U.S. military begins testing ‘smart’ rifles

[Zarvan]

• 
  
  In the action-thriller "The Bourne Legacy," Pentagon black ops assasin Aaron Cross takes down an airborne CIA drone with a rifle from more than a mile away. With TrackingPoint's tech, anyone can perform such a trick. (TRACKINGPOINT)
  
  
• 
  
  TrackingPoint borrows the target-locking technology from jets to turn any rifle into a super accurate sniper gun capable of consistently hitting a target at over 1.75 miles. (TRACKINGPOINT)
  
  
• 
  
  TRACKINGPOINT

Next SlidePrevious Slide
The U.S. military has begun testing several so-called smart rifles made by the applied technology start-up TrackingPoint Inc., company officials said.

The Army is rumored to have acquired six of the precision-guided firearms, which cost as much as $27,000 apiece. Oren Schauble, a marketing official with the Austin, Texas-based company, confirmed the military bought a handful of them in recent months for evaluation. A spokeswoman for the service didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

'We’re gun nerds, we’re video-game nerds, we’re engineering nerds. Imagine where we’ll be in three to five years.'
- TrackingPoint marketing official Oren Schauble

“The military has purchased several units for testing and evaluation purposes,” Schauble said during an interview with Military.com Tuesday here at the annual SHOT Show, the country’s largest gun show with some 60,000 attendees.]

It’s not hard to see why more than 30 government and law enforcement agencies have requested demonstrations of the potentially game-changing technology since the company debuted the rifle at last year’s show.

Smith & Wesson Unveils Backpack Cannon

With only a few minutes of instruction on the weapon, this correspondent was able to hit a target almost 1,000 yards away on the first shot. Of the 70 or so reporters and other novice shooters who tested the weapon on Monday at a range in Boulder City, Nev., only one or two missed the target, which was located about 980 yards away, according to Schauble.

“That is a better day than usual,” he said. “I would say we’re at about 70 percent first-shot success probability at 1,000 yards … with inexperienced shooters.”

By comparison, military snipers and sharpshooters have a first-shot success rate of between 20 percent and 30 percent, said Schauble, a relative of the firm’s Chief Executive Officer Jason Schauble. They usually reach about 70 percent on subsequent shots, he said.

“That’s the big value proposition,” he said. “There’s a huge gap between first shot and second shot.”

The military testing seeks to determine how typical troops perform using the weapon compared to expert marksman using traditional rifles, Schauble said. The Army has long been excited about the promise of precision-guided, shoulder-fired weapons. Last year, it tested

the XM25 air-burst weapon in Afghanistan.

But it’s unclear what kind of reception the smart rifle will receive in the sniper community. When asked whether the product has encountered resistance from military marksmen, Schauble said, “This is not necessarily for them. This is for guys who don’t have that training who need to perform in greater capabilities. This is more for your average soldier.”

While the company built the rifle for the commercial market, it quickly realized the potential applications for the military and defense sector, especially as battlefields become more networked, Schauble said.

“Rifles can communicate with each other,” he said. “We can enable a more information-driven combat in the sense that you can tag targets. You can pass off those targets to someone else with a scope. There’s a whole layer of communication that comes with having a rifle that can designate and track targets.”

The system includes a Linux-powered computer in the scope with sensors that collect imagery and ballistic data such as atmospheric conditions, cant, inclination, even the slight shift of the Earth’s rotation known as the Coriolis effect. Because the computer is wireless-enabled, information can be streamed to a laptop, smart phone or tablet computer for spotting or to share intelligence.

“The only way to guarantee accuracy is to control all the variables,” said Scott Calvin, a company representative who demonstrated the rifle at the range. The only variable the system doesn’t account for is wind speed and direction, which must be entered manually, he said.

Print Your Prosthetic at Home

The rifle operates far differently than its traditional counterparts, though the process is quite simple.

After looking through the scope, a shooter pushes a red button near the trigger to tag a target — similar to the way a Facebook user tags a friend in a photograph. A reticle then appears based on the bullet’s expected trajectory determined by the computer. The shooter then arms the scope by squeezing the trigger back, lines up the reticle with the painted target and releases the trigger to fire a round.

The rifle may take the art out of marksmanship, but its apparent accuracy is virtually guaranteed to continue to draw interest — not just from customers in the U.S., but around the world. The company has already sold about 500 of the rifles, mostly to wealthy safari hunters and elderly hunters, Schauble said.

