Life in Iran must be unimaginably hard right now. I give the Iranian government and people credit for
reversing course on their denial of responsibility for the airliner their security forces shot down. Speaking the truth can be deadly at any time, but in that tinderbox it takes tremendous courage.
Yes, it was the most decent course of action left after three days of denial. Though the AA battery commander was quite right to point out that he had to make a snap decision; if it had been an incoming American strike, he had to expect to be target #1.
ReplyDeletethe AA battery commander was quite right to point out that he had to make a snap decision; if it had been an incoming American strike....
ReplyDeleteWeapons controlling was my profession in the USAF. No, the battery commander did not have to make a snap decision (I'll not decry the Revolutionary Guard’s Aerospace Force CC's decision to decentralize execution in the circumstance). He'd been tracking the aircraft for more than two radar hits, so he knew the airliner was outbound from the Tehran airport, he knew there'd been no hits on the airport, he had access to the airliner's IFF/SIF, he had time to talk to Iran's civil air control facility, and on and on and on. The SA he had was instantaneous, and the time needed to coordinate was only a brief few seconds.
And if he were a target, it would have been by ASM, not aircraft-delivered gravity bomb dropped by an aircraft still climbing out.
The failure here was his lack of training in how to do his job, the lack of training in how to do his job under combat stresses, the failure of his command chain to provide that training, and the failure of that same chain to download, at the start of the current situation--some hours to nearly a day prior--the larger SA that would have informed the battery commander's immediate SA.
Kudos to the Iranians for confessing to an accidental shootdown (I don't doubt that it was accidental), but not many. It was one of a very few options left to them after their having been caught sanitizing the crash site and lying about "lost/damaged memory" in the black boxes that they'd only just found and didn't yet know how to physically unlock and didn't yet have the necessary software keys to access those memories. And the...confession...helped provide them a means of blaming the US and Trump for this "collateral damage," a means also provided them by the useful idiots in the Progressive-Democratic Party.
Eric Hines
if it had been an incoming American strike....
ReplyDeleteIf it had been an American Deep State strike, they would have thought it came from Israel, and the entire region would be one big burning wild fire of death.
People continue to underestimate the military technology of the Deep State. Check out the DoD's recent failed self audit. that 2.1 trillion Rumsfeld was talking about is now 21 trillion, give or take a few.
Iran is not nearly at covering things up as the Air Force did with Grum Lake, now known as Area 51, and NASA's work as wall facer onion.