Originally Posted by
dave.rooney
Consider the conditions under which the AA missiles were launched. The Iranian ballistic missiles were fired on the Iraqi bases around 3AM local time. The people manning the Tor-M1 would be hunkered down inside the vehicle waiting for an American counterstrike at any moment, especially since they were in the vicinity (and probably guarding) a ballistic missile research centre.......... snip...................
Neither you nor I have any first hand knowledge of exactly what the TOR crew knew. You seem to believe that they knew about the Iranian attack on the airport in Iraq or at least that they were put on some sort of alert status. That may very well be true; however, based on my experience flying with the Iranian military, I would would not be at all surprised to learn that they did NOT know about the attack against Iraq.
I have no proof of course, but I have quite a bit of combat experience in the U.S. Navy and we were made aware only of operations which might directly impact what we were doing. We got information on big picture items from the newspaper. I suspect the Iranian missile shooters were not in the big picture loop only three hours after the event took place.
During the time I was flying Iranian F-14's I had the opportunity to make a couple of simulated Phoenix missile attacks on what I believed to be Russian Foxbats overflying Iran, but they could have been another type belonging to another country. Whatever they were, they were very high and very fast but I never got any kind of heads up from the Iranian Air Defense folks. I assume somebody knew about the overflights, but the word never filtered down to the squadron level. Nonetheless, they did prove to be a good training exercise on high altitude, high speed intercepts for my back seat students. Command and control was not a strong point back then, and based on the events in the last week, I'd say it is still a problem. Fog of war and all that.