Israel's air raid on Syria:This
blog post has a good round up of the speculation about the meaning of it all. Excerpt:
Commenting on the September 6 operation, a retired Turkish general told the Turkish Weekly, “Syria is very close to Israel and you likely don’t need auxiliary tanks for a flight to a neighbouring country… Using this long flight equipped with tanks, Israel tested its ability to fly to Iran.”
posted by Quiddity at 9/21/2007 01:04:00 AM
Not so fast. An F-15 without external tanks has a combat radius of approximately 600 miles. I just went to Google Maps and did an approximation of how far it was to where the attack presumably happened in the far northeastern corner of Syria and it was... about 600 miles. So while it could have been done without external tanks, I know that if I were the pilot, I sure the heck would want those external tanks to give me some extra combat capability in the unlikely event that there was a Syrian fighter that could actually fly and came after me. (Syria's air force is largely grounded due to lack of trained pilots and spare parts).
I remember reading on the intertubes that the Israeli Air Force has been doing long dry runs down the Mediterranean to Gibraltar. They have to go through Jordan, Syria, Arabia, or Turkey to get to Iran. Syria is the shortest route. But I don't know what went down with the Syrian incursion.
Was Korea selling their nuclear materials to Syria who would then smuggle the material to Iran thru Iraq?
And was their efforts thwarted by Israel?
Why was Syria's defenses so impotent? They seemed to not even see this comming!
Instead of being secure they are obviously vulnerable to being held accountable for supporting terrorists.
