Ras_

Here's the original non-paywalled one. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/sensors-electronic-wa...

This twitter thread has most of the relevant new info that was added after the first article: https://twitter.com/TheDEWLine/status/1270068190224232450

OSD budget entries: https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg... (feb 2020) & https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg... (first public appearance feb 2018)

It could be a tactical ballistic missile (MLRS/HIMARS launched) payload because the slide's 100k-200k target can't include the launch missile (ATACMS missile 800k each, cruise missiles too expensive as well). Not necessarily just a kinetic one since ISR is mentioned. Surveillance platform that's sometimes a bomb, under an unclear amount of human control? Quite a terrifying idea.

At least one similar looking drone delivery project from the 2000s with an ICBM was terminated because it couldn't be guaranteed that it wouldn't look like a nuclear launch.

This article from May 28 is also worth a glance. "SWARMS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: THE CASE FOR DECLARING ARMED AND FULLY AUTONOMOUS DRONE SWARMS AS WMD" https://mwi.usma.edu/swarms-mass-destruction-case-declaring-...

You can forget the ground observer. Stealth is the reason why it can fly high all the time to avoid visual/audio detection. Non-stealth planes like F-15E are forced into High-Low-Low-High altitude flight profile. where low level ingress and egress will e.g. drastically reduce range. F-15E going around threats both ingress and egress uses about 30% of its fuel to do so. F-22 would use around 6% in comparison. So basically stealth means that you can waste less fuel on threat avoidance.

A-10 has been known to be a MANPADS magnet since the Desert Storm. If you have air superiority, you can keep them, use UCAVs or buy new Super Tucanos. But in contested environment they are useless. Multiroles or bombers with precision weapons are better suited for CAS. Cannons are legacy, which is why you haven't seen a uav concept matching your description. In the future targeting platform and the one doing the shooting might not even be the same.

"Part of the reason the A-10 has enjoyed the amount of success and notoriety it has is because there has been unopposed use of the airspace over Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria. It is not a contested environment. It is not a degraded environment. It’s not an operationally-limited environment–save for bad weather and some really big, nasty mountains in Afghanistan. All of that means our air assets have an ability to fly and operate unmolested in those AORs.

Tomorrow’s fight will NOT be that." https://fightersweep.com/2038/the-a-10-warthog-debate-a-fate...

In a lot of ways no as well. Take for example F-35B. That would've never happened on its own. Too few customers for a separate development project. Whereas now combined with amphibious assault ships it will be a quantum leap for USMC capabilities. Otherwise they'd have to retire Harrier for just V-22, AH-1Z and CH-53K.

It already costs less than its contemporaries Rafale and Typhoon. Remotely operated planes are not cheaper. Take for example MQ-4C Triton, which can only be used for intelligence and recon. That costs around 190 million apiece. Quite the sticker shock when you can get almost two F-35As for the same cost. Basically even if you could get similar capabilities (there are no air to air UCAVs atm), it will cost at least as much for quite some time.

According to pilots flying it, it's equal to clean F-16 within visual range.

F-35 program is also invaluable in utility. Nine countries became partners. Eventually most Nato-members and even some affiliates will adopt it. That's standardization of capability across the board on an unprecedented level.

Quick overview of test results: https://youtu.be/zgLjNsB_hyM?t=4m17s

In Finland I went through several hundred rounds. Wasn't even regular infantry. Served the shortest term possible in the signals corps.

Training is scheduled into three parts. 8 weeks, after which you are assigned into leadership track or your rank and file specialization. Then 5 weeks of personal specialization training and 7 weeks of squad training. Adding to 6 months. There are some more difficult rank and file assignments, lasting 12 months. Rank and file medics stay for 9 months.

NCO training after that initial 8 weeks is in two parts, 7 and 9 weeks. Those sent to reserve officer training swap the latter 9 for 14 at the reserve officer school. NCOs lead after that for 28 weeks and reserve officers 23.

Finnish conscription is very limited in its selectiveness. 25k conscripts serve yearly, which is roughly 70-77 % of male cohort. The numbers add up quickly: there's a massive trained reserve of 900k which eclipses most of European armies combined. Their usefulness is obviously somewhat debatable. Still all of them had 6-12 months of military training at some point. 230k have actual war time allocation and up to date kit. There's a similar 12 months of civil service or serve jail time "options" like in Norway. In 2009 2,5k picked civil service, 25 went to jail and 20 took a very niche option, which is to serve unarmed.

Answer to question "in your opinion, if Finland is attacked, should Finns take up arms in any situation, even if the end result seems uncertain?" has been very high for the whole of 2000s: 71–81% say yes. So the willingness is high, owning to mostly to geographical realities. The same thing which has ensured that there's never been serious intent on getting rid of conscription.

The big picture is darker. US Navy had future operating concept based on three types of new ships:

* CGX: ASW/ASuW/AD workhorse * DDGX: land attack platform * LCS: cheap platform for everything else

CGX got canned for being near $10B estimated. DDGX got canned according to CNO Roughhead because it's inadequate for the future and too expensive.

