SOCHey SOC could I ask you opinion on the subject of this thread, you seem to be our resident Russian missile expert (I must confess a degree of jealousy;) ). This whole subject has me confused, I think I have made all the evidence fit but something just does not seem ‘right’?:confused:
First off, the SRBM used by the earlier Iskander systems is the 9M723. The term Iskander encompasses the entire system, much like the term Trieumf encompasses the entire S-400 system, including the various missile types used therein. So any Iskander-K could very well employ a new weapon component.
Secondly, I doubt that the weapon is the 3M14. This weapon here, the R-500, is described as a stealthy, low-altitude, maneuvering, subsonic weapon. As far as I am aware the 3M14 is nowhere near as maneuverable throughout its flight regime as the R-500 is claimed to be. This could in theory be a 3M14 relation or some sort of advanced derivative thereof, or it could be related to the Kh-65SE for that matter.
SOCyou cut off israel, and you will have support to russia over chechnya as a problem. cut off chechnya and then you’ll have kashmir. then thats done, you’ll have thailand …it never ends. draw a line in the sand, and defend it, dont keep running away, it wont work.
1. We should cut off Israel, and not necessarily because of the benefit to relationships with people that matter (read: those with oil)
2. Chechnya is an internal problem. If Russia wants to rain down volleys of TOS-1 rockets into Chechen population centers, more power to them. It is an internal issue, and nobody’s opinions should matter but those of the Russians.
3. Kashmir is an Indian-Pakistani-Chinese issue. Let the three of them sort it out. No need for foreign involvement there.
4. Thailand? Another internal issue. Let the Thai citizens sort it out themselves.
It’s not running away. It’s letting the people who should be responsible clean up their situations. Much the same way that the FRY issue should have been treated as an internal civil matter and not something for NATO and therefore the USA to stick its nose into for no reason whatsoever. Much the same way that Darfur is another example of an internal issue that the USA has no business getting involved with. Much the same way that sectarian violence in Iraq is an internal issue that we have no business trying to solve (I already stated that we shouldn’t have gone in for regime change in the first place).
If these people can’t deal with their own internal and sometimes external (in the case of Kashmir) situations, then maybe they need to reconsider their status as independant nations?
SOCPentagon officials? Uhm, rather not.. I think this happened at much lower level…
The point is that someone in government service at some level (admittedly not at the top levels, obviously) had to leak those images to the press.
I can tell you one thing. Every European would stand up and applaud such plan. Me in the first place.
Don’t stand up and applaud just yet, that’s my plan for the Middle East only, you have no idea what I’d do to Europe…
If you embraced Iran as a new partner, you got a smooth change there in less than 30 years. The best way to dissolve Islamic regime is not B-2A and F-22, but Hollywood, rock’n’roll, alcohol and weed. All this very demanded by large share of young Iranian population.
Well, that all depends on your meaning and interpretation of “dissolve” :diablo:
At any rate you are correct, I’ve said personally for years that the way out of the North Korea and Cuba situations are McDonald’s in Pyongyang and a baseball expansion team in Havana. Foreign relations does not have to be as complicated as people want to make it out to be sometimes.
Why make them enemies if they basically want the same as we do?
Precisely.
Precisely. Iraq was a time bomb, sooner or later a situation like this would have happened (when nothing else then after Saddam’s natural death). Isolating all three fractions in some kind of quasi federative republic could have prevented much of this mess.
What is most amusing is how people didn’t see this coming.
SOC.
So you only see a film if,for example,Arri or Panaflex supply the cameras?What’s wrong with hand held digital?
Ever thought that this is how the director wanted us to see his vision.
His vision is his prerogative, and there is nothing wrong with that. I just don’t like watching a film that has been done that way, that’s all.
SOC.
So you only see a film if,for example,Arri or Panaflex supply the cameras?What’s wrong with hand held digital?
Ever thought that this is how the director wanted us to see his vision.
