Iranian drone plane buzzes U.S. aircraft carrier in Persian Gulf

Originally posted by xmotex
If the conflict can't be contained to a simple set of airstrikes, and ends up with a wider war requiring a land invasion and occupation of the country, a death toll in the millions is entirely possible. I'd expect a lot more resistance from the civilan population in Iran than we've seen in Iraq.

[edit on 6/3/06 by xmotex]

I completely agree with you on this one. If this happens, it will get ugly on both sides, and as a direct result, the desperation will increase, which may result in a situation where all civilians are labeled as combatants.

Everyone would lose.

Originally posted by darksided
Basically the models they both used say Israel would attack first, Iran would counter against Israel and the US, and as soon as they attacked the US it was game over.
......
FYI, Paul Levian, a former German intelligence officer, wrote some about the wargames in an Asia Times article, you can read it here. In those simulations, millions of people died before it was said and done as war spiraled out of control.

I just read the link you provided. It assumes the U.S. will use a massive nuclear retaliation against Iran. If the U.S. were to launch a full fledged nuclear assault on ALL aspects of Iran than yes, we would be talking causalities in the millions and Iran would cease to exist as a country. That is a very extreme scenario by any-one's standards. Anything short of a full volley of nuclear retaliation by the U.S. will result in many casualties. Air strikes alone, assuming no tactical nukes used ,would be rather minimal on the grand scale of types of warfare. An air/ground campaign would have a tremendous increase in deaths but would still take some major, major events to cause millions of deaths.

To give you some sense of scale:
World War II deaths by Country

One thing holds true. You dont touch American boats.

Shall we review what happened to Japan after Pearl Harbor??

Seriously. Everyone speaks ass if Iran will be a push over. Realisticly, no it wont, but in the global view of war, it would be easy. If the US force was stretched far enough the draft would kick in. Oh and by the way, no one can cry about the draft, you "Voluntered" for it when you turned 18.. (Selective service)

In WWII the United Stated brought to bear a force of almost unstoppable strength. In WWII alone, 16.1 million Americans served in the military from beginning to end.

With todays US population that is a number unmatchable by few countries in the world, especialy Iran.

From census.gov
TOTAL AVAILABLE MILITARY MANPOWER
(List Represents All Available Individuals Capable of Military Service)
Data Up Through 2005


United States of America

67,742,879

Iran

18,319,545

( List trunicated for valid data)

Also, if you would venture to www.globalfirepower.com... and compare the countries you would find a very striking difference.

Also, we spend 518 Billion a year on out military.
Iran? A laughable 4 billion.

As for the nuke debate.. Well.... we know we have nukes.. and plenty of them!

Numbers and math are the one unifying language. And it speaks true here as it always has.

[edit on 8-6-2006 by ThermoNuke]

Originally posted by ThermoNuke
Also, we spend 518 Billion a year on out military.
Iran? A laughable 4 billion.

Well alot of that money is wasted on pporl barrel projects to prop up your ailing military industrial complex, well maybe not so ailing now, they just have to name a sum and the US taxpayer writes the checks. Remeber the ole FCS, that was a waste of billions of dollars, for zero result. There are too mnay projects to name. For all teh oney spent on R&D, nothing revoltionary has come from it, tanks are still susceptible to teh cheap RPG and your soldiers are still whacked by the bullets which have essentailly remained unchanged for 100 years,

My little brother is a radar operator on the reagan and he said to me " we saw the damn thing come off the ground right away and new it was drone 2 minutes into its flight. "
He's been in the navy for 17 years now and he's real good at what he does. Iran is full of manure on that one.

Originally posted by lilwolf
My little brother is a radar operator on the reagan and he said to me " we saw the damn thing come off the ground right away and new it was drone 2 minutes into its flight. "
He's been in the navy for 17 years now and he's real good at what he does. Iran is full of manure on that one.

I don't buy this!!

If they knew it was up there, why did they send fighters after 25 mins to intercept the drone?

