4 stolen military weapons that could have been used to more precision

Several action movies have hi-tech or destructive military weapons ending up in the hands of the bad guys or the terrorists, here I list the most questionable use of such weapons.

4. A Dassault Mirage 2000



As seen in: Les Chevaliers Du Ciel

The back plot to the theft of three French Dassault Mirage 2000's in the French movie Les Chevaliers Du Ciel was a lot more credible in the movie than I actual thought, all the jets were armed since the pilots were on a cannon ball run across the Horn of Africa in competition for a sale to an Asian company against an American F-16.

The terrorists shot the tanker crew and have an armed force where the Mirages almost out of fuel are forced to land, now if my geography serves me correct the Horn of Africa (or east Africa, hostile territory as its referred to in the movie) consists of Somalia and Ethiopia near the Gulf of Aden.

And they are flying fully armed Mirages (testing their arms endurance), surely at least they have on Exocet between the lot of them, why not use them to attack French shipping instead of a tanker at Bastille Day in Paris?

Of course our pilots escape when one is forced to test fly for one of the terrorists (to show him how the radar works), he performs a low altitude sonic boom of course and uses an air to ground missile to destroy the other Mirage escaping with one leaving the terrorists with one.

Which they smuggle all the way back to the France under the cover of a UN plane.



If you have connections that can bring you a stolen fighter jet back from Africa to the country it was stolen from surely you could smuggle in a single shoulder ground to air missile that would easily take out that low flying tanker!

3. A big ass nuclear submarine



As seen in: The World Is Enough

The plot of the 1999 James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough is Bond sent to protect a wealthy oil typhoon Electra King who has ties with a terrorist who plans to increase petroleum prices by triggering a nuclear meltdown in the waters of Istanbul making the world depend more on her oil company.

Awh, her diabolic plans are so cute!

If you're going to cause a nuclear meltdown in oil rich waters why not just cause it in the Strait of Hormuz, if you could get the submarine there, hell she could call the same guys who smuggled that Mirage into Paris during the Bastille Day to do the job to getting it to the Persian Gulf, I'm sure a nuclear meltdown there would be more significant, enough to bring down a good 40% of the world economy within hours.

2. a nuclear warhead



As seen in: The Sum of All Fears

In the movie The Sum of All Fears based on the much better Tom Clancy book of the same name it is revealed that Israel lost a nuclear warhead attached to an A-4 Skyhawk in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War.

This ends up in the hands of a neo Nazi who wants to pit Russia and the United States in a war against each other, so detonates it in Baltimore during a baseball game, it was intended to kill the president of course so the chain of command would be confused and unorganized, then they'd obviously blame the Russians.

It's a stretch considered it wasn't a missile payload and the fact it was on the east coast of the US, (maybe a nuclear destruction of Anchorage and an immediate loss of communication at Elmendorf AFB would appear more realistic).

But there is no way that the Russians could be blamed, unlike the book (which was more realistic but was still a bit of a push) this was set in the 21st century at the start of the War on Terror (just post 9/11), surely the US are trigger happy but the bad guys these days are the guys hiding caves organizing mass terrorist attacks, that may even involve nuclear weapons.

1. the USS Missouri



As seen in: Under Siege

The plot of Under Siege focuses on Steven Seagal foiling a group of mercenaries who've hijacked the battleship Missouri

to get its nuclear armed Tomahawk missiles, their plan is to smuggle the cargo back to North Korea after firing some at Honolulu to cover their tracks.

Then what give the nuclear Tomahawk missiles at North Korea who recently threatened to nuke Hawaii.

Why not just do the Koreans job for them, use all the Tomahawk missiles to wipe out Honolulu and other US military bases on the island, scuttle the ship and escape in the submarine to wherever?

It would cripple the US Pacific Fleet and kill a shit load of Americans in their home state.

Of course a group of mercenaries led by an ex psychopathic CIA agent helped by a psychotically unstable Executive Officer obviously don't know as much about what they're trying to do as I do!

modern day amphibious warfare

The above famous picture of one of the D-day landings on June 6th, 1944 shows the massive American/British/Canadian amphibious assault in Northern France spearheading the liberation of Nazi occupied Europe (or Fortress Europe), it was the largest amphibious landing in all of history.

Just over a year later two atomic bombs where detonated no Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan bringing the Pacific War and World War II to an end, conventional war was to continue throughout the cold war and up to this day, so even today with all these super weapons conventional warfare, including amphibious warfare is still important.



Your standard amphibious assault ship today can hold around 12 helicopters or 10 AV-8B Harrier II's or a mix of the two along with smaller boats for amphibious landings (stored in the well, see image above).

Its punch on shorelines would include strafing runs from marine Harriers backed by Marines in RH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters, to me the ship is more of a transport fleet to land in troops after the major punch is given, the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 is all the evidence I need for this theory.



