After pressuring Obama to "invite" Australia to join U.S. air strikes in Syria in time for the khaki by-election in Canning, concerns continue to be raised about the legal, moral and practical grounds. Sydney bureau chief Ross Jones says dispatching F18 Hornets is a dumb idea.
LIBERALS DO not change their spots — they are always prepared to sacrifice the best. Just look at the so-called Syrian airstrikes. They are sending F18 Hornets to the Syrian battle zone, which is a really dumb idea. Let me give you a bit of history to explain why.
During the Korean war, MiG alley was a swathe of territory between North Korea and China. It was called MiG alley because it was heavily populated by the innovative Russian MiG-15, a true fighter aircraft — fast, unstable and lethal. The latest iteration of the U.S. built F-86 Sabre struggled to keep up and all too often didn’t.
As a precursor to the Summernats, Australians eventually shoehorned a bigger engine into the Sabre and turned it into an unbeatable hotrod.
The trouble was the Korean war was over by the time this new jock toy lit up its first runway.
So, what did the Liberal Party do in the meantime?
Well, it dispatched 77 Squadron armed to the teeth with Gloster Meteors, an aircraft type which first saw service against Messerschmitts in 1944. Guess what happened?
30 pilots were killed, six taken POW.
Lucky the captured weren’t shot down over Syria, because there they burn you alive.
Yet our Liberal dickheads are sending F18 Hornets to the Syrian battlezone.
Former ADF Chief Peter Gration says #airstrikes in #Syria would be illegal and disastrous. He joins us at 10am AEST pic.twitter.com/o7KCmUnbGS
— ABC News 24 (@ABCNews24) September 9, 2015
Russia is going to back Assad in a kind of sick version of its betrayal of the anti Franco forces.
The Russians have a rather tasty fighter called the Sukhoi Flanker and Vladimir, who so recently escaped a shirtfronting by whatisname, is dead keen to give them a burl. If they win and take out, say, the entire RAAF, then it’s hello world.
Australian fighter pilots are the crème de la crème, the best, happiest in an environment of high-speed risk. Young, smart, dedicated.
So were the Meteor guys.
The F18 is obsolete, outclassed.
It can duck ground fire and SAMS launched from rubble-strewn terrain, but according to the experts:
'In conclusion, the Flanker in all current variants kinematically outclasses the Super Hornet in all high performance flight regimes. The only near term advantage the latest Super Hornets have over legacy Flanker variants is in the APG-79 AESA and radar signature reduction features, an advantage which will not last long given highly active ongoing Russian development effort in these areas. The supercruising Al-41F engine will further widen the performance gap in favour of the Flanker.'
What this means is that post 2010 the Super Hornet is uncompetitive against advanced Flankers in BVR combat, as it is now uncompetitive in close combat. (BVR is Beyond Visual Range.)
"Nobody believes there is a military solution to what is happening on the ground." - David Kilcullen #Syria #lateline pic.twitter.com/3Lw8CaepeQ
— Lateline (@Lateline) September 17, 2015
Instead, the brain-dead Liberals opted for a yawning gap in the defence of Australia by deciding to purchase the pig-plane, aka the obese J35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft which can hardly roll over in bed and costs more than Donald Trump is worth, then send our last line of defence to bomb what might as well be sand.
Then they will meet the Flankers. I have enormous faith in the commitment and professionalism of RAAF aviators, but when you are flying a Meteor against a MiG, well…
FMD.
Ross Jones' book on Ashbygate is due out in hardcopy and e-book form next month. If you would be interested in pre-ordering, please email us here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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