Uprising in Libya

[Thanas]

Thanks for the explanation. It just looked very odd to me.

Also you Germans just recognized the rebels for whatever reasons; remains to be seen if that will be backed up by some real aid or action.

Action not likely, but Germany has already sent seven million Euros in medical and humanitarian aid. The visit to Bengazi by two cabinet ministers, including the secretary of state, also was accompanied by another million and another six are pledged....

My guess is as good as yours as to what the Rebels use that money for...

Oh, and the bog standard commitment to infrastructure projects etc after Ghaddafi is gone.

[Sea Skimmer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyRBUAE ... r_embedded
Well I sure wouldn't expect this; the rebels are attempting to build remote control ground vehicles and remote weapon stations. You can see the top end of rebel weapons here... and they are taking this stuff up against an enemy with T-72 tanks.

[madd0ct0r]

strikes me as a mix of three things.

1) they need weapons, and they're using salvage. this leads to a lot of bodge jobs, some of which are successful enough to be repeated where parts available. I suspect the net will allow good designs to spread rapidly - like the rocket turntable detail shown in the video. reminds me a lot of the Vietcong stuff you get in the museums here.

2) it's good press. 'handy rebels build guns from scrap' is a good story, as is 'childs toy to RC gun drone'. It boosts morale for the footsoldiers, for the people at the back too and continues foreign interest and observation, something the rebels need.

3) it keeps people busy. some people, and engineers are good at this, are stubborn and detail focused. whatever plan you ask them to do, they'll find faults. give them a workshop and a brief and they'll work themselves harder, not cause hassle for you and some good stuff might come out of it as well. everybody wins

[TheHammer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyRBUAE ... r_embedded
Well I sure wouldn't expect this; the rebels are attempting to build remote control ground vehicles and remote weapon stations. You can see the top end of rebel weapons here... and they are taking this stuff up against an enemy with T-72 tanks.

Seems like something out of the A-Team. Its actually pretty impressive given the conditions they are no doubt working under. It would be interesting to see the actual effectiveness of those systems in combat.

[weemadando]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyRBUAE ... r_embedded
Well I sure wouldn't expect this; the rebels are attempting to build remote control ground vehicles and remote weapon stations. You can see the top end of rebel weapons here... and they are taking this stuff up against an enemy with T-72 tanks.

HMARS eat your heart out.

[Raj Ahten]

I don't know if I'd want to use that shoulder fired rocket launcher showcased in Sea Skimmer's latest video post. Firing an aircraft rocket off right next to your face looks like a good way to melt said face. (That launcher is something for someone else to demonstrate before trying it yourself....)

It is remarkable everything the rebels are able to put together given what they have though. I wonder how accurate their robot gun mounts are.

[Sea Skimmer]

In another video, which was mostly talking heads a week or so ago so I didn't post it, the rebels were actually making a tripod mounted rocket launcher totally from scratch, welding together little finned rockets of about 50mm caliber from sheet metal. They've got the will, but even if such designs work production rates are going to be very low.

[Sea Skimmer]

Another small town in the western mountains has been liberated, Kikla to the north east of Yefran. Its mainly important because it gives the rebels secure control of another road up the mountain escarpment; it also is now the closest point to Tripoli confirmed as in rebel hands which is not isolated by pro Qaddafi troops (some even smaller towns to the east appear to be pro rebel but isolated for months). Though we are only talking a few kilometers closer then earlier holdings. It was a real pain figuring out the location on maps, as almost nothing marks it due to small size, but it appears to be here
32° 5'59.87"N 12°33'24.08"E


Also since I’m going to sleep now and likely to be busy a long time tomorrow, those of you around keep an eye out for this; I’m seeing blurbs but not solid articles saying that Tunisia has now stated it is ‘ready’ to recognize the rebels as the government of Libya after yet another pro Qaddafi rocket salvo landed on Tunisian territory near the Wazin border crossing. If that happens it could make things mighty interesting. Qaddafi may for example suddenly find himself unable to import gasoline via Tunisia.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Thanks for keeping an eye on all this, Skimmer. I can't find a quarter of the info you're posting, so this thread is my go-to for Libyan news.

[Thanas]

Thanks for keeping an eye on all this, Skimmer. I can't find a quarter of the info you're posting, so this thread is my go-to for Libyan news.

