How do you square "shoot down" with "never happened at all?"
Also, suggesting alternate scenarios, as in the bolded words [B]"it may be" [/B]does not assert anything other than a possibility.


Do explain more about "self-deception." Since you do not seem to be a communications engineer, your doubts about the Iranian communication channels are just blowing smoke. You don't know, but you love to insert your opinions as if they were facts. Ernst took you down quite skillfully on this sort of thing quite recently.


I imagine that you are still licking your wounds over having to acknowledge that the US does evil, nefarious things like assassinating high officials of foreign governments with which no state of declared war exists. [U]Of course,[/U] the Good Old US of A never, ever overthrew a foreign government in Iran or anywhere else.


Enjoy your self-deception. Keep them blinders on tight. You might see unpleasant truths which you would feel compelled to doubt, so save yourself the trouble.

[QUOTE=kladner;535181]How do you square "shoot down" with "never happened at all?"[/quote]
I don't understand.
[quote]Also, suggesting alternate scenarios, as in the bolded words [B]"it may be" [/B]does not assert anything other than a possibility.[/QUOTE]But it's [i]not[/i] a possibility. Even [i]you[/i] have acknowledged that Iran shot down the plane. In fact, you were the [i]very first[/i] to post here to that effect, saying, if memory serves, "Well, Iran did it."

I will mention Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." ("Incompetence" is sometimes replaced by "stupidity" or perhaps other words.)

I would also point out that the tenor of the assertion that the taking down of the plane could "not possibly" be an accident (mistake) is based on the premise that the system is so foolproof, such a thing simply [i]couldn't[/i] happen.

It would be interesting to learn if that's what the [i]Iranians[/i] thought when they bought these infernal engines. Because if they did, it might have led them to believe that the crews didn't have to be especially well trained.

Of aircraft, horses and zebras -The Saker
 

[URL]https://thesaker.is/of-aircraft-horses-and-zebras/[/URL]
On The Saker. [URL]https://wikispooks.com/wiki/%27The_Saker%27[/URL]

[QUOTE]When you go to vet school, they teach you a simple principle: [I]if you are under a bridge and you hear hooves, think of horses first, but don’t forget there are also zebras out there[/I].
This is exactly what comes to my mind when I hear all the speculation about the shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner by a IRGC SAM.
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Lots of unanswered questions however.
Frankly, the story as presented by the Iranians makes no sense to me (not because I think that they are lying, but because there are a lot of information holes which need to be plugged). Why did the Iranian civil and military authorities not close down the Iranian airspace (which the US side, by the way, seemed to have done). Next, did the Iranian air defenses not get all the flight plans of all the aircraft in Iranian space? I had the privilege to participate in a few air defense exercises as a young man, and not only did we have full access to all the flight plans of any civilian aircraft over all of Europe, we even had their transponder signals live on our main displays. Was the Ukrainian transponder on? I strongly suspect that yes as a PIC cannot take off without this instrument in perfect working order (at least this was the case with European airlines in the 80s and 90s).
[U]The commander of the SAM unit explained that he had 10 seconds to take a decision and that he got NO order from the higher instances (regimental, divisional, national air defense authorities). I don’t have any reason to doubt him, but if he indeed speaks the truth, then this shows a glaring weakness of the Iranian air defenses.[/U] Not only was his audio/video call for instructions not answered, the air defense networks were either down or frozen. [U]HOW could that happen in a theoretically very redundant and highly survivable military network?![/U]
Then there is the Ukrainian PIC. The logical thing for him to do would have been to contact his corporate bosses in Kiev and they might even have contacted the Ukrainian authorities. [U]The question is WHO and WHY took the decision to take off when the situation was self-evidently fantastically dangerous.[/U]
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Could a US drone have shot the airliner? Could the US have conducted a cyber-attack?
Maybe. But, as I often like to remind everybody, “possible” is very, very far form “likely”.
For example, what would be the US motive? I don’t see one.
Why choose a Ukrainian airliner? Again, this makes no sense to me.
Then, a cyberattack is all fine and dandy until we look into details.
Was the putative cyberattack directed at, hmmmmm what exactly?! The computers are radars of the civilian ATC? The IRGC air defense network? The specific SA-12 battery? Maybe the Ukrainian airliner? Maybe at all of these at the same time?
Yeah, maybe. But, as I think Carl Sagan, liked to say “[I]extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence[/I]” and in this case, there is ZERO evidence. Yes, tons of speculation, but speculation does not amount to evidence, not even indirect evidence.
......................................
Frankly, I would love to blame it all on the US or Israel but, alas, I don’t see even a shred of any real evidence supporting this hypothesis. Maybe we will see it in the next few days, weeks or months, and I will GLADLY admit that I was wrong. But, alas, the way I see it is that the most logical and likely explanation is a major, huge and most embarrassing SYSTEMIC problem in the Iranian air defenses.
[/QUOTE]

