llm/846c9a15-b41d-4838-95e2-c7f2b00a317f/topic-13-753c7b15-8f3b-425d-953b-0ffdf3456bd3-input.json
The following is content for you to summarize. Do not respond to the comments—summarize them. <topic> Military Operation Speculation # Air defense shutdown theories, insider cooperation, Cuban bodyguard deaths, helicopter vulnerability, operational security </topic> <comments_about_topic> 1. The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike. They are the North Korean leadership saying that if the US (or China or anyone really) tries to surgically decapitate them (like the US just did in Venezuela) then the nukes are used to take the attackers with them 2. Nah, Kim will now wet his bed for weeks. If any dictator willing to deliberately kill thousands for nothing knew he could wake up in a chopper the world would have been a better place. 3. China, Cuba and Russia sent him air defences and some personal guards. What would China's millions do if Kim was kidnapped? Invade Seoul that had no say in it? 4. From where would an hypothetical operation to kidnap Kim be launched? Likely from SK or Japan, right? So yes, China could retaliate. The operation against Maduro was launched from countries in the region aligned with the US. 5. Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. They can be in international waters, the choppers fly quite far. China would not retaliate against the US. 6. My point is that since in this scenario SK would likely be involved in some capacity (granting safe passage, harboring US planes, etc) they would suffer retaliation by NK and possibly China. I don't see what's unlikely about this, it's basically NK's defense strategy. 7. China knows about carriers, and tracks them carefully. They have built a variety of weapons to sink them, too, but I don’t think they’d need to use them: note how the raid on Maduro went so quietly that people have been looking for evidence that some of the Venezuelan military were in on it? North Korea has built up a lot more paranoia and China wouldn’t need to sink a carrier, simply ensuring that the NK military knows what’s coming as soon as planes take off and communicates that in a way which makes it impossible for any potentially disloyal faction to act short of declaring a coup (you can’t “accidentally” miss something the entire chain of command knows about). I detest the NK government but I’d expect that to be a much bloodier fight, especially after a huge warning. 8. > Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. It wasn't just carriers in Maduro's case. The operation was carried from multiple places, including out of Caribbean countries aligned with the US. The US was literally signing deals with those countries months in advance. Who would those countries be in an hypothetical NK strike? Because those countries would suffer retaliation. 9. Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country. The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down. 10. >but even doing that successfully would require an extraordinary level of luck. On a normal day it'd probably not be a huge problem for Pakistani ballistic missiles to penetrate those bases’ own air defenses. However if the US was planning a strike, there'd certainly be Aegis BMD coverage there, which would be a problem. It's possible they'd even deploy THAAD to protect some bases. 11. Didn't we just do something like that in Iran? Not helicopters, but we still secured the airspace just the same. 12. Securing airspace for fancy stealth bombers is rather different from securing airspace for helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything. 13. If you mean during the israel-iran war, israel was allegedly using non-stealth planes once the airspace was secure. Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike. 14. Well yes, the US could certainly easily kidnap leaders of friendly countries. It'd also presumably be very unlikely to result in a nuclear response from either. 15. Honestly from what we learned in the earlier attacks on Iran the USA probably could take a quick trip over to Tehran and grab the Ayatollah. 16. I think clanky covered this pretty well, but dropping bombs from high altitude stealth bombers and fighter jets is very very far from actually delivering and extracting soldiers from a location. The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also. 17. It's odd that Iran was able to continue launching waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel after they had supposedly lost so much control over their skies that it would have been possible to hover a Chinook over Tehran for 5 minutes. 18. >It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention. Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did. 19. >Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention. No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat. A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation. Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small. >Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did. Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick. 20. The reporting suggests there was some kind of deal struck between the US and elements of the VZ administration, and even nuclear capability doesn't prevent that 21. Probably, but there is also some speculation usa had help on the inside, so it probably depends on the nature and pervasiveness of that help. 22. There's still a lot of information coming out, a lot of it conflicting, so that's hard to say. And frankly, the Venezuelan military is absolutely tiny and has been facing the same economic issues as the rest of the country. They have 24 F-16s, but rumor is none of them work anymore, maybe some SU-30s, but those would be shot down pretty much as soon as they were scrambled. There was pretty heavy bombing before hand to knock out AA. And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there; blowing up a graveyard for shits and giggles on an op is some shit even cartels have a little bit more respect than to do. IDK, the whole thing seems like equally could have been mostly what it says on the tin, with no more than the normal intelligence HUMINT/SIGINT/*INT cloak and dagger crap to have the right intelligence. 