Posted on 08/03/2007 11:29:34 PM PDT by ForGod'sSake
Yeah, I quite agree, Syria did come very close. The defense was so fierce (and costly) on the Israeli side that the Syrians may have thought the reserves had arrived. They did indeed begin to pour in during that lull or regrouping or whatever it was. The Syrian losses to that point must have been daunting; the final toll was something close to 1000 tanks lost. The consideration on the Syrian side may have been to assess whether the attack could/should continue. As one of the biggest tank battles since WWII, and as a Soviet-style massed armor offensive, I’m glad to hear that it is studied.
It’s odd to me that the massive tank-killer tactics used by the Egyptians hasn’t caught on per se. Seems like an effective counter against a foe with superior quality or quantity of armor.
But anyway... Greenspan’s erudite style and intransigence really got to the Congress. He basically blackmailed them into balancing the budget in order to get the lower rates they were trying to demand. :’)
And then the comet hit, and...
There really hasn't been a conflict that would showcase modern anti-tank equipment and tactics since 1973. We expected it in the first Gulf War, but Saddam's antitank weapons were older and basically ineffective against the Abrams, so he mainly relied on tank v. tank defenses. If we ever have to take on Syria, they have some of the Russians' more up to date equipment.
BTW, I remember participating in a huge war game simulating a Warsaw Pact conventional attack on Germany. With heavy losses, we stopped them about half way across. When I read Tom Clancy's book on the same subject it struck me how close our results were to his description of the Army side of the conflict. I always wondered if he was privy to the results.
Don't know if it will provide any more info than you already have, but impact research is a topic I'm fascinated by. And Gene Shoemaker is one of my heroes. I happened to visit Meteor crater only a few weeks after his death and met several people there who had worked with him and knew him well. They were pleased that someone knew who he was, his connection with Meteor Crater as well as the Apollo program and not just the Shoemaker/Levy 9 comet.
I go out of my way to travel the area and hunt along the current water ways. It is very clear that at one point there was much more water there than the current situation and not just the inland sea that covered the area all the way to SLC.
The nuclear deterrent kept ‘em right where they were. Then, as Shevrednze (? whew...) said to Gorbachev, “the whole thing has gone rotten”, and a bunch of hardware got sold to China. That was really nice of the Russians, eh? ;’) It was good that a ground war never took place during the Cold War (two major threats or more toward West Berlin, during the Truman administration, and again during, hmm, the Missile Crisis), because judging from WWII, huge losses don’t phase the overall ground movements of the Red Army.
DNA has the potential, and I believe, will shortly solve some of these mysteries. I just hope it happens before I die, lol.
True. The Sov's weren't troubled by casualties.
We took the threat seriously. Since Ike NATO depended on the reserved right to first use of nukes to deter a Soviet ground attack and their superior numbers. But in post-Vietnam America, especially with Jimmuh in the White House, there was a lot of suspicion that the Sov's would not be met with a nuke response and we would have to slug out a conventional war. We were concerned the Sov's sized up the situation the same way and might just be tempted.
Thankfully, it never happened. They got bogged down in Afghanistan.
In hindsight it may look silly, now that we know how near collapse the Soviet economy was and how bad training and morale were in their army, but at the time our intel seemed to think they were formidable.
What were you saying about that comet? :-))
One of the things I was and am most curioius about is I had heard before the meeting they were going to present findings linking the event to the Carolina Bays. I didn't find anything in that particular link making a connection so it may be necessary to dig a little more.
I have not been able to determine if there is enough of any DNA in the "bones" left to run a sample on. When I press the question with the museum they get weird. Guess I need to make a big donation!!!! Too bad becasue my daughter has access to one the best DNA labs in the West.
Also I remembered over dinner that 9 years ago when I started this quest an old rancher was the first to tell me about the red headed people. He maintained that they were nothing more than Vikings and the Paiutes couldn't tell time. After some research I went back to him and asked how explained the "findings". He said "Nothing can be counted on when it has been covered with bat cra$ for a few hundred years!"
The Carolina Bays, one of the most conspicuous geomorphic features on the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the United States, are a group of about 500,000, oriented, crater-like, elliptical lakes, wetlands, and depressions, ranging from a few dozen meters to about 11 km in length. Although long proposed as impact structures (Melton and Schriever, 1933; Prouty, 1934), this origin for the Carolina Bays has remained controversial mainly because of an apparent absence of associated extraterrestrial materials. Analyses of Bay orientation showed that their long axes converge near the Great Lakes, suggesting that an impact or airburst over that region may have formed the Bays (Eyton and Parkhurst, 1975).However, Bays dates have been reported over a wide range, calling into question whether all Carolina Bays could have formed simultaneously, although this issue remains unresolved and controversial. Many Bay researchers, who subscribe to widely differing theories, agree that modern Carolina Bays have been subject to repeated modification and that they most likely evolved from some type of ancestral depressions.
Now for the first time, we present conclusive geochemical and sedimentary evidence in support of an extraterrestrial connection for the Carolina Bays. Analyses of sediment from the rim sands and basins of fifteen Bays, widely distributed across North and South Carolina, reveal anomalously high abundances of microspherules, iridium, fullerenes with ET helium, carbon spherules, glass-like carbon, and other potential markers for extraterrestrial impact. No such markers were found in paleosols beneath the rim sands or basal sediments of the Bays examined. The assemblage of geochemical and sediment signatures of extraterrestrial impact found in Bay sediments are essentially the same as in the pan-North-American Younger Dryas impact boundary layer (the YDB), dated at 12.9 ka.
We hypothesize that at least some Bays were formed by the YD impact during the last deglacial, and we present OSL and radiocarbon dating, along with stratigraphic profiling, in support of this age. Data from the Carolina Bays we have examined suggest that at least some modern Carolina Bays may have evolved from depressions which were excavated by primary ejecta, secondary ejecta, and/or the shock wave from the Younger Dryas impact event.
Are you convinced??? The fly in the ointment seems to be differing dates of the bays themselves. Odd.
Any teeth? You have a much better chance of getting ancient mtDNA from teeth.
The On Your Knees Cave sample, at 10,300 years old, was obtained from a tooth and yielded usable mtDNA (after about three years of work). Brian Kemp, who did that work, is setting up a new lab to concentrate on ancient DNA, so there should be some great new data coming!
In hindsight it may look silly, now that we know how near collapse the Soviet economy was and how bad training and morale were in their army, but at the time our intel seemed to think they were formidable.nah, not silly. The WWII-era Soviet public put up with terrible privation, well, I guess that goes for the Soviet-era public in general; and yet they mounted the largest ground assault in the history of the world in response to Operation Barbarossa. The threat was real. No one had a gun to their head when they set up a proxy puppet state in Afghanistan then invaded under the terms of the so-called mutual defense pact when the Muzzies went hog-wild to oppose the puppets. The media was state controlled, but no one could control the word of mouth when the body bags started to arrive, and everyone seemed to know someone who had lost a son, brother, or father.
IMHO insufficient credit has been given to Afghanistan in the demise of the Soviet Union. I think the devastating impact on both the economy and the Red Army influenced the decisions not to respond with force in Poland and Lithuania when they began to break away. I don’t buy Gorby’s line that he didn’t do it because he was just a closet liberal social democrat all along.
To this day, Gorbachev doesn’t want to admit that he was pushed around from inside and outside the country.
Ping.
just a fake bookmark for myself:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1876220/posts?page=18#18
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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Ping.
Thank you for the link to this very interesting thread.
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