'Space bubbles' may have helped Taliban down 'copter in bloody Afghanistan battle The world has been treated to all sorts of excuses about why the United States and its allies from the UK and elsewhere failed to win the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Now boffins have put forward the bizarre suggestion that one of the Yanks' most infamous defeats was actually caused by a phenomenon called space bubbles. Lead …
No need for hush-hush - the operational effect is that under rare circumstances in certain bits of geography radio comms may fail. For a new reason, besides the other 101 grounds for comms failure. Exploiting the weakness requires some serious technical assistance (not as if the Taliban have many space assets) and a big dose of luck (maybe next time there's a flying comms relay or another friendly party nearby hears the confusion and relays, etc)
If some unfriendly major power wants to help the Taliban bag another chopper they'll find it easier and a lot more deniable to slip them a case of surplus short range missiles
"If you can easily manipulate the ionosphere, you probably already know about this effect and are advanced enough of an enemy this is the least of the US's worries."
So that's why the US government impounded all Tesla's equipment!
(The 'Death ray' was just a cover up.)
U.S Military will now buy a million barrels of Snake Oil from Toyota to fill in choppers and fly high closer to satellite.
Toyota Recall Might Be Caused by Cosmic Rays - LiveScience
www.livescience.com/8170-toyota-recall-caused-cosmic-rays.html
Toyota's Recall Woes May Have Started in Space | WIRED
www.wired.com/2010/03/toyota-cosmic-rays/
Cosmic Rays may be Causing Unintended Acceleration in Toyotas
http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/daily-news/100317-Cosmic-Rays-may-be-Causing-Unintended-Acceleration-in-Toyotas/
It has long been known that radio propagation is affected by solar and even weather conditions; communications problems that pilots ascribed to defective radios of one unit I was assigned to in Vietnam were quite often caused by flying above inversions that would not support propagation between aircraft and ground stations they were trying to reach.
That the ionosphere is often irregular is likewise well known by radio propagation specialists (and Amateur radio operators!), and mission planners knew that (lawyers would say "knew or should have known") -- and could have assigned alternate frequencies.
The remedy in my unit was simply to use a lower frequency less affected by inversions, and reports of defective UHF radio's dropped off substantially after I was able to alert our pilots to this phenomenon.
Take a look at William Hepburn's Worldwide Tropospheric Ducting Forecasts; to respect copyright, I have not linked to that site.
...when dropping bombs or "advisers" in Syria and Iraq (again).
Funny old world, isn't it? You spend a decade bombing the cr@p out of a place, it all goes to pot when you turn your back, but luckily the winning strategy turns out to be simply to drop more bombs, and supply yet more arms (often to the people you were fighting last week).
Luckily we now know that radio is not infallible, and when we're winning Sunni hearts and minds in this traditional manner we can do it a bit more safely.
No, no, this time the 'freedom fighters' we are supplying weapons to really are the nice ones. They promised that they wouldn't say 'thanks for the training and bang-bang kit', only to turn on us as yet another bunch of nutters in a decades time. I think a solemn commitment to be nice is enough, after all they are very religious, and you can always trust the devout ones, right?
Not even slightly. A more accurate description is:-
- SEAL recce team landed deliberately, but foolishly, on top of Takur Ghar. They were badly shot up in the process, but managed to take off again, during which one SEAL fell off the helicopter. While attempting a second landing to pick up this SEAL, the aircraft hydraulics failed it crash landed several miles away.
- after being picked up by a second helicopter, the SEAL team went back to search for their comrade on Takur Ghar, who, unknown to them had already been wounded and then executed by Chechen Al-Qaeda. They landed successfully, and mounted an attack in which several of the latter were killed, but were forced to withdraw. One Air Force combat controller was killed and two other SEAL's wounded. The SEAL's call for the Quick Reaction Force from a Ranger battalion.
- This Ranger unit landed on top of Takur Ghar after a breakdown in communications. This helicopter was shot down, and in the ensuing firefight over an entire day, 4 Rangers and an air force Para-recueman were killed
"In the interests of a fair and balanced view of the battle do we know how many Taliban were killed?"
A body count is difficult if not impossible when your opponents "own" the territory, but even if you manage it it tells you little. That's because there's no way of telling the mangled bodies of "my first Kalashnikov" yokels from senior, hardened and experienced fighters who really know what they're up to. Throw into the mix that the West clearly has not got a clue about who it is fighting, how many there are (eg, see wildly fluctuating CIA estimates on IS numbers), and the flexible loyalties of the locals, and you get a feel for how enemy casualties don't give any useful numbers.
