Rule number 2 of Principles of war - Maintenance of Morale (Joke doing the rounds on Facebook).

More stuff from tonights War-egraph
 

David Cameron: I will push ahead with Syrian air strikes - Telegraph


They are telling it loud as they can, possibly shouting down anyone who disagrees.
I find this a little disturbing. Why are these air raids going to be so important to the nation? Most of the UK public would be hard put to agree with any of points for attacking ISIS by air/missile/drone. They (our public) will have noted that:
1. Everyone who has taken on ISIS recently has suffered very quick terrorist attacks in response involving mass casualties and terror. Even Russia.
2. We are probably as a country incapable of defending ourselves on our own turf even as well as the French, if ISIS can penetrate past our pretty brilliant secret services/ code breakers/undercover agents and the like. We have been very fortunate to have these good people looking after to us for now, but will the extra element of luck hold?
WTF is it with the Daily Telegraph these days? I find it almost bloody unrecognisable as a newspaper. Politically I'm miles away from it, and now never more so, but I always used (up to a point) actually trust some of its reporting. Its coverage is biased and shrieking, horrible.


* RAF historians lurking here, out of interest to me alone can anyone point to me when an air attack, an air raid has made a profound input/difference to a war or battle. Real strategic impact. As PM Dave C. seems to be weighing up here?
Am I right in thinking two - the "Dam Buster" raids as one, and the operation on the night of the 17th/18th August 1943 against the research/testing centres for the V weapons program? What else? Amiens Prison?
Will this coming RAF v.ISIS attack be comparable?
If I don't reply in thanks, don't worry, I can still read yours - my replies are regularly blatted out by "company internet rules" dark forces.

Dropping two atomic weapons on Japan seemed to make them have a head scratch moment and decide to surrender.

Is that a significant moment in aerial bombardment ? Seemed to work for the Americans !

'I find this a little disturbing. Why are these air raids going to be so important to the nation? Most of the UK public would be hard put to agree with any of points for attacking ISIS by air/missile/drone'

Would they ? Have you carried out an idependent poll ? Most people realise that their holidays to Egypt or that nice romantic break to Paris is going to be a bit difficult now -certainly added queues at Dover ! Plus the RAF has large stocks of weapons -all of these bombs have expiry dates -its costs tax payer money to dispose of them . Exploding them reduces environmental issues in this country and onerous paperwork trails for civil servants.

'Everyone who has taken on ISIS recently has suffered very quick terrorist attacks in response involving mass casualties and terror. Even Russia'

Indeed I have come to the conclusion from all you have written that they are really not very nice people -infact the wife was discussing earlier who we should miss off the Christmas card list this year and at the moment they are top (ISIS) followed in close second by that relative who received a card last year and didnt return the guesture!

The USAF sometimes claimed to have won the war over Serbia in 70 days of bombing. :p
Air attacks in the six weeks leading up to Desert Storm going live in the ground op set up the battle field pretty well. Not sure if that is what you were looking for.
How many raids are you looking for as a criterion?
The Apache and SEAD/Wild Weasel ops before Desert Storm opened the door for that air campaign.
Taranto: significant impact on the freedom of the seas for Royal Navy in the Med.
Pearl Harbor: significant impact on US strategy in Pacific, which had knock on effect strategically on how much aid/materiel could be sent to Europe in the infamous "Europe First" decision. (You'll want to read up on Admiral King, USN, and his sometimes contentious relationship with the opposite numbers among the Brits on the combined staff ...)

Also, just because ISIS/Daesh will strike back is no reason not to strike. For the UK, are the reasons to date sufficient? Not sure, not my country, and out of my lane.

certainly it is, and they were also very fanatic and going kamikaze

war in Syria has produced hundreds of thousands of dead people, millions of refugees and billions of damage

couple of nukes at the beginning would likely make 1/10th of that damage and the war would be over

Dropped where? :confused: :eek: (Actually, don't answer that, nukes in Syria hardly an appropriate measure).

