Posted on 08/20/2006 3:30:35 PM PDT by familyop
Iran has fired tactical missiles during army wargames, as part of its preparations to face up to any outside threat.
State television said surface-to-surface missiles with a range of up to 250 kilometres were tested and that surface-to-sea missiles were also being fired.
It comes a day after the military exercises were launched. Tehran says they are taking place in over a dozen provinces and could last as long as five weeks.
The Islamic Republic is troubled by the US military presence in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It has also expressed concern about any Israeli attempt to destroy its nuclear facilities.
Iran said today it would not suspend uranium enrichment, ruling out the main demand in a package of incentives offered by six world powers.
A foreign ministry spokesman said suspension was "not on our agenda."
Iran says it will formally respond by Tuesday to the proposals, amid Western fears it is seeking to build atomic bombs.
Tehran, which insists its nuclear aims are purely civilian, shows no sign of accepting the package.
I say we show them the type of damage a nucler bomb can cause and go drop one one them right now.
OK fine. Sadly we cannot do anything about it. No matter what the president does he is hounded by the media and dem's making it all our fault so nothing will ever happen.
They are bullying their neighbors like Turkey. Iran is preying upon their neighbors whom they perceive as weak.
Iran is now the sort of pain in the butt that can only be remedied by Preparation H-Bomb.
What balls !!!
Iran wants the "multifaceted response" option behind door number 3. That's the one where they get the incentives and continues to enrich uranium. I'm sure the UN will find this very acceptable.
The weather is classic 'continental' of searing hot days and frigid nights in Summer and northern Canadian-type cold in rest of the year. Deep aerial interdiction is a virtual impossibility and the present governing gang has moved everything underground.
It's a horrible fate to out of the war and contingency planning loop sidelined by the passage of time alone.
Just bomb the place from 32,000 feet. No need to create another Iraq disaster.
I may have missed something in my Missile training - is a Surface to Surface Missile different from a Surface to Sea Missile?
If I aim a Surface to Surface Missile toward the Sea it becomes a Surface to Sea Missile.
Turn Iran to Glass now W!
Air Power can pass the resolution ball to diplomats to arrange for a cease fire, but as we see today, that creates not an end to the conflict, merely a ''timeout'' with more to come.
As miserably incompetent as Rumsfeld is, even he cannot ignore that fact that his briefers will tell him about the Persian landmass being the worse possible geography for a land maneuver force operations and---having never been successfully defeated or occupied in almost the past 2,000 years. The only regions where massed armies would be able to efficciently operate (even if we had a large enough army remaining after our current FUBAR--which, of course, we don't) is the vast high plains of the far north bordering Russia or one of its seceded new nations and the narrow littoral along th gulf. The centers of power, government, industrial, economic, demographic and armed strength sits smack-dab in the geographic areas essentially incapable of successful access to massed maneuver armies. Thus, air power can really screw with the infrastructure, transportation facilities and those things that affect the population, but it can't get them to run up the white flag or silence their fight-to-the-last-martyr rhetoric.
Don't expect a spontaneous civil uprising, revolt or coup. War making governments often rationalize and predict that, as Rumsfeld said: ''...the civilian population will greet us as liberators.'' Except in conquered nations like those Eurpoean countries taken by Hitler's force in WW II, that is a much wished for but irrational wet dream. It's much more likely, and usually the case, that the civilian population is enraged and will indeed fight to the last old man, housewife and teenage kid; ie: Great Britain in response to German bombing of cities.
Count me in
I propose a new more open ended type of war, as follows. Take the best known positions of Iran and Syrias leaders and bomb them once a week until submission. Make a strong intelligence effort to locate the most likely locations of the leaders each week and bomb. No ground forces, few civilian deaths. Just a statement that it will continue until Iran stops halts hezbollah and palestenian terrorist sponsorship and enrichment activities verifibly and we will stop. No other stipulations will be considered.
In a classic warfare scenario aerial bombardment softens targets. In this environment, employing airpower may harden some targets. That said insurgents haven't rendered war tech obsolete... on the contrary, modern war machines evolved to fight the enemy’s modern war machines. Most people don't realize that In the GWOT Americans are just as capable of fighting asymmetric warfare as any of our enemies. The fact is we've come to rely on tech, as our Cold War adversaries relied on tech. I believe we have to raise an ideological army to win – the prophets of liberty. Sure, we need boots on the ground… we have to have our ideas on the ground to win. This is a war of ideas isn’t it?
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