There is a Berton Roueche "medical detectives" story entitled, "The Hoofbeats of a Zebra." It concerns a case of myasthenia gravis which had been misdiagnosed for a long time. The doctor who figured it out says,[quote]There is a saying about diagnosis -- about why doctors often fail to recognize one of the less-common diseases. It goes, When you hear hoofbeats, you don't necessarily think of a zebra.[/quote]

I have read that nine other civilian flights had taken before PS752 without incident that evening. Also that PS752 took off an hour late.

More interesting perhaps, are reports that the PS752's transponder quit working (or at least the Tor's system quit receiving its transmissions) [i]before[/i] the first missile launched. Alas, these reports didn't specify whether it was the flight transponder, the IFF transponder, or both.

There are also the reports that the AA battery officer was unable to communicate with his superiors.

These reports suggest two possibilities. One is, the Tor battery was experiencing a [i]lot[/i] of malfunctions. That possibility is, I hope, being investigated.

What could cause such a situation? I don't know enough about the construction of the units to formulate a detailed theory. An obvious cause would be poor maintenance. Another possible contributing factor might be, some sort of driving mishap -- a collision, bottoming out, etc.

There may also have been inadequate training in what to do when things aren't working properly.

Another possibility is, there was some sort of "jamming" going on. I don't know what would be required to block both transponder signals and radio communications, but my guess would be, "a lot."

It is [i]conceivable[/i] that PS752's IFF transponder [i]could[/i] have been tampered with (hacked, reprogrammed, whatever) so as to transmit falsely that it was a hostile, but this would conflict with the reports that the Tor battery simply stopped receiving from it. It also would not explain the inability of the battery's officer to communicate with his superiors.

I also noticed in the video I watched that purports to show a missile taking down the plane, there were no navigation lights visible. Perhaps they weren't bright enough to be recorded. Perhaps they had been taken out by the first missile launch. Perhaps they weren't working for some other reason.

WRT the idea of hacking or spoofing, I note that there are reports that the Tor batteries the Iranians have, lack the anti-spoofing capability of later versions of these systems.

I did find a news story about interference with the operation of Russian AA missiles in the ME. This was in 2017, and concerned S-300 missiles (long-range AA missiles) in Syria. The Iranians couldn't help but notice that IDF planes didn't seem to be lighting up their targeting systems, which should have happened on takeoff. The Iranians concluded that the Russians were giving the Israelis the security codes, which enabled them to program their planes' transponders to signal that they were friendlies. The Iranians were able to change the codes for some of the missiles without the Russians' knowledge, and they suddenly started detecting IDF aircraft as hostiles.

The notions that the Iranians were somehow complicit, either in the assassination of General Soleimani, or the downing of PS752, are IMO so ludicrous as to be unworthy of serious consideration.

(Pretends to take a mighty swig of 130-proof absinthe, heavily laced with laudanum) But since the field has been thrown open to speculation as to who might benefit from engineering the destruction of a civilian airliner, I offer the Iranian military. The motive? To take the Revolutionary Guards down a peg or two. The IRGC are the military elite, answering only to Khamenei, who is vice-regent of the Mahdi. The regular military has resented the Guards' privileged position for a long time. This tragedy makes Iran look bad, but it makes the Revolutionary Guards look worse. (OK, so much for fantasizing)

The maxim [i]cui bono?[/i] (who benefits?) is [i]not[/i] evidence. It is at most a guide to looking for [i]possible[/i] motives. And this [i]assumes[/i] that the idea of "motive" even pertains, which means [i]assuming[/i] the subject of investigation was a deliberate act. This assumption is IMO unjustified in the present case.

The whole idea that [i]anyone[/i] would [i]deliberately[/i] target a civilian airliner just to make someone [i]else[/i] look bad is IMO completely looney tunes.

I note that, even in cases of purely accidental airplane crashes, investigations generally conclude they only happened because a [i]lot[/i] of things went wrong. I am sure that this is the case with the shooting down of PS752. It would thus be a further tragedy if the unfortunate AA officer who launched the missiles was saddled with all the blame. He would make a good fall guy, though -- that poor man is probably [i]ready[/i] to face a firing squad. But who knows? Maybe the head of the IRGC's aerospace division, who said he "wished he was dead," may get his wish.

