>>1149
No breadcrumbs. You can't think based on breadcrumbs. Let's get down to specifics then.
I see no evidence of "NATO missiles" in Ukraine. No footage, no secondary evidence of delivery, no eyewitness accounts. They're simply not there and we only have hypotheses to ponder. No point in arguing what-ifs now. What if Russia built a death star in the orbit?
I've not seen any plans or intentions of deploying cruise missiles to Ukraine either besides "trust me bro" stories on the Internet. If there were plans of constructing a "base" I think we would have at least started building it in the last 8 years.
So outside of Ukraine, you've said something murky about Tomahawks. You're talking about the Redzikowo AEGIS Ashore installation then.
You're talking about it because the site was built to house SM-3 missiles which use the Mk 41 canisters capable of launching other US Navy weapons including cruise missiles.
But why in the fuck would anyone want to keep Tomahawks in there?
Think we would put tactical missiles in a huge stationary building? Do you think we're stupid?
The thing about Tomahawk is it doesn't need giant sophisticated fire control radars. It doesn't need any of the AEGIS ashore infrastructure. All you need to launch it is data link. You put in the coordinates and a terrain map and the missile will guide itself along a given route.
These aren't huge weapons. If we wanted to deploy them in the east we would put them on much more manageable and survivable semi trailers, which was kind of already done in the form of the long decommissioned BGM-109G TEL. There used to be a treaty that required them to be scrapped, now defunct, doesn't matter. We'd put them on trailers again and we could drive them anywhere we damn pleased instead of keeping them stuck in a giant radar barn.
Now, the SM-3 is an anti-ballistic missile. Very expensive, very advanced, very precise. Big requirements. Can't be put on a trailer. Needs radars. Needs supercomputers. Needs a whole CIC and men to crew it. The whole setup needs its own power station. Why would we ever want to waste the AEGIS Ashore facility tailor made to enable the specialized and fabulously expensive SM-3 in favor of a bog standard Tomahawk that we could put on FUCKING TRAILER instead?
It's not like we weren't trying to calm Russia down about the Tomahawk nuke scare. If they wished the launch cells at Redzikowo could have been modified to make them incompatible with Tomahawk. Russians would get to confirm it. Additionally we offered to give Russian observers access to the site to perform arms control inspections on regular basis.
Russia chose not to. Russia came up with impractical theories on how we'd be cheating the system to hide atomic Tomahawks everywhere. Russia doesn't feel unsafe, Russia just wants its neighbors as disarmed as possible.
But here's another angle for you to think about: NATO has ships with Mk 41 cells. Shitloads of them.
We can put them anywhere in the Baltic or in the Barents sea, closer to Moscow than Redzikowo. We could put them right outside St Petersburg or Murmansk. Each of these ships can carry a full load of Tomahawks, one in each cell. Remember these aren't just on American ships.
Up close you have Germany, Denmark, Norway and Turkey operating ships with the trusty old '41. Slightly farther away there's the Netherlands, Spain, UK. Finland too, they're a neutral though.
Now answer me truthfully: have you ever been afraid of a reasonably sized 5,290 ton Norwegian frigate lurking somewhere out there on the seven seas? Do you think of it as an existential danger to Russia that would warrant invasions and interventions? Ships like these are infinitely more likely to carry Tomahawks or other cruise missiles than land based AEGIS installations.
How come there's no constant outrage about these highly mobile platforms roaming the oceans, God knows where with God knows how many murder-missiles on board?
Now about
>THAAD
Well the name says it all. It's a terminal defense system against ballistic missiles. Can't really use it to blow other stuff up, not designed for it.
It's scary only to those who really want to kill the operator with fucking ballistic missiles. You know, kind of like what's being done to Ukraine right this very moment. Russia's bombing Kyiv pretty badly right now, ballistic missiles included. I wish they had some of that THAAD to defend themselves with, but even if there was a will the system wouldn't be sent to Ukraine anyway because they're really expensive and in high demand in strategic US facilities.
But wait. Just like Patriot the THAAD is mobile. Scary? Well I don't know, man.
Russia is deploying massive numbers of mobile air defense complexes all over the place. In Russia proper, in Kaliningrad, in Belarus, in some other places far away.
Man, does Russia love their air defenses. Can't have a military themed TV program without showing off some S series variant or a Tor.
Thing is, Russia always claims these anti-air missiles it possesses have fantastic ranges, eyewatering velocities, mindblowing engagement envelopes and target portfolios far exceeding anything the western countries are capable of fielding.
These weapons "ne imieyet analoga v mirie" as you like to say, yes?
Sounds pretty scary. Maybe even destabilizing if we were to believe these claims. Yet I've never really heard us making any major complaint about these defensive wonder weapons being deployed by Russia the way Russia complains about our Patriot, THAAD or AEGIS.
The one case of strong opposition against them is Turkey but that is not an issue of capabilities, only of sharing information.
The S-400 Turkey bought isn't exactly open source gear and it's not ours. It requires regular cooperation with Russian specialists to maintain and service the proprietary hardware. We can't be certain it won't be used to get information about our shit.
Modern air defense systems are meant to constantly collect information on the what they see and update target libraries on the fly to better adapt in war. The Turkish S-400 would gather sensitive RCS, IR and sensor profiles of all the NATO platforms cooperating with the system, which the Russians could extract and use against us.
I'd say it's prudent to try to block an ally from buying a system that could easily be exploited to give important data to the enemy.
By the way Tomahawk isn't supersonic. Most cruise missiles currently operated by NATO are subsonic. I think only France is operating a supersonic.
A nuclear one, carried only by jets. So, you know, good old France could hop a single unassuming Rafale over to Germany or Poland and lob a fast mach 3+ nuke at Kaliningrad, start WW3 in under an hour at any given time with no advance warning but you're worried about the possibility of incomprehensibly stationary Tomahawks hogging up the space in our boutique fucking AEGIS setup where every cell is VIP premium deluxe.