Peter Cairns

Abbott, Greece. Italy. You don't need to be Special Forces or Secret Service to pull off this type of attack, it's well within the capability of most terrorist groups. Peter.

Looked at the BBC website that has pictures on it. The first have a tight grouping on the drivers window, and the second what looks like where the bulllets stopped on the passenger door. Given the angle that suggest that the killer was either standing within 10ft, in which case it's hardly great marksmenship, or a lot further away on the first or second floor, in which case it's good shooting with an automatic weapon. BBC News. Peter.

I'd say Hezbollah, rather than the syrians, as they don't want a strong Lebonese government that can disarm them. The Syrians got there fingers burnt badly with the last assasination. Oh course the conspiracy theorists will have a field day and probably point the finger at both Israel and the CIA, in an attempt too destablise the Lebanon and create a civil war as a way to take out Hezbollah. I don't buy at as it's just too high risk and difficult to pull off in a place like Beruit. So i am for Hezbollah and it might even just have been some bunch of jerks who saw a target and thought he's one of them. It can happen in these situations, sort of the cock up theory of history. Peter.

Lars, For the Syrians the hawk is as expendable as the UAV is to the US, oh and given that it would be light tactical, I wouldn't want to hand launch one with superglue and razorblades on it.... Peter.

You can find a fun clip on here. flight. It's a small UAV over Brisbane being attacked by some crows. it does raise what I think is an interesting asymetrical issue.... Could low tech forces like Syria use birds of prey against small tactical UAV's. Peter.

Steve, The US entered WW1 in April 1917, In the preceeding two months, Germany had resumed unrestricted attacks on shipping including sinking three US merchantman near the US East coast, and had been caught trying to get Mexico to enter the war, against the US. It didn't actually declare war on Austria/Hungary till 8 months later in devcember. It declared war on Japan on 8th Nov 1941, the day after the attack on Peral harbour, but not on Germany or Italy. Germany and Italy actually declared war on the US on the 11th Dec. So there is very strong evidence that those in Europe who thought America wouldn't fight were right, in both cases the US entred for real when they effectively came under attack. Come to think of it the War in Terror didn't start till the US was attacked on it's home soil either..... Peter.

Steve, Never ran a business but as a councillor on Budget scrutiny I did look after $700m (£400m) a year of public money for four years, so I suspect I know as well as you the difference between the gross amount, and how much of that you actually have to play with. Chinas exports and imports are around $750 bn and $630 bn respectively, but there economy is $2,200 bn, which actually makes the £150 bn they sell to the states, only 7% of the economy. Oh and as we are mentioning previous discussions, I have pointed out the propensity of the US to continually undersetimate, the resiliance and will of it's opponents, The korean, and Chinese in the fifties, the Vietnamese in the 70's and now the Iraqi's and Afghans. You may think that a set back in the economy would change China and send it in to crisis, but I think they are as well suited and able to weather a recession as the US was in the 30's. Indeed given the numbers of Chinese who have died in the last 50 years without the system changing, I'd say they were probably more capable of sustaining the fight than the US. Look at flooding, China almost on a regular basis suffers damage and death tolls greater than the Floods in new Orleans, but it doesn't seem to shake them the way it did the US. The vast bulk on Chinese have only the most rudimentary health care and no pension provision worth talking about, but they live with it. Mention cutting pensions ofr reforming medicare in the states and politicains hide under their desks. Peter.

Bertram, I think in part because of there experience with Viretnam, China would think long and hard about a jungle war, In addition Burma is hardly a prize. If you take a sinical view you want maximum benefit for minimum effort and risk, which is what Galtieri and Saddam thought hey would get from the Falklands and Kuwait. Steve, Looking at the CIA fact book, the US makes up 20% of Chinas exports , ( and 5% of US exports go to China, way behind Canada at 17%). However more han 30% goes to Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Likewise China is the biggest Single market for Japan, Korea and Taiwan. all these figure are slightly distorted by China-HongKong trade which shows up seperately. With 10% annual growth I think China could survive the loss of the US market, as long as it could keep it's neighbours on side. There would be hardships but I am pretty sure that the Chinese as willing to suffer for the sake of reunification, at least in the short term. As to food last Year China imported 5 m tons of grain, but it produced over 455 m tons, so I can't see how you think they would starve.... I agree that a war is extremely unlikely and that China would win as the costs of the war outweigh the benefits, and so it shouldn't be a CM:SF first choice, but I don't see it as being a disaster for China, ( or the US for that matter). Peter.