'RAF historians lurking here, out of interest to me alone can anyone point to me when an air attack, an air raid has made a profound input/difference to a war or battle. Real strategic impact'

I think the Swordfish attack on the Bismark had a somewhat profound impact on its future!

Still got your doubts Hangarshuffle ?

Vinrouge - I think most people will be thinking that!

Is it me.......but when is camaroon going to grow a pair and start talking like a world leader? I'm sick of his grovelling justification for the limited involvement we have here.
Right or wrong......Hollande has gone right up in my estimation. He said it was an act of war and he responded accordingly......can anyone imagine Camaroon having the back bone to do something like that? Nah.......I certainly can't! Hollande has now said (I'm paraphrasing here) "that the security of France is more important than EU rules".....respect!!!
Camaroon........:ugh:

:ok:ok::ok:

Didn't I say go for the logistics tail?

Reports from Syria are that ISIS leadership figures have started to move out of Raqqa to Mosul . Be nice to have all the dirty linen in one basket!

Hangarshuffle,

The air campaign in Libya was the decisive factor in the west's achievement of its military objectives. There was one British casualty: in a road accident in Europe. The ability to wield such influence at low political risk is a decisive advantage for air power. The fact that the Libyan state disintegrated two years later is beside the point. That speaks to a poor political strategy; the military strategy was perfect. The presence of western troops wouldn't have stopped the breakdown in relations between the leading factions.

The "accidental" bombing of Berlin in 1940 had a famously strategic effect.

The Black Buck raid is assessed to have forced the Argies to move their Mirages north to defend Buenos Aires, meaning they could not threaten our Harriers.

The Israelis' pre-emptive destruction of the Egyptian air force on the ground in 1967.

Shall we keep going?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be considered significant at the end of WWII, but Pearl Harbor was a perhaps equally profound input at the other end........

Stating that the bombing of Libya won the campaign on its own or that the bombing of Iraq helped win the ground war are both mis-understanding the definition of 'win'. Look at the state of both countries now. No bombing campaign in isolation can win anything - it is simply a step on the way to further action be it boots on the ground or diplomatic to force change on a nation.

You can bomb them back to the stone age but unless you come up with long term viable alternative solutions for people on the ground, you will breed festering bitterness and resentment that will manifest itself in years to come.... as we see now. (Not saying the bombing of France is a direct result of bombing Syria, its part of a longer term problem of lack of racial integration that France has - but that provided a convenient outlet and facility for such anti-Western displays- it could have happened anywhere in the West with the right conditions).

So.... how do we solve the political situation in Syria/Irag/Kurdistan because the Sykes-Picot Treaty has clearly run its course.....?

There are also Naval historians here; the Battle of the Coral Sea where neither side's ships sighted nor fired directly on each other, with all sinkings of capital ships carried out by air strikes. A turning point in the Pacific theatre.

Somewhere around border with S. Arabia that started all of this?

A large bucket of sunshine dropped on Japan pretty much brought an end to their involvement in WWII and the war itself.

"Boots on the ground" are no more capable of delivering long-term solutions than air power, unless they stay there forever as an army of occupation. An equally true statement for you:

"Stating that a ground force won a war on its own is mis-understanding the definition of 'win'. No military campaign in isolation can win anything - it is simply a step on the way to further action to force change on a nation. You can occupy them until the end of time but unless you come up with long term viable alternative solutions for people on the ground, you will breed festering bitterness and resentment that will manifest itself in years to come.... as we saw in pretty much every western land operation in the Middle East or Asia since WW2."

Even the great land campaign that finished WW2 in Europe did not deliver a "long term viable alternative solution" on its own; such matters as the Marshall Plan, the Nuremberg Trials and de-Nazification must be considered as parts of the long-term Allied victory. It's facile to refer to 'people on the ground' as a way of intimating that only action 'on the ground' can have decisive effect. We all live on the ground, so of course that is where the ultimate political effects of military action are felt. But decisive military effects can be delivered from any environment, for example by naval blockade.

