The Canadian Defense Minister now thinks that Pakistan is the “most dangerous country in the world”. At a talk I recently attended on Pakistan, the speaker said the country was ruled by the “Three A’s: Army, Allah and America”. And remember that America has no direct armed force in the fight.
Extremist attacks across nuclear-armed Pakistan in recent years have made it “the most dangerous country in the world,” Canada’s Defense Minister Peter MacKay said Monday. “I’m extremely concerned,” MacKay told a press conference. “The instability in Pakistan in my view makes Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world.”
Meanwhile, in other developments, Pakistan is going to test-fire the “Spada 2000 air defense system it has acquired from MBDA Italia”.
Across the border in Afghanistan, 84 schoolgirls were poisoned for the apparent crime of learning while female. The main goal of any terror-based insurgency is to maintain control over the population. Defeating superior counterinsurgency forces is secondary or even unnecessary. Who stays — in the village — wins. Who closes the schools — or keeps them open — wins. In some deeply philosophical way counter-terrorism is not at all about a “cycle of violence”. It’s about a clash of cultures.
At least 98 patients were admitted from Aftab Bachi school, including the principal, 11 teachers and two cleaners, said Khalid Enayat, the hospital’s deputy director. He said about another 30 students were being monitored to see if they developed symptoms, although they were not admitted to the hospital. An official earlier said 89 schoolgirls had been hospitalized.
Tuesday’s apparent attack is the third alleged poisoning at a girls’ school in less than three weeks. It comes one day after 61 schoolgirls and one teacher from a school in neighboring Parwan province were admitted to a hospital after complaining of sudden illness. They were irritable, confused and weeping, and several of the girls passed out.
Now there’s news that the USMC, perhaps without the budget to acquire AC-130 gunships of their own, have bought conversion kits called Harvest Hawk to convert KC-130 tanker assets into gunships. The kit will consist of “a modular surveillance and targeting pod taking up the rear portion of the inboard left external fuel tank, an AGM-114 Hellfire missile rack on the left wing, and a modular 30mm ATK cannon rolled in and mounted in the troop door.”
In other aviation news, Pratt and Whitney reports that it has successfully tested a “dual mode” ramjet engine. The interesting question is what sort of aircraft would use a dual mode engine.
A dual-mode ramjet engine is designed to operate as both a ramjet at moderate supersonic speeds (up to Mach 5) and a scramjet at hypersonic speeds (greater than Mach 5).
This broad range of operational capability is required for turbine-based, combined-cycle propulsion that would enable a vehicle to take off from and land on a conventional runway, and travel at speeds up to Mach 6.
One cited problem is the lack of any way to conceal such an aircraft. Wikipedia writes “there is no published way to make a scramjet powered vehicle (or any other hypersonic vehicle) have any sort of stealth. This is because the vehicle would be very hot due to its high speed within the atmosphere, and it would be easy to detect with infrared sensors. However, any aggressive act against a scramjet vehicle during flight would be nearly impossible because of the high speed at which it operates. However, if the aircraft was covered with RADAR absorbent material (RAM), the scramjet vehicle would be slightly more stealthy at lower speeds and altitudes.”
Lastly, one of the “wow” features at any Australian air show is the dump and burn routine of the F-111s, which the RAAF still operates. A video of a dump and burn shown below. Somehow I think it would be a bad idea to ask the RAAF to provide entertainment for a conference on Global Warming. embedded by Embedded Video
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…Poisoning schoolgirls for Allah…What kind of an animal does that ?
In other interesting COIN related aviation news, the Navy is placing in service 4 Super Tucano aircraft. These are propeller driven turbo prop aircraft that fill the same nich as the WWII vintage A-1 Skyraider. I would like to include some links but don’t want to get put in moderation. I’ll send links separately.
Navy Times Article on Super Tucano:
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/03/navy_tucano_031309w/
Wikipedia Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tucano
The A-1 Spad ought to be brought back as a UAV.
Compared to the Predator it would be so much cheaper.
They could be built in Taiwan/Brazil/(you name it) on the cheap.
No real concern about technology transfer for the basics.
“The World’s largest Zippo lighter”
Not for long… It always amuses me how the people most enthused about the ‘global warming crisis’ are often the exact same people intending to indulge in ‘private space travel’ joyrides (#1 hypocrite: Virgin’s Richard Branson).
Each person, during his or her few minutes of thrill-seeking, will be responsible for spewing out more atmospheric pollution than the rest of us manage to achieve in a normal lifetime.
As Glenn Reynolds has said, ‘I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people warning me about it start acting as if it’s a crisis’.
The Super Tucano debuted in Quantum of Solace. It was forced down by a C130 deftly flown by number 7.
The dog that isn’t barking? Women in the West’s response to such outrages (poisoning school girls for learning while female).