And did you talk to him on the phone? Is he allowed to talk about this sort of things?

Keep It Real, Mate

[edit on 8-6-2006 by proprog]

Some things he does talk to me about. That was told to me on the phone, because it's not now nor then a classified issue. There are alot of things that go on out there that he won't talk to me about, and I don't blame him. I have no need to know. But after 17 years he has never steered me wrong. So I have no doubts

They probably didnt shoot it down because it wasnt worth the cost of a missile. And if 2 fighters did launch, they were probably just changing shifts.

Originally posted by skippytjc
Think about this people:

The USA has the ability to monitor 100% of all air traffic in the USA 24/7, there is not one plane in the sky that is not tracked and noted, ever.

Now, imagine a war zone for all practical purposes, the USA is operating mulitple carrier battle groups and countless ships in the area all on elevated alert. Each one with its own set of detection abilites AS WELL AS round the clock AWACS overhead. Each carrier group by itself keeps awacs in the air at all times and at least two fighters in the air at all times. All day long, day after day, month after month.

There is no way it is possible, NO WAY, that any aircraft of any type was able to loiter above a carrier battle group for 25 minutes and remain undetected. That drone would have been picked up 100 miles out by multiple aircraft and ships.

And think about the timeline, in 25 minutes that plane managed to get close to an aircraft carrier, loiter for a bit, and then make it all the way back into Iran. All undetected. Not to mention there are a couple AEGIS equiped ships in every carrier group. IMPOSSIBLE!!

The Iranian officials are a joke. And each and every statement they make (if its even true) makes them look even more silly. JOKE!

[edit on 1-6-2006 by skippytjc]

Fools

If any of you are foolish enough to give specifics on our technology, range, and operations, this is exactly what Iran is trying to get, loose lips will sink ships, are you all that dumb not to think Iran intelligence is not monitoring forums and stuff to pump you for information, Your All a bunch of fools, and if any one from the military actually post actual information should be court martialed. This is time of possible war, you could be endangering the lives of our military personel, let alone a possible attack on the United States itself. Theres more going on than you can possibly imagine. You should consider what you post before you post it and the consequences of your actions, don't be a traitor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Iran has had years to study our combat up close in the Iraq war... This is Psyops at its best, don't under estimate your enemy as they gather intellignce on us!!!!!!!! This is consider pre war intelligence fools.. Don't let them see all the cards in your hand!!!


[edit on 10-6-2006 by Pendar]

Originally posted by Pendar
Fools

If any of you are foolish enough to give specifics on our technology, range, and operations, this is exactly what Iran is trying to get, loose lips will sink ships, are you all that dumb not to think Iran intelligence is not monitoring forums and stuff to pump you for

Iranian agents are monitoring ATS for US military intelligence

one of the funniest posts of this thread

>let alone a possible attack on the United States itself.

Wow! It must be like a 23rd generation UAV.



Iranian agents. Pysops. Iranian intelligence.

911 -

Please! Please! Have mercy!! The human body is only built for just so much laughter.

I'm glad I made you laugh, but if I was a foreign government and I seen stuff on ATS like the Boeing bird of prey that was indivisible. I'd monitor this web site, but I guess that's just me. Wow and people are actually posting information about our military capabilities. I stand corrected and wrong. I guess China and Russia who have practice mass land invasions is also nothing to be concerned about, especially since there behind Iran. Who knows maybe they want us to invade Iran so they can retaliate against us. We invade Iran they invade the United States. Our over confidence will probably be our down fall, along with the stupidity. I'm just stating a possible scenario. Go ahead and keep posting military capabilities on an unsecured website, it seems you know best. Heck in world war I and II they kept slogans going like loose lips will sink ships, because you never knew who might over hear it and take it to the enemy. So I hope I make you laugh even harder this time.

You might wanna think about just chilling...

We are in good hands.