Seconded (though the news over here are pretty good, I like Skimmer's updates - concise, informative and good summaries of what happens).

[Sea Skimmer]

Thanks guys. I use a lot of sources, and above all try to avoid repeating stuff that is unconfirmed or simply doesn't sound right, which is a lot of the news. like random claims of large pro Qaddafi convoys exploding.

Another small town is in rebel hands, Alaawinya, on the main road between Yefren and Zintan. People might recall that the siege was Yefren was broken, but it was via the road at the foot of the escarpment. This is the road on top of the escarpment. Only a few tiny settlements remain to be taken in-between the two; and while its not like pro Qaddafi troops cant and don't fight away from towns, both sides usually establish positions at settlements. Being desert war you've got little shelter from the sun and cold away from buildings and it just doesn't make much sense to fight and die over empty sand and rock hills. All the more so since while trees exist they aren't that heavy and pro Qaddafi troops like to have places to hide from the once in a blue moon NATO air strikes.

Slow but surely the rebel enclaves are linking together, and at the rate things are going they may all be linked by the end of the month. After that the next logical rebel target would be Gharyan to the east which is fairly large at 85,000 people, and while firmly in pro Qaddafi hands since the first few days of protests, it seems that isn't likely the will of the population. Its also has hills and ridges all around it which help favor an approach by lightly armed rebel troops. This article mentions the uncertain allegiance of the population.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/ ... JK20110615

Edit: just to reemphasis the importance of Gharyan, the whole western mountain area has about a half million people in it, so taking a small city of 85,000 people would be a big boost to the rebel population base even if only a fraction of the people want to fight Qaddafi. Also any city that falls of that size is surely is going to lead to many weapons and ammo stocks falling into rebel hands.

[Sea Skimmer]

Might as well share this, I’ve been filling in town locations as they come up in the news since Google Earth actually thinks many of these towns are located in the United States… and some really do have the same name though most of it is just Google being more retarded then the guinea pigs I used to have as pets.

Anyway main roads are shown; but a number of minor roads, I see 3-4 plus maybe 1-2 dirt trails, do cross they rather obvious mountain escarpment in-between Yafran and Garyan. Several of them are already blocked by the rebels as the rebels hold the settlements at the summits, and all of them are utter deathtraps for either side to advance up or down under enemy fire.



And hey, I see Obama has now said that while he does not believe the War Powers Act is illegal as I personally do, he does say he think's it simply doesn't apply to Libya, which is a supportable position as far as ‘intent’ goes since basically zero US military lives are at risk and the cost is trivial in US budget terms, that sure doesn’t seem like a specific argument that works in court.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43414648/ns ... ork_times/

[Thanas]

Are the Tigers making any difference? Because this weapon system was hyped to hell when we had to foot the bill and I'd really love to know if this was worth it.

[Sea Skimmer]

The French released some video of a Tiger effectively shooting up some undefended parked trucks. Other then that we have no clue what they are doing in detail.

But as far as I can tell and NATO has said, the choppers are primarily being used to strike specific preplanned targets to minimize risks, and other then that only fire in self defense. They are also, at least the RAF ones, actively avoiding killing personal who aren’t trying to shoot back (I suspect France is not, but I don't know). This pretty much completely removes all the advantages of an attack helicopter as opposed to a fixed wing air strike with laser guided bombs. If the helicopters were told to go out and air rape Qaddafis troops and hunt them down to the last man, the proper mission of attack helicopters, they’d be making a big difference. Some logic exists in not killing personal, in hopes they’ll surrender, but we simply have not seen any large scale surrenders of pro Qaddafi troops since the early weeks of the war. They may not want to fight, but they aren’t giving up. I think if constant relays of helicopters attacked then non stop for an entire night that would change, and if it didn't they'd all die anyway.

I speculate, as have others that the main reason to deploy the helicopters was simply that they are much cheaper then flying fixed wing aircraft on the same kinds of missions since they can fly from ships 20nm offshore, rather then making a 300nm flight from a land base with expensive inflight refueling support. But since little is being said about the helicopter operations, its very hard to know the truth. We may not know for five years or more, since European nations are far more secretive about air operations then the US and this war is even more political then normal.

