An alternative perspective. You should try to cultivate more of them. Attack helicopters - I guess that would be one of the things the Russians copied from Vietnam - dumbasses.

That is simply the evolution of warfare. Helicopters were great for about twenty years, and then the US started deploying effective countermeasures against them in the 1980s (as the Russians learned in Afghanistan). The Russians learned how to design for close air support the very expensive way. The US has actually been scrapping new helicopter development, though it is committed to upgrading existing ones. While I don't remember where I heard it very recently, but the A-10 (a very well-engineered combat aircraft) has been granted a last minute reprieve and is slated to be upgraded i.e. they are substantially extending its service life. The US is still mostly using Cold War equipment that has been patched with some upgrades. A broad slate of completely new technology platforms is scheduled for deployment over the next several years, bringing a very substantial leap in capability over what the US already has. The new platforms are, quite frankly, pretty scary to the extent they completely obsolete existing platforms. The ability to effectively and methodically destroy irregular forces and guerillas in urban and not so urban settings were explicit design goals in many of these systems. The targeting and tracking granularity of the automated fire control and surveillance systems is no longer vehicle and unit size nor is it dependent on the centralization of resources in big capital equipment. Instead it is more like a decentralized swarm of smaller machines that can work at the granularity of a specific individual. This is actually big picture bad in the same way that strong AI is big picture bad. In an environment where such things exist, all you can do is hope that it isn't used against you because there isn't much you can do about it in such cases. If the initial conditions aren't favorable, then you are all but hosed. Naturally, the US military is already testing primitive active countermeasures against such weapons. j. andrew rogers _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]