AviationBanter - View Single Post - biggest simulated demonstration of force in Gulf since the 2003 invasion of Iraq

**Tankfixer**

In article ,
mumbled
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:39:53 -0500, B-Hate-Me B-Hate-Me@home wrote:

"Sgt. Giggles of the Kamikaze Gasbag Squadron" wrote in
message oups.com...
Our military sources explain the presence of the French naval strike
group led by the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle which
joined the two US carriers last Friday: The group will carry out
security missions in the Arabian Sea and its warplanes fly in support
of NATO in Afghanistan.

Wait till the "Sunburns" start smokin' those carriers.

Useful open-source information is hard to find on the Web (though there
are lots of pages about how the Sunburn is "Iran's Awesome Nuclear Anti-
Ship Missile.") As far as I can tell, in the real world Iran may have
bought 8 Sunburn missiles from the Ukraine sometime in the 1990s,
or may not have.

From the bits I've seen they were past thier "Use by" date when someone
sold them to Iran.

I'm not an expert, but in my opinion a US carrier group can probably
successfully defend itself against a grand total of eight anti-ship
missiles of a type that first entered service in the early 1980s.

The "Sunburns' will have quite a task trying to defeat a
Nimitz class carrier.....Never mind TWO.

If I remember correctly, armored vehicles were declared to be
obsolete dinosaurs in the mid-1970s. The first major use of man-
portable guided antitank missiles in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war
showed that henceforth tanks would be nothing more than lumbering
targets.

However, weapons in the real world don't work as well as their
theoretical capabilities might suggest, and potential targets
have a strong incentive to develop countermeasures and tactics
that reduce their effectiveness. Western navies have had twenty-
five years to think about the threat posed by the Sunburn, and
about ways to reduce the threat.

It turns out that wire-guided antitank missiles didn't eliminate
tanks. Likewise, the existence of "awesome" anti-ship missiles
doesn't automatically make surface ships obsolete.

--
Usenetsaurus n. an early pedantic internet mammal, who survived on a
diet of static text and
cascading "threads."