VeeshanVault

Regardless of opinion of the war, i am blown away when i see the US Military deploying their stuff.

They were showing some ships offloading amphibious assault vehichles and hovercraft in kuwait.

How fucking cool is a tank that can leave a boat and navigate through ocean conditions, and dive up onto land.

i dont know whether they are worth a shit in combat, but they sure rank high on the 'wow' scale.

I remember during the Gulf War, when I was like 14 or so, Newsweek ran a big special on military technology. They had a big "centerfold" that showed all of our tanks and vehicles and such. I cut it out and hung it on my bedroom wall. All of that stuff is pretty sweet, too bad it's main purpose is to kill people.

All of the innovation and genious that went into designing the bigger and better, and easier to use, people killer. However, I do believe there's something infinately more noble about using that to kill someone, where it's on a battlefield, with enemy combatants, instead of using passenger planes to ram through towers. Or worse yet, a small canister left in the center of a large city.

A friend of mine was a tank commander in the last Gulf War. The hardware they have on those things is fucking amazing, especially the way it's all tied in together via the tactical communications.

He also used to whip ass at MechWarrior 2.

If there was honor in it Bush would fight Hussein in a duel heh.

Yeah, it's some cool shit. I know I wouldn't want to have to fight against our military.

screw it...

In all fairness, Dubya should face one of Saddam's sons. I think a Bush, Sr. vs. Saddam duel would kick ass, tho!

miir wrote:Noble?

Give me a fucking break...


They just are infinately more efficient.

Yeah god forbid we give any praise what-so-ever to the US.

Pie > Cake

I think the word noble was used to contrast our style of fighting our enemy with our enemy's style of fighting us.

I would agree that it is more noble to do your very best to avoid killing civillians and to target those "soldiers" on whom war has been declared who have a chance to fight back at you.

I would also agree that it is not very noble to crash a plane into a building filled with civillians who had no warning that they were about to be attacked and were in no way associated with any army.

Would you agree with that, Miir? I don't think anyone is trying to say that the US is championing God's cause and that all of our efforts are righteous. Just that as far as relative nobility goes, our highly-efficient killing machines targetting military targets is the winner.

Sylvus wrote: I would agree that it is more noble to do your very best to avoid killing civillians and to target those "soldiers" on whom war has been declared who have a chance to fight back at you.

I would also agree that it is not very noble to crash a plane into a building filled with civillians who had no warning that they were about to be attacked and were in no way associated with any army.

Thank you Sylvus. It's very comforting to see there are other's who don't need these things explained to them.

I've always had a facination with military weapons and vehicles. My grandfather, who is now a retired Air Force Colonel, once said to me in reguards to the Gulf War, "If you think that's powerful, you should see the stuff they're not showing you".

The stuff they have now is already unbelievably more advanced than the Gulf War.

Voronwë wrote:They were showing some ships offloading amphibious assault vehichles and hovercraft in kuwait.
>>snip
i dont know whether they are worth a shit in combat, but they sure rank high on the 'wow' scale.

That stuff is primarily just to get folks on the beach alive. They aren't really combat vehicles, though they can take quite a bit of abuse and still be effective.

The big hovercraft are awesome, they can carry huge payloads at high speed. I've watched them come up on the beach a few times, it's amazing something that large can be so nimble.

sup guys!

Noblity is now defined by

perfection of execution

rather than

honorable intent?

miir wrote:How noble is it to drop a bomb on friendlies conducting live fire excercises?
How noble is it to drop a smart bomb and accidentaly kill 13 innocent Afghani villagers?
How noble is it when a tank rolls over and kills 3 innocent South Korean children?
How noble are civilian casualties?


Poor choice of words.
While the intention may be more noble, the means are not.

Nobility doesn't figure into those, they were all accidents that happened. I don't think any of the planes crashing into the WTC or the Pentagon were accidents. Reread the part where I said "..do your very best to avoid killing civillians." It is more noble to use a supahsweet hovertank against your enemies than to HIJACK A PLANE FULL OF CIVILLIANS and crash it into a BUILDING FULL OF CIVILLIANS. And make that 4 planes and 3 buildings, just for emphasis.

