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Originally posted by The Vagabond
Please discuss the topic and not other members.
The fact that a mod happens to disagree with you is not relevant to this subject- your views have equal merit and are equally welcome regardless of position, as long as they are expressed with T&C.
ATS doesn't sanction any one view or require staffers to accept any particular ideology, and that's a good thing.
Originally posted by Xtrozero
Do you really believe that? Do you think that maybe Israel is trying to hold defensive posture?
Hezbollah is no match for them if it was an all out war, but Israel is just trying to contain them while protecting their own people.
Israel is the strongest military wise country in the region that is why adding nukes to the mix would change all that.
Korea was a lot like Vietnam where China was backing both and in both wars the US was defensive and had to stay defensive or China would had jump into the battle too,
and that would had turned a regional war into a world war...good thing we kept it defensive.
The problem with a defensive war is you cannot win it for you can only try and make the offensive country stop fighting.
I would also like to know how you can even compare the US military might that we have today against other countries to our military match-ups during the Korea or Vietnam wars.
If we fought either of those wars today in an offensive mode they would end rather quickly too.
Neither do I, but for different reasons.
Once you own the skies you can do anything you want.
That is what the US Air Force is all about, and that is our part. It is not about a dog fight of fighters it is utter dominance in the air. What ever and who ever we would own the skies.
An asymmetrical ground war is another matter for unless we are willing to go all Genghis Khan on them that type of war would go on for a decade or more.
What it does is but them on defensive and a country that has no power, transportation, C2, clean water or food cannot fight very well.
It all depends on what we would want to do with the country. In Iraq we are trying to get out while building them up to they can run their own country. This makes it very easy for the extremist to do their thing until we do like the surge and push very hard militarily.
As I said it is not about shooting down their aircraft, hell they only have 266 fighters if they could get them all working. It is about owning the air space, and to do that you also wipe their communication, C2, radar and anything else related out.
Their fighters are almost useless and most would not even get off the ground. They would be down to shoulder rockets and other very portable weapons.
Although hard-pressed to maintain their fleet of American-built fighters, Iranian ground crews kept as many as 60 Tomcats mission capable throughout much of the war, despite a lack of parts, normal attrition, and dwindling supplies of material and munitions. Iranian F-14 crews clashed repeatedly with Iraqi MiGs and French Mirage F-Is as the Iraqis attacked Iranian oil platforms and storage facilities. The fact that many of these highly skilled, aggressive Iranian crews had been in prison after the revolution makes their story all the more remarkable. These crews are responsible for the only kills scored by the highly touted Phoenix missile, which, along with the AWG-9 nose-mounted radar, was at the heart of the F14's weapons system. Throughout the book, the Tomcat's capabilities are highlighted in a way not seen in accounts of U.S. Navy operations and are nearly too much to be believed. Iraqi MiG-21 and MiG-23 pilots didn't stand a chance against the big American swing-wing fighter. The equally large and powerful MiG-25-some flown by Soviet instructor pilots-had to rely on its eye-watering speed to disengage from a flight of IRIAF Tomcats.
This book's photos and text abound with surprising details and accounts little known in the Western press, which the authors say was sadly misinformed as to the status and operational readiness of the IRIAF's Tomcat fleet. One unfortunately confusing aspect of the text is the authors' assertion that the names of the pilots whose experiences are featured in the text are not their true identities. Thus, as we read about a particular pilot's success or consult the appendices for details on Tomcat kills, we wonder who the Iranian aviator really was. However, I have since learned that the names given in the list of kills are the actual names. A little confusing, but at least we have some idea of these successful crews' identities.
This work is an entertaining look at an air force and arena that have seldom seen any in-depth exposure.
[Author Affiliation]
By Cdr. Peter B. Mersky, USNR (Ret.)
www.acig.org...
It does Tom Cooper and Farhad Bishop a disservice to compare this book to any other on the aerial aspects of the Iran-Iraq War. The aircraft enthusiast community is a competitive and often bitchy environment, but an attempt to detract from this book should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
The book is meticulous yet written with great passion. Literally dozens of forgotten episodes of this fascinating air war are brought to light for the first time. Only serious investigative research, including exclusive primary evidence gathered during in-country interviews, can generate the level of detail and colour contained in this book. Cooper and Bishop maintain an enviable contact book that many aviation journalists can only dream of. In a profession of bluffers, they are real experts. This is the reason for much of the criticism they face.
