But what’s the difference between Dave and Foxy ? One votes Labor, the other votes Liberal - but otherwise there’s no difference: they’re both personable and successful capitalist businessmen.
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That’s not how you spell p*rn
And long suffering Bomber supporters.
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More profits going overseas!
I am not personable.
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So what you’re saying is: there’s no difference?
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You might change your mind if you watched Aussie Rugby on Stan. The female version at least. And they play a better game than the males.
True. I was just being polite.
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Doesn’t suit you
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I would have preferred the sharks with laser beams myself.
Australia is a big place and attack helicopters allow you to exert an intense amount of force rapidly over a very large area. They are fragile, but their very existence changes how an opponent behaves. Sometimes you buy a capability just to make the rock paper scissors game more complex.
But as awesome as I think Apaches are, they’re going to face very real problems with drones now taking down helicopters in Ukraine. There’s going to be a race of military evolutions and I’ve only vague guesses of where that will end.
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A blue gen enhanced soldier whose guns and other equipment contain the spirits of his dead comrades is my guess, and hope.
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No sorry, but I knew a guy who got hold of some when a local line closed and installed them out the front of his beach house on a back road and if he saw a strange car coming down the road would turn them on for a laugh.
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I think the good thing about the HIMARS and Apache procurements is the risk management. We’re taking the military off the shelf option instead of giving in to the temptation to Australianise platforms, that has led to project delays and cost overruns in the past.
We should have bought the Apache over the Tiger in the first place. Instead, we decided to build the Tigers ourselves and then fit US weapons to them. This added layers of risk to the project. You could argue it worked out okay, but here we are twenty years later buying Apaches anyway.
We’re buying the HIMARS over the Strikemaster. The HIMARS is a proven system that is already in service and that can bought off the US production line. The Strikemaster is a development of the Bushmaster that would require setting up local production and then bringing into service. We should be able to bring the HIMARS into service sooner.
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I thought we were going to be producing the rockets here?
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The question I have is how many are we producing? These can fire like 200 rockets each in a day. Times 90 vehicles.
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And how resilient is the rocket production facility? And is the production run a one-off or ongoing? And once the production run of rockets is finished, how quickly can production be started up again and how many rockets per day can be produced?
If you’re buying a bunch of HIMARS systems and X rockets that you’re going to stash in a bunker somewhere, that’s not a defense policy, that’s a policy for preparing to fight whatever stupid overseas war the Americans start next time.
I haven’t been following events in Ukraine for a while, but the constant drumbeat there is how fast sustained combat uses up artillery munitons of every possible type. If we have no capacity to build our own rockets at a high rate in a crisis, or if the one factory that can do it gets taken out by a cruise missile attack on day one, then we might as well not have HIMARS at all in the scenario of a legitimate defensive war in our immediate vicinity.
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Another problem we’re working on 
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