Putin’s Missile Could Make U.S. Attacks on Iran Nearly Impossible

[Purveyor]

For years, Team Obama crowed about keeping this advanced Russian missile out of Iran’s hands. Now the Kremlin suddenly seems eager to hand it over to Tehran.

This nuke deal with Iran had better work. Because the Kremlin is lifting a ban on selling a powerful air defense system to Iran that would render an airstrike on Tehran’s nuclear weapons facilities nearly impossible.

The delivery of the new weapon, called the Almaz-Antei S-300PMU-1—known as the SA-20 Gargoyle in NATO parlance—would effectively force the U.S. to rely on its small fleet of stealth aircraft to strike targets inside Iran in case the mullahs make a dash for the bomb. But even those aircraft might have a difficult time.

“This would be a huge deal depending on where they [the S-300s] are based…The Persian Gulf would be an interesting place to fly,” said one senior defense official with experience on multiple stealth aircraft types. “These new [surface-to-air missiles] change the whole complexion…It’s a big move.”

more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/13/putin-s-missile-could-make-u-s-attacks-on-iran-nearly-impossible.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. I think Putin has joined the Republicans to kill any chance of an agreement

Iran as a client state to a re-emerging Russian Imperial Power is quite a feather in his cap.

[Wellstone ruled]

2. Try this on,

not about the US attacking,it is about BiBi and his Fascist Likude pals. Russia and Putin do not have time for Bibi and his ilk.

[Purveyor]

3. I've said for sometime that Russia would not allow another 'Iraq' to happen as they have important

interests with and in Iran.

IMO, this is a good thing.

[Wellstone ruled]

4. Seems to me Russia is in the midst of building

3or 4 new Nuke Power Plants in Iran. Juan Cole wrote something about how Putin has a major hard on for the Israel Oligarchs who stabbed him in the back and moved their money to London. Got a hunch the Germans are very interested in Iran also. The Germans and Persians have a working relationship that dates back a hundred years or more.

[FBaggins]

5. Gargoyles hardly make attacks "nearly impossible"

It would certainly make non-stealth manned aircraft attacks a less palatable option (at least until that capability was reduced), but in addition to stealth aircraft, the US has no end of cruise missiles and drones.

Can a Gargoyle take out a cruise missile? Sure - but would Iran have anywhere near enough rounds to be able to afford that? Likely not.

The likely strategy would be to target those defenses first (with unmanned options)... then return to air dominance strategies.

[Purveyor]

6. I suspect Iran and Russia will enter into a formal security pact not unlike NATO before it gets

that far.

Attack on Iran to be viewed as an attack on Russia with an appropriate response.

Stay tuned...

[jakeXT]

7. The F-35 is equipped to handle advanced air defense systems

...

...

HaCohen spoke as the IAF welcomed the arrival of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 demo flight simulator in Nevatim Air Base. The first pair of the next-generation jets are set to arrive in Israel in December 2016.

Israel plans to purchase two squadrons of 25 jets each, but has thus far ordered only 33, with the Ministerial Committee on Defense Procurement nixing the Defense Ministry’s request for the full 50 airplanes.

“The government doesn’t have to be a rubber stamp for the defense establishment,” Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said in February.

Steve Over, Director, F-35 International Business Development, said that the F-35 is equipped to handle advanced air defense systems.

“When developing the program, we took in consideration future threats such as the S-300 and developed technologies to deal with them,” he said in an email, noting the aircraft’s stealth and its
specially developed sensors, which are designed to pick up enemy radar.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-air-force-s-300-a-surmountable-challenge/

[Purveyor]

8. Perhap but "Will It Fly?"

The Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever developed. It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. No one can say for certain when the plane will work as advertised. Until recently, the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, was operating with a free hand—paid handsomely for its own mistakes. Looking back, even the general now in charge of the program can’t believe how we got to this point. In sum: all systems go!

by Adam Ciralsky

At nearly 500,000 acres, Eglin Air Force Base is not the most unobtrusive piece of real estate along Florida’s Emerald Coast. It is, however, among the best guarded. The base is home to top-secret weapons laboratories, swamp-training facilities for U.S. Special Forces, and the only supersonic range east of the Mississippi. Even from a great distance, bands of quivering heat can be seen rising from the miles of tarmac. At the end of May, I flew into Fort Walton Beach, a civilian airfield that shares a runway with Eglin, a fact that was driven home when the regional jet I was on ran over an arresting wire, a landing aid for fast-moving fighters, while taxiing to the gate.

