For those unaware, the A-10’s main gun, the GAU-8 30mm autocannon, had to have an entire aircraft designed around it - the A-10 - just to have an aircraft that wouldn’t destabilize itself or shake to pieces by the force of firing the gun! So unless we’re making that drone beefy af…

Bayonet production committee is waiting on the requisite permission forms to start the assembly line up again (it has been eleven months and counting)

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” and all that jazz.

Relevant Commentary From The Old Place:

To explain the bolded part some more, wargames in the military aren’t just giant laser tag matches. Most of what happens at a high-level is adjudicated by computers and by actual people (OCs or observer-controllers).

You can think of this in terms of a roleplaying game, like D&D. The computers handle the “rules” of the game, but those rules don’t cover every scenario. When someone wants to do something unconventional, it is the role of the OCs to adjudicate that. Conceivably, those OCs should be subject matter experts and able to make informed decisions as to practicality of the ideas.

In the case of the Millennium Challenge, the real failing was with the OCs. Once Van Riper started to do things that worked outside the bounds of the computer model, they needed to intervene to adjudicate. They either fail to intervene or they lacked the understanding to do so in a reasonable way. The two most commonly cited failings were:

Van Riper famously used “motorcycle couriers” to get around the destruction of his C2 network. The problem was that this was handled as simple handwaving, with him saying that he would use motorcycle messengers to handle all the message traffic. Despite supposedly doing so, he continued to relay messages as if he doing so with a normal communications network. Essentially, his motorcycle messengers were treated as being just as efficient as an electronic communications network. Clearly, that wouldn’t be possible, hence the folks joking about “light speed motorcycles”.

Van Riper also supposedly destroyed the US fleet with swarm tactics. Attempting to do so isn’t unreasonable, and evaluating these tactics is exactly the kind of thing wargames are meant to do. The trouble was that Van Riper again got too creative for the computer model and the OCs failed to impose reasonable restrictions on Van Riper. AShM aren’t small and you need a robust ship to launch them; you can’t just strap an Exocet onto a Boston Whaler and expect it to actually remain seaworthy. The problem is that Van Riper did exactly that. He mounted AShM onto boats that couldn’t have reasonably fitted them, and he further took advantage of the limited operational boundaries of the wargame to essentially have his swarm fleet close to effectively point blank range without having to transit any intervening distance.

What Van Riper did was less of outsmarting the US military and more a case of outsmarting the boundaries of the game. This would be like me playing Monopoly with Warren Buffet, exploiting some weird flaw in the rules to win, and then going on a press tour afterwards saying that I had proven that Buffet was a financial idiot and that I had invented some new financial investment paradigm.

relevant edit:

I once participated in a wargame that simulated an ABCT attempting to repel a Russian armored division. We were given a limited time, the scope of our resources, and a narrow AO in which the exercise was supposedly taking place (our flanks were secured by other armored brigades).

We set up a defense-in-depth across our entire AO, and then started the exercise. As soon as we did, the OPFOR literally just drove outside the map, through the conceptual AO of our supporting brigades, emerged behind all our forces and then obliterated us. It was stupid.

The way that exercise was handled reminded me of MC. Basically, the OPFOR just ignored the conceptual boundaries of the wargame and the OCs failed to step in to stop them. Of course the enemy isn’t bound by our AO definitions, but on the other hand, if they had actually attacked along that axis they would have ended up fighting two brigades instead of one. Ignoring the bounds of an exercise doesn’t mean you’ve outwitted the exercise; it just means you agreed to a set of constraints and then chose to ignore it (i.e. you cheated).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas

Explanation From Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_harbours

The Mulberry harbours were two temporary portable harbours developed by the British Admiralty and War Office during the Second World War to facilitate the rapid offloading of cargo onto beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. They were designed in 1942, then built in under a year in great secrecy; within hours of the Allies creating beachheads after D-Day, sections of the two prefabricated harbours were towed across the English Channel from southern England and placed in position off Omaha Beach (Mulberry “A”) and Gold Beach (Mulberry “B”), along with old ships to be sunk as breakwaters.