Built the same year as the Normandy invasion the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) with its 16 inch guns served along with other battleships in World War II on coastal bombard of islands in Japan such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it also served in the Korean War in the 1950's helping amphibious landings there.

But in the 1980's under under Ronald Reagans 600-ship Navy it was restored replacing its old World War II era flak guns with the latest in AA defences along with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

It's shells could hit and destroy solid concrete dug in positions from 26 miles away on the coast of its target, even the 2,000 pound bombs dropped from B-52's can't do this, and I'm pretty sure a strafing run from a Harrier couldn't neither, this was proven in 1991 when engaging Iraqi targets in Kuwait; its Tomahawk cruise missiles could also engage reinforcing convoys to the besieged ground forces outflanking them while troops get a chance to land;

So while World War II era battleships could still do some major damage in today's conventional warfare not much has really changed with amphibious warfare.



The Soviet Union focused a lot on this type of warfare in the 1970's, an example above (the Polnochny) shows that they carried helicopter gunships rather than Marine transports and Harriers, the above example being the Mil Mi-24 'Hind' gunship, which could ferry troops while engaging ground targets;
however very few examples of these are seen in Russia today!

Russia's deadly air defence

I wrote before about how Russian fighter jets are still more advanced than American ones already, but the truth is the Americans have twice as much jets in all categories than the Russians do, in my last post about how tanks aren't as important in today's battlefield as air power, I also mentioned how the MiG-23 was an aircraft mass produced in an attempt to help ground forces (which would be in even larger numbers) and how that concept didn't work.

SAM's (Surface to Air missiles) were built widely by the Soviets but never seemed to be very effective when put into combat, evidence of this is the Yom Kippur War in 1973 with Israel against Egypt and Syria, having learned from the Six Day War in 1967 Egypt put literally a wall of SAM's on the border, this did take down several Israeli planes but wasn't half as effective as it should have been.



With only a brief analysis it is clear that Russian radar and missiles have improved to the point that American F-15's, F-16's, F-18's and even the new F-35 aren't capable of surviving against them, the radar signatures of the F-35 are strong enough to be tracked and killed by these deadly systems!

The S-300 is old but still well capable of downing the 25 year old US F-15 Eagles;
many people dispute SAM's since they seem to have a bad record, most of them cite the Yom Kippur and the Iran Iraq War, I already explained the former and the latter would be because the operators on both sides didn't have adequate training.

Now as if shamming the USAF teen series fighters and the new JSF I'm going to put the nail in the coffin of what many believe can counter and/or destroy SAM sites;

Stealth aircraft:



Okay, let me show you exactly how much of a threat Russian SAM's can be to a stealth aircraft.

In 1999 during the NATO bombing of Kosovo Col. Dani Zoltan commander of the 250th missile brigade downed an F-117 Nighthawk with an SA-3.

The SA-3 entered service in 1961 and, while it had undergone some upgrades, was considered a minor threat to NATO aircraft!

NATO didn't even get a chance to bomb the wreckage and the Russians got a look at the wreckage thus compromising the then 19 year old stealth technology.

I hope America keeps this in mind considering the Russians more than likely considered all of these facts when building the S-400 system meaning that the Russian IAD's (Integrated Air Defences) will be twice as deadly.

I'm sure Iran and Venezuela will be thumbing it to the Americans when they receive (both have ordered) their brand new air defense systems in which a lot of work and experience has gone into and knowing the fact that in any American attack several fighter jets and pilots would be lost in the case of war.

tanks becoming hopelessly obsolete?

The invention of the British Mark IV tank in World War I along with its little brothers gave soldiers on the battlefield something they long desired, these tanks were bulletproof and able to crash through infantry on the trenches, it for a time revolutionized battlefield thinking.

For a time that is, but how relevant are tanks to winning these days wars, wars aren't as nearly conventional as they were back in the war years, the latter World War II posed a new threat to the tank.



New anti tank weapons were developed on the Eastern Front around 1943 and 1944, (such as Panzerfaust, the Bazooka, Panzerschreck and Piat). These proved that tanks wouldn't be able to run over infantry easily without a large amount of losses.

During the Cold War (around the 1970's, early 1980's) the Soviets depended on a vast amount of armour to crush Europe if it was going to be taken over conventionally, aircraft such as the MiG-23 Flogger were made so in theory they would cause a lot of damage in large number while supporting even a larger number of tanks.



The IrAF (Iraqi Air Force) in the 1980's used these against the Iranians and lost dozens of them at the hand of American made Iranian F-4's and F-14's, the MiG-23 concept was never proven in its lifetime, and for the tanks on the ground a new American plane was made that would be the biggest development and threat to tank warfare since the development of anti-tank weapons in the 1940's.



