In 1983 USAFE (US Air Forces in Europe) staged a nuclear exercise called "Able Archer". The Soviets interpreted this as the US possibly deploying for a preemptive strike.
Due to their very centralized top-down command structure, the Soviets were always afraid we might try to take out their leadership with a first strike.
While the strategic bombing campaign against Germany did cause damage to their industrial base, the German economy had so much slack capacity that it had very little effect on their actual war production.
German aircraft production actually peaked in 1945. They were just short of fuel to run them or pilots to fly them.
As a professional pilot, I HATE flying into DCA. The airspace is so restricted I feel like I'm playing "You Bet Your License" every time I go in there.
They should just close the thing down and build a high-speed rail line out to Dulles.
US annual inflation rate was 11% in 1974 and 11% in 1979. I know conservatives like to pretend that Carter invented inflation but it was there before he took office. I remember the "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons from the Ford administration.
You must live in that conservative alternate history where George W Bush took office on 9/12/2001
I don't know if this was due to the outdated theory that terrorism can't exist without a state sponsor or that they desperately wanted to think that there was a state sponsor.
I was flying my third Operation Northern Watch tour out of Turkey in late 2002.
The Iraqi Air Force had on any given day perhaps 10 flyable aircraft. Of those 10, they might have launched 2 or 3 training sorties on that day. If they were feeling really frisky they might actually send one up towards the no-fly zone to see if we were paying attention.
There would normally be a Marine EA-6 fragged to Northern Watch and another down south with Southern Watch. One day, by pure coincidence, they both turned their jammers on at the same time. This shut down the entire Iraqi air defense network.
When we invaded in 2003 they sortied exactly zero aircraft. None. With the country being invaded and the very existence of the regime at risk they didn't even put a single MiG in the air.
That's how "grave and gathering" a threat they were in 2003.
I always find it amusing how the UN is simultaneously an ineffective collection of buffoons and the evil mastermind behind every world-domination scheme ever hatched.
They're either scary or they're a joke, but they can't really be both at the same time.
To put things in perspective, the Koch family alone has already spent more money on this election than was spent in the entire 2008 election.
If you think the Democrats are supposed to just unilaterally disarm in the face of that kind of political influence buying I'll take you up on that ocean-front property in Arizona.
Michael Moore is strictly small-time compared to the Kochs. The Kochs could afford to hire Michael Moore to shoot home movies of their grandkids' birthday parties.
While not capable of full-auto an AR-15 can hold a 30-round magazine (let alone 100) which can be swapped out with another in seconds. It's designed to allow you to put as much lead downrange in as short a time as possible.
Even in semi-auto, it's an incredible amount of firepower in a relatively lightweight package.
We were worried that Israel would nuke Iraq back in 1991 when the SCUDs first started hitting Tel Aviv.
If that had happened, the Arab coalition partners might very well have switched sides. We were ready to evacuate Jeddah airport (which we were using at the time) on short notice if that happened.
We threw all our efforts into "SCUD hunting", which wasn't very effective but at least kept the Israelis appeased.
Speaking as a retired Lieutenant Colonel (USAF/ANG) -
For those not familiar with the military, a Lieutenant Colonel at the Pentagon is NOBODY. The Pentagon is so full of Generals and Admirals that even a full Colonel there is NOBODY.
Not sure how this Dooley ended up having that much influence.
I'm admittedly torn here. If the sanctions work, it's going to cause a lot of hardship for people in Iran.
If the sanctions don't work, I can see the bomb-Iran crowd using "See! We told you! Sanctions don't work!" as yet another justification for bombing Iran.
I recall that being one of their (many) reasons for attacking Iraq in 2003.
I'm reminded of the scene in Full Metal Jacket when the door-gunner in the helicopter is mowing down civilians and saying "The ones that run are Viet Cong, the ones that don't run are well-disciplined Viet Cong".
The Air Force is finding that drones have limitations.
For one, they have an atrocious accident rate. Bad enough when it's a $4.5 million Predator, but completely unacceptable when it's a $35 million Global Hawk.
The Global Hawk was originally intended to replace the U-2, but they've decided to keep the U-2 and ditch the Global Hawk.
Nuclear weapons are really only good for preventing the other side from using their nukes. This is why China, for example, only spends enough on nuclear forces to deter ours.
Ahmadinejad has rather limited power. He is not commander-in-chief of the military.
Even though his title is "President" he has nowhere near the power of a US President.
He may not be a nice guy, but that hardly makes him a dictator. We've so diluted the definition that it just means "Foreign leader we don't happen to like" at this point.
In 2003 we invaded a country that had no navy, no air force to speak of, no long-range missile force, no nuclear weapons and a poorly-equipped army that we swept aside in a matter of days.
