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ShnickyShnack:

The reason that the Iraqis are not, according to you, "blowing stuff up" was answered this evening on CNN...an interview with a 3rd US Infantry officer confirmed that, for the first time, the Iraqis are not afraid of SADDAM HUSSEIN! For the last two weeks, most of Iraq was more afraid of Saddam than the U.S. military. Now, as Iraq realizes that it is liberated, it is not interested in "blowing stuff up" but instead, "what's for dinner"! That should be common sense! Iraq, for the first time in a long time, is free from a tryant! For our part, we should all go shake hands with a serviceman, Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard...and say THANKS!

God Bless President George Bush and the 101st Airborne!

Now, as Iraq realizes that it is liberated, it is not interested in "blowing stuff up" but instead, "what's for dinner"!

Iraq has yet to be liberated.  Right now, it's still a country in chaos and no one can say for sure what lies ahead.

ShnickyShnack:

The reason that the Iraqis are not, according to you, "blowing stuff up" was answered this evening on CNN...an interview with a 3rd US Infantry officer confirmed that, for the first time, the Iraqis are not afraid of SADDAM HUSSEIN! For the last two weeks, most of Iraq was more afraid of Saddam than the U.S. military. Now, as Iraq realizes that it is liberated, it is not interested in "blowing stuff up" but instead, "what's for dinner"! That should be common sense! Iraq, for the first time in a long time, is free from a tryant! For our part, we should all go shake hands with a serviceman, Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard...and say THANKS!

God Bless President George Bush and the 101st Airborne!

Er ... they're afraid of Saddam, so presumably they'd follow his orders until they were certain there was no risk to disobey him, yes? So presumably those orders have not been issued. Why haven't they? That's what I'm wondering.

Jeez laweez, not everything has to be an excuse for political soapboxing!  Why am I even bothering to respond? God bless Jacques Rousseau and the Declarations of the Rights of Man!

A runway suitable for high performance aircraft (fighters etc) must be very clean and clear of debris. Even the aprons and taxiways must be clean to ensure nothing is ingested by the engines. Even small craters can render a runway useless for such aircraft. Cratering a runway to prevent high performance aircraft use is relatively easy. This is not the case for many transport aircraft types. STOL craft can use runways and strips that other aircraft wouldn't attempt to use. Cratering a runway to prevent their use can be more involved.

Cratering is not too hard, and is a basic part of military engineering. First create a row of small bore-holes with a 15 lb or a 40 lb shaped charges across the runway, then pack the holes with about 40 to 80 lbs (depending on depth of bore hole) with high explosive, like C4 or DM12.  Space these charges with about 5 feet between them, and after detonation you will get a crater about 8 feet deep and 25 feet wide across the runway.
A section of 10 men can do this in very short order.


...just in case anyone wanted to know.

A runway suitable for high performance aircraft (fighters etc) must be very clean and clear of debris. Even the aprons and taxiways must be clean to ensure nothing is ingested by the engines. Even small craters can render a runway useless for such aircraft. Cratering a runway to prevent high performance aircraft use is relatively easy. This is not the case for many transport aircraft types. STOL craft can use runways and strips that other aircraft wouldn't attempt to use. Cratering a runway to prevent their use can be more involved.

Cratering is not too hard, and is a basic part of military engineering. First create a row of small bore-holes with a 15 lb or a 40 lb shaped charges across the runway, then pack the holes with about 40 to 80 lbs (depending on depth of bore hole) with high explosive, like C4 or DM12.  Space these charges with about 5 feet between them, and after detonation you will get a crater about 8 feet deep and 25 feet wide across the runway.
A section of 10 men can do this in very short order.


...just in case anyone wanted to know.

Interesting...although now you have me wondering why you know about stuff like this 

snip...the people who were ordered to do the sabotaging seem to have sabotaged their own sabotages.

You're not nuts I saw this too. When you properly set a charge on an oil well "head" you set it at the base so the pipe coming from the ground is damaged as well. These schmo's in Irag set their charges higher up where only the valves would be damaged, and this was reported as being deliberately done. Also should remember that the US rather frequently told the Iraq leadership to not do such things or they would be tried for war crimes, possible they may have heeded that warning.

the news was saying something about runways being incredibly difficult to destroy.

Naw, couple of backhoes can ruin one in a day...er night. 

Meigs Field

Offtopic:  Now that was a ridiculous thing for the mayor to do - rip down the airport to protect against terrorism?!