His vision is his prerogative, and there is nothing wrong with that. I just don’t like watching a film that has been done that way, that’s all.
SOC[b]Sealordlawrence, plawolf, the two of you need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and re-engage in your discussion on more civil terms.[/b]
SOCSorry flex but you are wrong, absolutely wrong. Terrorism is a poor name, this is insurgency on a global scale. The westernisation of the Middle East could/would have reversed the slide towards radicalism.
Why should we go about westernizing the rest of the world? They can live how they want and believe what they want, up until the point where those beliefs cause them to desire to blow apart buildings in downtown NYC, as far as I am concerned.
Only the most ignorant of non muslim America haters solely qote Israel as the reason for the current situation. If anything Israel is a symptom.
The Arab nations have been irate over our support of Israel for decades. Israel is not the only reason, but it is a big one insofar as state-sponsorship of terrorism is often concerned, for example.
The overriding issue is oppression and poverty, that is the real issue causing Islamic radicalism.
Not so much oppression and poverty as lack of education (this does not mean that all Muslims are uneducated, bear with me). Someone who can’t read very well has to rely on what his teachers tell him the Koran says. If the Koran says go kill foreigners, how can he believe otherwise if he can’t read it for himself?
The idea was not out of reality at all, people like to forget that the sectarian issues did not emerge until well after the invasion and that AQ had to expend enormous efforts to manifest it. This was a product of incompetence that occurred immediately after the invasion
What do you call Saddams repression of the Kurds then? How was that not sectarian? Or the desire of the southern Shia’s to oust Saddam in 1991? That sectarianism translates to a nation-state level, even. Sunni Saudi Arabia was more than happy in 1991 to have Sunni Saddam left in power if it meant that a majority Shia population wouldn’t take hold and align themselves with the other major Shia power in the region, namely Iran.
SOCThe oil is for Isreal, not U.S.A., and go to Google and other search engines you’ll see the U.S. Gov installed and armed Saddam ( 1968-1996) American Free Press had lsit of all the U.S. companies the U.S. Gov aloud to sell Chemical Weapons to Iraq from 1980’s till 1996,
You can also find asinine claims of B-2s being shot down over the FRY too. Just because its on the internet, doesn’t make it holy writ…
remember Iran Contra affair, well you see Oliver North in jail, or is he hosting on FOX like he’s a American hero?
What does sending arms to Iran to finance the Contras have to do with Iraq, apart from the fact that said weapons were most likely going ot be used against Saddam’s military?
SOCSean- one thing that I find slightly confusing, is that while there seems to be a great awareness of the age/unreliabilty of many of the US supplied AAM’s (AIM-54,ect), the equally old HAWK missiles still seem to have a starring role in the Iranian AD network.
I find this slightly confusing, since the ground based missiles can be replaced/augmented by different types with relative ease, as compared to the integration issues of a AAM?
Matt
Some of the HAWKs were “newer” than the AIM-54s, as they benefitted during the 1980s from spares that were sourced through Israel.
Also, your average SAM can last a bit longer than an AAM. Each time you hang a live AAM from an aircraft and fly it about, there is a degree of damage done to the internal avionics and whatnot. They can be repaired to a degree, but most legacy systems at the very least (not too sure if this has been rectified on 21st century AAMs or not) did have a sort of “shelf life” as it pertained to time spent under the wing or fuselage of a fighter. A SAM sitting on the ground not doing anything isn’t affected by a lot of the stresses an AAM is when it is carried aloft. SAMs have their own things to deal with, such as corrosion and the like, but AFAIK those are less labor intensive to rectify.
