We’ll give you credit for a gracious exit. Thanks for calling in.

BJ, As I’ve said before it’s not American’s per se that are the problem. Glad to have your contribution to NZ.

From this leetle discussion already:

- Defence needs to be taken seriously, and I commend you all on not just parroting the ‘let’s be nice to everyone and it will all go away’ meme that so stifles actual strategy and policy development.

- Current living conditions (cities, infrastructure) in NZ were never planned with any defence in mind. In military terms there is no hardening whatsoever. This leaves us quite vulnerable to even small events. I’ve often joked to colleagues that a handful of old farts in $200 cars could gridlock Auckland for weeks by stalling them at key junctions, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see that electricity, water, and sewerage could be similarly disrupted oh so easily.

- a tragic sensibility is needed for this sort of stuff, and a .mil background doesn’t go amiss, either.

Good luck for pulling all that together. And selling it to the troops - whoops - Green personages.

Roger, over and out.

it’s based on the following syllogism :

* Fisk is not only anti-war, but against all forms of army or armed police
* Anyone who approves of anything that Fisk writes or says must necessarily believe everything that Fisk believes

Neither of these terms has been demonstrated, so your strawman falls flat on his face, with a dull thud.

Hahahahahahah!

Well, if any such threat should take form — and there’d be time enough to see it coming — then I think a couple of dozen SAMs should take care of it. Soviet-era technology would be fine — it would be cheap to buy, and with the added advantage that you could hire technicians to maintain and run them pretty cheap.

i.e. sure, let’s examine REAL threats, and take measures to deal with them if it seems necessary.

I am severely puzzled as to why anyone who claims that we should be taking measures to deal with security threats, should choose to cite Iraq as an example… it was possible to be mistaken about it in 2002, but not today surely…
It has not only made the world a much more dangerous place; it has, unfortunately, severely discredited the notion of pre-emptive military action in general. I can think of circumstances in which an Iraq-style intervention might be desireable (I am not made of straw, but of sterner stuff), but it clearly won’t be politically possible for a long time to come.

As may be, I have no doubt that he’s not thought through the scenario. There are 4 million Kiwi’s here and a surprising number of weapons, not even counting the reserves and the regular army. Packing 5000 “fighters” plus THEIR weapons into 747’s, landing them simultaneously at any single airport or at “all our major airports” and accomplishing anything aside from getting a lot of people killed is beyond even my imagination. How many people in one of them? I think there’d have to be about 15 of the things, but we don’t have that many runways.

I reckon they’d last a day, maybe two at most. Do some damage, kill some people and die. Supported by Submarines? Just what sort of amphibious or other support of ground troops do you get from a submarine Waymad?

Not only do I know the Columbians have a submarine I know just how useless it is to them, and just how useless they are in general for doing ANYTHING to people on the beach…( except for the SSBN’s and those aren’t much use if you actually want property you can walk on ).

Face it Waymad, you’ve gone over the edge here. The scenario you describe doesn’t lead to anything particularly useful for an opponent even with almost NO preparation on our part.

Gill- There’s not likely to be a problem with the Americans. I know we’re the boogeymen, but there’s orders and there’s orders. Officers swear to protect and defend the Constitution, not the administration…. and even if Bush is NOT impeached his ability to sucker them into another war based on fake intelligence offerings is hovering near zero.

I can’t “guarantee” anything… it’s been thirty years since I had regular dinners with the guy who is the current Chief of Naval Operations… (he was my first CO), but I don’t think he’d buy any part of it… and I am sure he’s not alone in that and oil or no oil… they’re going to have a lot of OTHER problems.

For those of you who didn’t know, I am an American… and a permanent resident here for 2+ years now.

respectfully
BJ

You seem to be having some delusional half baked conversation with yourself. This thread is titled “Campbell and Fisk” - you’ve not only gone OT - but have started repeating yourself on another blog with no reference to the original argument.

Your assignment (should you decide to accept it): describe NZ’s general strategic response.

Then, how to get there from here. Tactics.

Hint: it’s a fair distance.

But that’s just the sort of scenario a Defence Policy should be assuming.

Thanks for the link. The pound of salt I provide myself. Always remembering where these things are ultimately coming from it is hard to know how much credence to give them. Point is, and this is important, they were not a serious or credible threat to the USA AND they were not among the reasons the war as they were presented to the Congress.

Waymad, if you can tell me in simple terms, what you worry about and why I could perhaps deal with it. Since I have a very seriously and thoroughly considered set of possible contexts in which we MIGHT have to use our military I would welcome any actual indication of where I might have a “blind spot”. I don’t think there is one. I am VERY well versed in Carrier Flight Operations, and the maintenance and skill levels required to manage a bird farm. No Reggie Kray or any private arms dealer will ever have that kind of clout. The delusion isn’t mine.

Sunny? Greens? We expect peak oil, global warming, mass starvation, flotillas of refugee boats, and a 6 meter increase in the ocean level by the turn of the century unless there’s a global thermonuclear war to usher in the next Ice-Age with a nuclear winter. We don’t expect a carrier task group.

respectfully
BJ