Thursday, 24. March 2011
Topic: War and Peace News - on March 24, 2011 at 12:02:00 PM CET
Operation Odyssey Dawn explained (Day 5)
The news of Day 5 is that the Libyan Arab Republic Air Force “no longer exists as a fighting force”, a statement that impressed both media and public opinion and that was frantically retweeted on Twitter from around 16.00GMT (I’m still getting the “breaking news” around 23.50GMT). Actually, we already knew that Libyans had a largely obsolete fleet flown by scarcely trained crews and that they were equipped with a variety of old Soviet surface-to-air weaponry meaning that I didn’t expect LARAF to be as effective as it could be in the ’70s or ’80s to pose a real threat to the coalition planes. So, when I read the words the commander of Royal Air Force Operation Bellamy had said in Gioia del Colle during a visit to the RAF detachment, I didn’t find them particularly interesting. What I really found noteworthy were his next words (widely underrated and omitted): “….his integrated air defense system and command and control networks are severely degraded to the point that we can operate with near impunity across Libya”.
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