Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Not to mention, loss of air superiority is fatal to like, no government ever.
Not immediately fatal, anyway.
Again, I'm not saying the US should do this. But let's not kid ourselves that they couldn't do it. They have huge practice at it. They have demonstrated not only the capability but also the intention, several times.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Syrian regime doesn’t need to achieve or even attempt air superiority, just needs to make US attempts to do so costly.
As a deterrent, that makes sense. But once the shooting actually starts, it's curtains for their air force.
Agree. Also the large Mig-23 and Mig-29 forces don’t require airfields – a road with a shed to refuel will do the trick.
In which they are totally defenseless. If they take off, they will be tracked to their landing point, which can be attacked remotely without even risking any US lives. So they each get one mission, during which they might possibly not be shot down, so long as they don't actually confront what would most likely be a massive response. Then they get out of their plane and run for their lives, if they haven't just used it to hand themselves over without a fight.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Got a citation for that?
A Human Rights Watch report of 1 February 2000[27] quotes a study made by the US Defense Intelligence Agency:
The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.... If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Syria is relatively rich AND has spent a huge amount of it’s wealth on arms – supplied mostly from USSR and now Russia. They have been “at war” with Isreal for decades (an actual declared war). Their military is constantly training for actual war. They have as modern a military as almost any country in the world.
I'm predicating my claim around the US not going in with a steadily building force, a fighter here, a helicopter there, but instead with a blitzkrieg, as they have each time in the last engagements with any forces capable of even token resistance. There is a steady build up of massive force from every side they can come from, along with a diplomatic assault, seeking to build some kind of international consensus, but also just buying time, building up intel on every target, planning every mission, and issuing ultimatums to the target regime. They're imaging the entire country from satellites, to find everything that moves. They're collaborating with the Israeli intelligence which is most likely very substantial. They're dropping in special forces on the ground, they're circling with drones that are constantly feeding back imagery on every wavelength they can. They're violating airspace around the borders constantly, hoping to provoke some kind of incident to gain proof of "aggression", as casus belli. They're probably capturing people constantly, torturing them for installation intel.
When the assault comes it's as much an anticipated stage-managed event as an actual war, the timing of it known, and the outcome inevitable.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Even aerial bombing has a clear destination and a limited blast radius
Depending on the kind of bomb, and the bombing pattern, of course. MOABs have huge radii, Fuel Air bombs work in a way that is a mix of blast and chemical anti-personnel effects, and firebombing deliberately seeks to create uncontrollable firestorms, whilst cluster bombs can leave debris that is dangerous for years afterwards, particularly to children. But yes there are the expensive targeted bombs too, which still manage to kill many bystanders.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Even that’s hard. A mixture of force dispersion and rotating aircraft into the air means that this is unlikely to happen.
I'd be pretty amazed if they could maintain an effective airforce for more than a few hours against a concerted attack by the USA, if they do it the way they usually do, with massive overwhelming force built up over a month or so, all unleashed simultaneously. The place could become a no-fly zone like Iraq. But that would not really help the people on the ground, about whom any action would presumably be. There could be instant reprisals against anyone perceived to be against the regime on a massive scale, as has happened so many times in response to air attacks.
I'm not saying they should do it. Just that they could.
Assad has some 400 Migs and Sukhois with the most recent being easily a match for anything the US could throw at them.
It's not just about numbers of aircraft, it's about the ability to effectively deploy them. If you destroy the airfields, that's the end of the jet fighters. And once air dominance is established, it's pretty much impossible to reverse. Even if the regime could scramble 400 MIGs into the air, if there's nothing for them to fight, and nowhere to land afterward, that's the end of that - they'll surrender and land, or bail out and ditch the aircraft. Simultaneously, they strike at every radar installation, taking out the ability of the military to even see what's coming at them. Anything at all that creates any kind of detectable emission becomes an instant target. If the aircraft stay on the ground they are simply destroyed, either in the open or in their hangars, or even bunkers. If they are hidden, they have to stay hidden, or their launch will be detected, the hidden airfield destroyed, so they are completely neutralized.
We've seen this done before. Again, I don't think they should do it, but I'm pretty sure they have the capability.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Bart Janssen,
it really makes intervention (dropping bombs on people) a terrible option.
