Questions for our American friends

[palo5]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

True, but holding ground enables you to recruit

Sure, they let you arm and train them. Then you discover they aren't on your side, and there are many more sides than you knew about

[redball7]

The largely liberal media in the US makes much of the American casualties in Afganistan since 2001,which is up to around 2500. KIA.
While I don't make light of this number as each of these service-people has someone at home who mourns them,I will remind those who think this number is excessive that the United States was losing this many men in single battles
in the Pacific War,at places like Pelilu,which only lasted one month-not 10 years.
These people deserve our respect as they volunteered for service.,and knew the risks involved.
IMHO, it is technology that has kept the numbers low for the American forces.

[dbailey]

Originally Posted by redball7

These people deserve our respect as they volunteered for service.,and knew the risks involved.
IMHO, it is technology that has kept the numbers low for the American forces.

I gotta agree with that. When I go to Seaworld or some other event where they honour US service people and they show the American Flag flying, even I wanna get up and salute.....and I'm British.

To be fair though, they usually say something good about America's allies......and then show the British Flag. It usually gets a pretty loud cheer as well from the home team crowd...which is nice.

If only peeps could all get along like us perverts on here....there used to be a slogan..'Make love , not war' what about a modern VEF version

'Don't have a cow man, Knock one out'

[knobby109]

Originally Posted by redball7

The largely liberal media in the US makes much of the American casualties in Afganistan since 2001,which is up to around 2500. KIA.
While I don't make light of this number as each of these service-people has someone at home who mourns them,I will remind those who think this number is excessive that the United States was losing this many men in single battles
in the Pacific War,at places like Pelilu,which only lasted one month-not 10 years.
These people deserve our respect as they volunteered for service.,and knew the risks involved.
IMHO, it is technology that has kept the numbers low for the American forces.

It's all relative but 2500 of the best people seems a lot in absolute terms.
Yes, the improvements in medical technology have made a profound difference.Also the ability to get casualties quickly to medical facilities plus the training of the rescue squads is important.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by knobby109

It's all relative but 2500 of the best people seems a lot in absolute terms..

Its actually a very small number. The US military generally has 200 or so fatalities a year in training accidents. We've got 15,000 a year in fatalities from auto accidents in the nation

The difficulty with the number is that its so concentrated . . . actual combat casualties are very heavily concentrated in the Special Forces.

The hard-to-quantify casualties are psychological. We've got hundreds of thousands of men and women who spent years of their lives driving down roads, wondering if they were going to get blown up.

[keefriff]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

The hard-to-quantify casualties are psychological. We've got hundreds of thousands of men and women who spent years of their lives driving down roads, wondering if they were going to get blown up.

Great point. This is going to be an issue that are military better rise to face in a forceful and timely manner. They are already failing active and returning soldiers and vets on this issue. Some very interesting articles out there about how hard it is for soldiers and vets to get psychological help without being made a pariah. The rate of suicide in the armed forces is at an all time high and has become the military's dirty little secret.

The number of soldiers returning with missing limbs is substantially higher than previous wars as well. The nature of the conflict and the advances in medicine and evacuation time may keep death casualties low but these soldiers are still coming back with significant, lifelong injuries. I hope that these time tables that have been set for troop withdrawls will actually be adhered to and all of our soldiers can get out of Iraq. And Afghanistan too and the sooner the better.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by keefriff

Great point. This is going to be an issue that are military better rise to face in a forceful and timely manner. They are already failing active and returning soldiers and vets on this issue. Some very interesting articles out there about how hard it is for soldiers and vets to get psychological help without being made a pariah. The rate of suicide in the armed forces is at an all time high and has become the military's dirty little secret.

The number of soldiers returning with missing limbs is substantially higher than previous wars as well.

Very grim bit of data on those points:

at some point, I don't know when precisely, it became SOP for soldiers in convoys to have tourniquets on their "outside" legs . . . the idea was that if they were hit with an IED, its a very quick response to stop the bleeding.

We do have a much higher number of grievously wounded who'll survive. We also have a lot of folks with neurological trauma, of a kind we haven't seen that much of before-- with terrific armor, and mine resistant vehicles, you've got a lot of folks who've lived through big explosions.

We have some evidence that this causes subtle and not-so-subtle neurologic damage, but its not something we've seen a lot of before, so we don't really know what these folks will look like in 20 years.

[army1959]

Originally Posted by karlafong

As far as the parking ... in large cities, especially, some stores contract with parking structures so if a customer buys something at the store, they are not charged for their time in the parking garage (we're still a quite car-centered society, if you couldn't tell). When you park in the structure, you are given a receipt or ticket, which you don't pay until you leave (the charge is usually based on how many hours you're parked). So if you buy something, the store "validates your parking." Why the word "validate" came to be used, I don't know.

As far as the bus, I think that's probably more of a film-making shortcut, although some cities do have certain zones where bus travel is free.

The term applies to parking garages. Often the garages are run by a merchant or group of merchants who own and operate the garage. While they will allow anyone to park there, they want random people to pay for parking unless they are patrons of the owner's business(es), who will get free parking. The term "Validate" means to signify or certify or verify that a customer is indeed a patron of the owner's business and is therefore entitled to free parking. "Validate" is the verb form of the adjective "valid" which means that the person is in fact a (valid) true customer of the owner's business and therefore does indeed get free parking.

[onelucky1]

A question for our american friends,hope it,s not been debated.
At the moment america is still in the ascendency,but china is not spending all that money on weapons for nothing They need more and more food ,water,energy and minerals ,without america do you think they will take what they want by force

[JohnsonJackson]

Originally Posted by onelucky1

...china is not spending all that money on weapons for nothing...

dunno if you noticed, but recently a huge nuclear arsenal was discovered in china, previously unknown or reported.

this was probably not very surprising to many, since china is a country that pretty-much does whatever it wants to... whatever it can get away with. of course all nations tend to do the same, but among leading first-world nations, china takes the cake IME.

...They need more and more food ,water,energy and minerals ,without america do you think they will take what they want by force

IMO... in the world as we currently recognise it, no. there are too many checks-and-balances in place, including china's intimate relationship with the present global economy and the number of powerful deterrent nations in place around the world. plus, everyone is under a microscope these days. china still struggles to deal with local annoyances, such as north korea, tibet (sort of) and formosa. they would love to handle all of that very differently if nobody was watching.

as far as where civilisation is heading... that's a different matter. i can definitely see china flexing its muscle in a world of economic ruin... a world in which nations are falling apart from within and global weather disasters get worse and more numerous by the year. so, yea... they might indeed 'win' that type of situation. OTOH it's like being king of a rubbish heap- who really cares and who really wants to be around at that point?

but, again... china has such tremendous economic leverage in goods production right now and such tremendous leverage over the health and welfare of its populace that i don't see them pushing against the world too hard in the near-term. they simply don't need to. they can continue to ignore worker safety and pollution controls, stockpile weapons, artificially devalue their currency as part of a huge economic advantage, and steal technology and state secrets through their massive (and ever-growing) hacking networks.

just my tuppence, or whatever the right brit saying would be. :/


EDIT: remember, china also has a huge advantage over the rest of the world right now in the refining and production of rare earth metals, needed to produce the bulk of modern technology. they are sitting pretty right now in so many ways. not to say they don't have concerns of their own, like their growing middle class and the rapidly growing toxicity of several (many?) of their cities due to terrible pollution controls at their coal plants and many of their production plants.