The two most ridiculous decisions surrounding this calamity of which I am currently aware are, (1) the decision not to close Iranian airspace, and (2) the decision to deny what happened for three days.

Agreement. On the landing lights question, I think the video was shot from behind the plane. I read that anyway.

Since the video must have been of the second missile, the first may have affected the navigation/running lights. Considering the effects of the second missile, the first must not have done as much damage.

The fact of a second missile at least explains how the videographer was aimed in the right direction. Earlier, I saw implications of a planned operation asserted based on the camera orientation. This is clearly "shot down" by the existence of a second missile.

I was a bit puzzled by one thing I read about the Tor missile system: Namely, once they are launched, there is no way to prevent them from reaching their target and detonating. Yet there [i]is[/i] a self-destruct which automatically destroys the missile should it miss. So apparently there is no way for the operator to engage the self-destruct.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;535276]I was a bit puzzled by one thing I read about the Tor missile system: Namely, once they are launched, there is no way to prevent them from reaching their target and detonating. Yet there [I]is[/I] a self-destruct which automatically destroys the missile should it miss. So apparently there is no way for the operator to engage the self-destruct.[/QUOTE]
That seems like a very poor design choice. Maybe such a kill switch could be used by adversaries, as there would have to be contact with the missile by some means. I wonder if the first missile fired at the airliner was a miss, the self-destruction of which drew the attention of the person who shot the video of the second missile hitting. Has anything been published regarding the fate of the first missile (other than blowing up at some point after being fired)? Then, too, the flight time of these things must be pretty short, especially at relatively short range. The window of opportunity for destruction could be exceedingly narrow.

I went looking for information on the range of the TOR system(s). I found more information than I have time to try to absorb at the moment. Sure fire TL;DR material.

Whatever, this is from:
[URL]https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Tor_missile_system[/URL]
and it is extremely detailed as to its development history, operational hardware, and different versions.
[QUOTE]The Tor missile system (Russian: "Тор"; English: torus[1]) is an all-weather low to medium altitude, short-range surface-to-air missile system designed for engaging airplanes, helicopters, cruise missiles, precision guided munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles and short-range ballistic threats (Anti-Munitions). Originally developed by the Soviet Union under the GRAU designation 9K330, the system is commonly known by its NATO reporting name, SA-15 "Gauntlet". A navalized variant was developed under the name 3K95 "Kinzhal", also known as the SA-N-9 "Gauntlet". Tor was also the first air defence system in the world designed from the start to shoot down precision guided weapons like the AGM-86 ALCM.[/QUOTE]Here are the specs for the missiles, which include the range (12 km) that started my search. Note the emphasized feature below. It is radio command guided. The possibility of a self-destruct command seems to be there.
[CODE]Weight 167 kg
Length 2900 mm
Diameter 235 mm
Warhead Frag-HE
Warhead weight 15 kg
Detonation
mechanism RF Proximity
Propellant Solid-fuel rocket
Operational
range 12 kilometres (7.5 mi)[18]
Flight altitude 6,000 metres (20,000 ft)
Boost time Cold launch ejection for 20 m
Speed 850 m/s
[I][B]Guidance
system Radio command[/B][/I]
Steering
system Gas dynamic control system, with four control surfaces
Launch
platform 9A331 combat vehicle
Transport GM-569 tracked vehicle
[/CODE]

US claims it has right to attack Iran is not ‘restoration of deterrence,’ it's a return to Wild West
 

[URL]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52861.htm[/URL]
[QUOTE] Donald Trump is not the first US president to be accused of using military force illegally. But this White House seems to be giving Trump greater executive license to kill – and to start wars.
This week, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in a media interview claimed the US has the right under Article II of its Constitution to attack Iranian territory in response to offensive action by Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.

There has been a reported surge in rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq following the killing of General Soleimani and his companion, the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

In Esper’s reasoning, the US would have the right to launch airstrikes on Iran. And in Trump’s reasoning, he does not have to seek authority from Congress.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]The allegations against the Quds Force commander of having blood on his hands for “thousands” of US troops and “millions” of civilians is more in the realm of American propaganda. It is essentially hearsay which in no way meets any standard of due legal process.

Soleimani helped organize Iranian-backed militia which were effective in defeating terrorist militia in Syria and Iraq trying to overthrow the governments. The US role and that of its allies toward the terror groups is ambiguous at best, if not covertly working with the militants, despite official talk about “fighting terrorism.”

