MOSCOW — Russian Defense Ministry says its warplanes have flown first combat mission in Syria with U.S.-led coalition aircraft.I don't know the implications of this but I like it. About damn time. Kill ISIS and deal with Assad at our leisure.
THE British Army has sent a TANK through the Channel Tunnel for the first time – to practise getting armoured vehicles to Eastern Europe quickly in case of a crisis with Russia.This is big in Europe but I don't quite get the excitement. One raid by Russian Spetsnaz/GRU with a few demolition charges will destroy the tracks and shut down this form of rapid reinforcement.
The military exercise saw five armoured vehicles transported to France on train wagons in the early hours of Wednesday.
A Challenger tank and matching recovery vehicle, a Warrior armoured fighting vehicle, a Warrior recovery vehicle and a reconnaissance vehicle were all sent across the Channel during the exercise.
They made the 40-minute return journey a few hours later.
PETITION BACKGROUND
With Republicans controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress, reform proposals must be bipartisan to have any hope of success in Washington. Progressive Democrats may not have many Republican allies on some domestic issues, but for cutting the bloated Pentagon-industrial complex, we have potential Republican allies in the House Liberty Caucus. Of 40 Republicans who voted to stop the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, over half were members of the House Liberty Caucus. [1]Wow.
President Trump has called out Lockheed-Martin's F-35 warplane as a huge rip-off of our tax dollars. But jawboning Lockheed-Martin down on a warplane that doesn't work and we don't need anyway would only result in a slightly smaller ripoff. Congress should protect our tax dollars by shutting down the F-35 taxpayer ripoff immediately. The F-35 may never be ready for combat [2], and Pentagon brass are lying when they say there is no alternative. [3,4,5] The Congressional Budget Office says one modest proposal for killing the F-35 - buying different planes, but not fewer planes - would save taxpayers more than $20 billion over a decade. [6] Proposals to shut down the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which would likely harm renewable energy systems in rural areas, would save $2 billion a year - roughly the same amount. [7]
Urge Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders like Keith Ellison and House Liberty Caucus leaders like Justin Amash to work together to kill the F-35 by signing our petition.
References:
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-heeding-close-house_b_10516480.html
2. http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2016/f-35-may-never-be-ready-for-combat.html
3. http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2017/f-35-not-too-big-to-fail-twitter-trump-rattles-defense-industry.html
4. http://www.taxpayer.net/library/article/the-unaffordable-f-35-budget-history-and-alternatives
5. http://nsnetwork.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/08/F-35_FINAL.pdf
6. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/52142-breakout-chapter32.pdf
7. http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/315132-dems-blast-trump-plans-for-deep-spending-cuts
That's why speculating about how awful or how good some military unit perform just based on photos of wrecks doesn't make sense. Who knows how many hits the tank took before ending there? Or maybe the tanks didn't even take any damage but broke down before combat. Who would know based on a wreck of a tank?Story here.
2. The meme that the Leopard 2A4 is an old model and we can't judge its 
There has been a lot of hype and a lot of disappointment and sniping around this gun. It was originally supposed to ship in late 2015 — here’s a group buy thread on a forum that has been active since 2014, with a bunch of bullpup fans planning their purchase. Then after delays Desert Tech announced a “firm” commitment to shipping it in the third quarter of 2016. Here’s the company’s CEO in a statement:Story here.
“We’re really excited that we can commit third quarter of this year — that’s our firm time and we’re excited to have that commitment. … We’re going to take the time to make sure out of the box that this is the product that you guys have been waiting for.”
So that didn’t happen, and now the rep is swearing that it will be shipping in volume this coming July.
I, for one, am not going to hold my breath. As I said above, there has been a ton of disappointment out there, because folks have been so excited about this thing for so long.
I want to note that I did not see this gun at Range Day, and I take that to be a bad sign. If you’re shipping a new, hot gun this year, it’s going to be at Range Day. The fact that the MDR wasn’t there suggests to me that it’s still vapor.