Only LCS survived. It has two different classes (Independence from Austal USA and Freedom from Lockheed Martin) with very similar problems, mostly with engines. Their whole operating concept was just retconned. Now they have very lightly armed ships that cost almost as much as Arleigh Burke class destroyers.

Combined with 10 B/each Gerald R. Ford class carrier program it looks like USN is having massive problems with all of its surface vessel programs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LessCredibleDefence/comments/52a095...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/440kj1/dis...

This tells everything there is to know about the popular appeal of heavy metal in Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhhlYdySqQ

http://noisey.vice.com/en_au/blog/meet-hevisaurus-from-finla...

Between westeners at worst no more than curiosities, but they are a good platform to start business in the East, where previous contacts and trust building is more important.

Indeed. Once you go past certain amount of followed you end up inventing some rules for new ones. Like not too many tweets per day, especially if there's more RTs than OC.

Twitter is like a garden with weeds. Constant need of pruning. Facebook just hides most that you don't commit to every now and then. Twitter has also a bit too much automation and anonymity. But some of the parody accounts are gems.

Freeing up memory for some games, good memories.

I think my most vivid learning experience was when I managed to delete autoexec.bat.

I think the mushy ones go through steaming. So just choose dry-rolled/steel-cut vs. steam-flaked/rolled.

Like GFK_of_xmaspast said, it's largely a matter of choosing the porridge/baking shelves instead of cereal/muesli shelves.

They might be influenced by Russian politics?

Almaz-Antey is 100% owned by the Russian federation. The state is also their biggest customer, and nearly 90% of the business is with the military. Almaz-Antey produces very high priority strategic systems, like air and missile defenses.

It's not segregated. They are using the same services, just paying according to their income. 300 euros max /mo even in the capital. Poor families pay next to nothing and their multiple allowances cover it if there's a nominal cost (child allowance 100 eur/mo covers it).

Many languages have tons of words for the same thing if you include dialects.

F-35 is the stealthy sensor platform that can go closer to identify and target. Unlike F-22 it does air to ground as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be the platform that does all the shooting. It can spot for non-stealthy planes further back, or for land/sea based platforms. Basically the killer app of F-35 is providing better situational awareness to the whole coalition force operating in the area. It's much more valuable as a force multiplier than on its own. Super Hornet and the rest of that generation can hold their own 1v1, but they don't provide a similar benefit to the rest of system. It remains to be seen whether F-35 makes even EW jets like Growler obsolete. I suspect that the added human workload part of EW (F-35 doesn't have two seaters) is harder to overcome than developing suitable pods.

They will be carrying cruise missiles too. Because $1m is quite a bit less than $100m (the plane).

In your opinion what makes it terrible for peacekeeping & observation? Isn't it just a matter of Canada not buying and integrating suitable armament? With Jdams and Paveways you have to go too close for early operations, but Canada still dropped 10% of bombs in Libya according to wikipedia. Sweden has a similar setup, missing proper ranged options but they were restricted to doing strictly recon in Libya. In the end I suspect that even if you had the ability, no-one besides USA(/UK/France/Germany) has the stockpiles/willingness to start throwing around cruise missiles in foreign ops. For smaller countries there's political reasoning behind doing enough but not everything you possibly could in foreign ops.

Not all modern fighters have started as a multi-role, but every good fighter has ended up as one.

There are no pure air superiority fighters on the market, so you'll end up with a jack of all trades in any case.

Here's one telling example of the real name editor control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_Halla-aho

https://www.facebook.com/jussi.hallaaho

He's a member of the European Parliament and Facebook still doesn't allow his real surname. So he's Hallaaho, which is wrong even by Finnish linguistic standards, which state that all compound words with duplicate vowels should have a hyphen, like "Lähi-itä" which is Finnish for Middle East.

These best RT's of the day/week and other automated lists seem not unlike Facebook's excessive Game app messages. They were a proper nuisance until you became able to hide them. Twitter needs some tools for self-curating. For example some manual filter that you could teach which kind of messages to hide. Vast number of people will never adopt any third party options.

Indeed. You need to ride on the coattails of the people who have followers for quite some time before you can expect activity for your own tweets. Engaging in a discussion that's already there is much easier than trying to start one.

Herein lies a major reason why early Finnish academic results are so uniform:

"“To be honest, we are not interested in a child’s academic skills at all. From our perspective that would be silly,” she said. The motor skills tests, by contrast, “show us a lot and help us diagnose any learning disabilities,” she explained. If a learning deficit was detected, it didn’t count against the child or banish her to a different classroom."

The article describes advanced methods of diagnosing learning decifits. Early interventions pay off big time. When a kid is found to have some sort of a problem, he/she will receive extra help within the normal classroom (e.g. teacher's aide). That prevents the social circles from breaking up and usually the better students learn even more by helping others. Few extra months of early help to make troubled students into average performers is reflected well in the PISA results. It has also societal effects (equality/equity). Best students might not benefit nearly as much from extra attention than worst, but in the western sphere gifted students are the main focus of attention. Finnish school system makes everyone average, for better or worse. But is not a bad thing when your average is still world class.