Officials from the Agriculture Department stopped by the company’s booth at the show to look at the products for possible use in a program to better control the rising population of feral pigs.

The guns range in cost, from about $10,000 for scope-and-trigger kits installed on semi-automatic Daniel Defense rifles accurate to about 750 yards, to between $22,000 and $27,000 for those installed on bolt-action Surgeon rifles accurate to about 1,250 yards, according to Schauble. The kits can also be installed on other types of firearms, he said.

TrackingPoint was launched about a year ago by John McHale, a founder of multiple technology start-ups, and has about 75 employees, more than half of which are engineers, Schauble said. “We’re gun nerds. We’re video-game nerds. We’re engineering nerds,” he said. “Imagine where we’ll be in three to five years.”
U.S. military begins testing ‘smart’ rifles | Fox News
@Aeronaut @Oscar @nuclearpak @Icarus @WebMaster @RazPaK @mafiya @tarrar @Yzd Khalifa @Arabian Legend @JUBA @al-Hasani @BLACKEAGLE @FARSOLDIER @balixd @Slav Defence @jaibi @DESERT FIGHTER @fatman17 and others

 

[rockstar08]

WTF is this
dam looks Awesome

 

[armchairPrivate]

Dumb soldiers and smart rifles do not mix.

 

[GR!FF!N]

I was more exciting about this one....

XM25 CDTE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Informant]

American war machine is just too god damn overwhelming!

I was more exciting about this one....

XM25 CDTE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Much more practical: Daewoo K11

S&T Daewoo K11 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Coltsfan]

Dumb soldiers and smart rifles do not mix.

I have a feeling you're just being a troll, but in case you aren't........

These weapons would not be assigned to your ordinary infantry grunt, but to special ops forces.

Special ops forces of any country aren't "dumb", even Canadian ones !

 

[gambit]

Dumb soldiers and smart rifles do not mix.

True...And that is why this rifle should be used by US soldiers only.

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

True...And that is why this rifle should be used by US soldiers only.

But we chinese like to copy smart weapon

 

[armchairPrivate]

True...And that is why this rifle should be used by US soldiers only.

I have a feeling you're just being a troll, but in case you aren't........

These weapons would not be assigned to your ordinary infantry grunt, but to special ops forces.

Special ops forces of any country aren't "dumb", even Canadian ones !

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.

Dumb and Dumber

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.
By Fred Kaplan


FRED KAPLAN
Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

• Follow

Thelatest statistics—compiled by the Defense Department. and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based National Priorities Project—are grim. They show that the percentage of new Army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. (The Pentagon's longstanding goal is 90 percent.)

The percentage of what the Army calls "high-quality" recruits—those who have high-school diplomas and who score in the upper 50th percentile on the Armed Forces' aptitude tests—has declined from 56.2 percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more than 2 percent of all recruits could be "Category IV"—defined as applicants who score in the 10th to 30th percentile on the aptitude tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In 2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4 percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs.

These trends are worrisome in at least four ways.

First, and most broadly, it's not a good idea—for a host of social, political, and moral reasons—to place the burdens of national defense so disproportionately on the most downtrodden citizens.

Second, and more practically, high-school dropouts tend to drop out of the military, too. The National Priorities Project cites Army studies finding that 80 percent of high-school graduates finish their first terms of enlistment in the Army—compared with only about half of those with a General Equivalency Degree or no diploma. In other words, taking in more dropouts is a short-sighted method of boosting recruitment numbers. The Army will just have to recruit even more young men and women in the next couple of years, because a lot of the ones they recruited last year will need to be replaced.

Third, a dumber army is a weaker army. A study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Pentagon and published in 2005, evaluated several factors that affect military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and found that aptitude is key. This was true even of basic combat skills, such as shooting straight. Replacing a tank gunner who had scored Category IV with one who'd scored Category IIIA (in the 50th to 64th percentile) improved the chances of hitting a target by 34 percent.

Today's Army, of course, is much more high-tech, from top to bottom. The problem is that when tasks get more technical, aptitude makes an even bigger difference. In one Army study cited by the RAND report, three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were told to make a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Teams with Category IIIB soldiers (who had ranked in the 31st to 49th percentile) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IVs had only a 29 percent chance. The study also showed that adding a high-scoring soldier to a three-man team increased its chance of success by 8 percent. (This also means that adding a low-scoring soldier to a team reduces its chance by a similar margin.)

