Sic Semper Tyrannis

The New Drone Wars - TTG

Back in early 1981, I did a few “odd jobs” between graduating from the Infantry Officer Advanced Course and starting the SF Officers Course. One of these jobs was as an ARTEP evaluator for a mech infantry company on Fort Benning. While I had plenty of book learning about tank-mech infantry teams, I was much more comfortable following a dismounted night attack through a cold January swamp. There was no Moon and a stiff, steady breeze so I felt we were making a stealthy approach. Although the attack was well executed, I learned something disconcerting during the after action review. Our night approach through the swamp was monitored by a high flying AC-130 gunship from 1st SOW. The gunship caught the heat signature of each approaching soldier as they silently slid through that moonless swamp. The lesson I took was that the idea of remaining undetected in uninhabited forests and mountains was a myth. Combine that with the Fort Benning aphorism, “If you can be seen, you can be killed” and I quickly became enamored with the concept of urban guerrilla warfare once I reached 10th Group. We would survive behind the Iron Curtain only by hiding among those we were to liberate from oppression.

So what does this stroll down memory lane have to do with the new drone wars? A lot, actually. It’s the same principle. Armies can be seen and killed from above by a wide range of drones in 2020 just as we could be seen and killed by the AC-130 back in 1980. The difference lies in the proliferation of these drones and the fact that they are less expensive than manned aircraft. They also don’t expose pilots or operators to death or capture. 

First there were our Predators and Reapers hunting down jihadis and the occasional wedding party. We have well over 500 of these heavy drones. We have even more smaller drones down to man packed, hand launched tactical varieties. But we are not alone anymore. China is producing them like gangbusters. Turkey has emerged as a major leader in the development and employment of drones. One of these, the Bayratkar T2B, has had success in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan. Erdogan has also deployed the T2B against the PKK within Turkey and northern Iraq. 

The T2B is a medium altitude tactical drone. It has a range of more than 150 km and can fly at a maximum altitude of 22,500 feet. It has a maximum speed of 120 knots, a cruise speed of 70 knots and endurance of more than 24 hours. The T2B is powered with a 100 horsepower Rotax civil engine, an engine common to ultralight and homebuilt aircraft. The unit cost of the aircraft itself is less than 100 thousand dollars. Its electro-optical reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting system is now produced by Aselan in Turkey at a cost of 400 thousand dollars per unit. Although it does use GPS, it is not satellite controlled. Ground stations control the T2B by line-of-sight radio signal. The munitions, also produced in Turkey by Roketsan, are laser-guided, precision, long range and light weight. They include thermobaric and tandem warheads effective against reactive armor. Overall, the T2B is an impressive piece of kit. 

As I mentioned, the PKK were the first to feel the wrath of the T2B. Those fighters hiding in the hills and mountains of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq have been getting clobbered since the droness were employed against them. I’m sure they learned the same lesson I learned forty years ago in that Fort Benning swamp. The difference is that my lesson was academic, the PKK’s lesson was catastrophically lethal. Erdogan also used the T2B and other drones against the YPG/SDF over the last few years.

The first time the T2B gained notoriety in the West was when they were used as part of Turkey’s Spring 2020 counterattack against the very successful R+5 Idlib Dawn offensive. A large number of T2Bs, along with a smaller number of the larger, satellite-controlled Anka medium drones were deployed from 1 to 5 March. At a loss of six drones, Turkey claimed it destroyed over a hundred SAA armored vehicles, dozens of artillery systems and hundreds of SAA troops. Take that claim with a grain of salt, but Russia and the SAA agreed to a ceasefire immediately after that.

Turkish drones also played a significant role, along with the imported Syrian jihadis, in stopping Haftar’s LNA from taking Tripoli in early 2020. Until that time Haftar was using Chinese made Wing Loong drones to great effect. The GNA compensated for the shorter range of the newly arrived T2Bs by establishing radio relay sites to extend their operational range. The T2Bs used a Turkish EW suite to jam the Russian made Pantsir-1 units and took them out systematically. They then played havoc among Haftar's forces deployed in the flatness of northern Libya. Haftar and the Wagner Group were forced to withdraw from the outskirts of Tripoli.

The newest deployment of the T2B is in the current Armenian-Azerbijani war. The Azeri and Armenian forces are generally similar in equipment, manpower and training. However, the Azeri’s employment of R2B drones has been devastating to the Armenian armor and artillery in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azeris are advancing with the help of those R2B drones. There is a constant stream of drone kill porn on the internet. This time it is Armenian targets being snuffed rather than footage of Predators snuffing jihadis.

The proliferation of attack drones, especially Turkish drones, is changing ground warfare. In Syria, Russia rushed additional air defense capabilities to SAA front line units to blunt the threat of Turkish drones. Movement, dispersion and concealment methods required modification. A hull down position for an AFV is nothing to a drone. After the March 2020 drone attacks in Idlib, the Russians sent wreckage of those Turkish drones back to Moscow to develop an effective countermeasure. They have now rushed the KRET Krasukha electronic jamming system to their base in Armenia where the system reportedly caused nine drones to loose connection with their control stations and crash. The Krashukha also blocks GPS signals to prevent drones from automatically returning to base. The T2B doesn’t appear to have that feature, but many drones do. In my opinion, this is the most promising countermeasure to the widespread use of drones. The Russian military, due to their massive investment in radio-electronic combat (REC) is in the best position to pursue this countermeasure. We could someday soon see serious deployment of REC at the company and battalion level. Sure we can change our TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) to reduce our vulnerabilities to the threat of constant areal surveillance and attack, but that would be debilitating to normal operations. We best get to stepping in developing and widely deploying an effective EW capability. China is right up there with Turkey and the US in the development of drone warfare.

TTG     

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/turkeys-drone-war-syria-red-team-view

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/5/28/largest-drone-war-in-the-world-how-airpower-saved-tripoli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiSTvlBYx14 (fresh drone porn)

https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/russia-knocking-turkish-drones-from-armenian-skies/

What is causing all the damage in Iran?

"A building used for producing centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear site was blown up with a powerful bomb, the official told the newspaper.

A member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also confirmed to the newspaper an explosive was used. He ruled out cyberattacks as the cause.

The unnamed official said, however, Israel was not responsible for the other fires occurring around the Islamic Republic.

On Wednesday, seven ships caught fire at the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr which houses Iran’s only nuclear plant. It was the second blaze reported that day, with another breaking out at an aluminum factory in Lamerd in southern Iran.

There have also been a series of mysterious gas blasts and explosions in the Tehran area.

An explosion at the Parchin military complex, which analysts believe houses missile production facilities as well as a subterranean tunnel system, occurred a week before the Natanz blast."  Breitbart

---------------

Well, well.  the number, nature and distribution of these explosions and fires make it tempting to think of the incidents as targeting.

If it IS targeting, the pattern seems to be a drip-drip campaign of de-stabilization attacks in conjunction with other covert action to try to bring the mullocracy down.  Now, I have zero actual information official or otherwise about this phenomenon but consider one fanciful but perhaps entertaining possibility.

The USG and other countries have been doing R&D on directed energy weapons for decades.  They are all reputed to be still in R&D stage having major problems including diversion and/or obstruction of the death ray itself in the case of massive pumped lasers.   One such project was "Excalibur" (link below).  I never worked on any such project.

In the dark world of secret projects the US and other governments conceal projects that are too valuable to risk in public exposure or that are of dubious international legality.  The really valuable ones are often declared to be cancelled even as the work is moved into a SAP where it can be adequately protected.  The F-117 and the B-2 bomber were both carefully concealed in that way until the day of terrible revelation.

So, how about an orbiting pumped nuclear laser weapon aimed at targets on the ground?  Fun, eh?  I know there are problems with clouds and such like getting in the way but, you can wait for the clouds to clear.

This could be Space Force's first major operation.  pl

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2020/07/19/another-mystery-blast-hits-iranian-power-plant/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur

Ray Guns At Sea.

"The amphibious transport dock Portland blasted the vehicle with a “Solid State Laser” prototype on May 16, the first at-sea test of the system, the Navy said in a Friday press release.

The Navy has been developing lasers and other directed-energy weapons since the 1960s.

Such weapons “are defined as electromagnetic systems capable of converting chemical or electrical energy to radiated energy and focusing it on a target, resulting in physical damage that degrades, neutralizes, defeats, or destroys an adversarial capability,” the release states.

Or in laymen’s terms: PEW PEW!"  Navy Times

---------------

The big advantage in this is that the fleet will not have to expend limited ordnance on aircraft, drones, patrol boats, etc., while  reserving that ammunition for major targets.

Ray guns! Yes!  pl

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2020/05/26/watch-this-ship-mounted-navy-laser-shoot-down-a-drone/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EBB%2005.27.20&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Early%20Bird%20Brief

"Not good at the 'vision thing.'" George Bush '41

"Between 1995 and 2009, $32 billion was expended on programs such as the Future Combat System^[220] (2003-2009), with no harvestable content by the time of its cancellation.^[221] The Army has not fielded a new combat system in decades.^{[222][93][223][224][35]}

Secretary of the Army Mark Esper has remarked that AFC will provide the unity of command and purpose needed to reduce the requirements definition phase from 60 months to 12 months.^{[225][25][54]} A simple statement of a problem (rather than a full-blown requirements definition) that the Army is trying to address may suffice for a surprising, usable solution. —General Mike Murray, paraphrasing Trae Stephens^{[43]:minute 41:50} (One task will be to quantify the lead time for identifying a requirement; the next task would then be to learn how to reduce that lead time.—Gap analysis )^{[30]:minute 11:00[226][227][5]} Process changes are expected.^[226][48] The development process will be cyclic, consisting of prototype, demonstration/testing, and evaluation, in an iterative process designed to unearth unrealistic requirements early, before prematurely including that requirement in a program of record. The ASA(ALT) Bruce Jette^[156] has cautioned the acquisition community to 'call-out' unrealistic processes which commit a program to a drawn-out failure,^[228] rather than failing early, and seeking another solution.^[229]

Secretary Esper scrubbed through 800^[230] modernization programs to reprioritize funding^[231] for the top 6 modernization priorities,^[60] which will consume 80% of the modernization funding,^[232] of 18 systems.^[232] The Budget Control Act will restrict funds by 2020.^{[233][234][235][236][237][238][239][240][241][31][32][242][243][244]} Secretary McCarthy has cautioned that a stopgap 2019 Continuing resolution (CR) would halt development of some of the critical modernization projects.^[245][246] Realistically, budget considerations will restrict the fielding of new materiel to one Armor BCT per year;^[247] at that rate, updates would take decades.^[247][243] The Budget Control Act (BCA) expires in 2022.^[248][249] The "night court" budget review process realigned $2.4 billion for modernization away from programs which were not tied to modernization or to the 2018 National Defense Strategy.^[250] The total FY2021 budget request of $178 billion is $2 billion less than the enacted FY2020 budget of $180 billion.  wiki on AFC

---------------

Me dear ol' da' (a cynical old soldier if ever there was one) served for 34 years and cautioned me that "in the Regular Army we cut off anything that sticks out."  That glorious tradition is still alive.

The Army Futures Command, like many previous attempts at enabling rigorous but unimaginative thinkers to try to do "the vision thing"  will probably solve few problems.  The folks they are dealing with just aren't up to the task.  These guys are better suited to drawing up railroad timetables than they are at making an intuitive leap.

This reminds of the British Army leadership who tried to resist the introduction of machine guns before 1914 and who thought that motor vehicles were a bad thing because they would frighten the horses.  To be fair the Ordnance Department of the US Army successfully resisted the introduction of breech loading cannon and repeating rifles on the basis of an anticipated prodigal use of ammunition by the troops.  That was in 1860.

