Friday, November 09, 2007

Taking the Fifth: Iran can strike back

Michael Salla has written a very important piece:
The Bush administration has covered up and ignored dissenting Pentagon war games analysis that suggests an attack on Iran's nuclear or military facilities will lead directly to the annihilation of the Navy's Fifth Fleet now stationed in the Persian Gulf. Lt. General Paul Van Riper led a hypothetical Persian Gulf state in the 2002 Millennium Challenge war games that resulted in the destruction of the Fifth Fleet. His experience and conclusions regarding the vulnerability of the Fifth Fleet to an asymmetrical military conflict and the implications for a war against Iran have been ignored. Neoconservatives within the Bush administration are currently aggressively promoting a range of military actions against Iran that will culminate in it attacking the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet with sophisticated cruise anti-ship missiles. They are ignoring Van Riper's experiences in the Millennium Challenge and how it applies to the current nuclear conflict with Iran.

Iran has sufficient quantities of cruise missiles to destroy much or all of the Fifth Fleet which is within range of Iran's mobile missile launchers strategically located along its mountainous terrain overlooking the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration is deliberately downplaying the vulnerability of the Fifth Fleet to Iran's advanced missile technology which has been purchased from Russia and China since the late 1990's. The most sophisticated of Iran's cruise missiles are the 'Sunburn' and 'Yakhonts'. These are missiles against which U.S. military experts conclude modern warships have no effective defence. By deliberately provoking an Iranian retaliation to U.S. military actions, the neoconservatives will knowingly sacrifice much or all of the Fifth Fleet. This will culminate in a new Pearl Harbor that will create the right political environment for total war against Iran, and expanded military actions in the Persian Gulf region.
(Emphases in original) I first offered these data in June of 2005:
The Sunburn can deliver a 200-kiloton nuclear payload, or: a 750-pound conventional warhead, within a range of 100 miles, more than twice the range of the Exocet. The Sunburn combines a Mach 2.1 speed (two times the speed of sound) with a flight pattern that hugs the deck and includes "violent end maneuvers" to elude enemy defenses. The missile was specifically designed to defeat the US Aegis radar defense system. Should a US Navy Phalanx point defense somehow manage to detect an incoming Sunburn missile, the system has only seconds to calculate a fire solution -- not enough time to take out the intruding missile.
Thus, any attack on Iran must needs go nuclear. Bush or Giuliani (probably the latter) may deliberately sacrifice the fleet in order to justify a nuke strike.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I read that entire article last night, pretty much breathless.

The original article in its entirety is here:

http://americasherojourney.com/Article-New-Pearl-Harbour.htm

It includes links to a series of other articles he's written about the "Bent Spear" episode, available here, here, and here:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070907_was_a_covert_attempt.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_wayne_ma_070928_news_of_b_52_nukes_l.htm

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__071020_the_b_52_incident__96_.htm

All excellent and important reading.

Anonymous said...

I read this just after the exercise concluded last year, when General Van Riper demolished our forces by using simple tactics, mainly low-tech communications, and thinking-out-of-the-box stealth.

Then, like so many video games, the exercise was re-booted and none of the tactics were ever seens again, and lo, we won.

I do agree with the idea that Cheney will put out human bait, either on land at the border or at sea in the Strait, to draw fire and catapult the rest of the propaganda.

Anything to take our minds off the total collapse of the economy, I guess.

Anonymous said...

We already know that Bush suggested a provocation to get a war with Saddam going, involving re-painting a US or coalition aircraft in UN colors, getting Saddam to shoot at it and/or shoot it down, and then going to war with that as a pretext.

That's one of his proposed gambits that we know of.

False flag operations to create a casus bellum? Sure, and it's on the record!

...sofla