Stoker

With that in mind, how long until we tell them "feel free to take the Baltics?" After all, it's their backyard, no point in waiting to get involved in a conflict we couldn't possibly remain committed to.

At the current rate of Russian advance, how many years/decades will it take for them to capture Kiev?

That's basically LORAN, right? We de-commissioned that, because there's no way we'd ever lose GPS capability and it cost like a hundred million dollars a year to operate - which is just crazy money for a useless backup. /s I worry about the security of CPDLC and ACARS though... if bad guys will spoof GPS, why not a message to turn right 30 degrees for traffic?

The question is, what RNP does that in-flight reinitialization give you? If it's still higher than a mile, not particularly useful since you're still heavily restricted. Might as well stick to INUs with GPS updating off.

You can set GPS updating to off, which means you're just flying old school off of INUs, VOR/DME updating (which you can also turn off, though those haven't really been spoofed lately). Which is going to restrict you from certain airspaces, approaches, etc. Current procedure seems to be turn off GPS updating when you notice spoofing, but while there are cues you're being spoofed, it isn't as clear as a Master Caution saying GPS SPOOF. So you fly through it for an hour and get infected INUs. You can't remove the bias from the INUs because they need a solid reference point to start from - an airport, gate, lat long, etc. I don't know of any FMS out there that lets you reenter that reference point in flight - not really sure how you'd do that given the speeds we move at.

GPS spoofing effectively tells the FMS that the INUs are all off by some degree and should correct their position. Once they change to match the bad GPS signal, even once the spoofing ends, they can't go back to their original, correct position, which means that for the rest of the flight you have the FMS interpolating between good GPS and bad INUs for position, so you won't ever get a really good solution. https://ops.group/blog/nat-crossing-after-gps-spoofing/

If I recall correctly from talking to them a few months ago, they want one solid block a month, Sunday-Friday. Sunday and Friday are your travel days, they pay for airfare to the nearest commercial airport not that it helps much if you're attached to Del Rio. Expectations were to complete any CBTs on those travel days. Monday was a CT day, fly student sorties Tues-Thurs.

Could you imagine if we had 80,000 Afghans who fought the Taliban as hard as they fought to get a ride out of Kabul? We'd have won the war in 2005.

Not a fighter guy but I'd imagine that your age and job weigh heavily against you in fighter apps - hard to see you having high participation in the unit in four or five years when every day you show up is real money lost at the legacy. That gets worse, not better, with an enlistment and the at least a couple of years it would take to be eligible to commission. You say you're fighters or bust, so you've probably accepted that that entails a significant risk of "bust," and that your desire to fly fighters outweighs your desire to fly military aircraft overall. Just be sure you know the answer to the question "Will I be happier in 10 years having done a single enlistment and separated, or having found a C-17 unit to join and flown that plane?"

Seriously, if it wasn't for US aid to Ukraine these guys could have been living happily in a Siberian gulag by now, while the country they believed in was ground into dust by a nuclear-armed gas station doing a Soviet Union speedrun.

Certain politicians get really hung up on the Constitutionality of declaring war. We had (have?) a declaration of war after 9/11 - if Congress authorizes the use of military force, is that not them declaring war?

That would only be true if the invasion of Iraq was relatively cheap and wildly successful at improving American security, which it was neither.

Patton was both those guys. We was fining troops in foxholes under active observation for not being clean shaven or not wearing a necktie. He had utter contempt for the citizen soldiers he was leading. If someone whose been wearing the uniform for 35 years can't understand why someone who was a baker's apprentice ten months before isn't as good at soldiering as he is, he isn't a good leader of Americans.

Given how awfully the Germans were at anything approaching strategic thinking, that isn't the compliment you think it is. I admit he had a great PR campaign, he definitely looked and acted like people thought a general should. MacArthur falls into this same category. Patton was just lucky compared to MacArthur in that he didn't have the opportunity to get publicly trounced (twice!) because his enemies actually had the ability to take the initiative.

Was he? Anyone can be a brilliant leader when you have overwhelming material superiority, complete command of the air, and your enemy is so starved for fuel that your flanks are effectively immune from attack. His sole idea for motivating his men seems to be physically assaulting them, and like many of today's military leaders he seemed utterly incapable of understanding that the people he led weren't cut from the same stone as he was.

