h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mr. Moron wrote:

> "Incidentally, I never noticed any American made weapons, tanks, or military equipment."

I think that's because they mostly had "Made in the UK" engraved on them . In all seriousness, how exactly could you tell? Remember that they'd be using weapons which *were* sold by the UK/USA several years ago, and they'd have been a couple generations behind what the respective armies were actually using then, so already out of date tech.

> "I really couldn't care less how many Iraqi soldiers died. That's part of being an soldier opposing the United States of America. We will treat you as well if you surrender, if you don't we will use the most lethal means at our disposal, short of NBC weapons, to kill you."

How exactly are you planning for people to surrender when they're being attacked (partially) by cruise missiles and bombings? Are those computerised targetting systems advanced enough to spot a white flag at half a mile? Or where you planning them waving to their commander "hey - I'm just stepping outside to surrender - I'll be a little while".

By all means say that the deaths were necessary and justified. By all means say (rightly) that war is hell. But saying that you simply don't care about the abrupt ending of someone's life in that manner... I don't want to be insulting, but it just seems inhumane. And trying to excuse it by pretending that they actually had a choice in the matter...

I'm not a politician, but here's my view anyway.

Is it worth it...? Well, that depends who you ask.

In the big scheme of things, it's spending on weapons rather than on the business of trying to get food into the mouths of the starving, medicine into the arms of the sick, and a roof over the heads of the homeless - and the arms race it'll trigger will make things even worse. The threat of 'rogue states' can be effectively neutralised by active policing by the world's major powers, which serves the added bonus of forcing them to actually deal with the rest of the world, to promote democracy, and so on and so forth.

For the USA - well, I'd be in favour of returning that money to the people via tax cuts, or spending it on, say, subsidising economically friendly vehicles. But I can see the attraction, and no doubt the US media is spending lots of editorial space exaggerating the threat - after all, it's a good story, and it encourages people to buy papers...

For the UK, heck no! It seems to have passed some people by that our nuclear missile capacity falls into the same "rogue state" level as China (lower in fact, I believe). Why exactly we should help to reduce the power of our own nuclear deterrent isn't exactly clear. Sure, the UK and the USA are friends at the moment - but alliances change - and the USA has happilly forced the UK's hands in the past (Suez and Cyprus spring to mind). There's also the point that if the USA is protected, then the threat filters naturally downwards to the USA's allies. Which would be us. So no, I don't think we should allow USA bases in our country to install NMD stuff, and I don't think we should support the rewriting of the various treaties that it'll break.

Unfortunately, this is another one of these issues where the two major parties are refusing to listen to the people who supposedly they're meant to be representing. Popular opinion is definately against NMD, whereas the Tories are heavily in favour, and Labour are equivocating but will undoubtedly agree to it as soon as soon as they get re-elected. Only the Lib-Dems actively oppose it. Democracy in action, folks - aren't y'all glad you don't live in a state where the leaders take no notice of the common man?

I didn't think we shot down a Libyian airliner, I thought it was Iranian or Iraqi.

I thought that quote was from Mark Twain. He may have been quoting someone else, or I could be completely wrong.

As for where weapons come from, it's pretty easy to tell. Many nations make distictive weapons. For instance, Americans don't make AK-47's, T-72's, etc. The Iraqi weapons were mostly Soviet block. As I recall, the pistols were a locally produced 7.65mm Barretta (talk about a useless caliber) knock off. We also came across some Jordanian missles or missle launchers too.

Also, the quality of their hardware was not anywhere close to American military standards. I do have an Iraqi mortar sight that was cheaply made, but I think it's far superior to the XM-53 that we used. Once you get used to looking at military hardware, you start to get a sense of where it was made. Different countries have different production standards, and curiosly enough, they tend to paint everything with the same color scheme.

That's not to say we didn't subsidize the purchase of that equipment.

Sometimes people don't get a chance to surrender. In most countries they have no say in joining the army or in who they fight. (I never tried to imply that they did have a choice.) That's not really my concern.

As a soldier, my concern is staying alive and completing the mission. Anyone who even looks like an enemy is subject to being shot without warning. It's up to them to figure out how to surrender. If they can effectvly communicate that, I'll be happy to accept their surrender, as I did. As we all did. Obiviously we accepted people's surrender whenever we could. Some guys just took their weapons, and pointed them south.

I realize that it's callous, but that's pretty much how it goes. My life is more important than theirs. At least to me it was. I was 20 and I very much wanted to survive to until I had sex .