Fourth, today's Army needs particularly bright soldiers—and it needs, even more, to weed out particularly dim ones—given the direction that at least some of its senior officers want it to take. When the Army was geared to fight large-scaled battles against enemies of comparable strength, imaginative thinking wasn't much required except at a command level. However, now that it's focusing on "asymmetric warfare," especially counterinsurgency campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the requirements are different. The crucial engagements—in many ways, the crucial decisions—take place in the streets, door to door, not by armored divisions or brigades but by infantry companies and squads. And when the targets include hearts and minds, every soldier's judgment and actions have an impact.


field manual on counterinsurgency, which was supervised by Gen. David Petraeus (who is now trying to put its principles into action as U.S. commander in Iraq), emphasized that successful counterinsurgency operations "require Soldiers and Marines at every echelon to possess the following"—and then the authors recite a daunting list of prerequisites, including a "clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict," an "understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent," rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, and several other admirable qualities.

Some of the officers and outside specialists who helped Petraeus write the field manual expressed concerns to me, at the time, that the Army—which was just beginning to lower its standards—might not be up to the demands of this kind of warfare. Given that standards have dipped quite dramatically since—and add to that the problems the Army has had in retaining its most talented junior officers—the concerns now must be graver.

It's well-known that the Army might not have enough combat troops to conduct sustained counterinsurgency campaigns. Now it seems the problem may soon be about quality as well as quantity (brains as well as boots).

The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous "operations tempo"—soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight. This is well understood among senior officers, and it's a major reason why several Army generals favor a faster withdrawal rate. They worry that fewer young men and women—and now it seems fewer smart young men and women—will sign up if doing so means a guaranteed assignment to Iraq. They worry that, if these trends continue, the Army itself will start to crumble.

So, there's a double spiral in effect. The war keeps more good soldiers from enlisting. The lack of good candidates compels the Army to recruit more bad candidates. The swelling ranks of ill-suited soldiers make it harder to fight these kinds of wars effectively.

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We're probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the "small wars" we're more likely to fight.

So, we're facing two choices. Either we change the way we recruit soldiers (and, by the way, cash bonuses are already about as bountiful as they're going to get), or we change the way we conduct foreign policy—that is, we engage more actively in diplomacy or, if war is unavoidable, we form genuine coalitions to help fight it. Otherwise, unless our most dire and direct interests are at stake, we should forget about fighting at all.

 

[gambit]

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.

Still a lot smarter than the rest of the world's...And I speak from personal experience, unlike you who probably never left your province.

 

[Coltsfan]

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.

Dumb and Dumber

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.
By Fred Kaplan


FRED KAPLAN
Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

• Follow

Thelatest statistics—compiled by the Defense Department. and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based National Priorities Project—are grim. They show that the percentage of new Army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. (The Pentagon's longstanding goal is 90 percent.)

The percentage of what the Army calls "high-quality" recruits—those who have high-school diplomas and who score in the upper 50th percentile on the Armed Forces' aptitude tests—has declined from 56.2 percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more than 2 percent of all recruits could be "Category IV"—defined as applicants who score in the 10th to 30th percentile on the aptitude tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In 2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4 percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs.

These trends are worrisome in at least four ways.

First, and most broadly, it's not a good idea—for a host of social, political, and moral reasons—to place the burdens of national defense so disproportionately on the most downtrodden citizens.

Second, and more practically, high-school dropouts tend to drop out of the military, too. The National Priorities Project cites Army studies finding that 80 percent of high-school graduates finish their first terms of enlistment in the Army—compared with only about half of those with a General Equivalency Degree or no diploma. In other words, taking in more dropouts is a short-sighted method of boosting recruitment numbers. The Army will just have to recruit even more young men and women in the next couple of years, because a lot of the ones they recruited last year will need to be replaced.

Third, a dumber army is a weaker army. A study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Pentagon and published in 2005, evaluated several factors that affect military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and found that aptitude is key. This was true even of basic combat skills, such as shooting straight. Replacing a tank gunner who had scored Category IV with one who'd scored Category IIIA (in the 50th to 64th percentile) improved the chances of hitting a target by 34 percent.

Today's Army, of course, is much more high-tech, from top to bottom. The problem is that when tasks get more technical, aptitude makes an even bigger difference. In one Army study cited by the RAND report, three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were told to make a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Teams with Category IIIB soldiers (who had ranked in the 31st to 49th percentile) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IVs had only a 29 percent chance. The study also showed that adding a high-scoring soldier to a three-man team increased its chance of success by 8 percent. (This also means that adding a low-scoring soldier to a team reduces its chance by a similar margin.)

