The Military Thread

Taira...that wasn't my point. At all.

To meet the high demand? As far as I can tell from statistics, drug consumption is firmly entrenched in certain sectors US. Despite its extreme danger and infamy, heroin remains popular.

Still, Afghanistan as a modern Opium War is a far-fetched idea.

Silas:Well that is a bit different from the nation profiting but you do have a point. There have always been one form or another of war profiteers or another. Some are politically astute and plan ahead others take advantage of situation to make money. There are some who can possibly egg things on a little bit but their influence is often exaggerated beyond what they can realistically achieve.

In most of those cases of war profiteering though the money they do rake in largely stays in private hands rather then flowing into the national coffers.

This can be seen through out history but the easiest to research would be Late Medieval-Early Renaissance Italy. Various forges expanded their business even doing international trade in arms and armor. Various armor and sword smiths became famous enough to command commissioned works literally worth a kings ransom. Some forges specialized in churning out arms for the grunts and cheaper common armor. There were even private small firm style black smiths who sold privately to lower ranking nobles, mercenaries, and peasant soldiers.

Agreed. Adding to that, I'll say that the economic benefits to the war making process are not inherently bad, and sometimes quasi-war activities can actually mitigate or circumvent otherwise large casualty losses and damage to infrastructure (e.g. the US's relationship with China, the relationship between various drug cartels and terrorist groups, etc.). It's generally not a good idea to turn your business partner's nation into a crater, especially in today's age of globalization. This is a major economic feature of asymmetrical warfare, for better or worse.

edited 29th Oct '14 6:48:01 PM by Aprilla

Manila's doing a PR campaign against those who say the VFA between American and Filipino militaries killed Jennifer Laude in Olongapo.

Lawyers baffled over absence of Pemberton's DNA for the case.

Aprilla: More good points.

Wait they haven't been able to just get a swab and test it despite the fact he is housed in a Philippine facility? I don't care of the family or media have seen him but the people conducting the investigation is certainly eyebrow raising. They perhaps a bit gun shy?

In the case of the US, the charge that the arms manufacturers engineered the wars to make money just don't stand up to scrutiny. Lockheed Martin would be the case in point: it's the giant among defense manufacturers here, yet Iraq has not been good to it. Lockmart's cash cow is, after all, the F-35—a platform that not only was not designed to fight in Iraq, but had its existence and its rationale jeopardized by the Iraq War. After all, there are only so many dollars to go around, and every dollar sunk into the JSF is one that's not going to something that actually be deployed in the Iraq War. Far from benefiting from the war, Lockheed got to face even more intense criticism that its flagship program was not one that would aid in the small wars like Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's just like how arms manufacturers were caught short by the end of the Cold War and found that all the resources they'd sunk into the Assault Breaker programs—designed to destroy massive Soviet armored formations on the North German Plain—went to waste, as suddenly the US found itself facing new kinds of threats. Arms manufacturers don't provoke wars: they react to them and do their best to guess what the next one will be like.

@Tuefel

- I suspect he's not doing it out of trying to save his own butt.

I don't think he has much choice in the matter given he is under constant watch by someone else and is anything but free. Especially notable in that he is on a Philippine military base to begin with and not a US base or ship. Unless the US has a large contingent on the base there is not much really stopping the military of the Philippines from making sure that information is gathered.

To me this looks like a political hydra playing games and wheeling and dealing in the background.

As for The Assault Breaker program it wasn't wasted. The US has used various programs and weapons that came out of it across the years. The Hellfire Missile is partially derived from the program as are our various sensor fused anti-armor cluster munitions. Also the Maverick missile and LANTIRN pod.

edited 29th Oct '14 7:41:59 PM by TuefelHundenIV

It's true that the research that went into Assault Breaker wasn't wasted, but my point was that the original programs they were designed for—and the ones that the big defense companies were pinning their hopes on—were largely cut short by the end of the Cold War. Companies were left figuring out ways to adapt all these neat antiarmor programs into something usable for small-scale war. For instance, Hellfire made the transition successfully, but BAT did not, at least until Lockmart fitted a GPS/laser seeker on it and turned it into Viper Strike in 2006.