NMD was never designed to deal with a nuclear power as significant as the UK or China. Both these countries have a large submarine-based nuclear capacity, and it's doubtful that NMD would stop even a single Trident or Chinese JL-2 missile if launched a few hundred miles from the US coastline. In my opinion, the only reason the US government has not corrected the implication that China constitutes one of the "rogue states" NMD is intended to be effective against is because it helps garner domestic support for the project given China's unpopularity with Americans at the moment. As development of NMD means tearing up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, if China feels that their nuclear capacity is in any way threatened it'll be hard to justify why they shouldn't break any nuclear treaties they're signatories to as well.
In any case, China may not have to rely on missiles wending their way through the stratosphere for much longer thanks to the US Navy: two of the Tomahawks launched at Osama bin Laden's presumed base in Afghanistan failed to detonate and were recovered by China.

According to the BBC News:

> "But the first country to be affected by US plans would be China, whose arsenal of ballistic missiles is so small that it would be powerless against the limited NMD currently under consideration in Washington."

I'm not saying you're wrong - I'd just like to see sources for your information.

> "As a soldier, my concern is staying alive and completing the mission."

Oh, I agree with you 100% - you can't get yourself bogged down in ethical dilemmas during a war zone! However, since you're no longer in such a war zone, I would have hoped that you could at least feel a little sorrow in this respect.

Oh well - no biggie.

The way I look at it, is that you can't get all rapped up around every tragedy in the world. It's tragic when people die, but it's going to happen. If it's not my family, friends, or a fellow officer, I'm not going to get wrapped up in it.

I feel sympathy for the people I come into contact with both in my work now and when I was abroad. However, there's not much you can do for most people. So I do my job, and I move on and leave the past behind me. I don't want to be drowned in the tragedy. There's just too much of it. To nip a line, "I always thoguht that if I cared about anything, I'd have to care about everything." I just keep my caring limited.

I still try to be kind where I can. I hold open doors for my citizens now. I got send a sympathy card to the family of the 15 year old who's suicide I worked when I was a detective. We buried the dead as we came across them in Iraq to keep the scavangers off off them.

Incidently, there are ethical concerns that even a soldier must consider. Particularlly the treatment of Prisoners of War. There are laws to obey even there, but I think we already covered that here.

And thank you for participating in Two Bit's support group. This is about as much as I've talked about my feelings since the war.

PS: Please forgive me for seeming callous. I am a repblican after all.

Thanx for sharing these things with us Two bit, I hope we haven't been too hard on your republican leanings and military past to feel that we might have you backed into a corner!

Z.

No. As long as we're friendly. I know the political leanings of the people on this board.

While I take issues seriously, but I can make fun of anything including myself.

Lucinda, my source for the purpose of NMD is a DoD press briefing given in June last year. Admittedly this may be out of date in policy terms, but the technical issues are unchanged. The specific "rogue states" mentioned in the briefing were Iran and North Korea. With regard to China, Dr. Gansler (Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics) said,

"It is important to recognize that this system is not the designed for that threat. It doesn't expand to that dimension in terms of quantities. The radars, for example, couldn't handle that saturation. The complexity of those systems is not what we're trying to design to. So we're not trying to match that Soviet or Chinese sophisticated and large-quantity threat."

So, was he telling the truth? Well, currently China has about 24 ICBMs capable of hitting the USA, and about 16 SLBMs - soon to be upgraded - which are shorter range but still enter into the equation given submarines' tendency to move. The initial NMD missile deployment is to be 20 by 2005, shortly to be followed by an upgrade to 100, and after that it gets a bit vague. On paper it looks like once you get to 100 missiles, the Chinese are neutralized, but that isn't the case. Firstly, the NMD missiles are not guaranteed to hit their target every time, and it's anticipated that 4 missiles will be required per target. Secondly, one ICBM does not equate to one target: the NMD system is designed to hit targets in the mid-phase after they've MIRVed i.e. the booster phases have separated and the Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles have left the bus), and Chinese DF-5A missiles each have the capacity for 6 RVs, while their new SLBMs have the capacity for 3 RVs. Thus without even considering decoys or maneuverable warheads, 100 NMD missiles would account for just four Chinese ICBMs.

Having said that, the numbers change significantly if NMD improves and expands, so it's perfectly possible that China's ICBMs would be nullified in the future unless they were to some more.

Incidentally, the ABM treaty doesn't actually prohibit the use of Anti-Ballistic Missiles, it just limits their number to 100 all based at the same location for each of the super-powers. If the USA wanted to, NMD could quite easily be implemented in this manner and still be effective against nascent nuclear powers without renegotiating the treaty, so maybe China should be worried after all

I think both the Soviet Union and the United States had deployed some sort of ABM system. I think we used ours defend a missle site in the Mid-west. The Soviets used their's to protect Moscow.

These systems were extremely crude. Basically, you just fired them into space where they detonated. I forget the theory that they were supposed to work under.