German Tigers however have a glaring problem that would be highly apparent if they were used in this war, which is that they don’t have a turreted gun like most of the French ones do, which was a painfully stupid choice. A turreted cannon is great for allowing a chopper to shoot up fleeting targets as it passes and generally do a good job of defending itself from threats all at very low cost. It's damn perfect for this kind of war or any other war. Without the gun turret its kind of hard to see any vast advantage of a medium weight dedicated attack chopper design compared to just hanging missiles and rockets off a utility airframe as Germany did with the earlier and very cheap BO.105. Actually a fair portion of the French helicopter force is exactly that kind of aircraft anyway, they have four Tigers deployed alongside about six armed utility type Gazelle’s. The Tiger does have some modest armor, so that’s one advantage over utility attack types, but the gun is so much of the point its staggering that not all Tiger’s in even the French forces have one. Frankly I see Germany has having gained nothing with Tiger it couldn't have gotten from a quick buy of AH-1 Cobras from the US, but that was never the point.

On an Apache you not only have a 30mm in the turret, the thing can carry 1,200 rounds of ammunition for the cannon which is a damn lot of ammo when you remember that one 30mm hit can kill a light armored vehicle due to the shaped charge inside the shell. Mi-28 is pretty similar. The German Tigers are just dumb and I have yet to see a logical reason put forward as to why they don’t have the turret. A number of VERY similar medium weight attack helicopters exist since Mi-28 and Apache are rather big and expensive; Italian A129, South African Rooivalk, Indian Light Combat Helicopter, Chinese Z-10 plus one or two others and all of them have a turreted gun.

Now, at one point a 30mm fixed podded cannon was proposed for German Tigers, which means you would give up a pod of rockets or missiles to carry it, but has not been funded and R&D has ceased, and this is generally is a dumb option on a brand new post cold war chopper design. Some Hind models have an integral fixed gun, but the Hind is kind of crazy with a very long convoluted evolution spanning almost the whole history of attack helicopters, and the most prolific models all have a turreted gun anyway. Ka-50 has a semi fixed gun but Ka-50 is stupid. I’ve ranted against it in HAB recently.

[Thanas]

I think they have operation 12.7 MG pods, but these are iirc fixed wing (and much smaller caliber of course). Not sure how much of a use they would be in a war against tanks (given that the Tiger was sold as an AT-weapon), though I'd imagine they'd be of some use against the technicals and light units the Libyan fields.

Purely thought exercise though, the chance of actually deploying stuff is zero.

[Sea Skimmer]

.50cal is worthless against tanks and ineffective against most light armored vehicles unlike 20-30mm guns which are credible against the roof armor of most AFVs including tanks. Even against unarmored vehicles you can shoot up a truck or 4x4 with a fair number of .50cal holes without destroying it. Though to be honest, even 1-2 30mm hits is not a sure kill on a truck, but is is far more likely to set it on fire from the explosions.

You also have a key issue of effective range, the range of a .50cal on a chopper is no better then that of a .50cal on the ground, and most armies roll around with a damn lot of .50cal guns mounted on AFVs and support vehicles as anti aircraft weapons. Germany does not do this, being totally in love with the MG3 for all machine guns roles, but that isn't typical of other forces. Since it wont even have much ammunition in a pod its a pretty poor weapon. The US has a .50cal pod for our OH-58D helicopters, but these are low end low cost scout choppers and the pod is not much used.

As far as anti tank use goes, a turreted gun does make the helicopter heavier and that means a little less flying time to spending hunting down tanks, but that is more then counter balanced by NOT having an extra rack of anti tank missiles if you have the .50cal pod mounted or if you must fire anti tank missiles or rockets at enemy machine gun crews. Also turreted cannon are highly useful for shooting down enemy helicopters. I think the only reason German Tiger's have the .50cal pod is because the pods already existed for use by the BO.105 force.

As for thought exercise; sure they won't go fight in Libya. But in Afghanistan the lack of a proper gun would be an even larger limitation, far larger. Meanwhile in even smaller wars, like the recent French-Ukrainian helicopter missions in Ivory Coast, a light utility type like BO.105 would work fine. I really just don't understand the German decision at all, some stuff says they had doubts about the French turret mount, but the fact is France INVENTED the attack helicopter and many of the basic tactics to go with them and has extensive experience with the things in combat while Germany has little history with either. Seems like a reason to trust them. The real reason may have purely been cost, the turret costs money to buy, maintain and train the crews.

[Thanas]

AFAIK they were planning on developing their own gun, then the funds got cancelled halfway through development.