The US wants to break Saudi hold over oil
Not sure what exactly that would do to the overall situation with OPEC, which we’d still have to contend with. A far more likely reason for oil to have been a factor, if you ask me, is that we had advance insight into what Iran was concocting with their plans for the Iranian Oil Bourse. War is an extension of politics by other means, to nearly quote a military genius you should all know of, and politics and economics are always hand in hand. If we end up in an actual shooting war with Iran within the next decade (I find the prospect of anything else unlikely, the government has been distancing itself from the prospect of anything recently with the sudden downplaying of the nuclear issue), it will be for economic reasons, and this may well be the start of it in the IOB.
The revelation of these incidents never came from inside but always from external sources
Yes, but where do you think they got the AG photos from to begin with?
Purely theoretically, if this was the real reason and US really managed to turn Iraq into a capitalist democracy, how in the world would that solve the problem with Islamic terrorism?
Yeah, that wasn’t really going to help at all. Even I can tell you that.
Iraq was a total foul up. We had no business looking for regime change or any sort of post-conflict occupation in the first place. Military action to eliminate the need for ONW/OSW as Saddam was in violation of a number of UNSC resolutions already, sure, but that could be handled with B-2s and TLAMs. In reality we should have gone into Afghanistan with the express purpose of obliterating Al Qaeda, then ignored the Taleban and turned south to roll up all of the terrorist hideouts in Waziristan.
If you do it my way, we eliminate Al Qaeda in short order in Afghanistan, then cut off Israel, and move along to domestic matters, without getting into a quagmire in Iraq or an asinine sabre rattling exercise with Ahmadinejad, whose nation in fact should have been extended an olive branch and embraced as a new trading partner. We should have started and then stopped with Al Qaeda, and done it in a most overwhelmingly devastating fashion. Aggressor eliminated, put the sword back in the sheath until the next actual aggressor appears.
Now have to deal with the abject failure in Iraq and the remnants of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan that we failed to get the first time. Had we done that right to begin with, we’d have been free to do something sensible like drop Israel off of the wagon, embrace a new relationship with both Iran AND Iraq, and gone about strengthening ties with the Chinese and the Russians.
Where is any slightest connection between Iraq and Palestinian, Saudi or Lebanese terrorist organizations?
Find Richard Miniter’s book Disinformation. The Western media has been reporting on Iraqi terrorist connections for a good long while, they just forgot about them when a Conservative American Republican decided to go to war.
The most stupid was the idea itself of choosing a country with three separate religious and/or ethnic fractions
That is the most intelligent thing I’ve heard in this discussion to this point. I said something very similar a while ago. The best solution was a loose federation of three separate states, with the central government controlling and fairly distributing the oil wealth to take that out of play. Oversimplified, but you can find the whole discourse on the subject in here somewhere. Once Turkey decided to deny us the opportunity for a second front, their concerns vis-a-vis the Kurds should have been tossed and that solution given a hard look if you ask me.
All terrorists call one single reason for their hatred towards the US.. and that is their protection of Israel..
An oversimplification, as Osama was rather irate that we dared set foot on Saudi soil to defend them against Iraq for one, but that is the crux of the issue. What you basically have is an American political machine that values the existance of Israel over the lives of American citizens, and if you ask me that is criminal. We should have ended that unprofitable relationship decades ago.
The White House aides who lead Bush around like a puppy on a leash do not understand the Islamists.
Neither do pretty much all of the other Western governments out there, for that matter…
I don’t think the US have given any consideration to either of them, and this is well documented by various international agencies.
When have we faced someone who either of those apply to and not followed them? Are Islamic Extremists signatories of the Geneva Convention? And as far as I know we have not violated the LOAC, if I remember right it doesn’t cover things like AG or rendition flights.
You fight dirty and always have.
Not dirty enough, not by a longshot.
There is no reason that we should not be allowed to use combat tactics to fight Al Qaeda that would make the US military feared and not derided as we have managed to do to this point. If they want to blow up things in other corners of the globe, so be it, who are we to act as policemen of the world anyway.
If you really want a more in depth explanation of how we really should be handling things…
SOCWhy D?
