, even when India showed the missile debris with Paki contract code from Raytheon on it. Indians say multiple R-77 Adders were fired, while multiple AIM-120s were fired at them. All of the BVR exchanges were countered with CM and maneuvers/kinematics.
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  1143.  @Flankymanga  Russia used to operate under the assumption that they would have thousands of fighters and attack aircraft to spearhead an invasion, including medium bombers. When they tried to make comparable 4th Generation fighters, both of which had 2 engines, they lost the industrial capacity to mass-produce fighters like the MiG-21 and MiG-23. The MiG-29 especially ushered in the demise of large airforce power that was common to the single engine MiG designs. It happened at a time when the Soviet Union was already collapsing and the Soviet Premiers were trying to hold the alliance together. The decline of manufacturing capacity that was shared between Belarussia, Ukraine, and Russia fragmented after that, so the decline is still in-action to this day. Ukraine was a huge factor in the allied Soviet Republic industrial infrastructure not just for missiles, Radars, fighters, and strategic bombers, but for huge naval vessels like carriers, frigates, and other wartime ships from 13 different shipyards. Post-collapse, Russia was left with no choices as the economy continued to free-fall. The US actually offered bail-outs with billions of dollars in exchange for securing or deactivating many of the nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and manufacturing plants of these devices due to the alarming rate at which former Soviet officers were selling military equipment to any buyers than came there. As we saw in Syria, Russian armor was nothing but a series of targets for air power and USMC precision-guided artillery pieces, with total elimination of an armored Battle Group with artillery support group in a matter of 6 hours, with zero US casualties. The counter argument to that is that the battle group didn’t have Russian Air Power, but what Air Force units would make a difference when F-22As were part of the US air component force that responded to the attacks on US and Kurdish personnel? Had Russia tried to offensively employ Su-35S and Su-30SM, those would have been eliminated within minutes of entering the air space without knowing where they were being shot from. No air power, no ground component forces have any real meaning other than providing targets for the ATO planners. This is why Russia is trying to develop hypersonic missiles, which is far easier said than done, and the US is the pioneer of hypersonic technologies both manned and unmanned.
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  1248.  @sulla1537  It's also a generational thing. With each successive dumbing-down of classes, I guess many are ok with lowering their expectations from professional degrees when it comes to being able to form coherent and logical thoughts, then communicate them in proper English. The fundamental problem with her thinking is that there are 2 groups on this current campaign to inject everyone with experimental mRNA gene therapies. The flaw with that is that there can't be other options or classes of people, for example: 1. People who trusted the recommendations of their doctors, and are now suffering permanent neurological and blood clotting disorders 2. People who were coerced into getting injected, and now have experienced adverse effects or are learning more about the safety problems with starting a mass countermeasures campaign before the 2nd seasonal wave was even midway 3. People who absolutely accept that the bioweapon is real and dangerous, but also don't trust anything they're hearing from corporate media, and remain skeptical and cautious out of survival instinct and intellect (the largest group of skeptics are people with PhDs) 4. People who got injected, suffer adverse effects, but still "trust the system" 5. People who instinctively don't trust media and the pharma sponsors by default 6. People who have no clue about anatomy, physiology, or virology, and trust media and pharma without reservation because of 13 years of normative behavioral programming and conditioning
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  1269.  @vasilisbill  There wasn’t a lot that was conventional about either design, other than the dual tailplanes on the YF-22, and even they were quite radical. We simply don’t know what the low speed maneuverability was with the YF-23, and I suppose it was quite good with those huge tailplanes. I would be more concerned with airframe stress on the fuselage/wing junction area. YF-22 PAV-1 was the superior performer of all PAVs. It demonstrated time-to-climb, acceleration, and max V0 all in one flight, exceeding Mach 2. It was the only ATF prototype of the 4 to reach and exceed Mach 2. Neither of the YF-23s reached Mach 2 since their canopies cracked and the boundary layer control system seemed to have trouble over Mach 1.8, which is where they maxed out. If you notice, the F-23A design proposal totally redesigned the intakes to have an angled scoop to manage the leading edge shockwave off the inlet, and it was area-ruled tighter than the YF-23. They also lengthened the airframe even more. You could still see parts of the turbofan initial stages through the intakes and the square shape of the engine nozzle apertures from direct rear aspect would not be so stealthy with the right angles, as well as right angles in the exhaust trenches. The weapons bay also needed to be added to with another forward weapons bay to house more missiles, which contributed to the lengthening of the design. They still would have needed to develop some elaborate trapeze weapons racks and demonstrated supersonic separation with them. The USAF was concerned about risk over everything else because they know that congress can cut funding or interrupt funding, which increases costs. That was the main factor in the decision that was constantly communicated to all the prime contractors throughout the 1980s. The Northrop/McDonnel Douglas design represented the most risk to the program because of the aforementioned technical challenges. They all would have been solved, but at significant costs.
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  1283.  @fahadkelantan  The problem with the forward-deployed "cheap fighter" concept is proliferation of various layers of IADS, including non-integrated roaming systems like the Houthi rebels used against Saudi F-15E. That was an R-27T rigged as a SAM with a COTS FLIR cueing solution, towed by a Toyota in the desert. It successfully intercepted that high cost F-15E. Anything less than an F-35A just isn't survivable even in that "low threat" environment because they don't have anywhere near the SA. A multi-ship formation of F-35s would have seen those Houthi rebels from on the horizon, and avoided or attrited them with a PGM Glide bomb. A 4-ship of F-15Es with CFTs, pods, pylons, weapons, EFTs, and pilot training for 8 is roughly $450 million vulnerability flying over some savages with a Gerry-rigged R-27T. A 4-ship of F-35As with 4 pilots, and internal weapons is maybe $345 million and not vulnerable, as they can just avoid the WEZ they already saw from 40-80nm out, and can employ on it without entering the WEZ. An Israeli F-16I with some of the most advanced self protection systems on it got shot down by a Syrian older SAM in 2018 returning from a strike mission. F-16Is after mods are extremely expensive fighters. UAE Block 60 F-16E/F were $200 million per at unit program cost. When configured for strike missions, both the F-16I and F-16E/F are subsonic-limited. F-35As are full Mach 1.6 and 9Gcapable platforms carrying the same amount of fuel as a CFT/EFT equipped Israeli or UAE Viper, the same weapons, but with far more sensors and superior SA on the F-35. Striking ISIS inside Syria required F-22As and later F-35s to penetrate the WEZ of Syrian SAMs and fighters, so other strikers (F-15Es) could get in and deliver SDBs and JDAMs. The range for some of the missions was too much of a stretch for Vipers, and totally out if range of A-10Cs, but no problem for F-35Bs, F-35As, F-22As, and F-15Es.
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  1284.  @fahadkelantan  The Su-57 production samples are a lot different than the prototypes, although there were 2 stages to the PAK-FA T-50 prototype vehicles. The production birds have really clean surfaces, so we just don't know what the frontal RCS values are without test pole and real data. We also don't know how good their AESA capabilities are, since it's their first fighter AESA. We know that every Eurocanard design combat-configured has at least a 1.x m2 frontal RCS. None of them have mitigated the first bulkhead in the nose like China has done on J-10B. Oblique frontal RCS is even larger, so a dispersed formation of 2x Su-57 will likely have first-look from significant BVR, and will be able to offset angles for an oblique high altitude missile envelope, with excellent transonic/supersonic performance with totally clean 6x AAM weapons load. The main thing that would make Typhoons survivable in that scenario is the Mk.2 CAPTOR-E with its ability to volume search to the sides, but detection and tracking will be at much closer ranges than with Flankers. Using Flankers as high RCS bait, Su-57 linked with Flankers makes the situation more dangerous for Typhoons/Rafales/Hornets/Vipers. Introduce F-35s into that mix, and the tables turn to making the Felon/Flanker force the hunted. F-35s linked with Typhoon and other 4th Gen creates more problems, since F-35s have stand-off EA that out-performs the Raptor, which outperforms everything else. UK Typhoons are getting a fraction of that EA capability with Mk.2 CAPTOR-E, now that they've tasted it with F-35B. One of the most formidable A2A force mixes is UK F-35Bs linked with Typhoons and Meteor. Same can be said for US F-35s and 4th Gen with AIM-120D. The intercept options are really unfair when you break it down. This is exactly what we're seeing in Atlantic Trident (US/UK/France). F-22A, F-35A, F-35B, Typhoon, Rafale executing networked A2A, strike, and Anti-Ship mission sets.
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  1300.  @ThatWTVGuy  Biden literally drafted the 1994 Crime Bill, which Republicans voted against. The Democrat party had a huge majority in the House and Senate with 267 Democrats vs 167 Republicans in the House, and 58 to 42 in the Senate, with Bill Clinton in the WH. This was all the political mandate you could have asked for to push priority party objectives for the Nation. Guess what the Democrat Party decided to push? Harsher prison sentences for "Jive-talkin' ghetto hoodlums" - Joe Biden Mandatory minimum sentencing for possession of Marijuana (which Kamala happily enforced) $9.7 billion for more prisons to house more inmates that would be convicted under the new provisions Expanded the death penalty to a wider range of crimes, which disproportionately affected inner city youths and minorities. Banning pistol grips, flash hiders, and bayonet lugs from semi-automatic rifles that could be fed with detachable magazines, which have zero connection to crime as stated by decades of data compiled by the FBI and independent researchers. They rolled this legislation through Congress with Democrat Congressman Jack Brooks in the House, and Democrat Senator Joe Biden in the Senate, with Bill Clinton happily signing it. Then the media told people for decades after how racist the Republicans are.. That crime bill cost the Democrats the House in one of the biggest turnovers in US history. The Biden/Harris ticket represents almost 30 years of Democrat legislative and executive approach to crushing minorities with their "tough on crime" policies, while they both violated the law and escaped the consequences with their political privilege.
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  1318.  @MorteWulfe  1999 Columbine kids- Harris was on Luvox, Klebold’s medical records remain sealed-can’t see them even after suicide. Both were subjected to extreme forms of bullying in high school. 2007 Virginia Tech shooting- Cho was was diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder with selective mutism, as well as major depressive disorder and treated with medication. He gave multiple warnings to school officials in writing about ideations of mass violence towards students. Cho had been bullied all throughout his school years due to him suffering from mutism. 2008 Northern Illinois University Shooting- Kazmierczak was taking Xanax (anti-anxiety), Ambien (sleep aid), and Prozac (antidepressant), all of which were prescribed to him by a psychiatrist. 2012 Oikos University shooting- Su Nam Ko had paranoid schizophrenia, was bullied regularly. 2012 Newtown CT School Masacre- Adam Lanza. Lanza was treated by Robert King, who recommended extensive support be put in place, and King's colleague Kathleen Koenig at the Yale Child Study Center prescribed the antidepressant Celexa. Lanza took the medication for three days. His mother Nancy reported: "On the third morning he complained of dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was disjointed, he couldn't even figure out how to open his cereal box. He was sweating profusely ... it was actually dripping off his hands. He said he couldn't think ... He was practically vegetative. 2015 Umpqua Community College Shooting- Christopher Harper-Mercer was mentally-ill, broken home, ideations of rewards by satan for murdering. Suffered from bullying. 2018 Parkland school shooting- Nicholas Cruz had received years of mental health treatment, had at least 45 calls to Law Enforcement to the family for disturbances, and had made threats for years. Multiple school officials recommended further mental health assessments and involuntary commitment, but he was allowed to remain free, even making open threats about becoming a professional school shooter. Cruz had been bullied and suffered from depression, fetal alcohol syndrome, fetal narcotics, and brain damage as a result of his biological mother’s substance abuse. 2018 Sant Fe High School Shooting- Greek immigrant Dimitrios Pagourtzis claimed he was bullied by students and coaches for years, suffered from mental illness as a result and did the school shooting so his story could be finally heard. 2022 Uvalde shooting- Salvador Ramos was bullied in the 4th Grade classroom where he ultimately would shoot and kill 19 students. He was described as a school shooter for years by friends and acquaintances. Numerous warning signs of mental illness, attempts to acquire firearms, and anti-social behavior were supposedly ignored, to include communication with the FBI. 2023 Nashville shooting- Audrey Hale suffered from gender dysphoria and was under treatment for an emotional disorder. Therefore, all law-abiding people must be punished for.....doing the right thing, behaving safe with firearms, and exercising their rights. If only you surrender more of your rights, then these school shootings will....uh....continue anyway because mentally-disturbed, medicated, broken home, and bullied people will find a way to enact their vengeance.
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  1327. The FiAF and Minister of Defence already said in 2015 they want the latest technology found in JSF, not something warmed over from the past generation. They made these statements after being given access to internal JSF potential partner nation capabilities briefs with existing NATO F-35 nation pilot experiences shared with them. Once existing FiAF F/A-18C pilots saw what is going on with F-35, they immediately saw how it would change things dramatically for Finland. If you read the 5 sub paragraphs of the Military Capabilities paragraph in the H-X challenge documents, you see that they literally wrote the basic specs with F-35A in-mind. The first sub paragraph is “Counter-Air”, first sentence in that paragraph talks about sensor-fusion, followed by unusual requirements for EW against other fighters at BVR, autonomous PID capability, and multi-target track and PID. Initial discussions actually said they need a kill ratio of 30-1 like they had with the Brewster in WWII. The Counter-Ground (Air-to-Ground) paragraph talks about automated TGT detection/recognition, and ease of weapons employment with reduced pilot workload. Same for Anti-Ship mission set. Anti-ship is important for Finland, as it is for Norway. No other modern fighter is anywhere near as capable at anti-ship as JSF and Norway is the lead partner nation working with USN in development of the next generation anti-ship weapons. Next sub paragraph is about Intel/Surveillance/Target Acquisition/Reconnaissance. F-35s have these capabilities integrated into them, whereas every other contender needs to attach pods to perform the full ISTAR mission set. JSF ISTAR capabilities are continuous and networked with each other without pilot input. JSF are more like spy planes in this regard, covering most or more than what U-2R can do since they don’t need to maintain as much stand-off as the U-2 does. U-2s skirt international waters looking sideways with SAR and other sensors at specific TGTs, then can link that through the net with very high resolution imagery. F-35s have as or more advanced sensors in that space, with wider coverage and ability to get much closer. Next sub paragraph talks about Electronic Warfare. The H-X military capes descriptions/requirements are unlike any fighter requirements I have read before for Foreign Military Sales. Everything has changed.
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  1331. I did an analysis and cross-check of that paper at 6:21 several years ago, which had a lot of incorrect assumptions in it. I applied known real-world imagery from the Rafale OSF vs F-22A in both military power and afterburner that the French published somehow, which were very low-contrast targets for the Rafale’s dual-band OSF IRST/Digital TV imaging system. I built a graph showing the expected practical performance of OLS-35, 101KS-V, OSF, and PIRATE across varying conditions. The actual numbers across all of the altitude bands and weather/atmospheric conditions basically meant you might get an IRST hit on the edge of visual range against a 5th Gen IR signature VLO platform like the F-22A or any of the JSF. That means you were already dead minutes prior to that best-case detection range and sensor window. You can increase the detection range if they go supersonic and stupidly approach you without employing their weapons, while flying straight down your IRST field of regard. With a frontal aspect supersonic F-22A or JSF flying over a cloudless desert in the middle of July, you might see that 44km detection range, which is 23.8nm. So now you have to explain why a VLO platform would purposely throw away its VLO characteristics and march headlong at supersonic speed into your IRST field of regard. They have threat sensor emulators that show what areas to stay out of from the threat library, so they’re just going to work around you if needed. Not sure why they would do that when they can set you up for unfair NEZ parameters using a totally different set of tactics that isn’t available to 4.5 Gen fighters.
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  1362.  @jackalope5589  Biden told his roommate in Syracuse University (where he graduated 76th in his class) that he was doing a public service by choking his chicken and abstaining from alcohol before he got near children, because he can't control himself sexually with them otherwise. This was in the late 1960s, which made him a Soviet mark for exploitation. They propped up his weak Senate campaign in 1972 to oust the incumbent in Delaware, as part of an active measures program to get as many pro-Soviet moles into the treaty-signing body of the US government. Upon inauguration in 1973, Biden flew to Leningrad to meet with senior Soviet leaders. Interesting for the youngest Senator in history to have such foreign relations status, wouldn't you say? Upon his return, he went on a campaign to kill the B-1A strategic bomber under development at Edwards AFB. By 1977, with the support of Carter's DCI, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the B-1A was cancelled. Biden flew back to USSR, this time to Moscow, to meet with Brezshniv, Andropov, and other party leaders. When he returned, he went on a campaign promoting SALT II talks, where we would agree to kill more of our nuclear weapons programs, while the Soviets ramped theirs up. Then Reagan came in and undid the past 9 years of Biden's treasonous acts against the US. He restarted the B-1 as the B-1B, initiated further development of M-X, revitalized the military, and ditched the failure of détente as a foreign policy espoused by LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter before him. Biden and other compromised politicians writhed and wailed against Reagan's policies, so they refocused on agitating and undermining the fabric of American society. Biden had already done that in the 1970s with supporting segregation with KKK Senators from the Deep South, but now he was onto targeting inner city black communities with his "tough on crime" policies, to put these "jive-talkin' predators in their place". His rants about people of color on the Senate floor were repulsive. As part of the crime bill, he asked for over 100 new death penalty offenses targeting black inner city youth, saying "Democrats on my side for ages have tried to rehabilitate these hopeless savages, but it never works. Some of them just need to be put down." This was all part of the Soviet strategy to marginalize and agitate blacks to rise up and riot, to cause internal strife in the US. Biden is one of the worst traitors in US History, far worse than Benedict Arnold.
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  1376.  @robertcummingsjr3771  Even for a stud in his prime, the prospects of humping a basic load of 7.62 NATO or anything like it meet the harsh reality of magazine depth, load bearing kit space, and combat endurance even before we started wearing IBAs/plates. There just isn't enough room on your body to carry enough mags, and we're increasing weight substantially with 6.8x51 vs 5.56x45. For endurance, I'm talking about react-to-contact, setting a base of fire, and then maneuvering. Battle rifle cartridges don't allow you to do much of that, because initial base-of-fire fraction is too high. Compare: 5.56 basic load 7 mags/210rds 1 mag expended for RTC/BoF = 30rds, 1/7th expended, still have 180rds to bound with and execute actions-on, repel attack, sustain fire while immobilized, or continue mission and still execute. 6.8x51 basic load even if we go to 8 mags is 160rds. You can burn through a 20rd mag fast during react-to-contact/ establish base of fire, often having to mag-change and eat into the next mag. Now you're down to 130rds and you haven't even bounded yet. Keep in mind a minimalist 4 mag micro chest rig with 80rds of 7.62 NATO sucks to carry, not even talking plates, PC, MBITR, NODs, grenades, smoke, IFAK, and water. If I bound to another position and lay down more fire, I'm already through at least 2 mags now, or 25% of my total load, leaving me with 120rds before even any actions-on an OBJ. That's an example of a fire-disciplined soldier too. Others will have burned through 2-4 mags, so when we consolidate and reorganize, I might be one of the guys who has more ammo than most and will have to redistribute ammo. This type of thing has happened with units that took SR-25s or SCAR-Hs into fights that lasted longer than they expected. The M5 is absolutely inappropriate for mass issue.
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  1453.  @SianaGearz  I've lived all over the US, Europe, and Russia, have been to Canada (among 30 nations in total). I'm also a continual student of the geography and population statistics for G20 and other nations. The biggest difference you see between Europe and the US are suburbs. Suburbs are where the bulk of the US population lives. We never saw sprawling suburbs in Europe after WWII because Europe was already population-dense, suffered massive destruction to cities and infrastructure, and was very poor due to substantial losses of prime age males. Open land in Europe is used for farming. Europe remains a very apartment and government project-focused housing market with extremely limited ownership opportunities, high taxation/theft of labor, with centrally-planned urbanization. Russia is like stepping into a time machine back into a frozen world only our great-great grandparents might recognize. The US has vast open spaces, especially West of the Mississippi. East of the Mississippi, the population is more dense, but you can still own large lots of land for individual family residences not only on the South, but in New England. In the Midwest, there are very large parcels for single family residences as well. In the West, it's much more dry, but still has large parcels and homes in the suburbs. What we consider tiny and claustrophobic would be spacious and opulent in Europe. Geography and climate form culture. The US is warm, wide, open, and free. Europe is tighter, colder, crowded, and very diverse.
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  1470.  @petesjk  Spare parts are always a problem with new programs because demand for complete airframes and engines is so high. You’re left in a position where you have to prioritize whether parts go into complete fighters, or sit on shelves. It has nothing to do with funding because demand is so high. Multiple customers have entered the program that were not planned. Whatever source tells you they can’t do proper maintenance, you can block that from your feed from now on. Here’s why: F-35A has the lowest Maintenance Man Hour Per Flight Hour of any fighter in history at 3.5 - 4.5 hours. F-35B and F-35C are the next-lowest at 5.1 - 6hrs. The next lowest after that is the F-16C at 11-14hrs. F-35 maintainers say it basically maintains itself. They have had an unbelievably high rate of F-35A return from sorties with zero defects. F-16 has about a 10% break rate. A few years ago, F-35A was 6%, which is just crazy low. USAF has 922 F-16C/D in service as of DEC2022. As long as we have airframes in inventory of that flee size, we will continue to upgrade them. One such upgrade is installing 613 AESA Radars in Late Block F-16CM Block 40/42/50/52 Vipers that are D-SEAD capable. The other F-16s are older Block 30s used for Aggressors and in National Guard units. Even those are getting many upgrades. We worked on the F-16 program in 1982, then 1987-1990, before going to the F-15 Combined Test Force. I am quite familiar with it. The current plan is to replace F-16 squadrons with F-35As as the oldest airframes time out. Nothing has changed with USAF’s divestment and replacement plans for the F-16 fleet. USAF is delaying aggressive acquisition of new F-35As until Block 4, and letting other nations buy as many as they can get to replace their even older F-16AMs in Europe, or F-4Js in Japan. Even with that, USAF is the biggest customer getting 48 F-35As per year. That should explain the answers to those questions better.
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  1511. There are F-16XL test pilot reports openly published now. They loved the performance and handling, but all complained about the loss of T/W ratio. It had longer legs than anything except the Vark. The USAF fighter culture was heavily focused on the new capabilities of the F-15 and F-16, with pilots rating fighters by how well they could retain energy and execute excellent climb rate, as well as improved visibility from the teen series cockpits. HOTAS was also a new thing and a big deal, since many had F-4 experience to compare and contrast against. The XL was seen as a step backwards in the energy department when it came to turns, but was better at straight and level flight than the others. You didn’t need to touch burner to refuel when combat-configured like you do in a Viper.   The big pluses with the XL were combat radius and stores per sortie. You could service multiple TGT sites and TGT sets in a single sortie and still have tons of station time without need to refuel. If half of the F-16s in Desert Storm were F-16XLs, it would have increased the amount of deliverable ordnance in a much lower overall sortie count, which could have cut the length of the bombing campaign down. In combat configuration on an F-16A or F-16C, you only really have 2 primary mission-relevant weapons stations available. Every single other station is occupied with ECM, FLIR, or EFTs, plus AAMs for self-defense or rare opportunistic A2A TGTs that somehow slipped through the Grey Eagle’s claws.
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  1583.  @fahadkelantan  I've actually read all the GAO and DOT&E reports on JSF for over a decade now. Did you know the GAO is using F-16C fleet CPFH assumptions for F-35A CPFH Total Ownership, not actual F-35A CPFH? They openly stated this in their footnotes, and have been using 2012 F-16C stats as the basis "in the absence of fleet data". I don't know if you know this or not, but GAO is filled with pencil heads who have 0 real world experience in most cases, and know nothing about actual Squadron and Phase level costs, structures, spares flow, let alone the history of these things. It's basically a jobs program for college kids who think they're really smart, but couldn't hack a Law program, so they went into accounting and got hired by the Federal service GS schedule. They add negative value to DoD while justifying their own existence. Did you know the Squadron-level duty positions are reduced with F-35A vs F-16C/D? It takes less maintainers to service F-35s and F-35s have a lower break-rate than any other fighter in USAF history. Maintainers say it's boring to work on the F-35A because it hardly breaks, and diagnoses itself. A lot of them return with 100% up status, which is not normal. If the GAO and DOT&E accurately reported on F-35A, it would be that there's nothing really to report, this aircraft has the lowest break rate in history, it has exceeded the safety standards of the safest aircraft in inventory, while demonstrating decisive capabilities outside of the platforms it was meant to replace. But if they did that, they would basically be saying, "We're totally worthless and serve no useful oversight function in this program, and because of our reporting requirements, we've actually delayed development by 4 years so far." So anytime you see numbers from GAO, understand that the people compiling those numbers are.....absolute morons who should probably be facing charges for criminal misconduct. You can find similar reports from the UK Defence Ministry Audit office stating £50,000-£75,000 CPFH for the Typhoon back in 2011. The UK alone is billions over budget on Typhoon. Dassault told India they promise to work really hard to get the Rafale CPFH down to $25,000. What's it at currently? They aren't saying because it would jeopardize the few chances of FMS they're trying to get so they can fund FCAS. Same with Gripen E, which doesn't even exist in a production standard. There simply isn't any fleet data on enough Gripens to make any kind of estimates that are more accurate than the Swiss evaluation figures at $27,000 CPFH.
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  1584.  @fahadkelantan  Yes, I went to numerous colleges too. My college degrees were nothing compared to the NATO AeroE program in terms of academic rigor, and there was quite a bit of business math in my degrees. Applied experience in these fields over the past 5 decades trumps anything inside a classroom by such a huge factor as to make degrees seem almost worthless. The comment about the idiots in the GAO stands. You should meet some of them. They're net negative contributors, meaning they hurt our National defense. DOT&E reports are contested by the services as a rule every time they are published because they compile outdated information, then present it 8-11 months after whatever faults were reported have been corrected. So it's not me alone pointing out their major contradictions with the facts possessed by the actual operators of the systems. Again, I've actually read these useless reports for over a decade every time they spew out of the Pentagon's spastic excrement nozzle. The point about Houthis wasn't to disparage their ethnicity, but to point out how low-tech, low-IQ desert people can still intercept 4th Gen fighters with really cheap, re-purposed equipment supplied to them by foreign actors. Hyperbole arguments that distract from the core aren't helpful or very smart if you're trying to understand the JSF program. Rafale never flew into a high threat WEZ. You don't identify IADS environments by borders, but look at the actual IADS net coverage. Rafale has avoided high threat WEZ as a rule throughout its deployment history. You forgot to clarify that the F-35A in USAF exceeded all other fighters' FMC/MC rates, then tried to distract from that by mentioning non-fighter platforms as if they were remotely relevant. That's a common mistake people make when they have zero relevant background to the subject being studied, jumping in with what they think they know about the world, because someone gave them a piece of paper that validates the cost of wasted years in classrooms. Pretty much everything you believe or have been told about this subject is a lie. You learn to filter through usual suspect sources after decades of study. For example, knowing that F-35As have higher FMC/MC rates than not only the F-16C/D, F-15E, F-15C, and F-22A, but also the A-10C, what does that tell you? You wouldn't know it, but the F-16 & A-10 have had the highest FMC/MC rates of TACAIR fighters for the past 40 years. A-10s are especially easy to maintain because they are low subsonic (285kts cruise speed), low tech, simple FLCS, simple, underpowered engines, tube frame with wings design with no Radar, no ECM/EW suite, no fly-by-wire, no self-diagnostics, no FADEC, limited G airframe. And yet the F-35A with all of its capabilities has higher FMC/MC, lower break rates. So who has been lying to you and who is telling the truth?
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  1585.  @fahadkelantan  Yeah, I don't have any financial ties to L-M, NG, BAE, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon, etc. Actually, my family had more ties to the competition with just short of a million in McD stock since my grandpa worked for Douglas before the merger. McD later merged with Boeing so if I was some type of shill motivated by corporate whoredom, I'd be spamming the comment sections with pro-Super Hornet nonsense. You know why Rick Abell was called out of retirement to head-up the weight loss program for JSF? Because the collective brainchildren in the JPO (Pentagon) dictated an arbitrary strategic materials requirement as a % of the airframes, when Lockheed planned to use CF structures instead of 7000 series aluminum. L-M was overridden on the design by the Pentagon program managers, hence the overweight first 6 FSD airframes, resulting in the B and C models not being able to meet their Key Performance Parameters (KPPs). What did Rick do? Told the Pentamorons to go sit in the corner and let L-M use more CF as they had planned since the 1990s. That dropped the weight for each airframe type by thousands of pounds, reduced the RCS smaller than the Raptor (CF is RF permeable, not reflective), increased the structural life (they've already exceeded 3rd life in the static test stress apparatus at over 27,400hrs without failure), and set a baseline production standard that now exceeds all the KPPs. If they had let L-M use the full structural CF plan from the start, the F-35A would have a 25,000lb empty weight or less instead of 29,200lb. As to your point arguments, I'm alive because of US air defense systems that far exceed the steaming piles of garbage cranked out by the Russians. When we were in Kuwait as OIF 1 kicked-off in early 2003, we had multiple SCUD missiles launched at us that were all intercepted by Patriots. There was 1 Silkworm cruise missile that made it through and hit a pier in the Kuwaiti City harbor, blew out some windows in a nearby area, no casualties thankfully. The US uses asymmetric action and has done so for generations. Pretty much everything you think you know is a falsehood based on consuming mass media disinformation, in the vacuum of US secrecy regarding certain programs.
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  1586.  @fahadkelantan  6th Gen NGAD-A: This is a program to fill the gap left after killing the F-22A before we even went into full-rate production. It's a totally different track than JSF-A, but uses JSF as its baseline data link networking and high airframe count force structure to work with, in addition to VLO drones. F-35A supersedes primarily the F-117A, F-16CM, and A-10C fleets in USAF. F-22A was supposed to be made at 750 airframes to replace F-15C so we could have over 200 in Europe, 200 in PACOM, with coastal US basing to plus-up the 2 theaters as part of RDF if needed. China and Russia felt that heat coming on really strong, so they leveraged their power in US Presidents and SECDEFs on their payroll to kill ATF. (SECDEF Gates was a suspected/known KGB asset for decades by DIA, NSA, and other agencies). ATF planned force structure gave Theater commanders the ability to literally erase threat air in any region within hours, if authorized by the WH. It takes a ratio of 3:2 JSF/ATF to do the same thing, and there will be no less than 450 JSF in Europe 9 years from today. That still would be true had ATF gone into FRP, only we would have 152+ F-22s in Europe by now. Those would also be rotating down through CENTCOM basing as they have been. People who see NGAD-A as evidence of JSF-A not being successful clearly have never studied the fighter procurement and development tracks in USAF. For example, F-X development started before F-4E even went into production. USAF had barely started acquiring F-4Cs and F-4Ds at the time. F-X became the F-15 of course. 2 years into F-15C production (1981), ATF was launched secretly with actual funding and a resolute plan. ASTOVL was initiated in 1983 by the UK, USMC, USAF, DARPA, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas. We know we're going to need replacements for the force tracks, so RDT&E efforts are initiated well in advance. Same with NGAD-N for USN to fill the gap created by the interim stop-gap Super Hornet that had to fill the shoes of the cancelled A-12 and NATF, which were supposed to replace the A-6E and F-14 with VLO platforms that failed to meet weight and production capabilities at the time. We're moving into an all-VLO TACAIR force structure that was supposed to happen earlier, but was constrained by multiple factors, treason being the most effective one.
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  1630.  @oconnor6456  40k soldiers with air support and artillery can easily take a city of 5 million. A much smaller force took a much larger city in 2003. You might have heard of it. The US forces amounted to 30,000, whereas Baghdad was over 8 million people with a 45,000 defenders. You talk about “anyone with the slightest touch? in military education" without knowing basic recent facts of modern examples. I just happened to be in OIF1 in 2003, so I know a little bit about warfare, having studied it from the 1970s-present with a library and deployment history that far exceeds anything Russia has done. So given your metrics, it makes it even more obvious that Putin was absolutely planning on taking Kiev, and failed miserably. After getting his face kicked in, he shifted over to Donbas to try to save face and gloss over the fact that thousands of vehicles have been lost, with over 10,000 soldiers KIA. Diversions are a basic strategy that even the most incompetent generals have used in warfare. The ability to adapt and maintain logistics to the fight while letting competent leaders work in their space is what most armies never master. Russia has neither the competent commanders, the logistics, or the strategic planning and adaptability because of 6 major brain drains throughout its history since the Bolsheviks destroyed Russia from within. Anyway, on the Eastern front in Ukraine, I see it differently, where Russian forces will be defending and losing ground. Now that the Ukrainians taste blood and see how incompetent and weak Russian forces are, they aren’t going to hold back.
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  1637.  @Fng_1975  I’m not sure what Navy sources you’re listening to, but the major comments coming out of the current deployed carrier air wing operating F-35Cs is that they finally got long legs back to the strike group. That and the networking are the main things they’re talking about. (MEZ I’m referring to is Missile Engagement Zone common to modern IADS, not legacy IADS where Tomcats, Hornets, and A-6Es were shot down). The F-35B for the USMC and UK has the same mission radius as a 2-tank F-16C or better, and it has the least amount of internal fuel of the 3 separate airframe designs (there isn’t 1 airframe design). F-35B carries 13,500lb, about the same amount of internal fuel as an F/A-18F, but only has one engine and mostly a clean aerodynamic profile for most common configurations. The F-35A carries 18,250lb internal, while the F-35C for the Navy carries 19,200lb, while having very large wing and tailplane area. Senior F-14 pilots who worked on F-14D development praise the JSF program, as do all the pilots who convert into it. The criticism isn’t from people close to JSF, but from people who don’t know what they’re looking at and have very limited frames of reference to it. JSF is legit. I’ve called in CAS as well, so I know somewhat about that mission set and legacy profiles vs the modern profiles for weapons employment. Even the A-10C has gone to SDBs and LGBs as primary weapons, superseding the AGM-65G and CBUs from the A-10A profiles. There is no reason for the down-on-the deck close target eyeball CAS profile nowadays with SDB. The whole re-attack requirement for A-X in the early 1970s is what really pushed the A-7D out, which should not have happened. A-7D had crazy legs better than any of the teen series, including the F-15E. JSF-A and -C bring back the range/radius of the A-7D/E basically, but with better payload and the ability to do A2A better than the Raptor in many ways (IR spectrum sensor fusing with RF).
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  1638.  @Fng_1975  You'll find National Interest isn't a reputable source for information on any of this, but one of the many ad revenue click-bait sites. With the Super Hornet, Fleet Air Defense sortie generation increased over the Tomcat and with Block II SH with the AESA Radars and JTIDS, the detection ranges and coverage smokes the APG-71 & AWG-9 easily. F-14D doesn't compare well to a Block II Super Hornet in that regard, especially with ATFLIR slaved to the AESA. Regarding CAS with JSF: F-35s can PID from over the horizon in bad weather at night better than A-10 can do in clear wx on top of you, and PID both Blue and enemy forces in ways that really push more into what was traditionally spyplane and ELINT aircraft territory. The resolution of the early Radar Ground Mapping TGT mode was good enough to count windows on buildings at 80 nautical miles, which it fuses with the zoomable EOTS FLIR in the nose. At certain very far distances, they can read your IFF patches. F-35s don't use the legacy omnidirectional data link network like previous gen fighters. They have adapted comms with it, but MADL is extreme narrow beam LPI, so it can't be intercepted between F-35s, and they can specifically direct who they're sending to in a high ECM environment. A-10s have been involved in more Blue-on-Blue dating back to ODS, killed many US, UK, and Canadian forces in ODS, OEF, and OIF, all using visual approaches even against units with VS-17s clearly visible. I've seen the HUD footage with comms traffic. They threw PID out the window with buck fever, slaughtered guys in their APCs on multiple occasions, and stray rounds on danger close runs are high probability with a pilot with less than 1000hrs of experience. That's why A-10C has been focused on using Small Diameter Bomb, GBU-12, APKIWS, and GBU-31 vs the legacy weapons assortment. If you talk with JTACS who have actually employed F-35s, the story is totally different than what "experts" have been saying about F-35 and CAS. They were shocked what the F-35 pilots could see and know around them, while not even being visible or heard from the ground. You can't deceive the MADL networked fused picture from the AESA, EOTS, DAS, and RF sensor suite. You can't get anything in between 2 F-35s linked via the MADL, so now you have triangulation of over 30 different sensors covering the entire signature spectrum, 28 of those sensors being passive. It forces CAS into a new generation of capability that's hard for legacy TACPs and JTACs to understand without a detailed capes briefing. It not only exceeds what is known or expected in a traditional 9 line approach, but opens up Electronic Warfare options that were typically provided by certain fixed wing platforms that are vulnerable to MANPADS and AAA. In many cases, JSF can provide 10 digit coordinates to your organic fires assets and help manage the fight that way without needing to drop anything, while conducting exploitation of the extended threat forces order of battle and TGT their mobile nodes, tunnels, bunkers, Radios, vehicles, and nearby supporting forces. They see and share things that make the EW, ELINT, and AWACS systems officers envious without even breaking squelch. It's a revolution in CAS as we know it. As to airframes, they're all quite different, but share sensors and much of the propulsion to reduce costs from what was being proposed. If you look back at all the designs being explored during ASTOVL, then JAST, almost everyone had settled on the same basic fuselage configuration independently, with different variations in wings, canards, and tailplanes. The McDonnell Douglas fuselage/nose designs looked the same as Lockheed. There were dozens of these designs. Merry Christmas to you too!
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  1639.  @Chuck59ish  Good comment. Within the first 10 years of F/A-18 service, we lost at least 94 of them between USMC, USN, RCAF, and Spaniards, with 27 fatalities. Just the first 10 years....It was nowhere ready for production, but they still cranked them out by the hundreds. USN divested themselves of F/A-18A/B really quick, so by the time of Desert Storm, they already had F/A-18C/Ds. There were major structural problems, landing gear was faulty and caused loss of life/aircraft, Radar was all jacked-up and even into the C model, the upgraded APG-65 would trigger the RWR system. Hornets had tons of real bugs that should have been vetted and reduced before it was put into production. F-16 was an even bigger mess. 143 total airframe losses with 71 fatalities within the first 10 years alone. Fly-by-Wire system was great, but an on-floor unauthorized design change created wire chaffing in some of the fuselage through-boxes that were supposed to have rivets. Production manager on that section changed it to threaded fasteners for more efficient assembly, not understanding why rivets were needed there, killed several pilots and lawn-darted many airframes. F-16 bugs got mostly worked-out and it went on to become the safest single engine fighter in USAF or NATO service, until F-35A started hitting the force. Class A Mishaps in F-16C have been pretty stable at around 2-3.4/100k flight hours for decades now. F-35A is less than 1 per 100k flight hours, and they have flown over 300,000 flight hours of the total fleet’s 463,000+ hours (including B and C models).
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  1683.  @Whiskey11Gaming  I wasn’t referring to the wind sweep mechanism, which was not very problematic as you said (though it still required a lot of inspections). I was referring to: 1. Slats 2. Spoilers (multiple actuators, doors, hinges, arms, servo cylinders, hydraulic lines, splines, cogs, etc.) 3. Flaps (multiple servo cylinders, lines) 4. Rudders 5. Stabilators 6. Speed brakes 7. Variable intake ramps and doors for boundary layer management There is a lot of hydraulic line architecture woven throughout that airframe to pressurize all of those actuators for those surfaces. Notice that I left out the deactivated glove vanes. If you look at the fleet MMH/FH stats from 1972-2006, there was no difference in the 40-60hrs required when looking across F-14A, F-14A+/B, and F-14D. A lot of that was bathtub graph with the D model, but it never saw low hours even after they got the crews trained and equipped to maintain it. F-15 doesn’t have any of those additional control surfaces and actuators, since there are no slats, spoilers, or wing sweep mech. The one thing the F-15 does have that’s different is the variable inlet cowl, along with the internal ramps and doors for boundary layer management. Grey Eagle mx hrs are typically in the 18-30hr range, so about half of what it took to wrench the F-14. None of the F-14D improvements seemed to manifest in lower hours in the fleet, and the proposed ST-21 didn’t enjoy the benefits of EHAs, so I think it’s very reasonable to suspect it would have had similar mx hours as the legacy. Fiber Optic DFLCS could have helped with that, but the control surfaces required to get the landing speed down behind the boat are what they are on a 40,000lb empty weight bird. Capability would have been awesome, though sortie gen rates would not have been what the Super Bug has I think. Also the 2-man crew requires pipelines for both, and it’s hard to keep seats manned as it is with single seaters.
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  1688.  @garfieldfarkle  If you were a serious intelligence historian, you should know by now that many US military officers wear 2 hats after going into a foreign station chief position or their staff. Stansfield Turner was one of those, Oliver North was another (John Cathey). Have you ever heard of a position called US Defense Attaché? Tens of thousands of "dual hats" have gone to their graves with no public record of them having ever been anything but an officer. The B-1A was barely in initial development. Stop reading Wikitardia and get some legitimate sources if you’re ever going to make statements about military aerospace again. Carter didn’t develop cruise missiles. That’s a huge misstep on the timeline. Cruise missiles (the ALCM) was developed from decoy missiles for the B-52 that were already a thing with SCAD in 1973. Carter had zero to do with anything other than delaying development of ALCM and USAF switching gears to make AGM-86B. We were on that program too, as well as SRAM, SRAM II (cancelled by Bush41), and a host of others. ALCM and B-1A were a synonymous developmental set of systems with AGM-86A. B-1A was Mach 2-capable, and could nuke its way through Soviet IADS coming over the top (Northern Hemisphere) profile. The Russians hated the B-1A. B-1A had a massive internal weapons capacity with 3 huge bays, far more than internal weapons capacity of the B-52G. You can load up a lot of ALCM-Bs on B-52G/H internally and externally, but its profile is easier to intercept since it’s strictly subsonic. For rapid response time, B-1A would be able to get on-station into separation profiles with phases of ALCMs way sooner than any B-52. B-1 can configure the wing sweep angle for optimum cruise speed and specific fuel consumption with an internal payload and no parasitic drag. B-52 can’t with the external racks for ALCMs. That put a lot of pressure on the Soviets economically when trying to deal with counters to the B-1A, hence the heavy emphasis on active measures/diplomatic solutions, while the got the Technical Data for it and built their own, called the Tu-160. Too expensive for the US, but the Russians built it. Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
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  1731.  @mortil  Yeah, after 40 years of being in Aerospace and Defense technical collection and analysis, flying, deploying, and being tasked with assessing emerging systems capabilities, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about. You might not know this, but fighter data links were introduced by the US on the F-102 & F-106 interceptors in the 1950s. Interestingly, Sweden did the same thing immediately afterwards with the JAS-35 Draken with the same mission profile of the US delta wing interceptors-namely to intercept Soviet bombers before they could get within weapons parameters of strategic targets in the defended territory. We could then talk about data links in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, through the JAS-39C/D and the various stages of Link-16 development. Then we could discuss the next generation Raptor IFDL. The F-35's MADL is another generation ahead of that with multi-layered and integrated LPI transmit and receive features that can't be implemented on 4th Gen airframes. The top 2 fighter data links are on JSF and F-22. Gripen E data link, which is an exceptional system, still does not reach anywhere near the levels of connectivity, jam-resistance, and LPI methods employed in IFDL and MADL. More importantly, Gripen E does not have integrated spherical, multi-spectral, fused and interleaved sensor coverage. It has intermittent mechanically-steered IRST sweep coverage and steerable AESA field of regard coverage with excellent data-linked sharing with other Gripens and GlobalEye, so please don't mistake what I'm saying. It just doesn't take sensor integration to the levels that JSF does, because it doesn't even have the RF and IR sensor count that JSF does. It's an attempt to provide some of the coverage without having to spend $30 billion on RDT&E on a clean sheet design like Flygsystem 2020, which never happened.
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  1801.  @Triple87  There are no published kill ratios from the Gripen 2006 Red Flag Alaska exercise. It was not against the West’s best fighters, because F-22 would clean its clock for sport, and you could expect a disadvantage even against the F-15C+ with AESA and data links. The Gripen C did do exceptionally well though.  Alaska has mountain ranges you can use for terrain-masking while high-fliers act as AEW&C, data-linking SA down to the hitters in the weeds who then pop-up and commence to setting up NEZ parameters while exercising EMCON. A fighter equipped with a good IRST and high throughput data link net can do really well in that environment. There are no comparable mountain ranges in Finland or Russia (in that region). The exercise you really might want to look at is Falcon Strike 2015, where Royal Thailand Air Force Gripen C trained against Chinese PLAAF Su-27SK/J-11As. In BVR, they slayed the Su-27 for sport, but then were humiliated in WVR. The kill ratios were extremely lop-sided depending on BVR vs WVR in the Gripen. Biggest factors were the avionics/radar detection and tracking ability, missile range kinematics, low RCS for BVR. Thrust/weight, maneuverability, and HMS/R-73 were the biggest factors in WVR, where the Gripen C was dead meat with the AIM-9L. Keep in mind that wasn’t Super Flankers with PESA radar and PL-15, but outdated Su-27SK export model Flankers in PLAAF service. Subsequent Falcon Strike exercises saw the PLAAF send the J-10A and J-10C with AESA radar and Diverterless Supersonic Intakes to cut the frontal RCS way down, as well as employing the PL-15 BVRAAM. This took away the Gripen C/D BVR advantages. Su-27 has always been inferior to the F-15C in that respect for the same reasons, and is especially ill-suited in the BVR game vs the F-15C+/AIM-120C combo. The Super Flankers are a different story since they have PESA and R-77 with modernized digital self-protection and offensive EW suites as part of the upgrades. The Chinese have been looking at the Gripen E and F-16DSI/F-16MATV as models for emulating their J-10 upgrade program. None of these 4.5 Gen fighters fare well against the F-35 since every unfair advantage is firmly in the F-35’s favor, in ways that require total clean-sheet redesign to compete with.
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  1802.  @forzaisspeed  I can lay it all out for you with the math and applied physics if you like, but to simplify: Yes, it is actually very easy for even a relatively-new pilot in the F-35 to always be the victor in BVR against any current 4.5 Gen fighter with AESA, IRST, Digital ASPJ/EW suite, and whatever kind of data link you want to put in it, even with the 4.5 Gen fighter being piloted by a high-hr driver with all the schools and years of experience. It simply does not matter. It’s a more unfair fight than most anyone thinks on these threads. There is no 50/50 BVR exchange rate possibility between EF Typhoon, even with the latest possible Tranche AESA/PIRATE/Digital EW Suite, Meteor, etc. You could put the APG-81 in the Typhoon (if it would fit, APG-81 has a huge array with 1656 TRMs) and it would not change the outcome. Captor-E is a tiny little array, but has the cool feature of turret rotation, which is nice against 4th Gen threats when you notch/offset after initial volley BVRAAM separation so you can continuously provide mid-course guidance to the missile while it remains cold. It is meaningless against F-35. I’ll explain... Captor E and every other AESA out there can’t see the F-22A or any JSF at those distances. There are far more developed, capable AESA radars in actual operational service that have even bigger arrays than the F-22’s APG-77, like the F-15C+ APG-63(V)3 with well over 2000 TRMs and huge space in the nose for massive power amps, Digital waveform generators, and filters. F-15C pilots with that radar said even when they cheated, they could never see the F-22A. Even early LRIP F-35 RCS is too small for any fighter AESA in service. The one that would detect it sooner, but still not soon enough, is the Gripen E AESA since it uses GaN TRMs, where you have twice the electron mobility. You’re still talking about a very short initial detection range, and still no PID because of 5th Gen NCTR and EW deception if they have let you live to get that close on your terms. Why would you do that if you’re in the F-35s? F-35 EOTS and DAS see any of the 4th Gen airframes well before the F-35 shows up on the IR spectrum. One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming the F-35 has a similar IR signature compared with any 4th Gen airframe? Opposite is true due to the extent they went to with IR concealment measures. Both the F-22 and F-35 have extremely cold IR signatures and do not show up on IRST until around the edge of WVR on most of them. WVR, pilots who have flown against the F-22 in a Fox 2 fight using JHMCS and AIM-9X say they can’t acquire the F-22 with the reticle or AIM-9X seeker on a CATM. So the only real solutions for IR missiles would have to be a really tight rear quadrant approach and hope to defeat the automated countermeasures/MAWS that is integrated into the JSF self-protection suite. How you get into rear quadrant solutions with an F-35 is your nut to crack, but good luck. Now flip the coin and look at what options JSF has. If it wants to accelerate to maximum weapons separation V0, it’s doing it from an unobserved posture, so you have high altitude separation with thin air, much higher average V0 for the missile throughout the flight, with extremely high terminal phase and impact velocity with only a tiny window of active seeker "hot-phase" before impact. This is a much different scenario than mutual detection 4th Gen BVR/fast chess games on the timeline. Back to IR spectrum. PIRATE and other modern IRSTs CAN detect frontal aspect fighter-size targets of various sizes and IR signatures at different distances and conditions. There is no hard spec for that. Larger TGTs with reflective and radiating bodies/emissions will give different hits for IRST. F-35 isn’t showing up until Edge of Visual Range, and it models your sensor detection fields of regard in the tactical situation display, so not even an amateur F-35 driver is going to fly in there. It also emulates the threat sensor profiles based on conditions and aspect to the sensors, so side aspect of the F-35 has a larger RCS than frontal or rear, but still not that large. It does the same for IR signature aspect.   So nobody is closing into a WVR Fox 2 fight. Even if someone accidentally merged into WVR, Helmet-Cued systems and IR seekers will not acquire the JSF airframe. One of the 4-5 layers of IR concealment involves scooping cold air and flowing it around the engine nozzle, which diffuses around a spiral vortex from the angled reheat flame-holder arrays that are shaped to reduce rear aspect RCS. It also sinks surface heat into the fuel mass and has other integrated technologies that both reduce RCS and IR sig on the skin. There are also heat exchangers built into the low pressure fan stage of the engine, so that fuel mass stays stable and very cool for power management and systems cooling. This doesn’t mean PIRATE isn’t awesome. It is, and is one of the things that keeps the Typhoon (in UK service at least) capable against the Super Flankers.
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  1803.  @forzaisspeed  I think you might be referring to the brief visit where after the USSR collapsed, Russians brought some Su-27s over to the US and flew some friendly exchange with F-15Cs out of Langley AFB, VA. There was no exercise, West vs East games, or anything like that. They did some Basic Fighter Maneuvers where the Su-27 had better WVR kinematics for sure, excellent climb rate, excess thrust with us just letting them showcase what it could do. We then purchased a bunch of Su-27s from Ukraine, which have been seen flying out in Nevada doing BFM against F-16Cs. 70% exchange rate in WVR makes sense, but not in BVR. Here’s what you want to look at if you’re talking about the Su-27: There’s a really good analysis over many years where the Chinese have been flying against Royal Thai Air Force Gripen Cs. China first sent PLAAF Su-27SK Sino Flankers and got raped in BVR by the Gripen C with AIM-120, but slayed them in WVR using the helmet and R-73 in the exercises. China went back into their force modernization approach and brought the J-10A and later J-10C with AESA, both capable of using the PL-15 BVRAAM and took away the Gripen C advantage in BVR. The biggest negative for the Su-27SK was its huge RCS, which gave the Gripen C first-look, first-shoot since their AIM-120 has 80km engagement range, while the export R-77 RVV-AE variant to China is limited to 50km. China figured the J-10 (with its smaller RCS and AESA) could get them into a mutual detection or advantage first-look, especially with the J-10C (with the F-16 DSI intake copy) and PL-15. Once they got ahold of early F-35 TDP files, they went to work frantically on the J-20, which is now in serial production with the J-20B currently rolling off the line. The legacy F-15C would always get first-look against the Su-27 since the RCS is so huge and we make better radars. Once we upgraded to the AESA in the F-15C and put JHMCS with AIM-9X in it, along with Digital EW suite/CM, it takes away any practical advantages the Su-27 had in the helmet-cued Fox 2 fight. AIM-120 has always had better reach than what the Russians were fielding, since they kept R-27ERs and R-73s on Su-27s even into the present. Now when you start talking about the Su-30SM and Su-35S, things get different. That’s why we have F-22As and F-35s. F-22 was designed to future-proof our air dominance against any possible upgrades they could do to the Flankers. Su-30SM brought with it a massive PESA radar, but the F-15C+ APG-63(V)3 AESA is far superior to it and works extremely well, very reliable and game-changing for the F-15. Su-35S has a more modern cockpit, huge touch screen displays, more integrated avionics where the IRST works with the PESA, and RAM has been applied to the surfaces to try to get that huge RCS down. It also has Digital EW Suite and modern data link with MAWS, as well as capable ECM pods on the wing tips. Russia is currently phasing all their operational Su-27SM2s and Su-30SMs through a mid-life upgrade including better engines, better radar, better avionics, cockpits, IRSTs, into Su-27SM3 and Su-30SM2 standards, which have compatible data links with the Su-35S and Su-57. That creates a net-centric force structure modeled off of the US/NATO data link shared information approach with common interface among all their fighters. I think they’re putting it in the Su-34 as well. That force structure still is no match for the F-22A, F-35, F-15E, F-16CM, but is more capable than US 1990s pre-ATF IOC, 23 years later.
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  1824.  @quasimotto8653  It’s physically impossible to integrate the sensors, IPP, internal weapons bays, and VLO features into any 4th Gen platform. The entire mold line and bulkheads all have to change for starters, which means a completely-new airframe design. At that point, you’re back into the design cycle that resulted in F-35. There’s no place for DAS, MADL, and EOTS on the Viper. These technologies were tested on the AFTI F-16 at Edwards, which is the coolest F-16 you will ever see. They put LANTIRN pods in the LEX roots so you wouldn’t have left or right blanking of the pilot’s FOV when trying to lase or observe a ground TGT with the FLIR. That’s more expensive than going the EOTS route, since EOTS is centerline under the nose. The Flight Control System in the F-35s are actually more simple than in the Viper since they have independent ElectroHydrostatic Actuators (EHAs), with their own self-contained hydraulic fluid that doesn’t need to be piped under pressure to them from the central hydraulic reservoir and pumps. This makes safety and maintenance so much better than the Viper, and they’re not fly-by-wire, but fly-by-light. On the Viper, if replacing an actuator assembly, you have to bleed the hydraulics, disconnect the FBW system, disconnect the hydraulic line, unbolt the fasteners, install the new unit, fasten, reconnect the FBW, reconnect the hydraulic line, re-fill the hydraulic reservoir, pressure up the system and measure if it is too full or not full enough, and you have to manually index the actuator position with the control surface to make sure they’re tracking correctly with each other and the DFLCS position cues. With the EHAs in F-35, you disconnect the fiber optic line, remove the fasteners, pull the assembly, install the replacement EHA, reconnect the fiber-optic line, the system automatically indexes the actuator to the control surface position and registers the position with the DFLCS....done. Maintainers complain that it basically maintains itself.
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  1836.  @proudbrogressive315  I don't see it that way. Remember that the Republican establishment did everything in their power to stop Trump, to include McCain participating in the Steele dossier with Hillary. Trump isn't a Washington DC partisan ideologue who gets cue cards issued to him by party staffers. It wasn't the right wing that gave us Trump, it was millions of disaffected people who don't normally follow politics who surprised everyone and showed up to vote for the guy who wasn't part of the system. This has created a silent majority who were then told that the reason they voted was not because they're tired of their jobs going overseas, their Country being bashed, endless wars overseas, and two political classes who laugh at their voters while being personally enriched. No, they're told that the reason they voted was because.... they're racists. Then the DNC coughs up a putrid old furball who can't get through an interview without making bigoted statements, while the media tells us this is an example of Trump being the bad man. What is more likely to happen is a continuation of a cultural movement in the Country, similar to how FDR and Reagan created movements that lasted longer than their terms. Both political establishment parties absolutely fear this more than anything, whereas in the past, only the party that wasn't in the WH or didn't have a significant majority in House and Senate feared it. Because Trump bypassed the lifelong dues that the partisan sell-outs have to go through before they get a sponsored run from the campaign financiers (banks, big pharma, automakers, insurance, and law firm shells for the above-opensecrets source). Think about all the partisan whores like Booker, Rubio, Harris, Warren, Yeb, who have been taking orders from the financiers with promises that they'll get their chance for the big show some day. Along comes Trump, who actually slugged it out with success and failures in the private sector, bypasses all the usual prostitution of oneself in DC and actually gets elected. This was Trump's biggest offense to the whole establishment, and why all the presstitute brothels with their big advertising agencies for all the big donors listed above are freaking out daily with constant "Trump bad" stories. We're talking about trillions of dollars of money with substantial portions of market share at risk if the big donors aren't able to control the President. If you look at 2016 and 2020 from peasant-grade partisan kabuki theater, you missed the boat long ago.
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  1838.  @elfi9003  Interoperability: Right now, northernmost USAF F-35As are operating out of Alaska and New Hampshire, and with RCAF F-35As, we would have a strategic networked JSF MADL web over the northern hemisphere for NORAD missions. The moment a Canadian pilot would turn on the F-35, they would see sensor feed data from F-35As out of AK and NH immediately. Once airborne, flights of RCAF F-35As would also contribute into the MADL net providing unprecedented SA over the Northern Hemisphere, including detecting and tracking low earth orbit satellites. Gripen has its own data link that can send and receive signal, but it isn’t MADL. It does not see anywhere near the amount of RF and IR data, then fuse it like the F-35 and share with other F-35s in theater. It can pipe its limited data with coordination and adjustment to coalition force freqs and hopsets, but it isn’t automated like the JSF MADL. Then you have a totally different engine, radar, emergency escape systems, limited payload, spares, and ground support equipment. This is what we mean when talking about interoperability. We learned a lot from Desert Storm as far as coalition and inter-service operational cohesion went, and it left a lot to be desired. JSF is really the beneficiary of the lessons-learned from ODS, as well as the technical developments from 6 different fighter programs in the USAF/USMC/USN that morphed into the 3 JSF variants. F-35 is plug-and-play with more capability. Gripen E requires work-arounds with less capability for higher unit price. For joint overseas missions where RCAF integrates as part of a coalition, F-35A works with UK and USMC F-35Bs, USN F-35Cs, USAF/Belgian/Danish/Dutch/Polish/Japanese/Italian F-35As.
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  1841.  @SgTSlAugHteR613  SAAB wasn’t getting the sales they needed to fund their next generation projects, so they hired a British marketing firm with BAES to start really pimping it hard. This included them copy and pasting F-35 basic capabilities and claiming the Gripen E has the same or better. Meanwhile, Gripen Es are being delivered without IRSTs even. It makes me wonder if the EW suite actually works, what kind of radar they’re shipping it with, and how many shortcuts they tool in the flight testing and validation program. 8 of the Gripens have already crashed, so that’s not the kind of number I want to see with such a small fleet of aircraft (271). They’re sending Gripen assembly kits to Brazil to be put together on a Gripen assembly line built under SAAB’s supervision by Brazilians. Costs 4x as much that way, but labor costs in Brazil are deflated compared to Europe, so no bog deal. Brazilians think this means a full technology transfer, when Sweden has never been able to even manufacture a fighter jet engine. Even the SAAB J-29 Tunnan had a British de Haviland Ghost engine, the JAS-35 Draken (beautiful fighter BTW) had a Rolls Royce Avon turbojet, and the JAS-37 Viggen had a Pratt & Whitney JT8D turbofan variant (with modifications to it that made it suitable for a fighter engine). The radar and IRST are made by Leonardo of Italy, but Sweden claims the technology as their own. There are precious few people who even realize the Gripen’s major, most advanced critical subsystems are made in the US, Italy, and the UK. On one of the pro-SAAB websites dedicated to the Gripen, there’s a joke about marketing for the jet. “What’s the difference between sales and marketing? Sales knows they’re lying.” I thought that was quite revealing and unusually truthful.
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  1842.  @msaar1303  Anyone who joins the US military will be subject to the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). For example, when Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter joined the Navy Reserves as an officer, he pissed hot for cocaine on a urinalysis and was kicked out. When George W. Bush flew F-102s in the Texas Air National Guard and asked if he could deploy to Vietnam, they denied him because he didn't have enough flight hours in the F-102. They were only sending guys with 500+ hours, mostly guys with 1000hrs, and F-102s were being pulled out anyway. One exception I can think of is John McCain. He crashed so many aircraft, he should have been banned from pilot status, but his dad and grandpa were both admirals. When I mention the bulk of Finnish combat power, I'm talking about a unique set of weapons the US supplied to Finland even before we sold them to the UK. Those particular weapons are only employed with the F/A-18C. They have deep strike capability within Russia, with very large warheads (JASSM). Finland now has the ability to strike the naval yards at Murmansk, Primorsky, air bases in Saint Petersburg military district, and deeper targets in Russia, without even flying near the border. Prior to this, with the MiG-21, Saab Draken, and even original F-18C configuration, this capability was unimaginable to FiAF. The main combat power of FDF at the time was artillery and disbursed Infantry units who would lose ground slowly to Russia as the strategic plan, in a guerilla-like campaign on our own soil.
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  1850.  @marcusaetius9309  Stalin was born in the Russian Empire, and didn’t hold any Georgian separatist views for long if he ever had them. He soon embraced the international Marxist movement, attended multiple Russian Social Democrat Labor Party Congresses, the first of which was in Tampere, Finland, where he met Lenin.   These Bolshevik congresses were held all over the region, and their movement was seen as Marx envisioned-one of international proletariat laborers rising up against the bourgeois and corrupt institutions of the empires. So while he was from Georgia, he didn’t represent Georgian interests outside of rebelling against the Czar. It was just where he was born. He was actually more pro-Bolshevik, while Georgian Marxists where typically pro-Menshevik. When he advocated for splitting the Georgian Marxists from the movement, they wanted him expelled. He changed his colors to stay within the Marxist revolutionary groups, and was later rewarded with being selected to be a Georgian delegate to the first Russian Social Democrat Labor Movement Congress after the Czarist massacre of Marxists in Saint Petersburg in 1905. When Stalin had risen to military power under Lenin and Trotsky, he was tasked with handling the Georgian Affair, which was how to massage the conflict between Georgian Nationalism and integration into the international Soviet Union, so he had long departed from a sense of Georgian nationalism even in his youth, evidenced by his essays on Social Democrat philosophy and nationalism. Re Russian history with Finland: The Russian Empire took over Finland after the Finnish War, where Finland was in the middle of Swedish and Russian Empires regional conflict. Finland was surrendered to Russia by the Swedes at the Treaty of Fredrickshamn in 1809. When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, the International Socialists supplied Finnish worker’s party/Social Democratic Party with weapons to launch an offensive against the White Finns. Stalin invaded Finland using Russian forces in 1939, after initiating a false flag artillery bombardment of a Russian town using Russian heavy cannons. So based on history and proximity, and especially recent events of Russian invasion in Ukraine, we absolutely should be paying attention to any hints of Russian aggression towards Finland. I'm not following any parallels with Italy and the ancient Roman Empire, or “putting the screws” to anyone.
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  1854. He's way off the mark on technology. Army generals are often clueless about technology because they're not in the aerospace sector. They eventually are exposed to advanced aerospace systems much later on in their careers after having been cemented in lower technologies in one of the least critical branches and force structures in all of DOD. If an Army General came from Aviation, Intel, or Long Range Fires, they will be more Up to speed with some of the advanced technologies in DOD, but still nowhere near the cutting edge. To really illustrate how brutal the reality is and how far away Petraeus is in his understanding of it, the USAF ATF program had 4 different 5th Generation propulsion systems available for the prime contractors to select from in 1989-1991. They had two advanced avionics & sensor suites to choose from, and 4 Prototype Air Vehicles. Not only do none of the European prime contractors have any airframes comparable to that place in time in 1991, but none of the subcontractors have the subsystems comparable to that 1991 technology. This especially includes propulsion. Meanwhile, the US moved on to 5.5 and 6th Gen propulsion, avionics, sensors, data links, airframes, and flight control technologies. Europe is behind by 30 years in many respects, because they never funded the RDT&E. They still haven't even put an AESA Radar in the Typhoon in Germany and the UK. Meanwhile, the US has built or retrofitted over 2600 fighters with AESA Radars, and is moving into a new Multi-Function Array generation away from "legacy" AESAs.
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  1855. YF-23 cracked several windscreens in supersonic tests, so it never exceeded Mach 1.82 if I recall the graphs correctly. It also had problems with the intakes and boundary layer control systems at supersonic speeds. It also had dual actuators laid sideways for each control surface so they could keep the thickness of the wings as thin as possible for VLO, but added mechanical complexity to the FLCS. It still didn't have a solution for its weapons bay storage and ejection racks, and couldn't carry as many weapons as the YF-22. All of these issues represented serious cost risks to the whole program, so even though it met the requirements, it was a much riskier option from a company that had already demonstrated massive cost overruns with the B-2A in production and delivery to USAF. The YF-22 PAV-1 (GE YF-120L motors) was the only ATF prototype that exceeded Mach 2. They already had weapons bay solutions for AIM-9 & AIM-120 with demonstrated separation capability, and had an excellent bowless canopy with all-around view. The one area the YF-22 failed was weight. It was too heavy for the desired 1.2 T/W ratio on take-off, so engine performance increased to 35,000lbs per in production. As a result, the F-22A has monstrous T/W ratio and excess thrust throughout the regime. If the YF-23 had gone onto the F-23A, it was going to grow even more in length to accommodate another forward weapons bay and still not have the weapons load that the F-22A has. There were aspects of the YF-23 test pole model that had better VLO, but others on the YF-22 test pole that were better, especially looking at serpentine intake ductwork vs the YF-23's partially-exposed cold stage turbofan inlet guide vanes from lower frontal-oblique angles. Best thing going for the YF-23 was combat radius/range.
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  1878.  @robinstreets1792  The US Medicare and Medicaid programs make US Defense budget squirm with envy, and they're filled with billions of fraud, never audited or discussed much. Meanwhile, defense programs are under constant scrutiny and attacks. Congress uses Medicare and Medicaid as political slush funds to reward campaign donors, with Medicare A being used as a rolling hospital bail-out fund, but then the hospitals line workers are always wondering where the money went. It would be far better to let the private sector with massive defense contracts employ those people in high tech and manufacturing jobs with excellent private benefits, than scrounging for basic care on the dole-out after the money has been pilfered by political opportunists. Then we could have funded F-22A and F-23A simultaneously with obscene production numbers and sustainmemt, on top of thousands of JSF. The defense sector employees could send their kids to private schools or tutor them at home, so as not to be caught up in the socialist prison system of public schooling and counter-productive welfare conditioning. Federally-funded medical programs are wretched disasters, unless you're talking about Federal employees, which then becomes very high-end with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. NHSs in Europe are one of the biggest resource-wasting, tax money black holes ever devised by man. I've lived under several if them in Germany and Finland, with a lot of anecdotal accounts from family in Sweden. If you look at the number of hospitals, clinics, specialists, and dental clinics in even the poorest areas of the US and compare them with major cities in Northern Europe, it's sad to see what Europeans put up with unknowingly. It could be so much better, but socialists think it will create socioeconomic disparity by unleashing people's true potential, so better to just keep everyone muzzled and chained-down with limited take-home income potential and property ownership. My elderly parents are getting decimated financially by the tax codes there.
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  1947.  @NATObait  Norwegian Air Force logistics chief, air chief, and defense minister all said on different occasions that their F-35A CPFH is 110,000 Krone, or just under $11,000 USD. They have the additional expense of the drogue chute too. Saab’s own H-X Program Manager openly stated that the Gripen C/D CPFH was roughly 11,000 Euros, and they anticipate that the Gripen E would be the same. Between the 3 finalists in H-X for Finland, the F-35A, Super Hornets, and Saab Gripen E/F were all assessed as having similar maintenance/sustainment costs. F-35A current lots have been $77.9m Unit Flyaway cost, which includes the engine. Engine costs have been part of F-35 unit costs since 2015. Unit Program costs depend on the weapons that accompany the orders, and support equipment that attaches to the F-35 in the form of pylons and pods is far less than legacy 4th Gen fighters, since it doesn’t carry pods and doesn’t attach pylons that often, other than stations 1 & 11 for AIM-9X. Sweden has no authority to do a full technology transfer for Gripen since Gripen critical subsystems are US, UK, and German. Gripen E/F sales to Brazil was $4.5 Billion deal for 36 birds, which is $127.8m Unit Program Cost. Unit flyaway has never been revealed by Saab, but was estimated at $85m in 2015. This puts the Gripen E well above $109m in 2023 assuming inflation and unit cost were parallel. That would still leave $18m for weapons and support for Unit Program Cost. For F-35A, you can get way more for less. A Unit Flyaway cost at ~$80m gives you $20m in weapons and support equipment to hit $100m. The cost argument doesn’t favor the Gripen E in any of the metrics when you actually analyze the real data. I’ve been doing this since the early 1980s.
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  1975.  @Angel-tw3ko  It's helpful to look at all of this from a non-partisan perspective, which you never get from the presstitutes. Obama was a Manchurian candidate, not Trump. The Russians loved Hillary and Obama for the US and Canadian Uranium mining contracts Putin's front companies were fast-tracked into by the Obama WH and State Department under Hillary. When Putin took office after Yeltsin (who Bill Clinton helped rig the election in favor of), Putin assessed Russia's nuclear arsenal status and found it in almost complete neglect and disrepair. Since so many state-run former Soviet industrial centers had gone bankrupt, their strategic nuclear arsenal was in shambles. Why does Russia need uranium mines in Canada and the US? Enter Obama ("I can be more flexible after the election.") & Hillary. This is what this is all about. As to Trump's chances of reelection, he's better positioned than any previous President over the last 7 decades at least, if you dispassionately look at the 13 Keys to the WH metric. Right now, he's batting at least 11/13, & you only need 7/13 to win historically. Reagan won in a landslide in '84 and he had nowhere near the economic numbers we do now, plus he faced a substantial oppositional majority in the House (metric #1). Not only does history tell us Trump wins reelection, whoever his VP is in 2024 will be the next President because of the new political movement he has brought to the Nation. 2 good examples from the past were FDR and Ronald Reagan. All you need to look at to understand why there can't be a Democrat win in 2020 is the fact that Obama bankrupted the DNC, and Hillary took that opportunity to weasel her way in with all the chairs and vice chairs after 2016. None of the 20+ contenders have a chance of receiving the nomination without some type of oath sacrifice to the Hillary, and that will come across as weakness on top of their existing weaknesses as candidates. Even if they sell their souls to Hillary, and gather billions in campaign money from another fraudulent fundraising machine, none of the candidates has any of the 13 keys metrics in their favor. Meanwhile, Trump's digital media campaign has already been hard at work for the past 2 years leveraging ad space at cheaper rates well before the season. The billionaire you call a failed businessman is so far ahead of the game, you don't even know what's going on.
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  1999.  @Caeruleo  Regarding rifle qual scores. Nothing you do that's recorded in basic training is exceptional or worthy of mention. You are nowhere near the top shooters with any of your scores, not even close. Receiving basic rifle marksmanship training does not make you a sniper, an advanced rifleman, or anything resembling such. Oswald's basic training and later unit qual scores showed him trending downwards, which meant he wasn't utilizing any training opportunities to gain and improve proficiency. I have been shooting moving targets on military and professional range complexes since 1994, and even within 88yds, hitting a head-sized target is extremely difficult to do. Carlos Hathcock (one of the fathers of the USMC Sniper Community) tried to duplicate the shots in the USMC Scout Sniper Instructor Course at Quantico, set up a range with the Dealey Plaza scenario and he and other USMC Sniper Instructors couldn't even do it. He said so in his own words. They acquired a 6.5 Carcano rifle with 4x scope, zeroed it properly, and still couldn't pull it off. Now you're left having to explain how a Radar technician defector exceeded the rifle marksmanship capabilities of the best snipers in the US. There is obvious evidence that multiple shots were fired from the rear, maybe even 1-2 from the TSBD, but when you look at the angles of POI and exit on JFK's back through neck, then align them with the bullet hole in the windshield, you get a shooter position from the Dal-Tex building, not the TSBD. A lot of people say to ignore Dealey Plaza because it's too confusing, too much tampering, etc. but I'm of the opinion there is critical evidence there that invalidates the WC findings and does so demonstrably.
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  2000. The Gripens have lost every fighter competition they have entered, unless bribery overrided the decisions by the defense ministers (Hungary, Czech Republic, South Africa, Brazil). It’s a low-capability aircraft due to being underpowered and undersized. Everything you have heard about it in the AvGeek media has been mostly false or hype. The electronics are mostly US/UK via Honeywell and Leonardo if you’re talking about the Radar. The engine is US GE F404 or F414 in the Gripen E/F. Airframe is too heavy to allow anywhere near a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1:1, even when combat-configured for A2A only with 4 missiles, rails, ejector racks, and pylons with only 50%internal fuel. Wikipedia has erroneous data on it. I only use Saab, subcontractor, and operator data for the weights. With AIM-120C7 and upgrades to the Radars, along with Link-16 compliant data-link, it has some usefulness for sure. Russians have underperformed in A2A, as well as overall Air Force operational demonstration of their competence, so Gripen Cs vs Su-30 should favor Gripens, as long as they are networked with more capable fighters. The biggest problem for Gripen C is the same for any other 4th Gen fighter: Trying to fly in or around a modern SAM IADS network. Sweden and Finland aren’t well-versed or capable in the D-SEAD mission set, since they can only really afford Interceptor, Close Support, Anti-Ship, and limited Recce/ISR roles for their fighters. Their success against Russia in that space will rely on newer platforms like JSF, which Finland has contracted to acquire. Finland won’t receive F-35As until later this decade, which provides a window of opportunity for Russia to attack had they not performed so terribly in Ukraine.
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  2039.  @fahadkelantan  I've seen that "be-all, end-all" reference now several times as if I had made that claim. My sources for F-35A break rates are from the actual maintainers cross-checked with FMC/MC. There are 2 interviews here on YT with an F-35 maintainer who used to work Phase level maintenance on the F-16. He reports that especially with Block 3F jets, they are often just gas-and-go even after shut-down, which is not typical with legacy jets. Another thing that's different is transfer of ownership from mfgr to the units. With F-16s, they had to spend 2 weeks accounting for and testing all the systems to get everything on their maintenance books before delivering them to the Squadrons, whereas with F-35s, the Squadron can get the jet within 24-48hrs and immediately work them into their ops. If you don't have a relevant background for such a complex subject, why are you making declarations about what should or should not be done? There were small armies of engineers, air planners, pilots, and maintainers from the UK and US who collectively worked on ASTOVL, MRF, SSF, F/A-X, ATA, JAST, and JSF. The idea of producing 4-6 independent track designs was studied in extreme detail across all metrics, including air-vehicle studies, avionics, propulsion, sensors, countermeasures, man-machine interface, internal weapons, E&E, DFLCS, etc. This included wind tunnel testing, CFD, large scale RC craft, and extensive research from 1983-1990s. Allowing separate design programs outside of a joint effort would have increased development, O&M, and sustainment costs for no practical improvements in performance. One renowned engineer's opinion doesn't change that fact. The list of designs for ASTOVL, MRF, SSF, JAST, and JSF from McDonnell Douglas/Northrop/BAE, Boeing, and Lockheed was extensive. The McD/Northrop JAST/JSF fuselage design was literally the same as the Lockheed design, with different wing/tail/canard configurations experimented with. I'm always interested to see what design submissions all the hindsight critics would submit, if they were given the same requirements. For starters, 99.99999% of people can't even get the CoG and CoL right in subsonic flight, let alone even begin to understand what it takes to mitigate balances for supersonic flight. Every critic would fail miserably, because these things take teams of world-class AeroEs, technicians, test pilots, and managers. When you say you would take the word of 1 engineer over the army of engineers who actually were tasked with developing JSF, it again fails the Logic and Completeness pillars of the Intellectual Standards.
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  2053.  @januszkowalski5345  Basic logical fallacy argument of "if...then". When everyone is living in poverty, to the extent that nuclear engineers and technicians are stealing materials from nuclear reactors and selling them (see the internal report on Chernobyl 1 month prior to the 1986 disaster, its 2nd major incident after the partial core meltdown of reactor #2 in 1982), while pilots and aircraft maintainers guzzle hydraulic fluid, they can be called whatever the system wants to, and after all, they were in the most elite of professions. Once the whole system comes crashing down, you can claim that tens of millions are now poor. I think your definition of poverty and mine are completely different. "After all your system knows not just how to oppress, dispossess, bankrupt , terrorize and massacre the dissidents , how to organzie foreign interventions and wars of agression , how to manufacture consent where there is none or should be none." You just described the Soviet Union. Oppression was the rule of peoples within, as well as those on its borders. Ethnic peoples were routed from their homes and relocated or murdered, including my relatives. Dissidents were imprisoned or shot. Foreign interventions and aggression into nations like Finland, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan were executed to the detriment of all, where consent was often manufactured. The USSR was the biggest state sponsor of terrorism during the Cold War as well, helping any violent groups with technical support, training, and equipment, proliferating the Kalashnikov rifle so extensively that it even became the symbol of Marxist revolutionaries on their flags. The USSR used terrorists as proxies to fight the US and help spawn the Palestinian movement after Israel turned down the Russians for Foreign Military Sales, and instead chose to source aircraft and other systems from the US. The United States has helped develop more nations, donated more charity from private organizations, and assisted more nations in their quest for freedom than any other political entity in history. You're so brainwashed with Marxist-Communist ideology (Karl Marx called it "meine Scheisse"), that your responses are predictable. We wouldn't be having this conversation without the US and free enterprise.
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  2065.  @wildripeach1  One of the main stealth technologies is IR concealment. Huge efforts have been put into effect in that area of VLO on the F-117A, B-2A, F-22A, and JSF variants. F-35 is not a project management disaster. People who have zero clue about defense programs and legacy ancillary systems to the teen fighters make those kinds of statements because it generates click-bait headlines for their failure articles and total lack of knowledge about aerospace. Nowhere in the JSF performance specifications was anyone asking for supercruise. It will accelerate up to DFLCS limited 1.6 Mach, and then take a long time to decelerate once the throttles are pulled into mil power. Any of the other Eurocanards will decelerate quickly after reaching M 1.6 because of external stores. They will also consume a mission duration-limiting amount of fuel if they burn AB to reach Mach 1.6 configured. None of them can supercrusie in the mid-Mach 1.4-1.6 region with weapons and EFTs, and require relatively slick configurations to cruise at 1.2 Mach (which is the top end of transonic where drag is still erratic with the way the mach wave forms on the aircraft). Supercruise is really more relevant on a large RCS fighter, not a VLO fighter. It helps in a mutual detection and tracking 4th Gen BVR exchange, which VLO platforms avoid. Compared to legacy fighters and all of the Eurocanards, the F-35 maintains average higher cruise speeds while carrying an internal payload that would be an aerodynamic penalty for any of the 4th Gen airframes. With 18,450lbs of internal fuel and no EFT drag, it had a lot of endurance. It makes a mockery of any 4th Gen airframes in A2A, and is able to prosecute penetration/strike profiles that none of them are capable of.
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  2114. If you look at the average life of carrier aviation jet platforms, the F-14 series had a nice long run of 32 years, which was pretty normal compared to the F-4B/J/N, A-4, A-6, A-7A/E, and even the F/A-18A-D. All the A model airframes were trashed/timing out by the 1990s. The flight control system problems still remained in the D until it dealt with them with the DLFCS upgrade, but the mechanical architecture still had all the same issues. Wing sweep mechanism box was Titanium, and required electron beam welding. The Navy spent $369 million on development of a new engine for the F-14 in the early 1970s (1970-1973), the Pratt & Whitney F401-PW-400, which was an F100 variant to share commonality with USAF engines in the F-15 for better management from an industrial perspective. That engine never got put into the planned F-14B, and all that money was basically blown very early in the program, leaving the Tomcat with the temporary stop-gap TF30 engine from the F-111 program. The costs seem to have robbed the F-14 of additional upgrades that all the other teen fighters got. AWG-9 was a nightmare too, with disconnection issues, tubes, antiquated display for the RIO that burned images into the screen, and the system suffered from lag and drag when offsetting for better angles at BVR. F/A-18s regular out-performed F-14s even in the BVR fight, and that was before the Super Hornet. F/A-18 had a Radar that could look-down/shoot-down over land and sea, whereas AWG-9 only worked over the ocean (when it did work). There wasn’t enough processor memory to handle ocean and land background clutter when the F-14 and E-2 Hawkeye were developed. That changed in the mid-late 1970s with the solid state electronics and digital revolution, which hit at just the right time for the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18. F-14 just barely missed the boat on that one, and had its whole combat avionics architecture built on the AWG-9.
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  2120. @the goalie#1 Until it’s contracted and paid, with the birds arriving, you never know. Biden will leave Finland out to dry since Russia owns him, his son, and his brother. So Russia will lean hard on the current State Department and WH insurgents to screw Finland over just like FDR did in 1939-1944. Remember that Finland was forced to pay $300 million in reparations to Russia after the war, with a tight timeline that was meant to set Finland up for default, but Sisu won that game if you consider handing over $300 million in wealth to the Soviets a “win”. The system Russia fears the most is the F-35 networked with Poland, Norway, and UK with a wide industrial base among many nations, with US/UK weapons manufacturing already integrated into it. Russia already has the tactical and technical exploitation data from Falcon Strike and PLAAF against the Gripen C/D, so they are keyed-up to make the Su-57 superior to the Gripen E in every possible way. It already has the airframe and avionics architecture to out-class the Gripen E across the full spectrum of air combat, and with some theft and help from Swedish and other assets in the West, Russia will have all they need to game it out. Their biggest challenge is obtaining enough semi conductors and other critical sub components to populate the sensor count for a 3 AESA nose, plus all the other antennae. They will have the option to paint it or machine-apply RAM as Biden WH communists transfer the technology for free to Putin, just as FDR transferred nuclear weapons tech to Stalin.
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  2159.  @uyegidgg  JFK was already hit as the limo passed behind the street sign. Connally was not hit yet. Listen to Connally's many testimonies from the hospital bed and arranged public clarifications. He described it very well and insisted not only that he was shot after JFK had already been shot, but that the head shot followed immediately after he had been shot. Also, read the autopsy report where the shot in JFK's back was located at the inferior scapula region, not up high on his neck, and only half a finger could be inserted into it. The young doctors were not allowed to explore JFK's throat like in a normal autopsy to ascertain the wounds other than digital palpation (finger probing). It simply does not align with the throat shot. If you look at the WC diagrams for the proposed Single Bullet Theory wound path, they show JFK already leaning forward in order to align the Gerald Ford altered shot placement with the throat. If a shooter was firing from a rear elevated position down into the limo, the back wound can't be lower than the throat wound if they are connected. This is one of the most basic faults of the SBT, before we even get into its weight, lack of embedded fibers and tissue, lack of major frontal deformation, and its chain of custody gaps. I have worked with the Secret Service before when I was in the Army's official Presidential Escort in DC. It requires suspension of disbelief that the SS did not conduct a detailed crime scene analysis along with the FBI, complete with each agent and hospital staff to account for the projectiles and fragments.
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  2185.  @marygh4834  What time period, region, and types of schools did you go to? I went to Montessori, public Kindergarten, on-base school overseas for 1st and 2nd, private for 3rd and first semester 4th, public for remaining 4th and all of 5th and 6th. Public for 7th at 2 different Junior High Schools, private Baptist school for 8th and most of 9th Grades, private non-denominational for remainder of 9th, on-base school for beginning of 10th, public for 10th and 11th, exchange student to Japan between 11th and 12th, finished out 12th in public high school. Believe me, I heard a lot of personal views and dogma from all kinds of teachers. I had everything from anti-medication rants from my 2nd grade teacher to my parents (she was right too, even though she didn’t like me), to uncontrolled bursts of anger-driven physical abuse from both public and private teachers, to religious and anti-religious dogma, pro-communist ideology from my Baptist science/home room teacher, interesting challenges to societal ideas and mainstream media tenets through personal research and interviews, sexually-deviant behavior synonymous with sex ed volunteers teaching oral application of condoms, claimed weird experiences with clairvoyance about RFK’s assassination, an incontinent art teacher who shat his pants and sucked at art, an English teacher who was on multiple rounds of Jeopardy, you name it. School by its nature is an indoctrination experience in devaluing the family through daily and systemic abandonment of children, physical conformity training through submission, silence, and obedience, and precious little academics in both public and private institutions. The whole thing is a racket that needs overhauling.
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  2235. zelie-catherine r Remember that the voter information security issue showed up in December right before Christmas. When it boiled over into the public light, the Sanders campaign manager clearly stated that they had brought this problem up with the DNC 2x already before, and they did nothing about it. Hillary's people spun this to be a voter ID theft operation perpetrated by Sanders. If both campaigns could see each other's voter data, and the DNC had already been scheming to sabotage Sander's campaign from the start with DWS (Hillary's pawn), the Hillary campaign didn't care what voter info Sanders' people could see, because they already had the election in the bag. For Hillary's campaign, the whole operation has not been about winning the D primary. They already had it before the primary started. Their entire focus is to make it appear to be a legitimate campaign, with democratic principles and the will of D voters being represented. That's why they were interested in the only campaign that had true, grassroots excitement. They can then send emails, make phone calls, text messages, and social media targeting to Bernie voters in the election leading up to November, and milk these people for money that will be distributed to Clinton cronies in exchange for delegate pledges, with job and contract promises for loyalists in the Clinton Presidency. "We know you really identify with Sanders, and Hillary shares his same core values. Do you really want Donald Trump with the nuclear codes?" Or, for people who are looking for opportunity in a Clinton Presidency: "With your generous contribution and vote, think of the difference you can make in the new party apparatus and all the hubris we will have with Hillary making the new DNC appointments. If you get in now, and are able to fundraise in the $200,000 region, you are looking at assistant chair positions in the DNC in your State, or major contracts if you're in the private side." You think the emails they send to people that are super delegates or large donors are the same as Jane Doe? This is political party operations 101 in a campaign.
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  2243. Again, F-35 has superior supersonic performance to every other fighter other than F-22 and PAK-FA (not operational). F-35, when using internal stores for initial stage of air dominance campaign, has no limits on speed and maximum design speed. Any aircraft with external stores can't meet its maximum speed or cruising speeds because of the drag associated with all the additional aerodynamic drag. They can only dash to a designed stores category limitation established in the testing of those configurations. So all the premises about escapes and approaches, missile parameters, and closures are based on 1970s tactics again, with different planes, not the F-35. The F-35 has more speed available and super cruise (even though it was not designed for super cruise) than the F-15C, F-16C, MiG-29, MiG-35, Su-27, Su-30, and Su-35. The problem with the open source perspective of aviation aficionados when trying to compare the F-35 with other modern aircraft is that they often get fixated on stealth, while overlooking super cruise with full internal stores. They also overlook the ability of the F-35 to carry external stores, and for commanders to choose how to mix their strike package for the opening of the air dominance campaign. Example: A Task Force commander could structure his force of F-35s so that anywhere from half of them to 75% of them are carrying dirty. Guess what the external AMRAAM load out capacity of the F-35 is? 8, with the 4 additional internally. That changes tactics dramatically when you have 12 AMRAAMs per F-35A and even the USMC/UK B model. [IMG]http://i49.tinypic.com/bbq5g.jpg[/IMG] While the initial stage is cluttered with certain assets that screw over your IADS sensors across the spectrum, the initial stage of approach of F-35 is flown dirty. Any defending MiGs or Sukhois that come into solutions get slavos of AMRAAMs fired at them, causing them to go defensive. You can shed your initial claws in the open as a dirty bird, then disappear from radar returns, with ground operators guessing where they are going based on last contacts, if they even had contacts. Now you have however many F-35s there were out there, with their 4 internal AMRAAMs for the closer fight, and super cruise capability.
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  2245. And yet they have escaped prosecution. What I would recommend is that you divorce yourself from any political party allegiance for the moment, and do some more reading. The Clinton's crimes are so egregious and numerous, that it would take lifetimes to document them all. Start with convicted cocaine trafficker/SEC & FEC rules violator Dan Lasater and his personal secretary, Patsy Thomasson, who they appointed Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of White House Personnel. It is a cold, hard fact that Dan Lasater was a convicted cocaine trafficker, who purchased airfields in Central America and New Mexico to facilitate his international narcotics business, which he then laundered through various banking and trading vehicles. It is a cold, hard fact that Patsy Thomasson was his personal secretary for almost 10 years. Dan Lasater contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to various Southern Governors, including Bill Clinton, and provided a job to Bill's half brother, Roger in a quid pro quo scheme for political cover. He also benefited from the Rose Law Firm representing his claimants in securities and exchange violations he perpetrated against banks, with Vince Foster featured prominently throughout the settlements and dealings. That's just one, tiny little chapter in the Clinton crime syndicate. Then look into the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority as a drug money laundering vehicle. Even before you get to the White House in 1993, their crimes are so extensive, that you're looking at several 250 year Federal prison life sentences just for money-laundering and corruption related to cocaine trafficking.
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  2246. I was in DC at the time in a certain Army unit, and began my own investigation into his death. You guys need to look into the Foster case again. The reality is that the Clinton's were under investigation for 14 different serious crimes, and FBI Director William Sessions refused to call any of them off. Keep in mind, Sessions had an ethics probe launched on him by George H.W. Bush's Attorney General within 48 hours of Sessions refusing to call off the investigation into banking irregularities between Bush financiers and the House of Saud. 6 months into the Clinton Presidency, there were numerous scandals that the Clinton's were dealing with: Illegal Chinese campaign financing Illegal Vietnamese financing Whitewater money laundering scandal White House Travel Office firings and false accusations against the Director, who had been there since 1961 with JFK WH senior staff background investigations delayed Waco siege FBI files gathered by Hillary on thousands of politicians around the Nation Director Sessions refused to halt any of these investigations, and the guy is a Distinguished Eagle Scout, straight-laced, doesn't care if you are a Bush or Clinton, if your people committed crimes, you're getting investigated. The Clinton's sent Hillary's appointment for AG, Janet Reno, to tell Sessions he has to resign. He refused. This was the week of July 12-16th, 1993. The Clinton's hold an emergency meeting that weekend on Sunday, to which Foster was invited, but chose to spend with his family on a boat instead. On Monday, July 19th, they fired Sessions on BS charges of using an FBI Lear jet to visit his daughter and installing a security system in his house with government funds. On July 20th, Foster's body was found in Fort Marcy Park, gunshot wound through his neck and head. He was not suffering from depression. That's retarded. He was suffering from anxiety after he learned that his Swiss bank account had been emptied by the NSA when they discovered his role in an ongoing espionage case dating back to when he was in Arkansas. He cancelled his plane ticket to Switzerland, and started panicking with the impending case against him. If you go back and look at the record, John Kerry was onto this with his questioning during the Senate Hearings. He kept asking about the X-rays annotated on Foster's autopsy report. The case went away and was buried because high level people from both parties were facing serious crimes if the nature of the case was to see the light of day. Everyone in the Senate was happy to just pretend it never happened.
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  2265.  @scottnj2503  I’ve been immersed in defense aerospace since the 1970s, with a lot of that time at the USAF Flight Test Center at Edwards, a brief excursion to the West German flight test center near Munich, 10 years active duty with deployments all over the world, and some interesting things. I still remember the high-hour salty F-4 drivers in USAF in the late 1970s, early 1980s who knew they weren’t going to get a slot in F-15s or F-16s, saying, “We got the AIM-9L too donchya know.” "Yeah, but every one of you would trade the Guy In Back for fuel and the cockpit arrangement of an Eagle or Viper in a heartbeat.” I love the F-4. I also love the F-86 and P-51, but things change and if we don’t stay elastic/adaptive, we get left behind. One of the skill sets I embraced early on has changed dramatically, to where a lot of what we were doing and teaching is now invalidated because technology helped us understand what we were doing right and wrong better now. The fundamental technology that allowed that was the miniaturization of processors (microprocessors) percolating into the force via certain products and systems. We used to have to rely on either White Sands or Aberdeen Proving Grounds for certain ballistic information from their doppler Radar tracks, then look up published charts that showed the data, then compare our real-world data with that after using it to generate semi-predicable results. Now I can hold that capability in the palm of my hand and get better dead-on results out of the gate. F-15 really leveraged this first in TACAIR with the Digital Signals Processor upgrade that was standard in the C model Radar, back-fitted into A models that all went into Guard units before being poled or bone-yarded. ATF program took that as a baseline model for avionics architecture and made a closed-loop, fused system, but were still developing that in the 1980s and 1990s with the limits of computing power then. JSF benefitted from far more capable computing power in the design process, let alone the actual upgradeable quad-brain central processing bank. This covered everything from planning out human interface with common and uncommon maintenance access touch points, to Computational Fluid Dynamics and even RF absorption for those types of things. That’s partly why it has a lower RCS than Raptors and far better maintainability. It has a lower break-rate than Vipers do, and they’ve been the gold standard in low break rates for over 40 years. Vipers average about 10% break rate, whereas F-35As are at 6%, meaning 94% of sorties come back with a 100% full-up bird. We’ve never seen anything like it.
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  2279.  @Flankymanga  The US pioneered not only manned, but unmanned hypersonic technology in the 1960s (in the open) with the X-15 program, and later classified programs moving forward. The US has done more research and development on ramjets, scramjets, and advanced propulsion systems relevant to that class of vehicles. US Generals make statements to scare politicians into funding more programs. You can see certain atmospheric anomalies that show evidence of a continual hypersonic program in the US that still flies today, but is unacknowledged. When you hear or read someone saying "Stealth is a myth", you then wonder if they have seen all the current fighter and drone development programs, because every single one of them employs stealth technology. That is especially true with the Sukhoi Su-57, S-70 drone, and Su-75 proposed lightweight stealth fighter. It is also true with the Chinese J-20, J-31, UK Tempest, French/German FCAS, and multiple UAS platforms in development. DSP is Digital signals processing, a technology in-use in fighters since the 1970s and really a broad acronym to use in 2021 that has basically no meaning unless you’re giving a history of the change from vacuum tube tech to solid state at that time. This ushered in with the F-15 and APG-63 almost 50 years ago. Pilots I have spoken with face-to-face using the biggest fighter AESA in the world who set up on F-22As in a vulnerable position for them (cheated in exercises) still could not detect the F-22A, and that AESA they were using in the F-15C+ has better TRM technology than any current foreign AESA. So there aren’t any fighters with the latest AESA that can negate RF stealth in a BVR setting, let alone most of the closer ranges, which is too late to have any effect on the outcome because they would have been within Raptor WEZ for minutes by that point. Quantum Radars is only a lab stunt at this time in history, based on a theory of quantum comparisons between parallel RF signals paths. The processing technology necessary to drive a theoretical Quantum computing RADAR can also be used for a Quantum-adaptive RAM technology on the aircraft’s surfaces, letting RF energy flow through the aircraft and to the other side as if it wasn’t even there. Metamaterials will make this a possibility, if we haven’t done it already. VLO/stealth isn’t just RF spectrum, but multiple layers of the IR spectrum as well. This was literally fundamental to SENIOR TREND, SENIOR SKY, ATB, and JSF. Look again at the IR spectrum mitigation technologies on the F-22 and JSF and you might be surprised. I’ve done the extensive mathematical analysis on various current IRST systems on both NATO, French, and Russian fighters, and the short story is you aren’t going to even get a hit in the IR spectrum much outside of visual range, as long as the fighters stay subsonic. Supersonic speeds will increase the detection range, but you won’t have PID because a PESA or AESA slaved to the IRST won’t generate enough resolution on an RCS that is .0001m2 to .001m2. The Radar can blast RF right in that direction on narrow beam, high fidelity single TGT track and not be able to get PID. That’s not including any EW at play. F-22 and JSF use narrow beam LPI data links, not omnidirectional links that are easy to detect and jam. There will be zero evidence of their use to any air or ground platforms because none of the waveforms will cross any detection system. That’s the whole point of IFDL and MADL links, which are not reliant on AWACS. So they absolutely have high ECM environment-friendly connectivity and there isn’t anything you can do about it. EMP is another ignorant discussion because the US Mil-Std calls for EMP-hardening in all combat systems dating back to the atmospheric tests of late 1957-1963. We encountered major EMP interference of Radio relay stations, so this was noted and worked into the design considerations for bombers, ships, fighters, radios, etc. F-22 and JSF use a lot of fiber optics on top of all that, so in addition to EMP shielding, they are impervious to those types of attacks. It’s preposterous because the assumption is that small armies of engineers and program officers would just ignore these threats and make systems vulnerable to them, even after we first saw EMP effects. "APG-77 was impressive.” F-22s and JSF don’t rely on AWACS. They have far superior battlespace situational awareness because of the sensor coverage networked with each other. In low power LPI detection and tracking modes, you aren’t even aware that they are illuminating your airframe because they don’t trigger the RWS. You can’t “predict” agile beam freq-hopping LPI Radar waveforms with processing power that is greater than even your land-based Radar networks. You can’t predict a freq hopset being pushed by a randomized waveform generator that does billions of cycles per second. The outdated and already-replaced original CIP in the F-22A Block 10 did 10.5 Billion instructions per second. That was 1997 technology and you can’t see any evidence of when the CPUs have been replaced. They are one of the main things that get incremental upgrades with the Raptor Increment improvement program. Notice that they haven’t adopted a Helmet-Cueing sight, but they have spent billions on upgrades for F-22s. Russian point defense weapons have been serially defeated as a sport by air forces with far less capabilities than the US (Turkey, Israel). We have physical possession of so many modern Russian IADS platforms, as to not need to build training simulators for them and just populate training ranges with actual units. That includes S-300 and Pantsir S1. We got a Pantsir S1 in Libya, and Ukraine sold us an S-300 mobile Radar platform. We have every other type of Russian-built SAMs from S-75, S-125, S-200, 2k12 Kub in possession as well and have had some of them dating back to 1974. F-22A is not only a good A2G platform, it’s an awesome one. Combat-coded Raptors regularly employ the 1000lb JDAM and SDBs from supersonic speeds at high altitude, which can’t be done by any other aircraft other than F-35s. The JSF series make excellent A2A platforms. In fact, they defeat F-22As regularly and have done so since 2017 in Large Force Exercises. JSF kill ratio in LFEs is anywhere from 78:1 on up. LFEs include scenarios that are more difficult than actual combat. Many US pilots in Desert Storm said, “Man, this is almost as hard as Red Flag.” For those who think LFEs are rigged, yeah they are-against Blue Forces normally. F-22A was the first platform in Red Flag and other LFE history to make it impossible for the Aggressors to start off dominant. Presence of F-22As or F-35s at Red Flag made it so that Red Air was made useless within the first few sorties. They now use F-22As and F-35As as aggressors to provide a challenge to Blue Air if Blue includes F-22s or F-35s. So literally every statement you made is at odds with what I know. I’m not trying to be rude, just stating some cold facts that are what they are. FYI, I’ve been in the defense and aerospace industry since the 1970s, spent 3 years studying the NATO AeroE course materials, have deployed all over the world employing some of these systems being mentioned, and have seen the behind-the-scenes developmental side all the way to air planning and operational side. That’s where my knowledge base is coming from. Russian strategy relies on not ever fighting the US or NATO because of the unacceptable losses it would suffer. Russia can only conduct limited strikes against regional rivals and prefers to use asymmetric actions, while claiming innocence even as its own soldiers’ trail of geolocated selfies compromises the official lies. The problem really is that if Russia engages in conflict with a nation that has superior combat systems in even a limited space, like air power, it would expose how weak Russian military capabilities really are. The US has a vast combined component forces structure with better Air Power, better Navy, better IADS, better armor, better anti-armor, better sensor networks, better logistics, better training, etc. Everyone likes to talk about how great Russian SAMs are, but I’m alive because of the Patriot system. All you see is critiques of how Patriot is garbage by people who don’t know the difference between the nose cone and the motor. We were shot at by multiple theater ballistic missiles in a short period, and every one of them was intercepted by Patriots. There was one sea-skimming cruise missile that got through but didn’t hit us, thankfully, so nothing is fool-proof in ground-based Air Defense.
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  2308.  @markwalker3499  JSF production is over 716 airframes, which is more than Rafale, Typhoon, or Super Hornet and built in less time than any of those fleets. Will not be “a couple of trillion soon” since we haven’t even reached the initial acquisition costs of $251 Billion for 2,456 JSF-A/B/C for the 3 services. The worst-case forecasts from bean-counters in the Pentagon is $1.5 trillion by the year 2070 for all 3 variants, upgrades, and operations and maintenance costs over the life of the program. That averages $25 Billion per year from a $767 Billion defense budget, with that $25 Billion divided by 3 services, most of which will be USAF. 6th Gen is meant to integrate with JSF, using JSF data link architecture. They are also meant to replace top-end fighters in USAF and USN like the F-22A and Super Hornet, not in the same track for JSF series. JSF is superseding F-16C, F-117A, F/A-18A-D, AV-8B, EA-6B. There are always multiple fighter tracks in each service. I know you don’t realize this, but F-15EXs cost more than F-35As by quite a bit, and cost more to operate. F-15EX at a minus with its relevant combat systems attached so it can reach a fraction of F-35 performance take it up to over $103 million per airframe/pods/EPAWSS minimum. The baseline stripped aircraft with no pylons, fuel tanks, FLIR sensors, EW system, or the new Legion IRST pod costs $87.7 million. When you add the CFTs, 12 specific pylons that attach to the CFTs, wing and centerline pylons, LAU rails, and ejector racks, the price goes up even more over $103 million. That’s a non-deployable F-15 into the high-threat areas of the world, unless F-35s fly ahead of it and provide EW support. Wherever you got the idea that 10 or 12 F-15s cost what one F-35 does, the math is way off and flipped. You can buy 1 F-35A with its full weapons suite, spare parts, support, and still be less than an F-15EX with no weapons at all.
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  2316. European politics is slanted to the left because of the make-up of Parliaments and the people after 2 world wars. The real men who normally bear the brunt of societal challenges in leadership never matured to those positions because they died in combat. This left only shopkeepers and women to move into positions of critical national decision-making. While being insulated from the tough decisions for security, which were made by the US for them, they were able to focus on the economies and domestic infrastructure, education, services, and rebuilding with help from manual laborers from elsewhere. Instead of being held to account for their systemic failures in decision-making on government, economic, education, social, and military matters, they rode the waves of inputs from the US and US-backed security environment, taking credit for the things they never built. US politics is slanted to the right because of the original pilgrim stock being Puritans who fled out of survival, followed by waves of those who saw opportunity and risk in a new world. These people tended to be individualistic, not expecting for others to solve their problems for them. They believed that hard work and good principles might reward them, expecting no guarantees. After they built the largest economy in the world with the most productive industries, that bailed Europe out of two world wars and left the US as the dominant super power, it didn’t make sense to consider that the losers were ever right about their approaches to government.
