RAF Reaper drone was involved in botched US Syria airstrike A British Reaper drone was part of the US airstrike that killed 62 Syrian government soldiers on Saturday, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed. A terse statement from the Ministry said the UK “participated in the recent coalition air strike in Syria, south of Dayr az Zawr”, adding: “The UK would not intentionally target …
We should adopt a similarly loose definition of "terrorist" as Al Asshat uses. In my book, dropping barrel bombs on homes and hospitals and using chlorine gas against civilians is good enough cause to consider you a terrorist. I certainly won't lose much sleep over a few more "accidents" like this one.
Who told you only Assad uses Barrel Bombs?
I cannot be arsed to look it up now, there was a cute photo-essay in the Graunidad showing opposition weapons workshop where they were welding propane gas bottles to the solid fuel rocket engine off a Grad missile. Cute. Stunningly cute. Average range under 1km. Precision - utterly useless for any military use. Now, lobbing it into the middle of the Sunday market, bonus points if the market is in a Shia, Allavite or Kurd village, that is an entirely different story. But you know, the celebrated freedom fighters do not do that. At least so we claim (unless a clueless journo catches them when they are doing it and does not know what picture did he take).
I am not going to elaborate on what exactly can you put in a gas bottle if you do not cut the head off (so you can fill it with solid explosives). If you leave as a "gas bottle" it opens a ... err... a whole universe of opportunities for terminating the neighbours.
By the way - there is f*** all way to distinguish between a barrel bomb and one of these. The effect is the same. If a plane is in the vicinity, the plane is blamed, though quite often it has nothing to do with that - it is just the opposition groups settling scores and blaming Assad (not that he does not do it - he nowdays has better weapons courtesy of his Russian and Iran friends).
If by 'Precision Guided 500lb Bomb' you are referring to laser guided, more accurately laser marked target bombs, they are only as accurate as their markers.
The target is identified by the laser carrying marker being identified using a 4-digit number entered by the pilot. This number is conveyed to the bomber pilot who dials it in to the ''Precision Guided 500lb Bomb". The bomb ignores all other 4-digit identifiers.
The alternative can be infra-red markers placed around/near by ground based accomplices OR a laser target marking system. These are often referred to as Ground Laser Target Designator (GLTD) and are used in conjunction with Paveway bombs and Hellfire missiles.
The transmitted marker is from a Nd:YAG laser with a wavelength of 1.064 micrometres (3.93701e-5 inches) and a pulse energy energy of up to 80 Millijoules (0.0010 watt seconds). They are good for -32 degrees C to +45 degrees C operation.
Unaligned nations are using IR receivers that decode the marker signal and transmit the codes, in real time, to alternative IR decoy markers which then become the target for the incoming weapons, thereby rendering the 'Precision Guided 500lb Bomb' less ineffective.
So much for 'precision'.
"If by 'Precision Guided 500lb Bomb' you are referring to laser guided, more accurately laser marked target bombs, they are only as accurate as their markers.
The target is identified by the laser carrying marker being identified using a 4-digit number entered by the pilot. This number is conveyed to the bomber pilot who dials it in to the ''Precision Guided 500lb Bomb". The bomb ignores all other 4-digit identifiers.
The alternative can be infra-red markers placed around/near by ground based accomplices OR a laser target marking system. These are often referred to as Ground Laser Target Designator (GLTD) and are used in conjunction with Paveway bombs and Hellfire missiles.
The transmitted marker is from a Nd:YAG laser with a wavelength of 1.064 micrometres (3.93701e-5 inches) and a pulse energy energy of up to 80 Millijoules (0.0010 watt seconds). They are good for -32 degrees C to +45 degrees C operation.
Unaligned nations are using IR receivers that decode the marker signal and transmit the codes, in real time, to alternative IR decoy markers which then become the target for the incoming weapons, thereby rendering the 'Precision Guided 500lb Bomb' less ineffective.
So much for 'precision'."
I can't tell whether I've just read a Wikipedia article or an extract from a Tom Clancy novel.
You're muddling accuracy and precision which are two different concepts. In this case precision refers to the size of target you are aiming to hit, accuracy refers to how close you come to hitting the target. Blowing up a single building in a city is a precision strike, blowing up the wrong building is still a precision strike, just not an accurate one and carpet bombing a city to blow up a building would not be a precision strike but if all the bombs fall within the target zone it would be an accurate attack.
and I'd have thought that decoys would render "the 'Precision Guided 500lb Bomb' less" EFFECTIVE, unless the defending forces are particularly suicidal.
Which takes us back to the original post.
If a bomb is falling on your head, you won't care if it's a barrel bomb, a mis-aimed "precision" bomb or any other kind of bomb.
I'm not sure which is worse, those who deliberately carpet bomb an area or those who just don't seem to care who they kill as long as they hit their primary target.
Far too often the septics have just shrugged and gone "Oops! Sorry, didn't mean to hit that school next door. But hey, at least we killed our target!".
@Voland's right hand - "I cannot be arsed to look it up now, there was a cute photo-essay in the Graunidad showing opposition weapons workshop where they were welding propane gas bottles to the solid fuel rocket engine off a Grad missile.
