Like I said, I took no pleasure in the air bombing of Serbia, but I’m guessing unlike you I was a witness to the mass graves uncovered in Bosnia-Herzegovina, saw what the Serb backed militias did in that country, and when they tried to ethnically cleanse Kosovo using similar tactics then as far as I’m concerned they lost the right to make any complaints about what NATO did.

It appears that I remember more then you as there were no innocent sides in that sorry mess of conflict and terror, attrocities were committed by all sides, the Serbs just happened to be the best at it.

Call it moral equivalence, but if you think collateral damage of war is the same as genocide against civilians that’s your own values at work.

What NATO did goes way beyound collateral damage as the destruction of civilian infrastructure was the intended goal and not some unfortunate case of buildings getting caught up in the explosion of a missile targeting a legit military target.

Your arguement of moral equivalence is so morally bankrupt that I am genuinely suprised you would advocate it. Lets persue that line of reasoning a little futher shall we.

If its justified to target Serbian civilian infrastructure because they massacred Albanian civilians, what would be justified if the Serbs started massacring Italian, German and British civilans? Is it then justified to target Serbian civilans? Replace ‘Serbs’ with Albanians/Muslims and ‘Italians, Germans and Brits’ with Serbs and one can easly see how ‘moral equivalence’ is exactly the kind of philosophy that led civilized western Europeans to commit the attrocities that they did.

My disgust at the NATO targeting of civilian infrastructure is not based on what the Serbs ‘deserved’ but rather on what I expected from NATO nations. Guess its my fault for believing that NATO member states are principled and just nations that would follow the spirit of international treaties and plain moral rightousness instead of word lawyering to twist the meaning of those treaties to allow blantent infringments on their part. 🙁

History does not care about feelings of someone and results can not be changed afterwards. Cold logic is, the NATO did succeed with a minimum of losses, when the Serbs did not. In reality the Serbs still have the option to look for a political solution about their intrests, what their military were unable to achive and still unable to do.
In every real test, like that conflict, some shortcomings will show-up and do trigger corrections. Nothing wrong about that, just the contrary. Despite some shortcomings the NATO was still able to reach that outcome with a minimum of losses.
Never do exspect, that your opponent will run a war to your rules. Clausewitz did claim, that war is politics with military force. Military which showed unable to to do so had lost, even when they did not feel defeated militarily.

As usually you have your shutters on and its a waste of time trying to reason with you.

The only one here who is getting emotional is you with your stubburn denial of any and everything that does not fit in with your warped sense of how the world should be.

End results are far less important then the processed that led to them in many many cases, and just because you managed to fluke a favourable result is no excuse to avoid learning from the experience.

NATO’s military intellegence were spectacularly wrong on Serbian militrary losses, and had they sent the ground forces in, then they would have paid a steep blood price for that blunder. I dare you to dispute that.

NATO might have won, but the results could have been a lot different had NATO focused on purely military targets instead of targeting civilian infrastructure. One really has to wonder why it took such morally objectionable tactics for NATO to provail dispite its overwhelming military superiority, and that is exactly what NATO has been trying to find out and improve upon with new weapons and procedures. Because without addressing those questions, NATO’s only lesson from the Kosovo war would have been that to target civilian infrastructure will help you win a conflict more then targeting hostile military forces. That is a dangerous and slippery slop to get on, but those suffering from self-impose miopia or blind nationalistic fever don’t seem to be able to see the problem.

Those who lack the mental faculties to see potentail dangers would be unable to take measures to avoid them, and the opionions you are expressing are exactly what I would expect from someone who blunders through one avoidable mistake after another yet still refuses to learn from the experience. :rolleyes:

You know the answer but do not like it for personal reasons. Not mine but your problem. Some face-keeping losses did change nothing as the result did show. Your are absolute correct in your assumption. No sympathy for foolish military. They are the experts to warn the politicans about the military outcome. No doing so, the Serbian leadership did even loose the Dayton gains.
Idiotic behavior has nothing to do with honor!

What you seem completely incapable of grasping is the fact that the Serbs did not come anywhere near to loosing militarily. Control of the skies does no equate victory, and both superpowers had been defeated by foes who did not control the skies.

Had NATO ground forces gone in, it would have resulted in the highest body count for NATO in its history and would have been the highest for America since Vietnam. It is entirely possible that the heavy losses could have shattered western resolve and NATO forces would have quit the campaign under unbarable domestic outrage and shock.

That was the only way the Serbs could possibly have won and that was the strategy they were pursuing, with great success as the results clearly shows. The generals knew what they had to do and they were doing it. Had the civilians held their nerve for a few more weeks, a month at the most, NATO would have started the ground offensive and that is when the Serbs could have won their victory.

