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| via Warriors Creed Tumblr Page. |
“Whether it’s Clinton or Trump…they’ve got to strike a deal with Congress,” Harrison said. “I think that’s job number one for the new administration.”&
“Job No. 1” may also be Mission Impossible. “I’m not optimistic that we’ll see enough of a shift in the makeup of Congress that it will break up the budget stalemate that we’ve had for the past five years,” said Harrison.
“Because a lot of these issues do not fall neatly along partisan lines, it depends on the specific individuals who win these seats, not just their party affiliation,” Harrison told me and a few other reporters after the briefing. “We’re already seeing some changes likeRandy Forbes,” the House seapower subcommittee chairman and ardent advocate of bigger defense budgets who lost his primary to an anti-establishment ex-Navy SEAL. “(Senate Armed Services Chairman) John McCain, we’ll see what happens in his primary….That could be a big shock as well.”Finally
Clinton seems pretty committed to the Democratic consensus that there should be no increase in defense caps without equal, dollar-for-dollar relief for domestic programs. Trump, however, is a wild card.I continue to be amazed at how people are so misreading the American people. How so called smart people can so easily dismiss the toll that 10 years of war will have on a nation. The weariness of the American people when it comes to the Middle East. How tired people are of the threat of terrorist attacks.
“Quite frankly we don’t know enough about Trump’s defense plans; we haven’t heard that many specifics,” Harrison told me after the briefing. “We hear things like we’re going to have a stronger military, and then we hear him say things like, aircraft carriers…cost us a million dollars every time we ‘turn them on’ — I don’t really know what that means — and we hear Trump making statements about reducing our overseas presence, bringing more of our troops home, reducing our security commitments to our NATO allies, our Asia-Pacific allies, to our Middle East allies…. Okay, if you’re actually going to do those things, you could have a much smaller military.”
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| Note I picked these photos of the Piranha 5 to show the different turret configurations that were possible. Above its sporting the LANCE and below the MCT-30. |
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| Online Mag here |
Will the Air Force buy its full complement? Harrison was skeptical.Who is Harrison? Todd Harrison, is the defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“I don’t think it’s plausible that we’ll actually buy that full amount in the long run, but they don’t need to change their plans right now, they don’t need to scare the foreign partners by signaling that right now, it wouldn’t make sense to do it now,” he says. “You don’t have to make that decision on the total quantity, you don’t even have to make the decision on the full-rate production, until four or five years from now. So you can wait four or five years, more of the foreign partners will get deeply invested in the program, and then they can scare them.”
During the same exercise, LeClair fired an AIM-120C Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, or AMRAAM, carried internally, to take out another drone. This was a miss, however, as the drone target was out of visual range.Dress it up anyway you want this is what Hope Seck of DoD Buzz wrote in her article on the test firing of the AIM-120.
This strategy will include developing another demonstrator program named Carmel, a Hebrew acronym for Advanced Ground Combat Vehicle, which is meant to drive the design of a tank that will be used as a compliment to the 65-ton Merkava Mk4.A wheeled tank? Could the Israelis actually pull it off? If you haven't been paying attention then be advised. That economic slowdown and "new" recession is on track to hit later this year. As a matter of fact there are some economist that are saying we're already experiencing a global economic slowdown as we speak.
Zur commented that the MK4 is to remain in production until 2020 and Carmel isn’t meant to take its place, but will serve as a demonstrator program to assess a modern, medium-weight combat vehicle, that will. The vehicle will be wheeled instead of treaded.
The Air Force variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter passed another key test days ago, deploying an AIM-9X missile while in flight to hit a drone over a military test range, officials with the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office said.A beyond visual range missile missed a drone.
The test with the F-35A was conducted off the California coast July 28, Joint Program Office spokesman Joe DellaVedova said in a news release.
The Raytheon-made AIM-9X Sidewinder missile was launched from the Lockheed Martin-made aircraft’s external wing in the test. The F-35 was able to complete a series of complex steps to track and target the drone, including identifying the object with mission systems sensors; communicating with the missile; giving the pilot, Air Force Maj. Raven LeClair the change to confirm the targeting information using the high-tech F-35 helmet mounted display, and launching the missile to engage the target, according to the release.
“After launch, the missile successfully acquired the target and followed an intercept flight profile before destroying the drone, achieving the first F-35 Air-to-Air kill or ‘Boola Boola,’ which is the traditional radio call made when a pilot shoots down a drone,” officials said in the release.
During the same exercise, LeClair fired an AIM-120C Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, or AMRAAM, carried internally, to take out another drone. This was a miss, however, as the drone target was out of visual range.
Syrian opposition journo wishes female #Russian crew member stayed alive for #Syrians to basically rape her. pic.twitter.com/Jza8ZBHlUv— Nour Samaha (@Nour_Samaha) August 1, 2016