I wish Esper and McCarthy lots of luck in this effort to induce streamlined, creative thought.  They will need it.  The desire to reduce such thought to smaller and smaller bits run by interlocking committees is overwhelming among the people they are working with.  pl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Futures_Command

OPCW members denounce report on Syria. thegrayzone

"On April 8, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons released a report by its newly formed Investigation and Identification Team, a unit ostensibly established to identify alleged perpetrators of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The IIT investigation examined three alleged incidents in the Syrian town of Ltamenah in March 2017. It concluded “that there are reasonable grounds to believe” that the Syrian army committed a sarin attack in two of the incidents, and a chlorine attack in the third.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo praised the IIT probe, calling it “the latest in a large and growing body of evidence that the Assad regime uses chemical weapons attacks in Syria as part of a deliberate campaign of violence against the Syrian people. The United States shares the OPCW’s conclusions.”

But missing from Pompeo’s remarks and the ensuing U.S. media coverage across the spectrum is the crisis of credibility consuming the OPCW and its senior leadership. The IIT report’s tenuous conclusion “that there are reasonable grounds to believe” the official version of events closely resembles the conclusion of an earlier OPCW report that is now the subject of major controversy and derision. A series of leaks show that OPCW leaders suppressed the findings of inspectors who probed another much more consequential alleged Syrian chemical attack, in the city of Douma in April 2018, which triggered US airstrikes.

The evidence collected in Douma undermined allegations of Syrian government guilt and strongly suggested a staged event by the armed opposition. Leaked internal OPCW emails and documents show that the Douma investigators protested the censorship of their findings, setting off an unfolding cover-up scandal that has called the OPCW’s impartiality into question.

The Grayzone has published a series of leaks from the OPCW’s Douma scandal, and plans to reveal new material that further undermines the official story. The article below reveals how the dissension within the OPCW ranks extends well beyond the Douma investigation.

Here, OPCW insiders offer a withering critique of the IIT report, blasting it as another hyper-politicized piece of bunk. The Grayzone can verify that the authors represent the view of, at minimum, a small group of current and former OPCW officials who took part in its drafting and review. "  thegrayzone

------------------

Well, pilgrims, Pompey likes this report.  Of course he does!  IMO he set up the IIT to produce such a result replete with material that can be used to program Trump for further aggression against the Syrian Government.

As Mr. Jefferson wrote, "I fear for my country when I remember that God is just."  He was speaking of Virginia and slavery, but, you get the idea.  pl

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-chemical-weapons-report/

"Iran’s IRGC to receive new stealth drone with 2,000km range" AMN

"The drone is said to have a 7,600 meter flight ceiling, and the ability to be armed with precision-guided air-to-surface missiles or anti-tank missiles.

The drone’s outward appearance seems to be in line with design concepts found in many Western high-tech drone designs, including a bulbous nose similar to that of the US Predator drone, presumably containing the UAV’s avionics."  AMN

-----------------

This thing was supposed to have been dropped as a project at the prototype stage in 2013.  Now it is back as an equipment to be acquired in some undisclosed number by the IRGC.  Some will argue that the Iranians are bluffing.  If so, it is a good bluff.

When combined with something like the Qader anti-ship missile this could be a formidable anti-ship weapon system.

I presume that the US Navy and DIA are paying attention to this.  pl

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/irans-irgc-to-receive-new-stealth-drone-with-2000km-range/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAIO_Fotros

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qader_(missile)

First, it was "wild bat meat." Now, it was "an accident!" Stay tuned!

One of the basic principles involved in concealing a covert politico/military action is to wrap the whole thing in multiple layers of cover so that when exposure occurs you can say, well, OK, it wasn't that.  It was really this!

In the case of the Wuhan virus disaster, there were initial reports that the virus had somehow "leaked"  from the Chinese viral lab at Wuhan.

The WHO, headed by a well compensated Ethiopian Marxist friend of the CCP, pushed back hard against that claiming that wild meat in a market had caused the disease.  In this he was greatly assisted by the US leftist media crying RACISM! at anyone who said otherwise.

The wild meat story was a second layer of the cover "onion." 

The next development is a "leak" from within the USIC that local bat meat consumption had nothing to do with it.  The local bats have been identified by genetic analysis of the virus as being the wrong bats.  The bat genes in the virus come from hundreds of miles away.

Ah! time for revelation of a third and deeper layer of "cover," which is "Oh, well," it was an accident.  "Nobody is perfect, and anyone who thinks this might have been an inept criminal scheme under international law is a disciple of "tailgunner Joe."

I left out a few minor flourishes in the "cover" game.  There was an early effort to see if the world public would "buy" the idea of American soldiers infecting Wuhan with the virus.  Only hardened believers in US evil paid any attention to that.  There have been efforts to say that China was deeply wounded by the outbreak.  Really?  Where?  The consumer economy in Shanghai and Beijing is roaring along with all stores and restos open.  The death toll in each of these cities has been less than a thousand.  How lucky they were!

We are going to continue to burrow down through the layers of "cover" until the truth becomes apparent.

The governments are unlikely to accuse the CCP and China directly of the depth of their perfidious attacks on the US and the West.  Diplomacy must continue.  Pig slaughter and lima bean production and export must resume, but, the truth will be known.  There will be consequences.  pl 

Addendum 18 April:  Perhaps the release from the Wuhan lab was accidental but the CCP has behaved in a way compatible with a covert action.

Would counter-battery attacks in Syria or Turkey trigger NATO Article Five? -revision 1

 

"This map provides a general look at the recent gains by Turkish-led forces in southern Idlib. The Turkish Army and its al-Qaeda-linked allies have retaken several villages from the Syrian army and beiseged the town of Kafr Nabul, which the Syrians had recently liberated from al-Qaeda."  SF

https://southfront.org/map-update-advances-of-turkish-led-forces-in-southern-idlib/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Turkish_Land_Forces

----------------

IMO the gains made by the jihadis and the Turkish Army in Idlib Province are being made because of the masses of artillery weapons and multiple launcher rocket systems (MLRS) that the Turks were equipped with when they were a major factor in NATO plans to halt a possible Soviet attack in the Balkans and from the Caucasus.

A lot of these weapons are old but they still work well and have ranges that can influence the fighting in Syria from positions WITHIN Hatay Province, Turkey (what the Russians now call "the stolen province").   We are talking about 203 MM howitzers and 175 mm long rifles among other weapons.  I can tell you from personal experience that these are devastating weapons.

The appropriate military response to fires from such artillery and MLRS is COUNTER-BATTERY FIRE.  IOW the point of origin of the fires is determined virtually instantaneously by counter-battery radar or satellite observation (Russian) and fires are placed on the firing positions before the guns or MLRS can be moved.  This procedure would kill a lot of Turks and destroy a lot of their equipment.  IMO it would stop the present Turkish counter-offensive.  Could Fatih Sultan Tayyip politically survive such an experience?  Only Allah knows.

The NATO Treaty's Article Five provides for mutual defense against attacks from outside the alliance.  Would counter-battery fire against the Turks, if they are  firing into Syria, trigger Article Five?  I doubt that the Europeans would want to go to war against Russia to protect the sultan's ambitions.  Counter-battery fir against Turkish artillery operating INSIDE Syria would no be a political problem involving NATO.

The Turks must have moved some guns forward into Syria to support the Turco/jihadi force around Saraqib.  Some other group of heavy weapons  must be supporting the Turco/jihadi force near the northern el-Ghaab Plain.  Are they in Syria?  Maybe, but wherever they are, IMO they can be struck without fear of Article Five.

Would the Syrians then be attacked by US forces with or without Article Five?  Maybe they would be.  That would depend on the level of Pompeo's influence with the president.  pl 

Meet the Quds1 cruise missile. Made in Yemen?

"On September 14, several explosions rocked the Khurais oilfield as well as the Abqaiq refinery, one of Saudi Arabia’s most vital petrochemical installations. Several hours later, the Houthis claimed that they had targeted both facilities with ten drones as part of their “Balance of Deterrence” campaign.

What made this attack different from other recorded Houthi drone attacks was not only the unprecedented amount of material damage caused but also lingering doubt about the nature and the attribution of the attack. First, a video allegedly showing flying objects entering Kuwaiti airspace led to speculation that like a previous “Houthi” drone attack this strike might actually have originated in Iraq or even Iran. While the video remains unverified, the fact that the Kuwaiti government launched a probe into the issue lends some credence to the idea that something might have happened over Kuwait that day. Speculation about the origins of the attack was further fueled by a tweet by Mike Pompeo in which he claimed that there was no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.

Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in fact have been a missile strike. Previous Houthi drone strikes against oil facilities tended to result in quite limited damage which could be an indication that a different weapons system was used this time. Indeed, Aramco came to the conclusion that its facilities were attacked by missiles. Even more curious, several pictures began to emerge on social media purportedly showing the wreckage of a missile in the Saudi desert. While the images appear real, neither the date the photos were taken nor their location can be verified. Social media users quickly claimed the images showed a crashed Iranian-made Soumar cruise missile. The Soumar and its updated version, the Hoveyzeh, are Iran’s attempts at reverse-engineering the Soviet-designed KH-55 cruise missile, several of which the country illegally imported from Ukraine in the early 2000s. Others claimed it was the Quds 1, a recently unveiled Houthi cruise missile often claimed to be a rebranded Soumar."  armscontrolwonl

---------------

TTG raised the issue of whether or not this wave of strikes was done by UAVs or cruise missiles.  IMO this cruise missile could be built in Yemen with Iranian assistance.   I am very interested in the question of what the actual vector of the attacks was in this case.  pl

/www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1208062/meet-the-quds-1/

Houthi UAVs set big Saudi refinery alight. al-jazeere, etc.

"Saudi Arabia is shutting down half of its oil production after drones attacked the world’s largest oil processing facility in the kingdom, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The closure will impact almost five million barrels of crude production a day, about 5% of the world’s daily oil production, the WSJ reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Early Saturday, an oilfield operated by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, was attacked by a number of drones, which sparked a huge fire at a processor crucial to global energy supplies.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was one of their largest attacks ever inside the kingdom, the WSJ reported.

“We promise the Saudi regime that our future operations will expand and be more painful as long as its aggression and siege continue,” a Houthi spokesman said. The attack deployed 10 drones, the Houthis said."  CNBC

-------------

Watch the al-jazeera video linked below. 

Some time ago, an "expert" on toy UAVs expressed an opinion on my FB page that the Houthis must be trucking these drones up to within a few miles of the target before flying them.  This attack would seem to exclude this possibility.  The question of the size of the payload also is intriguing because of the amount of damage inflicted, and then there is the matter of the guidance system. 

This is a game changer.  pl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6BgA54VZBk

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/14/saudi-arabia-is-shutting-down-half-of-its-oil-production-after-drone-attack-wsj-says.html

SF video on Ansarallah recent attacks in SA

https://southfront.org/wp-content/uploads/video/IMR_Yemen_28_08_19.mp4

This SF video provides description of recent Ansarallah missile and UAV attacks in Saudi Arabia.  It does not mention the UAV attack on the Shaibah oil and gas field out in the Rub al-Khali just south of the UAE border.  pl

 

Riyadh was struck in a Houthi drone attack?

 
"On August 26, Ansar Allah (the Houthis) for the first time used a squadron of Sammad-3 (Invincible-3) combat drones to strike an “important military target” in Saudi Arabia’s capital city of Riyadh.

A spokesman for Yemeni Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, said that the drones struck the designated target with great precision, reiterating that the strikes were in response to the continued Saudi-led alliance’s crimes and aggression against Yemen, and its blockade of the war-torn Arab country.'  SF

-------------

When I was DATT in Yemen long ago the North Yemeni Army was beginning to develop skill in using SCUD missiles provided by the USSR.  In those days (early 80s) the Soviets supplied both North and South Yemen.  We and the Saudis restricted our supply activities to Salih's North Yemen.  Thie Soviet policy was odd because there was a flaming proxy war going on between the two Yemens.

Now, the Ansarallah/Salih Loyalists have a wide array of ballistic missiles and UAVs.  Are these manufactured in Iran as the US government claims?  IMO components of them may be and then these are assembled in Houthi/Salih loyalist controlled parts of Yemen.  If a lot of this materiel is wholly Iranian made why does it not show up somewhere else in the hands of other Iranian "allies?"  And, how does it get to Yemen?  By ship?

I have been unable to find a single document that describes all the different types of missiles,UAVs, but one of you will do that.

