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New Technology May Cut Risk of Giving Syrian Rebels Stinger Missiles
Hugh Pickens writes "PBS reports on a proposal of arming Syrian rebels with a force equalizer to make a decisive blow against Bashar al-Assad's ruling regime — an idea that has so far failed to take hold inside the Obama administration because of serious concerns about flooding a troubled region with dangerous weapons that someday might fall into the wrong hands. Could sophisticated weapons, such as anti-aircraft missile systems, be outfitted with mechanisms that would disable them if they fell into the wrong hands? According to military analyst Anthony Cordesman the U.S. could modify Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons with batteries that cease functioning in a few weeks or months or the weapons could be built to require authentication codes before they are enabled to work. "I think it would be relatively decisive," says Cordesman. ... Another idea is to install GPS-disabling devices so that Stinger missiles only worked in a designated geographic area, such as only in Syria. Such weapons, it is believed, might tip the balance in favor of the rebels in the same way that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, provided by the United States to the Afghan Mujahedeen, helped expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Cordesman stressed that this type of weapon would have to be thoroughly tested to make sure the controls work and could not be undone. 'You could not transfer these types of weapons without these types of protections. You simply have no way to know where they would end up, how they would be transferred, what would happen to them.'"
paging DVD Jon
We don't want these guys using this stuff against our own troops once our gov't betrays them (isn't that Uncle Sam's standard MO?).
"force equalizer to make a decisive blow"
A good job you can't Spoof GPS signals. Otherwise that would totally not work.
Everything can be hacked, given time and effort, and what this plan will do is to encourage the crazies of the world to get a better understanding of how to make even more lethal weapons. Please don't.
It seems that the US and Russia are fighting a proxy war over middle east oil by alternately propping up and destabilizing the already unstable Islamic regimes there. There is probably legitimacy to this. Without the middle east, Russia will become Europe's oil supply, and thus Europe will lean toward supporting the least stable major power and probably involve itself in another exciting world war.
A better answer here might be to heat up this cold war, as Reagan did in the 1980s and Mitt Romney suggests he may do, by talking tough to the Russians and the Europeans both, and making it clear what's on the table here. International politics is a purely Machiavellian matter because as cruel as Machiavellianism can be, it saves lives and empires from the dustbin of history.
Oh yeah, because this sort of technology worked so well in Fast and Furious when Mexican drug lords used American assault weapons against us after the batterries in the GPS tracking system meant to locate them failed. I am not very convinced this sort of technology would be very difficult to override. The comparison of the Syrian rebels to the Afghan Mujahedeen, aka Taliban, who we are still fighting now, demonstrates an unfornate grasp of history by the people behind this idea. It's still not clear if the Syrian rebels should get military aid from us period -- they are still not a cohesive group, and elements of the rebellion still engage in things like torture and attacks on civilian targets.
The rebels in this case are committing attrocities left and right, they're flying the flag of Al Queda, they're not our friends, and they're not the enemy of our enemy in a way that makes it valuable to help them out. We have no business being in any of these rebellions from Libya all through the middle east.
That's just insanity and screw you main stream media and leftists and democrats for not screaming bloody murder about it.
Like the previous poster I replied to, you also need to learn what you're talking about.
The MB was not the ones responsible for the attack on our ambassador.
Nor did "we put them in power" or "give them two countries".
Nor do those countries have "very substantial arsenals".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
history will simply repeat itself if we don't learn from it.
Sadly, the kind of people who study history are not the kind of people who wind up in power.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
For the same reason drone videos are broadcast unencrypted. Here in reality these will be cheaply modified and easy to bypass.
Replacing a battery is easy and what you are describing will make the weapon totally useless as Assad would just jam it.
The more complex you make a system, the easier it is to make it fail.
Even if you managed to put in a 100% crackproof DRM system based on GPS, this makes the weapon useless - the opposition will just start jamming GPS signals.
Can we just stop trying to solve all our problems with more weapons?
captcha: captive
The rebels in this case are committing attrocities left and right, they're flying the flag of Al Queda, they're not our friends, and they're not the enemy of our enemy in a way that makes it valuable to help them out. We have no business being in any of these rebellions from Libya all through the middle east.
