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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2381 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 22, 2024

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US warplane shot down by friendly fire in Red Sea, pilots eject safely

Two U.S. Navy pilots were shot down on Sunday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the U.S military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of targeting of Yemen's Houthi rebels.

Do you think it was friendly fire or the Houthi leveling up and the pentagon wants to cover it up? Iran do needs wins after Syria.

As I understand, shooting F-18 out of the sky requires either unbelievably good luck, or advanced anti-air equipment which if Houthis had it should be the first thing that gets destroyed (actually months ago when the whole thing started). And it should be quite hard to shoot down something like F-18 with lighter systems or MANPADs. So I'd rather believe somebody screwed up and accidentally turned their air defenses on a departing aircraft, which would be extremely vulnerable in such scenario.

Plane had just come off the deck and ran into the tico's range. I'm guessing they were running with the local PD in "shoot everything that moves" mode and weren't used to handling flight operations while running in "shoot everything that moves" mode.

If it was hit with a ram or phalanx it'll be confirmation.

They should probably keep the system in "pretend to shoot everything that moves" mode more often for training purposes, so they can log errors like this before they happen live. Have the phalanx go "bang, I would have shot that if I had any ammo, did I do good?"
On the other hand I'm not sure you can run them like that without the hydraulics slewing the barrels round to aim the sensors, and braining sailors on deck already accounts for most of phalanx's kills iirc.

Edit: supposedly the cruiser is a rusty piece of shit dragged out of mothballs and nicknamed the Ghettosburg. Navy culture sounds like a huge mess.

Edit edit: now they're saying it was 2 sm2 missiles fired at returning planes. If true someone's going to hang for this one.

The US has been laundering casualties for a while now. I’ve noticed that every time there’s a big offensive in Ukraine, two weeks later there’s a helicopter crash off the coast of America that kills half a dozen special forces guys. Or how there was another helicopter crash that killed a bunch of guys from the USS Eisenhower air wing two months after the Houthis totally did not hit it with a missile. Or how a helicopter crash killed some Delta Force guys two weeks after a big Israeli raid to try and rescue hostages in Gaza. Or that general that was mysteriously “found dead” at Twentynine Palms three days after he supposedly got back from Ukraine. Open source intel had indicated that a building housing American advisors in Ukraine had been hit by a missile a week before. Or going back a while, how half the SEAL team that killed Bin Laden died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Witnesses in Pakistan said that one of the stealth Blackhawks crashed during the Bin Laden raid with many casualties, but the Government maintained that the Blackhawk crash during the raid hadn’t killed anyone. They just happened to all die in a separate helicopter crash in Afghanistan a month later.

Training/deployment accidents happen absolutely regularly. Especially in any active army - US, Israel, etc. If you pay attention to it, there are a lot of them. Attributing them to "casualty laundering" would require some very strong proof - or at least evidence of a large statistical anomaly. Otherwise it just pointless posturing pretending to know more than the rubes, while not actually knowing anything.

I mean yes they happen fairly regularly, but having a high fatality accident every time the us or her Allies get involved in a battle does seem somewhat provocative to me.

Typical mistake. To show the correlation, you would have to demonstrate that accidents do not happen when US is not involved in a battle.

Helicopters are very unstable and crash a lot.

My father was a career NCO in the USMC. His stories when I was a little kid have left me with a lifelong fear of helicopters. I've never been in one and probably never will. I'm perfectly fine with airplanes have have gone skydiving twice.

I think this is dumb, but in a way which basically can’t be disproven. It just screams “confirmation bias.”

Is there a site somewhere that tracks casualty announcements?

This. We need disprovability and statistical averages, not anecdotes. How many incidents that might plausibly create casualties that need laundered occur, how many accidents involving military personal happen, and then do these correlate with each other more than we would statistically expect?

Friendly fire by US forces or other allied forces?

I’m doubting the Houthis shot this plane down, but the friendly fire explanation has a hole in it- namely, who did the navy think they were shooting at?

It’s not like the Houthis have f-18’s.

Couldn't some automatic system erroneously detected it as a drone?

Probably, but there should be safeguards- an IFF system to start with, and probably also a human that needs to sign off on weapons free. And IANA navy sailor, but that human is almost certainly an officer who should know better.

TDLR, someone screwed up big.

The USS Vincennes shot down a scheduled passenger flight back in 1988.

Huge screw ups happen.

The passenger flight wasn't data linked to the fire control of the Vincennes, whereas in theory fighters are always talking to every US ship with CEC capabilities, which are the ones launching missiles.

Edit: in this case I'm guessing it was an independent low altitude point defense system that shoots first and doesn't waste time asking questions. And someone forgot to flip the switch from "kill everyone" to "don't kill everyone" when they launched planes.

The pentagon really isn’t very watertight when it comes to leaks, if it was the Houthis I imagine that they‘d both claim it and that the NYT/WaPost/Reuters/AP/etc would have the leak relatively soon.

That’s just survivorship bias. You never hear about the many many things that don’t get leaked.

Why would they want to cover it up if the Houthis did it? I'd have thought that the US military would be happy to glass Yemen and Iran, but are worried that popular and muggle politician sentiment isn't behind it and they'll be dinged for warmongering - a case of Iran/proxies hurting American national pride and almost killing one of its finest would be just what they need. More likely that they'd cover up such an incident if it were Russia/China/NK, where popular enthusiasm for a military adventure could easily pull ahead of how beneficial the military thinks it would be.

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