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  2321. I’ve lived in Finland many years, as my mom is from there. I don’t really accept the premise that Finland is the "happiest country”. How would you even measure such a thing? Finland is very depressing for the people in the winter, so you see them brighten up for the few weeks of summer, then the long winter kicks back in. One cultural aspect of Finland that does contribute to a sense of well-being is summer cottages, which is really a regional thing based on geography. There are over 188,000 lakes in Finland, so it’s very easy to own a small summer cabin in a land area the size of California, with the population of only 5.5 million. This has nothing to do with forms of government. Another cultural aspect of health in Finland is hundreds of years of harsh winter breeding a tough, physically-resilient people who embody this with sisu. Then there is the sauna bath culture, which is excellent for your health. It’s also very academically and intellectually inept to compare this northern nation with long winters and a relatively-homogenous demographic, to the US in its temperate zone with 330 million people who are genetically-diverse. It’s erroneous and myopic to think that government is the primary contributor to the things that make Finland unique. Finland also benefits from the hard work, taxes, and advanced systems development of the huge mass of people in the US and US industries, whether we’re looking at Finnish Air Force F/A-18s (soon to be F-35A Block 4s), medicine, medical diagnostics equipment, electronics, computers, etc. Senator Sanders has an agenda to force the story of Finland into his profit hole, but he hasn’t considered the multi-factorial variables that make Finland what it is.
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  2333.  @CaptainDangeax  When you take the F-35A to Mach 1.6, then go to mil power, it takes a long time before it decelerates back down through Mach, unlike 4.5 Gen with external stores. With any of the 4.5 Gen fighters, you're not going to accelerate to Mach 1.6 carrying EFTs, FLIR pods, pylons, and bombs. F-35 can do it every sortie if they wanted to. Russians aren't going to push any of the Flankers there because of their notorious issues with engines. Even the Su-57 shot a 20m long burst of flame out of its starboard motor in front of everyone at MAKS during take-off and quickly aborted, which was a national embarrassment. With 4th and 4.5 Gen, the main reasons they go into low supersonic regime is for optimum weapons separation for BVR, and missile evasion techniques in BVR. Even in a Typhoon or Rafale, combat configured, they generally will not exceed Mach 1.2 to Mach 1.4 due to parasitic drag from external stores. You need a slick airframe to reach higher Mach values, like a Typhoon only carrying 4x AIM-120C or Meteors in the recessed stations, nothing else. The US explored all this in the 1980s with the F-16XL and concluded that it was much better to go with a VLO airframe as a priority. Any airframe that relied on external stores would never perform as well as it did clean. We had several different conventional designs, including the F-16XL, F-15 STOL/MTD with thrust-vectoring and canards, Agile Falcon (Big Wing F-16 sold to Mitsubishi for their F-2), F-16 VISTA and MATV (Multi-Axis Thrust-Vectoring), X-31 super-maneuverable delta wing with canards and 3D thrust-vectoring. We could have wasted billions on all those programs for incremental improvements, but none of them addressed real increases in lethality or survivability. Stealth, AESA radars, LPI data links, and improvements to missiles were found to be far more consequential.
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  2334.  @CaptainDangeax  I’m aware of Rafale’s 838 TRMs in the RBE2 AESA, vs the APG-81’s 1626 TRMs. RBE2 relied originally on US-provided AESA radar semiconductor technology transfer, which is then produced by Thales. I’m also aware of the SPECTRA RF antennae distribution, operating principles, and bandwidth coverage, including MAWS. Now compare that with F-35’s EW suite and integrated DAS/EOTS/AESA that are all closed-loop fed through the CNI/CPU bank with 4, more powerful computers, with mostly fiber-optic signal connectivity. In each sensor example, you see a significant leap in capability over what’s on the latest Rafale SPECTRA suite, AESA, and OSF. Those are all excellent systems on the Rafale, so don’t think I’m trashing them. It is a far more capable swing-role system compared with every other 1980s/1990s design from the Eurocanards and Flankers. Dassault and Thales also did a superb job on configuring the pilot-interface with the systems in the cockpit, which seems more futuristic and clear-thinking than what is in the Typhoon or Gripen C/D. I like the Typhoon’s stores carriage configuration better in most ways, except for lack of wingtip stations like the Rafale has. The man-machine interface on JSF is another leap above all that, where the pilot can configure the large panel displays how they want, at various stages of flight, minimize or maximize certain displays, with fused and interleaved sensor data from his and other F-35s in real-time, with far higher data transfer rates than what are in the Rafale. Data links are a Wide Area Network vs Local Area Network comparison. Unlike an older WAN-based data link that broadcasts omni-directionally on Rafale, the JSF MADL LAN pipes high-saturation data via LPI Line-of-Sight antennae with multiple fallback modes for future-proofing against EW. Only the F-22 and F-35 series have this type of LAN/LOS/LPI/LPD Data link. This is another example of a generational leap over legacy data link architecture. It shows again that 5th Gen really is a thing. We can literally dissect every detail of these fighters and I can point out how each subcomponent and system is a revolutionary leap over the older generational approaches. In every relevant metric, the JSF is simply a superior system. We can go through it component-by-component, subsystem-by-subsystem, and performance-to-performance. The facts are what they are, but precious few people have the relevant background to recognize and understand it.
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  2342.  @douglaspalermo5053  Reminds me of a Metallica song called Eye of the Beholder Do you see what I see? Truth is an offense Your silence for your confidence Do you hear what I hear? Doors are slamming shut Limit your imagination keep you where they must Do you feel what I feel? Bittering distress Who decides what you express? Do you take what I take? Endurance is the word. Moving back instead of forward seems to me absurd. Doesn’t matter what you see Or into it what you read You can do it your own way If it’s done just how I say Independence limited Freedom of choice Choice is made for you, my friend Freedom of Speech is words that they will bend Freedom with their exception Do you fear what I fear? Living properly Truths to you are lies to me Do you choose what I choose? More alternatives Energy derives from both the plus and negative Do you need what I need? Boundaries overthrown Look inside, to each his own Do you trust what I trust? Me, myself and I Penetrate the smoke screen, I see through the selfish lie Doesn’t matter what you see Or into it what you read You can do it your own way If it’s done just how I say Independence limited Freedom of choice Choice is made for you, my friend Freedom of Speech is words that they will bend Freedom with their exception Do you know what I know? Your money and your wealth Your silence just to hear yourself Do you want what I want? Desire not a thing I hunger after independence, lengthen freedom’s ring Doesn’t matter what you see Or into it what you read You can do it your own way If it’s done just how I say Independence limited Freedom of choice Choice is made for you, my friend Freedom of Speech is words that they will bend Freedom no longer frees you Doesn’t matter what you see Or into it what you read You can do it your own way If it’s done just how I say
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  2405.  @michaelkeller5008  The only theoretical radars people are talking about are quantum radars, which is based on quantum entanglement theory, and therefore is in a research stage with only very short range laboratory observations made. The laboratory-based short-range quantum photon experiments, use super-cooled liquid nitrogen systems (extremely heavy, require tons of equipment footprint). While you’re working on your quantum radar, stealth technology will be working on how to defeat it with entanglement-transparent RF and photonics-breathing surfaces, with better-funded research underway. Stealth technology is not static or constrained, just like sensors. The IR concealment measures on F-35 don’t just “do a little”. They would not have funded and implemented them had they not been game-changing. Already on the F-22, within visual range, you can’t acquire it with a helmet-sight and wide FOV IR missile seeker. Pilots equipped with JHMCS and AIM-9X have complained about this when doing Fox 2 BFM with F-22s. Engineers all over the world have been working on how to try to deal with the F-117’s RF stealth, while mostly overlooking the IR stealth. Same with the F-22 and F-35. They have not been successful, since improvements in IRST detection range don’t extend that range into significant BVR distances, and leave a pilot with the same problem of flying blind. The pilot never knows what his sensors have not detected because...they haven’t detected anything. You’re commenting about applied physics matters that require significant study and knowledge of the math behind them, and making a lot of assumptions with no real framework from which to understand the basics. “Everyone knows about the issues that keep the birds on the ground for most of the time”. No, everybody doesn’t know anything about actual readiness rates of JSF series. They are reading clickbait articles written by total ignoramuses who couldn’t tell the difference between a tow cart and an ordnance load cart, or what FMC vs MC rates are, MTBF vs CPFH, etc. Operational F-35 squadrons are experiencing very high readiness rates, including on deployment. Red Flag? This is a major oversight, not knowing that F-35s have been at RF for 4 years straight now. F-35s have been attending Red Flag since 17-1. You can watch hours of videos showing F-35s taking off and landing out of Nellis for RFs since early 2017. At RF 17-1, they achieved a 20:1 A2A kill ratio against Red Air, which has only ever been done by F-22As before. The “1” loss in that denominator was from Red Air re-spawning without following the admin ROE and going back to the assigned re-spawn points after they were killed, so they could at least get a chance to see them WVR and claim a kill. So "already dead" Red Air fighters got 1 kill for every 20 of them killed. No, I don’t remember when Gripen C used IR detection against F-22s to “annihilate” them in 2015, because Gripens have never attended a Red Flag where any F-22A units were there at the same time. Not in RF Alaska (Gripen’s first RF attendance in 2006, second in 2008, third in 2013). None of those RFs had F-22s there for the exercises. The only time Gripens were focused on A2A were in 2006, where they were part of Red Air. The only USAF fighters in attendance of that Red Flag where from an Air National Guard strike-focused F-16C unit, not even active duty Fighter Squadrons who do A2A as a priority. So Gripens working with USAF Red Air F-16Cs and F-15Cs beat up on an Air Guard Viper unit. It’s kind of sad really to think of how many Gripen fans still use that as evidence of Gripen’s "vast superiority" over anything in the US arsenal, but is worth a chuckle. The Gripen E is not anywhere close to being survivable against F-22 and F-35s, starting with RCS consequences on first-look, followed by the superior sensors on F-22 and F-35, followed by first-shoot into NEZ parameters that the under-powered Gripen won’t even detect until it’s too late, and can’t evade. F-15EX has nothing to do with F-35 fleet purchasing schedule. F-15EX is because F-15Cs are timed-out (and Boeing had a marketing executive as acting SECDEF until he was fired), with no F-22s to replace them because the prior 2 White Houses (with their enemy-within SECDEFs Rumsfeld and Gates) killed the F-22 program before we even reached 200 airframes. Typhoon, Rafale F4, Gripen E, Su-35S are a huge generational gap behind the F-22 and F-35 and there isn’t anything they can do to effectively close that gap. Even the Gripen E would have parity or slight advantage over Su-35S since it has a smaller RCS and a GaN based AESA, along with the Meteor. Su-57 is what causes problems for the Eurocanards.
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  2490.  @alexdarcydestsimon3767  AIM-120D can match and outperform the Meteor, which has been demonstrated on live drone targets with the longest recorded air intercept in history, not theoretical. Meteor generally out-ranges AIM-120C5 and C7, but -120D has comparable WEZ/NEZ. The numbers that amateurs look at and think are static don't apply to the real world, and aircraft sensors and kinematics also play a significant role in employment metrics. An F-35 equipped with older AIM-120Cs is devastatingly-more lethal than Rafale equipped with the next model Meteor upgrade that hasn't been fielded. The employment envelopes and unfair postures from F-35s or F-22s simply out-class anything you can do in legacy fighters like the Rafale. He who sees first, gets into unfair parameters first, generally wins. With F-35s, they remain unseen and no RHAWS or MAWS is triggered pre- and post-separation, so you just die instantly without knowing why. SPECTRA is not in the same class as 5th Gen EW suites. SPECTRA is more like the US late 1980s-era ASPJ, which is an awesome self-defense suite, but nothing like what is in Raptors or F-35s. ASPJ-type suites integrate RWR and run algorithmic automated countermeasures employment responses to specific threats. F-35 has simultaneous offensive EW that can run in-parallel with whatever else it's doing at the time, which can be employed tactically in concert with other F-35s on an LPI data link network. Rafale simply does not have that, as good as the Rafale is. F-22 can offensively jam and interfere with RBE2 at its pleasure. F-35's APG-81 has jammed the Raptor's APG-77 and the Raptor community doesn't like being out-Radar'd, so they got a major incremental upgrade. In terms of jamming and EW: F-35 > F-22 F-22A >>>>>>> Rafale Rafale >>> Su-35S
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  2493.  @pebblepod30  The ideological arguments are part of a kabuki theater, because US government was thoroughly taken over by organized crime from the late 1800s through Prohibition. Organized crime liked any politician that will do their bidding, regardless of affiliation, but seemed to favor Democrats and Progressives in that era. The Democrat connection was pretty solidified with unions, which were actually in decline during the Roaring 20s, by 33% from 1920-1933. When FDR got elected on the promise of ending Prohibition, one of his first major legislative acts was the National Industrial Revitalization Act, effectively making him the de facto head of all labor unions. By that time, the big crime bosses had legitimized and didn’t want any disruptions to their cash flow, as they found it more lucrative to buy businesses, politicians, and work with banks. They were already entrenched in the political parties, though the existing old money was generally aligned with the old Republican Party at the time. Those were their economic competitors. Guys like Papa Joe Kennedy and Meyer Lansky saw themselves as the new breed. The co-opted the new secret police of the US (totally unconstitutional in its existence) by sexually black-mailing its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who was a homosexual living with his common law husband, Clyde Tolson (Assistant FBI Director). They already controlled Hollywood, which was a powerful tool in forming public opinion. The partisan constructs of how America is divided is the lowest rung on the control ladder, designed to keep the people from seeing that criminals have been running government for well over a century now. If you find yourself aligning based on partisan baskets created by these guys for you, it’s probably time to jump out.
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  2501. Started flying in 1970, whereas F-15 was 1972, F-16 1974, and Hornet in 1978. Carrier-borne operations increase wear-and-tear on them so it makes absolute sense to start retiring airframes, especially from the early production blocks throughout the 1970s. They crashed or dumped so many of them as it was, with 173 airframe total F-14 losses. Some of those simply fell off the carrier or got splashed with salt water, immediately dead-lined if they still had the airframe aboard. Of all those, even though it came later, the Hornet would be the next fastest airframe type to see boneyard storage due to carrier ops, saltwater, and just being run hard. They lost 100 of them in its first 10 years of service with 20 fatalities.  They quickly started making changes to the Hornet with the C model even before Desert Storm, and put the A Models into Reserve units as fast as they could. F-16A had a pretty rough start too, with wiring harness chaffing, hydraulic issues, engine problems with F100-PW-200, EPU failures after engine failure, control surfaces popping up when they should be down, several GLOCs, and multiple fleet groundings in the A models from 1978-1985. It took a while to work out the Viper, but they got it ironed-out very well. F-15 is the unique 4th Gen fighter in terms of safety with very few total losses and fatalities. They also skimmed the absolute best pilots into Eagles, but that was also true with the Tomcat, with bringing it to the boat being the thing that separated pilots into other airframes that were much easer to bring back. The mishap rates are really eye-opening when you look at all of them. Harrier has the worst of all in the 4th Generation timeframe, even though it never gets mentioned as a 4th Gen aircraft.
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  2542. Have you done a cost analysis on what it would have been if we funded, produced, and maintained the following: ASTOVL Supersonic STOVL Fighter (to replace the UK and USMC AV-8 Harrier IIs eventually) Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter (to replace F-16s) Agile Falcon (Currently flown by Japan, each airframe was $171 million-more than F-22 Raptors) Advanced Tactical Aircraft (Navy stealth flying wing-$2 billion was spent on R&D for it, cancelled) A/X- US Navy stealth program after the ATA was cancelled Because the DoD and Congress did a cost analysis on what it would have been to not only fund these, but to cut these down to 3 and see how that worked out. Turns out that even with 3 of the above programs eliminated, it was going to be astronomical to fund the independent service-driven programs, so it was suggested, “What if we go with a common avionics and propulsion and as many subsystem common component approach, while each of the services gets its own airframe design?” Thus was born JAST and eventually JSF. This was really the best way to go when looking at cost and efficiency. None of the proposed airframes and separate avionics systems would have added a practical benefit overall because different radars and engines would create separate supply chains with spiraled costs, and radars and engines are 50% of the aircraft cost. By combining efforts and buying power, they ended up with the world’s most advanced, most capable AESA radar that exceeds the capabilities of the F-22’s bigger AESA, with the world’s most powerful fighter engine, and the lowest radar cross section and tiny IR signature of any other fighter in the world. They also carry more internal fuel than any other single engine fighters out there by a huge margin, to the extent that combat radius is superb with the JSF series. Things are not what they seem on the surface of the ignoverse.
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  2636.  @franksun4017  AESA Radars antennae arrays are made from hundreds of Semiconductors. That’s what TRMs are. The lower quality SCs you have, the bigger you have to make the antenna arrays and still won’t have comparable performance due to lack of electron mobility. China sucks in this space. When the antenna array is that large, you then have to make the first bulkhead very large, and you have to carry a certain weight in the nose with all the inefficient garbage electronics behind the Radar antennae. There are 2 power amplifiers that are critical to Radar operation. The first generates the waveform, which is sent to the antennae and resonated out in the airspace. Any reflections that come back to the Radar need to be converted from analog to digital, then amplified with the back end amp and run through a signals processor to make sense of the contact vs clutter. If your industry sucks at these types of technologies, the overall Radar components will be heavy while still having bad thermal management. This results in a 70ft long albatross of a fighter that now needs lots of thrust to get it into the air, with a reasonable climb rate to optimum intercept altitudes, with optimum cruise speeds and range. They have already stated that the Russian AL-31 motors are not enough to reach these desired areas of performance. You might be tempted to critique the F-22 for being heavy, but its weight is largely driven by Mach 2+ performance requirements, along with the weapons bay cavities and actuators, as well as 1980s-1990s era RAM (heavy). F-22s are definitely not underpowered, because the US makes world-class fighter engines. One thing I have noticed is that China has gone complete lockdown on reporting any mishaps with the J-20, which means they are very sensitive about exposing its weaknesses. In contrast, we have many reports on J-10 and J-11 crashes (happen quite frequently).
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  2753.  @Caeruleo  Re-watch Connally's hospital bed and 1964 statements. You missed a lot of key points he made. JFK was hit first, Connally began looking for where the shooting was coming from, then Connally was hit. Zapruder aligns with this perfectly. He specifically said he felt the impact to his back after he began looking for where the rifle fire came from. He also specifically said in 1964, "I know there's some disagreement among the experts about how many shots were fired and whether the first shot hit us both, but I know it didn't and I'll never believe that." Dr. McClelland said the cavity in the occipital region was a 5" diameter. (I have extensive training in combat trauma management, starting with anatomy & physiology from the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center, including real-world GSW treatment on myself and others, with access to Bible-sized military studies of high power rifle terminal ballistics including to the cranium.) He literally watched what was left of the cerebellum fall out onto the table. If you don't have a medical background, you won't have any relevant understanding of the structures, their locations, or how the wounds presented to the Parkland ER docs. McClelland approached JFK from above, immediately seeing the back of his skull, while the others were down around his thorax and lower extremities as they managed his airway. McClelland immediately noticed a very large exit wound and most of the right hemisphere gone, with pieces still falling from it onto the table. I don't know how many entrance and exit wounds you have seen, but I'll tell you that entrance wounds are rarely much larger than the diameter of the projectile. Exit wounds can vary from projectile diameter to several inches. The skull is a bit different since the cranium encapsulates the brain in varying thicknesses of bone, so when a high velocity projectile impacts it, you expect to see significant damage to the bullet meplat, ogive, and shank even if the bullet holds together. With a high velocity rifle that has higher than 2600fps mv, you will see rapid expansion and failure of the bullet after it penetrates the initial layer of the epidermis, connective tissues, and bone. This results in exposure of the lead core while still going over twice the speed of sound, sending a lead shower of smaller fragments through the brain, which continue at extreme speed, causing the structural integrity of the skull to fail. The exit wounds from higher velocity rifles are catastrophic and avulsive. Even if you assume a rear wound of a few inches, we're not talking about an entrance. It's not reality or physically possible to generate anything more than a roughly 6.5mm+ entrance, especially with a 162gr Round Nosed FMJ. The Parkland ER Doctors were unanimous in saying the occipital region had a huge exit wound. McClelland who had direct observation of it from above the head said 5", while others said 7cm (2.75"). Even more disturbing is the fact that the autopsy drawings provided many years later show a perfect entrance wound in the rear, and no cavity at all. This directly conflicts with the Parkland doctors' observations, makes it impossible for McClelland to have witnessed anything he saw. Then I point back to Zapruder with the projectile momentum transferred into the skull, sending it back and to the left. I challenge you to reproduce that knowing fully well you cannot and will not, unless you shoot from the front right aspect of the President's head.
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  2756.  @EnGammalAmazon  I've gone to school in Finland, my mom went to school in Finland, and some of my kids are in school in Finland right now (university). My mom left Finland after high school to seek better opportunities abroad. Where did she go? To the US, attending a prestigious university. There just aren't anywhere near the number of opportunities in Finland as there are in the US for higher education. For elementary schooling, Finland has kind of a hybrid of Prussian method but more relaxed. They've taught multiple languages since Finland used to be part of the Swedish Empire, but they refused to Russify during the Czarist times as a Grand Duchy. I do like that elementary school starts later, but I'm personally very opposed to compulsory schooling because it really trains people to be conformists, not problem-solvers. Finland is unique intellectually though because of the language. The words in Finnish are like Rubik's cubes that have to be changed in usage with interlocking and layered grammatical and vocal harmony rules. It allows each Finn to craft their own mannerisms of sentence structure and positions, as there are no prepositional phrases in Finnish. For example, in English I would say, "I'm going to Helsinki." In Finnish, you say, "Minä mennen Helsingiin." There are 23 different positional word endings you attach to objects, but then you have to go back into the word to vocal harmonize it. It's a very dynamic and adaptive neuro-network of hyper-plasticity relative to other languages, where you can say the same thing in so many different ways. The grammar makes other languages feel like cheating to learn, extremely difficult to attempt as an adult. I believe there is more to this than any particular form of schooling used in Finland. Political philosophers who don't even understand basic geography, history, or demographics, like to assign concepts they align with as causal to observed positive outcomes, without taking a holistic analysis of the environment. They like things simple and compartmentalized, rather than doing the work of studying everything from a fresh perspective. Most of what I see and hear about Finland is parroted by people who have never been there, don't really know anything about Finland, and cherry-pick what they see. Bernie Sanders is a prime example of cherry-picking to fit his agenda.
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  2762. Also, the initial developmental F-35A flight control law tests that were often cited by people claiming the F-35 is not capable against a 2-tank family model Viper has long been put to rest as the flight envelope was opened up. Just like with the Raptor, they didn't open full maneuvering capes out of the gate with the test program. Block 3F F-35As have been hurting Vipers for many years now in BFM, with senior Viper drivers who converted to F-35A saying that they have far more nose-pointing authority in the F-35 vs the F-16 since the F-35 isn't anywhere near as AOA-limited as the Viper. Viper drivers who thought they would treat the F-35 like a Hornet and fight a radius fight vs a rate fight then had to learn the hard way that the F-35 retains energy more like a Viper, and recovers airspeed better than a Viper. F-35 pilots learned to fight the F-35 in its strengths vs the Viper's weaknesses, and most BFM exchanges result in F-35s being dominant, not that an F-35 would ever let a 4th Gen within visual range of it anyway. Once you combat-configure the Viper with 2 EFTs, centerline ECM pod, HARM or LITENING Pod, bombs, and missiles, it has no aero or T/W advantages over an F-35 (that is carrying the same amount of bombs and missiles, with far more fuel than the Viper can carry). The Dutch F-35A pilots said when they came to Red Flag or trained against Nellis-based aggressor squadrons, they did BVR set-ups, then did BFM against aggressor Vipers who thought they could show up to the fight with 2 wing tanks. After the first day, the Viper drivers were surprised at the results, and showed up the next day only with centerline 300 gal EFTs, still had a hard time with the F-35A. 3rd day, they showed up slick with ACMI only to re-gain whatever pride was left. After the sorties, the F-35 pilots wouldn't return until much later for de-brief. Viper drivers asked what was going on with the time delay for RTB, and the Dutch said, "Let's go ahead and de-brief and it will all make sense." During the de-brief, which takes hours, they detailed how they flew every which way they wanted VLO approaches on the Vipers and killed them repeatedly, then went through all the agreed BFM set-ups with each other where F-35s were dominant, then explained how they flew out to the various test ranges to deliver live 2000lb JDAMs on-TGT after their BFM games. The Viper pilots were awe-struck that they had been fighting F-35s with full internal A2G weapons the whole time, let alone 2 x 2000lb JDAMs. It sent home the message that F-35 fuel fraction and internal weapons storage is a significant factor in its performance capes, and they realized the Viper they were flying is basically obsolete in comparison. Meanwhile, people with no familiarity with the actual capabilities of the F-35 talk about what a piece of garbage it is, how much more maneuverable the F-16 is, and how their pet Flanker/Typhoon/Rafale/Viper would smoke the F-35 because they read the "leaked" pilot report of the test article F-35 from years ago.
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  2772.  @MrNicoJac  Yes, US media is almost entirely slanted to the left, as is most European media. The US had largely moved away from racial division and strife by 2008, evidenced that many people voted for Obama across party lines because of the “hope and change” mantra that was in most of the news. European media is largely run by the remnants of the IOJ, so America is always presented in a negative light in Europe. I have lived in Europe on-and-off since 1979, as my mom is from Finland. I follow European news from various sources, and have done so since 1980. I remember watching the 1980 election results when we were in West Germany, just for context of how far back this goes for me. George W. Bush is anything but a "dumb religious cowboy”. He comes from an Eastern financial establishment blue blood family that moved to Texas, attended one of the most difficult prep schools in the US before going to Yale, was Governor of one of the largest land area/population/industry/agricultural States in the Union, and is the only American President who was a supersonic interceptor fighter pilot. Bush flew the F-102 interceptor in the Texas Air National Guard, which was a high mishap-rate fighter that was difficult to land (couldn’t see forward from the cockpit on final due to AOA). If you have grown up on European news, depending on the country/region, it’s very likely you are just about as misinformed as most people in the US were prior to the great disengagement of corporate presstitute legacy media, but with far superior orientation to the European geography. Germans tend to be better-informed, but still suffer from politically-biased, leftist media. Scandinavians and Nordic countries have very simplistic views of the world and swallow whatever their governments tell them, from single source state media as a general rule. Italians and Greeks just assume everything is corrupt and go about their lives. Brits still are under the impression that they deserve to be treated like heads of the empire that hasn’t existed in 70 years, now barely coming to terms with the reality that they are a middle power at-best. Yugoslavians are still trying to get people to understand what has happened to them since 1992.
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  2774.  @MrNicoJac  I have dual citizenship with US and Finland, so I can live anywhere I want in the Eurozone, have watched the Eurozone evolve from the 1970s economic pacts through the 1990s and to the present, have lived in multiple European countries under their NHSs, and have many close and distant family members in Sweden and Finland. I have also lived in 8 different US States across almost every region (SW, NE, South, Atlantic Coast, PNW, Mountain-West), and have been in the formal medical system in Emergency Medical Services as an EMS technician. More importantly though, I have been studying the medical market realities of the US, several States, Canada, and European nations for many years. What I have seen is that the numbers don’t add up to the general statements I see common with this topic, and all of my and my family experience anecdotes support the numbers I have researched, not what is reported in US and European media, or academia in the US. So in the US, if I have an emergency condition, accident, or sudden illness, I will get into an ER and have specialists on-me like white on rice. I will have diagnostics performed with the latest equipment, including CT Scan, MRI, X-Rays, blood tests, physical exams by senior nurse practitioners, PAs, and MDs specific to that set of symptoms. For urgent priority, I will have an MRI or CT scan within an average of 1.5 hours of arriving in the ER. For transport methods and times, States with lower populations than Finland or Sweden have more ambulances, more paramedics, more Life Flight helicopters with flight medics (called Air Ambulances in Europe), and faster transport time to a Level 1 Trauma Center (which there are more of per capita). In Finland, I have literally sat in the ER with my father (patient) waiting for over 6 hours before anyone saw us. The doctor he was supposed to see came and said “bye” to us on her way out off-shift. I’ve never seen that in the US. In Finland or Sweden, you get taxed no matter what to fund the NHS and other government-managed programs, where there is very little accountability. We definitely pay more in the US, but we also have higher quality and quantity of care available. That includes specialists, Emergency Medicine, oncology, dentistry, orthodontics, orthopedics, prosthetics, internal medicine, etc. The US has far more medical and technical universities where doctors, nurses, and medical professionals are trained. We also attract a lot of doctors from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. As to medical tourism, out of the 30 different nations I have been to, none of them would attract me to go there for any of the common procedures, especially anything surgical-related. I live in probably the best place on earth for orthopedic surgeons because we have so many people in sports, athletic teams, with an unusually-young population even for the US. I am very critical of the US internally from a position of seeking excellence, but we out-perform anything I have seen in Europe or Canada. Canada has a very US-like access to equipment and larger hospitals, but run by their sad NHS, which is why they complain so much about wait times. Canadian MPs come to the US for a lot of their procedures, rather than wait in NHS and suffer or die like the rest of the people must do. Short story is most of what is reported on this subject is grossly-erroneous, and misses fundamental facts about population size, regional climate, water sources, diet, and other truly-factorial variables, while focusing on policies that don’t manifest in reality.
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  2784.  @chrisdoulou8149  There is a lot more to AESAs than configuring them as AESAs. TRM materials and semiconductors need to be of high quality, with high density elements that deal with heat really well. These are spaces in the Semiconductor industry where China is grossly lacking, and these chips are tightly controlled in the US. In practice, it means a US-built AESA can have a smaller antenna array, with much higher TRM density, with better-performing TRM elements, that can radiate longer due to their thermal management properties. This is likely the biggest factor in why the J-20 has such a huge Radome and 70ft long airframe. Just to be able to achieve whatever capability it was they wanted for detection range on specific RCS values, with their limited TRM and SC technology, they had to make a giant nose. The F-22's APG-77, while smaller, has higher TRM density, better SC materials, better processing power, better thermal management, and always will since the US produces cutting edge SC technology that is closed to everyone else, except Canada, Australia, UK, and JSF partners. APG-81 in the F-35 is smaller than the APG-77 in the Raptor, but more capable. Raptor incremental upgrade program is bringing the combat-coded F-22As from later blocks up to speed with newer chip sets, new CIPs, and new unspecified sensors. China has been cut off from US and European SC manufacturing technology, so they will have to resort to black and grey market sources for less-capable SC materials. This is why they pay so much money to the Bushes, the Clintons, Obama, and Bidens.
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  2828.  @extraacct478  Lockheed senior management said that since Lot 4, the F-35 has lower RCS values than the F-22. I was designing RAM in the mid-1980s just for fun, or how I would approach that engineering challenge. Unbeknownst to me, I duplicated the early German RAM shaping used on their U-Boat masts before they went to the epoxy resin lead sphere matrix on their 2nd iteration of RAM, so I was 42 years behind the power curve on that one.   I basically used what I knew about anechoic chambers at the time, and applied that. I didn’t learn about the German RAM shaping until a few years ago, when an Australian MoD engineer revealed it in a presentation. RF propagation physics 101: There are all types of frequencies of course from different types and widths of emitters. Attenuating a design to minimize reflection/resonance back to the emitter has been a cat and mouse game for generations. The A-12 was the first operational US aircraft to incorporate these techniques, largely relying on a lot of composites and shaping along the leading and trailing edges, as well as use of composites for the variable shock inlet spikes and vertical stabs. Just from what I have seen from photos of the F-35 layered RAM, I can tell you they have taken into consideration far more than one specific bandwidth in the RF spectrum, as well as the IR spectrum. The comments about F-35 stealth not working or not being viable in the long-run are coming from people who don’t even know what the RF spectrum is. "Group of allies purchasing either one of these.” Allies are not able to purchase F-15S because F-15S was a Bondo/wood mock-up, nothing more. This is coming from former McDonnell Douglas-turned Boeing employee at the St. Louis Plant who said it was a stupid publicity stunt that didn’t even do static testing. I have not mentioned any specific RCS values, nor would I acknowledge such values had I ever seen them. Instead, you might want to read the open source details discussed by the JSF program leads and test pilots in a book called, "F-35: from Concept to Cockpit” 871 pages, meant for AeroEs. I think you have to be a member of a specific association that published it to have access though. It’s OSINT.
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  2842. It's best to understand the JSF program as 3 separate airframes that share a common avionics and engine core, not airframes that were compromised because of a common airframe design as much as has been hyped. Nobody has done a cost-benefit analysis in the media sector of all the airframes it would take using older technology to attempt to cover some of the capabilities of the JSF fleet, including all the ancillary systems that cost multiples of millions per unit in addition to the aircraft, when said systems are integrated into the F-35 seamlessly from the start. Then when you realize that F-35As are currently rolling off the production line at costs that are similar to, or less than legacy airframes with nowhere near the capabilities, the cost analysis really favors the F-35 considerably. Examples with 4th Gen fighters include: * External ECM pods necessary for operating in high IADS threat environments * External Electro-Optical Detection/Targeting/Laser Spot Tracking Pods * Helmet-Mounted Cueing Systems * Certain Countermeasures Systems that require additional external profile So the base price for a Super Hornet or later Block F-16 is one thing, whereas all the necessary ancillary combat systems that get bolted-on (taking up opportunity costs for weapons stations in the process) are millions of dollars in addition to that base price. Further, since the upgrading of these pods/external mounts often includes complete pod body replacement, the scaled costs run away from you quickly when looking at fleet sizes. With the F-35, all of these systems and more are integrated into the physical airframe and subsystems of the F-35 internally, with software-leveraged upgrades that can maximize the life cycle of the hardware components. When the hardware needs to be replaced, you don't have to manufacture a new external case for them, and scale those costs across the fleet, which saves billions in comparison. Also, since the 3 services and multiple coalition partners share the common avionics and engine cores, your upgrade costs go down because of purchasing volume. Then look at lethality and survivability. If it takes you 4 legacy aircraft with attrition to execute limited mission profiles vs 1 JSF to execute expanded mission profiles, the pay-off in pilots' lives saved and destructive campaigns compressed in time is unprecedented. Right now, the air threats know that everything is done on our terms because we hold all the cards in SA, so instead of having more frequent skirmishes with opportunistic regional powers (or F-14 RIOs who can't discriminate between new Flogger pilots doing their 2nd check ride and a nose-hot interceptor looking for solutions), we're experiencing far less actual aerial conflict as a result. This helps with regional stability, as much as pilots would love to be told, "Eradicate any threat air with extreme prejudice until all their fighters and aircraft are totally destroyed!"
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  2892.  @januszkowalski5345  Despite the massive success of the Soviet intelligence operations, they still didn't even come close to achieving a comparable economy or civilized lifestyle for the inhabitants of the Warsaw Pact and USSR member states. These limitations weren't based on the ideologies alone, but were more of a constraint of Russia's geography magnified by the worst political ideology Russia and her neighbors have ever been subjected to. The US does have a very embedded, multi-generational curse of Marxists dating back to the 1800s, and every single one of the programs these Marxists launched contributed greatly to the lessening of America, the worst and most cancerous being the public schooling system and Department of Education. The metrics you use from Das Kapital are a recipe for the complete degradation of a society wherever they're applied. Karl Marx's apartment is a microcosm of failure that you can apply to a nation in similar scale, with 4 of his 7 children dying from malnourishment while a do-nothing failure of a child from a capitalist family pays for his rent and cleaning lady. In return, he impregnates the cleaning lady, tells his wife that Engels is the father, while writing his "Scheisse" on his broken table in the rat-infested slums on London's East End. His ideas should be seen in that context and universally condemned by anyone with a thinking mind. His life and thoughts were a monstrous abortion that led to the enslavement and murder of hundreds of millions of people in Asia, let alone Africa and Central America. His ideas continue to handicap Europe and the United States to the extent that millions of people still think they have any merit in how one should run a society.
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  3003. @the goalie#1 The communists embedded key people throughout Finnish levers of society after the war too, including building YLE information control (generational perception shifting), arresting the war veteran leaders who were preparing Finland for another Soviet invasion (cutting off competent, experienced, mid-level leadership), getting as many communists/Social Democrats into the parliament, industry, etc. (seeding). I’ve heard that coping mechanism all my life, that it was better for Finland to be raped for $300 million so Finland could re-build its industrial infrastructure, rail lines, shipping, metals, and all the other high-value goods Finland was forced to hand over to the Russians, even after Russia had benefitted immensely from Lend-Lease (borrow-steal). Maybe it’s true... I don’t see why Gripen E would perform better than the Typhoon or Rafale though. Rafale has LO technology to reduce its RCS much smaller than Su-27/30/35, with a working AESA and actual integrated avionics suite that really works, and is in operational service. SAAB copied the Rafale’s wingtip fore and aft ECM antennae arrangement that is built into the body of the missile rails. The Rafale also has IR concealment structures that the Gripen can’t use, without seriously degrading the Gripen’s aerodynamic efficiency with the airflow over the engine nozzle. Rafale has airflow gaps to conceal the engine exhaust. (F-35 has this better than any of them with concealment of the engine nozzle across the IR, RF, and visual spectrums.) EF Typhoon has far superior magazine depth for AAMs that aren’t affected anywhere near as much as Gripen E. You can carry 6 AAMs with pretty much any Typhoon load and still carry all the EFTs and/or bombs you want without sacrificing any AAM hard points. Not so with Gripen E. Typhoon has the best of the 4.5 Gens with recessed missile arrangement for negligible parasitic drag, like the F-4 and F-14 had for fuselage-mounted BVRAAMs. It also has the best performance across the flight regime with the only comparable T/W and climb rate of the F-22, but really needs the AESA to be relevant going into the future. Rafale isn’t far behind with its AAM magazine depth and A2S weapons. Both have similar performance at lower altitude, but the Typhoon has better Ps in the upper FL bands. Problems with the Rafale and Eurofighter are the unit costs for an AESA, twin-engined modern fighter with all the IRST, EW Suite, Countermeasures bells and whistles, well exceeding $120 million per unit flyway cost, with greater operating costs due to all the physical system architecture to fuel and maintain 2 engines vs one. Finland simply can’t afford to operate them I think, and we’re left with a legacy data-link constrained system with limited growth potential, limited LPI/LD (Limited Probability of Intercept/Detection). If you’re going to stick with a 4th Gen airframe, a lot of FiAF Hornet pilots are immediately going to feel their claws get clipped with the Gripen E, since the Hornet can carry one of the most impressive A2A loads even when carrying AT FLIR pod on one of the intake mounts. It makes no sense to go with a less-capable fighter if it’s a 4th Gen airframe, because now each fighter’s pk with missiles is diminished if it has a large RCS. The Gripen E will work well against the Su-35S and Super Flankers, but not the Su-57. That’s the real problem it faces. Hornets with MSA radar already struggle to deal with the Su-30SM2, Su-27SM3, and Su-35S with their large PESA radars and IRST, far superior kinematics. The main advantage the Hornet has had is the AIM-120C5/7 and data links while Russia has lagged at fielding truly long-range capable BVRAAMs until recently. The Super Hornet Block III would do well with VLO pods for missiles, but those don’t seem to be part of the deal and it is questionable how that system would work against the supercruise capable, low RCS Su-57. Maintenance for the Super Hornet with its 2 engines and legacy LO/RAM already will be a major consideration, for questionable return on investment. Again, the F-35A makes the most sense across all of these metrics. It’s cheaper up-front for unit cost, and has the same projected CPFH with the Gripen E when we look at the non-biased Swiss Air Force assessment at $21,000 CPFH.
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  3006. The collapse of the Soviet Union was multi-factorial, not primarily due to the war in Afghanistan in any sense, since the structural failures were already making themselves manifest by the late 1960s-early 1970s. Economically, this should NOT have been true because the USSR, especially Russian SSR, had transformed from a net importer of oil and natural gas, to a major net exporter, bringing in substantial revenue for the Soviet state. What the politburo did was camouflage their structural problems with the incoming oil revenue, instead of investing in enough domestic infrastructure to build out the state. A lot of that money went into new defence programs and aerospace projects trying to keep up with the US. In the 1970s and early 1980s, several events happened that sent some alarm bells ringing at senior levels, but they just kept tipping back vodka and going about business as usual: 1. Arab-Israeli Wars showed that no matter what they did, even when they sent Russian pilots down to fly against the Israelis, they got curb-stomped in the air. The Arabs loved this because they were tired of being ridiculed as inferior people racially by the Russians. (That was well before the Israelis got F-15s and F-16s + E-2 AWACS.) 2. The Archbishop of Kraków, Poland, became Pope of the Catholic Church in 1978, taking the name Pope John Paul II. This was fundamentally a major empowering revival of Polish resentment to the Soviets and their official state atheism, as well as Polish independence and solidarity. This event would play out in the 1980s as desires for independent economies from Russia fomented among those nations trapped inside the USSR’s broken and corrupt sphere of influence, sparked with worker strikes, protests, and National labor unionization to bargain for their rights. Martial Law was declared in Dec, 1981 in Poland as a result. Brezhnev had been pushing for military invasion and crack-down on the counter-revolution happening inside Poland. Carter and Reagan both called Brezhnev begging him not to intervene militarily in Poland. 3. Chernobyl reactor #1 partial meltdown in 1982, which is not mentioned or well-known due to the secrecy enforced around it. 4. Bekaa Valley June 1982, Syria-Israeli war over Lebanon. Israeli Air Force shot down at least 84 MiGs, Sukhois, and helicopters with mainly F-15s and F-16s over a 2-day period. These were newer, upgraded MiG-21s and MiG-23s primarily, complete with frontal and rear aspect Radar Warning Receivers, well-trained pilots, newer missiles, trained ground controllers, following Soviet airborne tactics. They were humiliated in terms of air power and tactics, which caused a lot of internal high-level discussions within the Soviet SSR allied air component General staff. 5. Soviet-Afghan War drained material and men for 10 years, initially conceived as a quick Special Military Operation consisting of initially an Uzbek Spetnatz Brigade, the Afghan War spiraled out of control. It required far more troop deployments and lasted longer than they had ever anticipated. They were primarily concerned with an Islamist takeover of the government, which would possible spread into the Soviet Central Asian Republics, so they saw taking out President Amin as a preemptive measure to nip that in the bud before it got out of hand.   6. Under Brezhnev and the Soviet hard-liners, there was a policy of confrontation and escalation of regional wars from Central America and Africa, to Mongolia, China, and Vietnam. Failure in Afghanistan and the way they conducted the war led to loss of confidence in the hard-liners' policies, which ushered in Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary in 1985. Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet Union could not sustain all these foreign entanglements with unforeseen drain on the economy, causing stagnation. He wanted to empower the Soviet economies without all the war commitments, but these efforts were seen as weakness in many Russian and Soviet Republic populations. 7. Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Initially, the Soviets tried to keep this secret from their own oversight, but the devastation was so catastrophic that it quickly became impossible to hide from the Politburo, and then when Sweden’s nuclear reactor was shut down out of caution due to Chernobyl radiation levels reaching that far, the Soviets had to come clean in front of the world to explain how they failed at basic nuclear power plant safety. 8. Space Shuttle STS missions a regular thing in the US. Despite the Challenger disaster, the US had been running regular STS missions into space with high publicity, lots of media coverage, and awe from around the world. In addition to the Apollo Program, which put multiple manned missions on the moon, the Shuttle program was a constant reminder of how the US not only exceeded the entire Soviet Union in space mission capabilities, but made it a matter of a regular, humiliating schedule. What was even more humiliating was that most of the STS missions were classified in nature, with strategic reconnaissance satellite and payloads specifically built to surveil the Soviet Union. 9. Disillusion and resentment of the other Soviet Socialist Republics and the Polish People’s Republic rose to untenable levels in the 1980s regardless of the Soviet war effort abroad. Revolt and widespread rejection of the Russian-led mismanagement of their economies and resources became unstoppable. 10. The Estonians flat-out told Gorbachev they were done with the economic union and wanted economic and political independence. He begged them to stop as it would trigger a collapse of the entire USSR if they broke free. The Baltics held widespread singing protest holding hands across their nations. By then, it was over. Afghanistan was just one of many factors, certainly not helpful at all to the USSR, but not the deciding factor by any means. It would have been over with or without it I think. The writing was already on the wall in 1975 at the latest.
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  3054.  @janbo8331  The results of the climactic testing and data gathered from that were implemented into the production line, making the 3 JSF variants more durable than legacy generation fighters by considerable margins in many key aspects. So much so that the sorties flown by USAF F-35As in Alaska will dwarf the sortie generation rate of FiAF, let alone the Iceland NATO air-policing mission, or the Norwegians, who operate in higher latitudes and lower temps than in Finland. There are not 800 issues to fix among the 3 variants. DOT&E reports are all contested by the services every time they are compiled (well after any identified TCTOs are corrected). In one of the supposed 800+ DOT&E report lists, 285 of the “problems” were actually new capability potential discovered in testing and operational squadrons where suggestions from pilots, maintainers, and air planners are made. The most interesting one was from the US Navy for expanded sea search & track AESA modes for Anti-Ship and ASW. Every fighter has an ongoing list of TCTOs throughout its life, including the F/A-18Cs Finland currently flies. You have to do the math and break down how many TCTOs there are for the F-35B, F-35C, and F-35A, (which has the least). The story about "stealth coating melting" is totally erroneous and has been thrown around by presstitute types who don’t know anything about aerospace. During the flight tests of the first 6 Full Scale Development JSF variants, which included A/B/C models and were all overweight, they did extended supersonic flight test runs where the test pilots would fly the B and C models up and down the East Coast in between aerial refuelers, seeing what extremes in the flight envelope could be pushed. After one of these tests, the engineers looked at some of the instruments indicating heat loading on the inboard surfaces of the tail booms, and noticed temperatures that concerned them due to the Electronic Warfare system antennae that are in that area. There was no stealth coating melting. They sent the pilots back up to run the extended supersonic with long duration AB lit to duplicate the temperatures, and never could, even in dives. This was only seen on 2 early B and C model FSD birds. Part of the weight loss program involved replacing all of those areas with Carbon Fiber composites for increased strength like Lockheed wanted to do from the start, but were prohibited from doing by the Pentagon. As a factory of safety margin, they limited the use of AB in the B and C models around that time, which has no bearing on practical use of AB in an operational unit. “Hey, I put her in burner for 30 seconds.” said no fighter pilot ever on a mission-relevant sortie. Doesn’t even apply to the Finnish deal either way since we’re talking about the F-35A. A Tu-22M is also faster than any 4th Gen fighter combat-configured. Problem for the Tu-22M is that it has an RCS the size of an airliner, and is a BVR missile magnet. Whoever gets first-look on it will have the first opportunity for intercept. None of the other competitors in HX come close to bringing the networked SA of the JSF MADL web for early strategic bomber, cruise missile, and ballistic missile threat detection. For anyone who thinks F-35s are slow, they need to watch a Large Force Exercise take-off launch involving scores of aircraft, including F-16Cs, Typhoons, F-22As, F-15Es, EA-18Gs, B-1Bs, etc. What you will notice is that F-35s take off and climb to much higher altitude just ahead of the runway compared to all the others, except the F-22A, and are typically at a noticeably-faster speed already by the same geographic coordinate compared to any other TACAIR platform in the mix. The reason is pretty simple. The legacy aircraft all carry External Fuel Tanks, External FLIR pods, External ECM pods, with all the pylons to suspend those as well as their missiles and bombs. So your hot-rod airshow demo configuration fighter is not a reality in any operational squadron that actually has a wartime task to perform. F-35s generate faster with the IPP, launch faster, take a very short distance to take-off, and climb higher faster than legacy fighters. The VLO coating on the F-35 does not require constant maintenance. Only certain long-interval inspections and repairs require removal of some of the appliqués, which can also be re-applied at the squadron level. Normal day-to-day operations don’t require messing with the VLO/RAM. Remember that a big portion of the US fleet of JSF-A/B/C are early Block 2 F-35s that needed to be brought up to 3F standard, some of which need/needed structural modifications that were standardized in Block 3. No FMS customers care about this because those aren’t made anymore. 9% roll-through for upgrades of the Block 2 sounds about right maybe 2 years ago, but not now. Most have already been overhauled. Operational units and the Fighter Weapons School all get newer Block 3 F-35As in USAF. Not sure how the USMC and USN are doing that but I suspect it’s similar. Engine replacement on F-35A takes place after several years via a scheduled depot-level process, since the engine life rivals just about any fighter engine out there. Depot-level maintenance capability is part of the HX contract. UK and Italy have large support facilities, and Italy has one of the 3 assembly lines for JSF. Most Europeans are unaware of this for some reason. If ALIS is a joke, then whatever they’re doing on every single other fighter in the USAF is utter trash because the F-35A fleet in USAF, even with all the Block 2 to 3 upgrades that needed to happen, exceeded the FMC/MC rates of all other USAF fighters in 2020, including the F-16C and A-10. Those have been the unbeatable gold standards in maintenance/availability rates over the past 40 years in USAF. F-35A has surpassed them. F-35s roiling off the line in 2025 will be an even superior system. For reference, F/A-18s of all flavors are more difficult to maintain than F-16Cs, which are more difficult to maintain than A-10s. F-35A >> A-10 >>>>>F-16C/D >>> F/A-18C/D (This is where FiAF is now. Look over to the far left and that’s where FiAF will be.) Norway required the drogue chute for high crosswind landings on icy runways. The highways in Finland used for take-offs and recoveries are surrounded by forrest in every case I’ve seen there watching Hornets do the disbursed basing exercises. F-35A has huge brakes and landing gear more like an F-15E, so in most configurations, it will not need 2400m to land, and certainly won’t need what the MiG-21 required, which was used the same way. Norwegian Air Force said after doing some tests with brake-only landings and calibrating their runways like Helsinki Vantaa Airport has done, they have been able to land F-35As without deploying the drogue chute where they normally would have. Either way, F-35As without drogue chutes have been launching and recovering fine in Alaska and Iceland. Russia’s HF Radars don’t work for weapons-grade solutions, and don’t really work the way people think they do. They also make huge juicy targets for JASSM. UK doesn’t use Typhoons and F-35Bs the way you might be thinking. The Typhoon is not longer a “proper interceptor” when working in conjunction with JSF. JSF use them as pons like in a chess game. That’s straight out of a RAF Typhoon pilot’s mouth who has flown with them regularly in recent years. JSF takes interception to a different level that can’t be performed by any 4th Gen, but every 4th Gen wishes it could do. JSF is the only aircraft in production that has the capability of dealing with numerically-superior forces, and is the only one Finland has access to that can deal with the Su-57 and S-70 drone combo. Kill ratio with JSF in Large Force Exercises is staggeringly-in-favor of JSF. If you read through the FiAF HX 5 paragraph mission set descriptions, each paragraph basically says, “We want F-35. All others are wasting their time.” First paragraph of the first sentence for the A2A requirements mentions sensor-fusion out of the gate. Then it talks about being able to ascertain the Electronic Warfare posture of multiple threat aircraft of varying types at BVR, which will be Hornets and Hawks during the evaluation.
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  3058.  @sigma_frenchie4075  Every Western fighter developed over the past 4 decades has been primarily focused on managing the BVR realm while avoiding WVR. They have all been designed with compromises between the 2 regimes of A2A encounters, with altitude and transonic acceleration being the biggest dividers. F-14 & F-15 were focused on higher altitude and optimum dash speeds for intercept profiles, with excellent maneuvering against the MiG-21 if they got WVR. F-16 & F/A-18 were designed for lower altitude with lighter airframes leaning on more maneuverability in thick air against the MiG-21 if they got WVR, which was more likely due to smaller radars. USAF and USN wanted them primarily for strike platforms. JSF cruises like a slick F-15 or F-14, JSF-A accelerates through transonic better than a slick big mouth Viper, and can reach speeds none of them can while combat-configured. When you say the F-35 is slow, it doesn't match up with reality, and this is coming from the pilots. F-16 & Hornet pilots immediately notice the excess power and drag less behavior of the slick airframe. F-16 guys love it because it has so much internal fuel, and when you do aerial refuel with it, you don't have to constantly punch afterburner. As to BVR, JSF elevates BVR into something much different than even 4.5 Gen. Its networked SA is game-changing and unfair. WVR, it regularly beats F-16s, F-15s, Hornets, and even does well against F-22s. In BVR, none of them can get first-look/first-shoot on F-35s.
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  3069.  @harri9885  The Su-57 has not been discontinued. It's literally in production as we speak. The 2nd Su-57 has been delivered to the VVS after the 1st production unit crashed during a Functional Check Flight. Their plan is to build 76 of them through 2028, or roughly 10 per year. It makes sense for them to leverage Su-57s with Super Flankers like the Su-35S, Su-30SM2, and Su-27SM3 using the same data links with it flying AEW&C/Hunter-Killer/EW. VLO technology works both ways for offense and defense because it allows OCA (Offensive Counter-Air) missions with unfair NEZ (No Escape Zone missile parameters) profiles, while being extremely difficult or impossible for threat missiles to target outside of very tiny parameters. I've been looking at the Finnish-Russian border since the 1970s, hyper-aware of it, and have crossed it at least 8 times, overlaid fighter vs fighter and AWACS sensor envelope profiles from the Saint Petersburg and Murmansk bases, studied which fighter regiments they have, complete with imagery. Gripen E will not be survivable in 5 years, and is already at parity with Su-35S, slight advantage against Su-27SM2 and Su-30SM, parity with Su-27SM3 and Su-30SM2 when they carry R-77-1 or better. They've been phasing all their Su-27s and Su-30s through the serial modernization package that basically brings them as close to a Su-35S as possible. I would still expect the Gripen E to have first-look, but numerical superiority from Saint Petersburg and Murmansk Fighter Districts would be too much for Gripen E to handle, especially with Russian EW support aircraft flying in international airspace and inside the Russian border region, as well as EW from surface vessels and mobile platforms. That's where you really want a networked VLO fleet with better sensors and EW capability, not an obsolete airframe with some EW bells and whistles that still has very large oblique, side, and rear aspect RCS/IR signature.
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  3073.  @Jojooooooo  The early production, non-deployable, fault-prone, pre-Block 3F F-35As are far more capable than the Rafale F4 or any Rafale serial upgrade will ever be. None of those are in operational squadrons and never will be, as they are only located at USAF weapons test, Flight Test Center, and fighter conversion training squadrons to teach new pilots how to fly the F-35 and manage its systems before they go to an operational unit. There literally isn’t any aspect of the Rafale that is better, and from what I’ve seen of the Rafale, it’s the most capable of all the European 4.5 Gen Multirole Fighters. We can look at first-look, first-shoot, AESA, integrated RF antennae suite, IR sensors, EW, human interface, Helmet-cueing, and weapons envelopes, which are the deciding factors in A2A. Every single one of those categories is dominated by the F-35, even when you put Meteor on the Rafale and an older AIM-120C5 on the F-35. Then we can look at A2G/A2S. Rafale again is the most capable 4.5 Gen Swingrole fighter in this area because only the UK has really pushed the Typhoon as a true multirole, and Gripen is far behind them both, while Rafale F3 and F4 have excellent penetration/strike, EW, and anti-ship capabilities none of the others have. F-35 also out-performs the Rafale in these key strength areas that the Rafale uniquely possesses because it can penetrate much easier, can get closer to threat emitters for EW and network attack them (with an AESA that is twice the size of the RBE2), and has a more powerful central computing brain that is near real-time linked via LPI data link with other JSF and compatible nodes. On top of that, the F-35 IR sensor suite has 7 high resolution IR sensors in short, medium, and long wave IR spectrum that are not only fused with each other, but with the AESA and around a dozen RF sensors that span the RF spectrum and spherical coverage around the airframe. Rafale has excellent sensors in these areas compared to other 4.5 Gen fighters with its Spectra integrated defensive EW suite, but it is at least a generation behind the F-35’s EW suite. One key area is that the Spectra’s SIGINT collection capability is a post-flight analysis affair for geo-locating threats that can be targeted later, according to Thales own statements on Spectra. The F-35’s EW suite is real-time, shared with other F-35s and anyone who has receive capability with the joint services data link compliance (Link-16, etc.). If a satellite, spy plane, or other F-35 sees signature that is a known IADS platform, for example, then pipes that imagery and geolocation to the F-35 MADL net, an F-35 4-ship flying out of a location hundreds of nautical miles away will get that data and share it with each other, without the pilots having to do anything. There is a vast threat library constantly updated with threat signature profiles across the spectrum, so that the fused sensor network can scan those geocoordinates and cross-reference the signatures they see with the library, among each other from multiple aspects. That is a game-changer and makes survivability of IADS platforms a dead-end affair. We know so much about the target areas before even getting within 200km of them, that multiple attack options are opened up, as well as BDA and swing-role. If air planners dedicated an 8-ship to go conduct a DEAD mission profile, for example, while sending another 4-ship out for Offensive Counter Air, and the lead 4-ship kills all the mobile SAM launchers with ballistic profiled PGMs, the next 4-ship in that 8-ship package can swing-role to go assist with the OCA mission and really overwhelm an already-overwhelmed threat air interceptor force. 2 of those can switch to AEW&C and guide-in 4.5 Gen strikers like F-15E+, F-16C+, Rafales, Typhoons, and task-organize them on-the-fly where they’re needed, whether that be the next SEAD/DEAD mission sets, follow-on precision strike TGTs on the kill list, airfields, POL facilities, ammunition storage bunkers, C4 nodes, ISR platforms, counter-AWACS A2A missions, etc.
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  3074.  @Jojooooooo  I think that many of the European nations who have historically been involved in conflict due to the actions of larger empires, nations, and alliances, have a fundamental sense that something bad is brewing, and are now scrambling to get prepared after decades of neglecting their defense budgets. 5th Gen is a big part of that because the big European nations with aerospace industries, except for UK and Italy, really allowed themselves to fall behind in modern aerospace system development, while the US, UK, and Italy moved aggressively forward with JSF partnership. Russia lagged behind during the Yeltsin years while the economy was in near free-fall, until the US bailed them out with Nunn-Lugar. Russia’s aerospace industry was mainly kept afloat by large orders for Su-30MKI and Su-30MKK fighters to India and China during the mid 1990s through 2000s until Putin could come in and get the ship righted. In order to make it look like they have a competitive design with the US F-22A and JSF series, Russia began work on the PAK-FA, which has not materialized into a true 5th Gen fighter, but does present problems for all the Eurocanards due to significant RCS reduction with the internal weapons bays and selective use of RAM carbon fiber from frontal RCS. That means that any Rafale, Typhoon, or Gripen will be at a disadvantage in the first-look, first-shoot BVR realm, since the Su-57 has a much larger AESA radar and 2 side-looking AESAs in the nose. The radome-housed AESA has over 1500 TRMs (still smaller than the JSF series APG-81 with at least 1626 TRMs). Since the Su-57 will cruise faster than any of the Eurocanards, has a large AESA, and smaller RCS, it enjoys kinematic and detection range advantages that no upgrade to 4.5 Gen airframes can overcome. So now the UK, Sweden, and Italy are trying to generate the funs to develop a 5th Gen fighter with their combined budgets, but since so many parliaments are filled with Soviet-sympathetic democrat socialists and communists, it will be an uphill battle to get the funding. If they do get sufficient funding to start actual development & testing, you can always count on European Parliaments to later cut the funding mid-program and drive the costs sky-high. Then the communists/bolsheviks/digital marxists in the propaganda industry will run continuous articles about how terrible the program is, how it costs too much, and should be cut to pay for social welfare for immigrants from Africa and the Middle Easy, while Russia continues to plan its expansion and sacrifices as much of its domestic infrastructure budget for more Su-57s, attack submarines, stealth drones, cruise missiles, etc.
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  3113.  @JohnDoe-ef3nv  The Scandinavian countries aren't do as well as you think. My mom is from Finland and I have lived there several times. We have family in Sweden as well. Finland's government resigned in March because they were unable to pay for their healthcare disaster known as NHS. If you go to a government hospital in Helsinki, prepare to wait for 6hrs or more before you'r seen. Been there, done that multiple times with my dad. My son crashed his bike and hurt his knee really bad. They said he'll need an MRI. Almost 2 months later, we got the MRI. MRI machine was Made in USA of course, but it didn't matter by that point. Here in the US, an illegal immigrant from China or Honduras that doesn't know a sentence of English will have an MRI within hours, which is better than what Finnish Ministers of Parliament get. This is reality, not conjecture. On top of all that, the Scandinavian countries, including Sweden, have been able to spend more money on these wasteful, pointless socialist programs because the US has providing for the defense of Europe since 1945. The Swedes will say, "Not us, we develop our own defense programs." Then I point out their latest fighter, the JAS-39 Gripen, used General Electric GE F404 derivative motors and the US buys a lot of Swedish anti-armor systems. Norway? US F-16As and now F-35As patrol the Norwegian skies. Denmark? F-16As and now F-35As. Finland, who isn't even NATO? They've been flying F/A-18s since 1995. It takes billions in Research Development Test & Evaluation that the Scandinavian countries have spent on their social welfare programs and infrastructure, while the US spent it on defense that these counties have benefitted from significantly. In the end, people in the US living well below the "poverty line" have better access to healthcare and dental care in some of the "poorest" parts of the US Deep South compared to wealthy people in the major cities of Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, or Copenhagen. I've seen this first-hand in multiple locations in the US and Scandinavia, then cross-referenced my anecdotal experiences with the NHS data from those countries as a sanity check.
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  3148.  @Whiskey11Gaming  I got the MMH/FH from month-by-month stats from 1973-forward. That data was available. I’ve tracked MMH/FH, CPFH, MTBF of various systems, and related topics since about 1984. I was on the Air Force side initially, but we worked on some systems common with the Navy, namely AIM-120 and a certain advanced self-protection suite. On the F-15 CTF, we worked on APG-70 capes expansion, which cross-pollinated to APG-71. Regardless of F-14 model, they were 40-60hrs during its service life. On a recent podcast, the pilots and maintainers said 50hrs was the magic number they were always trying to stay under, so it took a lot of people as you can imagine to generate sorties. Yes on F401-PW-400. I’ve seen figures in then-year dollars that indicated they spent at least $360 million on it for the panned B model, without ever adopting it. It was suffering the same problems as the TF30, namely compressor stalls and blades letting go, AB unstarts, etc. If you had one stall behind the boat, asymmetric thrust and adverse yaw would be worse than the TF30. It would have been great for the other 99.99% of the flying time due to raw performance (28,000lb in AB x 2), but that one critical stage of flight in the pattern could have resulted in more airframe losses. This is my best guess as to why it wasn’t adopted. That burned up a ton of the budget for the F-14, so it got stuck with the TF30-P-412A for a while. There were only supposed to be 13-17 F-14As built. Navy was dead-set on the A-12 replacing the A-6E, which would have made a very capable Carrier Strike Group, but that was a boondoggle due to immature composites production capability. Airframes would have ended up with varying internal cavity volume, which would have been a nightmare for assembly and mx. ST-21 would have been an amazing multirole in capability, but I haven’t seen much that would have reduced the mx burden. The EHAs used in the F-35 control system could have solved a lot of the hydraulic issues, but didn’t exist at the time. RCS reduction was something the services had committed to back in the 1980s for all new designs, and ST-21 had a huge RCS like the F-14. Cavity resonance in the intakes is no bueno, hence the NATF plans.
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  3177.  @SquireSCA  I can see how we're coming to different conclusions. AR stands for "ArmaLite", not "ArmaLite Rifle". Evidence is the ArmaLite AR-9 and AR-17 Shotguns developed in the 1950s. People make this mistake a lot without being familiar with ArmaLite history. Barrel lengths: In the 1930s, Rifles typically had barrels 24"-30" in length. Carbines were 16"-24". Metallic cartridge technology and pressure containment vessels had lower working pressures in the 1800s, which incrementally increased into the 1930s. In 1934, if you read the NFA Hearings, you'll see that pistols were classified by barrel lengths of 12" or less. There were also short-barreled lever guns that didn't fit well into the common classifications at the time, as well as pistols with holsters that doubled as stocks. An overlooked firearms classification that has evolved more is the Personal Defense Weapon (PDW). PDWs don't always fit into Rifle, Carbine, or Pistol definitions because of barrel length and intent to use with either 1 or 2 hands. One of the earliest PDWs of the 20th Century was the M1 Carbine, but it had an 18" barrel and was literally called a Carbine, though it didn't fire a full-sized rifle cartridge. AR-15, Cz Scorpion, Hk, Striborg, etc. Pistols actually fall more into the category of PDWs. Arbitrary definitions that don't take technological progress into account repeatedly miss the mark. I'll give another example: The Army's new NGSW "rifle" has a 13" barrel, but generates velocities similar to a 24" .270 Winchester firing the same projectile weight. Is it a carbine or a rifle? How would a reasonable person, a firearms historian and technical analyst, and the ATF classify the following? AR-15 w/7.5" barrel AR-15 w/10.5" barrel AR-15 w/12.5" barrel AR-15 w/14.5" barrel Hk SP5 FN 5.7 PS90 w/10" barrel Steyr AUG w/16" barrel Mauser 7.65mm with holster/stock The NFA hearings discussed concealabilty of firearms used by gangsters and Dillinger, with Colt Automatics and Thompson SMGs as their main firearms to be taxed. The pistol tax provision was eliminated, making the concealability metric a moot point. Pistols aren't subject to the NFA. Since they defined pistols as having barrels of 12" or less, what are firearms with 12-18" barrels? Next, why did they arbitrarily change the barrel length for rifles from 18" to 16" in the 1960s, but left shotguns at 18"?
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  3178. @ One of the biggest mistakes amateurs and enthusiasts like Sprey made was assuming that BVR missiles are employed with the expectation of 100% pK. Especially back then, the AIM-7 in a fighter flight vs fighter flight, BVR missile shots are initially posturing shots to establish who is offensive. This was a missile designed to shoot-down non-maneuvering bombers, adapted to shoot down fighters in a very widening employment envelope. That became more true when we shifted from SARH to data-linked active seeker BVRAAMs like AIM-120. The hardest fighter to intercept with AIM-7Ms in ODS was the MiG-25PD, since it could just accelerate away from the fight much of the time. It’s very hard to pull an interceptor like that into NEZ parameters, and the Iraqi MiG-25PD pilots were probably the best in the world, had excellent counter-APG-63/AIM-7M tactics. They knew exactly when to crank, dive, offset, re-attack, or egress. Someone clearly had been passing F-15 community tactics and weapons employment metrics to them, or they extrapolated it from their days fighting F-14As and F-4Es from Iran. Pierre Sprey’s comments on the F-35 had no relation to reality, especially when it comes to maintenance and availability rates. You’re talking about a Radar and massive sensor clustered system that has 5 MMH/FH fleet avg for the A model. We would be lucky to see 11hrs with the Viper, not including all its pods and certain ancillary systems that are critical for its mission profiles. F-15C would do 18-35 MMH/FH. The biggest factor in F-35 availability rates is trained pilots on schedule and spares. Break rate is way less than a Viper. It’s a maintenance dream.
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  3208. My high school class? How about my time in the Military District of Washington, my friends in DSS, USSS, Congressional aides, Counter Intelligence units in the DC area, and decades of background with these matters. Treasurer? The SECSTATE is not the treasurer of the committee of which you speak. That's an amateur's comment. You have SECSTATE, SOT, SECDEF, SOC SOE, and SHS on that committee. It's a fact that Putin used Russian front companies to secure Uranium mining rights in the US and Canada. It's a fact that these front companies paid $2.35 million into the Clinton Global Initiative. It's a fact that Hillary used her very powerful vote and influence as SECSTATE to approve of these deals with the committee. We're talking about treason and bribery, as well as tax evasion and failure to report the $2.35 million the Russians contributed to her. You realize how big of a scandal this is? Providing access to US strategic nuclear materials to a Russian front company, then claim she didn't know about it? The Clinton campaign losers literally concocted this Russia-Trump connection after they lost the election, just like Hillary had one of her minions launch the "Obama born in Kenya" story she she lost the nomination to him in 2008. Why does this mentally ill witch do these things? Because that's how she reacts when she loses or doesn't get her way. She lashed out at other human beings, never looking inward at her own deranged condition. If you have ever known the type, you'd recognize it right away. She literally behaves like that drunken mental patient relative that nobody wants to be around, kids are ashamed when friends come over (once and never again), and the dad steers way clear of. We saw this in the early days in DC. The leadership climate was atrocious, and she was the biggest causal factor in creating that acrid environment, especially within her own partisan ranks. Al Gore had to threaten to resign before the Inauguration, it was so bad. If you find yourself trying to defend Hillary, it's going to be a downhill battle for you all the way, and multiple DNC strategists warned about this many years ago.
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  3219. Another fundamental flaw is that you're showing tactics from the early 1980s that date back to the F-4D and F-4E, not even tactics used by F-15A and F-15C. Even F-16C tactics from the 1980s are more developed than depicted in this simulated skirmish. F-22 and F-35 are a whole generation ahead of that. For starters, you don't need to fly in pairs, but even if you do, you are working for an offset flight or duo from a totally different aspect of the CAP zone. With redundant means of communication not using active radar emissions, one group is able to provide targeting solutions for another, and you end up with missile launches from unexpected azimuths and elevations coming at you without a missile launch warning, because no active homing is being done until the very last terminal envelope of the missile salvo. If you survive that with evasive maneuvers, you are now wondering what is happening, where are the threats, have bled energy, while none of the threats have bled energy or showed themselves. They can also provide solutions for missiles that are launched from not only other aircraft, but from land or sea-based system. We've been pushing very hard for a huge generational gap starting in 1980 after USSR responded to the teen fighters with the Su-27 and MiG-29, and the US achieved that, while the USSR collapsed, then after about a decade, started trying to pick up the pieces and develop their Gen 4 birds into Gen 4+, while the US was already fielding Gen 5 F-22A and finalizing F-35 series. The numbers gap is huge as well, with the US having thousands of different Gen 4 fighters, 187 F-22s, and thousands of F-35s planned. Most realistic scenarios for Russian side or nations with Russian Gen 4+ fighters would be something like 10 to 1 or 20 to 1, not even including other assets we have. Any air battle challenging US supremacy would be over before it was fought.
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  3220. George Dang: Every one of your assertions is false so far about ECM, Gen 4.5, hot exhaust, F-35 flight characteristics, climb rate, range, payload, and performance. It's now being revealed that F-35 RCS is less than the F-22's due to generational advancements in shaping and RAM, as well as other VLO aspects not discussed. Canadian and Norwegian pilots who now fly the F-35 state that it has superior performance over 4th Gen aircraft in every metric you mentioned. Canadian pilot Billy Flynn, who has flown 80 aircraft including the F-16 VISTA thrust-vectored test jet, the Eurofighter, and CF-18, says when you overlay the F-35's EM diagram on all the 4th Gen birds as configured for combat, it has better climb, turn, acceleration, crusing speed, etc. The F-35 has already super-cruised for 150nm, since the production engine is way more powerful than the original F119 variants they used in the X-35. It has far superior combat radius to all the 4th Gen fighters even when they carry EFTs. Even the F-35B has better combat radius than the F-16C, and it carries the least amount of fuel of all 3 variants. The Chinese J-31 is a major program mistake by going with 2 engines, because they will take up space for fuel, and consume fuel faster, just like the short-legged MiG-29. They are using MiG-29 engines in it too, as China can't build a modern fighter engine to save their lives. China is far behind the US in RAM and VLO technology, even with the TDP in front of them that they stole from LM. The US has decades of experienced engineers and scientists who have worked on everything from the SR-71 to the F-35. China has nothing like this. Same for engines. US experience in jet engine technology within Pratt & Whitney and GE has forgotten more about fan blade, compression stage metallurgy and shaping, fuel flow, pumps, cooling, DEEC, FADEC, etc. than China will ever know.
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  3261.  @scottnj2503  Weird. Your comment never popped up in my notifications so I’m only seeing it now. I used to see P-3Cs all the time departing from USAF Plant 42 in Palmdale when we were at Edwards AFB AFFTC. If you were to take a little time and study the JSF program some more from reputable sources, it will change your mind quickly. There’s a great book for those with Aero background or AeroEs called: F-35 From Concept to Cockpit It’s written by the engineering program leads for each system set, as well as some early test pilots, 731 pages. I’m surprised it was allowed to be published. It basically describes in astonishing detail all the things they went through and what they were asked to do by the services for each different airframe requirement. #1 performance requirement was combat radius, with a basic 100nm increase over legacy systems for each variant. Ex: F-35B needed 100nm more than AV-8B F-35A needed 100nm more than F-16C. F-35C needed 100nm more than F/A-18A-D. Then there was payload and performance, which all had to match or exceed the legacy platforms with a preference towards carrying the standard combat configurations internally, while leaving external stations open for follow-on sorties in a threat-degraded campaign after D-SEAD of IADS. They took multiple parallel technology research and development programs that had been on-track since the 1970s and streamed them into JSF, including AFTI, ASTOVL, MRF, CALF, A/F-X, propulsion, AESA sensor, ATF systems architecture expanded with the natural progression of semiconductor and microprocessor capabilities, better materials science, and better digital design tools. The flight control system alone is phenomenal, easy to fly, departure-resistant more than anything but the F-22A, which it is on-par with or better-than in several ways. The interesting things to rely listen to though are pilot perspectives from international pilots, especially the Israelis, Dutch, and Norwegians. For legacy metrics, the Dutch talked about doing BFM with F-16C Aggressors out of Nellis for a week, where they basically humiliated them day-after-day even while carrying GBUs inside the F-35A weapons bays that the F-16s didn’t even know they had until debrief. “Where did you guys go after BFM?” “Oh, we had GBU-12s to drop out on the ranges and plenty of gas left over, so we went and dropped after you guys bingo’d.” BFM is really an insurance policy where WVR fighter-to-fighter combat has become prickly decades ago with the advent of Helmet-HOBS missiles, so we just don’t even see it with 4th Gen anymore. Israeli perspective kinda spilled the beans when they said as you take off from Nevatim and get to 5000ft ASL, you start to see a strategic theater-level symbology TGT designate buffet ranging from the Mediterranean into Syria and the Levant. The lightbulb comes on brightly for the pilot at that point as to what this is. Heritage Foundation 2016 and 2019 anonymous USAF pilot interviews said that when they look up, they see Low Earth Orbit Satellites. All that for less than the price of a cheap, scam-ridden Gripen E (with .92 combat T/W ratio and limited payload). JSF sells itself all day long no matter what metric you look at. The open source usual suspect media presstitutes are opposite of the truth in every claim they make, especially operating costs.
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  3270.  @miletello1  The whole point of LPI AESA is to avoid triggering threat RWR, but there's more. You don't need an active sensor track for solutions. F-15C with IRST recently demonstrated passive track guidance for AIM-120D3 and successful live intercept. This approach is a far more advanced capability set in JSF than will ever be present in F-15C+ or EX since JSF has layered forward quadrant 5th Gen EOTS/DAS fusion across multiple IR wavelengths, fused with the passive RF sensor suite. Different threats have different RHAWS and EW capability, and most are excrement-level trash that deserves extreme ridicule. None are capable of playing the semiconductor development and production game with new SC and advanced processor boards with the US. That means US EW systems will always have faster processing speeds, better return signal amplifiers/exciters, and more advanced algorithmic capabilities. On top of all that, nobody has collected and disseminated a more comprehensive digital threat library. For many years now, even older variants of the AIM-120 do not trigger RWR upon launch, and you can be intermittently painted in tiny, freq-hopping bursts from AESAs without any knowledge of their presence, with far superior tracking than legacy pulse doppler Radars. Imagine now a 2-ship or 4-ship of F-35s, seeing more space than an AWACS can. Any airborne TGTs in that space are immediately tracked and PID'd early-on, doesn't matter how. You could paint the threat with full power AESA if you wanted to out of the gate from 2 different ships, get PID with 638 NCTR parameters, then those 2 move onto another TGT set, as they have data-linked PID and tracks to the other 2-ship, who haven't emitted a chirp. The 2-ship with passive sensors have been tracking the TGTs, which are now fully-PID'd, and work towards weapons parameters. The "threats" don't have a clue they're even there. At best (with a more advanced EW suite that has faster processing power and better threat library that doesn't exist), they might have seen RF emissions from the first 2-ship, who went EMCON after the initial spikes, and are chasing ghosts in that direction, while only setting themselves up for a brutal NEZ intercept from 2 shooters they don't see. Once the fully passive 2-ship has TGT tracks that are shootable, you don't need active painting. The fused sensor suites of JSF have scores of ways of triangulation across multiple spectrums, and it's all essentially automated with pilots managing EMCON. Short story is death from the shadows, literally nothing any current fighters can do about this problem. The kinematic metrics you're describing from mutual detection 4th Gen skirmishes are obsolete. Supersonic separation is not only unnecessary, but actually counter-productive because it increases threat IRST detection range due to leading edge thermal aerodynamic loading. That would only hurt stealth aircraft by reducing their undetected WEZ range, meaning you need to shoot earlier from farther and then avoid the IRST's ability to detect supersonic targets.
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  3282.  @alexandrnoskov5437  NATO Headquarters is in Brussels, not DC. The NATO partner nations have their own defenses to worry about, especially the Eastern Europeans. Many in the US thought NATO would be dissolved with the “peace dividend” once the Soviet Union collapsed, or used to de-nuclearize the region. The Eastern European nations joined quickly so they could have some type of defense pact with each other and get backing from the biggest industrial supplier of weapons, the US. They didn’t think there would be peace because they all have hundreds of years of history with Russia. CIA works for Moscow and has done since it was started in 1947. NKVD turned at least 200 German agents into doubles during the OSS days after the war, and those assets became the core of the new CIA. The situation you describe of CIA killing people was actually used against the Eastern European nations after WWII, to bring them under control of Russia. It happened with the resistance movements left over from the partisans, who were located and ID’d by CIA assets, then they were arrested or murdered by KGB before the Airborne units landed at the airports and tanks poured across the border. Russia used the CIA as a glove to do its own business and still does to this day. That’s why JFK formed DIA, to replace the failed and treasonous CIA, but he couldn’t follow-through with that plan since he was assassinated in 1963 before the 1964 election. Most of what you think you know about this subject is lies from both the “western media” and East.
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  3285.  @Flankymanga  Both F-22 and F-35 pilots have stated since 2017 that the F-22 is defeated by F-35s regularly, prevented from attacking Blue Air, and detected by the networked JSF sensor web. Thrust vectoring has nothing to do with it, not a factor. F-35A has better persistence than the F-22A, since they both carry the same internal fuel but F-35A only has one engine. Everything you’ve heard about F-35 is most likely very bad information at best. Combat radius on F-35A is better than any 4th gen fighter in USAF inventory, including the F-15E ( we used to work on the F-15E, so I’m quite familiar with it). Stealth vs stealth comes down to who has better sensors and who has better stealth, both in RF and IR spectrums.   F-16 is not better than F-35 in any metric, including BFM. F-35As have been dominating F-16C aggressors for many years now. Dutch spilled the beans on that one, described week-long BFM exercise sorties every day where they humiliated F-16Cs for sport, while carrying bombs internally in addition to everything else, then went and delivered in the Nellis test ranges. F-16C pilots couldn’t believe it. They were getting killed at a high rate by fighters carrying bombs inside that they couldn’t see. F-16s aren’t ever getting into a WVR merge with F-35s in reality. Why would they? Even if they could, they would attempt to egress away if they knew they were within JSF sensor coverage, which they can’t know. There are 3 JSF variants and any “critical issues” you see mentioned are erroneous, especially if they come from DOT&E. Canada never cancelled F-35 deal. They’re one of the biggest suppliers/manufacturers of F-35 parts. It’s the only option they have for RCAF to replace Baby Hornets. L-Band antennae arrays in the leading edges of Su-57 aren’t stealth detection systems, but for IFF and guiding the S-70 drone. It’s the same length as the antennae on the old LORAN antennae on F-4Ds used in SEA to guide drones. AIM-9X Block II+ is a BVR-capable missile as well with Planar Array guidance, not legacy IR. R-74 is the same way from what is claimed. Nobody is trying to get within visual of each other, not even in 4th Gen fighters. Everyone is carrying Helmet-HOBS missiles nowadays, so it’s a fool’s game to even attempt to get WVR. So who sees first and can shoot first without the other knowing about it, that’s the basic game. 5th Gen networked cooperative targeting and passive TGT tracks change that game tremendously. Su-57’s IR concealment leaves much to be questioned. They are using thermal blankets over the engine cowlings, but there is more to it than that. "Americans have not invested in serious ECM capabilities for decades.” That’s funny. There are small armies of engineers and technicians dedicated to EW that have moved into areas way beyond what Russia is capable of. The US led the way with ECM on strategic bombers back in the mid-century, while Soviet Union employed noise jammers in Bears and Badgers. A-12 had one of the first spoofing systems that demonstrated its effectiveness real-world against S-75 numerous times, as did the SR-71A. Fighters generally got RWR with attached ECM pods for jamming different coordinate vector methods from SAM radars in the 1960s-1980s. Then we integrated a lot of those capabilities into ASPJ with algorithms and faster processing speeds, better antennae, etc. ATF and JSF are different. They have the antennae array count of a dedicated spy plane, with AESA stand-off jammer capabilities that are networked via LPI. You talk about the individual TRM waveform size without recognizing the giant array with 1656-2000 elements, as well as all the various-length advanced SC TRM arrays in the wing leading edges, vertical tailplanes, wingtips, trailing edges, belly, and spine. Russia has zero advantages in EW and is in reality far behind. Su-57 is an attempt to catch up but falls short since it uses more 4.5 Gen defensive EW suite architecture. LPI data links are easier said than done. Su-57 relies on legacy data link tech, standardized with Su-35S, Su-30SM2, and Su-27SM3 modernization program. That is easily detected and jammed. You will never see evidence of IFDL or MADL signatures.
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  3302.  @thunder2434  If your definition of an amateur is someone who has been in aerospace and defense industry since the 1970s specific to fighters and their weapons systems development, yes, l will absolutely own that. None of what I’m saying is filtered OSINT, but insight from ground truth. 08AUG1993: Crashed after STALL in front of Stockholm Water Festival in front of the nation. Pilot ejected safely. 20SEP1999: Crashed after entering wake turbulence of lead Gripen in formation, STALLED, pilot ejected safely. 01JUN2005: During WVR training, pilot entered 60 degree pitch-up, aircraft STALLED, pilot received V minimum warning as A/C departed controlled flight, ejected safely over Baltic Sea. 14JAN2017: (Gripen C) During flight demo at low altitude executing barrel roll, aircraft departed controlled flight and impacted the ground. Pilot killed. The lack of Thrust-to-Weight is not from detractors but from basic math well-known to AeroEs. You looked up wikipedia. I’m using Saab and actual operator’s weights. The wikipedia T/W ratio is bogus, doesn’t add up at all. The Gripen E has a much lower T/W ratio than any Block F-16, but especially lower than F-16C Block 50/52. We were on the F-16C Block 30 and 40 avionics development program for certain systems in the late 1980s, after working on several of the other CTFs at Edwards AFB (USAF Flight Test Center). The F-16 curb-stomps the Gripen in climb rate and acceleration when they are both slick. When combat-configured with the same external stores, they both are diminished in performance considerably, but F-16C Block 50/52 still have much better T/W Ratio. Do the math down to the pylons, LAUs, missiles, ammo for the gun, EFTs, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Super Hornet didn’t drop out of H-X. They stayed for the full competition, which spanned many years. I’ve been following H-X since 2014 when it was announced since my family is from Finland. We’re kind of heavily-interested in that decision for obvious reasons. Super Bug got 3.81/5 total score. F-35A got 4.47/5, the only entrant to break the threshold of 4 in all of the 5 Military Performance metrics used to evaluate H-X. Nobody gives a rip how poorly Gripen E scored in H-X because we already know it was lower than 3.81. Go back and do the math on basic Thrust-to-Weight Ratio. You need to add: Empty weight of the airframe Internal fuel (you can do 50% for combat T/W) Wing pylons Ejector racks (these fit inside the pylons to eject the stores away from the airframe, and are relevant to AIM-120C and Meteor) LAUs for the SRAAMs IRIS-Ts or AIM-9s Ammo for the Mk27 cannon .92 T/W ratio is what it comes out to, which does not meet even a 1970s 4th Gen fighter. This is why I correctly label it pathetic and weak.
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  3305.  @BPo75  The US GE F404 was the most reliable turbofan of all the initial teen fighter engines far before Sweden ever even conceptualized the Gripen. Sweden had taken the Pratt & Whitney JT8D and converted it into a fighter engine in the Viggen in the late 1960s-early 1970s. It was very powerful and provided no-BS STOL capability. The problem it suffered was compressor stalls when you put AOA on, so it wasn't suitable for a fighter that would be doing a lot of turning. F-14A had the problematic TF30-P-412. F-15A/B had the F100-PW-100, which had compressor stall, AB unstart, and parts letting go problems. We had to de-rate those just to keep them manageable. F-16A/B had the F100-PW-200 with the same issues as the F-15, lost many aircraft due to failures with that motor. F/A-18A/B had the GE F404 that didn't have any of these problems, and was extremely reliable even through excessively-high AOA maneuvers and maritime/carrier operations in high seaspray environment. The Gripen didn't even exist. F-14A later lots got TF30-P-414A. F-15C/D got F100-PW-220 F-16C/D Block 25 got F100-PW-220. F-16C/D Block 30 got GE F110-GE-100. As part of this process, we developed what was called DEEC, for Digital Electronic Engine Control. That almost eliminated the high throttle cycle-induced problems commonly seen in BFM. My neighbor was one of the lead techs on that program at Edwards AFB while we worked on Radars, weapons systems, and combat-specific avionics. The F100-PW-229, and GE F110-GE-129 came after that with even better capabilities. The F404 got more digital control upgrades as well and evolved into the -402 variant with more thrust in the Hornet. Sweden got licensed production of the lower technology subsystems on the F404 for the Gripen when it was still Volvo Flygmotor. They never had capacity to build the hot stage central core of the engine. The metallurgy and processes really only exist in a few countries.
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  3308.  @termitreter6545  Every F-22 and F-35 pilot has commented on AWACS has mentioned that they have vastly-superior awareness of the airspace and even ground targets compared with AWACS. There are no buzzwords in there, just the basics. If you’re competent enough to understand what AWACS is, then you’re competent enough to look up any acronyms you aren’t familiar with. I’ve been immersed in these acronyms since the 1970s, so they are part of the military aerospace vocabulary, not marketing claims. AWACS have to maintain a stand-off pattern away from threat envelopes so they don’t get shot down. By maintaining stand-off range, they aren’t able to penetrate the airspace with the maximum detection range of their Radars and sensors. F-35s, more than any other aircraft, have the ability to get deep into the threat airspace and connect their sensor data with each other, forming a real-time picture of the area that is far superior to what AWACS can see. Does that make sense? If you overlay the sensor reach from AWACS and then compare it to F-35s inside the threat areas, you will see what I’m talking about. I’ve been overlaying our combat aircraft radii and sensor reach over maps of the world since 1983, just for reference. The statements about stealth coating peeling off are incorrect. The VLO RF features are integral to the structure of the skin and substructures of much of the JSF airframe. Coatings are mostly for IR spectrum, aside from the adhesives that cover rivets and panel lines.
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  3354.  @TheJacobshapiro  The F-16 doesn’t use hydrazine for an APU because the F-16 doesn’t have an APU. It has a JFS with 2 bottles that are used to pressure-up a hydraulic start motor. Depending on Density Altitude, the pilot usually selects START 1 on the JFS panel for normal start-up procedures. For a hot day with thin air, it might be necessary to select START 2, where both bottles power-up the JFS motor. The F-16 JFS is hand-pumpable by crew chiefs/mx personnel, or pilots through the Left MLG bay. It’s a pretty cool system that doesn’t need an external power generator or to rob fuel, and is very compact/lightweight. Hydrazine is something totally separate and for the EPU, not related to engine start-up procedures. The EPU provides FLCS hydraulic power in the event of engine power loss, so the pilot has time remaining to perform a dead stick landing. The hydrazine cell is located on the right side of the fuselage, opposite of where the gun is on the left. Hydrazine provides instantaneous pressure for the hydraulic system without any combustion. Very interesting system if you dive into it some time. I am not aware that either of these systems played a role in the selection or non-selection of the F-16 for Finland, Australia, or Canada. They may have, but I just don’t recall it. Landing gear and intake locations were considerations for austere basing, as is the F-16’s landing characteristics. It does not like to be put down, whereas you can precision-touch down with the F/A-18 exactly where you want. F-16 gets ground effect pretty bad due to its lightweight and lifting body design with the LERXs, even with EFTs and pylons.
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  3372.  @jensolsson9666  100% incorrect. Actual CPFH including personnel salaries is $17,333. This $36,000 number is simply pulled out of the air, with amortized projected costs over the life of all the Block II F-35s that will never be brought up to Block 4 and 5 standards when those come around, since the Block II birds will remain as training and testbed aircraft, and will never go to deployable squadrons. You can see the actual DoD Comptroller accounting with every single fighter, bomber, drone, cargo plane, AWACS, etc. I was surprised to see the F-35A costs about $1000 more per hour than the more complex USMC F-35B and USN F-35Cs. Another fact that isn’t being correctly reported is that F-16Cs in deployable squadrons cost way more per flight hour because they have multiple ancillary systems that are attached to them to do their mission sets. These systems are handled by separate repair and mx shops in the Squadrons, and don’t get included in any CPFH reports or mentioned in modern media sources, since none of them are familiar with the subject even to a basic level. Additionally, F-35As execute multiple mission sets in a single sortie that would normally take at least 5 different types of aircraft, so there are no actual relevant comparisons being made or presented in this narrative. The underlying story has nothing to do with CPFH, unit costs, or the framework of the arguments being made and repeated by presstitutes with zero fundamental knowledge of these programs. What it has to do with is Boeing losing contract after contract for fighters not only in the US, but abroad. Congressrats do not want to be left with only 1 prime contractor as their go-to in the long run, so there is a current effort trying to steer dollars to Boeing somehow.
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  3377. The premise doesn’t match the archeological record. If you study the Adena and Hopewell Native Civilizations of North America (mostly in the Mississippi and Great Lakes regions), they were very quite advanced. They enjoyed a vast waterway network in addition to their highways, built-up structures, mines, extensive use of hardened copper sufficient to behave more like steel using a lost metallurgical process, stone work, pyramids, temples, stone baptistries, and many elaborate structures that were destroyed by cataclysms, internal war/genocide, and European colonialism. The Army Engineer maps of the 1800s are very interesting to study in this context, since most of the structural remnants were plowed over and farmed since then. There are also vast stone works and city states throughout Maya, many of which were only recently discovered with Synthetic Aperture RADAR and still in the early stages of exploration. I have climbed a lot of the pyramids in Yucatan and Teotihuacan. One thing about Central America is you have tropical climate, which erodes and covers things up rapidly in jungle growth. The Mississippi River network is similar due to the constant precipitation cycle, whereas in the Mediterranean, it’s pretty dry. The Roman concrete with its volcanic ash component made those structures stand the test of time, so there was a major advantage there. The Smithsonian adopted a policy of basically burying any evidence of developed civilizations in the Americas. There was a policy in early US Government to categorize any and all Native peoples as savages, incapable of reaching more advanced societies, and this falsehood was taught throughout academia for the past 2 centuries at least.
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  3405.  @CaptainDangeax  Everyone in the defense aerospace industry recognizes and uses the 4th and 5th Generation terms, including pilots, air planners, and contractors, but you say it’s BS. Your relevant background is what again? The only people I haven’t heard use the term 5th Gen are politicians. My history revision? I lived through all of this with a front-row seat at the Air Force Flight Test Center at ED AFB, as well as a brief time at the West German Flight Test Center. The facts are, the F-35 exceeds everything that was expected of it and when it opens up new capabilities, these are listed as deficiencies by the DOT&E. When you compare the F-35 to the Rafale, it’s better in far more areas than RF stealth. JSF IR stealth is far superior to the Rafale, but the Rafale has the best IR stealth of all the 4.5 Gen fighters. It’s the only design that has significant IR stealth built onto it, though after the initial Rafale A design. F-35’s IR stealth designs come from the start, after generations of IR stealth research and development in the US on multiple previous programs (F-117A, Tacit Blue, ATF/F-22.....). Anyone who thinks Rafale IR signature is better than JSF is clearly not well-informed about all the JSF IR signature reduction systems. JSF will always have first-look in the IR spectrum against any current and emerging LO and VLO fighter designs. Sensors: F-35 has far more IR and RF passive sensors. There are 4 IR sensors on the nose alone with the F-35, with 3 more DAS on the fuselage. EOTS + DAS in unparalleled with anything in the 4th Gen airframes, as you need to build an entirely new airframe to accommodate them. F-35 is superior in speed for the reasons I mentioned. You have to strip a Rafale down to get it to reach Mach 1.8, and that means a non-capable airframe with zero combat stores. Put a normal load on the Rafale and its max V0 decreases significantly. A lot of the Rafale multirole stores configurations are subsonic. Meanwhile, F-35 can carry up to 8 bombs internal and toss them for long range ballistic arc profiles from supersonic speeds at high altitude. None of the 4.5 Gen fighters can do that because they can’t break through Mach with even 6 bombs due to parasitic drag and EFTs. Don’t look at book speeds, look at actual combat-configured speeds and performance that matters. Maneuverability: Combat-configured, they are very similar but pilots who have flown both the Typhoon and F-35 say the F-35 has comparable or better EM diagram against a configured Typhoon. You can go argue with the few pilots who have flown both, as it’s their words, not mine. Typhoon is more maneuverable and has more excess thrust than the Rafale. F-35A and Rafale C have about the same Thrust-to-weight ratio. F-35 has yaw axis capabilities the Rafale can never have due to delta wing compromise. High yaw rate in a delta wing is bad ju-ju. Connon efficiency? In over 40 years in the defense aerospace sector, I’ve never heard anyone use that term. Also, in 2021, anyone talking about the gun indicates they haven’t studied the history of air combat in the jet era. The gun was already barely relevant in Vietnam, on its way out. The "Last Gunfighter", the F-8 Crusader, used AIM-9 missiles for at least 15 of its 19 kills in Vietnam, one maneuvering kill where the MiG pilot ejected upon closing with the F-8. Operating costs: India’s assessment of CTOL Rafale operating costs is projected at $20,000-$25,000 CPFH. Operational USAF F-35A squadrons are seeing $21,000 CPFH. Reliability: F-35A squadrons have seen 72-92% readiness rates on deployment. Dassault promised India they can help India maintain a 75% readiness rate with the Rafale. Number of Weapons: Maybe you’re confusing the EFTs for weapons. Rafale is almost always configured with 3 EFTs, which take up weapons stations. It needs EFTs when carrying weapons because of the parasitic drag caused by weapons hanging from pylons. F-35A carries 18,250lbs of internal fuel so it doesn’t need EFTs, and can use ALL of its weapons stations for carrying....weapons. F-35 also never needs to sacrifice weapons stations to carry FLIR pods because it has the EOTS already built into the nose. Rafale has to have FLIR and Recce pods attached to it if it wants those capabilities. They are already built into the F-35 airframe, so if you want to carry 18,000lbs of pure ordnance, you can. Rafale can carry over 20,000lbs of external stores, but most of that is fuel, not weapons. Range of missiles: F-35 can separate Air-to-Air missiles at superior kinematics and NEZ profiles that the Rafale can’t even enter into. Both can carry long-range stand-off cruise missiles, but F-35 can get far closer to targets than the Rafale. Combat missions: USMC F-35Bs, USAF F-35As, Israeli Air Force F-35Is, and UK Air Force F-35Bs have been flying combat operations for many years now, over one of the most dangerous IADS networks in the world. Israeli F-35Is have been shot at by Syrian SAMs over 100 times years ago, while destroying Syrian SAM and weapons batteries. This continues to this day. Rafale has never flown over a modern, advanced IADS network with SAMs being launched at them. Libya is a low-capability proxy war zone with some IADS platforms like the Pantsir S1, which is a common target for Turkish and Israeli drone strikes. F-35 sorties in high-threat environments exceeds the entire deployment history of the Rafale currently, not that Rafale is bad. If I was choosing any 4.5 Gen, it would be the Rafale. The only failure here is your familiarity with any of the subject matter.
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  3406.  @CaptainDangeax  Forget the generation designations and just look at capabilities. Rafale doesn’t have the leaps in capabilities that the F-35 has whether looking at integrated sensors, propulsion, VLO, internal weapons, sensor interleaving with LPI data links, networked EW, a massive AESA with twice the TRM count as the Rafale’s RBE2, a vast network of passive RF sensors embedded in the airframe, prognostic systems diagnosis, and onboard maintenance, etc. I am aware of the Rafale’s deployments to both OEF and Libya. It is an admirable system, so don’t misunderstand me. I recognize and appreciate the Rafale as being better than other 4.5 Gen systems because Dassault and Thales actually got a lot of systems integration worked into the Rafale C and M. I can make a better argument for the Rafale than any of its fans due to my background. Royal Netherland Air Force, USMC, and USAF pilots and commanders have already briefly discussed how they use the F-35 to perform offensive electronic warfare in ways that could not be done by the EF-111A and EA-6B or EA-18G. The JSF series has far superior capabilities over the Rafale C and M in this area due to VLO, a massive AESA that is better than the RBE2, more RF sensors embedded throughout the airframe like EW birds have, fused with 7 IR sensors for far more passive detection and cooperative geo-locating. The Rafale C and M are great because they have the SPECTRA antennae added to the basic Rafale airframe, to include the wingtip ECM/ECCM pylons integrated with missile rails (which SAAB copied for the Gripen E). That’s an old approach to distributing EW sensors and antennae on the airframe-innovative for the last generation, but still out-classed by JSF and ATF antennae architecture. You can’t see where all the JSF antennae are because they are embedded into the LEFs, vertical stabs, wings, fuselage, H-stabs, along with a network of LPI data link portals for line-of-sight transmission with extremely high throughput that included video real-time capability, let alone high-resolution imagery. It cost the same or more to develop the Rafale, something like $30 billion. That includes the Rafale A, B, C, and M. The RDT&E budget for JSF-A/B/C is about the same, but they got a STOVL model as well. Overall procurement and operations costs are far more for JSF because there will be thousands of them, not a few hundred like Rafale. If you see a source that says the Rafale cost 100 times less than the F-35 to develop, go ahead and erase that media from your feed because they are wildly incorrect. There are currently 620 JSF variants delivered, vs 250 Rafales. By the end of 2021, there will be over 700 JSF.
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  3413.  @CaptainDangeax  John McStain had more time under a T-10 parachute than behind the stick (common joke in US pilot community). He crashed so many planes well before the Vietnam War, that he should have been removed from flights status multiple times, but his dad was an Admiral, so he got special treatment. His comments and observations on US aerospace defense as a member of the Senate Arms Services committee are some of the stupidest I’ve ever heard from a politician in DC, and he really should have known better. None of the experienced pilots who have flown both 4th Gen and F-35s agree with anything you’ve claimed. We now have scores of examples of their personal experience, including a lot of foreign pilots from UK, Israel, Norway, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, etc. You’re still not learning. F-35A is a 9g airframe. No sure why you keep mentioning 7g. Even when it was 7g, if you had watched the video I linked, you would see that it out-performs the slick MiG-35. Nobody cares though, because you aren’t ever going to need 9g. Amateurs look at maximum speed values, because pilots and air planners know that you are never going to go anywhere near those speeds in a combat configuration. You have been extremely resistant to accepting that fact. Rafale will never go Mach 1.8 with stores. F-15 has never gone anywhere near Mach 2.5. F-16s don’t fly Mach 2, and Hornets don’t fly Mach 1.8. Is there some particular reason why you don’t understand this? It’s basic aerodynamics of parasitic drag. Fatter, draggier birds with all this equipment hanging off of them can’t reach their maximum speeds. Even if they could, they will burn so much fuel that an immediate return to base is required. That was true in the 3rd Generation as well (F-4, MiG-23, etc.).
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  3424. Imaginez que vous êtes un pilote de chasse dans l'armée de l'air belge et que vous avez piloté des F-16A MLU Vipers toute votre carrière. Au fur et à mesure que vous êtes davantage exposé au programme JSF et que vous entendez d'autres pilotes JSF qui ont également piloté des Vipers, ils vous expliquent à quel point c'est différent, à quel point il est plus performant et à quel point cela change totalement la donne. Une fois que vous obtenez le briefing classifié sur les capacités de JSF, vous voyez la lumière et devenez un défenseur de l'adoption de ce système. Vous savez déjà qu'il n'y a rien d'autre qui se compare bien à cela simplement en raison de la nature fondamentale de l'intégration des systèmes et des sauts générationnels dans chaque domaine des systèmes de sous-composants. Surtout pour les petites forces aériennes, si vous savez déjà ce que vous voulez, alors c'est une perte de temps et d'argent pour entretenir des conceptions moins importantes, même en volant tout effort de votre programme de modernisation de la force. Cela est particulièrement vrai lorsque vous essayez de communiquer vos désirs aux politiciens, qui ne connaissent rien à la vie, sans parler des sciences aérospatiales avancées, de la budgétisation, des coûts d'exploitation et de maintenance, de l'intégration des armes, etc. Il est donc tout à fait logique de concevoir les exigences du programme pour arriver à une conclusion d'avance dans ce cas. La Finlande a perdu beaucoup de temps avec H-X après que leur ministre de la Défense et le chef de l'armée de l'air ont déjà annoncé en 2015 qu'ils voulaient JSF, juste pour passer par tout le processus d'introduction de conceptions inférieures qu'ils savent ne pas être
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  3442. The real argument is not a mechanical one, but a legal one. The NFA and 1986 MG registry closure created 2 classes of people with regard to exercising rights: 1. The ultra-wealthy elites who can afford to buy a real machinegun, Sub-Machinegun, or select-fire assault rifle for the entry fee of $14,000 to $200,000 or more, with a $200 tax and dealer transfer fees. 2. The deprived peasant-citizen who has no ability to exercise these rights. Pre-1986, it was much more affordable to buy automatic weapons through the $200 stamp tax infringement process, though still an offense to the 2A and the People. Remember that the NFA didn’t make keeping and bearing machine-guns illegal. It infringed on the rights of the people by creating a special bypass taxation scheme that only less than 1% of the populace can afford to pay for. This is the only valid argument in this case. Bump stocks are a cheap way for the people to imitate owning a machinegun without actually having one that works well enough for 2A purposes. For technical merits, a semi-automatic firearm equipped with a bump-fire stock is not a machinegun, and neither is an M16, AKM, or Uzi. Select fire rifles are assault rifles. Pistol caliber, compact, magazine-fed, automatic weapons are Submachineguns (SMGs). Machineguns are belt-fed. The idiots in Congress in 1934 got it all wrong, as has every Congress since (1968 and 1986). These are people who failed to bring in actual SMEs on the subject to clarify and contrast the different types of arms that are restricted from being infringed upon by any entity in the US.
