Eagle: That one might be a tough sell with the big space powers. No one is really willing to trade away a possible advantage. Unlike nukes scragging our orbit won't destroy the world. It will suck, sure, but it won't obliterate a city. Some of the ASAT stuff is also coupled with missile defense like the US Aegis-based systems.

As for ASAT stuff. Several nations have demonstrated an ability to at least temporarily blind a satellite deliberately with ground-based lasers and have done so on a few occasions. They could plausibly burn out any observation capability without turning the satellite into scrap. But the other side of the coin is all the major space powers have some sort of hard kill ASAT capability.

So far no one honestly extreme or desperate enough has been in a leadership position or at a point of perceived need or opportunity to see how worried we should be.

Kessler syndrome is also something we at least have theoretical ways of cleaning up, unlike nuclear warfare.

There has been quite a bit of study into its cleanup even as is due to the fact that it can just happen even without the waring.

Well, the point of dissention was whether or not we should be building up capacity in this area by designing and building rockets to quickly launch replacement satellites and missiles to shoot the opposition's down.

BTW— Just saw this article on Yahoo News: 'We're going to lose fast': U.S. Air Force held a war game that started with a Chinese biological attack. Not about ASAT specifically, but still relevant I think.

Edited by DeMarquis on Mar 10th 2021 at 8:30:02 AM

Biological attacks are one of those things that every one postures about, but no one ever does... they open you to retaliation, ostricize you in the international comunity, and even if you win you loose kind of deal.

There is a reason that even the Nazis never deployed them, and why even though plague bombing Seattle was proposed the Imperial Military backed down on that too.

Edited by Imca on Mar 10th 2021 at 10:31:32 AM

There's also the fact that you can't control a biological weapon once it's been let loose.

I'd rather die by nuclear annihilation than biological warfare.

That biowarfare exercise looks pretty sus to me, but I'm withholding my judgment until more details come out.

And yeah, I'm aware of some existing proposals to help clean orbital junk (like that one cubesat that deorbits debris with nets and tethers), but I wouldn't bet on us being able to clean after the Kessler syndrome once triggered. It won't physically annihilate cities like nukes would, but in terms of economic and infrastructural impact, it's basically going to be Y2K on a much larger scale. Not something we can afford to deal with in the midst of tackling time-sensitive climate issues.

The other challenge of regulating space-based weapons is that they're oftentimes interminably entangled with civilian tech. The Atlas V rocket that launched Apollo 11 and the R-7 that launched the Soyuz were both originally intercontinental ballistic missiles, meant to deliver nuclear warheads. China's main space launch centre in Taiyuan doubles as an ICBM testing facility. The US military's GPS (now operated by Space Force), Russia's GLONASS, China's BeiDou and India's IRNSS are all satnav systems with both civilian and military functions.

If terrestrial infrastructures like bridges, dams and power plants are considered legitimate military targets (so long as the harm rendered to non-combatants isn't disproportionate to military gains), you gotta wonder how long it's going to be until these things start to be targeted as well.

Meanwhile, in Russia: The former Deputy Chief of the General Staff and the Russian Army's most senior communications officer, Colonel-General Khalil Arslanov, was charged with fraud and bribery after it turned out that the R-187-P1 Azart tactical radios he procured for ₽18.5 billion (embezzling ₽6.7 billion in the process) were assembled in China.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 11th 2021 at 1:37:24 AM

Some of the proposals are actualy ground based too, so they don't very in use before and after.

They include using magnetic feilds and lasers to de-orbit debris with subtle nudges.

I’m pretty suspect of a war games that has the US hit by a WMD attack and not respond in kind.

I could see it happen if the US wanted to avoid an escalation into full on nuclear war.

Can we really say for sure how the US would react to something like that? Especially if it was clear it was a singular event? Tough talk about hypotheticals is one thing, but if it actually happened people may be thinking differently.

If it wa a clear singular event in that the US had itself done something insane to provoke the attack like send the US Army to invade Tibet? Yeah in that instances there might not be a nuclear retaliation, but an unprovoked use of WM Ds is only a singular event if the user then gets hit by so many WM Ds that nothing is left.

