people i know in the USAF
He pulled out of his ass as usual. If that happened, the ' letter' would have leaked in seconds and it would be all over the media.
Didn't Assad's brother brutally wipe out an entire city?
Not necessarily, it's the sort of benign bureaucratic change which mainstream media always ignores and takes watchers/analysts time to pick up on. Much easier connecting the dots with mass movement of military hardware over loosened credential checks.
That was Assad Sr. The high end estimates of that one basically match the amount massacred by the Mullahs.
He has a habitual impulse to lie and post unsourced shit, so until there's an actual verified source, it's just his typical JIDF crap.
It's why time is needed to accurately judge. I'll agree if there's no verifiable source come next week given how procedural the purported shift is. It's the sort of thing someone will talk about eventually, just not in the immediate, within-the-minute hype-train nonsense surrounding this buildup we have grown used to.
What a respectable gentleman.
Anyone who is a veteran knows the military is full of retards. Retards are expendable, planes are not. So it's obvious bullshit.
I'm new to the military supply chain side of things, but isn't the west generally fucked because none of us have got our shit together to refine rare earths so planes can go brrr?
It's a little more nuanced. If you're American, we invented most of this stuff. The States used to produce a lot too, but regulatory creep has choked out most of the mines and foundries. Over the last 30 years most industry state side has been exported, and the people who built and maintained things like factories and refineries have retired or died. China took a lot our industrial capacity, literally, and India has taken a lot of materials that we could feasibly recycled. We have a lot of great toys, but they are criminally overpriced and we don't do the sourcing ourselves anymore.
Yeah pretty much. There's one refinery in Canada and two mines in Europe, so it's not like we're gonna run out but we just can't do it at scale like China does.
This is somewhat true, but don't underestimate the capacity of the USA. The Department of War (feels good to say) has been buying up extra capacity for decades on all kinds of things. We (as in the place I work at) develop products that use rare earth but also several other technologies that would be considered "hard to source" and "no longer produced here"; however, DoW purchasing has never slacked and they've been buying up large quantities of product since before I was born (so go back to at least the 70s). The stockpiles of spare parts, component parts, and finished product are enormous; then you get to the equipment that is actually in-service right now, which is entirely separate and has its own redundancy systems in place that don't touch the stockpiles. And understandably so, you'll never hear about that.