there342
23d ago
Border crossings have decreased a lot. People don't necessarily apply number crunching logic to these things. If a big scary fascist man says he's going to deport them and make a tiktok video ridiculing them, that's a more effective deterrent than his predecessor who didn't really object to their presence while enabling a chain of NGOs to coach everybody into making it in guaranteed for free. People react to visceral fears a lot more strongly than they get credit for, rational or not.
there342
24d ago
Yup - projects like the Comanche are revealing, I think. I'm no expert, but I'd figure that such a weapon could have been a highly useful and survivable platform in a Ukraine scenario compared to a new generation of Apache with some new gizmos attached, but the Army needed to allocate resources to getting a ton of mine-resistant trucks, not a sci-fi stealth helicopter. And those trucks probably won't be that useful in a war full of missiles, drones, and artillery - hence those MRAPs just got sold to police departments. Huge waste to high-end acquisitions.
I meant if the US was involved in a war of this nature, sorry that I wasn't clear. The US radically altered its aviation plans in response to Ukraine, canceling their planned scout helicopter (which didn't have a lot of the advantages the more expensive Comanche would have) because of how survivable modern helicopters look. A war with the kind of air defense Russia has would be really bloody for Army Aviation and the Comanche probably would have given them an edge they don't have currently, and it's a perfect example of a project that was canceled for the war on terror, in which Army aviation was pushed to the breaking point and had to devote everything they could to keeping the old stuff they had running.
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