81–90 of 130 posts
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All the Airforce personnel that I've drunk with tell me that a couple minutes on pure oxygen do wonders to clear up a hangover.
Pure oxygen may clear up a hangover, but as far as I know the body metabolizes alcohol at a fixed rate unaffected by oxygen, exercise, etc.
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> when the Japanese Navy showed up, the US Navy weighed anchor and left I'm not even an amateur pacific theater historian, but I know that this story is more nuanced than that, and your implication that the Navy didn't cooperate sounds naive. It's true that the US armed forces suffer from high division. My canonical example is the retirement of A-10 in favor of F-35.
Of course it's more nuanced than that, but imagine you are a Marine on the beach. Do you care about the nuance, or do you care about seeing the ships leave with your supplies. When I read history, I try to imagine it with at least 3 points of view - the individual soldier, the commander, and the whole conflict. It is possible to take someone's lived experience seriously while still realizing that they don't have all…
I'm not really into military doctrine, but why not just leave all the flying stuff to the Air Force or maybe specialized parts of the Navy? When you look up US air units/forces, there is a bunch of stuff left to the national guards, marines etc. and flying is obviously something to be taken seriously. And it looks like they are more likely to screw it up or take it less seriously.
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> So while it's true that holacracies can quickly turn into hierarchies rather than democracies, it's still doesn't explain why hierarchies are preferred by humans over democracies, while the latter is obviously more acceptable on the state level. Democracy on the state level mostly refers to bureaucratic heirarchy where the leaders are (sometimes indirectly) accountable to the electorate; heirarchy and democracy coe…
> heirarchy and democracy coexist rather than being mutually exclusive Exactly, that is my point, in the army they are exclusive though. The people lower in the hierarchy have little say in whether they trust the people upper in the hierarchy. > Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises. That is true, but that's my point also. Why d…
We have almost no experience with non-heirarchical democratic state-level organization. We have experience with heirarchy with democratic accountability and heirarchy without it, and from that we can conclude that:
(1) the former may lead to better outcomes for those that aren't at the top of heirarchy, but
(2) the former definitely relies on formal delineation of authority and institutionalized structures enforcing those formal rules. (That is, democratic control at the state level requires formal heirarchy.)
Holacracy eschews formal structures of authority, and therefore the (informal) heirarchies it produces are not restrained by democratic accountability.
And even very small-scale democracy (which may not require formalization) still has heirarchy; people (social animals generally, people aren't special in this regard) form heirarchies.
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> why not just leave all the flying stuff to the Air Force or maybe specialized parts of the Navy? The priorities aka politics of each military branch are different. Canonical example: At Guadalcanal in WW2, the Navy was supposed to land supplies and support the Marines, but when the Japanese Navy showed up, the US Navy weighed anchor and left - with most supplies still aboard. The Marines are still mad about that 75…
This is also one of the main reasons why the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) program ended up as such an expensive mess. The Marines insisted on getting their own VSTOL variant to provide CAS from amphibious ships so that they wouldn't have to rely on the Navy. And that forced the use of a huge single engine instead of smaller twin engines, making it less aerodynamic (shorter range) and less survivable for other missions…
I'm not really into military doctrine, but why not just leave all the flying stuff to the Air Force or maybe specialized parts of the Navy? When you look up US air units/forces, there is a bunch of stuff left to the national guards, marines etc. and flying is obviously something to be taken seriously. And it looks like they are more likely to screw it up or take it less seriously.
It makes for better unit cohesion - Marines can train with Marines, and at least in theory everyone will eg know everyone's radio freqs and call signs and so on. (In practice, lol no not even close) Also specific to the Marines is the idea of delivering a fully-operational fighting force anywhere in the world in a short time: infantry, armor, artillery, CAS. Marines even have their own specops (Recon). So while the M…
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Our blood rarely carries all the oxygen it can. If its suddenly saturated, that means more oxygen throughout the body for metabolic purposes.
Uh, incorrect. Resting o2 sat is 99% in most young healthy people - like aviators. In older people, or the unhealthy, you may see it start to drop due to diffusion or ventilation defects - but barring serious lung disease, neuromuscular defects, severe, severe obesity, etc. that still gives you a resting sat in the mid 90s. There is also oxygen dissolved directly in blood rather than saturating hemoglobin, but that c…
It's truly an awesome sight. The aircraft are so big, and so close together. The tanker has colored lights all over it, I expect to help guide the following plane.
Through the windshield, it looks larger than life and a little surreal.
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This is also one of the main reasons why the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) program ended up as such an expensive mess. The Marines insisted on getting their own VSTOL variant to provide CAS from amphibious ships so that they wouldn't have to rely on the Navy. And that forced the use of a huge single engine instead of smaller twin engines, making it less aerodynamic (shorter range) and less survivable for other missions…
I don't think this was about "not relying on the Navy". The Marines have built an entire doctrine around the MEUs (Marine Expeditionary Unit) and the amphibious assault carriers are central to it. Who do you think the ships belong to?
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In that case, the question might as well be whether USA needs a navy at all, considering that the aircraft carrier and its planes have been the deadliest naval weapon system since WWII.
No doubt air craft carriers were very effective in WWII, when neither side had high precision radar let alone real-time satellite imagery. They won’t be effective in future wars. Air craft carriers are sitting ducks and will also prove to be a terrible waste of blood and treasure. The Navy is hugely important, and I think there’s even a good argument to be made in favor of the USMC continuing to exist in a quasi-spec…
The Navy can do close air support, but likes to keep its planes on its ships rather than forward deployed where the Marines need them.
The Army uses helicopters for close air support to get around the Air Force, but those have the problem of loiter time.
If you did manage to bludgeon the Air Force into handling air support, those units would have to be so tightly tied to the Marines and Army that their careers would be compromised in the Air Force.