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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • This is a frankly absurd and comical waste of resources in an environment that absolutely does not call for the deployment of the newest, most advanced, and most expensive naval asset in the USN inventory.

    In no universe is it reasonable to deploy the Ford (or really any of our CVNs) to the Caribbean for combat operations. For disaster recovery, sure - you can probably hook up the reactor output to land lines in a pinch, if some hurricane came and wrecked a major city down there, and a stopgap power supply was needed. But for pretty much anything combat related, the absolute maximum of a reasonable naval asset to stick there would be an LHA/LHD - that is, a “landing ship” whose primary job in terms of aviation is to host a bunch of helicopters and a small handful of F-35Bs. As well as a bunch of smaller boats that could be used for, you know, patrol and boarding.

    It’s so fucking embarrassing, on so many levels, for so many reasons - the humanitarian aspect is just the first-order outrage. There’s multiple layers of rank idiocy.







  • Because you can’t “program it to not attack China”. That’s such a wildly vague statement and system goal as to be essentially impossible to fulfill.

    You can degrade or impair or disable certain systems in response to specific stimuli (e.g. a “kill switch” transmission/signal [that is itself a bit of a misnomer]) - like for instance, activate a radio beacon to diminish stealth (counterplay: wire cutters), or to offline external system integration/datalink (counterplay: none, it’s proprietary, closed source and largely classified), or any other number of things. It’s generally pretty hard to completely offline/mission-kill an airframe electronically (outside of an EMP, and even that’s not guaranteed when you’re talking about hardened, mil-grade components), because they’re specifically designed to be extremely resilient and fault-tolerant.

    Source: I worked in defense aerospace earlier in my career