Considering how your political bias always screws up your analysis of any subject, you'll have to excuse me from putting your questionable opinion higher than that of a former leader of arguably the greatest intelligence agency in world history. I'm going to go with Mossad. Not what you say. No one jokes that God works for the CIA. They joke he works for Mossad.
:doh
you're not going with Mossad, fool. You're going with what Mossad puts out in an IO message. Mossad has
already demonstrated a covert capability to strike this program and the IAF has
already demonstrated an EA IADS suppression capability in service of an airspace violation and
still you buy an
open source reporting from them pretty-promising that their hands are tied, and so the Americans should come in and fix it.
Considering that the any such attack on Iran would essentially be viewed as removal of the Iranian regime, there's nothing to stop them from causing massive damage across the region. Saudi wells will burn as well as Bahrain refineries. Oil will shoot to levels never seen by man kind.
Actually probably one of the downsides of a strike on Iran's nuclear program is that it would solidify the regime. The Green Movement is strongly nationalist in flavor, and large elements of it are unlikely to see an attack on nuclear facilities as an assault on anything but Iran itself (rather than the government).
You think I'm talking about that? You funny.
fascinating. alright, tell me about the Iranian IADS.
this ought to be
fun.
Refinery strikes will hurt their economy, but it won't stop a determined attempt to produce a nuke.
gasoline is a touchy issue in Iran, whose economy isn't the most stable to begin with. you take out that refinery, absent some
massive reverse lift from the Chinese (which they are unlikely to do) you effectively bring that nation to a halt. the refinery isn't a national point of pride like the nuclear program is, and could be effectively used to fuel the in-country opposition.
I'll let you calculate that.
alright, I'll hand walk you through this since apparently this isn't your cup of tea:
The Intelligence portion of the Targeting Cycle (for further reading, JP 3-60) can be broken down into three basic functions: Detection, Collection, and System Analysis. Weaponeering can be handled by either the 2 or the 3 side of the house, and though all targeteers are trained to be basic weaponeers, it's really better left with the MAAP crew (it's their birds, after all). Irrespective of who is handling the sim, however, weaponeering
success, however, will flow directly result from three factors: A) detailed collection B) accuracy of analysis and C) modeling.
the point of which is, by observing the effectiveness of a strike, you can backtrack and grade the effectiveness of your collection, analysis, and modeling. Fortunately, we already have a strike by which we can measure in the unclass world the effectiveness of collection and analysis: the Stuxnet virus. Since it is important here that I to do so, allow me to quote from
Wikipedia:
good ole wiki said:
...Experts believe that Stuxnet required the largest and costliest development effort in malware history.[24] Its many capabilities would have required a team of people to program, in-depth knowledge of industrial processes, and an interest in attacking industrial infrastructure.[3][8] Eric Byres, who has years of experience maintaining and troubleshooting Siemens systems, told Wired that writing the code would have taken many man-months, if not years.[33] Symantec estimates that the group developing Stuxnet would have consisted of anywhere from five to thirty people, and would have taken six months to prepare.[55][24] The Guardian, the BBC and The New York Times all reported that experts studying Stuxnet considered that the complexity of the code indicates that only a nation state would have the capabilities to produce it.[10][55][56] The self-destruct and other safeguards within the code imply that a Western government was responsible, with lawyers evaluating the worm's ramifications.[24]...
Ralph Langner, the researcher who identified that Stuxnet infected PLCs, first speculated publicly in September 2010 that the malware was of Israeli origin, and that it targeted Iranian nuclear facilities.[58] However Langner more recently, in a TED Talk recorded in February 2011, stated that, "My opinion is that the Mossad is involved but that the leading force is not Israel. The leading force behind Stuxnet is the cyber superpower—there is only one; and that's the United States."[59] Kevin Hogan, Senior Director of Security Response at Symantec, reported that the majority of infected systems were in Iran (about 60%),[60] which has led to speculation that it may have been deliberately targeting "high-value infrastructure" in Iran[10] including either the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant or the Natanz nuclear facility.[33][61][62]...
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, experts on Iran and computer security specialists are increasingly convinced that Stuxnet was meant "to sabotage the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz – where the centrifuge operational capacity has dropped over the past year by 30 percent."[64] On 23 November 2010 it was announced that uranium enrichment at Natanz had ceased several times because of a series of major technical problems.[65][66] A "serious nuclear accident" occurred at the site in the first half of 2009, which is speculated to have forced the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization Gholam Reza Aghazadeh to resign.[clarification needed][16][67][68] Statistics published by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) show that the number of enriched centrifuges operational in Iran mysteriously declined from about 4,700 to about 3,900 beginning around the time the nuclear incident WikiLeaks mentioned would have occurred.[69][70] The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) suggests in a report published in December 2010 that Stuxnet is "a reasonable explanation for the apparent damage"[cite this quote] at Natanz and may have destroyed up to 1000 centrifuges (10 percent) sometime between November 2009 and late January 2010....