This debate started regarding the following comments:

However, I do believe there's something infinately more noble about using that to kill someone, where it's on a battlefield, with enemy combatants, instead of using passenger planes to ram through towers. Or worse yet, a small canister left in the center of a large city.

I agree with those statements.

pharm

miir wrote:.

Reminded me why I always leave ignore on for you in any post of this type.

Lets outlaw cars, they accidentally kill far more people per year than wars, and are completely preventable. Start executing alchohilcs who insist on driving too. Tobacco company officers too for that matter. (That's sarcasm in case you missed it)

I expected nothing more out of Miir than what he posted. If we ever take the gloves off and stoop to the level of some of the countries, then wars will definitely be over extremely fast and with a much higher cost to those we fight.

I think it is a noble cause to free a country from a someone who employs professional rapists to get his way.


Fighting for a free Iraq it will save more lives than doing nothing.

why do you insist on splitting hairs to such extremes in order to manufacture an emotional argument?

the machines were never described as noble.

the military tactics using those machines were contrasted with miltary tactics involving hijacking civilian aircraft and using them to bomb civilian targets.

reasoning with you on this matter is futile, because it is an entirely trivial point that you are trying to spin up into some larger platform for your opinions on the impending war in the middle east

Sup voro!

miir, you pharming a bit much on this post? I'd say more than usual. Good job!

My imput, war bad, cool bad ass tanks and millitary technology good.

The thing is there are a lot of technologies we've developed that are good for getting in fast, easily, little to no loss of life on our boys, and at the same time engage them and take over hopefully ending the conflict quickly saving lives on their end as well. For example if we goto war, I'm looking forward to seeing the effectiveness of EMP bomb we've developed and perfected. Not like they have high tech stuff so it's not going to be effective against this target, but I'm sure they'll be field tested and help in some extent. Drop it and watch all their power/communications/electronics all die with no loss of life then go in and capture or best case senerio watch them surrender.

Soriathus Serpentine wrote:... watch them surrender.

A huge part of this war is going to be Psychological Warfare. Our forces will be working very hard to encourage the Iraqi troops to surrender. I suspect a huge number of Iraqi troops will actively pursue a means to surrender with honor.

For example, there will be communications with Iraqi generals telling them that if they park their forces in a specific spot and don't move and don't initiate hostilities then they won't be attacked.

Our forces could "allow" a significant portion of the Iraqi military to ride out the war this way.

No one who pays attention to the middle east wants to see Iraq defenseless, it's important that much of their conventional military capability remains intact.

Day after day that I'm able to read this board I get so sick.


Shit happens. Hell we even kill our own military by friendly fire.

Mirr said :

How noble is it to drop a bomb on friendlies conducting live fire excercises?
How noble is it to drop a smart bomb and accidentaly kill 13 innocent Afghani villagers?
How noble is it when a tank rolls over and kills 3 innocent South Korean children?
How noble are civilian casualties?

Just as noble as when we accdently hit our own men with them. Yet the world doesnt scream about it. They don't say shit and it goes unnoticed. The last Desert Storm...what was it? 60% of the deaths on our side was inflicted by us.

Friendlies killed during live fire excercises?Happens here too in the US bud. Happens in any Military outpost around the world. Shit happens.Ive seen it happen personaly.

Smart Bombs. Still ran by people flying at god knows how fast. Their target is prolly with in 500 yards of the place that was hit. We have tried to tone down the amount of "boom" bombs have. We could always go back to using nalpam and just spraying 100 tons of it over 3 miles. Seems we have tried to go away from causing civilan deaths.

How noble is running over our own infantry on a US base? Fuck it even happend at Camp Blanding where I train at in Florida. A guy 15 yards away from me was ran over by a Bradly and killed. Did you read about 4 infantry men were killed by a Abrem Tank sp? about 2 weeks after that happend in S. Korea? No? Then shut the fuck up.

