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The Osprey helicopter crashes a lot. The Harrier melts a lot of surfaces it tries to land on. There's also the yearly budget surplus problem where military units will do things like shoot thousands of rounds of ammo at nothing or run thousands of gallons of fuel through jet engines just so they can budget in those same expenses next year
When I was in the military I heard stories of Hueys going out with boxes of excess ammo to dump it in the ocean (they would report is as being fired in training). This was at the height of the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq, I figure it can only be worse with how much military budgets have ballooned and actual operations have been scaled back.
The Bradley fighting vehicle is a garbage recon vehicle. Billions spent and its shit.
The F35. The F22 is so advanced it hasn’t been in combat because there is no equal fighter to it held by other nations.
Intelligence agencies trying to train cats with microphones to spy on things in the Soviet Union.
Camouflage changes every couple of years.
Fuckin uniforms seem to change every few years and they still look like shlubby garbage
I had to go through a uniform changeover this last time and it fucking sucked.
Wasn’t there a thing that happened with that digital camo when it first launched that it lacked dark black resulting in the wearers more easily spotted than the prior pattern?
Damn. Don’t even get me started on the ACU (army combat uniform). The digital camo was so bad in so many ways. It got dirty instantly. It looked like shit. It didn’t blend in with literally anything. I don’t even know how they got that idea.
There's another fun angle to take: mundane waste on a massive scale.
There's a narrative that The Iraq War was the first big war to be majority-supplied by contractors. That it was an experiment to see whether a war could be manufactured not only on the usual premise of regime change, but in a way that overtly and obscenely lined the pockets of contractors through every step of the process. This narrative certainly jives with how it all went down.
This filtered into MSM coverage in the form of whistleblowers talking about overcharging dye to "a lack of oversight". Of course, the DoD et al would be easily capable of auditing their contractors, the war(s) are intentionally structured so that this doesn't happen. Everyone knows, nobody cares.
This seems to be an okay lib-friendly source for starting the discussion: https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0319/A-lesson-from-Iraq-war-How-to-outsource-war-to-private-contractors
And just like the railgun, this shit didn't "work". The war failed to even accomplish its goal of neoliberalization and of making another Israel in the Middle East. Instead, it created a massive insurgency and a country that, even full of propaganda and bourgeois democracy, wants Americans to fuck off. Oh, and it caused the backlash that created ISIS, who we then funded as part of trying to destroy the Syrian government. Oh, and over a million people died.
There are few money pits larger than entire wars and that one was pure failure even per the sociopathic goals of its architects.
Edit: in case you can't use that I don't want to be entirely useless, lol. Look into spending on nukes. There is no arms race regarding nukes, the US has a pointlessly massive stockpile, yet it spends trillions on constantly upgrading and keeping those numbers up.
Shock Doctrine details this insane waste of privatizing nearly every aspect of war and “rebuilding.”
The Zumwalt class, its 155mm main gun uses proprietary ammo that cost a million dollars a round, so they have no ammo.
At one point, blackwater had a death squad for cats and dogs: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/iraq-kbr-one-million-dogs-death/
Can you imagine the mind of a person whose job is to kill a 100 cats and dogs in a day? The sheer fucking psychopathy necessary to do it and not off yourself right after. It's so cool and normal that "people" like that are trained to kill and then welcomed home in civilian society.
From the article:
“Adopting as pets or mascots, caring for or feeding any type of domestic or wild animal” in the Iraqi war zone is a crime, on a par with using illegal drugs, distributing pornography, drinking liquor, keeping war spoils, or selling your gun.”
Literally everything cool and good is illegal.
:duck-dance:
There was a shitty plane that can't go out in the rain and needs 24/7 air con, iirc
F-35 is like a trillion dollar project. Think they finally solved the pilot decapitation problem though.
Think they finally solved the pilot decapitation problem though.
:sicko-no:
f-35 hate is a product of sensationalist articles. the plane that crashed in the rain was a product of factory error not design error. the trillion dollar price tag was for the entire fleet of several thousand planes and maintenance of that fleet for several decades
The entire online left (except for me, specifically) thinks they're The Propaganda Understander but will soyface to the extreme about some new F-35 clickbait.
what i meant is that it's not a military failure. yes i agree that the money should be spent somewhere else
Nobody has mentioned the KC-46.
The US Air Force needed (cough cough) a new refueling tanker aircraft. Boeing and Airbus/Northrop Grumman submitted contenders and the Airbus/NG proposal was chosen. Boeing protested this decision and long story short Boeing now has that contract.
The tanker, simply put, isn't working yet. Why? Because Boeing decided to take the boom operator, who used to ride in the back with a rear window to see the boom and fuel receivers, and instead place him up front and give him a fancy 3D-like display powered by multiple cameras and something like 3D glasses. This system does not perform well at all. But they're stuck with it now.
Because Boeing decided to take the boom operator, who used to ride in the back with a rear window to see the boom and fuel receivers, and instead place him up front and give him a fancy 3D-like display powered by multiple cameras and something like 3D glasses.
When you absolutely, positively, want to go out like a shooting star...
Idk I feel like we could see railguns be relevant in the future, used by weaker forces against say a massive military empire that defends itself with anti-missle defenses. My understanding is that ballistics fired from a railgun are basically impossible to intercept, so that's kinda cool.
Let's suppose the rail gun could be made more mobile to operate in mountain conditions.
Let's also suppose that to have threat capabilities of mutual assured destruction, it could fire nuclear bombs from the rail gun.
Let's suppose a small mercany army gets this walking rail gun.
Buddy, that's a dang metal gear and we just got a new Outer Heaven.
lol i had a relative who was working on the star wars project and fuckin fell off a huge ass tower.
owned lol
Why is it so hard? Just turn the magnets on in front of the bullet and turn them off behind the bullet, right?
That's a coilgun. A railgun is basically two parallel conductive rods into which a conductive projectile is inserted while a very strong current is run through the rods, creating a very strong and very simple magnetic propulsion system that has the down side of creating a lot of friction and heat which oxidizes the surface of the rods making them less conductive if the current is strong enough to get appreciable velocities out of it.
So far it seems that's been an intractable problem: you fundamentally cannot get a useful railgun that doesn't foul its own barrel to the point of uselessness within just one or two shots. AFAIK small railguns roughly comparable to firearms don't have this same problem, but they do have the problem that firearms do what they do better in a smaller package that's more durable and time-tested.
The reason large scale railguns have been a topic of interest is because they theoretically could exceed the practical upper limit for artillery in terms of range and kinetic energy, in a package similar in size to extant naval artillery, with the obvious downsides that they experience ridiculous wear and tear and would need to replace large parts of their barrels after every single use and that modern rockets more or less render their whole purpose obsolete since even the most optimistic railgun gets beaten on range, payload, accuracy, and possible firing platform by missiles.
Edit: also IIRC the Navy railgun project was a hybrid system, propelling the projectile into the railgun assembly with an explosive charge, which could only make the fouling problem worse.
Strong electromagnets need a lot of power, and lots of power means lots of heat from conductor resistance and from the fields themselves exerting energy. Same reason why you can't clock one CPU core really high: more watts, more heat, and then shit breaks.
Until we get room temperature superconductors, railguns aren't viable since they do the Loony Tunes gun banana thing
Project HARP/SHARP. Giant cannons for launching things into orbit.
When the money dried up one of the principle engineers ended up working for Iraq basically tilting one of these cannons on its side pointing at Tel Aviv. Project Babylon, it was called. Anyways Mossad killed the guy pretty quickly after that.
