DukeNukeEm

No I haven't. I want to now, though.

Or a hockey mom from a small town in Alaska.

Qualifications for interpreting and evaluating laws in regards to precedent and our constitution should not include being a really good mayor. He should run for the Senate, not be on the SCOTUS.

That sounds like a politician. Not a judge.

I lol'd

This process is going to be hell.

UPS will work you like a dog, its run like the military.

I thought you meant the OTHER douchebag Diplo for a second.

The focus of my argument is that nobody wants to actually engage the United States in pitched conflict because we'd murder them. These massive programs that everyone calls wasteful keep a relative amount of peace going.

I was referring to Balta's post suggesting the Russians and Chinese could just throw hordes of crummy planes at us and win by sheer numbers. Obviously, we would win that battle of attrition.

The people who really wanted to do it finally had the political capital to go all in. Mix it with some dubious intelligence and it became relatively justifiable to a lot of people. Bring up the question of why we didn't just do it all back in the early 90's, but that doesn't change any of the realities surrounding the '03 invasion.

*makes other countries feel like their penises are smaller.

That sounds like the kind of stuff you'd like fairly modern stealth aircraft for? We were just keeping Saddam where we wanted him, not because he was a threat in 1998, but because we didn't want him to become one again like he sort of was in Kuwait.

Yea, but the threat of a different, nastier one still lingered. The purpose of it is to show-off to other countries so they know not to f*** with us. If it actually came down to using a 5th generation fighter the F-35 will be a lot more capable in a combat role.

We had concerns, the embassy bombings in Kenya and <I forget the other place off the top of my head>, plus the USS Cole. But after neutralizing Saddam the first time we didn't have much to worry about other than another intifada.

The 80's support of the Afghans had absolutely nothing to do with Afghanistan at all, just who they were fighting. We were scared to fight the Russians and the Russians were scared to fight us, so we tit-for-tatted in guerrilla wars. The names, dates and places change but from 1945 to 1991 the reasons pretty much stayed the same.

The F-22 will be at its best use sitting around doing nothing. Peace is war, war is peace, etc. etc.

By Vietnam I'm guessing you mean proxy war against a country that, as far as we knew, matched our military strength.

So why not try and push for a complete overhaul of our ground forces? Why didn't he try to find a new standard combat rifle? Defense contractors would've been ecstatic with any of those. It's all about credible threats, and neither of those countries posed one towards us prior to 9/11. There's nothing saying we cant get it wrong again and find ourselves too busy countering insurgents while China starts trying to expand. The best you can do is cover your ass in as many reasonable scenarios as you can, or elect bmags, who can apparently see it all coming.

We were definitely getting away from that though. Bush campaigned on stopping nation building and his biggest defense initiative was upgrading the missile shield before 9/11. Either way, Iraq and Afghanistan thoroughly outclass Mogadishu, Panama and the Balkans in scope and length, the conflicts are barely comparable.

You must be a Tralfalmadorian then.

http://www.globalfirepower.com/aircraft-total.asp I really dont see how inefficient the F-22 program is, unless you're just starting at the current pricetag without taking into account how much smaller the actual air force we'll have to maintain will be. The reason the foreseeable future doesn't contain wars between power countries is our overwhelming superiority over the rest of them. If you give them an avenue to actually challenge us militarily they'll take advantage of it. Remember 10 years ago wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not part of the "foreseeable future", but things change rapidly and if you're ill-prepared to combat them you get stuck in quagmires or, even worse, lose.

Social Distortion, The Strokes, Arcade Fire, Devo, Gogol Bordello, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Erykah Badu... not all bad. The top 3 headliners are all very skippable though. I'll go on the Arcade Fire night for sure and pray Social D and Devo get on the same day.

Cold War arms races are much cheaper in both money and lives than shooting wars, Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us that pretty well. The stronger the US military is the more peace there will be between great powers. I get antsy when I agree with Kap but the world will not look at defense cuts as a peaceful gesture. They'll see it as a sign of weakness and an opening to be more aggressive, first regionally and then globally.

The USA has more warplanes than the rest of the world combined. I wish the Chinese and Russians a lot of luck going for that strategy. But here's the point: refueling, maintaining and employing the ground crews/pilots for each of those planes costs an absolute ton. When you have 1 plane that can do as much as 10 planes but only requires 1/10th the landing space, fuel and crews in the end you save quite a bit of money. That will offset the R&D costs.