Black Hawk Down, does it matter?

[Azrael]

Ibrahim and Colonel Sun:

I think you all would find this link on Economic Complexity very interesting:

http://macroconnections.media.mit.edu/f ... servatory/

[Azrael]

[Ibrahim]

[Azrael]

[Ibrahim]

[Azrael]

[Ibrahim]

[Azrael]

[AzariLoveIran]

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

it is easier by many orders of magnitude to imitate than invent.

dont forget how much technology was given, sold and stolen during the Clintonista era

but the inscrutable empire is still confined to the china sea and environs.

another 20 years though the way things are going ....

we will all be studying mandarin

or the chineese spring

will shuffle the facts.


your call.

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

thank you Dr Azarri

but have been to the healing spring

near Balkh and have recovered fully.

[monster_gardener]

[monster_gardener]

[skyhook77sfg]

many thanks for such a luscious quote buried in a rather incisive post:


* As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.'

[AzariLoveIran]

.

Look "monster_gardener" , who the fuck are Indonesia or Malay ? you as good as I (and everybody else) know, from India to Kamchatka, all economy, is run by Chinese .. that since long long time

Who runs Philippine and Indonesia and Thailand and and and real economy ? the Chinese .. if the Chinese leave, Indonesia would drown in shit

All that is Chinese Hinterhof .. Vietnamese know it, Indonesian know it, Thai know it .. and you should accept it

So, mind your own business .. you neither have the power, neither the deep pocket, nor the balls to confront China

So, let's be friend

Silly notion (the new gag), promoted by GOP, let go of Islam rubbish and concentrate on China, could lead to USSR scenario, only this time, you the one who for sure will go bankrupt

So, let go, and enjoy (your hemisphere) and let Japs & Chinese handle it


.

[skyhook77sfg]

STEALTH NEWS FLASH





Two years ago, pictures leaked of a previously unknown, bat-winged drone operating out of Afghanistan’s Kandahar airport. Speculation spiked about the mission of the mysterious aircraft, instantly nicknamed “the Beast of Kandahar” by secret plane-spotter extraordinaire Bill Sweetman.

The drone’s smooth, curved shape meant it was stealthy — hard for radars to spot. But the Taliban didn’t have any radars. So what was the Beast doing?

Some suggested that it might be snooping on Iran’s nuclear program. Others thought the drone (officially known as the RQ-170 Sentinel) might be the test bed for a new, microwave weapon to fry enemy electronics or a next-gen jammer to screw with enemy communications. The drone was even spotted over Korea; maybe it was watching missile launches while avoiding the prying eyes of our foes in Pyongyang?

Turns out, the Beast wasn’t dodging enemy radars, at least not lately. It was avoiding detection by our putative allies in Pakistan, as it gathered intelligence about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.


The CIA used the drone to “fly dozens of secret missions deep into Pakistani airspace and monitor the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed,” according to the Washington Post

The use of the Beast in the hunt for bin Laden has been a more-or-less open secret since the May 2nd raid on his compound. But the extent of the drone’s employment wasn’t clear.

In fact, we called the bin Laden compound “drone-proof” shortly after the assault, because of its location far inside Pakistani territory and near a military cantonment. Send a standard-issue Predator or a Reaper drone there, “and it lights up on radar like a Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Pakistani surface-to-air missiles would have brought it down in an instant,” we wrote.

Which is why the CIA went with the Beast, instead. “It’s not like you can just park a Predator overhead — the Pakistanis would know,” a former U.S. official tells the Post. But a stealth drone can sneak right by.

Of course, Islamabad allows U.S. drones to fly over its territory all the time. But that’s in the remote tribal areas along the Afghan border. Bin Laden’s crib was 35 miles from the Pakistani capital. Totally different story.

The Beast never spotted bin Laden directly. But “the agency concluded after months of watching the complex that the figure frequently seen pacing back and forth was probably the al-Qaida chief,” according to the paper. The drone, which is believed to have a 48-foot wingspan and a gross takeoff wright of 2700 pounds, also had eavesdropping equipment. That allowed American operatives to listen up, in case the Pakistanis caught wind of the secret aircraft spying overhead.


PIC OF THIS PUPPY AT

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05 ... akistanis/

[monster_gardener]

[monster_gardener]

[monster_gardener]

[skyhook77sfg]

MONSTER

not so much kind as deserved.

glad to hear the word on Alissa Rosenbaum went to davey goldman.

perfect amos.

just perfect.

[skyhook77sfg]

more from the danger room

re rotary wing stealth.....









By now we know that the two helicopters that deposited the 23 U.S. operatives (and their dog) into Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2 were no standard-issue Army rotorcraft. Rather, they were stealth modifications of the MH-60 Blackhawk, optimized to reduce their noise, infrared and radar signatures.

But there’s a growing belief that other stealthy choppers might have been present, as well. It’s the latest in a series of revelations regarding the sophisticated tactics and techs behind the high-stakes raid.

We know about the pair of radar-evading Blackhawks because one of the elusive birds — dubbed “Silenthawks” by the media — crashed inside the bin Laden compound, leaving behind an intact tail rotor that photographers documented the following morning and aviation geeks used to infer the aircraft’s overall configuration.

That crash, plus the dicey politics surrounding the CIA-led assault, offer up circumstantial evidence of an even more secretive “silent” helicopter: a possible variant of the twin-rotor MH-47 Chinook, sporting the same stealth treatments as the Silenthawk and operated by the same 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Early reporting, including our own, proposed that Chinooks likely participated in the raid, for purely mathematical reasons. Twenty-four Navy SEALs and one dog would max out the capacity of a pair of H-60s. A single H-47, never mind two, could carry the whole assault force with room to spare.

That assumption was challenged on May 3, when CIA chief Leon Panetta said the assault birds were definitely “Blackhawks.” The same day, the photographic evidence surfaced of those choppers’ special mods. From that, observers concluded that the operation was conducted without Pakistani approval, and indeed against their wishes, using H-60 helicopters capable of slipping past Islamabad’s radars.

That seemed to definitively rule out the big, loud, radar-reflecting Chinooks. “I don’t believe that ‘normal’ MH-47s were involved,” Cenciotti wrote on May 6, owing to “considerations on the stealthiness of the formation.”

Then, this week, off-the-record government sources told the Associated Press that three Chinooks indeed supported the Abbottabad operation, as a reserve force. The school-bus-sized aircraft — normally used to haul platoons in Afghanistan’s mountains — “land[ed] in a deserted area roughly two-thirds of the way to bin Laden’s compound.”

The reserve choppers carried two dozen reinforcement Navy SEALs, in case the original assault team needed rescuing. With room for around 40 troops in each craft, that left plenty of room for the back-up Chinooks to exfil the SEALs in the compound — a contingency that proved necessary when one of the Silenthawks went down.

Cenciotti connected the dots, from the need for stealthiness to the confirmed presence of H-47s. “I believe that there must be also a modified MH-47 flying with the 160 SOAR,” he concluded on May 18. “Unlike the Blackhawk, we have no photographic evidences of it, but I think that their existence is somehow confirmed…. ”

It’s plausible. Sikorsky, maker of the Blackhawk, surely had a hand — alongside the Army and Lockheed Martin — in producing the Silenthawk, perhaps relying on techniques it refined while developing the now-canceled RAH-66 Comanche stealth scout copter.

Boeing, which manufactures the Chinook, was Sikorsky’s partner on Comanche, and has since used that chopper’s heat-absorbing paint on its own V-22 Osprey tiltrotor.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Colonel Sun]