This particular bird does not look like a "throw away."  What does it do? Does it fly up to Riyadh, fire a missile at a target and then fly home to the Yemeni mountains?  What does it do?  pl

https://southfront.org/ansar-allah-struck-military-targets-in-saudi-arabias-riyadh/

"U.S. Signals the Beginning of a New Arms Race" SF

"The Associated Press ran a brief article asserting that:

“The U.S. military has conducted a flight test of a type of missile banned for more than 30 years by a treaty that both the United States and Russia abandoned this month, the Pentagon said.

The Trump administration has said it remains interested in useful arms control but questions Moscow’s willingness to adhere to its treaty commitments.”

This was stated within the first paragraph. The author failed to mention that it was the United States that unilaterally abandoned the treaty. Russia only abandoned the treaty after the U.S. did, despite numerous Russian efforts to keep the treaty alive. Russia only abandoned the INF treaty when it became the only party to it, and treaties are quite pointless when they do not actually have more than one party as a signatory. Russia had in fact adhered to the restrictions imposed by the treaty, vague and unproven Pentagon leveled accusations aside.

Let’s be honest, both Russia and the United States have had the technology and the guided missile systems in service to field the intermediate range land-based missiles prohibited by the INF treaty. Both field such systems on their naval warships. The only thing that kept them from fielding such weapons was the INF treaty itself. Now that formal framework of prohibition is gone.

Now that we can acknowledge the fact that the INF Treaty no longer exists because the United States unilaterally abandoned it, let’s take a look at the missile that the U.S. military tested."  SF

---------------

OK, pilgrims, first we bailed out of the JCPOA, an agreement that was accomplishing what it was intended to do in impeding Iranian progress toward their supposed goal of a deliverable nuclear weapon.  Our claim, resoundingly approved by Israel, is that the JCPOA nuclear deal did not restrict Iran to a role as a "hermit kingdom" producer of pistachio nuts and carpets.  This policy of the US is ridiculously servile to the Zionist interest.

Now, WE (the US) have walked away from the INF Treaty, an agreement that had been in place since the dark days of the Cold War.  Its purpose was to prevent the deployment of land based intermediate range nuclear tipped missiles and it served that purpose well.

But, pilgrims, in the era of the triumph of the Trumpian neocon view of the world, we must prepare for war.  WAR!  Any advantage that can be pursued against possible enemies must be pursued.  Pompeo, Bolton and the other hyper-aggressive nuts want total world dominance.  Sooo, we canceled the INF and now have tested a land based version of the navy's Tomahawk which has a range of over 300 miles.

For shame! Shame!  We are unmasked as liars.  pl

https://southfront.org/the-u-s-signals-the-beginning-of-a-new-arms-race-while-the-mainstream-media-runs-interference/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty

ENOUGH AND NOT TOO MUCH By Patrick Armstrong

(First published at Strategic Culture Foundation, I put it here to see what the Committee thinks about it)

Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country’s military spending will gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the “world gendarme,” President Vladimir Putin said. Moscow is not seeking to get involved in a “pointless” new arms race, and will stick to “smart decisions” to strengthen its defensive capabilities, Putin said on Friday during an annual extended meeting of the Defense Ministry board. “Intelligence, brains, discipline and organization” must be the cornerstones of the country’s military doctrine, the Russian leader said. The last thing that Russia needs is an arms race that would “drain” its economy, and Moscow sure does not want that “in any scenario,” Putin pointed out.

– RT, 22 December 2017

 

It's easy to forget it today, but the USSR was, in its time, an "exceptionalist" country. It was the world's first socialist country – the "bright future"; it set an example for all to follow, it was destined by History. It had a mission and was required by History to assist any country that called itself "socialist". The USSR had bases and interests all over the world. As the 1977 USSR Constitution said:

the Soviet state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the revolution and for building socialism and communism. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making turn from capitalist to socialism.

A novus ordo seclorum indeed.

Russia, however, is just Russia. There is no feeling in Moscow that Russia must take the lead any place but Russia itself. One of the reasons, indeed, why Putin is always talking about the primacy of the UN, the independence of nation states, the impermissibility to interfere in internal activities – the so-called "Westphalian" position – is that he remembers the exceptionalist past and knows that it led to a dead end. Moscow has no interest in going abroad in search of internationalist causes.

Internationalism/exceptionalism and nationalism: the two have completely different approaches to constructing a military. The first is obsessed with "power projection", "full spectrum superiority", it imagines that its hypertrophied interests are challenged all over the planet. Its wants are expensive, indeterminate, unbounded. The other is only concerned with dealing with enemies in its neighbourhood. Its wants are affordable, exact, finite. The exceptionalist/interventionist has everything to defend everywhere; the nationalist has one thing to defend in one place. It is much easier and much cheaper to be a nationalist: the exceptionalist/interventionist USA spends much more than anyone else but always needs more; nationalist Russia can cut its expenditure.

The USSR's desire to match or exceed the USA in all military areas was a contributing factor to the collapse of its alliance system and the USSR itself. Estimates are always a matter for debate, especially in a command economy that hid its numbers (even when they were calculable), but a common estimate is a minimum of 15% of the USSR's production went to the military. But the true effort was probably higher. The USSR was involved all over the world shoring up socialism's "bright future" and that cost it at home.

Putin & Co's "bright future" is for Russia only and the world may do as it wants about any example or counterexample it may imagine there. While Putin may occasionally indulge himself by offering opinions about liberalism and oped writers gas on about the Putin/Trump populism threat, Putin & Co are just trying to do what they think best for Russia with, as their trust ratings suggest (in contrast with those of the rulers of the "liberal" West), the support and agreement of most Russians.

The military stance of the former exceptionalist country is all gone. As the USSR has faded away, so have its overseas bases and commitments: the Warsaw Pact is gone together with the forward deployment of Soviet armies; there are no advisors in Vietnam or Mozambique; Moscow awaits with bemusement the day next January when the surviving exceptionalist power and its minions will have been in Afghanistan twice as long as the USSR was. The United States, still exceptionalist, still imagining it is spreading freedom and democracy, preventing war and creating stability, has bases everywhere and thinks that it must protect "freedom of navigation" to and from China in the South China Sea. It has yet to learn the futility of seeing oneself as The World's Example.

Putin & Co have learned: Russia has no World-Historical purpose and its military is just for Russia. They understand what this means for Russia's Armed Forces:

Moscow doesn't have to match the US military; it just has to checkmate it.

And it doesn't have to checkmate it everywhere, only at home. The US Air Force can rampage anywhere but not in Russia's airspace; the US Navy can go anywhere but not in Russia's waters. It's a much simpler job and it costs much less than what Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were attempting; it's much easier to achieve; it's easier to plan and carry out. The exceptionalist/interventionist has to plan for Everything; the nationalist for One Thing.

Study the enemy, learn what he takes for granted and block it. And the two must haves of American conventional military power as it affects Russia are 1) air superiority and 2) assured, reliable communications; counter those and it's checkmated: Russia doesn't have to equal or surpass the US military across the board, just counter its must haves.

Russia's comprehensive and interlocking air defence weaponry is well known and well respected: it covers the spectrum from defences against ballistic missiles to small RPVs, from complex missile/radar sets to MANPADS; all of it coordinated, interlocking with many redundancies. We hear US generals complaining about air defence bubbles and studies referring to Russia's "anti-access/area-denial (A2AD) exclusion zones". Russian air defence has not been put to the full-scale test but we have two good indications of its effectiveness. The first was the coordinated RPV attack on Russian bases in Syria last year in which seven were shot down and six taken over, three of them landed intact. Then, in the FUKUS attack of April 2018, the Russians say the Syrian AD system (most of which is old but has benefited from Russian coordination) shot down a large number of the cruise missiles. (FUKUS' claims are not believable).

The other area, about which even less is known are Russian electronic warfare capabilities: “eye-watering” says a US general; "Right now in Syria we are operating in the most aggressive EW environment on the planet from our adversaries. They are testing us everyday, knocking our communications down, disabling our EC-130s, etcetera.” Of course, what the Americans know is only what Russia wants them to know. There is speculation about an ability to spoof GPS signals. AEGIS-equipped warships seem to have trouble locating themselves (HNoMS Helge Ingstad) or avoiding being run into (USS Lake Champlain, USS John McCain, USS Fitzgerald). Bad seamanship may, of course, be the cause and that's what the US investigations claim. So more rumour than fact but a lot of rumour.

In the past two or three decades US air power has operated with impunity; it has assumed that all GPS-based systems (and there are many) will operate as planned and that communications will be free and clear. Not against Russia. With those certainties removed, the American war fighting doctrine will be left scrabbling.

But AD and EW are not the only Russian counters. When President Bush pulled the USA out of the ABM Treaty in 2001, Putin warned that Russia would have to respond. Mutual Assured Destruction may sound crazy but there's a stability to it: neither side, under any circumstance, can get away with a first strike; therefore neither will try it. Last year we met the response: a new ICBM, a hypersonic re-entry vehicle, a nuclear-powered cruise missile with enormous flight time and a similar underwater cruise missile. No defence will stop them and so MAD returns. A hypersonic anti-shipping missile will keep the US Navy out of Russian waters. And, to deal with the US Army's risible ground forces in Europe, with or without NATO's other feeble forces, Russia has re-created the First Guards Tank Army. Checkmate again.

No free pass for US air power, strained and uncertain communications, a defeated ground attack and no defence against Russian nuclear weapons. That's all and that's enough.

And that is how Moscow does it while spending much less money than Washington. It studies Washington's strengths and counters them: "smart decisions". Washington is starting to realise Russia's military power but it is blinded and can only see its reflection in the mirror: the so-called "rising threat from Russia" would be no threat to a Washington that stayed at home.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

- Sun Tzu

Is Bolton Trashing Yet Another Arms Control Agreement?

by Willy B

There's been a lot of verbiage lately about the alleged nuclear threat emanating from Russia, often citing Russian President Vladimir Putin's March 1, 2018 address to the Federal Assembly as proof of Russia's malignant intentions. Mark Schneider, an analyst with the National Institute for Public Policy, writing in Real Clear Defense on May 30 went so far as to claim that Russia threatens pre-emptive nuclear attack on the US. "We have moved from the fantasy that there was no threat from Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union to a recognition of a serious Russian threat to the U.S. and its allies, including a nuclear threat in the last two years of the Obama administration and the Trump administration," Schneider wrote. "However, characterizing the relationship between the U.S. and Russia as 'competition' as it now appears in U.S. Government documents, does not go far enough. Lockheed and Boeing compete; Russia threatens preemptive nuclear attack. It is unilaterally trying to create a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states in the classic 19th Century sense while building the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. There is no competition here but rather a serious threat from Russia." He says this while the U.S., under the tutelage of British imperial geopolitics, is trying to make the entire globe its sphere of influence.

The day before Schneider's piece appeared, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, Jr., the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, appeared at the Hudson Institute to, among other things, accuse Russia of violating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by carrying out low yield nuclear tests at its facility in Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic (video and a transcript of Ashley's remarks can be found here). “The United States believes that Russia probably is not adhering to the nuclear testing moratorium in a manner consistent with the zero-yield standard,” Ashley said. "Our understanding of nuclear weapon development leads us to believe Russia's testing activities would help it improve its nuclear weapon capabilities. The United States, by contrast, has forgone such benefits by upholding a zero-yield standard.”

Comments on Official Response by OPCW to the Engineering Assessment on Douma

Comments on official response to the release of the Engineering Assessment of the Douma cylinders

Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, Piers Robinson

Members of Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media

• 1 Introduction
• 2 OPCW’s response to the release of the document
  • 2.1 Official response
  • 2.2 Unofficial briefings
  • 2.3 What the channelling of off-the-record briefings tells us
  • 2.4 Discrepancies between versions of OPCW’s response
• 3 Government responses to an alleged chlorine attack on 19 May
  • 3.1 Reports of the alleged attack
  • 3.2 UK response
  • 3.3 French response
  • 3.4 US response
• 4 Comparison of the Engineering Assessment with the published Final Report

1 Introduction

This post comments on the response to our release of the Executive Summary of the Engineering Assessment of the Douma cylinders on 13 May 2018. All emphases in quoted passages are added by us. After OPCW had confirmed the document to be genuine, the story was covered extensively by Russian media. An informed commentary by Professor Hiroyuki Aoyama in Tokyo has been published on Yahoo News’s Japanese site. The only coverage in western corporate media has been by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday, Robert Fisk in the Independent and Tucker Carlson on Fox. Other journalists who have been in touch with us have told us that their stories were spiked by editors. As expected, the story has reached much larger numbers through websites and videos that have disseminated it.