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  3456.  @scoots60  We had M21s in my first 2 Scout Platoons, and we had M14s in my first line unit, along with M16A1s, even though I went through Infantry OSUT with M16A2s. I have worked with and lived with all of those rifles pretty extensively across multiple continents, as well as the M4/M4A1. I like the M14/M21, but would never choose one to go outside the wire if I had other options for a DM or light sniper system. Nobody in Ranger Regiment wanted anything to do with an M14 once the SR25s came into the inventory, and even prior to that, they used M4A1s with ACOGs suppressed in the Sniper sections, along with free-floated Recce carbines, barreled with accurate pipes and float handguards. JSOC dropped M14s and went to SR25s in the early-mid 1990s as well in their Sniper sections. Old inventory M14s were issued to line units for DMRs with varying degrees of success in GWOT, but SOF units who actually had a choice used SR25s, SR25Ks, and SCAR-Hs. Some Teams tried going with all-7.62 NATO load-out, and ditched that idea after 1 or 2 missions due to weight and limited mag capacity. They tried configuring their kit with as many mags as possible, to include mag pouches on the backs of their plate carriers so dudes would act as combat squires for each other, which was just unnecessarily cumbersome and clumsy in a tactical sense. This is one reason why 6mm ARC in a standard AR-15 receiver set was chosen to supplant or replace 7.62 NATO semi auto sniper systems in certain units. We keep re-learning the lessons we already knew after the 1914-1918 Great War about appropriate rifle cartridges. 5.56 was the only cartridge adopted that benefitted soldier's load and combat persistence. 7.62x51 was warmed over .30 Cal in a slightly shorter case, pushed to higher chamber pressure to meet the same mv as the Garand. Didn't really change anything for Joe tentpeg other than having a detachable magazine and overall excessive weight.
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  3471.  @natthaphonhongcharoen  The was is an insurance policy for fighters that hasn't been used against another fighter since 1979 in Arab-Israeli border disputes. It was probably the wrong move to put it on the F-4E, reducing its turn rate and radome size. US Navy chose to leave the gun off the F-4J/N and secretly implemented Helmet-mounted VTAS with the AIM-9G, which pilots didn't like due to the added weight on the helmet. Guns and dumb bombs are major technological advancements that have been surpassed by better systems. Even rear quadrant IR missiles are obsolete for fighters, other than shooting down non-maneuvering targets like bombers and drones. Once we introduced the AIM-9L Sidewinder on the teen fighters and Harrier, visual range engagements became a face-shooting affair that the Argentines had the unfortunate place in history of learning the hard way, even flying much superior dedicated fighter-interceptors against the British Harriers. Israelis used a lot of AIM-9s and Python-3s, in addition to AIM-7F radar-guided missiles in 1982 over Bekaa Valley to shoot down 84 Syrian MiGs and Sukhois. The era of the all-aspect AAM was solidified at that point, while radar-guided missiles got better and better. AIM-7M was used for most of the F-15C's 34 kills in Desert Storm. As of late, the F-16C with AIM-120 has been doing most of the Air-to-air shoot downs, mainly in Turkish Air Force service over the past 7 years. They shot down 3 Su-24s in March of this year, all with AIM-120C7 AMRAAMs. They shot down a Russian Su-24M in 2015 as well, and also shot down a Syrian MiG-23 in March of 2014 with an AIM-9. Use of the gun on the F-22 & F-35 will be extremely rare, if ever. USMC and Navy chose to leave it as an optional pod system if they want it in rare circumstances.
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  3521.  @amano3847  I have zero connection with the healthcare industry other than as a consumer. We have a lot of family in Canada, some of them working in advanced diagnostics in nuclear medicine in BC area. If the healthcare system in Canada is so great, why do Canadian members of parliament prefer to travel to the US for faster care? You can go look right now on google maps and search for hospitals in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, and compare the number of hits to any city in the US even in States with relatively small populations. Then do a search for dental clinics and fire departments. Canada, while one of the better nations for healthcare infrastructure compared to the world, doesn't do well even against the poorest States in the US. There are small States in the US where the major cities have almost twice the number of hospitals as your nation's capitol city. I even tried to bias the searches in favor of Canada by expanding it to the greater metropolitan area of Ottawa. It gets even worse when you compare dental clinics of your nations capitol to the "poorest" of US States. In a moderate income State even below the National median, Salt Lake City has 18 dental clinics listed, while Ottawa has 2. Vancouver is much more like the US when it comes to dental clinics, comparing well against lower income cities like Little Rock, Arkansas. You have waiting lists when it comes to public hospital services, even critical diagnostics before procedures can be performed. This would be unheard of in the US:
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  3543.  @cortexus1  Gripen E isn’t completely different, but an incremental model step up from Gripen C/D using the basic framework of Gripen, increasing the size of the aircraft, uprating to the US-built GE F414 motor from the Super Hornet (without really helping its anemic thrust/weight ratio), while integrating wingtip EW pods with missile rails so it doesn’t end up with a tiny A2A load with the loss of wingtip stations. They tried to copy the F-35’s main glass panel display interface, but left the 1970s-era side panels and normal start-up federated power panels to the left and right of the pilot. Also keep in mind that despite some of the early flights of new jets barely flying off the assembly line in Sweden and Brazil, it’s still very much a developmental program without a final systems validation that is even ready for deployment or full operation. The multiple exercises I’m referring to include: Red Flag Alaska 2006 where Gripen C/D worked with F-16C and F-15C Red Air Aggressor Squadrons to fight Blue Air, who were comprised of only a strike-focused Air National Guard F-16C Block 42 unit with mainly a limited BVR and self-protection A2A tasking in their limited training schedule. USAF F-16 units have always been focused on strike, interdiction, CAS, SEAD, and CSAR with anything A2A being extra if they can get around to it. Red Flag Nellis 2008-03 where Gripen C/D were part of Blue Air strike package. Red Flag 2013 Gripen C/D where they were part of Blue Air again expanding Swedish Air Force strike capabilities as part of a coalition. Falcon Strike Joint Chinese PLAAF Royal Thai Air Force exercises from 2014-2019 involving RTAF Gripen C/D vs Su-27SK, J-10A, J-10C Internal PLAAF tactical exploitation exercises of J-10C vs Su-35. Surprisingly, the PLAAF AAR comments about the outcomes between their Su-27SK and J-10C vs Gripen C/D are more detailed than Red Flag ever allowed. Red Flag is extremely tightly-controlled because we don’t want to advertise our strengths and weaknesses, whereas China let it all hang out basically. China’s conclusions were that the Su-27SK simply was out-classed in every way against the Gripen C/D in the BVR realm where it really matters. The Gripen’s small RCS and superior radar, with longer reach missiles made it better than the Su-27SK in BVR. Once they did within visual range Fox 2 Helmet-cued HOBS fights, the Su-27SK slaughtered the Gripen C/D with a very unfavorable kill ratio, about like the Gripen did to it in BVR. Then China upgraded their J-10 to J-10C with AESA, DSI inlet that eliminates frontal RCS of the engine blades, with the PL-15 BVRAAM missile reach, and out-classed the Gripen C/D not only in BVR, but in WVR using PL-10 IR missile (developed from the Israeli-designed earlier Python-3/PL-8 made under licensed copy). So it goes like this: J-10C > Gripen C/D > Su-35 > Su-27Sk in BVR. RCS, Superior Radar, Longer Reach missiles are what make that a reality. The Flankers have a massive RCS that simply can’t be hidden, but you don’t want them getting near you WVR no matter what you’re flying. So which modern production aircraft have the smallest RCS, best radar, and most lethal BVR missile reach, the most magazine depth for BVR under the smallest RCS, with the most lethality/survivability if the threat gets within visual range with the current trends in stand-off with helmet-cued IR missiles? Smallest RCS that has already gotten smaller than F-22: F-35A Best AESA radar: Any JSF/F-35 variant Most lethal BVR missile set-ups: F-35 Most magazine depth under smallest RCS: F-22 (8), F-35 (4), with Block 4.x/5 going to (6) around the time of the Finnish order fulfillment schedule. The gap between the RCS of the F-35 vs the Gripen E is orders of magnitude wide, so that the F-35 enjoys a long-term practical advantage over not only the Su-35S, but the Su-57 and any incremental improvements that can happen to the Su-57 since they haven’t made it a VLO airframe, but merely LO. So any future procurement of the Gripen E is asking to be violated by Russia.
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  3545.  @wildripeach1  Austria was told that it would be receiving a true 4.5 Generation fighter with all of these wonderful capabilities, but instead got a baseline model with no IRST, no BVRAAMs, no HMS, no A2G capes, no digital EW suite, and really a truncated early EF2000 airframe with some rudimentary systems, at a very steep price tag of $2.28 billion for 15 airframes, including used Luftwaffe Typhoons the Germans didn’t want anymore. That’s a unit program initial procurement cost of $152 million / aircraft. Maintaining the current fleet of 15 Typhoons over the next 3 decades would cost $5-5.8 billion. It sounds like somebody really bent Austria over in this deal. I heard the Austrian court is investigating fraud and bribery allegations, which is what was done with Hungary and Czech Republic with the Gripen C/D sales/lease. Austria paid more in 2003-2008 for those low-capability Tranche 1 Typhoons than India is paying today for very high capability Rafales with all the bells and whistles, for example. Ouch! I would feel really cheated if I was Austria, as this is real money once you start talking billions. This just hurts me to read about, to be honest, because I’m looking at basically an empty IR missile-only mechanically-scanned array radar delta wing fighter with no AMRAAMs or A2G capes, that was sold for higher unit program price decades ago than current 4.5 Gen fighters with full systems capes. It will cost $386,666,667 to maintain and operate each Tranche 1 Typhoon for the next 3 decades, or $5.8 billion total. If I was in the Austrian Defense Ministry, I would have a hard time breathing from the stress. I can feel the pain right now physically. This might sound crazy, but after running the numbers, the F-35A looks not only more affordable to procure by more than half, but more affordable to operate as well. See if you can trade the Typhoons in with the US as adversaries for credit towards F-35As or even some nice F-16Cs for the air policing mission. That’s what I would do. This is madness. There are words for what happened to Austria, but I don’t want to say them.
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  3615.  @hb1338  F/A-18 performs a very similar role in Finland better than any operational Gripen simply by means of its robustness, superior payload, superior short take-off distance, beefier landing gear, superior weapons development backed by decades of USN/USMC funding, and expanded mission set capabilities in its multirole profile the Gripen has never had. The biggest example of this is the SEAD mission set. US Hornets were already doing that in Desert Storm in 1991, with MALD and HARMs. Gripen was never intended for that mission set because Sweden has no IADS threat on its borders, as it is buffered by Norway and Finland. The AIM-120C series has more live missile shots on maneuvering TGT drones than the Meteor will ever have, so with Meteor, you have to just hope that it works, with instruction on its employment by people who have never fired it. AIM-120 has a superb combat record with first-person instructors and squadron-level opportunities to do live shoots. For countermeasures, the Hornet and F-16 have decades of funded OT&E work to mitigate Radar, RWR, and ECM interference problems that naturally arise with those systems. Sweden has never been able to commit anywhere near the same levels of RDT&E or OT&E to address them. That takes continued funding the Riksdag isn’t willing to share. Saab had to take some Gripens to Fort Worth to get help from General Dynamics/LM when they were still having all the Pilot-Induced Oscillations with the Flight Control System, because Sweden has very little experience in that space and General Dynamics had tons of it. Remember the crashes on live TV and in Stockholm? Almost everything I see about the Gripen is Swedish nationalist pride with no foundation in reality. People with zero relevant experience make a lot of bold statements about the superiority of the Gripen, but can never substantiate them because they don’t know the difference between an EPU or ECS, let alone any other important facts about fighter engineering, development, testing, and evaluation.
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  3616.  @TheStugbit  I look at it like this, after following the case for many years: Gripen contract to Czechia: Bribery proven, offenders pleaded guilty in ITAR court, paid $400million in fines with the guilty plea. Gripen contract to Hungary: same as above as part of the same scandal, guilty plea entered. Gripen contract to South Africa: Bribery scandal, South African Air Force didn’t even want Gripens. This was part of a joint deal with BAe and Saab organized by BAe marketing folks who also did the Czech and Hungarian deals. They pled guilty to avoid the investigation expanding into the South Africa deal because it would have exposed the sale of BAe Hawks as well as part of the bribery to South African leaders. Those Gripens now sit in flyable storage because South Africa can’t afford to fly them. Gripen contract to Brazil: Strange money changed hands between these intermediaries with increases from 1m SEK to 16m SEK when they learned the Brazilian Air Force was favoring another fighter. Then Gripen E “won” the deal. Brazilian leaders also steered contracts for the panoramic cockpit display into the contract to sweeten it for them.   This is why the Gripen E has the PCD. Swedish Air Force never wanted the PCD because the current large panel MFDs work so well already in the Gripen C/D. Making the PCD arctic-friendly requires the same technology used and patented in the JSF PCD, which is not touch-sensitive but is based on Laser grid intersection, so when your finger brakes the IR Laser plane, the system knows where exactly you are touching on the screen. Gripen contract to Thailand: Contracts with bribery are normal in Thailand, as Thailand has one of the worst corruption indexes in the world. Even though they signed the UN agreements about anti-corruption, it’s part of the culture there. Foreign businesses must pay to play, pure and simple. What are the chances that Saab used an intermediary to bribe the Thai government to get sales of Gripen C/D to Royal Thai Air Force? Thailand global corruption index ranking: 101 Riksdag made the funding of JAS-39 to Saab dependent on foreign military sales as a large portion of the orders. Saab was placed between a rock and a hard place and did what they had to do to meet the dictates of Riksdag.
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  3639.  @JABelms  Why couldn’t Su-30MKI dominate Pakistani F-16s in real combat? The Typhoon exceeds the capabilities of the Pakistani F-16s in A2A, so it doesn’t make sense that the Su-30MKI would “dominate” a fighter that is more capable than the one it can’t beat in actual combat. Look at all the RVV-AE launches from BVR with no hits. The only successful BVRAAM that day was the AIM-120C5 launched from Pakistani F-16s at the MiG-21 Bison, which flew too close to the skirmish and got into AIM-120C5 NEZ. Chinese say the RVV-AE is garbage as well, out-classed by their PL-12 BVRAAM with far better WEZ/NEZ profile, better electronics. India orders Su-30MKI kits from Russia, then assembles them domestically. This costs more to do, but India thought they were getting some kind of technology transfer, which they didn’t. MiG-29s were never built to last that long. It takes a SLEP to extend their service lives. They’re rotting away all over Russia as we speak, very few are operational. We did technical analysis of real samples of MiG-29s including first-hand inspections from people very close to me. It’s a piece of garbage fighter that isn’t survivable even in the 1980s US and West German fighter force structure. Luftwaffe pilots who converted after unification and flew tactical exploitation with it said if the war had broken out, they would have dominated it with the F-4F, mainly because of pilot interface and training. Even the F-4 had better man-machine interface from controls to avionics, which is sad.
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  3642.  @koekiejam18  Why are Congressmen living in Boeing’s headquarters making a racket about a Lockheed program? Hmmmm. General Brown (career F-16 guy) made some comments about driving a Ferrari only on Sunday, which is odd. There is no real CPFH difference between the current F-16CM fleet with all its ancillary ECM, HARM, and FLIR pods vs F-35A CPFH and the F-16 does not have the range, which is why he said “not F-16” (not Lockheed). I think it’s really more of an economic/strategic hint of wanting another fighter production line to remain open, but there is no design to fill that non-space between the F-35A and F-16C Block 40/42/50/52. Current F-16Cs of those blocks face a very formidable threat even in the “low-end” fight where large hostile nations are equipping surrogate savages with passive sensor SAMs, like the Houthi rebels in Yemen who shot down a Saudi F-15S (F-15E export model) with a rigged R-27 IR-guided missile from a Toyota truck and trailer. What fighter do you want for that type of fight? Israelis have arguable the most advanced F-16Is with their own electronic warfare suites, their own specialized missiles, 600 gallon wing tanks, CFTs, and they still got shot down from a Syrian S-200 SAM. Meanwhile, they fly roughshod anywhere they want over Syria and Iran with F-35Is and bomb Syrian SAM sites and Hezbollah weapons caches with impunity. They were shot at over 100 times with SAMs within their first year of F-35 combat operations, and just destroyed the SAM batteries without any losses. We already have 287 A-10C for the low-end fight. We have over 200 F-15Es, MQ-9 Reapers, around 950 F-16Cs, supposedly getting 200 F-15EXs, Super Tacos, and hundreds of F-35As just for the USAF. Several of these will be timing-out and will need replacements, so because someone mentions another option does not mean that there won’t be F-35As as the cornerstone of the USAF fighter mix. That’s exactly what General Brown said. Click-bait sites including Forbes put out trash articles that mislead and deceive, without explaining the force structure and how there always is a large mix of aircraft.
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  3645.  @matthewbittenbender9191  If you want to see some serious cases of fraud, bribery, ITAR violations, and scams in the defense industry, I’ll turn your attention to 2 programs you might not have heard of. 1. Gripen C/D sales/bribes/leases to Hungary and Czech Republic. BAE Systems marketing department did that one for Saab. After getting caught, they admitted to the fraud and charges and were fined....$400 million. 2. Typhoon Tranche 1 sales to Austria, to include second-hand birds from the Luftwaffe for more unit cost than what India is paying for Rafale F4s today. With inflation, it puts the Austrian Typhoon unit costs way over the Rafale, and they can’t even carry anywhere near the full weapons suite allocated for the Typhoon. Along the way, it was discovered that Airbus transferred $144 million into the accounts of intermediaries in a bribery scheme when Austria was deciding on what aircraft to replace its fighters with. 3. Gripen E: Started development in 2007, still no production samples while developmental birds are being delivered to Brazil and Swedish Air Force. They are missing the promised F-35-style cockpit and IRST sensors as well. I think in the US the only kind of scandal you can get away with defense-related is if you’re politically connected, like General Mattis and that scam medical testing company, Clintons selling China everything they asked for, Neil Bush transferring his aerospace defense holding company tech into his fake Chinese real estate company, his dad and Clinton selling ballistic missile technology to Saddam before/during/after Desert Storm (Iraqgate), etc. But actual contractors making fighters have to be extremely careful about avoiding these types of things or it could jeopardize the whole program. Foreign companies desperate to make sales do it whenever they can, as seen above. I have yet to see a single article about how Lockheed bribed the USAF/USMC/Navy into getting them to send them RFIs/RFPs/prototypes. JSF came from the services. There’s no arguing that. Many of the contractors involved early in the 1980s/1990s were merged with other companies (McD to Boeing for example), and submitted an absolute abortion of a plane for the JSF prototypes.
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  3649.  @cbcluckyii4042  In my experience of being in aerospace and defense over the past 47 years, US politicians don’t really care about aircraft losses, accidents, or the minutia of day-to-day operations, with 1 major exception: The main times when they make a fuss about something is only when a particular program local to their Congressional district is under threat, then they become its biggest advocate, for example Adam Smith (D) Washington (Seattle/Boeing). He’s the Chairman of the HASC and is a huge critic of the F-35 program, even though he knows literally nothing about aerospace/defense other than what he’s told. Since the F-35A keeps beating the Super Hornet in Foreign Military Sales competitions and US Navy halted their Super Hornet orders, he’s become a really big critic of JSF. Some European politicians are big advocates for any programs that affect their nations, for example the Eurofighter Consortium or French Dassault Rafale, or “Swedish” Gripen (foreign critical systems shipped to Sweden and assembled there). But there are also huge delusional opposition groups assembled in pretty much every European Parliament who truly believe they should just eliminate defense and waste even more money on systemic failure social welfare programs that are examples of extreme waste/fraud/abuse while neglecting patient and client care as a baseline rule. In Sweden, the Social Democrats came within 3 votes of killing the Gripen or any home-grown Swedish fighter after their experience with the Viggen. In UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain, they all promised to buy an initially large order of Typhoons, then saw what it actually cost and cut their orders substantially. They’ve been messing around with finding an AESA Radar for the Typhoon for the better part of the last 2 decades, and none of the Euro Typhoons have them yet. Kuwaitis are the only operators with AESA Radars in their Typhoons so far. It’s a constant battle fulfilling the primary role of the state, which is defense. NHS and reckless social welfare fiascos get funded like a drunken sailor blowing money in port after 8 months at sea. No real scrutiny or oversight, just more and more spending.
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  3652. The whole intro to this video is simply misinformed. One way you can see that is if you study the layout of the F-117A exhaust architecture. It’s almost as if teams of engineers were told to reduce the IR signature, knowing that the USSR had been deploying thousands of IR-guided SAMs. F-117A uses significant IR signature reduction measures, with the engine exhaust flattened out through a fan-like array that is diffused with cold air before it exist the training edge, with no line-of-sight to the nozzles from the ground, and very limited visibility of them from the air. They stepped that up a notch with the IR signature reduction technology on the ATF and F-22A with coatings, more airflow management over the much hotter F119 motors, and solar reflectivity as well. That technological culture was used to work on JSF signature reduction as well, with the LOAN nozzle and other features incorporated into the airframe, skin, and any hot systems. ATF and JSF signature reduction teams had full access to FORMAT technical data for IRST capabilities, which were copied off of older US Century series fighters like the F-101B, F-102A, F-106A, and the F-8C. Those all had IRST. F-106A probably had the best use of it since they flew much higher, and were largely looking for bombers and supersonic targets. F-4C/D had IRST under the nose, and F-4E got TISEO later. Notice that the F-15A-D never picked up IRST in USAF. JADF are the only ones that installed it in some of their fleet. IR signature reduction has been a focus with 5th Gen just as much as RF signature reduction.
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  3669.  Jörgen Persson  F-35 averages higher speed every sortie compared with legacy fighters because there is no parasitic drag, not that speed is life with 5th Gen. None of the Russian fighters fair well against JSF. Single fighters don't prosecute the airspace, multi-ships do. An F-35 4-ship has plenty of missiles for a sortie. None of the Flankers would survive the BVR intercept phase since VLO intercept pK is much higher than 4th Gen metrics. Russia and China have already done 5 years of regular tactical exploitation in the Gripen C/D with Royal Thai Air Force. Chinese stopped using Su-27SK and upgraded the J-10 to J-10C with AESA and DSI intake (very small RCS-smaller than Gripen E), with the PL-15 BVRAAM. That took away every advantage that the Gripen C/D had, since Gripen suffered heavy loss rates already once it went to a Fox 2 WVR fight against the obsolete Su-27SK with HMS/R-73. Gripen C/D has lower RCS and a better radar than Su-27SK with 80km AIM-120C reach and superior pilot interface/SA. J-10C has better metrics across the board compared to Gripen C/D. Gripen E is an incremental step above J-10C with radar, Meteor, and Arexis, but not in RCS, so you're looking at a dead end parity design. F-35s would rape the J-10C and they wouldn't know what happened. That's why China is building J-20Bs as fast as they can. Remember, the biggest advantages that made the Gripen C/D successful against the obsolete Su-27SK were: 1. Low RCS 2. Better radar with first look 3. Better cockpit/pilot SA 4. Longer reach BVRAAM Now go down those metrics and see which aircraft does better, and how each area of overmatch affects the next factor. The Gripen has already been outdone by fighters that don't stand a chance against the F-35.
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  3722.  @miketheman4341  I'm talking Army SF when I say SF, not Wikipedia answers for kids who have never served in or with any of these units. Every guy from Ranger Regiment who goes to SFAS gets selected unless they were injured, which is very few and far between. SFAS is business-as-usual for an E-4 or E-5 from Ranger Regiment, more like a vacation from the training cycle in Battalion. For JSOC, most guys come from Ranger Regiment, not SF, and it has been that way for generations. A guy from Ranger Regiment has a much higher probability of being successful in Unit Selection because the PT standards are so much higher in Battalion than SF. SF has very low standards, technically big army APFT standards, which are a joke. Ranger elements deploy alongside the others in certain JSOTFs, you just don't hear about it. SF is a major let-down if you've ever been embedded with them. Lots of fat guys who are broken, marking time until retirement. They suck at SUTs, whereas Batt Boys are always doing SUTs, live-fires, flat range work, demo, breaching, weapons squad work, mortars, rotary wing cycle, and fixed wing airborne ops. There aren't places for senior NCOs to park themselves and ride it out in Ranger Regiment. SF has ODAs where half the Team could be doing that. I saw this firsthand. Before we deployed, it was like someone tossed an admin grenade into the Team, and none of our critical 18 series MOS guys could go. Both 18Ds...non-deployable (medical profile from civilian skydiving injuries and the other's wife was on bed rest/high risk pregnancy) 18Es...non-deployable (SOTIC & Golden Knights try-outs) An ODA is Non-Mission-Capable with at least 1x 18E and 1x 18D. We had to borrow 1 of each from 143 & 145 (Mountain & SCUBA Teams in the Company). Then the 18F was off to SCUBA School at Key West without even clearing it with the Team Sergeant. I'd never seen anything like it. Senior 18B was off to SF ANCOC, hadn't even done time on Team, just skipped past the junior B into senior slot. He was a senior E-6 from 2/75 who made E-7 just prior to going SF. So we had only a handful of dudes to deploy with from an almost-full 11-man ODA. Something like that would be unimaginable in Ranger Regiment. That was a specialty ODA as well, the paid Level 1 MFF Team. So I chuckle when dudes who never even served, never caught a glimpse of the Bn area of any of these units try to pontificate about what they do, who they are, and what the culture is like.
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  3791.  @jamesplant5280  The Saab Gripen series is a case study in politicians driving capabilities down due to not wanting to pay for what's actually needed. Sweden's Riksdag had a really bad taste in their mouth after the Viggen, which had multiple variants for the different mission profiles. Biggest ones were the interceptor vs strike and reconnaissance versions, same airframe. They told Saab the only way they're funding a replacement was if it cost way less, while combining the J, A, and S mission profiles into a single airframe, that also needs Foreign sales to fund it. Saab purchased the design work already done by Convair in the 1960s for the Convair-200, which the Brits then acquired for the P-106A/B in the 1970s pre-ECA. This meant the wind tunnel aerodynamics studies and overall structure had been done. They just needed an engine. Problem was, Convair-200 and P-106 were designed around an F401 class motor (similar to PW F100). Saab couldn't get any F100s due to high demand from the F-15 & F-16 fleets. They scaled down the British Aerospace P-106B to fit the GE F404 meant for the F/A-18 Hornet. This design compromise is what really hurt the JAS-39 series. Fast-forward to their last iteration of the Gripen E/F, still underpowered and incapable, and the claims about technology transfer are laughable. Saab was going to transfer US GE's F414-GE-39E engine tech? Saab was going to transfer US Mil-1553B databus (Canada already has it.) Leonardo Radar technology, licensed from Raytheon through US DACA? US hydraulics, landing gear, weapons, servos, etc.? UK Martin Baker ejection seats? Canada has already been making thousands of far more advanced components for the F-35. Sweden had zero to offer in tech transfer because none of the technology belongs to Sweden. This is why Sweden's marketing firm, BAE, was fined $400 million and plead guilty in the Gripen bribery/ITAR scandal to Czechia and Hungary for illegally representing and selling US tech to those countries via bribes. Journalists could write really sensationalist stories that are 100% accurate if they wanted to, but they don't.
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  3800. The A-10 was conceived and built as an armed escort for Airmobile units because of Vietnam, which I’ve been forced to consider was an ill-advised concept outside of SEA. They had A-1 Skyraiders that were perfectly capable of armed escort for rotary wing formations, but the A-1 didn’t have the payload to take out the emerging self-propelled AAA platforms like the ZSU-23-4 and tanks. The A-7D had that capability, but couldn’t re-attack with visual acquisition on its first pass like the A-1 could. So they basically wanted select features from the A-1 and A-7 combined into one, purposely handicapping its power so that it would be slow, while giving it more payload to be able to bust tanks with AGM-65s, drop CBUs on light vehicles and troops in the open, 500lb bombs on emplaced gun positions and relay stations and trucks, then use the 30mm gun once other ordnance was expended. The A-10 was especially ill-suited for the European Theater of Operations with NATO, since it was a suicide mission into Soviet mobile IADS nets that were part of their armored regiments, made even more unsurvivable with the advent of SA-6 and double-digit SAMs. The A-7D was a much better for for the Fulda Gap. In ODS, the A-10 had to be grounded until strike aircraft could effect the D-SEAD mission set and clear out most of the AAA and SAMs, because they shot down or damaged so many A-10s in the first 2 weeks of the war. 20 of them were lost (7) or damaged (13) from Iraqi AAA and SAM fire from January 17 - February 27, 1991. It was still very effective once SEAD had been conducted, but the F-111F as just one example, killed more tanks than all A-10s combined in 1/4 the sorties flown by A-10s. F-111F with PAVE TACK Pod and LGBs was a brutal hunter of Iraqi tanks at night. Only 3 F-111Fs were hit by AAA, able to return safely to base each time, no losses. It was one of the most survivable platforms of the war.
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  3807.  @frankenz66  I’ve been a delegate before and have been to many meetings where people say the same, but I agreed with them in several particular cases because their conscience in those cases was in line with the Constitution. This was just delegates though. What happens is that once a delegate goes to the State and Federal level Q&A meetings with Senators/Congressmen/AGs/etc., there is a large effort funded by the sponsors to steer opinion with lots of “facts” to support their corporate agendas. Most people who have been to college are poorly-equipped to filter through these facts because they have zero formal critical thinking training or analytical skills, so it’s actually better to send someone with good gut instinct or someone with a PhD or strong scientific background, because the corporate sponsors/campaign bundlers are excellent at appeal to emotion arguments supported by select data. The pillars of thinking that get immediately eliminated are Completeness, Fairness, Accuracy, Relevancy, Depth, Precision, and Logic. It’s very easy to sway delegates to think a certain way, and the rigged political parties have been in this business for basically 2 centuries, with a populace who has only gotten dumber. The big party meetings teach representatives to look down at their stupid peasant constituents, and how to manipulate them into foregone conclusions that only benefit the campaign financiers. The whole thing is a cursed illusion with some extra games to play than in an outright corrupt system, but the results are basically the same.
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  3818. H-X took 7 years from 2014-2021. The outgoing Air Chief and Defence Ministers back in 2014 said they wanted F-35, not old technology warmed over. FiAF Hornet pilots who have been visiting various current European F-35 operators and have been able to fly the simulators for years have seen what it is from the inside and all say, “We need this now.” They send their reports up the chain into senior FiAF staff, who also are able to fly the simulators if they want and see how JSF changes everything. Then the bureaucrats and accountants talked with other nations to get real operating costs numbers, checking those against the numbers coming from the US. What they realized is that they can acquire Option A for less than Option B (Boeing), C (Typhoon), D (Dassault), or E (Saab). Finns kept their cards close to the vest and went back to all the contenders asking for better deals, without telling the contenders how they were doing (they already knew they wanted F-35A Block 4). Now they could leverage the unknown against the contractors to get the best F-35A deal possible, including sustainment and independent maintenance options that will give them more long-term control in case of instability in global supply. It would have looked really bad for the F-35 to lose, even though L-M was confident they would win it all along. Finland used that confidence to get a great deal for their military, which is all fair in the art of the deal. Gripen E came in dead last in military performance, which is no surprise to anyone with extensive military aerospace background.
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  3819.  @perelfberg7415  My agenda is the truth, along with getting the best capabilities for Finland, where much of my family is from and currently lives. So I've worked and trained with the Finnish and Swedish militaries from 2005-2016. Finland has far stronger ties with the US and other European nations than it does with Sweden. The Swedes like to overstate their relationship, then try to dictate to the international partners how exercises would be run as if they were in charge by royal decree. Meanwhile everyone else who has actually been deploying is just chuckling at them, letting them pretend to be Napoleon while we just handle our business. US, Brits, Danes, Norwegians, Estonians, and Finns worked together great. The general cultural feeling was that Swedes are a joke, more of an annoyance that had to be comically tolerated. One thing that was constant with all my experiences across different Finnish units was that they tell a lot of jokes about Sweden. I also have current family in Sweden, so it was interesting to learn how each of the nations interact with each other. Maybe it's different with the air forces. Europe has been relying on US defense since 1945, which allowed Europe to rebuild and later focus on economic growth while US taxpayers continue to foot most of the bill for European security. Sweden is totally dependent on US and NATO main industrial nations for engines (GE), Radars (Leonardo), IR sensors (Leonardo, L-M, Raytheon), databuses (US), hydraulics (UK, US), servos(UK), fuel pumps (UK), ejection seats (UK), missiles (US, Germany), etc. Saab and Volvo Flygmotor are not domestic companies manufacturing organic Swedish systems, but instead final assemblers of US/NATO systems into the Swedish-built airframe. This is why Saab's marketing firm was charged and convicted of ITAR violations when they bribed multiple foreign government officials to cheat their air forces by placing Gripen at the top in competitions where it was at the bottom, (not wanted by their air forces). They pled guilty and were fined $400 million, which could have been used in the Gripen NG development budget instead. Since then, they still used an intermediary to transfer $740,000 to the former President of Brazil after he steered Brazil into the Gripen E/F under an exorbitant multi-billion deal with high interest rate financing by Sweden.
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  3822.  @perelfberg7415  If you’re referring to regional SA, I can see why you’re reaching the conclusions you are without being aware of the basic features of JSF sensor suites.   The primary detection sensors on JSF Omnirole combat platforms are NOT AESA Radars in an active RF propagation mode. The AESAs and other distributed RF sensors detect RF emissions from other contacts at extreme BVR, at least twice the detection range of an active RF mode while being more flexible in how close they are positionally relative to the TGTs. (AWACS have to maintain very long stand-off, which limits their ability to detect and track.) These threat or unknown emissions are immediately shared with each other in real-time via LPI data link, which instantly generates triangulated TGT tracks for the Long Wave IR sensors to stare at until they get hits in IR spectrum, which is then cross-checked with each other via MADL interleaving. All ships in the air reference these hits against the threat library independently and collectively. Other ISTAR platforms in the network can either generate or collate/validate these contacts as well, so a multi-dimensional picture is constantly evolving with time very quickly between all ships. This all happens before anyone opens up their AESA for active LPI mode PID propagation in the BVR timeline. If you listen to F-22A and JSF pilots, they all say that they have far better SA than AWACS could ever give them, and the reasons I listed above explain why. Now look at regional Air Force flight scheduling. FiAF SW air base launches sorties at early time block for ISTAR and basic air policing of their airspace. Norwegian AF launches NE F-35A flight for same over Barents Sea. Both nations set MADL protocols for interoperability so they can feed each other with wide-area coverage. Polish AF launches 2 F-35As in the next time block for Baltic policing, feeding to Denmark via MADL protocols. Denmark launches 2 F-35As on the tail-end of the Polish flight, and feeds to Netherlands, who launch later in the day, who feed to the UK. UK flies their sorties and feeds back to Norway, who feed back to Finland. The whole nature of air policing national sovereignty changes dramatically with JSF among technically-aligned nations, who don’t even need treaties to form those technical agreements. I’ve never seen a “fighter” platform have these kinds of implications and effects on geopolitics. To mention any other type of fighter in this conversation with legacy data link protocols doesn’t even register into the discussion, because they aren’t capable of doing what JSF/MADL/Sensor Suites do, not even close. JSF is a strategic asset like no other, whereas anything 4.5 Gen is only tactical with diminishing relevancy. We’re in a totally new world now.
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  3826.  @jbs8704  Rumors are that an intake cover was left in a place that allowed it to be sucked into or already obscured the airflow into the motor, so it couldn't generate sufficient power to take off. Flight ops resumed immediately after, as the deck crew apparently saw the engine cover floating on the water and pointed it out. Harrier first 10 years of service? 100 total airframe losses, 20 fatalities. Harrier to this day has the highest mishap rate of any fighter in service. F-35B has been flying since 2008. First loss was actually mechanical/assembly process failure crashed in 2018. The 2 other F-35B crashes were human error. 1 hit an aerial refueler, the other was the UK deck incident just described. F-35A has been flying since 2006. First crash was Japanese senior pilot, nosed down after a BFM sortie at high altitude, plunged into a long 60° dive into the ocean with no attempts to recover. He's the only F-35 fatality to-date, which is a phenomenal record. The other F-35A crash was an instructor pilot who left speed hold on, and bounced it off the runway at night at Eglin, smashing the gears into the wells, then ejected. So that's 6 crashes total for 3 different types. My bets were on an F-35B or F-35C crashing first, with much more frequent losses because I lived through development of the teens. First 10 years of F-16? 143 crashes, 71 fatalities F-35s are ridiculously safe compared to anything else out there. Over 750 have been delivered, with over 480,000 fleet flight hours.
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  3838.  @pablo_escanor1681  What do multiple wars, including genocide have to do with the EU when those wars are on its borders? Have you ever heard the term: refugees? Who determines where the refugees go? London or Brussels or Berlin? EU was meant to make military irrelevant? That’s not even close. EU was an economic union formed under the military protection of the US, where member nations used the benefit of not having to fund their own militaries properly to try to elevate the EEC to a competitive economic power with the US. The main core partners of the EU are historical military rivals with territorial disputes across each other’s borders that date back over 1000 years. As Europe exited the fairytale times of the Cold War and hot wars erupted again, Brussels and Berlin were dictating trade, refugee allocation, and economic policies to the member states, to continue to prop up the German Deutschmark/Euro. As a result of that and other factors, the GBP steadily declined in value, while the Euro had a good run. Most people in EU don’t even know the Deutschmark is the base currency for the Euro. The fundamental issues with the Eurozone are kept from public discourse for some reason, while sensationalist arguments are fomented by the corporate whore media, like Financial Times. FT is owned by a Japanese firm who are big on internationalism and own several media conglomerates. Media conglomerates= advertising agencies, not sources of reliable information, which is why this emotionally-charged, divisive hit piece was formulated the way it was. It gets clicks for the sponsors while criticizing UK for exiting the EU, which is not even debated as to its validity. Notice that in the underlying tone of the story? EU = unquestionable. UK = fully subject to criticism. That’s the blatant bias in this report.
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  3845. Nobody is getting close to F-35s though. Why would a formation of F-35s allow anyone to approach them when they can see everything from hundreds of km away before any threat aircraft have any idea of what’s going on? Even if they were allowed into IR missile parameters, they would have to eat AIM-9X or AIM-120D face shots, where the launch aircraft doesn’t even need to provide mid-course guidance and can separate and offset, while others you don’t see are giving cooperative data link mid-course or LOAL for AIM-9X Block II+. Flares and DIRCM don’t work against AIM-9X or IRIS-T due to dual focal plane arrays with UV and IR sensors, plus AIM-9X is thrust-vectoring with a high duration motor. This means you’re going to eat it if you get within about 30nm of frontal closure. Su-35s still wouldn’t even have detection at that point, and would be subject to 5th Gen EW offensive electronic attack against their PESAs. That’s one of the worst ways to enter an edge-of-visual range fight, which isn’t going into legacy 3-9 line crossings anyway. Supermaneuverability is a big waste at every stage of what I just described, because you aren’t going to out-maneuver a thrust-vectored HOBS missile with modern seekers and improved motors. Watch the 22yr-old live fire videos of early AIM-9X tests against maneuvering target drones that are deploying flares and using DIRCM. AIM-9X blasted right through them regardless of aspect, closure, even across a one-circle set-up. What fighter pilot would ever purposely try to get into those parameters? An idiot who doesn’t belong anywhere near the cockpit.
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  3849.  @JaM-R2TR4  The turret gimbaling Gripen E radar is actually for something different. It’s designed to set it apart from fixed AESA 4.5 Gen fighters in a metal detection BVR fight. It works like this: 1. Opposing fighters detect each other at some time in theater, normally headed towards each other in some way. 2. Depending on what the threat warning and EW system tells them about the opposing aircraft, they will close into weapons parameters and fire first based on who gets parameters first. Initial missile volleys in this scenario are generally not expected to connect, but if they do, all the better. 3. As soon as the first one to launch separates a missile, they will normally offset from the original flight path because they are expecting the enemy to fire soon afterwards. These things happen within very compressed timelines because of the speed involved in closure. The missile starts off receiving mid-course guidance from the launch fighter. The problem with this maneuver is that it leaves the missile outside of the AESA’s field of regard, and the missile then switches to active seeker mode. 4. By offsetting oblique to the original closure vector, it forces incoming missiles to pull lead in anticipation of where that fighter is headed, not where it is. This requires the responding missile to expend most of its rocket energy in that direction. 5. The first-shoot fighter will then reverse course almost 180 degrees, so the enemy missile with energy spent can no longer propel itself for another correction with sufficient speed. With a 4th Gen fighter even with AESA, breaking your mid-course guidance makes the probability of intercept very low because when your missile switches to active seeker mode, triggering your TGT’s Missile Approach Warning System because the RF bandwidth that missile seekers operate on and their speed is much different than a fighter radar. With the Leonardo ES-05 rotating AESA, as you offset after firing an AIM-120C or Meteor, the radar rotates so that the AESA is still pointing towards the TGT(s), allowing you to both notch/offest/evade threat WEZ, while still providing continuous mid-course corrections to the missile until the last seconds where it goes into terminal phase with the active seeker. That’s why the Gripen E has the ES-05. With 5th Gen, none of this matters because there is no step 1 from the above list, only you seeing them and setting up intercept how you want, while watching their sensor envelopes. Totally different, extremely unfair fight.
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  3854.  @phillip_iv_planetking6354  Sweden makes quality military hardware and always has, but they don’t have the budget or infrastructure to develop their own fighter engines, and they rely on the US for other critical systems components for sensors and avionics as well. The US has 6 of the top 10 world leaders in semiconductor manufacturing, with #1 drawing the next 3 in volume and revenue. You need semiconductors to build radars, modern fighter RF antennae, redundant super-computer processors, and electronics. Sweden has excellent engineers who have developed world-class designs across vehicle and weapons systems though. I would never call anything they make crap. I just look at the Gripen E/GlobalEye combo as a high risk/high cost option that would result in quick air dominance for Russia since it would face the Felon/Super Flanker network, followed by Fullback bombing campaign. Gripen E and Super Hornet would be the easiest platforms for the Russians to defeat. Of the Eurocanards, Rafale would be the most difficult since it’s the only one with significant IR concealment, but it would still face an uphill battle against Felons/Super Flankers working together. JSF is the only future-proof system that presents a high-risk deterrent for the Russians, since it can not only hunt Felons and Super Flankers, but simultaneously destroy their airfields and critical nodes in the region with near impunity. Russia will lean heavily on back-door influence to steer the new millennial idiot females in Finnish Parliament to try to pressure Finnish Air Force into buying something stupid, which will be either the Gripen E/GlobalEye, or Super Hornet/Growler. Finnish Air Force already wants JSF, so we’ll see where this all goes. Russians would love for Finland to pick Gripen E or Super Hornet.
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  3866. 2:28 Critics of the aircraft: The “bells and whistles” integrated into the JSF series are not nice-to-have extras for Canada, they are need-to-have capabilities in the modern air combat mission sets, whether they be NORAD CAP or NATO expeditionary Joint Air Component Forces missions. They are far more affordable in JSF as well, since legacy and growingly-obsolete counterparts are bolted-onto 4th Gen fighters in several key areas, ECM and FLIR being the biggest ones. Critics don’t have the historical knowledge from which to view this whole subject, because most of them never lived through the development of the teen series and 4.5 Gen fighters. They are painfully-ignorant when it comes to actual acquisition and Operations & Maintenance costs on the legacy aircraft. They still accept major headlines as valid sources of information on an extremely complex subject that none of the major corporate presstitute brothel excrement spigots have even the remotest grasp of. One of the most glaring examples of this is in acquisition and O&M costs. Right now, the F-35A and even the B an C models are more affordable than legacy designs. The Gripen E/F, Super Hornet Block 3, Dassault Rafale F3R and F4, and Eurofighter Typhoon are all more expensive to acquire, and are comparable or more expensive to operate and maintain...not including their required ancillary systems. The presstitutes have droned on about how expensive F-35s are, when they seem to have totally ignored inflation and the relative costs of other fighters on the market, even after the Swiss and Finnish evaluations clearly stated how much more affordable the F-35A is compared to all of the competitors, some of which were twice the price. The Gripen E/F is really a scandalous example of how badly the press has been about costs. It’s the least-capable fighter of them all in the West, with a much higher Unit Flyaway and Unit Program Cost compared to even the future priced F-35A Block 4. The Finns had so much money left over for weapons, that they’re staging their acquisition of weapons to the future when newer ones will be in-production. They did detailed O&M analyses against Norwegian, Dutch, and US F-35A costs and found that there weren’t any significant differences between all of the H-X competitors that made it to the finalist stage. Swiss came to the same understanding with their detailed accounting methods. Meanwhile, the idiots in the Pentagon and press talk about crazy CPFH that don’t match up anywhere in the DoD Comptroller’s published budget, and are 1/3 of what the Norwegians Air Logistics Chief says they are seeing.
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  3919.  @TheHuggybear516  The Founders were very well aware of the political schisms perpetrated in the name of faith, whether it was the English Reformation, Protestant Reformation, the control over Europe by the Roman Empire, Papal Schism, secret societies, guilds, and wars. They recognized the benefits of common faith, morals, and fabric necessary to hold a new Nation together, while despising other men dictating the specific practices to political subjects like was done in Europe. England underwent their Reformation in the 1500s because of Henry VIII, then recoiled back into Catholicism under his daughter Mary for 5 years (1553-1558), with executions of the King's court and 280 Protestants burned at the stake who helped advise him to betray Catholicism. Then after she died, England went back to Anglicanism under his other daughter Elizabeth I, who ruled for 44yrs and cemented Anglicanism into the English monarchy and government. Puritans fled to Switzerland during Bloody Mary's reign, hence where the Geneva Bible comes from, then returned to England once she was gone. Puritans did not like Kings telling them which Church they must belong to and attend, and were a mix of political and pious non-conformists. Puritans saw Anglicanism as basically English Catholicism, and maintained that the English Reformation needed to get back to more pure principles contained in the Bible. Puritans were fragmented into factions of right wing dogmatic types, countered by left wing sectarians like the Quakers. While most Puritans remained within Anglican congregations practicing diluted forms of non-conformity, the Separatists held their own local meetings so they could practice their faith without influence from any Catholic-Anglican rituals. This led to their persecution under various English edicts, prompting for many of them to flee to Holland, then to the New World on the Mayflower. Their original goal was to land in what is now Virginia, but they of course ended up in Massachusetts. Children of the New England Puritans were the most literate and educated of any in the world due to their Latin Houses and Dame Houses, because they wanted their posterity to be able to discern for themselves light and truth from darkness. Anglican British colonists settled in Virginia afterwards and expanded their lands, eventually filling New Amsterdam, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. There was a bit of religious friction and persecution of Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and non-believers in the Colonies up through and even after the Revolution. This is why the Founders agreed on separation of Church and State. They had lived through and studied the repeated problems of Church-State governments that marginalized otherwise good citizens. It's a fascinating history. Henry VIII is just as much of a progenitor of the US as the commonly-referenced men of the 1700s.
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  3931.  @garfieldfarkle  I certainly haven't overlooked the OSS's official disbandment, but the personnel were still working, including Aaron Banks as one well-known example, who met with Ho Chi Minh and had his medic nurse him to health in Indochina. The post-War years between 1945 and 1947 had a lot of significant activity with former OSS types, while the NKVD was scrambling to reposition in the face of US checking of Russia's attempts to push more into Western Europe. One of the big games was identifying war criminals by Nuremberg standards, who were in the 4 main POW camp types run by Brits, French, Russians, and US. Germans who knew better tried to get captured by US, French, or Brits, while avoiding Russian captivity if possible. NKVD ran an extremely aggressive recruitment campaign during those years, and had a stick already in-place to assist them because anyone accused of war crimes was going to Nuremberg. This helped them with turning doubles. They got Gehlen, who had a very large network of Wermacht intel working for him. Why trickle up from the bottom if you can get the top-down? That was one NKVD strategy. They also pivoted off General Vaslov's Army penetration and exploitation from making him combat ineffective during the war, to using their key doubles to transfer over into BND and CIA. Lend Lease transfer of enriched Uranium, Beryllium triggers, and a laundry list of essential and exotic materials was documented by a Lend-Lease officer, who testified before Congress and wrote a book about it. Major George Jordan. Check his eye witness accounts out. He provided the list, which includes the other 66% of Lend-Lease articles that were never openly reported. Stalin built their first bomb with Lend-Lease materials and scientific data collected from within Manhattan Project. Detenté was one of the driving factors in that, along with treason and espionage.
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  3952.  @insAneTunA  I'm seeing that from the usual suspect presstitute brothels, where entire groups of people are labeled haters and racists just because they have a different opinion on politics. That is what creates division and contention, by design. The Soviets tool over the US media company massaging back in the 1960s after turning Mockingbird on us. Mockingbird was designed to counter the Soviet International Organization of Journalists (which was run by the NKVD and later KGB Ideological Warfare branch under the World Peace Movement). Langley stood up in 1947, and recognized a need to counter the Soviet international propaganda. Since the Soviet NKVD had 200 doubles already within Langley, they reported back Frank Wisner's Mockingbird program, and launched out loud at how much fun they were going to have with the "Yankee dogs". Walter Cronkite was their first major win in forming US public opinion against the Nation, along with the rest who followed. Several generations of Americans have been raised with anti-American propaganda within the United States around the clock, including within the schools-especially at universities. Look up where Anderson Cooper interned, if you doubt me. Every major radio, magazine, and TV broadcast company was set up with working relationships with the CIA, under the guise of helping the Nation out. Instead, they were used to demoralize the Nation and create generations of Americans who literally hate their own Country, totally ignorant of the US role in helping the world.
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  3953.  @edgarvalderrama1143  Before Trump announced his candidacy, he was friends with everyone from all walks of life and political parties.  He was never and still isn't a political ideologue, since he has had to deal with more practical matters as a builder/construction tycoon. Trump never entered into agreements with Bush 41 to help smuggle cocaine into the US in exchange for promises of political gain. Trump doesn't have a lengthy body count in his wake, with countless associates who have been involved in narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, exiled from the US due to tax evasion (Marc Rich), sentenced to lengthy Federal Prison terms (Webster Hubbell), or mysteriously died in plane crashes and suicides left and right. His biggest sin against the system was bypassing the soul-sellout political class who have been paying their dues for decades with hopes of getting to run for Presidency. When someone like Trump can successfully come along and overturn the apple cart of the double-sided DC coin, it sends shockwaves throughout the swamplords and their populace-dividing political party kabuki theater cesspool. This is why there was so much opposition from the Republican Party to Trump, and why Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are united against him. Their power of endorsement and arms trade post-Presidency is at significant risk now, especially if 2020 sees Trump reelected, and in 2024 when he endorses his VP on the wave of a Trump cultural era like we saw with VP after FDR and Reagan. Veteran swamprats like McConnell and Graham would love to lead a swell of Republican majority wins in the Congress against a Dem WH, not have to tiptoe around the issues with a non-partisan businessman who is used to actual results and has no loyalty to them like Trump. 2020 will be more interesting than 2016 in that regard. Right now, the 13 keys and Primary Excitement models favor Trump's reelection. China and Russia can't afford another 4 years of him in the WH and they have plenty of allies in DC and the media to wage war between now and November.
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  4051. IRSTs are not "stealth equalizers" because a true 5th Gen VLO airframe/propulsion system uses extensive IR concealment measures. The JSF is really a 5.5 Gen system regarding SA since it uses threat sensor envelope emulation in the tactical situation display, so that the pilots can control whether they want to fly into the envelope or not. The only reasons to do that will be on their terms. When listing max detection ranges for IRST, it’s really important to state that this is a rear aspect detection, not frontal. 100km/54nm detection range on a rear-aspect, 4th Gen engine fighter like the Su-57 is reasonable, but not on the J-20A/B. They copied the F-35’s airflow concealment over the engine nozzles with the J-20 if you look closely, so you will have to reduce that practical detection range from rear aspect, as well as the frontal aspect. For this reason, I would not lump the J-20 in with the Su-57. With a common fighter size and 4th Gen IR signature, you might get a 27nm/50km frontal aspect detection range. Su-27/30 will show up sooner than that, F-5E much closer. Rafale F4 has airflow concealment and IR signature reduction coatings, so it will get even closer than any of the other Eurocanards, including the Gripen E. 27nm is already well-within AIM-7F 1980s-era BVR missile timeline. AIM-120A/B would already be headed out well before you flew into 27nm. Those weapons are outdated. In a AIM-120D, Meteor, PL-15, R-77-1, or R-77M world, legacy nose-mounted singular IRSTs need to step up their game with materials sciences and closed-loop integration with other sensors in order to be relevant, unless you have a VLO airframe in the RF and IR spectrums. Meanwhile, F-35 integrated EOTS/DAS/AESA/Distributed RF antennae network interleaved with other JSF provides strategic SA from sea surface into low earth orbit. Notice which aircraft all the others are trying to be (and failing) with their avionics and cockpit architecture.
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  4104.  @jakefromstatefarm142  The countries you think have “fixed their gun violence problems” have done no such thing. I see this false narrative a lot from people who hear it repeated on social media, from people who are clueless about math, geography, and recent massacre history. The US doesn’t even factor into the top 15 school massacres, for example. 1. Chile Santa Mariá School massacre 2. Russia (Beslan 2004) 333 murdered, 783 wounded 3. Pakistan 4. Sri Lanka 5. Pakistan 6. Kenya 7. Afghanistan girl’s school bombing 2021 8. Sri Lanka (Their Air Force bombed a school killing school children.) 9. Indonesia 10. Kenya 11. Nigeria 12. Thailand 13. Sri Lankan Air Force again, bombed 61 girls to death at school. 14. Syria 1979, Muslim Brotherhood bombed artillery school cadets. 15. Egypt, 1970 16. US Bath School, Michigan bombing, 1927 Those are the top 16 school massacres in history by death toll. Remember that the US is the 3rd-largest population in the world, yet barely factors on the list of nations by homicide rates. CDC statistics call a child someone ages 1-19 years old. That is disingenuous and deceptive, but allows them to then say that for the first time in 2020, firearms-related deaths exceeded automobile accidents as the leading cause. Automobile accidents have been the leading cause for decades. Here are the real numbers: Ages 1-4: Accidents, Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities, assault Ages 5-9: Accidents, cancer, assault Ages 10-14: Accidents, cancer, suicide Now you have to ask why someone would say the leading cause of death among “children” is firearms-related, when it clearly isn’t.
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  4127.  @michaelkeller5008  The modified SA-3 system used in Serbia was only able to detect at 13km from oblique aspect, while those F-117As had no Radar Warning Receivers or ECM gear at all, and having been forced to fly night-after-night through the same corridor. Trying to apply that incident to even the F-22A, let alone JSF, fails several significant points, the main ones being the presence of the most superior EW suites in the world, followed by smaller RCS values. Another flaw in the logic is the premise that VLO technology remains static, can't be improved, while sensors are unlimited in potential. F-117A went through 3 generations of RAM over its operational service life, with some of the fleet getting ATF RAM used on the early F-22A. JSF started with better RAM than that, which was already replaced in Lot 4 with Carbon nanotube wafered RAM with an extremely wide spectrum coverage in RF absorption compared to Lot 1-3 RAM. Your understanding of the applied physics of RF detection and tracking is very limited, which is causing incorrect conclusions to be made. Since JSF has the most advanced EW detection and ID system in the world, it shows the pilots where all the threat detection bubbles are in real-time, based on actual passive multi-band RF antennae distributed all over the airframe. That passive data is automatically fused with all of the IR sensors as well, which are checked against the threat library and allow extremely long range TGT PID of ground, sea, airborne, and low earth orbit contacts. It's like a future EW bird plus Spyplane smashed into the shape of a fighter. The Gripen is a pathetic joke next to it in this regard, doesn't even have its critical sensors fully integrated or developed, and takes 1.5-1.8x the runway to take off, with a fraction of the payload. Also, you get to pay more for the Gripen E and especially the F, which won't bring the same strategic SA to the region unless you also buy 1.2 Billion Euros (2013 rate) worth of Canadair business jets converted by Saab into AWACS known as GlobalEye. Nobody knows how much it will cost to operate and maintain Gripen E......because there isn't a single full Gripen E production sample aircraft in existence, let alone an operational squadron of them with years of experience.
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  4174.  @x-man5056  F-35 jas the advantage from systems integration, single engine, economy of scale. Multiple customers have already committed to buying thousands of them collectively. Because the basic airframe and flight control system are simplified in many ways, and manufacturing is streamlined, that reduces costs. Fiber optic Digital Flight Control System with compartmented electrohydrostatic actuators is simpler and more reliable than central hydraulic systems and miles of copper wiring. If you look at the component manufacturers for Typhoon, it has a lot of federated systems that are made by UK for UK birds, Germany for German EFs, Italy for Italian EFs, and Spain for Spanish EFs. From the start, it was a more costly framework from which to develop a fighter because of the languages, although English was mostly the default. We went to DLI for German before moving to West Germany to work on ECA development. The engineers were required to do the NATO Aero E course concurrently, which was in English. The Typhoon has 2 engines that have similar or greater manufacturing costs to an F135 motor, even though they're a 4.5 Gen motor design. With federated systems, parts count increases, especially electronics for different systems, radios, and things that are all integrated with the F-35 in contrast. For a 4.5 Gen cockpit as an example, there are multiple displays with metal cases, rimmed borders with physical pushbuttons, springs, LED lights behind each button, wiring for all the buttons and lights, and separate electronics boxes behind each display. The parallel wiring for each display converges in the wiring harness to the power supply and to the different systems computers, including the Environmental & Electrical, Flight Control, Engine Management, Stores Management, Navigation, Communications, etc. Then these various boxes need cooling, power, and physical space. Power to them comes from separate panels on the sides with master and individual switches for the pilot to go through his initial checklist when starting up the aircraft. In the F-35, the computing power is held in a quad redundant super-computing bank with CIP and CNI super computers. The cockpit displays are a large flat panel with no physical buttons, springs, rimmed housings, or typical MFD/MPD structures. Interface with them is by touch, and the pilots can configure the displays how they need to throughout the flight. There are less than 20 switches in the cockpit. There is no HUD. With maintenance access panels on the Typhoon, it is pretty typical of a 4th gen fighter with generous panel access to the internals, although I think they fully remove the radome whereas US 4th Gen have hinged radomes. On the F-35, you don't need to open the radome and access to the radar subsystems is done through the nose landing gear doors, which are obviously open already. You can also access many subsystems through the weapons bay and MLG doors. It's a revolutionary design looking at parts count and maintenance access, pilot interface, and systems integration.
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  4177.  @harb1911  Ha ha, a Russian trying to school a businessman in the US about economics. That's funny. Look up the definition of hyper-inflation. The US has had extremely low and flat inflation rates compared to the historical trends. We're in a position of more stable and low inflation than at any other time in US history. I'm seeing insane new residential construction in my State, and guess what? The foundations are some of the best concrete I've ever seen in my life. I've done foundation repair and construction when I was young, so I know what to look for. I've also lived in Russia and seen the construction standards there. Russian construction is best compared with construction in the US Northern States near the Great Lakes and Northeast, where winters are deep and very cold. Those places have higher standards for RE factor and insulation as a result, similar to how you would see homes in Scandinavia. Russian concrete on newly-built apartment complexes in Moscow were literally falling apart already, with kids vandalizing them before completion. I did find that walls are much thicker in Russia, as are the doors since temps get way down for much of the year, so you have to build thick or you will freeze. Every apartment complex I saw in Sainkt Petersburg, Moskva, and other cities was heated by a massive wood-burning furnace in the basement, fueled by manual labor, with water pipes running throughout the buildings heating the radiators. Single residences in the countryside had wood-burning stoves as well, and you go through wood like crap through a goose or you freeze. Water coming out of the pipes in apartments in all the cities I lived in looked like industrial un-off, not palatable or potable in many cases. It's like a huge society of country folk who don't know much about the modern world just trying to survive using infrastructure that hasn't been around in the US since the 1800s, maybe early 1900s at the latest. It's a huge mess of a place, and felt like stepping back in time. Think of all the domestic problems that could be solved without wasting $80 billion a year on crap military gear.
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  4232.  @michelangelobuonarroti4958  I respectfully don't accept your premises, after decades of experience and research in this field, to include living all over the US, Germany, and Finland. After all that I have seen, especially the internal audits of NHS, and the conditions of hospitals, wait times, available procedures, and standards of care, I have never seen anything that shows superiority in Finland, with one exception (that is no longer the case): Labor and Delivery water birth option. I have the choice of where to live since I have EU Citizenship through Finland. For me and my family, we choose to live in the US. We have lived in Finland before, but much prefer the US for different reasons. We got quick and efficient care only when we went to the private sector in Finland. Public sector is a joke by US standards. Even in the private sector, you have to get prescriptions for very common Over the Counter medications from Apteekki, whereas in any grocery store in the US, you can just buy them. Tylenol, aspirin, cremes, etc. Apteekki hours are very limited too, whereas I can get anything OTC basically around the clock in the US. EMS is fast in the US, with far more Level 1-4 Trauma Centers per capita, more Fire/Ambulance, Life Flight, and PTLS-trained Paramedics and EMTs, more Automated External Defribulators distributed throughout buildings, and more trauma surgeons and nurses per capita. European countries vary in quality/quantity dramatically in all of the above metrics, none of which are up to US standards, but are trying to reach the US.
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  4241.  @gordonjohnson405  I was there from Feb ’96 to Feb ’97, and our BC was LTC Fuller when I got there, then LTC Milley. Fuller was a Grenada Ranger with old school scroll from 2/75, mustard stain, country boy, awesome BC. The best BC I ever had in all my time in the Army across 7 different units.  We’d be out doing morning PT as a Recon Team and see this guy out running with his full ruck in OD Green Jungles by himself. It was LTC Fuller. He thrashed the new Lieutenants in the Currahee Club too. Made them low-crawl with their faces to the floor until they all had road rash from the carpets. It was beautiful. I remember his Change of Command ceremony where he said, “Alright men. I believe speeches should be like miniskirts, the shorter the better! Pass and review! Currahee!” Then from one of the line companies, someone called out, “Dogpile on the Colonel!” So imagine the better part of all the EMs dog piling the BC in his change of command ceremony. Great Battalion. All we did was train and I loved it. Milley was more reserved, sketchy-eyed, always sniffing the wind to see if what he was doing would be kosher for his career. He wasn’t particularly bad or good, just there. He signed off on our proposal to institute a Battalion DM program for the line companies that we ran out of the Scout Sniper Platoon, since our PL was prior service E-6/B4 and SOTIC Qual’d, Panama Vet and we had an ODA split team from Okinawa run a Sniper short course for us the summer of 1996. We rarely got to go downrange south of the Imjin River. You had to have a liberty pass for either a day or overnight, and only a certain % of the Battalion could get them, so I could count the number of times I took that on maybe 2 hands. Some of my SPC4 mafia mates and I went down to see the Seoul War Museum, which was cool. The DMZ was really our home for the full year, with rare exceptions. We did MPRC and EIB south of the Imjin. Lots of incidents happened when I was there with Norks.
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  4272.  @soulsphere9242  There’s quite a difference between multirole and omnirole. Multirole fighters can be configured for limited A2A and A2G capes for the same mission, or lean on one over the other and go execute that primary mission set. They have extremely limited profiles outside of A2A and A2G. Omnirole fighters can switch mission sets within the same sortie between 3 different profiles while providing high capability in each of them. There are different levels of Omnirole starting with the Rafale as a 4.5 Gen baseline, then moving into 5th Gen. 5th Gen by nature are Omnirole, starting with the F-22A. JSF are kings of the hill in that space with far more mission set options than the Rafale or Raptor. Rafale later standards F3R and F4 can execute a very lethal offensive counter-air BVR A2A set while carrying LGBs or long-range stand-off weapons for A2G, switch to the A2G set and deliver precision munitions, and do self-protection electronic attack. They can’t execute a deep penetration mission into the WEZ because they don’t have VLO and they are limited in their data link connectivity relative to Emissions Control since they have Wide Area Network data link signatures. F-22A combat-coded Raptors can do: Deep penetration strike into the WEZ like an F-117A, only with very formidable EW for self-protection Offensive EW to lead strike packages through the perimeter defense radar nets, deliver precision A2G weapons VLO Offensive Counter-Air with extreme prejudice air dominance, threat air platform eradication operations (kill everything you see that is thread PID) VLO Defensive Counter-Air, which is an unfair intercept set against any poor fighters who try to attack strikers violating defender's airspace Airborne Warning & Control of coalition aircraft inside the threat area, including Bomb Damage Assessment with Radar Ground-Mapping, reallocation of strikers to new TGTs, guiding strikers around threat WEZ/MEZ JSF can do all of the above and more, including: VLO anti-ship mission set Anti-Submarine Warfare Theater Ballistic Missile Defense More options for offensive Electronic Warfare Multinational Networked Airspace and Battlespace Management Cyber Attack Multispectral ISR that rivals most dedicated spy planes (AESA ground-mapping fused with EOTS and DAS IR systems, data-linked with other JSF) Over The Horizon Targeting for sea and land-based fires (providing targets for Navy cruise missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, and Army/USMC precision-guided artillery) You start to see the massive distinction between legacy Multirole Fighters and true Omnirole Combat Systems.
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  4284.  @chasefreedom5178  Have you ever modeled multiple Radar station basing on a 3D surface of the earth before? One of the problems that will immediately be seen is the horizon obscures connectivity between stations. Another problem is that VLO technology is a lot more advanced than people think. What little RF is deflected in a totally different direction is typically 90˚ or more away from any emitter/receiver origins, even in a net. Most of the energy is not reflected, but absorbed. If these types of systems actually worked, they would make life that much harder for any legacy airframe design. That’s why literally every single fighter and drone design right now has at least extensive LO, many attempting to be VLO, and US ones actually VLO. The head-start the US has had since the 1950s on VLO technology places the US in an unfair advantage against other nations’ industries. F-22 tooling was put in storage. I know the people who ordered that to happen, despite what they were told to do by Gates and comrade Obama White House. Even though there are traitors woven all throughout the US hierarchy, patriots still get a vote in what they do. F-4 climb rate exceeded all fighters at the time, so it had more than a few tricks. F-4’s were not lost because of a lack of a gun. F-4’s were mainly lost to SAMs going up North. Pretty much everything people think about what happened in SEA is incomplete at best, erroneous more the norm. Of the 3 USAF F-4 variants, guess which ones had the most gun kills. (Choose one) A. F-4C B. F-4D C. F-4E (M61 internal 20mm gun built-in, production started in 1967)
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  4285.  @chasefreedom5178  F-22A was killed before we could go into Full-Rate Production with the assembly line and subcontractor streams open. This was ordered by SECDEF Gates and 2 White Houses, both of whom were compromised as assets to Russia and China, with evidence in their defense dealings through various family members. (Neil Bush, Hunter Biden, James Biden). The F-22A was going to be deployed with permanent basing in UK, Central Europe, and the Pacific with around 200 Raptors in each of those theaters, then multiple Wings along both US coasts to be able to plus-up Europe and Pacific theater units as part of the Rapid Deployment Forces structure. That would give theater commanders the ability to erase with extreme prejudice, any Air Force in those regions with nothing that could be done to stop it with any of the existing or planned IADS platforms in either Chinese or Russian inventories. This is why the Chinese and Russians leaned so hard on their paid moles within the upper levels of US government to kill the Raptor, while they worked hard on trying to develop answers to it with the PAK-FA and J-20 programs. Had the Raptor line remained open, it would be getting the 5.5 Gen + RAM currently being used on the JSF airframes, newer sensors, PCD cockpits, HMDS helmets, with much lower unit flyaway costs due to mass-production of 750 airframes. It’s a strategic system disguised as a tactical one, that was never meant to be strategic. The technology sets combined have pushed the airframes into another category by nature of the rapidly-changing capabilities of the individual sciences morphing together.
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  4322.  @benghazi4216  Volvo Flygmotor assembled British and US subassemblies under license. They have never been able to produce the critical core technology required for HPHT turbine blades and modules. It's much more difficult to conquer that metallurgy than anything in the space program, for example. It involves extremely exclusive materials science and production techniques. Since my family are Swedish-speaking Finns and Swedes on my mom's side, no, I'm not someone who you can pigeon-hole into a myopic ignorant US perspective. Forget about nationality and look only at the industrial capacity. Sweden can't produce GaN TRMs in sufficient quantity to meet US Mil-Std for that. GaN SC technology in production volume is only a recent breakthrough in a small sector ot the market. Typhoon CAPTOR-E Mk.II has far greater demand than any Gripen E orders, and is only getting half of the TRMs in GaN, the other half in legacy GaA. The US literally pioneered, fielded, and continues to field incremental improvements with Long Range BVRAAMs. We're not catching up to anyone. AIM-54C held the previous successful longest range intercepts until AIM-120D broke that record recently. Meanwhile, total crickets on LR engagements on maneuvering drones with Meteor. Europe collectively can't afford to shoot live anywhere near the volume USAF does, let alone USN and USMC. Sweden isn't even a player on that space. As to data links, again, US NORAD SAGE system on the F-101, F-102, and F-106 predates the Draken by several years, and Draken received US Hughes fire control systems and US missiles at the time to fulfill the Swedish AF Air Defense Intercept mission profile. Swedish AF's data link network was a simplified and scaled-down model of SAGE, so Sweden could afford it. Everything you see in the Swedish aerospace fan community about these things is very glossy propaganda, void of the timeline and facts.
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  4326.  @Mnecrafter99  We had far more instability in the 1960s after the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK and the Vietnam War protests. Take a look at France, Germany, UK, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Spain, Russia, and China just for starters if you want modern examples of political, economic, and military instability. France has had massive and sustained protests under Macron, while their immigration problem and taxation are too much for French citizens to bear, especially with low birth rates. Germany has a Manchurian candidate East German communist at the helm, while brining in unchecked numbers of immigrants who will never integrated into the German society, and can't maintain basic readiness or availability rates with critical military systems. Low birth rates plague Germany as well. The UK Prime Minister just resigned in the face of massive internal opposition within the government, to the will of the people for Brexit from the EU. Low birth rates are another factor in the cultural shifts in the UK. Sweden is committing cultural suicide with mass immigration of people who will never integrate into Swedish culture and society. They also suffer from low birth rates. Finland's government just resigned because they can't solve the massive problems within their NHS nightmare. Finland has had major problems with birth rates dating back decades. Italy is suffering from massive debt crises in their banking sector, as well as low birth rates among Italians. Spain unemployment rates have been near depression-level around the time of the global financial crisis, and are still some of the highest in Europe, though having come down. Russia's economy has been in the toilet since the price of oil has dropped, they have major internal leadership voids in the regions, and they're about to see major downturns in their Foreign Military Sales markets as their weapons are humiliated further. But the US is on the verge of erupting?
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  4339.  @Aspen51  1. Both F-22A and JSF series are Omnirole, not multi-role. They can swing from Electronic Attack (mission of dedicated jets like the EF-111A, EA-6B, EA-18G) to penetration strike (like the F-117A only better), to Airborne Early Warning and Control (Like E-3 and E-2), to constant ISR (like a mix between a U-2R and a Reaper drone), to Offensive Counter-Air (looking for enemy aircraft to destroy), to Defensive Counter Air (preventing enemy fighters from attacking your people/places), to CAS. 2. Every nation flying F-35s is using a working aircraft, 9 of them already having declared and met Initial Operating Capability, several of them already using it in combat as we speak. (IAF, USMC, USAF, UK). Moreover, for the first time in air combat history, multiple nations are flying and operating different airframes from different services using a common avionics interface and networked communications that allow even Americans and Brits to finally understand each other... 3. JSF isn’t “a project”. It’s multiple projects with 3 different airframes, for well over a dozen air forces, with 3 major final assembly lines and thousands of manufacturers disbursed globally. There is no project to compare it with to provide any baseline reference of what to expect, and the numbers you see thrown around by imitation journalists are without any relevant experience or understanding of the entire subject of military aviation, procurement, or integrated systems technology. Every modern fighter and every fighter dating back to WWI has been chasing the first-look, first shoot rabbit all along. Every fighter ace achieved most of their A2A victories with what you call “sucker punches”. The idea that you would purposely look for an even fight means you have a loser’s mindset, looking for how you can lose intentionally, which is insane from a military standpoint. About 95% of what the F-35 variants can do is not advertised, and it has been under-advertised, kept close to the vest all along, with disinformation leaked (F-16D “dogfight” for example). It’s far more capable of what has been advertised, and they don’t like it when some of the key novel capabilities become apparent.
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  4351. They advertised the F-16 as an affordable lightweight multirole fighter at single digit million unit cost. Then it was a $16 million unit cost, not including ECM, FLIR, or weapons upgrades. Most NATO Vipers flying today have gone through several SLEP or MLU upgrade programs, some of which cost tens of millions each just for the MLU. One of the MLUs was $37 million per bird. The laundry list of upgrades they did with MLU is substantial, basically replacing as many internal systems with Block 50-like systems. They took 2,500 man hours per bird, or about 5 months of work. So if the initial purchasing cost of the F-16A airframe was $16 million back in the early 1980s, several upgrades were made along the way, many out of necessity for safety and constant TCTOs, then you do the MLU for $37 million, not including any pods, then convert to 2021 dollars... $37 million MLU unit upgrade cost in 1997 converted to 2021 dollars = $60.3 million $16 million in 1982 in 2021 dollars = $43.37 million Not including FLIR, ECM, decoy pylons, etc. and you have European F-16As flying today that are $103.6 million airplanes. The “cheap” marketing strategy of the F-16 definitely holds true if you compared it to doing the same thing with the twin-engined F-4 that a lot of nations flew. Most of the F-16 nations flew F-104G Starfighters or F-5As prior to that, and wanted something with capability to defeat the Soviets as the new wave of upgraded MiG-23MFs and emerging MiG-29s hit the stage. But the F-16 has been anything but “cheap”, as you can see. We haven’t even started talking about missiles. A $77.9 million unit cost F-35A is exponentially more capable than any F-16 MLU, which is why you see so many traditional MSIP partner nation Vipers being replaced with F-35As.
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  4366. @Jakob Heinrich F-35A large order just broke $71 million per aircraft, and can do CAS better than the A-10C will ever be able to. I've called in A-10As for CAS, as well as Vipers, and know how bad it sucks to wait for a 285kt slow poke airframe to get to you, vs a fast-mover. F-15Es do CAS much better if you have Troops In Contact that need help NOW, not waiting for 15-45 minutes for them to get to you. An F-35A can get to you within 3-7 minutes over the same distances, depending on whether he needs to take off, or divert from an ISR or other mission profile pattern. JTACS who have worked with everything else and are now working with F-35s on live CAS missions say the amount of SA the F-35 gives them about things around them before they even get there is mind-blowing. They are also able to put precision munitions on enemy TGTs in the area from over the horizon, at night, through bad weather faster than a Strike Eagle or B-1B can, with far superior sensor data about the TGT and the area, while minimizing collateral damage and blue-on-blue. Everything everyone said about the F-35 not being able to do CAS like an A-10 was true, but in ways they didn't realize. It smokes the A-10C at CAS without even needing to get down into the weeds within MANPADS or AAA range. A-10C re-wing is a very costly program, with recent awards to Boeing August 23rd to the tune of $999 million, after they got a $1.1 billion re-wing contract in 2007. The original manufacturer of the A-10, Fairchild, hasn't been a company in decades.
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  4400.  @aviationaerospacechannel5987  IR spectrum is very limited based on conditions especially. US maintained IRST on the F-101B Voodoo, F-102A, F-106A, F-4B, F-4C, TISEO on the F-4E, then didn't use it on the F-15A-D, F-16, F/A-18, but did on the F-14D. I've done fairly detailed analysis on current IRSTs with the math across all the altitude bands, air densities, temperatures, and TGT size/velocity/presentations. Not all airborne TGTs are created equally in IR spectrum. Once you go supersonic, you significantly increase your initial detection range to the latest threat IRST sensors. Stay subsonic and it significantly decreases the detection range and PID, making your Radar and passive RF sensors far more valuable for these tasks. ATF was supposed to have AIRST, but it was cut due to cost spiraling, and JSF of course has EOTS fused with DAS and the RF sensor suite. It's one thing to detect a small fighter-sized TGT, and something entirely different to PID it. PID generally comes from RADAR, whereas JSF use all their sensors in a web with each other to PID in either passive or LPI active modes generally speaking. IFF on the latter 3 teen series with the C models and MLUs was far more operationally-relevant for the time compared to the F-4, especially since they had RF spectrum NCTR capability for BVR. The F/A-18C was more capable in that respect at BVR than an F-14A/B, even with the TCS on the F-14. TCS like TISEO and previous IRSTs were more ideal for PID on large bombers when slaved to the fighter Radar. The tiny window of time available to PID via legacy IRST was extremely limited compared to fire control Radar track combined with AIFF and NCTR features all in RF spectrum. F-15C and F/A-18C had NCTR prior to Desert Storm. We were working on it at Edwards in the late 1980s for F-16C Block 30G, which never got implemented until Block 50 in production. So the late 1980s gave the later teen fighters and F-14D a dual-check NCTR/AIFF capability for at least 2 parameters in RF spectrum. F-35 in IOC had 638 parameters in comparison, while it has extensive IR VLO features.
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  4403.  @extraacct478  Considering how many generations we've been working on VLO technologies, I wouldn't be surprised if they've tackled multi-bandwidth RF better than most can imagine on JSF. When we were on B-1B CTF, they kept the LO features very hush, even from people working on it. Turns out the frontal RCS is smaller than a Viper, which is impressive. I'm not aware of any effort to employ LO on the B-1A, and the podded nacelle configuration changed when they dropped the Mach 2+ requirement, favoring non LoS intake ductwork arrangement to protect the low pressure stage from direct cavity resonance. There's a retired career F-16 FWS Instructor who interviewed dozens of F-35A pilots. They said they can't see each other outside of WVR, but are tracking Low Earth Orbit satellites when they look up. Both F-35 and F-22 pilots report that F-35s are defeating Raptors in Large Force Exercises because of their sensors since 2017. I think the Chinese are farther ahead in LO after the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama/Biden/Hillary gave them access to stuff they had no business even knowing about. One of our friends on B-2 CTF said he was ordered to give access to the cockpit to a female Chinese intelligence officer at ED in the 1990s. She went up in there like a Japanese tourist with her camera. He asked her, "Why is this so interesting to you?" Her: "To use against you, of course!" Bushes are surprisingly-sinophile as well. Neil merged his US Defense Aerospace Holdings firm with his Chinese real estate front in 2019. People at those levels sell access to technology we developed over decades for our defense, and they're selling it to our enemies.
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  4434. Most of what he said has been known since the 1950s, with hundreds of pilots, engineers, police, doctors, and witnesses who are trained observers. They have been reporting visual and radar contacts since at least 1947. Where he misses the boat is terrestrial experimentation with Nikola Tesla's theories on electrogravitic propulsion, which really started in the 1920s and 1930s. Either he isn't being forthright in discussing the applied physics of electrogravitics research here on earth, or he was kept in the dark about it all these years as part of the ET narrative. When you generate your own extremely high electromagnetic field enough to lift you away from another massive gravitational body, you have your own 1g constant. The reference to the structural limits of the F-16 or human physiology are not relevant, because the g is constant for you in the vehicle. This is not aerodynamics, but electromagnetism and gravitational manipulation. Several black USAP sectors of industry and military (not only in the US, but in Russia, Japan, France, Germany, UK, China, and the major industrialized nations) have been working on electrogravitic propulsion throughout most of the 20th Century. Russia even offered to sell one of their vehicles in 1997 and this was shown openly on TV. It was a black orb-shaped craft with pointed nose. Then the story went away. This was during implementation of Nunn-Lugar financing and de-nuclearization of former Soviet states. Anyway, if you have basic mastery of control systems with electrogravitic propulsion, you can perform all of the maneuvers we've seen dating back decades with zero felt g forces by the crew. The pyramid-shaped UAPs even had navigation lights in compliance with air traffic regulations. That was sure considerate of our alien invaders.
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  4441.  @fahadkelantan  So again, without being privileged to how things actually work in a squadron, it’s very easy to read reports and think that FMC means what it says it does. A 90% FMC F-16C is not an actual FMC bird if its ECM pod and LANTIRN Pod (at that time) don’t work. A 1988-1991 90% FMC F-16C without an ECM pod is a limited capability fighter that can’t go near even "low-threat” mobile IADS platforms in Kuwait for the opening of ODS. They were just barely getting LANTIRN at the time and LANTIRN Targeting pods were priority delivered to F-15E community in ODS for the Scud-hunter mission in the West Desert. We worked on both of them before and during ODS at Edwards integrating these systems, so this is where I’m coming from and trying to steer you into reality. You will never see any of this written in Gulf War Air Power Survey, (which I have spent years studying BTW). The most-capable weapons platform in ODS relevant to FLIR/LST-guided LGBs was the F-111F. Your argument is that late 1980s F-15Cs and F-16Cs maintained a higher FMC/MC rate than 2020 F-35As. This would be like saying the dollar was worth more in 1991 than it is today (also true, but not Complete or Relevant). A lot of your problems would be solved if you took a formal critical thinking course and then spent about 5-10 years studying US Air Power, complete with engineering studies. Break rates and FMC/MC rates are 2 different things. I can have a 100% UP bird pre-sortie come back with some kind of failure, so there is a break-rate there. Depending on how fast that is repaired or corrected will affect FMC/MC, but it isn’t break-rate. F-35As have the lowest break-rates, as reported by the actual operational squadrons. A Block 30 or 40 F-16C of that ODS era is not anywhere close to be an operationally-relevant fighter today since those didn’t have any of the CCIP upgrades invested in them at the time. Again, you wouldn’t know this looking at all those reports, but F-16Cs are not even called that anymore in operational squadrons, and have undergone 2 official nomenclature revisions from F-16C to F-16CJ to F-16CM, when talking about Block 40, 42, 50, and 52 Vipers in USAF. Their primary mission set is D-SEAD, taking out enemy SAM sites and radars on the ground. Secondary mission sets are DCA, OCA, Strike, CSAR, and CAS. If they don’t have their Radar GMT/GMTT mode functioning in addition to all the A2A modes, HARM Targeting Pod able to locate threat RF emitters, LITENING FLIR pods working, or centerline ECM pod UP, they aren’t actual FMC for D-SEAD. That same bird could show up at 100% FMC on the squadron maintenance officer report, while the separate shops that never get reported would have the pods all down. Each pod has a separate shop that has never shown up in any FMC/MC rates by DoD. Now let’s assume that all of those systems are actually UP and ready to launch, full weapons suite is GTG, bird tracked an average of 92% FMC over 1 year. You will never get the whole Squadron 92% FMC with all the pods, not even if the aircraft were brand-new. This is the biggest omission from FMC/MC rates. The ones you can read OSINT are almost meaningless, unless your only concern is about the airframes without attached combat systems. A 70% F-35A still has far greater capabilities in terms of operational relevance that can be used by its squadron than that Viper will ever have, no matter how many modifications, millions sunk into it, and new systems are added to it. Each CCIP Viper in USAF currently has well over $103 million sunk into just the airframe, but you never see that reported because it isn’t reported. The USAF Viper fleet consists of several different types of F-16C/D production Blocks, broken down into 2 main groups: F-16C/D Block 30/32 are non-operational squadron Vipers, primarily used as aggressors at Nellis AFB and other locations for Large Force Exercises. They have zero FLIR, HARM Targeting, or AIFF capabilities and have older APG-68(V) Radars sufficient for emulating Russian threat. F-16C/D Block 40/42/50/52 are actually F-16CMs brought up to CCIP standard with full HARM, AIFF, GPS, JDAM, FLIR/LST Pod, and APG-68(V)9 Radars (currently being upgraded to SABR AESA Radars for 350 CCIP Vipers), along with Auto-GCAS. These are the actual operational squadron Vipers that get used overseas, while the Block 30/32s will never go feet-wet again in their careers. None of this shows up in the USAF fleet FMC/MC rates, just an average of the rates for airframe/engine only regardless if they are low-capability/non-deployable older Block jets, versus newer ones. The newer CCIP Vipers have brought the FMC/MC rates down in many ways because they have more things to go wrong with them, even without the attached pods. Their Radar mode and AIFF capabilities alone invite more fault opportunities when they are tested. With F-35s, you can’t hide any of this because of all of those types of systems are integrated into the airframe. If the EOTS doesn’t work, that’s a non-FMC F-35 but still MC. Here’s where it gets interesting though. That same F-35A with a down EOTS is more capable at using IR spectrum sensors for targeting than the full-up F-16CM is with all of its pods working, because that F-35 gets interleaved sensor data from its wingmen and its other 6 IR sensors fused through its brain, so the pilot still sees the same targeting cueing for his weapons. Everything I’m telling is real-deal ground truth regarding these programs, that you could never read or find in a DoD report because the people compiling the reports don’t see it from the squadron-level and actual air planner perspectives. They can compile and regurgitate raw numbers, but they don’t mean anything unless you really know what you’re looking at. If you talked to maintenance officers who oversee all the things I’m telling you, they will confirm the truth therein. High threat WEZs are public information due to modern civilian satellite capabilities, if you know what you’re looking at. You don’t fly near them in any 4.5 Gen fighter unless you want a double digit SAM volley headed your way with multiple guidance methods being employed. Meanwhile, “unidentified” aircraft make strikes deep within Syria on a regular basis. And finally, notice how you took this to a personal level without being even the least-informed from actual experience with these programs, and have called me a racist, conspiratorial cult member, fascist, like a WWII era dictator, etc. It doesn’t matter if I was all those things or not, they have nothing to do with the facts being discussed. Either the factual claims I have made are real, or they aren’t. Since they are based on the better part of 5 decades in the aerospace and defense industry (not Lockheed) with very specific knowledge relevant to the programs being discussed, you might want to consider what I’m saying and step back before getting ahead of yourself in a field you have zero relevant knowledge or experience in. Please, by all means be skeptical of everything I say, but be prepared to learn that everything I’m saying is actually correct and the things you’re concluding are simply erroneous and not well-supported at all.
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  4479.  @GreenBlueWalkthrough  You need a lot of radars to survive the initial slaughter from cruise and stand-off missiles. If you’re referring to the ADS-B stunt that Hensoldt did, no. Let’s pretend that you link a vast network of radars together, and now you fire a missile at what you thought was a valid radar track against an unidentified TGT that decided to not use any of its next generation EW suite against you. As your SAMs get closer to the unidentified TGT, talk yourself through the applied radar physics of a narrow seeker head working in high X-band and how it will detect the target for terminal phase guidance. Once you realize that doesn’t work, talk yourself trying to apply one of the other missile guidance modes, again assuming that no Digital Waveform Manipulation is happening from the hapless fighter. If you say IR seeker, now go and do some research on the IR signature reduction measures on JSF. If you say CLOS guidance, how will the ground controllers know when it’s time to detonate? You’ll start to understand how insidious VLO technology is, and that it goes far beyond what you might have expected. Most of the 4th Gen fighters can out-maneuver the F-16 in several regimes of flight. F-15 out-classes it across the board above FL250. Hornet has always had way better nose authority. Tomcat could out-turn it across the flight regime but would lose the vertical fight. Typhoon and Rafale can rape the Viper across the regime at all altitudes. MiG-29 had better nose authority like a Hornet, but better acceleration than a Hornet. This is all with slick airframes, which nobody has ever employed the Viper with really. In USAF, they’re always carrying EFTs, ECM pods, FLIR, pylons, mission-relevant weapons on only 2 stations 4 & 6, and can’t jettison the ECM pod, SNIPER or LITENING POD, or HARM Targeting Pod on F-16CMs. Even if you E-Jett the HARMS or GBUs and 2x 370 Gal EFTs, you’re stuck with all the pylons, centerline ECM, multimillion dollar FLIR and HARM pods. Ever see one of those do BFM? Not so maneuverable anymore. Meanwhile, an F-35A with full internal weapons can smoke a relatively clean Viper that the USAF and allies will never fly on real missions that way. Even with older, lighter Block 30 Vipers that basically are BFM machines. There are some very good and detailed accounts of this from high hour Norwegian Viper pilots who are now flying F-35As. Even when the F-35A was limited to 3i flight control laws with 7g restrictions, they were humiliating Red Air in no-holds barred BFM. F-35A is now 9g rated. The F-35A behaves more like a mix of the Viper and Hornet in BFM, with the positives of both, without the weakness of them. F-16 weakness is ITR, whereas Hornet is STR. F-35A has ITR like a Hornet, and can energy-fight like a Viper. Moreover, the pilot doesn’t lose sight in numeral merges, perch defensive, line abreast butterfly, scissors, or hi-lo merges because of the DAS and helmet. A lot of new pilots immediately lose the fight in neutral merges because they aren’t accustomed to quickly gaining rear quadrant field of view and acquisition of their opponent. With the F-35 DAS and helmet, a new pilot has a considerable advantage over a more experienced pilot right out of the gate. Again, this doesn’t matter because everyone and their poor nation brother is using helmet-cued HOBS missiles, many of which have over-the-shoulder Lock After Launch capability. So fighter pilots have been avoiding merges as a rule for decades now primarily because of that and the layer of BVR missiles they can expect to face before that. F-35 just sees all well before anything can get close to it, unless you have equal or better stealth, which not even the Raptor has. The Fox 2 HOBS fight in JSF is unfair since F-35 IR signature from all aspects is extremely cold, so any IR seeker missile and helmet-cueing don’t work even WVR. In a crowded battlespace, the number of TGTs falling from the sky within the first hour will be alarming to the threat forces, while their air bases are simultaneously destroyed with no divert airfields for them to recover on. Israelis have already used EW features in the F-35I to misdirect Syrian SAM units to shoot-down a Russian dedicated Electronic Warfare aircraft and all its crew. This is after Syrians using S-200 and S-300 IADS have fired over 100 SAMs into the air hoping to connect with F-35s, while the F-35s destroy those SAM sites in quick retaliation and suffer no losses.
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  4489.  @aritakalo8011  In modern warfare, the pace of operations happens much faster than Talvisota and Jaktosota, and Finland currently possesses offensive capabilities that shift the penalties of Russian first strike courses of action unfavorably on them. A protracted Russian Air campaign would have to gamble with the destruction of their regional air force bases and critical population center of Saint Petersburg, which are all currently within range of F/A-18C and JASSM. Finland was the first foreign nation to get JASSM. It is more difficult to maintain the Hornet from dispersed airfields than it is even the JSF-B. The basic flight systems, airframe, flight control system, environmental and electrical, radar, and sensors are easier to maintain on the JSF family. The main, most costly aspect of mx on it is the RAM. Since Lot 4 (we're in Lot 14 or more now), RAM is applied via CNC periodically. The USAF and Norwegian AF have been executing disbursed operations for years now. Most mx is done out of a backpack. The JSF uses self-contained electrohydrostatic actuators in its DFLCS, which is more robust than any other FLCS in operation. The F135 motor is proving to be the most reliable, most powerful fighter engine ever built. Maintainers in the operational squadrons complain that they don't get their hands dirty like on the F-16. Miles of copper wiring found on 4th Gen jets have been replaced by fiber-optic line, with closed loop avionics architecture fused through a quad redundant central brain, so in terms of how the F-35 is laid out, it is simpler compared to legacy federated systems fighters like the Hornet, F-16, Gripen, EF, etc. This is one of the several overlooked aspects of JSF. Then look at critical sensor systems that have to be attached to fighters like the Gripen, EF, or Rafale, with separate power, cooling, and processing considerations from a mx standpoint. Is that dispursed crew going to be able to pull a FLIR/LST pod, troubleshoot/diagnose/repair it, then re-attach it for the next sortie? How about ECM or recce? On F-35, these systems are each a generational leap above legacy pods, while integrated not only into the airframe, power, and coolant architecture, but into every other sensor via fiber optics and the super-computing CIP. If there are any faults, the systems tell on themselves to the mx crew before the aircraft even lands. During a mission, if one of these sensors is inoperable, the pilot still has the same picture of the battlespace because other sensors on his and other aircraft pick up the slack. The Finnish concept of fighting a totally defensive air campaign was thrown out the window many years ago when FaF converted its fleet of F-18Cs to F/A-18Cs, and expanded many of the air-to-surface capes of the Hornet. JSF would bring strategic deep penetration strike capabilities to Finland, including critical political/economic/military nodes in Moscow. It offers OCA fighter-sweep options where all of Saint Petersburg, Murmansk, and even Moscow fighter regiments are unsafe. JSF allows Finland to unleash an offensive air campaign that would render every airfield, POL bunker, aerial munitions supply bunker, air traffic control center, naval yard, rail yard, power station generators, C4 nodes, and population centers within the vast combat radius of JSF-A vulnerable to VLO precision strikes. It provides Finland a long, pointy spear to deter any aggression from Russia, rather than invite it with 4th Gen airframes confined to DCA in the obsolete concept of delayed losing as you describe. Any time Russian planners think about flipping that switch, they have to consider the consequences of JSF deep penetration and what they are willing to sacrifice. "Do we risk loss of 6th Air Forces critical facilities and all aircraft on the ground? What if they take out the power stations to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Murmansk in the dead of winter? How many Super Flankers would we lose? What submarines are currently in overhaul or in-port?" These are the questions JSF forces onto the table. None of these are really a concern much more than the current Hornet/JASSM threat with Gripen E/F. The most remote capability increase in that aspect comes from Rafale F4, and it is nowhere near as capable as JSF since it has no VLO.
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  4491.  @filibertkraxner305  A clean Gripen E with no weapons or pods with internal fuel only has one of the most pathetic thrust/weight ratios of any current production fighter. Empty weight: 17,600lbs Internal Fuel: 7,500lbs Max thrust in AB: 22,000lb Now add weapons and pods. It's embarrassing that someone would even bring up its basic flight performance, especially up against Super Flankers, the Typhoon, Rafale, or F-35A. Gripen even with the impressive performance of the GE F414 is under-powered. Combat take-off weight exceeds max thrust considerably placing it into 3rd Generation fighter metrics. You're looking at .71 T/W ratio on take-off with 5,000lbs of external stores. The Super Flankers, Typhoon, Rafale, and F-35A smoke the Gripen E T/W ratio if you do the math. Climb rate is important because of the contrail band. Your contrails can be seen visually at long range, so the sooner you get above them, the more survivable and lethal you are. That presents another problem for the 4.5 Gen entrants. When combat-configured with external stores, they all feel sluggish with one exceptional design: the Flanker. Even Typhoons, with their impressive excess thrust and delta wing "wheeze" once you start getting into the higher altitude bands. The Su-27/30/35 loves to be up there, flies like a sled, as long as they only load about half of its A2A missiles, focusing on the tunnel and a few wing stations. There is video of an intercept where the Flanker pilots flying next to NATO fighters pulls up alongside them, deploys the air brake, then accelerates ahead of them with all kinds of excess thrust showing how he has an unfair kinematic advantage at that altitude even with the brake deployed. If you get into a BVR missile exchange with Super Flankers on 4th Gen terms, they will have the kinematic and magazine depth advantages. Their main weakness has been lack of R-77 proliferation though, but this is changing as we speak. The moment Gripen E is detected, it is immediately at a disadvantage in a Felon/Flanker threat environment.
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  4492.  @aritakalo8011  I'm not talking about taking out all of Russia, I'm talking about the same thing, but instead of sabotaging critical infrastructure in Finland after a strategic loss, using the threat of inflicting strategic destruction of critical nodes in Russia. Russia isn't a monolithic force structure that can allocate all its limited combat system resources to the Saint Petersburg and Murmansk regions. They have to prop up Air Defense forces oriented to central Europe, Caucasus, Ukraine, Black Sea, China, Japan, and the Arctic. They have more borders and airspace to cover than any nation when looking at air defense. If you take out static and mobile radar platforms in the Saint Petersburg district, they can't magically spawn new ones from reserves. Their main semiconductor company went bankrupt in late 2019, and modern IADS systems need the latest semiconductor TRMs and boards. The F-35 loves geolocating mobile IADS platforms and destroying them. The point is that Russia will have to play a guessing game that asks the questions: "If we do X, will they saturate-strike Murmansk, take out 6th Air Forces base and fighters, or salvo-strike the Kremlin with stand-off weapons?" JSF is the only option that brings that dynamic to the strategic picture. You can disburse JSF all you want with less mx demand than the current F/A-18C w/MSA radar and bolt-on pods. You don't even need to crack open the radome on JSF throughout its service life because it's an AESA, and they integrated radar component access panels into the nose landing gear doors. When gear are down, you have access to not only the back-end power amps, filters, and coolant connections, but the guts to the EOTS as well. You have single engine that is a huge generational leap ahead of the US GE F414 in the Gripen. These are the only 2 single engine contenders for H-X. You don't want to have a force structure that invites Sukhois to fly wherever they want. You want them to truly be afraid of entering Finnish airspace and have to wonder if they will even have a divert base if they survive the skirmish area. Russians train to divert to nearby highways, but this is extremely difficult in extreme cold conditions and poor visibility-another area where the F-35 has an advantage over all the competition. Taking off, flying, and landing the F-35 is far easier than legacy fighters since it auto-configures and has spherical SA with regard to the horizon, day/night/inclimate weather.
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  4499.  @jeremygilbert7190  It is physically impossible to create the wounding effects and head behavior we see in Zapruder with a rear shot. I’ve been in the field of ballistics for over 40 years now, to include funded research in both projectile behavior, terminal performance from a combat trauma management perspective with access to volumes of forensic data, and hands-on live tissue studies with animals. I have also seen people shot in the right forehead with high velocity rifle fire and was able to study post-mortem photographs of their injuries. Additionally, I have lost track of how many rifle projectiles I have watched in real-time through optics impacting hard and soft targets, as well as review of high-speed photography videos. In particular, I am especially versed in 6.5mm projectile behavior, having studied them for many years, ranging from light varmint to heavy-for-caliber high SD bullets fired from the 6.5x52, 6.5x54 Mannlicher Shoenauer, 6.5x55 Mauser, 6.5x284, 6.5 Grendel, .260 Remington, 6.5 Creedmoor, .264 Win Mag, and 6.5mm Rem Mag. If someone tells you that what you see in Zapruder is from a rear entrance to JFK’s head, then they have no credibility from a terminal ballistics perspective. Additionally, the Parkland doctors all said that it was an entrance wound to his forehead/hairline with a large exit in the rear of Kennedy’s head. There literally isn’t any evidence from Zapruder or Parkland that supports a rear entrance. The Parkland doctors were threatened with loss of credentials if they wrote or talked about this. The doctor who did the threatening said he felt it was unethical to capitalize off any books or public statements about the incident. There was way more than one witness of the men who were setting up behind the fence. Multiple rail workers and bystanders saw the men, and others saw muzzle report and smoke. Several people charged up the hill to go see who the perpetrators were, and were confronted by men posing as SS agents or police.
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  4500.  @jetcat132  An unidentified man in a suit and hat picked up a bullet from the South side of Elm St, and was photographed doing so. You can see photos of that. The whole crime scene was left open to anyone and was contaminated out of the gate. The initial FBI Report was a problem for Hoover and the WC because it established correctly at least 4 shots. They were Dallas field agents gathering raw evidence without concern for the narrative. Once WC nailed-down only 3 spent cases and the Carcano that had to have been fired by Oswald alone, the WC staffers had major problems on their hands: The initial story ignored James Tague entirely, but local news kept running stories on it since he was an eye witness and 3rd victim of minor GSW fragmentation, pointed out to him by a Dallas cop witness. That shot missed the limo entirely, which is odd. Even with the Carcano that couldn't be zeroed, it was about 5" right and 5" up Point of Impact at that range. If you were aiming at JFK's head, the impact would go somewhere between Nellie and Gov Connally's jump seats. If you yanked the shot low, it would impact the trunk and penetrate through Kennedy's back. Missing the car entirely is over 25 mils off target. The rifle's POI was off by ~ 2 mils right, ~2 mils up. 1 mil is 3.6" at 100yds for reference. That forced the WC staffers to have to take the initial FBI report and invalidate it, then try to find a way to compress the 4 shots into 3. This created 2 magic bullets, not one. CE 399 has been the crux of endless argument for 60 years. But the bullet that hit JFK's head is even more of a problem. X-rays show tiny lead fragmentation in the front of his skull and residual brain matter, with a 6.5mm diameter portion of a bullet in the rear. CE 567 and the other fragment comprise the nose and tail end of the bullet, which WC says were found in the front of the limo. Problem is, lead showering or fragmentation happens immediately after the entrance and those fragments don't penetrate as much due to low mass. Larger fragments and portions of the bullet penetrate deeper. The nose and tail should not be on totally opposite sides of the mid section, which was shown on X-ray to be in the rear. Also, if the entrance was at the inferior right occipital region, the bullet shouldn't exit the R parietal side at a 90° angle, and if it had, those fragments would have flown out onto Elm St. The totality of the evidence points to a R frontal entrance at the hairline as explained by Parkland ER doctors, with a large exit wound in the occipital region as they also described. WC staffers like Arlen Specter had to massage all this data into 2 magic bullet theories. This is one of the main chaffing points for 3 of the WC commissioners themselves. They just didn't believe it because they knew the evidence didn't match the conclusions.
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  4506.  @DaRkLoRd-rc5yu  6 months mandatory conscription. Forget what is being portrayed in the Western media a bit and see it from the Russian perspective. Putin isn't getting his information from Western News. Russia seeded Finland with spies since the 1990s, who are reporting regularly how things are in Finland: where the F/A-18C/Ds are, the status of viable drop zones and Helicopter Landing Zones, trucking routes, Finnish military bases, economy, gas station prices, grocery store stocking cycles, train services, power and water stations, locations and habits of Ministers of Defence, Parliament, university professors, etc. One thing we noticed was that Russians immediately began buying property next to Finnish military bases already in the 1990s. The plans to invade Finland have been ongoing for the past 2 decades. Putin sees a modern Finland with only 5.6 million people who his intelligence staff are reporting on regularly. Ukraine had 43 million people before he invaded in February. Putin isn't looking at Finland or Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics like the West sees them. He sees inevitable victory, thinking that his success in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Georgia, and Donbas will be repeated with good planning, subterfuge, and military execution. The failure of his Generals to capture Kiev is their fault, not his. He gave them everything they needed to win, and they failed Russia, so he reoriented them to Donbas. That's how Putin is seeing this. In his mind, Finland is fairly easy to take. He can rain Iskander missiles on the critical military nodes, and obliterate Helsinki if Finland puts up a fight. He might be hesitant to commit naval forces though, given the losses he has experienced in the Black Sea and Finland's anti-ship capabilities, but his cruise missile attacks have been devastating on a much larger Ukraine, already displacing more Ukrainian civilians than the entirety of Finland's population.
