afransen
Senior Member
And yet that country will be rewarded by US diverting aid away from the country they are invading.
|
|
|
News from the Middle East
- Thread starter AlbertC
- Start date
Admiral Beez
Superstar
You have to give credit to the Iranians. These guys are hitting back hard against the US superpower.
Full Metal Junkie
Senior Member
They're hitting with what they have. It's less of a credit to the military prowess of IRGC and more of a case of arrogant overconfident stupidity on the US part. Years of bombing insurgents back into the stone age gave the US armed forces a delusion of invincibility. And even though they've had 4 full years to observe how modern drone and missile warfare looks like in Ukraine, they had zero takeaways. Russia literally lost dozens of aircraft this exact way to Ukrainian drone strikes. And even though Russians are really slow on the uptake, even they learned these lessons: don't park your planes out in the open, don't bunch them together, park planes under a cover, any cover (even a steel wire camo net will do just fine to prevent a drone from getting through).
The Americans looked at Russia losing a third of their strategic bombers to drones, and this is how they deployed to the Middle East:
This is just R-word level of dumb...
Last edited:
guavadelic
Active Member
WSJ is reporting that the Iranians also damaged an E-3 AWACS aircraft during the Saudi air base attack.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/ir...gSgZ997xNvJcdteEYvCQ0nKp3OcgyHAHNjWlizMQzHA==
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/ir...gSgZ997xNvJcdteEYvCQ0nKp3OcgyHAHNjWlizMQzHA==
lenaitch
Senior Member
The E-3 is based on the Boeing 707 and getting pretty long in the tooth. The last one rolled out in 1992. Others may know better but I believe the US has walked away from its intended replacement, the 737-based E-7 and is now going with the USN's turboprop E-2D which an airframe going back to the 1960s. I don't know but have a hard time believing it would have comparable range and capabilities. Much like the long delayed and problem plagued replacement for their tanker fleet, the US isn't in a great position to loose a lot of strategic assets.
Full Metal Junkie
Senior Member
kEiThZ
Superstar
Parking aircraft outside was always stupid. We do it a lot at home. And heck, even the pro-Gripen camp was whining about how the F-35 needs fancy hangars. This is why you park everything that is expensive inside.
lenaitch
Senior Member
^^ Particularly if you are operating in a forward location and shooting at something. Oftentimes, they shoot back.
Full Metal Junkie
Senior Member
The Kurdish ground invasion of Iran that never was:
www.timesofisrael.com
According to recent Israeli reporting, Trump started the strikes against Iran counting on Kurds to be the boots on the ground. After initial strikes and shaping operations, Kurds were supposed to cross Iran's northern border with Iraq and fight their way to Tehran, assisted by US combat air support. These shaping operations even took place in the first week of strikes on Iran, with US/Israel heavily focusing their air strikes on this border region.
But the Kurds never invaded. They got spooked by media leaks, demanded assurances from Trump that he wasn't going to leave them hanging like he did with the Syrian Kurds back in 2019. They never got these assurances, so they sat this one out.
Good on them.
US-Israeli plan for Kurdish invasion of Iran reportedly collapsed amid leaks, distrust
Mossad hoped ground campaign could ignite wider rebellion, but after plan was leaked, Iran bolstered defenses and regional US allies lobbied Trump to call it off, report says
www.timesofisrael.com
According to recent Israeli reporting, Trump started the strikes against Iran counting on Kurds to be the boots on the ground. After initial strikes and shaping operations, Kurds were supposed to cross Iran's northern border with Iraq and fight their way to Tehran, assisted by US combat air support. These shaping operations even took place in the first week of strikes on Iran, with US/Israel heavily focusing their air strikes on this border region.
But the Kurds never invaded. They got spooked by media leaks, demanded assurances from Trump that he wasn't going to leave them hanging like he did with the Syrian Kurds back in 2019. They never got these assurances, so they sat this one out.
Good on them.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Finding a hardened hanger for several large aircraft might be tricky. But these aircraft have immense range, so there was no need to base them so close to Iran.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
LOL. Why are they claiming that as "damaged". It's akin to saying JFK had a bad haircut in Dallas.
If i was Iran I'd send cargo ships into the Gulf armed with antiship missiles. It's easily done with containers, making any civilian ship a warship.
China’s Q-Ship Containerized Weapon System
Putting weapons onto a merchant vessel is nothing new of course, and the concept of containerized missiles in standard ISO 40ft (12m) is very much in vogue.Yet the latest Chinese vessel stands out in several important ways…Read More >….
www.hisutton.com
The USN certainly allows cargo vessels to approach their carriers, as the collision last year of the USS Harry S. Truman shows.
Now that it's open war the permissible distance will be extended, but if the Q-Ship can get off two dozen antiship missiles at close range the CIWS and SAMs on the carrier and its escorts may not catch them all. And it just takes one missile on a crowded flight deck to disable a supercarrier, as shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_fire and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire.
Last edited:
Full Metal Junkie
Senior Member
... don't give then any ideas!
Iran did test a containerized missile system 2 years ago. Not sure how many operational systems they have by now, but I assume it's a non-zero number.
Full Metal Junkie
Senior Member
The thing is, it doesn't have to be hardened cover to be effective against the one-way attack drones. All it has to be is some sort of cover. This is an example of a Russian solution to the problem:
image source
Granted, ^ this would only work against FPV drones, not the larger Shahed drones. And it's even questionable against FPVs given that the sides are wide-open. But with Russians, it's the thought that counts.
Here is a ready-made commercial solution US already has:
image source
Depending on what you make the canopy out of (i.e. reinforce it with a steel wire net), it can be effective at stopping the shahed one-way attack drones.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
From what I see online, the E-3 Sentry was hit by a ballistic missile, not a drone. The only way to keep the Sentries safe is to park them away from the warzone.
Full Metal Junkie
Senior Member
Yes, the aircraft that will cost $700M to replace should have probably been kept either away or in one of the hangars that exist on the airfield. I was more talking about the other forward-deployed aircraft that can benefit from such cover.
Also, while the the tent hangar will not have stopped the ballistic missile, it would have offered an element of concealment. These strikes were targeted using satellite intel. It's hard to tell on the satellite imagery which tents are housing which planes at what time. And if you have 100 tents to chose from and one ballistic missile, the odds of you striking something as important as an E3 Sentry are quite small.