Way Way Way OT )Stealth and Countermeasures..For Ray

Oh I get it now, my mistake I thought they we were talking about supply,

logistics and the effective use of resources in military conflicts
distant 
from their main bases.

Aparently I must have missed the 'best/greatest/most wonderful, can do 
anything/anywhere/anytime/anyhow' turn somewhere.

*But the F4 didn't have the ability to run interference on 12 Bear
*Bombers at 1400 nm at the same time. The F14 did. It was built around
*the 
ability to carry the Phoenix.

Neither does the F14 if it's somewhere else at the time. I wasn't
arguing 
about the merits of the two aircraft simply pointing out the never
ending 
Quantity Vs Quality argument.

*The point of his argument was that we don't need a 3 month lead time
*to 
ship everything over we need to begin ops. We can do it in 12 *hours.
SAC 
practiced this sort of thing with Loadmasters and B36's *back in the
50's. 
Surely you dont think that they tossed this whole *concept out the
window do 
you?

No you've missed the whole point. Perhaps the concept of 'Total
resources 
MINUS Total Commitments EQUALS Available resouces' will clarify where
I'm 
comming from. No nations Airforce, Army or Navy is powerful enough to do

everything it wants to, everywhere it wants to, whenever it wants to.

Yes everything mentioned for the USAF can be done and probably a lot
more 
that wasn't mentioned. So? How many others can? For that matter when
would 
their resource well begin to run dry too? One base deployed, Twenty,
Eighty, 
a Thousand? What I'm getting at is that loading a heavy transport
aircraft 
and flying 10,000 miles to a bare bones deployment area is on a
different 
scale to loading a couple of trucks and driving from the warehouse 10
miles 
to a fully functioning well established airbase. There is a vast
difference 
in asset use and expenditure.

*Possibly, you'd prefer we build the same quality of aircraft as the
*russians and have fewer pilots to fly them? One whole doctrine issue
*missed is that we don't have 16 million people wanting to fly in the
*airforce and navy. We have a select few. We train our pilots far more
*than the chinese do. Talk to Ed over on sci.military.naval and
*rec.mil.aviation. He'll tell you first hand the importance of
*training.

Another Quality Vs Quanty argument. You seem fond of comparisons so I'll

make good one here. The finest armed force of modern times was beaten in
the 
last World War, not by the British, not by the Americans, but by the 
Russians in four brutal, bloody years of war. They got their training in
the 
toughest classroom of all. I'm sure that I would agree with most of
whatever 
Ed has to say about good training. But it still comes back to
expenditure of 
resources. What to train in and for how long? The difference in peace
time 
train and a full scale war while not changing in content certainly
change in 
time available. What to leave out or keep in when the time goes from 2
years 
to 2 months?

*I'd rather spend lots of money and few lives than less money and lots
*lives like we did in WWII. Human waves were tried in Korea, we figured
*out how to deal there (you throw everything you can into their
*assembly 
area and throw more at them when they attack). Motiviated *professional 
troops are the way to go. Not half trained conscripts *with rifles and 
aircrat from the 60's.

Supidity, inexperience and overconfidence cost more US lives in WWII
than a 
lack of money! But policy these days is about avoiding casualties not 
mission effectiveness.

In any war that looks like lasting more than a few months and involves
more 
than beating the shit out of a little country with mainly third rate
weapons 
the professionals eventually get replaced by conscripts.

Weapons and aircraft from the 60's? Like the M16 rifle and if you count 
development the F-14 Tomcat?

One last little story, this is from a GI guarding a German Officer
towards 
the end of WWII. Being young, cocky and on the winning side he asked his

prisoner why if they were supposedly 'master race' were they in the
position 
they were? The German sat smoking the cigarette he had been given for a 
moment befor replying.
"I was in command of an 88mm gun detachment guarding a road. The
Americans 
sent a tank down the road and it was knocked out. They sent another, it
was 
knocked out. Then another and it was knocked out. Eventually we ran out
of 
ammunition before they ran out off tanks."

And that in a nut shell is Quanty Vs Quality.

I think we've probably inflicted enough on our fellow list members if
you 
want to continue this perhaps we should do it off this list?

Buck

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com