Pendar, when have you EVER seen anything posted on here that you couldn't do a 5 second Google search and find out for yourself? Yes, there have been things from Intelgurl saying that a project exists, but that's not going to tell anyone ANYTHING about how to find it, shoot it down, or anything else. There hasn't been anything on here other than saying a project exists that you can't find in Janes, or on Google, or pretty much anywhere online.

Post removed to start new thread instead ...



[edit on 6/22/2006 by centurion1211]

If the US wanted this thing shot down It would have been shot down. With the advanced radar They have, it was seen as soon as it took off.

Short video of Ground to air with US shoulder fired and Hummer mounted missile systems at UAV's

AlBeMeT


[edit on 5-12-2006 by AlBeMet]

Skippy,

The USA has the ability to monitor 100% of all air traffic in the USA 24/7, there is not one plane in the sky that is not tracked and noted, ever.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Our ability to cover the US is dependent on the size, and altitude of targets and, of course, transponders.

One clever smuggler's trick to fly North of the border beyond our territorial waters, enter at low altitude far from the border, proceed to a small local or private airport, then ascend and turn on the transponder so you can log your flight as originating from said small airport within the US. This technique has delivered MILLIONS in coc aine into the US.

One of my highschool teachers was a pilot and shared a few secondhand stories with me that also cast doubt upon the precision of our tracking. A friend of his liked to "have transponder problems", turn out his lights, and fly low over railroad tracks, then turn his lights on when he approached a train in attempts to generate UFO reports.

Our military capabilities on a theater level are very good, but a battle space being overflown by untold sorties plus AWACS and being watched by air defense batteries is not the same as the entire United States being watched by airtraffic controllers who are only concerned with keeping the transponder signals a safe distance from one another.

There is no way it is possible, NO WAY, that any aircraft of any type was able to loiter above a carrier battle group for 25 minutes and remain undetected.

It probably couldn't have overflown a boyscout troop worth its salt for 25 minutes and remained undetected.


Pendar,

If any of you are foolish enough to give specifics on our technology, range, and operations,

This isn't declassified information being discussed. We only know it because the US Military has decided that they are comfortable releasing it to the sources from which we learned it, sources like CNN, Jane's, etc, which I dare say are a couple hundred times more likely than ATS to be monitored by Iranian intelligence. For that matter, an intelligence operative is more likely to be found IN A BAR than on ATS. I'm not just saying that. A former coworker of mine worked on a construction project on Edwards AFB, and when the guys went to the bar after work, there was a chick there who for some reason hung out with these sweaty construction workers and let them impress her with the details of the work they were doing. He figured she was probably a reporter or maybe even a fed keeping tabs on the workers, but noted that if she had been a spy, she would have been able to give her handlers a good start on figuring out whatever the new project was based on the facilities needed to accomodate it.

Doesn't a battle group have 24hr fighter cap in these waters ? It would make sense to me,but what do I know I was in the Army!

The common sense answer is yes, they should have a fighter cap but it could concievably pose some legal questions, so I'm not sure that the usual obvious resources will tell us whether or not that is done.

Airspace is consistent with territorial waters. There are a grand total of 4 miles worth of channel in the 21 mile wide Strait that are considered sea lanes, the rest belongs to the territorial waters of Oman and Iran. Depending on the provisions of relevant treaties (I'm not going to hunt them down unless this becomes an in depth discussion on this point), it may or may not be legal for war planes to operate in that channel, and even if they could, they'd be confined to a space that they can traverse in under 30 seconds (excluding the obvious possibility of using Oman's territorial waters).

In so many words, it might be the case that we'd legally be violating Iranian airspace by having a fighter cap up in the strait of hormuz, but I don't actually know.

I'm not that sure how effective a fighter cap would be intercepting something like this.
We're talking about a very small aircraft whose maximum speed is probably well under an F-18's stall speed. I've seen F-18's trying to escort a Censsna over my neighborhood
shortly after 911 - they had a very hard time going slow enough to bracket it.

In this case, it would be more like trying to intercept a pelican than an airplane.