Defense Analyst: The Turks were setting up an ambush

The Su-24, even according to Turkey, were only in Turkish airspace for a total of 17 seconds. Those F-16s were just in the right place at the right time to initiate the attack, which occurred. There were Turkish supported rebels on the ground ready to attack the parachuting pilots and ambush the rescue force immediately after the Su-24 was shot down.

It doesn't take much to figure out it was a deliberate plot made in advance, as opposed to some reactionary response to getting their sovereignty violated as they claim.
 
The details in the article are pretty damning in that regard.
 
Would love to see Russia's reasonable response if Turkish jets entered their airspace repeatedly.

Turkey has zero nuclear weapons and an alliance with Western countries (NATO) whose words aren't worth shit. I am very skeptical that they, a rational country that knows these things, would provoke a country with a leader with absolute power and zero fucks about the opinion of the "community of nations."

Fortifying your border with a war zone isn't an ambush. They didn't bait nor force Russia to violate their airspace. That's on Russia. Maybe if they were focused on killing terrorists and not rebels like they claim, they wouldn't be over there in the first place.
 
Orgasmo said:
The Su-24, even according to Turkey, were only in Turkish airspace for a total of 17 seconds. Those F-16s were just in the right place at the right time to initiate the attack, which occurred. There were Turkish supported rebels on the ground ready to attack the parachuting pilots and ambush the rescue force immediately after the Su-24 was shot down.

It dooesn't take much to figure out it was a deliberate plot made in advance, as opposed to some reactionary response to getting their sovereignty violated as they claim.
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To be fair, it's a bit of a stretch to assume Turkey coordinated with rebels so that they would shoot at the downed pilots. I think they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The rest of the claim seems pretty accurate. I mean, you would literally have to have a jet circling that little swath of land, waiting for a Russian jet to slip up. 17 seconds is crazy.
 
Did any of you read the article?
 
Yeah. Only dweebs read. Youtube is where it's at.
 
Maybe try contributing more than a link, and your thread won't bomb.
 
KILL KILL said:
To be fair, it's a bit of a stretch to assume Turkey coordinated with rebels so that they would shoot at the downed pilots. I think they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The rest of the claim seems pretty accurate. I mean, you would literally have to have a jet circling that little swath of land, waiting for a Russian jet to slip up. 17 seconds is crazy.
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That is if the Russian jet even entered their airspace in the first place, as opposed to Turkey's claim of 17 seconds. The little patch of land Russians supposedly crossed is about 3 miles wide. Turkey has shown little regards to the airspace of Greece, Syria and Iraq before on a regular basis, so they supposed outrage about getting violated is bullshit. Russia targeting those Turkish supported Turkmen rebels and oil smuggling network must have struck a nerve.
 
Orgasmo said:
That is if the Russian jet even entered their airspace in the first place, as opposed to Turkey's claim of 17 seconds. The little patch of land Russians supposedly crossed is about 3 miles wide. Turkey has shown little regards to the airspace of Greece, Syria and Iraq before on a regular basis, so they supposed outrage about getting violated is bullshit. Russia targeting those Turkish supported Turkmen rebels and oil smuggling network must have struck a nerve.
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Yeah seriously. The chances of Turkey just happening to have a jet there at the exact time and place is astronomically low.
 
The Turks had launched two F-16s quite a bit earlier than the time we’re talking about, from Diyarbakir, a major base for the Turkish Air Force about two hundred and fifty miles away, to loiter just in from the Mediterranean over a mountainous area that was about twenty-five miles north of this border crossing. Interestingly, they arrived in that area to loiter just about the time that the Russian pilots were being assigned their targets, and the F-16s loitered over that mountainous area for about an hour and fifteen minutes.

Here’s the crucial thing. They were not loitering up at high altitude—say twenty to thirty thousand feet—to conserve fuel, which is where you would normally be loitering if you were simply doing a routine border patrol. They were loitering quite low, at about seven thousand five hundred to eight thousand feet, which, first of all, is below the coverage of the Syrian and Russian radars that were down around Latakia, and which is a very fuel-inefficient altitude to loiter. You suck up a lot of gas down at those low altitudes.

That tells you right away, if they hung out there for seventy-five minutes, they must’ve been tanked on the way in to that mission, because they were quite far from their home base—two hundred and fifty miles—so they must’ve topped up on fuel to have enough to even last for an hour and a quarter at this inefficient low altitude. The Turkish Air Force does have a number of American tankers that they own, so they certainly could’ve and almost beyond a shadow of a doubt did tank these F-16s before this whole engagement.
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But if the Russians were in Turkish airspace, as the Turks claim, wouldn’t it be reasonable for the Turks to intercept them?

There’s a little detail that’s very telling. The alleged border-crossing took place on the first bombing run from the loiter area to the target, and according to the Turks the Russians were roughly half a mile north of the tip of the finger and so they were in Turkish airspace for about seventeen seconds—a tiny, short, brief time—on their way to hitting the first target. The Russians, of course, say they were south of the finger by about a mile. God knows who’s right. I’m sure if we had access to the radar records we could tell very promptly who’s lying and who’s not, but nobody is going to give us access to the exact radar plot.