Personaly you make me sick.You can cry all you fucking want and wish this and that of the world. Shit happens. I know for a fact we can do things better and not worry about half the shit that goes on in the world. If it wasnt for the US the Middle East would have prolly fucking blown up in the 80s-90s fighting over the "Holy Land". Not to mention, how the world cries over how WE want to defend ourselvs vs radical crazy fucks around the world with Anti missle program protecting the US east and west coasts.

I dont agree with Bush. I dont like his Views and what he wants. But your cry baby bullshit reflects on what kind of person you are and how you live. Personaly I would kill myself if I woke up in your shoes. How you talk about shit, seems to me your views would have been the same back in the 20s-30s when Hitler was around. " Oh hes over there. Were over here, lets not worry about anything. We might have to stop him". No Im not comparing Hitler to anyone today. Thats just your attuide.

Never talked about Bosina or anyother area around there where we Saved Millions of lives from needless killing. Remember? War crimes. I have no fucking clue what the guys name was, but I remember it. He killed 300,000 + people for racial cleaning. Cant pick and choose what side we will help. Or the Billions of dollars that we could be spending on our OWN homeless/Starving people, yet it goes to other countries. No other country puts out as much money than we do to support them.


You,Forth,Xyn orwhatever his name is,Teenybloke and the whole lot of you fuck tards better off being hit by a fucking bus and sparing me from seeing how stupid people can be. What ever happend to natural selection? Seems to me that its slacking.


Have a feild day on my spelling and english. Personaly I don't give a fuck.

My favorite is still the A-10 (?). The one with the big fucking gatling gun mounted on the nose and the reinforced titanium bathtub for the pilot. It ain't fancy, it ain't exactly high-tech, but it's awesome!

yeah that is the A-10. they are the ones that use depleted uranium shells in that badass machine gun on the front that can pretty much put wholes in heavily armored tanks if i recall correctly. plus they can carry an absolute ass load of bombs and missiles.

I have an ANGB about 600ft to the south of me that is chuck full of A-10s. They fly almost all the time. Hell, I can see 3 flying in formation from outside my office right now. My buddy does maintenance on them as well. They're pretty cool!

You gotta love how Miir posts a bunch of shit and then goes back and removes it all after he gets the intended rise out of people.

The A-10 is great, though they are about to be taken out duty completely. Their role is somewhat diminished anyway as they were put into service as tank busters and any country that can field a modern tank isn't retarded enough to fuck with the US military anyway.

I saw one at an airshow once. When the pilot did a fly by, I was amazed how fucking slow the thing can fly given that it's so heavy. I swear to god I thought it was going to drop out of the air. The announcer said that when the A-10 fires it's vulcan, it can almost come to a complete stop from the kick and still stay in the air.

It was really a marvellous piece of engineering for the time (late 70s I think).

I am heavily into planes, and love airplane history. Personally, I think the war in the skies have lost a lot of it's honor over the years. Just the other week I watched a show on the History channel about British WW2 pilots and how they quite often refused to finish off a wounded plane in hope the pilot might save himself, and they said Germans did the same. Back then it was more man vs man, and way less machine vs machine like it is now (even though the plane itself obviously had a say in it, see Spitfire).

I guess I find that more honorable than a F-14 firing a Phoenix missile before the other guy even have you on his radar.

As for the A-10, if I recall correctly it can take on basicly anything a tank can give it head-on. But if a shoulder-fired missile (ala Stinger) is fired from behind it is vulnerable. I might remember wrong though. And no matter what it is a scary looking plane.

Yeah a couple years ago I was big into combat flight sims like aces over the pacific and MSCFS, but I could never get into the really detailed modern air war simulators. I could fly the jet and everything, but there's nothing fun about uplinking with a recon jet, locking onto an enemy fighter 15 miles away, and firing a missile at it and the only satisfaction you get from the hit is the blip on your radar dissappears.

