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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (378773)	4/17/2008 2:39:45 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577079

"So the arms race ranks a distant second?" They had won that in the 1970s. They had a huge lead in tanks and men under arms. They had a lead, albeit much smaller in planes of all classifications. They had a very big lead in helicopters. And they had certain classifications of helicopters that we didn't even have. Now, there were all kinds of arguments as to how their stuff compared to ours. Ours were generally more sophisticated and better armored, But how much difference did it make? Sophisticated weapons have a tendency to go non-functional on the battlefield. And, because our stuff was way more expensive than theirs, they usually had a lot more of them available. Your level 20 fighter with an AC of -10 can be taken out if you throw enough goblins at him. This is why we started to develop smart weapons during the 1970s. We knew we couldn't match the numbers. So we tried to leverage our technology. The Stinger was a good example. Man portable, cost about $1k in 1980 dollars. We also had the Assault Breaker program for massed tank assaults. They were small munitions that were air dropped. They'd recognize a tank and follow the heat signature to the engine. Right before impact, it would fire a self-forging slug of metal through the engine cover and destroy the engine. Of course, there were others. Some were not so successful. However, no one really knew if they would work or not. If they worked as advertised, then the Soviet teeth would be pulled. But, who knew? The Stinger in Afghanistan proved the concept worked. Extremely well. We estimated a kill rate of about 30%. The Afghanis claimed much higher. Doesn't really make a huge difference, we could produce and field way more than enough Stingers to take out their whole air force for a few hundred million. As far as weapon systems go, peanuts.