Hiding weapons among non-combatants and then crying foul goes back decades if not longer. It's certainly been a tactic used in the Middle East for 30-40 years.
yeah its a huge problem. Hell it helps israeli propaganda. They always use that excuse even when amnesty international calls bullshit on it.
So some of my former co-workers are still over in Bagram and there was that suicide attack a couple days ago on base. Trying to find out who was killed and injured is becoming very difficult.
I have a friend in the air force at Bagram who I heard from yesterday. He said he wasn't allowed to talk about it, but sent this link saying they(CNN) aren't wrong and that he was safe. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/11/asia/afghanistan-bagram-blast/
Yea I know 2 civilians and 2 service members were killed. One of my co-workers said they were ok, trying to find out if I knew either of the civilians. Just reminds me that even as a civilian that place was not safe and I'm glad I'm not there. And how the fuck did they get a suicide vest onto the base.
Just found out one of the two killed was my boss's boss. Had weekly meetings with him and he was always super nice to me and was instrumental in getting me transferred when one dept shut down and again when I had a conflict with a supervisor. Fuck that hits home now.
Sooooo fucking tired of Afghanistan. Absolutely horrible news. Also had the incident in Jordan recently.
The rumors of who will be Sec of State, defense, etc are all people who want to bomb the shit out of Iran and most of the rest of the middle east.
fuck...leave iran alone they are the most westernized of the middle east and actually like what we have going on over here.
Should tell that to Trump's team. They want to bomb the shit out of Iran. But I apologize for bringing that to this thread. I'm sure we have enough political threads on here right now.
At least that's what i gathered from college from being around a bunch of Iranians for 6 years. Yes they have the Ayatollah but the gen pop is more progressive from all my interactions with them.
well poop, i'm going to sleep since i have to work at 6pm. may more discussions happen that i will read upon and respond when i wake up.
If i remember correctly they're actually pretty well equipped for force projection in the arctic but, like, not much else
"Dated" an Iranian girl for awhile when I was working overseas. Definitely far more progressive than most of the general American public would believe. Now if her generation could just take over the country.
I don't think people really understand the leagues that exist between the United States Military and the rest of the world. That's arguably the second most powerful country on earth going to war with what is basically a floating parking lot from the 70s. The United States on the other hand, is moving on to new aircraft carriers to replace the current ones, which are light years ahead of what anyone else has. But we aren't strong anymore and need to spend more on defense fuck off
Turkish baked jihadists have broken through against the SDF in Manbij. Raqqa offensive about to stop. Once again turkey comes to the rescue of Isis
So that cable that snapped is the reason they lost their brand new mig 29. It was the last plane still out so they put it in a holding pattern over the carrier. Let it fly around for a while without a tanker until they realized that it was low on fuel. By then it was too late to get a tanker up or to redirect to the closest airfield which was only 50 miles away. The planning and logistical support needed to properly run a carrier battle group and flight ops is insane. No one is anywhere close to being able to touch us and even if they dumped every resource into it we are probably 15-20 years ahead.
Italy is the only other country besides us with more than 1 carrier, the have 2. We have 10. The world can't even build the class of carrier we currently operate and we're about to introduce a new class that's better. It's amazing how much better we are than the rest of the world
The Italian "carriers" barely qualify; they're just Harrier docks basically, more similar to a LHA in design. The only people with a real carrier are us, France, Russia, China (same class as Russia's) and India ( former Russian). I think UK is building a few though.
Didn't Russia outsource building their new ships in France and then France started being super cheeky about working on the ships at all when the Ukraine stuff started happening?
This wikipedia page lists all the carriers in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service
France is the only other country in the world with a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (not sure how that happened). It means that everyone else can't power a catapult. As a result all the jets have to be very light and can't carry nearly the amount of ordinance that we can. And refueling has to be a bitch logistically if you want to travel around the world with it.
The United States Navy is the most overpowered military branch in the history of mankind. I tend to think the world is more competitive on land, but the Air Force and Navy maintain complete dominance of the air and sea. We haven't even talked about our nuclear class submarines.
Our deep water capabilities vs any navy in the world would be like Alabama vs a freshmen team. The littoral/brown water arena doesn't tilt nearly as much in our favor and the LCS and Zummwalt programs are disastrous.
I like to think our navy would still beat Russia in spite of Trump giving Putin all our secrets and giving the military intentionally terrible orders
List of operational fleet carriers (or in Russia's case, heavy aircraft cruiser) It's even more fun and smug if you sort all "aircraft carriers" by length or tonnage. Top 20 by length... Top 20 by tonnnage
Also just for fun.. the US has 22 out of 29 operational cruisers in the world, 62 out of 215 destroyers, 72 out of 148 nuclear subs, 3,680 combat aircraft (next closes is China with 2,500), 1,840 combat helicopters (next closes is India with 736), 7,100 nukes (russia has 7,700; the world has 15k total), and 123 out of 320 known military satellites (next closest is russia with 74). Ballistic missile subs.. France 4 India 1 China 6 Russia 13 UK 4 US 18
And we add to this list this year/next year when the Ford (CVN-78) is commissioned. I didn't realize Brazil had one but it's a 50+ year old French hand-me-down.