The WMD taboo has stood since the end of WW 2, to break it with an act of unprovoked aggression would have huge geopolitical reputations and could get a state treated the way ISIS was.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 11th 2021 at 6:28:24 PM

Keep in mind that "WMD" is more of a political term than a technical one. Nuclear weapons are fairly well-understood: we know the kind of damage they can do to a country's military infrastructure, which is why every nuclear state has a SOP of limiting the damage they take by launching their own nuclear weapons at the enemy's military facilities. Nuclear war scenarios are always time-sensitive, and the facilities involved are some of the hardest human-made structures on Earth. So you can figure out why military planners thought it necessary to answer nukes with nukes.

Chemical weapons, in contrast, are... not that useful against any half-decent state military. They're great as terror weapons against civilians and ragtag rebel groups, sure. But against an army with CRBN-proofed vehicles and buildings, that could afford to issue every frontline personnel with a $100 gas mask? Not so much. Most chemical weapons aren't especially lethal compared to other types of munitions. The ones that are, like sarin, tend to be volatile, meaning that they're absolute bastards to store and prepare for use.

They still have huge political significance: during the Italian campaign in WWII, the Americans prepared mustard gas to retaliate in case the Germans decided to use chemical weapons, leading to disaster when a German air raid on Bari blew open SS John Harvey and unleashed its deadly cargo on hundreds of sailors, 83 of whom died. And there were debates during the Cold War on whether one side using chemical weapons would've been interpreted by the other as a licence to go nuclear. But practically speaking? Unlike with nukes, there's no practical reason to respond to chemical weapons in kind. In WWI, they had an actual role to play by overwhelming (if not always outright killing) enemy defenders in static fortifications prior to an assault. Nowadays, though, that's a role better played by mechanised maneuvers and guided munitions. And in any other battlefield role, plain old high explosives beat chemical weapons just about every time.

Biological weapons are trickier to discuss because we don't really have a tried-and-tested playbook on their use in the modern era (which is a good thing, obviously). That's why I'm curious about the details of that wargame: what kind of bioweapon are we talking about? What's the delivery method? How does the enemy keep it from backfiring? Like, if the enemy nation were blatantly launching long-range missiles carrying biological weapons at US bases, then I could see US planners considering a nuclear response to shut it down, stat.

But let's say we have a malicious version of the USS Theodore Roosevelt incident from last year. A sample of a highly-contagious biological weapon is snuck into a US military facility, spreading silently until some victims begin to show symptoms. Few actually die, but the whole facility effectively shuts down; personnel are forced to isolate themselves and can't do their jobs properly; adversary forces in the area have a free rein to move without US interference. Would US military planners see that as a case requiring a nuclear response? I can sorta see it in case a follow-up attack with conventional forces threatens to overwhelm US forces; just not as a response to the biological weapon specifically.

(Though if the recent bedbug infestation aboard USS Connecticut is any indication, the US Navy is a lot more vulnerable to biohazards than previously thought.)

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 11th 2021 at 11:22:55 AM

No, what happened when the played out the scenario was that the US lost. No one went nuclear.

My point being that obviously it lost, the condition of the scenario was apparently the US being subject to a surprise WMD attack and then choosing to not respond in kind.

It’s like running a war games where China nukes Hawaii and San Diego, then the US then just sits around and plays defensive and doesn’t nuke back.

I think the idea was that the bio-weapon attack is a surprise, and the Chinese launch their invasion before the US can effectively counter.

The basic element here isn't the bio-weapon, however. I think people may be getting distracted from the more important point that the US doesn't think it has enough conventional forces on location to counter an invasion of Taiwan.

It has the reinforcements available, but they would have to be brought into the combat zone from around the world, and that runs into the Chinese Anti-Access/Area Denial capabilities. What the simulation demonstrated (it is claimed) is that the Chinese have the capabilities to keep us from building up forces in staging areas close enough to Taiwan to prevent an invasion from succeeding. I myself feel some skepticism that this is necessarily true, but I thought the article was interesting.

A Chinese ASAT attack would simply be an A2/AD strategy extended into space. Just as China can't hope to match the US Navy at sea, and so they won't try, but simply blow everything up that floats, except what they can put across the Taiwan straight. Similarly, as China can't hope to compete with the US in terms of space-based reconnaissance satellites, they just blow everything up and rely on other types of localized reconnaissance instead.

I don't know enough about the issue to say one way or the other, but it appears to me that the fear of a Chinese attack in space, given first that some sort of armed confrontation appears inevitable to them, isn't just crack.

