Ex-Officer Says Air Force's Failure to Deploy Airships Costs Lives

Another example of how the military cares little about the lives of its troops. War is a complete fraud, you cannot debate otherwise.

This is not a joke! The religion of Islam and its offspring Sharia Law are taking over modern Europe as we know it. Muslims want Islam to take over Europe and North America and force women to cover up or be punished! Please educate yourself on this dire matter!

It hard to care about the lives lesser men when you have a bid roomy house and a nice car and a nice fat pay check. Its hard to care when you live life in luxury everyday.

Apparently it's hard to spell too!

What would an airforce officer know about combat?

Wouldn't a floating blimp be an easy target to shoot down?

chefboiaarni:

have you managed to shoot a third-hand AK47 60,000 ft straight up?

it's not like the Taliban are awash in sophisticated anti-air missiles.

Forgive my ignorance, I guess I'm assuming that they had access to missiles.

At 60,000' you would have a hard time seeing it, much less shooting it down.

I cannot forgive you, chefboiaarni, because there is nothing to forgive you for. You make a good point that I have made in the past. I'm sure that Al-Qaeda will have no qualms about giving the Taliban some cheap and dirty S to A missiles, and if this thing is really that big, it can't be that hard to hit it with a rudimentary guidance system in the rocket. Also, imagine how hard it would be to protect it when it lands. A couple RPGs could mean the death for that thing, and the Taliban already has a large supply of those.

PS. For different reasons, I cannot forgive SVB for his bigotry and/or trolling.

lnwolf41 I also wonder why we don;t have airships over there. And why must they be easy to shoot down? With all the survellance equipment avalable they just need to have anti-missle launchers and decoys, not to mention patrolling jets or UAV's that could attack the launch areas. As for landing any aircraft is easy target when on the ground.
As for SVB he probably has a picture of Torqamada in his room and thinks he's a hero of christianity.

Heres an idea make a bunch of smaller airships run them at low altitude and when they are shot at obliterate the area.

the AF's willful failure to use airships is simply "money"; that is, airships are unmanned, therefore do not require pilots, which would require more personnel to be hired, which would require more operational units to be formed, giving those officers more commands to assume, and thus more MONEY. I agree that airships hovering at 60k ft would be out of visual range, thus invulnerable to small-arms fire, or even small rocket fire. However, Al-Qaida has the money to buy surface to air missiles. Or small aircraft. They would only have to recruit small aircraft pilots to steal Cessnas or Pipers (among other brands) to either kamikaze into the airships, or one pilot and one "muscle" to hang out the window and shoot an AK47 into the side of it. I don't know how ballistically secure these blimps are. But I don't think they would fly well with small arms armor cladding. We could assign helicopters or A10s (if they still are in operation) to fly patrol around them. However, that requires more money. Too bad DARPAs Project VULTURE hasn't borne any fruit...

Around world war II Britain experimented with airships battle capability where they sent the airship up into the sky and shot all sorts of weapons at it. It was found that as long as the airship was filled with helium and not highly combustible hydrogen that the airships could take almost any amount of fire. The bullet holes would simply create holes that would leak the helium but because of the massive amount of helium that was inside the airship it would take hours before the craft came down to a soft landing.

Anyone have a vid of these tests Michael mentioned?

Light aircraft can not reach 60,000 feet, nor can a MANPAD, so it would take a large and sophisticated SAM to bring down a airship operating at those altitudes. Those are pretty hard to hide when something is up at 60,000 feet always watching.

kudos to Gen67. while the rest of you are trying to come up with reasons to discount what people with far more knowledge of the operational limits of terrorist groups and of their weapons. How about actually listening to the people who do know and who all agree that a high altitude airship makes a nearly impossible target first because you cant shoot what you cant see, second if you see it and cant reach it then it still cant be hit, and third the kind of SAM's that you would need and also the radar equipment needed simply arnt in the arsenal of most Jihadist so sorry naysayers the argument against recon airships just don't pass the litmus test.