The point of the troops isn't to be an invincible garrison that no army can conquer, it's just to act as a deterrent and trip wire.
I don't believe there's any realistic scenario where the Turkish military would attempt to seize the bombs, but if they did do something so insane the garrison would force them into fighting and killing hundreds of NATO personnel and capturing the rest. That sets in motion an inevitable response, and one that ensures any rouge military authority in Turkey would not last long.
There's similar logic to why the US maintains a force in South Korea. They aren't expected to solely defeat a full scale attack from the North, but can directly respond to smaller aggressions. If the north did overrun them, killing US troops, there would be no domestic political debate concerning whether to respond in the US.
To put it so bluntly as to be distasteful: they're there to die.
>> To put it so bluntly as to be distasteful: they're there to die.
Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft can reach the airbase in 15 mins. That is enough of a deterrent, I'm certain.
It's possible the US has some sort of pre-arranged agreement with Israel, and if not, Israel would certainly respond to a US request as they did to help protect Jordan from Syrian tanks in 1970.
Because declaring war on the most potent military force on the planet (along with all of NATO), murdering its troops in an ambush, and taking at least hundreds of hostages, is going to turn out really well for Turkey.
They'd be likely to get carved up in a back-room deal with Russia and NATO. The US would immediately declare war on Turkey and begin destroying its cities and infrastructure. The Turkish air force would be completely disabled within a week. All major access points to Turkey's cities, all transit lines, would be bombed and disabled, shutting down their economy and supply lines. All power generating stations and major grid lines would be disabled or bombed and non-functioning within the first week. Air superiority would be accomplished rapidly, the US could sit outside of Turkey and hit major targets with cruise missiles at will.
So what was your premise again, the US would lose some troops? Well that happens in a war. Is the premise that Turkey would threaten to use or attempt to use the nukes on US allies? All that would accomplish is providing justification for either preemptively nuking Turkey to put an end to the war, or dramatically escalating the all-out attack on Turkey to attempt to cripple them faster and convince the military to turn on Erdogan (which would happen very quickly). There's no scenario in which Turkey is a meaningful threat for long.
I think you're vastly underestimating 1st world intelligence capabilities. By the time anyone is brainstorming how exactly they want to take the base the big players in NATO already have guys sitting in jets idling on the taxiway, an aircraft carrier is taking a hard turn into the wind and an aide is popping popcorn and cracking a beer so Mr. Putin can enjoy the spectacle.
When nukes are involved things get taken very seriously. Nobody wants to be the guy who thought it would all blow over and got it wrong.
Really? Doesn't the following section from the OP directly contradict that view: "In 2010, peace activists climbed over a fence at the Kleine Brogel Airbase, in Belgium, cut through a second fence, entered a hardened shelter containing nuclear-weapon vaults, placed anti-nuclear stickers on the walls, wandered the base for an hour, and posted a video of the intrusion on YouTube. The video showed that the Belgian soldier who finally confronted them was carrying an unloaded rifle."
I'm sure conditions are exactly the same in Turkey right now; who'd dream of taking guard-duty seriously there?
And yeah, I'm sure the western intelligence-agencies are as sure to plant moles in anti-nuclear movements as in the rapidly deteriorating Turkish military high command.
I think you are giving people far too much credit, and wrapping it in too much nonsense. The amount of absolute intelligence failure (intentional or otherwise) in the last 15 or so years has been astounding.
You mean the same intel which said Iraq / Iran / Libya / Syria has weapons of mass destruction? There is also a chance Israel or Russia would bomb the site, before those bombs get in wrong hands.
Don't get me wrong, I oppose the kind of government that the Iranians have right now, but the chemical weapons supplied by the West were mainly used against the Iranians. And with a terrible outcome for the Iranians.
AFAIK, West governments (USA, West Germany) supplied only dual-use pesticides to Iraq, but then, after Iran-Iraq war with use of chemical weapons by Iraq, these dual-use chemicals were banned [1]. Do you know any other facts about supplying of dual-use chemicals or chemical weapons to Iraq by West?
"Other German firms sent 1,027 tons of precursors of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and tear gasses in all. This work allowed Iraq to produce 150 tons of mustard agent and 60 tons of Tabun in 1983 and 1984 respectively, continuing throughout the decade. All told, 52% of Iraq's international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin. One of the contributions was a £14m chlorine plant known as "Falluja 2", built by Uhde Ltd, a UK subsidiary of a German company; the plant was given financial guarantees by the UK's Export Credits Guarantee Department despite official UK recognition of a "strong possibility" the plant would be used to make mustard gas."
