Embassy AttacksFollow

Cite?

A litoral ship is designed for close in shore work. attacking pirates in somalian waters, spraying beaches with small arms, etc. It's the modern navy equivelent of a frigate, both in size and in throw weight. A 2.5 inch gun is a popgun compared to a 16 inch battleship shell, and a littoral ship is essentially useless as a shore bombardment platform unless you include their missile capability. Even if there are more drones, they still fire very expensive missiles compared to a cheap solid chunk of metal. Though i agree that small drone carriers, probably built on an America/wasp class marine carrier hull are a given in the near future. But the point remains, a battleship is THE single most cost effective shore bombardment platform we know of. Even aircraft carrying dumb gravity bombs are more expensive simply due to expended fuel.

An iowa class battleship, retrofitted to modern standards with current generation engines (conventional or nuclear) wouldn't be all that vulnerable. You could actually get about 20 CIWS Phalanx mounts on the old Bofors 50mm antiaircraft mounting points if you really wanted, which would make them very difficult to hit with missiles. Radar signature would be a problem unless they did a redesign of most of the topside and a recoat with radar absorbing paint, but you generally don't try to hide a battleship anyways, and in a shore bombardment role, we already control the immidiate sea area. Torpedos would be a problem, though i'd probably retrofit the battleship with stabilization pontons to allow for larger guns and higher muzzle velocities and use them as anti torpedo blisters of a sort. Between that, and the kinds of reactive armor we can build these days (see the M1-A2 Abrahms) means it would be very difficult to kill a battleship short of a nuke, and if we're talking nukes, our entire fleet is vulnerable.

List of places the sentiment doesn't exist in is shorter.

While calling them moderates would be extremely funny.

Another hot tip?

Reminds me of a guy who had month and months of hot tips from top ranking officials in real Nations like the UK, Russia, Germany about potential attacks using hijacked planes.

It's a pretty thin string you're going out on to try and lay blame on our own administration for this attack.

If you were an effective leader would you have evacuated the embassies before 9-11?









Edited, Sep 18th 2012 9:45pm by Elinda

Ok, I realize that I was being bit too obtuse. My point being that there is a lot of anti-American sentiment around, and that random attacks may be imminent at any given time. "Concerns" about attacks may well be too vague or unsubstantiated to lock down or evacuate all personnel in the region, although the date in question does deserve a bit of extra attention. Besides, I wonder what kind of insider info varus has to claim Obama knew all about it. I doubt it came up while shooting hoops with the brothers on base.

and that random attacks may be imminent at any given time.

Maybe. These aren't even close to random, so sort of a moot point.

Obviously we're going to need at least thirty drones.

I'd heard "30 years" as well but never looked into it. Who was killed in 2001? Or is the thirty years with some caveat?