Comments by "Gort" (@gort8203) on "Wild Weasel 1: Super Sabre vs SA-2 Guideline In Vietnam" video.

@katamarankatamaranovich9986 I agree with you about escalation management in a war, but the point is that action against North Vietnam was not yet a 'war', and the US policy was to keep it from becoming one. The US never intended to defeat North Vietnam. The whole point of rolling Thunder was to demonstrate US resolve in deterring North Vietnam from interfering in the south. That is not a war as much as border control (something the US has also never learned). If defeating North Vietnam was a goal you would have seen something that looked more like desert storm than Rolling Thunder. Despite everything the US should have learned from WWII and Vietnam, it still has an exaggerated fear of escalation which is evident in how it has let that fear hamper Ukraine and Israel in their current wars.
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@robertkalinic335 Comrade, you miss the point that North Vietnam should not have been sending forces into South Vietnam. The border was established by international treaty, and the South was to be allowed free democratic elections. Illegal aggression by totalitarian North Vietnam forced the US to fulfill its obligation to support the South in resisting external aggression.
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What heavily laden bombers were thrown at SAM sites by SAC in the Vietnam war?
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@michaelfrench3396 You remain wrong about everything. The F-105 was the fastest thing going at low level. ALL airplanes are slower while carrying a heavy external load. The A-6 would not have been faster carrying that load. I don’t know that any of these aircraft were cleared for release of an external bombload at supersonic speed. Who said they would be at top speed when releasing their bombs? You are making up counters to irrelevant points not even made. By the way, heavily laden is a relative term. Yes, bombs are heavy. If you think any jet carrying a normal bomb load is ‘heavily laden’, then they are all always heavily laden all the time, and there is no way to send a non-heavily laden jet against a target. You are soaking your comments in pejorative language that means nothing in realty. Any jet attacking a SAM site was going to do it at low altitude. Of course there is more AAA there. What plane do you think should have been used to attack SAMs from higher altitude (which was of course within the heart of the SAM engagement envelope). The F-105 was designed for striking ground targets. The air force did not have a better plane for the job or they would have been using it. We could discuss the tactics employed, which varied during the war, but that is beyond the scope of your comments and your knowledge. Weasels flew in pairs. Of course, in the battle area. Not to make them harder to hit, but because they were a limited resource, and you don’t put them all in the same area. Because they had to maneuver a lot to do their job, and a two-ship flight is a maneuverable formation. “I'm saying that the military leadership knew that it was a bad idea to throw a Large group of heavily laden aircraft at a Sam site” No, they didn’t know that, and it’s an inaccurate description of what they did. Again, your pejorative language means nothing. It was a strike package. You have no idea of how a strike package works. It is not “throwing damn near a hundred slow moving heavily. Laden bombers at a anti-aircraft missile site”. A strike package is a coordinated group of aircraft, and they all don’t swarm over a single point in the sky at the same time. You need to learn a lot more before you start criticizing the actions of people with more training, experience, and responsibly in this area than you will ever know.
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The point was that the USSR was not the enemy, and the Johnson Administration was fearful of any action that might make make it the enemy and turn a minor regional conflict into a major superpower conflict. This was not a new concept. Before Germany declared war on the U.S. in December 1941 it did not conduct unrestricted warfare against all U.S. ships supplying England, in order to keep the U.S. out of that war. That changed when Hitler declared the U.S. to be an enemy on December 11th.
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@katamarankatamaranovich9986 "But at the same time escalation and actual invasion of North was the only way to win the Vietnam war." I agree it would have been the most practical path to victory for sure, the fastest and least costly (provided it did not bring China or Russia fully into the war). I suppose in theory the US could have poured enough resources into the south to defend it without a ground invasion of the north, but that would have been a much more protracted and costly endeavor that the US public would never be willing to endure. (Especially if Walter Cronkite was going to report that the war was lost after every enemy defeat.)
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@michaelfrench3396 "My God everybody's so butthurt that I confused TAC and SAC. I'm guessing it's the only problem you could find with my argument." It's a huge mistake indicative of ignorance of the subject matter, and it's not the only problem with your comment.
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@katamarankatamaranovich9986 Obviously people can disagree as to whether these sites should have been attacked, as many did at the time. Many years later even more people can disagree from the comfort of hindsight and no responsibly for avoiding escalation of what supposed to be a limited war, not a no-holds-barred war. I also think they should have attacked the sites, but I can't say I would have made that decision if I'd been in LBJ's chair at the time. The point was the concern was not about 'offending the enemy' -- which is a sarcastic throw-away line in the video -- it was about fear of killing non-enemy personnel on site in an advisory capacity, out of fear of possibly forcing undesired consequences. We've now had had a lot of time to study that war, which didn't look so simple back then. (BTW, they were SA-2s, not SA-5s.)
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@michaelfrench3396 F-105s were not sent by SAC, which was Strategic Air Command, the operator of B-52 heavy bombers. The F-105 tactical fighter-bombers there operated (as I recall) by 7th Air Force under PACAF. The F-105 was anything but slow. It was the fastest fighter-bomber in the inventory and was designed for attacking well-defended high priority targets at low level. You appear to be completely ignorant of air to ground aircraft and tactics. Your use of the word maneuverability indicates you probably think a slow airplane like the A-1 Skyraider would have been a better choice for this mission. That's of course completely ludicrous, and even more of them would have been shot down attacking that target. One wonders why you think fast light bombers like the F-105 were even built.
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@Justanotherconsumer Not well funded? How many rockets have Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran fired at Israel in the last year alone? You must be too young to remember the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Egyptian SAMs caused unanticipated losses of Israel aircraft
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@reonthornton685 You don't have to have the same type of sophisticated equipment as the IDF to qualify as being "well funded". If HAMAS and Hezbollah are not well-funded why is the IDF still trying to subdue them after a year at war? And as I said, you may be too young to remember the 1973 war in which a sophisticated Egyptian air defense network inflicted significant losses of IAF aircraft.
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@reonthornton685 I'm not questioning the fact that unguided rockets are cheaper than more sophisticated systems like artillery. I was merely challenging any blanket assertion that the enemies of Israel are not well-funded, which if interpreted as less than well-funded in general could convey a less than accurate impression of the overall threat they represent.
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@reonthornton685 It's asymmetric warfare. Of course they can't compete directly with a conventional military force. You are arguing about what well-funded means in terms of money. I'm talking about whether they have the funding to execute their strategy. I don't think we will get on the same page, so let's agree we disagree. And again, the Egyptians were well-funded even in a conventional sense in 1973.
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@reonthornton685 Have a nice day.
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