In short, we didn't invade Iraq because they were strong. We invaded Iraq because they were weak.
Yeah, I used some hyperbole, but you can bet that when the time comes Iran will indeed be portrayed to the American public as an "existential threat" and the worst thing to come down the road since the Third Reich.
Just look back on what was said about Iraq circa 2002-2003.
I'm a 21-year retired Air Force O-5 with 500 combat hours in my logbook. That "experienced player" enough for ya?
Any air campaign against Iran would likely be much larger than "just targeting the nuclear facilities".
We would likely try to target their capability to retaliate. Unless you don't think they would retaliate, which takes us back to my original statement about them not being much a threat to anyone.
Once you start doing that, the target list expands almost exponentially.
We would end up with something more on the scale of the 1991 air campaign against Iraq than Osirak Part II.
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Mattis, although one of the saner voices in the administration, also has an unhealthy fixation on Iran.
In 1983 USAFE (US Air Forces in Europe) staged a nuclear exercise called "Able Archer". The Soviets interpreted this as the US possibly deploying for a preemptive strike.
Due to their very centralized top-down command structure, the Soviets were always afraid we might try to take out their leadership with a first strike.
So they're going to drown it in the bathtub after all?
Nice people. Sure glad I almost got my butt shot off saving them back in 1991.
If they could get you to pay more for gas they would.
Isn't that Capitalism 101? The market determines the price of a commodity?
Or did you feel that cheap gasoline is somehow our birthright in the United States?
"Al-Qaeda and its affiliated forces" = anyone we happen to point a gun at over there.
Keep in mind we're talking about the NATO alliance versus Serbia, who it would be a stretch to consider even a regional power.
Roughly equivalent to the entire Dallas Cowboys front line versus Pee Wee Herman.
That's not a convincing data point for the "we can win wars by air power alone" argument.
While the strategic bombing campaign against Germany did cause damage to their industrial base, the German economy had so much slack capacity that it had very little effect on their actual war production.
German aircraft production actually peaked in 1945. They were just short of fuel to run them or pilots to fly them.
What's that Professor Cole? I'm having a hard time hearing you over these war drums beating so loudly!
Our foreign policy often comes off like:
"Nice country yous got here. It'd be a shame if something was to happen to it."
(sounds better in your best Hollywood mafioso voice)
The oft-cited Switzerland also has a lower gun ownership rate than the Unite States with a correspondingly lower crime rate.
Sledgehammers make rather poor flyswatters.
Keep in mind that O'Reilly's core viewer demographic is between ages 65 and dead.
I can understand the Israelis responding to this - but they have a bad habit of swatting flies with sledgehammers.
Silly Palestinians. Everyone knows a civilized state would use F-16s and cluster bombs for that sort of thing.
Customs officers are neither happy nor friendly people.
To be fair, it's not much better crossing into Canada these days.
Shorter Romney foreign policy - Ready! Fire! Aim!
I guess someone has to make the mandatory Gulf of Tonkin reference...
If you have to blast the oil out of shale or go 5 miles under the Gulf of Mexico to get at it - that's going to be an expensive barrel of oil.
If it costs $80 to get that barrel out of the ground - nobody's going to bother if they can only sell it for $75.
I don't see this ushering a new age of cheap oil.
Well, you see, Iran is the biggest scariest threat we've ever faced - but we can them out with a few well-placed smart bombs.
They're both an existential threat and a pushover at the same time.
Kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it?
As a professional pilot, I HATE flying into DCA. The airspace is so restricted I feel like I'm playing "You Bet Your License" every time I go in there.
They should just close the thing down and build a high-speed rail line out to Dulles.
If the end result of your policies is the destruction of the world - I'd say that's hardly a ringing endorsement of your policies.
US annual inflation rate was 11% in 1974 and 11% in 1979. I know conservatives like to pretend that Carter invented inflation but it was there before he took office. I remember the "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons from the Ford administration.
You must live in that conservative alternate history where George W Bush took office on 9/12/2001
I don't know if this was due to the outdated theory that terrorism can't exist without a state sponsor or that they desperately wanted to think that there was a state sponsor.
So, if something changes on it's own, that means I'm incapable of changing it?
Strange bit of logic there.
Hey, my car broke down on its own once so that must mean I can never hurt it!
I guess I'll steer for that bridge abutment tomorrow and see what happens.
OK, I think we've beaten the Avery Brooks/Benjamin Sisko horse to death, dug up it's grave with a front-end-loader and then beat it some more.......
Luftwaffe aircraft conducted "terror bombing" raids.
RAF aircraft "de-housed the work force".
Actual British terminology from the period.
Not sure where you're trying to go with this.
If it's to point out the political cowardice of John Kerry, I would agree.
