Russian (and American) Strageic forces, especially ground based, silo ICBM’s go from cold start, to “missiles away!” in few minutes, so thats not much of a comfort. SLBM takes a bit longer, but “alert status” is meaningless for forces trained to launch at a moments notice.
Re the A50, IIRC the Russians have started heavy investment in network centric warfare over the years, so the A-50 might be there by design to augment the ground based guys not necessarily due to the later being poor.
What I am worried about is the Great Power’s allys (i.e Syria and Israel) doing something very stupid.
I don’t think the Russians want a nuclear war, anywhere, TBH and frankly the price of oil will be the last thing on anyones mind if we get one.
The messiness isn’t what Turkey is going to do. It’s how Turkey is doing it. If it were Turkish troops going into Afrin, then you would assume that the Turkish state has some control over the situation. The problem is that it’s not Turkish troops, it’s proxies that they largely pulled together from various rebel groups. What makes it bad is that these proxies are largely from Islamist groups of varying extremism. Regardless though, their goals are not the same as the goals of Turkey. They see the Kurds as American and Assad allies and they are attacking them mainly to keep their supply lines from Turkey open and to use those supplies to wrest power from other Islamist groups in Idlib. The real danger though is the possibility that these groups decide to slip Turkish control. They’ve already had problems with these groups looting and religion policing. There’s a realization that Afrin is not their goal and they have much bigger plans. Turkey is playing with fire. Even if Turkey does manage to exert some control, there’s a worry as to what will happen to these people during the peace. These are well-armed, battle-hardened jihadists from dozens of different countries that right now claim to have no ambitions beyond Syrian borders, but if they perceive that they lost the peace, is that ambition going to be channeled constructively or are we looking at tens of thousands of guys with large amount of foreign contact that think the West are a bunch of kafir in league with Shaitan that screwed them and they need payback.
The situation in Syria is so confusing and so complicated. Turkey and the U.S. are almost fighting each other! The big threat is that Russia-Syria-Iran really do constitute an “Axis of Evil” (in contrast to GWB’s “axis of evil” which was always stupid nonsense). The development of this threat is especially sad since in 2002 Iran, a relatively liberal and cosmopolitan country, was begging to be America’s friend, but was rejected.
But my question is about the timing of this latest chemical attack. Trump tweets some gibberish about withdrawing from Syria and the very next day, a stupid atrocity forces the U.S. to react. Was this really a coincidence? There’s some strange game of poker being played out hidden from the public headlines. Who’s bluffing whom? What the hell is going on?? How can this mess possibly have a happy ending???
That also struck me as suspicious which is why I was pondering this earlier. If I had a CT mindset I’d suspect that this time it actually might be some rebel group who has access to some WMD and has used them to try and prod the US and perhaps EU/NATO into action by making it look like another Assad chemical attack. What throws suspicion on this CT, however, was the almost knee jerk and immediate response from Russia saying there is no evidence of any chemical weapons usage in the region, which seems to directly contradict multiple sources saying that there is.
I don’t know where the hell some people get that idea, but thats not true at all. I have been to Iran. I have family from there. Liberal & cosmopolitan are two words which don’t come to mind at all. Please don’t mistake Iranians in the West (an often highly educated and integrated group) with the country of today.
Well they knew about 0.5 seconds after it happened that Assad would be blamed for it.
I agree, using chemical weapons for Assad a very stupid idea at this time.
And frankly, the Syrians force suffered mass defections in the early years of the war and they actually lost control of large military bases, ammo dumps, and logistics hubs. Are we to believe that no one from the chemical corps rebelled, and nothing from the vast pre war chemical arsenal ended up in rebel hands?
I’d like to do something to help the refugees and others who are displaced or harmed by the war, but other than that, sure, lets let other people fight over some patch of sand on the other side of the world.
You really don’t know Syrian history if you think ending the war will stop the killing. As soon as the war stops, the Assad government will begin rounding up the rebels, their families, their friends, the people in the town they grew up in, and the people they met in the street that one time and kill all of them. They actually have a name for it in Syria; Hama rules, named after a Syrian town where the government had everyone killed back in 1982 because some people in that town had rebelled.
(I know it’s not a great translation, but it’s from Yediot Acharonot, Israel’s leading newspaper. I recommend their reporting and analysis over the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, which IMHO are both much too partisan to take seriously).
It’s hard to fathom, but it sure seems the chemical attack could have been more bait to lure in an attack by US/France/Israel/ so that they could test/show-off their new air defenses after the last time Israel was baited by a drone and exchanged some ordinance with Syria/Iran/Russia. And if the bait hadn’t been taken, they could posture about their air-defense deterrents and yet another meaningless red line.
The Daily Beast has some good analysis of that:
*To all extents and purposes, the incident on Feb. 10 looked to have begun as an Iranian ‘bait-and-trap’ operation, in which an Iranian drone (a cloned copy of an American RQ-170 Reaper captured by Iran in December 2011) was dispatched from an aircraft hangar used by Iran’s IRGC within the T4 airbase. The drone was then flown at low altitude along the Jordanian border and toward the Israeli-held Golan Heights in an attempt to lure an Israeli response.
As it crossed into Israeli airspace, the drone was promptly shot down by an Israeli AH-64 Apache helicopter and shortly thereafter, eight Israeli F-16s launched a series of strikes on the IRGC-dedicated section of T4. In what then looked like a “SAMbush,” multiple Syrian government air-defense systems activated near-simultaneously and fired a barrage of27 surface-to-air missiles at the Israeli aircraft, bringing one down. In the two hours that followed, the Israeli Air Force launched a substantial air response that struck four IRGC and eight Syrian government targets, reportedly including the principal “command and control bunker” used to coordinate Syrian military operations nationwide.*
Evidently there are gobs of aircraft in the area already, from a variety of nations, including the French and British. USS Donald Cook, a Burke-class destroyer, is already in the area, and the IIRC, Truman CVN battle group is about to leave Norfolk to join the festivities. It’ll take, what, 5 days or so at maximum speed to get to the Eastern Med from Norfolk? God only knows how many and whose submarines are in the area. I don’t know if any Russian surface combatants are still in the area.
Ah, so nothing’s in the Eastern Med or Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea? That seems hard to believe, though the battle space in the Eastern Med is so small, I guess you could cover everything from either Al Udeid, Incirlik, bases in Cyprus, and Heraklion, etc… I’m sure I’m missing some too.
I am hearing rumors that, if the U.S. chooses to use further military strikes at all, that such strikes will be more long-term than just a TLAM salvo or three. It is sounding like preparations are being made for more in-depth strikes, and maybe even overt ground troop action like the 82nd maybe getting mobilized. (We all know that various ODAs and the like are there, but they don’t count, I guess.)