BF2S Forums How do you feel about Drones?

RAIMIUS wrote:

The bigger problem with the F-35, in my partially educated opinion, is that the DoD let "mission creep" go way too far.  It's the "solution" for just about any fighter/attack problem you can think of...and now the price for that is showing.  The A-10 was a brilliant aircraft because it is EXCEPTIONALLY good at just a few things.  The F-22 is as well, but the R&D price was a real killer.  The problem when you develop something as a multi-role platform is that everyone wants it to be great at whatever they value, so you wind up with a ton of compromises and a huge cost.

True, but it's too late for that now.

It will probably happen sometime in the next 10-20 years

War Man wrote:

PrivateVendetta wrote:

RAIMIUS wrote:

The bigger problem with the F-35, in my partially educated opinion, is that the DoD let "mission creep" go way too far.  It's the "solution" for just about any fighter/attack problem you can think of...and now the price for that is showing.  The A-10 was a brilliant aircraft because it is EXCEPTIONALLY good at just a few things.  The F-22 is as well, but the R&D price was a real killer.  The problem when you develop something as a multi-role platform is that everyone wants it to be great at whatever they value, so you wind up with a ton of compromises and a huge cost.

True, but it's too late for that now.

Never is too late to stop it, at least saves us a little cash. We have canceled projects before with such heavy investment, look at the old German-American MBT-70 tank project, we invested so much and yet Germany and USA just decided to fucking forget about it and work on newer and more affordable replacements for their tanks.

you know that the leopard 2 was pretty much based off of a better designed mbt70 right? not like nothing came out of it.

US Airforce higher ups aren't exactly fans of the A10. Airforces prefers fighters and strategic bomber aircraft over cas, which is why airforce tried to get rid of the a10 twice. They now accept the fact that they will have to keep their a10's and just have the F35 replace their F16's and some F15's. Tomcat is long gone and replaced by the super hornet

Cybargs wrote:

War Man wrote:

PrivateVendetta wrote:

True, but it's too late for that now.

Never is too late to stop it, at least saves us a little cash. We have canceled projects before with such heavy investment, look at the old German-American MBT-70 tank project, we invested so much and yet Germany and USA just decided to fucking forget about it and work on newer and more affordable replacements for their tanks.

you know that the leopard 2 was pretty much based off of a better designed mbt70 right? not like nothing came out of it.

Leopard 2 was mostly derived from the Leopard 1 with improvements from mbt70.  Abrams, however, is a different story.

How did this become the military technology wank thread?

wiki all up in this bitch

rdx: 'neo-imperialism is a puff term', 'america has no interests in imperialist activities'.

what do you actually respond to the legacy of the central americas/far east? and how do you counter news like this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ma … ntres-link

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq, that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele, then 58, was a retired special forces veteran nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, according to an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the membership of the Special police commandos was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups like the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman (now 59) worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding. Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq between 2003 – 2005, and kept returning to the country through 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

seems a little beyond 'liberation' and 'bringing freedom' to me.

Macbeth wrote:

Whenever I read a rdx post I get the feeling he reads his post back to himself a few times and laughs about how clever he is.

And whenever I have the distasteful misfortune of reading a Macbeth post, I get the creepy disgusted feeling that I'm reading the incoherent ramblings of a future serial killer.

Macbeth, fuck off.

You are a piece of shit, a broken bit of humanity, a failed suicide, a creepy little troll, an idiot, a fucking moron, and a psycho.

You are the kind of gutter trash that even the most jaded Asian hookers steer clear of, so they don't end up locked in a torture basement.

You are the sad little fuck that butts into a conversation, says something creepy and stupid to kill the conversation, then delights in his own trollish awkwardness.
People feel sorry for you.  It's not your wit or trollish awesomeness - it's disgust and awkward sympathy.
The only "skill" you have in life, is to bring shit and aggressive creepiness into other people's lives.



Now, here's the deal;  Fuck off.  You're a sad little piece of shit.  I would prefer to ignore your existence. Don't post towards me, don't mention me, and I will extend you the same courtesy.
Is your feeble, creepy little skull full of shit capable of processing that?

why does calling it imperialism tie it to russian and english imperialism? i am confused. why not french? why not portugese? why not japan? a confusing statement. 'neo-imperialism' (or neocolonialism, if you prefer) has a very precise definition of exactly what it is, and the term has been developed and fleshed out as an ideology by almost two generations of thinkers now. you saying it is "cloudy" only betrays the fact you have clearly refused to do any reading on it. the academy and the discipline of political science are really quite familiar with it.

Neo-colonialism (also Neocolonialism) is the geopolitical practice of using capitalism, business globalization, and cultural imperialism to control a country, in lieu of either direct military control or indirect political control, i.e. imperialism and hegemony.[1] The term neo-colonialism was coined by the Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah, to describe the socio-economic and political control that can be exercised economically, linguistically, and culturally, whereby promotion of the culture of the neo-colonist country facilitates the cultural assimilation of the colonised people and thus opens the national economy to the multinational corporations of the neo-colonial country.

this is exactly what america aims to do by bringing 'freedom' (the colonizers ideology) and 'democracy' (the colonizers preferred method of control, via global multinational capitalism) to supposed 'countries in need'. it is exactly why you are willing to use shady tactics -  the most oppressive and totalitarian, contrary to democratic ideals in every single way - in order to achieve this goal. accept it.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-03-09 08:29:35)

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

why does calling it imperialism tie it to russian and english imperialism? i am confused. why not french? why not portugese? why not japan? a confusing statement.

