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In article .com,
wrote:

tone of their reporting seems to imply a bias toward the Iranians. And
they seem top have good access to unimpeachable sources inside Iran.
Were it not for their astute reporting, we would never know what was
going on inside Iran.

I think this is an overstatement, or at least a misstatement. You are
implying, essentially, that they are tools of the Iranian government. But
that's clearly _not_ the case. In their F-14 book they make it quite clear
that the Iranian revolutionary government has been pretty repressive towards
the air force and the pilots. This is actually understandable, because the
Iranian pilots were trained in the 1970s by the US and naturally a
revolutionary government would be suspicious of these people.

Cooper makes clear that many of his sources are ex-pat Iranians--people who
left the country even as late as the mid-1990s. Not all of these people
would necessarily be against the current government, but a fair number of
them certainly are.

My interpretation of this is that Cooper and Bishop are essentially a couple
of guys who have a major interest in the Iranian air force and are impressed
by it, but certainly not pro-Iran. They could be characterized as "pro
Iranian air force" while "anti Iranian government." But they're more likely
simply buffs who think that the Iranian air force is interesting--and cool.
That doesn't imply sympathy toward the government, or any kind of government
sanction. I think that they've probably built up sources over time and
these sources trust them to greater or lesser extent.

My concern is less with their bias than with their analytical methods. Bias
is easily detectable, but methods are not. I don't know how careful they
are at checking their information. I'm not saying that they're bad at it,
only that I don't know how carefully they check it. For instance, if one
person tells them something do they report it, or do they only report it if
they can confirm it from another source? We don't know that. Fortunately,
some of their claims are proven by their photographs. We can tell, for
instance, that Iran was still showing off its F-14s as recently as 2004.
And although they did not put an AIM-54 missile on display, they did display
a training round, which obviously implies that they still train to fire
these missiles.


Thanks for correcting me on our supply of curise missiles. It is nice
to have 2000 on hand and to be able to expend 300 in a day or two's
worth of attack.

The exact number is classified, but I believe that the last time I saw a
discussion of this in a military journal they said that the number was "over
2600."


area be raked over by SEAD Vipers, F-15E's dropping bombs on value
targets with cruise missiles hitting air bases to maximize confusion
and F-15C's doing air interdiction of enemy aircraft and all steps
being taken to ensure that the SAM belt is completely eliminated before
the B-2's come. You want to get them all the very first time, but you
never know what may happen. The Golden BB is the thing aircrew fear
the most.

I don't think there is any point to playing armchair general and positing
highly speculative scenarios about how a war would be conducted.

However, the article that I refer to does make some interesting points that
the Iranians have managed to keep a lot of vintage American equipment in
service despite all odds. The one thing about the F-14 is that its Phoenix
missiles would make it a threat from long range. They could stay well
within the air defense umbrella and fire at distant American targets. If
the article is correct and at least a couple of dozen aircraft remain
operational, then they could present a problem to any American air campaign.
The threat to US aircraft is certainly greater from SAMs than aircraft, but
that has been the case for decades.




D