Jordan wrote:
Ed Kyle wrote:
I would only point out that Israel was unable to stop the attacks,
despite total control of the air, just as the U.S. was unable to
stop the Scud attacks during the first "Gulf War".

Both Israel and America in both those cases was able to greatly reduce
the frequency of the attacks, and you will note that Scud attacks
proved impossible from territories America _overran_ during the second
"Gulf War."

According to the following site

"http://www.jcpa.org/brief/brief006-10.htm"

There were 4,228 rocket impacts inside Israel from July 13 to
August 13, 2006. "During the first two weeks, rocket attacks
averaged about 100 per day. Then in early August, Hizballah
proceeded to double its rate of fire to a daily average of
200 rocket attacks. There was a decline during the final week,
but on August 13, the day before the cease-fire, 250 rockets
landed in Israel. Israeli counterattacks apparently had no
serious influence on Hizballah's rate of fire..."


Israel's losses and damage from Hizballah rocket attacks include 53
fatalities, 250 severely wounded, and 2,000 lightly wounded. There was
extensive damage to hundreds of dwellings, several public utilities,
and dozens of industrial plants. One million Israelis lived near or in
shelters or security rooms, with some 250,000 civilians evacuating the
north and relocating to other areas of the country.

The use of
mobile launchers to perform "shoot and scoot" attacks makes
it nearly impossible to stop such attacks. Even if the launcher
positions are known, it may prove impossible to take them out.

Given the removal of political inhibitions against using whatever level
of firepower might be required to take the launchers out or to
disproportionately retaliate against the launches, I find this hard to
believe. An America suffering such bombardment against civilian
targets would not be under such political restraints;

The Hizballah war provides a telling example of this problem.
As you can see from the images in the above link, it is easy
to see how the launchers might be hidden within trailers or
tarps to look like commercial transport trucks. Once the
missles were fired, the simple launchers became relatively
expendable, so were not much of a loss if the Israelis were
able to find and destroy them. And the bad guys set up
their launchers among civilians, whose bodies would be
paraded across TV screens whenever Israel did manage to
get off a "counter battery" response. As you note, the only
way to really stop such attacks is to occupy, and hold, the
ground with foot soldiers.

Of course it is hard to image how such an attack with short
range missiles could be carried out against the U.S. as long
as we keep our adjacent neighbors on relatively friendly
terms.

The U.S. was, for example, never able to "take out"
(or even locate) the mortar and rocket positions that pounded
Khe Sanh for weeks during the Vietnam War even though the
positions were all within relatively short range of the base.

Mortars and rocket-launchers are much smaller weapons, and given the
technology of the 1960's it was impossible to track mortar shells in
flight. In general, it is easier to hide a smaller weapon than a
larger one.

The deal with mortars is that their can be a lot of them, they
can be very mobile, and they can be set up to fire a brief mission
en-masse and then be moved or hidden. As for artillery,
the NVA possessed some 130mm pieces that had a range of
31 km, double the range of U.S. artillery. Some of these were
fired from seriously dug-in and hidden positions across the border
in Laos. The NVA would pre-dig artillary hiding places, complete
with reinforced underground bunkers, etc. They would move the
guns out to one of several dug-in positions that would be hidden
under a leafy camoflage, fire a mission, and then move the guns
back into the underground bunkers before the U.S. could find
them from the air. The same type of system can work against
a radar-tracking counter-battery system today, except that the
number of shots fired might have to be reduced.

BTW, most Americans don't really know how throughly the NVA
outfought the U.S. over in Vietnam. The recent Hizballah fight
reminded me a lot of some of the NVA tactics. They dug in
deep, they used lots of long-range indirect fire, they used
surprisingly modern weapons that Israel didn't expect, they
were heavily supplied and supported by outside forces, etc.

- Ed Kyle