Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Re: the president picking bombing targets

Look at it this way...
Larry J — (archived)

During the 1986 attack on Libya (Operation El Dorado Canyon), France denied the use of our airspace to our planes. That forced them to fly several more hours, no doubt increasing crew fatique consiberably. The fact that a stray bomb hit the French Embassy in Libya is kind of poetic justice.

As for the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Clinton Administration, it appears that was caused by a error in the target database. You try to build and maintain a database of every building in your own town and see how hard it is. Now, imagine how tough it must be when you're talking about many cities in many countries. The Chinese Embassy has moved from one building to another and someone missed it.

As for LBJ, if you want to hear some real bitterness, try tuning in to the Discovery Wings channel when they show their program on the F-105 Thunderchief (AKA, "The Thud", supposedly for the sound it made when it crashed). Those men who flew the Thud bore the brunt of LBJ and McNamara's meddling and stupidity. For example, LBJ tasked the military to come up with a list of targets sorted by priority. He then started at the lowest priority targets and began working UP the list instead of starting at the most important targets first. The result was that a lot of men were shot down and captured or killed unnecessarily. As they worked their way up the list, the North Vietnamese were smart enough to see what was going on. This gave them time to build what was at the time the heaviest air defenses anywhere.

Another example of McNamara's stupidity came from his obscession with statistics like sortee rates. A sortee is a single mission by a single plane, so 10 sortees is either 10 planes flying 1 mission or 1 plane flying 10 missions. At one point, there was a shortage of bombs. One F-105 squadron was down to 8 bombs for a given attack. A single F-105 could've carried all 8 bombs and would've had a good chance of getting in and out unharmed. Instead, they were ordered to send 8 planes each carrying a single bomb. Anyone familiar with antiaircraft defenses will tell you that such tactics greatly increase the chances of losses. Sure enough, not all 8 planes came home that day. I used to work with a former F-105 pilot. He confirmed the stories about how stupidly LBJ and McNamara micromanaged that war.

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