A more telling picture of the overall position has to be the simple fact that the West got shown the door in Iraq (after destabilising and crippling the country) and now it has to go back. US estimates suggest war in Iraq has thus far cost the US $2 trillion (other countries' contributions are noted, but are rounding errors on the US magnitude of cost). And still the West need to drop more bombs.
So for a fair and balanced view, who's winning? I'd say that the insurgents (probable budget less than $200m since 2003?) are doing well to goad the US into launching a further fusillade of expensive cruise missiles, to have seized half of Iraq, and a third of Syria.
But this latest battle isn't about winning, it is about symbolism and vanity. If IS wanted to win, they'd have been nice as pie to their hostages, given them a message for the West, and sent them home with a few (non-explosive) gifts. Nobody in the West cares if IS slaughter a few hundred locals. Had IS been nice to the Western hostages, would Bamaboy be raining down more death on the Middle East? Probably not. Instead, IS indulge themselves with some more primitive brutality against journalists, tourists (and I sadly suspect, soon amongst aid workers), and invite attack from the US, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The vanity and symbolism for us in the West comes from televised pictures of cruise missile launches against IS, and infrared images of these missiles hitting unknowable buildings in Syria. Go Team West! Obama is a war president! Except that there will be further undesirable consequences from this latest bombings and supply of arms. Don't forget, at least one of the murdered hostages was sold by "moderate" rebel factions in Syria to IS, and a large chunk of IS' best weapons were supplied by the US to "moderate" rebels, or to the useless Iraqi army.
In 'Stan, we ended us spending a decade fighting people we'd trained, financed and armed because we thought they'd piss the Russians off. They most certainly did, but in the light of 9/11 and a decade of war in Afghanistan, was the cost to us acceptable? I'd say no. Many of you will have heard the parable of the good Samaritan. It's a lovely and enduring tale. Helping the downtrodden was a noble motive. But it didn't involve interfering in an ongoing fight. That's what the West is now doing, getting embroiled in not just one, but two civil wars at once, and as a side order inflaming extremism from Nigeria, through Algeria, Libya into the heart of the Middle East. The tragedy is that our simpleton politicians can't even see this.
Which bit of "leave well alone" is beyond the understanding of western politicians? Since Sykes-Picot they've interfered, meddled, messed and buggered up the whole place. So coming back to fair and balanced, who's winning? Irrespective of casualty numbers, the undisputed winners are the men of violence, and the forces of chaos. And our politicians must therefore fall into one of those two groups. I'll leave others to decide whether Obama, Cameron, Hollande et al are men of violence, or men of chaos.
I come from a military family, I have huge and enduring respect for the forces, I've worked in support roles to the military, my own son is shaping up to join the forces....if only our hugely skilled, professional, dedicated and competent forces were being used for good. Lions led by donkeys, yet again.
" Helping the downtrodden was a noble motive. But it didn't involve interfering in an ongoing fight. That's what the West is now doing, getting embroiled in not just one, but two civil wars at once, and as a side order inflaming extremism from Nigeria, through Algeria, Libya into the heart of the Middle East. The tragedy is that our simpleton politicians can't even see this."
Bamaboy, his predecessor Bush and the bevy of brown nosed supporters from other countries have waged war in the most cynical of ways; Not to help the downtrodden that they claim but to benefit from a growing number of destabilised and fragmenting former nations that have or are en route to resources the US and it's allies covet oil, gas, metals and other resources.
The Ukraine for example (once the breadbasket of the world) is on it's way to becoming the biggest GM lab on the planet if the new Ukrainian government doesn't manage to irradiate it and all controlled by US companies.
What really pisses me off now is that they don't really even make much of an effort to formulate a supposedly valid reason foe interfering in other peoples countries just the shallowest of statements and no effort to cover up or validate in some way the outrageous statements made by the likes of Victoria Nuland or Jen 'it's time for the next question' Psaki and many others.
Luckily for Bamaboy his own back yard is working with him in the Shape of Enrique Pena Nieto the current president who has a lot of support from the White house in dismantling all the previous beneficial reforms that have improved Mexico since the 1910 revolution.
The rest of South America not so much so look out for the NED donating funds down there.
