Passing kills off as accidents doesn’t seem to be done. There’s no gain in it.

propaganda use during wartime… keep up morale etc… it does happen and has happened.

Truth is Iraq got pummelled and most of it’s airforce was blown up on the tarmac.

agreed… in fact the truth is the Iraqi Air Force was destroyed on the ground much more severely than the US had estimated itself… which is what drove saddam to make the decision to evacuate some remaining frontline aircraft to Iran.

here’s a list of official losses from 1991… http://iraqimilitary.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=71

compare to losses from 8 years of war to Iran!

They bagged a single F/A-18 (which from memory got passed off as SAM kill because info wasn’t known).

actually Iraqis also got several more air to air kills… but its a moot point in the “grand scheme”… they could not stop the US from destroying Iraq’s entire civilian infrastructure (bridges, power stations, factories, railway yards) which in the end was the biggest cause in the rapid capitulation of the Iraqis (order to withdraw from kuwait, and chased by the USAF/Army from behind and destroyed).

And that’s the truth in war – so often it’s an unknown.

but some are unwilling to accept the opposing perspective unless it matches 100% their own wartime propaganda narrative… which is silly.

yes of course… whilst the US team were looking to recover gun camera footage from a shot down MiG29 (hardly of much importance in the grand scheme of things at that time, and such footage is usually burned out completely anyway), they never seem to have found their shot down pilots and planes in the deserts of southern Iraq (wasn’t that F18 pilot “missing” for donkeys years?)… strange that… risking SF teams to verify some geezers’ “kill claim” instead of using them for something more important… 😀 honestly. how gullible are they believing such nonsense?

no one has a shot with the MiG29 HUD instrumentation showing by any chance?

this is a real shootdown btw…

They would have passed it off as an “accident” had it not been for the video.

I guess you’re right Mack8. there’s no point hitting my head against a brick wall.

yes that was the HUD shot from a MiG29 getting whacked. The Iraqi pilots were a bunch of incompetent cowards and the only thing stopping the brave well trained US pilots from killing them all is that the cowardly iraqis decided to run instead of fight. [/end history of 1991 gulf war]

looks nice and clean. but in this day and age its a bit long in the tooth.

Digging undersea & very deep tunnels isn’t easy to do secretly. They’d have to dispose of millions of tons of spoil. Nor would it be easy to conceal the exits. S. Korea is a densely populated country, & the border zone is closely watched. Digging deep costs more (& no, they don’t have unlimited labour: half the population of the south, & a lot worse fed), & even the deepest tunnel is shallow when it approaches the surface.

its mad but its doable… for a tunnel similar to the latest ones discovered along the DMZ (2m x 2m)… stretching over 40km under the sea with multiple entrances and multiple exits at either end would be about 2m x 2m x 40,000m = 160,000m3 … specific gravity of the rocks around that area about 2.9….. so about 470,000 tonnes of rock to get rid off over a construction period of 15 years… or about 31k tonnes of waste rock in one year… about 2 heavy truck loads per day. if you conceal your entrance near a mine, it can be disguised as quite normal activity even to other mine workers… almost no one need know about it. then you build dozens of entrances from different locations to the main trunk… but since that’s geographically dispersed it can be hidden easily.

on the southern side you dig to the “last 50 meters” for each of the dozens of exits and on “D-Day” blast your way out… in the middle of gangnam 😀

rise of the underworld.

if the “peace” continues for some more years… you can continue extending the deep main trunk until you reach Osan airbase… so much for air supremacy when DPRK hommies stuff claymores into the F15s…

presumably the DPRK is aware of the above… and are thus only maintaining the air bases full of obsolete aircraft and army bases and artillery dug outs with decrepit guns as diversions against their “real” attack… light infantry infiltrations, IEDs, RPGs and light mortars carried by SF to hit US/SK airbases from behind… they would dress them up in SK clothes to create chaos “behind the lines”… and if they used 100,000 of these SF troopers behind korean lines (most in civvies or SK clothing) pandemonium would break out and a swift collapse of the SK internal security. All it will take is lots of US soldiers shooting SK civilians and soldiers by mistake (in fear that they are infiltrators) for trust to break down between the SK/US troopers on the ground (of little consequence, but if some SK troopers open up firefights with US soldiers when the US soldiers shoot at them… relations can quickly deteriorate). Also expect lots of SK troopers shooting their own approaching civilians thinking they’re infiltrators as well as IEDs by the roadside disrupting all the military convoys to the front as well as supplies to airbases… 100,000 SF behind lines is about 12,000 individual cells… each can carry out 1-2 operations per day that is an enormous number of attacks they can carry out in a short space of time… I wonder if the DPRK have now dug their tunnels across the DMZ so deep as to reduce their detectability (logging resolution decreases with depth / type of rock). they would be able to flood out thousands of their men and materials across the tunnels and the war becomes a battle of whether the SK internal security collapses before the DPRK conventional force or not…

I am guessing that the DPRK is aiming to make use of their behind the lines Sf as a potent psych-ops… the “conventional” soldiers in their dugouts will have to bear the brunt of the US/SK arty/air onslaught up until each US/SK airbase falls to the rear line infiltrators.

Its certainly

Western, Asian Arms Suppliers Target Cash-rich Qatar

Looks like France (and others) is trying to sell quite a bit of equipment to Quatar along with the Rafale.
A 20b pie that should make things quite interesting…

I would have thought that Dassault should do a widely publicised offer of Rafales to Iraq in order to get the GCC to “bite”… they’re desperate to stop any high tech weapons deals to Iraq and would sign on the dotted line immediately to stop the Iraqis getting the aircraft. Perhaps dassault can pay a small commission to the Iraqis for their effort afterwards :dev2: