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The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

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Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#121

Post by vacri »

remarkEon wrote: post #54
venomsnake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The A10's minigun is ineffective at killing modern main-battle tanks, so I wouldn't say it's a raging sucess. I love those improvised battle tanks by the guerrilas that the US has been encountering in their last 30 years of wars.

Yeah good thing no one we're dropping bombs on today has any armored vehicles. http://defensetech.org/2015/01/07/us-airstrikes-agaisnt-isis...

You make it sound like the A-10 doing close-support is the only way the US has to destroy a tank from the air.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#123

Post by angersock »

hackuser wrote: post #88
jleyank wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless, of course, you're interested in strafing what's on the ground. If you carry 8 missiles, you have 8 shots. Assuming you can get a lock on what's on the ground. If you have 10-30s of 20mm or larger, you can do wonders on, say, a convoy of trucks. While we used to have different planes for different tasks, the staggering costs of current/future models is killing off such things. And as there's no external threat…

> Unless, of course, you're interested in strafing what's on the ground My (very limited) understanding is this: Against far inferior enemies such as ISIS and the Taliban, strafing works fine. But against peer enemies, such as the Russians, we'll never get close enough to strafe. Also, guided munitions are so much more accurate than unguided ones (such as bullets) that the number of hits is comparable. What we could…

What we could do with hundreds (thousands?) of unguided munitions before, we now can do with 1-2 guided ones fired from a thousand miles away.

By this logic, we should only be deploying snipers instead of infantry.

Look, once you've run out of guided munitions and SAMs and things, you're going to really, really, really hope that the technologically inferior aircraft hadn't packed something as obsolete as a machinegun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_%28short_story%29

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#124

Post by jjoonathan »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #115
CountSessine wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Accept C but reject C++? That's completely ridiculous. "Well, the scout leader's fire control computer should have returned fire at the MIG. It should have, but the C-programmed fire control software cast the void* target object to a ... well, a seagull_t object. I guess you could say that the scout leader was shot down when a seagull fired a radar-guided missile at him. That's pretty funny, right? R…

Linus Torvalds once quipped (in a discussion over Git) that "even if the choice of C over C++ had no other benefits than keeping the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to prefer C".

What is the preferred way to implement generic containers in C?

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#125

Post by dba7dba »

philwelch wrote: post #81
Tloewald wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic perversity is building a gigantic military in peacetime because the arms companies have enormous lobbying power. Everything else flows from and is secondary to that.

Gigantic? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/pentagon-plans... Have you considered the gigantic military requirements that are placed on the United States? By treaty alone, the US is required to defend almost all of Europe, Japan, and South Korea. These are not easy requirements to disentangle from; if Japan alone were allowed and required to rearm, it could lead to an arms race that would destabilize all…

The thing is despite the gigantic military requirements placed on US, it doesn't have be such a financial disaster only if procurement was done in a sane way. So there's really no one to blame but ourselves.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#126

Post by scintill76 »

CountSessine wrote: post #91
zanethomas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, that's scary, I would accept C for such a job but C++ provides too many opportunities for things to go wrong in strange and difficult to find ways.

Are you kidding? Accept C but reject C++? That's completely ridiculous. "Well, the scout leader's fire control computer should have returned fire at the MIG. It should have, but the C-programmed fire control software cast the void* target object to a ... well, a seagull_t object. I guess you could say that the scout leader was shot down when a seagull fired a radar-guided missile at him. That's pretty funny, right? R…

It seems like I've seen this type of C-bashing (vs. C++) recently, and I don't understand it. How is well-written modern C less type-safe than C++? I define that as something along the lines of "using the latest language specification, making judicious use of all features possible, turning on extra-strict compiler warnings and errors."

To address your specific scenario, you could just as well cast a void* to seagull_t* in C++ as you can in C, can't you? I'll admit to not being totally up-to-snuff on the different casts available in C++, but IIRC C-style casting still works.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#127

Post by scintill76 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #124
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds once quipped (in a discussion over Git) that "even if the choice of C over C++ had no other benefits than keeping the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to prefer C".

What is the preferred way to implement generic containers in C?

I'm not an expert, but I was curious too and looked around. Apparently glib is pretty popular, and they just use void* (typedef'd to gpointer) for the type of items in the container: https://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.42/glib-Doubly-Linked-Lis...

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#128

Post by icebraining »

javajosh wrote: post #92
philwelch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US began the WWII draft over a year before Pearl Harbor, and was manufacturing arms for the Allies months ahead of Pearl Harbor as well. Even a weakened American industrial base was significantly larger than that of any other country in the world at the time ( http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm ). World War II was an unusual case, though. Every war since then has been a relatively limited one in the sense…

>There was hardly a single American who lived through that war who didn't make sacrifices and materially contribute to victory. Contrast this with how Americans were told to support Iraq 2 and Afghanistan: "Go shopping." The best possible policy for peace-loving American's to adopt would be a "no war without conscription" law. This seems counterintuitive, but it is my believe that when Senators' and Presidents' and C…

Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods-a number that has increased substantially over the past four years. (...) American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#129

Post by mcguire »

javajosh wrote: post #61
sithadmin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about scaling out cloud deployments or something here. Building a military takes an incredible amount of lead time. If you don't have a strong standing military force during peacetime, you won't have one during wartime.

Utterly false. Prior to involvement in World War 2, the US had hardly any standing army and rather weak tooling industries (being wiped out by the Great Depression) and yet still managed to field like 2 million troops and vast amounts of weapons for allies in a very short period of time.

Designs for the US's more advanced fighters, like the P-38, P-47, and P-51, were begun in 1937-39. They were not initially available when the US entered the war.

The M4 Sherman tank design began about 1940, although it followed closely on US light and medium tank designs from 1935.

If by "prior to involvement," you mean 3 or 4 years prior, you're probably right. Most of the design and development work was done to supply the British well before 1941.

Further, the Great Depression not withstanding, and certainly by 1941, the US had the strongest economy in the world.

Re: The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35

#130

Post by mcguire »

jjoonathan wrote: post #124
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds once quipped (in a discussion over Git) that "even if the choice of C over C++ had no other benefits than keeping the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to prefer C".

What is the preferred way to implement generic containers in C?

There isn't. You don't do generic containers in C; you implement each specific data structure from the ground up to do specifically what you need.

This is both a strength and a weakness.

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