Recently, an American who made many millions off of the military industrial giant red ink ocean here in the US, built himself this massive touring machine that is grossly over-engineered. Which is exactly what is wrong with all our military equipment these days: Inventor spends millions on RV to take his four year old around the world | Mail Online
The incredible interior boasts everything from a fully stocked office, kitchen and bedroom, to a popup tent on the roof for Kira, Ferren’s four year daughter the truck was designed for.
Bran Ferren, the 61 year old cofounder and chief creative officer of Applied Minds, a world-renowned tech and design firm whose on-the-record customer list includes General Motors, Intel, and the US Air Force, has spent four years traveling the world to talk to experts as he finalised the truck’s design.
The above machine has literally everything including a kitchen sink. And is vulnerable to nearly every weather mishap one could think of especially ice. Its many moving and electronic parts can have millions of things go wrong and is very difficult to fix. It is cluttered with every possible bell and whistle most of which create more dangers than doing anything good.
And then this old man will park the young daughter from his obviously young wife and drive around the place in this thing that crawls with dangers to children. Inappropriate, dangerous, expensive and wildly unusable due to too many distractions and complexities: this is how our military operates and why it is mainly a failure and why it is so extremely expensive to keep in order and why it is bankrupting us.
Supposedly, we are cutting back on everything except money for Israel and for foreign coups: 2013 Pentagon budget: Why so much spending on big-war weapons?
There is a mismatch between the defense strategy and the defense budget. The strategy emphasizes a “leaner, meaner” military, with more emphasis on small-scale campaigns, special-ops forces, and unmanned aircraft. But the budget lays out the usual bounty for large-capital, big-war weapons systems…
Last year, the Air Force and Navy, which operate the program jointly, bought 31 of the planes for $9.7 billion. This year, they’re buying 31 for $9.2 billion. For next year, the Pentagon proposes to buy 29 for $9.2 billion. It’s a cut, a slight one, in the number of planes, but no cut at all in the money spent, because the cost of each plane is going up…
here’s also $781.7 million for the first year of construction on a new nuclear aircraft carrier (they usually take about five years to build). Does the Navy really need 11 carriers to perform all its missions? And are all those missions necessary? Carriers are expensive enough; but each carrier, besides carrying a lot of planes and sailors, is but the lead ship of a “carrier battle group,” which includes a complement of cruisers, destroyers, and other ships, all of which are also expensive…
For instance, there’s the Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), aka the GPS-guided “smart bombs” dropped by high-flying planes with pinpoint precision. These things cost almost nothing. The Air Force and Navy are requesting 4,350 of them at a total cost of $204 million. That’s about $40,000 apiece. Or take the Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”). The Pentagon wants $884 million to buy 24 more (about $35 million each).
One of the most dangerous things in war is the overhead cost of equipment. If weapons and systems are too expensive, you can’t afford to lose anything. And wars are all about losing lots of things including lives. Just as dying empires like Japan can’t afford even 10,000 deaths in war due to a declining population, the US can’t afford to see even one jet go down due to the insanely high cost.
One ship going under will be immensely destructive in terms of cost. The stupid drones are hideously expensive and ALL of them are useless after a short while. The cost of assassinating poorly armed peasant warriors in Afghanistan and Yemen is in the millions each. Meanwhile, they spend pennies attacking us successfully. This disparity of cost is exactly why bin Laden wanted to lure us into Yemen and Afghanistan. He knew the overhead costs of our ridiculous system would destroy our finances and it has.
During WWII, Russia successfully developed and used fairly inexpensive weapons systems that effectively ground down the fearful Nazi military machine and grind it to dust: Weapons of Victory: Katyusha! Episode 28! (English subtitles) – YouTube
These multi-rocket weapons systems terrorized the Nazis and drove them rapidly back into the streets of Berlin where these rockets proceeded to tear apart the entire city leading to Hitler committing suicide. The only reason the US didn’t go bankrupt during WWII is due to Roosevelt’s refusal to allow the manufacturers to set their own prices. He stopped the Daddy Warbucks game in order to win the war.
With the Vietnam war, the Daddy Warbucks game began all over again and after Reagan, it ran out of control under all Presidents including today, Obama. Congress yaps about money and then spends it like fiends due to this being a looting expedition with nothing to do about protecting our country or keeping it solvent and healthy. And now we are being egged into confronting Putin on his own territory with him being very popular and Obama quite unpopular and with the Russians not deep in debt to anyone while we owe everyone including Putin, a lot of money.
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Interesting the Russians beat the Germans at rocketry,what with the V-1 and 2 on the western front.
The Russian launch vehicles were just American Studebaker trucks from the Lend Lease program!They looked very primitive but obviously did the job.Rockets were easy enough to build they could keep making then in the Lenigrad siege.They could aim 600 rockets at a time on a target.Scary stuff.