You got:
AV-8A Harrier
AV-8B Harrier II
AV-8B (NA) Night Attack Harrier II
AV-8B+ Harrier II Plus
It’d be D because you forgot the AV-8C 😀
SOC12 missiles is a workable loadout, they don’t state all of them are internal either.
360 degree radar coverage is also not that far-fetched. The Su-27M was already envisioned with a rear-facing radar. Put an AESA in the nose, an AESA in the tail, and flank AESA antennae along, say, the intake trunks, and there you go.
SOCI think that depends on the situation. I, for one, would hate anyone blowing himself up in my country for any ideology. But in the peculiar case US or Russians would find my country worth invading, a couple of Polish and Hungarian terrorists blowing themselves up in order to take some invaders with them would be a rather welcomed addition to otherwise dull occupation days.
The problem is that the terrorists self-detonating are targeting a lot of civillians. They do that because the civillians are not overwhelmingly pushing for a US withdrawl so that the terrorists backers may exert their influence. This is akin to, say, terrorists from the USSR laying IEDs along the Autobahn in late 1945 because they didn’t like the US presence in post-war Germany.
The point is, they don’t have to. Even if you leveled Bushehr, Teheran International and Bandar Abbas in one single attack, how would that help remove Iranian regime? Or do you think that the few F-14s are the last obstacle that prevents another Iranian revolution from happening?
I wasn’t implying that an air war would result in the decapitation of the Iranian regime, I thought the whole air campaign argument begun with a discussion of taking out the nuke facilities anyway.
Iraq is pumping oil as fast as it can…
Go look at US imports from Iraq over the last 15 years or so. Then re-evaluate the question I asked.
There would be enough to mount an attack on US interests in the region, like oil shipping traffic, or oil refinery resources in the region.
If they attacked refineries, they’d be in a whole new mess of trouble. At any rate, relying on their air power to interdict shipping is relatively pointless. A few AEGIS ships can protect pretty large pieces of real estate from everything from a C-802 to an Airbus. The Iranian threat to shipping is theoretically very real and very severe, and it doesn’t involve airpower. It involves exploiting their Kilo subs and taking advantage of the shallow water operating environment. Aircraft are better left for air defense, as they don’t have much of a SAM network. Plus, attacking US interests with aircraft is iffy at best, and suicidal at worst, given the large number of air defense assets (airborne and ground-based) in the region.
So what is the point of being a military and political superpower if Interpol has a better record of getting their man… and interpol is French!
Hey now, before we bring French policing into this, let’s let them sort out the issues inside France first 😀
I notice you didn’t mention MANPADs in your Blog
Do you see any MANPADS’ in Google Earth? 😀 At any rate I only focus on identifiable SAM systems, mostly strategic level assets. Kill those off with TLAMs or stealth aircraft and you can overfly the small stuff for the duration of your bombing campaign for the most part anyway.
Not sure how the US will cope with a real threat…
Hopefully it’d cause us to realize that we need to fight wars on the level of the enemy, and not hamstrung by archaic and outdated concepts like the Law of Armed Conflict or the Geneva Conventions.
SOCI have come across some articles on the web that state the SR-71 had one external hardpoint that could accomodate some sort of nuclear weapon and I was stunned?
BUT, I do recall the SR-71 being able to piggy back some sort of launch vehicle now that I think about it? Does anyone know what Im talking about?[/B]
The object in your image is a NASA experiment called Coldwall hung underneath one of the YF-12As they used for high-speed flight testing after the USAF program was axed. Coldwall was bascally a really cold cylinder inside of a fairing. That fairing was jetissoned at speed, and obviously the really cold thing got really warm, really fast. That was what they were researching, in plain English.
Two A-12s were modified to carry a special reconnaissance drone, designated D-21. The modified A-12s were redesignated M-21s. These were designed to take off with the D-21 drone, powered by a Marquart ramjet engine mounted on a pylon between the rudders. The M-21 then hauled the drone aloft and launched it at speeds high enough to ignite the drone’s ramjet motor.