But at the end of the day, NATO, despite its overwhelming military superiority, completely failed in its attempt to win militarily by devastaing Serb forces but instead only narrowly averted disaster by deliberately targeting civilian infrastucture and thus broke the will of the population.

If there is any case for arguing that some weapons systems were useless, it would be against NATO precision weapons that failed frequently in the cloudy and misty environment and were so spectacularly ineffective it hitting the targets the NATO high command wanted that they had to resort to targeting civilian infrastructure. The facts support my arguement as it was exactly the poor performance of LGBs that caused the Americans and then the world to look more and more towards GPS guided weapons and better all weather recon and targeting capabilities.

But as usual, you never let little details like facts and logic cloud your ‘reasoning’. :rolleyes:

The US Army took a different view, and considered it a fixed-site system.

Thats true enough, but I was just pointing out that it would not take much to make the whole system ‘mobile’, well certainly mobile enough to move out and set up in time with strategic SAMs like the patriot and S300 etc.

Flight International’s Uncle Roger used to claim that if an engineer said that something would take a long time and a lot of money to develop, he was almost certainly telling the truth. But if he said it could not be done, he was lying! But those technical hurdles might prove not so easy to overcome. Various progress reports on the US ABL programme have stressed the degree to which it is pushing the state of the art to the known limits.

Indeed, but even proven tech is good enough to be fielded as it is, which is hardly state-of-the-art now. The US military might not judge it so, but that is only because they are forced to make hard choices by Iraq and Afganistan.

Besides, considerable break throughs have been achieved and there is talk of fighter-based energy weapons becoming a possibility before too long.

The likes of Russia and China has the money and industrial base needed to make such a project work and are more willing to accept systems that might not pass US requirements.

A laser weapon of the sort you are advocating would add something new to the target set to be found on a future battlefield, but I’m not sure I’d be happy to serve in its crew.
It will be large.
It will have a strong thermal signature, particularly if it’s an electrically-powered laser.
Its likely deployment would spur the development of countermeasures. Sensors have been developed for sniper-location that detect the presence of an optical system (the sniper’s telescopic sight), so detecting much larger laser optics should be relatively easy. Although the range will be much longer, the target will be much bigger.

Ture enough, but that is the nature of the weapons industry.

However, I see great potential for such a system, and if the technology matures enough, it even be enough to force the abandoment of the ARM in favour of a more viable alternative, just as it is specularted that new gen rail and energy weapons being worked on for warships might force nations to focus more in favour of torpedos instead of anti-ship missiles as a means of attacking warships.

Imagine, so what if the think can be detected hundreds of miles away if it can kill any and all missiles sent after it? (it might make the SAM less useful, but the element of suprise is less important in the blanket air defence coverage I am thinking of as opposed to opportunistic pot shots trying to down an enemy or two after you had surrendered control of the skies)

Stealth would be of little help to ARMs trying to get past this system as the target radar is strong enough to detect it many many miles away anyways, and high speed don’t sit well with steath, so the system is odds on to always be able to detect a missile and be ready to shoot it down.

The only thing that missiles can do against such a system would be either saturation attack or sub-munitions, which is pretty much the same thing as the smaller the bomblets the less range they have, so the closer the missile need to get before it can release its payload. Then it would be a case of the number of missiles/sorties needed to kill the SAM and whether it would be more economical to use a different weapon, like railguns, precison ballistic missiles or longer ranged laser weapons or even special forces etc.

My thesis is that dealing with that ARM may not be as easy as you are postulating.

True, I am looking more at the potential of the idea as opposed to the possible capabilities of a system fieldable very soon from now. Any laser weapon fielded of defence of key targerts would likely have to be one of many and one lay amongst many to be truely effective. But their inclusion will force the use of a far higher number of weapons against a target then would normally be necessary and may keep something functioning for far longer then otherwise.

As I think someone else remarked, that’s called a mission kill. It was a central concept behind the Alarm missile’s loitering mode.
When a radar crew sees an ARM launch, they shut the radar down. That’s what the crew of the 36D6-M ‘Tin Shield’ near Gori in Georgia did on 6 August, so the incoming Russian Kh-58 (AS-11 ‘Kilter’) crashed harmlessly near the village of Tsiteliubani.

Yes, in the case of Kosovo, the Serbs pretty much gave up control of the skies from day one and it was only ever about how long it would take and how much it would cost NATO. No single weapons system could have made much of a difference in such a situation no matter how good it is. The serbs could have had F22s and they would still have lost, the Raptors would have simply been swamped and killed off on the ground, or after they ran out of muntions, or crashed because they had no base to return to…

ARMs are a bit more single-minded that that. I don’t think the ARM ‘chooses’ its target. It’s either locked onto a specific threat before being launched, or is programmed to look for a specific threat and in some cases a specific threat in a specific geographic area. That’s why the Tetraedr decoy I posted info about a few days ago might be effective – its false target will be sufficiently close to the real emitter to meet any geographic (positional) constraints loaded into the ARM.