The problem with that is that the US has an effective counter against a WMD attack, it’s called the US nuclear arsenal.

It wasn’t a current capabilities war game. Based on what we know, the military thinks that if capabilities change such that they match the scenario (I believe they had Chinese forces grown from where they are currently and US forces adopt a more defensive stance than they have currently) and the US is subjected to a surprise bio-weapon attack that gets no retaliation, the US would not alone have the capability to defend Taiwan.

This is a pretty specific scenario, the lessons from it seem to boil down to “Don’t let the capability change we’ve theorised happen”, “don’t fail to respond to a bio-weapon attack” and “make sure we wouldn’t be alone in protecting Taiwan”.

There are actions to take from that. Going forward the Do D can look to ensure that the Pacific Fleet maintains the required capability and the State Department can look to ensure that China wouldn’t consider it worthwhile to launch a bio-weapon attack and that if the US has to protect Taiwan it won’t have to go it alone.

The situation crated and the lessons from it are far more specific than “China could steamroll the US if it wanted to invade Taiwan”.

The fear of Chinese attack in the event of armed confrontation is valid, the assertion that such a confrontation is inevitable is what’s crack.

Daniel McCabe's 2017 documentary This Is Congo has a segment on the 2012-2013 M23 rebellion in the country's North Kivu province (the shooty bit starts around the 1:03:30 mark).

So why were there UN troops shooting at the rebels in the film, you ask? Well, these weren't your regular blue helmets: they're the Force Intervention Brigade, a task force given the mandate to dismantle regional insurgencies in eastern Congo by force. The unit is made up of South African, Malawian and Tanzanian forces, of which the Tanzanians are the most closely linked to the conflict.

Back when Idi Amin ruled Uganda, the Tanzanian government under Julius Nyerere cultivated a wide umbrella of Ugandan resistance groups. Many of the fighters in these groups were, in fact, ethnic Tutsi refugees from Rwanda who'd fled to Uganda and Tanzania during the ethnic violence of the country's 1959 revolution. An ill-judged war against Nyerere in 1979 led to Amin getting stomped to the curb by the Tanzanian military and its Ugandan auxiliaries, and one of the Tanzanian-backed rebel leaders, Yoweri Museveni, eventually won out in the ensuing power struggle.

During his time in the bush, Museveni fought alongside many emigre Tutsi fighters, one of whom was Paul Kagame. Along with another Tutsi officer, Fred Rwigyema, Kagame built up the Tutsi wing of the Ugandan Army into a new group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), with which he planned to invade Rwanda and topple the ethnic Hutu dictator Juvénal Habyarimana. The RPF were virtual strangers to their own country, being brought up in English-speaking Uganda rather than French-speaking Rwanda; nonetheless, they were well-motivated and enjoyed Museveni's support.

The RPF managed to attract some Hutu supporters, as well as some from Congo, then named Zaire under the rule of the Mobutu regime.^* Eastern Congo has a Kinyarwanda-speaking ethnic community called the Banyamulenge, who descended from Tutsi pastoral herders who migrated into the cool highlands in the 19th century. Even though they regarded themselves as Congolese citizens, the Mobutu regime eyed them with suspicion as a possible fifth column, and The Congo Wars that ensued did very little to help that perception. Long story short... okay, there's no way to tell this in short, but anyway. The Rwandan Genocide happened; the Hutu-dominated army, left leaderless after Habyarimana's plane ate a SAM, fell apart; Hutus both armed and non-armed fled en masse into Congo in terror; the RPF seized power in Rwanda with Kagame as the de facto head of state.

Tanzania's capital Dar es Salaam played a bit of a City of Spies role throughout this whole period. Nyerere had hosted Habyarimana in a summit that many hoped would lead to a ceasefire in Rwanda; at the same time, the neighbouring Burundi, being Rwanda's twin under Belgian rule, was going through its own civil war,^* Though in this case the Tutsi-dominated government and army shot first, in a 1972 series of large-scale massacres against the Hutu majority called the Ikiza. which the Tanzanian elder statesman was working to mediate.