Air power achieved the west's military goals in Libya, by tipping the balance decisively in favour of the local ground forces we wanted to win. Do you think that if we had used western land forces instead, the eventual political outcome would have been any different? Remember that initially the political settlement looked good - it was only THREE YEARS later than it broke down after a disputed second election. The only way land forces could have made any difference to that is if they had stayed in Libya for that entire period to disarm the militias and provide internal security until an army acceptable to all the tribes could have been formed. I think that is in the realm of fantasy, both practically and politically. That does bring into question whether we should have intervened at all, but it doesn't change the substance of my point that decisive military effect can be delivered from any of the environments, air included.

Two cases in 1944/45 as regards the assault on Germany. The campaign against oil targets from June 1944 onwards and the Transportation plan which was originally aimed at supporting the effort for Overlord, but was continued right to the end of the war (attacks on rail, canal and road infrastructure). The infamous Dresden raid very much fell in the latter. The Germans basically ran out of oil and the poor communications made the bringing together of components for weapons very difficult (as well as moving those weapons and the forces using them from a to b) in any good weather. It was Harris's refusal to put as much effort into the two plans in late 1944 that almost resulted in Portal sacking him (though in the end, Bomber Command dropped more tonnage on oil targets than the USAAF did).

Hit those two targets in the ISIS areas without mercy (kill anything that moves between the towns and cities) and they will be in serious trouble as PN has correctly observed.

John (your #175),

All true, but I think that the turning point in the Japanese war was rather Midway. That removed all seaborne threat to the W.Coast cities of the US, and more importantly broke the back of Japanese naval air power in the Pacific. From then on the war in that theatre could only go one way: there was no way back for Japan, as the American yards could out-build them three to one.

The Dams raid, although it was a partial success in its stated objective, had an enormous "unintended consequence". The Germans rebuilt the Dams in a few months, but at a fatal cost - the diversion of civil engineering resources from other tasks - among them from finishing off the Normandy section of Hitler's "West Wall". The next year we went ashore there, and "the rest is history".

Of course, the prime example has to be the Hiroshima bomb. "People say", declared Air Marshal Harris in 1942 (?), "that aerial bombing alone can never win a war. I would say that it has not been tried yet, and we shall see"......Three years later we saw. I have a particular interest in this, I was out there at the time, we all knew that the final stage of the land/sea war would have to be an invasion of the Japanese homeland, and that was a fearsome prospect. It was conservatively estimated that it would cost a million Allied lives (very possibly including yours truly !) to subjugate Japan.

Pontius Navigator (#170) is on the button. On another Thread somewhere a few days ago was an account of the US using the "obsolete" Giant Warthogs to take out a convoy of ISIS oil tankers on their way to market. Now there's a really good idea ! I assume that there isn't a pipeline they can use (or the stuff would never be on the road), and a camel can't shift much.

Danny.

Returning to the origin subject and Paris - it would seem the latest cell were caught by the usual achilles heel - their phones. Link below and a rough translation from Bing.

Attentats : les terroristes trahis par leurs téléphones

Attacks: terrorists betrayed by their phones

A laptop containing a plan of the Bataclan and a text message found near the location of the attack helped to trace the apartments as well as monitoring of the cousin of Abaaoud phone.

Tuesday, Mediapart can reveal the existence of the first clue: a phone found in a trash can near the Bataclan, containing a detailed plan of the concert hall and an SMS written at 9:42 pm Friday night, revealed by an informant as saying:

"It is gone. It begins."

This phone, according to the information of the informant, enabled the location one of the terrorist "hideouts". Searching through the phone geolocation data, investigators discover that the terrorists passed through Alfortville (Val-de-Marne) just before the attack. Salah Abdeslam, for whom they were already searching, was found to have rented two bedrooms in the Hotel Alfortville.