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  4527.  @lvd8122  It's a hybrid where various factions got major votes on what would be taught and how, none of which are the parents. I. You have the historical Prussian reforms where after they were conquered by Napoleon in 1806, saw that they needed some major changes to their society. Compulsory schooling with smaller classrooms and group-think training were part of the reforms. (They used to have massive darkly-lit factories with rows of tables where the instructor would walk up and down, dictating lessons and exercises. This was shifted to a "smaller" 30 student classroom where the teacher could interact more with students who had questions, but it was still a one-way information flow through a bottleneck. The Prussian reforms were observed and lauded by many thinkers in the US, seemingly-validated after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 where Prussia and Southern Germanic tribal areas defeated the French, then took over much of France. The US Command and Staff General College even adopted Prussian Army theories and officer training after many years of focusing on Napoleonic theory. The reduced classroom size and lecture method live on to this very day from these reforms. II. Next would be the Kindergarten movement started by Fredrick Fröbel in the Prussian Kingdom from 1816-1851, who lost his mother very early and was neglected by his father, so he spent time playing around the large estate garden with friends, looking at nature, and just being free. His attempt to compensate for lack of a mother was institutionalized into a system where young female teachers lead small groups of children in outdoor activities like nature study and dancing, with some indoor shape-manipulation and "Fröbel's gifts" exercises in spatial discovery. Kindergarten programs are largely ignorant of these methods and history, and merely regress into a preparatory elementary school experience at an earlier age with simple tasks that can all be done easily at home. III. Then there is the late 1800s John Dewey psychological conditioning method where the classroom and school are supposed to be a model for the "new social order", with no real emphasis on learning classical subjects or any relevant skills, but where children are surrendered to the state to be conditioned as collectivist social justice warriors by "prophet teachers ushering in the true kingdom of God". He was an atheist, self-proclaimed psychologist, with a feminist wife who saw the minds of youth as the perfect tapestry for his vision of a society run according to Marxist and Darwinian principles. IV. As the industrial era entered its higher efficiency manufacturing facilities in the US, the corporatists with their heavy influence on the House and Senate drove a more dumbed-down society of worker-consumers. Their radio and later TV ads emphasized parental compliance to whatever back-to-school trend was in fashion, with the unspoken reality that your child will be bullied if they don't have the latest styles. This was true with lunch boxes, bicycles, clothes, and later with backpacks, shoes, cars, and now with cell phones. The people determining what was in style worked from glass towers in New York, or filming studios in Hollywood. Because people are trained to think myopically, where one simply answer nicely wraps up the complex subject they are trying to understand, you'll often hear people refer to school as just a factory worker training program driven by big business kleptocrats, or a Marxist indoctrination center teaching anti-religious and communist political ideologies. All of these are true and more when you dive deep after asking a series of questions throughout your life, then having the perseverance to study and find those answers. We have a compulsory Prussian reformist, Fröbelian childhood abandonment, Dewinian-Darwinian-Marxist, Kelptocrat-consumerist hybrid system of schooling that somehow mixed together in this unique American experience of individual liberty and family values, which have been pushed aside for the monster to consume us.
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  4542. Players and motives: Putin: Reestablish the Czarist and Soviet era territories held by Russia. Ukraine: Assert their sovereignty and right to determine their own future without Russian interference. Poland and smaller Eastern European nations: Keep this fight away from their borders as long as possible, continue to build their defense forces, and weaken the Russian forces by proxy. Central Europe: Keep this war from spreading into Eastern Europe and affecting their borders, economies, and trade. United States: Contain the war in Ukraine so that it doesn’t spread into Europe and destabilize the European security structure, economies, and trade. Biden: Hide the fact he’s been on Soviet payroll since 1972, while appearing to support Ukraine. Obama underlings in the WH: Slow-roll the US support to Ukraine to allow Putin to be successful. US DoD: Provide enough material to contain Russian forces and attrit them so they aren’t capable of invading Europe any further, while trying to re-orient the force to the Pacific theater threats from China, and fund new weapons systems that have been in development for many years. Try to improve recruiting and retention. China: Attempt to contain economic stagnation and collapse in real estate and finance sectors, while prepping for integration of Taiwan through political subterfuge, followed by military intervention. Iran: Take advantage of chaos in order to upgrade the aging Iranian Air Force with help from Russia. Fund surrogate Islamic maniacs in the Middle East to knock the US and Israel off base.
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  4545.  @yoloman3607  Long range IR missiles face an extremely basic engineering challenge, which is why you don’t see them. Aerodynamic heating of the leading surface just happens to be the seeker head. The seeker head needs to be relatively cool, even with digital imaging IR. The physical properties of the very sensitive seeker head elements change when subjected to Mach 4, then Mach 3 cruising speeds. They are useless when they arrive even if you shielded the seeker and jettisoned the shield, because of IR signature stealth. There’s an Australian Air Force Hornet pilot who was flying exchange in the US in F-15Cs with the new AESA, JHMCS helmet sight, and Captive AIM-9 HOBS missiles as an aggressor out of Nellis. He said even in within visual range, he could try to place the reticle inside the helmet on the F-22A, and it would not acquire it with the CATM-9 uncaged in HOBS. Remember, that’s in WVR with him visually-acquiring the TGT, but can’t get either system to see the F-22A. IR and IIR missiles are next-to-useless against F-22A and F-35 series. Russians realized this kinda late in the development of the Su-57, when they adjusted the airframe to include thermal blankets over the engine cowlings, which then forces re-design on the Izdeliye-30 motors because the thermal blankets are cooking the engines in the cowlings. Integrating an airframe for IR VLO is not as simple as slapping thermal blankets around the motors, and the US has been developing this technology since the 1970s. Good luck to everyone else trying to catch up.
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  4563.  @wildripeach1  There are at least 4 different IR signature reduction layers to JSF. If you look at the rear where the engine nozzle normally joins the nacelle, there is a large circumferential sawtooth gap there for a large air cavity to allow cool airflow mass to pass over the nozzle and plume. Inside the afterburner flame-holder array, the spars are angled to deflect RF so the rear RCS is actually extremely small. The serendipity of the angled spars for IR sig is that the plume spirals and diffuses very coherently with the cool air flowing over it. There are also heat exchangers integrated into the low pressure section of the initial bypass fan on the motor, with fuel msss used to heat-sink the thermal-loaded leading edges from aerodynamic friction, as well as power amplifiers and other E&E internal heat-generating systems. On top of all that, there is something else integrated with another signature reduction aspect of the airframe that has already evolved from about 10 lots ago. They took IR signature reduction techniques from F-22 & improved on them. F-22 already can't be acquired with Helmet-cued HOBS missiles, so JSF is also extremely survivable in that space as well. IRSTs are passive so we don't normally refer to them that way, as it's a given. While an advanced IRST might see a fighter-sized front aspect airborne TGT at ~50km in optimal conditions (already too late for certain BVR missile NEZ parameters), you will never see an F-35 or F-22 at 50km frontal due to the IR sig reduction. You'd be lucky to get a low contrast register at 15km, which is WVR. For rear aspect, you'd think it would really bloom, but neither of them do. They are extremely cold IR targets. By the time your practical IRST range comes into play, you're long-dead. "Must fix" deficiencies get fixed. No weapons program is static. By the time you read about it, it's a distant memory for developmental test folks. The delamination incident happened on 1 early F-35B and was corrected. Never happened before or since. Speed doesn't really matter if you have first-look, first-shoot and the threat thinks they're closing on good solutions when in-fact, they're flying into an even worse NEZ. Remember, JSF and F-22 can manipulate their RCS values, go hot and cold in RF emissions, cooperatively. Any Gripen pilot who is honest will tell you they would hate to face that. As to performance, Gripen response to their abysmal thrust/weight is that it doesn't matter with Helmet-cued HOBS that can launch all-aspect at 15km. The tactics are totally different in 5th Gen platforms, and non-VLO threats die the same way, blind and unaware of what's around them until too late.
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  4576.  @211steelman  Typically Republicans have been the aggressive foreign policy/military wing of Congress against foreign enemies, with generations of deployment experience in Europe, Asia, and the ME. Democrats with CPUSA and the Democratic Socialists of America have not only been in league with the USSR and Russia, but 420 of them have had their campaigns funded through Russian fronts like Council for a Livable World. Guess who got into the Senate in 1972 with CFALW money? You start to see it all make sense when you realize Putin was behind Elena Baturina wiring $3.5 million to Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca shell corp in February of 2014, right before Putin lost his puppet Yanukovych in Kiev in March. That’s when Putin invaded Donbas, annexed Crimea, and did everything in his power to stop Ukrainian investigators from uncovering how he had been robbing Ukraine through Burisma. Then Hunter ended up on the board of Burisma in May, 2014. The new Ukrainian President Poroshenko had his close friend lead the new investigation into Burisma and other corruption cases, and multiple assassination attempts were launched against him, Viktor Shokin. VP Biden called for Poroshenko to fire Shokin, with threat of the US withholding $1 Billion in aid money. The IMF and EU also voiced strong opposition to Shokin, because he had all the files on how Russian fronts were selling Ukrainian girls to all sorts of billionaires and banking class Barrons in Europe all these years for vast money flowing into Russian oligarch coffers, who then have to pay Putin corruptsia taxes. Americans in the intel community have witnessed these things going on for decades, only to be silenced by NDAs. But the idea that Democrats are on the right side of all this and Republicans are somehow in bed with Russia is one of the most retarded things I’ve witnessed over the past 5 decades.
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  4577.  @baronvonlimbourgh1716  Putin had planned to take Ukraine and every other former Russian empire and Soviet sphere territory back when he assumed office in 2000. I learned about this plan in the early 2000s from a Russian Deputy within the Foreign Ministry. My assessment was that he was an old Soviet blowhard, but I didn’t write it off entirely because it was within the historical profile of Russia (my family is partially from Finland.). Ukraine is an extremely high-value territory and industry/resource-rich geography that Russia sees as an imperative to control. Russia did have a puppet named Yanukovych in Kiev from 2010-2014, until he was ousted by 79% of Ukrainian people with the Euromaiden protests. That’s when Putin invaded Donbas and annexed Crimea. Ukraine had 13 of the Soviet naval yards in the Soviet times. Russia lacks warmwater ports if you look at their terrible geography. They are basically isolated and land-locked effectively. Several of their main oil/NG pipelines run through Ukraine into Europe as well. Ukraine had rediscovered vast oil fields near Kharkiv and off the coast of Odessa, which meant they would have been able to explore, extract, and supply Europe in the long run, bypassing Russia as a source for the European market. You start to see why Putin did what he did. He also used a lot of Donbas region ethnic Russians to do much of the fighting and dying, along with Chechens, Mobniks from hinterlands, and Wagner mercenaries so the population centers in Russia don’t see or feel the losses of so many soldiers. Putin still has plenty of soldiers to throw at the real fight, which will be in Poland, the Baltics, and Finland. That has been his plan since 2000.
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  4611.  @birrextio6544  F-35 takes off from short runway as well, since it has far better T/W than the Gripen E. Gripen E has the lowest T/W of any production fighter right now, but due to being a delta wing, can get airborne very quickly. It’s also lightweight with the smallest payload of any Western production fighter on the market right now. Canada doesn’t have a disbursed base requirement that I’m aware of within NORAD, but might on European deployments. The Baby Hornet does that well, as does the F-35A. USAF has been doing disbursed base FARP exercises with operational F-35As but with a different FARP posture, but still very fast turnaround and re-arm. The big mission set for Canada is the NORAD defense and intercept profile. The best airframe for this would be the F-22, but Canada can’t afford that and it was shut down by enemies within the US government, including Bush/Rumsfeld/Gates and Obama/Gates. F-35 is the next best thing with better SA networked with USAF Alaska and US Air National Guard New Hampshire. Look at a NORAD theater map and see where Alaska and New Hampshire are. Now see all the space that is missing because Canada doesn’t have F-35s yet. That’s not an accident, and is the main reason Trudeau was propped up by Moscow to delay Canada’s fighter acquisition of F-35s. The JSF/MADL net provides theater ballistic missile warning and low earth orbit satellite detection and tracking. That’s literally why Trudeau ran on an anti-F-35 political promise and got foreign backing to get into the PM slot, with a willing parliament filled with Canada’s Liberal political party.
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  4616.  @cchrizzy219  As I have studied indigenous peoples of North America for decades, the history becomes more complex. We have the ancient Adena and Hopewell peoples of the Eastern Woodland and Mississippi regions, who I believe came from the Middle East at different times by boat. Adena date back to right after the Tower of Babel, so they weren't walking that far. Hopewell arrived near Florida/Georgia when the Mississippi Delta was more like a huge bay area in a post-glacial period of significant water bodies in North America that have since subsided. We have very detailed geological records of the Mississippi though, due to sedentary fluctuations like a snake, leaving deposits in a pattern that acts as a calendar. The Adena and Hopewell built a lot of structures with orientation to the stars. The vast river network promoted fast travel and trade, with lots of copper, furs, timber, and fairly advanced workmanship in goods. They were far more advanced than most historians give them credit. There are baptismal fonts with the water still running in a hidden subterranean temple in the hills of Pennsylvania, for example. Pyramids in Illinois at Cahokia Mounds, Jewish structures that pre-date European exploration, Ten Commandments inscribed on a boulder in New Mexico pre-Columbus, the Bat Creek Stone with ancient Phonecian/Hebrew inscribed on it "For the Jews", and strange things like that. There's also evidence of regular trade between Mississippi and Mexico/Guatemala due to specific pigments that came from Central America. It also looks like Chinese came by ship to Central America on several colonizations and voyages. The traditional history we've been told is really silky, about cavemen walking across the Bering Strait. Why walk when you can sail?
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  4649. A woman would not be able to do the job we did in Recon or on Sniper teams. The Russians employed women in WWII because they were running out of young male bodies at alarming rates, but they never carried the amount of gear that US Snipers carry. If you ever look at a mission ruck, it will crush your soul to lift it, let alone carry it all day, all night, day-after-day. It’s just not a reality for the weak. I never met a female soldier who could even draw certain weapons from the arms room (Mk.19, M2 .50 BMG). The weight of several of the crew-served weapons exceeds women’s upper body strength. Just to load those weapons onto vehicles is beyond what I’ve seen any female soldier be able to do.  For the Sniper skill set, if you look at movement, hide site construction, living in a hide (not shown in this short video), working out of it, or supporting the line companies with advanced TGT Recce, humping alongside the support-by-fire position guys on gun teams, and doing general light infantry work, it’s just not for most men, let alone women. A great example of all this is the fact that you don’t see women clamoring to or being steered into 11C MOS (Mortarman). Those were the only dudes I saw who had as heavy rucks as ours. Imagine strapping a mortar base plate to the outside of your ruck, while also having to carry rounds, the tripod, firing tables, sector stakes, radios, batteries, water, broken-down meals, and no room for personal gear. On top of that, line dogs will have to carry mortar rounds and drop them off at the mortar position before moving into position before actions-on. A lot of times, the line platoons will not pick up their mortar rounds because of the pace of the movement, so the mortar guys get stuck with all the additional rounds. It freaking blows, but men have performed this type of extreme endurance work over the centuries. Women and weaker males just can’t do it. If you look at rucks carried by infantry, combat engineers, combat medics, snipers, mortarmen, and RTOs, you would be setting a unit up for complete failure if you relied on weak males and women to do those duty positions. It’s not bigotry or anything like that, just the brutal, harsh reality of extreme physical pain that only a small number of people can endure and excel at.
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  4678. For starters, there isn’t a VSTOL JSF variant, but a STOVL variant with the F-35B, which the USMC, USAF, RAF, and RN began research on initially back in 1983 with the genesis of the SSF and ASTOVL programs. All 4 of those services were interested in a Supersonic STOVL Fighter due to basing considerations in a degraded environment after incoming cruise missiles and TBMs targeting runways in Europe and PACOM. UK Royal Navy and USMC were also requesting this capability for deployment off of smaller carriers in the same fashion as the Harrier, so there are two different types of basing options as the foundation for SSF and ASTOVL. If we had allowed ASTOVL/SSF to be a separate program with separate sensors, propulsion, and subsystems, then you’re looking at more developmental, acquisition, maintenance, and operational costs. Since there was so much overlap between CALF, A/F-X, ASTOVL, SSF, Agile Falcon, and MRF, Congress was not going to fund 6 different programs for 3 services. That would have really been a financial disaster in the making. Great examples of why pursuing even a separate ASTOVL/SSV program would have cost more in every respect include answers to the following questions: 1. What radar would you use to replace and improve upon the performance of the AV-8B+ with the APG-65? 2. What engine would you use to meet the performance and bring-back requirements for ASTOVL? 3. What IR sensors would you use? 4. What avionics core processor would you use? 5. What flight control system? 6. What cockpit and Man-Machine Interface? If any answers are different from APG-81, F135-PW-400, EOTS, DAS, etc., talk yourself through the multi-billion dollar RDT&E process for each of those systems. The number one performance requirement that drove the design of all 3 JSF variants was combat radius/range. All 3 JSF variants exceed the combat radius of the 4th gen aircraft they replace by significant margins, and the shortest-legged JSF, the F-35B, still has roughly the same internal fuel of an F/A-18F Super Hornet. The F-35C exceeds the combat radius of the F-14D with 2 tanks by 100nm. The F-35A exceeds the radii of all 4th Gen TACAIR platforms in the USAF. I also don’t accept the premise that the USMC doesn’t need [fill in the blank]. The USMC is no longer the WWII conceptual maritime assault force, because technology has facilitated more aggressive thinking in their organizational structure. We should advocate for a more capable USMC, not pigeon-hole them into something that other services think they should be. The information warfare directed against JSF is coming from our adversaries, who drive messaging for our corporate media. It worked against the F-22 (which was originally planned at 750 units and never made it to full rate production), and they are now hammering it even more since they have a traitor in the White House again, who got into the US Senate via a Soviet program disguised through the Council for a Livable World in 1972. The last thing you ever want to do is rely on the bantering of the presstitutes for any information about aviation, defense, current events, or anything for that matter.
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  4689.  @rob737700  The entire US media was co-opted by the Soviets in the 1950s, by inserting their propaganda campaign into the CIA’s attempt to influence media in favor of the US to counter the Soviet IOJ, which was beating us in that department. Once the Soviets found out about Mockingbird, they took it over from within the CIA, with assistance from their assets in academia, the State Department, and DoD. So any major successful US defense program that sets them off-balance will be allowed to go through its development cycle where they can let us do all the RDT&E work that they can’t afford to do, don’t have the facilities for, then they steal as much of the design as possible for their own programs. They then launch a major media initiative with help from politicians to kill the program (B-1A, F-22, MX, etc.) and constantly run the mantra of, “It’s too expensive. It’s going over budget. It doesn’t work. etc.” If it doesn’t work, then why do they copy our designs? (A-5 Vigilante --- MiG-25, B-1A---Tu-160, F-15/F-16----MiG-29, F-14/F-15---Su-27, F-22/F-35/YF-23----Su-57). The problem they face is when a program is already a significant industrial base across numerous States in the US, where Congressrats have to face their voters who are employed throughout the industrial chain for the program. But the Soviets had a plan for that as well, to get as many Democratic Socialists of America (CPUSA rebranded) into office to kill Defense programs no matter what repercussion from voters. Make the useful idiot congresswomen and manlets go full-retard together if they must, as long as the program is killed. Russia does not want F-35s all around its borders in foreign partner nations, especially Norway, Finland, and Poland.
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  4702.  @BertoxolusThePuzzled  Sensors: JSF sensor web is so revolutionary, that they are often tasked like dedicated spy planes normally would be used, and can swing-role during that at any time during the sorties. Costs: Nowhere near the $300 Billion acquisition budget has been spent yet, let alone anything approach a Trillion. The click-bait articles talking about over now trillion are estimates for the entire life of the program through the year 2073. The US has only acquired roughly 500 JSF out of 790 delivered so far, and our program of record is 2,456 airframes between all 3 services, while the total program of record just keeps growing with foreign customers and partners. Not even 4th Gen fighters are engaging in much WVR combat due to Helmet-HOBS missiles, which earlier generations of don’t work against JSF. JSF maneuverability is superior to almost all combat-configured fighters of the world if they decide to not use their missiles and try to engage in a 1950s-era guns fight, which hasn’t been done since 1979. Climb rate and acceleration in F-35s is superb especially in the subsonic regime, and not that different than a Block 50 F-16C in supersonic regime. F-35s are far more lethal than any modern fighter within visual range at night, including the Typhoon or Rafale or F-22. NODS are integrated into the HMDS, so you don’t have to remove things like JHMCS and then attach NODs like in legacy fighters. UK Typhoons are getting an integrated Digital NODs/Helmet-Cueing Helmet Sight, but have nowhere near the 360 coverage of JSF, so they would be at a great disadvantage WVR at night against F-35s. Russians and Chinese don’t have anything like this and lag in those areas considerably. JSF is an important component set in a multi-nodal network, and is the first fighter-shaped aircraft in history to deploy a space-sensor reaching suite. The JSF networked sensor web detects, tracks, and PIDs low earth orbit objects, which is one of the most overlooked things about its capabilities. The F-35s minus all of that are still far superior to 4.5 Gen fighters because they don’t bolt on the necessary combat systems, they have the best fighter AESA in the world, the best multi-seeker 5.5 Gen combined IRST capability with the frontal DAS fused with the zoomable EOTS, which is fused with the AESA and RF passive sensors, and their fuel fractions surpass legacy fighters considerably. All 4.5 Gen fighters are the actual relative garbage to JSF. I can break down the accurate and relevant math if you’ve made it this far.
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  4731.  @nigelft  Harrier suffered 100 total airframe losses and 20 fatalities in its first 10 years of operational service between the UK and USMC. Maintenance on the Harrier airframe requires total wing removal to pull the engine, which takes most of the day. UK, USMC, and USAF started working together on its replacement in 1983 with the Supersonic STOVL Fighter and ASTOVL, which eventually became the JSF-B. UK did a ton of RDT&E on that with the VAAC Harrier for the STOVL Digital Flight Control System, and the networked AIM-120 BVR intercepts with data-linked Harrier F2/Blue Vixen radar. The USMC and UK are not looking back at the Harrier now that they have so many F-35Bs, which are a revolutionary platform in so many ways, it is hard to really compare them with anything else out there. Right about Pentagon Wars-total sham of a movie, but entertaining. If they had truthfully finished the movie with Bradley performance in Desert Storm, it would have made the premise of the movie totally invalidated and humiliated their own story line, so they conveniently left the most important part out: How did it do in actual combat? It slayed more tanks in the Battle of 73 Easting than the M-1A2 Abrams did, and they both killed so many tanks in that battle against an Iraqi reverse-slope defense where they should have died and been repelled, that it was really a marvel of excellent training, weapons, and taking the initiative. The silly anti-tank missile that the fat General wanted on top? Yeah, that’s the TOW that was used to kill so many enemy tanks.
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  4742.  @sepposavinainen2660  The training pipeline into the F-35 is really fast since it has such good simulators, and it’s the easiest fighter to fly in the world. Requires minimal pilot effort to take off, navigate, and land. Navigation can actually be done by the CNI hitting waypoints and altitude profiles by itself while the pilot focuses on the battlespace management and coordination with other JSF and receptive data link nodes in the network.   Any modern autopilot system can fly waypoints/FL bands, but F-35’s interface is much easier to use than any other cockpit design. The pilot configures the Panoramic Display throughout the flight, depending on what he’s doing and all relevant flight data is presented in the HMDS just for normal flight modes. A new pilot in an F-35 after maybe 6 months of squadron-level work-ups is far more lethal, survivable, and effective than a 20 year pilot in a 4th Gen fighter. The DFLCS doesn’t allow the pilot to depart the aircraft, so you can fly it with reckless abandon on the edge of the performance envelope. They did Mach 1.4 tests where the test pilot would execute full left rudder, full right stick at that speed, commanding full g authority from the control surfaces and it still wouldn’t depart. Finnish Air Force has a pretty unique fighter pilot community who are quiet about what they do, but are extremely brutal in their lethality against friendly fighters in large force exercises. They’re already training on F-35 in the US, and have been going to the US for a while now to become familiar with JSF and how it operates, how they can maximize it for Finnish Airspace defense and coordination with surface units via the network.
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  4865.  @dexterplameras3249  The 2020 AIM-120D3 when fired at optimum kinematic state from an F-15C+ exceeded the range of the 1990s AIM-54C fired from optimum kinematic state from the F-14A. Had the AIM-54 series remained in inventory along with the F-14, it would have undergone the same types of upgrades in propellant and guidance resulting in incremental improvements to WEZ and NEZ parameters. AIM-120C5 can't reach AIM-54C effective range, for example. AIM-120D3 fired from a Hornet or Super Hornet will never achieve what it can from the F-15C+, Typhoon, or Raptor. This gets more complex as you get into the missile model and series, plus the separation aircraft altitude and speed. We were working on AIM-120 integration on the Block 30 & 40 F-16C/D back in the late 1980s, so I'm coming from a place of intimacy with the subject. A huge factor in BVR is IFF against Non-Cooperative Targets. You have to have PID, otherwise you could be blasting an airliner out of the sky like the Russians have done multiple times, and USN did in the Persian Gulf in 1988. Precious few fighters/interceptors have the Radar detection, tracking, and PID range to employ the latest AIM-120D3 to its maximum WEZ potential. R-33 & R-37 series have the propellant mass capacity for more burn time, which results in significant WEZ/NEZ parameters. When used in conjunction with the huge Zaslon or Irbis-E PESA Radars on MiG-31BM and Su-35S, there is a long-look/long-reach problem for smaller fighters that isn't solved merely by giving them a longer WEZ AAM.
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  4866.  @dexterplameras3249  There are IFF features introduced with solid state electronics Radars already in the 1970s that work strictly in the RF spectrum. They really showed up first on the F-15A with its APG-63, and it was significantly upgraded starting in 1978 with a Digital Signals Processor that was standard on the F-15C/D models, then back-filled into the A/Bs even as we pushed them into AFRES and ANG units. F-16A benefitted greatly from the F-15's Radar developments, but it has a much smaller antenna and less volume for back-end amplifiers, waveform generators, filters, and analog-to-digital converters. F-16C Block 25 got a new APG-68 Radar that has been upgraded until (V)9 through the late Block F-16s (40, 42, 50, 52), which are now being replaced by AESAs with the PoBIT program. F/A-18 benefitted from a lot of the lessons and improvements on the F-15 and has also undergone a series of Radar and avionics upgrades throughout its service life. It had multiple upgrades to the APG-65, then got the APG-73 and now APG-79 AESA. The F/A-18C had at least 2 NCTR parameter capabilities the F-14A/B didn't have, which allowed them to face-shoot MiGs in Desert Storm. The US teen series have mostly been limited to RF spectrum detection, tracking, and PID without relying on IRST like we had on F-101B, F-102A, F-106A, F-8G, F-4B/C/D/J, and some F-14s with TCS. What you'll notice is those Electro-Optical sensors were primarily used on interceptors who commonly encountered strategic bombers that had very powerful jammers to render their Radars useless. IRST is totally passive, so they could use them to maintain sensor tracks for firing solutions for IR-guided missiles. For fighters vs fighters, the US and NATO shifted into aircraft with very user-friendly multi-mode Radars, working in conjunction with AWACS. The F-15s in particular would operate in 4 ships in tactical spread abreast of each other, covering large sectors of airspace getting first-look, first-shoot. If they closed into visual range after multiple AIM-7M shots failed to kill the threat fighters, they would still face-shoot with the AIM-9L/M, which had all-aspect capability. F-22A and F-35s play a different game. So I mentioned the F/A-18C had at least 2 NCTR parameters in 1991. F-35 had 638 in 2016, covering multiple bands in RF spectrum, LW IR, Mid IR, short IR spectrums, with a huge threat library where each target has a multi-spectral profile set. Focal Plane Array seekers don't care about flares because they are locked onto the specific image of their target and its constant location/presentation. Chaff is designed to confuse and distract Radars and Radar missiles from their targets. Without going into details, you can imagine that there are counter-countermeasures for chaff and notching. AESA Radars operate much differently than legacy Mechanically-Steered Array Radars. 2 Fighters with AESAs and Line of Sight LPI data links can maintain track on fighters trying to use common 4th Gen tactics of Radar evasion (notching in clutter while dispensing chaff). 1 Fighter with an AESA and IRST can also maintain track if a threat fighter is close enough, even if it notches against surface clutter. Threat fighter emissions also compromise their location, especially with MSA and PESA Radars vs AESA-equipped fighters.
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  4931. China bought up GE appliances division through questionable deals, in order to weasel-in on GE jet engines. They could give to rips about airlines, as the priority is for their fighters and military aircraft. Airlines are down the priority list for them. They’re important for domestic and regional clout, but it all comes down to being able to back up your clout with air power. Making jet engines is an exclusive club China has been trying to join since the 1980s, and failing miserably at it. The US is the global leader in fighter jet and turbofan engine design and manufacturing, surpassing the British in the 1960s-1970s at the latest. UK is 2nd in terms of quality. Russia is 2nd in terms of quantity and knocking off US designs, but still falling behind in performance, systems integration, and HPHT stage longevity. France is 3rd in quality, right up there with UK. Germany is up there with UK and France. Japan is up-and-coming in this space. China is way behind all of the above, and they’ve been throwing billions at trying to copy the GE CFM56 since the 1980s. China crashes Flankers and J-20s quite frequently, one of the main causes being engines exploding in flight. They have relied on Russia for the better part of the last 70 years, and Russian engines have sucked all along that time. China had no interest in the Su-35 itself, but had to order them just to get the engines. Russians put dead-man’s switches in them of course so the engines couldn’t be used in other Chinese Flankers like the J-16. Engines are a big deal though.
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  4953.  @monty2654  Not sure what test program you’re looking at, but it isn’t the JSF series. Not only did they conduct more extensive testing, weapons separation, validation, and integration iterations, but they did it with cooperative test centers between the USAF Flight Test Center at Edwards, Naval Weapons Test Centers at China Lake and Point Mugu, Naval Flight Test Center at Pax River, UK Flight Test Center, Eglin AFB Climactic Chamber and Eglin Weapons Test and Eval Ranges in Florida, White Sands Missile Test Ranges, NM, and other integrated test locations that have never worked together in concert like that. The opposite is true with the F-14, F-15, F-16, and F/A-18. None of those designs were ready for mass production with their A models, with maybe an exception to the F-15A. F-14 didn’t even have the F401-PW-400 engine the USN invested hundreds of millions of early 1970s dollars in for the planned production original F-14B (never happened), F-16A/B was unsafe and experienced over 600 Class A mishaps/100,000 flight hours its first few years with 143 crashes/total losses and 71 fatalities. F/A-18A/B didn’t even have sound landing gear for safety, with an alignment bar that would come loose, send the thing skidding or cart-wheeling down the runway. Avionics were whacked, with the original APG-65 suffering all kinds of failures, triggered its own RWR, vertical stabs buffeted so badly that they cracked the underlying support bulkheads around the engines, and the wing tips fluttered so badly at transonic speeds they caused cracks and failures to wing structures. First 10 years of F/A-18 service saw 97 airframe losses with 27 fatalities. Those of us who were involved in the development of the teen series look back, then look at the JSF program and just shake our heads at how wrong people are in their ignorant assessment of how unbelievably-safe all 3 of them are, and how smoothly the sensors and other avionics have been integrated in comparison.
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  4954.  @redslate  I’ll preface this with the fact that I have been following unit costs, programs costs, MLUs, SLEPs, and related programs since 1984 because we were directly or indirectly involved in several of them for the F-16C/D Block 30 and later, F-14D, F-15C/D, F-15E, and other programs with relevant metrics essential to this subject. "The per unit cost of an F-35A is twice that of an F-16.” This is incorrect and also not specific to which F-16 model and MLU. An F-16AM that has undergone MLU is considerably more costly than its 1979-1982 initial unit flyaway cost. You also have to adjust for inflation from the years of purchase, then add the MLU costs. There are MLU phases that exceeded the original unit flyway cost if not adjusted of inflation. F-16CM Block 40/42/50/52 after CCIP 1 & 2 cost more per unit than an F-35A, not even including their necessary ancillary pods. Original unit flyaway costs were in the $40 - $50 million range, but CCIP per bird cost tens of millions. The labor and materials/systems costs are huge. Some of the CCIP schedules were 45 days per bird. F-16E/F are more than twice the cost of the F-35A. F-16E/F were $200 million per, due to a totally new program set of requirements ordered by the UAE. But here’s another cost nobody is talking about: Projected airframes loss costs vs airframes retained. F-16s crash on a regular basis to this day, with many fatalities. F-35s do not. You pay more money for an F-16CM, F-16E/F, or F-16V for a higher chance of losing the airframe and experiencing pilot and other fatalities. You pay less for each F-35 with extremely low probability of airframe losses and fatalities. There has only been 1 fatality in the JSF program to-date, with 16 years of flight on the F-35A. That’s unheard of. "An F-35B is three times that of an F/A-18.” This is also incorrect. F-35B is currently $101.3 million. F/A-18Cs had an initial flyaway cost, then have undergone numerous fixes, improvements, SLEP, airframe structural repairs, and several in USMC and RoCAF service are getting new and expensive APG-79(V)4 AESA Radars with GaN Transmitter Receiver Modules. So we’re looking at F/A-18C+ unit costs pushing well over $100 million. Here’s the math: F/A-18C built in 1988 and delivered for unit flyway (no spares) at $29 million. 2022 dollars = $72.98 million for the stripped airframe, no SLEP, no pylons, no racks, no support equipment. F/A-18C/D SLEP 1 = $16.3 million per aircraft (Swiss paid $490 million to SLEP 30x F/A-18C/D fighters.) Add the APG-79 AESA, ATFLIR or LITENING, new EW system, and we’re over $100 million for the respective USMC and RoCAF birds. That’s an F/A-18C+ that has maybe 1/8 the capability of an F-35 on a really good day, with one of the FMC birds that isn’t broken. "The published numbers are future projections or don't include the cost of engines: $15M (A&C) / $32M (B).” This is also incorrect. For some of the early years of JSF production, airframe and propulsion system costs were accounted separately, but they merged many years ago. Unit flyaway costs have included the motors since then. I think it was 2015 off the top of my head, maybe earlier. I have spent hours looking that all up before from reputable contractor and DoD publications. Hopefully this information helps correct some of the bad data you came across, and you can look back on the corrupt data sources and remove them from your feed. Happy New Year!
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  4971.  @howardbartlett3026  I haven’t heard any of those former Navy FWS instructors say they wish the Navy had purchased the 145nm radius F-20 vs the 500nm F-16N. They even used the weaker, older APG-66 from the F-16A in the F-16N. F-20A didn’t have anywhere near as big of a Radar with the APG-67. I remember all that developmental work and advertised capabilities of the Tigershark well. F-20A would not have been a good platform to replicate Su-27 and MiG-29 in BVR, let alone WVR. F-20A and F-16 were never designed for CAS, so I’m not sure why that would come up, but the F-20A especially has no legs from which to conduct CAS. I have personally called in F-16Cs and A-10As for CAS, but the B-1B and F-15E are better at it because they have legs and payload, with multiple crew to work the CAS call, gain SA, and maintain comms with Troops In Contact. Yes, F-16 is a 2-pass platform normally. One initial pass for gaining TGT and Blue Force locations, 2nd pass for weapons employment, depending on proximity to their basing to aerial refueler. A-10s aren’t survivable in most theaters in the world, so their usefulness as a CAS platform is limited to a permissive environment, which means you can’t really use them in the Air Tasking Order other than standby QRF. Venezuelan F-16A/Bs got left way behind technologically. F-16C Block 30 and up absolutely have BVR capabilities in excess of any F-5E/F. APG-68(V)8/9 is a very capable FCR, being replaced by SABR AESA radars currently. Even before that, the APG-68/AIM-120 combo was quite formidable in BVR, as demonstrated live against the solid state electronics-equipped MiG-25PD, Serbian MiG-29As, MiG-23BNs, Su-24s, etc. F-16C has added 10 A2A kills in the past 10 years, much of which was with AIM-120. The big problem with the F-20’s radome size is that we already had and were developing missiles that out-WEZ’d the APG-67, namely the AIM-7M and AIM-120. AIM-7M was an interim solution to the AIMVAL problems identified with lightweight fighters achieving mutual kills against the F-14A and F-15A in the 1970s out at Nellis.
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  4974.  @johanmetreus1268  So you think Finnish Air Force pilots and planners wanted some other fighter to send their best up in against Russia, but chose the F-35A instead? They listed the 5 military performance domains. F-35A exceeded the minimum threshold of 4/5 in all of them. No other entrant came close. Ask yourself this. Which fighters would you rather have right now up against MiG-31BM and Su-35S lifting hypersonic R-37Ms at you from extreme long range? * Gripen E with 1m2-2m2 RCS, limited payload, range, detection range, networking not even remotely developed, needs GlobalEye for SA, legacy maintenance problems, lack of prognostic systems management, no upgrade path/last of the series, costs more than F-35A, all major and subcontractor tech comes from US, UK from 2-3 decades ago under 2nd tier licenses * F-35A that can't be seen outside of 13-27nm, superior SA to anything currently, with 6x BVRAAM, LRASM, JDAM, JASSM, NSM, LPI MADL, best fighter AESA in the world, easy to fly, easy to land, maintains itself practically, can go deep into Russian MEZ if it wants, D-SEAD beast, offensive EW capable, scary anti-ship platform, automated theater networking and industrial base with Norway, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, US... * Rafale F4 at € 216m unit program cost, 1-2m2+ RCS, expensive mx w/2 French motors, French missiles, underdeveloped strike SEAD capes, no industrial share, F4 variant likely last of the production series, old gen data link * Super Hornet Block 3 + Growler combo, last production models, USN already looking to divest of theirs in favor of F-35C Block 4, good systems maturity but lacks survivability in latest R-37M MEZ both due to RCS and weak kinematics to Flankers and Foxhound * Typhoon at over €200m unit program cost, no industrial share, 2 motors, expensive mx, legacy data link, 1-2m2 RCS, etc. The choice for Finland was glaringly-obvious just in terms of capabilities and cost. The others just didn't cut it no matter which angle you want to look at it from.
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  4977.  @Karl-Benny  Where are you getting $44k CPFH from? That's F-22A CPFH, not F-35A. Remember that when you hear the entire fleet average worst case estimate for CPFH (including projected life cycle mx amortized back into the current very young fleet), you're not seeing a representative figure for operational squadrons. If you look in the DoD Comptroller reports over the past 4 years, there are very detailed hourly cost rates for every single fixed and rotary wing aircraft in service. Even with personnel costs, F-35A was $17,333/hr in 2018. Interestingly enough, the F-35B operating costs were less. When Switzerland did all the accounting on the Gripen E, they assessed it would cost them $21,000-$27,000 CPFH for O&M. There is no $8000 CPFH for Gripen. It's just crazy when you see someone citing those kinds of numbers. If you dive into the world of defense accounting, there are so many variables to consider that you can really manipulate numbers to fit an agenda. What I've been noticing in the cost argument agenda is that any number associated with JSF is inflated dramatically with no real basis in reality. We've seen that with references to $150 million airframes (F-35A is $77.9million), $1.2, then $1.5, then $1.7 trillion estimated program costs through 2070, and now these exorbitant O&M costs of $36k, might as well add another $10k and make it $46k CPFH, from presstitutes who couldn't even balance their own bank accounts. Finland isn't taking on cost risks of having to upgrade USAF older Lot inventory F-35As, or build entertainment facilities for USAF pilots. Finland's purchasing schedule will be at a time when a whole new production Block is commencing, with all the improvements incorporated into the line from Blocks 1-3F. In the worst-case USAF CPFH estimates, they amortize future upgrades needed to bring the entire fleet up to Block 4 or 5 standards, which don't even exist. It's a money request scheme the USAF uses, even including funding for new fighter squadron buildings, possible mx shops, and ancillary spending barely associated with actually flying the aircraft. Anytime you see anyone talk about CPFH, be very aware of variable costs and fake cost projections amortized back on top of the real O&M costs.
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  5027.  @andrewszigeti2174  One if the most overlooked, misunderstood aspects of VLO is the IR stealth on all the JSF variants. If you look at Lockheed's generations of expertise in this field, then look closely at the F-35, you'll start to notice some things. There are at least 4 layers of IR signature concealment systems integrated into the F-35's surfaces, fuselage, wings, and engine nozzle. There are large air scoops that take ambient air (which is anywhere from -20 to -60°C) and flow it over and through the LOAN engine nozzle. The massive fuel volume is used as a heat sink to pull aerodynamic heat off the wing leading edges, and heat exchangers are integrated into the cool air bypass fan stage on the motor. Then there are things integrated with the RAM to virtually eliminate solar radiation from the surfaces. The engine exhaust spirals within the cool air flow mass since the afterburner flame holders are angled and concealed in the RF spectrum, so there is a synergy of RF and IR concealment that is revolutionary from a signature reduction perspective. So all the assumptions and claims you see about F-35 IR signature being huge are very uninformed and opposite of the truth. It's an extremely cold TGT in the IR spectrum. The presence of IRST on the MiG-29 and Su-27, plus IR sensors on Russian mobile IADS platforms drove the IR signature reduction program within JSF. They were given billions to solve that problem, with test ranges and expertise that dwarf what any other country has at their disposal. So the IR spectrum is a place the JSF and ATF dominate. JSF has more sensors that are fused with each other to detect, track, and PID at BVR better than anything out there. If you wanted to configure a certain number of F-35Cs for A2A focusing on Fleet Defense, you could load them with 4x AIM-120C/D, and 2x AIM-9X Blk III. F-14s typically only flew with 2-4 missiles because of loading time for ordnance across several squadrons, weapon wear from carrier ops, and bring-back limits. With F-35, you get more kills due to higher pk than with legacy fighters because there is no mutual detection timeline, counter-moves, and re-attack sequence common to 4th Gen. That's why the F-15 and Flankers have the magazine depth that they do, because they were envisioned in a mutual detection BVR scenario where the initial missile releases are usually posturing for who will be offensive first. 5th Gen fighters don't play in that space. They hunt from the shadows on their terms, with extremely unfair missile WEZ parameters that immediately go into NEZ with no missile approach warning.
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  5028.  @andrewszigeti2174  Most IRSTs are radar-cued. Not sure that you’re aware of that. The field of regard of IRSTs is large, but they need some type of cueing to look at a specific spot in the sky. Threat IRSTs don’t show any hit until right on the edge of or within visual range against F-35s, which means they’re already dead tens of miles before getting to that place. 4th Gen Radar Warning Receiver sets don’t work against US AESAs that well, which is why there has been such an effort to upgrade RHAW equipment into digital self-protection suites on the 4.5 Gen fighters. LPI AESAs in freq-hopping, using low power beam steering and tracking and can detect and track targets without the targets knowing they’re being painted, even with most of the later RW sets. That’s the whole thing with 5th Gen vs 4th Gen. They fly blind until weapons impact, not much they can do. 5th Gen don’t rely on AWACS while airborne because they form their own more dense, more-informed ISR and AEW&C nets, with better resolution and airborne/surface detection and geo-locating capabilities than any AWACS. AWACS primarily fill a duration mission set in that context, so that there is always somebody up to provide early warning. Nobody flies fighter CAP, maritime patrol, or DCA with only 2 aircraft. I was using the 2-ship example in simplistic terms. There are swarms of these things with constant sortie generation, along with the other aircraft in a Wing. F-35s possess the ability to defend AWACS and Tankers better than any other fighter, more on-par with the Raptor in that mission. The best defense is a great offense, so the OCA mission includes striking aircraft wherever you find them. F-15EX is meant to replace F-15C+ fighters in the Air National Guard for CONUS-based Air Defense mission profile primarily, since Raptor production was cut short by traitors within the Bush and Obama Administrations with full support from those Presidents. There are 620 JSF built so far, with F-35s already flying operationally in 9 different nations, in addition to F-22As, F-15C+s, F-16Cs, F-16A MLUs, Typhoons, Rafales, F-16E/Fs, Super Hornets, F-15Es, F-16Is, F-15Is, etc. The combined arms force mix already exists and F-35s make everyone else much more lethal. All Large Force Exercises with F-35s have been incorporating these force multipliers every since F-35s were delivered to the USMC and USAF, followed by Royal Netherlands and Norwegian Air Forces. I’m not sure if you’re aware but F-35s carry the largest Internal fuel fractions of any fighter. Even the F-35B carries almost the same amount of internal fuel as a 2-seat Super Hornet. The F-35A carries over 18,000lb, while the F-35C carries over 19,000lbs internally. There are no external fuel tanks. They don’t have EFTs on any F-35s. There are talks about making them just for trans-oceanic ferry flights, then removing them for operations, but so far, they’ve been operating with internal fuel only. Just to give you clarity through contrast with legacy fighters, the F-16 only carries 7,000lb of internal fuel and has to use EFTs on every mission to have a decent radius. F-35A exceeds the mission radii of all current TAC AIR fighters in USAF inventory just using internal fuel, including Strike Eagles when they carry CFTs and 2x EFTs with weapons. So the JSF concept deals with all of the concerns you have raised back during its design stages, and has only evolved since then. The new missiles currently in development and testing will increase the F-35’s internal missile count by a factor of 2. One of them is basically a HALFRAAM with the same performance of an AIM-120C7. The other is a LRAAM called the AIM-260. UK F-35Bs should declare IOC with the Meteor soon as well. The Sidekick weapons bay will be standard on later Block 4 F-35As and F-35Cs, increasing the internal AAM count to 3x LRAAM in each bay for a total of 6, or 6x in each bay with Peregrine missiles for a total internal count of 12.
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  5029.  @andrewszigeti2174  You’re talking about a close range IR camera of an air show flight demo of the F-35B in hover mode, where the engine generates over 40,000lb of thrust. The cool airflow isn’t cool since it’s at sea level, and it isn’t flowing over the F-35B’s F135-PW-400 in the 3BSD hover mode since the nozzle is pointing down. In full military power, the F135 engine generates 28,000lb of thrust, and there is no reason to maintain that power level while cruising much of the time. It has a lot of excess thrust already. In contrast, the F-16C Block 50 needs to go into full afterburner to reach 28,000lb of thrust. So now think about F-35s way beyond visual range, looking at them with the best IR camera you can imagine. You’re not going to see anything, while they’re watching you with the best layered sensor arrays of IR cameras in different bandwidths of the IR spectrum. DAS is short wave IR, EOTS is mid-long wave, and they are fused together into one picture for the pilot with 360 coverage. If you want to see what a 4th Gen IR signature looks like, watch the Su-35 airshow demo. You can’t even make out the shape of the aircraft the entire time, since the IR signature is blooming so large like a giant ball. The F-35 is extremely stealthy in the IR spectrum. They didn’t spend billions on IR concealment for it not to show considerable achievements in that signature reduction realm. You can’t even acquire it with helmet sights and IR missiles in visual range Fox 2 fights.
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  5101. When you're guilty of actually committing those war crimes over decades of senior political decision-making. You have to understand that Hillary picked most of the Clinton WH cabinet positions, against the will of Bill and many of his staff. She chose Madeline war criminal Albright ("yes, it's worth it" - Iraqi children deaths), Janet murder scores of women and children Reno, Travel Office Firings, firing of FBI Director William Sessions the day before Vince Foster was murdered, voting for the Iraq War when she was in the Senate, passing critical NSA surveillance system codes to enemy foreign governments, sending Ron Brown on the trade mission to Yugoslavia when Brown was under investigation by the DOJ for money-laundering foreign campaign funds for the Clinton's through his son's bank account, "We came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha ha ha ha!" That's how you lose to Donald Trump. There were plenty of politically-savvy people in the Democrat Party who warned everyone about Hillary's garbage baggage, crimes, and unlikeability, but nobody listened, because Hillary literally took over the DNC with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, her former Campaign Chair from 2008. Underlying all of this, 2016 simply wasn't going to be a Democrat year no matter who was in the hot seat. If Bernie had miraculously gotten the nomination in the face of Hillary/Wasserman Schultz, Trump would have simply said, "Crazy Bernie", and people would have that simple catchword wrapped around him. Bernie Sander's views on foreign policy were admittedly and shamelessly uninformed, which he openly declared. Bernie's main focus was domestic policy, which is really outside most of the practical purview of a President, no matter what the campaign rhetoric is. Presidents drive foreign policy more than anything. That's where their power lies, not in domestic policy.
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  5102. None of those candidates would have stood a chance against Trump, for a number of reasons. For starters, none of them have the credibility of ever building or creating something, and they identify with the fringe of even the leftist partisan apparatus, not the majority of Americans. They are career politicians who the electorate ultimately don't trust. You need a very charismatic leader to overcome the natural 2016 turnover which was destined to happen with all of the negatives that happened over the Obama years with the economy, new home starts, wars, jobs moving overseas, increasing distrust in anything the media claims, and even more distance between the DNC and America. The only person who could have won against Donald Trump would have been JFK Jr., but he died in a plane crash many years ago. He would have had a substantial number of Republicans voting for him, just on the old file footage of JFK's funeral alone. What combined into a perfect storm in 2016 was a charismatic leader, regardless of how you feel about him, who took a wrecking ball to the Republican primaries, appealed to the electorate through countless campaign rallies that were packed with overflow, who ran as an outsider, non politician who has a record of actually building things, managing things, to the tune of billions, regardless of how anyone feels about those accomplishments. People that call him an idiot do so based on partisan ideology, without taking a step back and asking, "Who is the idiot? The guy with billions in assets who the banks come to for money that doesn't need their contributions to run, or the little mental midget who takes their talking points from provably incompetent media presstitutes who are wrong about most of the stories they cover.
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  5107. +09mjeternity Hillary was caught again in her murderous lies, which is what she has been doing since her days in college at Yale. Her entire "career" is filled with nothing but lies when you look at it. I worked under the Clinton White House in DC from 1994-1996 in the Military District in Washington, and I could write a book about just the high crimes and treason that were committed in that small timeframe alone. We had Vince Foster's body found in Fort Marcy Park the year before I arrived, with the investigation still ongoing. None of the important facts ever saw the light of day. Before that were the WH Travel Office firings ordered by Hillary. Hillary's staffers actually occupied Al Gore's Vice Presidential office during the transition, and Al Gore threatened to resign before Clinton was even set up in the Oval Office. The DOJ was investigating the illegal Chinese money funneled to the Clinton's campaign, so they fired the Director of the FBI, William Sessions. Deputy White House Counsel, Vince Foster, was found dead the next day at an old Civil War Fort park on the Potomac River about a mile north of where I was stationed later. Foster was also handling the Clinton's dodgy tax records, in addition to making large deposits in 3 Swiss bank accounts in Chiasso, Switzerland, flying there 12-20 times per yer, with less than 24hr lay-overs for years dating back to the Arkansas Governor years. The Clinton's were in bed with some of the biggest cocaine smugglers in the US, and even hired the accountants of Dan Lassater's drug empire to be senior Director of White House Office of Administration. The more you dig, the dirtier it gets.
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  5156. Dogfighting has already ended in the 4th Generation. Nobody in the current fighter communities is thinking they will merge with other fighters into visual range, cross each other’s 3-9 lines, and start gaming for rear quadrant missile or guns shots on an opponent. They still train for it in BFM, but since everyone has helmet-cued HOBS missiles with pretty substantial range and No-Escape Zone (NEZ) parameters from frontal or high-aspect approaches, every one keeps away from those bubbles. With modern sensors, PID can be achieved right before entering visual range, so face-shots with HOBS missiles are the norm for the pilots that are dumb enough or amateurs at evading threat WEZ profiles in the older jets. In 5th Gen fighters, the SA is so ominous, that they are already watching everything you do from hundreds of km away, scanning what weapons you have with multi-spectral fused sensors even in passive modes, sharing that data with each other, faster than it took me to type this sentence. They manage the space with vastly-superior knowledge about where threats are and what they are capable of, then employ weapons against them in ways that are almost impossible to deal with. Even if a 4.5 Gen +++ fighter is able to evade incoming weapons with its countermeasures somehow, its next course of action is to attempt to leave wherever it though the weapons were coming from, which could mean flying into even more unfair NEZ profiles. These are the rules of the new road, and why China and Russia are doing everything in their power to try to develop and produce similar systems.
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  5159. For anyone who is involved with alternative media (to the mega conglomerate information control channels), you need to be very careful with Hillary and understand that she does really have an enemy's list. The biggest political story that was never given the coverage it deserves revolves around two dates in US history that should have sent open shock waves among the electorate and Congress. Those dates are: July 19th, 1993 July 20th, 1993 On July 19th, after weeks of trying to force FBI Director, William Sessions (Eagle Scout, Distinguished Eagle Scout) to resign after an ethics probe launched by George H. W. Bush's AG, and continued by Bush's partner, William Jefferson Clinton, Sessions was fired by Clinton. What none of the corporate presstitutes would ever discuss were the 14 active NSA, DOJ, and FBI investigations into a laundry list of crimes by the Clinton's, including espionage, illegal campaign financing from China and Vietnam, money laundering, suborning of perjury, Madison Savings & Loan drug money and political pay-off money sheltering, and the Travel Office firings. Do you know what they said did Director Sessions in? Using FBI Lear Jet to visit his daughter, and installing a security system in his home with Bureau funds. No really. The ethics probe started when Sessions refused to back down from investigating some "banking irregularities" related to financing and the Saudis in Bush Sr's Administration, so Bush's AG launched the ethics probe on Sessions 48 hours later. In early July, the NSA had frozen or seized 3 different bank accounts belonging to 3 high profile people in the White House, and referred the results of their investigation to the DOJ and FBI for espionage. Sessions of course allowed these investigations to continue, and lost his job for it in an unprecedented firing after he refused to step down when Attorney General, Janet Reno (Hillary's pick) told him to resign the prior week. On July 20th, the next day, Deputy White House Counsel and former senior partner from the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, Vince Foster, was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head in Fort Marcy Park. 2 weeks prior to Foster's death, he had cancelled his routine flight to Chiasso, Switzerland, where he had been making visits to for years, all of which were less than 24hr in duration. One of the bank accounts frozen by the NSA belonged to Foster. The other 2 belonged to "unnamed members of the First family". If a half-drunk journalist straight out of school had been allowed to print these 2 stories together, it wouldn't have taken Sherlock Holmes to see what was going on. Taken against the backdrop of the emergency meeting the Clinton's and senior WH staff held on Sunday, and Vince's choice to spend the day with his family on a boat instead, you see where this is all going. Thankfully for the Clinton's, they had long been partners with George H.W. Bush, and Sessions was a common enemy. Conveniently, William Sessions was replaced with Acting Director Clarke, and then Louis Freeh in September, while the initial investigation of Foster's death was handed to the DC Park Police. These two events combined have never been presented to the public as relevant, and most people don't even know Clinton fired William Sessions. Several investigative reporters, witnesses, and private investigators died under suspicious circumstances related to these events. Be very careful who you openly revile when dealing with Hillary Clinton.
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  5161. The YF-23 had too many design risks, many of which needed to be corrected for the proposed F-23A to work. Each actuator in the wings for control surfaces was 4 smaller hydraulic actuators so that the wings could remain super-thin for supercrusie performance. There was a complex dual-reservoir hydraulic actuator system for each of the tailplane stabilators. It never demonstrated weapons bay storage or separation because there wasn’t a functional design to deal with the narrow fuselage and the required weapons count for AAMs. At least 2 of the wind screens cracked during supersonic tests, so that needed to be re-designed. The intakes did not manage the boundary layer air well enough to allow it to go past Mach 1.81, so the F-23A was going to need totally new intakes and flight testing on the basic airframe and propulsion combination. For these reasons, the USAF saw a lot of risk in costs with the F-23A proposal, and awarded the ATF contract to the F-22A proposal by Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics. The YF-22 had none of those problems. It had simpler actuators, PAV1 YF-22 flew faster than any of the other 3 ATF PAVs and was the only one to exceed Mach 2. It demonstrated weapons release from both weapons bays, with the AIM-9 and AIM-120. None of the bowless canopies cracked at even higher speeds that the YF-23, and its intakes perfectly separated boundary later air while also not providing any Line-of-Sight RF wave propagation like the YF-23 did, which is the first signature a LO airframe needs to eliminate, let alone a VLO/Stealth design. The YF-23 looked and flew superbly because it was an aerodynamic masterpiece, but had a lot of internet problems with the design that needed major attention and billions more in RDT&E. That’s why it was not selected.
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  5201.  @ginger6582  Bush41 did it with ballistic missile components to Saddam and who knows what to China. China financed Clinton’s ’92 & 96 campaigns in exchange for access to US nuclear facilities, Loral Space Systems ballistic missile tech, missile guidance technology, and advanced encrypted Radio comms tech from Motorolla. Chicom spies were given access to the B-2A program at Edwards with escorts ordered to allow it, and many more facilities were openly compromised by order of Clinton. Neil Bush merged his US Defense Aerospace holdings shell company with his Chinese real estate firm he was on the board of, while claiming that his friends in Hong Kong had no problem with CCP taking over. Putin funneled $363 million into Clinton Global Initiative while Hillary was SECSTATE and magically got access to US Uranium mining rights under the Uranium One deal. FBI even had a high level informant describing all this, nothing was done. This was right after Putin announced he was going to revitalize Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal (which had been in a terrible state of disrepair for decades). Biden has been transferring US defense secrets to Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. for decades, and placed his son on the board of Burisma per Putin’s request after Elena Baturina wired $3.5m to Rosement Seneca in Feb 2014. Putin’s millions flowed into the Biden family shell company network, but Hunter and James are always begging for money. Seems as if it slipped through their fingers into Obama’s real estate purchases.
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  5245. Have you ever read the 1934 NFA Hearings, all 5 days of them? It's far worse than you might imagine. The original draft covered Machineguns, Short Barreled/Sawed-off Shotguns, Pistols/Handguns, Any Other Weapons, and Silencers. On Day 1, morning 1, after the AG admitted the whole thing was unconstitutional, Congressman Harold Knutson of MN proposed the Short Barreled Rifle infringement to "protect deer hunters back home". The original draft from AG Cummings set shotgun barrel infringements at 16", but Knutson suggested it would be stronger if they increased the barrel length to 18", and included rifles. (He turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer at the time, and spy during the War.) On one of the subsequent days of the hearings, the NRA President and Counsel showed up, got the pistol infringements removed, and explained to the Committee what rimfire, centerfire, semi automatic, fully automatic, revolver, automatic pistol, etc. meant. The Committee members were grossly ignorant of the most basic of firearms knowledge. At the time, they were going to include any semi automatic firearm with a 12 round magazine as a "machinegun". The NRA President explained the different types of automatic weapons to them, and that the function of the trigger determined automatic vs semi automatic. Because he was an Olympic Gold Medalist pistol shooter and collector, he objected to the pistol infringement provisions, and provided examples where pistols had been used in self defense dating back to the 1800s. His arguments got the pistols and semi autos = machineguns removed from the final draft, but Knutson's SBR infringements were inserted on the final day of the hearings when he reminded them of their conversation on day 1. It almost didn't make it into the final draft.
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  5247. CNN corporate whore sponsors include: AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals Johnson & Johnson Bayer It went like this: Corporate pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (who had $82.6 Billion in revenue in 2020), has chief officers who sit on the board that owns CNN’s parent company, which is Time/Warner. They said, “We’ve got to get ahead of this Joe Rogan story. We’ll run the usual hit piece ads, make him look like a loon, don’t say anything about Ivermectin, but call it horse-dewormer medicine. Yeah, that’s great. Ok, write up the hit piece and distribute it to our little degenerate minions on the desk, as well as the social media maggots we have." “Ok, now that we ran the hit pieces, maybe we can gain some more views back to the legacy platform by having Gupta go on the Joe Rogan show. Someone get Gupta into pre-interview prep with all the buzz phrases and messaging so he’ll be ready.” Interview goes down.... "That interview with Gupta was an unmitigated disaster! Who let Gupta even go on there anyway? Get the fixers on this quick. Get Gupta on with the prima donna boys Lemon and Cooper maybe to do some damage-control and snippet that out to all the social media platforms.” Within a minute of research, I was able to find connections between Time Warner’s Exec VP of Communications and Chief Inclusion Officer with Johnson & Johnson. Same as USA Today and Gannett with Pfizer. Pfizer's CTO sat on the board of Gannett, who owns USA Today, who ran the hit-piece on nurses refusing to get the experimental crap shoved into them. This is all so boring and predictable. Why anyone would turn on CNN or even give them a voice is senseless.
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  5251. Medical bankruptcy is one of the most inflated claims in the US to generate hype for political purposes, while not having a very significant influence on bankruptcy filings. Bankruptcy filings are a result of multiple factors, and medical bills are nowhere near the top factor according to all the data I have studied. For starters, Elizabeth Warren’s cherry-picked study went to 2005, where there were only 1.45 million bankruptcies filed in the whole US including Chapter 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15. Only Ch 13 is for wage-earners, while Ch 15 represented the largest % of filings. The study expanded the parameters to include if people had missed 2 weeks of work due to sickness, had medical bills over $1000, and mortgaged their home to pay for bills. If bankruptcy filers fell into those categories, it was listed as "bankruptcy due to medical expenses", even if that wasn’t true. That’s less than half a percent of the overall population who even filed for bankruptcy. By adding those parameters, they fudged the data to indicate that 61% of the filers filed because of medical expenses. Another study in 2011 found that only 26% of Ch 13 filers said medical expenses played a role. Some studies said 57.1% while others said more people filed bankruptcy for medical expenses than overall bankruptcy filings, which is egregiously flawed. Not only can’t all Ch 13 filers be due to medical expenses, but Ch 13 can’t exceed all of the types of Chapter filings due to the dominance of corporate and foreign businesses filing bankruptcy each year. Ch 13 is only 27-38% of bankruptcy filings each year. Another thing is that personal bankruptcies are not a constant Y2Y. Personal bankruptcies peaked in 2010 at over 434,000 after the financial crisis, then dropped dramatically down to around 299,000 in 2016, 289,000 in 2019, and 194,000 in 2020. Chapter 13 Bankruptcies in US Year to Year 2008: 353k 2009: 398k 2010: 434.8k 2011: 417k 2012: 375k 2013: 343k 2014: 313k 2015: 302k 2016: 299k 2017: 296k 2018: 288k 2019: 289k 2020: 194k 2021: 117.7k 2022: 149k (.05% of the US population) Anytime someone presents a claim, automatically question whether that claim is even accurate, then do the research and understand the basic math. In the case of medical bankruptcy, it’s an extremely inflated piece of hype used by proponents of massive change to the overall US system, with no numbers to support it. It’s sensationalist hype really.
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  5252. It simply outclasses the Harrier in every performance metric imaginable. Most important of all those metrics is safety. The Harrier is an inherently unstable jet during landing and is responsible for the loss of hundreds of lives and airframes over its career. Aside from that, the F-35B has... * Roughly 2x combat radius * Mach 1.6 capable * 5,700-22,000lb payload * Humiliates any 4th Gen fighter in A2A combat using unfair advantages in SA, first-look, first-shoot * Can penetrate the most dense IADS on the planet and conduct deep VLO strike on national command level TGTs * Can execute Destruction of Enemy Air Defense nodes better than 4th Gen fighters who were dedicated to that specific mission * Regularly conducts electronic attack in advance of strike packages by opening perimeter defense radar nets with 5th gen EA techniques * Has anti-ship and ASW capabilities that are rarely discussed, with cooperative multi-spectral surface & sub-surface scanning abilities that are in the early stages of awakening the US and UK maritime 5th gen dominance * Regularly tracks low earth orbit satellites with the AESA, then fuses those tracks with its other sensors, and pipes that live track data to anyone on its data link net * Is able to detect and track ballistic missile launches at 800nm with the early DAS, which is being replaced with an even higher res new gen DAS * Can read aircraft tail number markings in the IR spectrum based on temperature gradients between light and dark paint * Regularly performs Airborne Early Warning & Control for other F-35s, Typhoons, NATO F-16s, Hornets, & F-15s. The leaps in capability from the Harrier to the F-35 are almost like jumping from an F-86 into something Skunk Works would make for Darth Vader.
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  5278. Typhoon is like an old flip phone text message being sent on the network. F-35 is like a smartphone that can screen time between other F-35s, and still get texts from older gen, but can’t pipe high-fidelity data to the lower tech aircraft. Still better than what we had before by leaps and bounds. Once 2 F-35s are in the air, AWACS is kind of pointless and doesn’t have good PID tracks or high resolution location data for airborne TGTs, especially altitude and exact position. Everyone has moved onto a net-centric battlefield now in the West, and the US is many generations into net-centric warfare already. F-35s are meant to be different things for different nations. For the USAF, the F-35A will ultimately supersede the F-16, while several other platforms on different tracks will remain. For countries like Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Japan, and Australia, it holds a very dominant position in the force mix. For USMC, F-35C and F-35B are the new fast jets, replacing F/A-18A-D and AV-8B. For Poland, F-35A will accompany F-16C/D Block 52 in the Air Force mix. For UK, F-35B complements Typhoon in the RAF, and is the replacement for the Harrier in the RN. F-15EX is a strategic industrial base plant program to keep workers at St. Louis, not a planned future program USAF ever asked for. Once the NGAD orders are contracted, especially for Unmanned systems, St. Louis won’t have to go looking to re-hire all the assembly line people. I’m not sure F-15EX will ever go feet-wet, as they are only being assigned to Air Defense National Guard units.
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  5279.  @madrooky1398  We worked on Typhoon development when it was still "Future Fighter 1990" from 1980-1982. It's the whole reason we PCS'd from Edwards AFB to West Germany on scientific exchange. Typhoon not only has federated systems architecture, but Brits, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards who were all fighting over the design in broken English designed it. The French were still on the program back then, and punched out because they weren't going to get the industrial share they wanted or a carrier variant, hence the Rafale program. So a lot of the systems layout is wonky with Typhoon, starting with the cockpit. Funding for upgrades has been done at a trickle pace through the European parliaments, which are filled with Social Democrats, Labor Parties, Greens, and straight up communists. It's why their premier air interceptor still doesn't have an AESA Radar in 2024 yet. A lot of these politicians have been on Russian payroll or ideologically aligned as well, even at senior leadership levels throughout the Cold War and since the rise of Putin. So Typhoon has been handicapped from within in many ways. Brits/UK have done the most in upgrades for A2G and systems development while the Germans have dragged their feet. By the time EFA went into Full Scale Development, the US had already committed to VLO designs moving forward, based on losses from SAMs in Vietnam and analysis of newer Soviet systems in Arab-Israeli wars. ATF was funded in 1981 while we were still in Munich, for example. Typhoon really came decades late and billions short in development.
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  5287.  @alexandrnoskov5437  I agree 100% about Congressmen and government officials of any stripe. They aren't technically-inclined, but are good at being spineless and bendable for their puppeteers. You have to understand that the current White House is filled with traitors. Biden was co-opted by a Soviet active measures program in 1972 that funded his Senatorial campaign in Delaware. The front group is called The Council For A Livable World, acting as an environmental rights non-profit, but actually an arm of Soviet Intelligence to get as many moles into the US Congress. These types of moles already existed dating back to the 1930s and populated the US State Department, White House, War Department, OSS, universities, and media. This is why Biden's first action in office was to kill the Keystone pipeline and shut down as many energy projects as possible to raise the cost for barrels of oil to benefit Russia. Both Russia and China have been bribing and extorting the Biden family for decades, so there is a tug-of-war going on right now between Putin and Xi with puppet Biden in the middle, surrounded by traitors in his cabinet who are more of the same. China only grows economically and militarily when oil/NG is cheap, while Russia can only grow when oil /NG is higher price. Since Russia and China have a mutual military pact, there is a hidden economic conflict that Putin has tried to diffuse by signing an energy deal with China, but China really relies heavily on Middle Eastern oil coming from the Persian Gulf. Interested times we live in. I have a suspicion China is using the US to weaken Russia since Russia has been the main supplier of war material to India for generations. China is adept at playing people against each other while they never have to fire a shot.
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  5289.  @alexandrnoskov5437  Lend Lease was an open transfer of billions of dollars worth of military technology during WWII to several nations, including Russia. If you're a student of military history, you had to have heard of it. One of the US Lend Lease officers wrote a book about the things he saw, including transfer of enriched Uranium and Beryllium triggers necessary for initiating atomic weapon detonations. The Russian Ambassador's wife managed multiple moles inside the Manhatten Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. She even had one of her assets buy the local hamburger restaurant in Los Alamos that the scientists frequented. The race for developing atomic weapons really began in England in the late 1800s, so it wasn't a new concept for the industrial powers. All of them had a classified nuke research program. The US just beat everyone to proof of concept with successful detonations. The stories behind the scenes are very interesting. FDR's White House was a hotbed of communist sympathy, including the hosting of Ludmila Pavlechenko's "shaming campaign" where Russia wanted the US to commit millions of troops into the European Theater earlier in the war to help Russia, never mind the fact that the US was fighting Japan in the Pacific. After the war, England gave Russia their Nene jet engine, which Russia reverse-engineered and used for the MiG-15. Russia also recovered B-29 Superfortress intercontinental strategic bombers and copied it directly with the Tu-4. Russia got the technical data package for the B-29 using assets who worked at the Boeing Wichita plant in Kansas to help understand the physical samples, materials, and processes.
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  5290.  @Flankymanga  If you talk about hypersonic and ICBM in the same sentence, it reveals a fundamental unfamiliarity with the subject matter. Any vehicles put into low earth orbit are traveling well in excess of hypersonic speeds, often over Mach 23. We don't describe them as "hypersonic" because they aren't anywhere near the tropopause and have no aerodynamic drag up there. Flight profiles for ICBMs are constrained in the tropopause where they reach the aerodynamic limit from atmospheric density and wait until getting out of the tropopause to throttle-up into escape velocity. Hypersonic vehicles travel through atmospheric resistance for much of their flight profile using ablative nose section materials. The materials science needed to overcome the coefficient of thermal expansion gradients between the frontal, mid, and tail sections of a hypersonic vehicle are daunting from an engineering perspective. The design approach for hypersonic systems is significantly different because of the flight profile and thermal loading on the leading edge surfaces, and how those thermal loadings migrate through the body and internal systems. DSP for fighter Radars was pioneered on the APG-63 in the F-15, not the MiG-31. MiG-31 didn't even exist. Once the F-15 with DSP was introduced, the Soviets initiated an upgrade program for the MiG-25 as MiG-25P and PD with solid state electronics attempting to mimic the F-15's processors, which allowed the first true look-down, shoot-down capability. The MiG-31 was designed to have a much longer mission radius than the short-legged MiG-25, and incorporate a Radar operator in the rear seat. The PESA Radar technology was literally acquired from the B-1 program, which a young Senator Biden was tasked with killing after the developmental work had been done in the early 1970s. Digital Signals Processing is not exclusive to military technology in the US. One of my very old guitar effects processors uses DSP/COSM technology to emulate various amplifiers. It has 85 banks, each with 4 channels, dozens of effects, an acoustic guitar simulator, synthesizer, expression pedal, chorus, reverb, flange, phaser, compressor, harmonizer, Wah, etc. all integrated into one foot board. There isn't an implied connection with DSP to Radar signals processing. DSP is used in automotive, medical, communications, musical, RC, and entertainment industries. LPI Radars don't use brute force with high power output, but very high fidelity, low power emissions in billions of cycles per second frequency hopping, with limited bursts as opposed to continuous emit. No EW system is going to predict their emissions. IR signature reduction has been a focus of VLO platforms since the 1970s in the US. ATB, F-117A, F-22A, and all 3 JSF have significant IR reduction technologies to defeat the effectiveness of both ground and airborne IR sensors, reducing their effective ranges considerably. A RAAF exchange pilot flying F-15Cs with an Aggressor squadron out of Nellis said when he was doing WVR exercises against F-22s, the JHMCS helmet-cueing sight and Captive Air Training Missile seeker head could not acquire the F-22 even when he put the reticle directly on the Raptor. There isn't a merge with 5th Gen fighters, only he who dies and doesn't know why. For ground-based platforms, take into consideration the curvature of the earth and now see what happens to your network. 2nd place is really far from 1st when you understand the applied physics of these subjects.
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  5291.  @Flankymanga  F-22A can carry 4 AAMs and 2x 1000lb JDAMs, or 4 AAMs and 8x Small Diameter Bombs, with 18,000lb of internal fuel. None of those bombs need LASER TGT Designator cueing. The F-22A can release any of those weapons at high supersonic speeds as well, and has demonstrated such. It’s a superb VLO strike platform, opposite of what you are saying, and has been operationally employed that way for years, putting SDBs through specific windows of buildings in Syria. The reason why the F-22A was killed was because Russia and China put pressure on traitors who were on their payroll within DoD and White Houses to cut the program before we could ever go into Full Rate Production. Russia did not want 200 Raptors in Europe, and China didn’t want 200 Raptors in the Pacific, with 200+ reserves in the US on the coasts to rapidly plus-up the ETO and PACOM Raptor units. There were 195 built, not 150. Multiple USAF Chiefs of Staff fought and sacrificed their careers trying to keep the F-22 assembly line open, but patriotism doesn’t hold up to treason in the network of traitors that has been long built-up by Russia and China in the heads of US government. For example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was a KGB asset dating back to the 1980s, as I have confirmed with people who worked with him. Moles within US DoD reported the initial capabilities back to Russia and China, which kick-started PAK-FA and J-20, while the “kill F-22” treason active measures were launched as well, under guise of cost-savings. F-35 series hasn’t been going through a “myriad of developmental failures”. The opposite is true, in that JSF-A/B/C have been demonstrating a long list of developmental and operational firsts. The media campaign against JSF is primarily coming from Russia via the residue of Mockingbird and IOJ, still running same old playbook from the 1950s (because it’s effective). Canada has not cancelled its orders. Justin Trudeau was propped up by Chinese and Russian backers with a campaign platform of killing the F-35 for Canada, even though Canada had already committed to JSF as one of the upper tier partners. Russia does not want USAF Alaska connected with RCAF and USAF in Vermont via the MADL network acting as a strategic networked next generation NORAD web, which not only has airborne and low earth orbit TGT detection and PID capabilities, but surface vessel detection and tracking in the Arctic Circle. Trudeau is a traitor to Canada and has been before he ever entered office. Pierre Sprey is a laughing stock in the defense aerospace community and has been since the 1970s. He said that the USAF ruined the F-15 by putting complicated electronic garbage in it that never works, and said the same things about the YF-16 to F-16 upgrades. He made similar silly statements about the M48 tank being better than the M-1 Abrams, so he discredited himself every time he opened his fat mouth. RAND Corp did no such simulation. 2 idiot employees published an amateur simulation that had no relation to reality and were immediately fired for being idiots. Their baseline assumptions in that simulation are comical. Anyone who has seen an F-35 demo knows immediately that they are watching new levels in performance. All 3 have superb climb rate, very short take-offs, and superior combat configuration maneuverability to 4th Gen fighters. Pilots around the world who fly F-35As, F-35Bs, and F-35Cs have been singing its praises for years now. Finland just ran a 7 year higher evaluation program with double-layered oversight from independent groups to monitor the fairness of the H-X competition, and the F-35A smoked all the competitors hands-down. There aren’t any discrepancies in my statements. I’ve been in defense and aerospace since the 1970s, with 20 years spent at the USAF Flight Test Center, West German Flight Test Center, and certain Western Test Ranges in the US, in addition to 10 years of active duty deployments all over the world. You are correct in that many US technologies have foreign origins, but a lot of the aerospace tech in Europe has been seeded by the US after WWII as well. We were working on the FECA/EFA on a scientific exchange program, while other colleagues were working with the Germans and Brits on the Tornado from 1980-1982. The US-European aerospace efforts have been very collaborative since manned flight began really. The “great newspapers” in the US didn’t even believe that the Wright Brothers were really flying for years. It wasn’t until Wilbur took one of their Wright Flyers to France and demonstrated it there, that the newspapers in the US finally took notice. Russia’s problem is being isolated from the trade routes by being almost land-locked. A map doesn’t make it seem so, but the limited number of sea ports with access to international waters severely limits Russia’s market penetration from a geographic perspective. This is why Russia has always wanted more depth into the European peninsulas, which it has gained and lost cyclically throughout history (Finland, baltics, Poland).
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  5294.  @Flankymanga  Yes, that's the fake image. Notice the white rectangular background and the lack of clipped wingtips and stabilators that are characteristics of the F-22A planform. That looks more like a model someone made using a YF-22 toy. Amateurs would swallow the story without critical analysis, whereas those familiar with the basic shape of the Raptor immediately recognized the fake. This was posted by an amateur, not an official Russian source. If you want to see real IR imagery of the F-22A both in burner and in dry power, the French published images of that from Rafale's OSF. Both images were extremely low contrast and at close range, with beautiful high resolution. When speaking about civilian FLIR at RIAT watching low altitude performance demos where much of the profile is done in burner, it isn't representative of actual long range TGT detection in atmospheric contrast. That RIAT FLIR is valuable for seeing a huge difference though, because you can watch the Su-35 demo as well. On the Flanker, you just see a huge radiating blob of fire where you can barely distinguish any shapes because the IR signature bloom is so overwhelming to the sensor. I've been studying the applied physics of IRSTs from the collective NATO AeroE subject matter perspective since 1986, with lots of graphics and spectral analyses looking at near, mid, and long wave IR sensors and emissions. The short story is you will not see F-22A or JSF at any BVR distances over Europe as long as they remain subsonic, if talking about OLS-35. Supersonic profiles have reduced detection range compared to 4th Gen, but the detection range is of course sooner than a subsonic profile. Over the Middle East or North Africa at night, you can detect them just outside of visual range, but they have been watching you from 200-400km away already, so it never gets that far on a BVR timeline. Regarding F-15 APG-63 developments: The DSP upgrade program began well before 1979. DSP APG-63(V) was the most significant upgrade from F-15A to F-15C. We were at Edwards when all this was happening in the 1970s, so I'm not talking about online sources. F-15C production began in 1978. RDT&E at Edwards and Eglin began years before that, along with AIMVAL at Nellis AFB. Belenko didn't defect until September of 1976. The APG-63 DSP upgrade program was already well underway before it went into production and upgrades to the F-15A fleet simultaneously. The other major upgrade was increasing the number of internal fuel tanks with the F-15C airframe, since the F-15A consumed its limited fuel quickly. The Flanker is a superior design in this regard since it has to perform long range escort without using EFTs. The MiG-29 is inferior since it has very limited fuel capacity and a short mission radius. F-15As were rapidly transferred to Air National Guard units as F-15Cs replaced them from 1979-1985. Another concurrent development that was driving its BVR capabilities was the push for the AIM-7M after seeing that the AIM-7F limited WEZ made the F-14A and F-15 vulnerable to all-aspect IR missiles at the end of the BVR timeline. This was due to the SARH continuous wave illumination constraint of the AIM-7 guidance architecture. AIM-7M was the stop-gap while we went to work on the AMRAAM program. USSR was monitoring all these developments from the extensive spy network within the US and NATO, and soon began work on the R-77, most of which took place in Ukraina SSR and just north of Moscow. USSR also acquired technical data and subsystem samples of the Honeywell Visual Target Acquisition System for US Navy F-4J (1969) meant to provide helmet-cueing for the AIM-9G Expanded Acquisition Mode Sidewinder, and implemented that system into the MiG-29 & Su-27 in the 1980s with the R-73 all aspect IR AAM. I have seen the materials samples of these myself, noting that the shape of the helmet tracking avionics boxes were copied exactly from the Honeywell VTAS, including the serial cards. Russian Air Force brought MiG-29s to Edwards AFB in the early 1990s, and my father was pulled from his engineering duties on another program to act as a translator, since he speaks Russian quite well. One of the Russian officers went on a bender one night, was late for the shuttle bus pick-up, so he tried to hitch-hike from the bachelor's quarters to the liaison buildings where everyone was meeting. It created quite a scene since he was in uniform, so they had to go pick him up quickly. They really wanted to just get trashed and go sight-seeing. We were shocked at how crudely the MiG-29s were built, with USAF maintenance personnel noting that the APU exhaust was routed through the centerline fuel tank, and how many exposed fasteners there were on the airframe. In hindsight, that made sense for Soviet wartime production rates assuming high attrition for the MiG-29, but it hurt the MiG-29 longevity because the fastener holes for skin panels were individually drilled by hand, following a rough template. This meant that the panels were not interchangeable from one fighter to the next. Airframe life on the MiG-29 is also very low.
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  5295.  @Flankymanga  Look at a top view of an F-22A. Now look at that fake image. You can see clearly for yourself that it’s a fake by looking at the trailing edges of the wings and stabilators, which are clipped on an actual F-22A. In that hoax image, the wings and stabs are not clipped. The YF-22 had wings and stabs like that, which leads one to suspect that the amateur hoaxer used an image of a toy or model YF-22 to fabricate that really bad attempt at looking like he had some inside info. F-35 doesn’t have JHMCS, the F-15C, F-15E, F/A-18E/F, and F-16CM do. The pilot I was referencing was flying the F-15C as an aggressor. The JHMCS and Captive AIM-9 training missile could not acquire the F-22A within visual range. These WVR set-ups were arranged after BVR, where F-22s wrecked the aggressors for sport. They followed with BFM so both sets could get some BFM training in, nothing more. Rafale’s OSF was able to see F-22A on the edge of visual range and they leaked these images, since USAF and Armee de L’Air frequently train in annual exercises. French are tired of being killed all the time at BVR and BFM, so maybe someone who was upset leaked the images. Doesn’t mean anything since Rafales always die before any kind of merge. IR concealment absolutely has worthwhile returns because it negated a whole series of weapons and sensors that had billions invested into them. IR VLO requires potential adversaries to invest in newer weapons and sensors, which take a lot of time to develop, fine-tune, and then deploy operationally. Why have you assumed F-22s will be operating with AWACS or that presence of AWACS in the airspace compromises blue forces? F-22s and F-35s don’t need AWACS. They have vastly superior situational awareness to any AWACS platform. AWACS are mostly relevant now because of their endurance. The sensor web formed by F-22s and JSF provides each individual pilot a better picture of the airspace and surface threats than if you combined all of the crew stations in the E-3D. AMRAAMs fired at altitude from optimum separation speed and vector can be sent into a NEZ profile that isn’t within the fields of regard of either the IRBIS or OLS-35. Fighter Radars in X-Band don’t normally detect incoming BVR missiles, nor do IRSTs. The search mode you would need to use with a high fidelity IRST with the latest Western electronics and Germanium glass would need to be in extreme narrow FOV. The way that fighters detect incoming BVR missiles has normally been when their RAWS sensors detect a specific missile seeker bandwidth illuminating their airframe. There are many ways around triggering the RWR in that spectrum, primarily by keeping the active seeker off as long as possible. The latest variants of AIM-120C7 and D use 2-way data links and have been demonstrated using passive sensors on the launch aircraft, no active RF painting of the targets. There is no need to employ within IRST detection range, since that is very short against IR VLO platforms (edge of visual, short BVR distances in practice). Air National Guards are State-controlled, not Federal. There are small States in the US who could deploy their Air National Guard assets and erase most of the air forces on the planet, as many have both Air Mobility and Tactical Air units. For example, Vermont (one of the tiniest States) has F-35As now. There are also Federal military Reserves. It goes like this: USAF AFRES (Air Force Reserves) ANG (Air National Guard) USN USN Reserves USMC USMC Reserves US Army Army National Guard US Army Reserves The USMC has a larger Air Force than the UK, for example, and the USMC is the smallest US military service. APG-63 DSP was already under development before the MiG-31 prototypes flew. I was literally there at the USAF Flight Test Center when that was happening and we later were on the F-15 CTF. APG-63 Radar development was extremely guarded, not openly discussed much at all. There were other features it and the APG-66 had that are still not able to be discussed, even though they were replaced generations ago. The F-102 and F-106 Air Defense Fighters as part of NORAD had the SAGE networked data link program in the early 1960s. Most of what is said about who did what first is entirely at odds with the history. Swedes claim they had it first as well on Viggen, but theirs came right after SAGE, and they had a lot of Hughes systems in their fighters. CIA was co-opted by the NKVD before the CIA was even formed. It was the most aggressive, most successful counter-intelligence operation conducted that I know of in history. Russia went straight to the top and the rest of the organization was downline of that. They had 200 double agents in the OSS/CIA transition even before Congress signed the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, NSA, and USAF. CIA is not the main people who acquire foreign materials. DIA and its assets among the services are much better at that, while CIA takes credit for it and immediately leaks back to the source nations exactly what has been acquired. CIA is a double agency working for Moscow, and this has never changed. All fighter Radars operate in X-band with similar sized antennae. That doesn’t equate to them being capable of jamming the other. ECM systems are used for that typically, until the advent of 5th Gen AESAs with certain Transmitter Receiver Modules. For example, F-35s can jam the earlier APG-77 in the F-22A, so a massive modernization effort has been undertaken to bring the APG-77(V)1 up to that capability I suspect. Typhoon CAPTOR-E Mk.2 for the UK will have jamming capability, whereas the German Mk.1 will not have the GaN TRM elements. To save money, the UK is installing 50% of the TRMs with GaN semiconductor materials, and the other 50% with Gallium Arsenide (GaA). It isn’t openly discussed what the TRMs are made of for F-35 and F-22 upgrades. Up until a few years ago, GaN TRMs were unobtainable in quantities necessary for mass production to populate hundreds of antennae arrays with over 1600 TRM count. The current JSF series has had stand-off jamming capability leveraged with VLO and the ability to manage their signatures deceptively, which is a new capability for fighter radars. Russian ELINT birds have already suffered from being shot by Syrian SAMs when they showed up on the Syrian IADS net as hostiles, even as Syrian IADS is managed with technical assistance and networking with Russian expeditionary forces. Russia complained to Israel, but Israel said all of their F-16I strike fighters had already landed. Again, everyone who thinks Russia leads the way in EW is sadly mistaken. The US just doesn’t talk about it, puts out all sorts of disinformation, and distractions about “dogfighting”.
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  5304.  @Elthenar  The original vision for JSF involved multiple mission profiles for each service variant, with take-off and landing methods driving the substantial differences in structures, airframes, and propulsion. USAF wanted more of an F-16 replacement with imoroved VLO features over the F-117A, along with all the sensors F-117A never had, with 100nm longer combat radius than a 2-bag Viper, capable of matching or exceeding the combat-configured Viper's kinematics. Navy wanted a replacement for F/A-18C with VLO they never got from A-12 program, with at least 100nm longer mission radius than the Hornet, and got 100nm+ longer than Super Hornet in the process. UK and USMC wanted a supersonic replacement for Harrier with longer legs, more payload, more survivability using VLO. All had multirole in-mind so there would be usable platforms in the ATO, unlike the F-15C or A-10 most of the time. What they got was something that included that and a bucket of fries, side order of shakes, happy meal, seasonal passes to vacation spots, and much more. Nobody thought F-35s would be acting Ike an EF-111A or EA-6B, then executing a continuous ISR profile en route to a deep strike like F-117A into the MEZ, then pivoting into self/buddy BDA, then into an Airborne Controller, or opportunistic OCA killer, then back into an EF-111A on the way out. Nobody thought that, and they're just getting warmed up. Nobody thought they would be border-skimming Spyplanes sucking up all the trons and thermal signature providing collective targeting data in a live warzone the US isn't actively participating in. Nobody thought they would be TBM detection platforms with a vast sensor web complex that tracks low earth orbit satellites. Whatever everyone thought they were going to be used for, they have stepped so far outside that box, that nobody but older guys remember those days.
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  5318.  Vincent Trivigno  Yes, I love it. That's probably one of the most exemplary appointments, although you got it mixed up. He appointed a coal guy as acting EPA Chief! Savage! If you study the EPA's history of fail, they're more like a Soviet bureaucracy that takes pay-offs from the biggest polluters, while crushing small companies who actually follow the rules. Then they manage to order total destruction of ecosystems like they did in Colorado after local towns and mining companies repeatedly begged them not to spill 3 million gallons of toxic mine waste into the Animus River, then refused to pay for it. So as a life-long advocate for our environment, I'm filled with pure glee when I see the EPA's budget slashed and energy sector people put in charge of it. Paris Climate Accords have nothing to do with the environment other than using it as a lever against US competition as the world's 2nd largest exporter. China happily signed Paris Climate Accord. China, where the pollution and environmental mismanagement is so horrible, it puts out 30% of the entire world's air pollution, most of the plastic in the ocean, untold tons of chemical waste into the pacific, and even into its own rivers. You can't breathe in many of the cities if you go outside on a bad air day. Signatory treaties that affect trade are a cutthroat business. The US is one of the only nations that actually combats pollution. In Russia, instead of having emissions test centers, you pull in so they can pull your cadmium catalytic converter for resale, while giving you a certificate of compliance. The disparity in environmental management in the US even with EOA corruption/incompetence is night and day compared with the 10 largest populations on earth.
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  5353. Gripens crashed because their flight control system wasn’t vetted well enough before they went to live flights, and they are prone to stalling due to the poor Thrust-to-Weight Ratio. Gripen C/D performance at Red Flag is not what it is cracked up to be by amateurs who don’t understand what Red Flag even is. Gripens had to be tasked with Red Air because they couldn’t bring anything to the table being incorporated with Blue Air, because they had no real Air-to-Ground capability for their first attendance. Red Air knows all the terrain and how to inflict maximum losses on Blue Air for the opening of campaign. Gripens flew with F-16C and F-15C aggressors as part of Red Air to do that job against National Guard units who were lacking in their Air-to-Air tactics, since they had done so much CAS and strike mission sets in OIF/OEF. Follow-on attendance of SAF Gripens to Red Flag happened once they integrated GBU-12 and FLIR/LST pod capability on the Gripen C/D. Once Sweden passed several basic milestones for A2G delivery, they came back to RF and incorporated into Blue Air, but were again not very useful due to the poor combat radius of the Gripen C/D when carrying bombs and EFTs. It was more of a token of cooperation bringing Sweden up to speed with some very basic coalition air component forces interoperability. Finland didn’t settle on F-35A by a narrow margin, but by a huge margin. 2nd place was the Super Hornet Block 3, which didn’t meet the threshold performance requirements for H-X. Gripen E came in dead last, its numbers too embarrassing to publish to-date. Super Hornet scored a cumulative 3.81, whereas F-35A scored 4.47. The only reason Brazil ordered Gripen E/F was because the outgoing Brazilian President was bribed. Canada of course chose the F-35A as well, since they have been a partner in he JSF program for many years.
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  5358.  @termitreter6545  This is a highly-technical discipline with more advanced technology than any space program (fighter engines HPHT turbine blades as one example). AWACS have to maintain stand-off distance from any threat WEZ and surface-based MEZ, so yeah, the AWACS Radar reach is significantly limited by positioning in-theater. JSF especially can get closer to threat sensors than any other platform in the inventory, and they have the latest Semi Conductor technology in their TRM materials, with better processors that are all interleaved with each other for multiple vantage points. Those factors plus their higher operating altitude place the JSF kill web in a far superior situational scheme than any AWACS can ever hope to have, and multiple pilots have stated for years how dramatically-superior their picture of the battlespace is over AWACS. I can cite multiple pilot reports and even comms backing up the JSF/AWACS SA superiority. It’s not even close. A single JSF pilot has an infinitely-better picture of the space than if you fused the brains of all of the station operators sitting in the back of an AWACS. A huge factor in this is the presence of high-saturation IR sensors that cover short, medium, and long-wave IR spectrum right inside the threat areas, whereas AWACS has none of this. The entire flight regime in the F-35A is superior to the combat-configured F-16C Block 50 (best performing engine). The subsonic acceleration of the F-35A is superior to the F-22A. F-35A maintains higher sustained speeds and altitude than the F-16 and F/A-18, comparable more to the F-15, which likes to hang out above the cons (FL400). If you’re reading any sources that claim the F-35s suck at sustained speed and altitude, you now can toss those sources into the trash bin and never click on them again. I just unsubscribed from an aviation-specific channel after repeated failures and click-bait BS claims that have no correlation to reality. I’ve been flying since the 1970s. Having high fuel fraction is absolutely a bonus and the main driver for that was combat radius. The KPPs for JSF required 100nm combat radius over each legacy platform they were replacing. They accomplished that in spades with each of the variants.
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  5360.  @olympia5758  US military technology has changed dramatically since the 1990s, mainly due to AARs from ODS combined with planned long-term programs already in existence. Examples: Radios went from open channel FM encrypted to VHSC Frequency-Hopping encrypted, now to the 3rd generation of net-centric systems. Navigation went from INS for air, map and compass for ground, to GPS integrated with better INS for air power, and multiple tiny GPS units for ground forces integrated with net-centric displays and data link comms. Radars went from Mechanically-scanned Arrays to Active Electronically Scanned Arrays. Missiles got tiny guidance units with far superior processing power and memory, with programmable functions, better rocket propellant, superior sensors, and thousands of more test iterations on moving targets. We’ve gone through 2 generations or more of updates to vehicles, from 1st Gen HMMWV to 2nd and 3rd Gen, now to JLTV. 1980s-era fighters were timed-out and replaced with mid-1990s to early 2000s built fighters, now with 20teens to 2020s-build 5.5 Gen fighters. We’ve been through 4 or 5 combat uniform changes since the 1990s. BDUs, DCUs, MCUs, ACUs, MC, Scorpion. Patriot missile Defense has evolved to PAC-3 already. Body armor went from PASGT to Interceptor/IBA, E-SAPI, IOTV, SPCS, and now the Modular Scalable Vest. Helmets went from the PASGT to MICH/ACH, then the Lightweight Advanced Combat Helmet Gen II and Lightweight Helmet. Night Vision went from PVS-4s and PVS-4s to PVS-7, PVS-14s, PVS-15s, PVS-31s, PSQ-20s, and PSQ-42s. Laser Aiming Modules went from the AIM-1 to PAQ-4A, PAQ-4C, PEQ-2A, PEQ-15, PEQ-16, DBAL Weapons went from M16A2 to M4A1 and M4 Gen I, M4A1 SOPMOD Block I, SOPMOD Block II, URGI, Big Army M4A1 PIP. Rifle Sights went from Iron to several ACOG variants, various Aimpoint RDSs, and now LPVOs. The boots have changed multiple times as well. Nothing is the same. There isn’t much left over from the 1990s in US inventory when you go down the list of aircraft, equipment, weapons, radios, vehicles, medical equipment, and uniforms. If you showed up with 1990s gear on in any operational US military unit, they would stare at you like some kind of anachronism and you wouldn’t be able to integrate well with anyone left and right of you until you were issued new weapons and equipment.
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  5445.  @mikev4621  So I've been involved in ballistics research, to include 5 decades of practical and professional experience in the field, with funded and published studies on the subject. I've seen a lot of live projectile impacts through optics, high-speed photography, and extensive human and animal terminal wound ballistics. When you watch the stabilized Zapruder film in slow-motion, you can especially see initial spalling and explosive response from the highly vascular, right frontal quadrant of the cranium that is consistent with an impact in that location. Rifle projectiles fired at high velocity experience violent deformation on impact with a hard surface, sending some material outward radially at supersonic speed. That blood splatter is from a frontal impact, not an exit. The observations of the ER Docs at Dallas all pointed to an entrance in the front, and a large exit wound in the rear. With skull injuries from high velocity missiles, they don't always follow the initial bullet path either. Due to the curved shape of the skull, any impact off-center will usually be deflected from the initial flight path. We've seen a lot of head injuries in the military and crime where impacts outside of the center 1/3 of the skull penetrate the soft tissue only, then skirt or circumscribe the skull and exit the scalp on the far side. At closer ranges, high velocity rifle impacts almost always "canoe" or cavitate part of the skull. This is what happened to JFK. His right brain was mostly evacuated from the skull due to high velocity missile trauma. The angle at which the shot came from could be more from the right of the motorcade, then redirect from its impact to the skull and blow out the rear. His head reaction to the left and rearward is consistent with a right frontal impact angle up to 45° from the direction of travel of vehicle. Also, given the quick succession between the last 2 shots we can see between Governor Connally and the explosive frontal head shot on JFK, it is an absolute certainty that they were not from the same rifle. Zapruder and multiple ear witnesses confirm this definitively.
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  5487.  @Albertkallal  If you want to focus on raw performance metrics, start with: * Actual engine thrust at specific altitude and speed bands. Some engines deliver maximum thrust uninstalled, while others deliver more thrust at certain speeds and altitudes. It depends on the airflow mass rate of the intake geometry, bypass ratio of the turbofan, fuel flow rate, compression ratios, etc. It's easy to just use uninstalled ratings for the basic math, but some engines love gulping air at certain speeds and creating more thrust at 40k feet and higher, while others wheeze up there. * Specific model empty weights. F-16A MLU is lighter than F-16CM CCIP Block 40. They also have totally different engines. Rafale C is lighter than Rafale M. F-35A is lighter than F-35C, which is lighter than F-35B, etc. * Internal fuel state (take off fuel is different than mid-profile, so we often use anywhere from 40-60% internal fuel or a Thrust Specific Fuel Consumption based figure if you know the TFSC for the engine/airframe/profile). 50% internal or 50% of total int + external can be used to even the metrics when trying to determine T/W side-by-side. * Wing Weapon Pylons, ejectors, launch rails all have weights. Pylons rated for fuel tanks and A2G weapons are heavy by themselves, plus the ejector racks that get mounted inside them. * Cannon + ammunition weighs a lot, rarely accounted for when people try to calculate T/W. * ECM, FLIR, LST, TGT pods are heavy and present g limits to the aircraft when carried in many cases, while also adding parasitic drag. * Weapons all have weights of course. F-35A has a really high combat T/W ratio in this regard, with no/minimal parasitic drag. Last time I did the detailed T/W analysis, it was like a Rafale M, both carrying the same amount of fuel and weapons. Rafale has much lower empty weight, but not as much thrust. Rafale M empty weight is 23,400lbs. Thrust in mil: 22,500lb Thrust in AB: 34,000lb F-35A empty weight is 29,300lbs. Mil power thrust: 28,000lb AB: 43,000lb Start-up fuel state: 18,400lb internal
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  5512.  @menotyou7762  Gripen E avionics are nowhere near being close to JSF. Gripen E uses 2 generations-old US Mil-1553B databuses, which were superseded by Mil-1773 Fiber Optic databus. The Mil-1553 dates back to 1978. It’s sad to see so many people effectively deceived about how great the Gripen avionics are, when it is already obsolete. Speed is slower in a combat-configured Gripen. It will be lucky to reach Mach 1.4 to Mach 1.5 when carrying only 4 AAMs and External Fuel Tanks. Combat-configured maneuverability is weak and anemic. Even slick with a no weapons Gripen, the F-35A will out-climb the Gripen and has far superior slow speed handling and performance. F-35A has better acceleration through the Mach and can actually reach Mach 1.6 while carrying full internal fuel and 6 A2A missiles, or 4 AAMs and 2-8 A2G weapons internally. Gripen has never been able to and never will be able to do that. The Gripen E Radar can’t detect or track the F-35A until on the edge of visual range at best. F-35A in passive sensor EMCON mode will see the Gripen E from up to 400km, maybe even farther depending on the network posture at the time. Gripen IRST won’t detect the subsonic F-35A until edge of visual range, supersonic at maybe 30km. F-35’s fused IR/RF sensors will have been tracking a 635 NCTR reference point Gripen E from hundreds of km away. Look at the Finnish H-X Challenge. F-35A was the clear and dizzying performance winner in the military performance trials. Super Hornet Block 3 was 2nd place. Gripen E was dead last, failed to meet any of the performance thresholds of 4/5 in the measured areas. It’s a scam to try to keep Saab in business with a low-capability fighter.
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  5513.  @Xenomorphine  F-22 cancellation was purely treasonous, not economic. They spent the money we should have done for Raptors on MRAP vehicles, without even planning for MRAP spare parts. That gave the WH and SECDEF Gates the cover to make it look like they were taking care of troops, when it fact they were delivering a death blow to the fighter replacement for the aging F-15Cs. I’ve spoken with people in back channels who worked with Gates throughout his career, and they always suspected him of being an KGB asset back during the Cold War. Russia and China were feeling intense heat from the F-22 proposed acquisition numbers because it would mean the US has the ability to erase their air forces and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. There were going to be over 200 Raptors in Europe, and over 200 in the Pacific, with Coastal US Wings on the Atlantic and Pacific bases able to plus-up the PACAF and PACEUR units as part of the JRDF if needed, same way we postured the F-15C units. The proposed Raptor fleet would have given theater commanders and unprecedented strategic capability of being able to conduct offensive fighter sweep operations without peer. They also would have provided theater commanders with Defensive Counter-Air options that could intervene in smaller-scale assaults on regional nations, eliminating any Russian threat air as if it were a sport. Russia leaned hard on their old assets who were in high positions of influence in US DoD and the WH, along with the Chinese, while both acquired as much technical data as possible for their own domestic programs. The Chinese rubbed this in Gates’ face when he visited to have talks after he betrayed the US, flying the J-20 officially for the first time during his visit. Russia flew the T-50/PAK-FA prototype around that same time as well. Gates was on record of saying we don’t need Raptors to bomb the Taliban and that Russia and China didn’t have anything like it. They played the traitor like a fiddle and made a mockery of his usefulness to them. The Bush and Obama White Houses were in-on this whole treasonous affair, and multiple USAF Chiefs of Staff sacrificed their careers trying to save the F-22 so they could get it int Full Rate Production where the unit costs would have dropped down to $93.2 million with an open assembly line. Killing it bought time for China and Russia to try to catch up, which they have done their best attempts to do with J-20 and Su-57.