More importantly for the future, Tanzania hosted the exiled Congolese rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, an old-school leftist who had established a short-lived Marxist state in southern Congo during the '60s.^* His adviser in the earlier Katanga secession crisis was none other than Che Guevara, who had some... choice words for his military acumen. At this point, the Hutu refugees in eastern Congo were stuck in overcrowded refugee camps around Lake Kivu, where people died en masse from diseases and Hutu insurgents (including The Remnant of the old Rwandan Army) intermingled with the populace, leeching off international aid money and supplies to the camps to continue their fight against the RPF regime.

At this point, the whole African continent was fed up with Mobutu's shenanigans. The Hutu insurgency was the last straw. Kagame and Museveni assembled a veritable Avengers of African leaders to release the Mobutu regime from its suffering, from Angola's dos Santos to Eritrea's Afwerki. Tanzania was a central organising hub of sorts, owing to the large Congolese exile community there that the """liberators""" were hoping to tap into. Before long, the Rwandans and the Ugandans recruited Kabila as their Congolese Rebel Leader (even thought it would be their own troops doing the heavy lifting) and went to work recruiting impressionable Congolese locals to their cause, including children.

The allied forces eventually launched their invasion of Zaire, the RPF in particular massacring fleeing Hutu refugees with glee. Mobutu's army collapsed like a row of dominoes, doing little of effect aside from slaughtering their own ethnic Tutsi population and murdering their only competent general, Donatien Mahele, for trying to open up negotiations. The allied forces rolled into the Congolese capital of Kinshasa and installed Kabila as the new president, to the cheers of the locals... who then immediately wondered why the foreign troops weren't leaving.

Kabila himself was uneasy with being viewed as a puppet of Rwanda (a much smaller country) and soon began to roll back relations with his erstwhile allies. Thing was, well, he ruled a fragmented country, and many of those who'd fought Mobutu with him were more loyal to Kagame than to him. The Rwandans and the Ugandans, along with their Congolese paramilitary allies, went on to plan for Kabila's deposition.

The lynchpin of the plan was Operation Kitona, an audacious air assault operation where Rwandan and Ugandan commandos, operating out of territories in eastern Congo held by anti-Kabila rebels, would hijack several civilian Boeing 707s and fly them to Kinshasa in the country's west, hoping to seize the lightly-defended capital and land an instant checkmate. And it would've succeeded, too... if it weren't for those meddling Zimbabweans and Angolans, rolling in with heavy mechanised columns to save Kabila's regime at the last minute.

Nonetheless, the war dragged on, and even the Rwandans and the Ugandans fell out with each other, with tensions between their troops erupting into a battle in the diamond mining town of Kisangani. Kabila himself was soon assassinated by a former child soldier serving as his bodyguard (though accounts of cheering at the Rwandan presidential palace and army HQ suggest that there's more to that story than it seems). The war went on for years, killing millions through starvation and diseases, until nobody was sure what they were fighting for anymore. Rwandan and Zimbabwean troops duked it out in bloody trench warfare, and both sides brought in mining contractors from around the globe to finance the bloodletting.

Eventually, Kabila's young son and successor Joseph, proved canny enough to secure his accession to presidency and negotiate ceasefires with the neighbouring countries. The wounds are still bleeding to this day, though. Eastern Congo is still pockmarked by remnants of the conflict: Hutu insurgents, communitarian Mai-Mai militias, armed poachers, Islamic extremists, a new round of ethnic conflict in the Ituri province and a veritable alphabet soup of Rwandan-backed armed groups.

The M23 rebels depicted in the above documentary were themselves spin-offs of the NCDP militia, a group cultivated by the Rwandans and founded by Laurent Nkunda, a former Congolese fighter in the RPF. At the time the movie was shot, the people of Kivu were fed up with the UN for failing time and time again to prevent rebel aggression (which led to the formation of the Force Intervention Brigade) and with Joseph Kabila's presidency, which for its authoritarianism had been ineffectual in putting down insurgent groups, which eventually led him to give up the presidency in 2019. "Tutsi" is still a dirty word in Congo, where people blame the Rwandans for orchestrating their country's misery. And both Kagame and Museveni are old frenemies, still holding on to power after three decades in office.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 12th 2021 at 9:06:10 AM

SADF still has business having to pursue and fight the remnants of the old Hutu regime.

Senior leaders dunk on Tucker Carlson's misogynistic comments about maternity flight suits

Hit the link for more. Typical Carlon, he's whining that the DOD has it in for him.