If it's a variation of "But Mom! The other kids did it too!", I'd say that wasn't a valid excuse when I was 8 and it hasn't improved any with age.
Just to point out how weak Iraq was in 2003:
I was flying my third Operation Northern Watch tour out of Turkey in late 2002.
The Iraqi Air Force had on any given day perhaps 10 flyable aircraft. Of those 10, they might have launched 2 or 3 training sorties on that day. If they were feeling really frisky they might actually send one up towards the no-fly zone to see if we were paying attention.
There would normally be a Marine EA-6 fragged to Northern Watch and another down south with Southern Watch. One day, by pure coincidence, they both turned their jammers on at the same time. This shut down the entire Iraqi air defense network.
When we invaded in 2003 they sortied exactly zero aircraft. None. With the country being invaded and the very existence of the regime at risk they didn't even put a single MiG in the air.
That's how "grave and gathering" a threat they were in 2003.
I mean really. What could possibly go wrong?
There must be some mistake. I thought only "those people" were terrorists?
Truly frightening. The thought of these people anywhere close to the levers of power is enough to make me start drinking heavily.
I always find it amusing how the UN is simultaneously an ineffective collection of buffoons and the evil mastermind behind every world-domination scheme ever hatched.
They're either scary or they're a joke, but they can't really be both at the same time.
Bill,
To put things in perspective, the Koch family alone has already spent more money on this election than was spent in the entire 2008 election.
If you think the Democrats are supposed to just unilaterally disarm in the face of that kind of political influence buying I'll take you up on that ocean-front property in Arizona.
Michael Moore is strictly small-time compared to the Kochs. The Kochs could afford to hire Michael Moore to shoot home movies of their grandkids' birthday parties.
Yeah, we've got Soros - and the GOP has the Kochs, Scaifes, Coors (yes the beer people), Olins, Bradlys, Waltons, Mognahans, Adelsons etc.
Sometimes I think Soros only exists so that the Right can go "But! But! Democrats do it too!!!!"
Oh, let me guess, "both sides of the aisle" are bad so always always always vote for the Republican?
I thought the term was "mud people"? Have we been demoted to "dirt people" now?
And the Telegraph is the conservative newspaper.....
I agree with the NRA "Guns don't kill, people do".
Which is why I don't think every walking personality-disorder in this country needs easy access to high-powered weaponry.
Yeah, the Predator drone locking on to me from 5 miles up is going to be really impressed when I whip out my Kimber Tactical Ultra .45
I suggest you ask any surviving residents of Fallujah just how well civilian militias stand up to modern military forces.
I mean really, do you think Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are going to personally show up at your front door to oppress you?
While not capable of full-auto an AR-15 can hold a 30-round magazine (let alone 100) which can be swapped out with another in seconds. It's designed to allow you to put as much lead downrange in as short a time as possible.
Even in semi-auto, it's an incredible amount of firepower in a relatively lightweight package.
You're all just jealous that the voices only talk to Michelle.
I think the first use of the term "concentration camp" was when the British imprisoned Afrikaner civilians during the Boer War.
We were worried that Israel would nuke Iraq back in 1991 when the SCUDs first started hitting Tel Aviv.
If that had happened, the Arab coalition partners might very well have switched sides. We were ready to evacuate Jeddah airport (which we were using at the time) on short notice if that happened.
We threw all our efforts into "SCUD hunting", which wasn't very effective but at least kept the Israelis appeased.
Fox News - As fair as an Iranian election, as balanced as Charlie Sheen on a 3-day bender.
"Fixed defenses are monuments to the stupidity of man" - George S. Patton
And here you thought "1984" was supposed to be a cautionary tale.
Turns out it was a how-to manual.
Speaking as a retired Lieutenant Colonel (USAF/ANG) -
For those not familiar with the military, a Lieutenant Colonel at the Pentagon is NOBODY. The Pentagon is so full of Generals and Admirals that even a full Colonel there is NOBODY.
Not sure how this Dooley ended up having that much influence.
I'm admittedly torn here. If the sanctions work, it's going to cause a lot of hardship for people in Iran.
If the sanctions don't work, I can see the bomb-Iran crowd using "See! We told you! Sanctions don't work!" as yet another justification for bombing Iran.
I recall that being one of their (many) reasons for attacking Iraq in 2003.
Sadly we've propped up more than a few monsters abroad when we felt it was in our "interests".
The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia? What if the Holy Roman Empire attacks East Prussia?
I'm reminded of the scene in Full Metal Jacket when the door-gunner in the helicopter is mowing down civilians and saying "The ones that run are Viet Cong, the ones that don't run are well-disciplined Viet Cong".
The Air Force is finding that drones have limitations.
For one, they have an atrocious accident rate. Bad enough when it's a $4.5 million Predator, but completely unacceptable when it's a $35 million Global Hawk.