So how do they deal with frequency agile radars (FAR) then?

If you could see my office, you’d understand why it has become lost – anything not relevant to my current project(s) is either despatched to the local recycling scheme, or if it’s of possible long-term interest gets stowed (alas unindexed) in an archive box. With the Christmas vacation rapidly approaching, I doubt if I’ll have time to go searching. Since gun systems are of peripheral interest to me, it may have gone to landfill

Lol, fair enough.

While we’re talking about the battle between ARM and radar, during the ‘Allied Force’ airstrikes against the former Yugoslavia in 1999, ARMs fired against the 1S91M1 (‘Straight Flush’) radar-surveillance and missile-guidance vehicles of the 2K12M1 Kub-M1 (SA-6 ‘Gainful’) surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, seem to have hit the antennas, but done much less damage to the vehicle itself. Engineers from the Digitalni Radio company and Moma Stanojlovic aircraft repair factory in Serbia have developed replacement antennas that will allow the vehicles to be returned to service.

Mercurius Cantabrigiensis

Interesting. But these days, the AESA radar of modern SAM systems are the most expansive single piece of kit by a long way, so I don’t think that is going to work unless you are talking about trying to physically armour them somehow. But the only armour I can think of that will even have the slightest chance of working would be that electro-magnic force field thing I head was being developed for tanks and other armour. But that is far more into the future then even my laser weapons. 😉

If the scheme could be made to work, it is unlikely to prove a solution to the ARM threat. A network of mobile surveillance radars would have to deal not with today’s ARMs but with next-generation types. Designed to deal with mobile threats, these would combine a passive anti-radiation homing head with a second channel able to lock onto the threat emitter, even after the latter has shut down.

For example, the AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile combines an Improved Anti-Radiation Homing seeker with an active millimetric wave sensor able to lock onto a target emitter that has shut down. Germany’s proposed Armiger would use an imaging infrared seeker as its second sensor.

If the ARM can use this sort of technology to home onto a non-emitting target, a vehicle-mounted radar fleeing to a bunker or similar safe shelter might not survive long enough to reach its destination.

If we are talking about future ARMs, then it might also be worth while to take into account future defensive weapons, most interesting of these are ground based high energy laser weapons.

The US already has demonstrated an almost feildable working example that can engage artillary shells amongst other things, and the airborne laser is another example of just have far the technology has developed.

Other countries are obviously some way behind the US, but you must admit that it should not take the likes of Russia and China, who already have great past experience with laser tech and also have active laser weapon programmes (some of which are already being fielded), to come up with an operational if somewhat cruder version for use in teh defence of high value targets such as SAM sites.

Employed in this manner, their relative short range would be of little importance and plugged directly into the national grid or even independent generators, they should be able to shoot a vast number of shots at a very low unit cost.

With a layed defence of Tors, lasers and maybe even CIWS’, any ARM is going to have a pretty tough time getting to its intended targets.

Thus, could the ultimate solution to ARMs be laser weapons?

Another effective counter to networked mobile surveillance radars could be the Israel Aerospace Industries Harop (Harpy-2) anti-radar UAV. Unlike the earlier Harpy, which could loiter over the battlefield for up to two hours, Harop is not solely dependant on a passive radar homing seeker. It also has a visual guidance channel that would allow man-in-the-loop attacks against emitters that had shut down.

I am highly dubious of the Harpy’s capabilities against modern intergrated defensive networks, given its slow speed. Tors and even late gen MANPADs would eat them for lunch all day long and even standard AAA would have a more then decent chance of killing them before they even got close to their targets.

Aren’t the Americans taking a long hard look at hypersonic interconternental bombers? Thats a damn good reason for a dedicated interceptor right there.

Also, high speed interceptors could be fairly good counter against stealth ac. For example, if you use long frequency radio waves, you have a decent chance of getting a readable return from stealth planes, but the data is not good enough to guide a SAM with, so you send in your high speed interceptor instead.

Against the likes of the B2 and F117, it would be an easy kill as soon as the interceptor detects them. Even against the likes of the F22 and F35, if you have a M4+ plane, you can just spam missiles at them as you make a pass, and so what if the F22/35 can outdance you? At full speed you can easily outrun their missiles and head home to refuel and refit to try it again.

People who actually know about nukes suggest that such a last line of defence is necessary only if your procedures are slipshod and slack (or perhaps if you’re doling out your nukes to less-than-reliable allies).

So, according to you, the Americans have ‘slipshod and slack procedures’ and has a habbit of ‘doling out their nukes to less-than-reliable allies’? And they have PALs because they realise this and decide to add PALs instead of improving their procedures?

Your reasoning simply flies in the face of reality.

