We're not trying to make friends with warlords. We're trying to establish law and order and make friends with the starving people.

So as I said. Drop a stack of missiles on the warlord, or the 82nd Airborne - whichever is less likely to produce colatteral damage (If he's stupid enough to be sitting in a compound in the desert, drop a REAL stack of missiles on it, until there's nothing left but debris.)

It's difficult to make friends with someone who doesn't respect you, particularly in an environment where strength rules.

-Siege

Which is why I said to remind everyone that no matter how big and bad the local dogs are, they're a toy poodle to our pissed off great dane/pit bull hybrid.

That's because they used violence as their last resort, but failed to resort to enough of it.

Trust me, when cruise missiles start landing on weapons' depots, the fuckers will take note.

Black Hawks full of Marines aren't impressing enough?

Nah. They can understand and shoot at a Marine.

What're they going to do when they realize "Holy shit. They can wipe everything we have off the face of the Earth, and we can't even shoot back."

Meh. Just drop a stack of missiles on the problem. Repeat until the lesson that "Fuck with the biggest damn dog in the world and get dead" has been hammered into their heads, or the "fucking with bigger dogs" gene has been chlorinated from the Somali gene pool.

I doubt the UN would watch a missile storm over Somalia very long. Pure brute force isn't rarely the way to a solution, other than " let's bomb the country to dust".

Somalia has nothing to offer, besides poor people, warlords and a lot kalashnikovs. So why bother with it anyway? It's not like it's the only country in Africa which matches the descirption above.

Well then, will you settle for instituting a social policy of "Ships at sea are off-limits unless you want ships at sea to start putting missiles on-land?"

The lesson of Iraq is the same as the lesson of Somalia. People can't surrender to a missile, and no number of them will particularly ease the situation if you are fighting unorganized opposition.

An organized opposition can potentially have its government destroyed. Hell, many governments do not survive the death of one man. But an unorganized opposition can't be. It happens simply because a lot of people in a region don't like you. If you kill a man with a missile from the sky, that's one guy's entire extended family and network of friends that also don't like you.

The tighter you clench your fist, the more worlds will slip through your fingers. The more people you kill, the lower your approval rating will be. You can't conquer a country like that. It has been tried over and over again since the thirties, and air power has never conquered any country ever. Not Japan, not Yugoslavia, look it up. In both cases those countries surrendered because the government was running out of resources - not because air power had destroyed enough munitions or soldiers that the war could no longer be prosecuted.

Air power is great. It lets you destroy enemy naval power, fortifications, and armored vehicles. And all of those things can make life difficult for your land forces. But don't get too sweaty over it - that's essentially all it does. If your opponent doesn't have any major military installations for whatever reason, air power is less than useless as an offensive tool.

-Frank

Iraq is an exercise in instituting control inside of an existing power vaccuum.

Somalia lacked any form of valid self-control.

Both require substantial effort to rebuild, but Somalia requires more because Iraq, while brutal, at least has a history of a singular, consolidated power structure.

In Somalia, you have to convince warlords, who have ruled by power of might, to share power for the better of all. That won't happen without a pressing common foe.

Are we advocating an attempt to install a government in Somalia? No. Are we trying to impress upon the local warlords and organizations that a bigger boy is on the block and is not to be fragged with? Yes.

Your assessment about Iraq is absolutely correct - the price of a new government in the face of old traditions is measured in blood. And even then, it seems unlikely that long-held cultural values will bend easily to foreign concepts.

-Siege

hmm, im reading today that the captain if the ship was from norway...

Heh.

I think those pirates are lucky there wasn't an axe on board.

"Aaaaaarrrrrrrrr, me Vikings!"

-Siege

'sonic cannon?' ..... Okay, cut the BS. That captain tried to ram them, and they said "WOAH, frag to this drek!" and decided to cut losses and run.

The BS.
More BS.

I still call it BS. A 'sonic cannon?' You really think a loud noise is going to scare off bloodthirsty pirates? No, it'll make 'em MORE pissed. And you can't aim at both boats at once.

I figure once they realized this captain was hardcore, they decided to go after softer prey.

I'd reserve judgement until I can ascertain the effects of said weapon myself.

The metal isn't molten, there is no time for sufficient transfer of heat for that kind of thing. The metal (usually copper) jet is in a state of superplasticity. It doesn't "burn" through the target either. Suggested reading (although I assume Birdy knows the rest of the stuff pretty well).

Not really. More like how likely you are to damage a house with your fist. An RPG can make all kinds of holes in a cruise ship (compare to putting your fist through windows/non-structural walls/doors), just none to anything important.

~J

Also depends on the warhead used on the rpg

"The most common type of warheads are the High Explosive (HE) or High Explosive Anti Tank (HEAT) rounds" and "specialized warheads are available for illumination, smoke, tear gas, and white phosphorus. Russia, China and many former Warsaw Pact nations have also developed a fuel-air explosive warhead. Another recent development is a tandem HEAT warhead capable of penetrating reactive armor" (RPG's).

An FAE warhead?

Yikes - can we say, "new SR toy?" I knew you could.

-Siege

Presumeably it would have more impact if aimed on or near the engine compartment - although this is sheer speculation on my part.

Any else feel like asking for various SR stats on RPG warheads?

-Siege

The "sonic cannon" is LRAD - Long Range Acoustic Device.

CNN is doing an expose on it now.

It generates a hyper-focused sound beam.

