Uh, the Tomcat had a tighter turn radius than anything but the F-16 and F-18... and it was pretty close. The swing wings gave it miraculous maneuverability. The problem that the Tom did have in performance wasn't maneuverability or even it's large size, but rotten engines that were underpowered and finicky. The Tomcat drivers I knew used to joke that "If it says Pratt & Whitney on the engines, it'd better say Martin Baker on the seat" (for those that don't get the reference, Martin Baker makes ejection seats for military planes).

Please note that the Tomcat served longer in frontline service than any fighter in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 30 years. Not even the Phantom served that long in fleet squadrons. The reason the Navy retired the Tomcat had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with cost. It was expensive as hell to maintain and fly. Even with the much-better GE F110 engines in the D model, the Navy simply couldn't afford to keep it anymore. Pilots that had flown both the Tomcat and the Hornet will tell you that in fleet air defense, they'll take the F-14 all day long, thank you. Ask any pilot familiar with both platforms and they'll tell you that, performance-wise, the Navy traded down. The Super Hornet won the day because of cost, cost to buy and cost to fly. It has much fewer maintenance requirements. Economics is the sole reason the Tomcat is no longer with the fleet.

Which is why the whole strategy of stealth-based long range missile interception is a loser. Long range missiles are notoriously unreliable. Even the latest versions of the AMRAAM have under a 40 percent kill probability at long range. Our best missile, by far, is the short range all-aspect versions of the AIM-9, which has a sub-20 mile range. A fighter should be a dogfighter first. When critics raised the point that the F-35 would be less manueverable than the F-16, Lockheed's response was "Oh, dogfighting is obsolete anyway". What's truly infuriating is that we've been down this road before, when the Brits released their 1958 Defense White Paper stating that missiles made dogfighting a thing of the past, and as a result. western fighters of the late 50's and early sixties didn't have guns, and we stopped training in dogfighting. Then we get to Vietnam, and 15 year old subsonic, no-missile MiG-17's are shooting down multi-million dollar F-4's because the Sidewinders were chasing the sun, and the Sparrows just plain missed (the early AIM-7 couldn't hit a barn door. It was that bad). And since the pilots no longer had dogfighting skills, they were being eaten alive. The whole reason for the teen series of fighters and the Navy's Top Gun and USAF's Red Flag schools were these hard-earned lessons in Vietnam. And now contractors feed us the same crap, and we eat it with a higher price tag. Note that the Navy and USMC versions of the F-35 won't have an internal gun. Lessons? What lessons?

So I'm heartened by the Admiral's good sense here. USAF put all their eggs in the stealth basket, and wanted the Navy to follow along. That's gotten them $200 million dollar fighters that cost $40 grand an hour to fly. USAF now has fewer than 400 fighters that are less than 10 years old, and it's only going to get worse. And the drawbacks of such megabuck planes outweigh the benefits. Good for the Navy. Cancel the F-35, and keep the evolutionary-not-revolutionary weapons development policy. Those Super Hornets the Air Force says aren't good enough? The Navy will have twice as many of them as USAF has of their Raptors. $50 million a pop is a hell of a lot more affordable than $200 million a copy.

This is stupid beyond words. We HAVE diplomacy, and always try diplomacy first, Democrat or Republican in office. Further, this kind of thinking completely ignores the fact that the US has intractable enemies that won't be swayed from their national interests by any amount of diplomacy. Russia is always going to see the US as an adversary. China is always going to see the US as an adversary. Various Middle Eastern and Asian countries are the same. No amount of diplomacy is going to stop Russia and China from blocking UN support for freedom movements in countries with rulers they support. No amount of diplomacy is going to stop Putin's Russia from trying to reassert supremacy over their former satellites in East Europe. No amount of diplomacy is going to stop China from trying to claim all of the islands, oil fields, and shipping lanes in the South China Sea.

Get your head out of the sand. Everyone here... myself included... agrees that we need a smaller military. But "diplomacy not bombs" is hippy-ish stupidity. Try diplomacy first. If that doesn't work, then you'd damn well better have the bombs.

On Slashdot, it's the top five reasons to peddle cheap cynicism. Even when something good happens... Hey, other countries want to move jobs here! ... some people bitch and moan, and are generally just looking for any excuse to complain about the United States.

I've been saying for years that we should simply build an updated Saturn rocket. The primary argument that people threw at me on this was cost: that it would simply cost too much to replace the outdated components in the design. I said that was mush then, and I'll say it now. We (meaning modern countries) continually build updated versions of older designs all the time. It's not that big an obstacle, or that costly either. Not only do we continually update old hardware for current and future use... the B-52 will famously roll along in service for another 25 years, with Boeing sticking new electronics in it... the Russians went one better and simply put their old Tu-95 Bear bombers back into production in the 90's... an aircraft that first flew in 1953. Several Russian rockets are nothing but dressed up old designs, and they work fairly well.