The depth of collection and accuracy of analysis that would be required to pull off designing a virus to find, enter, and operate (all undetected, btw) within a nuclear facility, moving from damaging
software to damaging
hardware in a precise manner as to
further avoid detection until it was too late would be.....
...well, let us just say
extraordinarily thorough. the people who built this thing knew their target better than you know your house. The collection was exceedingly detailed and the analysis of that information (thereby turning it into intelligence) was apparently quite accurate.
In other words, whoever it was that designed stuxnet
knows e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g about the relevant facilities. The fun thing is - collection on the
internals of a hardened facility
is much much much much more difficult than collecting on the facility itself - after all, you can watch these things get built if you have satellites. You, OC, could probably do it with google earth if you wanted to spend the time and energy (they have a tool that allows you to flip forward and backwards through time). You can put your IMINT and MASINT guys to work, and they can fully recreate the facility itself for your modeling needs.
Everyone imagines hard-target defeat as having to smash your way down through repeated layers of rock. You can do it that way if you want to, but you should only really have to if your collection or analysis has been insufficient (and in the case of these targets, we know that it has not). Maintaining a low-tolerance facility underground, however, is actually quite complicated; and the more complicated your process, typically, the easier it is for an outsider to break. You have to have transportation in and out for the workers - which in the case of straight underground facilities means elevator shafts. Shafts that carry people, however, can easily carry bombs. Destroying entry/exit points is hardly that difficult, and futhermore they will guide your munitions in deeper so that you can get blast into the facility itself. ditto for air cycling shafts; which usually have the ability to open and close (an attempt at concealment). Air, Water, Food, People, Work supplies, Sewage, Energy - all of these have to get into and out of underground facilities, and each of them represent targeting opportunities for someone able to collect on them and perform an accurate system analysis. Kill any one of those things and you kill or degrade the facility. Remember, the point is not to achieve a K-Kill on the bunker (though that is one way of doing it), the point is to achieve an F-Kill on the facility it protects. Personally, I'm a big fan of killing energy, entry/exits, and air ducts. That makes me kind of an asshole (imagine dying slowly, suffocating, panicking, listening to the screams of your coworkers, in the pitch dark), but I tend to imagine that the IO effect on the next generation of workers is worth it
.
SO. We know that (for example) Natanz is a hugely complex underground nuclear facility. And we know that such a facility has numerous points of vulnerability, where supply lines that it is dependent upon can be struck. These will be protected by their
own hardened structures (of various degrees), but we also know that the secondary structures by their nature have to be more easily accessible, interactable, and therefore more vulnerable. SO the question isn't "can we peel through the rock over the thickest part of the facility", it is "can we bust into the various points of vulnerability to shut this facility down". We know that the collection and the target system analysis of this facility has been incredibly well done, which leaves only the modeling. Our modeling is pretty good, at this sort of a level it's handled by the hard-target guys at DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency).
Now,
those guys, for some reason, are playing with a new bomb:
When adversaries of the United States move their WMD underground, DTRA helps the United States military regain the upper hand. Our Hard Target Research and Analysis Center locates and analyzes the underground facilities used to develop, store and launch WMD, but it’s another DTRA program that will finish the job.
The MOP
Over 20 feet long, weighing in at 30,000 pounds, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator is a relatively simple weapon system designed to accomplish a difficult, complicated mission – reaching and destroying our adversaries’ WMD located far underground. Partnering with the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate, DTRA is perfecting a weapon ten times more powerful than its predecessor, the BLU-109. Guided by GPS, the MOP relies on gravity to turn its massive weight into tremendous kinetic energy. Designed to penetrate supposedly untouchable facilities in one piece, then unleash the power of more than 5,000 pounds of explosives, the MOP will defeat our adversaries’ WMD before they leave the ground.
now, we have some great testing sites out West in White Sands and so forth; and we can work the effects of a weapon into our modeling pretty well once we've dropped a couple, but there is always that... well, that "X-Factor". To make
99% sure that we are
99% sure about how well a weapon will hold up under combat conditions, frankly, you need to test it in combat....
I mean hell - Did you think we were blowing up all those bunkers in Libya because they were such big threats to a bunch of guys running around in the backs of pickups?
The only way to stop Iran is regime change, turning Iran into glass or full sanctions on Iranian oil.
that is not the only way, as has already been demonstrated in RW. you just get a little chubby from calling other people idiots, and find it nearly impossible to accept that you have unknown unknowns.
The most likely outcome is that Romney is butt talking and frankly has no idea what's coming out of his rear end.
I have no idea what he knows or doesn't know about this. but everything discussed above is unclassified and open-source; and if i can use it to put two and two together for you, I'm pretty sure the national security experts that brief him can do the same.