WW1 and WW2 pilots had guts. They had life expectancies of less than two weeks as well, but at least there was honor in the combat.

Actually my favorite period of air combat was the Korean war when jet fighters were first being used in the conflict on both sides, but the old style of air combat still reigned supreme. Those fighters were basically wings and a cockpit with some munitions strapped to a big ass jet engine, and pilots still tangled it up with machine guns.

If memory serves, the F117a (the stealth fighter/bomber) isn't even equipped with guns, and it flies more sorties than any other type in the American arsenal. The days of the dogfight are over unless some quantum leaps in jamming or EMI technology are made.

Pahreyia wrote:...I do believe there's something infinately more noble about using that to kill someone, where it's on a battlefield, with enemy combatants, instead of using passenger planes to ram through towers. Or worse yet, a small canister left in the center of a large city.

Be that as it may, it's not as if Bin Laden could have brought a tank into the "battlefield" of the United States in order to launch his assault on the WTC. He was working with the budget his men had, and their ingenuity. They were evil sons of bitches, but they sure outsmarted our system.

kyoukan type-R wrote:Yeah a couple years ago I was big into combat flight sims like aces over the pacific and MSCFS, but I could never get into the really detailed modern air war simulators. I could fly the jet and everything, but there's nothing fun about uplinking with a recon jet, locking onto an enemy fighter 15 miles away, and firing a missile at it and the only satisfaction you get from the hit is the blip on your radar dissappears.

WW1 and WW2 pilots had guts. They had life expectancies of less than two weeks as well, but at least there was honor in the combat.

Actually my favorite period of air combat was the Korean war when jet fighters were first being used in the conflict on both sides, but the old style of air combat still reigned supreme. Those fighters were basically wings and a cockpit with some munitions strapped to a big ass jet engine, and pilots still tangled it up with machine guns.

Yea that was my favorite period too for all the reasons you stated. Modern air combat games are booooring. I tried searching for a Korean theatre combat game 2 months ago because it was the dawn of jetfighters, but I could not find any. The genre goes from WWII type flight sims with props, straight to modern times with falcons etc.

kyoukan type-R wrote:WW1 and WW2 pilots had guts. They had life expectancies of less than two weeks as well, but at least there was honor in the combat.

I myself would rather shoot a missle from over the horizon than be in a dogfight. Given the option most of those WW1 and WW2 pilots would do the same I'd bet. 99% of them were there doing the job because someone had to (which is honorable in itself), not for honor or glory.

I'm not trying to discount anyone in any way. Being able to go home to your family after it's over counts a lot more with people who are actually being shot at.

Yeah I agree that era is good.. guess I just am a sucker for the way the pilots treated eachother during WWII. There was a lot of respect between eachother then,

There was skill involved which in turn almost made air combat a kind of art form. Not much skill in shooting a missile over the horizon to splash someone. That's technology carrying the load, not skill. I know exactly what this is like....when gunpowder first made combat impersonal. It would take skill to fell someone in combat with a sword, or even a bow....but when pistols were introduced into the fold, any farmer could pick one up and carry as much killing power as the next guy with zero skill. Yea, that's it exactly.

In keeping with the derailing of this thread even more...

My grandpa said that he was good friends with a pilot who saw a German plane shoot down an American plane in a dogfight. The American was able to ditch and parachute down. However, the German did a U-turn and shot the pilot as he was drifting and defenseless. Apparently, that is so against the unwritten rules of air combat, that my grandfather's friend chased that German plane down and killed him. He said he never stopped shooting once he got him in his sights, even after the plane was disabled. He wanted to make sure he killed the man. He gave him "the whole 9 yards".

That phrase is referring to the 9 yards of ammo that were in specific American planes.

On a similar note, my grandpa was a field medic. He said that the medics never carried guns, because if you did, you could be shot. However, if you didn't have a gun, the Germans wouldn't shoot you. Instead, they'd let you grab your wounded and take them back to your lines. We did the same thing for the Germans apparently. My grandpa really, really hated the Japs because they didn't follow those unwritten rules and they'd kill anything that moved.

