• Parzivus [any]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    What a fucking opener lol

    Early one morning this month, 864 Army paratroopers bundled into C-17 transport planes at a base in Alaska and took off for a Great Power War exercise between three volcanic mountains on Hawaii’s Big Island.
    Only 492 made it. Some of the C-17s had trouble with their doors, while others were forced to land early. A few of the parachutists who did make it sprained ankles or suffered head trauma. And one — a 19-year-old private — began to fall quickly when his chute did not open.

    “But yeah we’re gonna be ready for war in like three years”

    It’s pretty striking that the rhetoric is still about US wunderwaffen, which has literally never worked. If the US was equal to China it would still lose in Taiwan, and it looks they’re a long way from equal, especially after sending so much to Ukraine and Israel.

    • You see, they sent all the old junk to Ukraine, the US military has the latest thunder-fuck 9r-x weapon that costs $10m and a small village in the global south to produce each. Meanwhile, the average person in a country being bombed to shit figures out how to take out a tank with a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe car bomb that cost them $20 in household chemicals and duct tape.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        14 days ago

        the average person in a country being bombed to shit figures out how to take out a tank with a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe car bomb that cost them $20 in household chemicals and duct tape.

        Often times it’s because they’re being bombed. The unexploded bombs make for excellent buried IEDs.

      • Jabril [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        14 days ago

        and they will have a dozen of the brand new wonder weapons ready in three years, they might even have one factory to produce them ready in three years if they even start production by then. The US can’t even keep up production with the demand in Ukraine, not to mention Palestine and the greater regional war that is forming there. We just watched the last two years of US depleting all reserves and then realizing they can’t even replace them, the only option is to go nuclear or go back to the drawing board. Oh and of course the new wonder weapons will be rushed and untested so half will fail before use and another third will turn out to be ineffective in the environment or situation they are used in.

        • Hard disagree on the nuclear part - going nuclear stops the gravy train for arms contractors because of guaranteed escalation. They’ll just do what the bazingafied Pentagon has done for the past 40 years, outsource it more. If the quality continues to deteriorate (it will), the Fed will eventually seize all the pop up drop ship bomb companies under emergency powers. Former jet ski dealership owners who built bomb factories as “a rare investment opportunity” will become radicalized against the military industrial complex.

          lathe-of-heaven