2 OPCW’s response to the release of the document

2.1 Official response

In an email dated 11 May and shown to us, Deepti Choubey, the head of OPCW Public Affairs, wrote:

Thank you for reaching out to us. It is exclusively through the Fact-Finding Mission, set up in 2014, that the OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of use of toxic chemicals for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic. On 1 March 2019, the OPCW has issued its final and only valid official report, signed by the Director-General, regarding the incident that took place in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. The document you shared with us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM. The individual mentioned in the document has never been a member of the FFM.

A subsequent email on 16 May stated:

The OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic through the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), which was set up in 2014. The OPCW Technical Secretariat reaffirms that the FFM complies with established methodologies and practices to ensure the integrity of its findings. The FFM takes into account all available, relevant, and reliable information and analysis within the scope of its mandate to determine its findings. Per standard practice, the FFM draws expertise from different divisions across the Technical Secretariat as needed. All information was taken into account, deliberated, and weighed when formulating the final report regarding the incident in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. On 1 March 2019, the OPCW issued its final report on this incident, signed by the Director-General.

OPCW Engineering sub-team assessment on the Douma gas "attack" in April 2018

Assessment by the engineering sub-team of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission investigating the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018

Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Piers Robinson

Members of Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Commentary on the Engineering Assessment
  • 2.1 Methodology
  • 2.2 Results: Location 2
  • 2.3 Results: Location 4
  • 2.4 Conclusions of the Engineering Assessment
• 3 Implications of the Engineering Assessment combined with other findings
• 4 The hijacking of OPCW
• 5 Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

In our Briefing note on the Final Report of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission on the Douma incident, we noted that the FFM had sought assessments in October 2018 from unidentified engineering experts on the “the trajectory and damage to the cylinders found at Locations 2 and 4”. The Final Report provided no explanation for why the FFM had not sought engineering assessments in April 2018, when the experts could have inspected the sites with cylinders in position, rather than six months later when inspection of the sites with cylinders in position was no longer possible and the assessments had to rely on images and measurements obtained by others. We raised this as an obvious anomaly.

OPCW staff members have communicated with the Working Group. We have learned that an investigation was undertaken by an engineering sub-team of the FFM, beginning with on-site inspections in April-May 2018, followed by a detailed engineering analysis including collaboration on computer modelling studies with two European universities. The report of this investigation was excluded from the published Final Report of the Fact-Finding Mission, which referred only to assessments sought from unidentified “engineering experts” commissioned in October 2018 and obtained in December 2018.

A copy of a 15-page Executive Summary of this report with the title “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident” has been passed to us and we have posted it here. Please download and share this document via your own server if you link to it, so as not to overload our server.

We are studying this document, and encourage others with relevant expertise to contribute. We provide some initial comments below:-

Analytic piece on staged chemical attacks

" ... weaponized disinformation campaigns, staged videos and fake news are common approaches used by the US military and special services to promote their own agenda around the world. The US was actively using these tools during its intervention in Iraq and after it.

According to the later revelations, the employed programs were varying from placing Pentagon-provided articles in Iraqi newspapers as “unbiased news” to producing footage, which were made to look as if they had been “created by Arabic TV,” and CDs with fake al-Qaeda videos, which then distributed through various channels.

The employed propaganda approaches are constantly evolving. Therefore, propaganda coverage of the conflict in Syria has some differences with those which were observed in Iraq. Now, mainstream media, the Pentagon, the intelligence services and diplomats are actively using Hollywood-style approaches. This style of the coverage is based on providing catchy, even if horrible, pictures and videos influencing the emotions of the audience rather than convincing it with logical conclusions.

Just like with Hollywood movies, the mainstream news has increasingly been turning away from the logical narration of stories with realistic motivations to emotional judgements based on anonymous sources, non-verified images, pocket citizen journalists and even open speculation. The content developed within the framework of this approach is usually based on the results of social and psychological research. This allows results to be maximised by the targetted development of content and appropriate segmentation of the audience. An interesting and successful example of this audience reaction modelling can be seen in the mainstream media coverage of the Salisbury incident, which gave rise to large-scale hysteria in Western countries about Russian spies."  SF

-------------

Well, pilgrims,  you heard it first here and often over the last years.  This piece speaks for itself.  pl

https://southfront.org/staged-chemical-attack-videos-and-other-trends-in-modern-propaganda/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog

A slide to nuclear war?

"For more than 30 years, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) has been one of the cornerstones of the international security system. This ended on February 2, 2019 when the US officially suspended its participation in the Treaty. Washington said that it will fully terminate the treaty in 6 months if Russia does not comply with its ultimatum – the “verifiable” destruction of what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described as “INF-violating missiles, their launchers and associated equipment”. US President Donald Trump said in an official statement that the US “will move forward with developing” its “own military response options” and will work with NATO members and other allies “to deny Russia any military advantage from its unlawful conduct.” By this statement, Trump in fact announced that the US is restoring production and deployment of INF-banned weapons.

On the same day, Russia also halted participation in the Treaty. President Vladimir Putin said that Russia will no more initiate talks to try and save the deal and publicly gave a green light to development of a mid-range hypersonic missile and a ground-based model of the sea-launched cruise missile Kalibr."  SF

------------

This SF report effectively states the Russian analysis of the likely result of INF cancellation.  pl

https://southfront.org/inf-is-dead-nuclear-war-in-europe-is-one-step-closer/

Underwater Currents of Naval Strategy - by Andrei Martyanov

Late Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, Sergei Gorshkov at the peak of the Soviet naval development in late 1970s to mid-1980s continued to stress his seemingly simple idea, first officially articulated in his 1976 treatise The Sea Power of the State, that modern (Soviet) navy must be balanced.[1] Gorshkov's idea of balanced fleet was that of a navalist, who envisioned modern navy capable to conduct global operations ranging from amphibious landings, to global anti-submarine warfare (ASW) operations, to nuclear deterrent. Yet, throughout Gorshkov's long tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy one platform above everything else remained dominant in his thinking—a submarine. Unsurprisingly, 1968 Time magazine cover featured image of Admiral Gorshkov superimposed on the background with a submarine at the periscope depth. With all the Soviet Navy's impressive development of its surface fleet at that time, these were primarily submarines which USSR developed at a break-neck speed and eventually equaled or surpassed US Navy's submarine forces not only in quantity but in quality too, with even US Navy grudgingly admitting in 1988 that project 971 (NATO Akula-class) nuclear submarine being the best in the world.[2]  

Gorshkov knew, as well as contemporary Russian naval commanders know that no balanced fleet is possible without powerful submarine component. Even in the worst times of post-Soviet collapse, with what became Russian Navy's surface component rusting away and disintegrating in 1990s, submarine development never stopped in Russia because submarine forces were and are viewed still as one of the major elements of national security. Submarines, apart from strategic missile submarines serving as a crucial pillar of the national nuclear deterrent, are indispensable in ASW role, they are also a major factor in operations, both as a defender and otherwise, on the Shipping Lanes of Communications (SLOC). This fact is important when considering what is emerging as a flash point, one of many, between China and the United States in the oceans, Indian and Pacific Oceans to be precise. There is very little doubt that any American Administration, as recent experience with Donald Trump's affection for the most extreme neoconservatives, such as John Bolton or Mike Pompeo, demonstrated, will pursue the most aggressive policies both in relation to Russia and China. This is today the nature of the American state, driven by crusading spirit of exceptionalism and desperate vain desire to not allow emergence of economic and military peers. China long ago surpassed the US economically. In terms of naval development, however, some questions still remain as of today. 

 

Chinese naval rail guns.

"A railgun is a device that uses electromagnetic force to launch high velocity projectiles, by means of a sliding armature that is accelerated along a pair of conductive rails.^[2] It is typically constructed as a weapon, and the projectile normally does not contain explosives, relying on the projectile's high speed to inflict damage. The railgun uses a pair of parallel conductors, or rails, along which a sliding armature is accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current that flows down one rail, into the armature and then back along the other rail. It is based on principles similar to those of the homopolar motor."  SF

-------------

Now this has little to do with Mu Gu Gai Pan. 

I have long been interested in these gadgets.  I remember a NOVA feature that looked at what they called "mass drivers."  This is the same thing I suppose.  The device was also featured in Heinlein's novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in which big ones were used to fire loads of rare earths and the like at target ocean areas on the earth for retrieval.  How well that would work is beyond my ability to judge.

These things typically will fire metal bolts at hyper-velocities at maritime targets.  Cool.  pl

https://southfront.org/chinese-ship-with-electromagnetic-railgun-starts-sea-trials-reports/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

Barbed wire obstacles I have known.

I am somewhat bemused by today;'s TV images of newly arrived soldiers stringing triple concertina wire at the border.  This is not much of an obstacle.  It is the kind of thing you put up in a newly occupied defensive  position.  The coils of wire are connected to each other and should be staked down but this is still not much of an obstacle.  It would normally be covered by fire from small arms, mortars and nasty things like Claymore Mines.  It is better than nothing to have out in front of you, but not much better.  Since this obstacle on the border WOULD NOT be covered by fire the barrier would be easy to defeat.  A few foot wide planks thrown forward onto the wire can be run across.  Alternatively, a few caravaners thrown forward onto the wire could serve the same purpose as the rest run across on their backs (joke).  Actually not much of a joke, they teach the troops to do that in the army if they unexpectedly run into such a flimsy obstacle when moving forward.

The little picture above shows what a serious barbed wire obstacle looks like  Two double apron barbed wire fences with the intervening space filled up with two or three concertina coils.  All of this staked down and covered with fire and filled with mines.  Now, that would make your eyes water if you had to get through it.  We used to wire our permanent positions in with obstacles like this plus berms in VN.  pl

Craig Murray: “The Holes in the Official Skripal Story”

 

"The nub of the British government’s approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the “novichok” class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002.

Furthermore, it was the USA who decommissioned the facility and removed equipment back to the United States. At least two key scientists from the programme moved to the United States. Formulae for several novichok have been published for over a decade. The USA, UK and Iran have definitely synthesised a number of novichok formulae and almost certainly others have done so too. Dozens of states have the ability to produce novichok, as do many sophisticated non-state actors.

As for motive, the Russian motive might be revenge, but whether that really outweighs the international opprobrium incurred just ahead of the World Cup, in which so much prestige has been invested, is unclear."  Craig Murray

https://southfront.org/craig-murray-the-holes-in-the-official-skripal-story/

No nerve or other chemical agent at Douma - OPCW

 "A preliminary report published Friday by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) found no traces of any nerve agent at the site of a suspected chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma. The OPCW report states this unambiguously as follows:

“No organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties.”

Compare the newly published official OPCW findings with the 5-page White House assessment released on April 13th, just days after the alleged attack. Now contradicted by the new OPCW findings, the White House asserted that sarin was used at Douma,"  Zerohedge and SF

-------------

Follow the link at "OPCW findings" to read the international agency's denial of the Borgist claims of Syrian Government use of chemical weapons at Douma in the recent battle to liberate the city of Douma from jihadist occupation.  It is now well established that the "White Helmet" (WH) darlings of the Borgist deep state work force at the State Department are merely a propaganda instrument of the British and US governments.  The WH production facility for gas propaganda films was captured ad revealed at Douma.

The depth of this deception points to the falsity of the never proven, merely asserted, supposed previous Syrian Government "gas attacks" at Khan Sheikoon and East Gouta.  People rave on about Obama's failure to punish the SAG for that "attack."  Well, pilgrims, he did not attack because DIA told him there was no evidence of the attack.

