Yet another embarrassing air war in a fair weather scenario

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At least some of the combat aircraft involved in the current air campaign against Libyan loyalists are taking off as far away as from Germany and the UK.This reminds me of the 1999 air war against Yugoslavia when combat aircraft took off in Northern Italy, not in the more close Southern Italy. This time it's just more extreme.

Well, is this about a fetish for tanker aircraft? Europeans such as the French are generally not the usual suspects for this.Is it about an inability to deploy quickly to Mediterranean airfields, such as on Sicily? The whole affair developed over days, and my expectation is that a lag of several days should be enough for the deployment of a squadron or two.That's what air forces buy transport aircraft for, after all!
A similar observation is about the campaign being led by some U.S. air force staff so far. Several participants want to transfer command to a NATO staff.WTF? Why isn't it possible to form an ad hoc staff? Air campaign operational leadership is not quantum physics, after all. Most of the planning can be done (and is usually done) by the involved wings and squadrons - the pilots - themselves, anyway.Again, I have substantially higher expectations here than the European air force officer corps seem to be able to meet.

And then there's the cruise missile salvo, which seems to have addressed the stationary air defence batteries. Let's face it; by now all combat aircraft can be expected to be invulnerable to the 1960's air defence missiles which are way beyond their shelf life and serviced by as far as is known ill-trained and ill-motivated troops, if any.This "destruction of enemy air defences first" mantra has developed its own life, is able to sustain itself even in face of paper air defences.


Thus we have yet another air war in near-perfect terrain and weather conditions, against a de facto defenceless target and still lots of behind the scenes embarrassments for air forces from "the West".
S O
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Recommendations

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by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing blogfor being extremely funny and pretty close to reality.for being hilarious and well-deserved. The last episodes of the show were great (here's the full last one).A politically incorrect (in Germany) official 1980's booklet of the German army. It was revised, re-named and re-issued a few years ago and drew again PC criticism. I didn't get the criticism even on this original booklet. You should either maintain an army and prepare it properly or you disarm. There should be no tax money-wasting middle way (the PC criticism seems to have come from people who agree with this because they favour disarmament).The booklet is an excellent source on the soldier's basic competencies for everyone who can read German texts.
edit: Almost forgot it
The Civil War that killed Cholera (almost)
by Charles Kenny
S O
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Draft for German security policy: discussion parts (9) to (12)

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Comments and discussion on:

(09) Multilateral arms control treaties
(10) The importance of UN, OSCE and EU
(11) External exercise of influences on the EU
(12) Foreign military in Germany
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German (language) security policy and military blogs

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This time I used a very loose definition and also list some inactive blogs. Swiss and Austrian blogs were also included this time. The definition of "blog" in use was furthermore rather loose:

The usual bloggers are former generals, politicians, journalists or political scientists.
S O
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Internet censorship in Germany: Agreement on rollback

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The German federal government (cabinet) decided back in 2009 that internet censorship should be introduced to block certain internet contents (supposedly only child porn) in Germany.Critics pointed out that this was(a) entirely unnecessary because the German executive could simply wake up and ask the providers to delete the content for good - with great chance of success,(b) it was ineffective because even children were able to circumvent the proposed censorship and(c) it was a dangerous step towards censorship that would lay the groundwork for autocratic government by building both acceptance for their methods and build their tools.It was also pointed out that such blacklists from other countries are extremely crappy; outdated and blocking lots of legal content.

A citizen petition of 134,000 people was ignored and the ruling coalition created the law in the parliament, but the government (not the responsible minister) was uncomfortable with it. The next elections yielded a different ruling coalition and they agreed to not execute this law, not to introduce the censorship.This agreement was rather questionable as well, treating an effective law as something lesser than a mere coalition agreement detail. The parliament's president - in theory ranked higher even than the chancellor - criticised this recently.The minister who was responsible for the stupid law had long ago moved to another ministry and had apparently lost enough political capital by now.Finally, it turned out that simple work without any specific law enables policemen to delete 93% of the identified child porn sites within two weeks and 99% within four weeks. The mere censorship would not have achieved any such thing; all perverts would have been easily able to get past the utterly useless "warning sign" censorship wall. Meanwhile, seven billion people could still have reached the porn.Well, there has been another cabinet-level decision; the shitty and 100% useless law will be rolled back soon. The members of parliament should ask themselves why the heck the gubernative is deciding such things and delegating merely the execution of legislation to the legislative, but this time it's at least about a good move.

The government has understood that it moved too quickly into a direction that too many Germans consider to be questionable if not dangerous. Our Chancellor Merkel has proved in the last few years that she's capable of changing course - probably not the least because politics is for her most likely almost entirely about power and only marginally about ideology or conservatism.This flexibility is at times a good thing, for some of those corrections have been rather good ideas.
S O

edit: Related: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/31/britains-back-room-n.html bad news from the UK.
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France Builds World’s Greatest Defense System (Mar, 1931)

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They really began this at a time of recession and facing a less than 100,000 strong army (and Italians)...
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Fun Friday

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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