Is Russia winning in Syria?

[Suff]

I'm with WM on this. The moment the West started interfering in the Middle East, we ran the risk of importing the fanaticism and terrorism that they seem to take fro granted as part of life.

Even worse is when we started to take them into our countries and allowed them to wall us out of their societies, taught their children that our societies were bad and should be changed, then let them get away with all sorts of idiocy which should have been stood on from the outset from an acute attack of "multiculturalism". Forgetting, of course, that all cultures have to meet in the middle for multiculturalism to work. If any one steps out of line and abuses it, then the whole thing falls apart, not matter whether the majority tries to make it work or not.

So we are at risk and, as we can see with IS, the only thing the fanatics really understand is absolute black and white with a direct and brutal implementation.

Democratic second guessing, supposedly anti racist, societies which try to promote multiculturalism whether the multiple cultures want it or not; are easy meat for the fanatics....

[Workingman]

Armed forces around the world know that if their opponent is brutal and unwilling to negotiate then their only option is to be the same - Geneva convention, or not.

Politicians and Diplomats work in a different way - often causing many deaths of their fighting forces and civilians in order to try to keep things "manageable" or under control in foreign lands.

The ME is a classic example of the latter failing miserably.

I have lived and worked in some of these places and without Western engineers and technicians many of them would collapse overnight. The rich in Saudi, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Oman are very rich; and useless. The poor are badly educated, but somehow survive. The glue keeping them all ticking over at the top is the ex-pat forces from Europe, the States, SA, Aus and NZ. At the bottom are the Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Malaysians and Filipinos. Remove the glue and the pack of cards falls down.

[KateLMead]

I was mortified when watching the programme on Russia, their attitude to Black individuals, knife training classes.the sheer violence encouraged and taught, the violence turned my stomach as has their military might,
I wonder what protection we have in this country in the event of world war three. We have NO WEAPONS. Sub Standard equipment purchased from China. A radically reduced army and Airforce. No fighter planes. 4 ships...A country full of immigrants of military age sitting at home whilst our English (British?) soldiers go to war ( disregarding the enemy within.)
I also look at the military might of Iran. I wonder whether those responsible for the safety of this Island have suicidal tendencies.

[Suff]

Not quite.

With Trident, we have the third largest nuclear deterrent in the world.
We have 6 type 45 guided missile destroyers. Which might not seem like a lot, except that the type 45 can engage and destroy the same number of hostiles as 5 type 42 destroyers (the type we had in the Falklands), with the missile defence systems upgraded to remove all the problems found in the Falklands
We have 13 Frigates. Granted they are Anti Submarine Warfare configured, but the UK is resolving that with the current type 23 which will be a much more powerful general class ship that will be armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles which can, if required, have a nuclear role, as well as a similar air defence capability and ship killing capability of the Type 45 destroyer.

We have 3 other types of ship to project power plus we are in progress of delivering the new carriers.

So we're hardly defenceless. OK our Army is in a pretty poor shape right now, but much of that can be resolved fairly quickly by calling up reserves and, if required, 6 months of intensive training for draftee's.

I don't want to overplay the hand but anyone who wants to try WW3 with the UK is going to know they have been nudged and nudged pretty hard and that's without NATO as a backup.

Of course this is all without mentioning Nuclear mines or the 22km rocket assist packs used in the larger field guns to deliver nuclear tipped shells....

We have 22 Eurofighter typhoon aircraft and 98 Tornado ground attack aircraft which will be replaced with 103 typhoon ground attack variant aircraft.

It's hard to try and associate these numbers with the thousands of sorties flown over Germany in WWII or the huge numbers of ships we had in WWII. But consider that one type 45 destroyer can simultaneously engage and attack "hundreds" of aircraft or missiles whilst, simultaneously long distance tracking 1,000 other threats.

So one ship has the air capacity of a carrier battle group of WWII. Plus the ability to kill ships over the horizon with the harpoon missiles.

We are hardly alone and hardly powerless. We have the ability to smash all but the most powerful navies in the world and lay waste to a country the size of Russia with our nuclear weapons.

Which is why we are respected and even listened to in the world. In fact the only countries in the world which do not tend to listen to us are those in the EU, who treat us with dismissal and contempt. Something much more powerful nations on this earth prefer not to do....

Which is why I start shouting at the PC or the TV every time some spineless simp of a politician, who doesn't want to do the job, tells us the UK is somehow in drastic need of "protection" from other nations in the world.

In fact, if truth be told, it is exactly the other way around.....

[KateLMead]

That makes me feel better Suff.

[Suff]

It is very hard to compare the old WWII mass bombing with the current armament we have with our Tornado's. But let me try.

This image is of a railway viaduct which was attacked by thousands of smaller bombs but, eventually, by Grand Slam (10 Tonne) and Tallboy 12,000 pounder bombs.

Note the misses which make the surrounding ground look like the surface of the moon.

Now let's look at a comparative bombing campaign in Iraq.

