True, but the Russia Ships seem to be designed to stay nearer to friendly ports.
Russian ships have a poor history of sailing around the world
(Cue Drach!)
In the mid-1980s they seriously tried to go for a blue water navy, and had a few more bases like the former Camranh Bay in Ho Chi Minh City to help out, but yeah, realistically, after Tsushima they kind of wanted to be able to wade home.
So … looking at the Zumwalt, and one of the LCS pictures… did the Navy start deleting bridge wings? Isn’t that a bad idea for a navy that has had an issue recently with combat ships getting struck by civilian freighters that have poor maneuverability? Doesn’t the officer on the bridge sometimes have to go look around at things that might be approaching from the side?
I believe the idea was to reduce the radar profile for “stealth” purposes and they’d likely use some camera mount system for close maneuvers. I’m rather skeptical on just how effective all that is on a ship, however.
Well, according to the linked video, they show up as tiny fishing boats.
KevinC
1820
Military elite meaning special forces, not military elite as in the upper ranks of the military. Thank god. I mean, still really bad, but if military leadership went down the QAnon rabbit hole…
That some special forces / special operations people turn out to be crazy is, well, to be expected I guess.
Also, there are senior people like Flynn and a few others who are certainly rabid.
The vast expansion of the SpecOps community in the last few decades pretty much made this sort of thing inevitable. When it was very small, you could vet people more closely and carefully, and did not have to fill nearly as many slots. Not that old-school Green Berets or SEALs were all angels, but dollars to doughnuts a lot of the people in SpecOps today would not have made it past the psych screenings thirty years ago.
Maybe, but I’m skeptical. I think that special forces / special ops is the kind of work that is going to attract a certain moral flexibility and strange world view, regardless of the size of the force.
Yeah I think so, either some real amorality (as in not caring much about right or wrong) or some hardcore justifying of a certain (usually to the right) position.
I have some friends in that community, and I’m pretty sure they were 100 % pro brexit and pro “independence”
Yes, that sort of thing has always attracted a certain type, but before the expansion of SpecOps numbers the attractiveness of the job plus the small number of slots meant they could be really picky, and filter out the really iffy ones for the most part. Once you start increasing the number of people you need to bring in, given the high physical/technical standards, I suspect the pressure grows to relax the “soft” standards to fill out the rosters.
Waging a couple of wars at the same time also tends to lower standards.
Heh, there is that to be sure.
ShivaX
1829
Gotta hit those numbers, I guess. Honor and integrity are overrated anyway.
From the headline, I thought no one was expelled, but the story does have some details.
Most of the 73 West Point cadets accused in the biggest cheating scandal in decades at the U.S. Military Academy are being required to repeat a year, and eight were expelled, academy officials said Friday.
The cheating scandal is the biggest at West Point since 1976 and preceded the tightening of an academy policy that spared many cadets in this case from being kicked out.
The academy also said it will end its 6-year-old “willful admission process,” which was used by 55 cadets and is designed to protect cadets who promptly admit to wrongdoing from being kicked out. Officials determined the process was not meeting its goal of increasing self-reporting and decreasing toleration for violations of the honor code.
The 1976 scandal involved 153 upperclassmen who resigned or were expelled for cheating on an electrical engineering exam. The secretary of the Army appointed a select commission headed by former astronaut Frank Borman to review the case, and more than 90 of those caught cheating were reinstated and allowed to graduate.
Alstein
1831
Given most were freshmen, I’m willing to cut them a second and final chance- this seems sufficient.
They’re going to have it three times as rough as the rest , as they will have their reputation preceding them the rest of the time there.
Timex
1832
#sad #lowenergy
I was working with some guys out of Holloman, and at one point they were taking about some renovations taking place, and one of them was like, “nah man, that got delayed. They are using that money for trump’s dumass wall,” and everyone was like “Jesus fucking Christ…”
