Yemen Crisis/Conflict & the "Decisive Storm" Coalition

shen

Senior Member
delft what "perhaps" doesn't fit your anti-American conjectures, which I noticed you had been posting all the day today, is that the opposite is true:


etc. but I think you're ready to say any baloney if it's anti-American enough, and I think in between your "false flags" one is conveniently missing: A horizontal tricolor of green, white and red, with ... but no, I won't conspire for you LOLOL)
now I'll give you Like and won't respond

not necessarily anti-American or conspiratorial, BVR engagement/target recognition is difficult even with modern radar. I don't need to remind fellow members that an Aegis ship once mistook and shot down a Airbus airliner for an attacking F-14. Technology is not perfect, nervous people make mistakes.
 

delft

Brigadier
I was an aviation ordanceman for 11 of my 20 years of USN service. No ordnance that I know of has a use before date...of course things could have changed.
There is a lot of bombs and ammunition that was considered too old to use and was therefore dumped into the sea around Europe until about thirty years ago. It includes poison gas ordnance that was dumped in the forties and fifties. These dumps are given a lot of trouble to fishermen and perhaps more importantly to the building of oil and gas pipelines and glass fibre cable connections.
I would expect that rocket motors are even more vulnerable to getting old and the electronics in modern ordnance will also a limited life. But I would expect that the ordnance in an aircraft carrier will not give trouble during a commission. How long does a commission last?
 
this is interesting:
U.S. support to Saudi Arabia to hinge on Yemen cease-fire
Future American military assistance to Saudi Arabia will hinge partly on whether the gulf kingdom embraces a U.S.-backed cease-fire with Houthi rebels in Yemen, officials said Thursday, as the Obama administration intensifies efforts to distance itself from a bloody bombing campaign.

“It’s not going to help sustain any support . . . if they don’t accept the unconditional cessation of hostilities that we think is absolutely, urgently needed, now more than ever,” a senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

In a sign of tensions with a core Middle Eastern ally, officials issued the blunt warning to Saudi Arabia as the White House begins a top-to-bottom review of military aid for the kingdom, including both a massive, long-standing program of arms sales and more-limited assistance for the extended air war over Yemen.

The review follows a grisly Oct. 8 bombing in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, which capped a series of apparent Saudi strikes on civilian targets and deepened U.S. concerns about involvement in a war that has killed more than 4,000 noncombatants.

The Oct. 8 strike, which killed more than 100 people at a funeral, appeared to be a final straw for administration critics of Saudi Arabia’s handling of the campaign, which they believe has ranged far beyond its original mission to defend the kingdom’s border from Houthi attack.

“We are telling the Saudis that supporting their territorial integrity, their sovereignty, that’s one thing. But their campaign inside Yemen is something else, particularly if they’re not prepared to accept the unconditional, immediate cessation of hostilities that we’ve called for,” the official said. “That will obviously be a factor in our assessment.”

Officials spoke about the review hours after the Pentagon launched
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in Yemen, a response to a series of attacks this week on nearby U.S. ships. The Obama administration has blamed those shore-to-sea missile attacks, which inflicted no damage, on the Houthis; the rebels have denied involvement.

The officials said the exchange of missile fire, while potentially complicating efforts to secure an immediate cease-fire between the two parties, would not affect the deliberations about future support to Saudi Arabia.

They signaled determination to continue a gradual reduction in U.S. military aid to the Saudi air campaign that has taken place in recent months. Since the campaign’s start last year, U.S. tanker planes have conducted more than 1,400 missions, offloading tens of millions of pounds of fuel. U.S. personnel also have advised their Saudi counterparts on targeting rebels and avoiding civilian casualties.

But U.S. support has dropped off since a now-abandoned cease-fire earlier this year, officials say. According to U.S. military statistics, the frequency of U.S. refueling missions, which has fluctuated throughout the campaign, fell in late summer from a peak earlier in 2016. Today, only four U.S. personnel remain at the Saudi command center in Riyadh.

“[We are] distancing ourselves both in terms of what we say but also in terms of what we’ve done,” the official said.

U.S. personnel do not approve Saudi targets beyond providing a “no-strike” list of civilian and off-limits targets, officials say.

A spokesman for the Saudi military was not available for comment.

For administration critics of the Saudi campaign, the Sanaa strike, which Human Rights Watch labeled “
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,” provided an opportunity to press the case that the U.S. support for the campaign must be curtailed even further.

Officials said reductions in or changes to arms sales, not just to support to the Yemen campaign, would be under discussion during the high-level review.

“Everything is on the table,” the official said. The United States has already halted new sales ofcluster munitions to Saudi Arabia.
source:
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and inside
"Officials said reductions in or changes to arms sales, not just to support to the Yemen campaign, would be under discussion during the high-level review."

I'm pretty sure arms sales worth of tens of billions of dollars and involving tens of thousands jobs, would be, ehm, mentioned in such a discussion.

EDIT
in case you didn't know what I was talking about, here's a link from 2010:
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bd popeye

The Last Jedi
VIP Professional
There is a lot of bombs and ammunition that was considered too old to use and was therefore dumped into the sea around Europe until about thirty years ago. It includes poison gas ordnance that was dumped in the forties and fifties. These dumps are given a lot of trouble to fishermen and perhaps more importantly to the building of oil and gas pipelines and glass fibre cable connections.
I would expect that rocket motors are even more vulnerable to getting old and the electronics in modern ordnance will also a limited life. But I would expect that the ordnance in an aircraft carrier will not give trouble during a commission. How long does a commission last?

Very true delft. After the very end of the war in Vietnam in 1975 aboard Hancock we were bombing water targets & bombing ranges in the Pacfic in order to dispose of ammo.

Aboard Hancock we did not dump any ammo over board but I'm sure other ships did.