China should be worried that the US will overtake it as the most isolationist country in the world!!


Thanx for the commentsin PR Two bit, high praise from a self confirmed free-market supporting republican as yourself.


Z.

see what I mean, if we try to lead, or just infact participate with the other contries in the world, we are said to be pushing out weight around! If we retract we are critisized for isolationism. I'm really tired of trying to please any other country. And even if we where to blow up an asteroid that would wipe out Earth, France would still be p****d at us!

One of the reason (sorry I'm rehashing an old subject here) about the Patriot failure, was that the weapon that it was deployed against was a piece of crap.

The SCUD, in its standard form can be fired 180km 2000 lbs payload. Its CEP (Circular Error Probable) is pathethic something about 500 metres. However this wasnt the weapon used against Israel. The SCUD as is, lacked the range to strike Israeli targets. So they cut up 3 SCUD's to get 2 Modified SCUD's. These were even more inaccurate and their Payload was even more pathethic (Relative term here) at 250 kgs. It also did stuff that the standard SCUD wasnt designed to do. i.e. high speed Re entry in an unstable frame. When fired, the modified scuds went higher and faster than ever before. In Re entry they simply broke up.

Patriot (gliches aside) was faced with a mulitude of targets. Being a SAM (the A part is the big thing here) it meant to go after plane sized targets. What looks more attractive? A small Explosive payload, or a large spent fuel cell? (think as a Computer thinks here). Its like shooting a boulderblusses projectiles. i.e. nigh on impossible to hit the right target.

Was Patriot effective? Yep it was. It was the emtional security blanket, along with the SAS and a sizeable amount of the Air Tasking Order assigned to kill the Militaryily worthless, but the polictical Atom bomb that was SCUD. It, along with concessions made to the Israeli's, kept the Israeli's out of North Iraq, and most important the allied Coalition together. Who cares if it didnt shot down Missiles then? It did its mission. In a round about way, but it did its misson.

All radar-guided missiles are programmed to go after the target with the strongest return signal, just like infrared-guided missiles home in on the target with the hottest heat signature. That's why chaff and flares are so effective.

I gather that the broken-up missiles meant that the warheads didn't work, because I recall seeing a lot of footage of SCUD damage that was not caused by a detonated warhead, but from falling debris. The failed detonation was credited to a Patriot hit at the time, but the debris was also blamed on the Patriot.

I don't think it's necisary for their to be a conflict between Free Trade and Fair Trade. The idea of Free Trade is to let products flow from one nation to another without undue governmental burdens. The idea of Fair Trade is to let small producers to bring things to market without going through big companies.

The idea behind both is to reduce barriers in trade. Free Trade reduces governmental interference, and Fair Trade seeks alternatives to established corparations.

*drift*
Hey Two-Bit,

There's something wrong with your miranda pr entry, the frame with the comments hasn't got anything in!

Z.

Whoa people have been busy this weekend. Personally I was out for a picnic but I know how everyone loves their computers. So I shall leap forward with foot in mouth to make up for lost time.

Patriot : was a 100% successful. The world was duped into believeing that a US shield would protect any country that wanted to come under it's wing. (Call me silly or call me Propaganda but they used misinformation to control public opinion.)

NMD: Will be the same. Who cares if it works it will act as a political deterant and ensure US foreign policy "Big Stick" will continue to work.

UK & NMD: UK = target. NMD = No benefit.

France: are allowed their opinion, the reason that they react negatively to the US interventionist policy is.
1) They don't watch as much American Films about Rambo and Delta Force. U-571...
2) They are an old Empire that has fairly recently handed back it's colonies and would like to think that they learnt something along the way.

China: Don't underestimate this country. They have 4 times as many people as the US and plenty of resources. The USSR gave the US a run for it's money & it would be a big waste of resources to try the same "Game" with modern China.

Sorry about the long post.

MOX Bombs...

It seems that our posts were already out of date. The modern internet savy Terrorist will probably have skipped our dull thread for the more interesting
[URL removed by moderator]
Search for MOX and check it out. I think this is just another "Dirty Bomb" and aparently would only require 13 Kgs (+ Packging & Delivery).


For those who have never heard of this it is a popular and reputable magazine with the UK Academia.

Touche! Le Moderator. Despite my valiant efforts to hide the link among names and words they still spot it and hunt it down.


Echelon food...

"DOT"."COM", "Hezbollah", "Truth", "Hammas", "Osama Bin Laden", "Kill", "Oklahoma Bomb", "Greenpeace" , "Terrorism", "FBI", "Soviet Manifesto", "blah blah blah blah blah"

(let them filter through this to slow them down in the hope that some poor sap doesn't have his links removed.)