This looks implicating to me to a degree that there is no doubt in my mind that these governments supported the chemical weapons program of Iraq. I also read that there were actually German soldiers on the ground during the Iran-Iraq war that helped the Iraqis use the chemical weapons correctly, although there is no proof for that other than a few people who testified. I at least believe this is possible.
But yes, they wanted Iraq to destroy Iran, when they saw that they couldn't do it they wanted the weapons gone.
Intelligence has discovered some very valuable information, but it has always been unreliable. There's plenty of information that is never discovered, and there's an incredible amount of noise that these intelligence agencies are collecting, that the signal is hard to find. To make things worse, other intelligence agencies are purposely spamming everyone else with noise and false information. The really hard part is figuring out what's true and what's valuable.
Agents have historically been fond of generating false intelligence to prove that they are valuable, and historical documentation has shown that agents aren't always that competent.
Using technology certainly helps, but it has its limits. Human intelligence tends to get better information, but can be unreliable and generate lots of false information.
It would not surprise me at all if intelligence agencies failed to realize something is coming. Hindsight shows that the intelligence failures in 9/11 and Iraq were due to valuable information not being identified or the intelligence community sucking up false information from informants who were just making it up to stay in the CIA payroll. It's a real hit and miss sort of business.
> If what you write is true they should have had clear warning about that coup attempt. It might have succeeded.
Or, the relevant intelligence agencies had clear warning, a good estimate of capabilities and what it would take to defeat it, and were able to intervene to assure that the Erdogan government was capable of putting down the coup
Or they had clear warning, sufficient intelligence about the intentions and orientation of the coup plotters that they were comfortable that the weapons would be no less safe even if the coup succeeded.
I'd be surprised if they don't have the capability to disarm them and destroy the "interesting" components relatively quickly.
I would also be surprised if (besides initial instability) the expected outcome of a military coup is much worse than the status quo.
With the current situation there's probably not much good of saying "yeah, that place is pretty fked so we gtfo'd." Which exactly the message sent by loading up all your nukes and gtfoing at ~Mach 2.
If find that a more worrisome scenario than a failed coup. The previous (successful) coups in Turkey ended with the military handing back power as soon as it was feasible and they have traditionally only done this to safeguard Turkey as a secular state.
Going with your suggestion would indicate that this safeguard no longer exists.
Why would the weapons need to get out? Why wouldn't the weapons be equipped with a self-destruct, or self-disablement mechanism? Why wouldn't the US destroy the facility if there was a risk of the weapons being used?
Non-proliferation, for one. If Turkey goes hardline Islamic and it would get its hands on those weapons that would make it yet another hard to predict factor in Middle-East politics.
> Why wouldn't the weapons be equipped with a self-destruct, or self-disablement mechanism?
Anything that can be added can be removed and likely such mechanisms would not work (for obvious reasons) by remote control.
> Why wouldn't the US destroy the facility if there was a risk of the weapons being used?
Because they were too busy saving their asses? Because raining bombs on Turkey would probably not be a better solution than getting those weapons out while it was still possible?
>Anything that can be added can be removed and likely such mechanisms would not work (for obvious reasons) by remote control.
Surely the 2000 troops would be able to initiate a self-destruct sequence before being overtaken. I'm sure there are already protocols in place. The mechanism would likely not be remote control, but hard-wired into the facility.
>Because they were too busy saving their asses? Because raining bombs on Turkey would probably not be a better solution than getting those weapons out while it was still possible?
You posited a situation where the US troops were already overtaken. In such a situation, the US probably would have already launched a strike that would destroy the facility <30 minutes from authorization.
They can provide the necessary standard of security from random intruders, and hopefully act to disable the bombs rather than lose them if it comes to that.
Three days ago they had the power to the base cut off and a 'no fly' zone was created over the base. It has exactly one runway that would only take a few well placed bombs to put it out of commission. Yesterday they were still on 'internal power' (aka diesel generators).
Now, I'm sure the US would do everything they could to avoid those weapons falling the wrong hands but I think you're being a bit over-confident about the situation there, which even now is far from stable and the US/Turkey relationships are right now at a historic low.
I don't believe there's any realistic scenario where the Turkish military would attempt to seize the bombs, but if they did do something so insane the garrison would force them into fighting and killing hundreds of NATO personnel and capturing the rest. That sets in motion an inevitable response, and one that ensures any rouge military authority in Turkey would not last long.
There's similar logic to why the US maintains a force in South Korea. They aren't expected to solely defeat a full scale attack from the North, but can directly respond to smaller aggressions. If the north did overrun them, killing US troops, there would be no domestic political debate concerning whether to respond in the US.
To put it so bluntly as to be distasteful: they're there to die.