Trump has had a steep learning curve in the ME.  There is some sign that he is BEGINNING to learn, but he sure isn't "there" yet.  pl  

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_the_Prohibition_of_Chemical_Weapons 

https://southfront.org/no-nerve-agents-in-douma-opcw-report-demolishes-white-house-sarin-narrative/

"We're taking names..." Ambassador Nikki Haley

"Washington is exerting pressure on Turkey to make it abandon the plans to purchase Russia S-400 Triumf state-of-the-art air defense systems. So far, Ankara stood tall refusing to bow. US Congress is already considering the proposals on halting US arms sales to that country."  Korzun

"Unlike Turkey, India is not a NATO ally but its desire to acquire the Triumf triggers a negative reaction in the US. American lawmakers not only express concern over the planned deal but also issue warnings that sensitive American military technology may be banned from being shared with India in future. According to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, “There is a lot of concern in the US administration and Congress with the S-400.” India’s decision will be made final before the October Russia-India summit. During the informal talks in Sochi in May 2018, President Putin and Prime Minister Modi discussed the ways to get around the US potential sanctions when the deal goes through. Both countries have pledged to jointly create a plan to keep it out of CAATSA. New Delhi has just concluded price talks on the S-400 deal with Moscow, saying it will go ahead, no matter what the US says or does.

Those who follow the news on arms trade know well that India is interested in purchasing 22 American Predator Guardian drones for its Navy. It’s also willing to acquire the weapon the US has not sold anyone so far: 80-100 Avenger (Predator C) armed drones for the Air Force. The price may be as high as $8 billion. The F-16 production on Indian soil is also in doubt. All these projects are questioned as the US sticks to its guns implementing the “do it or else” policy. But it will hardly work with India, a nation known for its independent foreign policy. It has never bowed to any pressure from outside since its independence.

Iraq, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Morocco, Indonesia and Vietnam are among the countries threatened by sanctions if they go on with the plans to purchase Russian weapons. Many of them are particularly interested in the S-400."  Korzun 

https://southfront.org/us-warns-india-not-to-buy-russian-weapons/

-------------

America leads the way!  Or else.  Well, folks the international situation would be at least this bad with the wandering basket case Hillary Clinton in charge.

It appears that Israel is wasting American money by maintaining its own ambassador at the UN since they already have Nikki Haley.  They should make her status official and save money.  Yesterday she vetoed Kuwait's draft resolution on Gaza and was joined by no other country on that.  Then she offered a US resolution condemning Hamas for the Palestinian deaths on the Gaza border and was joined by none.  Not even the usual European toadies would sign up to support that.  Haley must be planning to run for president on the new Ziotrumpian Party ticket.

The control wielded by the Zionists over Trump appears to be complete at this point.   I doubt if Trump really understands anything about the Middle East.  His "thinking" appears to be a melange and reflection of the Grima Wormtongue murmurings of his family members, the flickering images on the Fox channels, (Hannity the Wise, Jack Keane and Stewart Varney) and his own lack of a reflective mind. 

The Saudis get s big response from him as well.  But, after all, they have disposable cash.  They don't have as much as they did, but they still have a lot.  That counts in the narrow world of The Art of the Deal."

In the arms trade, the objective seems to be to dragoon all these countries into accepting their roles as satrapies of the Peacock Throne,  Will that work?  We will see.

The name of US Pacific Command has been changed to US Indo-Pacific Command.  I don't quite see the significance of that unless it is accompanied by AOR boundary changes in the Unified Command Plan (UCP).  pl 

Israel doesn't like the the S-300

"Israel opposes Russia supplying Syria with S-300 anti-aircraft systems, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon told RIA Novosti on Saturday."

“Of course, we do not like it,” the former Defense Minister said. 

“The S-300 is a more powerful system, and we do not like its appearance there, but just as we are ready and able to overcome the entire existing air defense of Syria, we should be ready to deal with the S-300,” Ya’alon said.

According to him, Tel Aviv did not want the complexes “fell into the hands of the Syrians”, and earlier, when such questions arose, the Israeli side discussed them through channels of communication with the Russian leadership.

“I believe Russia is receiving signals from our authorities about the undesirability of such supplies,” the former Defense Minister added."  AMN

-------------

 The level of arrogant presumption on the part of the Israelis with regard to the world at large and the Russians in particular is breathtaking.   For Yaalon and presumably the Israeli government behind him to imply that Russia will bend to Israel's displeasure seems to be reflective of a collective hubris born of assumptions of innate superiority and an even worse assumption that the fell power of the United States can be employed by Israel against Russia.   Natanyahu said on tape that "the Americans can easily be pushed." 

Yes, we can easily be pushed by Israel using every IO technique available to them, everything from illegal manipulation of electoral financing to the memory of Paul Newman's blue eyes in "Exodus."

Well, we will see if Putin and Russia are as "easy" as we Americans.  pl  

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/israel-opposes-russia-supplying-syria-with-s-300-systems/

"Animal" Assad strikes again! - This time to celebrate victory?

 

"At least 70 people have been killed and hundreds injured (500-700) in an alleged chemical attack on the distict of Douma in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta, the mainstream media (MSM) reports citing “rescuers and medics” in the militant-held area. [for example: BBC, SkyNews]

Obviously, the alleged attack was immediately blamed on the Syrian government.

According to mainstream and pro-militant “analysts” and “media outlets”, the “Assad regime” has nothing to do but to conduct chemical attacks in Douma. Especially, considering that the militants’ defense fully collapsed in Eastern Ghouta, Douma is now the only militant stronghold in the entire area and Jaish al-Islam has no chances to win the battle for Douma even theoretically.

First reports, about the alleged chemical attack in the area appeared on April 7 when the Syrian Army re-newed its military operation against Jaish al-Islam militants controlling Douma. It’s interesting to note that according to initial reports by Jaish al-Islam-linked media only 15 people had been affected by the attack. However, by April 8, the story had reached the MSM and the death toll had grown to “at least 70”.

The notorious al-Qaeda-linked propaganda organization White Helments as always played a key role in sppreading the story.

The White Helmets closely cooperated with the Syrian al-Qaeda branch – Jaish al-Islam, and continued to cooperate with the group after it was re-branded to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and then Hayat Tahrir al-Sham."

https://southfront.org/old-new-story-msm-claims-70-people-killed-douma-chemical-attack-assad-regime/

-------------

"Animal" Assad?  Our beloved president has once again been watching a bit too much TV news.  Does it ever occur to him to pick up the secure phone and call the watch officer at CIA, NSA or wherever and ask if they think the news reports are correct?  All of these information feeds to the MSM and thence to DJT's ears are news feeds from the propaganda apparatus of the rebels, much of it supported financially by the British government's foreign ministry and delivered through MI-6.  What on earth motivates the UK in this devilment?  And then, of course, there is the extreme group think on the part of the US and European MSM in parroting these objectively unproven claims.  I have grown weary of pointing to the congruence of such thematic material and Zionist policy goals with regard to Syria.  pl

Putin: Listen to Russia Now by Willy B

Rusian President Vladimir Putin delivered his State of the Nation Address to the Federal Assembly, yesterday, and while his lengthy remarks covered the gamut of policy issues in Russia, it was his remarks on nuclear policy and weapons that garnered headlines around the world.

"I believe it as my duty to say this: any use of nuclear weapons of any yield - small, medium or whatever - against Russia or its allies will be regarded as a nuclear attack against our country. Retaliation will be instant with all the ensuing consequences," Putin said to draw loud applause from the audience. He warned that "nobody should have any doubts on that score." At the same time Putin cautioned against creating new threats to the world, "but on the contrary to come to the negotiating table to give thought to an updated, future system of international security and the civilization’s sustainable development."

Though the new weapons that Putin described were not a response to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, released last month, he directly attack aspects of that document. "Some of the provisions of the updated US nuclear strategy review, which reduces the threshold for using nuclear weapons, trigger tremendous concern. One can try to calm down anyone behind the scenes as one chooses, but we read what has been written. It is written in such a way that it can be used in response to a conventional weapon strike or even in response to a cyberthreat," Putin noted. He stated that in its military doctrine, Russia "reserves the right to use nuclear weapons only in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it or its allies or in the event of aggression with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is jeopardized."

How Do Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles Work? - Space.com

 

"An ICBM, as its name implies, can travel from one continent to another. Once launched, ICBMs travel in a parabola, much like a baseball flying through the air. Just like a baseball, an ICBM can be released at any angle. But in North Korea's case, the ICBMs are being launched "almost straight up," Coyle told Live Science. "They fly straight up against the force of gravity and come down some distance from North Korea … If they're long-range, [the North Koreans] usually drop them on the other side of Japan, which, of course, makes Japan very nervous."

It's important to note that North Korea wouldn't aim its ICBMs straight up if it wanted to launch an actual attack. "They'd launch toward their target, which might be thousands of miles away," Coyle said. That means that even though the Hwasong-15, the latest ICBM, traveled about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from its launch site, it could travel much farther — likely more than 8,100 miles (13,000 km) from its launch site if it had a standard trajectory, according to a Nov. 28 blog written by missile expert David Wright.

However, it's challenging to know how far a battle-ready North Korean ICBM would fly, as its "practice" ICBM likely had a light payload or none at all. Such a payload — like a nuclear warhead — would weigh down the ICBM and limit the distance it could travel, Coyle said."   Space.com

---------------

 Achievement of a miniaturized nuclear warhead for this beast is just a matter of time and effort.  NoKo progress so far exceeds expectations.  Why should it not continue to do so?  For a literally wormy lot, they have an impressive ability to build these things.  I remember my father (a Korean War veteran at age 50) telling me that Korean farmers used human feces to fertilize their fields and that as a result the population was rotten with parasites. (parental reference).

My point is that NoKo will achieve what amounts to a first strike capability with their first and last ICBM to be launched at the US. Would we be lucky and have the thing hit Toronto rather than NY City?  Who knows?  IMO it would be the luck of the draw given the probable CEP of a NoKo ballistic missile.

How big a warhead would the thing be armed with?  Would it function after re-entry?  Who knows?

Ballistic missiles are very different weapons from the usual run of destructive instruments.  I was in Baghdad during the harb al-mudun (war of the cities) when Iran and Iraq were pummeling each other with SCUDS.  (self glorifying reference) There was little warning.  Occasionally a few seconds of radar driven siren, but usually there would be ordinary city noise followed by a very loud noise and a building would be gone.  I made it a habit to stay on the middle floors of hotels to avoid the consequences of a rooftop hit or a ground burst next to the hotel.  pl  

https://www.space.com/38954-how-do-intercontinental-ballistic-missiles-work.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-15

Bellingcat Buffoonery on Khan Sheikyoun by Publius Tacitus

The pushback against Sy Hersh's latest piece of genuine investigative journalism in which he exposes the lie that the Government of Syria hit Khan Sheikyoun with a sarin gas attack on 4 April 2017 is based on ignorance and misinformation. One of those leading this effort is Eliot Higgins, who blogs under the handle, Bellingcat. Well worth asking, Who is Eliot Higgins? According to Wikipedia:

In 2012, when Higgins began blogging the Syrian civil war, he was an unemployed finance and admin worker who spent his days taking care of his child at home;^[1] he is married to a Turkish woman.^{[3][4] . . .}

Higgins has no background or training in weapons and is entirely self-taught, saying that "Before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."^[1] Higgins does not speak or read Arabic.^[4]

Higgins is credited with being among the first to report on the widespread use of improvised barrel bombs by the Syrian government, a phenomenon which has spread to other troubled nations such as Iraq to combat insurgencies and opposition forces.^[5][6]

Ah yes, an uneducated, inexperienced guy with an opinion who happens to be married to someone of Turkish descent. Nothing unusual there, right? Of course he's an expert on sarin (sarcasm fully intended).

The fact that this gentlemen is treated as a credible source is further proof of the insanity that has taken over the public debate. He knows nothing other than what he has read. He has not been through live agent training at Fort McClellan (I have). He has no scientific background in the subject matter and no experience (other than playing video games) with actual chemical weapons (Ted Postol, who has written extensively on the subject, does have actual scientific and military expertise on the topic). Higgins knows nothing of the military doctrine for employing such weapons. He knows nothing of the process and procedures required for a military unit to safely handle, load, activate and deploy such weapons.

