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It's come to my attention that in addition to the F-117 everyone acknowledges that they had shot down, Serbian military records list a shoot-down of a B-2 , which crashed in Croatia, using a similar method - booting up the radar extremely briefly during a NATO bombing mission. Saw loads of targets - one of them was ~ 15km away, looked very peculiar. Fired two S-125 missiles at it. The plane immediately started evading but was damaged by either or both 60 kg blasts, and then crashed just outside of Serbia, in Spačva basin.
Here's the fairly pretty interesting in-depth account on how it supposedly went down. It opens up with claiming that after may 20, 1999, all B-2 bombing missions of Serbia ceased, that the Spirit of Missouri was withdrawn from combat operations on May 20 and also presents a possibly verifiable claim that a section of near border woods in Croatia had an unusually heavy military presence.
At the end is they also present a Serbian hypothesis that the 2008 crash of B-2 in Guam was staged by crashing a remote-controlled B-2 test article that was secretly assembled at Guam, crashed via stall at takeoff and then passed off as the plane lost in '99.
Found this interesting bit of information on Quora, from a Serbian.
/images/1751914589569709.webp
EDIT: interesting info on in New York Times from 1991.. Full article.. I was previously unaware B-2 was ever found insufficiently stealthy in tests.
Strange and convenient coincidences of this kind happen more than you might think. Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.
Carrier groups fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea suffer all manner of random bad luck. Bad luck that strangely always seems to coincide with Houthi claims that they have struck American carriers. The USS Eisenhower had to be towed out of the Red Sea due to unspecified mechanical issues a day after the Houthis claim to have struck it. A few months later several members of its air wing died in a helicopter training crash. The USS Truman suffered extensive damage due to a freak collision with a civilian merchant ship just days after its Red Sea deployment. It also lost a fighter a few days after that because... because it just fell off the ship ok??
An American Marine general was mysteriously found dead in his quarters at 29 Palms Marine Base in California. Coincidentally he had just returned from unspecified duties in Ukraine. Coincidentally there had just been a particularly large round of Russian ballistic missile strikes against Ukraine, many of which OSINT analysts theorized were targeting NATO military advisors in Kyiv.
Members of elite special forces units tend to die in helicopter crashes during training exercises off the East and West coasts. Usually these training mishaps happen a few days or weeks after major Ukrainian offensives. A particularly nasty one claimed the lives of several Delta Force soldiers about a month after October 7, 2023. It was confirmed that Delta Force was assisting the IDF during raids to rescue hostages held in Gaza, but this crash is of course completely coincidental and did not happen anywhere near the Middle East.
AAQC'd even though it doesn't fit the "normal" profile of an AAQC because I really appreciate these types of comments that tell me about something interesting I didn't know about before (especially on topics that don't fall within the ambit of what normally gets discussed on TheMotte) and I want to encourage more of them.
Maybe you don’t know about them because they’re not actually reasonable?
Like, the same reasoning applies here as to underwater pyramids. Or moon landing skeptics. Or celebrity gossip. It’s bad epistemics.
Assuming the armed forces does not lie about who dies, how when and where seems... silly. The most obvious reason being that you might not want your enemies to know what is going on.
Oh, they probably do. Maybe even in these specific cases!
That doesn’t make a series of anecdotes into evidence.
That's the case for all anecdotes. On top of that, the nature of some questions can deprive us of our preferred tools to deduce fact from fiction. That doesn't invalidate the questions or unburden us from the consequence of the answers. Using heuristics to help guide us towards some sense of rationality is perfectly valid and reasonable.
A key example of this would be military propaganda. We know it was used. We know there were branches within the armed forces and government whose sole purpose was understanding, disseminating and otherwise advancing propaganda for whatever purpose. Seemingly all the major players in conflict hide or obfuscate their casualty numbers in a variety of scenarios. So without evidence we can reasonably claim that news about Ukrainian or Russian or IDF or HAMAS casualty numbers are at best skewed. Why would the US army be different in this regard? Maintaining a narrative of how strong the US specials forces are or how powerful the navy is seems to fall within the basic purview of a propaganda arm.
Yes, we are missing fact, but the nature of the subject matter kind of has that problem built in. That doesn't make it unreasonable. In fact, the only position on could argue that point from was if one believed one had a better understanding of reason than anyone else. That one is here to finger wag other people as if they can't understand the nature of the question and the inherent problems just overviewed.
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Do you think it’s ever reasonable to infer that the government is lying about anything, prior to it being vetted by “official” sources?
I distinctly remember thinking “damn why are training missions so dangerous?” at several points in the past. And this seems like a pretty reasonable explanation for why they’re so “lethal”. I don’t think that the government lying about cause of death for service members is on the same level as moon landing and UFO theories.
Yes, sure. I am absolutely willing to believe that the government covered up one or more of these things. But not on the basis of one guy listing his favorite coincidences. If the only reason you encounter a data point is because someone picked it for you, it’s not evidence. It’s trivia. It’s an excuse to repeat whatever you already believe, maybe feel a bit clever about it.
What’s the expected fatality rate for training? Is there historical data? Previous spikes whenever a U.S. ally fights some terrorists? Who knows? Who the fuck cares? Some guy on the Internet said special forces “tend to” do this, so it must be real.
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"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war." Training exercises are deliberately as close to the real thing as possible. That means safety rules that exist in peacetime are often waived. Flying low to the ground, jumping out of perfectly good aircraft, operating a boat with no lights or radar, for example, are all things that can easily go catastrophically wrong. But the military trains to do them anyway because practicing while no one is shooting at you is still safer than learning while under fire.
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Occam's Razor says that the same USN that's had multiple destroyer and carrier collisions in the past, including with merchant ships, including lethal ones, might also have another one, rather than a massive conspiracy that requires the entire crew of both ships (and any potential nearby observers) to be in on it.
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The counterpoint would be that training missions aren't especially lethal, there's just a lot of them.
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