posted on Jun, 28 2005 @ 06:52 AM
>>
French Rafales + Meteor = A fair fight for Pakistan (If I was from Pakistan, I would put India dead in 10 minutes just to annoy him, but I'm not,so
just forget that).
>>
Don't be an idiot. You _DO NOT_ attack airpower while it's 'in it's element'!
You attack it where it spends upwards of 60% of it's day, even at the height of combat: on the ground.
The best way to do that is with something like a Delilah-GL (no sortie steal) or similar cruise weapon which can sit offset from a HAS'd target
matrix and then zip in to catch the enemy based on an activity warning from COMINT, remote imaging or some kind of direct observation (snakeeater)
alert.
OTOH, once you make it clear that you are going to pound the crap out of your enemy's base infrastructure /his/ best alternative is not to go with an
airplane and 12,000ft of concrete base signature at all.
Nor is it to shift to a Soviet styled '1 shot, hit or miss-ile' system. Rather it is to use the _exact same_ drone technology, with a supersonic
booster segment.
Why?
Three Reasons:
1. Because if you can force that jet to make 1 9G+ break, even if it hasn't mission killed itself with jettisoned weapons or lost fuel margin, the
/second/ such break is going to be of about 5G and the third is going to be of 2-3G. Because it cannot reenergize it's Ps factor fast enough to beat
a weapon which, like a wolf or a shark, _comes back for another pass_.
2. Because you can loft such a weapon in giant curtains of hold orbit or skirmish line sweeping movement. And the enemy will likely not be able to
see it, even while a simple datalink between them will achieve pure optical search volumes that rival that of radar (i.e. cheap and _easy_ tech to
master). Hence, there is no 'point defense' (and _all_ SAMs which launch from a specific geographic location in response to a site associated
guidance capability are ultimately 'point defense'). Rather you can loft weapon which is 1/20th the size of an SA-10 Grumble. And have it STAY A
THREAT for upwards of 3-4hrs.
3. They are dirt cheap. Even if you can see a Turbo-SAM, you cannot kill it with an AIM-120 or MICA or ASTRA or SD-10 for less than the cost of the
SAM itself. Which means that you can loft 30 T-SAMs against 4 Mirage 2000 with 6 MICA each. And 16 kills later, with roughly 8+8=16 million dollars
worth of missilery in the toilet, the last six T-SAMs are going to centerpunch the manned jets for upwards of 80-100 million dollars /more/. Such
negative-accounting cannot go on for very long. And the 'nice thing' is that each Turbo-SAM can be fired off a cheap back-of-pickup-truck catapult
and _recovered_ perhaps 4-5 times, via a parachute and an airbag beacon or digital map type recovery system. A hand grenade will end the life of a
fighter if it plunges through the canopy folks. And a missile that can _reattack_ won't have a miss distance.
>>
Pakistan will be getting Rafales and newer F-16s from France and USA respectively.
>>
I doubt it. Too poor. Too willing to play both sides off the middle. The Chinese have already provided the Paks with TBM technology. And they are
jerking us around on Osama because they know we will leave them in their backwater frustration as soon as we 'declare GWOT won'.
The difference is that there is a lame duck president (and party) who _WILL BE REPLACED_ in 2008. Thanks to the quagmire that is Iraq's 'bailing
the Titanic with a teaspoon' approach to liars politics.
And when that happens, the Democrats (and Congress) will do the same thing they did in 1972. Declare our interest in the region over. Presidential
Hubris or no.
It should be noted that when General Garrison quit the Army as a sign of his acceptance of responsibility for the MASSIVE flubup that was Mogadishu;
it was less than a year after that Mohammed Farrah Aidid was face down in a pool of his own blood.
Either the Israelis (or semi-acknowledged bypass for Presidential prohibition against assassination) or Al Quaeda (who trained his rocket teams but
otherwise did not like his politics) doing for him in a fashion that proves that once you are no longer sheltered by the people against the 'Great
Satan' of an overwhelming bully force. It's back to business as usual. Which is pure cutthroat.
Such is how we get Osama. If he isn't already dead and the Fed simply covering it up to continue letting contracts to firms gone thin on defense
drawdown.
And when we do 'get our man' Pakistan will be as helplessly subject as ever to the Indian's benevolent acceptance of their existence. Force on
Force metrics, even up to and including nukes, simply DOES NOT favor anything but a treasury depleting continuation of the Paki bluff.
And even this may end as the role of facilitator (smuggler and currency/document exchange) middlemen is coming to an end via the shutting down of the
unlicensed money trade. Which was about 90% of the funding and intel keeping AQ and the Taliban 'safe' to begin with. Everybody knows the U.S. is
so fickle that 'any excuse will do' to abandon someone no longer convenient.
KPl.