March 02, 2003

A question

Does Saddam Hussein think he's going to be attacked by armies on horseback?

"...and as the trenches were made each was filled with fire, though how it was kindled or fed, by art or devilry, none could see." -- Return of the King

(It's the post for March 2; I guess there will never be any working archives on a Blogspot site.)

Posted by Andrea Harris at March 2, 2003 11:35 PM
Comments

I read somewhere that the resulting smoke would interfere with laser-guided missiles...I don't know much about the subject, but seems to make sense.

Posted by: Rita at March 3, 2003 at 07:10 AM

This is why we have Longbow. Smoke doesn't do squat against millimeter wave radar. And the smoke will blind his soldiers as much or more. Where's the advantage? Possibly in the assumption that Iraqi soldiers are much more likely to want to sacrifice their own lives than American soldiers.

He's neglected, perhaps, to consider that we can just carpet-bomb whole areas where we think they are. We can actually locate their armored forces with MMW radar and just rain cluster munitions down on them.

Posted by: Hornblower at March 3, 2003 at 12:20 PM

Iraqi soldiers won't run away if they can't see the Americans coming. Kinda like putting a blind over a horse's eyes to get it out of a burning barn.

Posted by: Kevin McGehee at March 3, 2003 at 12:44 PM

Smoke works very well againgst JDAMs.

Yup, it has a mighty strong effect on those GPS-guided munitions we're so fond of.

Of course, a couple of sticks of Mk. 80 series "dumb" bombs on the smoke covered position would probably work as well.

Posted by: yak at March 3, 2003 at 03:41 PM

"There's smoke."

"Any tanks or APVs around?"

"Nope, plenty of tracks going where the smoke covers, though."

"You know, I think it's against regs to land with unexpended ordnance."

"Ya think?"

"Yeah."

"You know, that smoky patch ain't too large..."

"Yeah."

"Ya wanna?"

"Yeah."

"You know, I wish I had the scrap metal concession for this area."

"Yeah. Bombs away."

Thirty seconds later....

"Woo."

"Hmm. Looks like there was something under there, all right. That was what, eight good sized - make that nine. Ten. Eleven.... Boy, those flashes as the turret comes off just cuts through the smoke, don't they?"

"Yeah."

You can hide in the smoke - but you're going to die anyway. White flag time, boys! And MAKE IT A LARGE ONE!

J.

Posted by: JLawson at March 4, 2003 at 09:54 AM