Actual people with such expertise look at the public accounts about what supposedly happened at Khan Sheikyoun and scratch their heads. Why?

 

North Korea’s Missile Program Progressing Faster Than Expected - Southfront

The North Korea missile program is progressing faster than expected, South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-koo said on Tuesday.

He told the parliament that the Sunday missile test was successfull and pointed out that North Korea’s missile program was developing faster than the South had expected.

“It is considered an IRBM (intermediate range ballistic missile) of enhanced caliber compared to Musudan missiles that have continually failed,” the minister said.

Earlier, the UN Security Council warned it may hit North Korea with a new round of sanctions in response to its missile tests and blaimed blamed the country for stirring up regional tension. The council also urged Pyongyang to stop its nuclear and ballistic missile activity.

“The members of the Security Council agreed that the Security Council would continue to closely monitor the situation and take further significant measures including sanctions, in line with the Council’s previously expressed determination,” the UN Security Council statement read.  Southfront

 

-------------

I don't know much about the Koreas.  So far as I can remember I have never been in South Korea, but it seems to me that the threat of a war that the US cannot avoid there is so severe that a thread on the linked subjects of the NoKo nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs is a necessity.

The NoKo government has made it explicit that the territory, and fleet of the US are desired targets as well as US allies South Korea and Japan. 

Let's talk about it.  pl       

 

https://southfront.org/north-koreas-missile-program-progressing-faster-than-expected/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Delivery_systems

WMD Mirage By Richard Sale

The sketchy information that justified launching U.S. cruise misses on Syria takes us back to an unpleasant episode in our past.

On May 29, 2003, President George Bush announced during a speech in Poland that, “We have found the WMD.” His tone was jubilant.

He pointed to two Iraqi mobile labs who allegedly were involved in producing chemical weapons, which had been named by a German intelligence source code named Curveball whom the CIA had never interviewed directly.

The mobile labs proved to be harmless.

The rational for the Iraq War of 2003 was mainly based on lies, but of all the fatuous and insulting lies told to the U.S. public, the ones regarding Iraq’s WMDs were the lowest. They would dishonor a sewer.

In May of 1991, under the cover of Operation Provide Comfort, the U.S-run military relief effort in Kurdistan, the CIA began an intensive program to debrief Iraqi defectors about Saddam’s WMD.  U.S. intelligence agencies were in a state of shock when, after the war, they found Saddam had progressed much farther in his WMD programs than they had thought.

One of the first things the United States did was to infiltrate the United Nation Special Commission, UNSCOM.  As early as May of 1991, a senior Iraqi scientist had defected to America, making his way through Kurdistan.  He was called, “Defector source DS-385.” At first, the U.S. refused to share the information with UNSCOM, but later it did and the CIA was soon holding daily briefings for UNSCOM officials. Soon the CIA teams, based in Bahrain, were invited to send reps from the U.K, Canada and Australia.

The CIA operations there were complex. There was a National Security Agency team in Bahrain tasked to review the agency’s findings. The NSA unit was a special unit under the NSA’s “B” group responsible for the Middle East. The intercepts were sent by satellite relay to Bahrain and forwarded to the NSA at Fort. Meade, Maryland. The CIA also had a Special Collections Unit, a five man team able to intercept not only the calls of senior Iraqi leadership but also their security detachments.

The surprise UN inspections were invaluable. The UNSCOM teams destroyed so much WMD equipment that in July of 1994, that the UN leader Rolf Ekeus had wanted to lift sanctions from Iraq.

But the problem was that no one knew what the exact status of Saddam’s WMD arsenal was. UNSCOM was constantly bedeviled by faulty information. One DIA analyst was always peddling the worst case scenarios, one allegation insisting that Iraq had squirreled away a large batch of Scud missiles. But on August 8, 1995, the obscuring murk vanished when Saddam’s son in law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, defected from Iraq and the whole landscape lit up. He was not a pleasant character-- he was a megalomaniac, delusional etc -- but he had unsurpassed access to Saddam’s WMD processes -- their inventory, the performance of individual weapons, knowledge not only about weapons but even where they had been made, by whom, and where they had been deployed. Ekeus, accompanied by two technical experts, were told that Iraq had “unilaterally destroyed” Saddam’s WMD in the summer of 1991. His questioners were stunned, and he expanded. “All weapons—biological, chemical, missile nuclear warheads were destroyed,” Kamel adding, “You have an important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” Later I learned that this destruction had occurred in June of 1991.

Not only did Saddam not have any WMD, his intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, wanted Baghdad to display complete openness to the United Nations on strategic grounds.  The Mukhabarat did not want Saddam to hide any WMD or remnants of WMD programs or in any way hamper or impair the work of the inspectors. The Mukhabarat’s only concern was to keep the weapons inspectors under the closest possible scrutiny and to get them out of the country. Other Iraqi security organizations disagreed, among them the Special Security Organization which felt that anything related to Saddam’s security could never be discussed with the UN. Yet much of this resistance was not perverse willfulness, but based on Iraq’s own pride in its being a sovereign nation.

In Operation Desert Fox, a bombing campaign that involved 650 bomber and missile assaults during a 72-hour period, CENTCOM Commander, Gen. Anthony Zinni targeted, not Saddam’s WMD but Iraq’s air defense system, Saddam’s pillars of powers including palaces strongholds, units of secret police, guard, an transport organizations. Several barracks and units in and around Baghdad or outlying provinces were hit as well. The attacks were designed to shake the regime to its core and destabilize it if possible. But the attack did not drop one bomb on Iraq’s Army.

In 2009, I asked Zinni about Saddam’s WMD.  He said, “If Saddam had any WMD, it was only tactical stuff – old Soviet artillery rounds, and those things tend to degrade quickly.” He added that Iraq wasn’t storing or producing WMD at all.

But the aim was to weaken Iraq, not occupy it and Zinni was shocked by the Bush administrations claim of WMD.

We all were.

The Turks have moved fighters to Hama from Al-Bab?

"The post came amid circulating rumors that a major part of fighters of militant groups involved in the Turkish Operation Euphrates Shield has been redeploying from northern Aleppo to northern Hama via the Turkish territory. These fighters will allegedly participate in the ongoing HTS-led offensive.

However, there were no independent confirmation this and no ACV-15 vehicles were spotted at the Hama battlefield yet. Step News Agency’s photos are the only evidence of such a move and the geolocation of photos are not clear.

If the rumors are confirmed, this will mean that Ankara decided to increase its support to militants in Syria amid no progress in the Astana talks and the Turkish inability to achieve its own goals in the country via diplomatic means."   Southfront

--------------

If this picture really shows a Turkish made ACV-15 fighting vehicle in the jihadi led offensive north of Hama City, then the case is stronger for Turkish government duplicity in supporting an offensive south out of the rebel redoubt that is Idlib Province.  In the past the Turkish government has transported rebel fighters from their lodgment north of Al-Bab to  Hatay Province by roads north of their border with Syria. 

If this is what has occurred, then it is likely that the Astana talks are just a blind for Turkish government strategems intended to help the jihadis and other rebels defeat the Syrian Government.  pl

https://southfront.org/alleged-photos-of-turkish-acv-15-armoured-vehicle-in-hama-appear-online/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FNSS_ACV-15

David's Sling, Iron Dome and Israeli Hegemony

"David’s Sling, meant to counter medium-range missiles possessed by Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, will be operational in early April.

This marks the completion of Israel’s missile defense system, he said.

That includes the Arrow, designed to intercept ballistic missiles in the stratosphere from long-range threats like Iran and Iron Dome that defends against short-range rockets from Gaza. The official spoke anonymously in line with protocol.

Israeli deployed its Arrow system Friday when Syria fired missiles at its jets on a mission to destroy a weapons convoy bound for Hezbollah."  Washpost

----------------

The deployment of this system will mark a turning point.  As I have written on SST many times Israel has been deterred since 2006 from attacks on the Tabouleh Line -2 (Hizbullah missile and rocket systems).  This system plus Iron Dome may change that calculus altogether and Israel may become a great deal more aggressive not only in Lebanon but over Syria as well while  looking to demonstrate the cost of any resistance to Israeli military power and political hegemony.  pl 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israels-multi-layer-defense-system-fully-operational-soon/2017/03/20/4f6b6024-0d7f-11e7-aa57-2ca1b05c41b8_story.html?utm_term=.46922512d18e

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%27s_Sling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

UAVs in the ME wars.

 

 These flying machines are not hard to come by.  If you want some there are companies like this one which will sell you systems complete with surveillance packages.

On the other hand they are also not terribly difficult to make.  What you need to do that are some tools and parts that can be bought on-line and a space the size of a two car garage in which to manufacture the machine.  The amount of skill required is readily available in any Middle Eastern country, even Yemen.

I took part in a study some time ago concerning the utility of UAVs in the small wars raging all over the ME.  What emerged from the work was the evident truth that for countries that have fixed wing or helicopter assets the UAV is an interesting force multiplier at a low cost both for surveillance and strike operations, but for a force that has no air force these little "birds" are a game changer.  They vastly extend the ability to screen borders and infiltration routes and to strike where previously there was no ability at all.  pl  

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/photos-hourhis-reveal-new-types-surveillance-attack-drones/

http://www.uavfactory.com/

Ah! MANPADS! We'll show those Rooshans!

"MANPADS were developed in the 1940s to provide military ground forces with protection from enemy aircraft. They have received a great deal of attention, partly because armed groups have used them against commercial airliners. These missiles, affordable and widely available through a variety of sources, have been used successfully over the past three decades both in military conflicts, as well as by terrorist organizations.^[1]

Twenty-five countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden and Russia produce man-portable air defense systems.^[2][3] Possession, export, and trafficking in such weapons is officially tightly controlled, due to the threat they pose to civil aviation, although such efforts have not always been successful.^[4][5]

The missiles are about 1.5 to 1.8 m (5 to 6 ft) in length and weigh about 17 to 18 kg (37 to 40 lb), depending on the model. Shoulder-fired SAMs generally have a target detection range of about 10 km (6 mi) and an engagement range of about 6 km (4 mi), so aircraft flying at 6,100 metres (20,000 ft) or higher are relatively safe.^[6] However, the FIM-92 Stinger (1996 version) has a range of 26,000 feet (7,900 m). "  wiki on MANPADS

---------------

 It appears that US +NATO frustration with Russian unwillingness to surrender Syria to the jihadis will express itself in US + NATO sponsored Gulf Arab purchase of MANPADS for the jihadis in Syria.  26 countries make some variation on the theme of these weapons systems.  They vary widely in capability but are readily available through grey and black arms merchants or through white market purchases by states.  They are not hard to buy one way or another.

A major disincentive for provision of these weapons in the past was the threat these weapons pose to airliners near destination airports.  It should be expected that some of the MANPADS provided to jihadi groups in Syria will be re-exported to their comrades abroad.  They would be a particular threat to Israeli airliners. 

Would the introduction of such weapons to the Syria Civil War on the rebel side be a game changer?  I doubt but do not know enough about the particular weapons available to have a valid opinion.  pl      

http://english.almanar.com.lb/43327

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa-idUSKCN11W2NN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-portable_air-defense_system

Our hydrogen bombs or Erdogan's?

 

"Erdogan to announce tomorrow major policy change after the National Security Council (MGK). Could be something drastic, like leaving NATO, or giving up the EU membership application. Or even maybe declaring himself president for life, effectively taking over the entire state apparatus. Or even disbanding the parliament, and calling for a new referendum and election."  A Turk

*********** 

"As of 2005^[update], 180 tactical B61 nuclear bombs of the 480 U.S. nuclear weapons believed to be deployed in Europe fall under the nuclear sharing arrangement.^[7] The weapons are stored within a vault in hardened aircraft shelters, using the USAF WS3 Weapon Storage and Security System. The delivery warplanes used are F-16s and Panavia Tornados"  wiki on Nuclear Sharing

*********

"The WS3 system consists of a Weapons Storage Vault (WSV) and electronic monitoring and control systems. One vault can hold up to four nuclear weapons and in the lowered position provides ballistic protection through its hardened lid and reinforced sidewalls.^[1] The WS3 system allowed storage directly underneath the aircraft intended to carry the bombs. The location inside the aircraft shelter increased the weapon survivability in case of any kind of attack and prevent monitoring of preparations to use the weapons. The electronic systems include various classified sensors, electronic data-transmission and security equipment such as video, motion detectors, closed circuit TV coupled with thermal imaging devices. These facilities enabled remote controlled weapon safety and made the large security forces obsolete."  wiki on weapons storage  and security system

-------------

"A Turk," whose words are quoted above is a long term commentator on SST.  I consider him to be a good source.