Funny, last time I looked Boston-Logan was still there.   

It astounds me that people are still playing on 9/11 paranoia to try to get votes

To be fair now, you can't expect him to understand or even believe Chicago politics

Are they stupid or what?

No, they aren't Saddam Hussein. It's really that simple.

Keep on believing they all hate us and want us dead.

Those brown people will get us yet! 

ShnickyShnack:

The reason that the Iraqis are not, according to you, "blowing stuff up" was answered this evening on CNN...an interview with a 3rd US Infantry officer confirmed that, for the first time, the Iraqis are not afraid of SADDAM HUSSEIN! For the last two weeks, most of Iraq was more afraid of Saddam than the U.S. military. Now, as Iraq realizes that it is liberated, it is not interested in "blowing stuff up" but instead, "what's for dinner"! That should be common sense! Iraq, for the first time in a long time, is free from a tryant! For our part, we should all go shake hands with a serviceman, Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard...and say THANKS!

God Bless President George Bush and the 101st Airborne!

So why are they still fighting?  Why aren't they surrendering?  Why are they packing themselves into buses and trucks for idiotic, ill conceived suicide attacks?

If they're not afraid of Saddam, and they want to keep the infrastructure in place for the people's use post-war, why are they still shooting at our troops?

And for our part, we should also go and shake hands with a journalist and say thanks for keeping our government honest.  It's a fine line between the free exchange of ideas and government bozo's like the Iraqi information minister delivering the party line.  It is the journalist, not the soldier, who holds our leaders accountable for their actions. 

God bless Michael Moore and the American Civil Liberties Union.

A runway suitable for high performance aircraft (fighters etc) must be very clean and clear of debris. Even the aprons and taxiways must be clean to ensure nothing is ingested by the engines. Even small craters can render a runway useless for such aircraft. Cratering a runway to prevent high performance aircraft use is relatively easy. This is not the case for many transport aircraft types. STOL craft can use runways and strips that other aircraft wouldn't attempt to use. Cratering a runway to prevent their use can be more involved.

Cratering is not too hard, and is a basic part of military engineering. First create a row of small bore-holes with a 15 lb or a 40 lb shaped charges across the runway, then pack the holes with about 40 to 80 lbs (depending on depth of bore hole) with high explosive, like C4 or DM12.  Space these charges with about 5 feet between them, and after detonation you will get a crater about 8 feet deep and 25 feet wide across the runway.
A section of 10 men can do this in very short order.


...just in case anyone wanted to know.

Thanks for the insight.

My question, regarding cratering, would be, how easy is it to fix?

The ease of fixing runways is what I was trying to get at with the thing about the army engineers needing only a few days to build a runway in the north.

Hypothetically, let's say Saddam blows some holes in the runway of Saddam National Airport. Granted, it will be too damaged for planes to land on right away, but the army engineers might be able repair the runway in a matter of days (if not hours). Therefore, the only real way to make that runway useless is to destroy it to the point where the army engineers can't easily fix it -- to the point where maybe it just makes more sense to build a whole new runway. Thus, Saddam might not bother with the runway at all. Spend the resources somewhere else.

Granted, I don't know if what I'm proposing is at all factual or plausible -- I'm just trying to make sense out of what I remember hearing on the news.

Why aren't the Iraqis blowing stuff up?
           

The Iraqis dispatch pregnant women as suicide bombers to blow up.  Does that count?

There are portable runways of interlocking mats that can be laid down very quickly that are suitable for some transports. Engineers can patch and pave pretty quickly, as long as they are in a secure area. To patch a properly cratered and sabotaged runway requires combat engineers to de-mine and remove all booby traps that should have been placed in and around the craters. Then it requires earth moving equipment to fill the craters. It's a big job, but if you watch a motivated civilian paving crew in action, you get the idea of how fast it can go. One of the difficulties is finding suitable back-fill for the craters. Unlike civilians, there are no streams of dump trucks bringing in back-fill and aggregate. It all has to be found locally. The importance of air-droppable heavy equipment is very apparent.

All in all a properly cratered runway is a big fat pain for anyone to deal with. Cratering and other properly executed rear-guard demolitions can seriously hamper an invading force. Had the Iraqis carried out these sorts of operations, the pace of the war would be much slower and would have allowed them time to re-group in better order.

I have the feeling Combat Engineering was not high on the Iraqi militarys priority list.