…and then they tried to employ a different launch/separation procedure and one of the M-21s was lost in the process. Only the second aircraft, which was the jet lost, was ever used for launching D-21s, the first aircraft conducted captive carry tests only and now resides in a museum in Seattle.
The claim for SR-71 nuke strike capability is probably a mutation of its original mission:
“While Lockheed continued to refine the A-12, the U. S. Air Force ordered an interceptor version of the aircraft designated the YF-12A. The Skunk Works, however, proposed a “specific mission” version configured to conduct post-nuclear strike reconnaissance. This system evolved into the USAF’s familiar SR-71.”
It’s a little more complicated than that. The jet was originally designated RS-71, for Reconnaissance-Strike, but the designation got changed by Curtis Lemay in an LBJ speech:
http://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/nonstandard-mds.html#_MDS_SR71
Apparently the Strike mission was cancelled and SR-71 stuck, but I have heard rumors that the jet may have been able to be fitted with a weapons bay in one of the chine bays rather than a sensor pallet. If you’re conducting post-strike reconnaissance, having the ability to pop a target with a SRAM-type weapon that has escaped destruction to that point would be a useful capability.
Note that the A-12 and the SR-71 have different systems and different capabilities, despite both being recon aircraft using the same base airframe.
A lot of that derives from the fact that the A-12 was primarily a photo-recon platform and could fit a much larger camera in the bay behind the pilot than the SR-71 would be able to fit in the chine bays or the nose. In Operation NICE GIRL, a fly-off was conducted between the two jets, and it was found that the photo take from the A-12 was of better quality than that of the SR-71. No big suprise due to the much larger camera, but still interesting.
SOCNow I have read of it being critcized for not having any fuselage pylons.
There was one fuselage station almost between the ventral fins, I remember seeing ALQ-131 ECM pods being hung there. As far as I know this was not a hardpoint wired for weapons carriage though.
the Su-34 has a flattened nose radome, contrary to the Su-33KUB, how can we explain that?
Different radars, for one. Differing RCS requirements, for two.
I have answered why the Su-34 has a flat and blunt nose to avoid assymetric yaw movements and side slips at high AoA
You’re making an assumption. It probably has more to do with lowering the RCS than anything else. Ride control can be effectively managed by flight control software and canard action. The Russians are far from stupid in the FCS arena, they did manage to de-TVC the Su-37 and give it all of the agility that the TVC-equipped aircraft had, and that is pretty impressive in my book, speaking volumes about the aerodynamic capability of the FLANKER airframe.
The Su-30M was a PVO project that had nothing to do with strike capability.
I think you mean the baseline Su-30/Su-30K…
SOCNot enough oil for you? It seemed so important to save Iraq from Saddam… what has changed? Starting to work out the real world doesn’t want to have a form of government imposed on it by a foreign power?
Foreign terrorist idiots entering the country and blowing things up doesn’t make it easier either, do remember that. And where is all of this oil that the US is supposed to be usurping?
Or they could sign a contract with Sukhoi and fly their F-14s and F-4s to Russia to be reengined and have a modern digital avionics package installed. With R-77s and a modern though not necessarily ground breaking radar they should be decent aircraft to defend Iran.
But are there enough of them to defend against an organized, concentrated USAF/USN air assault? I’d think the answer would be no.
Yeah, the americans have a track record of hunting down individuals and it really isn’t very good. Saddam, Khamenei, OBL… considering they are supposed to be a super power you’d expect better…
1 out of 3 isn’t THAT bad…but maybe Ahmadinejad needs to just invest in some nice caves to escape the Great Satan 😀
Anyway, here’s one reason why an air campaign (only speaking to that aspect) over Iran wouldn’t be as difficult as one might think:
http://geimint.blogspot.com/2007/09/iranian-sam-network.html
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