Air Raiding Ourselves
The night of the most recent air attack I drove to a rooftop I knew to have a look. Not much to see by then. Colombo was shrouded in fog, could hear voices and dogs wafting in eerie displacement through the air. Went home and sweated it out till the power came back. However, there was shooting. Colombo’s air defenses consist primarily of everyone with a gun firing in the air. The photo above is an anti-aircraft bullet that went through a window in the World Trade Center and through a wall. Note that this damage was inflicted by the government, not the LTTE. And presumably all the munitions we fire in the air have to come down. I don’t object to air defense, but shooting ourselves in the foot is perhaps not the best way to move forward.
Colombo’s response to LTTE planes is to generally freak the fuck out while they bomb predicable targets (usually our power supply). In this case they bombed Mannar, had time to fly down bast Colombo to Kelantissa, and then back. In flight meals were not served. The governments response was that they had detected the LTTE planes the whole time. Meh.
The LTTE is a bunch of fucktards who’ve totally screwed over their people and the whole country when they could have negotiated something much more conducive years ago. Now they’re engaging in this nickel and dime bullshit while the Tamil population steadily declines into a political non-entity. However, Sri Lanka’s air defenses leave much to be desired. I’ve gone through three girlfriends and we still don’t control our airspace. All we can do is black out Colombo, fire guns in the air and get bombed anyway. There surely is a better way.
In an aside, here are some fun quotes from today’s Daily Mirror:
‘The Minister [John Seneviratne] told journalists yesterday that the LTTE attempt to cut the power supply to Colombo city had failed.’ Presumably because Colombo cut the supply itself. I guess he means long term.
‘Infant milk should contain no melamine – Health Ministry’ – is this not obvious?
quite true. i really didnt know the air raid happened until next morning. i had power at my place!
I was actually wondering about the falling weapons fire myself.
The lack of experience is frightening. We must shoot these aircraft down. If you look into history however this has always been difficult.
I wonder what the armed forces will do when they get into Killinochchi and they start being sniped form behind by the LTTE tunnel rats who’ll go underground for them to pass and emerge again for guerrilla tactics. Ariel bombing of tunnels have proved fruitless, gain proved by the Vietnam war when trying to flush VC from this tunnels.
Seriously the armed forces should already start to stockpile wild boar from the southern jungles. The only solution would be to attach bombs to these animals and release them into the tunnels.
sniped from…
again proved…
from these tunnels…
sorry about the typos, just type, never check
Chief Vitalstatistix isn’t alone… it looks like everybody in Colombo has the same fear of the sky falling down on our heads.
Between sips of Mullathivu Toddy, Old Velu must have a chuckle at how this ‘low tech – high impact’ strategy of his has worked over and over again, for more than a year. A little bit of petrol to start the lawn mower engine, a bit more kerosense to puff the tin cans to Colombo and back, a few ‘cheena pataaas’ chucked overboard and all of Sri Lanka flicks the “aes vahagana vedi thiyapang yakko” switch.
The Fat Man must fear his cholesterol and his ‘jungi maama’ designer clothes (rising waist line is sure to cut off his air-supply) more than he fears the imbeciles who came up with this brilliant (not) air defence system for Colombo.
Reminded me of Cheney’s friend who went hunting with him! And picturing whole of Colombo with guns drawn made me spew tea (green) on my keyboard.
haa haa, good post, great reading for a Friday morning.
Glad to see someone is telling it like it is… keep up the good work!
The title of your blog, “Air Raiding Ourselves” got me thinking, what if these “air raids” are really the work of the government? I realize that this notion flirts with conspiracy theory, but think about it for a moment?
Let’s break this down…
Who saw or heard the air craft(s) in question? You mentioned it was a foggy night, I don’t claim to be a pilot but I’d venture to guess that doing a bombing raid on a foggy night has to be pretty tough unless they were flying pretty low, which it doesn’t appear they were- given that no one shot down the alleged aircraft.
Perhaps the more important question is why haven’t they been able to take these aircraft down? Ever! The fact is, if they really wanted to bring a plane down regardless of where it may end up crashing, anti aircraft guns is not the way to do it as we have seen all too clearly. For the sake of argument, let’s for a moment concentrate just on shooting an object out of the air and not be concerned with that thing called “gravity”. Shooting blindly into the air just based on where the gunners perceives hearing the sound of an aircraft, especially in a city environment is just plain dumb; since the sound bounces of buildings which causes auditory disorientation. If that were not bad enough on its own, let’s add in the sound of anti aircraft, and small weapons fire to this equation. Now all bets are off as far as actually shooting (blindly) in the right direction. BTW, these are airplanes, which as we all know tend not to stay in one place when they do that thing called flying. So realistically, what are the chances that the gunners are actually going to hit something which they cannot see, which also happens to be moving? What are the chances that the guns will even be pointing in the right direction?
Why not invest in a few Stinger missiles if they really intend on eliminating the aerial threat? Just advertising that the military has these weapons should be enough to deter any further “air raids”. Not to mention they would be guaranteed a kill and this time they will be hitting the right target, not civilians and buildings. Unless of course there is and never was any intent of doing so. IMHO this is nothing more than a fear tactic to justify the war.
BTW, I couldn’t help but notice how clean the holes were in the two pictures you posted. If the intent was to shoot upwards at the alleged air threat in the sky, then why were they shooting directly at buildings instead? Those holes don’t look like they were made by projectiles returning to earth at a near vertical angle. I doubt you would see such clean holes if that was indeed what took place. Shouldn’t projectile which hit vertical surfaces on the way down at near vertical angles themselves have a more elongated/ teardrop shaped pattern?
John Doe – conspiracy theory I think not. There is too much positive publicity for the LTTE and too much negative publicity for the government for this to be true.
These aircraft are too slow to be taken down. They have a cruising speed of 210kn and can fly even slower. Jets that are designed to cruise at 1000km+ cannot intercept- even if they get it in sight they overshoot in seconds and cannot get in their gunsights for long enough to engage or even take a pot shot at it. Just read up on the specs of the Zlin and the Mig29/F7 on the web. On the other hand, hitting something travelling at 150-200km/hr from the ground is not easy either.
Night flying is tricky at the best of times, locating a speck of an aircraft – which has a lot of acrobatic capability, is even worse. If you have a slow plane then you have a chance but otherwise forget it.
Stinger might work, there seems to be some debate if the heat signature of a small plane is enough to lock onto, but then have they invested in those? As far as I know they bought 5 MiG29′s and five Chinese copies of the Mig22 (F7 i think its called) to deal with the Zlin.