wolit@rabbit.UUCP (09/13/83)
I'm surprised rabbit!jj couldn't figure out that there's a whole lot of intelligence that could be garnered by a civilian airliner "accidentally" overflying the USSR that couldn't be gotten from satellites and military recon planes. Satellites are really only good for photo recon -- they could tell us where the Soviet radar sites, air bases, etc., are, how many, and what kind of planes they have at each base, and other useful info like that. Military planes (like the RC-135 that both sides admit was in the area of KAL007) can tell you what frequencies the Soviets use for radar and communication, what kinds of codes and encryption, and counter- and counter-counter-measures they use, and a little about how their air defense is organized. But you can't send a military aircraft across their borders -- at least not too often or too deeply -- without risking an international incident. And without sending a plane into their airspace, you lack vital information about how closely they watch each section of their borders, how long it takes them to scramble interceptors, how many and what type they send up, how well controlled they are (i.e., how long it takes them to find you), what kind of search pattern they use -- in short, all of the absolutely essential operational intelligence you need to know is you want to have any confidence in your defense planning. We will probably never know for certain whether KAL007 was on such a mission -- it's not the kind of information that either side gives out -- but it WAS in Soviet airspace, it WAS in the vicinity of that RC-135 earlier, its radios WERE working (it communicated with Japanese air traffic controllers after crossing the border of the USSR), and there's too much of this circumstantial evidence to allow me to rule out that possibility just because Reagan says it's all coincidence.
jj@rabbit.UUCP (09/13/83)
I don't buy a lot of what rabbit!wolit suggests. We don't know which planes they will sscramble, etc, but we do know exactly what kinds of radar, what sort of radio communications, etc, they have, so the only thing we acheive by testing them is finding out if their in-place systems work. I think we already knew that. A further result of testing their defenses is that we show the soviets any weaknesses or flaws in their response strategy, something I don't think we really need to do. In short, I don't think that there was any useful information to be gained by the overflight. We know what kinds of planes they had in the area, we know that they are armed, we know the kind of tracking systems, we know the freguencies used for the various radio/radar systems, we know their pulse rates, shapes, identification mechanism, in short, we already know everything we need to estimate their operational capability WITHOUT trying the system out. I don't think even the most rabid McCarthy leftovers are either stupid or psychotic enought to send another nation's airplane over hostile territory just to see if they will really shoot. I must say that the Koreans may indeed think differently, its been clearly shown that the US can't keep them "under control". I can conceive of a scene where the US wouldn't give the Koreans the most recent information for security purposes, and the Koreans decided to take matters into their own hands. I don't hold the US responsible for this.
tech@auvax (09/19/83)
Well you now know that you can go 300 miles into the Soviet Union before they will finally shoot you down. The Koreans don't own any satellites and I would think after a few lapses like Iran in the last ten years that the USA does not hand out intelligence data like jelly beans. Richard Loken