Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
No, that was the land assault that did that. Saddam survived the cruise attacks in 2003 reasonably intact
If you call having no air force, no tanks, totally immobilized and confined to hiding under a civilian blanket "reasonably intact". The ground assault was supported by all of these facts, to a massive degree, such that a country the size of France was completely captured with the loss of less than a thousand American soldiers. It really does matter if you have no air force.
The only way space for wing could be created was if a lot of US aircraft had gone down.
If they're actively fighting, they don't actually all need to be on the deck of the carrier. Since you're talking some kind of massive air battle, it could very well be worthwhile to keep the aircraft in the air continuously, refueling midair, and only landing briefly to switch tired pilots out. Pretty much any and all aircraft that the US cares to bring can get there as fast as they can fly.
Which is, again, all rather irrelevant if they don't even lead in with jet fighters at all, but instead simply bombard and circle around collecting intel for targeting, and destroying radar capacity. Once that's gone, jets aren't going to be very effective. At that point they've achieved the objective of neutralizing the air force, especially the helicopters which are being used in the ongoing battling against rebels on the ground.
So I don't even think a giant pitched jet-vs-jet battle is likely at all, but if it is, I think you underestimate just how much force can be brought to bear by a military the size that the US commands.
Which ally within strike distance is going to allow US aircraft to use bases? Turkey? Israel? Saudi Arabia?
Yes, any and all of those could probably be pressured hard enough to help. I don't even know if Israel would need much pressure, since they're already at war with Syria (according to Syria). That being so, you can also add in their military forces, if the battle turned into an outright massive air war.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
It’s not required, but for the highly skilled and specialised jobs we’re talking about it’s fairly rude not to
I don't think I've ever received a full and frank breakdown on a refusal, and when I was doing hiring, I never gave one. I think HR gave them the news, usually via their intermediary agent, telling them that someone else was a slightly better fit. This was actually true, too, but it isn't really specific. Often, I've had them even sing my praises in a refusal, stating that they really liked me, I was second in line etc, etc. But there was someone else. Which is probably true.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Like many of those insidious ideas, there’s some truth to it, but it’s also code for “you’re not like us”.
Yes, and it's pretty much impossible to avoid. If someone really doesn't like you, even if it's just because they're a prick, they can find a way to block you. Is it in any way required to ever give a reason to someone when they aren't hired? It can be polite and helpful to do so, but mostly the excuse is "we found someone better". How are you going to know if that's true, unless you know someone in that workplace?
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
The events also showed that those governments were toppled and their leadership killed. Degrading of their military capability is not worth nothing, it led to total defeat for the parties concerned. Saddam survived shock and awe, by hiding in a hole in the ground, until he was captured and executed. Gaddafi survived until he was caught hiding in a gutter, then killed pretty gruesomely. The threat to Assad is not insignificant since his country is in rebellion right now.
From where? They have no regional land bases. They’re carrier dependent.
Even if every single one of their many allies refused to allow them to operate from their soil, carriers and other ships are still a pretty significant platform to launch a massive bombardment assault. Every ship they have is at most a few weeks hard steaming to a location near enough to assault Syria with missiles. And huge amounts of munitions can be transported around the world by planes in only a few days. Planes can, believe it or not, simply fly to the locations, possibly shuttling via aircraft carriers across oceans. Forces can be assembled extremely fast if they really want to.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Doesn’t say it’s an MP, or even from the Labour Party
Indeed, it might not even be of this earth.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
If Cunliffe wins I don’t want to have laid out material someone can use to attack him later on. Not playing that game.
Guards! Seize him!
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Stephen Judd,
FWIW, I am reasonably convinced that Gower is strongly disliked by the vast majority of the Labour caucus, irrespective of their preferred leader.
Whoever is feeding him his gossip, and I do think there's someone, is really fucking with their party. How is it to their interests for it to become public that there's some secret clique of Cunliffe haters? Is it supposed to put pressure on the rank and file, or the unions somehow? More than likely it will have the opposite effect, so secretive and undemocratic is such a manipulation.
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He could make or break it. It's exciting, and that's something new for the Labour Party. I'd rather they took some risks. It would mean a decent chance of holding National to only 2 terms, which is historically a bloody good effort. Odds are, though, that National will get in again, just on the long run averages. If Cunliffe manages to grow the vote and be a dynamic leader in Opposition during the third term, then I'd say there's bugger all chance that National could pull off the coveted 4 terms, which is important.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Gary Young,
Really, how complicated does the hiring process have to be?
That depends on how complex the job is, and to what extent the person is intended to actually change or grow the business. Jobs that are completely circumscribed do exist, but they're often not the ones that people really want, because they're also limited in where they can go, and they are also very often the most poorly paid.
Corporate hiring is very often much more about getting the "right kind of person" than getting a person with the exact skills, because it is acknowledged that they join a culture and are likely to be mobile within it. Also, very often it is not entirely clear to people doing the hiring exactly what skills will be required, or what will be available. In IT there is likely to be a considerable induction into the systems of the particular organization, especially for programmers, analysts, project managers, etc. It might take quite a while to work out if a person really is competent, and often if they aren't it isn't that terrible, since there is an alternate job that they might be better at. Or they just turn out to be useful in a different way to what was expected.
Also, there really are some kinds of personality foibles that are extremely bad for business, and avoiding hiring those people is much cheaper than trying to get rid of them later. I don't think that there's any really reliable ways of detecting that, but there certainly is a demand for anything that helps.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Networks of on and off mobile units are really really hard to to track and take out.
I'm surprised by that, since radar is a very powerful electromagnetic signal. It's like turning on a strong beacon to anything tuned even nearly into the wavelength. You can be nearly instantly triangulated. Any spotter in the area can then sight it, follow it, and guide in any number of munitions that are nearby, from mortars to cruise missiles to smart bombs dropped by stealth bombers
What are you going to do if you do spot it too? Take out an apartment building?
I certainly would not put that past the US military.
The Swedes and Swiss also use caves. Hard to track a hot jet under a mountain.
No, but it's not that hard to put a bomb into the cave mouth, collapsing it, burying everyone who isn't killed by the blast. This is "infrastructure", extremely expensive to build, and once destroyed, your capacity is "degraded".
the last time the US came up against a fighter hostile environment and won was 1953 and that was primarily because the F-86 was a vastly superior aircraft to the MiG-15.
I think you are massively overestimating the effectiveness of a fighter force in defending against the kind of attack that I'm talking about. Are you saying that they'll be shooting down drones and missiles all day long, and not losing anything themselves? That somehow they'll be able to launch thousands of missions without ever once giving away the locations that they are landing at? Every plane they lose is a plane they won't get replaced, if they have become diplomatically isolated. They might go for an all out fight like that, which could rage for a few days, at the end of which they would be severely damaged, whilst the Americans would simply be bringing in more force from practically every direction. I think it's more likely they would just stay hidden, and the air would be lost without very much fighting at all.
Of course there's a chance of a real fight. That's at least a part of the reason Obama should not be striking. But I'm just trying to be realistic about how fighting the US with a conventional military is likely to play out, given the events of the last 20 years. They have nothing at all that can deter a sustained bombardment other than a humanitarian appeal, and that becomes very hard to maintain if you've been using chemical weapons.
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