Coping with LossFollow

Bah, foiled again.

True, but it's still predicted to grow 7.5%, as opposed to say 9% prior to the financial crisis.

You've also got to take into consideration how the US populace would react in a war with China. If the US is the aggressor, I wouldnt say it would work out so well. If China is, you've got a significantly better chance. Either way you have got to deal with the American reaction to the 4 million Chinese that currently live in the United States. The national public morale would be very important in a war with China.

Edited, Nov 30th 2008 7:33pm by Keikomyau

The biggest mistake we made was letting the SAS train your Special Ops forces.

yeah. besides, if it did come to that, Japan would just send in their secret giant robot legions of doom and stop everything!

Hopfully the American Scientific community can develop now, after a mini-dark age under the Bush administration.

Sorry Kao but Typhoon > Raptor and you know it, the US pilots who came over to fly the Typhoon certainly knew it.

No thrust vectoring on the typhoon. Also no real stealth characteristics other than it being tiny. Speed is about comperable, and if the Typhoon had thrust vectoring i'd concede the manouverability front to the Typhoon by a wide margin, but I have seen them both fly in airshow demonstration flights, and the F-22 would probably have a slight edge in a close in dogfight at this point. When you see a large fighter aircraft stop in mid air, do a backflip, then pivot about it's axis and fly off in a completely different vector without even breaking a sweat, you know you have something interesting. That the Typhoon can accomplish some similar manouvers without thrust vectoring is truly impressive, and I've never understood why they ommitted thrust vectoring from the design, especially given how trivial the system is to implement and retrofit.

Long range, it would be no contest with the F-22 having a significant advantage due to stealth and better targetting sensors and missiles. External weapons stores is a problem too. Under combat loads the F-22 would likely handle better.

Both aircraft are close enough in capability that Pilot skill would play a huge role in the outcome of an engadgement.

It's the old Spitfire vs. mustang doctrine again really. You brits like your airplanes small, fast and manouverable. We like ours large fast and manouverable with the armament of a small tank.

There is truth to that, and we as a people tend to have an ability to turn a blind eye to unplesent facts. But to say we have lost our place in the world is really overstating things I think. political might derives partially from economic might, but also from military might and the will to use it. We're in a period of feeling guilty, of self pity and doubt at the moment, but should an external threat rouse us from our current angst you would see an imidiate and overnight change. That is the strength, and weakness of America. We can shift gears immidiatly on a whim.

The rest of the world needs us too, though right now they don't really want to admit it. You need us to be the target. The European union needs someone to try and compare themselves favorably to. The russians need their bogeyman to rebuild. Africa needs our intervention from time to time despite their high muslim population. The middle east needs us as a stabilizing force, though we have not done the best job of that. You remove the U.S. presence from Qatar, the support for Israel, and pull out of everywhere else, and you get total overnight chaos and the collapse of the Oil market. Israel and Iran nuke eachother out of existance, Pakistan attacks india, and Saudi Arabia steps in to rebuild the Ottoman empire and puts a stranglehold ont he world economy.

Are we any better than that? I don't know. Long term, I think we will be unless they due an immidiate pullout and everythign decends to civil war.

The intel issue is a problem. We have vastly superior sigINT capabilities, but without the HumINT forces to verify things on the ground, or to give us a clue where to point our satilites, we're pretty much screwed. The terrorists in particular have learned that if they go low tech, carrier pigeons, no cell phones, no computer usage, they can really blindside us.

Some of the intel from the iraq war was not so much wrong, as our interperitation of it was wrong. yes, Iraq really was importing massive amounts of chemicals that could be made into various chemical weapons. Unfortunatly for our analasys, they didn't know those particular weapon compounds existed and were actually using the chemicals to make soap and other innocuous materials. The metal tubes they were importing which could have been made into centerfuge chambers were actually being used for components in standard anti aircraft surface to air missile engines. Again, having people on the ground to confirm that is problematic when you have no people. We also got screwed over by some defectors from iraq who figured out we would pay them for every secret they "remembered" about WMD. We unfortunatly never spotchecked, and thus shot ourselves in the foot. Lucky for us we have a U.N. security council seat, so what the rest of the U.N. thinks of our crappy intel is less of a problem than it might have been otherwise!

Automaker R&D is a problem, but we are seeing a resurgance of smaller, less bogged down R&D manufacturers entering the market who are better able to leverage new research technologies. Tesla motors, etc. These smalelr companies that don't have the same union baggage may succeed Ford and GM when all is said and done. Gm is actually going to be able to pull off a recovery though, due to all the aerospace engine technology they invest in. Eventually someone will figure out their stock is horribly undervalued and start buying mass amounts of it up, and that will be that.

Sure I listen to pilots talking in the restroom with a dictaphone and then post the transcript on the internet.

To Joph - Brasil is still tipped to overtake USA within 5-10 years, but China & India within less than that.

To the others - the states I was referring to were UK, most of Europe and 80% of the free world - USA adopted us when we weren't orphans.

To Gwyn - Tits or GTFO

Well anonymous toilet conversations are certanly difficult to argue against. I've obviously never flown either craft myself, and I only have "most" of an aerospace engineering degree since I switched to Security and intel instead and got a degree in that, but from what I do know about the various capabilities of both aircraft (at least the non clasified bits I have seen), the F-22 as configured today should beat out a non thrust vector equipped Eurofighter in a close engagement. The F-22 has a higher thrust to weight ratio, is overall faster, has a higher rate of roll and rate of climb, and can carry more ammo while doing so. It would be a close contest though.

Well, we did have a B-2 bomber crash recently. That kind of hurt.

The renewal refusal there was less about U.S. politics and more about the fact that they elected a ******* insane coca head to their government. Our anti drug efforts were kind of cramping their style.