oh ****, there goes the safeguard.


surprisingly, it comes from Saudi Arabia tho.

Sure. And buying stock, looking to profit, when the Syrian civil has been going for two years and counting, where thousands have lost their lives is just ******* dandy?

Ah, it's clear now. Your original post made it sound like you were armchair general-ing USAF employment doctrine. Hope I wasn't too harsh.

My sincerest apologies, Graygor. Your initial comment about investing in oil stock made it sound like you were looking to make money off the war in Syria and it literally made me see red.

CNN Headline:

'Syria is not easy to swallow'



Yeah. It'd be like a really large, dusty mint or something

Right now our armed forces are telling our PM that we do not have the ability to take on assad because his cuts mean we have no carriers, few fighterbombers and the army is critcally undermanned.

Best we can do is to use a trafalga class sub to obliterate a few targets but cause no real damage.

Here be truth and the voice of experience

I would disagree that Syria has nothing to do with fossil fuels, given that it ispart of a proposed route for natural gas from Qatar/SA to Europe. Given that this would lower prices and increase volume in line with the EU intent to diversify awayy from Russian gas I would think this plays a part in Russias position.

I dont think most people want a war but its obvious we feel we need to do something here, and I'm not sure that the WMDs weren't fired for the purpose of dragging outside part ies into the war. Given how Obama said it was the red line, he has to do something or the US is shown as a paper tiger, much how Russia is generally seen but on a larger scale, strongest of the Great Powers as opposed to the Lone Superpower.

If we genuinely want to solve this and start this week, it nessesitates a ground campaign and occupation. Standoff bombardment like in Libya would crush Assasd and strengthen the rebels relatively and I would be disgusted by NATO if thats the plan. Take out the anti air and the known WMD depots, though a smart move would be to keep them kobile at this point. If SA wants Syria fixed beyond that then it would need to commit its own forces. We already know throuh the cable leaks that they lean heavily on the US to strike at Iran, so they are not some innocents pulled into this.

This could in a worst case be the big one that kicks off the Arab/Persian war again like the Iran/Iraq war if this is mismanaged, and something is going on in the background to distort logic to the current conclusions.

The UK military is at rock bottom. Most of the highly experienced squaddies have either left or been sacked. The only airpower our fleet has are sea Lynx, merlins and seakings. We do have the best air defence ships in the world but they cant defend an entire fleet alone. Some of our armoured regiments dont even have any tanks.

We have not been this vulnerable for the last 500 years.