The A-10 Warthog is one of my favorite planes if not my favorite (and I very seldom say that), it may not look as sleek as its fellow fighter jets but it kicks a lot more ass on the ground then any of them, the A-10 was put forward in Bitsburg AFB in West Germany during the height of the Cold War in the 1980's.
Just to give some background information, the plane is built around a massive Avenger gattling gun which spews out more up to 70 amour piercing bullets a second!

It also has fire and forget AGM-65 missiles that will turn any tank into a great big fireball;
In West Germany (and in South Korea today) the pilots of the plane often worked in groups of two to attack enemy tanks that would be crossing the border in minutes, after each attack run when returning to base the A-10 only takes minutes to rearm and refuel before getting back out to engage more tanks on the battlefield.

So the Soviets weren't going to have a very good chance being covered by armour if they were going to invade Western Europe, but with this kind of weapon why are tanks still being reconfigured by the west in wars?

Well simply because tanks are good to have in a conventional war!

Although modern tanks such as the British Challenger 2 and the American M1 Abrams are still used today in wars, (most notably the two wars in Iraq), the Republican Guard took out a handful of these tanks in the Battle for Baghdad in 2003 but not many.



Finally on the invasion of Iraq once again, the Iraqi Army then still had several tanks, US soldiers during the invasion used the FGM-148 Javelin missile, the first anti tank weapons that allowed soldiers in combat to destroy a tank from any angle.



The missile even though it was fat and heavy once fired could stay locked on to destroy enemy tanks head on; after that the launcher can be reloaded in a mere 30 seconds to be used again!

With this kind of whoop ass technology available to infantry on today's battlefield its a wonder if tanks are really needed in war.

can fighter pilots listen to their iPods on the job?

I remember watching the French movie Les Chevaliers Du Ciel and seeing the one scene where the character Ipod (guess where he got his call sign from) cracks out an iPod while in flight and starts up a tune while on a mission off the Libyan coast!



I know its just a movie but is it possible for real fighter pilots to do that?

In the documentary Soundtrack to War for instance the drivers of an M1A1 Abrams tank described how they could hook their CD player up to part of the tanks internal communication system (the Charlie box), now simply listening to an iPod would be a lot less complicated.

I sincerely doubt it would be possible in real life after looking at this shot of a pilot taking off in a Eurofighter Typhoon.



Good luck fitting a pair of ear phones in there, but still think about that, it would be a pretty cool thing to do!

the mother of all combat games

The above is a screen shot of Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising, to me this game is going to be one of the best games of all time full stop, Operation Flashpoint (the first one Cold War Crisis) was a very good game, way ahead of its time, and the one great thing that makes it stand out even today eight years on as a potentially brilliant game was its realism.



When you get shot you die, you don't die after walking into the line of machine gun fire and taking 50 bullets to the stomach before even falling like in Call of Duty, no you die like you would in real life.

Also you don't carry an excess of weaponry, you carry the same amount that a real person would be able to carry comfortably unlike; the excess amount of ammunition you could carry in any other combat shooting game.

Operation Flashpoint Resistance (an add on to Cold War Crisis) you lead a small resistance group against a large Soviet army, this one is twice as a realistic and twice as hard, completing the game is actually a difficult task and requires a lot of patience.

For instance having to wait to ambush a convoy, but wait ten minutes in real time, just standing there!



Flashpoint features dozens of realistic guns, vehicles and aircraft combat, it provided vehicle realism very close to dedicated flight and tank sims, and it combined all of these elements and accurately simulated the complex relationships between these elements in war.

Now that was 2001, imagine with graphics better then Battlefield 2 and with a faster game engine, along with the realism of Cold War Crisis, yes Flashpoint is coming back, and hopefully with a vengeance.

The role of the media in the South Ossetia War

Remember the 8th of August this year when the news clearly stated that Russia was invading Georgia?
Like literally attacking the vulnerable sovereign state of Georgia for no reason, Russia obviously did this because they were bad and for those few days Iraq and Afghanistan weren't comparable and neither logic.

Apparently because of the Olympic games Georgia's brutal attack on South Ossetia went unreported in the main stream media, but when Russia launched its counter attack deep into Georgia, then it was reported about the attack on South Ossetia and that it was the Georgian president who had lied, but that Russia had taken the incident to invade Georgia like they had always wanted to since 1991.

But that's the problem, it's obviously clear that the Russians simply moved in, cleaned up the hostile areas (since Russia citizens in South Ossetia were under attack), bolstered their defences in South Ossetia and then pulled out of Georgia, yet it's called an international crisis for what Russia did in the counter attack, and suddenly South Ossetia is recognized as an independent state.

I mean serious c'mon!