Amazing RAF airstrike on ISIS target

It's great, but it would be useful to know that these targets are actually what the military say they are. The problem is that in both Afghanistan and Iraq, large numbers of civilians were killed in these kinds of attacks and there isn't any reason to suppose that similar mistakes aren't being made in Syria/Iraq against ISIS. I'm not saying that's the case here, but with our military attacking people on the ground with impunity like this from high above with no media on the ground to see the results, it's actually pretty easy for the authorities to get it wrong and not admit it.

Just a cautionary thought because all the high-fiving that goes on from armchair warriors and fanboys that we see in response to these kinds of air force PR films may actually be in response to murdering completely innocent people. And indeed often is, judging from the known results of previous incidents.

This is a pretty incredible video from the targeting pod on a Royal Air Force Tornado attack aircraft. It's targeting an ISIS truck which is carrying a vehicle on the tray (possibly being moved to a garage to be fitted out as a car bomb).

The Tornado fires a Brimstone missile which perfectly strikes the car. The truck itself wobbles off the road and comes to a halt, and the cab looks like it's ready to fall off. I suspect the driver of the truck was killed when the missile struck from shrapnel

[video="youtube;9ZN1twedjsE"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZN1twedjsE[/video]

The horror stories come almost exclusively from the use of a particular set of ROE, ones not employed by the British armed forces. We all know who did use them...

The odds of the same types of mistakes being made are as low as is possible given the circumstances - they'll never be zero though.

Yes, which is why whooping it up and partying at imagery like this is to say the least in poor taste and to be more accurate, is celebrating something over which we've never had a democratic say or debate, which may represent murder of civilians and which is probably in some cases a war crime.

Oh and for the apologists who say the RAF never make these kinds of mistakes, here is the coverage of an RAF reaper drone strike in Afghanistan that killed four civilians 'by mistake'.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/05/afghanistan-raf-drone-civilian-deaths

Just one of many most likely.

But acting like this is a new thing isn't doing anybody any favours either.

It's very simple. Either we act or we don't.
If we act then we have to accept the fact that, as humans, we will make mistakes.
If we don't act, then we have to accept that other people will die and that the fight will sooner or later come to us.

It isn't - and never has been - black and white. It's just about which shade of grey you accept, because you have to accept something.

I agree and it's pretty inevitable that there will also be many terrible civilian casualties during this kind of campaign. The bombing may look smart, but in reality it's often catastrophic to families and murderous to defenceless people, including many children.

My objection is to the kind of behaviour around these images with people celebrating what are in effect terrible deaths, because it looks 'slick' or 'high tech'.

I also object to the game playing that the PR people in the RAF and MoD are playing with this, using smartbomb videos as war recruitment tools to promote their side of the story.

Let me try again, if military resources were unlimited and infinite, and (as you state) people are the only limiting factor, then wars would be fought by millions of soldiers piloting transformer robots.

At the very least, every soldier would have his/her own tank.

They don't because tanks are limited, the resources and funding needed to build and maintain and transport so many tanks are not plentiful enough for this to be feasible.

Short of deconstructing every building and appliance we simply wouldn't have enough raw materials available, or enough fuel to run them cause who is going to sell fuel to the country building a bazillion tanks.

Well 1, it's not. It has a finite amount of money (that's every decreasing, too), therefore it has a finite number of things it can buy.

And 2, they have done in the past, no reason why they can't do so again.

Thanks

We have a better missile than any of the Americans? That's worth celebrating.

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I don't think it's that inevitable. Enormous efforts - and huge amounts of money - are put into learning from from previous occasions and the numbers of incidents gets lower every time.

Well. You can dislike the reaction, but arguing it's not high tech will fall on deaf ears because it quite clearly is. This is cutting edge stuff we're looking at. You might not like what it's cutting edge at, but you can't deny that it is incredible technology.

I agree and it's pretty inevitable that there will also be many terrible civilian casualties during this kind of campaign. The bombing may look smart, but in reality it's often catastrophic to families and murderous to defenceless people, including many children.