There are between 50 and 90 B-61 variable yield thermonuclear weapons  (hydrogen bombs) stored at Incirlik Air base in SE Turkey.  This base was built by the US starting in 1951 but it has always been a TURKISH base with US tenants.   Some of the weapons are earmarked for US use and some for Turkish use against US/NATO agreed on targets if they are ever released by the US National Command Authority.  The weapons are stored there in a semi-automatic system in vaults under the delivery aircraft.  Small point - There are no US delivery suitable aircraft now stationed at Incirlik.  They would have to brought in from somewhere else to mate them with the bombs.  At the same time, the Turkish Air Force no longer has nuclear weapons certified pilots.

Questions:

1.  What are the targets for which these weapons would possibly be used?   Are there any?  Really?

2.  How firmly are the American airmen at the base in control of these weapons, weapons situated on a foreign base?

3.  Can the weapons be disabled, perhaps remotely?

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Erdogan controlled forces make a move to seize control of the hydrogen bombs on THEIR BASE.  What could the US do about it?

IMO the US should remove the weapons or disable them as soon as possible.  pl

IS is working on a drone force

 

"“Some of the bad guys are fiddling around, trying to improve the performance,” she said. “It may be a very basic, ‘actually take off’ kind of improvement, but it says that there is some level of active work in the drone area. It’s probably not super-sophisticated yet, but they’re working on them.”

Out-of-the-box, tactically viable drones can be purchased on Amazon for under $100, but face major operational limitations due to their short range, slow flight speed and minimal battery life. ISIS has used commercial drones to capture propaganda footage of battlefields and suicide attacks since at least December 2014, but improvising solutions to their limitations would raise the ante — and potential lethality.

Weaponized payloads, while difficult for ISIS to pull off, are not too far a stretch. “If it was me, I would be asking ‘How can I extend the battery life, how can I extend the operational range, how can I stick a payload on here that I can actually use? How can I really get that to work?’” Grant said."   Marine Corps Times

-------------

Having given drones (UAV) some thought, I have reached the conclusion that the introduction of UAVs to the kind of wars that I deal with will have a profound effect.

There has been a great deal of attention given to the use of very sophisticated UAVs by the US.  The armed Predator has become the very symbol of the GWOT and it is not by any means the most fearsome UAV possessed by the US.  Reconnaissance and armed UAVs are an interesting auxiliary capability for a state that possesses an air force.

OTOH, the possession of UAVs will be a game changer for those combatant parties that do not possess a traditional air capability.  The ability to conduct reconnaissance and surveillance over extended distances will lead inevitably to armed systems.

The toy helicopter drones now being experimented with by IS are just the beginning.  Fixed wing drones with actual engines are easy to make.  The technology is familiar to model airplane enthusiasts who seem to exist in every country in the world.  The process of scaling up sizes to pilotless aircraft with a wing span of ten feet or more is just a matter of experimentation and incremental improvement.  Guidance systems over extended ranges will be more of a problem but some sort of GPS system and  airborne relays of signals from the drone to its controllers can overcome that.

We are now glimpsing the shape of insurgent warfare to come.  pl 

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/military/tech/2016/04/17/islamic-state-drones-target-american-coalition-forces/83096864/

IS is using chemical weapons.

"U.S. and Iraqi officials said U.S. special forces captured the head of the ISIS unit trying to develop chemical weapons in a raid last month in northern Iraq.

The U.S.-led coalition said the chemicals ISIS has so far used include chlorine and a low-grade sulfur mustard which is not very potent. "It's a legitimate threat. It's not a high threat. We're not, frankly, losing too much sleep over it," U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters Friday.

The coalition began targeting ISIS' chemical weapons infrastructure with airstrikes and special operations raids two months ago, Iraqi intelligence officials and a Western security official in Baghdad told the AP.

Airstrikes are targeting laboratories and equipment, and further special forces raids targeting chemical weapons experts are planned, the officials said. " 

http://dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2016/Mar-12/341885-iraqi-officials-isis-chemical-attacks-kill-child-wound-600.ashx

---------------

 So....  IS has and is using chlorine and mustard gas in Iraq.  Well ... pilgrims, if you can make those chemical agents, you can make Sarin nerve gas like the weapon used by someone at Ghouta in the east Damascus suburbs in 2013.   At the time one of the arguments voiced for assignment of guilt in the Ghouta attack was that the insurgents could not possibly have such weapons because they lacked the ability to manufacture them.   As I wrote at the time it is not very difficult to make such chemical weapons.  The industrial processes are simple and the ingredients are widely available on the international markets for the making of such things as insecticides.  IS is not Nusra or some of the other jihadi groups who were at Damascus in 2013 but the implication for what may have happened at Ghouta should be clear.  pl

JCS J-2/DIA told Rumsfeld and Myers there was no WMD in September, 2002

 

"The report was an inventory of what U.S. intelligence knew—or more importantly didn’t know—about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Its assessment was blunt: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns. ... We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program.”

Myers already knew about the report. The Joint Staff’s director for intelligence had prepared it, but Rumsfeld’s urgent tone said a great deal about how seriously the head of the Defense Department viewed the report’s potential to undermine the Bush administration’s case for war. But he never shared the eight-page report with key members of the administration such as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell or top officials at the CIA, according to multiple sources at the State Department, White House and CIA who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Instead, the report disappeared, and with it a potentially powerful counter-narrative to the administration’s argument that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons posed a grave threat to the U.S. and its allies, which was beginning to gain traction in major news outlets, led by the New York Times.

While the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq was at the heart of the administration's case for war, the JCS report conceded: “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”"  Politico

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/iraq-war-wmds-donald-rumsfeld-new-report-213530#ixzz40pNX4o5G

---------------

 I missed this in Politico last month, but a kindly friend who likes to be known as "Bigfoot Six" brought it to my attention. A .pdf of a scan of the document can be found at the links below.

The J-2 section of the JCS staff is a bit of a bureaucratic fiction.  There are a few officers on the Joint Staff who are called the "J-2 Section"  (intelligence directorate - including the USAF two star who signed this report) but DIA manages the function and does all the real work. 

The basic story here is that Rumsfeld asked the J-2 in September 2002 what we (the US) did not know about Iraqi WMD programs.  DIA labored and produced the enclosed report that said clearly that although they (J-2/DIA) had many assumptions about Iraqi WMD, the authors knew precious little about the actual programs.

This was not a desired response and Rummy sent the paper to General Richard Myers, USAF (then chairman of the JCS) covered by a rather panicky sounding note.

So, pilgrims, the BS about the "go to war decision" having been based on bad intelligence is just that, BS.

I don't think Bush 43 lied to the American people.  I think he was bull-dozed by the neocons like most Americans.

Interestingly, this document was released and declassified in 2011 and was at some point in the "Rumsfeld Archive."  That is Rummy's "how great I am" archive. The funny little running horse stamp is from the Rumsfeld Archive.

Seems like there ought to be a criminal conspiracy charge available for what Rumsfeld and Myers did and also did not do about this.

Once again the brave boys and girls at DIA  deserved our gratitude for the risk they took in writing this document.  pl 

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2697361/Myers-J2-Memo.pdf

http://www.occupydemocrats.com/2016/01/25/bombshell-declassified-memo-proves-pentagon-told-rumsfeld-there-was-no-evidence-of-wmds-in-iraq/

http://papers.rumsfeld.com/library/library_detail.asp?id=1

Loose ends at San Bernardino

These are things that puzzle me about this attack and these people.  Tell me what I have gotten wrong about these points:

1- Siyed Nizwan Farooq was evidently never on any warning list, was not under surveillance, was not on a "no fly" list.  Therefore the Democrats' bleating about keeping suspected terrorists from legally buying guns is just silly.  He was not a suspected terrorist.

2- Nevertheless, he chose in 2011 and 2012 to have a neighbor, a "shade tree mechanic" buddy, buy the two rifles.  These were California-legal versions of the semi-automatic AR-15.  These were limited in magazine capacity to ten rounds by design to make them California legal.  Why did he not buy them himself?  He could have and would have passed the federal/state background checks as he evidently did for the two handguns.  Was he afraid that some "trail" he had left would have emerged in the background check and cause him to be surveilled?  Was he afraid that the very act of buying them would have caused him to be surveilled?  In any event, he was careful that far back to hide the purchase.  That indicates to me that even then he intended to use these guns in a criminal act or acts.

3- Someone modified the two rifles to make them fully automatic.  This is a federal crime in itself. Someone modified the two rifles to make them capable of larger magazines, 30 rounds I believe.  This is probably a California crime.

4- The person who modified the two rifles had a considerable amount of skill as a gunsmith.  Who was that person?  Was it Farooq?  Did he have that kind of skill? I know a lot about small arms and could not have done the job.

5- His mother either lived in Farooq's town house or visited it often.  She saw nothing that would have made her criminally liable for not notifying the police?  I doubt that.

6- His father, evidently a drunk, and divorced from the mother, is also called "Siyed."  Since both father and son are so named it is likely that this is an honorific and that the family has some pretensions to descent from the Prophet Muhammad.  This may well be fantasy on their part but did this influence the mental attitudes of the son?

7- This woman, Malik, seems to have been virtually invisible both in the larger community and in the Muslim community of San Bernardino.  Her brother in law said he had never seen her face.  Did Farooq do all the shopping?  Did she never go out alone?  She did not go to the local Mosque while he prayed.  She waited out in the parking lot in their car.

8- Farooq was born in Illinois, and had not lived in the ME or Pakistan.  He had visited but one does not learn languages well on that basis.  She was Punjabi and had lived in Saudi Arabia.  When she had returned to Pakistan the local people called her "the Saudi girl."  I suppose that tells us something of what they thought of her.  She spoke Urdu and Arabic and broken English.  What language did they communicate in and do all this planning in.  It must have been quite a romance.

9- Why did they not leave town after the attack?  Flight would have been understandable and easily prepared.  Instead they hung around town, and returned to their house at least once.  The police picked up the chase there and the two lovers were killed a few blocks away.

You will think of other unusual things about this.  pl

The Grinding Phase

It is to the advantage of the R+5 forces to keep the jihadi/unicorns fighting to defend their present positions as long as possible.  The jihadi/unicorns are not local forces in the places where they are fighting.  There are only so many of them.  "Dead men don't bite" should be the watchword of the campaign for the R+5.

Something was said about NW Syria not being good "tank country." IMO that is an over-simplification.  If you think of armored forces as being cavalry to be used in broad sweeping movements in the style of Murat, Guderian or Patton then that would be true, but it is also appropriate to think of tanks the way the Wehrmacht thought of mobile assault guns used in direct support of infantry in the attack.  The Wehrmacht was very good at this and developed specialized weapons such as the STUG-III for the mission.  A T-72 tank combined with infantry makes a formidable weapon in close combat.  The USMC thinks of tanks the same way, and plots each vehicle on their maps as major assets.  pl

An Update to How Did He Get the Gun

*

Adam L. Silverman

Last weekend's post on how the Lafayette movie theater shooter got his gun included the links to the relevant portions of the Alabama and Georgia codes in regard to mental health commitment being a disqualifying event for the purchase of a firearm. What it appeared to be, based on the Georgia code, was that the commitment had aged out under Georgia law. At The Truth About Guns, Nick Leghorn argued that the shooter would have had to falsify his answers to the Form 4473, which is, of course, a crime. We now know that neither his involuntary commitment, nor his answers on From 4473 were disqualifying accounts or a criminal act. The reason for this is because Houser was not involuntarily committed. He was subjected to an Order to Apprehend by a probate court judge in Carroll County. An Order to Apprehend is the first step in the evaluation process - a process that is intended to NOT run roughshod over anyone's civil rights and liberties. Houser was brought in, evaluated, and the recommendation from the mental health professionals was not hospitalization - i.e. involuntary commitment. As such, nothing regarding his mental health status would have or should have been entered into NICS. As for all of his other run ins with the law: the link to the Ledger-Enquirer story has a full run down of everything he was alleged to have done, as well as how and why none of it ever, in the end, resulted in a felony conviction.

