Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:
I guess if you want to split hairs, it's more excusable than KAL 007
in that we didn't actually have fighters shadowing it before we
attacked. But neither incident was anything other than shameful.


There's no doubt the wrong decision was made. My point is that the wrong
decision was made in a matter of minutes if not seconds.

In the case of KAL 007 there was no immediate threat. In point of fact the
aircraft was leaving the area.

In the case of the Vincennes, there was no immediate threat either. It
was an A300, not an aircraft typically known for its anti-shipping
prowess, flying down a commercial air corridor on a scheduled flight.

The Captain of the Vincennes went looking for a fight. There was a
naval policy to not fly within a certain distance of Iranian gunboats
due to their tendency to take potshots; his helicopters violated this
policy. When his helicopters came under fire, he expressed a desire to
bring them under his ship's air defense umbrella; rather than have the
helicopters fly toward the ship at 120 knots, he took his ship toward
them at 30 knots, into Iranian territorial waters.

Furthermore, his crew was utterly incompetent at operating their
equipment. They had loaded incorrect data regarding the air corridors,
causing them to be displayed in the wrong location. They interpreted
the range figure as altitude, causing them to make radio calls
addressed to "a diving F-14", rather than a climbing A300.

There's nothing good about the way the US handled the Vincennes
incident, from start to finish. It was incredibly negligent, in my
opinion criminally so. But... it was negligent. The US tried to cover
it up, but not hard enough effectively do so, even though they could
have (e.g. USS Liberty).

The USSR, on the other hand, knew they were shooting down an airliner,
did so anyway, and then lied blatantly and repeatedly about it for
decades.

So yeah, KAL 007 was worse than Iran Air 655, but that's only because
the Soviets were quite spectacularly bad, and anyone who's tempted to
say "Well, at least the USN isn't as bad as the Soviets" should, again
in my opinion, reconsider.

-jake