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Iran Unveils Its First UAV Bomber
ms_gen writes "Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled today the first UAV bomber produced by Iran. The drone, named Karrar (farsi for Striker) can carry various types of bombs. It can reach up to 900 km/h in speed and has a range of 1000 kilometers (620 miles). The Iranian president mentions that 'Karrar is a symbol of the progress of defence technology in Iran.'"
How can one summarize this bit of news, and leave out the fact that Iran refers to this UAV as "The Ambassador Of Death?" I mean, come on. That's the best part.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Video of a test launch and production.
http://vodpod.com/watch/4282312-iranian-karrar-drone
Looks alot like a V-1 or Loon but with hard points on the wings and turbojet instead of pulse jet. So late 50s technology designed with CAD. Probably a 30-40% failure rate on them too, that's standard for first or second generation cruise missiles/drones.
It's called Persian. You don't go around saying "in espanol it's called..." do you?
THANK YOU! Here's a PDF that lays out some of the arguments against calling the language Farsi. We don't go around calling the English that people from Boston speak as "Bostonese", do we?
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Right, just to clear this up: the fact they've developed their own UAV bomber is purely to spite the 'West' whereas any similar defense technology development by a western nation should never be construed as antagonising the Middle East, let alone Iran. Furthermore, Iran should not by any means be allowed the same fear sodden defense industry that the West so covets and they should simply accept that.
OK, thanks, I think I've got it now - you're schlepping the same drag-and-drop late-night-international-espionage-TV-drama idiocy that practically defines the geo-political arrogance of our precious West in the eyes of others.
You ought to remember that many countries see the supposed leader of the West, The U.S, as a terrible and amoral aggressor, having willfully used WMDs against civilians (carpet bombing, nuclear weapons), continues to stockpile nuclear weapons munitions while chastising the rest of the world for doing so using trade and political embargoes, trades big-brother-style protection rackets to arm-bend smaller countries into accepting U.S military bases, has camps in which they not only 'disappear' but spiritually and psychologically humiliate the prisoners using methods not seen since Vietnam (the list goes on). This is the stuff they see in talk shows on their TVs, read in their opinion columns in their newspapers, talk about in political science classes at high-school, etc...
Just to point you to the other side of the coin where the opinions of 6 or so billion other people may differ from your picture of it all.
His behavior only appears to be irrational if you believe that either Israel would win a quick victory in a war with Iran by itself or that the US would quickly enter the fight to defend Israel in a war that it started against the express advice of the US. I don't think either is very likely to be the case. Iran clearly has a much higher tolerance for civilian casualties. They can accept casualties in the hundreds of thousands while the Israeli government could hardly survive if Israeli casualties reached the low thousands in an unprovoked war that it began without any immediate threat.
China is heavily dependent on Iranian oil. Both China and Russia would come out with uncompromising condemnations of Israeli aggression. The choice facing Obama would be to force an Israeli ceasefire or start World War 3.
it is a fairly obvious trap and it is highly unlikely that Israel is going to fall for it. The consequences would be catastrophic if it did.
Instead, Israel appears to be trying to invite a preemptive strike by Iran on Israel which would be disastrous for Iran for much the same reasons.
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Well, to be honest, it does seem like more of a "we can do that too!" type of gesture. The US employs UAVs because, right or wrong, our military presence is effectively everywhere.
The UAV does seem to be the poster-child of US military power in the region. Whether or not the Iranian weapon system is effective on the battlefield probably isn't as important as the propaganda it will generate.
This thing is a gimmick. It is a small cruise missile with remote capabilities. The bomb on it is a tiny little dumb thing that isn't going to hurt anyone unless it hits them directly, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the avionics on that drone don't amount to much more than a camera bolted on. In defense against the presumed target, the US, this thing is a novelty. The US gets giddy over electronic warfare and this thing is asking have its connection severed. The fuel and explosives are better spent on a missile that doesn't bother to return home and doesn't need an operator to guide it in. This does nothing to help the defense of Iran against the style of combat the US uses.
If you are going to fight the US, and you are not China or Russia, you need to fight dispersed, hidden, and from cover. The only time it is worthwhile to fully stand and fight is if the victory you achieve is worth the destruction of the force you are having stand and fight. It is worthwhile to launch a massive simultaneous missile on a US carrier battle group with everything you have knowing that force will be destroyed. If you kill a carrier, the fact that you just destroyed your missile force is worth it. Outside of that though, you need to fight with the understanding that the US has the capability to glass the shit out of any arbitrary size of land using just conventional weapons. Your goal as the defender is to make it so that your forces are concealed and doing hit and runs, and so never standing around waiting to be glassed, or to fight from a position the US is unwilling to destroy. Namely, if you fight from a city the US won't level the city World War II style. They might knock down the buildings one by one trying to take out suspected military units, but the won't just level the place in one swipe like they could with a few MOABs. This glorified cruise missile doesn't help this style of fighting. It can't be launched by field units, and even if it could, it is going to lead the US back to your position assuming it even makes it back. You are better off to launch a missile that isn't expected to return or, even better, save the money to arm your city bound army with more and better RPGs.