".....Which bit of "leave well alone" is beyond the understanding of western politicians? Since Sykes-Picot they've interfered, meddled, messed and buggered up the whole place......" Sykes-Picot was signed in May 1916, the Sunni-Shia schism occurred right after Muhammed's death in 632 - do the maths and you might gain a clue to the fact that the 'mess' started long before Europe or America got involved. Indeed, Muslims started 'messing and buggering up the place' with their expansion out of the Arabian Peninsula in 634, taking advantage of the exhaustion caused by the wars between the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine empires. TBH, you need to do a lot more reading of history.
Just goes to show Special Forces are able to fuck up in special ways.
Also the ' never leave a man behind' practice even if he is dead has cost the Americans extra deaths, casualties and loss of materiel on several occasions.
But it does give them the excuse to bomb the crap out of bits of foreign lands in retribution.
MH370 explanation?
Theory: plane had massive onboard cargo fire, comms working barely due to cable burnination induced power loss but space bubble dropped it below the noise floor, leading to a lack of a distress signal.
Bubble also messed up the GPS signal causing erroneous positioning information.
Mystery solved?
GPS is just one of multiple navigation inputs - there are also several (commonly 3) sets of gyroscopes and even an old-fashioned magnetic compass. The lack of adequate GPS signal would be handled automatically (since it's absent rather than falsified)
And the fire theory doesn't need a "space bubble" anyway: rather than posit that the radio is 90% destroyed and so no signal, just assume that it's 100% destroyed: same result, bubble or not.
So (sadly) MH370 remains as mysterious as ever
For me there's if there's one outstanding achievement of the whole Afghan campaign it's one they said couldn't be done, even by a world-wide 'coalition of the willing'. It took hope, it took billions, it took time, great sacrifice and effort but against all the odds it finally came into being: a police force more gay than the Parisian Gendarmerie.
"62 miles (100km) wide"
I hate it when journalists do this. The original figure was 100km, which is only 1 significant figure. The journalist has then converted this into another (non-standard) unit and given the result to 2 significant figures, which of course is just plain silly. Should have said this:
"100km (roughly 60 miles) wide"
If the actual figure was 101, that is three significant figures and the translated number is still wrong. If you write 100 km, it is always assumed to have 1 significant figure. For as much as we joked about it cgs being Celestial Goofy Shit in astro, that was the reason to use it instead of kms. You wind up writing the number as x.y * 10^z so the number of digits in x is always the minimum number of significant digits.
but I got mad as hell when I heard it, because everyone knows if you going to run an LMG out the back of a shithook you BETTER hookup the safety line!!! This should be muscle memory to everyone that is air-mobile - I know the heat of battle can rattle your cage, but I still don't see it as an excuse.
The biggest DOH! About the whole affair is that after ALL we learned in Vietnam, and we still don't send gunships with these missions! Ridiculous!
delight in playing with transient 'space bubble' type weird events: look for "Trans Equatorial Propagation" (TEP), "Sporadic E"(Es) or "Auroral Es" or "Long Delayed Echo" for some 'amateur' viewpoints.
For mission-critical comms, would have thought that a bit of frequency diversity redundancy, ELF/MF emergency broadcasting, 121.5/243 overlay mesh network, even a stab at Mobile Telecommunication Privileged Access Scheme (MTPAS) might have helped?
Need to sort it out before the boots go on the ground in Al ash-Sham, ME does feature a lot of RF anaprop, mostly ducting, but then the coming winter campaign will see less of that. joy.
What a lazy excuse. Where was the Awacs to support that mission? Could have just radioed in with line of site. Hell, even a semaphore connection would have done. But nowadays Morse code is no longer taught as far as i know. Wars are still fought grunt to grunt and it will never change. Keep it simple. Recently, a group of Chinhooks came back from the baltics and they had to make a stop over in Poland and ask the locals for direction. Are this space warriors too stupid to even use the Satnav in their phones? This is exactly the reason why all this "islamic terrorists" are so succsesful. They keep it simple. No high tec army in the world will ever stop a dedicated group of men with AKs and CB Band comms. Drone controllers in a bunker somewhere in the states doing 9to5 bombing Talibans and go home with some war syndroms? Pussys all around. You wanna go to war? Bring on the grunts! but they cant run anymore because of 40kgs of HiTec on their backs instead of a beltback ammo. When a gouvernment decides to go to war it needs a dedication. Now how do you get dedication to fight in some fucking desert/mountain region which your president does not even find on a map? Oh, and don´t forget gender equality. What the Fuck? And that is why this religiuos driven, dedicated people will succeed in their quest. Anyone remembers Frank Herbert? Dune? Butler´s Jihad? Destruction of all HiTec? Interstellar fall back to analog technics? There you go! Herbert saw it coming.
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