Posted on 08/29/2021 9:02:52 PM PDT by blueplum
WASHINGTON, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Multiple rockets were fired at Kabul's international airport but were intercepted by a missile defense system, a U.S. official told Reuters citing initial information.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said as many as 5 rockets were fired, though it was not clear if all were brought down by the defense system.
The official said initial reports did not indicate any U.S. casualties...
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Everyone at that airport is now trapped like so many fish in a big barrel.
Need Predators on station, 24/7 … not sure if that’s possible though, flying out of UAE. Even Other aircraft would need in flight refueling to sustain 24/7 ops -
So is this missile defense system going to be abandoned tomorrow on the way out, like every other piece of hardware we put in Afghanistan?
You beat me to it. It has been estimated that around 600,000 weapons U.S. gave to the Afghan government is now in the hands of the Taliban. I wonder if this missile defense system will be left behind for the Taliban to use after September 1, 2021. I doubt these anti-rocket system is based on a ship.
Where is this defense system? Bagram is closed to US ..who is operating the system
Would that have been the SAM-D
looks to me like it’d fit inside a c-17 with a little wiggle room, but is it worth the risk of an additional flight?
boom the truck and take the modular units to serve another day
When I read this, I didn’t know if the rockets were fired by the United States or by the Taliban. The article seems to imply it wasn’t by the U.S. But this article could have been better written.
I suspect there are, but they are Reapers, since USAF retired Predators in 2018. I figure Global Hawk aircraft are there too.
My nephew is there. Literally at the end of the runway. He is a warrant officer with an electronic warfare team attached to the 82nd. Says they will be the last ones out but doesn’t know where they will be going, and if he did couldn’t tell anyway.
Now its a game of damage control lies and scumedia support spin
I would guess it to be the C-RAM (Counter Rockets Artillery and Mortars) system.
Would be a travesty to abandon it potentially allowing it to be used to determine its weaknesses for exploitation.
Were the missiles fired from US drones? Their batting average hasn’t been so good lately.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility that they could have hustled the Iron Dome 'prototypes' to A-stan so quickly but that would have required being pro-active, which is something that there's been precious little evidence of since the start of this fiasco.
Of course it could be the same as the case of the SpecWarriors who defied orders and went outside the wire in Kabul to round up all the Afghanis who had served them as guides and interpreters. Maybe somebody in the Air Defense command structure with both brains and balls (and probably at Ft Sill) saw this coming and put the wheels in motion to move those Iron Dome systems to A-stan simply because it was the right thing to do and damn the consequences.
There are other versions of the same story on the 'web offering more detail from this anonymous source, stating that the US military has defenses against rocket and mortar attacks. Except I think that their source is conflating a counterbattery fire system with a system that can literally shoot rockets and mortars out of the sky. Or maybe the reporter fails to understand the distinction.
As to the former, the US has had systems in the field for decades that use radar to measure the trajectory of incoming artillery and use that data to back-track to the point of firing. Then it relays those grid coordinates to an artillery battery and the cannon-cockers execute a fire mission against that target.
But those counterbattery fire systems don't do anything approaching shooting an arty round in flight out of the sky. And until this story surfaced, there was no indication that the US had anything that was both designed for that purpose and had proved itself effective.
found the answer: C-rams
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