So don't throw the "too costly/too complex" argument at me. Would an updated Saturn would really cost more than the Ares rockets planned for the Constellation program? I really doubt that. We're way too prone to reinvent the wheel on things like these, with an erroneous belief that "new" always equals "better".

Uh, there's definitely a big science angle to disease outbreaks. So they problem is...?

Wish? More like planned that way. The Pentagon knows how to play the game: lowball your estimate for a weapon system you're selling as critical to national security, get the process flowing to as many Congressional districts as possible (one factor that raises costs, in fact) in order to gather maximum support, and then when production actually starts, you know that Congress won't have the courage to cancel the program.

I'm very hawkish, but over the years, I've also become very, very cynical about how we buy weapons. This is one of the reasons that, despite my support for free trade in civilian goods, I think perhaps we should go back to a mostly-nationalized weapons building regime. The Navy owns a lot of shipyards, the Air Force a lot of aircraft plants, and the army some armories (and in the past, even armor factories). But they no longer design and build ships, planes, and guns on their own. It's totally contractor driven now, and anyone that studies the issue objectively has to admit that weapons procurement (domestically) is in no way any kind of free market... it just has the appearance of one. The whole process is very corrupt (by design). Maybe we'd be better off going back to designing and building our own ships and aircraft (the Navy especially was into doing this... they even had their own aircraft factory, and they found that it kept costs down in the 20's and 30's as it kept 3rd party contractors honest).

This is coming from a right winger, folks. Entitlements are our biggest budget problem, and a corrupting influence on it's own, but we can not continue to ignore the fiasco that is our arms procurement process and military budget either. No nation in the world can afford $15 billion dollar aircraft carriers and $200+ million dollar fighter planes in any useful quantity. And not only are we engaging in corruption, we're borrowing 40 cents on the dollar to do it.

Pretty much everything the Pentagon does is over budget, behind schedule, and budget-wise, generally a spawn of wishful thinking. The "cheap" Littoral Combat Ships were sold to Congress as sub-$250 million craft. They're currently just under $700 million apiece. The "cheap" F-35 was promised to be no more than $60 million a copy or so. They're now just under $200 million a copy, flyaway (more expensive than the F-22 they were supposed to compliment). The new Ford class carriers... an evolutionary development of the current Nimitz class.... will now cost 2 1/2 times as much as the last Nimitz that was launched just a few years back.

Why should DOD software be any different than DOD hardware when it comes to wishful thinking from the brass?

Does this scenario remind anyone else of the old War Games movie, where WOPPER would put fake Backfire bombers on NORAD's screens?

I work at an airport and talk to our FAA tower guys a lot, and they tell me the ultimate goal is to make most radar go away and rely on GPS. FAA has had these plans since the early 2000's, although groups like AOPA protest that we should keep some kind of radar backup.

Virtually all of those technological improvements concern lowering costs. None of them increased performance, which is what the Concorde and the proposed American SST projects were all about... zooming civilian passengers around at military speeds. The Concorde was all about speed. We've actually slowed down since then, with the modern high-bypass turbofan airliners... especially the two-engined craft... gaining fuel efficiency but losing speed compared to the first generation of jet airliners with their thirsty-but-fast turbojets.

Here are some cruise speeds of jetliners vs. the later crop of comparable turbofan liners:

Boeing 707: 604 MPH
Douglas DC-8: 596 MPH

vs.

Boeing 767: 567 MPH
Airbus A330: 567 MPH

It's great that our jets are more efficient, but there's zero allure about that when it comes to the passenger. Nobody brags about the efficient fuel usage on their flight. Concorde passengers got to lord it over their friends that they went Mach 2.

Why is this insightful? It's not the kids, or even their parents that are banning this stuff. They're a vocal minority. It's a government that wants to nanny us 24 hours a day banning things like this. "For the children" is just another variant of "the public good". Various levels of government want to regulate... or outright ban... everything from the size of your soda to the ingredients in your food.

First off, what I call entitlements are just that: entitlement spending programs, and they're the most massive chunks in the budget pie. Second, medicare and SS will remain a problem regardless because cost growth is outstripping income from new generations of workers. Third, it is simply a falsehood that repealing those tax cuts will make up for entitlement growth. Not even close, especially in the long run. We have several problems in our budget, but when you look for the biggest ones, entitlements are the problem.

Maybe it's just me, but I found 7's performance to be about the same as Vista 64bit on the same or similar hardware. That in and of itself was an improvement to me. But 8 seems genuinely more responsive than 7.

First, you're right, in K-12, we have the highest spending in the world, and you're correct: you'd hardly know it from the results.

Second, our university system is at the edge of a precipice. Our colleges have been living off of their reputations for years, and other institutions across the world are catching up, or have caught up with us. Harvard and Yale... like Oxford and Cambridge... will always have a brand to sell, but our higher education bubble is going to burst soon, and it's going to make the housing bubble look small by comparison. We have too many colleges with too many students that shouldn't be their learning too much fluff and paying too much for it. If something can't last forever, it wont.