Morning After Musings-Syria Airstrikes on Chem Facilities
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Morning after musings. Trump is Trump I’m not analyzing the many words of a fool today. Tomorrow there will be even more words from him and nothing further learned.
Motivation-Is Chlorine gas the new Sarin? Did the Novochok incident ensure we had coalition allies for this strike? Of course it did. Chlorine is not on the list like Sarin or Novochok. But it’s what Syria often uses according to available evidence. The UK is not the only place Russia has been playing deadly spy games way beyond the pale of normal ops. And France is surely appalled at the chlorine attacks. I agree, let’s not hesitate to counterstrike a truly chemical gas attack at well chosen times, when strong diplomacy fails.
Means-Why did Russia stand down in Syria, and so far at least have less than a diplomatic furor and meltdown given past promises and threats? Did Putin make an arrangement with Trump, or did they not want to lose a lot of gear and vastly escalate a limited anti chem attack?
I think the latter, partly caused I’m pretty sure we have their EW and SAM systems spoofed when we want. Keep trying the radar etc and it’s goes bang and turns into a smoky hole. Note Israel gets in there regularly and suffers little in the way of destroyed aircraft or lost crews.
Conspirators-It appears to me for Russia in Syria the red line is regime change, not military action (up to a point anyway) at peripheral forces. One way to keep your fancy but not superior defense network alive is absorb and rebuild after a limited strike, and preserve your hard to replace forces for a wiser fight.
As the middle east returns to governments (good and bad obviously) in control and we finally exit the era of vast areas and resources held by AQ or ISIS I sure wish we would get our forces back and rebuild, repair, heal for a while. Our navy is strained to the limit, our air force is in a tough spot for fighters and tankers. It’s tough to recruit good volunteers when the President is a singularly horrible person. It’s hard to get those mega billions for shiny new military everythings that seems to take twice as long and cost three times as much as they used to. We can’t do things fast anymore.