Salute!
I love that question about friendly airraft being painted by radar. Love it.
Up to me I would have told the "reporter" nope, they didn't even know we were there until the bombs and missiles hit........ next question.
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Over at Tyler's blog, lotta tweets and intell being updated at good intervals:
The War Zone - The Drive
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Gotta tellya, that looking at one of the targets destruction, that Allies must have super warheads if the Syrians shot down most of the missiles. I saw the long video from Syrian "Ministry of Truth", and only saw one "hit" by a Syrian missile and plenty of launches.
If they used SA-6 systems, or a more modern version that used doppler for guidance on the missile, then they should have engaged and shot down many cruise missiles.
Our Israeli students in the only group IAF sent had a vet or two from the Yom Kippur episode. They were fighter/attack pilots checking out in the Viper, circa mid to late 1980. The SA-6 was a beast and they said you could not get low enuf to defeat it. Nevertheless, they found two ways to defeat the thing and I employed one in the mid 80's at Red Flag to escape and hit the tgt. The easiest way was to taxi a tank up to the sucker and blow it to kingdom come. The other eay was to "beam" it, then get closer and blow it up yourself.
Bear in mind that the SA-6 shot down our F-117 in the Balkans. It may be old, but the sucker works. The biggie is the integration of the air defense system to pass on the tgt to the missile battery and so forth. I flew against the best IAD the world has seen, and it was not in the mideast.. The Vee had plenty of practice, as we flew hundreds of missions up north. I shudder to think of what our losses would have been if they had the SA-6 for the low folks and the SA-4 for the initial folks heading in.
Oh well, I just pray we won't let this thing escalate.
Gums sends...