Personally, if I had to organize the defense of Iran from the US, the only conventional forces I would bother with would be sea mines and easily concealed cruise missiles. The only point of those forces would be to try and sacrifice themselves in doing damage to the ocean going invasion force. The rest of my defense would involve the army stripping down into civilian clothing the second the invasion hits and dispersing into the population with a plan, and giving everyone a (civilians included) gun. Train the army in guerrilla tactics, cache weapons and explosives all over the place, and never even make the pretense of fighting with uniforms on. Encourage the civilians to fight in their own amateurish way not to inflict any real harm, but to blur the line between military and civilian in the eyes of the enemy as much as possible. The only military tech worthwhile would be the kind useful to guerrilla forces. Bike bombs, all manner of concealed explosives, easily concealed weapons, concealed body armor, methods of communicating across cells and receiving orders, methods of smuggling, modified civilian vehicles (that still look civilian) with military applications, and that sort of thing are the techs worth developing in earnest. You still need the capacity to fight a conventional war against your neighbors, but the real threat, the US, is a fight you don't want to do standing up. The US loves nothing more than to see massive troop formations all lined up nice and orderly in a big open desert. See Iraq War part 1 for what happens to armies that stand.
And yet, in the fifty-five years since the two times they were used, we've managed to avoid sliding down that slope. So far, we've done something right; I just hope we can keep it up.
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Whether you call it Farsi or Persian, Karrar is neither. It's Arabic and while many Arabic words and phrases are used in everyday Farsi, "Karrar" is definitely not one. As a native Farsi speaker with some knowledge of Arabic, I had to look the meaning up. Generally, the government has some fetish of putting Arabic names on everything, especially anything military related to make them sound more "holy" since Arabic is language of Islam.
And a range of 620 miles? Isn't that about the distance between Iran and Israel? How sweet of them.
(This "coincidence" is the surest sign to me that it doesn't have nearly the claimed range.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Air war is as much about intelligence these days as anything else. Long gone are the days of the dog fights. Now, at least if you are talking the US, you engage targets beyond visual range with extremely smart guided missiles.
So if you want to have an airforce that can deal with the US you need four things:
1) Something to counter their AWACS. It might be stealthy jets, it might be good jamming hardware, whatever the case you have to have something to stop that. Otherwise, they'll know ever every single thing in the air is, with pinpoint accuracy. This can be crossdecked directly to new fighters, or simply told to older ones, so their jets can come in without ever turning on a radar. They don't even need them on to fire with AWACS coverage.
2) Something to pick up their planes. The US has a bunch of stealthy craft these days. Even the F/A-18Fs aren't easy to pick up and the F-22As are close to invisible unless the fire, never mind the B2-Bs. You need to have some technology to be able to find those, otherwise they'll pick off your planes, destroy your bases, etc and you won't be able to do anything about it. I don't know if there is such a technology, but you'd need to have some reasonable way to find their craft to kill them
3) Good night fighting ability. The US loves night attacks, because they are really good at it and most people are really bad at it. So you need the equipment and the training to have your jets as effective at night as during the day. Otherwise they'll simply wait until your air cover becomes weak at night and destroy the air bases.
4) Long range, highly effective missiles. Even if you can find their craft and so on you still have to engage them at a long range. The US has long range missiles that are hard to jam, you have to have the same if you are to have a realistic chance in air combat.
Without those four things, the US WILL have air superiority. They'll simply shoot down any fighters, bomb air bases (which can be done with extreme accuracy) and then blast SAM sites.
It just goes to show how morally bankrupt the Left has become, when they scoff and sneer at some poor illiterate woman who's facing death by stoning, claiming that her case is over-hyped and overblown. That's not the kind of liberalism I was raised to respect - kids these days (sigh).
How about this for a liberal value: LEAVE SOVEREIGN NATIONS ALONE. If we have to invade Iran for stoning women, we've got about twenty other countries with worse human rights records - including some of our biggest allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan - that we'd have to invade. And those other allies I mentioned are far less democratic than Iran.
Hezbollah did not appear out of Iran's magic crystal ball. It appeared directly as a result of Israeli and American forces invading Lebanon in 1982. If you'll remember at the time, Iran was fighting an all out war against the US backed henchman Saddam Hussein, because we didn't like their chosen government back then either. I don't think they had time to form a commando unit and invade Lebanon while they were losing that war. (Gee, and that was around the time that Reagan and some current Fox News personalities were committing treason by selling weapons to sworn enemies, taking the money to Colombia, and playing the other side of the drug war to fund the unconstitutional CIA. Fascinating!)
We like destroying secular Arab nationalism and getting absolutely shocked when it turns into extreme islamic fundamentalism. We destroyed the Iranian government in 1953 and ended up with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. We destroyed the marxist government of Afghanistan and eventually got the Taliban. We destroyed the PLO and got Hamas. We destroyed Lebanese movements and we got Hezbollah. We destroyed Iraq and I'll guaran-fucking-tee you we're going to get some crazy Shia elements there as well. Amazing! It's like if you subject people with war and misery for decades, they come out the other side with some kind of chip on their shoulder.
Can we see a pattern here? Just like if you invaded South Carolina and took out their army, you'd have a bunch of fanatical Christians blowing themselves up trying to take just a piece out of whoever invaded. It's a rational response when you have no options left.
So, seriously, shut the fuck up about Iran. You can get all offended and moral about their religious laws when you stop Catholic priests from using their separate religious rules to rape children and get away with it. Oh, but I guess child-rape is morally sound in your sad, fucked up world, huh? Either that, or you think it's easier to go halfway around the world and start another war in the same spot for the third time this decade to stop some injustice.
If you really think that's the case, I have only one thing to say: go. fuck. yourself.
Sincerely,
A "Liberal" Who Has Values,
Including Calling A Spade A Spade