My objection is to the kind of behaviour around these images with people celebrating what are in effect terrible deaths, because it looks 'slick' or 'high tech'.

I also object to the game playing that the PR people in the RAF and MoD are playing with this, using smartbomb videos as war recruitment tools to promote their side of the story.

I've never understood the recording of these.

Is it from the jets perspective? Some sort of targeting pod? How does it track so well when the jet is moving so quickly.

I agree and it's pretty inevitable that there will also be many terrible civilian casualties during this kind of campaign. The bombing may look smart, but in reality it's often catastrophic to families and murderous to defenceless people, including many children.

My objection is to the kind of behaviour around these images with people celebrating what are in effect terrible deaths, because it looks 'slick' or 'high tech'

I also object to the game playing that the PR people in the RAF and MoD are playing with this, using smartbomb videos as war recruitment tools to promote their side of the story.

I would be celebrating just as much if it were a video of an ISIS member being bayonetted in the throat. I hate them, I want them destroyed. They're a fascist infestation. Every dead and enslaved Yezidi, homosexual, Christian, Shi'a and all the Sunnis who just didn't do what they were told... their murders cry out for some zeal in the prosecution of this campaign.

These aren't recruitment tools. If anything the military is laying off people at the moment. This is vital PR to show that we're fighting back, that we're not resting on our laurels, and also to show any Muslims who are considering going to Syria and Iraq to fight that it won't be glorious and cinematic. One moment they'll be there, the next moment they won't; they won't even see the Western enemy before we clip them.

The problem is, you don't really know that you're celebrating an ISIS member or members being killed. It could equally be a civilian dying on that video, or a whole family of civilians.

These things are probably counter-productive if they are part of a propaganda offensive as they won't deter young Muslims wavering on the edge of active Jihadism, far from it. However, they seem to be mainly designed to promote the idea that HMG are not powerless and are fighting back and the audience is clearly the average Mail/Sun reader. It isn't thought about very well and the overall effect will most likely be detrimental.

The problem is, you don't really know that you're celebrating an ISIS member or members being killed. It could equally be a civilian dying on that video, or a whole family of civilians.

These things are probably counter-productive if they are part of a propaganda offensive as they won't deter young Muslims wavering on the edge of active Jihadism, far from it. However, they seem to be mainly designed to promote the idea that HMG are not powerless and are fighting back and the audience is clearly the average Mail/Sun reader. It isn't thought about very well and the overall effect will most likely be detrimental.

As the other commenter said (and you mentioned), it's a targeting pod (though on the Tornado I think it's Litening III). These pods put three crucial technologies in the one pod which can be clipped onto the bottom of the aircraft like a USB drive.

The targeting pod brings three vital bits of technology together. First, it has an incredibly high-powered digital camera with tremendous zoom capacity sitting on a rotating platform; the feed from the camera either goes to the weapons officer in the second seat or the pilot if it's a single-seat aircraft. The pod's computers also have digital algorithms that can allow you either to click to hold the camera at a particular point or to track a moving object; it does his by measuring the brightness and contrast surrounding it of the clicked area. The second vital piece of technology is a laser; this allows the pod both to lase targets for laser-guided bombs, and also to be used as a rangefinder to determine the distance to the target. The final piece of technology is an intertial navigation unit; gyroscopes, accelerometers and GPS to tell the pod where it is in space. With that information and data from the laser range-finder and the orientation of the camera it can also compute the GPS co-ordinate of the target it's looking at (which is useful if you are using GPS-guided bombs or just to have that intelligence of enemy forces exact position)

From 20,000 feet the weapons officer can be looking at the pod's feed very zoomed out for a wide view, or zoomed in for a close view. It's also very useful because a ground force, say, Pesh or Iraqi forces, can call up the RAF and say, "This is our GPS co-ordinate, our forces are on the south side firing north" and the Tornado flying overhead can simply punch that in and tell the targeting pod where to look viz GPS co-ordinates, and it can tell from the gunfire flashes where the frontlines are (then they just need to find some targets by looking).

Thanks for the informative post.

Some amazing avionics there.