With F-15s and F-16s circling overhead, I drove to the main gate at Eglin, where I was escorted through security and over to the air force’s 33rd Fighter Wing, which is home to the F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, and some of the men who fly it. The Joint Strike Fighter, or J.S.F., is the most expensive weapons system in American history. The idea behind it is to replace four distinct models of aging “fourth generation” military jets with a standardized fleet of state-of-the-art “fifth generation” aircraft. Over the course of its lifetime, the program will cost approximately $1.5 trillion. Walking around the supersonic stealth jet for the first time, I was struck by its physical beauty. Whatever its shortcomings—and they, like the dollars invested in the plane, are almost beyond counting—up close it is a dark and compelling work of art. To paraphrase an old Jimmy Breslin line, the F-35 is such a bastardized thing that you don’t know whether to genuflect or spit.

When the J.S.F. program formally got under way, in October 2001, the Department of Defense unveiled plans to buy 2,852 of the airplanes in a contract worth an estimated $233 billion. It promised that the first squadrons of high-tech fighters would be “combat-capable” by 2010. The aircraft is at least seven years behind schedule and plagued by a risky development strategy, shoddy management, laissez-faire oversight, countless design flaws, and skyrocketing costs. The Pentagon will now be spending 70 percent more money for 409 fewer fighters—and that’s just to buy the hardware, not to fly and maintain it, which is even more expensive. “You can understand why many people are very, very skeptical about the program,” Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, who has been in charge of it since last December, acknowledged when I caught up with him recently in Norway, one of 10 other nations that have committed to buy the fighter. “I can’t change where the program’s been. I can only change where it’s going.”

Lieutenant General Christopher C. Bogdan talks with members of the F-35 Integrated Test Force on January 2013 at Edwards Air Force Base. As the man now in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter, Bogdan has held the program and its prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

The 33rd Fighter Wing’s mission is to host air-force, Marine, and navy units responsible for training the pilots who will fly the F-35 and the “maintainers” who will look after it on the ground. The Marine unit, known as the Warlords, has outpaced the others: the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, has declared that his service will be the first to field a combat-ready squadron of F-35s. In April 2013, Amos told Congress that the Marines would declare what the military calls an “initial operational capability,” or I.O.C., in the summer of 2015. (Six weeks later, he moved the I.O.C. date to December 2015.) By comparison, the air force has declared an I.O.C. date of December 2016, while the navy has set a date of February 2019. An I.O.C. declaration for a weapons system is like a graduation ceremony: it means the system has passed a series of tests and is ready for war. The Marines have been very explicit about the significance of such a declaration, telling Congress on May 31, 2013, that “IOC shall be declared when the first operational squadron is equipped with 10-16 aircraft, and US Marines are trained, manned, and equipped to conduct [Close Air Support], Offensive and Defensive Counter Air, Air Interdiction, Assault Support Escort, and Armed Reconnaissance in concert with Marine Air Ground Task Force resources and capabilities.”

more...

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/joint-strike-fighter-lockheed-martin

[jakeXT]

9. The MIC gets the $, the plane never flies and can't be shot down ... win-win

I'm still surprised what the PNAC report wrote about it.

The report also advocated the cancellation of "roadblock" programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter (which it argued would absorb "exorbitant" amounts of Pentagon funding while providing limited gains)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

[yurbud]

10. why would we want to attack Iran?

IF they got nukes, they would never use them against the US or Israel since doing so would guarantee their country being burned of the map.