Anyway, I thought those were interesting stories. My Grandpa never talked about the war until a couple of years ago. Now, all he does is reflect on the friendships he had made and how so may of those friends are dead now. It's pretty sad really, but he has really seen some amazing things and I love to hear his first-hand information. It's usually quite different than what I see on documentaries and such.

..

superior weapons/equipment/training will win.

I think the Vietnamese missed this memo.

Fairweather Pure wrote:

superior weapons/equipment/training will win.

I think the Vietnamese missed this memo.

So did the Afgans with their war with Russia. Superior weapons/equipment/training will win most wars....but superior TACTICS has changed history against overwhelming odds. This is fact, and the existence of my very country is living proof of this.

I haven't played a flight sim in ages. I think the last one I played was Longbow 2 because choppers still give a great sense of accomplishment.

I remember playing Wings of Glory. Pretty cool game for it's time. Sort of WW1 Wing Commander.

but superior TACTICS has changed history against overwhelming odds. This is fact, and the existence of my very country is living proof of this.

Bah! We were distracted by war with the french is all

Deleted my last one to get out of the derail before I saw your posts

There are other factors involved in winning admittedly, competence and other factors come into play. The goal in Vietnam wasn't to win for instance.

Russia lost in Afghanistan due to incompetence, they had the resources to win and with proper strategy could have. Holding it would have been difficult.

vn_Tanc wrote:

but superior TACTICS has changed history against overwhelming odds. This is fact, and the existence of my very country is living proof of this.

Bah! We were distracted by war with the french is all

Hehe, well no matter how you slice it, it was for the better. You'd be hard pressed to find two other nations that are as tight as ours are.

Russia lost in Afghanistan due to incompetence, they had the resources to win and with proper strategy could have. Holding it would have been difficult.

Russia couldn't hold Afghanistan for the same reasons everyone else who tried to invade it for the last 500 years failed: the terrain and the people.
The terrain is hostile and mountainous. Ideal for guerrilla warfare and largely untameable to any degree. Then the various tribes of afghanistan are historically tough, resilient, fiercely independant.
Russia controlled the country as well as any occupying force ever could. They owned the cities and the "civilisable" flat areas but the wilderness belonged to the mujahaddin and pretty much kept the occupying soviets under siege.

You'd be hard pressed to find two other nations that are as tight as ours are.

A lot of people bitch about this in the UK. It's weird that we're still brought up hearing about what "a great nation etc blah sun never set, world power" when it's been nonstop decline for the UK for a century. The UK government has kissed so much US arse it's made me a little uncomfortable from time to time, but I guess everyone likes to think their nation and people are somehow special and can go it alone. The UK probably could once upon a time but not since naval power was usurped by air power as the ultimate in "force projection and defence". Heck even before that, cos the US and Japan sneakily built a bunch of warships while we were fighting the germans (Blindsided again! I see a pattern! ;p) and we went from #1 naval power sharing that spot with these 2 other nations.
But anyway next time you hear someone complaining about the UK being too much of a lap-dog to the US you can tell them it's down to one, single-word reason: Trident. We bought our nuclear weapons from the US and now rely on the US for their supply an maintenance. If we piss off the US we end up with £25bn worth of empty nuclear submarines and without those we lose our spot at the top table of world affairs.
Still, as long as we keep the US sweet we can rain nuclear death down on anyone we need to without them being able to stop us. And now we're building 3 "supercarriers", the biggest warships the UK has ever commissioned. And as much as I'm against war, the hardware is interesting and cool and if we do have to go to war I like our boys to have cool (and effective) tools. Looks like the Eurofighter is shaping up quite nicely too. So there you go. I hate war but find the weaponry kewl.
See also how I went off on a huge tangent then brought the post back to the topic at hand?

A particular favourite of mine:

http://www.army-technology.com/projects/mlrs/index.html