Fourth, today's Army needs particularly bright soldiers—and it needs, even more, to weed out particularly dim ones—given the direction that at least some of its senior officers want it to take. When the Army was geared to fight large-scaled battles against enemies of comparable strength, imaginative thinking wasn't much required except at a command level. However, now that it's focusing on "asymmetric warfare," especially counterinsurgency campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the requirements are different. The crucial engagements—in many ways, the crucial decisions—take place in the streets, door to door, not by armored divisions or brigades but by infantry companies and squads. And when the targets include hearts and minds, every soldier's judgment and actions have an impact.


field manual on counterinsurgency, which was supervised by Gen. David Petraeus (who is now trying to put its principles into action as U.S. commander in Iraq), emphasized that successful counterinsurgency operations "require Soldiers and Marines at every echelon to possess the following"—and then the authors recite a daunting list of prerequisites, including a "clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict," an "understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent," rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, and several other admirable qualities.

Some of the officers and outside specialists who helped Petraeus write the field manual expressed concerns to me, at the time, that the Army—which was just beginning to lower its standards—might not be up to the demands of this kind of warfare. Given that standards have dipped quite dramatically since—and add to that the problems the Army has had in retaining its most talented junior officers—the concerns now must be graver.

It's well-known that the Army might not have enough combat troops to conduct sustained counterinsurgency campaigns. Now it seems the problem may soon be about quality as well as quantity (brains as well as boots).

The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous "operations tempo"—soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight. This is well understood among senior officers, and it's a major reason why several Army generals favor a faster withdrawal rate. They worry that fewer young men and women—and now it seems fewer smart young men and women—will sign up if doing so means a guaranteed assignment to Iraq. They worry that, if these trends continue, the Army itself will start to crumble.

So, there's a double spiral in effect. The war keeps more good soldiers from enlisting. The lack of good candidates compels the Army to recruit more bad candidates. The swelling ranks of ill-suited soldiers make it harder to fight these kinds of wars effectively.

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We're probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the "small wars" we're more likely to fight.

So, we're facing two choices. Either we change the way we recruit soldiers (and, by the way, cash bonuses are already about as bountiful as they're going to get), or we change the way we conduct foreign policy—that is, we engage more actively in diplomacy or, if war is unavoidable, we form genuine coalitions to help fight it. Otherwise, unless our most dire and direct interests are at stake, we should forget about fighting at all.

Your reply is flawed on two parts

1) I had clearly stated in my earlier post that these weapons would not be provided to infantry grunts but special op forces. You obviously missed it!

2) You're quoting an article from year 2008, when US Army was fighting two wars. It is only expected the quality of recruits to dip when the demand is high. I'd like to see Mr. Kaplan write another article now that Army is in a draw down phase.

PS: If you're so itching to start discussion about quality of US military feel free to start another thread, don't be a troll!

 

[Genesis]

Still a lot smarter than the rest of the world's...And I speak from personal experience, unlike you who probably never left your province.

Really, stupid is the same everywhere, US are not smarter or dumber than anybody else.

Most of the kids joining military are well, not the Harvard or Yale candidates, there could be some qualified young people looking to a career in military, but the common US soldier is just as stupid as the rest of the world.

The fact that on the Afgan battle field has Americans and Afgans, means both are equally stupid for getting in that situation.


the only people who wants to be in battlefields are the French Foreign Legions. True professional killers.

 

[Khan_patriot]

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.

Dumb and Dumber

The U.S. Army lowers recruitment standards … again.
By Fred Kaplan


FRED KAPLAN
Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

• Follow

Thelatest statistics—compiled by the Defense Department. and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based National Priorities Project—are grim. They show that the percentage of new Army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. (The Pentagon's longstanding goal is 90 percent.)

The percentage of what the Army calls "high-quality" recruits—those who have high-school diplomas and who score in the upper 50th percentile on the Armed Forces' aptitude tests—has declined from 56.2 percent in 2005 to 44.6 percent in 2007.

In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more than 2 percent of all recruits could be "Category IV"—defined as applicants who score in the 10th to 30th percentile on the aptitude tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In 2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4 percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs.

These trends are worrisome in at least four ways.

First, and most broadly, it's not a good idea—for a host of social, political, and moral reasons—to place the burdens of national defense so disproportionately on the most downtrodden citizens.