Just to bug you and Shat, really.  Rather than list every nation with imperialist histories, I chose the two that would hit closer to home.

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

'neo-imperialism' (or neocolonialism, if you prefer) has a very precise definition of exactly what it is, and the term has been developed and fleshed out as an ideology by almost two generations of thinkers now. you saying it is "cloudy" only betrays the fact you have clearly refused to do any reading on it. the academy and the discipline of political science are really quite familiar with it.

And those "two generations of thinkers" are about 10-20 years out of date now.

I'm sure their writings are very well thought out, very detailed, and very out of date.

US imperialism was crippled in Viet Nam, and died with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Some misguided, misinformed policy wonks in DC tried to resurrect it in Iraq, and failed.

Saddam's Iraq and the 1990 Gulf War;
We didn't remove Saddam. We didn't bring Democracy and Freedom to Kuwait.


Wonderful that a bunch of Ivory Tower academics have reached a consensus on their historical studies.
Perhaps they could host a conference, write a few more papers?

Meanwhile, on Wall Street and in Washington DC, foreign policy has moved on.
Direct control is out of date.
Influence through business and money is the new control.
No pretense of culture, freedom, or democracy.

Setting regional powers against each other is the new "intervention"
We don't have the national will to indefinitely occupy the Middle East or Asia with our own troops.
More efficient to set regional powers against each other (Iran vs Saudi Arabia vs Israel, or China vs Japan vs Korea).
Doesn't have to be a shooting war, as long as the foreign nations are wasting time, energy, and attention on each other.
Neighbors understand how to bleed each other more efficiently than a foreign power could ever comprehend.

Two rivals are expending time and energy against each other? It's a "win-win", a "paradigm shift", a "dynamic synergy"
(To sarcastically borrow some business phrases).


Do you get the point?
I'm not trying to rewrite the historical definition of Imperialism, or colonialism, or neo-whateverthefuckism.
My point is that the term "imperialism" no longer fits.
It is outdated and imprecise.

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

are you not even reading?

Why don't you try reading what you quoted, smartass.

The term neo-colonialism was coined by the Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah, to describe the socio-economic and political control that can be exercised economically, linguistically, and culturally, whereby promotion of the culture of the neo-colonist country facilitates the cultural assimilation of the colonised people and thus opens the national economy to the multinational corporations of the neo-colonial country.

Again,

RDX-fX wrote:

The whole concept of "spreading freedom & democracy" around the world is an outdated Cold War ideological prop.

We are no longer in the business of spreading American culture around the world - we are in a culture of spreading American business around the world.

The end goals are nearly the same ("opens the national economy to the multinational corporations"), the defining methods have changed.

RDX-fX wrote:

Influence through business and money is the new control.
No pretense of culture, freedom, or democracy.

Setting regional powers against each other is the new "intervention"
We don't have the national will to indefinitely occupy the Middle East or Asia with our own troops.

Again, with a key difference.

We don't really care about 'opening foreign markets'. 
We don't give a shit about opening up a few more McDonalds in Turkey or Tokyo.
We want THEIR markets to come to US. 
Ship us your oil, your cheaply manufactured goods.
We don't give a shit about your domestic market, your domestic politics, your religions, your sweatshop child labor, your forced movement of farmers to factories.

Again, the model has changed.
The viewpoint you are referencing is out of date.

Which, for the Nth and final time, is exactly my point; 
The term "imperialism" is wrong, it is outdated, it implies fundamentals that are no longer true, and describes policies and perceptions that are no longer current practice.

If you want a fixed point in history where the model fundamentally changed, it would be the 1990 Gulf War.
We didn't "liberate" Kuwait, or bring "freedom" to Iraq.
We didn't change any cultures.
No, we went in, gave Kuwait back to the same royal assholes that ran it before Saddam made a land grab.
Then we left Saddam in control of Iraq (for the time being).

Who runs Iraq now?
The useful parts are under Iranian Shia influence.
The rest of it is a cesspool of corruption and petty influence peddling, last I checked.
And the USA isn't going to do a damned thing to change that.
We're done there. 

We took out Saddam, changed the power balance in the region to Iran vs Saudi Arabia vs Israel in one part, and Pakistan vs India in the other part.

When we leave Afghanistan, Karzai will be (in name) in charge of the major urban centers, and the tribals will be being tribal in their tribal regions.
Same as it ever was.
Really rather fascinating, the history of how presumptive "rulers" of Afghanistan have occupied Kabul and/or Khandahar, only to find themselves imprisioned in a 'gilded cage' within those cities.

And, again, the point of this excursion into history lessons is to show how the "new imperialism" is NOT the "old imperialism".
A new word is needed to describe the "new imperialism", as the old word has a history and methodology that does not describe the current world.

Neocolonialism, or new imperialism died in 1990.
Call it "psychotic international business", call it "post-neocolonial-imperialism", call it "capitalism on crack".
Doesn't matter what you call it, really.
Just don't call it by the name of it's predecessor.

The modern 21st century incarnation is different,
just as 20th century neocolonialism was different from 19th century Great Game era imperialism,
which was different from 18th century colonialism.

lol yes. i must go to iraq and shoot donkey herders in order to understand what the concept of 'neocolonialism' means.

you dumb fuck.