U.S. surrounds Iran with missile defenses

UPI ^ | January 30, 2010

[mrsixpack36]

Wishful thinking that someone with the ego and arrogance of Obama would just resign.

[chilltherats]

I know....but maybe when the people show up with pitchforks, tar, feathers and rails he might consider it.

[Smokin' Joe]

While that scenario does not surprise me (no disagreement, here), keep in mind that the standoff distance for any of those vessels has been increased by their improvements in delivery technology. With a greater radius of deployment, there is greater difficulty in keeping tabs on the vessels and in retaining the ability to eliminate them before launch.

Of course, with the ROE that the current administration might gin up for such a scenario, there would be multiple incidences of cities reduced to rubble and the grid would be down by the time they got the vlf go-ahead to do diddley squat. Boarding the vessels in international waters would bring the usual cries of piracy, etc. from the mullahs as well, eliminating that option also. Keep in mind, there would only be the need for three or so such vessels to do major damage.

[myknowledge]

How about sinking them with torpedoes from subs?

[red irish]

But wouldn’t that be an act of war from Iran? do they really want that? And wouldn’t Mossad have some kind of inkling?

[Touch Not the Cat]

Interesting!

The U. S. Navy experimented with launching V-2 rockets off of ships — what you are proposing couldn't be much different.

[Drill Thrawl]

“One Second After”?

[Drill Thrawl]

Everytime I see Shahab missle, I always read it as Schlub missle. :-)

[Drill Thrawl]

But wouldn’t that be an act of war from Iran? do they really want that? And wouldn’t Mossad have some kind of inkling?

Yes.

Yes. It will bring back the Mahdi. They want this.

Dunno.

[Smokin' Joe]

Herein lies the difficulty.

While torpedoing them is a fine idea, if you sink just one decoy out of the inevitable fleet of them, the international outcry will be horrendous, especially from Muslim and Socialist (Anti-American) sources.

If there is no way to tell which ship(s) are carrying warheads, they all must be followed and their sctivities tracked 24/7. All they need do is to buy more ships than we have subs...

The current administration does not have the stones for such ROE, and our military, though eminently capable, has to have the OK to do what needs to be done.

Of course, it goes without saying that the UN and the rest would harshly denounce any "act of agression against peaceful merchant ships" sunk (most likely) over the abyssal plain (deepest part of the ocean and toughest to recover evidence from), and there would be a huge international push to try the commanding officer and crew as war criminals at the Hague.

Unless the specific vessels can be identified and interdicted, it is a difficult scenario.

If you have studied EMP, only one missile (high altitude airburst nuke) need get through and be effective to really make a mess of things here.

While urban strikes would be effective terror, the threatened implosion of the data streams that keep everything going would be enough to cause even more widespread panic and disruption.

[rmlew]

In 2003 the Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz was the hottest x86 on the market with a SPECint2000 of 1834, while today you can get quad-core multi-gigahertz Xeon processors that blow the doors so far off the 2003 CPUs they needed a new measuring scale, SPECint2006. Even under the old benchmark later processors achieved as high as 3119 as compared to the 1834 result in 2003.
As of September 2003, the faster x86 processor was the Athlon 64, the FX-51.