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Originally Posted by Doug Sams
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I've seen this before, where folks talk themselves into accepting a partial solution, only to realize later that half-@$$ed solutions usually amount to no solution at all. The Maginot line comes to mind...
Doug
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Sorta like SLS... which looks good on paper, but when you look at the price tag and what's being given up to pay for it... and what they're gonna be able to do with it... (or not do as the case may be... won't be doing much without modules, in-space propulsion stages, etc.)
Talk about your champagne tastes on a beer budget... and that never works long term...
Later! OL JR
Maginot Line is an interesting case... classic case of planning to fight thinking the next war will be fought like the last one, while the enemy learned the lessons of the last war and intends to fight it completely differently.
Maginot Line would have worked GREAT... in 1914... but in 1940, it was a completely different story... The French completely ignored the lessons learned in WWI, about the futility of trench warfare and the essential nature of movement and breakthrough to victory. After four years of stalemate, the war came to an end in a matter of months due to the employment of tanks to create breakthroughs in combination with the German Army not being backed up because Germany's economy was collapsing and demoralization of the populace. The Germans, who'd been on the receiving end of those early tank attacks, learned the capabilities of armored thrusts to break the lines of resistance and turn the tide of battle, and employed that as a cornerstone in their tactical thinking about how to fight the next war (Blitzkrieg) as spelled out by Heinz Guderian and others...
Whats interesting in hindsight is that NATO took much the same foolish stance for the defense of Western Europe during the Cold War. They assumed that the Soviets intended a massive armored invasion in a conventional war against the West if it came to war, since the Russians had all those dozens and dozens of tank divisions standing by in the Warsaw Pact. Thus, NATO intended to 'turn back the Red hordes' and destroy the massive conventional armored thrusts of Soviet tanks by the use of tactical nuclear weapons, neutron and enhanced radiation bombs, and such (which incidentally would have devastated Western Europe anyway, using them on their own soil). The Soviets were well aware of this, and their plans were completely different. If it came to war, the Soviets intended a full out nuclear first strike against NATO bases and assets in Western Europe as a PRELUDE to any other action-- IOW, nuke "everything" and then send the tanks in to secure what's left...
Later!