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  5515.  @laughingdaffodils5450  You don’t want to close within visual range of any legacy or modern fighter equipped with Helmet-Cued HOBS missiles, and you won’t really get that chance against a fairly-updated 4th Gen anyway with the current state of AESA Fire Control Radars and BVR missiles. If you’re in a 4.5 Gen fighter, you will really struggle to get first-look against the Su-57 if they continue to make strides in the RAM theft/development of US tech. The production Su-57s are looking much cleaner than the prototypes. They will have superior first-look, first-shoot against unsuspecting airborne targets if they get their BVRAAM act together, which has been delayed even since the end of the Soviet times. F-35s actually can carry plenty of AAMs. Block 3 F-35As configured for A2A carry 6 AAMs, 2 AIM-9X Bock 2+ missiles and 4 AIM-120D-3 BVRAAMs. Pk from F-35 delivered missiles is much higher than pk from 4th Gen fighters due to unobserved/undetected releases from unfair No Escape Zone parameters. The stowed kill count of an F-35A Block 3 is therefore in practice higher than the stowed kill count of an F-16 or F/A-18 in common configurations. F-16s and Hornets typically only carry 4 AAMs while the other stations are occupied with FLIR pods, ECM pods, External Fuel Tanks, leaving only 2 stations for their relevant strike missions. F-35s carry that same combat load internally, without having to use any stations for ECM or FLIR pods, leaving all of the weapons stations open for weapons. Even with an internal load, they carry a more relevant, more lethal and effective load, along with more internal fuel than the combined internal and external fuel of a Viper or Hornet. In BVR exercises between AESA-equipped F-15Cs vs new pilots in F-35As out in PACOM, the F-35s humiliated the F-15C folks in their core mission set because they had no SA the whole time. F-35A is cheaper to operate than any other fighter in USAF inventory. F-16C airframe costs less, but once you add the LITENING FLIR, ECM Pod, HARM TGT Pod, the F-16CM is actually more expensive and it has a higher break rate of 10% (the lowest of any USAF fighter until F-35A). F-35A break rate is 6%, which is unprecedented. F-35A CPFH dropped about $4000 from 2020-2021, putting it into the $13,000 range. F-22A went from $44,000 to $50,000 during the same timeframe since they have very limited airframes and a closed production line. F-15C, F-15D, F-15E all cost more to operate and maintain, not including ancillary podded systems, which are not reported openly.
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  5518.  @chm985  Nobody is entitled to their own set of facts. This is a huge and continuous problem with kids who were raised in the 1990s-2000s. Everyone got positive feedback for simply breathing and showing up. Reality doesn’t work that way, and the Gripen is especially an example of this. It embodies the entitlement mentality quite succinctly. People think that because a small country who makes a fighter is on equal footing somehow with nations that have been building higher-capability fighters for generations, where those fighters have been designed based off many decades of lessons-learned in combat and forward-deployed theaters. The Gripen doesn’t benefit from the same experience channels directly because nobody cares if it can perform, since Sweden doesn’t normally participate in allied air component forces. The Swedish Parliament didn’t care either, other than a side show jobs program for Saab, so they restricted Saab in what they could build by benchmarking it to FMS (Foreign Military Sales). Saab couldn’t find a good engine source in a higher thrust class (the Viggen had the most powerful fighter engine until the US IPE program, but it wasn’t optimized for high AOA reliable performance and would compressor stagnate). This left Saab with the option of buying the GE F404 from the US, which was designed from the outset to be 2 engines powering the F/A-18, not a single engine powering a LWF. That constraint really doomed the Gripen from the start to being a low-capability fighter, with a low payload, poor Thrust/Weight ratio, poor climb rate, and long take-off roll, going backwards from the 4th Gen fighters-all of which could take off from extremely short distances and climb into the vertical with unprecedented authority. There doesn’t need to be any emotion associated with these facts. They just are what they are. Denial is the first stage of coping with reality, and accepting the fact that the Gripen marketing has ignored these facts while promoting capabilities that aren’t there should be recognized and called out.
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  5522.  @andrewmackay9934  Gripen E is weak in the EW department. Saab is advertising capabilities that were standard but highly-classified on US teen series over 30 years ago. Saab took the approach to wingtip pod configuration from Dassault/Thales that's used on the Rafale when designing AREXIS. There's no internal space for such systems on a tiny fighter, so they had to use a podded approach, which are actually pretty draggy if you look at the AREXIS QRTs. Saab basically discovered baseline ASPJ and then runs their mouths about it as if they are the leaders in EW. Then in a desperate move towards the end of H-X, they advertised a MAL-D EW missile decoy capability as part of the EW suite. Early F/A-18C models were launching those on the opening night of Desert Storm in 1991, but didn't talk about it for decades. New entrants to the AvGeek world see these things and think Saab is at the cutting edge. It's pathetic to watch really. Digital Radio Frequency Memory jamming isn't "active stealth". That's one of the most asinine claims I've seen made for years now. DRFM senses and records threat emitter signals, then sends those back in order to hopefully confuse the threat emitter. This was already being used on certain strategic platforms many decades ago, and was one of the main features of the ASPJ program for the US teen fighters initiated in the 1980s. I remember it very well. The US remained very tight-lipped about it with very limited information other than it existed. You know right away if a source is credible or not if they describe DRFM jammers as "active stealth". It's patently retarded to make such a claim. The Gripen E has a 1.5m+ frontal RCS when configured, very easy for any modern MSA or ESA to detect and track.
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  5524.  @shade9272  F-35 has better payload, longer legs, better durability, and the most affordable acquisition and O&M costs compared to any of the competitors. If you think F-35A maintenance is nothing short of abysmal, why was it the most available fighter in USAF in 2020 with the highest rates? For 2021, it’s the 2nd most-available after they got the A-10C fleet wings done, so F-35As are still more ready than F-16Cs/CMs. The F-16 has been the gold standard in FMC/MC rates for the past 4 decades. You might want to consider finding better sources of information, because whatever ones you’re using are simply full of errors and no facts. Dump them. F-35’s roles only credible in ELINT and tactical strike? What about A2A? When brand new F-35A pilots in a newly-formed squadron from Hill AFB deployed to Kadena several years ago and went up against F-15Cs, they wrecked them as if it were a sport. Same in all the Red Flags, to the point where they told Red Air you don’t even have to play by the rules anymore, do anything to get a kill. Same thing in Atlantic Trident or Northern Edge. It doesn’t matter. They’ve been defeating F-22As since 2017 in A2A. For the Iceland ADIZ shared rotational NATO interceptor role, Norwegian and Italian F-35s worked together with common data link and were able to execute VLO intercepts against live Bears. Norwegian F-35As integrated with B-2As for D-SEAD and escort. Israelis have been flying over Syria as if they own the place, turning Syrian SAMs against Russian ELINT birds, destroying the latest IADS nodes, to the point now instead of the regional news reporting on F-16s striking targets, it’s “unidentified aircraft” struck targets in Syria. None of the current European fighters on the market are cheaper or better. They are far more expensive, with Rafale and Typhoon being twice the price for nowhere near the capability, and more O&M costs. Your information sources are bad.
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  5525.  @laughingdaffodils5450  Frontal RCS of some legacy AIM-9 profiles is already .0002m2, so you’ll see operational F-35s carrying the 2 AIM-9X Block II+s quite commonly without concern of that load causing any practical degradation to their VLO profile for a lot of sorties. In LFEs and deployments, you see a mix of aircraft in those configurations. Carrying 2 out of the 7 external stores stations isn’t loading them all up, so that’s a hyperbole fallacy from you on that one. I’m not talking about loading stations 2, 3, 9, and 10, just 1 and 11 with the angled pylons mean to deflect RF and not create right angles. There is no spin, just recognizing key traits of the design that were obviously meant to allow VLO carriage of the AIM-9s. The argument that JSF wasn’t supposed to do A2A doesn’t hold any water at all. I’m referencing the JSF program history from ASTOVL all the way through CALF and JAST, with specific KPPs called out by the lead program engineers in the 741 page book on JSF written by those engineers and early test pilots. Every single JSF airframe type of the 3 variants was meant to meet or exceed the A2A capabilities of the F-16C and F/A-18C. The F-16 and F/A-18 designs came from an A2A-only focus, then were adapted to multirole by the service customer requests. ATF was supposed to get AIRST, but it was cut due to cost spirals, as was the supersonic ejection seat and STOL thrust reversers. JSF got EOTS and DAS out of the gate which constitutes a dual-plane, multi-length IR spectrum IRST better than AIRST. DAS was an evolution of the F-22’s MAWS into a more capable spherical IR spectrum SA system, fused with the RF and EOTS sensors, which is why it is more capable than the Raptor in A2A as far as first-look is concerned. APG-81 is also more capable in stand-off jamming than the Raptor’s APG-77, so they’ve been upgrading the Raptor based on capabilities demonstrated in the F-35 program. It was openly revealed that F-35s were able to jam Raptor’s APG-77 in force-on-force exercises. APG-77 went through an upgrade overhaul after that quietly, as did the other sensors. The money they could have spent on a HMS in the Raptor was spent on more important sensor upgrades that aren’t detailed, but some of us can make very good guesses about what they did. Cost of a current Lot 14 production F-35A ($77.9 million flyaway) is less than half the cost of an F-16E/F for UAE. The UAE Desert Falcons were over $200 million each. Saab won’t reveal what their Unit Flyaway is on the Gripen E/F, but the Unit Program Cost for Brazil was $155.5 million per. That includes spares, weapons, support, pylons, EFTs, etc. F-35A unit program cost for Finland was lower than any of the other competitors. The whole contract details for pricing was published by the Finns for all to see.
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  5526.  @laughingdaffodils5450  The ATF program was also managed with the assumption that the Stealth might not work, so it had to have significant leaps in raw performance over anything the Su-27 and MiG-29 could do. A lot of people had their doubts about the Stealth and the IFDL data link took 7 years to get to finally work reliably from 1997-2004, but they pulled it off after a Herculean effort at Edwards. After they started Initial Tactics Development, they saw that the VLO actually worked better than expected, so the raw performance wasn’t really a factor. JSF had already been envisioned and the fly-off conducted by that point, so the initial concept of a Hi-Lo mix following the F-15/F-16 force structure for ATF/JSF was still being pursued under 4th Gen assumptions. The more work they did in operational test and force-on-force exercises really highlighted that the other distinguishing factors of 5th Gen were far more important than legacy metrics of speed and maneuverability, with information-sharing being at the top of the list. Pilots who have flown both describe the Raptor as a huge factor advantage over anything else in the 4th Gen world, but the F-35s have even more of a factor of those features that make them significantly-more capable due to the sensor fusion, IR spectrum fused with RF, and a faster data link with higher transfer rates. Since one of the production Lots on JSF, the RAM was changed significantly and the RCS was dropped considerably once they went to Carbon Fiber tailplanes. That made the frontal RCS and certain aspects lower than the Raptor in RF spectrum. You can’t just do an “upgrade kit” to reach into JSF sensor suite capabilities. The Raptor is the closest thing architecturally, and they still haven’t been able to fund it. So I’ve been closely tracking US fighter and weapons acquisition since 1984. We haven’t seen a $20 million F-16 since about that time. The first Block 25 F-16Cs were a little over that. F-16A Block 15 in the early-mid 1980s was $16 million. Block 30s made in the mid-late 1980s were $32 million. Block 40 Night/All Weather-Capable Vipers with LANTIRN were over $42 million. You could basically look at the production Block number and it would correlate with how many tens of millions they were for unit flyway cost. After CCIP on Block 50s, 52s, then later on 40s and 42s, we have well over $115 million sunk just into the airframes. All the different podded systems are on top of that price, as is JHMCS. Same with the MSIP partner nations in NATO with their F-16AMs. The MLU program added tens of millions per jet to get them up to speed for JTIDS data link (Link-16 incremental protocol adherence), AIFF for enhanced AIM-120 employment envelope expansion, JDAM integration, WFOV HUD, improved cockpits, structural mods, and other things. We worked on some of that critical development that was supposed to be part of Block 30G, but didn’t get into production until Block 50 in the 1990s. If you’re looking up Unit Flyway Costs online, prepare to find all kinds of totally erroneous sources uploaded by kids who weren’t even alive at the time, that know almost nothing about this subject. It’s a big problem I see in the AvGeek world now. Lots of kids looking up things online from dubious sources and taking that as gospel. There’s a whole ecosystem of erroneous information that doesn’t match up well at all with those of us who actually lived through these things and were intimately familiar with the details. Unit Program Costs vary with the customer. You could see contracts for the exact same fighter off the same production line from the same year with different UPCs. Biggest factor in that is the weapons suite the customer orders through DCA. A general rule of thumb I’ve seen is roughly a 75/25 ratio of Unit Flyaway/Unit Program, but there are plenty of contracts where that margin is larger. The recent F-35A, Rafale, and Typhoon contracts hold to it pretty well. As far as O&M costs go, Saab’s very own H-X campaign manager, Magnus Skogberg, said that the Gripen C/D costs roughly 11,000 euros to operate, fuel, maintain, replace spares, and pay personnel. That’s the same price Norway’s Air Logistics Chief said it costs them to do all the same on their F-35As. Magnus said they think Gripen E will cost the same as Gripen C/D, which is odd because Gripen E carries more internal fuel, has more systems, more complexity, and a heavier airframe. There are literally no positive selling points for the Gripen E. Not a single one. It excels at nothing.
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  5543.  @NesconProductions  Regarding range: The terminology we use in Defense Aerospace relative to fighters is "combat radius" or "mission radius", which is a very flexible metric dependent on many variables. F-35C combat radius averages 100nm+ longer than the F-14D, which had more fuel efficient engines than the F-14A if setting up a low-speed BEARCAP patrol around the Carrier Battle Group. Not only can and does the F-35C exceed that perimeter by 100+nm, but it also brings long-range strike back to the CVN that was lost with the A-6E and A-7E retirements decades ago. We lost that with the adoption of the Hornet and Super Hornet, though the SH has longer radius than the baby F/A-18s do. For the strike mission profile, evading threat SAMs and their radars significantly reduces a legacy fighter’s strike radius because of multiple heading and altitude changes along the profile. F-35s don’t do this anywhere near as much since they compress the threat MEZ and detection bubbles dramatically. F-35C especially has roughly 20,000lb of internal fuel, which no single engine fighter has ever had. For comparison, an F-16 is 7,000lb internal, while Super Hornets are 14,700lb and 13,760lb respectively for E and F models. The F-35C carries all that fuel without any aerodynamic drag penalty, whereas all other 4th Gen fighters carry EFTs pretty much on every mission profile. Russian and Chicom carrier-borne fighters have to take off with limited internal fuel and weapons, otherwise they can’t get safely airline off the deck (no catapults). They are a pathetic joke in comparison to the USN CVNs.
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  5761.  @SlavicCelery  Yup. You will not find a bigger 6.5 Grendel proponent than me, and there just isn’t much of a comparison between 6.8x51 NGSW and 6.5 Grendel. The velocity from a 13” NGSW smokes a 24” 6.5 Creedmoor, and is about where a 22”-24” .270 Winchester is pushing 135gr SMK. I know because I load the 135gr SMK in .270 Win and have gotten into the 2850fps region with H4831SC. 6.8x51 NGSW with the High Performance load is spitting a 135gr EPR at 2900fps from a 13” barrel. That’s screaming velocity. It will make a great little DM Carbine, suppressed, with the optic. Same for the M250 AR in 6.8x51, though the ammo load will get heavier/bulkier like a Mk.48 gunner. The M250 weighs a lot less than a SAW though. Experienced NCOs are going to love that thing. The XM7 is too much for most of the Infantry Rifle Platoon though. One way around the problem is to equip 3rd Squad with it, and keep 5.56 NATO in 1st and 2nd Squads. Make 3rd Squad the DM/Overwatch/Support Squad, who can act in reserve and plug-into the fight where they are best used for precision fires and fire support/overwatch. Let 1st and 2nd Squads do the maneuvering up front, with first bounds or flanks. 3rd Squad can also co-located with Weapons Squad for Support By Fire, be the Support and Security Elements in Deliberate Attacks, and undergo periodic Designated Marksman training with a formal MTO&E and ARTEP program. Start it in OSUT and the NCOPD courses so every Squad has DM-trained soldiers and NCOs no matter what. Everyone else gets M4A1s that are upgraded on the SOPMOD Block increment program. Many duty positions in the line need an even smaller, shorter weapon than the 14.5” M4, so there should be a lot of 11.5” guns in the Line Platoon and especially the Company and Battalion.
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  5771.  @elysiumfields  This is a great example of what I’m talking about. College kids in the US have been told a pack of lies by teachers and professors who have never lived in any Nordic country. My oldest son and daughter-in-law are going to school in one of those Nordic countries right now, where my mom is from. Education isn’t free. It’s very costly to everyone, namely the taxpayers. It’s also very exclusive, where gaining admission into university is extremely difficult. They section students off from each other at a certain time in school, so most go to skilled vocational training, and the more intellectually-minded kids with disciplined studying habits get to apply for university through entrance exams. Many take 2-3 times with the exams before they are admitted. Many do not complete their studies, then are in debt for the cost of schooling and housing. I’ve seen that happen to friends of mine as well. When all is said and done, those countries rely on the US for their most advanced defense systems, medical diagnostic equipment, finances, trade, computer technology, software, and critical aspects of the economy all stemming from innovation mostly in the US or mainland Europe. Even with more GDP than comparable population US States, the US States with lower GDP have more Emergency Medical Systems, healthcare, transportation, finance, housing, higher education, PPP, etc. But if we can leverage the inherent power of tariffs to fund limited government in the US, that would be far superior to what we’re doing now.
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  5789.  @CWLemoine  I lived through a lot of this with a front row seat to what was going on before JAST. F-35B STOVL variant is from a different track than USAF CALF program. There's a big misconception that STOVL negatively affected the A and C models, but this is simply not reality, unless you know something I don't. There were 6 different programs between 5 different services. USMC RAF RN USAF USN USMC, USAF, RN, and RAF began planning for replacement of the Harrier in 1983 and USAF was originally interested in a Supersonic STOVL Fighter for Europe austere basing as well. USAF also wanted a Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter (CALF) to replace the Viper. USAF also recognized that proliferation of IADS required new fighter designs to be VLO, and a handful of people who knew about F-117 pushed for new VLO designs. USN invested billions in a VLO replacement for the A-6, knowing that the A-6 wasn't survivable in double-digit SAM environments. USN also planned long term for replacement of the Hornet with F/A-X. The various offices in the Pentagon saw all these new wish list birds for each service, saw a lot of overlap, and formed JAST, then the JSF program where instead of 6 aircraft (that would do most of the same mission sets at exorbitant developmental and sustainment costs), those 6 programs with all their separate radars, propulsion, E&E, cockpits, etc. needed to be done with 3 variants based on each method of basing. Contrary to common belief, the STOVL variant did not set: * fuselage width * wingspan * weight * configuration * weapons bays * propulsion * sensors * performance To the contrary, the JSF-B variant has its own weapons bays with different dimensions than the A & C. Fuselage width was set by the DSI inlets and serpentine ductwork for VLO in frontal aspect, as well as weapons bays on all 3. Since JSF out-performs all the legacy platforms they supercede, while adding EW, ISR, AEW&C, Anti-Ship, and regional networked early warning capes none of the teen fighters can do, what's the problem?
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  5790.  @CWLemoine  B has a different canopy, fuselage, weapons bays, and airframe. Even the wings are different than the A. Performance is what matters, and when you see guys describing single mission profiles that sound like someone put a Sparkvark, Wild Weasel, Raptor, AWACS, U-2, & F-117 into a blender, it tells me we're dealing with a revolution in Tac Air. Then look at how the numbers are being manipulated to make CPFH look bad. They exclude the costs of ALQ shop, LITENING FLIR, HARM TGT Pod, and integrated countermeasures pylons on the Viper when listing its CPFH. Then they take the multi-service aggregate JSF fleet including early LRIP birds that are fine as-is for the training squadrons, and OT&E birds that will constantly be undergoing significant upgrades before those are TCTO'd and fed into new production. On top of that, DOT&E throws in the small fleet of F-35B and F-35C early LRIP with the same considerations, and spits out these meaningless CPFH stats that senior leaders in the Pentagon think are gospel truth, and you get totally false long-term fleet O&M projections. Additionally, they don't assess cost/affects analysis of an EW/F/A/R/AWAC-35 and still try to compare it with a Viper. My question is, what's the actual CPFH once we account for LITENING, ALQ-, HARM TP, EPIDSU, ECIPS+ pylons? EPIDSU/ECIPS+ is a $471 million program just for acquisition. My position, knowing what I know about all the federated and ancillary systems on the Viper, F-15E, Hornets, and Super Bugs is that JSF is likely cheaper to operate and maintain over the long run. A stripped down F-16CM, SH, or Mudhen is not a real metric from which to compare CPFH.
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  5798. Clinton (not his birth name) was raised in the biggest Buick Car dealership family in Arkansas, where his adoptive grandfather taught him memory training, and the senior salesmen taught him how to profile and communicate with "suckers"(customers). He became very adept at this when taking advantage of girls in high school, pulling up in his new convertible coup. He admired JFK very much, and saw himself becoming President from a fairly young age. He is gifted and well-trained in remembering facts and figures, but often fudges numbers to fit his narrative, with confidence and delivery that are rarely challenged. He became accustomed to having any girl he wanted, which quickly lost its excitement, so he moved into more forceful exploitation of college girls and women until rape was normalized. A fellow law student at Yale saw his potential and how people drew to him, but also how he ran through girls voraciously. She would intimidate them after he had humped and dumped them, to keep his wake clear. He proposed to her due to her usefulness in that regard, but she declined, seeing herself cutting out her own path in politics. He passed the bar and returned to Arkansas to run for Congress. She took the DC bar and failed. She then called him up and asked if the offer was still open, which it was. Her father strongly opposed the marriage, telling her that a Democrat was only one step away from a communist. Her brothers came down from Chicago to babysit Bill before the wedding to mitigate the obvious scandal. His name is William Jefferson Blythe III. Hers is of course Hillary Rodham.
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  5803.  @oliveleaf7376  FDR was one of the worst presidents in our entire history due to his socialism and dramatic expansion of the administrative state. The Supreme Court said that he was running things as an authoritarian. He put 2 KKK Justices on the court, including Hugo Black, a freaking KKK Grand Master from Alabama. He was propped up by the Mafia/Papa Joe Kennedy and the media creation of the cult of personality around him. Teddy Roosevelt was another one. Really kicked off the progressive era embracing Marxism and statism into the US, firmly establishing blue blood elite families into power vs the grassroots caucus system he despised. George H.W. Bush? China man George? You're kidding, right? He was instrumental in covering up the JFK assassination, former DCI under unelected Ford, key Warren Commission culprit. Bush family is bought off by China after he was ambassador there. Read up on Neal Bush and the Thai hooker scandal honey trap. Skull & Bonesman out of Yale, which is where CIA leadership comes from. Bush was literally providing Saddam Hussein with ballistic missile components from Loral Space Systems and directly involved in the Iraqgate banking scandal. He hated Reagan for his populism that a Bush could never command. Trump is so much better than any of these stooges combined because he managed to overcome a rigged election in 2016 and represent the people for the first time in at least 150 years. The others were propped up by the system with full complicity and active involvement from corporate media. You have volumes of reading to do.
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  5804.  @anacaicedomacia  He's the only candidate who knows how to set policy for an economy that allows young families to afford homes. They can't right now and the future isn't looking good for them (my 5 kids included). He's the only President who didn't get us into new wars, the only President who sent weapons to Ukraine before Feb 2022, especially Javelins and other missiles Obama refused to send. He then threatened Putin not to make any moves there or else.... He negotiated more Middle East peace deals than all US Presidents combined. He brought consumer drug prices down with HHS authorizing 900-1000 generic drugs every year. Big Pharma hates Trump more than RFK. He finally put China's unfair trade practices in-check after every other US President sold out to them, especially Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama. He then renegotiated our trade deals with threats and allies alike, where we went in and said, that's nice, now here's how it's actually going to be on US terms favorable to US workers and families. He brought energy prices way down and threatened any US company with massive tariffs if they sent any more jobs overseas. He took the WTI from 56 down to 22 with generous energy policies, which fueled a great economy. He went around telling NATO to get their defense spending in order, because the US taxpayer is tired of footing the bill. They laughed at him until Feb 2022. He's the only US President that brought in black inner city leaders who have pioneered functional youth services programs to listen to them and get them more assistance, and did it for weeks, televised. Not even Obama did anything like that. These were all real, non-partisan policies that are great for America.
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  5805.  @anacaicedomacia  Economy: Young families had more access to home-buying under Trump, now they don't. Home prices and interest rates have moved single family residences away from their buying power. Jobs: Trump reshored US jobs and threatened US companies with severe financial penalties if they moved assembly lines overseas. Energy policy: Trump promoted the biggest growth in US energy dominance, taking the WTI from 56 down to 22, gas was in the $2.xx range/gal. That's the lifeblood of an economy. National Security: Trump ran the best National security policy of any President in generations by making it clear US comes 1st, then backed it up by threatening the Taliban leader that if a single hair was hurt on US soldiers, he would bomb the Taliban leader's house, then pulled out the photos of his house, handed it to him, and walked out of the meeting. When Putin attacked US forces in Syria, he authorized 6 hours of JDAMs, SDBs, Hellfires, and Precision artillery against them at the Battle of Khasham. Corporate media won't touch the story. He also didn't start any new wars, and negotiated more Middle East peace deals than all US Presidents combined. He made US border security a top priority to stop illegals from entering the US. He's the only US President that brought in inner city leaders to help spread their private programs with rehab, supporting the fatherless, and vocational training. Obama didn't give those ministers and youth leaders the time of day. Military: Trump prioritized rebuilding the services, producing critical combat systems, and elevating US National security strength to deter anyone from attacking us. Drug pricing: Trump had his HHS Director authorize 900-1000 generic drugs per year to bring the cost of drugs down to help the people. Pharma hated him for this something fierce. I could go on all day. He hit the ground running like no other US President and accomplished more in 4 years than multiple White Houses have done in decades.
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  5863.  @u2beuser714  Millenials with no experience in these matters can make a lot of mistakes and bad assumptions, since they rely on internet searches and OSINT, with zero real-world. We were involved in Nunn-Lugar base exchange program, but the main effort in Nunn-Lugar was to remove nuclear weapons from the former Soviet satellite states of Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belorussia to get them under centralized control. What we found out was that Russia had been running a shell game throughout the Cold War, bolstering their capabilities through a series of feints and movements, when they were in-fact very limited in their ability or willingness to actually trust warheads at all the advertised operational units across the "triad”. They relied more on controlling the US intelligence community within using plants, moles, and political stooges placed throughout government, CIA, and DoD to orchestrate an image of the 10ft tall Russian bear, with its thousands of warheads deployed all over. This is yet another example of the US system being totally ignorant about Russian/Eurasian culture and how no self-respecting Russian leader would trust subordinate leaders with nukes all over the place. So they ran a shell game from the warhead production sites purposely timed with US satellite overflights so we would see the trucks carrying the warheads out to Murmansk, to the Tu-95 bases, and mobile ICMB munitions hubs. But the trucks just took the few warheads they had back to the manufacturing site because they had problems cranking out reliable initiation systems. They manipulated the US with Nunn-Lugar to get billions in funding in exchange for a continued shell game, and former KGB oligarchs pilfered all the money that was meant to prop up Russia from falling. They also used it to disarm Ukraine and Georgia further in preparation for taking those states in the future (we’ve already lived through partially now). If someone tells you Russian maintenance is good, they’ve never lived in Russia, have never studied Russian military maintenance “standards”, and haven’t had insight into the Russian nuclear forces culture. The deterrence is based on posturing, with far less warheads and capable delivery systems than advertised. It’s still enough for a deterrent, but Russia can’t afford to find out if their systems work, because then every territorial dispute they have with the rest of their neighbors will kick off, especially with China.
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  5954.  @krityaan  Imagine a world where global energy and food supplies are compromised, where India has suffered from heat waves and reduced crop yields, China is suffering from continual floods, food shortages, energy shortages, lock-downs, increasing elderly population, infanticided young generation, 45+ million excess prime age males (based on CCP fake numbers), and China is increasing its naval presence in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. I tried to see some harmonious opportunities for India where she could trade more with Iran, since Iran has oil and India had excess grains, but then India has been hit with weather-restricted crop yields from sand storms and droughts. Iranian oil has increased almost 3x since July 2021, so Iran will be raking in revenue by the billions. Iran is frantically looking for new weapons, but is very constrained in that space because they don't have access to US or European fighters, aircraft, and munitions, and the Russian equipment is being destroyed for sport in Ukraine. The new Russian Su-57 can't be mass-produced with its high saturation demanding semiconductor and integrated circuit component requirements, and India already rejected it after investing hundreds of millions into the Su-57 program, opting for French Rafale instead. I'm not saying piracy is the only possible outcome, just that the degradation in stable global supply chains and regional instability are highly likely to break out into regional conflicts, using asymmetric and conventional actions. Someone used drone weapons to attack oil carriers and even in-land Saudi pipelines in the Gulf, just as an example of asymmetrical actions that normally would result in open conflict if flagged vessels could be identified. I'm an eternal optimist, but things are not looking so great for the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, and China.
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  6027.  @JustARandomFio  Obama, Biden, and Clinton were all working for Putin behind the scenes. The biggest act of treason was letting Putin bribe access to US and Canadian uranium mines to build new nukes, after Putin learned that the Soviet-era nuke programs were a joke and a shell game. SECSTATE Clinton was lead on that, after Putin funneled hundreds of millions into Clinton Global Initiative. That was the Uranium One deal. Up until 2014, Putin was robbing Ukraine left and right though his puppet Boyars, including President Yanukovych. 79% of Ukraine wanted to trade with the EU, but Yanukovych signed onto Putin’s Russia-Eurasia Economic Union instead, which triggered the Euromaiden protests in late 2013 until Yanukovych was ousted in March of 2014. Hunter Biden then received $3.5 million from former Moscow First Lady Elena Baturina (wired to his firm with John Kerry’s nephew), then was placed on the board of Burisma in Ukraine. Obama flew to the UK in Sep 2014 and told David Cameron to shut off the investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky, then VP Biden flew to Ukraine in March 2016 to tell Poroshnko to fire Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. Putin used the Bidens, Clintons, and Obama as insurance policies to try to hold onto Ukraine until he could get another puppet in. Biden was supposed to pull Zelensky out, which would open Kiev for occupation in the leadership vacuum. Zelensky choosing to stay and fight changed the course of history. Europe rallied behind him and used Ukraine as a distraction from mass social unrest over lock-down, masking, and mRNA injection protests. Ukraine was their new focus to relieve the pressure, and a genuine existential threat to Eastern Europe that required full attention.
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  6029. I’ve been following since the STRATFOR days in the 2000s as well, which was much better when you had George Freidman and the senior analysts all collaborating on their assessments. Peter and the former FBI guys were very adverse to feeding into “conspiracy theories” because they all come from backgrounds where confirmation bias and conformity of thought were critical to organizational acceptance and your source of income. In academia, it is very dogmatic and cult-like. In the Federal agencies, you will lose your job if you are seen as “one of those guys”. The Bureau is especially insular, with a cult of personality expectation to worship the Director, even as openers to daily communications between junior staffers and agents. It’s very weird. One of the biggest failures of STRATFOR and Peter is not looking at conspiracies with a clean slate, and vetting them using their same analytical methods. Instead, they just dismissed them reactively. One of the main areas that left a void in their assessments was failing to understand and assess false flags and other types of operations conducted by the intelligence agencies, organized crime families, criminal NGOs, and International money-laundering networks that actually do conspire together as a rule. I also recognize that had they done so, they would have alienated a lot of their corporate customer base, who don’t want to hear or deal with those rabbit holes. The problem is, if you ignore them, it can cost you a lot of money.
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  6074.  @SNESpool  Bad analogy of the zero sum premise. Healthcare isn't a zero sum marketplace. Everyone that wants coverage could get it. The ones that didn't have policies prior to ACA were mostly college students who were healthy, didn't want to pay for it, didn't see the need (free climbers with no experience, but just doing some bouldering down low, with a giant Medicare and Medicaid safety net to catch anyone without ropes at the bottom.) Medicare and Medicaid are well over a combined annual $1 Trillion funded programs, so anyone that couldn't afford it was covered. I used to investigate fraud, most of which was related to false medical claims, and my wife did medical billing for years. None of the premises used to justify ACA were legitimate. It was all about the insurance and medical industry working with politicians in DC to screw over the Nation for short-term profits, while being sold as universal coverage. It was really conceived back under "Hillary Care" in the early 1990s, when she worked behind the scenes with big pharmaceutical campaign donors and left out the senior Democrats in Congress who had been trying to get a European NHS-style monstrosity bill put together for many years. She set up her own dictatorial task force, which really turned Congress against her because none of them were consulted or brought-in to work on it cooperatively. The Democrats in Congress got shellacked in 1994 for that and the Biden "crime bill" with one of the biggest mid-term losses in US history. When Obama came in with Biden and Hillary, they dusted off Hillarycare, put Obama's face on it, and bribed their way through RINO Congressmen to get it through. Then Democrats and RINOs got shellacked even worse than 1994 with an even bigger mid-terms turnover, which saw Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul, Jason Chaffetz, and Trey Gowdy get into Congress. The people never wanted this kind of corrupt, heavy-handed legislation that directly hurt so many of us.
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  6080.  @greghuff3316  None of that was the case. Finns take long vacations in the summer, so they are short-staffed around popular holiday seasons, including in hospitals. The rankings aren’t scientifically-valid because they don’t account for the fact that most medical advancements have come from the US, which are sold to other developed and developing nations, including technologies like MRI. They also don’t take population, demographics, climate, water supply, daily habits, diet, etc. into account, and isolate the causal factor of outcomes into healthcare alone. Name me any other developed nation with 330 million people, and you start to see how the national comparisons fail basic principles of statistical analysis, while also ignoring more influential factors like culture, climate, region, diet, and genetics. For example, it makes zero scientific sense to compare the 5.5 million population Finland with the 330 million population of the US. Finns, until recently, have been relatively genetically-homogenous, live at extremely high latitude (really long winters, short, mild summers), take sauna baths regularly (excellent for health, stress-reduction, pressure-cleansing through thermogenesis, excellent for lung cleansing, etc.), and many people in Finland have kesämökit (summer cabins). During the weekends, Finns will drive out to their cabins to drink, cook sausages, go swimming in the lakes, and just relax. Conclusion: "Finnish NHS provides better health outcomes!" See how that line of reasoning fails basic critical analysis? This is why I am very dismissive of OECD and other studies that ignore important multi-factorial variables.
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  6081.  @Ms.Byrd68  HAD the kind of money to go on overseas vacations before we had our savings depleted on premiums, then were kicked off our plan. Missed my oldest son's wedding and haven't been able to take my family to see my mom and new daughter-in-law. ACA is the most detrimental piece of legislation that I have personally felt its effects of in all my life. I'm not on ACA. Once we lost our excellent plan with affordable premiums, the only way to find another plan for my wife and kids was to get me off of it. I then relied on VA coverage ever since. Small business owner/self-employed. With inflation the way it is now, we're just trying to figure out groceries and bare necessities. My mom is paralyzed in her apartment in Finland. She relies on her US school district retirement and health insurance policy to pay for home nursing aids to come by 3x per day, as well as meals on wheels service (not covered by Finnish NHS). She does not want to end up in a Finnish nursing home because they're referred to as "dehydration centers" where the seniors are just left to wither away. I really would just love to have our old insurance plan back. I haven't thought about all this in a while, but now I I'm starting to remember how infuriating it was when Barrack Hussein and hundreds of complicit politicians tampered with our system the way they did. My wife still doesn't have a Primary Care Provider after 12 years now, and we're surrounded by hospitals, clinics, universities, and medical research companies.
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  6105.  @amano3847  You've been to 3rd-world countries where many of them have better healthcare than the US? Please name these countries, because not even the Scandinavians or Canadians have better healthcare than the US. Do a simple search on nearby hospitals and dentists in population and rural areas, fire department distribution, diagnostic equipment and access times, elective surgeries, specialists, multiple layers of care available in the US private and public sectors, life flight helicopters per capita, Level 1 Trauma centers, and it's not even close. I've lived abroad in most of the countries where politicians in the US tell us healthcare is so much better, and they're simply ignorant or lying. I and many members of my family have used healthcare services in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Japan, and Italy. It's always a breath of fresh air to be in the US when needing healthcare. Nothing in Central America, Africa, Asia, India, or the Middle East compares well with Switzerland, Scandinavia, Canada, Austria, Germany, or Japan. Even the Southern European sh*tholes are better than the 3rd world, and you don't want to go to the hospital for anything serious in Southern Europe if you can help it. The US is just in a different league entirely compared to these places, for the same reasons we outclass them all economically, militarily, and GDP (PPP). We also exceed the volunteerism and humanitarian relief of all other nations by a wide margin, including foreign medical relief aid to 3rd world countries. Wherever you're getting your information on healthcare from, I would recommend ditching it.
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  6108.  @JB-kx9bx  Yes, but the Finnish studies where they audit their own NHS are in Finnish. They found that patient care was prioritized effectively at the bottom of the list, wait times are excessive (we've experienced this numerous times across all ages within our family), and care was nowhere near what was expected and funded by parliament. In the US, I get an MRI within hours of going into the ER if it's part of the diagnostic protocol. Doesn't matter if I can't speak English, don't have citizenship, whatever. Not so in Finland. Once we finally got my son into the MRI 47 days after his accident in Finland, I looked on the machine. "MADE IN USA". My cousin in Sweden had a rare condition where his ribcage didn't grow and expand with his body as he got older, so he ended up having to be taken to Spain where a Spanish specialist had learned how to treat this with some advanced surgery and equipment he had learned and accessed in the US, where the procedure and apparatus was pioneered. When we take our own children to the dentist here in the States, the dental clinics tell the families who are on Medicaid to bring the kids in every month since the taxpayers are paying for it without any oversight. Immigrant families take advantage of these services more than others, since most natural-born citizens are busy working during the day, whereas many of the low income family structures include grandma in the home so kids can visit as often as the dentists tell them to. In Finland, healthcare is a national bureaucracy/jobs program more than anything, where patient care gets the least amount of attention. Think more of something like the DMV running hospitals and clinics, where employees are comfortable with their job security, no incentives to provide timely and focused patient care. We just use the private sector clinics when possible now whenever visiting. You get seen usually within 15 minutes, meet with the doctor, they prescribe whatever or perform whatever procedure is called for, then bill you 65 euros per 15 minutes or 975 euros per hour. I've lived there multiple times throughout my life. Have also lived in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. US hospitals are generally superior to any of those, and wait times are almost non-existent compared to those places. A lot of people suffer worse injuries due to delayed care outside of the US. The US health trends are largely driven by over-eating more than anything else.
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  6115.  @amano3847  There are multiple factors to consider when assessing Healthcare, starting with availability. None of the G8 or G20 nations have the same availability or timeliness of services as in the US. Most of the advancements in medicine, diagnostic equipment, and EMS have been pioneered in the US, then shared with these other less-populous nations. The US helped rebuild most of the G8 nations after WWII, developing infrastructure including Healthcare services and hospitals. This is especially true for UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy, who all suffered major losses to infrastructure and prime age males. You can cherry-pick some of the statistics to make the US look worse if you don't account for per capita data, especially since the other G8 nations pale in comparison to the US population. Even still, if you get hurt in the US, you have access to quick transport to a level 1 trauma center staffed by multiple specialists in EMS who benefit from the latest developments in funded battlefield trauma research, which drives equipment and diagnostic systems. There are far more quality medical universities and programs in the US to train Doctors, RNs, LPNs, Paramedics, lab techs, Pharmacists, imaging technicians, and staff, to the extent that professionals from around the world go to school in the US so they can take that knowledge back to their home countries. What I saw in the BC area of Canada after my cousin's accident/death was very modern and looked like it could have been in a US hospital, but the timeliness of access to care in Canada is a known issue that can't be denied and ignored. Canada has benefitted greatly from US investments in healthcare, has negotiated its US-provided drug prices into a fraction of what is paid here (that's changing under Trump's order last week), and works jointly with the US more as a partner when it comes to this issue. The WHO statistics on healthcare aren't structured well at all, and one would be a fool to trust anything coming from that corrupt body, which goes without saying as of late.
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  6123.  @atarkus8  You can have no insurance in the US, not speak English, and you have to get an MRI or other diagnostic services for life-saving procedures in public hospitals. Most of the US population lives in a metropolitan area and its suburbs. Since almost every single State has at least one major metro area, and many States with several major metro areas, it's better to compare US States individually with other nations-where you often have limited metro areas and unipolar infrastructure like in Finland (Helsinki). You don't have to pay a ton of money out of pocket since almost everyone in the US is either on employer-provided health insurance, or is eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Indian doctors are not just as good since they don't have access to the same training and support, even if they go to school in the US. The ones that come to the US stay in the US as a general rule, due to the plague-ridden levels of poverty and infectious diseases in India. It's impossible to receive equal care in India just from a sanitation, clean water, and infected population perspective. We're talking about a place where homeless people evict the dead from their graves to have a place to sleep. Using extreme examples from during the COVID-19 response in the few areas that were overwhelmed is not a good position to take when comparing healthcare availability between nations. My friend who was waiting for the liver transplant on a list was a Finnish citizen, born and raised there, spent 9 years in the Finnish Army, did de-mining work in Africa as part of a UN mission, went to school in Saint Petersburg Russia, was a small business owner, very interesting guy with a storied life. He'd probably still be alive if he lived in the US, but I can't say for sure. He was only 46.
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  6124.  @RyanJones-vl1ow  That's the first anecdote in a life of anecdotes, not the only. In every single experience I've had in Finland, while I was grateful for the services, they were not good compared to the US. They are very behind the times in hospital facilities, services, diagnostics, and especially wait times. The US Veterans Administration is much faster than what you'll experience in public hospitals in Finland. I have a lot of family in Finland right now, have lived there multiple times, and it's not on-par with the US in most areas. If it was, I would tell you how superior it is, how much faster you get treated, and how more modern everything is. It just isn't. You shouldn't expect it to be either when the population is only 5.4 million people and the winter is 7-9 months long, with the national government running things. The Finnish parliament and their bureaucratic infrastructure is extreme inefficient in the NHS, filled with a lot of incompetent people who don't connect the dots because there is no incentive for them to do so. When I was living there at one time, it was widely-published that their own internal audit of their NHS discovered that patient care was at the bottom of the list of priorities in practice, and due to demographic losses of young workers, there isn't a viable solution to this since immigrant workers don't learn Finnish well, and don't have Finnish work ethics. It was brought up as a major issue in the Finnish Presidential debates, where it was pointed out that many Finnish assisted living homes have been neglecting patients as the norm due to lack of staffing and low quality of work ethic among staff. I've watched that for decades visiting relatives in those homes. Coming to the US from Finland is like stepping back into the modern era when it comes to healthcare. I'm usually there 2-3 times per year until 2016. You'e been lied to is all. People go through the tourist honeymoon stage when visiting foreign countries looking for all the positives. When you actually live there for years and get to see how it really is, especially the places they don't want tourists to see, your perspective becomes more informed. There are a lot worse places, and it's one of the few places I would feel a lot more comfortable in than most other nations, but it doesn't compare well with the US.
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  6126.  @atarkus8  By law, ERs have to treat you even if you're too lazy to sign up for Medicare or Medicaid. Hospitals will be sued by greedy attorneys (who will pocket most of the damages awarded by a court) if hospitals violate Federal law. Even private hospitals were banned from sending indignant patients to community hospitals by the 1985 COBRA Act (patient dumping), for unmistakable emergencies. Patients have to be stabilized before being transported from private hospitals to public ones, otherwise they can be sued. If a private hospital provides services, then they absolutely should be able to be paid for those services. I don't understand why people think anything is free, especially healthcare. It certainly isn't anything close to being free in Europe. Not only are you taxed excessively for it, you still have to pay a co-pay that they will come after you for in collections if you fail to do so. Millions of people in the US who choose not to have insurance do it because of laziness or they don't want to pay for it, especially college-aged kids who don't have any medical conditions and are gambling on not having any accidents. My entire point doesn't hinge on one aspect of healthcare. It is multi-factorial like real life, complex and hard to study before one can have a valid perspective on it. Availability Accessibility Professional Training Services Advanced diagnostics Advanced medicine Advanced procedures Long-term care Specialized fields Research Cost These are some of the important metrics to look at when comparing healthcare between nations. Starting with availability and accessibility, the US dominates those and all of the other fields I have listed. We get criticized for cost, which is another complex variable that needs full accounting, showing how we get raped on costs of drugs while nations claiming to be so better than us get our drugs at a fraction of the price we do, even after we spent all the money on R&D and trials for those drugs. Doctors in India have access to training in the West. I never said they didn't. If you come here on a student visa and graduate medical school, chances are you aren't going to go back to a malaria, typhus, and blood borne pathogen-infested cesspool like India or Bangladesh. They aren't stupid. COVID stresses on various hospitals in the US are not indicative of systemic failure since only a handful of hospitals have been overwhelmed. My local hospitals haven't even come close to reaching 50% capacity in ICU for respiratory therapy, and most States haven't either. It doesn't paint the picture accurately to say that because NYC has terrible police on spreading the disease (nursing homes infected neglectfully by NY politicians), that everyone else is the same. Terminal cancer is a bad disease no matter where you live. The grass is not greener in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Denmark, the UK, or Canada. It's going to suck. Sorry about your mother. We lost my MIL to cancer several years ago and I don't like the way she was treated either, but it happened fast. She had refused to get colonoscopies for decades because she had 3 friends die from them when the procedure was still being developed. The US definitely has all sorts of issues, but we're the cream of the crap compared to all the other "socialist utopias". Modeling out superior system on them just doesn't make sense to me after all I've seen and learned about them.
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  6139.  @VolodyaMuchavsky  Value-added economy means you have industrial and intellectual infrastructure to refine goods and provide services through a chain of production that creates more refined and useful products at home and abroad. Russia has a raw materials-based economy with no value-added other than in the military sales sector, since Russia wastes a huge % of its GDP on weapons. Russia’s main exports are oil and Natural Gas. In the energy sector, the US imports millions of barrels of oil from nations with thick crude, and refines them in a mixture of US light sweet oil that is very easy to refine. But when you look at US heavy industry, vehicles, aircraft, jet engines, telecom, petroleum refining equipment, computers, electronics, chemicals, medical devices, medical supplies, food, and down the list, there is no other nation like it. The US and NATO have not sent their full. weapons production capacity to Ukraine/. The US has mainly sent outdated equipment and weapons that were scheduled for destruction. It’s actually cheaper for the US to send those older weapons and munitions than it is to dispose of them. I live right near one of the main depots that destroys old munitions. We normally would hear explosions from the depot all the time. Since 2022, that has ceased. Here’s another problem though, in that I have actually lived all over Russia, from St. Petersburg to Pushkino to Obninsk. I spent a lot of time commuting into Moscow every week when living near Pushkino, and saw how Russians live in various cities, towns, and villages. The US has 50 States that cover a broader region of population distribution than Russia, even though Russia has much more land area. Most of the Russian population is in the West near the borders of Europe, so population density in Russia is more like what you see East of the Mississippi in the US. The US has 341.8 million people spread out more, with cities all over the Nation. The US has over 7 million km of roadways, highways, and streets and is at #1, with India at #2 if you count all their dirt roads. Russia isn’t even in the top 4 nations for roadways, due to a combination of frozen terrain and wasting money on weapons. The US is also #1 in rail network size at over 220,000km. Russia isn’t even half that, at 105,000km. You see this when you travel all over both nations as I have. Same with airports. The US is without peer in this space, with over 14,000 airports and airfields, many of which I have flown out of since the 1970s in private, commercial, and military aviation. As to standard of living, they show you propaganda in Russia so you don’t leave. If you saw how people live in the US, you wouldn’t believe it. I do love the food in Europe and Russia though. it is absolutely true that the US food market is packed with chemicals and additives that I avoid as much as possible. This is very much a real problem. You have to be selective in what you buy, so my family home-cooks almost all of our meals.
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  6256.  @spartanx9293  One topic I noticed conspicuously missing from the PLAAF and RTAF air combat exercises was any mention of IRST. Gimbaled IRSTs in the nose are generally radar-slaved for initial cueing, so without a wide Field of Regard, trying to use them in a rapid BVR timeline seems extremely difficult for a single seat fighter with federated avionics architecture. Only the JSF with fused AESA/DAS/EOTS has such a wide and deep detection envelope, followed by the Chinese J-20, which copies the F-35 sensor scheme. The JSF pilot isn't a systems technician trying to collate data from a RWR, radar, & IRST like in a federated system with independent, parallel displays. They're using a simplified "sensor-fusion" approach in the later variants of Typhoon, Rafale, and Gripen, while the JSF program seems to have picked up some of the Star Trek promises from the original ATF program (that were cut) and implemented them after a very difficult development period. They dropped the side-looking AESAs and AIRST from ATF because they knew that would escalate costs. The AESA it was getting was so capable anyway, so why do you need side AESAs and AIRST if you can't be seen already, have brutal kinematic advantages, and are able to snipe people out of the air with impunity? Rafale F3R dropped the IRST, while F4 is getting a new one. The baseline Rafale IRST/OSF system is unique among 4.5 Gen in that it has 2 IR/Optical spectrum forward-looking sensors that operate in different spectrums. The JSF series have 4 different IR sensors in the nose. Forward-looking and 2 side-looking DAS, plus the EOTS under the nose, which are all fused with the extensive RF sensor network including the AESA. The IR sensor capabilities of JSF are truly a generational leap over anything in 4.5 Gen. That gap is quite large.
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  6257.  @michaelkeller5008  Another interesting thing about the initial tactics development of several generations of fighters. With the F-15A in the mid-1970s, they did initial tactics development out at Nellis since RF and aggressor units were there, along with actual MiGs north of there. Against the F-5E, the F-15A flown by combat-experienced pilots (F-4D/E guys from SEA), the F-15 had about a 1:1 exchange ratio, later about 2:1 in AIMVAL/ACEVAL. The F-22A initial tactics development at the same place in the late 1990s/early 2000s had basically an undefeated exchange ratio, no matter what they threw at it. The pilots for F-22 tactics development were all F-15C Weapons Instructor Course grads, high-hr, and even MiG-killers with real-world shoot-downs. They were very skeptical of the stealth technology even working. After their first sorties against multi-ship F-15Cs vs 2-ship F-22As, they came back huge believers because the F-15C drivers were never able to see them no matter what angles they set up intercepts from. One of the pilots described setting up head-on, from low-to-high, from high-to-low, oblique, left, right, didn’t matter. Keep in mind the F-15C at the time had the world’s best fighter radar and enjoyed a 104:0 A2A kill ratio against the MiG-29, MiG-25PD, MiG-23MF, Mirage F1, and MiG-21. The F-22s simply made mince meat of them and even did 2vs 12 with all 12 killed in 2 minutes, 22 seconds. The difference between F-35 and F-22 in A2A for threat air isn’t really measurable, since they just die without knowing why. Nobody is max-performing the jets for speed or using the supercruise anyway, so the raw performance isn’t as much of a factor as people assume. RCS and sensors with networking are what matter more.
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  6261.  @pharmika  I’ve looked at the Rafale and don’t see any strengths it can play against greater strengths in the F-35’s corner in every relevant metric. You can take the best, most experienced fighter pilots in the world and pit them against very new F-35 pilots, and the outcome is still the same. This has been done already hundreds of times in Large Force Exercises, including multinational partners. That’s a huge indicator that something massive has changed with 5th Gen, which isn’t marketing hype, but an actual relevant term that means something. 5th Gen isn’t just Very Low Observables. It’s integrated systems, superior man-machine interface, fused sensors, interleaved sensors between ships, using LPI data links with line-of-sight secure/high transmission rates. On top of all that is superior combat-configured raw performance in climb rate, cruise speed, acceleration through the Mach, and maneuvering in the worst-case for when more VLO airframes become more common down the road. I actually do know many things about the capabilities of JSF and 4th Gen, since I’ve been in defense aerospace since the 1970s, spent several years studying the NATO Aerospace Engineering course material, and have a 741 page book on JSF written by all the lead systems engineers and some test pilots. JSF RF VLO systems have already evolved after Lot 4 into something different, reducing the RCS even more. Multibandwidth RCS reduction has been something people have been chasing for decades, but that certainly isn’t openly discussed since it’s pretty cutting edge. APG-81 isn’t the primary detection system on JSF. Primary early detection is totally passive in the RF spectrum, followed by different approaches to assessing contacts cooperatively using minimal RF emissions, very controlled LPI RF emissions, as well as IR spectrum cooperative TGT PID. The passive RF detection and tracking is far ahead of what people think, and overlooked by most amateur AvGeeks. They took the same approach from the F-22’s passive RF detection framework. Since F-22 and F-35 are VLO in the IR spectrum, IRST and OSF sensors don’t see any real discernible contrast until right on the edge or within visual range. There are some really good OSF photos from Rafale against F-22A showing this, even with the F-22A in afterburner. Seems like fantasy at first, until you understand how cold air is managed around the exhaust plumes, as well as surfaces. F-35 has LOAN technology integrated into the engine nozzles and around the engine to mitigate IR signature from engine heat, as well as coatings integrated with the RAM that cover several spectra of IR. The Super Hornet's APG-79 can detect 1m2 TGTs at around 134nm in just volume search mode, and 220nm for cued search. APG-81 is a superior AESA with higher TRM count, more processing power, better integrated cooling, and better freq hop/LPI modes, just for starters. This is where trying to understand a 5th Gen Fighter vs 4.5 Gen really sticks out. The AESA is not a separate sensor in the F-35. It’s part of the passive RF sensors distributed all over the airframe, part of the EOTS, DAS, and EW suite. It’s part of a closed-loop avionics architecture that performs a certain set of functions as needed, depending on what the pilot and wingmen are doing. The RBE2 is an excellent radar, the only AESA in operational service among the Eurocanards and well ahead of France’s peers who tried to develop the Typhoon together, and for that France should be recognized. It just isn’t on the same level of the integrated avionics on JSF. The short story is that a flight of JSF will always have first-look and first-shoot decisions against fighters who don’t even know they are there.
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  6321.  @REgamesplayer  The old AF-2 flight dynamics envelope expansion on a pre-SWAT F-35A (one of the first 6 LRIP birds that were never mass-produced) is not what you would want to use as a sample for F-35A performance, since it was heavier and was restricted to 4-5g. A real F-35A humiliates the F-16 in WVR, not that it matters. Read about the Dutch F-35A pilots dong a week-long BFM series of exercises with Nellis AFB Aggressors in F-16C Block 30s (lighter airframe than Block 40s and 50s). F-16s showed on Day 1 with 2x 370 gallon EFTs on the wings, got spanked in every set-up. Next day switched to centerline 300 gallon tank, still got wrecked. On the final day, they showed up slick with no EFTs, very short sorties due to need for hitting the tanker, and still weren’t able to push over a 50% kill ratio. On one of the days, the F-16s BINGO’d and returned to Nellis, F-35s flew off to the training ranges. F-35 pilots came back to debrief for hours as USAF does, and F-16 pilots asked, “Hey, where did you go after the BFM exercises?” Dutch: “Yeah, we were carrying GBUs the whole time, so we wanted to maximize the airspace and training value to go do drops on the live ranges.” F-16 pilots: “........what?” Jaws hit the floor. Sustained Turn Rate on the Viper is awesome when slick. With Pods, EFTs, all pylons loaded, even after you E-JETT the tanks and bombs, you have: Centerline 800lb ECM pod LITENING FLIR Pod on 5R HTS on 5L for CCIP F-16CM later blocks WWPs on 4 & 6 WWPs on 3 & 7 ALE-50 equipped pylons on 2 & 8 with missiles attached AIM-120Cs on 1 & 9 Your sustained turn rate in that configuration is still nothing like an airshow demo, and if it was a 1950s gun fight, you would still get wrecked by any of the F-35s, including the B. Since it’s not a 1950s gun fight, but a 2020s Helmet-HOBS missile fight if someone is stupid enough to close into WVR after making it through the BVRAAM WEZ layers, then JSF smokes everyone including Flankers because of IR VLO, better HMDS, better FPA missiles that have close BVR reach for the face-shoot, automated offensive/defensive EW suite, and other things. The conversation about the WVR fight is negated on so many levels, since it’s a non-starter already for 4th Gen fighters. They stopped doing it long ago just because of Helmet-HOBS.
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  6327.  @REgamesplayer  Yes, the F-16D was nowhere even close to being combat-configured since it didn't have: 800lb ECM pod on 5 LANTIRN TGT Pod 5R Weapons You can E-Jett stations 3, 4, 6, 7 on the F-16, 5 if it's a 300 gal EFT, but not the ECM pod. A Combat-configured Viper is still a CAT 3 stores limit bird with the ECM pod, FLIR, and HARM TGT System for deployable CCIP Vipers. Even with EFTs jettisoned, it can't pull 9g, has limited roll rate, AOA limiter, and doesn't hug the EM diagram like it does slick. It has worse acceleration, ITR, STR, and climb rate than an F-35A in a post E-Jett configuration. Real production F-35As have been dominant against even light-loaded F-16C Block 30 aggressors for many years now. The Dutch stated openly that they saw the F-16s show up on day 1 with 2 tanks because they heard about that early test report, thinking they could just fly circles around the F-35As. After they got wrecked, they RTBd and then showed up Day 2 with only centerline 300gal EFTs, ACMI, CATM-9s, still got wrecked. Then they stripped them down to no EFTs and only the ACMI and CATM-9, and brought the exchange ratio up a little, but not enough to break over 50%. Then the Dutch went and dropped live bombs after those sorties, which they had been carrying the whole time. There's a very lengthy pilot interview on it. These are high hour Dutch F-16 pilots who converted over to F-35As as the initial Cadre that will instruct and lead their air force as it transitions. The whole conversation is in the wrong place though being focused on WVR guns fights, when you have the sensors that JSF do. Why would you ever let the fight get close? Keep in mind they see everything from surface vessels to satellites in their HMDS.
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  6352. I’ve been studying the ATF history since the 1980s. The purposes of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1968 Gun Control Act from which the ATF claim their authority dealt with certain situations respective to each on of those eras: In 1934, a few small-time Midwest gangs like Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde were using V8 cars and various weapons stolen from law enforcement and the military to rob banks. The Attorney General went before Congress and told them this was a National emergency, that 500,000 men like Dillinger comprised the criminal underworld and were armed similarly. (Page 4, NFA Hearings, 73rd Congress, H.R. 9066, 1934) During those hearings, Attorney General Cummings proposed Congress could circumvent the Constitutional restrictions on government from prohibiting the possession and bearing of arms by placing exorbitant taxes on them. That way they would still be technically obtainable, but not practical to the common man since they proposed stamp taxes of $200 in the worst year of the Depression, when unemployment was 24.7%. It turned out that there were only a few gangs like Dillinger, namely Bonnie & Clyde and Ma Barker’s gangs. All of these tiny gangs were gunned-down in 1934 and the US Midwest was the only place they could commit the crimes they did due to vast distances between towns, which allowed them to battle out with local LEOs, then hop in V8 powered automobiles and speed away. In 1968, the premise for the Gun Control Act was that Lee Harvey Oswald ordered his Italian 6.5 Carcano and .30 Special through the mail using a fake identity, which he allegedly used to assassinate JFK and kill officer J.D. Tippit. Therefore, all other Americans must pay for these alleged crimes with more restrictions imposed on the ability to purchase and order firearms across State lines. The ATF would be charged with regulating the new Federal Firearms Licensing system, which is a de facto extension of Federal firearms restrictions on the citizens of the States, where ATF demands that anyone wanting to own a firearms business must enter into a conspiracy with them to defraud the people of their rights to keep and bear arms. None of these Acts that created the ATF and gave them power are even remotely-constitutional for reasons that should jump out right away. After 1934, we basically have a few scraps left over from what the Founders intended the people to keep and bear.
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  6357. Have you ever heard of a concept called Low Probability of Intercept/Detection Radar? It's literally one of the foundational operating principles of AESAs. In addition to reducing, (not increasing) peak power output from the antennae TRMs, they frequency-hop around their relevant spectrum at insane cycles per second to avoid triggering any RF detection sensors. That's if an F-35 pilot even chooses to actively search & track in RF spectrum. The AESA is fused with over a dozen other frequency-wide sensors embedded in the F-35 so it really gets its first hits passively. F-22 is the same way. Those passive RF systems have almost 2x the detection range in the RF spectrum compared with the AESA. The moment any signature emits from your aircraft in both RF and IR spectrums, you risk populating yourself into the new kill web with JSF. If F-35 gets a hint of anything, the super-computing brain directs other passive sensors to pay particular attention to those directions/contacts, and does everything within its power to know what's out there, cross-referenced with a vast threat library that has up-to-date signatures of all known threats. The pilot manages signature carefully to gain weapons-grade tracks, and sets up for an unfair, unseen VLO approach, while staying out of the detection envelopes of the threats. So unlike a 4th Gen encounter, mutual awareness does not happen in BVR at any point until the threat system detects an active missile seeker within a few seconds before impact. That's the extent of the threat pilot's awareness of anybody else out there. You need an entirely new airplane with a more saturated and multi-spectral/wide bandwidth sensor suite, with more processing power. Good luck with that.
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  6390.  @TheStugbit  Brazil’s Gripen Influence Case: "By 2015, Brazil’s long-running anti-corruption investigations had already implicated one major arms procurement program, the Scorpène submarine contract, when yet another scandal emerged with far-reaching consequences. This controversy, however, proved to be much more politically tinged than its predecessor, as it implicated two former presidents. For decades, the Brazilian Air Force had pushed the government to fund a new generation of combat aircraft. In 2014, Saab was granted a contract to provide 36 of the still-in-development E-variant of the JAS-39 Gripen combat jet, but the competitive tender came under almost immediate suspicion. Investigators have since built an influence peddling case against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”), his son, and two intermediaries, alleging that Saab paid for Lula to promote their plane to then-president Dilma Rousseff.” Buyer: Brazil Seller: Saab (Sweden) Year of deal: 2014 Equipment sold: 36 Saab JAS-39E Gripen Combat Aircraft Value of Deal: USD 4.68 billion (re-negotiated value, down from initial contract price of USD 5.4 billion) Sum involved in Corruption Allegations: BRL 2.6 million (USD 1.21 million) Dramatis Personae Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – former president of Brazil; accused of selling his influence after leaving office to help Saab win the tender competition. Luís Cláudio Lula da Silva – son of Lula da Silva, the former president; accused of receiving BRL 2.6 million through a consultancy on behalf of his father as payment for influence peddling. Mauro Marcondes and Cristina Mautoni – owners of the lobbying consultancy Marcondes e Mautoni Empreendimentos e Diplomacia; accused of acting as intermediaries in passing payments from Saab.  In August 2001, Brazil launched a tender competition for a new generation of combat aircraft to replace its aging fleet of U.S. F-5Es and French Dassault Mirage variants, as well as the newer Alenia/Embraer AMX light fighter-bomber. The competition, which was known as F-X and called for the purchase of twelve new planes, was postponed in 2003 after President Lula da Silva assumed office, and eventually cancelled in 2006. In late 2007, the program was resurrected as “F-X2,” with the Brazilian Air Force (Força Aérea Brasileira, or FAB) requesting information from Boeing, Dassault, EADS, Lockheed Martin, Saab, and Sukhoi. In October 2008, the FAB selected the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, Dassault Rafale, and Saab JAS-39E Gripen as finalists. In September 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a swap of 36 Rafales in exchange for 12 Embraer KC-390 cargo jets, and although Lula da Silva initially backed the plan, it was scrapped after encountering strong resisted from the FAB. The Super Hornet also had its detractors; in October 2009, Brigadier Engineer Venancio Alvarenga Gomes, director of projects for Brazil’s aerospace technology command, was taped lecturing on Brazil’s prior bad experiences with restrictive U.S. export controls. Little progress was made on selecting a finalist in the following years, in part because of a 26.5% cut to the military acquisition budget after President Dilma Rousseff took office in January 2011. Lula da Silva was widely reported to favor the French Rafale, while, according to a diplomatic memo released by Wikileaks, Rousseff told U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in March 2011 that she supported the Boeing Super Hornet. The views of the FAB were also made public in January 2010, when a 30,000-page assessment report was leaked to newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, naming the Saab Gripen E as the air force’s top choice because of a lower price and opportunities for co-development with domestic firm Embraer. The Super Hornet ranked second, while the Rafale finished last because of its high cost.
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  6391.  @TheStugbit  Saabs Jas-affär i Brasilien kopplas till åtal om olagliga metoder UPPDATERAD 20 MARS 2018PUBLICERAD 20 MARS 2018 UPPDRAG GRANSKNING · Jas-affären kopplas till ett åtal i Brasilien där Saabs agent misstänks ha betalat ut stora summor pengar för att påverka den dåvarande presidenten, Dilma Rouseff, att välja svenska stridsflygplan. Samtidigt får Saab kritik för att inte ha levt upp till de löften som gavs under försäljningskampanjen. I Jas-affären i Brasilien misstänks otillåtna metoder ha förekommit. En åklagare i Brasilia har väckt åtal mot Saabs agent, Mauro Marcondes. Rättegången kommer, enligt uppgifter till Uppdrag granskning, inledas under våren eller sommaren. Den svenska statsministern Stefan Löfven, liksom stora delar av Saabs styrelse, ska kallas som vittnen av försvaret, enligt ett dokument som Uppdrag granskning har tillgång till. Affären, som gjordes upp sommaren 2015, är värd omkring 40 miljarder kronor och räknas till de största svenska exportaffärerna någonsin. Totalt såldes 36 Gripen NG som ska vara på plats i Brasilien senast 2024. Arvode höjdes från en miljon till 16 miljoner Enligt åklagaren, Herbert Mesquita, hade Saab ett avtal från 2009 med lobbyisten Mauro Marcondes. När avtalet omförhandlas 2012 höjdes plötsligt Marcondes arvode från omkring en miljon kronor till 16 miljoner kronor. Åklagaren kallar detta för ”anmärkningsvärt”. Omförhandlingen av arvodet skedde i samband med att president Dilma Rousseff meddelat att hon var intresserad av att köpa amerikanska stridsflygplan. När beskedet nådde Saab ska det enligt åklagaren ha ”slagit ner som en bomb” vilket fick företaget att besluta sig för att anlita Marcondes som en så kallad ”influencer”. Marcondes ska ha fått uppdraget att trycka på Dilma Rousseff via den förre presidenten Lula da Silva – en person som hon brukar lyssna på. Senare har åklagaren kunnat visa att Marcondes betalade ut stora belopp till Lulas son. Detta ska ha gjort expresidenten Lula, och hans familj, rika enligt åklagaren.
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  6432.  @robertromero8692  Have you ever shot on a USMC or NRA Hi Power range by chance? You realize that the targets are gigantic black bulls eyes, with pit monkeys who pull the targets down, then place discs where your shots impacted to give you visible feedback, then lift the targets back up so you can see the impacts. They don’t train on shooting moving targets with bolt action surplus rifles. It’s not a thing. The reports on what type of marksman he was are largely irrelevant, and have been invalidated by subsequent attempts to duplicate the shots. Here is what Craig Roberts said about Carlos Hathcock: "I’ve been asked this question of whether Carlos said this or not many times. I can assure you he did. He was a personal friend of mine, and when I was doing the research on Kill Zone I called him and asked what he thought about the “official” story of Oswald being the lone nut with a Carcano could do what the Warren Commission said.  He laughed and said that they tried to duplicate it at Quantico at the USMC Sniper Instructor School. He said they used a 6.5 Carcano with 4x scope (he didn’t mention if it was a cheap Hollywood Optics scope like what was mounted on the “Oswald” rifle.) But I’m sure they bore sighted it before trying to duplicate the feat of 3 shots in 5.6 seconds on a moving target in a high to low angle. He said after several tries they simply could not duplicate it on the conditions Oswald would have had. It takes time to fire a shot, work the bolt, get back on target and get the proper eye relief from the scope to fire the next shot. I didn’t record the phone call but I took notes. When I wrote that part of Kill Zone I sent it to him to make sure it was correct. He said it was.” In addition to this, LE SWAT Snipers who attended courses run by Hathcock said he used this as an exercise sometimes, and nobody could duplicate it with a Carcano.
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  6491.  @kaseyc5078  Yes, but after WWII, there was a massive deficit in prime age males who are necessary for rebuilding society, and getting back to work. All of the European nations except for Switzerland and Sweden suffered tremendous losses to their native prime age males. What many of them did was import workers from Turkey, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Most of these men worked the low-skilled labor jobs, while some of them went into higher-skilled education and work as well. Along with all of that, Europe adopted relaxed abortion laws, so native young adult females exterminated their children in the womb. This created even more demand for foreign laborers. The problem is that these foreign laborers were enticed to come to Europe to take advantage of “free” social welfare programs, not to work. The uneducated and altruistic weak Europeans who idealized their social safety nets started to see that the immigrants weren’t contributing to society with productive work and paying into the tax system. What did they do? Abort more of their children, and import more foreigners with promises of free everything. The consequences of this are disenfranchised and separate class of foreigners who will never be accepted as natives, who see themselves as superior to Europeans due to their own bigoted ideology and internal messaging from elders. This means from a societal order standpoint, you have a people who don’t respect the nation’s laws. Any time you try to enforce the laws when they break them, they feel like they’re being discriminated against, rather than accepting responsibility. You also have genuine criminals who will use this dynamic to claim discrimination in hopes of avoiding consequences for their crimes. The best thing would be to deport everyone back to their homelands because they refuse to integrate and refuse to obey the laws, refuse to work to contribute, while stealing the workers’ fruit.
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  6495. There’s a huge difference between security clearance for access, and executive power for classification and sharing intel (Presidents often share highly-classified intelligence with allies, as well as withhold it.). VPs do not have authority to share intel unless specifically blessed-off by the President. In Biden’s case, he was engaged in very direct international relations with Ukraine and Russia, all of which benefited Russia. One of the most treasonous acts was the Obama-Biden-Clinton fast-tracking of the sale of uranium mining rights in the US to Putin. The other was the intervention in Ukrainian anti-corruptions efforts once they threw Yanukovych out of office, and democratically elected Poroshenko. Poroshenko appointed Viktor Shokin to head the new drive in eradicating corruption, especially where the Ukrainian government had been infiltrated by so many Russian agents and pro-Russian separatists. One of the companies Putin was using to launder his illegal pilfering of Ukraine’s economy and to hide human trafficking operations was Burisma. Burisma’s energy profits were not that large, so it didn’t make any sense that so much effort was made to conceal what was going on with the company. As soon as Putin realized Yanukovych was going to be ousted, a Russian oligarch named Elena Baturina wired $3.5 million to a shell company run by SECSTATE John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, and VP Biden’s son, Hunter. That was called Rosemont Seneca, one of dozens of Biden family shell corporations with no evidence of actual services provided other than access. VP Biden threatened Poroshenko with keeping $1 Billion in aid money from Ukraine, if Poroshenko didn’t fire Shokin (who was investigating Burisma).
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  6525.  Jörgen Persson  3-4x more expensive than what? Gripen C? Show me the operational cost breakdown for the 3 platform force of: Gripen E Gripen F GlobalEye You can't because there is no published baseline for that. There aren't 12 years of data to analyze since Gripen E is barely in production and Initial ODT&E starting in 2018. That's 2 years of data on what is still developmental/early production. GlobalEye can't have better AESA resolution from stand-off range compared to F-35 net closer to the targets. You need to overlay the GlobalEye racetrack in the Finnish ADZs and look at RF propagation, then compare that with F-35s flying wherever they want in Finnish airspace and the total coverage across RF and IR spectrums provided not only from FiAF, but Norwegian and Polish AF in the MADL net. Even with improved detection range and resolution provided by GaN TRM based sensors, stand-off takes away that edge while the fused sensors on networked JSF provide an extremely detailed picture from multiple aspects of what is out there in the air, ground, sea, and space. Gripen E doesn't have the same sensor coverage to feed into the links with GlobalEye, although it is a good system compared to legacy systems. F-35s dispursed see ultra high resolution imagery of airborne and surface threats from multiple angles, and can ride the border while simultaneously conducting EW and ISR. Gripen E makes itself vulnerable if it tries to fly that pattern, so it needs some stand-off based on the Arexis EW suite capabilities and its side aspect RCS. This is an invitation to be killed by the Felon/Flanker network while GlobalEye helplessly flies a track over the Gulf of Bothnia.
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  6528.  Jörgen Persson  Didn’t we go over this already? Have you not looked at the dimensions of the Meteor vs AIM-120? They both are the same length and diameter. Of course the Meteor fits inside the F-35 weapons bays. Nobody calls them "bomb bays", since they always have BVR missiles in them when configured. China already exploited the Gripen C/D in RTAF service from 2014-2019 and proved it to not be very capable against the J-10C. They also pitted the J-10C against the Su-35S and J-10C enjoys a much more favorable BVR exchange ratio against the Su-35S. Why? Reduced RCS, better radar (large 1200 TRM AESA), longer reach PL-15 BVRAAM, better pilot interface with the systems. J-10C has DSI inlet, very small frontal RCS, but all single vertical stabilizer fighters have large side RCS so it’s no competitor with the JSF. In every metric, the F-35 outclasses the J-10C, which out-classes the Su-35S. The F-35’s frontal, side, and rear RCS values are at least 1/100th what any of the 4.5 Gen fighters are. The F-35’s AESA is more capable than any of the foreign AESAs in production, with modes that a lot of people haven’t thought of, integrated with the EOTS/DAS, and RF suite for maximum detection and tracking in passive and outer-spectrum ranges that don’t trigger any RWR. Gripen E is more comparable with the J-10C, so why would anyone want the Gripen E that is already facing obsolescence? Su-57 frontal RCS is also very small, and it has EW capabilities with expansion potential that the Gripen E will never have. Su-57 has a 1500 TRM nose AESA, 2 side-looking chin AESAs, L-band IFF in the LEVCONs, DIRCM, internal weapons bays, modern data link interoperable with Su-35S and SM Flankers. That’s what Finland is facing. The Gripen E would struggle terribly in that environment because it has a very large side/oblique RCS that will be seen by high power PESA and AESA radars networked together. You can Digital waveform manipulate all you want towards one radar source, but when they have you triangulated because you’re easy to see, the next phase is incoming R-77-1 BVRAAMs in volleys from multiple vectors with mid-course guidance and no active seekers until it’s too late, so the MAWS portion of the EW suite will not activate until terminal phase. They will purposely fly counter ES-05 tactics that evade or stay out of Meteor R TR/NEZ parameters while sending Flankers to decoy as Su-57s make hidden approaches at supercruise speeds and optimum separation parameters for R-77-1 and newer missiles with different guidance methods, including radar-homing A2A variants. Short story is you start losing Gripens left and right or flying Gripens in a totally defensive posture when you don’t have to if you had chosen a cutting-edge design like JSF. With JSF, you can be doing OCA the whole time instead of working about any incoming missiles, and dropping Su-57s, AWACS, and Super Flankers from the sky, while striking their mobile IADS nodes and sea ports, air bases, whatever. JSF is a deterrent. Gripen E is a jobs program for Saab who needs to fund their own future generation fighter program after seeing how limited Gripen is.
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  6529. Biden has been working for Moscow since 1972. They funded his campaign through the Council for a Livable World under the guise of environmentalism and anti-nuclear proliferation. Immediately after his rigged Senate 1972 election in Delaware, he flew to the Soviet Union in 1973, then returned to the US to execute his taskings to kill the B-1A program with Carter saying it was too expensive. In 1979, he flew back to Leningrad, met with Brezshnev, Alexey Kosygin, and Andrei Gromyko. He returned to the US and began lobbying in the Senate for the rest of them to ratify the SALT treaty by disarming the US further with our strategic weapons posture while the Soviets used the technical data from the B-1A to build the Tu-160. Biden, having succeeded in killing the B-1A program, further worked to fight the development of the B-2 secretly, and US ICBM, SLBM, ballistic missile submarines, and other developmental programs. When Reagan came into office, he thankfully reversed the course on Soviet momentum using traitors within and ramped-up US defense spending on these programs, restarted the B-1 with the B-1B program, MX, ATF, and re-built the military into a more formidable force that emphasized battle-focused training, a major departure from the fragmented institutional norms of the 1970s. Biden critiqued the Reagan White House throughout, espousing pro-Soviet positions at every turn. He especially hate the Reagan philosophy on defeating the Soviet Union, calling it appalling. Biden has represented a clear and present danger to the United States of America throughout his entire Senate, VP, and WH occupation working for the hard-liners in Moscow. Various elements in US intelligence have been aware of this since the 1970s, but have been stopped from prosecuting him for treason because he receives cover from other traitors in high places, like CIA Director Stansfield Turner under Carter, (who was recruited by NKVD moles who penetrated the OSS and CIA in the late 1940s). This has been going on for a long time.
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  6567.  @elfi9003  There isn't a current production fighter that is more upgradeable than any of the JSF variants. The Gripen is probably the least-upgradeable Western design because of its small size, which limits radar, engine, sensors, internal fuel, and weapons capabilities. It is alone among the 4.5 Gen fighters by going drastically in the opposite direction of thrust-to-weight ratio, being the most under-powered fighter in production in the past several decades. Air Forces don't choose F-35s because of Gucci factor. They choose it after their pilots and air planners get the partner nation capabilities briefing from other F-35 pilots who flew F-16s, F-15s, Hornets, and F-22s. Once they show interest, they send senior pilots through the conversion training for F-35A, then they get to fly them and make assessments themselves. After being exposed to it, they say, "This is a game-changer. Revolutionary. There is nothing else out there like this. If we don't have this, we will be left behind." It actually makes things harder for the US because we aren't getting as many F-35Bs for the USMC as fast as we need them due to production line scheduling, even after they ramped up to making over 130 per year. There are 3 assembly lines already: Fort Worth, Japan, and Italy. Still can't keep up with demand. Gripen E isn't even developed or shipping with its full sensors. The more I learn about the state of Gripen E, the more major risks I'm seeing, and that includes safety, as well as costs.
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  6601. Biden-su is from Pennsylvania. The main reason he is affiliated with Delaware is because of his support from the Soviets through The Council for a Livable World, who funded his Senate campaign in 1972 to get as many Soviet moles into the US Senate as possible with treaty signature authority. They had the goods on Joseph Biden because he was a pedophile, so they could lean on him hard through coercion with minimum bribery payments to get him to do their bidding, rather than a Boy Scout who would require much more effort via the MICE matrix. Evidence of this? Biden’s first trip immediately after being sworn-in was to the Soviet Union in Leningrad, where he met with senior party leaders of the USSR. Their first directive to him involved killing the B-1A strategic bomber program, while helping them obtain technical data on it. Biden came back and became the main ringleader/chearleader in the Senate working hard to kill the B-1A, which was eventually done with cooperation with the Carter WH. After they killed the B-1A, Biden flew to Moscow and met with the senior Soviet leadership for his next set of marching orders, which was a thing called SALT II treaty where the US would agree to drastic ally cut our nuclear weapons and USSR would sign the same papers, but actually ramp-up their production. Biden has been a traitor to the US since no later than 1972, fully open to receiving bribes from the Soviets, Russians, Ukrainians, and Chinese. This has spilled out into the open over the past few years, with him openly bragging about the corruption, and the absolute incompetence of his son and brother in their inability to maintain any degree of discretion when betraying the US people.
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  6623.  @Krill_all_health_insuranceCEOs  So everything you just outlined is from Rules For Radicals, a Soviet front initiative to destroy the US from within. The Russians have hated the fact that the US has been a Nation where authoritarian rule isn’t a thing. It defies their very historical political framework, whether it be Ruriks vs Kievan Rus, Mongols dominating them for 250 years, Czars, Bolshevik mass-murderers, Communist Bureaucrats, or the new Kleptocracy. As the US out-performed Russia in every metric in the 20th Century and invalidated their political-economic pillars, they seethed at the Yankees dominating the world’s economy, militaries, industries, and trade. They have a belief that because Russia is such a large country, it therefore is the best country, even though they see abject poverty surrounding them due to terrible geography and an extremely cold climate. The US just doing its thing shows their efforts to be futile in trade, industry, economy, and military, so they have to erase the US to confirm their validity. They’ve been working hard at that since the 1930s, as soon as FDR recognized Stalin’s USSR as a legitimate political entity. Your point about trying to get more exposure for left issues and independent left media is interesting, because leftists have dominated the media throughout the 20th Century, until people have finally wised up to the incessant lies and rejected them in pretty gargantuan numbers. This is why younger people have stopped watching ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, etc. Those were all leftist strongholds. What you’re arguing for is for younger people to go back to the left-dominated networks of lies, propagated by Soviet active measures campaigns that co-opted US media via the CIA with Mockingbird. I don’t think many young people in working-class families are going to latch onto that failed messaging. Ignorant college kids will continue to lap it up though, but many of them are seeing through this too.
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  6632.  @msaar1303  None of those nations have anywhere close to the US population. First thing about statistics is the larger the observed population is, the larger the standard deviation will be, and each metric will average lower. Also, the OECD metrics are faulty, not scientific at all. EMS, dentistry, wait times for Healthcare, and Healthcare options are superior on the US, so they ignore that and switch to costs. Of course better Healthcare costs more, especially when you're also footing the bill for research and development for countries who buy at bulk rates from you because they can't afford retail prices. This makes pricing even higher in the US because so much of modern Healthcare systems are funded by US programs-not all, but most. Europe and Canada have many similar studies, research, etc, but nowhere near the capacity of the US to do it. Just look at how many MD, nursing, radiology, specialist, and EMS programs and universities there are in the US compared to all of Europe. Same with airfields/airports. US has over 14,000. Most of the medical advancements happen because of defense, which is why I start with defense as an interesting metric from which to branch out from. If you haven't heard this argument before, it shows you've been operating in an echo chamber reinforcing common beliefs that I see as erroneous and unscientific. I have used the Finnish NHS, taken several family members in it to appointments or walk-ins, and it reminds me of the US VA system-not as good as the private sector. Not terrible, but not exceptional or oriented towards high quality patient care. I know what that looks like, and it isn't in any NHS.
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  6658.  @miketheman4341  Guys in Ranger Batt have done more reps in CQM and CQB because they don’t have to train for any of the UDT and Combat Swimmer skill sets, none of the VBSS, and don’t have to do as much methods of insertion training that is very time-consuming. 2 main aerial methods of insertion in Battalion are rotary wing and Static Line Airborne. If a kid joins at 17-18, they will still go through 6 months of Infantry OSUT, 2 months of RASP if they make it straight through, and 3 weeks of Airborne school before going on PCS leave in-between Benning and Hunter AAF, Ft. Lewis, or staying at Benning for 3rd Batt. Once they show up, they go right into training cycle with tons of CQM, CQB, rotary wing, fixed wing, and specialized training pre-deployment, then deploy somewhere for a JRX, JRTC, Jungle Ops, Desert, the UK, Thailand, etc. You see a very rapid climb in maturity in Ranger Regiment because guys that can’t perform are booted out quickly via RFS or injury. When you witness how a Squad or Platoon of Ranger Batt guys execute SUTs vs SEALs, it’s night a day. I’ve done OPFOR against both and deployed among CJSOTF or other composite units of each, and it’s just a brutal harsh reality that Rangers are far more competent in CQM and CQB, IADs, and SUTs. I would never want to face them with live ammo. SEALs I would happily face day or night, and skull-drag them with the kinds of guys I was used to running with. They were very lax/undisciplined with their SUTs and it showed.
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  6713.  @crosslink1493  The problem is a lot of those people in the State Dept and WH are idiots who are appointed based on political kick-backs and who they’re related to. DC is very incestuous with the elite classes who live in an administrative state that begets more bureaucracy. This current WH has the youngest staffers ever in history on the economic council, for example. CIA was populated with 200 Russian double agents when it was formed in 1947, from the OSS days. State Dept weenies and department heads come from Harvard finishing clubs (secret clubs), while CIA are mainly from Yale historically with their societies as well. These are blue bloods who groom their children to maintain the old order of European-based finance elites leveraging positions within USG to further European goals. The Russians did the same thing as much as they could dating back to the Czar, but since Russia has almost no trade with the US due to their geographic isolation, they have focused more on espionage, political subversion, and planting as many people within key levers in US society to protect their interests. So the State Dept and CIA were filled with Russian moles dating way back. When the US formed the CIA in 1947, the Russians had already been tapping diplomatic cables since the early 1900s and reading all of our communications between the President, foreign ministers of other nations, and related nodes in the geopolitical web around the world. They also propped up multiple political action organizations to get politicians elected who would do their bidding, especially on nuclear armament affairs because of the US’s dominance in that space. They watched us nuke Japan twice unilaterally, and always have feared that we could do the same to them if things got kinetic between us. That’s why they financed a pedophiles hopeless bid for the Senate in Delaware in 1972, along with 420 other Congressmen since 1962. He’s now sitting in his excrement-filled diaper drooling on himself in the WH, surrounded by Marxists in his senior cabinet positions and staff.
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  6812.  @gunguru7020  You can even go with less chamber pressure and generate 3400fps muzzle velocity from 12” barrel 6.5 Grendel with a lighter bullet. We know even the 6.8x51 doesn’t penetrate Level IV at 100m, but does only at close range, so the baseline expectation of it to penetrate hard armor at 600m has not been met and was exempted year ago. That was the basis for most of the ballistic requirements of the program, which then set the magazine, rifle, and LMG weights and configurations. The whole program is literally flawed because the people who specified and are running are incompetent. This is no surprise, because big Army has not been able to solicit, select, develop, or manage a successful rifle program since the M1 Garand. M1 Garand “Great success” M14 Massive failure SPIW Massive failure ACR Failed OICW Failed ISCR Failed (7.62 NATO redux battle rifle) NGSW Colossal failure across the board Now look at USAF rifle history: Used what the Army did, namely M1 & M2 Carbines for Security Police in the 1950s AR-15 adoption driven by Curtis Le May for SPs after US Army Ordnance declared it wholly unfit for US service rifle use Special Forces, Airborne, Airmobile, and Commonwealth Special Forces Units quickly adopted it in the early-mid 1960s (UK SAS, Canadanion Recce/SOF, Australian SAS, New Zealand SAS) Then look at JSOC history: XM177E2s Colt 653s M16A1/M203s from 1977-1985 Colt 723s from 1984 to 1993, introduction of Aimpoints and Surefires, Ops Inc Suppressors, SR-25s M4A1 from 1994-2004, more LPVOs, newer LAMs, better lights, slings, suppressors, newer SR-25s, rails, FF RAS, MRE, better sniper optics, Thermals Hk 416s from 2005, more optics, better LPVOs, smaller/higher output WPLs, newer suppressors, SR-25 ECC, better optics KAC AMG belt-fed constant-recoil LMGs 6mm ARC DMRs with newer optics and accessories US Army has proven they can’t define, select, manage, or develop appropriate weapons systems even for its own infantry, combat support, and support troops, even with the biggest Army budget in the world, with help from the other services. Therefore, small arms development for individual service weapons like rifles, carbines, and pistols should not be driven by the US Army anymore. They’ve had over a century to get it right with all the resources one could imagine, and still failed.
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  6816.  @ffakr  I’ve been studying the history of education since the 1980s and am always learning more. Of course parents raised in public and even private schools don’t know math very well as a general rule, by design. Math is the problem-solving language of scientific inquiry and applied physics. It’s impossible to maintain control with centralized systems of government when a substantial portion of the population is exposed to applied math solutions and organic approaches to logical analysis of problems. It’s extremely difficult to steer these types of people. So why would someone advocate for more of the same system that produces functionally-illiterate adults in the basic sciences? For me, I was raised in a developmental aerospace community with multilingual parents and close-hold defense programs where the top minds were concentrated, not just in engineering, but the hands-on technicians and mechanics who had to work on, repair, and build the advanced systems. Many senior career engineers have stated that watching episodes of Mark Rober and Smarter Every Day covered courses they took in college for engineering better than any classroom environment could have. So today, we live in an information exchange system that allows people who went to school to gain an actual education alongside their children at home. The biggest challenge is that they have been conditioned to no longer question or show that spark of curiosity that children have, so staying in the rut of consumerist and entertainment-saturation behavior is hard to break from.
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  6854. There are school shootings, mass murders, and similar events all over the world with far greater death tolls. The US doesn’t even factor into the top 15 mass murders at schools in the past 120 years. 1. Chile 1907, 2000 murdered by the Army 2. Beslan Russia, 2004, 333 murdered, 783 wounded 3. Dhaka Pakistan, 1971, over 300 murdered by the Army 4. Chenkalady Sri Lanka, 1990, 158 murdered by the Army 5. Peshawar school, 2014, 149 murdered by Taliban in Pakistan 6. Garissa, Kenya, 2015, 148 murdered by al-Shabaab 7. Kabul School bombing, 2021, 90 murdered 8. Nagerkovil school bombing (Sri Lanka), 1995, 71 murdered, 150 injured by Sri Lankan Air Force bombing 9. Walisango School Massacre, Indonesia, 2000, 70 murdered by Catholic militants 10. Kyanguli School Arson, Kenya, 67 burned alive by 2 school students 11. Buni Yada School Nigeria, 2014, 59 boys murdered and 24 school buildings burned down 12. Thammasat University Massacre, Thailand, 1976, 46+ murdered, 167 injured by Thai Police and paramilitary 13. Chenkolai Bombing, 2006, 61 girls killed by Sri Lankan Air Force 14. Aleppo Artillery School massacre, Syria, 1979, 50-83 cadets killed by Muslim Brotherhood 15. Bahr El-Baqar School bombing, Egypt, 1970, 46 killed by Israeli Air Force 16. Bath Michigan School bombing happened in 1927, using dynamite and a truck bomb killing 45 and wounding 58 Look at how many other nations have massacres where the Army or police or terrorists are involved. That’s when you see really high death toll of the innocent. US is also #3 largest population on earth, but doesn’t even factor into the worst school massacres until you go back to 1927.
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  7008.  @Red_Sector_7  It roughly matches the F-35A’s internal fuel capacity if you attach the CFTs, but will be limited in supersonic speed due to area ruling. If you look at the CFTs though, they have really optimized them for as much speed as they can get, with the bulk up front as not to impede on the volumetric displacement of the fuselage wing mid-section. The Super Hornet and Hornet are already well-known for being really slow with acceleration, bleed energy quickly at altitude, and don’t dash well through Mach for missile kinematics. These were the compromises for making an airframe more ideal for controllable glide slope and responsive inputs for carrier landings at relatively slower approach speeds to help reduce landing mishaps, which are a huge consideration for the Navy. The new engine module upgrades planned for Block 4 F-35s will increase the already impressive combat radius and endurance of the F-35A, which is better than even the F-15C with 2 tanks and the F-15E with CFTs and 2 tanks. As far as ordnance, they both have about the same, though the F-35A can carry 250lbs more ordnance across 11 points. For the NORAD patrol and intercept mission, heavy weapons count isn’t a factor. F/A-18E/F Max Ordnance/Load: 17,750lb F-35A: 18,000lbs Supersonic dash goes to F-35A. Situational awareness goes to F-35A. Thrust/Weight goes to F-35A. AESA radar capability: APG-81 smokes the APG-79 in TRM count, integrated cooling with the internal fuel mass, modes, systems integration with all the other sensors IR sensors: F-35A has EOTS integrated into the nose and with the 6 DAS His Res IR cameras embedded in the airframe, fused with the AESA and RF sensor suite. F-35A makes a lot more sense just looking at the metrics that are really important for Canada. The only thing that really comes to mind for me is the Super Hornet’s impressive Air-to-Air magazine depth with the option to carry 10x BVRAAM and 2 IR missiles, but that’s more for a fighter vs fighter in a 4th Gen BVR exchange. An F-35A with 6 missiles is far more lethal than a Super Hornet with 10. PK is higher with VLO intercepts.
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  7026.  @humbuggaming2126  Do the research on total loss mishap rates of every single fighter over the last 50 years. JSF series is the only one that never lost a prototype, and went 10 years into production before an F-35B crashed due to an improperly installed fuel tube. If you're claiming that it is inherently an unsafe aircraft, then you obviously have zero experience or knowledge about fighter mishap rates, because 2 of the fighters being replaced by the JSF series experienced 100 total losses with 20 fatalities on their first 10 years of service. It's a much easier to fly, easier to land, and far safer aircraft than the underpowered, stall-prone, AOA-limited, buggy DFLCS, and limited SA in the Gripen. Go look how many Gripens have had major issues with stalls, PIO, DFLCS problems, refusing to respond to pilot input, and even an uncommanded ejection due to G-suit inflation working the election handle loose. Its mishap history reads like an amateur 3rd world country trying to develop a fighter, very disappointing. I suspect that's why Sweden just outsourced the Gripen E ejection seat to Martin Baker in the UK. Keep in mind that Gripen's mishap rate of total losses is for 271 aircraft, while the F-35A has been built already in far larger numbers, with far fewer total losses and mishaps. It's one of the main things I first noticed about the whole JSF program compared to what we saw with AV-8, F-14, F-16, & F/A-18. There are well over 600 JSF now with only 4 crashes after 300,000 flight hours. 271 Gripens with 8 crashes is not a good place to bring up mishap rates from, especially with all the strange causes for those crashes that should have been eliminated in a competent test program.
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  7029.  @phillip_iv_planetking6354  The US has been using Swedish Bofors steel cannon barrels, and anti-tank systems for many decades. If you ever get a chance to handle any of their small arms, even dating back to the Ljungman, they are high quality, comparable with Swiss-made rifles. Take the Swedish AK5 licensed variant of the FN FNC as an example. It’s a very well-made weapon. I’m not a fan of the design, but the quality of workmanship is excellent. Back to aerospace. Their SAAB AESA in the Gripen E is actually an excellent radar with its rotating capability so you can bias the search and track azimuth offset from the velocity vector of the aircraft. This comes into play with BVR missiles like the AMRAAM and Meteor, where you can set up a long-range separation, then offset left or right to stay out of threat missile WEZ, while continually providing AESA-based data-link midcourse corrections to the missile(s) on the targets. Problem for the Gripen E though is that it struggles at higher altitude since it is underpowered and lacks a high service ceiling, which is a critical metric for 4th Gen BVR kinematics. It is simply outclassed in this area by the legacy Flankers, let alone the Super Flankers and especially the Su-57. Gripen E leverages its survivability entirely on EW systems to try to remain undetected. That’s not a good strategy in the era of ever-advancing IRSTs and super-computing processors that drive IR sensors in a passive detection scheme with high transfer-rate data-linked network.
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  7059.  @wesman7837  It was a group of men who built the bomb in a salvage auto business shop in downtown OKC. They were Middle Easterners organized by Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian intel officer who was purged from the Egyptian military after the assassination of Sadat. He was under FBI surveillance after he got out of the US Army, and traveled around the US conducting site surveys and terrorist cell recruiting/organizing. The whole media story about OKC is so fake, it's better that you had never heard it if you want to study OKBOMB. There were 14 criminal referrals from multiple agencies within DOD and DOJ against the Clintons when they left the Arkansas Governor's mansion and went to the WH, and the FBI Director allowed those investigations to proceed. OKC Murrah Building contained most of the files for those criminal referrals, since Arkansas falls under that Federal region with OKC as their central Federal building. The DEA, FBI, DIA, Arkansas LEAs, and NSA were just some of the referring agencies, with charges that included murder, treason, espionage, perjury, suborning of perjury, obstruction of Justice, evidence tampering, criminal conspiracy, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, concealment of income, undeclared offshore assets from illicit activities, assault, and sexual harassment, which all happened as an abuse of executive while the Clintons were in the Governor's position in Arkansas. Gee, it sure would be convenient if those records were destroyed and then blamed on his political rivals. After the OKC Bombing, Clinton blamed right wing talk radio for the attack, at a time when his Presidency was so scandal-plagued, that things were looking bleak for his and Hillary's future. With help from the media, he was cast as "the healer in-chief", and Senator Joe Biden had his staff draft the PATRIOT ACT to "combat domestic terrorism". It was then passed into law in the next Administration of George W. Bush.
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  7107.  Nick Yankee  These are the types of studies I’m talking about that count on people not looking up the numbers. It’s not possible for 530,000 families to turn to bankruptcy when only 229,703 Chapter 7 filings and 149,077 Chapter 13 bankruptcies were filed in 2022. Somebody is lying, and it isn’t the US Bankruptcy Courts statistics. The worst year since 2008 was 2010, with 1.146 million Ch 7 and 434,839 Ch 13 filings. That was because of the sub-prime housing Markey with variable rate mortgages, not medical bills. Ch 7 & 13 filings dropped dramatically since then and most Ch 13 filings are due to mortgage default, auto loans, credit card debt, and a series of financial factors that contribute overall to households seeking Ch 13 protection. Those studies (that say anything over 26% of Ch 7 & 13 filings are due to medical bills) manipulated the data to include if the earners were off work for 2 weeks or more, were injured during the year in question, and things not related specifically to their filing. Even we add up all Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcies and Chapter 13 wager earner bankruptcies, we don’t reach this 530,000 number since 2020 unless over 88% of bankruptcies were due to medical bills in 2020, and 124% of filings in 2021 (not possible): 2020 Ch 7 + Ch 13 = 603,548 2021 Ch 7 + Ch 13 = 428,381 2022 Ch 7 + Ch 13 = 378,780 filings In reality, there were more likely 98,780 Ch 7 + Ch 13 filings combined where medical bills were the major factor, on top of bad debt/income ratios, especially with credit card bills and crazy auto loans. Medical providers generally work with people on a payment plan, which should not even be a thing because we have Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, ACA, and private providers. Medical debt bankruptcy is generally more of a story about bad personal finance, not an inherent problem with the healthcare system, although I do agree that providers, Pharma, and insurance companies hike up prices when nobody sees how much things actually cost.
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  7123.  @emporiahandalusi5725  Every time you see an article mention 871 deficiencies, ask how many deficiencies existed between the Harrier, F-16, Hornet, and A-10 back in the 1970s and 1980s? How was the breakdown of those 871 "deficiencies" between the F-35A, B, and C before they were corrected and the obsolete reports compiled by bean-counters in the Pentagon made totally meaningless? When those erroneous reports were compiled, did you know that 285 of the "deficiencies" were actually newly-discovered capabilities that have since been expanded on? What if there was a way to see for the layman if these 3 fighter designs were truly troubled without needing to know much about aviation? Consider accident, mishap, and fatality rates and compare them with the legacy designs. Between UK and US, 100 harriers were lost, with 20 fatalities just in a 10 year period. F-16? 143 losses, 72 fatalities in first 10 years. Hornet? 90 losses, 27 fatalities. 15 years of F-35A service...4 losses, 1 fatality in Japanese Defense Forces. Only 2 losses are from impacts with the terrain. 1st was the JADF CFIT/pilot non-responsive who flew at a steep angle down into the ocean, 2nd was at Eglin AFB where the pilot bounced an F-35A off the ground at over 200kts with autopilot speed hold left on. The other 2 were really early F-35s that caught fire on the ground, problem was fixed immediately and incorporated into the production line. F-35B: 2 crashes, 0 fatalities. Has been flying since June 2008. F-35C: 0 losses, 0 fatalities, has been flying since June 2010. No need for an aerospace degree. There are 710+ JSF delivered so far, with 450,000 flight hours, soon to be half a million flight hours among the fleet. By this time with the teen fighters, we had lost well over 500 aircraft to accidents, with 189 fatalities just in their first 10 years of service. None of them were safe for full rate production, but we made them by the hundreds and quickly had to replace all the A/B models with C/D models in the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 fleets. AV-8A had to be replaced with AV-8B.
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  7125.  @petter5721  Gripen is a scam and Norway never wanted it. They and Switzerland have turned down the Gripen 4x now due to it not being fully developed at the time of evaluation because it's never been properly funded. Same with Finland. Every time these 3 nations looked at early Gripen or Gripen NG, it was still in development before meeting an operational standard, which is where Gripen E is currently at as well even after almost 15 years of test flights and empty promises. Switzerland analyzed and did extensive accounting on what CPFH would be on Gripen NG many years ago, and forecast a $27,000 number including spares and basing logistics (indirect + direct costs). If you ever see those crazy low numbers of $4700 or $6000, you know you're being lied to. That barely covers fuel. For reference, the A-10 in USAF service in 2017 cost over $17,000/hr to fly including indirect costs. It has no Radar, no IRST, no EW suite, no afterburner turbofan, very subsonic airframe that can barely cruise at 285kts, no DFLCS, just a tube airframe with wings and mechanical flight controls. Current international F-35A operators are seeing very low CPFH in the $14,700-$16,000 region for direct costs. US DoD Comptroller shows those same figures with F-35A being higher than the Navy and USMC F-35Bs and Cs. US Navy gets cheaper JP-8 fuel. F-35A in 2020 was $16,953 direct costs CPFH. What do the click bait media and DOT&E from Pentagon report? They round up from $27,000 to $30,000. The indirect costs at the beginning of any advanced fighter adoption are high because of logistics, training, and adjusting to something new. UK MoD reports on the Typhoon showed £50,000-75,000 CPFH when they first adopted it. They cut their order 30% because costs were so far away from what had been expected. Short story with CPFH is that you have to see the breakdown of direct and indirect costs to know what you're looking at. If you see random figures spit out from some click-bait or even official source, it doesn't mean much without the itemized costs or a qualifier explaining direct vs indirect, airframe count, stage of life cycle, etc. We normally see a bathtub graph with O&M costs, starting high, dropping rapidly, hitting a long consistent low, then starting to rise as the airframes get older and upgrades start to pile on.
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  7335. If you measure it by the millions funneled into shell companies from Russia and China, then it’s the Clintons. Would have to see the internal break-down of the money agreed to between Obama and Biden after it went through the various Rosemont Seneca shells. John Kerry is also on the list since he and Hunter Biden sat on the shell companies as executives when Elena Baturina wired $3.5 million to them in Feb 2014, right before Putin lost his puppet Yanukovych in Ukraine. Then Burisma sent a delegation to the Obama WH to negotiate the insurance policies to be put in place with WH officials’ family members, and Hunter was on the board of Burisma by May 2014.   Zlochevsky, the Burisma CEO and Putin stooge, fled to Monaco. Then Obama flew to the NATO Summit in Sep 2014 and told David Cameron to shut down the UK investigation into Burisma corruption, and release $15 million of Zlochevsky’s funds. Then Obama, Biden, the ECB, and IMF all demanded that the new Ukrainian President, Poroshenko, fire his new chief prosecutor (Viktor Shokin), who was investigating the Burisma money-laundering fraud. Poroshenko refused to fire Shokin, and there were 2 assassination attempts on Shokin’s life after that, one with snipers, the other with poisoning. He fled into hiding and has been rarely seen since. Biden threatened to withhold $1 Billion in aid to Ukraine until Shokin was fired, so Poroshenko had officially fired him, but secretly kept him on to investigate the massive corruption perpetrated against Ukraine by Putin puppets in Kiev that had been brought in by Yanukovych, who was part of the Pro-Russian party. Trump as a billionaire doesn’t need to sell out his Country, which is why the above treasonous degenerates hate him so much.
