From: jac54@cas.org ()
Subject: Re: Scudbusters
Organization: Chemical Abstracts Service, Columbus, Ohio
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 16:27:55 GMT

In article <1992Aug12.235016.23628@bony1.bony.com> jake@bony1.bony.com (Jake Livni) writes:
>In article <EGGERTJ.92Aug11134057@moses.atc.ll.mit.edu> eggertj@atc.ll.mit.edu writes:
>>In article <1992Aug11.011856.26074@bony1.bony.com> jake@bony1.bony.com (Jake Livni) writes:
>
>>>   They would've flown lower and recognized the decoys.  The Americans blew
>>>   up a lot of decoys.  Israeli air tactics, as demonstrated in the attack
>>>   on the Osirak nuclear reactor, are characterized by precision, not
>>>   by the sledgehammer approaches regularly utilized by Americans.  While
>>>   sledgehammers make lots of sparks fly and sure do smash things up,
>>>   they often miss the point.

	I don't think you know what you're talking about.  Consider the
	possibility of building a decoy of a nuclear reactor.  When it
	comes to precision U.S. pilots and systems are hard to beat.  I
	doubt that the IAF could have been any more accurate against any
	given target than the Americans were.

>>Now Jake, certainly you recognize the vast difference between
>>attacking the Osirak reactor and attacking the scud launchers.  The
>>Osirak reactor doesn't move, scud launchers do.
>
>Which is why low-flying, precision bombing as perfected by the Israeli
>AF would have been effective here.

	The Israelis neither invented nor perfected low-level precision
	bombing.  It would have been counterproductive in a Scud hunt.
	At 100 feet and 400 knots objects zoom in and out of a limited
	field of view very quickly, too quickly to react unless it's a
	fixed target that you were expecting.  At 1000 or 2000 feet you
	can scan a larger area and see things in time to move in for a
	first-pass-hit attack.  Otherwise, you have to go back round and
	expose yourself to ground fire unnecessarily.
>
>>The Osirak reactor is
>>big, scud launchers are little.
>
>>The Osirak reactor attack allowed
>>considerable planning time, the scud launcher attacks did not.
>
>What do you think Bush and Schwarzkopf did for 6 months?  Before it
>was know as Desert Storm, it was Desert Shield, you know.

	Nitwit.  Not even Saddaam was dumb enough to leave mobile
	launchers sitting in the same place once the war started.
	Fixed targets are a piece of cake compared to small mobile
	targets.
>
>>The
>>Osirak reactor site was infiltrated by Israeli spies, the scud
>>launcher sites probably were not.

	Sounds like the sort of tale Mossad likes to spread
	to frighten little children.

>Secondly, the kind of ElInt (Electronic Intelligence) that the US has
>come to rely on more and more is becoming quite unreliable.  HumInt
>(Human Intelligence), something the US has screwed up on big in
>recent decades, not just in the Middle East, is something that the
>Israelis are pretty good at (and used to share with the crooks in the
>White House and Pentagon, until Pollard pointed out that Israel was
>being cheated in the deal).  Therefore, it seems likely that Israel
>would not have wasted as many smart bombs with pin-point accuracy as
>the Americans seem to have done on plywood mockups and inflatable
>plastic decoys.

	ELINT and SIGINT are not unreliable.  They are limited.  They
	can indicate capabilities extremely well, they do not see into
	minds and cannot gauge intentions.  The U.S. has ignored HUMINT
	rather than screwed it up.  As far as the Middle East is concerned
	you may care to try to disprove the theory that the Israelis
	are systematically dismantling U.S. HUMINT assets in the Middle
	East (and thereby make themselves indispensable).  Unless you
	have the text of any agreement on intelligence sharing agreements
	between the U.S. and Israel I suggest you stop indulging in flame
	bait.  Anyway, when you're flying at 100 feet and 400 knots and you
	see something that might be a SAM battery or a plywood mockup, you
	don't stop to tap on it, you attack it.

	Do you have any evidence to suggest that the Israelis have
	HUMINT assets in Iraq?  The Ba'athists are particularly paranoid
	about Israel and have not shown any hesitation about killing
	their people on the slightest suspicion of spying for Israel.

>If you recall during the war, almost every day the Pentagon claimed
>that Iraq only had one or two dozen SCUD launchers and that almost
>all of them had been destroyed on that day.  After a few days of this,
>with more and more Iraqi SCUD attacks, it became obvious that the
>Pentagon didn't have a clue where the SCUD launchers really were.  In
>the end, the UN will have destroyed more SCUD launchers than the USAF
>ever could.  Sorry to disappoint you.
>
	They knew that the Iraqis had only a few of the GAZ TELs, they
	were not aware of the rapidly improvised launchers the Iraqis had
	come up with.  As it happens, none of the mobile launchers appear
	to have been hit.  This was with air coverage that was
	qualitatively and quantitatively superior to anything the
	Israelis could have done.  Don't forget that the rate of Scud
	launches dropped steadily throughout DS.  They may not have
	been killed but they were forced to stay under cover.  That
	counts too.

	Alec Chambers
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