On 1-Jan-2008, Matt Whiting wrote:

Your post covered a lot of ground, but your point above is very
important and not understood by Jay and others lacking knowledge of
military tactics and capability. It is very important to not be tricked
into showing what your true capabilities are and letting your enemies
think you have much less capability than you have is a very smart
tactic. The one exception was during the cold war when the MAD strategy
required showing a fair bit of your capability to your enemy.

Launching more aircraft than required for the threat at hand serves no
purpose other than to convey a lot of information about your capability.
I still believe based on what I know from both public and private
sources, the the main lag on 9/11 was a complete lack of any expectation
about an attack of this sort and the fact that the military really
wasn't prepared for it from a decision-making perspective more so than a
fundamental capability basis.

I agree with you Matt, except for one point. I am completely sure that the
Soviets knew exactly how many jets were up on alert status at each of the
NATO bases, and could probably even give you the tail numbers of the jets on
alert on any given day. Our OPSEC (Operations Security) left a lot to be
desired. Any time a ZULU jet had a problem, Job Control radioed the fact
along with the tail number of the afflicted jet to us in our AMU so we could
dispatch someone over to fix it. And when the jet was repaired, the fact was
radioed to Job Control as well. When a scheduled tradeout of tail numbers
was to be done, that info was also talked about openly on our radio net. The
only thing I can figure is that USAFE and NATO were quite convinced the
Warsaw Pact would never actually attack us, contrary to the public posturing
put forth about the "imminent Soviet Threat." I wonder if the whole
propaganda effort was just in order to keep their funding up, and continues
to this day supported by the paranoids in our government. I do know I came
away from that experience and several other experiences during my 10 years
Active Duty thinking that what we refer to as "Hawks" in our government
really don't know what they are talking about. To me they are just paranoid
beyond all reason. Remember the "Domino Theory" and how it was so important
to stop the Communists in Vietnam to prevent the global spread of Communism?
Well, the Communists won in Vietnam, and the dominos didn't fall. And all
the bluster about Saddam and Iraq from the Bush Administration leading up to
the invasion was simply ridiculous, and it's a shame that so many of our
people were paranoid enough to have bought into it. I believe it's our duty
to be skeptical of our government's claims of threats, they've proven
themselves not trustworthy in my view.
Scott Wilson