Rocket motors have a tendency to crack which would cause them to explode or go ballistic when fired. The older the get the more they are prone to cracks.

The life span of a carrier is 50 years. However ordnance is unloaded after every deployment and transferred to a carrier preparing for deployment. Carriers are unarmed when in the shipyard for upkeep or undergoing a re-fit.
 

delft

Brigadier
this is interesting:
U.S. support to Saudi Arabia to hinge on Yemen cease-fire

source:
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and inside
"Officials said reductions in or changes to arms sales, not just to support to the Yemen campaign, would be under discussion during the high-level review."

I'm pretty sure arms sales worth of tens of billions of dollars and involving tens of thousands jobs, would be, ehm, mentioned in such a discussion.

EDIT
in case you didn't know what I was talking about, here's a link from 2010:
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
From the WaPo article:
The Oct. 8 strike, which killed more than 100 people at a funeral, appeared to be a final straw for administration critics of Saudi Arabia’s handling of the campaign, which they believe has ranged far beyond its original mission to defend the kingdom’s border from Houthi attack.
The original mission was to reinstate the expelled Saudi friendly president. The Houthis started there attacks into Saudi Arabia months after the beginning of Saudi bombing campaign.
 
From the WaPo article:
The Oct. 8 strike, which killed more than 100 people at a funeral, appeared to be a final straw for administration critics of Saudi Arabia’s handling of the campaign, which they believe has ranged far beyond its original mission to defend the kingdom’s border from Houthi attack.

The original mission was to reinstate the expelled Saudi friendly president. The Houthis started there attacks into Saudi Arabia months after the beginning of Saudi bombing campaign.
I missed this inexplicable part earlier today ... now I briefly searched Internet for what such a claim might mean :)
"In response to rumours that
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could intervene in Yemen, Houthi commander
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boasted on 24 March that his forces would invade the larger kingdom and not stop at
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, but rather
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."
??
(it's in wiki article on that war)

ironically though, I saw two vids today purported to show Houthis fighting INside Saudi Arabia (I've posted about it previously here;
EDIT for example Feb 20, 2016
https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/ye...ive-storm-coalition.t7260/page-27#post-389679
once I was even trying to check such a vid looking at google map and at the action, but I failed because the footage didn't show the mosque, which would've been the only way for me to "geolocate")
 
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tonight
CNO Richardson: USS Mason ‘Appears to Have Come Under Attack
A U.S. guided missile destroyer may have been attacked on Saturday off the coast of Yemen by anti-ship cruise missiles for the third time this week, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told reporters on Saturday.

USS Mason (DDG-87) — operating in the Red Sea, north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait — believes to have fired upon by multiple coastal defense missiles, a Navy official told USNI News. Mason used defensive counter measures to counter the apparent attack and the ship and crew were unharmed, the official said.

Following the Baltimore commissioning ceremony of guided missile destroyer USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), Richardson confirmed some details on the apparent attack to reporters.

“The latest is there has been recent activity today with the Mason once again. It appears to have come under attack in the Red Sea again from coastal defense cruise missiles fired from the coast of Yemen,” he said.
“So as you know this is the third such attack. We suffered one about a week ago. We also saw one in the middle of last week and now we see more activity.”

In a late Saturday statement to USNI News, Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Gary Ross said U.S. ships launched countermeasures to defend against an apparent attack.

“Earlier today, a U.S. Strike Group transiting international waters in the Red Sea detected possible inbound missile threats and deployed appropriate defensive countermeasures,” Ross said in a statement.
“Our sailors and ships are unharmed, and we are still assessing the situation.”

The latest attack on Mason follows a Wednesday retaliatory strike in response to earlier attacks on the ship. Guided-missile destroyer USS Nitze (DDG-94) fired several Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles into Yemen to target three Houthi radar sites the U.S. said were used to provide information target the anti-ship missiles used in the previous attacks, Pentagon officials told USNI News earlier this week.

In a statement on the Wednesday U.S. strikes, spokesman Peter Cook threatened the U.S. would respond to additional attacks, “as appropriate.”

“The United States will respond to any further threat to our ships and commercial traffic, as appropriate, and will continue to maintain our freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb, and elsewhere around the world,” he said.

Mason, Nitze and USS Ponce (AFSB(I)-15)
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strait following the Oct. 1 attack that destroyed the high-speed logistics vessel HSV Swift operated by the UAE.

The attacks on Mason and Swfit are believed to have been launched by Iran-backed Houthi rebels using Chinese-built C-802 anti-ship cruise missiles supplied by Tehran.
While the Pentagon is reluctant to discuss the countermeasures the ship used, at least during the first attack
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(ESSM) to counter the threat, USNI News reported.

“They have everything that they need to defend themselves from these attacks and respond when needed and so we’re proud of the crews – they’ve done terrific,” Richardson told reporters.
“It’s another thing that shows you when we send our sailors overseas that we send them with the very best because it’s dangerous.”

The following is the Oct. 15, 2016 Pentagon statement provided to USNI News on the apparent attack on USS Mason.

Earlier today a U.S. Strike Group transiting international waters in the Red Sea detected possible inbound missile threats and deployed appropriate defensive countermeasures. Our sailors and ships are unharmed, and we are still assessing the situation. We will continue to defend freedom of navigation in this critical waterway, and we will take all necessary steps to respond to threats and defend our personnel and ships.
source is USNI News
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delft

Brigadier
tonight
CNO Richardson: USS Mason ‘Appears to Have Come Under Attack

source is USNI News
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It still sounds incredible. If Iran were to be supplying weapons as large as C-802 they would choose weapons for use against air or ground targets, not anti-ship ones.
Besides HSV-2 was attacked by much smaller weapons.
 
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