Posted on 04/05/2007 10:57:37 AM PDT by Fennie
MOSCOW - Iran has air defense systems capable of repelling possible United States air strikes, a high-ranking Russian military official said Thursday. "In line with my assessment, Iran's air defense system is strong enough," Colonel General Yury Solovyov, commander of the Air Defense Forces Special Command, said. "Currently Iran has our Russian air defense missile systems, which are capable of tackling U.S. combat aircraft. Iran also has French and other countries defense systems...
I hope so, but from my own experience as a B-52 Electronic Warfare officer the 'new' equipment tended to be pretty marginal stuff, just good enough to say we had new equipment. The Air Force thinks in terms of 'attack' and loathes spending real money on defense.
Of course, that was nearly thirty years ago.
Someone correct me if Im wrong, but don’t we have the gravity bombs that can be released miles and miles away and still hit their targets?
And wouldnt this be an excellent time to try out our supposedly conventional ICBMs that I heard we had?
Sounds like a salesman talking. Off-the-record, General, tell me what you really think? Do you want to stand near an Iranian Nuke facility after the B2’s leave Whitman AFB?
Depending on what they have, possibly better than many think. People forget the F-117 that was tracked and shot down in Bosnia. The Russians (and Chinese, and French) have not been idle since then.
DR. Strangelove. Great flick.
We should send a brave couple of souls to fly over one of their air defense units at about 100 feet and pop some flares when they are right on top of them.
We won't need to hit those planes directly. We will just destroy the runways first. That will pin those planes down their revetments for future destruction.
Did they not say the same thing about serbia?
Detecting is only Step 1. You have to be able to Track, before you can FIRE. Tracking is the hard part, and it almost never gets mentioned.
Networked air defense systems can detect & may be able to track stealth aircraft. But as Iraq found out, the first cruise missile salvo usually takes the network offline. Stand-alone radars get picked off after that.
The F-117 has a big RCS compared to a B-2. Also, the F-117 that was shot down was flying a very restricted and repetitively traveled ingress-egress route. AND as far as I know, there was no ECM/jamming assisting their flight.
The F-117 is NOT invisible — it is relatively low observable. Put enough RF of the right frequency out there and your targeting system can find it. The B-2 OTOH is a fast-moving shadow of a bird to a SAM radar.
But they will hear it ... 2.3 seconds after it passes by !
They got right on the outsourcing bandwagon. They outsourced some of their most belligerant, mass destructive elements to so called “rogue” nations. They outsourced cheap, mass produced tactical and IRBM oriented nuclear production to the PRC. And they resourced terrorism from Arab Pan Nationalsts to the current terror cabal, in its variety of flavors.
And there is a big problem. If our sole aim was to take out their nuclear reactor than an onslaught of cruise missiles might do the trick.
If we launch a bunch of aircraft against them then we would inevitably lose some of them. In this very political war any captured American Pilots would be put on parade. The media would act like they were the ONLY U.S. plane sent into the area and "the powerful and superior forces of Islam blew them out of the sky!"
One of the major tools of war is propaganda. The left all but owns the propaganda machine and in their world victories by the United States are never anything to celebrate, rather victory is to be demonized and mocked.
They cannot repell the Tomahawk cruise missle... flies too low and below their antiquated Russian radar systems.
Techno-moslims operating equipment built by the Russians. Now there is a no-win situation of there ever was one.
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