Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Considering a War With Iran: A Discussion Paper on WMD in the Middle East

From SOAS, U of London, pdf. here, Pat Lang Commenting:
"One of our readers asked me to look at this paper. Having done so my opinion is that the authors need to develop a healthy sense of skepticism when confronted with bureaucratic statements of intent with regard to desired capability.
The premise of the paper is that the US possesses the ability to attack 10,000 Iranian targets from a great distance on a nearly simultaneous basis. The authors believe this because the US Strategic Command (old SAC) has as its goal to achieve such a capability and a clutch of think tanks are holding meetings about it.
Just after the first Gulf War a senior civilian colleague approached me to express outrage that the "smart" weapons in use had Pk (probability of kill) rates lower in fact than those promised by the manufacturers. She was surprised when I told her that highly complex equipment (gadgets) never performed as advertised and that they usually broke down just when needed.
The point is that these two academic authors actually believe the "air power" baloney. They think that a renewed attempt to apply the principle of "shock and awe" will result in complete devastation of Iran, Iranian inability to respond and a very short war.
Douhet, Trenchard and Mitchell would be pleased with their gullibility.
In fact such a strike would be merely the opening battle in yet another long war fought against a major piece of the Islamic World.
The current IO campaign against Iran makes it seem more and more plausible that such an onslaught will be attempted"

1 comment:

bishop said...

come on, man... there ain't no way we bombing Iran... our actions in Iraq have made that an impossibility. they can write all the papers they want...