Bulletins and News Discussion from December 4th to December 10th, 2023 - The Legacy of Kissinger - COTW: Laos

Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.

After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.

There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.

The weekly update is here on the website.

Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.

The Country of the Week is Laos! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

You're viewing a single thread.

1.5K comments

https://archive.is/5x2cx
Another fun story from the f-35 train wreck saga:
The Air Force is trying to save 2 severely damaged F-35s by merging them into a single 'Franken-bird' aircraft
The US Air Force on Thursday said its engineers in Utah are trying to restore two damaged F-35s by rebuilding them into one fully operational stealth fighter.

While military engineers have attempted similar restorations with other aircraft, the project to create what maintenance experts called the "Franken-bird" is the first among F-35s, the Air Force said in a statement.
To assemble the Franken-bird — an F-35A Lightning II — the Air Force said it's put together a "dream team" of experts from Lockheed Martin, the F-35 Joint Program Office, the 388th Fighter Wing, and the Ogden Air Logistics Complex.
One of the jets they're working on saw its landing gear collapse in June 2020, while the other F-35 suffered an engine fire in 2014.
No seriously,

The aircraft that caught fire is estimated to have sustained $50 million worth of damage, with the rear two-thirds of its body burned, per an Air Force report at the time.

Now, the Air Force said it's trying to replace the damaged nose of the F-35 that was damaged in 2020 with parts from the jet that caught fire.
"All of the aircraft sections can be de-mated and re-mated theoretically, but it's just never been done before," said Scott Taylor, Lockheed Martin lead mechanical engineer, in the statement. "This is the first F-35 'Franken-bird' to date. This is history."
Taylor said the Franken-bird team has been documenting the project meticulously, hoping their work can develop standard repair procedures for other F-35s in the future.
Lol
The team is working out of Hill Air Force Base near Salt Lake City, where engineers had to design and build "entirely new, unique specialized" equipment, tools, and fixtures to perform the repairs away from the F-35 plant in Texas, the Air Force said.
They're trying to mormonize the f-35 lmao
All of this can fit into a Conex cargo container so it can be transported and used for other purposes in the future, Taylor said.
The project is estimated to take around five years to complete, even with the team now being months ahead of schedule. It was conceptualized in January 2020, according to Taylor, and is set to be finished in March 2025, according to the Air Force.
Two more years before we hear news of this one crashing

A single F-35A costs around $70 million to manufacture, according to Lockheed Martin.
The name Franken-bird is also a reference to the Franken-tiger fighters that the US Navy bought in the late 2000s. Northrop Grumman engineers created the Franken-tiger by replacing the nose of an F-5E built for Switzerland with the nose of an F-5F.
- 5 years to basically repair one plane, amazing.
  
  It took them 6 years to even think about fixing 'em
  
  America would lose a near-peer war in the first month
  as somebody reading The Capital Order by Clara Mattei which is partially about WW1 and Britain and Italy discovering what an industrial war is, reading how the British government was just like "Oh, surely the invisible hand of the free market will step in and produce all the materiel we need for this war, as if we have high enough demand, the supply shall surely rise to meet it, this is literally economics 101," and when that obviously didn't happen and the capitalists were even selling British ships for profit while they were increasingly needed for the basic survival of Britain as a functioning country, the government had to finally step in and do nationalizations or they would have collapsed...
  all of this really rung a bell with the current way that the American military is structured. except I'm unsure if the capitalists of today would let the president actually do any of this. Although, part of the British military production (in fact, most of it) was a hybrid of government ownership and private ownership where the government essentially handled the companies and told the workers what to do and told the capitalists that they needed to make X amount of stuff in Y weeks, but the capitalists were guaranteed significant profit (and because this non-market production was so much more efficient than market production, and because workers were essentially not legally allowed to strike or mass bargain anymore, this profit was actually higher than what they made pre-war in many cases). So I wonder if current-day capitalists would tolerate that kind of arrangement or if they would cut off their noses to spite their faces.
  though tbh it might not really matter anyway - the war would start and might - might - be effectively over quite quickly if China/Russia decides to just take out carrier groups with hypersonic missiles within the first month or two. It would then take years to establish domestic military production at sufficient scale to build the naval and air power that the US would need to be a fighting force, especially if they needed to source all the critical minerals they needed for their fancy shit from places other than China for obvious reasons. And those are years where, like, what is the US gonna do without half their aircraft carriers? China will be chewing through the island chains and because they're just kinda right there, they don't need the ability to project force on the other side of the planet, they can just use facilities that they already have in mainland China to strike whatever they need to strike. I guess the US will just threaten to nuke the world I suppose, or even actually do it.
  
  I guess the US will just threaten to nuke the world I suppose, or even actually do it.
  Concidering how that was the plan if the Red Army ever decided to do a liberate Europe 2.0, I'm all but convinced it's going to take an actual gun to the head of whoever the president is to prevent a nuclear ending to the world over the first hint of the American military capabilities crumbling like a sheet of toilet paper under a garden hose.
- The rapid enshittification of a $1 Trillion project will never not be funny.
- Lol. But cars are “totaled” with far far less damage.
  
  combining two wrecked cars into one salvage title car is a time honored tradition
  
  SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! At the TACOMA DOME! M-M-M-MONSTER truck demolition derby! BE THERE!
  
  I think an f-35 would even lose in a junkyard derby against g-bodies and panther platforms
- A single F-35A costs around $70 million to manufacture, according to Lockheed Martin.
  All the estimates I'm seeing around are more like 170 million per unit? Also hilarious that this article doesn't say how much the repair effort is costing
  A Sukhoi Su-57 is estimated to cost between $40-50 million bee tee dubs, how many brand new planes can Russia build for what this chop shop job is costing the US?
  
  I mean it's probably incorrect and a typo then. But if that's somehow Lockheed Martin's actual cost to manufacturer the plane that would mean they're pocketing 100mil per plane.
  I doubt Lockheed Martin would give just the production cost out and would want to hide that though.
- "All of the aircraft sections can be de-mated and re-mated theoretically, but it's just never been done before,"
  Sorry honey I'll have to de-mate you. No that's not a made up word, even the USAF uses it!
- This is why we don't have health care meme.
  For a plane that can't do shit.
- 5 years, custom tools, and no repair procedures? How the fuck are they supposed to do maintenance on these things if they get damaged in the field? I guess they just toss the whole thing and build a new one? Most efficient system.

1512 comments