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  7482.  @jrus690  People are being forced into extended loan terms to keep the monthly mortgage payments within a barely-survivable DTI ratio. The foreign investors who are buying up residential real estate and renting it out have inflated the US housing market astronomically, to the extent that people in their late 30s to early 40s who have been doing the right thing all along with their finances, still can’t afford a home with a reasonable mortgage payment. I know many people in the tech sector and construction industry management who are pulling in stupid money every month, well in excess of $100k annually with one income. They have not been able to afford a home, other than as renters. I know people in tech companies that are in charge of hiring. They actively screen for new, quality employees throughout the year, then go through the interview process. There are people making $130k/yr in other companies looking to move over to them, who are struggling on that salary. Food costs are a huge monthly expense these days, especially for those who are trying to stay organic and not shop at grocery stores where everything is packed with modified corn oils and carcinogenic chemical mixes that the human body doesn’t know how to digest. If you track average transaction prices for used and new vehicles, they have also gone up to unprecedented levels of inflation. Used car avg price broke through $25k some time between 2020 and 2021. In Sept 2022, used car avg price broke through $31k. People are getting maxed-out on big expenditures without comparable income ratio. It’s basic math.
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  7506.  @hansdampf232  I've experienced healthcare in Europe from Germany to Finland dating back from 1980-present, with family members in Finland and Sweden. One of them had to go to Spain to get a new procedure that was pioneered in the US. Finland's government just resigned because they can't fund the NHS and elderly care, primarily because they have aborted their children and don't have enough workers to tax in order to take care of the elderly. Finland also audited their NHS in the 1990s and determined that patient care was the least priority in the NHS in practice, especially the elderly. When my son crashed his bike and needed care, we waited almost 2 months before he could get an MRI, and children have priority there. When I had my stroke here in the US in 2016, I had an MRI within 4 hours, after I had EKG, Echogram, and CT scan. They were on me like white on rice, found the blood vessels on MRI. Thankfully, no signs of permanent injury, partly because they caught it so quickly and administered the treatments that help prevent further clotting. I'm in the fairly unique position where I have lived extensively in 8 different States in the US across 6 different regions including: * Southwest/SoCal * Southeast * NoVA area/DC * Northeast * Mountain Central * Pacific Northwest I've also lived in several nations in Western Europe and Scandinavia, and was an exchange student in Japan. Coming from a US perspective, when receiving healthcare or any government interaction in the other nations, I've always had this feeling that there is an element of humanity missing that we have in the US. It's more intangible, but noticeable to me. That included West Germany when I was a kid and was hospitalized after an ice skating accident with my school field trip. I have citizenship in the US and EU, but choosing to live in the US is such an easy decision overall. Not all agree, but there are way more cons than pros in Europe. You pay more for less, including healthcare, which is deducted from your income. It certainly isn't free. I have also received bills for treatment and medical devices in Finland, through they weren't that high. Better costs more. I think that's the principle a lot of people overlook. Whether we're looking at emergency medicine, internal medicine, orthopedics, pediatrics, dentistry, or optometry, our choices are so much more vast in the US than any of the European nations, even when you compare healthcare infrastructure of the poorer Deep South in the US to metropolitan areas of Scandinavia.
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  7536.  @skydragon23101979  I’m not anti-China. If China collapses like I think it will, it will send shockwaves of devastation around the world. I think we’re already watching the opening acts of that happening now. The Chinese growth period has come to an end, and now is going into retraction, first in the real estate sector, now in supply side. The energy and food shortages will significantly affect China. Look at where China gets most of its oil. That region just got hit with 70% of their wheat imports shut off. Russia only supplied 11% of Chinese Oil/NG in 2013, then after the Gazprom and Rosneft deals in 2013, that rose to 14.6% in 2019. That pipeline in Sibersk was serviced by Halliburton and Slumberger. They ceased services within the first 2 weeks of Russia invading Ukraine. Exxon Mobile just pulled out of their Russian services operations as well. Why is that important? Can’t Russia just replace those services? Why did Russia need those services in the first place? Russia never had the ability to drill through the permafrost. Only 2 nations can do that and have the advanced technology and petroleum engineers, plus the tooling to do it. That’s the US and Canada, and the Canadian tech comes from the US. The drill bits and machinery they use is more advanced than any of the components in rockets. The metallurgy is extremely advanced, not duplicated anywhere. That’s all turned off now. How will China solve their energy and food shortages? Right now, the plan seems to be to use COVID as an excuse to limit people’s movement and feed them vegetables on a reduced calorie diet. How long will that last?
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  7548.  @melvintan86  People from undeveloped regions of the world don't think about work and society the same as Europeans, especially Northern Europeans, whose ancestors had to work very hard and be smart about how they would survive each winter, with such a small growing and harvesting season. Anyone who was lazy or couldn't solve problems well didn't survive. In undeveloped parts of the world, clean water is a very scarce resource, so much of the conflict is based on water, with religion used as an excuse to foment conquest over others. You see that in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East on huge scales, with some of the most consequential battles over water going on as we speak (Mekong & Euphrates just 2 examples). Europe doesn't need as many low-skilled workers as it used to, since assembly lines are automated substantially more nowadays, and technology has leveraged working capacity in ways that minimize manual labor. Europe also has layers upon layers of regulations just for building city streets, apartments, and infrastructure, to the extent that manual laborers need to be more and more literate and aware of the technical details in construction. Most of the immigrants immediately head to the local social services offices and demand their monthly stipend, money for their baby carriages, apartments, cell phones, clothes, and food, while a shrinking European workforce is forced to pay for this, even as the vast majority of these immigrants don't ever pay into the system with income tax. That is a huge burden on the European economic system at a time when literacy among native Europeans is already degenerating with the failed Prussian schooling model propagating the dumbing down of multiple generations of Europeans, most of whom don't even know where this schooling model came from or why. The stresses on the pillars of European society are too great to overcome, that is why warfare is forecasted for the European continent, starting in several different regions.
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  7555.  @gunguru7020  A high performance intermediate cartridge to replace 7.62 NATO, which will also reduce shipping bulk and weight (this is where the real money is in the budget, costing billions just Army internal). We could keep 5.56 for the low-end PDW and for most combat arms duty positions, and equip anyone who used to employ a 7.62 NATO weapon with an efficient intermediate cartridge. M4 program just needs to adopt the SOPMOD-style Block upgrade approach rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, as you can’t really get a simpler design with less moving parts. Anodize the receivers FDE and make little improvements here and there. The Surefire/Magpul ICAR solves the mechanical side of frame and magazine for the new intermediate cartridge. Apply cartridge and propellant design improvements to 5.56 or make an even smaller cartridge with equal or better performance than 5.56 for most dismounts, combat support, and support personnel in a much smaller overall form even than the M4. Just for reference on the Intermediate cartridge side, a 12” 6.5 Grendel will spit a new EPR projectile out at 3400fps, without exceeding 52,000psi chamber pressure. 6.5 Grendel and 6mm have decades of developmental history already behind them, so we aren’t re-inventing the wheel there either, and we haven’t even tried pushing them with the new case technology. The hybrid cases are failing though, so single piece cases continue to be a proven solution that can either be legacy brass, and/or NAS. This solution set reduces the overall soldier’s and unit weight burden, while increasing the round count, increasing hit probability, increasing lethality, and increasing survivability. NGSW does all of those metrics wrong.
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  7628.  @SomeGeezer0  I’ve been working with Finland from 2005-2016 in preparation for these contingencies. My mom is from Finland and I have Finnish citizenship as a result, have lived there many times since 1979. The biggest thing is that people apply their thinking to the Russians, and the Russians don’t think like the rest of us, not even close. They’re historically retarded and also self-aware in a way that we aren’t. Russians will do whatever Putin orders, and Putin still believes the history that fascist Finland invaded Russia in World War II. The official internal dialog within the KGB was based on Stalin’s history, where the false flag Stalin used to start the Winter War was a real attack from Finland. Russians don’t generally even acknowledge Finland as an independent nation, many saying that the Czar created Finland, therefore Finland belongs to Russia and they should rightfully take it back. Same for the Baltics. Estonians aren’t even recognized as people. “Who are they? What do they have?” Russians are very primitive thinkers in ways that make some of the dumbest, uneducated people in the West seem brilliant. You have to see it for yourself to understand what I’m talking about. What that looks like in practice is Iskander cruise missiles hitting Helsinki, whether Russians can take any ground in Finland or not. Putin doesn’t read any Western analyses of Russia because he already has the best, most reliable information in his mind due to his KGB background. Everyone else are stupid peasants in his mind, filled with propaganda. Russians project their own condition on everyone else just as Westerners do to them. Neither are correct.
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  7635.  @sentimentalbloke185  We use a planning process format called PACE, Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency. For OSS training during WWII, they had towns in the Eastern US they used for insurgency and counter-occupation tactics, leveraging the resistance movements against the Nazis. The British Special Operations Executive trained the OSS on these tactics, techniques, and procedures. OSS also recruited Mafia hitmen and gangsters who already had hands-on experience in that space. For an urban sniper ambush, you have security elements who would signal the command & control element that the target was approaching (frequently Nazi officers in their command cars, or Nazis on motorcycles with the side car). They had to be very ingenuitive with signals with primary and alternates. In Dealey Plaza, it would make sense to use Radio and visual. Umbrella-pumping was an old technique used for signaling that would back-up the radio calls. You don't want your shooters to be set up too early with rifles pointed until the target is close to the kill zone, so the timing is crucial. You also need to work out your quick withdrawal and abort criteria, and can add diversions. For a High Value Target, you would have multiple shooters to ensure they are eliminated, regardless of how good your shooters have performed before. Moving targets are harder to hit, especially when partially-exposed. That whole set-up in Dealey Plaza is like the UW exercises in OSS training or Robin Sage for the SFQC, which is a direct descendant of OSS culmination exercises.
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  7648.  @dichebach  Good points. The politicians of both parties typically have been more like each other than not, picking letters based on their constituent leanings in the districts in which they run. They are mostly attorneys after all, who win based on being malleable to the financiers of their campaigns. Organized crime really bought DC and City governments during Prohibition, with no real signs of having let go. From Eisenhower to Reagan/Bush, Republicans were pretty hawkish on foreign entanglements, though both parties had major protests about Vietnam. Nixon criticized the LBJ handling of the war and said you either go full-court or get out. There was a lot of polarization in the 1960s-1970s during Vietnam, which placed the voters at odds with DC in general, especially after 3 major assassinations of key leaders in the US. The Country was more unified again under Reagan, who was a populist. No matter what party is in the WH, the opposing party always finds some way to critique the WH for foreign entanglements. In this case, the GOP has been actually much more supportive for a WH that many of them think is not even a legitimate Presidency after the 2020 election. Republicans understand better than Democrats the importance of stability in Europe because the military has been providing security in Europe for generations since 1945, and military personnel come from a lot of conservative families. You see more left-leaning liberals in the officer corps because of college, while enlisted war-fighters trend Republican. Given that the new leadership of the Republican Party sees 2024 as an existential imperative for the Nation, and has a massive treason case brewing over the Biden family taking millions from Russia, it isn’t just a political gamesmanship season between D and R.
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  7705.  @AlexKall  The ones who set the trends get to establish the metrics by which they will be matched or countered. For example, up through the MiG-25, the Soviet Union only produced fighters with turbojet engines, analog instruments, vacuum tube electronics, engineer-designed cockpits with limited human interface/ergonomics, GCI-focused intercept profiles and primary weapons, mostly tube fuselages and heavier metal alloys (MiG-25 used extensive amounts of stainless steel), etc. Once the US teen fighters emerged, radical changes in airframe design and propulsion came forth, with low-bypass turbofan engines, blended fuselage/wings, leading edge wing root extensions, significant use of composites, computer-aided design, significantly-improved pilot-sensor interface, HOTAS, advanced multimode pulse-doppler radars, radar warning receiver sets with expanding computing power for bandwidth, threat signature recognition, and closure rate algorithms to delineate between threat radars vs missile warning. What did Russia/Soviet Union do? Copied the airframe designs down to the landing gear doors (Su-27 from F-14), engine nacelle arrangement, leading edge root extensions, wing and tailplane arrangement (F-15), intake geometry (A-5 Valkyrie, F-14, F-15), and adopted turbojets of their own (with far lower service lives). With the F-22, Russia set out to develop a counter to it with PAK-FA, but originally claimed they would match or out-perform the Raptor in climb rate, speed, and supercruise, while also making it a stealth airframe. In each of these metrics, they have failed. So the successful aerospace community gets to raise and set the bar with innovation, while the imitators get what they get, especially when they fail.
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  7709. ​ @ADigbySellers Posner isn't remotely credible here. He isn't qualified to make any scientific statements about any of this. He's a quack attorney with zero experience in forensics, terminal ballistics, or gun shot wound behavior. I've been involved in this field with tens of thousands of observed rifle impacts through optics and high-speed cameras over the past 40 years, as well as laboratory setting live tissue studies and trauma management at the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center. I have specifically focused on 6.5mm projectiles of all types and their terminal performance for the last 14 years, with published studies documenting their behavior in tissue and ballistics media. In my professional perspective, the final head shot observed on Zapruder shows a high velocity impact through JFK's right frontal region of the skull, immediately causing supersonic 90° spalling, and cavitation of the skull with avulsion of the right scalp. This had to have come from the front. A 6.5x52 Carcano seems to be what produced the throat and back wounds, if we accept SS Agent Landis recent testimony that he found "the prestine bullet" on the ledge behind JFK, and placed it on his gurney at Parkland so it would stay with JFK. I have some suspicions about a higher velocity rifle cartridge used for the head shot. What I can say with surety is the WC fundamentally undermines itself throughout, including the ballistic creations it uses to try to make a single shooter fit the lone gunman narrative. Given Landis' recent statements, the magic bullet theory can finally be put to bed. Posner should just go away quietly and not say anymore on the subject, unless it's a total retraction of all of his claims.
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  7728.  @amanuelasele7799  So you’re saying the Chinese economy is doing well, their scientists are finally innovating solutions on their own (not stealing breakthroughs from their time in US and European universities), registering patents and publishing papers in scientific journals, and this is causing US politicians (many of whom are bought by China) to panic? Do you mind sharing with me where you get your information from? I track internal reports from observers in China outside of the corporate media, and their assessments are quite different about the Chinese economy. I also track PLAAF mishaps and things are not looking good for their engine performance in terms of reliability and safety. They’re basically where the US was with after burning turbofan development in the late 1960s-1970s with regard to engine failures, and that’s with the benefit of FADEC technology that was developed in the US in the 1980s-1990s installed on their unreliable/unsafe turbofan engines. Look at mishap rates for the J-10, J-11, Su-27SK, etc. Excrement performance. They are very guarded about anything in this space for the J-20, so we are to believe that it has suffered no mishaps. Russians have lost at least 2 Su-57s, one to a fire and the first production sample to a crash, and openly reported those mishaps. So far, if we believe China’s reporting, the J-20 is the epitome of 5th Gen aviation, the Mighty Dragon! It’s propaganda written for small children’s minds, and coming from an American, that’s saying a lot.
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  7762.  @ivanlagrossemoule  Il n'y avait pas de cloques sur la peinture et il n'y avait que 2 des 6 premières variantes JSF de production des premiers lots (qui n'ont jamais été produites en série), qui ont connu des températures élevées lors des tests supersoniques. Ces 2 modèles, un modèle B et un modèle C, ont été volés à plusieurs reprises le long de la côte est des États-Unis à des vitesses supersoniques soutenues maximales pour déterminer les limites structurelles et de surface avec une instrumentation intégrée aux surfaces pour recueillir des points de test de données d'ingénierie. Les ingénieurs étaient préoccupés par certaines des températures qu'ils ont vues sur 2 des avions dans les stabilisateurs verticaux, alors les pilotes d'essai ont pris les 4 autres avions et ont essayé de dupliquer ces points de test avec des charges thermiques encore plus extrêmes via une vitesse supersonique soutenue et des plongées. dans un air plus épais. Ils ne pourraient jamais dupliquer ces points de test. De toute façon, cela n'avait pas d'importance, car les matériaux de l'empennage utilisés sur ces premiers avions en surpoids n'ont jamais été produits pour les autres avions 686 JSF qui ont été construits depuis ces premiers jours. Le problème était que le Pentagone a été poussé par les districts du Congrès à imposer arbitrairement l'utilisation de certains pourcentages de matières premières stratégiques, l'aluminium par exemple. C'est l'alliage le plus couramment utilisé sur les chasseurs, mais Lockheed-Martin et Northrop-Grumman voulaient utiliser davantage de composites en fibre de carbone. Les 6 premiers oiseaux étaient en surpoids en raison de l'utilisation intensive d'aluminium dans les 4 empennages. Dans le cadre du programme de perte de poids d'urgence, toutes ces structures en aluminium ont été remplacées par de la fibre de carbone dans les empennages, ce qui non seulement les rendait plus solides, mais les rendait également transparentes au RADAR, réduisant considérablement la section transversale du RADAR. Ils ont également changé la RAM en un processus plus avancé, plus facile à appliquer et beaucoup plus facile à entretenir. Vous pouvez immédiatement voir la différence entre les premiers lots F-35 et les lots ultérieurs par la couleur et le schéma de peinture. Si vous voyez une source médiatique parler de "fonte de la peau" sur les F-35, vous savez maintenant à quel point ils sont dépassés et mal informés sur ce sujet particulier. Ces 6 premiers oiseaux ont été construits au milieu des années 2000. Le principal problème qu'ils ont présenté était de ne permettre à aucune des 3 variantes JSF de répondre à leurs paramètres de performance clés, ce qui aurait tué le programme si elles avaient été autorisées à être produites en série. Ils ne répondaient pas aux spécifications de poussée/poids, de taux de montée, de performances de virage ou de rayon de combat en raison du poids, de sorte que la conception a été considérablement révisée avant d'entrer en production de masse.
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  7767.  @thierrydonat6824  Des dizaines d'unités de l'USAF et de l'OTAN ont déjà remplacé leurs F-16 et A-10 par des F-35A et se sont déployées de manière opérationnelle dans le monde entier, y compris des années d'opérations de combat en Syrie, en Irak et dans le golfe Persique. Les Israéliens utilisent les leurs au combat depuis début 2018. L'USMC s'est déployée dans la mer Rouge avec les leurs en 2018, suivis de l'USAF des Émirats arabes unis et du Royaume-Uni de Chypre 2018-2019. Les Italiens volent en Islande avec le statut d'alerte du corridor de la zone de défense aérienne de l'OTAN, tout comme les Norvégiens. Il y a déjà beaucoup d'historique de déploiement et de mission opérationnelle dans la flotte JSF pour les modèles F-35A et F-35B dans plusieurs pays. Des centaines de « carences » sont en fait des opportunités d'amélioration des capacités identifiées en dehors des spécifications contractuelles, et non un problème avec l'une des 3 variantes. Encore une fois, s'ils avaient vraiment toutes ces lacunes critiques, nous aurions des taux d'accidents plus élevés. Ce que nous voyons, c'est la série de combattants la plus sûre jamais conçue jusqu'à présent. Comparez ses taux d'accidents avec le Rafale, le Raptor ou le Typhoon, qui sont tous beaucoup plus sûrs que les anciens jets des années 1970 aux années 1980. C'est ainsi que vous savez qu'on vous ment et que vous n'avez pas besoin de 41 ans d'expérience dans l'industrie aérospatiale et de la défense comme moi pour le voir. Les chiffres ne mentent pas. JSF a en fait une structure logistique plus rationalisée que le F-16, par exemple. En 2020, la flotte de F-35A de l'USAF s'est hissée au sommet avec les taux de préparation les plus élevés, plus élevés que même les F-16C et A-10C, qui sont historiquement parmi les avions les plus disponibles avec peu d'heures de maintenance. Le suicide entraînerait une flotte de F-16C ou A-10C dans certains des environnements de défense aérienne intégrée à moindre menace que l'on trouve dans de nombreux pays pauvres.
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  7768.  @BFOP15  Il n'y a pas de programme officiel d'enregistrement pour de nouveaux achats de F-15 pour Israël. Il existe un programme officiel d'achat de 50 autres F-35I, ainsi que de ravitailleurs KC-46. Israël ne reçoit pas ses avions gratuitement. Ils obtiennent une contrepartie dollar à dollar par les programmes d'aide aux ventes militaires à l'étranger des États-Unis, il serait donc plus exact de dire que la moitié de leurs commandes sont soutenues par les États-Unis avec l'aide. L'USAF n'a pas « commandé d'urgence » 128 F-16. Le calendrier de production de 128 F-16V (Block 70) est prévu depuis de nombreuses années et chacun d'entre eux est destiné à des clients militaires étrangers, et non à l'USAF. La dernière nouvelle Viper a été livrée à l'USAF en 2005 et pilotée par mon ancien voisin, qui a également piloté le premier à piloter le F-16B des décennies auparavant. Ces F-16V vont à Bahreïn, en Bulgarie, en Slovaquie et à Taïwan. Cela peut être déroutant car les commandes de ventes militaires étrangères sont compensées par le DoD. "700 F-35 de pré-production". Réfléchissez à cette déclaration pendant quelques minutes et dites-moi ce qui ne va pas. IOC a été créé il y a des années pour les variantes USMC et USAF JSF, et a été développé depuis avec la validation et l'expansion des armes comme tout autre programme de combat. J'ai vécu le développement des dernières années pour le F-4E, les années initiales et intermédiaires pour les blocs F-15A, F-15C, F-16A et F-16C 25, 30, 32, 40 et 42. Le F -35A a commencé avec une combinaison d'armes et de capteurs beaucoup plus performante que toute autre plate-forme aérienne tactique de l’histoire. Chaque fois qu'un nouveau programme de chasseurs entre en production aux États-Unis, la plupart de la première série de production ira normalement aux unités d'essais en vol, d'armes, d'essais et de conversion d'entraînement. Cela a été fait avec les F-4, F-15 et F-16. Avec le F-16, il s'agissait de quelques blocs de production de modèles F-16A/B avec des capacités air-air et air-sol limitées, et qui présentaient toutes sortes de défauts majeurs. Ces défauts ont entraîné 143 pertes totales de cellules et 71 décès au cours des 10 premières années de la durée de vie du F-16. Le moteur était susceptible d'exploser, de caler et de démarrer la postcombustion. Les boîtes de routage fly-by-wire avaient des vis fixées à travers elles, contrairement aux rivets demandés par les concepteurs pour éviter les frottements. Un responsable d'étage avait remplacé des vis sans autorisation, causant la mort de nombreux pilotes et la destruction de cellules. C'est pourquoi nous avons des tests et des évaluations opérationnels. C'est juste fait à une échelle beaucoup plus grande aux États-Unis parce que la taille des flottes est gigantesque par rapport à d'autres pays. Nous avons largement dépassé ce stade avec le F-35 et remplissons des escadrons dans des escadres opérationnelles depuis de nombreuses années maintenant. Bon nombre des systèmes prévus pour le bloc 4 sont plus légers que les systèmes actuels. Par exemple, les nouvelles caméras Raytheon DAS sont beaucoup plus légères, ont une résolution de 2048x2048 et représentent une fraction du coût des caméras Northop-Grumman DAS. Il intègre également l'EOTS avancé dans le nez, pour améliorer les performances déjà phénoménales de l'EOTS actuel. Le module de mise à niveau du moteur déjà développé par Pratt & Whitney en tant qu'option de remplacement lors de la révision programmée du dépôt est principalement destiné à augmenter l'efficacité énergétique, ainsi que la poussée. Ce n'est pas parce que le F-35 devient plus lourd, mais pour augmenter les performances similaires à ce qui a été fait avec le programme d'amélioration des performances du moteur pour les F-16C Blocks 30 et plus. Le F-35A a actuellement un rayon de combat et une endurance plus longs que tous les chasseurs tactiques hérités de l'USAF. Les F-35 norvégiens et italiens ont mené des efforts conjoints pour remplir la mission de zone de défense aérienne de l'OTAN en Islande. Divers chasseurs de l'OTAN y effectuent une rotation, car l'USAF n'y a plus de base permanente de F-15C. La Norvège remplace tous ses F-16A par des F-35A. Vous devriez lire les rapports des pilotes seniors norvégiens Viper de plus de 2000 heures qui pilotent maintenant le F-35A. L'armée de l'air finlandaise et le ministre de la Défense avaient déjà déclaré en 2015 qu'ils voulaient des F-35, et non des chasseurs d'ancienne génération qui coûteront trop cher et n'auront pas de capacités pertinentes par rapport aux menaces émergentes. Biden n'a rien à voir avec ça. Il ne savait même pas pour quel poste il dirigeait l'année dernière, déclarant à plusieurs reprises au cours de sa "campagne" qu'il "courait pour le Sénat américain", et que "nous ne pouvons pas avoir 4 ans de plus de George, George, euh George Bush)". Son cerveau est rempli de dommages causés par des anévrismes. Il ne sait même pas où il est ni à qui il parle. Il est parti vers les buissons de la Maison Blanche il y a quelques semaines. Son cerveau a presque totalement disparu. Qu'est-ce que cela a à voir avec l'armée de l'air finlandaise ? Ils s'en moquent. Ils ont juste besoin d'un avion de combat moderne et évolutif qui remplacera leurs Hornets vieillissants et sera pertinent contre les drones Su-57, S-70 et Super Flankers couverts par un système de défense aérienne intégré le long de la frontière russo-finlandaise. En rejoignant le programme JSF, la Finlande disposera d'une capacité en réseau avec la Norvège, la Pologne, les Pays-Bas, le Royaume-Uni, le Danemark, la Belgique, la Suisse et l'Italie. C'est ce que la Russie ne veut pas, c'est pourquoi vous voyez une campagne de désinformation aussi massive dans les médias pour jeter le doute sur JSF. Ils ont réussi à tuer le Raptor avec SECDEEF Gates, mais JSF est trop énorme, trop international, trop de sous-traitants répartis dans le monde entier, avec 3 chaînes de montage sur 3 continents différents. Il y a une réalité totalement différente lorsque vous commencez vraiment à étudier JSF, et rien de tout cela n'est vraiment discuté au grand jour. Le bilan de sécurité est le premier indicateur majeur de l'étendue des mensonges.
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  7807.  @anordman9659  It has nothing to do with patriotism, since my family line is heavily Swedish and Finnish. My grandfather was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and we have lots of family in Sweden and Finland currently. I’m pretty dispassionate about my analyses. For example, the Viggen had the most thrust of any single engine fighter until the IPE program for F-16 in the US (though the P&W JT8D in Viggen was not developed for use in a fighter like that), and I was tracking that in the 1970s-1980s. The Danes have been flying Vipers since 1980 as part of the European/NATO F-16 enterprise partners. They have undergone MLU and various Danish AF specific modifications and upgrades to their F-16s, especially looking at their integrated countermeasures pylons and Recce pods, as well as spotlights for the intercept mission profile. What you seem to be suggesting is that Saab somehow would have been able to provide better support over the past 4 decades than the F-16 international enterprise. Assuming the Gripen had existed in the late 1970s to be evaluated for replacing the F-104s, you’re now extending the critical subsystem supply chain even further, since the engine, Radar, landing gear, fuel pumps, hydraulics, ejection seats, brakes, Air Data Computer, Mil-1553 databus, APU, ECS, refueling probe, servos, gun, composites, and a laundry list of its systems are all made in the US, UK, France, and Germany. Poland? Poland has their own depot-level maintenance facility for F-16s and has had for 10 years. I’m not sure what regrets you’re referring to on F-16 acquisition for those nations. We do know, by Saab’s marketing firm’s own guilty pleas in ITAR court, that the only reason why Czechia and Hungary bought/leased Gripen C/Ds was because of bribes. They plead guilty with a $400 million fine to reduce the scope of the investigation into the South African deal, because that would have exposed further bribery not only for the Gripen, but Hawk trainers. The stories about Gripen deployments to Red Flag have been some of the most misrepresented and twisted accounts I’ve seen. The first RF 2006-01 involved Gripens being tasked in Red Air, working with Aggressor F-15Cs and F-16Cs to provide a tough air component OPFOR for attending Blue Forces. I’ve gone through the list of every attending USAF and foreign partner nation fighter squadron, and the highest capability F-16C squadron was from the Oklahoma National Guard for RF06-01. The main thing Gripen attendance did was provide a venue for Swedish AF to employ GBU-12s on follow-on RF LFEs, to expand the Gripen’s Air-to-Ground capabilities and bring them up-to-speed, since the instrumented training range opportunities of that nature didn’t exist in Northern Europe at the time, and still don’t have boxes with all the threat emulators and aggressor fleets like at RF. USAF extending an invitation to Swedish Air Force was a hand-up, not a venue for the Gripen to come display superiority to any other platforms. Red Flag isn’t about that at all.
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  7809.  @anordman9659  Wikipedia is riddled with inaccuracies, so I don’t use it other than an example of what not to do. I’m referencing the UNCLAS attending units ATO for all Red Flags, along with comments from the Gripen community who attended. Gripens have been to Red Flag more than once, and follow-on rotations had them incorporated with Blue Air for the strike mission set. Photos and videos of those rotations show them configured for strike with GBU-12s, EFTs, and FLIR pods. Yes, Saab’s marketing firm was a cut-out used by BAE, so Saab itself could not be implicated in the bribery to Czech Republic, Hungary, South Africa, Thailand, and Brazil. The outgoing Brazilian President’s son had $740,000 deposited in his bank account by intermediaries associated with Saab. The main culprits are the Riksdag, who handicapped Saab with a limited budget and the stipulation of FMS to support Gripen development and acquisition, so Saab had to secure FMS contracts at all cost. Agreed on supporting Ukraine. I think all of the 4th gen options are compromises, but I would lean on which one has the most robust self-protection suite available that is proven and well-developed, that also has some good anti-Radar capability. I have no financial or personal gains to be made from this, since I was DoD, never employed by any of the contractors. Many of my family members and friends have been employed by various Aerospace contractors, including BAE and every major US company, except maybe Lockheed.
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  7851. RINO George Bush Sr. betrayed the Kurds because he was involved with Saddam in a banking scandal and supplying Saddam with WMD. F-15 pilots flying over could have smoked the Iraqi helicopters and nobody would have been the wiser, but they were told to go cold and not interfere. The only good FBI Director we ever had, William Sessions, allowed Federal investigators to snoop under the WH door on that one. Bush’s AG told the incoming Clinton DOJ to fire the FBI Director as a result, as he also had 14 referrals to high crimes and treason on the Clintons before the inauguration even in ’93. That outgoing AG for Bush41 was..................Bill Barr. Bill Clinton fired William Sessions on July 19, 1993. The next day, one of the main targets of the 14 referred espionage/high crimes/treason investigations was found dead in Fort Marcy Park just over the other side of the Potomac. His name was....Vince Foster. The Independent Counsel to investigate numerous criminal referrals on the Clintons was appointed, and a young law school staffer latched onto the Vince Foster story and would not let go. Robert Fiske soon saw the IC was not going to help his health, and washed his hands of it, giving it a chance to die, but the young staffer refused to let go of the Foster murder, so another RINO named Kenneth Starr picked up the IC and later threw us a bone with the Monica Lewinsky Scandal. The young staffer who wouldn’t let the Foster case go? .................Brett Kavanaugh These things are all connected in very fascinating ways.
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  7884.  Ernest Hemingway  Yes, US fighter engines have been better than Russian engines since the F-86F. Russia had a British engine given to them (as a token of English hope in a peaceful future), which the Soviets mass-produced for the MiG-15. The MiG-15 had a better thrust-to-weight ratio than the F-86A-D models as a result. Brits had been working on jet engine tech before the US, as had the Germans. The results? The US pushed ahead with the Century Series (F100, -101, -102, -104, -105, -106, -110, -111) fighters, advancing turbojet engine technology with the J57, J75, and J79, then ushering in a new era of afterburning turbofan fighter and bomber engine tech with the TF30 in the F-111 & F-14, as well as the GE F101 in the B-1A. This later evolved into the Pratt & Whitney F100 and GE F110 afterburnung turbofans, which became the basis for the world-class Improved Performance Engines for the F-15, F-16, & later F-14A+/B/D. If you track Soviet fighter engine technology from the 1950s through the 1970s, you had the R15, R25, & R35 Tumansky motors for the MiG-25, MiG-21, & MiG-23, all of which were turbojets. The US already was using operational F-111A and F-14A fighters with afterburning turbofans by the late 1960s(F-111A), early 1970s(F-14A). As the 4th Generation optimum bypass ratio F100 and F110 motors matured in the 1980s with DEEC, we already solicited GE and Pratt for the next generation engines for the ATF, which were the YF120 & YF-119. The YF-120 actually was a generational leap ahead of the YF119, but still needed to be worked out since it was an adaptive/ variable cycle motor with fan stage placement modulation. We can also look at the SR-71 & its unparalleled Pratt & Whitney J58 afterburning, compressor bleed turbojets. Russia has never duplicated anything remotely close to the SR-71 & its engines. As we look at the IPE fleet of GE & Pratt motors in US and coalition fighters, they are the gold standard in performance and reliability. In contrast, the Lyulka/NPO Saturn AL-31 motors in the Su-30MK are described as FOD-sensitive, maintenance-intensive engines that last maybe half the advertised service life. Russia continues to work on trying to develop a new generation motor for the Su-57, & upon demonstrating an Su-57 at MAKS, one of the motors exploded with flames shooting out the rear in front of all of Russia's observers and customers. Where Russia is currently at is producing attempts at 1980s tech the US skipped over. This was the VISTA/STOL/MATV programs of the late 1980s/early 1990s where test F-15s and F-16s were fitted with IPE core engines, but with 2D and later Multi-Axis Thrust-Vectoring nozzles controlled by an integrated DFLCS with FADEC so that the engines contribute to pitch, roll, and yaw along with the DFLCS. The 3 driving forces behind US experiments with this technology were: 1. STOL for runways in Europe or any theater where runways might be attacked 2. Super-Maneuverability 3. Optimum Supersonic Maneuverability We chose to invest in this tech in the ATF Lockheed variant, not on legacy 4th Gen fighters. The JSF variant that won the competition didn't need TV since it has thrust well ahead of large tail surfaces.
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  7894. There isn't anything unique about what's described in this video about calculated risks among NATO forces, who have generations of actual combat experience while Sweden has none. For example, it's commonplace for NATO air component forces to conduct hot re-arm, refueling, and even FARPs supported by transport aircraft on remote airstrips as part of Large Force Exercises and Warfighter Experiments with new platforms. On top of all that NATO air forces do this under NBC and base attack conditions, both in training and for real. USAF, USMC, and USN in Vietnam, REFORGERs, TEAM SPIRITs, BRIGHT STARs, RED FLAGs, ODS, Yugoslavia, OIF, OEF, OIR, and Atlantic Trident have been performing under these conditions at levels the Swedes will never experience. As to OPFOR: I've done OPFOR against all kinds of units. OPFOR is always more agile and Blue Forces will almost always seem sluggish because OPFOR is initiating contact and is left free to do what it wants to test Blue Forces. The only unit that impressed me was 2/75 Ranger Battalion, operating in Platoon or smaller elements. They crush OPFOR for sport, and would do the same to pretty much any other NATO force aside from Para Regiment and Royal Marines (their peers). I have also worked with Swedish military officers and enlisted in Estonia during Erna Raid. The Swedish officers like to talk around in circles about extraneous things without any sense of purpose, easily losing focus of the mission at-hand, because they've been so far removed from actual combat experience, creating a culture of military theory, not practice. When Swedish senior snipers were invited to attend FinnSniper, they showed up, started unpacking, saw the Finns, Germans, French, Danes, etc. getting prepared, then packed up their stuff saying the accommodations weren't up to their standards. These were better than most barracks I have seen in all my deployments across the world, ranging from all over the US, Germany and Korea, to Panama, and the Middle East. I think the Swedish Sniper instructors just realized they would be out-classed, had no chance of placing in the competition, and instead of using it as a training opportunity, quit and left back to Sweden. It was the most unprofessional thing I think I ever saw at such an event. That sums up Swedish military mindset.
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  7895.  @SkruffyTalez_TheWarzone  Everything I stated is based on facts and personal experiences. It's the problem when a nation with zero military experience tries to sound relevant and competent, while not being teachable. I'll explain: It’s not physically possible for Sweden to create anything resembling Navy Fighter Weapons School, let alone the Navy Strike Fighter Weapons Instructor Course. And that’s just the Navy/USMC. USAF Weapons Instructor Course is 6-8 months long and even more impossible to replicate. The reasons why Sweden can’t operate equivalent courses is because Sweden doesn’t have the Aggressor Fleets, Aggressor pilots, threat data to emulate, instrumented ranges for ACMI, nor any of the surface threats found in the vast US training ranges. Nap of the Earth heights aren’t a metric we use to measure aircrew capabilities for the past 3 decades. F-111F did it automatically, as does the F-16C Block 40/42 with LANTIRN and F-15E with LANTIRN NAV pods, but it isn’t a valid ingress method anymore due to double digit SAMs. It’s nothing that anyone today thinks about in terms of priority fighter pilot skills. When you say “Mission Command”, we call that Flight Lead in the US. UK and other small NATO nations basically do the same thing because they don’t have thousands of pilots to train. The US does a flight lead initial conversion now because of the F-35, which you have to be independent to operate. The problem with trying to train a flight lead in a 4th Gen multi-role fighter for his squadron’s mission sets is that he needs to be able to do D/SEAD on top of everything else. That generally takes years to accomplish in the F-16CM, which is far more capable than any Gripen since Gripens aren’t designed or equipped for D/SEAD. Fighter Fundamentals are covered in the B Course, which include BFM, BVR, strike/attack, and CAS. Swedish Air Force has to train for Fighter, Recce, and Anti-Ship. Gripens aren’t equipped for D/SEAD, though they are working towards a partial capability with Gripen E employing US-designed MALD. MALD carriage significantly reduces the Gripen E’s ability to carry kinetic air-to-surface weapons, unless it relies on US SDBs. Gripen E isn’t even IOC yet, still working through all the bugs, weapons employment schedule, training, conversion for existing Gripen C/D pilots vs new pilots, etc. Swedish military culture has an insular set of habits based on its own doctrines in a training setting only, not on the battlefield, because Sweden hasn’t been on any battlefields since 1809. The differences are palpable. When I’m training with Danes, Norwegians, French, Germans, or Brits/Irish, we’re more or less on the same sheet. Swedish officer starts talking and everyone rolls their eyes. The ones I’ve been exposed to reminded me of cadet officers with little man syndrome when I was a cadet as a teenager.
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  7909.  @SkruffyTalez_TheWarzone  This is also not correct. Swedish Air Force's first attendance at Red Flag was with them integrated with Red Air F-16Cs and F-15Cs, vs a Blue Air Force who had Oklahoma National Guard F-16Cs in attendance focusing in the strike mission profile and self escort for Defensive Counter Air. Of course they used all the lessons and tricks during planning shared from the local Red Air Squadron guys to put the hurt on Blue Air. That's the whole point of Red Flag. They didn't fly against operational squadron F-15Cs, F-22As, or even Fighter Interceptor Squadron F-16Cs from the Active USAF, nor did anyone care. Follow-on attendance of Swedish Air Force Gripen C/Ds saw them integrated with Blue Forces as part of the strike packages, so they could work with their new US-built FLIR pods to drop GBU-12 LGBs in the huge Nellis Test & Training Ranges. If you look at the photos and videos of Gripens at that Red Flag, they're always configured for A2G with the pods and GBU-12s. So where does this Gripen dominating Red Flag come from? Swedish reports on how great they did after the first RF as part of OPFOR. OPFOR used to always humiliate Blue Forces. It was that way since the 1970s when RF started, until the first F-22A attendance in RF, as well as F-35Bs much later. They immediately said, "We need 5th Gen in Red Air otherwise it's going to be shooting ducks in a barrel every time." Now there's an F-35A Aggressor squadron at Nellis. But yeah, the whole Gripen at Red Flag was way overblown.
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  7910.  @SkruffyTalez_TheWarzone  Re-arm/refuel depends on the aircraft and crew plus weather conditions. Some fighters carry 3x as much fuel as a Gripen so it takes longer to gas-up, no way around it. They also stay airborne much longer and carry more weapons. F-16s will land with 1000-2000lb fuel reserve. Internal tanks take 7000lb, 2x370gal take another 5000lb for a total of 12000lb. Gripen C carries 5150lb internal fuel and either 1x 300 gal centerline or 2x450 gal external wing tanks. The 2x 450s is 6000lb of fuel and the single 300g is 2000lb, so you can gas-up a Gripen quickly if it's only carrying the centerline. It will be about the same with the 2x450s (11,150lbs from empty to full). Nobody is coming back empty. In the interceptor role, which is the main critical turnaround time you focus on in Sweden, they'll normally be configured with the centerline EFT and 4-6 AAMs, namely IRIS-T and AIM-120C and/or Meteors. Hot re-arm and re-fuel can be done very fast on the F-16, F/A-18, and F-35s with 2-3 crew. You need 1 Crew Chief and maintainer plus ordnance. Squadrons typically cross-train so wrenchers get ordnance load/unload time too. You don't necessarily need a vehicle, just a load cart or you can manually carry the Air-to-Air Missiles. You aren't manually-loading the bombs for obvious reasons so you use the cart with lift. F-35s require the least amount of maintainers due to the low break rate and self-maintaining features of the systems. Instead of large diagnostic carts, the crew chief has a tough book laptop that plugs into the aircraft. F-35s have a superior power generation system to all of the legacy fighters though called the IPP (integrated power pack). It's an APU, EPU, ECS all-in-one that runs on normal jet fuel. FLCS is fiber-optic signals, no copper wires. F-35 has the easiest control surface actuators to replace as well because their hydraulic fluid is self-contained. The basic flight systems, engine, and critical components are simpler with lower parts counts, less failure nodes. The harder thing with F-35 is loading the missiles and bombs into the weapons bays, but you can stand up inside the bays, so they look low to the ground, but aren't. F/A-18s are very convenient to load with weapons due to the pylon/ejector racks heights, as well as the cheek stations. Short story is this will mostly come down to how well-trained and motivated the crew is. You also want a smart crew who doesn't make mistakes during the missile/ordnance arming procedures. Ordnance is stored with safeties in place, which are removed before flight. Modern weapons also have programmable features that need to be actuated by the crew. There isn't a black and white answer for any of this based on a particular fighter design. Each has its own pros and cons that the crews learn to work with.
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  7920. When Joe says the media is failing us, it's under the assumption that US media networks are geared towards spreading the truth. Along with this whole Russian disinformation and crisis posture, they captured the CIA's Mockingbird Program from the moment is was launched by Frank Wisner in the late 1940s/early 1950s. The Soviets already had 200 double agents within the CIA before Langley was even stood-up, and those guys rose quickly through the ranks to upper management. They immediately reported back to Lubyanka that the Yankees were developing a counter to the Soviet International Organization of Journalists, which presented a unique opportunity for them to poison the American effort of trying to compete with them in Ideological Warfare. As Mockingbird coordinated with every newspaper, magazine, radio, and TV station owners, managers, and journalists, pro-American propaganda was supposed to be seeded or reported, but instead, carefully camouflaged anti-American propaganda was slowly introduced. This culminated in the anti-War message against Vietnam in the late 1960s, where they even had Walter Cronkite falsely reporting every news clip he filmed with his crew, including the statement that the US can't win there. We literally have generations of Soviet-controlled media in our broadcast and print "journalism" that has relentlessly repeated an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-free enterprise, anti-military message. Combined with the preaching of pro-marxist-Leninist political-economic philosophy in the schools and universities, they have really influenced our society's views about itself more than we have by making it organic to academia and common discourse, and anyone who questions leftist ideology is immediately declared to be a radical or mentally ill. This is right out of the same playbook they used against Russian nationalists in the Russian Civil War. And what do they really need to do to take away the voice of people who disagree with them? Any means for them to be able to defend themselves, just as they did in the 1920s. "Comrades, we have an amnesty period where you can turn in all firearms and weapons since we have outlawed crime!"
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  7931.  @michaelkeller5008  Over 95% of the 670 F-35s are Lot 4-14 with new RAM. That RAM is maybe 10 years old at the most, not 20. F-35A hasn't even been flying for more than 15 years. That's when they started producing in numbers, not the very early LRIP Lot 1-3 birds. The RAM on newer F-35s reduced the RCS below that of the F-22A. F-117A went through 3 different generations of RAM throughout its service. VLO technologies aren't static, and have continually evolved in the US since the 1950s. It's just that they weren't discussed much at all until the late 1980s. Your statement about aerodynamics is only partially true when the Rafale or Typhoon are void of their critical external stores, and even in airshow configuration, neither of them can execute the tactical pitch/drift, high yaw rate pedal turn, or high AOA power loop that the F-35 can. They will depart controlled flight and lawn-dart if they tried it at airshow altitude with DFLCS uncoupled, since it won't allow them to do any of those maneuvers as it stands. In combat configuration with weak attempts at trying to carry comparable fuel and sensors, the Typhoon and Rafale will not be able to cruise in the pocket at .95 Mach and enjoy the same transonic acceleration with those big EFTs. The statements about IR signature aren't informed by all the work that was done for JSF on the LOAN nozzle and cool bypass air that flows around the engine cowling, let alone the IR coatings and thermal radiation eliminator signature management. "A 40yr-old" IR missile is entirely worthless against JSF, not that there's a fighter that can get it into WEZ anyway. Even JHMCS and AIM-9X can't acquire it WVR, and AIM-9X is one of the most tested HOBS missiles of them all on many years of constant live-fire against high-maneuvering drones employing DIRCM and flares. In visual spectrum, you can see the AB, but in IR, the cool air conceals its thermal signature better than I would have imagined. From frontal aspect especially, you aren't going to get a hit with even the most modern IRSTs until you're within visual range. Dozens of anonymous F-35 pilots say they can't detect each other with the vast sensor suite, but can see low earth orbit satellites, subsurface whales, and airborne TGT tracks at extreme ranges that rival any fighter radar/IRST combo out there.
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  7932.  @Teutathis  Can you cite an article from the USAF that states the F-35A is a massive failure? Because the USAF says the exact opposite. The F-35A exceeded the F-16C and A-10 in FMC and MC rates in 2020, and those are the 2 most-ready fighters in TAC AIR historically. Those rates don’t include necessary ancillary combat systems required for the F-16C and A-10C, so they make them look far more available than they are if needed to actually perform. So even with all the older Block 2 F-35As the USAF operates in training squadrons at Luke AFB, the entire F-35A fleet average FMC and MC rates blew away every single other fighter in the inventory. Block 3 F-35As from later lots sometimes demonstrate 100% availability rates even after a sortie that day, ready to gas-and-go. None of the older, non operational training squadron birds used to convert pilots into the F-35A have any relevance to the costs or availability rates for FMS customers because new customers are getting Lot 14 and later F-35s with all the advancements from lessons-learned on Block 2 and Block 3i-3F. Another overlook is that people with no background in defense accounting or acquisition completely overlook the fact that the US has 3 services flying different JSF variants with different operating costs, especially for the USMC and USN. The GAO, which is staffed with people with zero relevant knowledge about the program, averages all the fleets from USAF, USMC, and USN together and then makes scathing conclusions that are irrelevant. USAF calculates expenses based on bringing up the entire fleet to the latest standards so maintenance, training, and support can be standardized. They did that to the later block F-16Cs 40-52 to what’s called CCIP standard. The average time it took to modify an F-16C to CCIP was 144 days in overhaul depot-level work. None of that applies to FMS for European partners. Australia already reports way lower CPFH numbers than we’re seeing thrown around in irreputable publications in the US and online. They were in the $21,000-$27,000 CPFH range. Finland will see even lower CPFH because the program will be far more mature in 2025 when they start receiving orders. Spare parts have been the biggest bottleneck for JSF as it’s an early-stage production program with emphasis being placed by US Congress on cranking out airframes, even though the services haven’t asked for those rates and would prefer lower rates with more spares. 690 airframes have been delivered as of September 1st, so by the time Finland starts getting new aircraft orders filled, there will be between 1200-1350 JSF already delivered and operating all over the world, hundreds of which will be in Europe.
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  7939.  @michaelkeller5008  I'm looking over each one of your quantifiable claims, and none of them are accurate or remotely correct. 1. UK never cut their orders for F-35B. That's fake media hype with lots of "maybe" in those non-aviation click-bait articles. 2. 4th Gen large RCS birds considered stealth. Some fighters naturally have LO characteristics to them, mainly frontal RCS size...when slick. 4.5 Gen incorporated RAM in certain areas to reduce RCS and cut the detection and tracking ranges by small margins, which help with mutual detection weapons employment scenarios. ESM/EW does not equal VLO or stealth. This is one of the common amateur statements I've seen thrown around for years that is patently false. Digital Waveform Manipulation techniques are just that, used to send false and confusing returns back to the source RADAR. They make doppler effect tracking, PID, and weapons employment more difficult, but don't hide your presence if you're in the RADAR field of regard and have a detectable RCS. What an advanced EW suite allows is longer range passive RF detection and tracking, which then allows the pilots to manage their flight path around threat sensor envelopes and approach from different angles, as long as they get first-look and have enough time to bypass the envelope and scoot in for better WEZ/NEZ. The JSF series are king of the hill in that space, followed by F-22A, then Rafale. F-35 pilots have out-matched the F-22 in that game since 2017 in Large Force Exercises.
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  7948.  @enterchannelname676  AWG-9 wasn’t better than APG-63, as AWG-9 couldn’t look-down/shoot-down over land. It also didn’t have NCTR capabilities that were developed in the 1970s, since it was so old (started development in late 1950s). AWG-9 was great for detecting giant Tu-95s or Tu-22Ms over the water, not so great for fighter-sized targets feet-dry. It still had some major problems with lag and drag, clutter reaction, filtering, and reliability. APG-63 was the first truly-capable look-down/shoot-down FCR that actually worked, and only got better with the Digital Signals Processor introduced on the F-15C, and back-fitted into the F-15As. F-14 didn’t get DSP until it got the F-15E’s Radar in the form of the APG-70 with added over-water modes, called the APG-71. We worked on all this in the late 1980s/early 1990s. When TOPGUN got F-16Ns, guess who they asked to come in to teach them how to drive the APG-66 Radar in it (obsolete F-16A’s Radar, F-16Cs had the APG-68) to help them build their BVR set in that platform? Not F-16 Fighter Weapons School Instructors from Nellis. Not F/A-18 FWS Instructors as they were populated by former A-7E drivers. Not F-14 RIOs because they were already there and not used to using a modern solid state electronics FCR. They brought in F-15C Weapons Instructors from Nellis, who went through the conversion course for F-16 at Luke AFB, then got assigned to TOPGUN. F-15C with APG-63(V)1 and TEWS had far superior SA than the RIO with his antiquated AWG-9 and older ALR-45, and still had superior SA after the late block F-14As got ALR-67. F-14D with APG-71, TCS, IRST, LANTIRN, and ASPJ had superb SA. At least 3 of those systems came from a lot of work we did on F-15 CTF at Edwards, China Lake, White Sands, Eglin, and Nellis. Once we got the AIM-7M on F-15C, it changed the WEZ profile considerably, but F-14A got it too, as did the Bug. AIM-7M bridged the gap between AIM-7F and AIM0120A, and was a very capable missile that proved itself admirably in ODS. F-14As and A+s couldn’t even operate much in the mix due to NCTR limits. The F/A-18C had better NCTR than the F-14A, which was humiliating for the Tomcat community. The Navy blew hundreds of millions on the F401-PW-400 motor for the planned F-14B in the early 1970s, which makes me wonder if that money spent left it behind a bit in terms of avionics upgrades to keep it up-to-speed with the other teen series.
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  7951. @TomcatE303  Max detection ranges are conditions-dependant, based on TGT RCS, aspect, altitude, wx, and other factors that come into play. F-15A was quickly replaced with F-15C and APG-63 with PSP already starting in 1978. We moved F-15As to ANG units and back-filled PSP into them while Cs rolled off the line into operational units. APG-63 had better fidelity, resolution, and reliability. It also didn't lose track as easily as AWG-9 did. You have to understand that AWG-9 started development in the late 1950s on the Missileer, then went into F-111B in the early-mid 1960s. APG-63 development was really late 1960s into production in the early/mid '70s. It was solid state with the latest semiconductors and processors, so way ahead of AWG-9. I'm talking about the iceberg under the water you never see. Not the tip, which is inflated brochure specs. A single pilot is much more efficient running a then-modern Radar like APG-63. AWG-9 was so old, it required a separate crew member to employ it. F-15 driver could quickly manipulate the Radar and monitor TEWS and the HUD, make quick decisions about positioning in a fraction of the time it took an F-14 crew to coordinate via intercom. F-15 was a better BVR machine in many ways as a result. F-15E WSO is there to steer the LANTIRN TGT Pod, run the Radar Ground-Mapping Mode for strike profiles, and then drive weapons release and laser spot tracking for LGBs pre-GPS era. We were on the F-15 CTF primarily working on E model systems development. You're basically trying to tell someone who built houses for decades, how to pound a nail. Just for context.
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  7968.  @Qrayon  It's pretty basic math. You can't have trillions missing if you didn't get extra trillions cumulatively even decades prior to that. You would have to manufacture trillions out of thin air, which was never allocated to DoD. Each fiscal year is a finite budget to fund DoD. Look at the DoD budget timeline Y2Y. There simply isn't anywhere to lose even $1 trillion. DoD budget was pretty flat in the 1960s-1970s, at $49-$84 Billion/yr. It broke through $112B/yr in 1978. It broke through $200B/yr in the '80s ($221B in 1984), and $300B in the '90s, never exceeding $400B/yr until after 9/11/2001. So now start adding. There's no mathematical way to come up with Rumsfeld's numbers unless you make $230B disappear every year for 10 years, which is preposterous when the budget was only $143-$320B/yr from 1980-2000. Since every funded program and O&M costs were what they were, there simply was no room for that to happen. You're talking about a continual gargantuan accounting fraud, while simultaneously having contractors deliver aircraft carriers, submarines, heavy cargo lift aircraft, B-1Bs, stealth bombers, satellites, thousands of fighters, tanks, APCs, IFVs, base housing all over the world, depots, nukes, missiles, bombs, ammunition, uniforms, boots, and food for free. Then you would have to account for Healthcare costs, schools, military institutes, test facilities, and the O&M budget to operate and maintain all of the above, which is typically 3x the cost of acquisitions over the life of a program. Those $49-$320B/yr budgets were spent on acquisitions, RDT&E, O&M, personnel, and services. Each fiscal year has detailed accounting for all the weapons systems, test programs, operations & maintenance, and contracted services. It's the most accountable portion of the entire Federal budget, unlike Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, HUD, DOEd, DOJ, EPA, IRS, FEMA, FDA, DHS, etc.
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  7978. ​ @shihori6751 The West has elevated the economies and infrastructure of the countries of origin for immigrants. It's just that Europe and the US are much farther along the path of development and are therefore far more attractive places to live. North African Muslims believe they are superior people with an ethnoreligious heritage that is unquestionable within their societies, therefore any strife they suffer must be someone else's fault, even the generous hands that feed and house them. They are incompatible with French society in particular because the French have their own very unique history and culture that they want to preserve. Socialism and weak parliamentarians have allowed unfettered immigration in the vacuum of prime age males who were slaughtered in 2 world wars. This all means civil war in France in the near future, where Arabs will be overmatched with French military and police forces, but it will destroy much of France in the process. The only solution is for millions of Arabs to leave France and return to North Africa, who can't support them. North Africa has been suffering food shortages for years now already due to COVID supply chain disruptions, then the Russia-Ukraine invasion. From the French perspective, North African Arabs have been a curse to France. From Arabs in North Africa, they are a curse unto themselves because they can't be fed and housed in the portion of Africa their ancestors stole from the previous inhabitants of the Mediterranean coastal cities during their murderous and savage crusades.
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  8019.  @Sedna063  Typhoon can't be detected if it isn't flying within the Su-35's field of regard. With the Typhoon running EMCON and letting F-35s provide SA to it via Link, it now becomes a hunter of the shadows with the most deadly AAM in existence. UK has been a ground-level partner in JSF-B from the start practically once they learned the USMC was investing in the ASTOVL evolution into what became JSF-B. They provided a lot of the VAAC Harrier DFLCS research and development, as well as the Rolls Royce lift fan. It's both a Royal Air Force and Royal Navy program since both used the Harrier, either for deck launch and recover, or remote airfields and FARPs in Europe with the RAF. Typhoon can't penetrate modern IADS very deep without ESM, and F-35 proves better ESM than legacy ESM platforms since it can get so close with an integrated sensor/RF antennae suite and massive amounts of RF power, networked. They way they are used together, F-35s beagle like Electronic Warfare penetration aircraft, then switch role to DEAD/SAM elimination, then either A2A, AEW&C, precision strike, with ISR constantly happening anyway. Typhoons, F-15Es, F-16Cs, etc. follow and go hit their TGTs as the F-35s bore a hole through the IADS for them. F-35s hit TGTs and provide BDA, TGT-switching along the opportunity list in the kill web, and then open the door for the legacy aircraft on the way out. Without F-35s, any of the legacy fighters are extremely vulnerable to modern IADS networks because of signature and the countermeasures game that goes back and forth. Iran has been supplying Houthis with cobbled SAMs using COTS IR sensors to shoot down Saudi fighters, helicopters, drones, and Arab coalition F-16s.
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  8096.  @Jimunu  Take Valerie Jarrett, as one example. Her father was a Soviet asset on the FBI's arrest list who got tipped off by moles within the Intelligence Community, so he and his business partner (another Soviet asset) fled to Iran. That's why she was born there, not because she's Iranian. Then there is Frank Marshall Davis, a known member of the CPUSA taking its orders from the Soviet Union to agitate blacks so that they would be incited to riots as part of the Soviet ideological warfare and internal chaos programs directed against the US, synchronized with Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen Underground terrorist group. If you read Obama's own books (the vast majority of his supporters haven't even cracked them open), he mentions that he attended socialist conventions and studied Marxist literature that was handed out at these gatherings. Obama and Bill Ayers were both board members of the Woods Fund. Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are husband and wife, and were both leaders in the Weathermen, including construction of bombs, bombing Federal buildings, police stations, the US Capitol, and getting a bunch of their friends killed when one of their bombs detonated in the Greenwich Village Townhouse in 1970. They were the BLM and ANTIFA members of their day, all funded and taking orders from Lubyanka as part of the Soviet scheme to destabilize the US from within. Same funding structure, same sources, same cut-out templates, same mission. If you study the prime imperatives of SDS and Weathermen, agitating blacks in the US was at the heart of the campaign. Instead of recognizing these facts, Obama and comrades fell into line as part of the Soviet movement to undermine the stability and safety of the US as part of a long-term strategy. They're all useful idiots, as Lenin would describe them. Nobody on the left is talking about these realities, and most are falling for the same traps because they've listened to deadbeat professors for generations talking about the greatness of dirtbags like Karl Marx.
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  8103. I spent many years from 2005-2016 doing a lot of multi-day high volume courses in Finland, often with mixed attendance of AKs, Rks, and ARs, the occasional FNC, a Bushmaster ACR, shorty AKs from Arsenal, and a franken-74. During winter conditions in either Arctic or sub-arctic locations, it was usually -25° to -30°C (-13°F to -22° F). Not once did I ever see any of the hundreds of weapons experience surface moisture freezing like that. We just never let the rifles get into that state. Not once did any of the controls freeze-up that I can recall on any of the designs. What did fail? Interestingly, there were more malfunctions with AK variants than ARs during firing. Mostly FTExtract followed by double feed. That was always with Russian garbage steel case ammo. The Finnish military brass-cased ammo is of a quality similar to German and Swiss ammo. I've never seen an Rk92 or Rk95 malfunction, but they were typically fed brass-cased Finnish ammo. The AKs that malf'd were usually Arsenal out of Bulgaria. Polymers broke, especially my early gen MIAD grip and the toe of an aftermarket M4 waffle stock. One of the most reliable configurations was 11.5" AR set up as close to a TDP build as possible. The Finns kept very detailed records over the years of what types of malfunctions they experienced. They said AKs were about as reliable as low quality imitation AR-15s, namely Bushampsters. Rk62, Rk92, and Rk95 had the highest reliability, followed by TDP-compliant AR-15s. Then AKs and Bushampster AR-15s.
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  8113. Both political parties and the electorate as a whole in the United States are undergoing transformational shifts in the past 2 or 3 generations. The Democrat party abandoned and betrayed its working class and voters in the unions for generations by shipping their jobs overseas after decades of restrictive regulations imposed on their employers. The republican party and blue dog democrats abandoned the military-industrial complex/security Foreign Affairs wing of Washington DC in favor of domestic economic policies, Though this was tug-o-warred with the global war on terrorism. Lifelong Democrat Union families we're looking for someone to represent them were constantly ignored and lied to by snake-tongued politicians, who only rallied them during election years, while voting consistently to ship their jobs to Asia. This is where the Tea Party filled in, followed by Trump and MAGA, which career politicians in both parties had no answer for other than calling them racists. The RINOs fear it just as much as their country club fat cat Democrat friends in Congress, which is why they both fought the Tea Party and MAGA movements. It's weird to watch Democrats turn into war mongers who also love the FBI and CIA, while Republicans become war-weary (they disproportionately fill the military ranks and don't like seeing their children left out to dry by the political class in DC). The actual voting base of the Republican party has morphed with blue collar union workers who want a strong military that doesn't get squandered on senseless overseas deployments with no strategy. These aren't war hawks of the Cold War, but peace through strength common sense folks who want to focus on America first. The Democrat party is now a big tent with a hollow cavity in the middle. Along one edge of the tent are single children technocrats who love the authoritarianism of network-enabled FBI & CIA, while on the other side are transvestites, blue-haired cat lady feminazis, and gaystapo activists with spiraling moral compasses, whose main common ideology with the technocrats is the religion of climate alarmism. Gone are the Kennedy idealists, Carter pragmatists, and Clinton compromisers. Under Republican pressure against Clinton, we actually had a balanced Federal budget. The common sense voting blocks of both parties feel betrayed and marginalized, but have awakened to the fact that regular people share common goals for the Nation, while the political class work for someone else.
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  8153.  baggabliss  Buying power and the shear size and diversity of the US market is in a league of its own, not because the US is inherently better from an ideological or political standpoint (although both of those are true), but because the US is: * In an ideal temperate zone * Has complete physical isolation from historical powers with Atlantic & Pacific Oceans. * Can navigate the seas from its coasts as it wishes without any naval powers anywhere near to challenge it. * Has the largest arable farmland on the planet. * Has the most vast connected river network on the planet. * As a result of the river network, it has the most vast rail, highway, and airport network on the planet. * Instead of a central city governing the US, the US has distributed and connected cities all over the States, several States having 2-6 cities with massive economies into themselves that include significant intra-State, inter-State, and international industries. In contrast, Russia is effectively a vast wilderness of land-locked forest, arctic, and tundra, has huge rivers that aren't connected with each other in most examples, shares a border with 16 other rival nations with ongoing and historical territorial disputes, relies heavily on its food sources from Ukraine, relies economically on energy exports, and is isolated away from the high volume sea traffic routes for global trade. Russia also has its political, economic, and military power center in Moscow, with Sainkt Petersburg being Peter's attempt to shift Russian trade relationships to the Baltic and northern European economic powers of his era. By geographic location, Russia is depressed, even with her bounteous natural resources. The rest of the world does not value Russia that much as a result, since there is little or no reason to interact with her unless you want to buy some of her energy or mineral resources.
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  8155.  Bradley Scott  CIA was penetrated and occupied by over 200 NKVD double agents before it even started, from the OSS days. NKVD turned General Reinhardt Gehlen's intelligence organization for a massive exploitation operation that brought more results than Moscow could have ever imagined, eventually landing them several CIA directors who were recruited by these doubles. If the CIA makes an assessment, it usually hypes the Russian capabilities in attempts to scare the US JCS, while over-estimating Russian systems capabilities. The MiG-25 was a perfect example of that, as was the MiG-29. Once we got our hands on those systems, they turned out to be nowhere near what they were advertised as by the CIA. If CIA is forecasting massive Russian economic boom, then consider the source. This is exactly opposite of all the real economic indictors surrounded by the continual collapse of the always lackluster Russian economy, especially with the compounding problems of Russian demographic shifts and loss of profitable energy exports. The US is the true long-term market for stability and growth, with no enemies at our borders, a temperate zone, a massive industrial base that is unparalleled in the world, unmolested coast lines filled with deep sea ports, which are connected to the most vast river network in the world, with the largest farmland of any place on earth by size and output by wide margins. If you want to put your money in a growing, stable place, there is no better environment than the US. Russia doesn't even compare well with Texas in economy.
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  8161.  baggabliss  I'll be astonished if Tempest sees anything beyond wood and Bondo mock-ups at the current 2 billion pound budget, which is 1/4 what the Russians put into the failing Su-57. It's going to take way more than 2 billion pounds to develop much beyond the Adaptive Cycle propulsion. Direct energy weapons (already in development in the US for decades-my family was on airborne laser in the 1990s), is going to take billions as well and breakthrough technology. Anything outside of a tech-sharing joint program with the US will simply never have the political will and industrial or economic capacity to move any such program forward. Partnering with Sweden and Italy can't overcome that industrial-techno-political barrier. The UK, Sweden, and Italy have the brains for most of it, but trying to get their respective parliaments to stay the course through such a massive undertaking is going to be less than a snowball's chance in hell. Only 3.4% of the UK's 43 billion pound/$56.1 B US defence budget is allocated to R&D, and that has to cover all services, not just aerospace. In order to have the speed, VLO, direct energy, propulsion, and next generation avionics concepts being thrown around, you're looking easily at a minimum of $40 billion US just for development, and likely more. F-22 was $38.8 Billion, and F-35 was close to $50 billion (3 variants including JSF-B). The F-35 is the "cheap" one too, since it doesn't have the requirement to exceed Mach 1.6, whereas the F-22 had to reach/exceed Mach 2. That adds a lot of cost to a program because of the thermodynamics associated with leading edge heating and heat transfer into subsystems. In order to just have a genuine Mach 2 capable fighter, each airframe cost goes up considerably just from an airfoil and structures perspective. 6th Gen fighters are supposed to have no-BS Mach 2.5+ speeds and extended range, with higher average causing speeds than any previous fighter outside of the YF-12A. To thermal-load a large fighter like this for extended duration mission profiles, you're looking at costs that can only be taken on by the US, and even that is under question at the moment because of the burgeoning increases in developmental costs seen on the ATF and JSF. We're not even talking about the non-existent AI and quantum computing technology. My forecast is that the UK, Italian, and Swedish parliaments are going to laugh in the faces of the defense ministers when they tell them what all this is going to cost, even as joint partners.
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  8163.  baggabliss  I don't underestimate the capabilities of Europeans, especially since we were involved directly with EFA development on international exchange. My father speaks very highly of the German physicists and engineers he worked with on EFA in the early 1980s. The problem is in budget and parliamentary will power to push through some of these programs. Germany and France are already caught with their pants down with no 5th Gen answer to modern air power. The US never built the SST projects it had under development due to sonic boom noise encroachment over so many populated areas, whereas France and England relegated the Concorde to trans-oceanic flight. You're smoking crack if you think the EF can outmaneuver the F-22. The BFM set-ups they have done with each other resulted in wins for the F-22 every time, other than rear perch, which is about impossible with any super maneuverable fighter in offensive perch. Every single other set-up, whether butterfly, line abreast, neutral head-to-head (even with unfavorable altitude offsets), scissors, resulted in Raptors defeating Typhoon. Rates were 8:1 and 6:1 on 2 different days from the clickbait article entitled, "Typhoon has Raptor Salad", not that you would ever make it to a WVR merge with a Raptor. The truth is that these two friendly aircraft are more lethal working together, especially with Typhoons using Raptor as a dual-role AEW&C/Air Dominance Fighter while Typhoons can run EMCON and employ the Meteor. That is a brutal combination for any adversary, with the UK using F-35Bs and Typhoons this way.
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  8165.  baggabliss  Every aircraft will bleed energy in a turn if it is unable to compensate with excess thrust, and instantaneous turn rate will bleed massive amounts of energy in a second. The F-22 has 70,000lb of thrust available to retain its energy during turns. This is more important for all of them at higher altitude at higher speeds. The F-16 has excellent STR at lower altitudes below FL200, but really starts to bleed energy in thinner air above that. This is a reflection of it's designed operating envelope to counter and defeat the MiG-21 in daytime WVR encounters. The Viper is AOA limited since flying it outside of the AOA limiter will make departure very probable, and limited AOA helps it retain its STR so well. The F-22 will match a Viper STR at low altitude by sheer excess thrust and lifting area, and smoke it as the altitude increases. The Typhoon also does better at altitude by design, since it was envisioned to counter the MiG-29 & Su-27 starting with the BVR fight, and still have low speed maneuverability in a degraded WVR fight, although snap-shooting HOBS missiles was and is a focus rather than rear quarter shots reminiscent of the Korean War. The Typhoon has excellent ITR but dumps airspeed quickly when it does it. The F-22 has a limiter for initial pitch rate as well, but still has superior nose-pointing authority with TV and a much wider yaw axis available. All of these visible performance metrics seen by air show audiences are simply leftovers of the true design parameters of each fighter, which can't be shown since they require much higher altitude and speed.
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  8173.  @SmotritelMayaka29  You need to learn how to make a coherent and supportable argument before posting. There are dozens of current conflicts in the world that the US is not participating in. It does not help your argument to use hyperbole that is easily proved false. Russia invaded Eastern Europe after WWII in order to position closer to the sea ports, at the expense of millions of people living there. Russia invaded the sovereign nation of Afghanistan, assassinated its President, and disrupted that region to the extent that it is still a major problem today. Afghanistan used to be more of a tourist destination, no fundamentalists running around telling women what to wear, and an agricultural haven for fruit, nuts, and dates along the ancient trade routes between Persia and India. US troop numbers dropped dramatically in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  US Army in Europe shrank from 213,000 soldiers in 1990 to 122,000 in 1992.  Current US Army presence in Europe is at a 63 year low, with around 60,000 total Soldiers/Airmen/Marines/Navy. Eastern European nations begged to join NATO so that they would have protection from any future Russian threats of invasion, especially Poland and the Baltics, who suffered tremendously under Russian occupation, including genocide, execution of their intelligent classes, and forced migration from their homelands into Siberia or Russian slave camps. Departing Russian units openly robbed these nations on the way out. Russia has a history of raping and pillaging every neighbor it has, dating back centuries. I've travelled and lived in many of the places who suffered from Russian occupation, and the sentiment is universal among all of Russia's neighbors. I can't think of another nation that has that type of reputation in the world. Russia trained and supplied the PLO, airline hijackers, Yasser Arafat, and terrorist organizations since the 1960s, while promoting their actions with the international journalist association KGB information warfare front. The KGB's Middle East files have been opened for you to see this yourself.
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  8182.  @Katyperryfan0801  I never get the flu shot. The best way to be free from influenza is to take Vitamin D in high doses, and this is proven with multiple studies across various nations among Vitamin D deficient patients. Once they got on a high Vitamin D regimen, flu rates plummeted among them. “The COVID shot” consists of several different approaches, all of the mRNA variants having failed their clinical trials (before COVID-19 was seen in the world). Every large pharmaceutical company that has tried to make mRNA LNC technology work has failed, and people die in the clinical trials. Moderna was approached by Anthony Fauci and Dr. Baric back no later than 2014 to develop coronavirus countermeasures to the biological weapons he has been working on since 1999. If you doubt me, you can read the US Patent Office records and Moderna’s Shareholder Meeting Report up through 2019 before COVID was released. 2007 USPTO Denied Patent Application for Weaponized Coronavirus with engineered spike proteins designed to bind to human cells: https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7279327.PN.&OS=PN/7279327&RS=PN/7279327 2017 Stat News Article discussing “Unicorn” Moderna who after failing safety tests with their mRNA treatments, gets valued in the billions: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ 2019: Moderna Shareholder Report: https://web.archive.org/web/20200913054217/https:/www.modernatx.com/moderna-blog/moderna-2019-shareholder-letter "mRNA-1647 comprises six mRNAs encoding two antigens in one vaccine, and I give tremendous credit to our technical development teams for their relentlessness in building our capabilities to manufacture this complex drug product at clinical scale. mRNA-1647 is wholly owned by Moderna, and we believe it has the potential to be a blockbuster commercial opportunity."
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  8183.  @Katyperryfan0801  So you’re saying that the virus gets spread by people who have natural immunity faster than those who have artificially stimulated immunity? Let’s play who knows nothing about virology for 5000. The absolute best protection from viruses is natural immunity and immune responses from healthy people. The various mRNA therapies and J&J vaccine are nowhere near 90% effective at helping people develop antibodies for the virus, but the virus itself is not the main problem with SARS-CoV-2.   The engineered spike proteins are the real problem not only with the bioweapon virus, but the supposed COVID countermeasure systems being injected into people. The COVID injections are causing mass-production of the S1 spike protein by people’s immune system, which are spreading throughout the vasculature and attaching to the capillary endothelium (lining of your blood vessels). This is causing systemic micro thrombosis (clotting). Some people just die within 3 days, others experience strokes, pulmonary embolisms, Bell’s Palsy (like Australia’s vaccine passport MP official), blindness, deafness, weakness, difficulty breathing, or no symptoms at all for the time being. A Canadian doctor who saw over 900 patients administered the injections discovered that 62% of his patients now have micro thrombosis, after they presented with weakness, malaise, and difficulty breathing. He brought it up with the hospital management, who told him to remain silent-a violation of his oath, so he went public and was fired. All viruses mutate, but your natural or acquired immunity is able to recognize mutations because there is only a small % difference between them. Here’s a NIH article about that: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/immune-cells-common-cold-may-recognize-sars-cov-2
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  8195. It fails on almost all of the keys. I don’t know if he’s reading WSJ and watching CNN for the 2 Economy metrics, but he is way out of touch with voters on those, and Trump/Vance/RFK Jr. still win without those, even though they’re primary concerns of voters. The 3rd party challenger joined the Trump campaign and is promised to have a leading role in the WH covering health of the Nation and oversight of agencies who have failed us time and again. How do you metric that in the 13 Keys for 3rd party? Definitely not in-favor of the incumbent WH. What major policy did the Biden/Harris WH enact with their 81 million votes mandate? Normally we would have an easy-to-remember massive piece of legislation associated with Biden/Harris. Let’s establish clarity through contrast: LBJ: Civil Rights Act/Vietnam Nixon: End of Vietnam/Watergate Carter: Oil crisis/Iranian hostage crisis Reagan: Cut taxes/Reaganomics/Military revitalized/“Mr. Gorbachev: Bring down this wall!” Clinton: Endless Scandals/NAFTA/Lewinsky Bush 43: 9-11/Afghanistan/Iraq Invasion Obama: Obamacare Trump: Renegotiated NAFTA and APP on US terms/re-shore US jobs/affordable energy/first-step program/Abraham accords (more ME peace deals than all US Presidents combined) Biden: Open border policy, killed Keystone pipeline, massive inflation, incompetent/derelict/geriatric, scandals with Hunter & James Biden money-laundering foreign enemy monies paid into Biden family Even when I’m generous to the Biden/Harris WH, Trump still walks away with 7 of the keys. A realistic voter perspective based on the economy and other accepted FALSE answers to the keys shows 9-12 FALSE answers, which indicates a freaking blow-out election. 13 Keys predicts popular vote, not the EC. So now Allan has to explain 2016 again. If we believe the numbers, Hillary got the popular vote.
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  8197.  @courtneybrubaker9738  That's flipped around. Bloody Mary reverted England back to Catholicism because she was Catherine of Argon's daughter, Henry VIII's first wife who was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (same who commissioned Christopher Columbus). When Katherine couldn't produce a surviving male heir, Henry applied for an annulment with the Pope and was denied, so he divorced Katherine and declared Mary a bastard, then put them away, launching the English Reformation into official Protestant Anglicanism. Mary watched her mom praying every day of her life and vowed to avenge this injustice that was done to them. When Henry VIII died and Mary got on the throne, she had all the former clergymen who went along with Henry burned at the stake, and yanked England back into Catholicism for 5 years. That's when the Puritan leadership fled to Switzerland, which is why they have the Geneva Bible. Once Mary was out, and Elizabeth inherited the throne, she carefully moved England back to Anglicanism and when they defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, it was seen as a confirmation of "the Protestant winds" in their favor. England stayed Anglican ever since that time. These events were very instrumental in the foundation of the British Colonies and United States. The Founders didn't want all of that religious infighting and back-and-forth chaos, but also recognized Divinity and Christian morals as the foundational principles of the Nation. The main reason why we have 8 Catholics and a Russian Jew in the Supreme Court, and a bunch of Irish and Italian surnames on all the committees in Congress is because organized crime took over the government in the 1920s. The older entrenched Irish and newcomer Sicilians and Italians shared the Catholic-derived blood oaths in their "Made man" ceremonies, while the Russian Jews did the bookkeeping and accounting. They were initially at war with the Blue Blood Mason WASP Nativists, but all operate according to their own oaths, not US law. These are the real religions that govern DC, NY, Baltimore, Boston, LA, Sacramento, SF, Dallas, Miami, etc. You can map out the history of the crime families from late 1800s to Prohibition, then post-Prohibition to the present. Forget about Democrat/Republican. That's kabuki theater for the peasants, while Masons, Mafiosos, apostate Jew atheists, and degenerate blood-oath demons rule our government. Look at their fruits.
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  8226.  @paulchristensen2854  If ever there was a combat aircraft that was the opposite of a one-trick pony, the F-35 is it. It is really Omnirole, not even multirole. S-200/S-300/S-400 have not brought them down. To the contrary, they have been used to take out S-300 and S-400 IADS nodes components, even before some of the components made it to their mobile platforms. Every aircraft is susceptible to bird strikes. It is one of the most dangerous in-flight emergencies to have because they usually hit the cockpit or get sucked into an engine. One should not look into bird strike incidents as anything indicative of being specifically problematic for one aircraft over another. F-35 does not need a lot specialized mx per flight hour. It requires specialized maintenance for periodic phase-level inspections when certain sections have to be removed and RAM needs to be re-applied. The Brits built an automated laser-etch removal system for this that totally changes how quickly it is done. Squadron-level regular mx is less-involved than on F-16s since there is no central dual-redundant hydraulic system like on legacy jets, all the actuators have self-contained fluids. Cold weather: Meanwhile, USAF-Alaska, Japanese AF, Vermont ANG, Norwegians, and UK have been flying them for a while now. If someone ever tells you that the F-35 can’t operate in extreme cold weather conditions, ask them why they’re doing it around the Northern hemisphere and within the Arctic Circle every day across multiple air forces.
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  8320.  @rafm3068  We are repeatedly brow-beaten with claims about utopian life in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Canada when it comes to healthcare/NHS.  So yes, these claims are very common in the public discourse in the US and must be refuted with mathematical analyses. Life expectancy is higher in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Iceland, South Korea, Israel, Sweden, France, Malta, Canada, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Netherlands, and Luxembourg when compared to Finland. Would you conclude that all of those countries have better healthcare than Finland? Some do, some don’t. United States (79.05 years), with its 335 million population, is within 3.26 years of Finland (82.31 years) for life expectancy. From a mathematical and statistical analyses position, that tells me the US has something better overall that is able to maintain such a high life expectancy over such a massive and ethnically-diverse population. The US is the only top 10 nation among the largest populations in the world with high life expectancy. Japan, with its 11th highest population, is the only other high life expectancy population of the top 60 nations in the world (that range from 73.65 - 85.16 years). None of the top 10 world populations fall within the top 60 except for the US. This is immensely-significant from a mathematical perspective. We typically see ethnic factors playing a big role in life expectancy, even when standard of living might be lower, though clean water and modern medical services do play some role that can’t be ignored. The question is, if I applied US healthcare options to Finland, would Finland’s life expectancy increase? Since there are far more specialists and healthcare options in the US, more EMS services even in States with smaller populations that Finland, I propose that Finland would benefit with higher standard of living by continuing to adopt more US healthcare options. I also would expect to see higher standard of living if more people in the US had access to summer cabins and sauna baths, but the cabin option just isn’t a reality because of population density and geography in many areas.
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  8334.  @josephpiskac2781  There was a condition they only found on 2 early lot LRIP F-35B and F-35C samples where they experienced delamination of some of the surfaces on the vertical stabs. They tried very hard, including diving at supersonic speed with counter-intuitive flight control inputs to duplicate the condition with other aircraft, and never could do it. They then made an upgrade to the structures and RAM application with Lot 4 JSF forward, which actually made a more durable RAM with lower RCS value, making it even smaller as a result. The click-bait article responses? “F-35 can’t fly supersonic speeds.” You can watch several videos of F-15s and F-16s delaminating at subsonic speeds during flight demos, but you’ll hear nothing of this, only that the F-35 is garbage. I’ve never seen anything like this before really, and I’ve been close to the legacy programs since the 1970s. Back then, with the 4th Gen platforms, we had 427 total airframe losses and 147 fatalities within the first 10 years of service between the F-14, F-15 (very low, very safe numbers actually), F-16, F/A-18, AV-8, and A-10. These losses were rarely reported, although the F-16 eventually got the brunt of the criticism, even though it turned out to be the safest single engine USAF fighter until the F-35A came along. Early years of the F-16 teething problems resulted in numerous crashes and deaths, and the USAF actually worked hard to bury those problems. Wire chaffing was one. The engine was another. EPU, Leading Edge Flaps, hydraulics, and a list of other issues caused numerous crashes and deaths. They even made a movie about it starring that lady who played in Jurassic Park. Afterburn or something like that. We know what real problems look like, and F-35 program is not anywhere close to those legacy fighter teething issues. It’s so far away from those days, there should be rejoicing everywhere, but instead, it’s as if it was the worst thing ever designed with wings. You start to see an agenda.
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  8345.  @afranks8566  Look up Fajitagte, Jamal Trulove, Cheree Peoples, CA State Prison slave labor: Fajitagate is where SF DA Kamala made the case go away as a favor to Willie Brown and the Police Chief. The police chief’s son and 2 of this drunk buddies (all 3 off-duty cops), bullied some random patrons of a restaurant/club who walked out with their food. They demanded the people to hand over their meals just being drunk jerks, then beat the victims, stole the food, and drove off with it. PD pulled them over, said, “Oh, you’re chief’s son, have a nice evening boys.” Public outcry over the crimes started to rise, and Kamala refused to investigate the offenders. Jamal Trulove is a black man who was randomly targeted by Kamala’s DA office, where she bribed a fake witness to testify against him with over $60,000 in taxpayer money. Kamala showed up for his sentencing to smirk at him as he was convicted and then given a 50 year prison sentence for a murder he never committed. 6 years of appeals and his lawyer discovered not only the exculpatory evidence, but the prosecutorial crimes of bribing a fake witness in a capital offense case leading to imprisonment of the innocent. The appellate judge ordered Jamal released immediately and his record expunged, but Kamala stepped in and fought his release. The Supreme Court had to intervene and smack down her corrupt office. She should have been immediately disbarred, prosecuted, and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. Cheree Peoples is a black single mother/nurse who was raising and caring for a daughter with sickle cell anemia. Kamala was State AG at the time, and saw that CA was losing $1.4 Billion in Federal funding due to truancy, so she said blacks are the main offenders who need to be arrested, starting with the parents. They randomly picked Cheree Peoples, got a warrant for her arrest, perp-walked her, took her to jail, she lost her job, her daughter had a stroke with a paralyzed right arm, they became homeless, and Cheree had to fight the case for 2 years before the DAs finally gave up on trying to get her to plea. US Supreme Court had to intervene once again on civil rights and basic Bill of Rights violations by Kamala and CA. Kamala responded by saying people weren’t ready for her ideas yet. She should have gone to prison for that as well and never let out. Trump did the opposite with his First Step program, helping incarcerated 1st-time non-violent offenders who were nabbed for an ounce of weed or limited possession that CA and other States considered intent to distribute, and used 1994 Biden Crime Bill Federal mandates to put harmless people away for 25 years.
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  8391.  @oxide9679  During Prohibition, pretty much every LE Agency, police department, city Council, Mayor, most Congressmen, Senators, etc. were corrupted by the Mob unless they lived in dry counties. None of that was cleaned up in the Depression, where police powers were largely expanded and abused.   America had a distraction from all of that in the 1940s with the War, where everyone was coerced or encouraged to participate collectively in the war effort, which meant any able-bodied young men went into the military or defense industry. That included untold Mafia enforcers who were then marketed to the War Department as counter-saboteurs to the Germans on East Coast Harbors. Lucky Luciano negotiated his way out of prison with that approach. America never dealt with the corruption of LE after the war, and was already in a compliance/do your part cultural paradigm coming out of the Great Depression and War, into the expanding boom of the 1950s. Mafia loved it because they built casinos, gambling halls, coin scams, strip clubs, night clubs etc. all over the Nation, while pimping whores and narcotics for even better profits than during Prohibition. LE played the game of crushing the little guys who didn’t have politicians paid off to protect their rackets and enjoy fringe benefits. For example, Jacob Rubenstein and his brother were Bureau of Narcotics informants. Jacob ran multiple night clubs in Dallas for the Mafia, while smuggling weapons and narcotics in the Caribbean and inside the US. You probably better know him as Jack Ruby.
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  8430.  @VioletJoy  What’s really interesting to me is that this family has a long history with crimes, many of which involved people dying under strange or suspicious circumstances. July 8th, 2015: 19yr-old Stephen Smith was murdered on a country road 15 miles from the Murdaugh hunting lodge. Multiple people close to the Murdaugh brothers said Buster Murdaugh was the offender in that case, which just went away. Stephen was impacted in the skull with a blunt force instrument, and witnesses say that Buster hit Stephen as they were driving by in their truck, drunk. Stephen’s body was left in the road, ruled an accident. Local and State LE had some very strange behavior related to the handling of the non-investigation of that homicide. Feb 2018: The Murdaugh family housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield died after “falling down the stairs” at their residence. Her cause of death was ruled “natural causes”, even though she had a brain hemorrhage. There’s a 911 call with Paul and Maggie talking to the operator about this incident right after it happened, saying Gloria was mumbling something as she bled from her head. Feb 23, 2019: Mallory Beach (19) dies in a boat crash near one of the Murdaugh properties, while Paul Murdaugh was co-piloting the boat drunk with his friend. She was ejected from the boat and not found until 6 days later. On the morning of the incident, Paul Murdaugh’s main concern was contacting his grandfather (also an attorney), who then showed up to the ER to groom witnesses. Paul was very hostile to LEOs and EMS personnel. June 7, 2021: Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were murdered at the kennels near their hunting lodge. LE immediately determined that Alex Murdaugh wasn’t a suspect. This family is bad blood, entrenched lawyer elites who have people dying around them all the time, followed by LE covering for their crimes. One of the older Murdaugh Patriarchs was also an attorney back in the day, arrested for bootlegging.
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  8483.  @Caeruleo  I'm a very comprehensive speed reader, formally trained in speed-reading an various memory training disciplines. I've read all of your empassioned responses quite thoroughly. The fresh bullet impact on the curb on Elm Street and on the overpass support are the proposed paths between James Tague and the rifle(s), not the final head shot. If you had ever spent considerable time with firearms watching ricochets and bullet spall, there isn't enough energy in fragments that far after having perforated a skull. I observe bullet spall every time I run a rifle or pistol course, since we shoot steel targets. I've been hit many times over the years with bullet fragments, none of which have penetrated my skin. Usually it's splash-back from higher power pistols in poorly-designed shoot houses. If you were adjacent to a hard structure, like a reinforced concrete pillar under an overpass, and a rifle projectile hit near you, you could very well suffer a superficial or eye injury from the jacket and core fragmenting. You need to be close to the impact site to have superficial penetration from jacket or core off-axis from the POI though. I've been immersed in this field of study with hands-on experience both at the range and in a lab setting spanning over 40 years now. The idea that a fragment continued at high enough velocity to cause the injury to James Tague's cheek after perforating JFK's skull does not pass the sniff test, given the forensic realities of the curb strike. You have to make 3 bullets do the work of 4 minimum. Dr. McClelland's statements are clearly viewable right here on YouTube, which is the source material I'm referring, not something someone else has claimed. As to JFK's head reaction to bullet momentum, I've personally conducted and analyzed hundreds of terminal ballistic tests on tissue and calibrated ballistic gel media, to include high-speed photography analyses. Never once have I or any other technicians witnessed the majority of projectile momentum resonating backwards through the media or animal. The opposite is true: momentum transfers through the media generally in the direction of the bullet flight path, with departures in bullet path sometimes caused by yawning, fragmentation, and/or expansion. Heads on a fulcrum (cervical spine) blow violently in the direction of bullet flight path. The civilian sector is lacking much data with high velocity rifle performance on heads, but it has been well-documented in the military for many decades. The Zapruder film is absolutely consistent with a frontal/right quadrant high velocity rifle projectile traveling no less than 2600fps mv, but more likely 2700-3400fps. I'm not asking you for your opinion or anyone else's on this, but declaring the ballistic realities as I see them. You can't make that head behavior and terminal performance happen from the rear. It's not reality. You must force yourself to accept this, because you can't physically duplicate it.
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  8507.  @littlehumphreyton7580  The people of Ukraine overwhelmingly wanted nothing to do with the Ruble and Russian rule, voting for trade with EU by 79% of the population in 2013. Putin had his puppet, Yanukovych, sign his Rus-Eurasia Pact instead, which triggered Euromaiden. US and greedy industrialists had nothing to do with that, but you are very correct in mentioning oligarchs. 2nd generation Russian oligarchs (who were all put in place by Putin) were pilfering Ukraine of its resources and using companies in Ukraine to launder money from illicit trades, especially human trafficking, narcotics, arms sales, and s_x trafficking. Elena Baturina was just one of these billionaire oligarchs who must pay a huge cut of her profits from selling women and their services, to Putin. Zlochevsky was another boyar who Yanukovych appointed to run Burisma. Putin was using Ukraine as a money-laundering and exploitation vehicle and yes, there were several Western leaders in his pocket as well: A certain Vice President and Secretary of State for the US received millions of dollars (this is nothing for Putin, since he collects billions from all the oligarchs and boyars). He paid $363 million into Clinton Global Initiative through shell companies in Kazakhstan, Belorussia, and Ukraine when Hillary was SECSTATE, then millions into shell companies run by SECSTATE John Kerry and Hunter Biden. In Feb 2014, during the height of Euromaiden protests in Ukraine, Putin's billionaire oligarch Elena Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca, a shell company owned by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz (John Kerry's stepson). Yanukovych fled from Ukraine in March back to Putin, then Putin kicked-off the Donbas war, and Hunter Biden was placed on the board of Zlochevsky's Burisma by May, 2014. Putin was making all the big moves behind the scenes, not Western industrialists (that's a term from the late 1800s-early 1900s by the way).
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  8513. ​ @csmidt2885 Let's see here... Biden lies during the debate: Only President in history who didn't lose any troops under his watch. Fact: Afghanistan retreat was a disaster that cost many American soldiers/Marines their lives, as well as coalition forces and locals. Claim: Economy is doing great, created 15 million jobs. Fact: Jobs recovered to some level near pre-Wuhanflu, while inflation has skyrocketed month-after-month with Biden fiscal policy, to the point that housing prices are out of reach of most younger buyers. "Fixed the border. 40% fewer apprehensions. Border Patrol endorsed him." Lol Border Patrol Union fact-checked him live saying they never have and never will endorse him, while an unprecedented 7 million illegals have entered the Country. "Trump pulled out of the Paris Peace Accord." LOL, that was Vietnam accords in 1973! Claimed Trump wants to end Social Security & Medicare. Trump has openly defended them with full commitment. Senator Biden in the last century said in the future we would have to cut those programs. "We have a thousand trillionaires...I mean billionaires. They're in a situation where they in fact pay 8.2% taxes." Fact: Top 1% pay 26% tax, while those making $77m or more a year (.001%) pay 23.7%. He claimed Trump had 15% unemployment rate, when it was actually 4.4-6.4%, with a temporary spike of 14.8% during State-imposed lock-downs from Governors and stupid corporations, but mostly recovered close to pre-SARS levels. Then he lied about drug prices that Trump actually cut with his HHS, now Biden is trying to take credit for. Lie after lie after lie somehow managed to come out of his geriatric aneurystic brain in between gargantuan gaffes that would sink anyone normally.
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  8567.  @MrOneball1  If you’re talking about armor and self-propelled howitzers, your thinking is outdated. You need to be talking about aerospace systems, missile defense, long-range fires, ISR platforms, Omnirole Stealth Combat Aircraft, Reconnaissance Satellites, stealth cruise missiles, and stealth drones. No other nation in the world has advanced aircraft manufacturing, propulsion, avionics, flight control systems, integrated sensor suites, and weapons like the US does. The Euroconsortium enterprise is still making out-dated Typhoons, a 1980s technology fighter, and has failed to even upgrade them with the CAPTOR-E AESA Radar. Why? Parliaments refused to fund it. The basic Typhoon airframe is already 2 generations behind F-35, even though it was cutting edge for the 1980s. US Army has shifted more to long range fires with missiles like the ATACMS long ago. If you ever have seen what an old ATACMS does, you would quickly realize that Self-Propelled Howitzers are weak. There is video of what an ATACMS did to a Russian convoy of soldiers riding in trucks in Ukraine. Everyone was dead, mostly still sitting in their seats in the trucks. That was the cluster munition variant that disperses little baseball-sized explosives over a specific area with extreme precision. Europe has these that it has bought from the US, just like most NATO partners have bought F-35s, Patriot missile defense, etc. If you don’t invest in strength, you will be reliant on those who do. Choose wisely in the 1990s. It’s too late now.
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  8577. Luneberg lenses are on all the time, but can be turned off when “stealthing up”. Can also be used for deception and tactics to ruin threat fighters, as well as networked EW. An example would be going active with the Luneberg at a certain distance at BVR to set up a fighter to head in that direction, then turn the Luneberg off and get very offset angles outside of any of his sensor envelopes for an easy NEZ window.   The Rafale has avionics that allows the OSF to be cued by the AESA radar and its EW system, where the HUD symbology is being generated by a fused track. This is what ATE is avoiding since pilots aren’t able to really discuss it in an open setting. Within Visual Range and with the Luneberg lenses actively blasting the F-22’s RCS into a large TGT, the Rafale’s AESA will immediately see that, and tell the OSF and missile seekers to "look there”. It’s a way of having fun and providing a challenge for the Raptor pilots doing dissimilar BFM. If they maximized the F-22’s VLO capabilities even for BFM, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge and would cheat the Raptor and Rafale pilots out of good training. This was a line abreast merge with separation of x miles, converging towards each other. F-22A would have had valid missile shots within a very early turn towards the Rafale, as ATE mentioned was very likely, when he discussed the Rafale pilot using his Radar guided missile mode during that early stage as well. If someone is walking away from this HUD footage thinking the Rafale can defeat the F-22 easily, they are making a huge mistake and are not understanding the intent of the exercise. We do this every year with and UK, France under what is called Atlantic Trident. As ATE mentioned, it is a joint operations centric Large Force Exercise designed to get 3 historic allies working together with good interoperability.
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  8592. It's important to understand that Peter's reference for an optimally-functioning Presidency is that of George H.W. Bush, because he was the last one with an actual foreign policy. Trump pulled off what nobody has been able to do in at least a century of Roosevelt-initiated Blue Blood control of the WH (and the crony relationship between Wall Street conglomerates and the political parties). He circumvented the sell-out politician career path to the WH, bypassing Congressional, Gubernatorial, or cabinet positions (over a lifetime of fake public speaking and obedience to the financial interests who control both parties). This is why Trump was hated and feared by both parties. There are dozens of Congressmen plugging away with the establishment system like good little conformists, eager to lick the boot of the financial interests who determine who makes it into the run-offs, who then not only got sidelined and politically eviscerated (especially Jeb Bush), but then faced a potential dynasty blocking them out. Think about Cory Booker, Marco Rubio, Gavin Newsom, John Kennedy, Lisa Murkowski, Amy Klobuchar, etc. There's a narrow window that opens at certain times, mainly determined by a combination of age, tenure, party affiliation relative to the cycle (RR, D, RR, D, RRR, DD, RR, DD, R, D), name recognition, previous campaign experience, Vice President, etc. Trump threw all of that out of whack, which ruffled the feathers of dozens of career politicians in both parties. Even worse for them, he commands such a groundswell of grassroots support, fomenting a rare populist cultural swing that hasn't happened since Reagan and FDR. FDR's populism was created by crisis and mass control of the media. Trump's was created despite the established media, by leveraging the internet and his long career in business and entertainment. The worst possible outcome for the establishment sell-outs in DC would have been a 2-term Trump, followed by whomever his VP would be in 2024 with his blessing. This is why they threw everything at him possible, short of assassination like they did to Reagan.
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  8611.  @thomasdonovan3580  Putin was planning on invading Finland anyway. One of his foreign ministry secretaries was running his mouth about the new plans already in the 2000s. Russia didn’t invade Ukraine over possible NATO membership, but because Putin lost his puppet, Yanukovych, and Putin had been using Ukraine for a personal bank through embezzlement of Ukrainian revenue through various companies, including Burisma. As long as Yanukovych was in power, Putin was happy, along with Biden, Obama, and all the other stooges who were on Putin’s payroll. Look at the Panama papers for further evidence of what I’m talking about. Finns know that without a mutual defense pact, they would be seriously damaged by Russia at a minimum, with a giant loss of population. The Ukrainian refugee crisis is 2x the Finnish population, for example. The US didn’t drive a wedge between Russia and EU. EU nations got in front of that on their own, outside of the influence of puppet Biden or Obama. The US has been in strategic withdrawal from Europe since 1992, after Desert Storm and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Eastern Europe came begging to join NATO because, unlike the comfortable Germans, French, and UK, they didn’t buy into “the end of history” silliness that was being spewed from Brussels, London, New York, and DC. The Eastern Europeans’ instinct was of course correct, and all the talking heads and academics in the US and Western Europe who thought we were done with the old ways were wrong. This should have been clear already with Yugoslavia. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, most knew the gig was up.
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  8668.  @Meatlooaf  The conclusion I came to is that the Gripen program was fundamentally an appeasement to Riksdag (Swedish Parliament). The Riksdag expected to live in peace forever, and didn’t provide the budget necessary for what Sweden actually needs. They also placed the burden on Saab for FMS, so that foreign sales would help finance much of the program. The reason for this was primarily the excessive sustainment costs associated with the JAS-37 Viggen in all of its variants. Viggen was actually a very high-capability platform ahead of its time in many ways, but had an engine that was cobbled together with a Pratt & Whitney JT8D core, with an added high bypass cold stage (for a fighter), with an afterburner and thrust-reverser system that had weight-on-nosewheel activation option for STOL. The complexities that arose from the Viggen series left the Riksdag with a sustainment budget that really frustrated them, and almost half of parliament wanted to kill Saab’s aerospace fighter-building division altogether. Moving forward, Saab would be under a very restrictive budget to not only produce a cheap, lightweight fighter nowhere near the size and weight of the Viggen, but that would promise low MMHPFH. Saab had only one choice, to promise what they could not achieve, otherwise they would be done building fighters. They also would be required to combine the various mission sets of the Viggen interceptor, reconnaissance, strike and trainer variants into JAS-39A/B, (J A S standing for each of those mission sets in Swedish). The Gripen was under-powered from the start from a 4th Gen perspective, because 2 motors would have increased the airframe weight, cost, and complexity like on Rafale and Typhoon, but would have exceeded what was normal for lightweight teen series. Size and being underpowered really prevented the Gripen from being a worthy competitor to any other 4th Gen fighter, so the only FMS contracts it “won” were due to bribery. Saab’s marketing firm was fined $400 million in ITAR court for these crimes, which they pled guilty to in order to prevent further investigation into the South African and Thai deals. ITAR came into play because most of the Gripen’s critical technology is from US/NATO countries. With the Brazilian deal for Gripen E/F, a Saab subsidiary paid $740,000 into the outgoing President’s son’s bank account, which has been prominent news in Brazil. In every serious NATO or foreign country with a decent budget, the Gripens have lost every fighter competition. Czechia and Hungary were a result of bribes.
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  8670.  @Meatlooaf  I consider Norway to be one of the most serious NATO countries when it comes to defense, because they deal with the Russian Air, sea, and submarine threat on a regular basis. They rejected the Gripen A and Gripen E both times because they learned that they would be footing the bill for an undeveloped, lower capability platform that was being falsely advertised. Anytime you see win/loss ratios referred to from exercises, they are rarely given in any context. For example, Finnish Air Force has repeatedly humiliated Swedish Air Force, not only with Hornets vs Gripens, but even in Hawks vs Gripens. They just don't talk about it because Finns are pretty silent on capabilities. The Finns are extremely focused on A2A and train for that mission set harder than most, so they have very capable pilots in that space. Swedes really excelled at low level in the A-37 Viggen, to the extent of flying much lower and faster than most NATO A2G/strike squadrons. They were very respected in that mission set. They were at least decent in the interceptor role in the J-37 Viggen and previous J-35 Draken, comparable to the US F-106A and RCAF F-101 Interceptor NORAD profiles. Gripen is a new capability set for Sweden because it's multirole, so they've been adapting to creating a multirole mission training syllabus much later than the US or UK. This was obvious at subsequent Red Flag exercises where Gripen C/D joined Blue Air for strike missions. The anti-ship role is very important for Sweden, so it makes sense for them to train to that.
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  8673.  @Meatlooaf  My family is from Finland and I have studied the FiAF history, have friends in FiAF, and have worked with the Finnish Defense Forces from 2005-2016 in preparation for what’s happening now. Check out FiAF history in WWII and their kill ratios. Gripen didn’t exist when F-16 MSIP was launched in the late 1970s. Multiple NATO nations were looking for replacements for their F-5A/Bs and F-104Gs, which is where the F-16 came into play. Gripen C/D first came to Red Flag in 2008 if I recall. Since they didn’t have their A2G capabilities developed yet, they could only be used with Red Air, which is pretty unique to allow foreign partners to join up with Red Air. By 2013, we had worked with Swedish Air Force enough to get them FLIR targeting pod integrated with GBU-12 so they could come work their new multirole/strike-focused skill set in a vast range complex that isn’t available in Europe. There wasn’t anything special about Gripens integrated into Blue Air other than that, and in honesty, would normally be seen as a force-reducer than enabler. The hype in the AvGeek world about Gripen in Red Flag was mainly to boost relations between Sweden and NATO, so everyone at RF stayed pretty hushed about it. Red Flag is not a competition where particular airframes are tested against others, but a massive choreography of air component forces working together as part of Blue Air against a highly-capable Red Air threat, who do a great job of replicating real regional threat air forces around the world.
