Posted on 09/10/2008 3:18:45 PM PDT by Flavius
Yes. Putin's feeling rich and powerful these days - but let Bush and Cheney engineer a deal with the Saudis to bump up production (or to not cut it as demand falls), and the price of oil will drop. I'm betting anyone here $1 that it is $80-$85 by Election Day. That not only helps McCain, but also bricks the Russkies pretty well.
Oh, regarding the B-1sky...hey, Vlad old chap, ever hear of an F-22? Your pilots wouldn't even know that it was coming, and you'd be wondering why you lost radio contact with both planes within 30 seconds of each other.
Were the hell are those dylithium crystals?
Really we need fusion.
We don't need to discover energy - we're floating on 9 times the Saudi reserves, in the form of shale oil in the Colorado Rockies and in North Dakota. More oil than has been burned since its discovery in 1859. Screw discovery - let's lynch the Dems in Congress (politically speaking, of course) and remove the restrictions. Do that, and oil will be $50/bbl. in 6 months, even before the massive production increases...it'll be all the speculators getting out.
“Sending two heavy strategic bombers to Venezuela on a training sortie is hardly the recommencement of the Cold War!”
I think plainly is. No doubt next will be a test of some sort of upgraded Raduga Kh-55 cruise missle.
last airframe was delivered in 1992. Electromechanical cockpit. crew of 4.
it’s specs, like a Russian athlete’s resume, are better than its performance.
no evidence of a Mod X to improve RCS.
potent but very killable, and we’ll see if all the support logistics follow the visit. Betcha they can’t beat 50% combat readiness flying out of south american base- with 24 hours between sorties, minimum.
if they put a fully deployed squadron there, THEN consider it a threat. for now it is a weak tweak.
JMO
“That’s a nice target, has a really large radar cross section.”
It would never be over target, instead standing off and firing its cruise missles from far, far away.
Of course, since it can hit Mach 2, it would probably penetrate a little ways before we scramble, launch its missles, then scoot.
Better than a B-52 -— and same mission -— fire cruise missles from afar -— never encounter the F-22 because far, far away when firing.
They will be grounded within a few days. Russia probably did not send along so much as a single spare lug nut nor a wrench to turn one with. The Russians don't have the ability to project power beyond their border much less all the way to Venezuela. Ok, they were able to road a couple of battalions to Georgia - big deal...
I think the US is way past Russian technology when it comes to warfare. It is a threat, but we have many ways to counter it and kill it. We left Russia in the dust many, many years ago.
Russia has a lot of money and a stand off and fire weapon (cruise missle) is very hard to beat for soft civilian targets.
We couldn’t even stop slow fat airliners from crashing into buidings remember.
We’d never know until the mushroom cloud went up.
The ONLY thing that stops it is the Russians love their children, too.
Chavez? Iran? Not so much.
......They have oil and a little bit of capitalism now.....
They have a population of dysfunctional alcoholic males and a declining birthrate because the women won’t accept children. The economy is one of armed thugs that is like a Chicago actually controlled by Al Capone.
They have revenue but it is only good for financing the funeral of Mother Russia.
Bush knows this and knows it is not really necessary to react to Putin’s bravado.
By that famous Soviet inventor Regus Patoff.
If you haven’t noticed, they are in control of the House & the Senate.
The problem is the massive amounts of water (in short supply) it takes to process that stuff.
Russia would never attempt using their military against the U.S. on our own soil, the Cold War taught us that. A mushroom cloud over a U.S. city, caused by a Russian aricraft or missile, would mean that Russia would effectively cease to exist. Whoever lived through the U.S. response would have to move to Siberia, because that's all that would be left of Russia.
That said, Washington should none-the-less do whatever possible to keep Russia in a third-world economic state. Russians are a belligerent, back-stabbing, untrusworthy, dangerous people who need to be kept in check.
There are huge holes on radar coverage in the USA.
Hence why drug planes infiltrate all the time.
A stealthy cruise missles (drones, really) would have no difficulties hitting most civilian population centers without warning of any kind.
You read a lot of Clancy fiction, don’t you?
I have noticed. How could you not? I live close enough to DC to smell Pelosi’s stench.
Not thinking are you? The support comes from IL-76/78s deployed as part of the support fleet. Doesn’t take much to deploy a small support team and spares on those transports/tankers.
That is part and parcel of the Russian strategic air force. The Russians have been testing ALCMs for years now. Even before the current tensions over Georgia. 2003 saw power projection missions out into the Indian Ocean via Afghanistan and Pakistan. They launched ALCMs at targets in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.
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