The Chinese had multiple rocket systems long before this of course.
That RV is an abomination and a massive heat score/target.
Here in Tucson this weekend we have ANOTHER airshow. No one ever asks how much these “shows” cost. `How many MILLIONS of dollars it costs to keep the Thunderbird flying team flying. I am sick of this “blank check” approach to anything military- ostensibly all to keep our country safe. LOL.
Ah, the Tucson Davis Monthan shows! Jets flying all over the place.
During the Vietnam war, the pilots would goof off all month long and then at the end of the month log in all their required hours so it would be nonstop jets screaming overhead…until one of these fell out of the sky and smacked into the parking lot where my former house stood.
Luckily, I fled three years earlier.
off topic
meanwhile in Nevada
http://www.infowars.com/breaking-sen-harry-reid-behind-blm-land-grab-of-bundy-ranch/
Euromaidan posts hyper inflammatory headline: “SOS! RUSSIA OCCUPIES CONTINENTAL UKRAINE!”. Nothing of the sort has happened.
http://goo.gl/T5UjTi
Rather this seems to be the current situation. Russian speakers are in control of buildings in various areas, and police and troops refuse to fire on pro-Russian demonstrators and occupiers. From “Vineyard of the Saker” blog.
http://goo.gl/Nb2wuy
I should add that the video in the Euromaidan article is titled “Shootout”, but there is only one type of rifle being fired by the sounds of it and people by the building entrance are all still standing afterword. I question if it was a shootout or simply a discharge without any casualties.
There has been a 7.6 quake outside the Salomon Islands in the Pacific.
looks like something Homer simpson would build
The most effective tool the Russians had against the Panzer Tank was the Molotov Cocktail. The Russians would dig slit trenches which the Panzers would cross over, and the soldiers in the trenches would then pop up and shoot at the German infantry following behind the tanks.
The cockails were used in street fighting out of desperation. The killer of the tanks were the much superior Russian tanks which were better protected and had more powerful cannons and of course, the multi rocket array system which was superior to anything anyone else had at the time.
Americans celebrate our rocket program but the Russians were ALWAYS ahead of us until the moon mission. Now they are ahead of us again in many ways.
The Russian tanks were cruder, but could be produced in far greater numbers. The Russians simply swamped the Germans who relied on superior engineering and craftsmanship but produced far fewer tanks. Also a lot of the German tanks were almost obsolete, if servicable, at least until they came up against the new generation Russian tanks starting with the brilliant T-34 that started to enter the war in numbes in 1942 and 1943. The Germans then came up with new generations of tanks that were better quality, but harder and slower to produce. Too few tanks doomed Germany to defeat on the Eastern front.
The medium T-34 was so crudely and swiftly built it sometimes even had outright holes in the joints of the armor letting in sunlight, but the Russians knew they simply had to get the tanks out there on the battlefield to do the damage. The T-34 was the best tank of the war because it was cheap and fast to make, had great mobility, good protection and a good gun.
The Germans may have built technically better machines but they lost the war because they couldn’t keep the numbers up. Crucially, the German army was largely horse driven at the start of the war. People think that the German Armies were all mechanized but that is incorrect. The majority of the infantry divisions and the artillery simply walked. When the horses died the artillery couldn’t move. Also the Germans used petrol for their engines, at least the earlier models, which require more refinement, while the Russians used diesel engines. Petrol and gas was always a huge problem for the Germans.
The armored divisions were quite few specialized units. So even if the Russians couldn’t defeat the German top units they could always grind them down by relentless fighting. Overall the Russians could simply attack everywhere and the Germans couldn’t defend as the weaker units were overrun and so they had to retreat. In this way the German front was slowly ground down.
The Russians won because they had far superior numbers and cheaper, but still very effective, weaponry (this includes the air force and obviously the brilliant katjusha batteries, using American Studebaker trucks as platforms btw) they could produce in numbers significant enough to make all the difference. The Germans had better tanks and weapons but could never produce enough of either to make up the difference.
The T-34 was a nasty shock to the Germans. When a top German general inspected a destroyed/captured T-34 model tank on the battlefield in 1941 he said: “If the Russians can produce this tank in large numbers we have lost the war”.
Correct: fast and furious and easy to make=victory. Expensive, tiresome to make and delicate loses.
Thanks to the insane neo-cons in Washington with their nazi coup in Ukraine and their threats against Russia, Russia has now closed its land to NATO convoys; so how are they going to get the NATO soldiers and very expensive equipment out of Afghanistan? But the traitors neo-cons do not care one bit about the life of the NATO soldiers.
http://rt.com/news/us-afghanistan-withdrawal-russia-880/
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