Assault on H-3- please oponions-Reply to ED RASMIUS

Paul Michael Brown wrote:
Ed Rasimus wrote:

Those readers of RAM who have been following these postings as well as
Amir who has offered them might enjoy the background piece written by
Tony Cordesman on the Iran-Iraq war at:

http://www.csis.org/burke/reports/90...qII-chap13.pdf

So I was immediately suspicious of Amir's original
post because certain parts of it featured sophisticated prose that has
been absent from his other posts. It came as no surprise when another
poster revealed Amir's effort was copied from a web site.

This is suspicious, but hardly proof of inaccuracy or dishonesty. That
distinction is academic, though, when the OP gives mixed signals about
his sources. He claims to be an Iranian Phantom driver - which may
imply to some that he was close to the actual events, closer to being
an eyewitness than armchair aviators like me. I have little problem
crediting accounts like the one Amir provides when I have a decent idea
of where they came from. If Amir claimed he witnessed the event
because he was there, spoke with pilots he knows who were there, read
official reports describing the event and their own sources - I could
still doubt the story, but I'd have a better idea of just what the
poster was asking me to belive. In this case, he spits out the story,
claims to be a fighter pilot and baldly claims he's read unspecified
reports.


Moreover, scanning through Coredesman's piece I found this tidbit
regarding Iranian F-14 ops:

"According to most sources, the Phoenix missile systems and/or guidance
avionics in the Iranian F-14As were sabotaged when the war began, and have
not been operational since. The Phoenix systems are reported to have been
sabotaged by Iranian Air Force personnel friendly to the U.S. shortly
after the Shah's fall, although some sources report they were sabotaged by
Iranian revolutionaries to prevent air force operations. This meant Iran
could not make optimal use of its best fighter, or use an advanced
all-weather, air-to-air missile with good shoot-down capability and a
range up to 124 miles (200 km)."

Cordesman's conclusion that sabotage precluded Iranian use of the AIM-54
stands in square conflict with other posts by Amir. Even accounting for
the passage of time, the dimming of recollection, and a substantial TINS
factor, I remain VERY leery of his stories.

To give Amir the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Cordesman presents the above
information as the result of reports - implying a degree of controversy
rather than consensus. The copy that I saw had cites for other
interesting factoids (including one to the author's own work on the
war) but not for the above claim of sabotage. Even the nature of the
sabotage (assuming that this really happened) is up for grabs -
pro-Islamic revolutionaries, pro-American (or perhaps, as others have
said, but ommitted here Americans). I don't think it's a huge leap to
include unsuccessful sabotage or no-sabotage-at-all among the catalog
of possibilities both consistent with Amir & Cordesman.