Way Way Way OT )Stealth and Countermeasures..For Ray

Oh I get it now, my mistake I thought they we were talking about supply,

logistics and the effective use of resources in military conflicts distant
from their main bases.

Aparently I must have missed the 'best/greatest/most wonderful, can do
anything/anywhere/anytime/anyhow' turn somewhere.

*But the F4 didn't have the ability to run interference on 12 Bear *Bombers at
1400 nm at the same time. The F14 did. It was built around *the ability to
carry the Phoenix.

Neither does the F14 if it's somewhere else at the time. I wasn't arguing
about the merits of the two aircraft simply pointing out the never ending
Quantity Vs Quality argument.

*The point of his argument was that we don't need a 3 month lead time *to ship
everything over we need to begin ops. We can do it in 12 *hours. SAC practiced
this sort of thing with Loadmasters and B36's *back in the
50's.
Surely you dont think that they tossed this whole *concept out the window do
you?

No you've missed the whole point. Perhaps the concept of 'Total resources
MINUS Total Commitments EQUALS Available resouces' will clarify where I'm
comming from. No nations Airforce, Army or Navy is powerful enough to do

everything it wants to, everywhere it wants to, whenever it wants to.

Yes everything mentioned for the USAF can be done and probably a lot more that
wasn't mentioned. So? How many others can? For that matter when would their
resource well begin to run dry too? One base deployed, Twenty, Eighty, a
Thousand? What I'm getting at is that loading a heavy transport aircraft and
flying 10,000 miles to a bare bones deployment area is on a different scale to
loading a couple of trucks and driving from the warehouse 10 miles to a fully
functioning well established airbase. There is a vast difference in asset use
and expenditure.

*Possibly, you'd prefer we build the same quality of aircraft as the *russians
and have fewer pilots to fly them? One whole doctrine issue *missed is that we
don't have 16 million people wanting to fly in the *airforce and navy. We have
a select few. We train our pilots far more *than the chinese do. Talk to Ed
over on sci.military.naval and *rec.mil.aviation. He'll tell you first hand
the importance of *training.

Another Quality Vs Quanty argument. You seem fond of comparisons so I'll

make good one here. The finest armed force of modern times was beaten in the
last World War, not by the British, not by the Americans, but by the Russians
in four brutal, bloody years of war. They got their training in the toughest
classroom of all. I'm sure that I would agree with most of whatever Ed has to
say about good training. But it still comes back to expenditure of resources.
What to train in and for how long? The difference in peace time train and a
full scale war while not changing in content certainly change in time
available. What to leave out or keep in when the time goes from 2 years to 2
months?

*I'd rather spend lots of money and few lives than less money and lots *lives
like we did in WWII. Human waves were tried in Korea, we figured *out how to
deal there (you throw everything you can into their *assembly area and throw
more at them when they attack). Motiviated *professional troops are the way to
go. Not half trained conscripts *with rifles and aircrat from the 60's.

Supidity, inexperience and overconfidence cost more US lives in WWII than a
lack of money! But policy these days is about avoiding casualties not mission
effectiveness.

In any war that looks like lasting more than a few months and involves more
than beating the shit out of a little country with mainly third rate weapons
the professionals eventually get replaced by conscripts.

Weapons and aircraft from the 60's? Like the M16 rifle and if you count
development the F-14 Tomcat?

One last little story, this is from a GI guarding a German Officer towards the
end of WWII. Being young, cocky and on the winning side he asked his

prisoner why if they were supposedly 'master race' were they in the position
they were? The German sat smoking the cigarette he had been given for a moment
befor replying. "I was in command of an 88mm gun detachment guarding a road.
The Americans sent a tank down the road and it was knocked out. They sent
another, it was knocked out. Then another and it was knocked out. Eventually
we ran out of ammunition before they ran out off tanks."

And that in a nut shell is Quanty Vs Quality.

I think we've probably inflicted enough on our fellow list members if you want
to continue this perhaps we should do it off this list?

Buck

> Geoffery R wrote:

> "Eventually we ran out of

"Quantity has a Quality of its own"
- Josef Vissarionich Dzugashvili aka Stalin

There's another matter, logistics.

I had a good talk to a senior officer of the Thai armed forces on this
one, re the benefits of getting 120 odd crappy Chinese T-59s vs half a
dozen Leopard IIs.
The T-59s might have about 50 operational at any one moment, whereas the
Superior German Technology would have 5 (with the right maintenance).
But a T-59 can be fixed in an auto shop. And although 1 Leopard-II would
easily deal with 100+ T-59s under most circumstances (if supplied with
enough ammunition), after a march through bad terrain, you'd be lucky to
have one left that didn't need repair. Same with the T-59s, but they
didn't need the extensive infrastructure, and could be repaired to an

This is some of the point I was trying to make in my post about colonies and
force/weapons structures.

Michael Brown

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