191–200 of 227 posts
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FYI, I'm not seeing how this relates to the story or discussion. That might explain the current downvotes.
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> Your news routinely picks and chooses what to report on, leading to a slightly distorted understanding You are not wrong, the european press hugely distorts and manipulates, but this is also textbook pot calling the kettle black: the american press is no better in that regard, and actually quite worse IMO. So this part of your argument is DOA. > at least those who have never been here or taken the time to interact…
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What you mention are your personal anecdotes while being mildly prolific in 2 out of many languages. Where I live, knowing fluently 4 or 5 is the norm and nobody considers themselves an expert on given country, even if its just another European country or even neighbor. I've been to the US for couple of months working here and there, you folks are fine but I still don't get even after 2+ decades why you end up with s…
I live here. I know the problems. I'm very critical of them. In fact, the things that get discussed here don't even make it to Europe.
I live in a very violent city. I am a minority. I see minority crime. I know people who have been shot.
My point is that you all see us as unreliable, but fail to talk about the way this applies to western Europe as well.
I didn't say I was an expert.
You judge the US based on politics? Ok, I judge Europe based on politics. Your media lies to you regularly about the US and if the US is so bad, why did Europe obsess over it for so long?
I wouldn't put all my eggs on a single billion dollar basket like that in 2025. A networked flock of million dollar drones with phased array radar could be cheaper, more effective, thanks to a larger virtual aperture, and far more survivable an overwatch resource. You could stagger refueling and have it available 24/7.
Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It would take quite some effort to turn the fantasy into a reliable theory, and then quite some more, into a practical swarm.
Will be cool though.
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As an American, I am also gratified to see the EU take steps toward independence from US foreign policy. Independence doesn't mean enmity; it just means that the EU and US should both be adults in the room, reaching decisions on equal terms. If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly reflecting relative European weakness in the aftermath of that war's physical and moral d…
> If one takes a longer view of things, the period from WW2 to now is very much an anomaly WW2 was the anomaly- a conflict impacting all nations on earth, with Europe falling under a horrible regime
I wouldn't put all my eggs on a single billion dollar basket like that in 2025. A networked flock of million dollar drones with phased array radar could be cheaper, more effective, thanks to a larger virtual aperture, and far more survivable an overwatch resource. You could stagger refueling and have it available 24/7.
Sounds cool as a fantasy. How are you going to measure the distance between the drones with millimeter precision? How are you going to synchronize the pulse between the drones with nanosecond precision to achieve the phased array effect? How are you going to do all that with the enemy actively deploying EW measures? Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It w…
What would be even more fun (i.e. stretching the limits) would be to include a 30-300 mhz radar in the mix, which would resolve just fine with dispersed nodes, and penetrate most stealth coatings and bounce off the airframes of the enemy.
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The thing is - the Baltic states are in our sphere of influence, so Russia messing with them is a problem for us. Tell me why we should care about some island on the other end of the world. It would make sense to begrudgingly accept it, just like we did US military adventures in South America.
> Tell me why we should care about some island on the other end of the world. I mean, if we're talking about Taiwan, it has strategic and commercial importance above and beyond being "some island". Certainly more than Central America ever did when the rest of the world was ignoring the US's idiotic anti-Communist adventures. Pretending that it's irrelevant because it's far away seems like a pretty big economic misund…
It is your problem and you're not exactly being great allies to us in ours.
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Iran and Paris weren’t treaties. Neither of them were ever ratified by the Senate. Trump didn’t break NAFTA, he renegotiated it. NAFTA remained in effect until the new treaty, USMCA, came into effect.
See, this is exactly what I mean. In international law, they were treaties. Your internal squabbles do not concern us and just make you look unreliable.
Please provide a verifiable reference to the specific international law or laws that says that a US president's signature is sufficient to create a binding treaty.
The US Constitution, specifically Article II, section 2, says "[The president] shall have the power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur". That's pretty clear that the President's signature alone is not enough.
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Sounds cool as a fantasy. How are you going to measure the distance between the drones with millimeter precision? How are you going to synchronize the pulse between the drones with nanosecond precision to achieve the phased array effect? How are you going to do all that with the enemy actively deploying EW measures? Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It w…
Atomic clocks are now less than $5000 devices. The same type of circuits that allow GPS receivers to correlate timing to the picosecond could be used in this application. None of what I suggested is fantasy, but it would require good engineering. What would be even more fun (i.e. stretching the limits) would be to include a 30-300 mhz radar in the mix, which would resolve just fine with dispersed nodes, and penetrate…
Then, there should be a super-node in a larger aircraft that would receive the data from the swarm and turn it into a coherent picture, run object detection and tracking, etc.
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> The US doesn't really see Russia as an adversary under Trump. From the fall of the Berlin wall until the Ukraine invasion, the US saw Russia as more of an adversary than Europe saw Russia. Yes, even after Russia annexed Crimea. In fact, it's only this year that Europe has started to significantly increase defense spending, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine. And, even then the most aggressive increase plans e…
I 100% agree that Europe regarded Russia as a potential trade partner (and possibly more positively than the US) even after the 2014 annexation. But I don't think that this makes EU policy necessarily incorrect : Would German military spending of 5% GDP have prevented the Crimea annexation? We won't know, but I don't think so, and European militarism in the 2000s might have led to significantly worse outcomes than we…
Probably not Crimea, but you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".
The lack of European defense spending since 95 means that Europe doesn't have much to help Ukraine. (EU countries brag about "100% to Ukraine" but never talk about how little that 100% is.) It also means that Europe doesn't have much in the way of a defense industry. (And then they whine when money gets spent on US weapons.)
Getting serious in 2014 (after Crimea) would have given Europe options.
> EU military spending only really came up under Trump
Trump's comments, the actual words, on EU defense spending were basically the same as Obama and W's.
The difference was in how Europeans, especially the Germans, reacted.
BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"