Steve, Whats the problem with a save function for each turn replay, that lets players compile there own movie after the game. Obviously it's not perfect as they can't go back once the have choosen a particular set of views, but if we can get WeGO turns to play then they should be saveable. Peter.

To be honest although it looks like the Chinese are probably going to get the carrier working, I really can't see what they would want it for. One or even two or three isn't enough to challenge the US beyond shore based cover, and it's not really needed for any of their regional rivals. I've always admired the Chinese nuclear deterent in that unlike the US and old USSR, they stopped building Nukes when they thought they had enough to hurt the enemy enough to prevent war, regardless of how many their opponent built. If I had to guess the Chinese will get this one working and out to sea as a research and training ship ( getting round the agreement not to use it as an aircraft carrier) some time in the next five years and then wait and see the ion. If it doesn't make neighbours sit up and beg then they won't build their own. If it does then they might think well ones enough why build more, and if it gets the US to blow billions on defence building a new generation of carriers for a challenge that China isn't going to make, then thats billions that don't go in to helping US manufactureres compete with China. China seems to be adept and keeping the US off balance by a combination of greed and fear. The US eyes the chinese market with averice, and can't get enough cheap Chinese goods, while on the other hand it is warry of the Chinese as rivals and a potential military threat. Peter.

It's not how hard you can hit it's how much you can take..... For the Chinese Taiwan is part of their country so any Nuclear use is against their soil could be seen to merit retaliation in kind. If China is willing to risk unification by force, then it has probably calculated that the US won't go nuclear first, as the US won't risk California. From there point of view if they are wrong, the get a couple of divisions vapourised, although that would hardly go down well with the Taiwanese as they would be on their soil. The US would have to think about the consequences of Chinese retaliation and thats when LA and SF come in to the firing line. It's all about how far up the escalatory ladder each side is willing to go. A difficult factor is credibility, if the US backs down then the credibility of it's deterrent and resolve is brought in to question. That of course does raise the prospect of a country starting a nuclear war to prove it has the resolve to start a nuclear war and so can deter people from starting a nuclear war, which is pretty self defeating and daft. However you could argue that once you adopt a deterrent posture, that depends on people believeing you will act if necessary, that it filters down and ultimately increase your propensity to take action because " We need to maintain credibility" That was the line that Blair took about Nato and Kosovo, we had to act, not only because of what the Serbs were doing, but also to show that Nato was a force to be reckoned with. The contradiction that we had to take offensive action to prove we were a defensive alliance seems to have escaped him. As I have said before there are huge incentives on both sides too keep it as local as possible and conventional, so as in Korea, the US doesn't hit mainland China, and the Chinese don't attack US bases or Carriers ( as long as they stay outwith Chinas EEZ). If I was either the Chinese or the US I'd want to keep it all as tight as possible. Peter.

I read an interesting article recently about the effect China is having on the dollars status as a reserve currency. It made the point that when that happened to the pound it marked the end of Britain as a global power. I still think the US would respond, but as time goes by in Iraq, I wonder how willing the US would be to risk loosing thousands fighting a country that can nuke california. Peter.

Given that one ASM can disable an assault ship if it's 50,000 or 15,000 and Taiwan is closer to China than Cuba is to the US, I'd have thought that a half dozen at 17,000 would make a lot more sense for China than one or two at 50,000. As for the catamarrans, I would think they were just about ideal for the type of operations the Chinese would want to undertake, and if they can produce them at more than 4 a year it shouldn't take long to build up a significant force. We are talking about coastal operations close to, Korea, Taiwan, or Vietnam, not going to the Gulf or invading Mexico. Peter.

Just found this, and thought people might be interested, they are also building 17,000 ton assault ships. Catamarran. Peter. [ November 20, 2006, 01:25 AM: Message edited by: Peter Cairns ]

Syria plus minor, works well. The main part will give us what BFC does best the realistic portrayal of real armies in real situations, and the add on will increase flexibility. We get "What if" and "What if and also" in the one box. Peter.

