You mean, like you're doing right now? Good question.

Only for wars that never had any popular support in the first place.

And America can't afford to lose its high-tech aircraft, because they're so expensive.

That's because they had real bombers to do the grunt work. They'd sure have been complaining if the F-117 was the only bomber they had.

The F-35's stealth is only useful in a ground-attack role in a few tiny corner cases--which country, exactly, do you think it's going to be bombing which has good enough air defence for the stealth to make a difference, but not good enough that it makes no difference?--and, for that, you pay several times the cost of an aircraft that's just as capable the rest of the time. And, given the cost of losing one, odds are they'll just stay back out of range and launch missiles, the same way a cheaper aircraft would.

Isn't the F-35 heavily reliant on networked sensors to detect targets, since using radar immediately tells the other guys where it is? Doesn't that have precisely the same jamming problem as drone links?

Sure, it can keep flying without those links, but that doesn't help if it can't shoot anything.

Duh. You don't have to worry about 'air supremacy' when fighting third-world peasants, because they don't have any planes. What you do have to worry about are anti-aircraft guns and missiles, which are vastly cheaper than F-35s.

Sending a $337,000,000 (according to the 'War Nerd' post linked above) fighter to blow up Toyotas full of peasants is like using a 30mm gatling gun to hunt ducks. It's all very exciting, and fun if you can afford it, but not very sensible.

You do realize the F-35 has to carry most if its weapons on highly non-stealthy wing pylons for air-to-ground attacks, right? If I remember correctly, it can only carry two bombs or four air-to-air missiles internally, everything else has to go under the wings... including the external fuel tanks required for a long bombing mission.

The predecessors actually have to do something in the real world, like bombing third-world peasants, while the F-35 sits in a hangar. Besides, who's really going to risk a $200,000,000 jet to blow up a $10,000 pickup with a couple of guys with RPGs in the back?

Because everyone in Europe has a high-speed rail station outside their house from where they can take a train all the way to their destination by the direct route without stopping anywhere in between.

You're right that flying makes little sense on short routes, due to the time taken to get on and off the plane. But high-speed rail makes little sense on those routes, either. When I lived in the UK, even the relatively slow 220-ish km/h inter-city trains used to spend about the first half hour crawling out of London before they could get up to speed, then, after a few minutes at that speed, they'd be crawling in and out of the stations where they stopped along the way.

First of all, you say, "North Korea didn't hack Sony," as if it is an indisputable, known fact. It is not -- by any stretch of the imagination.

The fact is, it cannot be proven either way in a public forum, or without having independent access to evidence which proves -- from a social, not technical, standpoint -- how the attack originated. Since neither of those are possible, the MOST that can be accurate stated is that no one, in a public context, can definitively demonstrate for certain who hacked Sony.

Blameless in your scenario is the only entity actually responsible, which is that entity that attacked Sony in the first place.

Whether that is the DPRK, someone directed by the DPRK, someone else entirely, or a combination of the above, your larger point appears to be that somehow the US is to blame for a US subsidiary of a Japanese corporation getting hacked -- or perhaps simply for existing.

As a bonus, you could blame Sony for saying its security controls weren't strong enough, while still reserving enough blame for the US as the only "jackass".

Bravo.

Many of the same slashdotters who accept "experts" who claim NK didn't hack Sony will readily accept as truth that it was "obviously" the US that attacked NK, even though there is even less objective proof of that, and could just as easily be some Anonymous offshoot, or any number of other organizations, or even North Korea itself.

See the logical disconnect, here?

For those now jumping on the "North Korea didn't hack Sony" bandwagon that some security "experts" are leading for their own political or ideological reasons, including using rationales as puzzling and pedestrian as source IP addresses of the attacks being elsewhere, some comments:

Attribution in cyber is hard, and the general public is never going to know the classified intelligence that went into making an attribution determination, and experts -- actual and self-appointed -- will make claims about what they think occurred.

With cyber, you could have nation-states, terrorists organizations, or even activist hacking groups attacking other nation-states, companies, or organizations, for any number of motives, and making it appear, from a social and technical standpoint, that the attack originated from and/or was ordered by another entity entirely.

That's a HUGE problem, but there are ways to mitigate it. A Sony "insider" may indeed -- wittingly or unwittingly -- have been key in pulling off this hack. That doesn't mean that DPRK wasn't involved. I am not making a formal statement one way or the other; just saying that the public won't be privy to the specific attribution rationale.

Also, any offensive cyber action that isn't totally worthless is going to attempt to mask or completely divert attention from its true origins (unless part of the strategic intent is to make it clear who did it), or at a minimum maintain some semblance of deniability.

At some point you have to apply Occam's razor and ask who benefits.

And for those riding the kooky "This is all a big marketing scam by Sony" train:

So, you're saying that Sony leaked thousands of extremely embarrassing and in some cases damaging internal documents and emails that will probably result in the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment being ousted, including private and statutorily-protected personal health information of employees, and issued terroristic messages threatening 9/11-style attacks at US movie theaters, committing dozens to hundreds of federal felonies, while derailing any hopes for a mass release and instead having it end up on YouTube for rental, all to promote one of hundreds of second-rate movies?

Yeah...no.

What on earth makes you think that NK has to have the native talent? The didn't figure out how to make nukes on their own either. They didn't home-grow their substantial currency counterfeiting operation, either. They likewise don't design and build their own military equipment. But that doesn't stop them from having nukes, from doing big business in phony currency, and sinking other people's ships.

Sure they did. They stole time from millions of people. They deliberately screwed with the expectations and plans of millions of people, all for a little bit of cash and bragging rights among their fellow assholes.

You're right, all those people should have chosen to buy fun, well-developed, richly supported gaming platforms from one of the many providers who offer open source, freedom-minded, anti-IP, systems that have a large selection of really cool massive multiplayer games with giant networks supporting all of that activity. There are so many to choose from that I'm sure it's why you just didn't have time to list them.

It's idiots like you, who think that businesses, networks, people's entertainment time, and the like "aren't real" that give comfort and encouragement to idiots like the guys who pulled this. They did it to be dicks, just like other dicks might throw a rock through your window and nail your TV right before you were going to watch the World Cup match you've been waiting weeks to watch with your friends. Or, in a closer analogy, waiting until moments before the game starts, and then cutting the cable that services your house or apartment building.

Let me guess: that soccer game's not real! They're not at the stadium in person, so denying them the chance to watch it as they planned isn't actually harmful! Destruction of the time someone plans to use in a certain way is a theft more real, in many ways, than stealing physical objects. You'll never be able to replace the time. Which is one of the reasons these guys are dicks. Deliberate, purposeful, not noble in any way, dicks.