At 10:15 PM 9/1/96 -0400, Simon Spero wrote:
On Sun, 1 Sep 1996, Alan Horowitz wrote:
The Aegis ship in the Gulf wzs not in an exercise. It was in a war zone.
If my memory serves, the Iranian jetliner had its squawker turned off, or broken. The officer in charge in the CIC had about ten seconds to decide if he was about to be locked-on by a missle. And no real information to
I think it was actually a combination of a design flaw in the user interface for the control system combined with a human error that led to the radar officer confusing the airbus with an (F4?) a hundred miles away that he'd previously clicked on.
Isn't there just the tiniest bit of a double-standard here? If the ship was supposedly "justified" in firing on an airplane just because it _could_become_ a threat, and _could_ fire a missile at any moment, then why can't we turn this logic around and claim that an Iranian aircraft could view an Aegis as a ship which "could become a threat" and "could fire a missile at any moment." Generally, I'm not sympathetic to the Iranians; far from it. But I can smell hypocrisy a mile away and the US military's "logic" in this area is unbelievable. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com