Investigators have not established the identity of the recipient of the SMS or what terrorist of the Bataclan attack owned the phone. But this SMS confirmed coordination of the attack wit an outsider. A restaurant client told the "Figaro" that the assailants Polo was parked on the street near Bataclan, prior to the attack and that at least one of them was using a Smartphone:

"I saw the face of the driver and the passenger as they began to tap on the smartphone, making it light up their faces. It was the passenger who was to using his mobile phone."

Saint-Denis hideout found thanks to the "telephony"

Since Friday, the mobile phones of terrorists were at the center of the investigation and the Paris Prosecutor hinted Wednesday morning that telephone tapping had identified Saint-Denis as the possible hideout and base of Belgian jihadist Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged attack's sponsor.

"In this investigation, much work was carried out and allowed to obtain, by telephony, surveillance and testimony, which could suggest that the named [AAA] Abaaoud could be found in a conspirators apartment in Saint-Denis", said François Molins after the end of the police assault launched in the early morning.

The weak point of the terrorists? According to our information, Abaaoud's own cousin, a young Frenchwoman of Moroccan origin who was, as explained by Itele, triply monitored by the judicial services (Sdat), police and intelligence. It was she who died Wednesday morning in the explosion of her explosive vest, within the first minutes of the assault.

Not without, as TF1 has learned from a source close to the investigation, making a final phone call... possibly to "warn accomplices", that investigators have yet to identify.

Let's not forget that when that was dropped no one else in the entire world had Nukes.

I know ISIS do not have them.

But let's get specific instead of just writing 'Nuke them'

Come on Armchair strategists, give me your targeting lists, yield and delivery systems.

Raqqa and Mosul I assume? 1, 5 or 10 Kiloton? 2 or 3 warheads to spread the damage or one big **** off 1 Megaton weapon.

What about fallout patterns? Any analysis done as to where this stuff is going to come down?

Can we confirm all the leaders of ISIS are within the blast radius of the weapons? Or is this simply a demonstration of mass firepower and wanton destruction?

And just suppose that we do employ nuclear weapons and then another Paris type outrage happens anyway. We have used our weapons of last resort and failed. What then?

Start expanding the target list to countries that support ISIS with logistical and financial support?

I look forward to your planning documents.

"You can bomb them back to the Stone Age..." Which, unfortunately, is exactly where IS want to be!

The "let's bomb"/"don't bomb" argument is all very well but what's missing so far is a coherent plan as to how extending the air assault will achieve victory. Or even agreement as to what would constitute victory.

Worth reading.

As everyone else was hoisting the French flag on Facebook, a Dutch student named Hanna gave her profile picture the colors of the Syrian flag. The act led to a spirited chat on WhatsApp with her dad, who runs out of comebacks as their conversation goes on. Meanwhile, Hanna shares insights quite a few government leaders could learn from.

WhatsApp after Paris: 18-year-old Hanna teaches her dad a thing or two

Eighteen-year-old Hanna Nijenhuis wrote her final term paper at her Dutch high school on why the United States managed to win two world wars yet has failed in smaller conflicts. These days, Hanna studies German in Berlin. Her father, Hans Nijenhuis, is opinion editor of the respected Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Last Monday night, they had the following chat on WhatsApp.

Many years ago I went on holiday to the Pyrenees, staying in Lescun. There was the day I was dropped off to walk up one of the gorges. I popped out at the top, over into Spain, with not another person in sight. I could have easily carried on to Madrid, given enough time and a credit card or two.

I've also scrambled up to and along the French-Swiss border and walked from there down to a Swiss hut.

You are quite right, whatever border controls are in place there are many places where at the right time of year it's ever so easy to walk from one country to another.

I have a 17 year old daughter and that is a common occurrence. Does not mean she is always right.

Evening Standard had a piece in it last night as to why the deaths in places like Africa do not get as much column inches as the events that happened in France. Cannot find a link but it basically said 'the further the distance, the less they can sell it'. Harsh but true.