23. the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money (at least couple hundreds of millions), and after completing the time will end up with his money in Russia/Belarussia. We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes. Using nukes isn't just a matter of pressing a button, it involves a lot of people and processes - thus any significant opposition inside the force or just widespread sabotage will make it unusable. 24. It strikes me as completely possible that the exit was negotiated. The fact that they knew his exact location and "luckily" nabbed him right before he went into some kind of panic room / bunker is certainly... something. But it seems equally likely to me that he was sold out by somebody in the VZ government/military. And that the paltry military resistance was because they saw direct confrontation with the US as suicidal. 25. 80 of their guys died? Not just venuzuelans. If it was negotiated then maduro negotiated his own closest security forces to be killed as a cover. Not impossible but certainly in the tinfoil hat range of possibilities. 26. I wonder what kind of capabilities the US army didn't use during this operation. 27. Let’s be honest, that was a crazy operation. I wonder whether they really secured all chances of success, or just winged it with chances of not depositing the leader, and him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA. While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice. 28. The outcome is less-crazy if one views it as assisting a palace-coup, partnering with a bunch of Venezuelan government and military insiders already seeking to depose Maduro, able to subtly clear the path and provide intel. 29. we don't really have a way to tell if it was even real, it would actually be a rather trivial operation for the government during those times and the entire thing could have just been overplayed and/or involved collaboration from all sides. none of those documents exist since it was probably never documented to begin with so we will never know I guess. 30. Alternative theory: Part of the operation caused power outages or disrupted some connections, the BGP anomalies were a result of that. The data would make that more likely, because deliberately adding a longer route doesn't achieve much. It's not usually going to get any traffic. 31. What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect. For example, maybe some misconfiguration caused these routes to be published because another route was lost. Which could very well be the actual cyber attack, or the effect of jamming, or breaking some undersea cable, or turning off the power to some place. 32. General Caine specifically said they utilized CYBERCOM (which is the US inter-branch hacking command) to pave the way for the special ops helicopters. I personally have no doubt that any (whether or not they all were) lights being out was due to a US hack. Some of the stuff that got blown up may well have been to prevent forensic recover of US tools and techniques. 33. Something like this more or less happened during the initial Israeli strike on Iran ? From what I remember reading, they were able to gain air dominance not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside, allowing the Israeli jets to annihilate them. 34. > not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside, Wouldn't that constitute air defense being "bad"? There are no "well technically it should have worked" in war. Failing to properly secure the air defense sites is bad air defense. 35. Not really. Ferrari is a great car, but with punctured tires or bad driver, it won't win any race. Although I do agree, that in war only the final outcome is important. It's just that in this case it failed not necessarily because of technology, but because of humans. 36. A Ferrari with punctured tires isn’t a great car, it can’t drive. It’s an immobile, useless hunk of metal with a great engine and transmission, similar to disabled air defense systems: really expensive, useless hunks of metal. 37. See the remotely operated Spike missiles: https://www.twz.com/news-features/spike-missiles-that-destro... 38. The unquestioning logistical and intelligence support from the US military is truly formidable, and probably expensive. 39. The only anomaly was military. As far as I can tell, Venezuela's AD was shut down, or told to shut down. Didn't the US use Chinooks? They're supposed to be loud. And AD didn't take even one out. If Venezuela as corrupt as most socialist countries, I have no doubt that someone in his inner circle gave him up. Back in the days of our version of socialism we had Indian politicians selling out for $100K, leave alone $50M. </comments_about_topic> Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) summarizing the key points and perspectives in these comments about the topic. Focus on the most interesting viewpoints. Do not use bullet points—write flowing prose.
Military Operation Speculation # Air defense shutdown theories, insider cooperation, Cuban bodyguard deaths, helicopter vulnerability, operational security
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