Parents raising children without interference is great, when the parents don't suck. There's really two kinds of conscription: military slavery as practiced by Egypt, Russia, Eritrea, for example, and that practiced by western countries to either round out a professional force or develop a functioning reserve. The former is unjust, the latter is part of your duty to your society. It's also utterly historically justified - we've been conscripting people in the Americas to fight in practically every conflict we've ever fought, from the earliest colonial wars through Vietnam. The last thirty years are an aberration, not the rule.

Serious question, do you consider compulsory primary education a form of slavery?

Let's make sure to give the Russians back Finland, the Baltics, and Poland as well. They'll be turning over Kaliningrad in the exchange, of course... unless historical land claims only work one way? The US will be handing Texas and California back to Mexico, obviously, and the Kosovars need to get used to being massacred by Serbs on a daily basis. Historical ownership is the key to sovereignty, the will of the people be damned. /s

I feel like the Gripen was well suited for European nations that wanted to say they had an air force, but didn't want to spend the money on actually preparing to fight Russia. Seems like the use case for the Gripen has more or less gone away (except as a "well there's a factory going so you can actually get these rather than wait for F-35s" kind of way).

When I was at Columbus a few years back as a Reserve hire, I was able to live in the dorms for free and receive BAH for my apartment back home. That was due to being a geo bachelor, though - wife stayed behind.

Debt and deficit are two different things. Closing the gap on the deficit will eliminate the debt in the long run. You can eliminate the deficit by taxing the entire US population roughly 5% of their income. Honestly, it might be a great compromise agreement - pass a constitutional amendment that if the budget is in deficit, we hit everyone with a 5% surtax. That would rile the hell out of huge chunks of the population (as I clearly have done here), which means Congress would have real incentives to reduce spending to avoid it. Just sitting around angry at spending and hoping government will magically reduce itself in size isn't productive thinking, though.

Yes, that's been my whole argument. The only path forward is to do both. Saying "no raising taxes until we balance the budget" is functionally equivalent to saying "let it burn, I don't care." You need to meet the other side halfway ("I'll take a 5% tax increase if you agree to raise social security and medicare ages by five years", etc.). A couple folks in this thread seem to think it's as simple as cutting the budget. Well, it is, but the most simple things are very hard. I'd rather make a compromise that achieves the goal of righting our ship, than dig my heels in and watch the water wash further and further up the deck.

To pay double my total tax rate (not marginal rate, that's different), you'd need to be clearing north of $800,000 household income filing jointly. At that rate, yes, you can afford to pay more to help avert fiscal doom. I'm totally with you that I'd love for Congress to magically all agree that the spending is crazy and we should revert to a limited government - but I've grown up enough to know that it isn't going to happen. If your only solution is "my team gets its way, 100%, for five or six election cycles, until we remake America to our vision," well... keep dreaming. The whole "they'll be happy to take what you want to donate" is an asinine argument that stupid people think sounds smart, but what it isn't is a solution to a problem that will see your children remarkably worse off than you are. I guess we don't quite crack the top 10% of US incomes, but we're both darned close. Bingo.

The money we're spending in Ukraine is some of the most cost-effective spending we've had in decades... We've spent trillions over the past eighty years with the goal of denying Russian domination of Europe - it has been at the core of US strategy since May 1945. If that hundred billion is a waste, then the overwhelming majority of our defense spending is a waste (I'll be the first to agree that a lot of it is, but probably not 90% of it). It's like being worried about burglars, so you hire 24/7 armed guards and build a moat, but you don't buy a door lock from Home Depot. As for raising taxes, we need to get the brackets up. We've got too many people for whom government is just a thing other people pay for that gives them money. It's corrosive to democracy. Even where I sit, with two high income earners in the household, only paid 17% of my net income in federal taxes. Do I want to fork over more? No. But I want to let our Republic careen drunkenly into the abyss even less.

Two things can be true at the same time. We waste a lot of money because, thanks to deficit spending, we don't need to prioritize one program over another. Very different than balanced budgeting. I spent five years with a front row seat to a state budgeting process, programs get racked and stacked brutally because you just can't fund everything. And yes, we need to tax more as well. We're about to be strangled by entitlement spending in the next 20 years and if you think the solution is as simple as cutting those programs, you don't really have a very good view of how the US electoral and political process works. We need a grand bargain that raises taxes across all income levels, cuts wasteful spending, raises retirement and benefit ages to realistically track the growth of life expectancy in the last fifty years, and drives us in the general direction of a balanced budget in a decade or two. You gotta give a little to get a little. Or you can dig in your heels, say "taxes too high, no new taxes," and await the inevitable collapse of the US financial and political system. If you're lucky, it won't happen while you're alive, but your children won't thank you.