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  8675.  @Meatlooaf  I’m not saying Gripen is bad, just that it is constrained by the limits I described, placing some of its performance in the 3rd Generation (T/W, take-off roll, climb-out, but with less payload). A Gripen C even with AIM-120C5 will out-stick the 1980s-era Su-27/R-27, but that’s not a high bar. I think Sweden would have been better off economically and capability-wise joining in ECA/EFA, Rafale, or just buying/building F-16s or F/A-18s in the 1980s/90s. Gripen kind of painted them into a corner. Within their theater AOR, it’s still a capable platform with distributed squadrons operating out of dispersed basing, but like we’ve seen in every conflict where IADS and modern fighters are present, you can expect attrition with 4th and 4.5 Gen platforms. The US impetus behind NATO really wanted to wane after 1992, but instead, NATO saw a new wave of Eastern European nations who hungered for a mutual defense pact against Russia’s inevitable aggression, so as the US drew down our permanent basing in Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, and Netherlands, the Eastern Europeans were begging for all the FMS and support they could afford...plus some. Sweden and Finland weren’t really in serious consideration for NATO membership because both enjoyed a sense of autonomy and independence, not wanting to be obligated to NATO treaty protocols. They still contributed forces to Afghanistan in limited capacities, and Finland has done UN Peacekeeping operations for decades, but they were content to be mostly left alone. What types of fighters they have had no real big picture influence on NATO membership, since both have been training with NATO quite a lot over the past 2 decades with some degree of NATO interoperability, especially Finland. An interesting counter to that is US sales of JASSM to Finland even before the UK got them, employed from F/A-18Cs.
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  8724.  @kevinsutube1p528  The former Soviet officer, Pavel Sudoplatov, who managed Council for a Livable World as part of the NKVD and KGB's "Administration for Special Tasks", revealed its true purpose in a book after the collapse, co-written with his University of Moscow Economics Professor son, Anatoli. Szilard was about to be arrested back in the early 1960s because he had been passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets all along. The Soviets had so many moles in the FBI, they were able to steer their assets in advance to prevent them from being arrested, or sacrifice them to bolster the credibility of new high-level moles. Zsilard's value was enormous if they could have him switch gears from technical espionage, to political activism based on nuclear alarmism. That is why they directed him to found a front group called The Council for a Livable World. Their strategy was to first focus CFALW money on Senatorial elections in States with tiny populations where their campaign donations and bundling could have more influence on the outcome. Enter a young pedophile named Joe Biden in 1972, and the State of Delaware. What was Biden's first conspicuous action in office in 1973? He traveled to Leningrad to meet with Senior Soviet leadership so they could talk about policy, while showing off their new trophy to each other. Biden returned to the US and immediately began cheerleading against the B-1A, which was supposed to replace the B-52 fleet. After he, Admiral Stansfield Turner (DCI under Carter who had been recruited into CIA by one of the original NKVD double agents in CIA), other closet CPUSA Congressmen, and Carter cancelled the B-1A in 1977, Joe was then tasked with getting the US to reduce its nuclear arsenal while the Soviets built theirs up under Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. He returned to USSR, that time to Moscow in 1979 for this purpose. You can see photos of this yourself with an image search. Joe Biden has literally been working for the Soviets his entire career.
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  8735.  @SerratedEdges1  Separate the political decisions from the physical reality of the force structure and recognize that Canada does and has had some type of fighter force structure. The 2 big demands for Canada’s Air Force are: 1. NORAD airspace defense from incoming threats aircraft, historically bombers. 2. NATO coalition commitments and interoperability, particularly in the strike role, but also A2A (Iceland rotation as one modern example). Canada was all set to be one of the base layer partners for JSF, funded hundreds of millions into JSF, and currently supplies subsystems and components for JSF with 1400 different firms/supply chain points. Then Trudeau was tasked by his backers to destroy Canada’s participation in JSF with an orchestrated media campaign that continues to this day. Who benefits from this interruption in Canada’s JSF participation? For starters, Russia is the primary beneficiary because it delays or eliminates Canada’s air defense and se surface defense posture by preventing Canada from having the joint sensor interlacing situational awareness that comes with JSF. This is substantial, and includes detection and tracking of low-earth orbit satellites, to sub-surface thermal signature contacts in the Arctic Ocean. Combined with Canada’s maritime patrol aircraft, the JSF would fundamentally change the nature of naval threat presence and operations in Canada’s territorial waters. For air interception missions, the threat now has to deal with being intercepted by fighters they cannot sea, in both peacetime response tests and real world. This has massive implications on the Russian bomber force and their inability to deal with that type of system. The only real way for Russia to deal with JSF is by leveraging political and journalistic warfare against the Canadian people and parliament to handicap Canada out out of the JSF program.
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  8742.  @ManuelGarcia-ww7gj  With Finland right on the front of latest Russian Super Flankers and Su-57 using network-centric warfare, you think they might want to hear unbiased reports from pilots flying some of the actual aircraft they are considering. Supply chain for Gripen is longer because the most important subsystem in the Gripen is the General Electric F414 afterburning turbofan, which is then modified in Sweden since Sweden does not, nor has it ever had the industrial capacity to manufacture fighter engine cores. F-35A engine is made by Pratt & Whitney in the US, and is proving to be one of the most reliable fighter engines ever made, with very long service life. Transfer of engines would be direct, vs the indirect supply chain from US to Sweden to Finland with the Gripen. The F135-PW-100 motor already has a mid-section upgrade module developed by Pratt & Whitney that increases the max thrust from 43,000lb, to 47,300lbs and even better fuel economy. Let’s look at GlobalEye. It’s a Canadian base model business jet that is modified with all the electronic systems in Sweden, using Rolls Royce engines made in the UK. Sweden takes delivery of complete Bombardier Global 6000 business jet, then tears them down, strengthens the airframe and wings, adds a taller vertical tail, AESA radar antennae, and electronic sensors and systems, at considerable cost for the customer. UAE spent $1.27 billion just for 2 of them and spares/support. So now you’re talking about multiple production chains that don’t even start in Sweden, that Sweden is totally reliant upon other countries for not only propulsion, but even airframes and total flight systems before they make modifications. You also have added ancillary costs with the Gripen F 2-seat aircraft since you need 2 emergency escape systems, cockpits, and control interface. With the single-seat JSF, you have a European-wide logistics base with depot-level facilities already in-place in the UK, Italy, and multiple nearby NATO countries who have already adopted it. That means more spare parts than Sweden will ever be able to make, with a common engine/radar/EW suite/IR sensors, and open architecture upgradeability that benefits from multinational buy-in. The more you analyze the Gripen E/F and GlobalEye option, the more you see how there are not only significant risks from a logistics and operational cost perspective, but significant risk from a threat perspective on top of that. It looks really good at first because people think the F-35 is costlier from a unit flyaway perspective, and assume the the Gripen is cheaper, without even thinking about how it will deal with Su-57 networked with Super Flankers.
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  8746.  Jörgen Persson  F-35s have been and currently are flying combat missions in CENTCOM. Su-35s aren't trying to get near anybody or violate ROE, so your question isn't valid. To get an idea of how well a combat aircraft will perform in A2A, we can look at hundreds of real-world samples of A2A kills in several aircraft and squadron community types, then see how those aircraft performed in dissimilar threat training before they went to war. Let's take the F-15, as an example. When the initial F-15 started its tactics development against aggressors at Nellis, flown by the best F-4E pilots with actual combat experience, it had a 1:1 exchange ratio against the F-5E, mainly because the F-5 is so hard to see. In subsequent Red Flag exercises over the years, there was always a loss ratio. In actual combat, it is now at 108 to 0 losses, most of those being Israeli AF and USAF against a wide range of Soviet and French-built fighters/interceptors. Next we can look at the F-16, which is now at least 88 to 1 or 2 A2A kills real-world. F-35A in Red Flag has had 15:1, 17:1, and 20:1 kill ratios in the early Red Flags, and that was with Red Air regenerating after being killed trying to game the system. F-15C+ & F-16C aggressors even with IRST pods basically fly blind and then get killed without any SA, same as with the Raptor. The Su-35 is in the same boat. It doesn't have as good of a radar as the F-15C+, but has better kinematics and endurance. None of that helps it to see first. The IRST is almost useless because of IR VLO on the F-35.
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  8748.  Jörgen Persson  As far as actual combat missions, they're keeping things very close to the vest because it's like having a stacked hand of Aces, Queens, and Kings. Air planners and pilots report that USMC, USAF, UK, and Israeli AF JSF have exceeded their expectations so significantly, it is causing fundamental shifts in how we look at the entire force structure, training, tactics, and coalition interoperability. USAF F-35As that were tasked with another mission inadvertently detected and geolocated strategic missile systems in an area far away from where they were, even while dedicated strategic ISR platforms were actively searching for them without luck. The implications for Finland are that we immediately get to plug into a strategic networked sensor web that is shared by Poland, Norway, Denmark, UK, Italy, Netherlands, and the US, without signing any military alliance. That alone totally changes the national defense strategy for Finland and places an immense burden on Russia if they were trying to attack or even violate Finnish airspace and sea surface. The Gripen E does not bring anywhere near this level of capability or MADL interoperability to the strategic picture, and instead goes backwards with the 4th Gen fighter-AWACS system approach to SA/ISR, with data links and bolt-on recce pods if you want to configure the Gripen for ISR. Every JSF is configured for ISR already and rivals the combined capes of dedicated ISR, AWACS, and recce platforms. It does all that while being a nightmare for the Su-57, Super Flankers, and S-400. Gripen E does none of this.
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  8779.  @michaelbee2165  Russia never really could integrate with the West though because of geography, climate, and infrastructure. They never had the infrastructure to support mass distribution of materials to Western markets, and still don't because literally none of their sea ports will allow heavy displacement freight ships. That means not only do shipping companies have to travel farther to Primorsk and ports within the Black Sea, but they aren't able to realize much profit due to the logistics associated with having to offload freight from mid-sized ships to heavy displacement vessels. When it comes to rail lines, their rail width is larger/wider than Western European rails, so they're not compatible. This would require more effort to offload rail freight at hubs, which substantially increases costs. Finland is one of the only nations with Russian rail standard, since the Russian Governor of Finland in the 1860s oversaw the construction of Russian railroads there when Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia. One thing you'll learn about Russia is that any time their national leadership tried to adopt Western reforms, it got dicey. Peter the Great was the only one who really successfully adopted Western technology and ideas to improve Russia without being seen as weak, but he also relocated the capital into Finnic areas on the Baltic. Katherine the Great started out open to Western European reforms, which backfired on her, so she reversed course and cracked down to the latter half of her long rule, resulting in one of the most stable times in Russian history. Gorbachev was a reformer, which triggered a 2nd time of troubles in Russian history where everything fell apart during the Yeltsin years. So from the Russian perspective, they are extremely averse to Western reforms for very valid reasons. The only worse leadership experiences they have had than the 1990s were the abdication of the throne by Nicholas II during The Great War, and the Time of Troubles from 1598-1613, with the death of Fyodr I, the invasion of Polish-Lithuanians, a famine that killed 1/3 of Russia, anarchy, regional eruptions of rebellions, and an end to the Rurik dynasty. From the Russian perspective, Putin was a godsend who pulled them out of the disaster of the 1990s. From the Western perspective, Putin looks like an adventurous dictator needlessly seeking power to stroke his ego. It's far more complex than that, but people aren't even familiar with the geography or basic history of the region, so they will believe whatever they are told by the dominant media in their sphere of influence. Russians are rallying behind their strong leader. Europe is rallying behind Ukraine because they see a people who want independence from an aggressive and bullying authoritarian regime.
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  8833.  @shaneviola8848  The Congress was supposed to be comprised of neighbor statesmen who go serve for 2 years, then come back home. The Senate was supposed to be comprised of State-appointed representatives who spent a little more time there. Large financial interests quickly saw a way to circumvent the system by getting Congress to not limit the number of terms, while accepting pay-offs through their campaigns and endless campaign-financing efforts. You could be a total failure as an attorney, bankrupt, but if you were willing to sell out your neighbors and vote for corporate interests, then you had a guaranteed job in the House or Senate, and the lobbyists would spend whatever it took to keep you there. We don’t need that kind of “expertise”. A solution to this would be a grassroots political training program run in the States, where neighborhood-selected Congressmen get informed about what to watch out for, how the slimy lobbyists try to bribe you softly, and how to represent your State better. There would be a continual periodic meeting with Representatives and former Representatives to help ensure the people are being heard and supported in the US Congress. This crap where all the major lobbyists funnel millions of dollars to both parties, then have them play these charades about being opposed to each other to tap into the American spirit of competitiveness and gamesmanship has got to stop. They keep us divided and at each other, when they are the culprits behind many of our woes. We can do better as Americans, no need for some bogus party.
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  8853. When I looked into Burisma’s actual revenue, there wasn’t much there. Burisma was being used by Putin as a laundering vehicle for illegal funds from industries like human trafficking, arms sales, racketeering, and typical Russian corruptsia. Putin was very motivated to conceal what was going on with Burisma, and had Elena Baturina wire $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca in Feb 2014 because he was about to lose his puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, who was providing services to Putin from Ukraine. They sent negotiators to the Obama WH in March 2014 to set up Hunter’s no-show job at Burisma, and Hunter was officially on the board by May. Putin knew that a democratically-elected pro-Ukrainian president would wrestle power away from his meddling in Kiev and Ukraine, so he placed Hunter there as a roadblock to future investigations. The new Ukrainian President appointed Viktor Shokin as the chief prosecutor, who picked up the existing evidence of massive corruption inflicted on Ukraine by Russia through plants and moles in Kiev under Yanukovych. Hunter’s job was act as a disincentive to look into Burisma, but Poroshenko and Shokin went forward anyway, so Putin leaned on Biden to demand that Poroshenko fire Shokin or Ukraine would not get $1 Billion in IMF aid. Obama, the European Central Bank, and IMF all were putting pressure on Poroshenko to fire Shokin because Shokin had evidence that was international in scope that exposed the financial systems of the world being in-bed with Putin’s money-laundering of human-trafficking and other high crimes. He tried to have Viktor Shokin assassinated twice, first by sniper fire into his office, then by poisoning which he almost didn’t survive. After the poisoning incident, Shokin went into hiding.
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  8875.  @RefurbishedPrototype  Being against authoritarian rule does not make me a member of ANTIFA. ANTIFA is not anti-fascist. ANTIFA is a front for foreign interference in the US rule of law and peaceful society, designed to instigate rioting and a police response that will be portrayed as heavy-handed. The communists learned from their failed campaign with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Weather Underground in the 1960s and 1970s, so instead of having ANTIFA build actual high explosives as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn did and bomb Federal buildings and police stations, they’re instructing ANTIFA activists to make silly little fireworks bombs and to get in the faces of people, threaten people, use shields and flags to conceal blunt object bearers who then selectively strike and injure peaceful people, thus causing as much social unrest as possible without openly engaging in easily-identified violent acts. It’s a subtle strategy more refined than the Weathermen bombing and murder campaign. The ultimate goal is to overthrow the US government, which will then be filled with a fascist totalitarian regime. The ANTIFA activists don’t know this because they don’t know history. They will be the first ones rounded up and executed just as Lenin and Mao did to their peer revolutionaries after they took power. Dolloff and his 9news “cameraman” were an evolution of this tactic. They penetrated a peaceful group of patriots for the purpose of agitating them to violence, but Dolloff went off-script and murdered one of the protestors exercising his right to assemble. This will bring more attention to ANTIFA and their tactics, and now distance the population even more from them.
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  8960.  @extraacct478  Static, fixed RCS values are the things of a more amateur discussion of course, and can’t be corrected fully in the open. Senior sources have used physical representations before as references, without compromising any recorded values and spike locations. Things like small birds, golf balls, marbles, etc. have been mentioned. In practical terms, it’s ok to say that you won’t bee seen on any airborne threat Radar or ground-based Radar network until it’s far too late in the BVR or weapons separation timelines for A2A and A2S. F-22 test pilots have stated that they can orient the F-22 to cause a spike return as they offset, then turn back hot onto an airborne threat and disappear from their Radar as a tactic. It was also revealed that the F-117A went through 3 different generations of RAM, so VLO technologies don’t remain static even within a particular production design, even after it has been produced. I would not be surprised if the combat-coded F-22As have a new generation of RAM techniques applied to them, but this is speculation. It’s one of the most time-consuming aspects of the Raptor fleet maintenance, while not much of a contributing factor to MMHPFH on the F-35A. JSF uses much better VLO technologies that have hands-free maintainability/durability incorporated into the structures, rather than having to be applied all the time. F-35A MMHPFH are 3.5-4.5hrs, which is stunning. On the F-16 fleet, we have seen 11-14hrs, not including ancillary combat systems like the FLIR, ECM, and HTS pods.
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  8979.  @aidanwilliams9452  Dassault openly told India they are "committed to getting the CPFH down to $25,000". That doesn't include FLIR or Recce pods. There's a lot of scrutiny on the Indian deal because the unit program cost is $213 million per with weapons and spares. DoD Comptroller publishes annual detailed reimbursable rate costs for every aircraft across the services, which spells out exactly how much it costs to operate each one with and without personnel costs that day, no long-term amortized costs or snack bars, golf courses, or theaters snuck in. Funny things in those reports pop up, like F-35B and F-35C being cheaper to reimburse, while USN Adversary F-16As cost more than USAF F-16Cs on the same tables. F-35A hourly reimbursable rate was $17,963 without personnel costs, $18,065 with personnel. You can manipulate CPFH in so many different ways as to be meaningless. The most blatant facts that are being hidden from click-bait articles and discussions are safety records. That blows the whole story wide open and forces people to start to see something interesting, especially laymen with no real aerospace background. Over 690 F-35s have been delivered. How many flight hours have been flown? How many have crashed? What's the Class A mishap rate? How many pilots have died? Answers: 430,000hrs 4 crashes in 14 years and 10 months of flight 1 pilot killed in Japan off the coast, controlled flight into terrain (water) Now compare that with the F-16. First 10 years of F-16 service.... 143 crashes/total losses, 71 fatalities. F/A-18? 100 losses, 20 fatalities first 10 years
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  9017.  @jaxastro3072  Whatever pilot you spoke to simply doesn’t know any facts about the F-35 then, or this story is fabricated. The F-35A has a longer mission radius than any current US 4th Gen fighter. It does not need or carry external fuel tanks. It has far greater range than the current Hornets, F-15C, and F-15E. Former senior F-15C and F-15E pilots have all stated that they have more legs in F-35As that they fly now. I thought the “short range” fallacy had been pretty well-debunked long ago, but it seems that it still hasn’t died. F-35A internal fuel is 18,250 lbs. F-16C internal fuel is 7,000 lbs. Always configured for combat with 2x370gal for an additional 5,000 lbs, brining total to 12,000 lbs. F-15C internal fuel is 13,850 lbs. Always configured for combat with2x600gal for an additional 8,000 lbs bringing total to 21,850 lbs. F-15E internal fuel is 13,550 lbs. Always configured with 2 CFTs and 2x600 EFTs for an additional 18,000lbs, bringing total to 31,550 lbs. Once you hang all that parasitic drag on the legacy fighters, their fuel consumption goes way up. F-35A’s fuel fraction is huge, much greater than any other single engine fighter design. None of that fuel causes parasitic drag on the airframe because it’s all internal. None of the 4th Gen fighters operate normally without EFTs, so their aerodynamic designs are compromised in favor of adding some range to them when carrying draggy weapons and pods off pylons. Next fallacy: Low speed. None of the 4th Gen fighters when configured for combat can reach their maximum placard limits, and never have been able to. The fastest of them all, the F-15A, was never able to reach Mach 2.5 even stripped of paint, Radar, pylons, HUD, all combat avionics, etc. That was the Streak Eagle time-to-climb demonstrator in the 1970s. It reached Mach 2.2 during those runs. Hornets and F-16s rarely even get near 1.5 Mach when lightly configured. When carrying FLIR pods, ECM pods, EFTs, bombs, and missiles, they normally don’t even go supersonic. F-15E is largely a subsonic platform in its standard configuration with CFTs, EFTs, and bombs. F-35A is a Mach 1.6 capable platform all the time when configured with many of the standard weapons loads currently used on the Hornet and F-16 (4-6 AAMs, 2-8 A2G weapons, FLIR, ECM). It has faster start-up due to the IPP, faster take-off when configured, faster climb rate, and faster cruise speed at profile altitudes. These are the facts, so the math doesn’t add-up when someone says it isn’t as capable. It is far more capable in the raw performance metrics that we use to measure 4th Gen fighters, and on top of all of that, it isn’t G-limited when configured. Gripen is in even a worse boat in that regard because it doesn’t match any of the 4th Gen fighter raw performance capabilities for QRA. Take a heavy F-15C with 2x600 gallon wing tanks fully loaded with 8 A2A missiles. That F-15C can take off in 12 seconds after break release and can zoom-climb up to cruise altitude in 30 seconds. A lightly-loaded Gripen C even with only 1 EFT and 4 AAMs takes 18-21 seconds, and struggles to climb. They can’t go into the vertical because their thrust-to-weight is so poor and anemic. These are basic mathematical facts that get overlooked by the majority of the AvGeek world, which means our math skills have deteriorated that badly even among the nerds. Gripen E has even worse T/W compared to Gripen C because Gripen E starts off with 2200lbs more empty weight, and 2300lb more internal fuel, while only getting 3,900lb mx thrust increase from RM12 (18,100 lb) to F414-GE-39E (22,000 lb). It has less payload than the existing F/A-18 by quite a large margin. Current F/A-18 can carry 12 AAMs and 1 EFT on centerline for a pure A2A high magazine depth mission if it wanted to. Climate advantage to Sweden fallacy: Sweden doesn’t have anywhere near the experience testing and building fighters that will operate in extreme cold conditions. The USAF is the king of that game, with over 70 years of experience in Alaska, Northeast US, Norway, and Iceland, let alone all the REFORGER exercises, permanent basing (UK), and rotations with NATO countries. The cumulative flight and maintenance hours aren’t even close. Of all the modern fighter designs, none have been subjected to extreme climatic testing and validation than the 3 JSF series, including the F-35A. F-35As are currently operating from permanent basing locations in Alaska, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, and Japan, while Finland just selected the F-35A Block 4 with drag chute after their extensive 7-year H-X challenge. Gripen has zero range advantage over F-35A. If you’re looking at Wikipedia for performance data on the Gripen, it won’t be helpful to understanding anything about this subject. Saab has been caught misrepresenting the Gripen so many times as to be laughable now. The Gripen is an unintended scam that Saab was forced into when Riksdag set such tight budgetary restrictions on the program, leaving them with a really limited choice for propulsion.
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  9146. USAF also was involved with ASTOVL and SSF for disbursed basing considerations in USAFE and PACOM. That all started in 1983. I would counter your statements by stating that the F-35A blends better than F-16, Hornet, and MiG-29 maneuvering and transonic performance with A-7D combat radius, which is unprecedented. A/F-X was basically a Stealth Hornet replacement with a demand for more range, and they got that in droves with the F-35C. If Congress had funded the 6 different pre-JAST programs, that would have been a real boondoggle. Each would duplicate the other in most metrics, and the complainers would be arguing that we should have made 3 variants for each service using the same radars, propulsion, sensors, and subsystems. There were extensive combined engineering and budgetary analyses that came to these conclusions. There are big differences in the airframes and long-term subsystems of each JSF variant, with as much commonality as possible between frequent replacement parts. It's genius really from a logistics, training, and sustainment perspective. Had we broken the programs up further into a non-VLO USMC STOVL, USAF MRF, and Navy A/F-X, the combined costs of those development, transition, acquisition, and sustainment costs would have been larger than what is currently projected for JSF. The synergy between services and multinational partners for JSF has allowed benefits from these efforts to be shared across the variants, which isn't possible with independent programs sourcing systems on separate tracks. The joint forces comms and connectivity allowed by JSF is fundamentally making us better as allies from a technology-driven standpoint that filters out cultural bias and noise by getting rid of most voice traffic. JSF is a massive success that is being targeted heavily by our adversaries and their stooges within our own Nations because they know and appreciate how devastating it is to their current and projected defense systems.
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  9187. The Ukraine “Special Military Operation" was supposed to be a lightning-fast seizure of Kiev and the coastal sea ports, predicated on the removal of Zelensky by Biden. Remember, “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo.” Biden played a key role in opening the door for Putin, but Zelensky didn’t play along, and threw the whole invasion into a long-term slug-out of conventional forces. People, including Generals and military historians, rarely discuss or consider the critical roles that traitors play in major strategic moves. Biden has been on the Soviet payroll since 1972, when they financed his hopeless campaign into the Senate to act as a mole in the US who would vote against and cheerlead to weaken US defense programs and positions on START II. Having traitors inside your opponent’s castle court is a basic tenet of Eastern thinking. Russia has hordes of traitors on their payroll in Germany, the UK, France, Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, etc. When you coordinate an invasion with strategic moves from leaders within the targeted nations, the invasions have much greater success. Look at what they did to Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. How many EU Members of Parliament do you think are on Russian payroll or compromise? How many NATO staff members and Generals? Remember that the German BND was headed by Reinhardt Gehlen, who the Soviet NKVD turned at the end of the war before BND was even created once West Germany was formed. Russia’s deck of cards is so extensive, that they use traitors’ sons and family members as pons in puppet regimes in other nations even. For example, Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma. Burisma was being investigated for embezzling funds and routing them to Putin. That’s why Vice President Biden told Ukraine that they wouldn’t get a billion dollars from the US until the prosecutor was fired. Burisma’s CEO was living in exile avoiding prosecution for these crimes at the time. Russia has invaded all of these territories throughout history, and they were almost always part of an empire to counter Russia. It didn’t matter to Russia, they invaded anyway.
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  9191.  @crawkn  Putin didn’t come into power like that at all. Putin as placed in the Yeltsin presidency as a Deputy Prime Minster after the 1st Chechen War, by the KGB Oligarchs who took over Russia’s main industries after the collapse. They recognized Russia was in a state of chaos and needed to stabilize the nation under authoritarian rule, which Yeltsin was not capable of exercising. Putin managed the 2nd Chechen War with a scorched earth policy to appear to be the new strong man that Russians are used to having, and Yeltsin resigned on Dec 31, 1999 on TV, announcing Putin as their new President. https://youtu.be/ZVitEiKkRZ8 Putin was financing Hillary through Clinton Global Initiative. He didn’t take Trump seriously because all the media said Hillary would win, and Putin had given $363 million to Clinton Global in exchange for Bill to give speeches , but really to bribe Hillary, Obama, and Biden to sign off on Putin’s access to US and Canadian uranium mining rights with the Uranium One deal. There were hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands, with whistleblowers/informants inside the companies reporting to James Comey’s FBI (Director from 2013-2017 synonymous with Obama WH and Hillary State Department). https://youtu.be/6qTQJXni48k The sources for Biden corruption evidence are whistle-blowers, business partners, and Hunter’s own communications, as well as VP Joe Biden bragging about getting the Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired with an open bribe to the Ukrainian President, using US international assistance money allocated by the Obama WH. He isn’t even trying to hide it: https://youtu.be/UXA--dj2-CY I have disapproved of Biden since the 1980s, just as the Democrat Party laughed him out of the 1988 primaries. Especially after I learned about his treason regarding the B-1A program, working with the Russians through Council For A Livable World, I disliked him even more. I also disliked his calling for over 300 new death penalty sentences for inner city blacks, and how he talked about forced bussing would create racial jungles. I disliked his co-sponsoring legislation from KKK Grand Masters in the Senate. I especially disliked his drafting of the Domestic Surveillance program after Oklahoma City Bombing, which was signed into law as the PATRIOT ACT by George W. Bush after 9/11. The evidence is in the open, not special or insider. Biden literally bragged about being corrupt and told people not to assumed he wasn’t corrupt, because he’s literally that stupid. I’ve been watching him run his mouth for over 4 decades, and only stupid things come out of it as a rule, even before he had the aneurysms.
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  9192.  @crawkn  Ukraine has been governed as a puppet state of Russia for centuries, and went back and forth with puppet presidents after the Soviet collapse. Ukrainian people wanted to trade with Europe and grow their economy like Poland. Putin had Yanukovych as his puppet, who basically managed the flow of Ukrainian industry revenue embezzlement to Russia to keep Ukraine subverted. Yanukovych violated the will of the people, who all voted in favor of trade with EU by 79% in 2013. Instead, he signed onto Putin's Russia-Eurasia Economic Pact in late 2013. That triggered the 4 month Euromaiden revolution and protests, leading to the ousting of Yanukovych in March 2014. Ukraine began a systematic house-cleaning of these Russian-loyalist plants in government and industry, including the investigation into Burisma by chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Guess when Hunter was brought on board with Burisma? Spring 2014. That would insulate Burisma since Hunter's father was Vice President at the time in the Obama WH, with bought/paid-off Hillary as SECSTATE. Russia did everything in its power to ensure Ukraine didn't have control over their own energy, because it would then be able to compete with Russia by providing natural gas to Europe, as a bilateral trade partner with no territorial ambitions against European states. Joe Biden threw a wrench in Ukraine's government attempts of cleaning house. He wasn't helping to fight corruption, but to instead enforce further Russian subversion of Ukraine. The timeline and facts are extremely damning for the Bidens. Trump is the only US President who presided over US forces destroying Russian forces in Syria in 2018 at the Battle of Khasham. US F-22As, B-52Gs, F-15Es, AH-64Ds, and MQ-9s dropped JDAMs, Hellfires, combined with M777 artillery, HIMARS, and AC-130 gunship fire for 6 hours on Russian Wagner mercenaries and their Syrian Army battle group who attacked US Special Operations Forces over the Euphrates River. Stories about Trump "licking Putin's boots" in the leftist media were projection. Soviets hijacked US media starting in the 1950s with the CIA's Mockingbird program. Look at all the money that changed hands between Putin, the Clintons, and Bidens. Hunter was business partners with the former first Lady of Moscow in her sex and human-trafficking ring. Biden corruption and treason is in the open. Iran just "obtained" US shipments of Javelins and Stinger missiles by the way. It took over 6 months for Biden WH to send a lot of the promised military aid to Ukraine. Much of it came from critical stockpiles in the UK, Poland, and Finland.
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  9194.  @crawkn  Russia has been meddling in US elections and politics since no later than the 1930s. It’s a running operation of active subversion that is top priority by their intelligence services. They have helped elect over 420 Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and US Presidents since 1962 using Council for a Livable World and other front groups. If you try to see these events through the lens of US-internal political partisanship, it will prevent you from viewing the big picture, though it is true that Russia/Soviets prefer to co-opt Democrat candidates. They target everyone though. Quid pro Quo was Uranium One to help Putin revitalize his nuclear forces, not soft corruption. Taking heat off a company Putin had corrupted to benefit Russia (Burisma), while subverting Ukrainian independence is not soft corruption, especially when the Vice President and his son are acting as lead men to that effort. Biden exercised corrupt influence to get Shokin fired with a massive bribe/carrot-stick approach using US foreign aid money to Ukraine, which benefitted Putin. There isn’t any Russian propaganda exposing their high-level moles in the US, but disinformation spread through their media mouthpieces in the MSM to distract and attack those who present a threat to them. Russia also focuses on fanning the flames of political division within the US through their assets in the MSM and now online to create chaos and agitation. They have always been involved in AGITPROP, especially through the universities and media. Their goal is to balkanize the US so that our forward-deployed combat power in Europe can be weakened, allowing them to take territories on their borders to act as buffers from the historical invasion routes into Russia. It makes zero sense for Russia to hurt their chess pieces in the WH, Pentagon, and Congress. In fact, Putin endorsed Biden in the 2020 election. He stated his reasoning was that since Biden is a Democrat, and the Democrat party is more ideologically-aligned with socialism, it made more sense since he is also ideologically socialist from the Soviet times.
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  9250.  @kathrynck  My great uncle worked for North American skinning the P-51 during the War, and F-86 after that, while my grandpa worked on Manhatten without even realizing it. He died in a mine later. My step-grandpa worked for Douglas as a machinist. He ended up making Titanium parts for the A-3 Skywarrior and A-4 Skyhawk as a foreman for Douglas (refueling booms and tailhooks). My dad, my mom, and her cousin worked on many DoD programs at Edwards, and I was DoD, never worked for an aerospace contractor. Her cousin went to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach on several different programs after that, to include the C-17A. We PCS'd to West Germany during the Cold War to work with the Germans as part of an ongoing international scientific exchange program, that was focused on flight sciences for what would become the Typhoon. We had other US colleagues who were helping with the Tornado at the time, which was plagued with all sorts issues. Came back to Edwards, temporarily were in F-16 CTF, then B-1B, then went out to a Mountain West State to work in the training ranges, some stuff with M-X, back to Edwards on SRAM II (cancelled) and F-16C/D with a brief departure from DoD to a contractor, back into DoD on the F-15 CTF at Edwards, then Global Hawk. I don't think we ever worked on or with a Lockheed program. My grandpa was obviously a Douglas McD guy. I think he was retired before the merge of McDonnell Douglas, but got McD stock which was great for my grandparents, except my aunt and her deadbeat husband stole the $942k after my grandpa died. SRAM II was Boeing. F-16 was General Dynamics and tons of subs. B-1B was Rockwell International, GE, Westinghouse, tons of other subs. F-15 was McD, Pratt & Whitney, and Hughes. We were DoD though, so I never had any sense of contractor loyalty in our homes, other than residue from 2 generations removed with my grandpa. He hadn't worked on airplanes for so long, it didn't really matter. A lot of people think I'm a Lockmart shill, which is funny when you look at all the programs we were on.
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  9251. ​ @mattrogers5188 Biden has been on Russian payroll since 1972. They literally financed his campaign into the Senate through Council for a Livable World, which was a Soviet front political action group started by Szilard. Obama was raised by the Soviets out of the womb. His mother told her college mates she was going to protest the white capitalist patriarchy by getting knocked-up by a black African communist, which is exactly what she did. She then worked for US AID in Indonesia, where Barrack got his citizenship that later allowed him to get into Columbia as a foreign student, since his grades from Occidental were nothing close to Columbia material. Biden was flown to Leningrad in 1973 to be paraded around by Politburo and KGB chiefs as their "cheap b*tch", since they had targeted him for exploitation knowing his huge compromise as a pedophile-something he openly disclosed to his roommate at Syracuse, and what his in-laws discovered about him fairly quickly. They tasked Biden with sabotaging the new B-1A Mach 2+ bomber politically from within the Senate, then got it cancelled in 1977 once Carter came in, and brought in a double agent CIA Director, Stansfield Turner. B-1A was cancelled with the stipulation that its development still be funded, so the Soviets could have the technical data handed over for their Tu-160 copy. Once that was achieved, they had Biden move into SALT II negotiations where the US would disarm, while Soviets continued cranking out warheads and delivery systems in the triad, including the Tu-160 built with US technical data. They flew Biden to Moscow for those talks in 1979. You can image search those. Along the way, the Chicoms expanded their bribery from Ambassador Bush under Nixon, to Biden, using his brother James and son Beau. Hunter came into the picture later after Beau died, and was placed on the board of Burisma in 2014 as an insurance policy for Putin. The extent of treason that exists within the Bush, Biden, and Obama families makes Nixon look like a textbook Boy Scout President.
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  9265.  @mtlb4906  What nobody is telling you in any of the mx articles on F-35 (because they don't know themselves), is that there are different phases of mx. The most common mx is everyday squadron-level before and after flights. USAF F-35A maintainers are already complaining about this that they don't get their hands dirty because the jet basically maintains itself. The next level is phase mx at the Wing, which involves scheduled periodic inspections or major repairs the squadrons can't do. This is much more involved with more access panels removed. The key difference with F-35 here is that Radar Absorbent Material strips that cover certain fuselage seams needs to be removed, then re-applied once the inspections/repairs are complete. The basic flight systems, avionics, and engine on the F-35 are all much easier to maintain than on the Hornet or even the F-16. The upper phase-level mx requires different infrastructure than 4th Gen fighters, and bases have to adjust to that with significant logistics footprint and security for the RAM removal and application. The UK already built an automated laser-etch RAM removal and CNC re-application process hangar for this to cut phase-level mx turnaround, while achieving more consistent work than the manual process from before. This is where a lot of that money in the budget can go towards generating Finnish economy relevant to JSF. Short answer is that you aren't doing phase-level mx on any fighters while being attacked, unless you place your phase shops in underground shelters. The combat-ready jets of any type will be at their disbursed hangars flying missions anyway. The F-35 airframe is more robust than any of the others, having doubled its advertised flight hour stress rating in the intense structural failure testing. The real problem is that you can expect at least 50% of the Gripen Es to not survive Day 1 sorties up against Su-57/Super Flanker/EW platform force mix. So mx is the least of your worries here. Even if it were true that Gripen E only costs half or 1/3rd of what it costs to fly F-35A Block 4s, if you lose 50% of the alert sorties and their pilots in combat on Day 1, you just threw 10 Billion euros in a giant toilet for nothing. You want the Russians losing every fighter, AWACS, and EW platform they throw into Day 1 with a fat, bloody nose questioning whether they should re-attack. While they're doing that decision, precision weapons are catering their runways, S-400 mobile launchers, trawlers in the sea, sea ports, ATC towers, etc. It turns Finland into a Badger. Just leave her alone, continue to do mutually-beneficial trade deals, and nobody gets hurt.
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  9345.  @turhankhan1503  There are at least 9 Keys against the party in the WH right now. 1. You are absolutely correct on Party mandate, as Dems lost seats and Republicans gained in 2022 Mid-Terms to be the majority. FALSE 2. There was no primary contest because the DNC forcibly removed the sitting President and installed Kamala with no delegation. How do we weigh that in the keys? 3. Incumbent was seeking reelection but was replaced with the VP. It’s weird again. 4. There WAS a 3rd Party, who then joined the opposition, and it isn’t just anyone, but a common household name who is the son of the assassinated RFK. This should weigh doubly against the incumbent party. 5. Short term Economy is not strong. FALSE 6. Long term Economy is not strong. DTI, income/housing ratio is way off, inflation, energy, everything costs more. FALSE 7. Major policy change-they never had a mandate even with 81 million votes? Where’s the major legislation? Biden WH just opened the border, which is a huge negative. FALSE 8. Social unrest. College pro-Palestinian protests FALSE 9. Scandals. So numerous, yet Allan says no. Hunter Biden alone has how many, all tying to his dad, then the cocaine, James Biden money-laundering, Biden classified documents, blackmailing Ukraine, Secret Service, withholding protection from RFK Jr. when he was 3rd Party, multiple assassination attempts against challenger...I mean, these are unprecedented scandals. Kamala as border Tsar is a huge scandal that is costing Americans their lives every day. Apartment complex takeovers by Venezuelan gangs? Are you kidding? FALSE 10. Abject military failure with Afghan withdrawal and vcxx mandates, forcing service members out. FALSE 11. No foreign or military successes. FALSE 12. No charisma at all. FALSE 13. Challenger and his team have amazing charisma with Trump, VP Vance, RFK Jr, Tulsi, and Vivek. FALSE That’s 10 FALSE answers to the 13 Keys. Allan ignored these and didn’t even talk about RFK Jr., the scandals, the economy, or the weird case of the DNC and removing Biden.
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  9412. It's really best to approach this subject with context from the late 1800s, then move forward from there. Place yourself in the era where Tesla's polyphase A/C system, the telephone, radio, automobile, and airplane. Read what Tesla said when he was asked about the Wright Brothers' achievements. Read what Tesla said about flight. Then realize that the majority of Tesla's patents are not publicly available, even in 2021. I'm so glad I studied this subject before the internet was available. The US and Germans were already jointly working on electrogravitic propulsion systems in the 1920s out at White Sands, NM. As industrial powers learned about EG research, they started their own black programs. WWII enhanced US research in that field, while it was stunted in other nations due to their geigraphic proximity to the war. The US had parallel flying wing conventional flight technology with the Northrop company, which was conducted independent of the Horten bros. But the Horten Bros fighter samples were brought to the US, reverse-engineered, and flown in black programs that remain black to this day. This is what Kenneth Arnold and other pilots saw in 1947-forward. Kenneth Arnold's description was of batwing-shaped jets flying so fast, it looked like saucers skipping across the water. The controlled presstitute media then said, "flying saucer". Major Edwards crashed as a test pilot in the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber out at Muroc Air Field, which was later renamed Edwards AFB, the USAF Flight Test Center.
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  9467. @Trond Knudsen Those other systems under-perform even compared to the post-ACA environment in the US. I've lived in several of them, and have family in others (Canada, Sweden). My mom is from Finland, where I have lived at various times since 1979. We also lived in Germany and Japan. I've spent a lot of time all over Europe since the 1970s. Finnish NHS doesn't even compare well with US VA system, and it's one of the better NHSs. You might wait 45 days to get an MRI. US is trying to get MRI delivery from order down to 45 minutes, complaining about 56-137min averages since 2019. The lies about how great European NHSs are have been perpetuated by college professors and media idiots who have never bothered to study them. The grass is not greener in those NHSs, not even close. I can break it down mathematically just showing wait times, hospitals and clinics per capita, dentists and orthodontists per capita, specialists, level 1-4 trauma centers per capita, fire, EMS, Life Flight, you name it. You'll see a lot of cherry-picked figures that ignore the fact that the US has 330 million people, and tertiary results that aren't directly a result of access to Healthcare, but represented as such. US is without peer when it comes to availability and quality, but ACA hasn't helped that. It helped a ton of insurance companies make temporary obscene profits though, as long as they and their pons in both political parties backed it. Some of them took huge bribes to change their votes in favor of ACA, acting as hold-outs until the last minute to extract maximum payments. The whole thing was unconstitutional and hurt the US.
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  9471.  @jhegre  US Healthcare has more expenses associated with it because there are far more options, specialists, hospitals, clinics, research centers, universities, Dr./nurse/EMT/technician training programs, EMS layers, diagnostics, and long-term care options. It's like comparing a shopping mall complex to a corner store. I'm not just basing my research on 5 decades of anecdotes living across the US, Europe, Asia, and Central America. I've done market analyses looking at types of hospitals and clinics relative to population density, wait time comparisons, and treatment cycles from onset/incident to pre-hospital care, in-patient care, treatments available, and long-term outcomes. What you'll find is that other countries are very poor in comparison to the US in this respect, so they invest in propaganda from the state declaring how great their NHSs are to affect mass compliance, because direct taxation rates are so high in those countries. Their parliaments and trade negotiators rely on the US primarily to develop and manufacture many of their drugs, medical devices, and diagnostic equipment. US research and development in medicine and biotech is instrumental in propping up Europe and other countries who signed onto Bretton Woods after WWII. So this adds to the expenses US taxpayers and businesses bear in the domestic US market. None of these nations are operating inside of a bubble. Most of them can't develop or manufacture advanced systems like MRI, fund huge medicinal or treatment studies, or equipment because their economies are too small. The US domestic politicization of the Healthcare argument talking about how better European NHSs are is void of a comprehensive analysis. The math doesn't add up.
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  9474. @Trond Knudsen I heard my whole life how much greener the grass is in European NHSs, but having lived in several European countries since childhood, the US hospitals always seemed more modern, with more money invested in them. I've also lived in 8 US States (CA, UTx4, ME, GA, VA/DC, WA, NC, CO), and have been Nationally-Registered in EMS, with several family members in the medical field to compare notes with (anecdotes of course). Looking at empirical studies, I found that audits of the Finnish, UK, Swedish, and Canadian NHSs identified that patient care was very low priority in practice, while jobs and bureaucratic policies were of top concern. Sweden adjusted their system by encouraging more private health options due to efficiency vs wastefulness of government, so they improved by using more free market solutions due to failures of their NHS. One of the studies I have done is to look at hospitals and clinics per capita, and how they're located in these relatively small countries compared to the land mass of the US. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to compare UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, etc. to the entire US, but to look more at States with similar latitude/climate/population/GDP to try to baseline the metrics. Even then, the poorest, least-educated US States outperform the more wealthy European nations in most ways. You see it in availability and proximity of Fire/EMS, Level 1-4 Trauma Centers, dentistry, orthodontics, and specialty clinics. Dentistry in Northern Europe is just not as accessible, so you see a lot of crooked, missing teeth, even among English Royalty (Prince Charles' mistresses). A Minister of Parliament in London doesn't have the same access to Healthcare as an illegal immigrant family in the deep Southern US. Same for Canada, where MPs frequently fly to the US for quicker care (bypassing the atrocious wait times in Canada). Europe as a whole has a very diverse range of quality of care, and differing standards. Your hospital/clinical experience in Norway, Sweden, or Finland will be different than in Italy, Greece, Slovenia, or Portugal. The US has National standards of training in pre-hospital EMS care, MD, Radiology, nursing, L&D, etc., all speaking the same language. Europe is extremely diverse culturally and linguistically, so it's difficult to even convene discussions on EMS and hospital care standards, just like with the army of translators needed for EU Parliament. The truth about this matter can't be told in Europe, otherwise they would see significant exodus of their actual working class and professionals. They have to keep the propaganda about how much better their Healthcare is alive and well for that reason. US media and politicians, who are ever-more clueless about most subjects, repeat the European NHS superiority mantra as gospel, when most of them can't point out on a map where Sweden, Switzerland, or Albania are, let alone capitols, languages, and populations. OECD numbers look at life expectancy and infant mortality, lumping 330 million US population together, then itemizing separate European states who have tiny little populations like Finland (5.5m), Norway, etc., then saying how the US isn't at the top. It's as if whoever compiled the data never took a basic course in statistics (large data aggregate vs small data isn't valid). In other words, a 330 million population of 50 States will never be at the top when compared with a 5.4 million population of homogenous people. Life expectancy is largely a factor of diet, exercise, and accidents. US over-eats as a rule, which isn't within the purview of Healthcare systems, but more about individual and family choices in meal-planning.
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  9489.  @someperson4865  The funny thing is that this professor ignored his own metrics and didn’t even appear to read them when making this insane forecast. Let’s go through the keys together to see what I’m talking about: 1. Party Mandate. Dems lost seats in the 2022 Mid Terms, didn’t gain. R: 212 - 222 D: 220 - 2013. This should be a FALSE by his metrics. 2. No Primary contest. This one is unique in 2024 because the sitting President was removed agains his will and Kamala announced as the nominee without any convention or delegate process. He doesn’t even have a metric for this. Either way, it doesn’t benefit the incumbent party. 3. Incumbent seeking reelection. Yes, but was removed with a soft coup. VP installed, so it’s a huge FALSE. 4. No 3rd Party. There was the strongest 3rd party campaign since Ross Perot with RFK Jr., but he JOINED the challenging party platform! This is a mega-FALSE for the incumbent because the challenger was not only a Dem, but a Kennedy who is the son of assassinated RFK and favored Dem candidate in 1968. 5. Strong short-term economy. Weird, as he lists this as a TRUE when it is FALSE. Jobs numbers and inflation are misrepresented in the media, with constant revisions post-haste. FALSE 6. Strong long-term economy. Allan must read CNN and the WSJ if he thinks per capita economic growth equals or exceeds the mean growth of the two previous terms. Younger people looking for first-time home buying can’t afford to enter the market and are stuck renting. Inflation has squeezed most people’s budgets to exclude marginal products and services, causing a recession in many industries. This one is a big FALSE. 7. Major policy change. You would think Biden had entered the WH with a huge mandate with 81 million votes, yet there was no sweeping reforms or support from Congress or the electorate. This is one of the biggest anomalies in US election history. The main thing the Biden/Harris WH has done is open the border so millions of unvetted illegal immigrants have swarmed into the Nation. This is not a positive, so to weight it as one is erroneous. It only makes sense to mark it as technically true, but bad for the Country. 8. No social unrest. What are we calling all the pro-Palestinian protests, shutting down access to class for college students, and the occupation of apartment complexes by foreign gangs? Biden called the college campus unrest “chaos”. FALSE 9. No Scandal. Allan must be reading DC corporate media. Vaccine mandate scandal for military and DoD, hospitals, public employees, and private sector. Did he not hear about the Hunter Biden money-laundering scandal that directly implicates himself in a foreign bribery scheme lasting many years? Then you have the Biden classified documents scandal, which ties into the Hunter laptop showing an espionage ring, his brother James’ investigation for money-laundering and tax evasion, Hunter Biden tax evasion trial, Hunter Biden illegal firearm possession, the cocaine WH scandal, the Secret Service scandal of denying protection to RFK Jr, the Trump assassination attempts after Biden Secret Service failures and withholding of resources, the Ukraine scandal where Biden was involved in blackmailing Ukraine and now under his WH, Putin invaded. To top it off, Biden has called Trump supporters garbage. So this is another big failure per Allan’s metrics. FALSE 10. No foreign or military failure. Afghan withdrawal was one of the biggest foreign and military failures in US history. Eruption of the Middle East into regional conflict with ballistic missiles, genocidal terrorist strikes and hostage-taking, bombings, and missile exchanges is escalating into unprecedented conflict. Allan correctly assesses this as a FALSE. 11. Major foreign or military success. Allan chalks this up as a TRUE. Not sure what he’s referring to. Most Americans would agree we have had no foreign or military success under Biden. A great metric for measuring this is military recruitment and retention, which is way down to alarming levels. FALSE 12. Charismatic incumbent. Neither Biden nor Kamala are even remotely charismatic. Both are incompetent and terrible public speakers. FALSE 13. Uncharismatic challenger. Allan correctly recognizes Trump is charismatic. FALSE There are at least 10 FALSE responses to Allan’s metrics, yet he somehow thinks there are less than 6. I would really love to debate him on this because even if I’m generous and list 2, 3, and 4 differently, there are still 9 FALSE responses to his keys. How did he skip over all his own metrics?
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  9495.  @thephilosopher7173  He tried to tie Pakistani elections into the strategic logistics chain of US weapons flow, claiming that the US is using Pakistan as a vassal state and manipulating it, conditional on compliance with funneling weapons to Ukraine due to its strategic position near Ukraine. This is patently ignorant of basic geography, and the real logistics chain through Europe. I've been in the US Defense industry since the 1970s, and have tracked a lot of our Foreign Military Sales (FMS) since that time. Mostly old/expired US munitions are being flown by C-17As and other transport aircraft to Europe, where they are then trucked or railed into Western Ukraine. It makes no sense to even fly near Pakistan in that Log chain. The real history of US FMS to Ukraine has never been reported by anyone in the legacy or internet media. Clinton WH worked feverishly to disarm Ukraine under Nunn-Lugar. Senator Obama came in later and oversaw disarming of Ukrainian artillery stockpiles. Bush didn't send weapons. Obama sent a few HMMWVs and non-weapon supplies. All US Presidents except for 1 denied weapons FMS to Ukraine from the 1990s-2022. Trump is the only one who authorized Ukraine to acquire weapons from the US, starting with the Javelin & CLU sale on Mar 1, 2018. This was immediately after the Battle of Khasham in Syria where Putin's Wagner armored battle group attacked US forces at the Conoco plant in Feb, and we annihilated them with 6 hours of precision munitions. Trump sent another Javelin/CLU order, and a $600m weapons package in 2019. Ukraine paid for those. NATO partners were the first ones to send older weapons in the spring of 2022 after it was clear Ukraine was standing their ground. Biden WH dragged their feet until enough momentum was building from the Europeans, to send old US stock that was scheduled for destruction. Pakistan plays no role in any of this.
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  9550.  @AlexJones0316  I can’t think of a President in recent memory that got as much done in 2 terms as Trump did in 4 years.   Energy independence/net exporter for US, economic growth, Record-low unemployment,  More Middle East Peace Deals than all 8 Presidents before him combined,  No new wars,  Pulled us out of the UN Climate BS treaty,  Renegotiated US trade deals with China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, UK, Korea, etc. from a position of strength, not compromise.   He reduced income inequality. Lower 50% of US households saw a 40% increase in net worth,  7 million new jobs,  401k plans hit record highs,  Brought back businesses and manufacturers who had left the US,  Tax relief for the middle class,  Cut business tax rate from 35% down to 21%,  $1.5 Trillion repatriated to the US from overseas tax-sheltering,  Created the first paid family leave tax credit,  Expanded apprenticeships,  Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years. Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market. Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada. Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone. Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients. Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need. Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals. Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a month’s supply of each type of insulin. Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017. Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs. Updated the way Medicare pays for innovative medical products to ensure beneficiaries have access to the latest innovation and treatment. Reduced improper payments for Medicare an estimated $15 billion since 2016 protecting taxpayer dollars and leading to less fraud, waste, and abuse. Took rapid action to combat antimicrobial resistance and secure access to life-saving new antibiotic drugs for American seniors, by removing several financial disincentives and setting policies to reduce inappropriate use. Launched new online tools, including eMedicare, Blue Button 2.0, and Care Compare, to help seniors see what is covered, compare costs, streamline data, and compare tools available on Medicare.gov. Provided new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, including modifications to help keep seniors safe in their homes, respite care for caregivers, non-opioid pain management alternatives like therapeutic massages, transportation, and more in-home support services and assistance. Protected Medicare beneficiaries by removing Social Security numbers from all Medicare cards, a project completed ahead of schedule. Unleashed unprecedented transparency in Medicare and Medicaid data to spur research and innovation. Secured the Southern Border of the United States. Built over 400 miles of the world’s most robust and advanced border wall. Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed. Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border. Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries. Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications. Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States. Instituted national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists, and implemented a uniform security and information-sharing baseline all nations must meet in order for their nationals to be able to travel to, and emigrate to, the United States. Suspended refugee resettlement from the world’s most dangerous and terror-afflicted regions. Rebalanced refugee assistance to focus on overseas resettlement and burden-sharing. 85 percent reduction in refugee resettlement. Overhauled badly-broken refugee security screening process. Required the Department of State to consult with states and localities as part of the Federal government’s refugee resettlement process. Issued strict sanctions on countries that have failed to take back their own nationals. Established the National Vetting Center, which is the most advanced and comprehensive visa screening system anywhere in the world. Issued a comprehensive “public charge” regulation to ensure newcomers to the United States are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare. Created an enforcement mechanism for sponsor repayment and deeming, to ensure that people who are presenting themselves as sponsors are actually responsible for sponsor obligations. Issued regulations to combat the horrendous practice of “birth tourism.” Issued a rule with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make illegal aliens ineligible for public housing. Issued directives requiring Federal agencies to hire United States workers first and prioritizing the hiring of United States workers wherever possible. Suspended the entry of low-wage workers that threaten American jobs. Finalized new H-1B regulations to permanently end the displacement of United States workers and modify the administrative tools that are required for H-1B visa issuance. Defended United States sovereignty by withdrawing from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration. Suspended Employment Authorization Documents for aliens who arrive illegally between ports of entry and are ordered removed from the United States. Restored integrity to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by strictly adhering to the statutory conditions required for TPS. The list goes on-and-on. I’ve never seen a White House come close to this level of activity.
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  9568.  @yoloman3607  The only concerns they had were when they ran F-35s up and down the East Coast out of Pax River at sustained supersonic speed for up to 5 hours, only slowing down to hit the tanker in between long supersonic runs. The profiles they were flying are not possible in an operational setting and would never be duplicated in reality. Some ignoramus media types latched onto that story and ran it over and over, repeated by equally-ignorant people with zero knowledge about Aerospace Engineering or applied physics, and believe that F-35’s melt their own skin off if they fly supersonic. The truth was that engineers were concerned about sensors under the skin in the horizontal tails taking those multi-hour sustained supersonic speed runs, so they put a recommended limit on how long a pilot should fly at supersonic speeds. That limit was far more than any 4th Gen platform would even think about flying, but people with no reference read it and think the skin melting claim was valid. You also don’t want to sustain supersonic speeds around aircraft like the F-35 with the EOTS and DAS, because it will heat all your leading edges and make you stand out in the IR spectrum. For your long-range missile idea, you need to fly those missiles into an accurate kill basket. How will you acquire that accurate kill basket sufficient to enter a terminal phase IR seeker that won’t work against an IR stealth platform anyway? Not with HF RADAR, that’s for sure. Not even AWACS have accurate range or altitude data and they’re airborne with better line of sight. This video is simply way outside of being remotely accurate in its statements about IRST, which are useless against VLO IR platforms. Sounds like another millennial who reads a few things without understanding the applied physics, then makes an erroneous video that a wide audience of unsuspecting followers watch and thing is legitimate, then laud him with praise about how much they’ve been informed by the entirely-bogus information.
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  9619.  @mebadiheidar  There was a group of people who left after The Tower of Babel and went by barges first across the Mediterranean, then over the Atlantic to North America in shell-shaped boats. They died out thousands of years ago. They’re known as the Jaredites. Their leader was Mahonri Moriancumr, the brother of Jared. Another set of 2 groups left Jerusalem centuries later in 600 BC, before the Babylonian invasion of Israel. The first group was a family whose father was warned in a dream to leave Jerusalem before it was destroyed. The second group left right at the time of the Babylonian invasion years later. These two groups who left Jerusalem took different routes, one down the Arabian Peninsula, then by ship to North America. The other group ended up in North America, but we don’t know what route they took. Descendants from each group found each other in North America hundreds of years later and records were kept by the first group of all these events. The second group didn’t take any records with them when they left Jerusalem at the time of its sacking, and lost their native tongue over time in North America, but found records and one survivor of the ancient Tower of Babel group, the Jaredites. Those records got combined with the family records of those who left Jerusalem when the descendants reunited. These records were later buried in a hill in New York around 400 AD, then were made known to a young farm boy in the early 1800s, who translated them with a Urim and Thumim after being shown them by an angel who was the last to deposit the records in the hill when he was still alive. These people say they had prophetic revelations about the coming of a Savior of the World, and He visited them in the year 33 AD, descending from Heaven in a pillar of light after some cataclysms. We call those records, The Book of Mormon. Mormon was the father of the last guy to make an entry on the plates, the same one who showed them to the New York farm boy. That man’s name was Moroni. There are a lot of ancient Mediterranean symbols found in the Eastern US, as well as mounds, earthworks, and artifacts from those eras. The Cherokee say their ancestors arrived to America via boats long ago. It’s all very interesting.
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  9677. 100% nailed it. He ignored his own metrics and didn’t even appear to read them when making this insane forecast. Let’s go through the keys together to see what I’m talking about: 1. Party Mandate. Dems lost seats in the 2022 Mid Terms, didn’t gain. R: 212 - 222 D: 220 - 2013. This should be a FALSE by his metrics. 2. No Primary contest. This one is unique in 2024 because the sitting President was removed agains his will and Kamala announced as the nominee without any convention or delegate process. He doesn’t even have a metric for this. Either way, it doesn’t benefit the incumbent party. Even if we list it as technical TRUE, it weighs against the incumbent party. 3. Incumbent seeking reelection. Incumbent but was removed with a soft coup. VP installed, so it’s a huge FALSE. 4. No 3rd Party. There was the strongest 3rd party campaign since Ross Perot with RFK Jr., but he JOINED the challenging party platform! This is a double-FALSE against the incumbent because the challenger was not only a Dem, but a Kennedy who is the son of assassinated RFK and favored Dem candidate in 1968. I would list this as a FALSE x 2. 5. Strong short-term economy. Weird, as he lists this as a TRUE when it is FALSE. Jobs numbers and inflation are misrepresented in the media, with constant revisions post-haste. One of the #1 complaints from Americans is cost of groceries, income to cost of living expenses, gas, housing, transportation, and medical. FALSE 6. Strong long-term economy. Allan must read CNN and the WSJ if he thinks per capita economic growth equals or exceeds the mean growth of the two previous terms. Younger people looking for first-time home buying can’t afford to enter the market and are stuck renting. Inflation has squeezed most people’s budgets to exclude marginal products and services, causing a recession in many industries. This one is a big FALSE. 7. Major policy change. You would think Biden had entered the WH with a huge mandate with 81 million votes, yet there was no sweeping reforms or support from Congress or the electorate. This is one of the biggest anomalies in US election history. The main thing the Biden/Harris WH has done is open the border so millions of unvetted illegal immigrants have swarmed into the Nation. This is not a positive, so to weight it as one is erroneous. It only makes sense to mark it as technically true, but bad for the Country. 8. No social unrest. What are we calling all the pro-Palestinian protests, shutting down access to class for college students, and the occupation of apartment complexes by foreign gangs? Biden himself called the college campus unrest “chaos”. FALSE 9. No Scandal. Allan must be reading DC corporate media. Vaccine mandate scandal for military and DoD, hospitals, public employees, and private sector. Did he not hear about the Hunter Biden money-laundering scandal that directly implicates himself in a foreign bribery scheme lasting many years? Then you have the Biden classified documents scandal, which ties into the Hunter laptop showing an espionage ring, his brother James’ investigation for money-laundering and tax evasion, Hunter Biden tax evasion trial, Hunter Biden illegal firearm possession, the cocaine WH scandal, the Secret Service scandal of denying protection to RFK Jr, the Trump assassination attempts after Biden Secret Service failures and withholding of resources, the Ukraine scandal where Biden was involved in blackmailing Ukraine and now under his WH, Putin invaded. To top it off, Biden has called Trump supporters “garbage". So this is another big failure per Allan’s metrics. FALSE 10. No foreign or military failure. Afghan withdrawal was one of the biggest foreign and military failures in US history. Eruption of the Middle East into regional conflict with ballistic missiles, genocidal terrorist strikes, hostage-taking, bombings, and missile exchanges is escalating into unprecedented conflict. Allan correctly assesses this as a FALSE. 11. Major foreign or military success. Allan chalks this up as a TRUE. Not sure what he’s referring to. Most Americans would agree we have had no foreign or military success under Biden. A great metric for measuring this is military recruitment and retention, which is way down to alarming levels. FALSE 12. Charismatic incumbent. Neither Biden nor Kamala are even remotely charismatic. Both are incompetent and terrible public speakers. FALSE 13. Uncharismatic challenger. Allan correctly recognizes Trump is charismatic. FALSE There are at least 10 FALSE responses to Allan’s metrics, yet he somehow thinks there are less than 6. I would really love to debate him on this because even if I’m generous and list 2, 3, and 4 differently, there are still 9 FALSE responses to his keys. How did he skip over all his own metrics?
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  9739.  @SlowhandGreg  All the claims about Russian collusion were projection from the Biden/Clinton/Obama team, and you can see that in the Durham Report. Biden literally got into the Senate with Soviet money in 1972. He was a nobody, destined for jail, self-admitted pedophile. Council For a Livable World propped him up and voila, Senator. Clintons had been on Soviet payroll since the Rose Law firm days in Arkansas in the 1980s with Systematics and the NSA bank surveillance and seizure program compromise. They were selling PROMIS upgrades to the Soviets, Chinese, Pakistanis, Iranians, Saudis, etc. for years using one of the senior law partners as the bag man running back and forth to Chiasso, Switzerland. NSA, DIA, FBI, etc. had him under surveillance for years even into the WH when he was Deputy WH Counsel in 1993. Obama was raised as a Soviet mole from infancy, helped Russia on the tail-end of Nunn-Lugar to disarm Ukraine in the 1990s of conventional weapons like the much-needed artillery shells, and munitions that had nothing to do with Nunn-Lugar. It's one thing Mearsheimer mentioned in this interview that sticks out and exposes who he supports (Russia vs Ukraine). Biden was supposed to extract Zelensky from Kiev within the first 3 days so Kiev would be open for occupation by the Belorussian and northern border-staged SMO forces. This was going to go down like a typical Soviet occupation where political subterfuge acts as a precursor to occupation. Zelensky didn't play along. Biden and Putin got left with a huge nightmare on their hands, because EU/NATO reacted opposite of expectations with Zelensky still intact, begging for weapons. Interesting times....
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  9742.  @richardkey1678  Putin didn't help Trump win in 2016. This has been thoroughly investigated for years by people who hate Trump and they came up with nothing but the Steele Dossier, which was fabricated by Russians for the Clinton campaign. The Clintons have been on Russian payroll for decades dating back to when Bill was Governor of Arkansas. Putin paid $363 million into Clinton Global Initiative in order to get uranium mining rights in the Uranium One deal when Hillary was SECSTATE. In every single one of these cases, we have known money trails between Russia, China, and the Clintons. Putin "knew" Hillary would be elected and was looking forward to a Clinton WH where US energy would be suppressed, raising Russian revenue for the full invasion of Ukraine, annexation of Moldova, and invasion of Poland and Finland. Trump ruined Putin's plans significantly just by turning the faucet on with US energy independence, let alone threatening Putin about Ukraine. The conversation with Zelensky was about how Biden threatened to withhold $1 Billion of US Aid from Poroshenko after Putin's puppet, Yanukovych was thrown out by the people in 2014, followed immediately by Hunter Biden getting on the board of Burisma. Burisma was being pilfered by Putin for years under Yanukovych and Zlochevsky, a Donbas region Russian loyalist. Biden openly bragged about coercing Poroshenko to fire Viktor Shokin, who was investigating all of this. Everything you're being told in the corporate media is backwards from reality. I can tell your information is coming from the likes of CNN and MSNNBC, not ground truth like mine, from living in the region and studying the history of Putin for the past 23 years.
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  9757.  @mikev4621  When a high velocity rifle projectile impacts a hard surface that also has soft tissue attached to it, you will see explosive effects of spalling at the point of impact, especially one so vascular as the face and head. In Zapruder, we see 90° spalling of blood and facial matter from the POI. You just don't see 90° spatter from exits. You might see 30° splatter from exits. For a lightly-constructed bullet, such as those used for varmints, this effect is even more pronounced. Watch video of varmint shooting and you see outwardly-explosive terminal effects. With frontal impact of a high velocity projectile to one hemisphere of the skull, left or right, if the skull is penetrated, we typically see that hemisphere cavitated and terribly disfigured, with significant destruction and fragmentation of that side of the skull and brain. Brain matter is displaced and ejected from the skull normally in such a scenario, which is exactly what happened to JFK's skull and brain. The projectile, which is typically spinning at over 200,000rpm, sheds some of the jacket as it impacts the skin and skull, with the thin copper jacket exploding into tiny pieces. The lead core, no longer held together by the jacket, fragments and splatters along a wound path generally aligned with the bullet flight path, though it may redirect due to bone and soft tissue resistance/shaping. The core is also spinning at over 200,000rpm before it travels through the medium. There is a tremendous amount of force entering the target with both directional energy along the bullet flight path, as well as rotational energy. The scalp tends to hold together very well and is surprisingly tough, so it will often drape or fill in voids where the skull used to be. The Parkland doctors all said there was a large exit wound in the occipital region of JFK's skull. People with no real A&P knowledge have tried to manipulate a strange narrative about this, saying the Parkland doctors didn't know what they were looking at, which is incredible. These are all guys with extensive hands-on experience with human anatomy & physiology, to include hundreds of gun shot wounds.
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  9764.  @joshsch1331  You didn't define the last generation, but I think you meant baby boomers. We're 3 generations past baby boomers with Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Boomers constituted a very diverse workforce and socioeconomic strata with a lot of economic mobility. The factory workers were the GI and Silent generations before them. A good resource to study would be The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe. Boomers had all sorts of jobs ranging from the mundane to the advanced aerospace, telecom, and computer industries. Many invested in real estate. Their biggest challenge wasn't economic, but family, as they had significantly higher rates of fathers and mothers working to finance larger homes, while neglecting their Gen X children. Divorce rates and broken homes increased, with many children basically being raised between the public schools and bouncing between visitation with parents that didn't have time for them anyway. Through societal programming with TV, people were conditioned through repetition and marketing to buy more and bigger things they didn't need, while sacrificing a stable home and family life. Gen X continued this madness, with limited connection to their parents since they felt abandoned. Many boomers ended up raising their millennial grandchildren in the wake of Gen X divorces, so millennials have a natural distrust of the prior generations, while being more friendly with their hands-off Gen X parents. These generational dynamics drive much of the underlying currents in the US and Anglo nations. This pattern is not new, and has repeated itself for hundreds of years in a cycle according to Strauss-Howe. The politics follow that, even with the global elites and their children.
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  9837.  @alexsouthpb55  When you look at Zapruder in slow motion and listen to Connally's testimony, JFK had already been shot before Connally was hit, so the angles and jump seat relative to Kennedy's seat don't matter. It forces the analysis to account for: 1. Bullet deflected off a tree, as indicated by WC. 2. Bullet deflected off a curb. 3. Bullet deflected off the overpass pillar. 4. James Tague's cheek injury from a bullet fragment. 5. Bullet through JFK's throat. 6. Bullet through Connally's chest, wrist, and left leg. 7. Bullet through JFK's head, which came from the front. WC says 1-4 are the same bullet, which isn't plausible, but let's give it to them and still see if it works. That's 1 round performing unrealistically, requiring suspension of disbelief. Next is one through JFK's throat. Parkland Doctors all said it was an entrance in the front. Let's say they got it wrong and it's a weird type of exit that pulls the epidermis inward instead of leaving an outward, more ragged exit as you would expect. That's #2 per WC. Next is the bullet that hit Connally like a hammer, WC says through his back, chest, wrist, then landed in his left leg. That's #3. Then we have the final head shot, #4, which came from the front. The lone gunman theory of Oswald firing 3 shots in close succession has already fallen apart with the round that perforated Connally. In totality of the forensic evidence, we're looking at multiple shooters, at least 2 of the shots having come from the front. We also have the Canadian photographer from Toronto's very detailed photo of the 6th floor window that he said contained 2 men, which vanished after he dropped it off to be developed. Ruby Henderson, another eye witness, saw two men on the 6th floor of the TSBD, one with a light-colored shirt or jacket, the other with dark complexion and a dark/dull worker's type shirt. Carolyn Walker also saw two men on the 6th floor, one with a light colored shirt/jacket, the other with a dark shirt, dark complexion, and a rifle. The FBI tried to make her believe the dark shirt was a box. Inmates in the jail across the Plaza with direct line-of-sight to the 6th floor TBSD said they saw 2 men, who they thought were security for the motorcade. Johnny L. Powell saw two men on the 6th floor of the TSBD "fooling around with a scope on a rifle". They had "darker complexion than whites", one wearing a light-colored shirt, the other wearing a darker brown work uniform. None of them saw anybody that matched Oswald's photos.
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  9849.  @colinchampollion4420  I noticed striking connections and similarities between the sweat lodge, clothing, chanting rituals, dress, and language between Algonquin, Iroquois, and Sami peoples. I have a theory that this is where Suomi (Finnish language) might get its main roots. Sami, Finnish, and Estonian are anomalies in the region, not Indo-European. There are also Ingrians, Livonians, Karelians, and other remnants of Finnic languages in Northwestern Russia, most of which are dead languages that went out over the past 2 decades. Pre-information age archeologists and historians were very myopic mostly, looking for tidy answers to very complex human migratory behaviors over time. The evidence points to far more sea traffic than was known or recognized by academia over the past several centuries. The Mediterranean civilizations had seafaring peoples from Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece (including coastal cities now located in Turkey), Carthage, Sardinia, Sicily, Iberia, etc. The various peoples found throughout North America, Central America, and South America have come from and traveled to other continents at different and overlapping periods of time throughout history. The era of the Vikings and recent European explorers are just the later chapters of that saga. We've had a very interesting record of a group of people who left Babel after the tower, headed north, then crossed a large body of water, before building sealed vessels to cross the Great waters and land in the Americas. Their records were passed onto descendants of another group of people from Jerusalem that fled the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem in 597 BC, and also traveled by ship to North America. We have inscriptions in the Eastern US in ancient Hebrew. There was so much copper mined from the Great Lakes region in ancient times, that it represented volumes that indicate inter-continental trade. I think natural disasters, cataclysm, and war erase continuity between the historical record, and we're left with a few puzzle pieces.
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  9899.  @ChrisAlvarezAlvarezImaging  He had 59 Dem Senators and a large Dem majority Congress from 2009-2011, where they: Continued the Bush Wall Street and European Bank TARP bail-outs. Expanded the Biden/Clinton/Bush PATRIOT Act to spy on political opponents. Killed the F-22 program while diverting billions allocated for it to Afghanistan and Iraq. Shoved ACA down the throats of America by bribing key hold-out Senators against the private contractual relationships of millions of Americans with their providers. Oversaw the smuggling of thousands of weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels via Operation Gunrunner/Fast & Furious, resulting in the murders of thousands of Mexicans and at least 3 US Law Enforcement Officers, including Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Dec, 2010. Weaponized the IRS against the Tea Party and Conservative PACs. Signed off on the Russian acquisition of Uranium mining rights in the US, after Putin announced he was revitalizing Russia's nuclear arsenal and bribed the Clintons with $343 million in speech donations to Clinton Global. Fomented rebellion in Arab nations in the wake of the wheat import drop-offs from Russia due to 2010 fires. Signaled the US taking a back seat in foreign policy among our allies. Stirred up racial agitation, rather than celebrating the final end to the ultimate glass ceiling broken with a black family in the White House. He was actively one of the most venomous and injurious Presidents in US history, while largely absent on the functionary duties of a head of State, since he has no leadership experience.
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  9903.  @michaelboano7183  Someone groomed his rise to power, someone with motive and means bigger than the DNC. His actions in the WH were extremely injurious to the United States and our relations with out allies, while agitating and polarizing the US populace against itself. Some relevant points about his family history.... Fact: Madelyn Dunham (Obama’s maternal grandmother) worked at the Boeing Wichita manufacturing facility on the B-17 and B-29 during WWII. Fact: The B-29 Technical Data Package was compromised and transferred to the Soviets, (who had physical in-tact samples of B-29s from crash landings and diverts during the war, but needed technical data for materials and processes to make the clone/unlicensed Tupolev Tu-4). Fact: Madelyn Dunham worked the night shift at Boeing’s B-29 manufacturing facility, and she and Stanley Dunham (her husband) can be seen in photographs where they are dining with Boeing executives from the plant at an exclusive table, where Madelyn is in the arms of one of the older men, far from Stanley Dunham. Fact: Stanley Anne Dunham (Obama’s mother) was born 10 months after Stanley went off to serve in World War II. Fact: The FBI was investigating who transferred the B-29 TDP to the Soviets from the Wichita plant, even after the war, narrowing-in on Stanley, even though he didn’t have access. The more you look into the Dunhams, the more of a rabbit hole you will find. Their history is extremely strange, to say the least. What is absolute is that a young Senator from Chicago with a doctored past, shot into the White House with an extremely short political record, a flimsy work history of being employed by a CIA financial intelligence front company (BIC), and a Constitutional Law professor. The whole thing is extremely odd by any metric.
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  9914.  @TheGreatAmphibian  Not sure why they removed my comment, but I mentioned that the whole reason we PCS'd from AFFTC to West Germany in 1980 was to work on "European Combat Aircraft 1990" development, which was later named EFA, then EF2000, then Eurofighter Typhoon. Funnily enough for you, we were laying down all the flight control and kinematic behavior characteristics specific to post-stall maneuvering and EM. This was before the demonstrator airframe even existed. When we DROS'd back to AFFTC, we were on the F-16 CTF briefly, then B-1B, then out to UTTR, back to AFFTC on SRAM II, then F-16C Block 30 & 40 A2A systems integration and capes expansion with AIM-120. I was calculating STR and ITR across different altitude/air density bands using multivariable equations well before you were born. I have forgotten more about this subject than most will ever know. This is why I chuckled at your reference to the RUSI paper, assuming you knew what you were even looking at. F-35 has superior kinematics to most 4th Gen fighters in a combat configuration due to excess thrust and lack of parasitic drag from EFTs, suspension equipment, pods, and added IRSTs. Typhoon max V0 with PIRATE IRST is 1.8 Mach due to volumetric excursion from the ogive of the radome/nose/canopy. Those shapes were formed, modeled, wind-tunneled, and flight tested pre-IRST to support excellent transition acceleration and high Mach conditions for missile kinematics on the BVR timeline. Adding the IRST fundamentally altered the airflow and Mach cone behavior on the radome/nose/canopy geometry. If you study supersonic aerodynamics, you will start to see why the placard limits aren't supported by modifications to the airframe.
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  9925.  @TheGreatAmphibian  Most of the Typhoon Praetorian antennae architecture is on the wingtips and vertical stab, with protrusions outside of the original mold lines, but I was mainly referring to 4th Gen birds that require large podded systems for RF spectrum jammers, power amps, signals processors, and coolant systems. On the F-16, we put 800lb ECM pods centerline/station 5, which adds a lot of drag, weight, and g restrictions but is necessary equipment for the SEAD/DEAD mission sets. On the F-4, we either went centerline or in one of the AIM-7 recessed stations for the ALQ-119 and -184 on F-4G. F-4D used AIM-7 stations with the older ECM pods. FCA 1990/ECA/EFA was primarily focused on being a fighter/interceptor with follow-on multirole capability, so we really were in a 1970s energy fight and F-15 follow-up mindset with that program. This de-emphasized large ECM typical of strike profile fighters and focused more on higher altitude A2A threat warning/defensive posturing upon Missile Approach Warning or estimated timeline separation. This is why it has minimal RWR protrusions, 4 semi-conformal recessed stations for BVRAAMs like the F-4 and F-14, with a high % composite construction airframe and tons of excess thrust for rapid take off, climb-to-intercept, and transonic acceleration, as well as excellent nose authority and sustained turn rate in an A2A configuration. One of the main principles discussed in the NATO AeroE coursework at the time was already looking at a conceptual integrated systems airframe without any bulbous sensors, pods, or protuberances that compromise aero efficiency. F-22 & F-35 were first to manifest this concept into reality. Late model Flankers put large pods on the wingtips. Rafale integrated the podded wingtips with IR AAM LAUs, while retaining fore and aft quadrant emitters for defensive ECM, which SAAB copied for the Gripen-E. With smaller volumetric space to work with, you have less jamming capability due to lack of power amp, processors, cooling, and antennae size. AESA equipped fighters can use the antennae array as a stand-in jammer with forward quadrant capability. F-22 & F-35 have 2-4x the sensor/emitter count as the 4.5 Gen birds though, and stand-in EW capability.
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  9933. Any RF VLO aircraft can be detected at a certain range. By the time you see the F-35’s RCS, you’re basically within visual range, which means you were dead way before that. Another thing you might not know is that the F-35 has unprecedented IR signature reduction measures built into it, so it does not show up on IRST until....within visual range. The Rafale F4 has some IR sig reduction with its airflow management over the engine nozzles, but nowhere near as extensive as the F-35’s multiple systems, which are also integrated into the airframe, radar, engine, skin, and internal central cooling architecture for other heat-generating systems. F-35 is much faster than the Super Hornet configured. Super Hornet is extremely draggy, the slowest of them all when carrying weapons and fuel tanks. EF Typhoon has the best max speed and performance when configured, but with huge RCS. F-35 with full internal payload can always do Mach 1.6, pull 9 gs at Mach 1.6 (if they wanted to), execute maximum climb rate to get above the cons, and cruise at the same region as the A2A-configured Typhoon or Rafale would. Once you put EFTs on any of the Eurocanards, none of them will every hit max V0 nor would the pilots want to. F-35 cruises about 50-90kts faster than a 2-tank Viper, doesn’t need to go into burner to sustain speed in turns at altitude, and has a very long duration/combat radius that compares more with the Typhoon and Rafale if you load them with EFTs. F-35 focuses more on offensive systems integration than countermeasures, but has next generation programmable countermeasures integrated if you want to call them that. Its MAWS is really a first-look IR detection system integrated with a vast array of RF sensors embedded in the airframe, more applicable to surface-launched missiles. Within a second of a surface-launched missile, the DAS detects that on the IR spectrum and immediately triggers other detection systems to locate and ID that threat, while sharing it with every other F-35 in the MADL net. So every other pilot sees that same threat and can imply weapons on it with a near-instantaneous geolocation hive mind. In reality, they target IADS nodes before they are able to launch. Gripen E relies on the Arexis EW suite to confuse and deceive active RF sensors, but it does not have anywhere near the IR concealment or IR detection capabilities of JSF, nor does it have the RF sensor count of the JSF. The Arexis is reported to be effective, but nobody really knows. JSF uses its EW suite for Cooperative Offensive Electronic Warfare with capabilities that the Growler even does not have and is envious of. 1656 TRM AESA radar with quad super-computer bank fused with all those RF antennae, cooled with a huge mass of internal fuel, air scoops, and heat exchangers in the low pressure fan stage of the engine are a next generation EW platform compared to a Growler with its pods and cooler fans.
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  9934.  @WanderfalkeAT  Russians have been carrying the R-73 Helmet-cued, all-aspect HOBS missile for decades now. Every fighter pilot will tell you that if someone starts a conversation about dogfights, you know the conversation is in the wrong place. When a Gripen pilot was asked the same question, referring to the Gripen’s anemic thrust/weight ratio, he said it doesn’t matter because he has a helmet and can launch the IRIS-T at 15km from frontal aspect anywhere in his FOV. Senior TOPGUN Instructors have said the same thing, that dogfights are dead and have been for a long time. Every modern fighter carries helmet-cued HOBS missiles, so if you have made the mistake of flying into the NEZ of another fighter and his wingmen on their terms, you will eat a missile usually from frontal aspect many km before a 3-9 crossing merge. F-35 doesn’t play that game on their terms due to VLO in both RF and IR spectrums, and has far more offensive posture throughout any potential skirmish because it sets up on its terms unseen. F-35 has smaller RCS than the F-117A, and got even smaller after Lot 4, which was many years ago on the production line. differently. They don’t need to get WVR of other fighters when they can just set-up nearby and call them over guard freq, tell them it’s in their best interest to turn around now or be forced down. The maneuvering fight argument only makes sense in the BVR chess game, where you want good transonic performance for a 4th Gen fighter that can be seen by another 4th Gen fighter. The F-35 has performance very similar to a slick Viper and Hornet combined, with better T/W than them when they are combat-configured. Wing loading is not that high on the F-35 due to body lift and the lift contributed by the horizontal stabs. It performs far better than the F-16 at altitude, and spends a lot of time above the cons cruising at higher speed, with far longer mission duration. Russian aircraft can’t jam a missile they don’t know is headed towards them. The only one that has DIRCM is the Su-57. We have so many samples of Russian flare packs that our IR missiles have been developed to reject those and filter on the specific heat signature of the aircraft with digital signals processing in the seeker head guidance. The days of establishing a rear quadrant gun solution on fighters are long-gone. That hasn’t happened in any US-built fighters operated by foreign armies since 1979, IAF F-15A vs SAF MiG-21. Air policing in Europe is different for Finland than it is for Central Europe. Right now, Russia violates Finnish Air Space whenever they want and there isn’t much to be done about it. Introduce something like JSF into that mix, and their pilots will learn how to navigate all of a sudden. Gripen and Hornet would be the least-capable platforms to deal with that, since Super Flankers have superior kinematics across the spectrum, and massive PESA radars with IRST and data link. If you were scanning the airspace and knew that multiple F-35s are out there, but can’t locate them, it demoralizes you already before take-off and when you sleep at night. Even if you imply some kind of reactive tactics trying to locate them, you’re at a signature disadvantage for weapons solutions that favors them significantly. R-73 isn’t going to be able to acquire the JSF airframe, nor is the R-77. Meanwhile, Finland can use latest AIM-120 variants and even get in on Meteor like the UK.
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  9938.  @WanderfalkeAT  Who will see whom first? You ever look at the RCS values and IR sig of a configured Su-30 or Su-35? Even the Su-57 will show up at long range, depending on who is searching and how the Su-57 is managing the EW suite. When the F-22 intercepted Iranian F-4Es trying to intercept a US drone, they didn’t just pull up next to them first. Sukhois aren’t just cruising along at Mach 1.6, nor will they accelerate to Mach 1.6 in most circumstances other than a max performance egress from open hostilities. They aren’t going much faster than that with external stores anyway. Cruise speed will be in the .8 to .9 Mach region most of the time at altitude (same as F-35A). Over Finland, they do Nap of the Earth too. The point is that F-35s have more options than any of the other submissions when it comes to intercepts. Typhoon has the best raw kinematic performance, followed by Rafale and F-35A Block 3. By the time the H-X contract will be fielded, you’re looking at the next increment Lot with Block 4 F-35s. That includes the Sidekick weapons bay expansion and the engine upgrade that Pratt already developed without solicitation. The new engine module already developed increases the thrust 7-10%, while increasing fuel efficiency and maintainability. Pratt already has the plan in-place to drop-in those modules when engines cycle through mid-life overhauls. Now imagine an F-35A Block 4 with 6 internal BVRAAMs with networked HOBS employment capability, and a massive Thrust/Weight ratio increase on top of an already exceptional T/W. With half internal fuel and 6 BVRAAMs, you’re looking at 1.16 T/W. You didn’t say “Cobra”, did you? A Cobra maneuver is the fastest way to get killed in a multi-ship fight.
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  9940.  @WanderfalkeAT  You’re still talking about 1970s-era rear quadrant weapons solutions fights before the AIM-9L came into the fleet. Time to level-up man. We don’t fight like that anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time. The idea of going head-to-head in a merge where you cross each other’s 3-9 lines is over because of advanced radar and IR sensors, and helmet-cued HOBS missiles. That’s with 4th Gen fighters and has been the norm for decades. Nobody in their right mind is purposely trying to fly into NEZ parameters of all-aspect missiles. It’s just asking to get face-shot for no reason, and you still won’t cross 3-9 anyway. At altitude, the air is a lot thinner. You want high-speed energy retention and good transonic, high-subsonic performance with the ability to pull enough G in BVR maneuvers while staying fast. That’s 4th Gen still. Think about notching incoming BVR missiles, getting them to pull lead while you’re offset at supersonic speed, then reverse so they burn out and can’t intercept you anymore. 5th Gen doesn’t play those games because it makes no sense when you can simultaneously evade and set up threats into really bad NEZ parameters they can’t really deal with. Modern fighters are designed with this in-mind. Any low altitude, thick air performance you witness at an air show is simply a by-product of other design focuses, none of which are low altitude turning. How quickly can you get into stand-off, unfair NEZ solutions, separate, then offset while wingmen assist with targeting, deception, follow-on shots, and egress or continue mission. That’s what we’ve been focusing on more for decades.
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  9968.  @Greasy__Bear  The AESA in the F-35 isn’t the primary initial detection system, and neither is the APG-77 in the F-22. There are passive EW sensors that see electronic emissions first, then cue the other sensors to those targets. The pilots manage how much signature they want to emit in RF spectrum. APG-81 and APG-77 absolutely are very long range detection and tracking-capable AESA Radars, with farther effective range than AWACS because AWACS have to stay away from the skirmish zones due to vulnerability. AWACS are less and less a critical C4 node due to the emergence of 5th Gen. People talking about AWACS as a central node for C4ISR are thinking in 1970s-1990s metrics pre- Link-16 JTIDS. F-22 IFDL (Inter Fighter Data Link) is miles ahead of JTIDS, and F-35 MADL is miles ahead of IFDL. The gap between ATF/JSF and 4.5 Gen is huge. Iraq had 768 tactical combat aircraft and were better trained and experienced than Russia will ever be (Iraq fought Iran for 8 years, and the Iranians had F-14A/AWG-9/Phoenix, F-4Es, F-5E/F, AIM-7E4, AIM-9J, AIM-9P). East Germans were the best Air Force in the Soviet Union, followed by the Poles. Russians are defunct and have been for generations-not even a remotely-competent air power. We’re talking about an Air Force that practices firing rockets into the mud for their Large Force Exercises even to this day-total tards. They were handicapping China with those LFEs too, as PLAAF thought that’s how you do LFEs. After Chicoms got exposed to a small LFE with Royal Thai Air Force, PLAAF switched gears and started actually learning. Russian Air Force would be curb-stomped by any of NATO nations in Air-to-Air. This is why NATO is trying to keep the Ukrainian conflict limited to Ukraine, because a humiliating defeat by Russian forces vs NATO would increase the likelihood of them letting loose with nukes.
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  9969.  @divoulos5758  To give another set of answers to your questions though, the US built several fighter weapons schools in the 1970s and 1980s and regional aggressor squadrons to provide dissimilar air combat training for operational units around the world. That means huge portions of the USAF, USN, and USMC were specifically dedicated to acting as aggressors or adversaries, emulating threat tactics, radio procedures, and emissions. The Soviets never did this because they believed their own propaganda about how much better their fighters were, and that their pilots were blessed with some type of innate skill from the patrimony. If you read Vladimir Kondaurov’s book, he talks about flying the captured F-5E against the MiG-21 and MiG-23, where the F-5E beat them both in BFM repeatedly, and they had to report this personally to the Moscow Central Aviation Research Bureau with great apprehension. The F-5E was a low cost fighter the US sold to poor nations who weren’t authorized to buy top-line US technology, and the Russians knew it. The F-5E handily beat their top-line fighters at the time, even though all their data said the MiG-21 should have beat the F-5. With Red Flag and TOPGUN, the US maintains fighters that emulate Russian threat capabilities. We have already established an F-35A Aggressor Squadron at Nellis AFB recently to emulate emerging Chinese and Russian threats. That’s how serious the US takes aggressor trainers. We have more F-35A Aggressors than Russia has Su-57s, for example.
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  9989. A lot of John Stewart's premises are false though, so he enters this conversation with really bad data and then thinks he has the high ground while condescending to someone who actually has to deal with the numbers daily. To set things straight, I'm a very strong proponent for accountability and I despise waste, fraud, and abuse, but people don't really understand what that entails. Waste, fraud, and abuse often are locally-driven and involve kick-back schemes for labor (jobs) within Congressional districts like a mafia-run operation, on top of poor leadership decisions within the services having to do with resource mismanagement driven by budgetary fears vs operational requirements. When he mentioned "a $1.7 Trillion airplane that doesn't...." he's talking about the JSF/F-35 program. That's one of those giant false premises because there is no $1.7 Trillion F-35 program. "Journalists" throwing around the "Trillion dollar+ price tag" for JSF are being incompetent and untruthful. Those numbers are estimates for what the whole program might cost including operations & maintenance through the year 2074. Who does that? We're not even 1/4 of the way into acquisition of F-35A/B/C for DoD, and the estimated acquisition budget is roughly $400 Billion for 2456 airframes into the 2030s for production. 900+ F-35s have been delivered so far, hundreds of those to European and Pacific partner nations, so we're not even close to US DoD total buy numbers. Then there's the claim that it doesn't work, doesn't fly because of maintenance, sucks at its job, etc. Nothing can be further from the truth. He shouldn't have mentioned the F-35 program to support his argument, because it undermines addressing the real problems with waste, fraud, and abuse.
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  10061. Fan blades aren’t breaking. There has been talk by members of Congress who have GE in their districts wanting to spend billions on a new engine, when the current engine is the most reliable, most powerful fighter engine ever built. It’s not a buggy engine like the F100-PW-100 and PW-200 were when they hit the USAF in the 1970s and precipitated the great engine competition of the 1980s with IPE. The follow-on F100-PW-220 and PW-229, and GE F110 motors established new benchmarks in performance and reliability. The F119 leaped ahead of those engines in performance and reliability, and the F135 in the JSF series jumped ahead of the F119. The Pentagon has actually made things worse for the JSF program, mismanaging and delaying its development with antiquated reporting requirements, endless criticism of the contractors, and nothing but negative statements made from DOT&E office. The Pentagon set the program back initially by 18 months with counter-productive requirements to use invalidated materials for structures, which cursed the first 6 JSF samples with a major overweight issue. Lockheed had designed them to use CF structures, but Pentagon mandated 7085 Alcoa Aircraft Grade aluminum bulkheads, spanners, spars, and runners in places where it added unnecessary weight and reduced strength. Lockheed was able to incorporate the CF structures in those areas after 18 months of wasted time, all because of the Pentagon mismanagement that got the JPO officer fired and replaced, but that was over a decade ago. The Pentagon should be cut out of any real decision-making on JSF and let the services manage the program together, with their competent UK and NATO partner nations who are already invested. The Pentagon is an albatross around the Nation’s neck when it comes to procurement. It’s contaminated by proximity and immersion in he DC swamp, and should be leveled for more burial spots for Arlington National Cemetery or a nice park for people to enjoy.
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  10121.  @infinitelyexplosive4131  If you ever start an argument with, "So you think that..." then insert a series of statements that were never made, it's time to take a critical thinking course where you learn about logical fallacies and how to avoid them. The biggest overlook every one of these hit pieces fails at out of the gate is labeling "the F-35" in the singular. There are 3 JSF variant airframes for multiple services and allies. These "journalists" skipped right over that fact, while only talking about JSF-A. It's another case of information-void millennials reading click-bait headlines, doing a rough compilation of a series of falsehoods, with zero background in the matter. Every fighter-type aircraft program starts out with a bathtub graph for O&M costs, where initial changeover to a new system involves a lot of up-front logistics and training, parts supply bottlenecks, and growing pains. Normally that includes really high mishap rates, but we just haven't seen that with all 3 JSF, including Navy & Marines. They got the unit cost wrong as well. It's $77.9m per F-35A, which is lower than the advertised unit cost ceiling threshold when JSF was envisioned ($40-$50m in 1995 dollars). They also didn't do any due diligence in researching O&M costs, which are less than half what is being advertised according to the detailed DoD Comproller annual reports. F-35A fleet average is $17,963 CPFH. Operational squadrons are less than that, but if you use projected worst-case upgrades over the life of the aircraft and amortize those, then back-fill that into the # and account for USAF wish list money, you see they just doubled it and rounded up.
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  10165.  @carthag1574  I’ve been studying acquisition and CPFH/O&M costs since the mid 1980s as reference. First of all, the CPFH figure you’re listing at 44,000 euros is simply so far off from being correct, I wonder where you saw that. If you were to convert that, it would be $52,360/hr. That’s $5,000 more than the F-22A CPFH! Actual CPFH not including upgrades down the road is $17,963 per the 2021 DoD Comptroller’s extremely detailed reports. So now you would have to find an additional $24,000 to make that number work. Especially in foreign nations who haven’t bought any of the Block II and early LRIP birds that have high projected (not purchased) upgrade costs to be brought up to Block 4 standards (which there is no reason to do since they are training conversion aircraft), the CPFH is much lower than the average fleet cost for all of US Dod with all its early F-35As, F-35Bs, and F-35Cs. If you try to correlate any of these costs from the whole US fleet, you will get totally false numbers. Additionally, partner nations have been training in the US at Luke and other bases before even taking delivery of their fighters while waiting in the acquisition schedule. Your figures for the Rafale are also way off by under $10,000. Dassault promised India that they will work hard with Indian Air Force to get Rafale’s CPFH down to $25,000 over the long-term. That doesn’t include ancillary systems like FLIR or Recce pods. FLIR and recce are integral to the F-35, so you can’t separate them from operations and maintenance costs like you can with 4th gen fighters to "cook the numbers”. Right now, operational F-35A squadrons have been seeing $21,000 CPFH, which is about $3,000 over the raw CPFH of $17,963. You can calculate those numbers by the expected service lives of each airframe and draw the long-term conclusions. You mentioned availability next. Operational, later-production Block 3 F-35As have enjoyed availability rates from 70-95%. Dassault promised India they will work hard with them to reach a 75% availability rate for the fighter itself, no mention of the ancillary FLIR or Recce pod systems. Rafale also uses an advanced simulator with 180˚ immersive screen, not as immersive as the F-35 simulator, but still very modern. It is an integral part of the Rafale training process. Rafale is more useful for a matching enemy? Rafale is not survivable against the F-35 in Air-to-Air, nor can it penetrate saturated IADS nets like the F-35 can. There are 3 times as many F-35s with 3 assembly lines and huge supply chains, as opposed to the Rafale, so the parts availability and long-term supply side is again in the F-35’s favor. This is just reality. So in conclusion: F-35 has less O&M costs with full-up systems integral to the air vehicle machine, while Rafale without pods is more expensive. F-35 has about half the unit cost ($77.9 million vs $144 million). F-35 has the same or better availability rates (70-95% proven vs 75% promised). F-35 is more lethal and survivable. F-35 has more supply-side support and will into the future by a large factor. But you think Rafale would be a better choice?
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  10173.  @alexdarcydestsimon3767  F135 is the most reliable fighter engine ever built, not to mention the most powerful. There is cold hard math that supports that if you look at engine failure/flight hours. No other motor comes close. The next closest engine for reliability is the F119 in the F-22A, followed by F100-PW-229. These are indisputable numbers. Electronics/avionics are the standard to beat for reliability, only a portion of which contribute to the "800 deficiencies" across 3 aircraft types (F-35A/B/C). F-16 has over 1000 deficiencies, not including pods and its ancillary combat systems. F-16 had the highest reliability rate of any fighters in USAF service until F-35A came along. Even the F-35B in USMC, RAF/RN, Italian, and Japanese service has much lower MMHPFH than the F-16. Again, the math in favor of all variants of the F-35 series out-performs the best legacy birds in service. The cockpit has less failure nodes than any other fighter cockpit in the world, with more redundancy for critical navigation/instrumentation for bring-back, all on separate circuits for power and signals. Voice controls aren’t used much, if at all. Most of the important buttons are on the throttle and stick, while other interfaces are touch screen. In a high-g scenario doing BFM training, you don’t remove your hands from HOTAS anyway. F-35A airframe structures are much stronger than legacy airframes and rated to 8000 hours service life, but stress-testing has exceeded 27,400 hours years ago without structural failure, so it exceeds the rated service life by greater than a factor of 3. That is not normal. Since it uses CF in many areas instead of Aluminum, it explains the increased durability and resilience to stresses. You can see each one of these claims is not supported by reality.
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  10193. Incorrect: The USAF has not capped F-35A procurement at 1000 units to make way for the F-15EX. The F-15EX is to fill a gap that was created when the F-22 production was cut short before we even got 200 units out of 750, and therefore left the F-15C fleet exposed to further mission demands well past its safe service life. This is especially felt in the State Air National Guard units who were flying F-15As, then converted to F-15Cs that are already long-in-tooth, and were to be replaced by F-22A Raptors over the past decade. Those F-15C ANG units actually want F-35As, and are asking if they’re getting shafted for some reason. The F-15EX is on a totally different track than F-35As, which are replacing older F-16C Block 40/42 airframes in both the active and ANG Air Force units. Notice which operational squadrons are getting F-35As. Hill AFB, Vermont ANG, Alaska, Lakenheath. Cutting the USAF F-35A order to 1000 units would be huge news. No, the F-35A was never meant to replace all tactical air. If you look at the replacement schedule, there are going to be F-16C Block 50/52 serving for a long time as F-16CMs as the F-16CM Block 40/42s are replaced with F-35As, just like when we started replacing F-4Gs with F-16CJs and a shared transition, or F-15As replacing F-4Es and F-106As, or F-16As replacing A-7Ds and F-4E units. F-4E FIS-----> F-15A--> F-15C-----------------------F-22A cut short to 195/186 airframes A-7D TFS----> A-10A or F-16A-------> F-16C Block 30------> F-16C Block 40/42 or Block 50/52----------------------> F-35A F-111F----------------> F-15E---------------> ??????? F-4G-------------------> F-16CJ-------------> F-16CM Block 40/42/50/52 EF-111A---------------> ????????????-----------------------------------------------------[US Navy EA-6B/EA-18G come help us]-------F-35A Where does F-15EX fit in here? F-15E replacement would make the most sense. It takes time to happen over decades, not overnight or a few years. The USAF force structure has no planned replacement for the F-15E, for example, at least none that they’ve communicated. Some think this F-15EX is a round-about way of getting a replacement for Strike Eagles, especially the F100-PW-220 powered units. F-15Es have 2 different motors in the fleet, as mentioned in the video. Most aren’t aware of that. There’s a big difference in performance between the 2. Another idea for all this is to keep the Boeing (McDonald Douglas St. Louis) production line open as a strategic industrial capacity, while also keeping General Electric building F110 motors and not losing that base. The idea is that we want more than just Lockheed-Martin and Pratt & Whitney as the only fighter/fighter engine companies left, which would present a monopoly of sorts to Congress after they made a DoD environment where all the major aircraft companies merged into 3 big conglomerates, of which 1 has won the last 2 major fighter programs (ATF and JSF) and both of those programs are powered by engines from Pratt & Whitney.
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  10199. The US electorate has NEVER elected a consecutive Democrat WH in the last 180 years unless the President dies in office, namely FDR-Truman and JFK-LBJ. America has elected 2 Republicans consecutively with Teddy-Taft in 1908, 3 Republicans back-to-back with Harding - Coolidge - Hoover, and 2 again with Reagan-Bush in 1988 (same year Joe Biden first ran for President and was laughed out of his own party with plagiarism and gaffes). Al Gore, after conceding the election initially, demanded to only re-count certain ballots in Florida, not the whole State, while the State wanted to do a total recount. SCOTUS shot down his campaign’s arguments under per curiam and Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. And if we look down the 13 Keys for the year 2000, it was an indictment by the people of 8 years of Clinton scandals, abuses of power, failures, and key metrics that didn’t sit well with the people. 2000 wasn’t a clear key-turner for Dems. Clinton WH suffered a major and humiliating military failure with Somalia in 1993, with US soldiers’ bodies being dragged through the streets. Allied Force in Yugoslavia was seen by many as wag-the-dog, with hardcore Democrats even making a movie about it called “Wag the Dog”. The number of scandals was too much for Americans to even keep count of. Waco, Whitewater, campaign finance, Foster, affairs, Chinagate, cattle futures, Hillarycare, Lewinsky..... Allan’s 13 Keys did predict that Al Gore would win the popular vote, and if the votes are correct, he did 50.999 million to Bush’s 50.456 million. The 13 Keys predicted Trump would win the popular vote in 2016, but the vote counts say Hillary did. So either the model works and something is off with vote-counting, or the model is flawed and vote-counting works better, but still gives conflicting results to the 13 Keys consistency.
