Oh dear chuks, for once we're in perfect agreement. :):ok:

It's a funny thing, but...
 

There's a school of thought that goes, 'All Germans should bear some guilt forever for whatever went on during the Hitler period!' That's kind of interesting, but stupid. (It's okay for me to say that, because my kids are only half-German. That means they are only half as guilty as their friends. On the other hand, half-German, half-American... should one part be in a permanent state of conflict with the other half?)

So it's okay to strafe some kid herding goats because some other kids were shot up by a Stuka? I am sorry, but I just can not follow that line of thought.

Not that we should allow the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to shut off our sacred supply of motion lotion or anything like that; we must have some God-given right to that crude, but... oh, I don't know! The more you think about this business of war and guilt and all, the less sense it seems to make.

Here, I guess we should just stick to the way of fighting, not whether that is really right or moral or how many goats and children must die once it sparks off, as it very well may. No bickering here about morality, if you please! That would be like fighting in the War Room.

It's really an interesting question: How do you defeat a low-tech 'swarm attack' by a flotilla of speedboats? Those things can hit 60 knots and they are highly manouevrable. I suppose that some sort of Kamikaze-style mission, each boat crammed with Semtex and would-be martyrs, would be a tough one to beat. It's sort of the nautical version of the arguments you read here about one F-35 against ten MiG-29s.

About the only way I can see to really deal with such a threat would be by a pre-emptive strike, using air power to take out the speedboats before they can launch. Of course, that would then give the Iranians the green light for mine warfare or whatever else they have planned.

"So it's okay to strafe some kid herding goats because some other kids were shot up by a Stuka? I am sorry, but I just can not follow that line of thought."

I didn't say that, I was just pointing out that it occurred on both sides, not agreeing with the action.

Well... Yes!
 

I once gave a lift to a young German about my age who was trying to reach 'Mont-pel-ee-ay,' Vermont. First thing, I had to tell him that it was 'Mont-peel-ee-err' he wanted to ask for, and then we got to chatting. Of course 'ze warr' came up, when he ended up telling me that his mum had told him that, during the war, we Americans would drop 'poisoned sweeties' for unsuspecting German children to pick up and eat.

What was I going to say to that? 'Umm, I think your mum was telling porkies there!' probably wouldn't have done much for international friendship, so that I just said that this was news to me, that there was a famous pilot who would drop perfectly good 'sweeties' during the Berlin Airlift, the so-called 'Candy Bomber,' Gail Halvorsen, but that was about it as far as I knew.

I suppose this was the best Mum could do for her little boy, trying to put we Yanks on the same level as the Nazis, as if to say that we were all about the same when it came to doing bad things. Same here, I guess, when a Stuka strafes some kids in the UK and a P-47 strafes a girl in Germany. Is there a deeper meaning in that? Perhaps only that war is just not such a safe activity, which really does seem obvious. It can be fun, sure, blowing up some deserving s.o.b., or else all this gun camera film wouldn't be floating around on the internet, but it's certainly not safe.

If this Straits of Hormuz business does get going then I expect we will get hours of 15- or 30-second clips of some speedboat getting blown out of the water, showing our high-tech weaponry at its best. That should give the video gamers a thrill!

" Is there a deeper meaning in that?"

No, from the way it was described to me, it was opportunistic on the Nazi pilots part when he saw them as he obviously hadn't done his homework because he flew straight over an AA gun on the top of the hill at the dn of the road and was shot down. As my grand mother said, "that wiped the grin off his face".

Re the Iranians, I am sure the US would have repelling swarms of speed boats but the phrase "they only have to be lucky once" comes to mind. I hope the Iranians don't do anything rash but it seems the sanctions are biting more and more.

.

Fars News Agency: MP: Iran Closes Persian Gulf If Threatened

TEHRAN (FNA)- A senior Iranian lawmaker stressed Tehran's preparedness to confront all types of sanctions and restrictions, but meantime said that if the country feels any insecurity, it will not allow oil shipment through the Persian Gulf.

