GLORIOUS SPARTAN: Prelude of upcoming events in the Gulf ?

DarthAmerica

Defense Professional
Verified Defense Pro
Iranians intelligence cant detect them if they cant see or find them.
There is a very small Pakistani land that is dividing India from Afghanistan.
Afghanistan will not know who flew by since Afghan Airspace is controlled by USA.

The Israelis can always come from the sea using the air refulers. Enter India, go low, cross that maximum 2 km Pakistani area and enter into Afghanistan and then into Iran, attack targets and then fly West or use one of the returning routes mentioned in Osirak Redux.

Reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia when he attacked Aqaba from a side Turkey least expected. Same here. Iran expect 99% of the attack to come from West so why not attack from the East using India ?

Afterall, they are helping India so much fixing their military projects. Doubt that the Indians are in a position to say no to Israel. and not like the route will be declassified anytime soon.

Just a speculation to add more thoughts.
OK a few things. A force sized similar to GLORIOUS SPARTAN is logistically massive. We are talking about a beefed up wing at least and associated logistics. A unit that size that is organized to be expeditionary and properly equipped takes several days to move and would take many sorties of transport aircraft. Are the Israelis going to use Indian fuel? Can Indian bases support F-15I, F-16I and western logistics aircraft? The Indians operate Soviet and French equipment mostly. That means that if an F-15I has a flat tire on the runway after landing in India the Israelis would not be able to change it! That's just a minor typical issue. I picked the F-15I but it would be worse if one of the IDF refueling tankers had the flat. You should look into how the United States deploys AEF to different theaters and the support requirements. It's a massive undertaking to deploy away from home and operate on foreign soil. It's not something an air force can just do on the fly no matter how good their reputation is.

Now lets talk about OPSEC. Iran may be militarily insignificant compared to the United States. But I would access their capabilities in the SOF/Intel area as on par or superior to the U.S. Military in a lot of areas regionally. Moving a wing from point a to point b over such a distance can cue a lot of sensors both electronic and flesh and blood. For example, Iran probably knows how many planes are at what base, who the unit commanders are and even where they live. What happens when these men are not present for days at a time? Or when a parking ramp in Israel is missing aircraft? What happens when Indian personnel start behaving differently at whatever base the Israelis use? Flying over Pakistan and Afghanistan unannounced would almost certainly be noticed by several nations. There is a huge potential for an incident. Where are all these Israeli planes going to recover? Are they going to egress through Iraq or Saudi Arabia? More issues. Are they going to do like the USA did in 1986 and take the long way home over water? That took over 30 refueling tankers to support! And tactical aircraft are not really designed to fly those kinds of distances which makes the probability of in flight mishap substantial.

The risk factor here is well beyond tolerable levels using India as a staging area IMV. Also, remember that India and Iran trade very heavily in energy supplies. India has an industrial age economy heavily depended on fossil fuels. Any such move and this would directly threaten their growth. Have you considered that? I don't want to go too much into economics or politics but it is a contemporary military issue in regard to basing rights and is the reason why Strategic Bombers and Carriers are so crucial to U.S. Military operations. Israel doesn't have that.

What we are discussing here represents a "band-aid" approach to Israel's tactical problem. They realy don't have the proper force structure to conduct operations like this. They could throw something together of course but the risk are just out of this world for very little gain IMV. They would be better off trying to approach from the west, south or north. But even that would depend heavily on the complicity of other nations.

If they were to do this and it worked at all. The biggest heroes would definitely be the logisticians who managed it because this is a truly mind boggling task and almost unprecidented. One last thing though, it's really hard to ID a tanker over international waters. Not to mention that you can also contract the darn things these days!

http://www.globalairtankerservice.com/
http://www.omegaairrefueling.com/vms/

-DA
 

swerve

Super Moderator
...There is a very small Pakistani land that is dividing India from Afghanistan.
Afghanistan will not know who flew by since Afghan Airspace is controlled by USA.

The Israelis can always come from the sea using the air refulers. Enter India, go low, cross that maximum 2 km Pakistani area and enter into Afghanistan and then into Iran, attack targets and then fly West or use one of the returning routes mentioned in Osirak Redux.....
Your 2km figure is the distance from the nearest point of Kashmir to the thin sliver of Afganistan separating Pakistan from Tajikstan. But that part of Kashmir has been under the control of Pakistan since 1947.

The shortest distance from Indian-controlled territory to Afghanistan over Pakistan (and a small piece of Pakistani-administered Kashmir) is about 200 km, not 2 km. It's <100 km north of Islamabad. Aircraft crossing the LOC from India in that area would set off alarms all over Pakistan.

http://www.iakf.org/main/files/uplink/Kashmir_map_low_res.jpg

In addition to what DA says, consider how difficult it would be to concel a flight of Israeli fghters flying to India over the sea. They would have to fly south down the Gulf of Aqaba - in sight of Egypt & Saudi Arabia, unless at night, through an area with rather good radar coverage - then the full length of the Red Sea, through the very narrow straits, turn east into the Gulf of Aden - then at last, open sea. Even if the fighters & their pilots could manage such a long flight, and Israeli tankers could support it (impossible, IMO - nowhere near enough of them), the chances of doing it secretly seem to me to be approximately zero.
 
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kato

The Bunker Group
Verified Defense Pro
It should also be noted that that section of Afghanistan is not under US air control, but German air control.
 
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