(BTW, Maverick predated Assault Breaker—it was deployed right near the end of the Vietnam War.)

They did adapt them and rather handily if they didn't just use some of them outright. I should correct myself yes the first two Maverick variants were Vietnam era those are the Camera Guided models. the IR and Laser models though were partially derived from the Assault Breaker Program. It also is not uncommon for programs to change and the successful tech to move on to future projects. As you noted we are still picking up pieces of tech we developed a couple decades back and using them in new weapon systems. There is a long history of that occurring not just in the US but in other nations as well.

edited 29th Oct '14 8:15:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV

But why on earth would the US government want to do that? Hard drug use is bad from the perspective of a national government. Hell your linked bit on the Opium War just proves that, the British weren't bringing the drugs home, they were forcing the drugs onto somebody else, who actively went to war to try and stop the flow of drugs.

For those interested in reading up on US Cold War Conventional Weapon development and concepts and the Soviet Reaction

@Tuefel

- Indeed it is. It's a playing game between President Aquino, the victim's family and left-wing groups and sympathetic politicians who are eager to get rid of the Visiting Forces Agreement as they see it as inadequate, given that the Armed Forces of the Philippines is now very weak. Anti-American military propaganda is hyping up even more.

Note that this is a few days ago and Senator Santiago is trying to file a resolutio to get rid of the VFA. But she understands that the only reason why it's there is because of the things going on in the region, especially with the PLA.

re: conventional weapons programs: I think another reason is the progress of Moore's Law: electronics continue to get more powerful while becoming cheaper and cheaper. I believe that a microchip required to guide a bomb in the 1980s needed to be purpose-built and specially coded; ditto for some of the tricks like GPS/INS guidance or terrain following. These days, all the major players have the experience to write the code required to seek a laser dot or a given image of a target, and the requisite electronics are available for a few bucks. So, concepts developed in the 1980s become not only a lot more doable, but possible to do cheaply as well today—which might be why we're seeing many programs conceived back then coming to fruition now.

edited 29th Oct '14 9:27:32 PM by SabresEdge

Ominae: Ha finally the video showed up. It wasn't loading. The VFA is certainly pretty ugly. It needs to die in a fire. I would love to see the US military do the right thing for once and make sure this fucker hangs but we haven't had the balls to do that for a long time.

Saber: There is certainly a fair bit of truth in that. Several programs have found new life in "new" systems.

I'm reading through that Rand Corp article you linked, and it's proving very interesting. Interesting, I think, is how Western countries envisioned concepts like Assault Breaker and Airland Battle as essentially defensive: it's designed to devastate an echelon of advancing tanks while crippling their follow-up units; meanwhile, the Soviets were worried about the new technologies enabling the Western powers to carry out a first strike against Warpac forces, since it was explicitly envisioned as a counter to the Warsaw Pact's single greatest advantage—the sheer mass of its forces.

This is probably linked to how both NATO and Warpac saw themselves as being defensive alliances, and feared the other side as an aggressor.

I had similar thoughts as I was reading that.

Big album of pictures from Syria floated across my computer today. Some of them are kinda heavy, just so you know.

I'd really like to know who took these.

edited 30th Oct '14 5:24:44 AM by LeGarcon

You should probably mention some of them are NSFW and/or trigger-y, you know.

VA opens new registry for US servicepeople who were exposed to burn pits or other airborne hazards.

So I guess they aren't ignoring enough, and decided to start a whole new database to ignore or "conveniently" lose/damage...

BBC: The Royal Marines - in 350 years

BBC podcast announced that a ROK Military court sentenced a corporal to 45 years in prone for beating a man in national service while not allowng him to sleep or eat for a month. Prosecutors wanted to charge him for murder, but courts stuck to homicide.

Victim's mom is upset and said that her son died because he was "murdered".

Any links?

BBC has this now.

http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29828761