It is important to note here, that 4 is basically the minimum you can have and maintain a constant presence. You drop below 4 and your going to have coverage gaps; in not immediately then intermittently... IIRC at 3 you loose coverage at maintenance intervals and at 2 you can't do 24 hr coverage anymore.

Thanks, DYAC!!!

Lloyd's of London

Servers, at first. High capacity and low voltage. Cutting your power budget is real shit when you're running thousands of machines... Trickle down to laptops and then desktops eventually....

Oh, for sure... On both counts, actually.

While I don't think the S400s do the Syrian border much good packed up in a warehouse, they don't do any harm (like making high-resolution scans of western aircraft on hardware that Russia may have access to...) either. And I definitely do think that the present Turkish government doesn't do anything unless they figure that they have squeezed as much out of the situation as they can (see also: The Finns and NATO).

More SAMs is more SAMs even if they are just a T90 style rebrand.... and besides, they aren't really doing Turkey any good sitting in a warehouse making the US hate them... Having them would do good for the Ukrainians and not having them would potentially do good for the Turks... Or, they could just drift farther away from the west and NATO, ya know, whatever...

I agree with most of the statements in the original post but the follow-on post that makes the argument that "the details of the deal don't matter" is both a bad take and incorrect on the face of it, given how deep the geopolitical implications and attendant backroom wrangling goes into even fairly simplistic weapons transfers, let alone cutting edge tech with wide ranging NATSEC implications.

As has been pointed out, asking to buy something in the same fashion everyone else has, with the same training and support as everyone else has received is one thing. If after you have been approved through the same process as everyone else, you decide that you require all the tools, training, software and engineering background information necessary to modify or potentially build one of them on your own; that is something else. If it were available at all it would not be available at the same price, the price both monetarily and otherwise would be massively higher. It is at a minimum the difference between buying a Honda and buying a Honda dealership.

Also given that the Patriot Missile System is a part of the US BMD umbrella, and things related to strategic strikes at best and nuclear war at worst tend to be held quite "close to the vest" it seems logical that the details of the inner-workings of the Patriot Missile system might not be available to anyone at any price. AFAICT the only example of tech transfer around the Patriot is the integration of the Rafael Skyceptor Missile into the system and that was primarily transfering information into US hands not out of them.

If you didn't know or understand any of that, that is one thing as Turkey/Western relations is a pretty deep rabbithole, especially post Erdo and no one will fault you for that. If you were deliberately trying to conceal information (which seems less likely on a reread) that makes Turkey look less like the victim and get them more sympathy after they way overreached in their relationship with the US and then decided to play a little "fuck around and find out" by buying S400s from Russia, than that would be something else and something worse. Turkey has decided to play hardball with everyone all the time and that is certainly fair and valid for an independent nation, they just shouldn't be surprised if people want to take their ball and go home, and tell others not to bother with them if they are going to be like that...

Sidenote: the way reedit rearranges comments over time based on votes makes it much harder to keep track of deeper conversations with more branches like this one...

The other option is that he knew the details and made a deliberate decision not to mention them because they make his argument much weaker... Either way is bad, but yours might actually be the more charitable interpretation....

Ok... So now, to prove that they are superior, Turkey needs to donate their S400s to Ukraine... ;)

Yes, because all military actions are always entirely force-on-force and there isn't any collateral damage or, God forbid, dictatorial autocrats waging genocidal wars of territorial expansion where killing civilians is explicit the point. That would never happen.