* Hi-Point .40. Image found here. Houser used a Hi-Point .40, my apologies to all GLOCKophiles/GLOCK fanboys that felt besmirched by last weekends graphic of the Plastic Fantastic...

** I know I promised a review of Winkler's Gunfight. I want to reread the book before I do it up as I originally read it last August. I have an analytical project I'm working on for work, which should be done by the end of the week. So I'll endeavor to get it up in a ten-day or so.

New OPCW Investigation In Syria

 
"... the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons says it received a letter from the Syrian government May 21 with the permission needed for the team to go to Damascus.

The team will look into allegations reported by the Syrian government as well as separate allegations by activists and doctors who say chlorine has been repeatedly used against civilians in recent weeks."  seattlepi.com

------------

(irony alert)

Devious fellows these Assadistas, imagine having the gall to invite the OPCW to come investigate them again!  Imagine!

What are they trying to do, disrupt the narrative?  The Borg will not be pleased.

(un-ironic alert)

The present director of OPCW is a career Turkish diplomat?  Hmm...

pl

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/us/article/Fact-finding-team-heads-to-Syria-to-probe-toxic-6301658.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_the_Prohibition_of_Chemical_Weapons 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmet_%C3%9Cz%C3%BCmc%C3%BC 

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2013/12/download-chemical-weapons.html

Related articles

Undeclared Chemical Weapons Traces Reported at Syrian Military Site - TIME

The Borg speaks with one voice.

The Borg speaks again on Frontline and through poor Jen Psaki.

Fact-finding team heads to Syria to probe toxic chemical use

LOOPS OF LIES: The story behind the fake "yellow cake" deliveries to Iraq

 

by Patrick Bahzad

In the weeks and months preceding "Operation Iraqi Freedom", a number of stories made the headlines that seemed to prove the US administration's contention about Iraq. The case for Saddam's WMD programmes was widely publicized and backed by a wealth of information, only to be proven wrong later on and have a dubious light shed on the intelligence work done prior to the invasion.

In the full-scale media offensive that was launched to bolster President Bush's claims, two scandals now stand out: the "Curveball" affair, named after the Iraqi informant who was the source for the "mobile bio-labs" lie that Secretary of State Colin Powell presented in his famous speech to the UN Security Council, and the "yellow cake" uranium deliveries from Niger To Iraq, which ultimately led to the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. The fact of the matter has been narrated since and the "Plamegate", as it has been called, has been analysed extensively by US media. However, the baseline that was told American audiences over the years only reveals one side of the story. This piece is an account of the other one...

Why the full story was never disclosed to the American public is a bit of a mystery. Maybe people weren't interested in hearing a truth that showed how gullible they had been. Maybe the media didn't want to hear embarrassing questions about their own failing in the build-up to the Iraq war, or maybe journalists in the US simply lacked credible foreign sources that could have given them an insight into how it all started.

The Presidential briefing of September 2002

From a strictly US point of view, the chain of events began with CIA Director George Tenet briefing the President about some alarming news the Agency had received in September 2002. Aluminium rods on their way to Iraq had been intercepted and diagnosed as possible spare parts for centrifuges used in the enrichment of uranium. Additionally, it appeared that Saddam had attempted to obtain hundreds of tons of uranium ore (called "yellow cake") from the African country of Niger between 1999 and 2001. Both pieces of information taken together made for a worrying scenario: Iraq was trying to restart its nuclear weapons programme.

The information seemed so convincing that even Colin Powell mentioned its contents two days later during a hearing by the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations. Two weeks later still, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the President to use the US armed forces against Iraq, in order to put a stop to the alleged WMD programmes. The collective hysteria that seemed to have taken hold of D.C. didn't stop there. In December of the same year, the State Department itself – up until then a stronghold of sceptics against the Neo-Con led charge – published a statement listing Niger as a provider of uranium to Iraq. And finally, the cherry on top of it all, in his "State of the Union address” of January 2003, George W. Bush again made reference to the aluminium rods and the "yellow cake" that had been mentioned in the CIA briefing by George Tenet.

The only word against the impeccable case the US administration had built came from the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed el-Baradei. What a claim it was ! It should have hit the Bush administration like a bomb, but instead it made less noise than a dud. Not many observers in the US paid attention to the IAEA director's statements. Anything even vaguely related to the UN had already been discredited in America at the time, with the implicit help of a press and media that were only too willing to pick-up the bread crumbs of fabricated intelligence that had been thrown at them. El-Baradei didn't mince his words: the evidence on which the CIA based its report of September 2002 had been forged.

"How to Avert a Nuclear War" Cartwright and Dvorkin

"... we are still living with the nuclear-strike doctrine of the Cold War, which dictated three strategic options: first strike, launch on warning and post-attack retaliation. There is no reason to believe that Russia and the United States have discarded these options, as long as the architecture of “mutually assured destruction” remains intact.

For either side, the decision to launch on warning — in an attempt to fire one’s nuclear missiles before they are destroyed — would be made on the basis of information from early-warning satellites and ground radar. Given the 15- to 30-minute flight times of strategic missiles, a decision to launch after an alert of an apparent attack must be made in minutes.

This is therefore the riskiest scenario, since provocations or malfunctions can trigger a global catastrophe. Since computer-based information systems have been in place, the likelihood of such errors has been minimized. But the emergence of cyberwarfare threats has increased the potential for false alerts in early-warning systems. The possibility of an error cannot be ruled out."  NY Times

----------------

We used to think the outcome of a US/Soviet all out exchange would be 40 million dead on our side and more for them. 

After all, we are an Exceptional Nation and should achieve exceptional results. 

The ensuing Madmax dystopic world would favor the hard of heart.  pl 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/opinion/how-to-avert-a-nuclear-war.html

The F-35 and its woes.

"the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 — which can avoid sensor detection thanks to its special shape and coating — simply doesn’t work very well. The Pentagon has had to temporarily ground F-35s no fewer than 13 times since 2007, mostly due to problems with the plane’s Pratt & Whitney-made F135 engine, in particular, with the engines’ turbine blades. The stand-downs lasted at most a few weeks.

“The repeated problems with the same part of the engine may be indications of a serious design and structural problem with the F135 engine,” said Johan Boeder, a Dutch aerospace expert and editor of the online publication JSF News.

Pratt & Whitney has already totally redesigned the F135 in an attempt to end its history of frequent failures. But there’s only so much engineers can do. In a controversial move during the early stages of the F-35′s development, the Pentagon decided to fit the plane with one engine instead of two. Sticking with one motor can help keep down the price of a new plane. But in the F-35′s case, the decision proved self-defeating.

That’s because the F-35 is complex — the result of the Air Force, Marines and Navy all adding features to the basic design. In airplane design, such complexity equals weight. The F-35 is extraordinarily heavy for a single-engine plane, weighing as much as 35 tons with a full load of fuel."  reuters

--------------------------

 Most here on SST will not remember the F-111.  In the case of that design, the McNamara whizkids decided that having different fighter bomber aircraft for the different services; USAF, US Navy and USMC was wasteful and lacking in elegance from an ORSA applied math point of view.  To overcome that awkwardness a shotgun marriage was ordered in which one airplane would be designed, produced and issued to all three services.

The Keltec CMR-30

"The Kel-Tec CMR-30 Rifle is chambered for the .22WMR cartridge (22 Magnum). The design is a rifle version of the popular Kel-Tec PMR-30 pistol. The same 30 round magazines are used. The single action trigger mechanism, bolt stop, ambidextrous safety levers, and mag catch are also identical. The CMR-30 rifle includes a collapsible stock and the 16” barrel is threaded 1/2”-28 to accept many different muzzle attachments. The collapsible stock allows for a short overall length of 22.6” with the stock collapsed, and 30” when exended. The long top picatinny rail will accept a multitude of different optics, and the removable under picatinny rail is included. The ambidextrous operating handles are non-reciprocating and latch in the forward position. The stock latch lever is also ambidextrous and located just in front of the trigger guard. An integral sling loop is included near the rear of the grip, on both sides. 

The CMR-30 is constructed of hard-coat anodized aluminum for the upper assembly and rails and houses the steel barrel. The collapsible stock is made with aluminum stock rods, and a nylon butt plate. The stock was designed to have a natural cheek weld when extended. The grip, mag catch, safety levers, stock latch, and operating handles are made of glass reinforced nylon (Zytel). The grip houses the frame which is made of 7075 aluminum. The bolt assembly is made of 4140 steel and includes the captive recoil spring assembly. The CMR-30 can easily be disassembled by pushing out the assembly pin, then unlatching the rear grip latch."  Keltec

----------------

This looks to be a hell of a rifle/carbine.  The .22 WMR cartridge is a winner.  3.8 lbs. empty - marvelous!  By contrast, the Norinco Hawk 12 gauge home defense pump shotgun that I recently bought to test weighs close to 10 pounds, something like an M-1 Garand.  Lots of steel in it.

Sign me up for a CMR-30.  pl

http://www.keltecweapons.com/our-guns/cmr-30/rifle/

"Four Ways The Ukraine Crisis Could Escalate To Use Of Nuclear Weapons" Loren Thompson

"In 1983, the ABC television network broadcast a movie called The Day After about how a superpower nuclear exchange devastated the lives of typical Americans in two midwestern cities. The conflict began with a Russian troop buildup in Eastern Europe (which Moscow initially claimed to be a military exercise), and then gradually escalated to a point where both sides launched their nuclear missiles for fear of losing them in a preemptive attack. Coming as it did during a period of U.S.-Soviet tensions and controversy surrounding Reagan Administration nuclear policies, the broadcast attracted a huge audience of over 100 million viewers; it is still the highest rated made-for-television movie in U.S. history. Americans haven’t thought much about such scenarios since the Cold War ended, because the Soviet Union dissolved and the ideological rivalry between Washington and Moscow ceased. However, this year’s crisis over Ukraine is a reminder that Russia remains a nuclear superpower, and that the geopolitical sources of its security concerns have not vanished. In fact, Moscow may have greater reason for worrying today, because it has lost the buffer of allies that insulated it from Western attack during the Cold War, and now finds its capital only a few minutes from the eastern border of Ukraine by jet (less by missile). If you know the history of the region, then it is easy to see why Moscow might fear aggression."  Forbes

---------------------------

There is  a lot of news today, news that stirs the loins of the MSM:

- An aged rancher in Nevada is exposed as a fool who threw away right wing support for his non-payment of grazing fees on federal lands by saying that he thought blacks might have been better off as slaves.  As a lifelong student of nineteenth century America I can assure him that they were NOT better off.   The Hillary enthralled press has, of course, seized on this and is running with the ball.  What a splendid way to "sell" their thematic material on the subject of conservative awfulness.

 

A Threat to the US from North Korea.

"“We do not hide that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets which will be launched by the DPRK one after another and a nuclear test of higher level,” the statement said, “will target against the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people.” As in the past, the statement also suggested North Korea viewed its weapons programs as a “deterrence” against attack. It may prove that the statement was another outburst by an insecure, starving country; North Korea has often threatened to strike the “heart” of the United States, and a popular propaganda poster there shows a missile hitting what looks like Capitol Hill. But the difference now is that the country has just completed a successful long-range rocket test that showed for the first time that its goal of designing a weapon that could hit the United States could be within reach in the next several years."  NY Times

------------------------------------------

North Korea is an obvious menace.  Any country that seeks a capability to hit the United States with nuclear weapons must face the consequences of their actions and stated intentions.

A missile launch that carries a warhead that lands near Guam, Hawaii or the West Coast will bring a change in US policy.  pl  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/world/asia/north-korea-vows-nuclear-test-as-threats-intensify.html?_r=0