An RAF aircraft would NEVER have been accidentally loaded with live nukes, an RAF pilot would never have failed to notice the coloured bands on the weapon that indicate exactly what it had, warhead wise, and he and his aircraft would never have been released to the runway with weapons aboard without proper authorisation, and would have been physically stopped without that authorisation.

I’m sure you would have said the same thing of the Americans a few months back. :rolleyes:

Indeed, proper procedures and safeguards are BETTER than PALs, which have problems all of their own.

Since when has this been a ‘this or that’ choice?

Nor was the lack of a PAL on WE177 a “dirty little secret”, certainly since the weapon was withdrawn, much has been known about the weapon’s characteristics and the procedures surrounding it.

You get as worried as you like, old chap, but do so in the realisation that you’re doing so out of total ignorance, and about a weapon we haven’t had for nearly ten years.

I’m not worried about any one type of bomb, but the culture that places trust in people above proven technology.

Trust is a great thing, but you can’t change human nature, and it is in our nature to error and fail. Mistakes are always made no matter how well designed the system is. Having something to fall back on if and when humans fail is a hell of a lot better then not having it. Especially when we already have an all to similar example when your vaunted procedures have failed so spectacularly.

The sheer breadth of your misunderstanding and ignorance is astonishing.

WE177 was not armed before take off, it was pre-armed. Since the bomb used a thermal battery with a wax-like electrolyte that was virtually inert until it was melted by a tiny pyrotechnic charge, the bomb had to be dropped to be used. (Except in the Jag, release of a weapon also required the active consent of both crew).

Nor was the pre-arming key all that simple. The SEF key was a specially designed and unique key with a million combinations.

The two man principal has nothing to do with numbers of guards. It dictated that anything involving the weapon should involve two authorised and competent persons, familiar with the task in hand. Two men must be present at all times whenever there was access to a nuclear weapon or nuclear component and there should be no situation where one man would be able to make settings on the weapon, or make decisions as to its use, without a second person agreeing.

The two man principle applied even to two aircraft technicians who had nothing to do with the weapon, and if it was necessary to change a component then the fitter AND an overseer, competent in that job, had to be present. An electrician at Wildenrath was shot for crossing the NLZ line momentarily before the rest of the crew…..

Meanwhile the use of NLZs (50 yards around the weapon) ensured that your imaginary ‘traitor pilot’ would have been killed if he tried to even approach a bomb alone, let alone steal one. A yellow line across the mouth of the hangar marked the No Lone Zone. The guards had orders to stop, and if necessary shoot, anyone crossing the line alone. And even if they didn’t, they needed proper authorisation to let the aircraft taxy (the nuclear QRA sheds were always physically blocked off from the runways by barriers).

The idea that one man could have overpowered the guard force and stolen a nuke is risible, and is clearly the product of a fertile imagination unencumbered by any knowledge of UK nuclear practises and procedures.

When the RAF used the single-seat Jag there were host of additional precautions that made it impossible for a pilot to get anywhere close to an armed aircraft, let alone get it out of the HAS, without proper authorisation, and there were a number of hurdles to clear before the aircraft was released onto the runway. This included a dual key system for the entry door to the HAS, one key issued to the pilot and one held by the RAFP guard at the HAS. The key was issued with a three digit release code which the pilot had to write on a whiteboard just to get the HAS doors opened to taxy. It would have required the co-operation of the armourers, the HAS team, the RAF Police and the security team at the taxiway gates for a pilot to be able to take off without authorisation.

It almost makes me want to “suicide myself”. (Don’t tell me, that’s a typo too?)

Don’t forget that the RAF had seen and used PALs (on the RAF Germany Canberra B(I)8s and F-4s) so saw the advantages and disadvantages of the technology.

Do you know what happened if the PAL failed? “The crew would call in the custodian who would then dial the digits straight in to the bomb….”

And what makes you think the Americans or Russians or Chinese or any other responsible nuclear power does not employ similar measures? Yet the Russians and Americans also employ PALs.

As the recent American case shows, all those theoretical safeguards and security measures can and have already failed. What is written in textbooks is more often then not not what happens in real life, that is why there are so many safety measures. One thing you have to remember is that even if a system is perfect in theory, if it relies too heavily on humans, then human error could easily undo it. That is the reason behind PALs – it is a last line of defence totally independent of anyone who may have physical access to the weapon. It is something that British weapons lack, and now that this dirty little secret is out, every terrorist nutjob and underworld arms dealer is going to be actively seeking out cracks in the system to try and get their hands on these ‘unsafe’ weapons. If nothing else, that is going to make attacks in this country more likely.

Lastly, please do not insult the intellegence of people here by suggesting that the true reason for the MoD’s decision not to employ PALs as anything other then petty penny pinching from politicians who have a damning record of underinvestment in the military. Have a think of why nukes deployed to Germany would need PALs in the first place.