Some of these folks have played waaaay too much Call of Duty.
Menzo
1975
I’m all in for Republican Party v. US Military Industry. Is now the time for Schumer to suggest military budget cuts to cover the infrastructure bill?
No , we need the military on our side as much as possible- they’re the last line of defense we have, even if they probably won’t do anything.
Expecting to see a lot more of this from insurgents and vs all forward deployments.
Oh absolutely. Drones are clearly the future of warfare.
Maybe we can do it like the old days, when each tribe would send out a champion to fight for the prize. Just send out your best drone to go circuit-to-circuit with the other side’s robowarrior.
Let’s do it with 2v2 Air Combat using manned fighter jets! That’d be hella cool!
I had those Rock-em Sock-em Robots as a kid. Well, I had a second-hand one, from a garage sale. It mostly worked. I think one of the arms was a bit lacking in its punch. I made sure my brother got to play that one.
RichVR
1983
Make them use Flight Commander 2 as well. :)
ShivaX
1984
Turns out combat effectiveness takes a back seat to contractors making money and controlling their products.
Im a technician in the US Navy, I can tell you, there was a time when we used to be able to troubleshoot and repair pretty much everything we own. We were able to keep spare parts (high fail items) on hand and we had complete parts lists and troubleshooting diagrams for everything. Now, most new equipment is under contract, and instead of being able to repair, we are required to contact a civilian technician and they have to come onboard to fix problems. This mean, when we are deployed, we are paying to fly someone thousands of miles, into warzones, to fix something that probably just needs a simple component replacement. its a nightmare.
I’ve seen equipment that could’ve been fixed in our shop for $20 get sent out and replaced entirely for $30k. The contracts say we can’t work on it, so why did the army spend all that money training me if I’m not even a system repairer?
Shit like that makes me think we deserve to lose the next war. If it wasn’t for the price our servicepeople would end up paying, that’ is, of course. But it will take something that dramatic before the greedy bastards in the Military Industrial Complex (both in the government and civilian) get their comeuppance. If they ever do. The almighty dollar has long been the nation’s only true god, for sure.
vyshka
1986
That’s a new one. We did preventative maintenance every week, and we had people at the BN level that did all sorts of work on vehicles and equipment.
Yeah, the NCOs I worked with in the 80s, from all the services, were supremely competent at fixing damn near everything. Admittedly, I was working with folks who were in tech/intel fields mostly, but across the board I was very confident in the ability of the service men and women I met to get stuff done. Especially when their asses depended on that gear (or at least their well-being!).
I was a contractor, too, and back then at least it was pretty normal for non-specialized maintenance to be handled at the local unit level. As long as the people were cleared–and for working on stuff like external HVAC installations or things like that, clearances were not hard to come by-- the people in the units we were working with handled most things. Only the highly compartmented or really arcane stuff got shunted on to the contractors, IIRC.
Fixing things yourself was so common in the early eighties that there were regulations designed to constrain it. Regulations against e.g. cannibalizing one thing to fix several others. Despite that, we did it, because the brigade / depot maintenance capability was severely constrained by funding. There was always one jeep in the company waiting for brigade maintenance to restore to service, because it was effectively the parts store for every other jeep. Jeeps were easy to fix, if you could get the parts, only you couldn’t get them except by taking them from another jeep. The battalion commander would say “I want the entire anti-tank company ready for the upcoming deployment,” and that meant all the jeeps had to work and you made it so. Sorry about the supply sergeant’s jeep!
I remember one long night on the Big Island, up at the military training area in the saddle between the two volcanoes. I was driving a jeep from one point to another, as part of a larger unit movement, and the gear shift snapped off in my hand. The platoon sergeant told us we would have to sit there all night, waiting for someone to come to fix it or tow it away, though nobody knew who would come, or when. So another guy and I removed the hump plate that covered the transmission to expose the shift lever linkage box, removed the ball on the end of the stick shift so we had a narrower piece of metal, and I drove while the other guy jammed the narrow end into the box and shifted the gears. Shifting was not easy, in the dark over rough terrain, but we managed to stay with the column all night and reach the bivouac area with our unit. As Top used to say, the things you do in training you damned sure do in combat.
MikeJ
1989
Well, deserve or not, it certainly makes it more likely.
Even after 40 odd years, the words to Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” keep resonating. Unfortunately.
Faith No More’s cover is actually IMO a better rendition of the song, heretical as that may be.
On submarines we had enormous stores of parts and the ability to manufacture most things in a pinch. Because no one is coming to fix stuff if it breaks underwater. We learned this when the captain was outraged that the ice cream machine was broken and we had to manufacture a replacement part from bar stock.
Oh, the ice cream machine on submarines is sacred. Especially on the old diesel-electric boats.