Honestly, if Tucker feels emasculated by the sight of a woman in a maternity uniform, that says a lot more about him than the US military.

And as members of the military have pointed out, he's never served in the first place.

Reminds me of the Armchair Military Paul meets in All Quiet on the Western Front.

Tucker fucked himself on that one. Even the Marines got in on it.

Raytheon launches Stinger missile from Javelin launcher.

And meanwhile, in Australia, proof that ASW crews are the MVPs: Restored Australian Navy aircraft allows emotional reunion for Vietnamese refugees, 40 years after dramatic rescue.

A group of Vietnamese refugees and their families have reconnected with a restored aircraft near south of Sydney, 40 years after their miraculous rescue from a "floundering" fishing boat that was helping them flee Vietnam's communist regime.

In June 1981, crew on the Australian Navy's HMAS Melbourne were flying in an anti-submarine patrol plane, a Grumman S-2G Tracker 851, when they helped rescue 99 refugees from their broken-down vessel in the South China Sea, 250 nautical miles east of Vietnam.

Before long, HMAS Melbourne arrived to rescue the men, women and children from their overloaded boat after four days adrift.

Stephen Nguyen was 20 years old at the time of the rescue and helped organise Saturday's reunion to see the restored tracker at the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) aviation museum in Albion Park.

"We have very mixed feelings," Mr Nguyen said.

"We didn't realise that we would have a chance to see the airplane again after 40 years."

Of the 99 refugees rescued, more than 70 of them settled in Australia to make new lives for themselves, while others resettled in Canada or the United States.

Now 60, Mr Nguyen lives in Oatley in southern Sydney and spent much of his 40 years running a bakery in the city's south-western suburbs.

He said the reunion was an emotional moment for the 40 attendees.

"All of us have a feeling of going back to the past, to the time we were in danger and being helped by someone and one of them is the Tracker 851."

Four days at sea

Most of the refugees were sick, weak and dehydrated.

They had run out of food supplies, their water was contaminated and they had spent four days exposed to the elements on the open ocean.

Vince di Pietro was a 21-year-old Wessex helicopter pilot for HMAS Melbourne during the rescue in 1981.

He still remembers the operation vividly.

"I'd never seen anything like it," Mr di Pietro said.

"There were all sorts of people — young and old — hanging over the side of the ship."

Rescue a miraculous coincidence

Carl Robinson from HARS said it was a miracle the rescue occurred.

He said it was only by chance that the crew on the last Tracker flight of the day noticed the refugees' signal for help.

"They spotted a flare or a fire coming from the horizon," Mr Robinson said.

"They flew over and found a floundering boatload of Vietnamese refugees who had been afloat for three days."

In the 40 years since the navy crew saw that flare in a perilous and stormy South China Sea, the aircraft's history had mostly been forgotten.

"Nobody knew the story," Mr Robinson said.

"No one had gone looking for [the Tracker] 851 before."

A 'blessed' life in Australia

Captain Nguyen Van Tam, now nearly 80, was at the helm of the small, struggling vessel in 1981.

Among the refugees were his wife and seven children.

Captain Tam spoke positively about his life in Australia, and how proud he was of his family's achievements.

"I feel very blessed," he said, speaking through Vietnamese interpreter Kim Robinson.

"I arrived in Australia with seven children they have all been successful and contributed to Australia.

"Our boat people are very honoured to be here — to live here in Australia."

Captain Tam said he and his family had lived a "very happy, pleasant" life since making Australia their home.

A captain's 'duty'

Captain Tam said seeing the plane again that had rescued his passengers and his family was a powerful experience.

"The first time I saw this [plane] I was on the boat, so this is the second time," Captain Tam said.

"I am very happy and very emotional. I feel like I may burst into tears when I see it."

Four decades have passed but Captain Tam remains in touch with the Vietnamese refugees on his boat and has always tried to keep them connected.

"We brought them here, took them with us," he said.

"My duty is to support them, to keep them together in community."

The restored Grumman S-2G Tracker 851 will remain on display at the HARS aviation museum in Hanger 1 to commemorate the miraculous rescue.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 13th 2021 at 6:41:17 AM

China's top general advises increased military spending in case of war with U.S.

I know this sounds paranoid but considering this is one of China's top military leaders saying this, how much stock should we be putting into this?