And as her father I would have had some serious words with her, and a very, very one sided conversation about her personal security if she displayed a Syrian flag at this time on her Farcebook page.

Out of interest what was her profile picture before the attacks in Paris?

One of those soft lighted 3/4 turn to the camera shots that make the user look good?

Edit to add: Yes I know Syria is not ISIS. But lunatics on the net are not known for their ability to discriminate or for their sense of reason.

I don't think anyone was or is advocating the use of nukes, but were responding to "when did air power/airstrike" do something decisive?"

Completely agree with your point on what has to be considered if nukes are even on the table, which I am pretty sure they are NOT in either political or military leadership circles.

I agree Lonewolf, I assume they are not being considered but the military would be remiss if they are not at least gaming out some scenario that involves the application of E=MC2

My main 'annoyance' I guess is the word I am looking for is the

bit and people using WW2 as the example.

As I said, no one had nuclear weapons when that happened except the people using them.

To infer the events in August 1945 have any bearing on the multi-polar and heavily nuclear armed world of today is completely false.

With respect, I disagree. Unless there is political direction to begin that planning process, there is no reason to waste the time on that. (I think we've both been staff officers?) I helped to retire some Op Plans using tactical nukes when I worked in NATO. (Yay, never was a burn bag better used, IMO). The general stepping back from the assumed use of tactical nukes when the Wall came down, and for that matter the negotiations in the 80's with that objective in mind, has not been reversed at the political level. I'll suggest quite the opposite.
Agreed completely. Each situation is evaluated on its own merits and demerits -- there is no cookie cutter (I can still hear our instructor at the Staff College stamping his feet each time he said that :hmm:).

My quote reference a large bucket of sunshine was not a strategic targeting plan or reference to wanton destruction. It was an answer to a direct question from Hangarshuffle, which clearly had a direct impact on ending WWII.

Lonewolf you are quite correct, think I fell into my own trap. Remember that horrible old saying about West German towns being 10 Kilotons apart?

Staff Officer - Never sir, Other Rank myself. I used to work for a living.:ok:

ATC - apologies. I took it out of context and did my own inferring.

I think I was getting this thread and the one in JB a bit mixed up.

Heh, that takes me back to my misspent youth ...
Sorry, bad guess on my part, and thanks for all of that work! :ok:

It happens to us all eventually :confused: but don't worry I have re-alligned my armchair position for a better key board aiming strategy :)

usual fluffy leftist blue sky thinking

Unfortunately IS only do one colour that is the darkness of oppression and death

Beirut, once 'the Paris of the Middle East'.

There was an earlier accidental bombing that was later used to justify bombing of cities. Arguably this too had a most significant effect though in tit end the opposite of what was intended.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb...on_10_May_1940

Nigeria's Dasuki 'stole $2bn' from anti-Boko Haram fight - BBC News

Might go some way to explain why the Nigerian problem has not been solved.

All good replies.
 

Yes some good answers, missions and events that I must have once read about but had also now forgotten about.
I'm agreeing with Shot One. We can be involved in bombing somewhere yet again, but that alone wont ever end the cycle of violence...is our involvement going to be even worth it?
I would simply like to keep the foreign war money and transfer it to home defence in its very various meanings and ways. Preferably, a last line of defence - armed troops to guard major conurbations, towns, our transport systems. To shoot back at them, if it has to come to that, to take them down. Its a sobering thought and hardly an ideal strategy, really.
The defence of the UK seems to be entirely focused around London, but the attacks could come anywhere, when they come, and they probably will if we start bombing...Glasgow Airport attack hardly anyone ever seems to mention.
* I got the nod from my boss to write off London as a traffic/transit hub if I wish... no more tube or train from now on in or out of the city. It will probably cost us slightly more money as a company. All this hardly makes me proud of myself or feel clever about it... reduce the risk ALARP.
HS.