I can attest that the book is slowly getting read and recommended onwards amongst military and regional specialists in Washington and throughout the US military community. The reason is obvious. The book shows, in detail, how developing world countries (and particularly Iran) can use the highest levels of military technology and even improve on their employment through local innovation. If you were wowed by laser-guided bombs and electronic warfare in the wee hours of 17 January 1991, then spare a thought for those who were fighting that kind of war from 1980-1988. This is what Cooper and Bishop have so expertly done.
Dr Michael Knights
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
www.amazon.com...
Picture this...once we own the air EVERY military vehicle that moves in the country is destroyed.
An antiseptic war, fought by pilots flying safely three miles high. It seems almost too good to be true-and it was. In fact-as some critics suspected at the time-the air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely ineffective. NATO bombs plowed up some fields, blew up hundreds of cars, trucks and decoys, and barely dented Serb artillery and armor. According to a suppressed Air Force report obtained by NEWSWEEK, the number of targets verifiably destroyed was a tiny fraction of those claimed: 14 tanks, not 120; 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artillery pieces, not 450. Out of the 744 "confirmed" strikes by NATO pilots during the war, the Air Force investigators, who spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot, found evidence of just 58.
www.geocities.com...
Despite the heavy bombardment, NATO was surprised to find afterwards that the Serbian armed forces had survived in such good order. Around 50 Serbian aircraft were lost but only 14 tanks, 18 APCs and 20 artillery pieces.[12] Most of the targets hit in Kosovo were decoys, such as tanks made out of plastic sheets with telegraph poles for gun barrels. Anti-aircraft defences were preserved by the simple expedient of not turning them on, preventing NATO aircraft from detecting them but forcing them to keep above a ceiling of 15,000ft (5,000m), making accurate bombing much more difficult. Towards the end of the war, it was claimed that carpet bombing by B-52 aircraft had caused huge casualties among Serbian troops stationed along the Kosovo–Albania border. Careful searching by NATO investigators found no evidence of any such large-scale casualties.
www.answers.com...
Think of 100s of Apaches, A-10s, and other air to ground attack aircraft littering the roads with 1000s of destroyed vehicles with little threat to them.
About 3 days to destroy their infrastructure to bring the country to a complete halt after that it is a turkey shoot much like The Highway of Death that was quoted.
In the end, as noted above, enemy SAM fire brought down only two aircraft (both American), thanks to allied reliance on electronic jamming, towed decoys, and countertactics to negate enemy surface-to-air defenses.37 However, NATO never fully succeeded in neutralizing the Serb IADS, and NATO aircraft operating over Serbia and Kosovo were always within the engagement envelopes of enemy SA-3 and SA-6 missiles—envelopes that extended as high as 50,000 feet. Because of that persistent threat, mission planners had to place such high-value surveillance-and-reconnaissance platforms as the U-2 and JSTARS in less-than-ideal orbits to keep them outside the lethal reach of enemy SAMs. Even during the operation’s final week, NATO spokesmen conceded that they could confirm the destruction of only three of Serbia’s approximately 25 known mobile SA-6 batteries.38
In all events, by remaining dispersed and mobile, and by activating their radars only selectively, the Serb IADS operators yielded the short-term tactical initiative in order to pre-sent a longer-term operational and strategic challenge to allied combat sorties. The downside of that inactivity for NATO was that opportunities to employ the classic Wild Weasel tactic of attacking enemy SAM radars with HARMs while SAMs guided on airborne targets were “few and far between.”39 Lt Gen Michael Short, the Allied Force air commander, later indicated that his aircrews were ready for a wall-to-wall SAM threat like the one encountered over Iraq during Desert Storm but that “it just never materialized. And then it began to dawn on us that . . . they were going to try to survive as opposed to being willing to die to shoot down an airplane.”40
www.airpower.au.af.mil...
The bad part for them is our abilities are much better now than then with vastly better equipment and tactics.
The big question is what then? That is why we would not attack them unless they attacked first and then we would only destroy their military and infrastructure from the air and then sit back and let them make the next move.
Originally posted by chickeneater
When Iran is done, will Saudi Arabia be next? I mean, most of the 9/11 hi-jackers are saudis. That country also covertly funds all sorts of terrorism cells and madrassas all over the world.
You don't think all those "suicide bomber's family fund" comes from no where do you? The saudis are hell bent on converting the world to islam.