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  10214. This is just one 10-year block for the F-14A from the first operational deployment in 1975 through 1984: 1975 F-14A Crashed into sea near Cubi Point after engine explosion. 13JAN1975 F-14A crashed into sea near Cubi Point after engine explosion. 24JUN1975 F-14A suffered engine fire on take-off from NAS Oceana. 05AUG1975 F-14A overran flight deck after arrester gear failure, JFK in the Mediterranean. 29OCT1975 F-14A was destroyed by engine fire aboard USS Enterprise 05MAR1976 F-14A crashed close to Pax River after entering a spin. 23MAR1976 F-14A crashed near NAS Miramar. 21JUN1976 F-14A crashed after inflight engine explosion. 14SEP1976 F-14A taxied off the deck of the JFK in the North Sea. 19DEC1976 F-14A crashed while landing aboard USS Enterprise. 22FEB1977 F-14A crashed near Pax River after entering stall testing TF30-P-414 28MAR1977 F-14A crashed after ramp strike on USS America. 19APR1977 F-14A lost after double engine flame-out during ACM near El Centro. 21JUN1977 F-14A crashed in Atlantic after engine failure. 26JUN1977 F-14A crashed on downwind leg in the pattern at NAS Miramar. 28JUN1977 F-14A crashed 85 miles sw of San Diego after total power failure. 03OCT1977 F-14A crashed into Atlantic after ramp strike on the USS Nimitz. 31OCT1977 F-14A crashed near NAS Oceana. 10NOV1977 F-14A mid-air collision with EA-6B over Agean Sea, total aircraft loss. 20MAR1978 F-14A crashed into the Atlantic off Florida coast. 25MAR1978 F-14A spun into sea while operating from USS Kitty Hawk. 27MAR1978 F-14A crashed into freeway near NAS Miramar. 15JUN1978 F-14A crashed into sea while flying off USS Constellation. 25AUG1978 F-14A lost at sea off coast of CA. 13SEP1978 F-14A crashed into sea after stall post-launch from USS Ranger. 05OCT1978 F-14A crashed into sea while flying off of USS Eisenhower. 25NOV1978 F-14A lost 100 miles off the coast of Pusan, Korea. 21MAY1979 F-14A crashed into sea flying off of Ike. 09SEP1979 F-14A crashed near Cubi Point 03NOV1979 F-14A crashed into Med while operating from Nimitz. 05DEC1979 F-14A mid-air collision with another F-14A off Puerto Rico, crashed into Caribbean. 03MAR1980 F-14A crashed near NAS Miramar. 06MAR1980 F-14A crashed on approach to the Ike. 01APR1980 F-14A crashed on approach to Nimitz. 03MAY1980 F-14A crashed off coast of Iran after launching from Nimitz. 13SEP1980 F-14A crashed during ACM with an A-7E, entered a flat spin. 04NOV1980 F-14A crashed in Pacific operating from Kitty Hawk. 24APR1981 F-14A crashed after take off from NAS Oceana. 26MAY1981 F-14A written off after EA-6B crashed on recovery. 26MAY1981 F-14A written off from same incident. 27JUN1981 F-14A crashed during pre-delivery flight from Calverton when it crashed into Atlantic off of Long Island, NY. 07SEP1981 F-14A written off after A-7E crashed into it on landing on Kitty Hawk. 29SEP1981 F-14A crashed into Arabian Sea after control difficulties, flying off USS America. 19DEC1981 F-14A lost in Indian Ocean after arresting gear failure from Connie. 06FEB1982 F-14A lost doing ACM off of JFK, pilot lost control. 06MAR1982 F-14A lost arresting gear failure off coast of Italy, Ike. 14JUN1982 F-14A crashed into Pacific off San Clemente Island. 29JUL1982 F-14A crashed at VA Beach after take off from Oceana. 20SEP1982 F-14A crashed in Med after loss of FLCS. 28FEB1983 F-14A crashed near Yuma proving grounds, AZ, crew ejected. 17MAR1983 F-14A mid-aired with another F-14A operating off the Ike near Puerto Rico. 17MAR1983 F-14A same incident 17MAR1983 F-14A Ike lost another that day, hydraulic failure and loss of FLCS. 09APR1983 F-14A crashed on approach to USS Carl Vinson. 30AUG1983 F-14A mid-aired with another F-14A doing ACM, crashed into sea off VA Capes. 30AUG1983 F-14A same incident as above 08NOV1983 F-14A crashed into Med near Cyprus while doing low level CAP mission. 11NOV1983 F-14A crashed into Med off coast of Lebanon, crew ejected. 18JAN1984 F-14A crashed into sea after total loss of power on single engine approach to CVN-65. 17JUN1984 F-14A substantial damage after port MLG collapsed on landing aboard CV-66. 20JUN1984 F-14A slid off #3 elevator on USS America into the sea (I met one of the maintainers who watched this incident happen.) 15JUL1984 F-14A lost after crew ejected over Arabian Sea. 08AUG1984 F-14A crashed out of NAS Cubi Point. 04SEP1984 F-14A crew ejected after inflight fire, A/C destroyed, NAS Miramar.
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  10216. They tried to hide the hearings from the NRA, but NRA members notified the NRA leadership, so the NRA president showed up to testify and persuaded the members of Congress to drop the pistol provisions from the legislation. He was an Olympic gold medalist pistol competitor and Pistol collector who complained that if he had to pay a $5 stamp tax for all of his pistols he would not be able to afford it. He also explained that pistols could be used for self-defense and they had many newspaper clippings dating back to the late 1800s documenting this fact. They were also trying to categorize semi-automatic firearms with 12 round + magazine capacity as "machine guns" and the NRA President Explained to them that this was incorrect, that it took a single function of the trigger every time to fire a round with a semi-automatic. They also said they weren't concerned about actual machineguns, just Thompson Submachineguns that could be concealed under coats. J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Incompetence informed the AG and committee members that there was a 500,000-strong army of bank-robbers like John Dilinger "out there" ready to wreak havoc across America, and if they passed this law, it would allow Federal agents to arrest them and send then straight to jail "without having to go through the complicated trials". They brought in Colt to testify about how many Thompson SMGs they made, which turned out to only be 20,000 in 1921, most of which still had not been sold by 1934 due to their high cost ($185-$200).
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  10264.  @TresLinguas  F-14 weight was always a problem, especially for recovery on the boat. You can watch videos of Tomcats slamming into the deck and snapping a main landing gear strut, including during its initial carrier trials. They just shrugged it off and said, “All part of carrier ops.” Turns out there was a fundamental fault with F-14 landing gear that wasn’t discovered until over 20 years later, where corrosion had found a way into some crevice that was near-impossible to inspect. They were flying with that critical issue the entire life of the program. Hornet also had critical safety-related landing gear problems in its first 10 years of service, causing loss of several aircraft and fatalities-including one of the famed VF-41 Libyan Sukhoi killers from 1981 who had gone into the F/A-18 test and development program. The landing gear had a retaining/alignment bar that would come loose, allowing the complex articulating gear to go cock-eyed and send a Hornet tumbling down the runway. They fixed it after it had already gone into mass production, and you never heard a thing about it. If that had been in the Internet era, who knows what kinds of articles would be written. But the F-14 was a very heavy aircraft for carrier ops, and very difficult to recover on the boat with. That’s how they really selected Tomcat pilots during carrier quals. It was nothing like the T-2 or T-45 in handling or in the pattern, which was very difficult to transition to for a pilot in training. Its weight also affected bring-back, which is why you never saw them launch of the boat with more than 2 AIM-54s, in the rare times they flew with AIM-54s. When they did, they usually only carried 1, an AIM-7, and an AIM-9. So much for the 6 Phoenix ad they video’d to make it look so capable.
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  10269.  @StryderK  Cheney had zero influence over the F-14 from 1970-1989, and from 1993-2001. There were numerous upgrade programs for the F-14A right out of the gate that ranged from massive mismanagement to mildly-successful during those years. The TF30-PW-412A upgrade to -414A was one mildly-successful upgrade, but they had already spent literally hundreds of millions on the F401-PW-400 in the early-mid 1970s and got literally nothing from it. That money was blown into thin air. Most people, especially Tomcat fans, have never heard of the F401 motor and the original F-14B.   The TF30 was never meant to be the engine for the F-14, as it was seen as an interim engine for maybe 17 airframes until the F401 could go into production. Th F401 shared the core with the F100 for the USAF’s new F-15, so it was supposed to be an industrial scale benefit for both services using their cooperative development funds on motors to get a better motor. Early F100s and the F401 still had the same types of problems that the TF30 did, so the Navy didn’t adopt it and stuck with the TF30, which was a choice between 2 terrible options at the time. They would have at least gotten more thrust, albeit with the same compressor stalls and AB unstarts, flame-outs, etc. But that would have made the asymmetric thrust problem in the Tomcat even worse, and likely contributed to even more total airframe losses and fatalities with a jet that was already killing crews fast enough as it was, with a 37% FMC rate in 1975. This goes back into the inherent problems with the design. The requirement for the Phoenix drove the tunnel and engine nacelle separation, which caused asymmetric thrust if you had stalling on one side, which combined with a stall-prone motor to cause loss of airframes. If you look at it from SECNAV and SECDEF perspective, you see that over $300 million was spent on the F401 and they got nothing, with program managers explaining to them in detail what I just did above. Now they’re asking for more money to....replace engines, fix avionics, do overhauls just for basic airframe and flight control work, not even upgrades. It drained itself of available developmental funds for new systems that could have kept up with the pace of avionics and flight controls like were realized with the F-15, F-16, and Hornet because that money had to go into just keeping the basic albatross of a system of systems flying. It's not as simple as being able to blame one person for all its woes. Any person in the position of being faced with the budgetary decisions would be reasonable in doing what the Navy did. US Navy had already made its long-term decision about it before Cheney was Vice President in the early 2000s, with the LANTIRN-equipped Bombcat providing an interim solution to A-6Es being phased out by 1997. A lot of the systems integration work done in the 1990s when Cheney was nowhere in the picture was LANTIRN and LGB at Pax River, since the Navy had already started retiring the Intruders, which proved to be not so survivable in a modern IADS net like we experienced in ODS.
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  10271.  @TresLinguas  F-35C with big wings, bigger tailplanes handles better behind the boat due to the basic planform, wing area, body and chine lift area, 4 tailplane areas, and axial thrust. DFLCS with auto throttle and holistic flight control inputs would not have made the F-14 that much less problematic because of the added complexity of the spoilers, and asymmetric thrust. You could have integrated FADEC with DFLCS in ACLS, but there were a lot more things to go wrong. I'm well aware of the F-14D and proposed ST-21, as I lived through their development and proposals. Paper extra Super-21 Tomcat was totally unproven, so I'm not sure why anyone would refer to it against a real airplane. All the faults you're listing for F-35B & C are from 2 sample aircraft pre SWAT, that could never be duplicated in any other aircraft. You're talking over 10 years ago DOT&E reports. That would be like citing the F-14's original mirrored Titanium hydraulic lines that burst after hitting a harmonic node on its first flight, as if they never fixed that. Afterburner exhaust doesn't come anywhere near the control surfaces, and it's surrounded by cool air flowing through the LOAN nozzle. After the delamination incidents on those 2 pre-Lot 4 birds over 10 years ago, they made a new RAM that's CNC applied, more durable, and reduced the frontal RCS even more. It's so good they're using it on Raptors now, and I think most are aware of what kinds of speed the F-22 is capable of. You never see 9 carrier air wings afloat. Normally there are 2 or 3 while other carriers are being repaired/overhauled, and carrier wing quals pre-deployment as the others head back from their floats. Especially once the Navy developed their NAWDC TOPGUN course for the F-35C, Super Hornets started looking obsolete really fast.
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  10272.  @TresLinguas  You're the one who stated maintaining CVN air wings for 9 carriers, which has amateur written all over it. USN has a hard time biting F-35Cs out of the production line because demand is so high for As. I was close to AFFTC and China Lake mostly, so Naval developmental programs were primarily weapons systems employed from their aircraft, though some of the ranges were for shared programs. As to early test article F-35B and C models, the test pilot (Billie Flynn) said he never saw any damage, and he was running the aircraft up and down the East Coast doing repeated Mach 1.6 weapons separation tests, flutter tests, maintaining extended duration supersonic flight, hitting a tanker, then doing it again in ways you never would with an operational fighter. The engineers looked at instrumentation indicating several points on the 2 F-35B and C articles had exceeded predicted temperatures that if continued, might result in lower component life. Click-bait presstitute millennials with skulls full of mush translated this to, "It's melting!", and pumped out their ad-based bogus content for even more uninformed avgeek consumers to gargle. They took up several other test articles, flew them to max speed with extended duration aerodynamic thermal loading, performed more aggressive maneuvering to try to recreate those temperature points, and could not. Conclusion by the ignoramuses: "F-35 can't fly supersonic without melting!" You can watch airshow demos of F-15s and F-16s actually experiencing delamination at subsonic speeds doing extreme maneuvers, with parts flying all over the place. Try sustaining Mach 1.6 in any of the teen fighters with weapons. Over half your stores configurations can't be flown at that speed for starters, let alone what happens to your fuel consumption with all that drag. The first thing 4th Gen airframe pilots notice in the F-35 is the lack of drag, and how well it accelerates and climbs without needing EFTs. Tons of input from F-14D test pilots went into JSF-C. It brings capabilities to the fleet that are most of what the A-12 was supposed to do (payload/range), with far more A2A than any ST-21 could do, with Maritime Patrol and ASW that nobody really thought of for JSF, at least not openly.
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  10281.  @TresLinguas  The biggest problem for F-14s, aside from all the propulsion and mechanical issues, was AWG-9 failure on Cat launch. Connections would come loose, making it a 50,000lb day visual range capable fighter at best. Upon trapping, the connections would reset, and avionics mx techs would scratch their heads when it passed inspection with their test equipment. When it did work, it would lag and drag targets as the jet offset for BVR angles, which is why VF-32 had that incident in 1989 where they shot down a Libyan MiG-23 IP and student for the student's first solo flight over the water. Tomcat RIOs took unauthorized tools into the rear pit to manipulate displays because they were so antiquated. D Model was a different airplane in that respect, finally letting the pilot manage the BVR fight while RIO/WSO could focus on EW or strike. I think the F-14 came 4 years too early, which left it with a lot of analog and vacuum tube electronics, just barely missing the solid state and digital avionics that the later teens got. It also was trapped in a time where turbofan fighter engine technology was still going through its initial 10 years of major growing pains. It wasn't anybody's fault, just the nature of the beast at the time. Had the propulsion upgrade budget not been blown, they could have gotten F110s in more of the fleet 3-4 years earlier, right around the time we saw them coming in with F-16C Block 30. Could have, should have, would have... Every F-14A/D pilot close to the F-35C sings nothing but praises for it. Several of the F-14D test and weapons integration pilots were instrumental in JSF-C.
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  10283.  @TresLinguas  I would disagree with that and can lay out the metrics quiet plainly: 1. Combat radius and BARCAP. F-35C has 100nm more radius than a 2-tank D model cat even with the more efficient engines. Time between tanking is much longer with the F-35C, allowing it to stay on-station much longer and execute the mission set without as many interruptions. 19,200lb of internal fuel is huge fuel fraction, without drag penalty. 2. On top of that vastly superior radius, a series of 2-ship or multi-ship distributed F-35Cs networked with E-2D and the frigates provides a gigantic leap in long range, multi-spectral awareness for the CIC that has never been possible before, no matter what you did even to AST-21 sensors and data links (no DAS, no MADL). 3. Payload. The common payload on F-14s on BARCAP was 2-4 AAMs, normally AIM-9L/M and AIM-7M on the glove pylons, rarely in the tunnel. F-35C common payload is 2 AIM-120C7 or AIM-120D (D has been emphasized for USN and Pacific Theater due to threats there) and 2 AIM-9X on outboard canted pylons with an AIM-9X variant with high use of RAM on it. You can add 2 more AIM-120C7 or Ds in the weapons bays for a 6 count if you wanted, with a much higher practical stowed kill count. 4. Stowed kill count of a 4 or 6 missile F-35C exceeds the stowed kill count of a 6-8 AAM F-14 due to increased pk from VLO approaches (unseen/undefended). AIM-120D pk rivals that of the AIM-54C due to rocket motor advances and dual pulse, while the guidance circuitry and data link capes have increased as well without the weight penalty of the whale. The practical advantages for the Carrier Strike and Battle Group are that you have much earlier detection of threat bomber or cruise missile approaches, you add a networked sensor suite that covers everything from shallow sub-surface to low earth orbit, and your pk for BVR missile shots is much higher because any approaching threat aircraft will not know they’re being targeted. Then there’s the whole bring-back issue. F-35C with only 2 externally-mounted AIM-9Xs is easy to recover on the boat with its internal stores that don’t represent any considerable measure of fuel fraction.
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  10284.  @TresLinguas  1. Agreed on range for the paper ASF variant. I looked skeptically at the claims about an additional 335gal of fuel per wing glove volume, compared it to the nacelle-mounted EFTs, and determined that this was a realistic claim provided they would be able to use the full space of the wing root glove leading edges. Given the warped curvature planform of those for added vortex generation as well, I think it pans out. But as you said, there’s the twin thirsty engine design. Same reason an F-35A has a longer combat radius than an F-22A, both starting with 18,000lb of internal. (F-35A has a few hundred pounds more, which is negligible.) The F-14 could find an optimum altitude and configure the wings and airspeed for maximum BARCAP time on station, but the manta-like wings of the F-35C, its F135-PW-100 motor, body and chine lift on the fuselage design, with no cumbersome external stores, still has an impressive radius and BARCAP profile. 2. If you put a giant APG-63(V)3 sized AESA in the ASF like is in the F-15C+, you would think it should have more range. This is one of the important areas where you start to see separation between 4th Gen and 5th Gen, aside from the obvious. The AESA isn’t a separate federated sensor in the F-22A or any JSF series. It’s a staged and layered, fused RF sensor array with the high count of RF sensors embedded all over the airframe. Primary detection method begins passively in RF spectrum, generating bearing and rough distance when the distributed RF suite senses signature. The AESA in LPI mode can be used to further resolve the contact(s) in a way that doesn’t trigger their RWR. So an F-35 will typically see bomber, cruise missile, and anti-ship sea-skimming missiles before a larger fighter with a larger AESA. Substitute “Array” for “dish” when discussing AESAs. There are small Transmitter Receiver Modules stacked together to form the array, using beam-steering to achieve the traversing and elevation field of regard. Another part of this is the networked interleaving of multiple birds with their own fused data, shared via the MADL Line of Sight along narrow beams that can’t be detected outside of the encrypted Local Area Network. The MADL transmit and receive antennae require certain structural features that aren’t really doable on legacy designs, and are VLO apertures. So 2x F-35s have farther detection, tracking, and PID ranges than 2 ASF with bigger AESAs, even if data-linked. This is also true for 2x F-35s vs 2x F-22s with their own 1st Gen 5th Gen IFDL data link, since JSF has fused LW/MW/SW IR spectrum sensor data with RF sensors. Raptor only has SW IR MAWS fused with ALR-94 for closer missile protection/warning. Counter to that would be the ASF dual chin-mounted IR sensors, but there was no plans for DAS fused with EOTS. EOTS is like having LITENING pod in the nose. 3. The most difficult thing to destroy regarding wing boxes were the actual Titanium boxes that housed the wing pivot and actuation mechanisms. They were electron beam welded enclosures that went through very stringent assembly and testing for integrity of the EB welds, including X-ray of the weld thickness and width along the joints. It was one of the only things on the F-14 that was basically indestructible and actually worked, compared to all the other complex systems. From pilot perspectives, they said bring-back was always a concern and the AIM-54 was really expensive, representing additional deck hazards in the event of a rough landing with gear collapse. Another problem was cyclic deck operations with the time constraints driven by loaders trying to get birds armed up. It’s faster to load onto the wing glove stations than trying to negotiate around the underside of the Tomcat. Weapons loads typically varied based on threat profiles in the regions they were in. For most of a Pacific float, before getting near the PACRIM, maybe a single AIM-9 would be fine. For the Med and Persian Gulf, they often flew with 2 -9s and 2 -7s, then would add an AIM-54 if hostilities were more likely. AIM-120D on an AESA Block II Super Hornet has some better intercept profiles and pk than AIM-54C/AWG-9 did, though upgrades to the AIM-54 with incremental improvements in dual pulse motors and guidance would have kept the AIM-54 more capable on an ASF. AIM-120 integration on the glove pylons stations presented some aerodynamic problems when they were doing F-14D/AIM-120 tests, and it was dropped because of that. Not sure what the solution would have been for ASF/AIM-120. Regarding speed. F-35s cruise as fast as you can without going supersonic, which is bad for fuel consumption no matter how you do it, even in supercruise. Cruise speed is in the .9 Mach range, which is already into transonic region (.8 to 1.2 Mach). You can optimize a design for efficient .9 mach cruise without killing fuel efficiency, which is what was common in a lot of previous designs once they hit .8 mach. If they wanted to go supersonic, they had to muscle through the transonic region wave drag and get to 1.2 Mach to alleviate the fuel consumption. A clean 4th Gen fighter can push through Mach 1 quiet easily, but with necessary stores, the wave drag and parasitic drag are very detrimental to aerodynamic performance, which is why we have ATF and JSF. Muscling through with more power doesn’t really solve the internet problem of parasitic drag from stores. There are some detailed measures of F-35C acceleration through the Mach and up to 1.6 which are impressive compared to 4th Gen fighters. Some articles made it sound terrible by comparing it with the F-35A and not providing any legacy performance baseline to show how much better it is. The main benefit of AWACS birds is duration. With 4 E-2Ds per Carrier Air Wing, they can always have a bird up for early warning. Once F-35Cs are up in the air, the situational awareness expands dramatically over what any AWACS can provide, and they form a net-centric AEW&C web with extreme accuracy for range, altitude, and PID that AWACS can’t provide. Range and altitude error with AWACS is a known problem with those sizes of radars, although the E-2D now has an Electronically Scanned Array versus the old school. E-2D working in conjunction with F-35C, Triton, and Poseidon is where it’s at. AIM-120D on the F-35C net is more capable, with faster time to intercept than ASF could have been for these reasons, and ASF would have been vulnerable to all the pitfalls of a huge RCS target with large IR signature as well. The Navy knows more about VLO and LO technology dating back to submarine masts and ship LO tech, so I think they really understood the way of the future was VLO and LO. That’s why cutting the Tomcat fleet as soon as possible was necessary to remove the O&M albatross it hung around their necks.
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  10285.  @TresLinguas  F-22 & F-35 AESAs use Gallium Arsenide TRMs, not GaN although there's a possibility they're upgrading the Raptor's ALR-94 with GaN. I noticed in one of the increment 3.x phases that they're overhauling a lot of antennae, but they're extremely tight-lipped with those upgrades. APG-77 has somewhere around 2000 TRMs, but again it's a fused antennae array with the 30 different RF antennae of varying lengths embedded around the airframe beneath the skin all working together for true spherical 360 SA. As to power output, AESAs in LPI modes make efficient use of much lower peak power to minimize the possibility of triggering RWR, and they freq-hop at blistering speeds to also elude RWR bandwidth sensitivity and attenuation to specific regions of the RF spectrum. Since AESAs have very narrow beams, they are more flexible in how they can be used. The IFDL data link on F-22 & MADL on F-35 are narrow beam directional secure links, not wideband omnidirectional RF signatures that can be detected and jammed. MADL has way more throughput, so that imagery and fused RF/IR data can be piped automatically in near real-time. It's a whole new generation of connectivity that is a massive gap between legacy data links. It was one of the most difficult things to pull off on both programs. ASF would have lijely gotten a radar like APG-63(V)3 with its even bigger frontal array. That AESA is bigger than the Raptor's but the Raptor still has better detection & tracking range because the AESA isn't a single sensor, but merely another sensor among dozens that are all fused together via fiber-optics through the redundant central brain. Initial detection is passive, then the pilot can selectively escalate his signature with minimal active LPI scanning to get PID without triggering threat RAWS. It's really a different and more refined way of detecting TGTs, tracking them, PID'ing, and then moving forward with deception or EW as intercept angles are prosecuted. F-35 has even more capabilities than the Raptor in this regard, because of lessons learned from F-22 and natural inertia of technological progress in these areas. It allowed them to reduce the RF sensor count, while also getting multiple bandwidth IR spectrum sensors that are also fused into the combined spectrum picture. So MADL-equipped JSF get first-look even vs IFDL-connected Raptors, and have several layers of LWIR, MWIR, and SWIR to work with in cooperative PID against Non Cooperative Recognition (NCTR) Targets. ASF was to have the dual-chin IR/TV sensors of Radar-slaved IRST/TCS, which is still 1950s-1980s approach, which is a giant gap in between the ATF AIRST (never funded) and EOTS/DAS. If you look at the DAS cameras, they are wide FOV SWIR, but still have unusually high resolution at long range, enough to get a small spike in IR which automatically triggers the EOTS to look there in longer wave IR spectrum with zoom feature. F-14 and ASF sensor design was to use radar as primary volume search and within relevant range before a merge or intercept, PID with TCS and IRST. F-14D already had the dual TCS/IRST, which was really unique among US 4th Gen fighters. Closest thing to it is Rafale's OSF.
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  10286.  @TresLinguas  It's not just radars data-linked together. The dynamic SA for the pilots doesn't care where the picture comes from, since you have scores of RF and IR sensors all working together. The pilots only care about the color and shape coded TGT designate boxes, and for threats, when those boxes go from hollow to full. Hollow means out of parameters, full is within WEZ. Another surprising thing is that JSF have what is called an Integrated Power Pack that has combined the functions of multiple legacy internal power systems into a 270V DC electric system with intertwined electrical generation and thermal management. From an engineering perspective, no matter where I look at it under the hood, I see not only brilliant systems integration, but unprecedented performance that simply out-classes legacy Environmental & Electrical, flight control, propulsion, man-machine interface, etc. The Electrohydrostatic Actuators (EHAs) are another example of this. Holistic integration of propulsion, FADEC, DFLCS, thermal management, and Very Low Observability make it so that the AESA, IPP, IR Stealth, and engine are all intimately a part of each other. The lines are totally blurred as to what is what, which helps reduce weight and complexity. Legacy birds with Jet Fuel Starters, APUs, EPUs, and all the headaches with those systems seem antiquated in comparison. JSF is really an amazing revolution in combat air systems design, not hype at all like you see many claim. You can see so many instances where it's obvious to me that teams of engineers said, "Just because it was done that way before doesn't mean we need to. What if we..."
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  10303.  @danieleyre8913  You can’t adjust the length of a stripped Carcano stock, which is a foot longer than what Frazier saw. Imagine holding a 34” package under your arm, with one end cupped in your hand. The end of the package would protrude up 12” higher than his shoulder. I’m much taller than Oswald with much longer reach, and when I measured this, a yardstick extends 10” above my shoulder. The Carcano packed in a wrapper broken-down is a story for people who have no experience with military surplus rifles or bolt guns. This is a basic failure at math, and one of the many things that refutes the WC’s explanation for how he brought the rifle to the TSBD. There were no curtain rods. That was a story made-up by Dallas PD in their deal with Frazier. Frazier has made some very interesting statements lately, now that all those Dallas PD officers are dead. The shooting sequence could not be duplicated by Carlos Hathcock or any of the Senior USMC Scout Sniper Committee Instructors at Quantico, nor any of the students. It’s one thing to hit a static target within those ranges, and another entirely to hit a moving target repeatedly. Oswald has zero record of ever training on moving targets. I shoot moving targets in competition with rifles and pistols, and have done so for decades. The idea that a lone gunman got off that many shots on a partially exposed mover with a Carcano fails on many levels. In other words, it didn’t happen. Then look at the GSW forensics. More gymnastics from Arlen Specter that defy over a Century of recorded rifle terminal ballistics and the accounts of the Parkland doctors. If you still accept the Warren Commission in 2024, something is seriously wrong with your ability to think critically and dispassionately analyze data.
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  10308.  @danieleyre8913  The whole curtain rod story was manufactured long after Oswald’s death. Dallas PD was a known, fundamentally-corrupt police dept that specialized in frame-up jobs. It was their primary MO in cases so they wouldn’t have to do much work. They were never a bastion of even decent LE work, let alone anything resembling sound protocols in evidence collection and compliance with due process of law.  Once people started appealing their convictions, the overturned case rate was extremely high for Dallas PD. It was Dixie Mafia tied at the hip with business tycoons and Chicago Mafia. That’s why Ruby was sent by the Chicago outfit to work their nightclubs in the Dallas area and why he was always broke. If the Carcano didn’t need to be re-zeroed, why even install the scope and mount? See how the Carcano story falls apart upon basic inspection by people who are actual shooters and collectors? There would be no way for him to know whether it was zeroed or not upon reassembly. Here’s another thing they overlooked. I’m zoomed into CE139 right now looking at the stock cap/ferrule, and the stock band screws. To disassemble and reassemble the Fucile Corto Mod 91/38, you need a special type of flathead screwdriver commonly used by gunsmiths, to remove or loosen 4 different screws: The ferrule cross screw Stock/Handguard band screw Action screw front Action screw rear With the black-painted Mod 91/38s like CE139, the paint often makes the stock ferrule difficult to remove without a rubber mallet. Oswald would have had to re-install and tighten these 4 screws with a gunsmithing flathead driver, otherwise there would be screwdriver marks on the ferrule screw and stock band screw. Zoomed-in, I see zero evidence of any tampering with the screws at all, and the surface of the ferrule is clean and free from any nics or scratches that an amateur or ill-equipped person would normally leave. Stripping the flathead screws is a normal occurrence on mil-surps. If you asked me, I would say that rifle shows no signs of disassembly post-modification at the arsenal.
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  10337.  @sepposavinainen2660  F-35A is one of the, if not the most affordable fighter on the market. Unit flyaway cost: $77.9 million Unit program cost: Depends on the weapons package and what level of support the customer requires. Finland already has a compatible weapons inventory from the Hornets, so Unit Program cost might be much lower than say a nation who doesn't have AIM-120C, JDAM, JASSM, GBU-12, etc. Rafale unit cost for India's order is $144 million, $213 million unit program cost. The maximum allowable unit program cost for H-X is $187.5 million if 64 units will be funded with $12 billion (10b euros). You would think that the Rafale is the most expensive with its unique weapons and support systems, 2 engines, and French industry focus, but the Gripen E and F models might cost more because they haven't been developed for production-ready status. Gripen E/F is a development fund trap to help finance Saab, who isn't really looking to invest in Gripen, but their own workshare of a joint 5th Gen project with UK. Nobody knows what the unit program cost actually will be for Gripen E/F. Saab can bid any number they want, but they don't even know. They hadn't even flown their Gripen NG test aircraft at night, which was revealed during H-X. Eurofighter Typhoon Tranche 4 unit cost is right there with Rafale, but it can employ some of the weapons in FiAF inventory. Virtual training is better in one key area, namely full systems capability employment in larger flight formations vs emulated threats. Nothing replaces actual flying, and later lot F-35As are the most reliable, ready platforms in USAF, so Finland will enjoy better readiness than the Hornet right out of the gate.
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  10345. Obama was basically an absentee President who really did believe he's smarter than everyone else, condescending with his smirks, habitually late, didn't like to have many meetings, and let the political activists run much of the show. Valerie Jarrett had a lot of power in that WH, as did Hillary as SECSTATE, and Joe Biden as VP serving his masters. They all were working for Putin, Hu, Muslim Brotherhood, and the Mullahs of Iran on many fronts: 1. Uranium One to help Putin revitalize Russia's nuclear weapons 2. Burisma with Hunter Biden acting as an insurance policy from investigations into how Putin was using Burisma to pilfer Ukrainian revenue 3. Keeping Ukraine vulnerable to Russian invasion by denying them arms, and not lifting a finger when Putin invaded in 2014 4. Coercing Poroshenko to fire Viktor Shokin who was investigating Burisma. Obama then flew to England in Sep 2014 and told David Cameron to shut down their investigation into Zlochevsky, CEO of Burisma living in Monaco. 5. Syria-let Putin strengthen Russia's footprint there with Assad 6. Billions in cash sent to Iran with nothing in return 7. MB in the WH 8. Blatantly soured the relationship with Israel 9. Open affronts to the UK 10. Energy policy that benefitted Russia 11. Killed the F-22 before we could go into Full Rate Production, which created a fighter gap 12. Hillary destabilizing Libya, with Benghazi blowing up into the spotlight and the death of Ambassador Stevens 13. Hillary selling US secrets via her basement server, which processed tens of thousands of sensitive documents to hostile foreign governments not authorized to have them These were just some of the high crimes and treason going on during the Obama Presidency. The domestic side was also a nightmare with a weaponized IRS, Fast & Furious, illegal spying, racial agitation, ACA, bail outs, divisiveness, and erosion of the military culture.
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  10352.  @gpheonix1  The German MachinenKarabinen were all carbines based on barrel length, not fitting any definition of rifles. Rifles typically had 24"-31.1" barrels. There were 24" barreled carbines even in the 1800s if the actions were short enough. The MKb42(H) had a 14" barrel. M1 Carbine has a 17.75" barrel. In the first half of the 20th Century, most 20" barreled long guns were considered carbines. We saw a shift in the 1950s with the 21" barrel FAL, 22" bbl M14, 17.7" bbl G3, 20" bbl AR-10, and 20" bbl AR-15 all referred to as "rifles". Especially with the flash hiders on the FAL and M14, they were long in overall length like a rifle, plus the bulky/ lengthy receivers of the FAL, G3, and AR-10 contributed to their overall lengths. An M1 Carbine is tiny compared to a G3, even though the M1 Carbine's barrel is longer. The AR-15 came from the Small Caliber High Velocity Rifle program, where several of the prototypes had longer barrels. One of the early AR-15 prototypes had a 22" barrel with a rather long flash hider. With the 20" barrel AR-15 and the original Type A-E stocks, they all present like little carbines, not traditional rifles. A more correct description of the M4 would be a Small Caliber High Velocity Carbine. It's also interesting to note that the Russians have never classified the AK or AKM as rifles, but just Avtomat Kalashnikovs, while their rifles have Vintovka in the designation, i.e. Vintovka Mosina, SVT, SVD, etc. Exceptions to this are the VAL and VSS, which of course have tiny little barrels with large suppressors. Their overall lengths are still in the carbine department.
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  10361.  @ericpotter4657  The Navy was faced with several different paths moving forward after the failure of the A-12 program (almost $2 billion thrown down the drain with that). The A-6E had already proven to not be survivable in ODS and airframes were timing out anyway, so A-6E would be last of the subsonic medium attack capability in the Carrier Air Wing. That created a big void in strike capability looking at payload and range, plus the various mission sets A-6Es could perform including SEAD with the HARM. The more expanded multirole versions of the F-14 like ASF-14 and ST-21 were one path to consider. Pros were the possibilities in payload, range, improved avionics, and multi-mission set wing-role options with more clean sheet structural/propulsion/electronics evolutions of the Tomcat. Cons were 1) risks associated with an airframe design whose complexity never allowed it to realize a consistent mission readiness rate much above 60% throughout its career, 2) Costs spiraling away from any initial projections, which were already high, 3) Continual discoveries of systemic problems with F-14 structures even into the late 1990s/early 2000s, 4) The discovery that the AIM-120 required a new solution to the wing glove pylons due to aerodynamic problems with separation and roll, 5) Requirement for a 2 crew platform demand on the training pipeline, and 6) the incompatibility with the design yielding to application of Low Observables. Another option for NAVAIR was to adopt an enlarged Hornet with bigger motors, taking advantage of the development of the A-12 engines and making them afterburning, increasing the combat radius to match the F-14’s, adding 2 more weapons stations for a total of 13, acquiring a force mix of mostly single seat E models, but with enough 2-seat F models to handle the A-FAC mission and some other more involved strike and SEAD mission sets where a WSO would be helpful, and incorporating some low observables into the airframe design, specifically with the intakes and serpentine airflow geometry to hide the inlet guide vanes and fans from line of sight RF reflectivity. While the maintainability of the Baby Hornet fleet was overstated initially, it was still quite superior to the Tomcat, which helped increase readiness rates of the air wing while afloat, with far less MMHPFH exerted by Hornet wrenchers. It also had a more reliable avionics suite that used solid state/digital revolution along with the moving map display, and could genuinely flip from A2G to A2A while headed to prosecute strike missions, and had Non Cooperative Target Recognition capability that the F-14 didn’t have. Especially after Desert Storm, the tables flipped from all the ridicule that Hornets had received from the Tomcat community for "not being real fighter pilots", etc., to Tomcat guys eating crow for not getting any fighter kills in the most target rick environment since Vietnam (far more fighters than Vietnam has or ever will have). From the big picture, NAVAIR looked at these 2 paths and saw a lot of risks and challenges with the ASF-14/ST-21/Super Dooper Tomcat, vs less risk with the Super Hornet, and went with the Super Hornet. The acquisition costs alone for any Super Duper Cat were a known larger quantity than Super Hornet for sure, as was the training pipeline for an all 2-man crew platform. In secret, the US Navy had already been working with Royal Navy, USAF, DARPA, and USMC on a next generation stealth platform anyway, which would benefit from all the RDT&E spent on A-12 and ATF, so AST-14/ST-21 might have threatened that program as well. Imagine trying to acquire JSF-C right now while also supporting a Super Duper Tomcat fleet. The Navy is going to be talking more about how they wish they had more F-35Cs than Super Hornets after this current deployment, and they already announced a 20% reduction in upgrades from Block II Super Hornets into Block IIIs.
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  10364.  @jeromeportier4914  I went through the NATO AeroE course syllabus in the 1980s, which included total systems design challenges as part of the work and capstone projects, though I was not required to do so. It was more foundational to the way I look at things than any of the programs I have done in 3 other colleges or universities. We worked on various fighter, bomber, and missile programs from the 1970s-2000s, to include systems at the Rocket Propulsion Lab, Future Combat Fighter 1990 (this later became ECA, then EFA, then EF2000, then EF Typhoon), B-1B, SRAM and SRAM II, F-16C weapons expansion, F-15C/E Navigation and sensor expansion, and RQ-4. Any of the NATO STANAG databuses, which the US follows, should have been available for the Gripen E. From a systems engineering approach, the use of 4x Mil-15553B databuses seems to violate the weight/space trade-offs where other avionics or cooling systems could have been used, and a single fiber-optic bus utilized in the space of one of the 1553s, providing the same amount of porting for less space/volume. It just seems like a violation of basic principles to me. Maybe there is something I’m not seeing on the supply-side that pushed Saab down that path, but it doesn’t look right to me. There isn’t a modern VSTOL fighter in development or production. You meant to reference the F-35B, which is STOVL. There never was a warped tailboom. On 2 of the first 6 JSF birds that rolled off the initial production line, there were some elevated temperatures on the inboard horizontal tailplanes close to some of the embedded RF sensors. Engineers didn’t like some of the numbers they were seeing, so they took the other 4 birds and ran aggressive back-and-forth supersonic runs with them to duplicate the temps, and could not. None of those 4 airframes were mass-produced because they were too heavy, after certain members of Congress steered Lockheed into using 7086T6 aluminum for all the bulkheads, spanners, spars, and structures that were meant to be carbon fiber in the original design work. It almost sabotaged the whole program. They brought in Rick Abel from retirement to deal with the weight loss program, who asked, “Why didn’t you just let Lockheed build the plane they had designed?” The entire tailplane area was then done with Carbon Fiber, to include the booms, H-stabs, and V-stabs, which increased strength, airframe life, while reducing the weight and RCS values considerably. The silly comments you read from people with zero background in these spaces on supersonic speed limits are exaggerations that have no relevance anyway for the production fighters.
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  10373. The US will continue to be the dominant super power, as it has the largest economy, no threat nations on its borders, the largest and most experienced military with the largest Navy patrolling the sea lanes, the most dominant space-based assets, the most demand for products from abroad, while having the most healthy domestic production and consumption, the largest arable farmland for food cultivation, the largest population that lives in low population density, with cities evenly distributed across the land, with the most connected river network in the world, with the most deep sea ports connected to that river network. The EU isn't a union, but a bad idea of unifying historic enemies who don't speak each other's languages and don't share the same regional threats, with the majority of the most powerful EU members militarily allied with the US. Brazil is a weak collection of city states on the coast, who aren't connected geographically because of the terrain. China is its own worst enemy because it can't deal with the interior, which is what has always plagued China. Their military force projection capability has never been tested, and they are barely able to maintain internal security with their military, while facing a huge crisis in living conditions between those on the coast, and those in abject poverty. Russia is on the verge of fragmenting due to interior erosion and lawlessness, compounded by the coming demographic winter Japan is already well into. No matter how you look at each scenario, it just doesn't work out for any other nation currently.
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  10440.  @norske_ow3440  F-16 has fast turn-around as well, but the nose landing gear isn't as strong as the Gripen. Main gear on F-16 are stronger than Gripen. The amount of weapons test and integration is orders of magnitude better than Gripen. I see people constantly talking so surely about how much better Gripen C with Meteor is in A2A but there is nowhere near the level of systems integration and weapons capes expansion with Gripen and Meteor compared to an MLU Viper, APG-68(V)5 through 9, and AIM-120C5 through C7. We have over 5000 live fire shots with AIM-120s against TGT drones and real-world threats. Gripen C has great Man Machine Interface, but nowhere near the level of systems test and development behind it. It uses really old US Mil-1553B databuses and lots of US, UK, French, and German systems from decades ago. Saab had to go to General Dynamics to solve their FLCS problems they were having on Gripen A, with PIO-related crashes. RCS on Gripen is huge from certain aspects, so it would have major problems in the first-look, first-shoot timeline against S-300, S-400 sensors, and MiG-31BM + Su-35S, but this is true for any 4th Gen. Climb rate is a factor in that if you're trying to get into solutions with Meteor, or even vector to intercept. That delta wing profile during the climb is a giant reflector in RF spectrum. Without dedicated ESM birds supporting it, I'm seeing nothing but uphill battles for Gripens to get into useful solutions. Where I do see it being capable is in anti-ship, but F-16 shines in that space as well. The programmable signals processing pioneered and developed in the US to those ends is far more advanced than people know.
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  10545.  @Costa_Conn  I personally did a 1999-2019 relevancy-based research set of metrics, narrowed to medical and academic journals on the subject to eliminate 2020-forward media bias/contamination. I also included investor literature. SARSCOV was patented by a team, including Dr. Baric, at UNC Chapel Hill in 2002 before the first outbreak per the US Patent & Trade Office. They continued chimeric research on it with gain of threat lab iterations, using large populations of human/mice hybrids. To build those mice, they took human stem cells from fetal lung tissue and injected it into mice embryos in utero to grow miniature human lungs inside the mice. Then, they ran cycles of modified cpronavirus spike proteins using 4 positively-charged amino acids so that the virus would attach more easily to Human endothelia in veins, lungs, and soft tissues that have negative charges. I have some medical background with live tissue studies in a military setting and took an interest in virology, immunology, and epidemiology back in the 1990s, though my primary focus has been in aerospace defense systems. The evidence clearly demonstrates man-made origin of the modified virus, that it was done initially at UNC Chapel Hill, then the research was banned in 2014. Dr. Shi Zhengli then packed up the research samples and materials and moved the operation to Wuhan, while Fauci approached Moderna to begin experimenting with mRNA gene-editing Lipid NanoCapsule devices. At the time, Moderna described this research as classified, while openly talking about mRNA treatments for influenza and Zika virus. Everything I just described is pre-2019 even. Moderna's 2019 investor report is really one of the only stand-out documents I referenced, and it told investors they were looking at windfalls of profit around the corner.
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  10625.  @Micha-qv5uf  Their production schedule is for 76 of them through 2028. It is a threat because it is a lever that will be employed as a AEW&C/Hunter-Killer data-linked with Super Flankers. All Su-27SM and Su-30SM are being brought up to interoperability standards with Su-35S and Su-57, with Su-27SM3 and Su-30SM2 modernization packages. Operational Flankers have been undergoing that staged upgrade already and sent back to their fighter regiments. So if every major fighter regiment gets "only" 12 Su-57s, that's a force multiplier with all the existing Su-35S/Su-30SM2/Su-27SM3 Flankers and their massive PESA radars, data links, new EW gear, and new missiles. One of the most dangerous roles against a legacy force structure (with singular AWACS nodes directing fighters) is from the Su-57 in the anti-AWACS role. The Su-35 super-cruises already, and the Su-57 was designed to do this at a higher Mach value, so we should expect even more deep encroachments into Finnish Airspace from the Su-57. I looked at several scenarios where GlobalEye maintains maximum stand-off over the Gulf of Bothnia and it still is very vulnerable to anti-AWACS even from the Su-35, let alone the Su-57. This also limits GlobalEye sensor penetration into Russia due to curvature of the earth and atmospheric layers. Flankers already have more than plenty of combat radius to reach anywhere in the region, and the Su-57 has extremely long legs as well. If you overlay the combat radii, you can start to wargame things a bit.
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  10635.  @Илья-з7э3и  В обычном конфликте США покончили бы с российскими вооруженными силами примерно за 2 недели. Россия была слаба в Великой Отечественной войне, ей нужны были миллиарды долларов техники, оружия, самолетов, газа и сырья из США, чтобы бороться с немцами, которые топтали всю Россию. Когда Россия заявила египтянам, что они не знают, как правильно воевать в воздухе против израильтян, российские пилоты МиГов прилетели в Египет, чтобы показать им, как это делается. Потери у них были выше, чем у египтян, которые потом с ликованием над ними издевались, даже потеряв больше МиГов в войне 1967 года. Для начала российский флот практически в одночасье прекратит свое существование против США, а затем ВКС будут уничтожены, как будто это спорт. Российские вооруженные силы - это шутка, и так было всегда, если вы изучите историю.
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  10643. Never listen to the hand-selected, cherry-picked comments from 1st-term soldiers and junior leaders or senior officers who don’t have extensive experience from the Fire Team level up to dealing with DODICs. Do look at what Ranger Regiment and JSOC are using. Hint: They are avoiding this POS like the plague. If a US Army Battalion Commander is running his mouth, you can toss whatever he says out with the trash. He has extremely-limited experience unless he came from prior enlisted ranks in Ranger Regiment, Vicenza, LRSD/LRSC, Recon Community, or SF. An officer starts off as a 2d Lt, finishes IOBC/IBOLC/whatever they call it now. Hopefully he graduates Ranger School and gets sent to his unit. He gets his first Rifle Platoon, which he knows nothing about running, and is entirely reliant on the PSG and Squad Leaders to steer him right on learning his job. After a year of OJT, he might become Company XO if he’s lucky, then moves off to staff jobs from then-on. Again, any basic lessons he learned while a PL are becoming perishable every day. After years of sucking bungholes, he might get a chance to come back and command a Rifle Company after pinning Captain in staff jobs. Again, he knows next to nothing about how to run a Company, so the 1SG will have to carry him and mentor him through that assignment. After that, he goes back to being a staff wheenie, sucking Major’s bungholes, kissing up to LTCs and Colonels, and does this for years before he gets a chance at Battalion Command after pinning LTC. Officer promotions are adversarial and very competitive, so you have a pool of self-promoters looking out for numero uno, throwing each other under the bus, making their peers’ failures known at key moments while show-boating their own positions, until there are only a few standing looking for full bird Colonel promotion. A guy like this knows 2 things about small arms: Jack and _______. This is why when you hear one of them run their suckhole about small arms, you should ignore whatever it is they say.
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  10659.  @janbo8331  A lot of millennial generation articles have been written about how difficult it is to maintain JSF, without actually knowing anything about legacy fighter maintenance or doing the work necessary to gather real data to make an informed opinion. So what are legacy maintainers saying about JSF? USMC with the F-35B model: "We're seeing twice the availability rates compared to what we operated before. In fact, we have a hard time generating enough pilots for the birds." USAF former phase-level F-16C/D Environmental & Electrical Maintenance Tech, now F-35A Maintenance Instructor at Hill AFB: "I miss working on the F-16 because I used to be able to get my hands dirty. The F-35 basically maintains itself. You can really tell that unlike on the F-16, someone really listened to maintainers when designing the access to common inspection and replacement parts on the F-35. On the F-16, you really have to dig for a lot of things, which makes it more challenging and time-consuming. On the F-35, I open a panel and...'Ah there it is!'. Usually, we just plug in a rugged laptop and the jet tells us everything already, so there isn't much to do. It's boring. The new production F-35As from Block 3 are basically gas-and-go. We can launch them again right away. I work in an operational unit, so we don't have any of the older Lot birds, so I can't speak to them. We get a lot of them that are still 100% after a sortie, which is not normal. The F-35 has its own integrated gas turbine power generator called the Integrated Power Pack, so you can test all of the systems without any engine power, and get them started up before the pilot even gets to the jet. There are only 13 switches in the cockpit, so it's the easiest plane to start and interface with. Power is redundant to all the displays, so you can lose power to several of them and still have basic flight info displayed. It actually has more redundancy in that area than other jets since it has the HMDS, 2 large panel displays that form the PCD, and a separate back-up artificial horizon. For the F-16, we would have about 6 people per bird at the Squadron, not including the separate shops for pods. With F-35, we only need maybe 2." Access to the Radar and EOTS (FLIR, LST, TGT DES) is done through the nose landing gear bay, which is always open on the ground of course. It's really a brilliant aircraft from a maintenance perspective, far more easy to maintain than the F-16, which is the gold standard among the 4th Gen. F-16 is also more easy to maintain than the twin-engine Hornet, always has been. Finland will be getting a system that introduces a new generation of reduced logistics burden at the operational unit, with far higher turnaround rates than either a Hornet or F-16.
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  10763.  @WembysTRexArms  There is a 360° passive RF sensor network fused with the 360° IR DAS, so it does have a level of surround situational awareness that doesn't exist on other fighters. The RAM is not compromised from flying within its performance regime, including supersonic. There were 2 of the 6 original developmental F-35s, 1 F-35B and 1 F-35C that exhibited some slightly higher temps in the h-stabs that concerned engineers because of embedded antennae in those structures. They tried duplicating the problem on the other birds with extended supersonic runs, dives, and maximum Mach value between 2 tankers up and down the East coast, and never saw those temps in those structures again. The production F-35s after that didn't even use the same materials in the rear tailplanes, so the whole thing was a fluke. That was over 10 years ago, never duplicated. The F-35 series doesn't rely on RAM paint like other VLO designs. The paint is mostly IR spectrum camouflage. The physical structure of the 3-later skin has carbon nanotubes with wide spectrum RF energy defeating characteristics. The common maintenance access points have seam covers that don't require removal of and reapplication of RAM paint or treatments. There are periodic inspection and mx points like around the wingtip nav lights that have RAM tape covering them that does need to be scraped and reapplied, but they aren't day-to-day squadron-level operations. As a result, F-35A has less than half the mx hours of a stripped, new F-16. It's just a vastly-superior aircraft from a mx perspective, and former F-16 wrenchers have said as much repeatedly.
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  10806.  @DeanSpence-d9c  When ballisticians and forensic technicians at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland tested the CIA contract Western Cartridge Company 6.5x52 160gr RNFMJ ammunition on cadavers, human skulls immersed in ordnance gelatin, cadaver and amputated human arms, and goats, they had some very interesting findings. The ammunition fragmented in the skulls, and mushroomed like hunting bullets in the goat chests and human wrists. They couldn't duplicate CE 399 no matter what they tried, including tumbling bullet impacts to the goat chests. So the skull terminal ballistics were somewhat consistent for fragmentation, but Connally's wounds were not. They had conflicting opinions on how many shots were fired, and this is partially why 3 of the Warren Commission panel members dissented with the WC conclusions, with Congressman Russell even submitting his resignation from the WC. LBJ denied his resignation and coerced him to stay on the WC. William Sullivan, one of the FBI senior personnel involved in investigating the Kennedy Assassination, was scheduled to testify before the HSCA in 1977 as to why he disagreed with the WC conclusions, but was unfortunately unable to do so. He was shot in the neck by a State Trooper's son on Nov 9, 1977. Congressman Hale Boggs, another dissenter, disappeared in a twin-engined Cessna in 1971 while campaigning for another Congressman in Alaska. Their aircraft and bodies were never found. JFK's doctor, who was present at both Parkland and Bethesda, wanted to testify, but withdrew at the last moment.
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  10807. ​ @chrisgreene9963 Edgewood Arsenal ballistics lab studies showed that Connally had to have been shot at least twice by 2 different projectiles, neither of which was CE 399. Bethesda doctor's report reads that he inserted his finger in JFK's back wound on the inferior region of the scapula (lower portion) and could only get half a finger in. Gerald Ford admitted to relocating the back wound up higher near Kennedy's neck when he was on the WC. Even with Ford's tampered diagram, the WC shows JFK leaning forward to align the back GSW with the neck GSW, even though he was sitting fully erect when he was shot in the throat. Parkland doctors insisted the throat wound was an entrance. This means that at least 3 separate bullets were necessary to create JFK's injuries, none of which impacted Connally. Per Edgewood ballistics tests, at least 2 bullets and one fragment (that they removed from his L thigh) created Connally's GSWs, and CE 399 does not match any of the wounds Gov Connally suffered. From a purely scientific ballistics perspective, that would lean towards 6 bullets minimum having been fired, because we also have James Tague's cheek injury from a fragment, supposedly caused by one a miss that impacted the curb on Elm Street. JFK: 1. Throat wound entrance, R trachea lacerated 2. Back lower scapula GSW entrance 1.5" in depth, non-perforating 3. R frontal head shot entrance near temple and hairline, 5-7cm exit in posterior occipital region with massive loss of brain and skull tissue (entrance and exit) Connally: 4. Bullet entrance in R back creating an unusually long, tearing wound, exit on R anterior chest below centerline of the R pectoral muscle, causing a 2" exit and sucking chest wound 5. R distal wrist fracture with entrance and exit, multiple fragments left in the wrist 6. L thigh entrance with fragment present, removed at Parkland 7. James Tague fragment injury to cheek That's at least 10 gunshot wounds on 3 people. The proposition that 3 rifle rounds produced these 10 GSWs, a curb strike, a dent in the limo windshield frame, and a hole or crack in the window requires some ballistic and mental gymnastics only conceivable by ignoramuses to this field of research. That's 13 different impacts from 3 shots fired. You start to see why Russell, Boggs, and Sullivan knew it was all a big fraud.
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  10809. ​ @tomvan6008 If you read the WC, they really dance around the fact that nobody saw Oswald coming down the stairs, and both elevators were stuck up on higher floors. Dallas PD officer Marion Baker found Oswald on the 2nd floor, sometime between 1min 15sec and 1min 30sec after the last shot fired. WC had Marion Baker run through multiple reenactments of his actions that day, starting on his motorcycle, and timed each one. WC just says the evidence concludes Oswald walked down the stairs with plenty of time for officer Baker to run into him, and moves to the next conclusions. This is one of many problems I had with the WC when I read it 4 decades ago. The chapters danced around or over-emphasized things while ignoring basic questions. It's like a fluff piece to give you the impression of professionalism, while lacking in substance in key areas. For example, where did Oswald purchase CIA contract Western Cartridge Company 6.5x52mm Carcano ammunition from lot 6000? Where are the cartridge boxes? They do recognize that the paper package observed by Buell Frazier and his sister was much too short to have been the broken down rifle, but just say the Fraziers were mistaken and Oswald somehow carried a 35" long package into the building without any other witnesses. Frazier's sister said it looked like a bag. Buell Frazier used to work in a shipping center specializing in curtain rods, so the idea that he couldn't visually identify package lengths does not seem logical at all. WC just brushes past these facts saying Oswald carried in a long paper package. Then there's the whole problem with zero retention for a disassembled surplus rifle with a cheap scope and mount. It needs to be re-zeroed and confirmed before shooing at anything you intend to hit. WC says the unzeroed rifle helped Oswald by providing automatic target lead by 5-8". You don't need to lead moving targets that close with a rifle. 40-88yds is instantaneous time of flight for a rifle, even one that slow.
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  10811. ​ @paulpo999 Connally's R rib is a lot more dense than the landmarks on the skull where the WC and Parkland doctors saw the entrance and exits. Edgewood Arsenal ballistics lab could never duplicate Connally's wounds without the projectiles mushrooming and shedding fragments. They had excellent test designs with cadavers, goats, amputated arms, and skulls immersed in ordnance gelatin. The skull tests all fragmented. The chest and wrist wounds mushroomed and fragmented lightly. The chief ballistician said Connally had to have been shot twice, once in the back, and once in the wrist. They used Western Cartridge Company ammunition from the exact same lot as the spent cases found on the 6th floor. That ammunition is extremely rare because it has the lot codes stamped on the case heads, along with the manufacturer code. That ammunition was made for the CIA in 1954 via a DoD contract to Western Cartridge, in 4 lots of 1 million each. The spent cases deposited on the 6th floor were from the first lot, which was 6000. Edgewood Arsenal used this same ammunition, which had very soft, ductile lead cores with unusually-low antimony composition. Testimony from Dr. Joseph R. Dolce, Chief Consultant for the US Army in wound ballistics at the Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He designed and supervised their tests for the WC, but was not allowed to present the Edgewood Arsenal conclusions, which indicated Connally and Kennedy were shot separately before the fatal head shot.
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  10817.  @jetcat132  This is a fairly technical subject that requires some degree of education in the field if you are to make any informed observations and statements about it to gain clarity, not confusion. Familiarity with the technical aspects of a subject is imperative for clarity. Unfamiliarity with the technical details is what creates confusion. This is a major problem I have seen on both sides, namely all kinds of erroneous nomenclatures, mechanics, and dynamics that simply are not reality in the field of internal, external, and terminal ballistics, mechanical engineering of firearms, or human anatomy & physiology. I’m not “you guys” and I don’t do gymnastics. I only deal in reality since I have extensive training and experience in all of these fields, both from an academic and hands-on perspective covering decades. I pretty much stick to the Warren Commission as the best evidence against itself, which screams out at you along the way. I don’t read any assassination researcher books, as the WC is enough to tell you that it is extremely faulty from a scientific perspective. Reasons why CE 399 can’t be the bullet that translated through Connally’s chest, wrist, and impacted his left thigh are: 1. It weighs too much for the total weight when you add 158.6gr with Connally’s recovered fragments, the fragments from his wrist, and the fragment from his thigh. 160gr - 158.6gr = 1.4gr. I’ve been a metallic cartridge hand-loader for decades. Even the solid copper bullets that did not exist at the time lose at least 1gr of weight when you fire them into ballistics gel.   2. The Western Cartridge Company DoD contract (for the CIA) 6.5x52 Round Nose Full Metal Jacket (RNFMJ) cartridges used especially-soft lead cores with low antimony, so they deformed significantly in all of the Edgewood Arsenal ballistics tests. They simply could not duplicate CE 399 no matter how they tried. Read the studies after having learned the extensive ballistics vocabulary and definitions. Edgewood obtained over 100 rounds of ammunition from the exact same lot (6000) indicated by the lot codes on the spent cases and unspent cartridge in the M38 Carcano Carbine. 3. There were no fibers or human tissue embedded in the nose of CE 399. Every rifle projectile sample I have seen or read details of that has been recovered from a person or animal has tiny amounts of hair, clothing fibers, bone, blood, and tissue embedded in the nose or meplat. CE 567 and CE 569 were reportedly recovered from the front of the limo. CE 399 was found on the floor at Parkland by an elevator repairman. The difference in condition between CE 567, CE 569, and CE 399 are dramatic. The Edgewood Arsenal tests showed that these types of bullets did fragment when impacting human skulls filled with ordnance gel at velocities consistent with the M38 Carcano at those ranges. But they also showed dramatic deformation when perforating chest cavities and impacting human cadaver and amputee arms at the wrist. Dr. Dolce designed very well-thought test regimens to demonstrate how the Carcano Carbine performed, to include placing velocity screens between each shoot medium. His conclusion was that Connally’s wrist had to have come from a direct impact from another projectile. I already am familiar with the Commission Exhibit numbers dating back 40 years from when I first read the 888 Page Summary, then set out to read some of the supporting volumes. It is laden with fraud, strictly from a scientific perspective.
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  10819.  @mkrawc1  They Laser-scanned all the physical structures, to include the limo and occupants based on multiple films and Dealey Plaza, creating a digital twin environment not subject to human error in drawn diagrams. The left-right alignment is the least of the Single Bullet Theory's problems. The vertical alignment is the first insurmountable hurdle. 2nd is that the back GSW was not connected with the throat wound, which was still higher even with Gerald Ford's self-admitted manipulation of the autopsy diagram back wound (lower). 3rd is the back wound only was half a finger deep per the autopsy. 4th is the Parkland doctors unanimously asserted that the throat GSW was an entrance. 5th is that Connally's back injury is more like a long tear coming down from a higher angle, destroyed his R 5th rib, and exited with a 2" sucking chest wound. 6th is that during the extensive Edgewood Arsenal studies at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, they could only create Connally's wrist injuries with direct fire. 7th is that no matter what they did, the matching lot 6.5mm 160gr projectiles mushroomed dramatically in their goat thorax and human arm cadaver/amputee ballistics testing. 8th is that all the projectiles fired in the tests shed more weight than CE 399. 9th is that CE 399 has a really disjointed chain of custody from the crime scene to the floor in Parkland, and from within the FBI as well. Its evidence timeline in physical custody of the Bureau goes backwards in time. 10th is the worst, in that Dr Dolce, Chief consultant for the Army Ballistics Lab, was not allowed to present the Arsenal's conclusions to the WC. He said there was no possible way for a single bullet to have created both JFK's and Connally's wounds, and that they were created by 3 separate shots. This seems to indicate he was unaware of James Tague and the curb, which would require a 4th shot like the original FBI field report concluded before the WC was formed in '64. Either way, the Single Bullet Theory does not stand on any solid evidence. Just a cursory analysis of the SBT claims and the actual physical evidence rules out the possibility of it. A detailed analysis of the SBT feels like a dystopian horror crime novel.
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  10828.  @bboylyte8639  Medical bankruptcy is one of the most inflated claims in the US to generate hype for political purposes, while not having a very significant influence on bankruptcy filings. Bankruptcy filings are a result of multiple factors, and medical bills are nowhere near the top factor according to all the data I have studied. For starters, Elizabeth Warren’s cherry-picked study went to 2005, where there were only 1.45 million bankruptcies filed in the whole US including Chapter 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15. Only Ch 13 is for wage-earners, while Ch 15 represented the largest % of filings. The study expanded the parameters to include if people had missed 2 weeks of work due to sickness, had medical bills over $1000, and mortgaged their home to pay for bills. If bankruptcy filers fell into those categories, it was listed as "bankruptcy due to medical expenses", even if that wasn’t true. That’s less than half a percent of the overall population who even filed for bankruptcy. By adding those parameters, they fudged the data to indicate that 61% of the filers filed because of medical expenses. Another study in 2011 found that only 26% of Ch 13 filers said medical expenses played a role. Some studies said 57.1% while others said more people filed bankruptcy for medical expenses than overall bankruptcy filings, which is egregiously flawed. Not only can’t all Ch 13 filers be due to medical expenses, but Ch 13 can’t exceed all of the types of Chapter filings due to the dominance of corporate and foreign businesses filing bankruptcy each year. Ch 13 is only 27-38% of bankruptcy filings each year. Another thing is that personal bankruptcies are not a constant Y2Y. Personal bankruptcies peaked in 2010 at over 434,000 after the financial crisis, then dropped dramatically down to around 299,000 in 2016, 289,000 in 2019, and 194,000 in 2020. Chapter 13 Bankruptcies in US Year to Year 2008: 353k 2009: 398k 2010: 434.8k 2011: 417k 2012: 375k 2013: 343k 2014: 313k 2015: 302k 2016: 299k 2017: 296k 2018: 288k 2019: 289k 2020: 194k 2021: 117.7k 2022: 149k (.05% of the US population) Anytime someone presents a claim, automatically question whether that claim is even accurate, then do the research and understand the basic math. In the case of medical bankruptcy, it’s an extremely inflated piece of hype used by proponents of massive change to the overall US system, with no numbers to support it. It’s sensationalist hype really.
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  10829.  @la7era1u54  Government-provided anything means there will be more middlemen who use that same tactic you accurately describe, where opportunistic pieces of trash bribe their way into the corrupt scheme. Congress has run this way since the 1800s, and was thoroughly corrupted in the 1920s during Prohibition. It’s all pay-to-play, with Senators and more senior members of the House acting as appointed gate-keepers to the money streams from Federal programs. We want less involvement from DC, not more. Anything DC touches turns to excrement as a result, with a mafia-style union thug payment arrangement with specific donors who get choice positions at the pork barrel. Quality has decreased ever since ACA for a number of reasons, since health insurance providers, big Pharma, and medical suppliers wrote the legislation. Even with all of that, sadly, the US is the creme of the crap when it comes to healthcare availability, services, specialists, Emergency Medicine and EMS services, density, orthodontists, orthopedics, diagnostics, etc. I’ve been studying this subject and have lived in 30 different nations, 8 different States, have been to hospitals all over Europe and Canada, and have analyzed the data. The math is not in favor of any of those nations compared to the US, other than costs for medicine because we pay for the development of meds, while they group buy in bulk. From 2017-2020, HHS authorized 900-1000 generic drugs each year to help cut common drug prices, but now Pfizer is back to their antics of more and more fleecing of buyers.
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  10846.  @kingjack9502  I’ve been tracking fighter procurement, sustainment, operational, RDT&E and ODT&E costs since the 1980s. We’re talking Quadrennial Defense Budget analyses, comparisons between model numbers within series, ancillary systems costs, weapons costs, upgrades, SLEPs, etc. So I’ll continue to present my cost analyses over any of those I’ve ever seen on YouTube while watching most everyone else get it wrong every time. We already know what the F-35A costs. Even Lot 12 F-35As cost less than Gripen, and that was years ago. The cost keeps dropping every year because the program is capitalizing on initial development costs, and is making hundreds of them. They passed 600 total airframes last year, most of those of course being F-35As. Production costs have dropped 70% since Lot 1, and manufacturing time has been cut in-half. Lot 14 (2020) unit cost for the F-35A was $77.9 million. F-35A haven’t cost anywhere near $122 million since 2008, which was $128.2 million. F-35A unit costs have gone like this: 2007 LRIP-1: $221.2m 2007 LRIP-2: $161.7m 2008 LRIP-3: $128.2m 2010 LRIP-4: $111.6m 2012 LRIP-5: $107m 2013 LRIP-6: $103m 2013 LRIP-7: $98m 2014 LRIP-8: $98.4m 2016 LRIP-9: $102.1m 2017 LRIP-10: $94.6m 2018 LRIP-11: $89.2m 2019 LRIP-12: $82.4m 2020 LRIP-13: $79.2m 2020 LRIP-14: $77.9m As they’ve cut the production time in half, it’s more profitable to make more at a lower price and generate more orders. F-35A is a package deal. It has to be per the H-X contract with 10% of the total invested into Finland, no matter where it comes from.
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  10847.  @harri9885  Now factor in cost per loss with Su-57 linked with Super Flankers. Russia will use Super Flankers to bait the Gripen E into an Su-57 ambush. Not very smart. Read up on the Chinese PLAAF Falcon Strike exercises with Royal Thai Air Force from 2015-2019. First they brought Su-27SKs vs RTAF Gripen Cs. Gripen C smoked the Su-27 in BVR, but got slaughtered in WVR due to the HMS with R-73 and Flanker maneuverability/excess thrust advantage. Chinese didn’t like getting beat in BVR so they brought J-10s afterwards with a bigger AESA, IRST, and PL-15 missiles, as well as data link to take away the Gripen C advantage. SAAB technicians took a lot of those results and upgraded into the Gripen E as foreign buyers pulled out of Gripen agreements. So you’re looking at a last-ditch technology, obsolete airframe design that is already struggling to keep up with Chinese copies of the Lavi. The Russians also looked at those exercises and are cycling all their operational Su-27SM2s through upgrade into SM3, as well as Su-30SM into SM2 standard. This will give every legacy Sukhoi that stays in the fleet giant PESA radars, more modern IRST, new cockpits with 4 large displays, new AL-31F-M1 engines, data links, etc. Su-30SM2 are brought up to standards as close to what the Su-35 has in its systems as well, so all will be interoperable with Su-57 and each other. Gripen E should have first-look against Su-27SM3 and Su-30SM2, as long as the Su-57 isn’t jamming or deceiving it. The tactics make sense to use Flankers as bait and kill with the Su-57, or use Flankers for setting up initial volleys of R-77-1 BVR missile launch, forcing Gripen E defensive and set-up for being run-down. It’s not the platform I would want to hedge my bets on air defense with for Finnish airspace.
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  10882.  @user-jo7dd2jn5s  Every historical source in the US begins with the US staying out of the Great War, other than sending shiploads of supplies. Woodrow Wilson got reelected on the promise that he would keep America out of the war. Then we discuss the U-Boats and sinking of ships, including the Lousitania with the passengers. I've never even heard or seen the low-rate, minimalist info sources remotely claim the US fought throughout the Great War, since that would contradict the prominent political and international events related to the US. England and France were begging us to do more, but Americans didn't want to get in foreign entanglements, so they set up the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to cause public anger. That still didn't do the trick. It wasn't until April, 1917 that the US Congress finally declared war on Germany. Same with WWII. US was attacked in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor, followed by declarations of war against us by Germany and Italy. The Japanese had victory after victory in the Pacific, and the US still had not activated its industrial power or generated a sufficient military strength for multi-theater operations. Since I was a kid, it was always about dealing with the Pacific first, then sending forces to North Africa after the British defeat by Rommel in North Africa in 1942, to stop Rommel from reaching the Suez Canal. It's simple-mindedness on the part of Europeans thinking that the US even had the combat power it did in 1944, superimposed on 1939. We didn't. The largest awakening of industrial capacity in human history happened after 1941, where the Nation rallied to build factories, tooling, and workforces to manufacture all the war material that would feed the Allied War machine in the coming years. These are fundamental basics of WWII.
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  10924.  @negativeionz  I have to agree with you there. I’ve been studying virology, epidemiology, and immunology since 1997, marginal to my main focal areas, but more out of an interest in my survival. I approached my analysis of SARSCoV with a timeline method, leaving out anything from 2020, so 1999-2019. The picture that emerged was very damning and quite ominous. Patent applications for zoonotic-to-human CV are easily seen in US Patent and Trade Office dating to 2002, with Dr. Baric’s name as one of the applicants. Patent description details artificial spike protein manipulation with positively-charged amino acids, and chimeric organisms as test subjects used to get the zoonotic disease to jump to humans. They ran the chimeric research at UNC Chapel Hill, with Shi Zhengli as one of the researchers until it was banned in 2014, at which time she picked up shop and took it to Wuhan. They took human fetal lung stem cell tissue and infused it into mice embryos until they successfully made mice with little human lungs. Then got the spike protein-augmented bat CV to successfully bond to the endothelia of the chimeric human/mice organisms. Fauci oversaw this from a funding aspect, and continued to fund it in Wuhan. He’s referenced in Moderna’s 2019 shareholder report (scrubbed but accessible through wayback), along with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DARPA, BARDA, and other unnamed entities down at the bottom of the report. Moderna’s CEO paints a picture to investors of a windfall in billions of dollars coming soon due to their work with mRNA technologies (without mentioning that every single clinical trial failed). The Ukraine invasion was really a bleed valve for all the mounting pushback against government lock-downs, masking, and injection policies, so an unusual amount of effort was redirected away from social unrest in Canada, the US, and Europe. That doesn’t detract from the fact that Putin invaded a sovereign nation without provocation.
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  10934.  @Stlaind  A-X was an Army request that got passed by DoD to the USAF after the Cheyenne helicopter failed. They wanted an armed escort for mass airmobile operations as were being used in Vietnam. Self-propelled and towed AAA platforms, some with armored chassis, were a challenge for the AH-1 and A-1 Skyraider, and were shooting down helos and slow movers regularly, to include MEDEVAC birds and expensive Chinooks. The A-7D could bust those AAA platforms with its payload, but it couldn't fly low and slow to escort and maintain visual acquisition for re-attack, hence A-X. The A-10 was envisioned and designed for Vietnam. GAU-8 didn't even exist, so every time you see the claim that it was built around that weapon, look up the YA-10 with its 20mm M61 Vulcan. We were at Edwards AFB (USAF Flight Test Center) at the time when all of this went down. I remember all the failures with the gun and work-arounds to keep the engines from stalling from gun gas ingestion. Fulda Gap was a high-speed mission profile with more advanced self-protection systems required. A-10 was shoehorned into it because USAF was forced to give up all the A-7D squadrons (far more capable platform) in exchange for the A-10A. Talk to any A-10A pilot who was stationed in the UK and West Germany at the time and they'll tell you it was a suicide profile. Same with the Northwest Corridor in Korea on the DMZ. They have so much AAA, MANPADS, and SAMs there that the A-10 was a strafe rag there too. Interestingly enough, I have been stationed in all those places, with a feel for the terrain and enemy situation then and now. I have also called in F-16C Block 30 in Korea for CAS, and A-10As.
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  10968. Pourquoi les Suisses paieraient-ils presque deux fois par cellule pour obtenir moins de capacités, avec une offre douteuse, une formation des pilotes plus difficile, moins de sécurité, plus d'empreinte de moteur à réaction, pour un avion qui n'a pas fait le meilleur dans toutes les mesures qu'ils ont évaluées pendant la compétition? Ne vous méprenez pas, le Rafale est un superbe aéronef et système de combat avec un excellent bilan de sécurité. C'est juste que le F-35 est plus facile à apprendre à piloter, qu'il s'agit du chasseur le plus sûr jamais construit et qu'il apporte une infrastructure organique d'alerte et de contrôle aéroportée en réseau qui change radicalement ce qu'une force de chasse peut fournir à une nation en ce qui concerne la couverture des capteurs. . La Suisse peut également choisir d'ouvrir le réseau de couverture de capteurs avec d'autres opérateurs de F-35 en Europe en utilisant les protocoles de liaison de données MADL, augmentant considérablement leur alerte précoce pour tout vol terroriste détourné et approchant des violateurs de l'espace aérien. Leur voisin de la frontière sud, l'Italie, exploite non seulement 2 variantes de JSF, mais dispose également d'une chaîne de montage ouverte pour y introduire des pièces provenant d'entreprises anglaises, norvégiennes et italiennes. Si vous considérez sans passion les variables et les mesures importantes, vous commencez à comprendre pourquoi les Suisses ont pris la décision qu'ils ont prise.
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  10992.  @TheVanillatech  I'm tracking all that. One thing to consider are the early childhood development written skills, such as penmanship, art exercises, reading comprehension Q & A, diagramming sentences, geography coloring exercises blended with art techniques, etc. Many people are looking for coherent developmental plans that take a child from not being able to read and write, to a self-driven educational path. Parents who were trained to be passive and respond to classroom-based stimuli don't have the on-hand solutions and familiarity with various educational aporoaches and modalities, so they are scrambling to find solutions for their families. They're capable of creating an environment where actual learning can take place by reaching out and sourcing curriculum from where they choose. What I've seen looking at free market curriculum companies is that most parents don't think they have time to become a curriculum development specialist, lesson planner, teacher, and long-term evaluator of each child's individual path. This is what home education models have to tackle, so one of the most common approaches is to seek assistance from companies that specialize in this. Every educational approach is an experiment like life in general, and many families have already seen enough of the results of public and private schooling to know they aren't interested in repeating those experiments with their children. Instead of pointing out how insufficient parents are, I think it would help to provide avenues for them as we move forward with the rising generation.
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  11028.  @Nylon_riot  It’s been a passion of mine for many decades, among other things. Leif Erickson didn’t just set sail Westward on a whim into the chilly waters of the North Atlantic. There is growing evidence that there were preexisting trade routes between Europe and North America for fur, copper, and unique goods to NA, and the Norsemen knew of them in their oral history.   These trade routes would have ebbed and flowed with the expansion and retraction of the northern ice. If you look at the Great Lakes region, there’s an island that has ancient copper mines all over it with open pits still to this day that contribute to wildlife deaths (from falls, can’t escape). There is no recorded history known about who excavated and mined those pits. The volume of copper mined out of the Great Lakes indicates that the export of the copper would have been intercontinental. Copper was very prominent in Native American civilizations and tribes, and they also traded with Central America. Ancient Mediterranean civilizations had ships large enough to get to America and such a discovery would have been kept secret to its explorers/traders. There are stones and many other artifacts in the US alone that are engraved with ancient Phoenician/Hebrew, mound-builders who made mounds in the shapes of Minoras, and the Bat Creek Stone has an inscription that reads: “For the Judeans”. It is way pre-Columbian. What I think we would find with a complete record would be multiple expeditions and trade routes throughout time with North America and the British Isles, Mediterranean, and Europeans covering many different eras. Chinese are the likely predecessors to the Central American Olmecs. History gets erased by cataclysms, wars, famines, and migrations or extinctions. I have a lot of books on these subjects, and have traveled to many museums from Asia to Central America, the US, and Europe.
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  11109.  BubonicTonic  I’d rather they not be arrested, not imprisoned, and allowed to participate in the free marketplace without coercion from the People’s Republic of CA. The big problem is jail space for actual violent offenders like murderers, rapists, and felony assault convicts. When LE leans on the scales and says, “Just over an ounce. That’s gonna be mandatory sentencing.” for people who just want to come home and take off some of the pain from a day’s work, and the dealers who support them. Banks don’t want it legal because they’re making a killing in profits with no overhead, no taxes, no employment structure, no worker’s comp, no insurance, and no system that they have to support with management.   It’s easier to just allow people in the black marketplace to freely engage in illicit commerce at their own risk, while paying off politicians who get a cut of the premo product like Hunter Biden, the Bush’s, Clinton, and the crime families who sell out for their own financial gain and exemption from the law, while demanding that inner city people of color be imprisoned for life in many cases. Look at Biden’s brother DUI/fatality case, Hunter’s numerous run-ins with crack cocaine, Biden’s niece, and how all of the criminal cases against them just magically vanished in pre-trial arrangements, while people of color sit in prison or have their lives risked fighting stupid fires in CA that could have been prevented with proper resource management. It’s sickening really to behold.
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  11118.  @startrekmike  Nailed it. Over the past 10 years, guess which fighter suffered the following 65 airframe losses/38fatalities: EPU failure on final Birdstrike/turkey vulture Disoriented pilots Unknown Engine failure Landing gear collapse Mid-air collision Shot down/enemy fire Unknown cause Hit pothole in runway caught fire Skidded off runway into drainage ditch/destroyed Unknown Collision with Cessna/mid-air after late ATC call Engine fire Unknown Landing gear failed to deploy/controlled ejection Turbine blade failure Unknown Night mid-air collision Night mid-air collision Unknown Asymmetric load on take-off caused loss of control Crashed after take-off Max trim set accidentally before take-off (caused 2+9 fatalities, 21 injuries) Unknown Shot-down Shot-down Unknown Engine fire due to missing control ring and anti-rotation pin Caught fire after take-off Runway overshoot in bad weather  Unknown Iraqi student pilot crashed Unknown Shot down by Syrian SA-200 (Israeli AF F-16I) Missing, found crashed in mountains Unknown Runway excursion/pilot ejected Tech accidentally fired cannon, destroying other F-16 on ground Unknown Hydraulic failure Engine fire, crashed into farm house Partial electrical power loss/bad weather Catastrophic engine failure due to missing seal Unknown Ejection seat failure after gear smashed on failed landing Destroyed during landing Spatial disorientation Crashed unknown Multiple unknown causes in addition to this resulting in total airframe loss/fatalities Remainder are under investigation. This doesn’t include any of the substantial damage or minimum damage incidents, just airframe total losses and/or fatalities.
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  11123.  @jefferyroy2566  All of us are not limited to published reports from GAO or DoD because some of us actually worked on these things and have lived with them since they were born until later Block maturation. I’m most familiar with the F-16 and F-15 in that regard, but some of the things we worked on ran in parallel with the A-10, AV-8, F/A-18 and F-14. The 6 precursors to the JSF program were originally caste in 1980s mindset but the technology was already matured well into the late 1990s. The inertia of the various technology paths made what was intended to be a multirole, mass-produced, single engine fighter into an Omnirole, Next-Generation, Networked Combat System that exceeds the performance of all of the legacy fighters in each of their strongest mission sets. New Hill AFB F-35A pilots humiliated seasoned F-15C+ pilots in PACOM in BVR, for example. As soon as 2 F-35s are airborne, AWACS birds become relatively useless. Dedicated spy platforms couldn’t locate what F-35s accidentally located in CENTCOM, including White House/NCA-named Priority Targets. F-35A and C have combat radii like the A-7D/E or better, with more payload, with strike capabilities that have strategic implications like the FB-111A. USAF never replaced the EF-111A EW aircraft and saw no need to after certain offensive EW capabilities with JSF were realized/designed into the sensor/antennae suite and processors. US Navy is seeing capabilities with the F-35C they never envisioned that add extremely difficult problems for Russian and Chinese sub-surface platforms, while networking with P-8A Poseidon ASW/Patrol aircraft and RQ-4C Triton extended duration drones. What you’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg with the JSF series, a very tiny, minuscule, meaningless tip talking about dogfighting, how it compares with F-16s, etc. These conversations are meaningless in the grand scheme.
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  11124.  @redslate  Re: Beast Mode. You don’t need to load it with weapons on the external pylons for Night One or VLO profile mission sets. A big mistake people make here is thinking that legacy fighters like the F-16 and F/A-18 carry more mission-relevant weapons when combat-configured. The most overlooked component of this is what we call fuel fraction. You will never see an F-16CM or F/A-18C without External Fuel Tanks (EFTs) when pilots are stepping out before launching for combat or even most training sorties. You will never see an F-16CM without its FLIR or 800lb centerline ECM pods, which now means 3 of the heavy pylons are taken for fuel and ECM. That leaves you only with stations 3 & 7 for Air-to-Ground munitions. The other stations 1, 2, 8, & 9 are only for Air-to-Air missiles. "A ha!” you say, 4 AAMs is better than 2, right? An F-35 with “only” 2 AIM-120s has more "stowed kills" than an F-16CM with 4. Why? Because an F-16CM lights up like a huge reflector on surface and airborne radars, so it can’t enter a BVR skirmish one-sided. It also has to face some of the more-capable modern BVR systems in threat inventories today, which include hypersonic AAMs and LRBVRAAMs fired from fighters with large PESA or AESA Radars, with superior cruise and acceleration speeds above Flight Level 250. F-16CM with pods and bags is a struggle bus in the transonic flight regime, needs to jettison the EFTs, can’t jettison the FLIR and ECM. So an F-35 with 2x AIM-120C7 or Ds can set up into really unfair No Escape Zone parameters for those missiles while its prey doesn’t even realize it’s there. An F-16C cannot unless it’s enabled by F-35s or F-22s, and even then it is vulnerable. F-16CM usually carries 2x AIM-120s and 2x AIM-9s, not 4x AIM-120s because they are configured for D-SEAD. They rely on the protection from F-22As and F-35s. When the F-35 carries 2x AIM-9X Block II+ in addition to 4x AIM-120, those external AIM-9X do not increase the frontal RCS enough to significantly alter its A2A mission profile and VLO capabilities. They do increase side aspect RCS a bit, but not frontal much at all. We also don’t configure all the aircraft the same, whether they’re F-16CMs or F-35As. Some F-35As can lean heavy on A2A while others lean on A2G. F-35A Block 3 A2A configurations: 4x AIM-120C7/D or 4x AIM-120 + 2x AIM-9X or F-35B UK 2x AIM-120 + 2x Meteor + 2x ASRAAM The swing-role strikers will be configured thusly: 2x AIM-120 + 2x GBU-31 or 2x AIM-120 + 8x SDBs or 2x AIM-120 + 1x GBU-31 + 4x SDBs etc.
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  11126.  @redslate  I'm referencing the actual unit flyaway costs each year, which I have followed throughout the program from the DoD and each production lot, as well as Foreign Military Sales contracts which are purchased through DoD at US bulk rates. No matter what you do to the F-35 unit flyaway and unit program costs, you will never get them over legacy airframe costs though. There are tons of hidden costs with the aircraft we worked on that you don't see. You can't hide them in the accounting system with JSF because all the former ancillary pods, sensors, and countermeasures are fully-integrated into the physical structure of the F-35s. On the teens, those are hidden or separated not only in the budget, but in the maintenance and FMC/MC rate reports as well. Look at the Finnish acquisition contract. They published the whole thing in detail. It was not only the most capable fighter submission, but the most affordable. Swiss competition said the same thing. They're not using 2012 dollars. Finnish contract for 64 F-35As was signed in 2022 at 73.4 million Euros per, with a huge weapons and support package to go along with it. They evaluated the F-35A, Typhoon Tr4, Rafale F4, Block 3 Super Hornet/Growler, and Saab Gripen/GlobalEye AWACS submissions for 7 years. Winner was announced Dec 2021, contract signed in 2022. Typhoon and Rafale were 142-160€ million, making them over 200€ million unit program cost (just like the India deal) with weapons and support. They got dropped from the finalists. Same thing happened with the Swiss competition. The F-35A has proven repeatedly to be the most affordable, best ROI fighter in the West. Non-US aligned nations don't have an answer to it or any options to acquire something like it. Russia and France haven't manufactured an affordable single engine fighter in many years. That ended with the MiG-23, which was a strafe rag for the F-15 & F-16 in the early 1980s, as well as for F-15Cs again in Desert Storm. Anyone who isn't aligned with the US and doesn't have access to the JSF program is being left behind. This is a huge paradigm shift in the global security space that we haven't seen before.
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  11185.  @karlschmied6218  Do you want to change your life and outlook for the better? Read a book about Trump pre-2016, or anything dispassionate from people who actually worked in the WH around him. He brings in people that disagree on many things and asks for them to "Hit me with it straight." especially if it's uncomfortable. All Presidents and famous leaders have had a cultivated and crafted public image, and their real demeanor left for private. Obama is an absentee lazy guy who felt entitled, too above the job, simply couldn't be bothered with most of WH affairs. Didn't consult with Dems in Congress on much of anything, was hard to reach, didn't give inner city black leaders the time of day. He harnessed the desire of the Nation to put a cap on healing of any residual racial tension for political gain, then tore open the old wounds with agitation and vengeance. George W. Bush is a crack-up who is a social butterfly, loves getting people together to stir up conversations and debate. He's probably the most well-read US President of the last 100 years, very sharp, former F-102A pilot, used to party a lot including booze and cocaine. In public, he sounds like a slow, rural Texan and a clumsy public speaker. He said specifically he didn't want to come off like a know-it-all like Newt Gingrich and academics, because it alienates voters. Clinton will literally beeline straight for your wife in front of you. He grew up in a big buick dealership family who adopted him after his mom married into them. Grandpa Clinton taught him and drilled him on memory training skills. He had a convertible Buick at age 16 in Arkansas and got used to women chasing him until it was boring, then got into edgier behavior. Huge drug abuser to include a lot of pot and cocaine, overdosed after losing reelection as Governor in 1980. George H.W. Bush was very calculated, a carpetbagger from CT, Bonesman at Yale. Moved to Texas to work with guys in the oil business as part of his CIA cover after the war. He was still in US Navy service until 1955, even though he got out Sept 1945. He went into the oil industry in Texas and went quickly from salesman to CEO of his own oil drilling company. He also liked to sound like a Texan, but was very calculated behind the scenes, very disciplined. He was the last US President with a foreign policy focus. Find people you dislike politically, and read a wide range of books on them. It will expand your thoughts and point of view greatly.
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  11197.  @bryanekers3472  And just to give a little more perspective on this: I’ve been shooting since the 1970s, no big deal. Been shooting Long Range as my job (3 Scout Sniper/Recon Platoons in US Army), a competitor, or instructor since 1995. I’ve been conducting and publishing internal, external, and terminal ballistics studies on a 6.5mm cartridge that duplicates the 6.5x52 Carcano external ballistics since 2013, where I and 2 other professionals collaborated on the research and testing. One of the co-authors is a retired USAF pilot/DoD advanced weapons test & evaluation officer/engineer who worked at one of the US National Labs. The other is a PhD in biomedical engineering, with a long history in shooting as well. We submitted out work to peer-review among stablished labs, big industry companies, and engineers who specialize in this field, to ensure we weren’t publishing anything erroneous. Additionally, I have extensive training and hands-on experience with combat trauma management, anatomy and physiology, and live tissue training in a specific medical center for USSOCOM, which gave me access to the closed library at that institution, as well as the day-to-day terminal ballistics effects from high velocity projectiles in animal tissue. I read the various professional reports associated with the JFK assassination from that context, including the doctor reports, LEO findings, rifle characteristics, and the Zapruder film. I’m not a casual observer just looking at some evidence swaying me one way or another, and I am able to sift through a lot of misdirection or falsehoods and mistakes I commonly see made by both apologists for the WC, as well as those who challenge its findings. My bottom line motive is the truth. One of the first red flags I remember reading in the WC summary was the FBI Marksmanship Unit unable to zero the rifle without shims in the scope mount. That did not generate much confidence at all. Then there was the claim with the single bullet theory. The more I read, the more it felt like a construct by a group of people who were told to make it fit, rather than let the material facts develop the true narrative.
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  11219.  @raqueljacobs1542  The US experienced substantial and steady economic growth in the 1800s-early 1900s, including massive industrial growth. Foreign banks from Europe didn’t like the lack of control that they were accustomed to with their empires, so they created a system where US taxpayers foot the bill for the new currency (against the very specific dictates of the Constitution), loaned to them by a hybrid bank network with a US name but mostly foreign ownership, and US taxes backing a new exploitative financial scheme that benefitted the creators of that system. US economic explosion happened after WWII, where we financed the new naval and military protection of international trade under Bretton Woods, leading to a globalist economy where the participants didn’t have to pay a dime into the protection scheme. Tariffs benefitted the US tremendously because we had/have more of what other nations need/want than we need/wanted of their products and services. Huge factors in that are: 1. US is the largest bread basket in the world with the longest harvest seasons. 2. US has the most vast connected river network on the planet, with more deep sea ports along all 3 of our gigantic coastlines (not even counting Alaska). 3. US consumes most of its domestic product, doesn’t rely on critical industries from other nations (food, energy, defense). 4. US is geographically isolated from any threat nations. Tariffs are a superior position from which the US can maintain its trade relationships. Our new trade policies are effectively going to be tariff-based anyway, where Canada and Mexico got on board early with NAFTA, and anyone else who wants to enjoy a kind of favorable trade status with us must submit to our terms, no real negotiating.
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  11237.  @JhonPCT  L'une des principales causes mécaniques des pertes totales d'avions et des décès de pilotes était les défaillances des APU jusqu'aux chasseurs monomoteurs de 4e génération comme le F-16.  Dans le cadre des efforts visant à améliorer la technologie globale des chasseurs à l'avenir, nous avons consacré de nombreuses années de recherche, de développement, de test et d'évaluation aux programmes AFTI F-16 et F-18 HARV à la base aérienne d'Edwards aux États-Unis.  C'est ce dont je parlais par rapport aux accidents. L'augmentation de la fiabilité de la puissance auxiliaire réduit le nombre total d'accidents.  La plupart des accidents avec les conceptions des années 1970 et 1980 étaient des erreurs de pilotage, des pertes de conscience G, des collisions en vol et des accidents d'atterrissage, mais une partie pourrait être attribuée à des problèmes mécaniques. La différence dans un APU fiable est celle qui peut permettre une récupération sûre de l'avion, et celle où l'APU est à court d'énergie avant que le pilote ne puisse atterrir. Cela s'est produit plusieurs fois avec le F-16, et cela arrive encore occasionnellement. Le Rafale et les 3 variantes JSF ont d'excellents antécédents de sécurité par rapport aux F-14, F-15, F-16, F/A-18, Harrier, Mirage III et Mirage 2000.  Idem avec l'Eurofighter Typhoon. La série Super Hornet se situe quelque part entre les deux, mais est bien meilleure que le F/A-18. Nous avons perdu au moins 94 F/A-18 avec 20 pilotes tués au cours de ses 10 premières années de service. Cela coûterait 9,19 milliards de dollars aujourd'hui rien que pour les cellules du Hornet, sans compter les coûts engloutis dans les mises à niveau de la durée de vie, les pods attachés, les armes ou les ajouts.
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  11321.  @nole8923  It's more complex than that. I've lived in 8 different US States and 2 of the Nordic Countries, have citizenship in both the US & EU. If you have no life, quality of life doesn't matter and the Nordic countries don't respect your individual right to life as a human being, so you start off with a major eliminator criteria right off the bat. Scandinavia enjoys its security on the back of the American taxpayer, so that part is out of balance. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland benefit from hundreds of billions in US RDT&E on critical defense programs that they've been able to purchase without ever contributing a dime to the development of those systems. (F-16/F100, F/A-18/F404, F-35A/F135, AIM-7, AIM-9, AIM-120, APG-66, APG-68, APG-81 etc.) Saab Gripen uses US GE engine, servos, landing gear, brakes, and many of its subsystems so it isn't a domestic program as advertised. Advanced medical diagnostics systems, equipment, and drugs used in Scandinsvia were almost all developed and manufactured in the US. Transportation, telecom, satellite, and many other systems used to benefit the Nordic nations were mostly developed and made in the US. There have been things made in the Nordics that benefit the US in normal trade like Kone elevators and escalators, Nokia, and Ikea of course. US housing costs have sky-rocketed because foreign investors are buying up residential real estate to park their money in the US economy while generating monthly cash flow in billions, because the US economy is more stable than Europe's. I literally had a Finnish friend of mine die on an organ waiting list because the Finnish NHS deemed him not as worthy to receive a new liver. The NHSs in Scandinavia and Finland are a joke compared to what we have in the US. Taxes are out of control and purposely-punitive in Sweden and Finland to artificially depress the entire population for the purpose of social equality, which really handicaps the societies as a whole, making them dependent on the US for security because they neglect their defense budgets. Quality of life in the Nordics has more to do with geography and clean water from the lakes. When many people are able to have a summer cottage where they can get away from the cities, it's very healthy to be out in nature. You can say the same thing about Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, many places in CA, UT, CO, WV, VA, and NC for cabins. It's an imbalanced comparison to pick tiny little populations of traditionally-homogenous Aryan peoples with 334 million Americans living in vastly-different geographic regions of the US. I found most of the claims about the Nordic nations to be childish propaganda fed to the people steadily to create a pacified and servile populace. As far as governments go, the Nordic nations are astonishingly-childish to watch in-action, with the multi-party divisions, lots of stupid leftist women, and low-T males who know precious little about the world or their own history in general. These are places where parliaments frequently resign en masse, and place defense of their nations at the lowest priority. They can't be taken seriously, which is sad to say coming from the US system where politicians have been owned by organized crime since the 1920s.
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  11322.  @nole8923  Lived through all of that as well. Quality of life in many ways has improved in the US, while more stressors have been added so it’s not as black and white as some make it out to be. We were still under the threat of MAD, but the world was simpler with bi-polar super powers. 1960s US was one of the most chaotic periods in history, maybe only out-done by the Civil War. JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations, riots, Vietnam War protests, LBJ WH policies, exclusion of blacks from much of the middle class sector they had worked into, and the beginning of the welfare state that ultimately destroyed the black family to beget waves of crime in the 1970s-1990s with fatherless black inner-city gangs and the cocaine epidemic. 1st half of the 1980s was still in recession from the terrible 1970s policies and global market forces with OPEC, along with a new wave of punitive government regulations on blue collar middle class in the US. FDR had no such protections, as he was a stooge for the organized crime families who took over in the 1920s, along with the socialists and Soviets in many ways. He transferred gargantuan amounts of US technology to Stalin and allowed Soviet Lend-Lease Generals to dictate policy to US manufacturers during the war. Financially collapse of 2007-2009 was created by Congressional welfare promotion politics that dictates to lenders to issue mortgages to people without bank accounts who normally wouldn’t qualify for a home loan. Banks that were smart got rid of those loans and people started bundling them as junk, which European banks bought up stupidly. The main people that needed to recover from 2007-2009 in terms of housing liabilities were the ones who took out variable rate mortgages and got taken when the bottom dropped out, and their payments went up. I wouldn’t describe that as the average American, since most mortgages already existed prior to that period. Your recollection is common to talking points from partisan class-warfare propaganda, which does not align with the completeness of the picture. I find the political parties do a terrible job of understanding domestic issues because it’s all about trying to tidy-up complex metrics into partisan angles. It gets even worse for foreign policy matters where they both really fall flat on their faces trying to see the world through tiny partisan lenses.
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  11346.  @grahamdrew5512  Airborme radar/sensor web can see farther than ground-based. JSF MADL web is unparalleled in this aspect. Gripen is an offense to mention next to it from a purely technical standpoint. Gripen absolutely isn't STOL. It's a LTOL, Long Take-Off and Landing weak T/W ratio platform. F-35A takes off in as short as 550m as demonstrated in Finland in Turku. Gripens took the whole runway, 19-21 second rolls. F-35As in the same sequence only took 9-12 seconds, 1/4 the runway. I measured out all the distances, as well as the times. Gripen time-to-climb when configured is sad. Combat radius with weapons is also shorter. If you see hard numbers for radius, it isn't an accurate number. You can get a long radius with 3 EFTs on Gripen, but weapons and performance will be significantly degraded. Gripen does better with 1 EFT, but is short duration then. F-35A climb rate is world-class. It has high T/W with no parasitic drag, tons of fuel fraction with 0 stores points allocated for sensors or pods. Start-up for F-35s is easier and faster than any other fighter. Start sequence only has a few switches. Gripen is a legacy design in that respect. F-35s have all been subjected to more extreme climatic hardening and ruggedization than the Gripen ever will. Gripen is poorly-funded, poorly-conceived, and poorly-executed as a program. The engine is too small for the airframe, opposite of the Viggen and Draken. Viggen had excellent take off and landing for STOL. Riksdag didn't want to fund it.
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  11432.  @HankSemoreButz  I’ve been investigating politician donor records and foreign contributions for decades. Mike Johnson is probably the cleanest Speaker of the House in the past 50 years easily.   Pelosi is a Mafia stooge, as was her dad. McCarthy is a Mafia stooge, comes from a Mafia/firefighter family with those connections. Paul Ryan is squeaky clean. Boehner wasn’t the dirtiest of DC, but was in the pockets of big tobacco and even doled out checks from the tobacco industry on the House floor before a vote on tobacco subsidies. Dennis Hastert was a molester wrestling coach who had been paying off his victim to the tune of millions for years, along with being a typical DC pork barrel spender/steerer for Federal funds in pay-to-play schemes. Newt Gingrich was a super geek history professor who also is well-spoken. He was hell-bent on finance reform, so DC recoiled against him with almost everything they had, but it was all BS, including the tax evasion allegations that the IRS dropped. Tom Foley was a trilateral commission stooge with deep loyalties to subversive European-based societies, worked aggressively to fight term limits imposed by Washington State on its Federal politicians, which he took to the Supreme Court and got overturned after WA State made it a law via voter ballot initiative. That precedent ruined State-based term limits for everyone else because it asserted Federal supremacy over State restrictions on their own politicians who serve in the Federal Congress. Mike Johnson is a freaking Boy Scout compared to any of the others aside from Paul Ryan.
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  11533. Anyone who refers to the Century Series as a model to emulate now, clearly has no freaking clue what the Century Series was. Each design never really reached its intended potential, and several of them served their ultimate purpose as QF-1xx target drones for AIM-120s. F-101A was meant to be a Strategic Air Command supersonic escort fighter. Due to transcontinental capability of bombers, that was ill-conceived, so they made the F-101B interceptor variant, and RF-101B tactical recon variant. F-102 was meant to be a higher supersonic interceptor. Couldn't reach much more than Mach 1.2 clean, was put into Air National Guard service quickly. F-104 was never asked for by USAF, and instead served as an interceptor or multirole fighter among NATO partners. USAF literally had no use for it outside of flight sciences and NASA test bed work at Edwards AFB. F-105 was meant to be a supersonic tactical nuclear strike fighter. Early variants were structurally unsound, broke apart in-air, so it had to be upgraded and was most produced in the F-105D model. This was probably the most successful of the century series, but it had all sorts of problems, was shot down in Vietnam repeatedly, until being replaced largely by the F-4 and F-111. F-106 was what the F-102 was meant to be, but was limited to Air Defense Command as a Mach 2 interceptor. This video incorrectly showed a Mirage in place of the F-106. The real success story of that era around the Century Series was the F-4 Phantom II, which wasn't a Century series at all, but initially a US Navy fleet defense interceptor.
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  11538.  @xyzaero  Demonstrating carriage and separation does not equal multirole. You have to work out the systems, implement the profiles into weapons manuals, and train on those in order to be truly multirole. Grey Eagles and F-14A never had that. F-14A didn't even have the AIM-54A working throughout the 1970s, and was hit & miss in the early-to-mid 1980s until the bugs were ironed out and the -54C finally got into the fleet. There's only so much money for things. With F-14A, they burned $369m on the F401 engines in the 1970s, which were never produced. That was supposed to be the production motor for the F-14B, with only a handful of initial F-14A LRIP birds as stop gaps. After that fiasco, Tomcat money was allocated to developing the TF30-P-412A into the P-414A. They were hurting on RWR and other systems money and didn't get ALR-67 until much later, and were stuck with an old analog AWG-9 Radar that couldn't look-down/shoot-down over land. Same with AIM-7F integration from AIM-7E2, then AIM-7M and AIM-9L. These aren't plug-and-play, but require a lot of testing and systems integration, live fire weapons testing on TGT drones, and weapons manual additions, as well as weapons school syllabus updates. With F-15, the money went for Radar upgrades when we did Programmable Digital Signals Processor that went into F-15C, plus its EW systems were sucking up funds to get that side working better. We also had problems with the F100-PW-100 motors. Nozzle sections ripped off at high supersonic speeds, and it suffered compressor stalls, AB unstarts, and blades letting go. All the money going into F-14A and F-15A-D upgrades was focused on propulsion, A2A Radar, A2A weapons, and EW equipment. None of it was going towards A2G. The only funded additional role for Tomcats was for select F-14As to become TARPS birds as we retired the RA-5C Vigilante. The multirole F-15E was and is treated as a separate program, though we did have both F-15C/Ds and F-15Es on the CTF at Edwards. There was cross-pollination in A2A modes between APG-63, APG-70, and APG-71, but Grey Eagles never got any of the A2G capes from the APG-70 because it wasn't part of Grey Eagle community mission set allocation or training.
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  11555. They began preparing for war decades ago when they bribed Ambassadors and Presidential candidates in the US since 1972, including George H. W. Bush, who was Ambassador to China then under Nixon, then Director of CIA under Ford. They bribed Bill Clinton by financing millions into his 1992 campaign, and in return, the Clinton WH transferred billions in US cutting-edge weapons technologies in aerospace, nukes, satellites, manufacturing, missiles, intelligence collection systems, and communications. Clinton gave the Chinese access to our strategic nuclear facilities, the B-2 program, Lockheed's aircraft manufacturing tooling and assembly line processes, Motorola defense communications systems, Loral Space Systems, with moles welcomed into the US en masse. Since the 1990s, China has aggressively revitalized their military, stealing and bribing their way to access every US system they could possibly get, placing Chinese engineers in every defense program possible. They've been in competition with Russia to bribe the Clinton, Bush, and Biden families for ages. Riyady family scandal with Clinton campaign financing, Lincoln bedroom, John Juang of the '90s. Neil Bush bribery and entrapment scandal with the Thai hookers, leading to his divorce, merging of his US defense aerospace holdings shell company with his Chinese real estate front. Obamas with the micro-donation internet campaign financing, ties through Pakistan, Indonesia. James and Hunter Biden with the money trail in the open for all to see. Chinese steal and bribe. It's fundamental to their brazen culture.
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