The Mulberry harbours solved the problem of needing deepwater jetties and a harbour to provide the invasion force with the necessary reinforcements and supplies, and were to be used until major French ports could be captured and brought back into use after repair of the inevitable sabotage by German defenders. Comprising floating but sinkable breakwaters, floating pontoons, piers and floating roadways, this innovative and technically difficult system was being used for the first time.

The Mulberry B harbour at Gold Beach was used for ten months after D-Day, while over two million men, four million tons of supplies and half a million vehicles were landed before it was fully decommissioned. The partially completed Mulberry A harbour at Omaha Beach was damaged on 19 June by a violent storm that arrived from the northeast before the pontoons were securely anchored. After three days, the storm finally abated; the damage was found to be so severe that the harbour was abandoned and the Americans resorted to landing men and material over the open beaches.

Hey! My day’s always brightened when I see your posts!

As long as people enjoy my reposts, I count my time well-spent!

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2026/06/25/six-f-35bs-delivered-without-radars-thus-far-program-director-says/

Just temporary, but still. What a thing for a modern jet to be delivered without.

Explanation: As WW2 increasingly turned in favor of the Allied Forces, the forces of the Japanese Empire engaged in a tactic known as “Kamikaze” (‘Divine Wind’), as part of the death-obsessed fascist ideology of the Japanese Empire. In it, wherein surrender or failure was ‘dishonorable’ and worse than death, pilots would commit suicide attacks, ramming their planes into American ships, often while loaded down with explosives. All for the glory of the Emperor, who was revered as a living god under State Shinto.

It was occasionally effective, but very much a tactic of desperation, and did not manage to stop the inexorable advance of American industrial output towards the Japanese home islands.

I’ll never step on a solar panel again 😔

Explanation From Original OP:

The Mikoyan-Gurevich Ye-8 was a Soviet prototype fighter designed to replace the MiG-21, which it never did because it was a bit ass. Nevertheless, in its own eccentric way, it’s probably one of the sexiest Soviet fighters ever designed - it really does look like the illicit lovechild of a Typhoon and a MiG-21, although the side schematics also remind me a bit of an F-16.

Explanation From Original OP:

As part of his graduation project, Igor Stechkin developed a pistol (not an APS, so the meme is actually disinformation). The examiner looked at the blueprints and said it would never work. Stechkin then pulled out a functional prototype of the pistol and unloaded the whole magazine of blanks into the ceiling, proving the examiner wrong.

Explanation: Early in WW2, British bombing raids were little more than harassment and leaflet drops, in line with the general reluctance to repeat the destruction of WW1.

However, after Nazi Germany subjected Britain to intense bombing campaigns that flattened entire cities, especially London, the response of British bomber command became much more… aggressive. Counterproductively so, even - the strategy of “Terror Bombing” that was adopted was shown by postwar analysis to have been ineffective - targeting industry was useful, targeting population centers, near-useless; and the difference in strategy was a point of tension between American Bomber Command (in Europe, at least - in Japan, the US would eventually resort to terror bombing of the same ineffective kind) and British Bomber Command. But the British wanted revenge desperately after seeing their own civilians murdered by Nazi aerial bombardment, and they had revenge in spades, with concentrated firebombing campaigns wreaking havoc on Germany cities.

As “Bomber” Harris said, “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

Advanced indirect fire deflection tactics, they’ve trained for this don’t worry

Yeah. Not necessarily proudly. But being an American is part of my identity.

Its sins are my sins, to some small degree. That’s the nature of citizenship in a somewhat-democratic polity. We all bear a part of the blame, and a part of the responsibility going forward.

If we had tried nation-building, we would have been blamed for imposing our institutions on the Libyan people. See: previous attempts in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, the CAR, Chad, Cote D’Ivore. Or see the constant criticism of foreign aid to any number of developing countries.

In the end, while we probably could have done some more to help stabilize Libya, the fundamental fault was that Gadaffi had intentionally made himself the lynchpin of all Libyan national institutions, and without him, the process of negotiating a national settlement was reduced to… force.

Yet a nation can not (and should not, for that matter) remain under a dictator forever; and the longer the dictator remains, the more rotted even non-government institutions become, making the transition ever-harder.

I’m sure Ukraine would agree with that. /s

Imagine bootlicking for Gadaffi against an uprising of the oppressed proletariat.

Fascists are so uncreative.

Convergent evolution ig