Not quite, but certainly shows that the Chinese continue to move away from simply copying Russian designs. Photo. Discription. Of particular interest was a new emphasis on crew protection comfort and space. Peter.

GrAL, No I mean carbine... As in, M-1 garand rifle and M-1 Carbine. Peter.

No, M-1 Carbine for the USA? Peter.

Rumors about the WWDC on August 7th, suggest that Apples may be moving to "virtulization" where you would be able to use "Leopard" to run windows programmes, without havig to use "Windows", We may know more by this time next week. Peter.

Imperial Grunt ......the smell of Napalm in the morning, I just bet you just love that too. Peter.

Bewildered, The reason the rest of us will buy CM:SF is because it will be " thoughtful, restrained and devoid of the venomous hatred", Like CM, it will be a thinking persons game. Peter.

On a wider issue, I think we should discuss explosions in general. I think the explosions in CM are pretty good, and they look great in a lot of games, but I don't think they look "Real". I think "Game" explosions tend to resemble "Movie" explosions more than the real thing, so they have a lot of flames and billowing black smoke, but not a big enough "Flash" or "Dust" cloud. They also tend to be too slow. Looking at combat footage of explosions what you tend to get is a huge flash and bang and a massive cloud of dust and at the end a few small fires if any. What you get in movies and games tends to be slower and have more fire and burning, all and all it makes a more visually stunning effect , but I don't think they are that realistic. So shock wave or not as CM:SF is at the graphics stage I am for more realistic explosions. Hows this for an idea. Post some pictures or video from current conflicts of of real explosions and then have BF post some graphics of what they are thinking about and let people judge which is best or most accurate. Peter.

oren_m So where does flying F-16's at over mach 1 above civilian areas come in. It isn't actual violence, or indeed the threat of it, so although it strikes terror in to civilians the people doing it aren't actually terrorists. Israel are killing Civilians in an attempt to take out military targets so they aren't targetting civilians. If in a few years time Hezbullah has rockets that can hit things like oil refinaries, airports and power stations but when it does so kills lots of Israeli civilians, will that be all right as even though more civilians will be killed they won't actually be the targets. I am sure the Germans who died in Hamburg in WW2, because of allied bombing, understood and sympathised with the allies who were aiming at Industrial targets rather than them. Peter.

Megakill, Two questions, Could you effectively just give an "Advance" type orders at the start and sit and watch the game run, and do nothing from then on in, and Which seems to be the best tactic so far, if you play a scenarion more than once, hands off minimal involvement, with the AI doing most of the work, or a "Click Fest" where you take over as much as you can handle. I am interested in whether one style or the other gives and advantage or if it will be even between opponents with different styles of play. Peter.

Steve, Well put, we should judge by the standards of today not the distant past, I often get annoyed when politicians talk about 300 years of democracy when women only got the vote in the 1920's. The problem with the "war on terror" is that it started as a sound bite which then went on to become a strategy. Once you call something a war, on, terror or drugs or poverty, people start approaching it as one, and other alternative ways of dealing with it get sidelined. Equally it leads to over generalisation where lots of different act, drugs or types of deprevation are lumped together and the different causes and solutions that are key to the different types get lost . It's lke the Red Menace, where the splits between russia and China were overlooked because they didn't fit in with the idea of a monolithic communist block, and where we in the west ended up supporting any dodgy leader from Noriega to the Shah if they said they were anticommunist. At the end of the cold war there seemed to be a window where we were moving to judge states by how they treated there own people and there respect for human rights and international law. 9/11 seems to have put an end to that, and we are back to backing thugs like the warlords we fought in Mogadishu, because they oppose the Islamic Courts, who ironically seem to be the only people who can bring any law and order. I remember back to the rise of the Taleban when Afghan people rallied to them as saviours because the ended the chaos of the civil war that had erupted in the wake of the Russian withdrawal, that was the point at which we should have backed them as a force for stability and reconstruction, and got a popular movement on our side. Whether it be tha Taleban, Hamas or Hezbollah, we seem unable to spot early the people's choice and establish good relations with them, and I think that is because the overaching "us v Them" framework is stopping us making pragmatic choices in individual cases. Peter.