Yes, even a more targeted and purely military attack, like destroying Syria's air-force, doesn't have a clear purpose or end-game.
It's a terrible situation there. Despite my brain telling me that intervention is only likely to escalate the conflict, upon seeing the victims of the chemical weapons, I found tears on my cheeks, a purely visceral response that had completely bypassed rational thought. I tell myself that any death by violence is equally bad, that being hacked to death with a machete or blown up by a cluster bomb is not less disgusting than being gassed, and yet somehow, it really does feel worse. Perhaps it's that we use gas to kill vermin, that it's a tool for extermination, rather than fighting. It is not very effective against troops. Or more likely, it was the way that it was disproportionately affecting children, whose death throes we were actually witnessing. It's very difficult to use reason in the situation.
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OnPoint: BTW, the NZ Police can use…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Who knows, we may be folding information like proteins or tensegrity structures soon… or some kinda dark data dump device…
:- )Well it'll be half the Cheops pyramid next year, a quarter the following, and in about 40 years I'll have a whole bunch of camera sticks that size that I'll consider totally worthless because I can only store the entire internet from, like, 2020, on it, and the transfer rate of 20 exabytes per second will be too annoying to use. I may have paid off the mortgage on my 1/4 acre and 1970s assortment of sticks and jib, too, which will be worth approximately 50 million dollars.
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Southerly: A Blog on Behalf of an…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
If, god forbid, they all express their opinions it is utter chaos, but much more common is that three or four dominate and the rest just nod.
It's the voting that actually matters, not the talking. Some people who say nothing at all make perfectly good decisions.
I’m not saying substitute elite juries for the random ones but adding elite/expert (for multiple values of elite) juries to the mix might improve things, ’cos they’re like expert and all.
The more of these juries, the more the veto would be vetoed. It would eventually be a body crippled into total powerlessness, and parliament would again be supreme. They'd need only appoint the right experts, and that's the end of the upper house. Whatever value there is lies in the ability of the thing to actually inject public opinion into the political system. Your suggestions are 100% about how to get rid of it. Do you actually believe in democracy at all?
This was why I said right from the start that it's only a minor improvement on the current system. As a veto house, it could not introduce legislation at all. As a dual house with mutual veto, whatever old people AND young people mutually disagreed would be things over which they could cripple each other's ability to have any effect. Only in matters of agreement could they actually do a damned thing. To that end, anything that somehow was to the benefit of the general population, but not the two extreme groups, could and would be vetoed all day long, which is why I can't see much benefit in the stratification. It's simply yet another non-representative body making choices for everyone else. The good thing is that it's a balance on our rather balance-less system.
And this is all in the spirit of bullshitting around a table
In that spirit, there's nowhere near enough scantily clad women and ponies in this fantasy.
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Southerly: A Blog on Behalf of an…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I think it would take most of a year for the juries to get to grips with what goes on in govt.
I don't think so, any more than I think a criminal jury would take a year to get to grips with the criminal law code, rather than the zero training they get currently.
I didn't think the whole idea was to make professional politicians out of these jurors, it was to get the slice of public opinion into the process that is excluded by the professional process.
It would be nice to have a couple of other juries selected on talent.
Now you're killing the idea completely. It's no longer a democratic institution, but instead an elitist one.
There have been very few meetings I have ever been in where the decision reached by 12 could not have been reached by 6.
This is a parody argument?
@Lucy
OK, had more of a think about this, and the next problem I see is when legislation is going to be introduced which is contrary to the interests of a group who are powerful, wealthy and morally bankrupt.
If you just think a bit further, you'll see that any good legislation is never going to become more likely to be enacted by this process, since it is only a veto anyway. It can only block things. On the other hand, it can block bad legislation. Which means it is an extension of one of the most powerful guiding principles behind democracy - that it is not a guarantee of good government, but it puts some limits on how bad government can get, that are not available in any other system.
We may not have managed to get a system whereby our leadership is selected primarily from our most privileged classes, but we have at least got a system where we can get rid of one bunch of particularly bad elites. Putting another balance in that means highly and broadly unpopular laws can be blocked could work well in a time when that is the way the elites are operating. It could also form a significant barrier to progressive change on the odd occasion when the elites have got it right and the population have it wrong.
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