Iranian-backed militia in Iraq have opposed US forces. But let’s not forget, American forces are in Iraq due to an illegal invasion of that country in 2003. When Trump and his aides denounce Soleimani for US troop deaths, they conveniently forget that their own country is guilty of war crimes in Iraq, and in Syria from its illegal presence there.

The US Congress is right to be concerned about Trump’s increasing arrogation of powers for using lethal force against foreign targets.

However, his predecessor, Barack Obama, was a big practitioner of ordering drone-assassinations against terror suspects abroad. Almost every American president has deployed warplanes or missiles against foreign states in ways that breached constitutional law or the UN Charter. Remember Bill Clinton fired off cruise missiles on Sudan at the height of his sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]The US Congress is right to be concerned about Trump’s increasing arrogation of powers for using lethal force against foreign targets.

However, his predecessor, Barack Obama, was a big practitioner of ordering drone-assassinations against terror suspects abroad. Almost every American president has deployed warplanes or missiles against foreign states in ways that breached constitutional law or the UN Charter. Remember Bill Clinton fired off cruise missiles on Sudan at the height of his sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a major speech in which he put the assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi generals in the wider context of “strategic deterrence” against all adversaries. Pompeo explicitly linked the killings to the US policy of confronting Russia and China.

Tellingly, his speech was titled: ‘The Restoration of Deterrence: The Iranian Example’.

Pompeo summed up by saying: “We have re-established deterrence…We saw, not just in Iran, but in other places, too, where American deterrence was weak. We watched Russia’s 2014 occupation of the Crimea and support for aggression against Ukraine because deterrence had been undermined. We have resumed lethal support to the Ukrainian military. China’s island building, too, in the South China Sea, and its brazen attempts to coerce American allies undermined deterrence.”

The lawless reasoning here is appalling. If the Trump administration wants to use murderous force against adversaries for so-called “deterrence,” then it will, according to Pompeo. That apparently includes Russia and China.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=kladner;535299]<snip>
I wonder if the first missile fired at the airliner was a miss, the self-destruction of which drew the attention of the person who shot the video of the second missile hitting.
<snip>[/QUOTE]I wondered the same thing. It seems likely. As I understand it, Tor is designed to detonate the warhead directly in front of the target. So a direct hit would very likely destroy the cockpit and kill the flight crew. [i]Any[/i] detonation triggered by the proximity fuse would almost certainly do enough damage to bring the plane down out of control.

I also wondered about the plane's reported "turning back toward the airport" after being engulfed in flames. I suppose it is possible that a direct hit might take out one engine but not the other, which could cause the plane to turn.

I imagine the Tor system can detect that the missile has failed to implement course corrections, which should initiate a self-destruct. Statements to the contrary notwithstanding, it's [i]possible[/i] AFAIK that "in theory" the operator [i]could[/i] destroy the missile in flight in case of a misidentified target. But [i]in practice[/i], how much time has he got to make that determination and act on it after launch? Not long!

There is also a question floating around of whether the unit was operating in "automatic" or "manual" mode. But apparently the older Tor systems Iran bought don't [i]have[/i] an "automatic" mode, so, if the battery that shot down the plane was one of these, the distinction does not pertain unless they were "upgraded." Oh, joy, that would be another joker in the deck. Not that upgrades ever cause unexpected problems, of course.

I have read different things about "automatic" versus "manual" operation. In "manual mode" the commander has to initiate the launch. In systems with both modes of operation, some descriptions say that manual mode is used to overcome "strong passive interference." I'm not sure what that means. Chaff, maybe?

It is not clear to me how a launch is actually initiated in automatic mode. Some descriptions say that launch is initiated by default after the system locks on to the target, [i]unless[/i] the commander cancels launch within 10 seconds.

In addition, a Tor unit can function either linked to an air defense network, or autonomously. Which way the one that shot down PS752 was operating, is obviously an important question.

[QUOTE=kladner;535321][URL]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52861.htm[/URL][/QUOTE]
I think what we need here is an app that notifies people of the latest change in the Admin's justification for killing Soleimani. Perhaps such an app could be used to track the shifting sands of the Admin's justification for [i]all[/i] its policies, but I fear that then it would suck up all the available bandwidth.

I noted the latest rationale for killing Soleimani, that it was to deter Iran's adventurism in the ME.

My assessment? I guess that means the sanctions aren't working.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;535342]It is not clear to me how a launch is actually initiated in automatic mode. Some descriptions say that launch is initiated by default after the system locks on to the target, [i]unless[/i] the commander cancels launch within 10 seconds[/QUOTE]

Interesting. I have read reports that the missile operator said that he had ten seconds in which to make a decision.