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Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

the uk flew a refueling sortie out of qatar for the israelis supporting this strike. i will let you draw your own conclusions about who knew what

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I'm skeptical of that claim. I'm not even sure the Israelis would need refueling assets for this. According to the DoD source in the article, the ALBMs were fired from aircraft over the red sea. That's not far from Israel. Depending on the aircraft used and the exact loadout aerial refueling would probably be unnecessary. If it was necessary, Israel has aerial refueling assets of its own: they were able to conduct a strike campaign against Iran, which is much further away, without foreign tanker support.

It just doesn't make sense to me. This seems well within Israel's own capabilities. Why would they even ask another country for support? Just adds diplomatic complexities and increases the risk of the strike getting leaked.

It is my understanding that the UK refuelling system is incompatible with the one the Israelis use. Probe and drogue vs flying boom (or whatever the US/Israeli one is properly called).

That surprises me, I thought all NATO planes were interoperable. Israel isn't part of NATO but their systems are mostly sold by NATO countries. US jets can't use UK tankers?

Each system has its pros and cons, and as a result both methods are widely used. Even the US isn't standardized. The US Air Force I believe largely uses the boom method, while the US Navy largely uses the probe-and-drogue system. Though I believe some aerial tankers are capable of providing fuel via either method.

I think interoperability and modularity as core concepts in military design are "only" a few decades old and as such there's probably plenty of existing systems that haven't needed to be replaced yet, or can't be replaced due to constraint chains that will start fitting into that dogma over time.

Even the US airforce and US navy don't use systems that are compatible between them.

Is this something that is known? Or is it like a military secret kind of thing?

I am looking on the web and it seems to be indeed the case. It also seems UK tankers can't even fuel UK F-35, which is a bit lame.

Aren't their planes incompatible with the fueling requirements of the Israeli planes?

They are incompatible. He is lying or not smart enough to filter out propaganda.

> He is lying or not smart enough to filter out propaganda.

This kind of divisive rhetoric helps no one.

Do you have confirmation of this given what people are saying below? If true it is yet another thing to complain to our MPs about.

So you're saying the entire part about ALBMs (the crux of this article) is fake. Why not start with this then?

Maybe conspiracy theories are not welcome here.

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