Word is that some of the functions of Milosevic’s secret police were being carried out at the Chinese Embassy as a de-facto safehouse.
The JDAM simply glides to the GPS coordinates it is supplied with:
How likely is it that the US military programmed in the WRONG coordinates...?
The Embassy was struck because it was being used as an instrument of WAR.
I didn’t agree with that war, but that’s not the point.
And be prepared for them to bomb your embassy and assets...
The Embassy was struck because it was being used as an instrument of WAR.
what i heard was actually the downed f117 that was shot down there was not destroyed by the air force, (stupid) so they sold it to the chinese. They moved it into the embassy garage... THEN they decided it probably wouldnt be good to let the chinese have it. BOOM.
“How likely is it that the US military programmed in the WRONG coordinates...?”
About as likely as NASA calculating orbital velocities in feet per second, but imputing them in meters per second thus causing a billion-dollar Martian space probe to crash on the Martian surface. Bureaucratic error. It happens. Also, nobody is shooting at the engineers at JPL while they go a out their business.
All that said, the chances of that kind of error are less than the chances that the US attack was intentional. And if it was, the Chinese certainly know the reasons for it.
Exactly. You can't claim missile malfunction when what, 3 hit? The odds of three missiles suffering the same oddball malfunction are about the same as Capt. Kirk beaming down beside me as I type this.
Putting in the wrong numbers? Highly doubtful. I don't know the procedures for loading them. But I've got to assume the basic intel would be checked, double checked, and triple checked. Then the strike approval would be checked and double checked. Finally, the target load has to have at least one check, if not several. All along the way nobody pulled up google maps and took a peek? Seems like it was intentional.
Then again, we did fly a B-52 with nuclear weapons to the wrong base. So who knows. I believe the missiles were probably in the concept / requirements stage long before that. The Chinese have always struck me as extremely practical, pragmatic, and patient when it comes to military strategy. Why spend trillions on a blue water navy (carriers, escort ships, air wings, etc.) to oppose the US fleet. A fleet with decades of a head start? Why not a fraction of the resources to build a weapon that can directly oppose the carriers. Then build out a regional navy to project influence just as far as you want to. For now.
The Serbs were using a new radar that looks for “holes” in the electromagnetic field transmitted by TV and radio towers. That radar was used to find and track and shoot down an F-117. China provided that radar to the Serbs. The bombing of the Chinese embassy was a warning. I have no proof of this but you can look up all the individual events and draw your own conclusion.
Coordinates right, map datum not WGS 84, datum from map not checked or considered.