At any rate, when the gun eventually ships, our colleagues at TFB will be all over it, and then we’ll see if it can actually deliver more than just broken dreams.
Iran has increasingly been forced to acknowledge its losses—including at least four generals in the past year—with some reports suggesting that twice that number have been killed since the intervention began. Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani, who was killed on October 8th, was given a state funeral. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally called on Hamedani’s family to convey his condolences. Khamenei’s official Twitteraccount, in English, lauded the general for fulfilling his “martyrdom wish.”Story here.
Hamedani’s death was a setback for Iran—and possibly for Syria, too. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, Syria’s regular Army has been halved since the war began, in 2011. Assad has increasingly relied on leaders in Iran to develop strategy, and counted on Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, to provide new fighters. Hamedani was the senior Iranian tactician in northern Syria, where the regime is simultaneously fighting Western-backed rebels, the Islamic State, a local Al Qaeda franchise, and smaller militias. Hamedani was a hero of the war with Iraq—the deadliest modern conflict in the Middle East—and his death was the most notable Iranian military loss since that war ended.
Iran’s aid has increased since the Islamic State, the Nusra Front, and other Sunni extremists began seizing large areas of Syria and Iraq, in mid-2014. Over the past month, hundreds of additional Iranian “advisers” have reportedly gone to Syria. Middle East media outlets claim that General Qassem Suleimani, the renowned commander of the Quds Force, arrived in Syria this month to mobilize a new offensive around Aleppo. The growing Iranian ground presence has coincided with Russia’s new bombing campaign by air.Side note. I don't like the targeted assassination of "high value targets". In my opinion focusing on individual leaders instead of conducting the war is a distraction. Leaders can be replaced but when there is no one left to lead then the war is over. I personally feel that the current policy of raids and drone strikes is a fools errand. Having said that I would cheer if we caught General Suleimani in a strike while he's in Syria. I've heard rumors that the guy was behind the Quds Force while they were active in Iraq. A B-2 strike on his sorry ass instead of training camps would be welcome news.
The U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin are close to deal for a contract worth almost $9 billion as negotiations are poised to bring the price per F-35 below $100 million for the first time, people familiar with the talks said Wednesday.Either the mainstream news media is incredibly stupid, or they're purposefully dismissing issues with this plane.
The F-35, the Pentagon's costliest arms program, has drawn fire from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump who has made lowering prices for military equipment a pillar of his transition into office.
Talks are still ongoing for the tenth batch of stealthy fighter jets with a deal for 90 planes expected to be announced by the end of the month, three people said on condition of anonymity.
A Lockheed representative declined to comment and a representative for the fighter program said negotiations are ongoing.
I have posted about survivorship bias and how it affects your career choices: how a Hollywood actor giving the classic “follow your dreams and never give up” line is bad advice and is pure survivorship bias at work.Just wow. Awesome stuff.
When I read up on the wikipedia page, I encountered an interesting story:
During WWII the US Air Force wanted to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Center for Naval Analyses ran a research on where bombers tend to get hit with the explicit aim of enforcing the parts of the airframe that is most likely to receive incoming fire. This is what they came up with (note..its the pic above).
So, they said: the red dots are where bombers are most likely to be hit, so put some more armor on those parts to make the bombers more resilient. That looked like a logical conclusion, until Abraham Wald - a mathematician - started asking questions:
- how did you obtain that data?
- well, we looked at every bomber returning from a raid, marked the damages on the airframe on a sheet and collected the sheets from all allied air bases over months. What you see is the result of hundreds of those sheets.
- and your conclusion?
- well, the red dots are where the bombers were hit. So let’s enforce those parts because they are most exposed to enemy fire.
- no. the red dots are where a bomber can take a hit and return. The bombers that took a hit to the ailerons, the engines or the cockpit never made it home. That’s why they are absent in your data. The blank spots are exactly where you have to enforce the airframe, so those bombers can return.
This is survivorship bias. You only see a subset of the outcomes. The ones that made it far enough to be visible. Look out for absence of data. Sometimes they tell a story of their own.