The Wikipedia Entry

-Siege

Well, here's some RL data:

In general, 'light' anti-tank weapons will penetrate between 100-450mm of armor steel. In general, they will all use HEAT type charges to achieve this penetration. The ability of a HEAT charge to penetrate armor is roughly comparable to the charge diameter, so the AT weapons firing larger projectiles will generally penetrate more armor than the smaller ones.

There are four general ways to improve the performance of your armor against HEAT charges: composite armors, Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), ‘armor spacing', and electrical charges used to disrupt the HEAT jet.

The composite armors are 2 to 3 times as effective against HEAT type attacks compared to the kinetic energy (KE) protection they provide. As a sample, the frontal armor of the M1A2 tank is 'roughly' equivalent to 650+ mm RHA vs. KE attacks and 1400+mm of RHA vs. HEAT attacks.

ERA is essentially using an explosive device to disrupt the HEAT charge before it is fully formed, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of the HEAT attack. I don't have good data on how good ERA can be, but I'll guess that it can provide the equivalent of 500mm RHA equivalent. Note that you are essentially setting off explosives on the surface of the vehicle, to mount ERA a vehicle needs to be armored already. ERA can be at least partially defeated by 'tandem charge' warheads that use a smaller 'first warhead' to disrupt/set of the ERA, to clear the way for the second (main) warhead.

Armor spacing essentially means putting a light 'armor shell' that is spaced away from the main armor. This was used during WW2 to defeat the early HEAT charges of the time period. AFAIK, this defense is basically useless against modern HEAT warheads, as they usually have measures added to defeat the (minimal) armor you can add to a vehicle and still have it useable.

Electrically disrupting the HEAT jet is something new. It seems to work well. But I have no real data on how well (i.e. how much additional protection) or how often (will it work for every HEAT attack?) such a system would work.

Usefulness
Vs. Tanks:
Light antitank weapons cannot penetrate the frontal armor of any modern (and most semi-modern) tanks. Against the side armor, it depends on the weapon and the tank, but the side armor of the best tanks generally laugh at the efforts of the best LAWs. Most LAWs will penetrate the rear and top armor of even the best tanks.
Note that you can still blow a track off the tank with a LAW from almost any aspect, even if you can't penetrate the main armor.

Vs. IFVs/APCs
LAWs will generally penetrate the armor of all IFVs/APCs from any aspect. While ERA could be applied to such a vehicle to make it at least 'highly resistant' to HEAT, the fact that these vehicles operate in close proximity with friendly infantry make this usually undesirable.

Vs. Armored 'civilian' vehicles
This includes things like the city master line of riot control vans, armored limos, etc
The LAW will generally penetrate, the damage may not be 'catastrophic', (e.g. there may be survivors, but the vehicle will almost always be destroyed/disabled.

Vs. normal civilian vehicles
Toast.

Vs. fortifications
While HEAT charges penetrate very well, their blast/fragmentation effects are very limited. This means that you can blow a small hole in a bunker with a LAW, but you probably won't do much to the bunkers occupants with it (except those directly behind the hole you just made).

Vs. personnel
With almost no blast/fragmentation effects LAWs are basically useless against dispersed personnel. If you are really desperate to kill one guy hiding behind a wall, and you know exactly where he is, a LAW might do the job, just don't expect to get any of his friends.

An add-on to Crusher Bob and others:

+ There are special HEAT-based warheads against Fortifikations available for the "new" Panzerfaust III (german AT rockets are always "Panzerfausts" even if they are recoilless rifles). It consists of a small HEAT charge for punching a hole in the fortification and a fragmentation charge that flies through the hole and detonates inside. Can we say "chunky salsa". In use!

+ Some weapons like the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle or the RPG-7 are reusable weapons that can fire various warheads. That's how the RPG-7 got it's thermobaric warhead (Refereed to as using a slurry as opposed to gaseous explosivs)

+ FAE function against entrenched troops partially/mostly due to massiv overpressure rupturing major blood vessels leaving dead with no external wounds. The same effect has been observed in WWII when troops where hit by Nebelwerfer or Katjusha (Stalin Organ) fire. So Thermobaric will be ugly and useful

+ Some spaced armor (actually: Wire mesh) was IIRC used in Vietnam to disrupt or prematurely detonate the RPG fuse, sometimes sandbags or replacement tracks served the same job. The HEAT effect depends, among other things, on the proper distance between target and detonation. That's why a lot of the modern HEAT charges have a "nose" - it ensures proper distance, elder charges did this by a more massiv nose cap i.e the charge of the original Panzerfaust 30 ends at the biggest part of the warhead, not at the noseplate

+ The US LAW of Beverly Hills cop fame is only available as a HEAT

+ The SR LAW and MAW from Fields of Fire should have Anti Vehicle effects. They have HEAT painted on the weapon

+ Electrostatic Armor is a british development. From the description it should work multiple times if the hits are on different places and there is a short time to re-charge the capacitor (or multiple capacitors)

+ Shortly before the end of the Cold War at least one IFV was build along the same lines as modern battletanks (Composite armor) but not produced - The german Marder II. The British "Warrior" was originally planned to have the original composite armor (aka Chobham - Another british invention)

+ Composite Add-ons to IFV have IIRC been fielded for the Bradley, Warrior and Marder series

Btw: HEAT - High Explosive Anti Tank
HEAP - High Explosive Armor Pircing

can be used / are used exchangeable.

Birdy

I'm still sad about the slow demise of HESH

~J

I'm glad that lots of money has been spent to produce a noise gun to do a job vs. rioters that water cannons and tear gas do perfectly well, and to do a job vs. pirates that a .50 HMG, or, better, 20 mike mike does ten times better.