Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s certainly not borne out by any recent history.
Americans, if current polling is any pointer, are war weary. 11 years of unwon wars and mounting casualties seem to have had an effect on the national psyche and it won't be the first time either – witness the national military torpor after 1975. It took the best part of a decade to get the gung-hos back, and they did that only by invading fortress Grenada (where they lost more men to friendly fire than anything else).
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Also there’s an asymmetry — Syrian regime doesn’t need to achieve or even attempt air superiority, just needs to make US attempts to do so costly.
Quite. And they very likely will. This then plays out on evening news in the US over and over - dead or captured pilots to a casualty adverse US public. Obama might not be up for re-election but plenty of Congressmen and women are.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Keir Leslie,
So they each get one mission, during which they might possibly not be shot down, so long as they don’t actually confront what would most likely be a massive response.
I think you are overestimating the airborne assets the US has in the region.
They also don’t need to land at the same place they took off from. The roads as airstrips strategy, as developed by the Swiss and the Swedish in the 1960s, makes an airforce almost invulnerable on the ground. The US would need to keep several hundred aircraft in the air the whole time to counter it. They don’t have that many available, and certainly not to loiter dangerously over a very hostile environment.
Has the US demonstrated capability of exerting air superiority against maintained modern fighters without allied support over hostile territory using carrier based forces? I don’t think they have, not since Korea/Vietnam, at best.
Not since Korea. Vietnam was when they met their match and that was mostly against old Mig-17s.
The US fleet fighters have also regularly lost airborne practice brawls against similar aircraft to those in the Syrian fleet, which is the only time they've ever really fronted them. Fact is, the Russian built fighters are the best dogfighters in the world, which is a primary reason there is so much discomfort with the impeding F-35 as it’s nowhere near a match for the much cheaper Russian and Chinese built fighters.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I really don’t think it’s as easy an option as you suggest.
Agree. Also the large Mig-23 and Mig-29 forces don't require airfields – a road with a shed to refuel will do the trick.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to BenWilson,
Yes, even a more targeted and purely military attack, like destroying Syria’s air-force, doesn’t have a clear purpose or end-game.
Even that's hard. A mixture of force dispersion and rotating aircraft into the air means that this is unlikely to happen. And the very, very, last thing Obama needs are dogfights over Damascus with the possibility of a US Navy FA-18 going down. Assad has some 400 Migs and Sukhois with the most recent being easily a match for anything the US could throw at them.
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Given that much of this is driven by supposed Mossad intel, make of this what you will:
Israel has granted a U.S. company the first licence to explore for oil and gas in the occupied Golan Heights, John Reed of the Financial Times reports.
A local subsidiary of the New York-listed company Genie Energy — which is advised by former vice president Dick Cheney and whose shareholders include Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch — will now have exclusive rights to a 153-square mile radius in the southern part of the Golan Heights. -
Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Al Jazeera interview, 11/9/2011
I’ll see your white powder and raise you one Gulf of Tonkin
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Chris Waugh,
How did the US know Iraq had chemical weapons? They kept the receipts.
Indeed, and you could've filled a library with the vocal denials from the US political mainstream about this around 2003.
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And now we have this wee bombshell:
The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.
(h/t Jet Jaguar)
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Rob S,
our man Mountbatten wanted to get out as quickly as possible at minimal cost and loss of face presumably.
That was pretty much his job description when he took it.
When the British left Aden the last governor had to back up the rear stairs to the RAF Britannia with his pistol out as the aircraft was readied for take-off.
