Sunday, July 20, 2014

The Vineyard of the Saker: Memories, recollections, guesses and speculations about MH17

Intro and caveat

I think that any analysis of the events surrounding the downing of MH17 should begin with the following admission: no matter what, the AngloZionists will blame Russia. Just like 9/11, there is no way, no amount of evidence, which would affect the unanimous chorus of Imperial doubleplusgoodthinkers in their conclusion that obviously it could only have been "the Russians". So don't expect to come across The Proof which will prove that the Empire is lying because if 9/11 proved anything it is that even hard, undeniable truth can be easily ignored by the elites and their media.

Second, I have to begin my "kind of analysis" with the following disclaimer: my information on air defense issues is about 25-30 years old which means that not only could my memory fail me, but things might have changed a great deal since I last was exposed to them. Finally, the place from which I observed air defense happening was a rather peculiar one: from a underground army command center's air defense room which included a live fused (civilian+military) image of all the air traffic over an entire continent. I never got anywhere near a SAM site in my life, and I sure have never seen one being operated. Still, there are a few things which I know which might be relevant to this case.

If I got something wrong, or if things have recently changed, PLEASE CORRECT ME.

How air defense normally works

The control of airspace is done by two completely different networks: a civilian and a military one. The civilian one is the one people think of when they hear ATC (air traffic control). These are the folks who manage flight plans, who talk to pilots on different altitudes, who track the aircraft during the flight and make sure that there is enough distance between them. Depending on an airplane's altitude and what it is doing, it remains in contact with different ATCs but they all work together. One more thing: the radars used by civilian ATC are very primitive, all they can "see" is a bearing. What helps them is that all aircraft have a so-called "transponder" to transmit a special message which indicates their ID, speed, altitude and course. The ATC then superimposes that info on his screen to get a pretty accurate idea of what the aircraft is doing. The important thing about all this is that the military is normally patched straight into that data and that it can use it to supplement the data military radars acquire by themselves. In other words, a military air defense network "sees" and "knows" everything that a civilians ATC knows and sees.

The task of military air defenses is dramatically different from the civilians ATC: the military expects to deal with aircraft who will do their utmost to remain undetected and once detected, the military air defense network has to figure out a way to hopefully shoot-down the enemy aircraft. As a result, the kind of technology used by the military is very different.

The first "layer" of a military air defense network will be long range detection radars. Their task is to try to detect an airborne target as far as possible. Although one type of radar can do this alone, typically data from different radars (including airborne ones) is fused to create a single picture. Already at this point the air defense command post will be patched in into the civilians ATC and it will have all the flight plans, airline names, aircraft types and expected flight routes. The air defense command post's first task is to separate civilians (considered neutral) from possible hostiles. These 99% of flights are routine and regular, the folks in charge have a very good idea of what a normal sky looks like, they see the scheduled civilians aircraft doing their thing and they easily track them. Some military radars even have the capability to detect the kind of aircraft they are seeing on their radar simply by analyzing the radar signal bounced back (typically by the aircraft's engine). If a target is ambiguous, the military can use a very different type of radar to track that target: this target acquisition radar will operate on a different frequency, it will have a much narrower beam, and it will provide the operator with much more info about the aircraft even if the aircraft does not have a working transponder (which would be most unusual for a civilian airliner). Again, modern armed forces have the means to fuse the data from any different radar types (including airborne radars) to calculate a solution to identify and track a target. The next step is the send a special signal, like a password, to check if aircraft might not be one of your own. Civilian aircraft are not capable of this kind if "electronic handshake". Finally, if the military air defense command post believes that the target his hostile, it selects the best radar and missile combination to engage the target. Typically, this is done yet again by a highly specialized radar which sends a burst of energy to the target which is reflected by the airborne target and which is then caught either by a ground-based radar or even by the missile itself (that is called TVM track-via-missile) which then can guide itself to the target without emitting any signal (alternatively, the missile can use his own active guidance system which sends and receives radar signals). Advanced air defense networks, such as Russia's, can automatically chose the best radar for each task, the missile most likely to hit, the number of missiles needed for the task, the most threatening target, the mode of engagement, etc. These systems are highly integrated and highly automated, which also means that they are much safer than more primitive systems (more about that later). They are also highly redundant which in practical terms means that if, say, in an ideal environment a missile system like the Buk M1 is just one part of a much bigger network of systems, it can also operate almost autonomously if needed (again, more about that later). Now we need to look at the "who had what" on the day of the tragedy. First, let's look at

The Russikies and their capabilities.

While, obviously, they don't share with me the details of their moves, it is a pretty safe guess to say that, especially considering the war going on right across the border, the Russians literally had it all on that day: civilians radars, of course, but also long range radars (ground based and airborne), lots of advanced advanced surveillance (long range detection) radars, lots of tracking and fire control radars numerous radio and signal interception stations. Since all the data from this integrated network of systems could be fused at the higher level command posts we can safely assume that the Russian side had something like "20/20 radar vision": just about as good as it can get. There is no way the Russian shot down this aircraft by mistake.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: Memories, recollections, guesses and speculations about MH17

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