"If we eventually feel that our economy, specially in the Persian Gulf, is faced with insecurity and we cannot use this economic zone for oil exports, we have the power and capacity to create insecurity for other countries' exports and will not allow any oil cargo to be exported," member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini said on Monday.............

So much waffle. Just destroy their oil production and distribution capability and they won't be able to export anything. A reasonable proportionate response to any attempted closure of the strait.

1) the american pilot wasn't shooting childrn, he was shooting goats. Probably couldn't even see your mother, but could see a goat flock

2) how to take down a modern air defence destroyer.. 20 kamikaze speedboats to keep the gun busy, 20 kamikaze Cessnas, another 20-30 toy radio controlled aircraft with radar emitters, 10 land bases sea skimming missiles, and 2 or 3 ballistic missiles.
All timed to arrive within sensor range together. If you time it so that a civilian aircraft is overhead at the tume., all the better

500N,

A Stuka? As far north as Croydon? Are you sure? I thought they only had the range for coastal targets? Assuming that you do mean a JU87 when you say Stuka?

randyrippley,

Really? ALL that effort, for one Destroyer? What if there's two, or three, or more...

I'll ask my mother who may remember or she can at least ask here sister.

What else was capable of diving down to tree top height to shoot up civilians
AND the pilot was clearly visible as my grand mother looked at the plane, pilot was looking at here as he went past.


"Really? ALL that effort, for one Destroyer? What if there's two, or three, or more..."

The Iranians want to make a statement, then why wouldn't they. If more than one then they might have a bit more of a problem.

500N,

I have relations who tell of a JU88 dive bombing the Standard Motor works in Coventry in 1940, in broad daylight. It then departed the scene at low level with the rather embarrassed AA defences reacting rather belatedly as they all thought that it was a Blenheim.
The JU88 gunners responded to the AA fire, leading to wild reports of a 'murderous Nazi dive bomber' strafing innocent civilians on Hearsall Common.



Hell of a lot of effort for a 'statement'. Why WOULD they?

There's an entire fleet in the straights right now. A pretty large multi-national one.

pr00ne
you don't get it do you
life in Iran is cheap, so are light aircraft and toys
and the T45 only has 46 or so missles. What happens if the 47th target is a balistic missile with a 650kg warhead?
what I suggested isn't much effort to a country which believes in suicide as a legitimate attack technique

If you have more ships, just simply add the numbers
Assymetric warfare. Multi-faceted swarm attacks

randyrippley,

Put the Tom Clancy down and walk away...

wasn't it Clancy who predicted the use of hijacked aircraft as bombs?

Sounds like a complete misunderstanding. Clearly the target was the goats. The Vietnamese made that same mistake at Mai Lai - William Calley and his boys were actually shooting and uhh, raping, goats. He probably couldn't even see all the woman and children.

read post 9 in this thread
http://www.pprune.org/military-aircr...graveyard.html

Goats are targets

Do they have 20 Cessna's in Iran ? :E

Last time I checked I saw R/C model pilots sweating when their model plane was 1 mile away because it went out of range :}

Hitting a small, mobile target with a ballistic missile when the Iraqi's merely could hit the country they aimed them at in GW I, ehh?

Easy timing and small risk of being detected prematurely, when the 20 Iranian Cessna's are flying in formation towards the Gulf being preceded by hordes of Model planes gone wild ánd dozens of speed boats coming from nowhere.....

At least quite entertaining this contribution :ok:

According to wikipedia, for what it's worth, yes, they do - about 45.

List of aircraft of the Iranian Air Force - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hmmm

Prisoners in Jail
US - 2.1 Million (POP 313 MILLION)
Iran - 165,000 (POP 78 MILLION)


US Murder rate is 5 per 100,000 people while Iranian murder rate is 3 per 100,000 people.....

Life cheap alright not so sure its Iran where its the issue....

Might want to look at executions, although it wouldn't suit your agenda.

The Americans are mere amateurs compared to iranians, particularly child executions.