You appear to be trying to make a distinction without a difference, it doesn’t really matter which particular system they use to do the job.

No, that particular part was dealing with many of the inaccuracies in the reporting. I said more than once in there that all of them were partially at fault over the whole mess, the point of the article was not to decide who was right or wrong but to illustrate how the media has managed to foul up the reporting of the entire incident by eliminating standard practices such as fact checking.

WTF. What is with all these idiots doing things purely to antagonize the Russians? The Ukraine is an S-300P and S-300V user, they don’t need to be worrying too much about Russian SS-21 and SS-26 strikes. They’re going to be covered by the ABM network split between Poland and the Czech Republic. Why would they want to make this kind of announcement right now? Do they want to see if Putin’s Army has enough gas in the tanks to make a left hook and ford the crossing between Russia and the Crimean?

It does beg the question though why didn’t the Russians use PGMs when operatiing in proximity to civilians.

How close were they really dropping bombs to civillians though? We know the oil pipeline and airport attack stories were totally false, what else has been fabricated or at least confused with artillery or missile strikes?

The US intelligence services are overtaxed by the Middle East already or overrated.

Not exactly overtaxed. Each command (EUCOM, CENTCOM) has its own intelligence branch responsible for monitoring that area. This was handled by EUCOM, not CENTCOM, who handles the Middle East. I wouldn’t exactly say overrated either; if you watch Russian CBW facilities for decades and then see something similar in Iraq, what would you think? It’s not Hollywood, satellites and sensors cannot see through buildings and take samples of whats inside. Yes the intelligence community managed to dork up Iraq in more ways than one, but it wasn’t a deliberate fabrication of evidence. And at any rate those people wouldn’t be the ones primarily responsible for monitoring the Georgian situation either.

Here’s my take on a lot of the (primarily Western) media foul ups regarding the Russia-Georgia thing:

http://geimint.blogspot.com/2008/08/russia-georgia-disinformation.html

The Bank Job with Jason Statham, on Blu-ray. I’ll watch anything with Statham, he’s one of my favorite actors. This one was a really good film I thought. The way they twisted a bunch of historical events together to come up with an interesting and plausible plot was very well done. What’s really amusing is the historical featurette looking at the story. You have scholars talking about how MI5 would never do anything like that, countered by an ex-5 employee saying they sure did operate that way sometimes 😀 Anyway, a really good heist flick.

Libya fired a number of S-200s in 1986 at US aircraft during ELDORADO CANYON. Don’t recall that having worked out very well.

I told you, Arabs aren’t so smart in using a sophiscated obselete weapons.

Then how would your obsolete S-200 have changed any situation.

2 decades of experience means he started around ’88, so he wasn’t able to get any experience over Afghanistan. Plus these were BACKFIRE crewmembers, meaning that they weren’t going to be seeing any real time over Chechnya either. So it’s not like they had the opportunity for any significant combat experience until now. Also, as they were on a recon mission it was likely a Tu-22MR. There are very few of those around and you’d therefore want a more senior crew aboard, especially going into hostile airspace.

[color=red]20 pages, start over![/color]