Some language versions have higher requirements for notability. It's hard to set a clear cutoff point for example in sports, entertainment and companies. When does something become wiki-notable? Everyone has their own admins, deletion policies and arbitration mechanisms, which have and will influence content.

Statistics show clearly that some have opted to include as many stubs as possible via the use of bots (for example Swedish wikipedia). Tens of thousands almost worthless stubs (like all US townships and communities) could be machine-added at any time, but most wikis have steered clear of this kind of doping. German wikipedia is quite the opposite in regards to pictures. They don't allow any fair use / citation pictures, which leads to de.wiki articles having considerably less photos than other languages.

Entertainment sometimes seems to present the blunt truth of our aspirations:

"There’s certainly something to be said about the assumptions, say, Civilization builds into its simulations. Look at its winstates and what they value — technological progress, military conquest, economic superiority, and cultural domination. You don’t win by eliminating hunger or poverty or by nuclear deproliferation or by having a particularly high standard of living. You get it for, for lack of a better way to phrase this, very American goals."

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=582

True, for example half of Finns receive less than recommended amount of vitamin D. To combat this dairy and edible fat products have received vitamin D supplements since 2003. For example skimmed milk (the most popular one) would otherwise have very little D because it gets removed in the process along with fat. First you take it out, then put it back in...

History proves some interesting insight to education.

Take for example literacy. There are Finnish/Swedish parochial records/church examination registries dating back to 17th century down to a level of individual families. This is important due to Charles XI's Swedish Church Law of 1686 stating that everyone had to be able to read bible. So you can follow how that emergent Lutheran essence actually turned into literacy. From an individual perspective it was necessary to learn because you weren't allowed to take holy communion, be confirmed and later wed without reading ability. By 1750 some parishes started to have 90% reading ability. What is surprising is the writing ability. It achieved same levels only around 1900 (1920 in Finland). So that is clearly connected to industrial reform rather than spirit of protestantism. At least my initial assumption that reading/writing go hand in hand was proven wrong. In light of this long history of literacy in Nordic countries I tend to value the South Korean jump in literacy from previous generation more highly, even if it was achieved through “culture of educational masochism”.

Book about this: Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Contexts: Socio-cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson.

Take a look at pg. 47 at Google Books and see how incredibly detailed those church examination registries in 1688-91 could be (pg. 56 has a nice graph differentiating the development of reading and writing ability): http://books.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=frontc...

Nokia was certainly part of it. Even if they failed with their N-Gage gaming phones, some of the current successful companies like Rovio started around that time. Nokia spent money and convinced some state agencies to do the same. Nokia-effect also bloated CS&E programs in higher education. No direct links can be drawn, but these opportunities to learn must have contributed something towards the current state of mobile gaming industry.

Very active demoscene-culture in the 90's was incubator for the first Finnish gaming companies. For example Remedy (Max Payne, Alan Wake), Futuremark (3DMark), Bugbear (FlatOut, Ridge Racer Unbounded) and Housemarque (Super Stardust, Dead Nation). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Then there was National Broadcasting Agency (YLE), which in 1985 started a radio program called Silikoni. They even sent BASIC code nationwide via the air waves, which you could tape and then use in your computer. Readers could also send their own programs, which could appear in the program. Over 120 000 listeners nationwide were tuned in 1986. Here's one program (not sure if it is geoblocked, 4.15 should be where the code begins): http://yle.fi/elavaarkisto/artikkelit/silikoni_lahetti_radio... So I guess when people grow up with these things around...

I suspect that it's also somehow related to Finland being very good with open source projects. For example 1/2 of LAMP stack originating from Finland.

Ok Denmark, but overall the issue is valid. For example Finland has residency-based welfare aka no citizenship needed. Just read a headline last week claiming that Finland pays more welfare to Estonians than Estonia itself. Meaning Estonian citizens who live in Finland. Most came here to work but are now unemployed. You can't come here for welfare, but if you lose your livelihood soon after you are safe.

Yes, to many other countries. But how about Switzerland's neighbors? 40e for a rural hostel doesn't sound expensive.

I've seen many similarities with the group of friends I grew up with. Did we grow up and become more like each other or was our similarity (temperament, values) something that brought us together in the first place?

For example I was the first in our father's side of family to go into higher ed, but everyone in my group of pre-18 school friends ended up there. Many other groups in our school were characterized by other things like marrying young or seeking traditional blue collar jobs.

At least there was plenty of time for conversations to mold our thoughts. Parents might actually account for less than friends.

"Canada does not have a single port along the Northwest Passage but that Russia, by comparison, has 16 deep water ports along its Arctic coastline."

The article seems to end by identifying Canada's first major problem. Then you move into things like ice breakers etc. where Russia leads, while Finland and Sweden are ahead of Canada/USA.

Here's a nice infograph on world's ice breakers. It tells you something about short-term capabilities / general knowhow in this area. http://news.usni.org/2013/07/23/u-s-coast-guards-2013-reivew...

"Presently, 60% of all diesel icebreakers are produced in Finland, 100% of all nuclear icebreakers are produced in Russia." Meaning Finland and Russia have a big head start here... http://barentsnova.com/node/1573