Here’s the very interesting thing. This border-violating incursion was on the first run to the target at around 10:15. On the second run to the target the Russian planes were clearly further to the south. This is according to the plots and maps released in the Russian briefing, which are very, very detailed with exact time marks every minute. The seventeen-second crossing of the border alleged by the Turks happened at about 10:15, but the Turks waited. They didn’t come in and attack the airplane that had crossed the border at that point. They simply sat and waited until the plane flew a long re-attack pattern and came back on a second run seven or eight minutes later, and that’s when they attacked and shot him down.

Between the fuel-guzzling low altitude of the holding pattern of the F-16s, which miraculously coincided with the flight times of the Russian airplanes, and the fact that they didn’t even chase the airplane immediately upon its alleged border incursion, all that smells very much like a pretty pre-planned operation. The Turks allowed the Russian plane to hit a target and make a long seven or eight minute re-attack pass and then came in from their hidden low altitude position. They came up a little higher to gain a good firing altitude, came whistling south, hit the Su-24, dove under the radar coverage at the same time that they entered Syrian airspace and headed north out of radar coverage to head back to Diyarbakir.

Such an ambush wouldn’t have been hard to pull off, because the Russians, in their detailed account of this, state very clearly that they had coordinated with NATO, with the Americans, announcing this attack well in advance, and had followed the protocol of listening on the NATO-agreed frequency for any warnings or alerts from NATO or from the Turks. There was plenty of time for the Americans to inform the Turks that this mission was taking place. They might’ve even been informed by the Russians the day before it was going to take place. All the prerequisites for a setup were there.
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The Turks do say they transmitted their warnings from a ground-control station. They also claim they transmitted those radio calls on both the civilian international emergency “guard” UHF-band frequency and on the military VHF-band frequency previously agreed to by NATO and the Russians. The Americans were quick to confirm that their monitoring equipment picked up the Turkish ground-station radio warning calls, but they’ve been careful not to say what frequency they heard. Now it so happens that Su-24s have no radios onboard for receiving UHF-frequency signals, a fact which is well known to American, NATO, and Turkish intelligence.

There’s a lot of outs to this that could be the fault of either side. It’s quite likely true that the Turks radioed warnings, but those warnings may have been deliberately transmitted only on the international civilian frequency so that the Su-24s would never hear them. Or it may be that the Su-24’s military frequency radios were on the fritz, which is easy to believe given the well-known unreliability of Russian electronics.

I do believe that the F-16s never issued any warnings, because it would be astonishing if they did. Here they went to all the trouble of tanking up and flying at a very low altitude, stretching their fuel endurance just to stay out of radar coverage of the Russians and the Syrians, and then why would they suddenly announce that they were there by warning the fighters when they had so obviously set up a situation where they were hiding? The ground-control station in Turkey probably did issue warnings, but they may have been warnings that were intended not to be received.
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I still strongly recommend reading the whole piece.
 
Russia were warned by Turkey, several times prior to this incident.

What were they doing flying in a non ISIS territory in the first place?

In any case after multiple warnings, Ruskies needed to be cut down to size.
 
Rex Kwon Do said:
Would love to see Russia's reasonable response if Turkish jets entered their airspace repeatedly.

Turkey has zero nuclear weapons and an alliance with Western countries (NATO) whose words aren't worth shit. I am very skeptical that they, a rational country that knows these things, would provoke a country with a leader with absolute power and zero fucks about the opinion of the "community of nations."

Fortifying your border with a war zone isn't an ambush. They didn't bait nor force Russia to violate their airspace. That's on Russia. Maybe if they were focused on killing terrorists and not rebels like they claim, they wouldn't be over there in the first place.
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Today's rebels are tomorrow's terrorists.
 
Lol so his whole analysis breaks down to maybe the truks deleberitely didnt broadcast on the right frequencies or admits maybe more likely it WAS technical problems with the russians to blame as they flew towards turkish airpsace for 5 minutes not responding to warnings
so it still boils down to russian incompetence vs russia not giving 2 fucks after being warned
 
whougonnacall said:
Lol so his whole analysis breaks down to maybe the truks deleberitely didnt broadcast on the right frequencies or admits maybe more likely it WAS technical problems with the russians to blame as they flew towards turkish airpsace for 5 minutes not responding to warnings
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In addition, the Turkish jets were not at the usual high altitude loitering position used for routine patrol missions but in a low altitude position which takes up much more fuel and therefore only makes sense if they wanted to stay below enemy radar capabilities. Which again implies premeditation.
 
Rex Kwon Do said:
Might as well just destroy the whole planet, then. Today's [not-bad-thing] are tomorrow's [bad-thing].

Da fuq
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When it comes to the cluster fuck that is Syria and Iraq, I'd like to see how you differentiate between terrorist groups and rebel groups.
 
Ishaq said:
Russia were warned by Turkey, several times prior to this incident.

What were they doing flying in a non ISIS territory in the first place?

In any case after multiple warnings, Ruskies needed to be cut down to size.
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Did you read the article? They crossed a tiny part of Turkish airspace for 17 seconds, then Turkish planes waited for over an hour at stealthy altitudes before attacking the Russians while they were in Syrian airspace. The argument that they warned them 10 times then responded to a violation of their aerial sovereignty is pretty ridiculous.
 
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