Single Bomb



Single Bomb





During WW2 we used waves of hundreds of aircraft to try and take out targets and we had to create bombs so large they would create a local earthquake in order to shake bunkers apart from the shock, rather than from the actual explosion.

Today a dozen tornado's with precision guided weapons can create more havoc, where it is required, than 300 Lancasters. Of course if you want carpet bombing then you need something like the B52, but even America has turned them into precision bombing platforms rather than general mayhem makers.

Personally I thought it was pretty obvious how the world has changed re: war. Only the terror tactics of the groups we see nowadays can stop us. Mainly because we won't kill civilians. There is no doubt we could roll up IS in a month if we wanted to take 2 million civilian casualties into the equation. Because these terrorists gather together in towns and cities then launch their attacks within the civilian space. Negating all our power and ferocity of our war so long as we will not harm the innocent. They don't care about the innocent, to them the more dead the better.

This does not mean we are either weak or incapable in military terms. Just hamstrung. I thought we'd learned this in Vietnam. But apparently our politicians have to learn this over and over and over again. The price for that learning is paid in the lives of our servicemen and women....

But it does not mean we are either weak or helpless. No matter how many Corbyn's want to tell us so or how many EU countries, who gain the benefit of our military abilities, yet have virtually none of their own, want to denigrate us.

It might come as a fairly large shock, but there are only two really effective military forces in the entire EU. Britain and France. Britain is considered the more powerful force.

Finally on a different topic altogether. If anyone is unsure as to where the EU is going, they might want to read this article.

Especially under the headings of.

SAFE
CSDP
and onwards.

If there is any doubt that the UK's military is to be a vassal component to an EU military force, which has command and control over UK forces, then it should be put to bed. I was adamant at the time of the Lisbon Treaty that it made provision for an EU military force. It is in progress. Every link in that wiki page I sent, if you dig deeply enough, has it's command and control centre in Brussels...

[KateLMead]

Thanks Suff, as always yourself and w/man reveal facts I myself never consider.

[Workingman]

Has the BBC been played for a mug by the Russians?

It is carrying a story of the "leak" of details of a new nuclear torpedo called "Status-6". Lots of details.

Launched by a submarine, it would create "wide areas of radioactive contamination", the document says.

The "oceanic multi-purpose Status-6 system" is designed to "destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas and cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country's territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time", the document says.

This is a nasty bit of kit with a 10,000km range at depths of 1,000m and travelling at 185km/h. We know the class of ships it can be carried by and that it could have cobalt warheads.

Such a weapon would guarantee "that everything living will be killed", the paper said - there would not even be any survivors in bunkers.

Sorry, Auntie, the Russians do not do "leaks". This information, with all its details, is put out for the US and NATO to take heed of.

Kate, it also confirms what Suff said: War has evolved.

WWII was different from WWI. It was more mobile on land, sea and in the air, though there was still a need for huge armies. That evolution has continued, as we see today. We now have drones capable of doing the job of a manned aircraft. We have cruise missiles fired from thousands of miles away and then for the ship to sail to waters new. We are not that far away from remotely operated tanks and artillery. We already have warheads capable of doing much more damage than hundreds of conventional ones. And the need for huge standing armies of men and women are almost a thing of the past.

I suspect that today's computer gamers would find that fighting a future major war not that much different from what they will be playing this evening.

[Suff]

The part about 10,000 km at 1,000m depth at 185km/h sounds somewhat beyond anybody's capability.

Any nuclear reactor large enough to produce that much power would be too large to travel at those speeds. The fastest torpedo that I know of travels around 75/80knotts and can only do so for a few miles.

Also the part about bunkers is total BS. The US developed special warheads to penetrate bunkers. They come out of orbit at 18,000mph, penetrate hundreds of meters into the ground and have 25mton warheads. They will destroy only one bunker installation and won't really cause that much contamination above ground.

Cobalt warheads are designed for ground or very low altitude bursts where the cobalt will mix with the earth sucked up by the vacuum caused by the explosion and be contaminated and then blown on the prevailing winds to fall to earth as long lived fallout....

I really hate it when media like the BBC simply doesn't check it's facts but just reports the most appalling drivel....

[Workingman]

Yes, I bet there are a few vodkas being drunk in the Kremlin and Russian Mess Halls tonight. The BBC ran the story? You're kidding?

However, the Cobalt bomb interests me. It is not about bunker busting, it is about making an area so uninhabitable that nobody can leave a bunker for decades. That would need to be one well provisioned bunker. We used the 10:7 system for conventional nukes. After seven days the radiation would have fallen by a factor of 10. Give it six weeks and the level would be safe enough to leave a fallout zone - even at walking pace. That goes out the window with cobalt cased nukes.

A thing that worries me about future wars is that the human element will be taken out and replaced by numbers on a spreadsheet.

When I was in the RAF there was a personal element of danger. I was at risk, so were our pilots and infantry and seafarers, as much as those of the enemy were. It concentrates one's mind to do things properly.

Take that away and you can do anything to get to the enemy. Target A is at X, so destroy X. What else is at X, who cares?