No, and in fact swarm tactics are a major area of research, especially at the Naval War College. It wasn't long after this exercise that the US Navy developed anti-swarm tactics, and those are evolving all the time.

Clearly you've never played organized sports. It's not like every practice is a scrimmage; there are times when you set up a scenario where the opposing players run a certain play to see if your play works against it. If you didn't do this you couldn't choose what to practice. How much better would a team get if the guy playing the opposing quarterback quit each time this happened? van Ripen wasn't some no-nonsense tell-it-like-it-is leader, he was a whiner and cared more about personal credit than about testing tactics against tactics and improving, which is the whole point of a wargame. And by the way, in what sense is this a media ploy? You get a couple of articles about a given exercise and...that's it. These wargames are quite costly and the lessons we want to learn/theories we want to test are very well defined ahead of time to avoid wasting that money. If this was a media ploy it'd be the equivalent of you buying a giant tv and hiding it in your living room as you step outside and tell people you have a big tv.

This would, in fact, be news to everyone. This sentence:

is SO ridiculous that it sounds like something you'd say while playing the Steve Jackson game Illuminati, where you frequently say things like "The FBI, using the Boy Scouts, will try to control the South American Nazis aided by 10 million dollars from the Swiss Bankers."

What terrifying is that you might actually believe your point of view to be common sense accepted by everyone. Yikes.

I'm pretty sure that nobody was caught with a hand of any color, which is basically why stuxnet was such a significant piece of work. You negate your own credibility by calling this inaccurate propaganda when you, in one poorly-constructed sentence, make inaccurate and baseless accusations.

Come on. It's always amusing to see people bash the US for things that, heads up, literally EVERY country does. Here's the cycle:

1. My country can leverage x for economic gain (everything is about economic gain, even military power)
2. Suchandsuch is happening that threatens our x
3. Choose:
          a. Be fair, let it happen, watch your country grow poorer
          b. Be unfair, stop it from happening, allow your country to flourish

If your responsibility as the leader of your country was to ensure the economic prosperity of your country, what kind of an idiot would you be to choose 3a? Would you stand before your people and say "Yes, we could have avoided this recession, but I really thought that deserved the money more this time."

At any given time I have about 20 different tasks of varying timelines that need to get done. Lots of emails regarding those separate things, all relevant, will come in. I have a folder titled FORAC (for action, we love our acronyms in the military) and subfolders for specific tasks, each containing all the relevant emails. When I need something, I just hit up that folder. When the task is done, I move that subfolder to FORAC Complete so I can still reference it, but it's not in my FORAC folder. This tremendously helps me keep track of rapidly changing requirements and updates.

Where is that established?

As for fractions, if you really wanted to politicianize it, you could argue that it could mean more than what you're spending and that you're referring to an improper fraction. BOOM. I'm running for office just based on that.

Sounds like you don't have a whole lot of military experience. Just peruse Wikipedia about the relevant topics and you'll find what you're missing.

You don't have to think of them. The US National Strategy and National Military Strategy are unclassified and available for public perusal. Since you won't go read them, I'll gives a few points:

1. A global, credible military presence has a moderating effect on military conflicts.
2. The world economy is so globalized now that America must protect the economic interests of itself and it's allies in order to maintain economic stability.

There are more important points, and those two are summaries that you need to read the whole document(s) to understand, but that should be good enough for now.

Please provide actual criticism instead of ad hominem. I would actually like to see an intelligent rebuttal.

Also, Firefox wants to correct "hominem" to "Eminem." It might be time to switch browsers.

Ameri-eurocentric? Sooo...one side. I assume, then, that yours is a Germanitalian-Japan centric view? I wonder if somebody blurred the facts in the other direction would you be so quick to criticize them with country names

I guess I never read about the requirement to talk about how editor is, because these posts seem to happen with nearly every story. I would imagine the HR guidance for Slashdot editors doesn't factor in angry user comments too heavily, so what is the point of these? You're not even commenting on the article, you're commenting on one line in the metadata for it. You probably didn't even get to the summary before you had decided to complain. Aside from all of that, you described an editor posting a summary and a story and then criticized him for...what...letting people comment on it? I don't understand. Try to be a little happier and complain less.

I'm a naval officer, so my workplace is a ship integrated with all the relevant networks and systems of the US military. Stuff takes forever on the machines on the ship, but it's a different network environment than a typical corporate setup, I imagine. Our networks are under constant surveillance and attack all the time, so there are frequent patches (some which can't afford to be put off until a scheduled time), virtual machines, bootloaders, logins, logins within logins, lots of cross-system connections, etc. Add on top of all that the fact that at sea all of the bandwidth is satcom and a good chunk of it is encrypted and you have a giant tangle of a network to work with. This is something all modern navies deal with, so while I empathize with the general populace and agree that it's silly, it could be worse.

Oh, also, if it is an IT mismanagement you probably have the option of firing your IT staff and/or switching to another architecture. The good ol' US of A no longer has that option: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/

Yes, I do speak English and so I understood the sentence. The grammar crumbles when that half-sentence construct takes up half the paragraph. It should be just a few, like "The Larch! The Fir! The mighty Scots Pine!" and go back to actual sentences. Just like in programming, just because it works doesn't mean it's good.

Could this be one of those literary devices where they say one thing but are actually talking about another?!