posting to undo moderation

posting to undo moderation...

Already been done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE5PGeh2K9k

The m16/m4 isn't perfect. Direct impingement means its higher maintenance, but there is no good reason for it to jam if your are taking proper care of it. That brings me to my main point.

You can buy all the latest and greatest equipment in the world, but if you skimp on training it's all worthless. I'd rather have a squad with muskets that know how to fight than a squad with assault rifles that don't. I'm glad there is finally a reasonable discussion on the R&D side of the Defense budget. Every time budget cuts hit Defense it ends up resulting in lowered standard of living for soldiers, and far more importantly, scaled back training.

Nobody looks at the massive waste in R&D designing equipment that is often a step backwards (if it ever reaches the field) or more likely, gets so bogged down in bureaucracy that it is irrelevant to the battle by the time it's ready. It's hard to piss away billions of dollars in something relatively cheap like food, housing, and training. And yet these are the areas that get cut first as if everyone's been making out like bandits with all this gas we've been using for our vehicles and bullets fired on ranges.

And with all this money going to R&D how is that a weapon that truly needs redesign (MK-19) hasn't been replaced yet? How many times does this piece of garbage have to jam in combat before somebody drops the couple bucks to replace it? It isn't a fighter jet. Its a hunk of steel. We still use WWII .50 machine guns. As in we checked the serial numbers and we might be using the very same guns my Grandpa used in Normandy. They still work. We need to learn how to design things again.

ok. end of rant. I'm going to make an awesome rambling old person some day...

Dear mankind:

As an American, and I cannot stress enough, try not to get your hopes up. We'd fight this, but we don't have any real power over our government, and I'm pretty sure our country got hit by some kind of soviet "stupid ray" back in the '80s or so. That, or we fried our brains doing a lot of coke.

Good luck mankind!

There are most certainly MMA nerds. If you ever take a class on that type of thing you'll probably meet them. They know every fight in the history of MMA and study the strategies used. I recently went to the video store and looked at the sports section. There were one or two boxing DVDs, a couple for other sports, and a whole rack of MMA fights. If you just want to see a guy get kicked in the face, I'm pretty sure you can find it on youtube. These people actually study it.

This is definitely along the right lines, but I think a key fact is missing from the cost to an army planning against the bunker busters. Money is a big factor, but it is also human effort. Iran doesn't have a massive intelligence community like the US or China. Right now, Iranian generals are sitting in a room thinking about how to maintain command and control during an invasion. They can't get to the next step of figuring out what to do with that command and control because this bomb just threw a giant wrench in the works without even being used. Winning a battle is done with planning, and if you can just keep screwing with the guys doing the planning they won't be able to give the proper focus to things that also need their attention.

They might find that this bomb doesn't change much in their strategy, but even if they do, they already wasted valuable resources on a new problem when their intelligence community no doubt already has its work cut out for them.

Just want to second this comment. Last week I was eating a vegetable lasagna and had to throw most of it out because in the cold it returned to its natural cardboard state. This despite the fact that I missed breakfast and was eating a late lunch and was starving. Still wasn't worth it.

I never heat them unless I have time to kill, but if its warm out they'll usually be edible anyway.

A buddy of mine (a gunner) once had to stay awake on mission for 3 days while going through a particularly dangerous area of Afghanistan. Jittery or not, you MUST stay awake. If you don't, you can't protect your vehicle or the rest of the convoy at all. Caffeine hallucinations suck, but you can at least stay on task.

Personally though, I only see a useful effect from caffeine from about a cup per 8 hours awake. If I work a ~30 hour shift (used to do it twice a week in garrison), the sixth or seventh coffee or energy drink will just run right through me. It's best to wait until you can't hold your eyes open anymore, then start sipping slowly on something with caffeine. I had more trouble eating enough calories than staying awake since everything you eat feels like lead after a while. Maybe that's the logic of combining food and caffeine, to encourage you to consume something and restore some of that energy.

As opposed to punishing drug use, which is the politically accepted alternative.

I am an American Soldier. I'm from New York, and I enlisted after college. Like most of my buddies, I took a pay cut to serve in the Army. I knew exactly what I was signing up for. My recruiter tried to convince me to pick a safe job, but I knew I belonged in a combat job. My enlistment will run out before I'm scheduled to deploy, but I've decided to voluntarily extend my contract so that I can deploy with my platoon. I don't care about the Afghans or Iraqis. I hope they live long prosperous lives. But if I have to kill people, then that's the way it goes. That isn't what concerns me. I'm going overseas so that I can make sure everybody gets home.

My apologies if my story doesn't fit into your storyline. It is the truth, and you'll find most soldiers defy your expectations. I went to basic training with an enlisted soldier in his 30's who was a doctor and professor of economics. He spoke with a thick accent because he was from Portugal. I don't think he was a citizen. He just wanted to serve the country that took him in as one of its own.

The biggest problem I see with how the public sees soldiers is that everybody wants to speak for us. Nobody wants to listen to what we have to say.

This isn't Vietnam. There are rules. Seriously, things are a lot different now. They're even a lot different from the start of the war. I know rules aren't always followed, but that stems from the fact that people (including soldiers) like to live, not that they just like killing people.

The tinfoil is less of a countermeasure and more of a billboard. It would work only if you are willing to line the walls of every building in the area. Otherwise, we'll assume the bad guys are in the buildings lined with foil.

Personally, I think this has only limited use on a battlefield until the definition gets a lot better. You don't shoot just anything that moves on a battlefield (at least not recently). You don't shoot unless you're pretty sure you're about to get shot/blown up yourself. This can tell us somebody is in a building, but we'll still have to clear it the old fashioned way because we won't be able to tell if its military or civilian inside. So not really the greatest help in the world. With better definition, we might be able to identify weapons in the building which in turn could lead to justification to attack the building without entering it first. Obviously that would be a lot safer.

i think you hit the nail on the head.

I don't know if others had this problem as well, but I put my email address in the box for "notify me when it's available." I only just now learned that it is open for everybody because I was expecting some kind of email. Maybe mine just got eaten somewhere...

Not there yet. Actually new technology increases the need for grunts. Who do you think carries it? If we go on a mission with a dozen high tech tools, do you think there is any one person who is an expert in all of them? Not a chance. Plus, anything with a screen is a distraction. You can't look at a screen and pull security at the same time. Whoever uses this needs a few more guys to make sure nobody is sneaking up on him. Not to mention firepower will never be obsolete. One guy with all the tech in the world will still get beat by a dozen guys with rocks if they know what they're doing.