TSMacNeil wrote:
I say reel it all in, focus on the US and its' territories...and let the rest of them sort it out themselves. Make sure we have the highest capabilities for our defenses, and just take care of ourselves.
.02
I talked to a Vietnam vet about that once while we were doing maintenance on a combine. His take was that he'd rather fight them over there than fight them over here.
I don't think very highly of the Vietnam conflict, but I have to concede that a proxy war between the US and USSR in vietnam sounds better than an actual war between the two done via ICBMs, or even a conventional war staged from a recently-counquered Canada across the northern US border..
It helped me greatly to think of the whole thing by phase rather than process group like the PMBOK does them. When I went back and read it skipping around vertically it was a little more like real world and that helped with the “what would you do next” questions.
That and do your own math. There was a rounding issue I saw on one of the questions.
Jerry Pournelle wrote this back in the 70s, and helped make the case for outspending the Soviets -- especially in space -- as a strategy for victory. Apparently this used to be a textbook used in some of the military academies.
There's a lot of material here, but the key point he makes, that people would do very well to remember...
You cannot simply start an advanced weapons program when you find out you need it.
The engineers that did Apollo are retired or dead. The lead time to build operational capacity for things which have never existed before is _decades_.
I am very much in love with SpaceX, but it is important to realize that they are essentially re-creating decades-old Soviet rocketry, using modern computing power and the US's amazing logistical excellence -- things the soviets never had when they did all this stuff 40 years ago.
Just to update this sausage, . . . it looks like the test date is April 11, @ 12:30. Be sure to bring a #2 pencil so we can STOP hearing about this. Thanks in advance.
-Mngt.
