Does Australia need billion dollar jet fighters?

[Mike Gearon]

Onetrack, exactly! It has to be looked at differently. I’d not considered the points you raise. In some ways it’s an electronic version of crop burning. 

 

Back to the hardware...Each major conflict has involved trotting out the lessons learned decades ago in the previous one. Aircraft carriers being pacific war deciders. We are in the pacific and it’ll be different again. All money spent on carriers wasted. Just targets to take off the table. Targeted from top, bottom and sideways. Hypersonic from space, cruise sideways and ocean floor ambush drones ready for straight up. 
 

Looked at this way Australia is pretty safe from invasion by sea if defended properly. Air is a different matter. Heaps of small mobile air defence missile/ drone systems. Keep an eye on potential enemies and just make sure we have a multiple of hidden systems that can’t be overwhelmed. Say 5 to 1 defence against their attack capability. Overwhelming would need to be the thing that sits them back on their arse scratching their heads.

 

Expensive jets and pilots. Targets. Sad, really sad but just targets to take out. 

 

Will we learn the lesson. 100% no. It’ll be land, air and sea targets we spend a lot of money on so some geeky kid with a joystick can blow up from his or her overseas bunker. 
 

Probably the best defence of all is economic linking. That was happening up until a few years ago. Now it’s a race to independent manufacturing, Especially electronics.

[Methusala]

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat historic mistakes".

 

I hoped that the neanderthals inhabiting the powerful positions would benefit from the Vietnam war experience. The "world's greatest military power" humbled by a society schooled in millenial struggles against powerful invaders. Staggering it was to see in the 90's headlines stating that overcoming Iraq would be a "cake walk". Fools whose only life experience was as indulged rich kids in a society drunk on its material indulgence. As they gloated over Russia's "Vietnam experience" in Afganistan they blindly walked into another killing free for all. Now they use the corporate media to whip up similar hysteria against Russia (the west's eternal Satan) and China, an industrial miricle that they inadvertantly created.

You can argue from your armchairs the relative merits of one war killing machine over another but remember...guns don't solve problems, they only magnify them.

[old man emu]

Wait until the USA collapses into civil war due to its racist culture. Every other country will have learned from the USA's interventionist mistakes and will sit back and watch to slaughter. The only reason that the British stuck their noses into the US Civil War was because the British cotton millers wanted the South's cotton which the North was blockading.

 

Fortunately, despite being thrown out of work through the lack of supply of raw cotton, Britain's mill workers declared themselves on the side of the North and anti-slavery. Workers condemned British “capitalists and journalists” for their support for the Southern states. The British bourgeoisie distrusted “Yankee democracy” and sought to preserve their profitable trading relationship with the South. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/05/linc-j05.html

[Methusala]

3 hours ago, old man emu said:

Wait until the USA collapses into civil war

Not looking forward to that either OME. Best to remember that as a mega-star collapses it releases an unimaginable fireball consuming all around it. Better in our old age to concentrate on our grandkids/pets and not think too much about the future. Have a good day, Don

Edited April 19, 2021 by Methusala