I suspect that you are mixing these up with "Hell Cannon". They are large high capacity bombs launched from home made mortars. There are loads of "hell cannon" videos on YouTube if you want to see them. The western allied FSA affiliated rebels fire them off in the general direction of "anywhere we don't control", with little idea of what is on the ground where they will land.
The shells seem to be typically made from large propane gas cylinders with fins welded on the back (so the fuse can operate when it lands), but the hell cannon themselves are all different, so there's no specific size or range they have. Accuracy of course is unimportant, since they don't usually have any clue of what is off in that direction other than that it's territory that they don't control. The crude aerodynamics of the shells would preclude accurate targeting anyway. They are sometimes used in the countryside against small villages, but most seem to be used in large cities such as Aleppo, because that's where the groups that use them are concentrated.
As for "barrel bombs" they have been around for decades. I think they got their name because the ones the Israelis used in one of their early wars were made from actual barrels. During the Balkan wars a couple of decades ago, they made them from water heaters. I believe the early Syrian government civil war ones were made from propane cylinders (like hell cannon shells), but the current ones seem to be constructed from scratch in factories. They're just normal (but cheap) bombs in that sense.
The Iraqi government reportedly chucks them all over IS controlled cities in Iraq, but of course that doesn't tick the right foreign policy guidance boxes so the media isn't inclined to report on it much.
The lesson would appear to be we should rely on our own intel. I seem to recall there is precedent. A quote I heard from WW2 I heard just recently went along the lines of:
When the British shoot, the Germans duck.
When the Germans shoot the British duck.
But when the Americans shoot, everyone ducks.
Its mostly been under the radar but it is pretty obvious the DoD and military brass in general have no interest in Kerry's diplomacy (or being strung along by Assad and the Russians stalling for time depending on your point of view). They probably didn't derail things on purpose but hard to imagine they honestly gave much of a crap about the end results of this raid. They are probably just glad they didn't "accidentally" bomb another Doctor's without Borders hospital.
We can question the ethical standards of our allies (technically they are not), but such is the nature of compromise.
This will set back a diplomatic solution, if it doesn't make it impossible.
Why were we carrying out this airstrike so deep in Syrian territory, with Syrian military in close proximity, just days after the agreement? Surely the Russians were in a better position to deal with this as they probably have a direct com link with these Syrians.
This will set back a diplomatic solution, if it doesn't make it impossible.
I very much doubt that Assad will be either more or less inclined to some forced compromise by virtue of sixty odd casualties on his side.
Very unfortunate for those on the receiving end, but the "coalition" has been causing collateral damage across much of south central Asia for over a decade, without apparently seeing any need for changing its ways.
we didn't kill him, but the US gave half a billion of weapons to his enemies.
These enemies didn't turn on Assad, since he has a quite effective and resilient army (fighting for the past 6 years, and still not defeated....... ) , but on the unemployment benefit consumers in the east, better known as the Iraqi army.
Since then we see IS driving around in humvee's......
if we kill Assad, we'll get another 50 versions of him, plus Turkey trying to grow back it's territory to Ottoman sizes
and so on, and so on...
>What happened to "boots on the ground"?
Um more than a decade of little results in two far off hell holes and a few trillion pissed down the drain? But like Vietnam if we would have just killed a few million more off color people we would have civilized them to love our way of life eventually. Nothing wins hearts and minds like installing corrupt inept governments.
Has any government, anywhere, been anything other than corrupt and/or inept to some degree? Some of the more inept I can think of were not particularly corrupt; some of the more corrupt were not particularly inept. Some, of course, were spectacularly corrupt and even more inept at the same time. Those tended to not last long. Well, except for Mexico under the PRI. The PRI managed to stay in power for, what, 70 years? Something like that, despite being unbelievably corrupt and inept. It helped that they were propped up by el colosso del norte.
Fairly sure that article on the MoD site is wildly out of date* - they did re-form years ago now at Creech but it was my understanding that they've moved at least mostly to Waddington now. I'm happy to be wrong about that but I'd be surprised if they're not almost totally back there in terms of personnel at least.
* "the RAF formed 39 Sqn at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada two years ago" - they re-formed in 2007, 2 years means that was written in 2009.
Puts tin foil hat on -
It appears that the USA/UK happened to "accidentally" strike the target. After everything I've seen it doesn't appear unintentional. As the Russians put it - it was at least gross negligence, at worst assisting "ISIS".
https://www.rt.com/news/359732-us-syria-strike-moscow/
If the West can't get Syria, from a strategic point of view, it loses most of the Middle East to Russia and Russian doing a very good job at stopping that from happening.
Meanwhile the West is doing anything at the costs of millions of lives to ensure that does happen.
That whole "war" is a flustercluck. Today it's reported that someone (apparently the Russians or the Syrians) bombed the hell out of a UN aid convoy. The convoy was clearly marked, all sides notified of it's departure point and time and destination. It was shadowed by drones, choppers, and aircraft and then hit at the destination for several hours apparently. Very sad, very infuriating.
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