[Sea Skimmer]

That was the podded semi recoilless 30mm. Being totally new with an unusual means of operating requiring all new ammo it was a pretty dumb option that would have had limited ammo, and I have to wonder how serious it ever was, its not clear how much work was really done. IIRC work on it started independent of the Tiger program. If it had worked it would provide a nice way to put a 30mm gun on a range of very light aircraft, but it still means none of the tactical advantages of a turreted weapon. With a turret you can do stuff like orbit a target and keep it under constant observation and fire which was just plain physically impossible with a gun pod.

You can see some short clips of the French choppers strafing with bursts of 20mm at night in this video, its disjointed but can be seen near the start and end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va5_I4uFYh8

[Sea Skimmer]

Well the war has slipped back into a consolidation and creeping phase; but the rebels have now cut the last oil pipeline supplying the power plants and oil refinery around Tripoli./ Qaddafi has a lot of crude in storage tanks near the capital, but that's eventually going to turn out the lights and completely cripple the fuel supply. Five day gas lines will be replaced by Qaddafi needing camels to supply most of his forces. Meanwhile the rebels are now totally out of cash, NATO is bombing random farm houses rather then providing air support and signs suggest the air war may be breaking down. The mishandling of intervention may have already ensured stalemate.

Anyway, another map for June 18th fighting around Misrata

[Pelranius]

I don't suppose that the Gulf Arabs would be willing to pony up some cash for the rebels?

[Sea Skimmer]

Kuwait and the UAE promised hundreds of millions but have yet to deliver any of it, nor have any of the Europeans, mainly France and Italy who promised even more money. The banks in the east of the country are now closing because simply no cash exists to give people. The only reason the rebels have not totally collapsed alreadt is because Qatar has been delivering food and fuel for free on a considerable scale, but in view of the large scale of aid they have already provided they aren't too interested in handing up hundreds of millions in cash on top of it. Qatari aid may be past the billion mark already. No one can blame them on that, they are rich as hell but unlike western countries they aren't holding tens of billions of dollars worth of frozen Libyan assets in the first place.

A bill in the US congress was supposed to be voted on last week to allow 4 billion in frozen assets to be transferred but it seems to have been stopped in its tracks because GASP, it might be illegal in UN terms to send the money to Libya, even if we change the law to make it legal to seize it! So anyway, the beloved rule of law in the world is once more shown to be completely fucking worthless to the point of literally creating a situation in which wounded people may very soon be dieing from a lack of medical supplies or electrical power in hospitals. 5,000 tons of weapons and ammunition could end this war in a month, instead the utter weakness of NATO and apathy of the world is looking more and more like its going to create a stalemate with Qaddafi still ruling a dark Tripoli.

The rebels BTW have not cut a gas pipeline they've controlled for months, because Qaddafi's only real use for gas is to hand out to people to cook food ect... maybe run a few generators but its not strategic in the same way the oil flow is. Apparently the oil would have been cut earlier but NATO had leaned on the rebels not to do so.

[Mr. Coffee]

HMARS eat your heart out.

Proving conclusively that Redneck Engineering knows no nation, ethnic, or religious boundaries.

[Thanas]

The German Government has announced that it will give bombs, rockets and necessary parts to Nato allies as a sort of indirect aid in bombing Liby. German link, expected version in english will probably be up soon.

[Sea Skimmer]

And so the collective world failure begins to strike home at Rebel hospitals cutting off supplies.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13937817

[Sea Skimmer]

The rebellion in the west just solved its ammunition; though not weapons storage by overrunning the Al Qaa ammunition dump south of Zintan. Apparently it had only about 60 defenders with a few armored vehicles, who fled after a fight of under a half an hour. I count at least 65 major bunkers in the dump, plus open storage berms and only a fraction have been struck by NATO. The media have confirmed all of this in person and the rebels are hauling away ammunition as quickly as they can plus two T-55s and a ZSU-23-4 seen being driven off. This place easily has enough ammo to take the rebels to the gates of Tripoli, providing they can find enough weapons to shoot it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13948984

Latest map showing the steady consolidation of the rebel western holding
http://feb17.info/wp-content/uploads/20 ... a-28th.png

Video of arms looting without BBC crap to slow you down watching; boy did Qaddafis policy of remote desert arms dumps without even paved roads for access not work out today!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB2jO5PM ... r_embedded