Second, and more practically, high-school dropouts tend to drop out of the military, too. The National Priorities Project cites Army studies finding that 80 percent of high-school graduates finish their first terms of enlistment in the Army—compared with only about half of those with a General Equivalency Degree or no diploma. In other words, taking in more dropouts is a short-sighted method of boosting recruitment numbers. The Army will just have to recruit even more young men and women in the next couple of years, because a lot of the ones they recruited last year will need to be replaced.

Third, a dumber army is a weaker army. A study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by the Pentagon and published in 2005, evaluated several factors that affect military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and found that aptitude is key. This was true even of basic combat skills, such as shooting straight. Replacing a tank gunner who had scored Category IV with one who'd scored Category IIIA (in the 50th to 64th percentile) improved the chances of hitting a target by 34 percent.

Today's Army, of course, is much more high-tech, from top to bottom. The problem is that when tasks get more technical, aptitude makes an even bigger difference. In one Army study cited by the RAND report, three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were told to make a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Teams with Category IIIB soldiers (who had ranked in the 31st to 49th percentile) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IVs had only a 29 percent chance. The study also showed that adding a high-scoring soldier to a three-man team increased its chance of success by 8 percent. (This also means that adding a low-scoring soldier to a team reduces its chance by a similar margin.)

Fourth, today's Army needs particularly bright soldiers—and it needs, even more, to weed out particularly dim ones—given the direction that at least some of its senior officers want it to take. When the Army was geared to fight large-scaled battles against enemies of comparable strength, imaginative thinking wasn't much required except at a command level. However, now that it's focusing on "asymmetric warfare," especially counterinsurgency campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the requirements are different. The crucial engagements—in many ways, the crucial decisions—take place in the streets, door to door, not by armored divisions or brigades but by infantry companies and squads. And when the targets include hearts and minds, every soldier's judgment and actions have an impact.


field manual on counterinsurgency, which was supervised by Gen. David Petraeus (who is now trying to put its principles into action as U.S. commander in Iraq), emphasized that successful counterinsurgency operations "require Soldiers and Marines at every echelon to possess the following"—and then the authors recite a daunting list of prerequisites, including a "clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict," an "understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent," rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, and several other admirable qualities.

Some of the officers and outside specialists who helped Petraeus write the field manual expressed concerns to me, at the time, that the Army—which was just beginning to lower its standards—might not be up to the demands of this kind of warfare. Given that standards have dipped quite dramatically since—and add to that the problems the Army has had in retaining its most talented junior officers—the concerns now must be graver.

It's well-known that the Army might not have enough combat troops to conduct sustained counterinsurgency campaigns. Now it seems the problem may soon be about quality as well as quantity (brains as well as boots).

The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous "operations tempo"—soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight. This is well understood among senior officers, and it's a major reason why several Army generals favor a faster withdrawal rate. They worry that fewer young men and women—and now it seems fewer smart young men and women—will sign up if doing so means a guaranteed assignment to Iraq. They worry that, if these trends continue, the Army itself will start to crumble.

So, there's a double spiral in effect. The war keeps more good soldiers from enlisting. The lack of good candidates compels the Army to recruit more bad candidates. The swelling ranks of ill-suited soldiers make it harder to fight these kinds of wars effectively.

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We're probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the "small wars" we're more likely to fight.

So, we're facing two choices. Either we change the way we recruit soldiers (and, by the way, cash bonuses are already about as bountiful as they're going to get), or we change the way we conduct foreign policy—that is, we engage more actively in diplomacy or, if war is unavoidable, we form genuine coalitions to help fight it. Otherwise, unless our most dire and direct interests are at stake, we should forget about fighting at all.

ofcourse soldiers are dumb, you have to be really stupid to willingly take the risk to be shot at and possibly killed all for nothing but country, while at the same time your countrymen sit on their *** calling you stupid for fighting to protect them and the entire country......People like you need to be forcibly drafted and made to serve in the military so you know exactly what the **** the military is.......

 

[atatwolf]

But we chinese like to copy smart weapon

And everything else...

But Chinese copies like f35 Chinese copy is just paper tiger.

Wouldn't say it is a copy because copy implies the product has the same quality as the original.

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

And everything else...

But Chinese copies like f35 Chinese copy is just paper tiger.

Wouldn't say it is a copy because copy implies the product has the same quality as the original.

Neverless your Anatolians are still very interesting for our copy SAM...or should I said...sub-standard copy