That's just insanity and screw you main stream media and leftists and democrats for not screaming bloody murder about it.
ah you've seen "Charlie Wilson's War", then, i take it? remember the analyst's advice? the CIA *funded* the Taliban in a fight against Russian-funded incursions in a black-ops operation that started out with a budget of i think it was $USD5m that ended up around half a BILLION dollars.
the same analyst *also* said, "look - these guys you're funding - the Taliban - yes you're winning the 'war' but you're tearing their country apart to do it. afterwards, you're going to have to help rebuild their infrastructure, otherwise they're going to get PISSED. it's not going to cost much, but you've gotta do it".
so, this guy - charlie - takes the analyst's advice and goes off back to congress, just like he did for the other operations. the film dedicates i think it is about 1 minute to this part of the war. in this scene, the film portrays - against a background of silence devoid of "dramatising music" to get the point home - some unbelievably crass politician basically says, "well we won the war, what are you complaining about, son?"
you might want to think about that before mouthing off about things are going out there, yeah?
I would argue that the people in power did study history and want to repeat it.
A shadowy jihadi group believed to have ties to al Qaeda fought alongside rebels who seized a government missile defense base in Syria on Friday
Being aided by people [possibly] linked to al Qaeda makes you al Qaeda now? What I read from this is that they're linked by a common enemy, I won't lower myself to uttering the cliché. Do you honestly believe that US politicians gave a crap about the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and the Afghans during the cold war? Every country - mine included - has accepted the help of some pretty awful people to further their agenda.
The world has to get over this idea of al Qaeda being a group of uber-terrorists with laser beams coming out of their eyes*. They're a bunch of people who have got lucky a handful of times and the thing about suicide bombers is that the good ones can't repeat their work, and the shit ones tend to fuck up, get scared, or get caught.
If you want to live your life scared of these people, fine, do so. However, keep in mind that they don't hate you because of your freedom, it's for a range of reasons - some valid (stop fucking around in their affairs), but mostly invalid.
* With apologies to Bill Bailey
Whether they are quote unquote allied with al Qaeda frankly isn't the point, the point is history will label the "Arab Spring" with a more appropriate label which is "Islamic Spring" as every place that has had an Islamic Spring has seen the rise of the ultra militant Islam movement and their gaining more power.
Sooner or later the west is gonna wake up and accept that Islam and the west are simply incompatible and that we should be pursuing a policy of containment just as we did with communism. As long as the "moderate Muslims" refuse to stand up to the Mullahs there is NO moderates, because by remaining silent they are actively helping the radicals become more powerful. Remember "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" and that is EXACTLY what we are seeing all over the Islamic world, the radicals are given free reign by a populace that refuses to stand up to them. Even in the west, look at how many mosques have been openly preaching hate, are the mosques empty? Do the moderates walk out when the mullahs preach "death to the west!"? Nope, they still give their money and support.
So the west doing anything to support or encourage an Islamic spring is frankly madness, because ANY government that replaces Assad will be an Islamic theocracy, with the destruction of Israel and the west as its goals.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Did you live through the Cold War or just read about it? Because the big lesson was that sweeping generalizations about other systems of government and their danger to Western Civilization are complete bullshit. The Soviets were never capable of a fraction of the things we thought. Communism did not turn out to be a monolithic entity. It turned out to be organized crime running (or mostly not) countries. They weren't looking for world domination, they were looking out for #1. I don't know about you, but I promised myself when the Cold War ended to never be taken in like that again.
Characterizations of Islam as a monolithic threat to our way of life are even less tenable than the threat from Communism. Islam is a religion, not a movement or ideology. Its fractured all over the place. Iran and Saudi Arabia are moral enemies. And Saudi Arabia is by far the most aggressive state in the export of Islamist fundamentalism. The reason Islamic parties are winning elections is because they tend to be not corrupt. They are frequently the only political groups that have the first idea about taking care of citizens rather than getting rich. And I thought the whole point of American foreign policy was the furthering of democracy. Well Islamists were elected in Egypt and Algeria last year, and in Turkey a decade ago. Has one of those countries invaded Israel?
I think the biggest threat to world peace is not Islamists, its Republicans.