The Global Hawk was originally intended to replace the U-2, but they've decided to keep the U-2 and ditch the Global Hawk.
I wonder if we'll even take yes for an answer or will we just move the goalpost like we kept doing to Iraq prior to 2003.
Suddenly it's 1956 all over.
I better go check the garage to see if my car grew tail fins.
Oil is priced on the WORLD market. Declines in US demand have been more than offset by increases in demand from China and India.
I mean really, what could possibly go wrong?
My, how convenient.
So John McCain wants to bomb somebody? In a related story, the sun rose in the East today.
I wonder how we'd react if the main political topic in some foreign power was "Why aren't we bombing the United States back to the stone age today?"
Of course, I'm only supposed to believe him when he says something that justifies us attacking Iran.....
The thought of a group of fundamentalist end-timers with access to nuclear weapons terrifies me.
But enough about the GOP.
Possibly. If both sides have nukes they both know that a conventional conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange.
That's the main reason we never directly fought the Soviets during the Cold War.
Nuclear weapons are really only good for preventing the other side from using their nukes. This is why China, for example, only spends enough on nuclear forces to deter ours.
Why not? I had to spend all of 2000 hearing about Al Gore's "earth tones".
If he were a Democrat Fox News and talk radio would spend hours each day calling him a "wimp".
Imagine what the right-wing media machine would do to a Democratic candidate who wore sweater vests!
How is it that Republicans always get a free pass on being "tough"?
I'd say Santorum's Bible is missing more than the Beatitudes. I'd guessing it stops at Leviticus and skips right to Revelation.
Not really, no.
Ahmadinejad has rather limited power. He is not commander-in-chief of the military.
Even though his title is "President" he has nowhere near the power of a US President.
He may not be a nice guy, but that hardly makes him a dictator. We've so diluted the definition that it just means "Foreign leader we don't happen to like" at this point.
In a way, this doesn't surprise me.
In 2003 we invaded a country that had no navy, no air force to speak of, no long-range missile force, no nuclear weapons and a poorly-equipped army that we swept aside in a matter of days.
In short, we didn't invade Iraq because they were strong. We invaded Iraq because they were weak.
Once I just accepted that we're well and truly screwed it was much easier to deal with.
Well, as you probably know, we did invade Canada during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
Rick probably has one of those fundamentalist Bibles.
You know, the ones that stop at Leviticus and pick up again at Revelation.
That can't be correct. Everybody knows that Iranian history began with the 1979 hostage crisis.
Not sure how or why Iran would attack.......North Dakota.
The only reason to attack North Dakota would be in the context of a counter-force nuclear strike against the missile silos.
Only the Soviet Union, in their heyday, ever had that kind of capability (numbers, accuracy and throw-weight).
Even China doesn't that capability and it's doubtful that Iran ever could.
If Iran were to give a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group in some bizarre Tom Clancy fantasy scenario I seriously doubt they'd be targeting Fargo.
Because they would likely be subject to "painful sanctions, a covert spy war, and threats of military attack" regardless of what they were doing.
After seeing what happened to Iraq, they likely suspect that we'd just move the goalpost so that they could never meet our demands.
The neoconservatives were shouting "On to Tehran!" before the dust had even settled from the Iraq invasion.
Or more famously "Everybody wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
This is what happens when you make good and bad team names instead of moral absolutes.
It's only "terrorism" when somebody we don't like does it.
OK Pete, you win, China's evil. NOW can we stop moving our factories there?
I mean really, what could possibly go wrong?
Bill,
Yeah, I used some hyperbole, but you can bet that when the time comes Iran will indeed be portrayed to the American public as an "existential threat" and the worst thing to come down the road since the Third Reich.
Just look back on what was said about Iraq circa 2002-2003.
I'm a 21-year retired Air Force O-5 with 500 combat hours in my logbook. That "experienced player" enough for ya?
Any air campaign against Iran would likely be much larger than "just targeting the nuclear facilities".
We would likely try to target their capability to retaliate. Unless you don't think they would retaliate, which takes us back to my original statement about them not being much a threat to anyone.
Once you start doing that, the target list expands almost exponentially.
We would end up with something more on the scale of the 1991 air campaign against Iraq than Osirak Part II.
Of course, the Iranians are so fierce and fanatical that they would attack without provocation even if it meant certain national suicide.
However, they are so meek and easily cowed that they will sit quietly on their hands when attacked by Israel and/or the US.
Once again, they're somehow a grave threat and a cakewalk at the same time.
Sounds awfully familiar.
So, Iran is a huge scary existential threat to our very existence, but we can take them out with a few well-placed smart bombs.
They're somehow a monster and a pushover at the same time.
Is it just me or is the cognitive dissonance really loud in here?