This to me suggests that the big beef Western women have is not female mistreatment … but hatred, fear, and competition with men in the West.
Think about. More than 80 schoolgirls poisoned for learning while female. Not a word by Western women. Not one.
Never fear, Whiskey. I’m sure Nahncee will be around soon to valiantly hop on your ass for being a “misogynist”.
Heh, Nahncee can come around all she wants. Balances whiskey.
The meme today around the news is who said what when about the ‘torture memos. Makes me want to ask what else is going on the current regime wishes to distract us from.
The 0bamantion is due to land in my town in about 15 minutes. He is staying the night and going to attend a ‘town meeting’ in Rio Rancho around some public theft or another tomorrow. I hope he eats some of the local chili and gets the runs. Gringos like him cannot hack it.
Oh, credit card debt reform or some such nonsense is the subject.
Like I said, what else is this one hiding?
The thing that gets me is that in these really tough economic times, why is the UOTUS/TOTUS jetting around the country weekly at the cost of how many millions? Just to allow us rubes the grace of his presence?
i think it was a dc-3 (two engines) not a c-130 (4 engines) in Q of S against the Turcano.
hey
my money is on ”marie crud” to climb up whiskeys’ dark canyon, not nahncee.
My hope is that events like the poisoning of the school girls will be a galvanizing event for non-Taliban all over the country. If the average citizen gets pissed off and empowered, they’ll make all the difference.
Whiskey, you make a good point about the far-left feminists. Maybe they are saying something somewhere, but this very pure kind of female suppression doesn’t seem to fit with their larger political picture.
It’s the same brand of hypocrisy you get from the left on things like Guantanamo. They want people hung from the yardarm for that, yet for whatever reason I don’t recall them criticizing human rights abuses in, say, Iran. If you view the world a certain way, fine, but you need to apply that view evenly or you lose credibility.
12. starko
You have to remember that the underlying credo is, “It’s USA’a fault” if any fact or set of other ideas run counter to tthat they are ignored/banished/discredited. So it is clearly the fault of the USA that the girls were poisoned, we encouraged them to go to school, ergo we are to blame.
Feminists here go nuts because the Dean of some University says what is a provem medical fact; men and women’s brains process information in different ways, and the poor sod is run out of his job. Iran makes a hobby of hanging girls as young a thirteen for resisting being raped (and does nothing to the rapist) well….that is just a “cultural phenomenon” and can’t even be commented upon.
1984 is here. Just a little late.
RE: The scramjet, I’m no aerospace whiz but some of the commenters here are pretty smart that way, would that be useable as a missle-intercept platform? Or does it take too long to get up to speed?
It seems that it would be a replacement for the SR-71 idea of “yeah, you can see me, but you can’t do a darned thing about it” for recon/strike-aircraft, or even for a hyperfast cruise missle.
So the enemy gets a pass on using chemical weapons against children by all concerned.
During the Reagan administration the Orient Express program was a hide in plain sight research project for hypersonic flight. The classified project that it probably supported was called the Aurora Project. Aurora was supposed to replace the SR-71 but appears to have been an operational failure. My guess is that this engine is part of the research fallout. We do need an operational replacement for the SR-71 because space assets are to orbitaly predictable and have no lotiare time.
DocBill, what makes you think there is no operational SR-71 replacement?
Just sort of a guess. The U2 is back in use and is a relatively poor platform for such missions. There is a “buzz” level out there in the “community” when this sort of thing is flying. Yea, Yea, I know area 51 and all and there are reports of sesimograph “trails” coming in from the ocean in S. Calif. Still the buzz isn’t there. Do you know something?
7/Whiskey, today I agree with you! [I usually do, actually. I just don't want to be thrown in the same bucket with the far-left feminazi eugenicists, please!]
This may be OT, but sorta fits. Is anyone else concerned that LORAN will be shut down by the One? My understanding is that “GPS” is so wonderful and cheap, that LORAN is no longer necessary.
My question about that is, aren’t we putting all our ‘aids to navigation’ in one basket? A basket which the Chinese have only too well demonstrated is susceptible to attack? What do we do when the GPS satellites are knocked down? Cheap insurance, IMO.
tom
“Never fear, Whiskey. I’m sure Nahncee will be around soon to valiantly hop on your ass for being a “misogynist”.”
Isn’t being boring, redundant and stupid worse even than being a “misogynist”? (Why the scare quotes, BTW?)
But in any case, consider Whiskey’s latest blather to have been hopped upon, even though he’s right in that NOW and other Western feminists routinely ignore these occurances. I’ve commented before on why that might be, and feel no reason to repeat myself since evidently Whiskey can’t be bothered to remember or take into account those reasons.
Really, isn’t just keeping track of Obama’s latest treason enough for EVERY American, male and female, so that the girls of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia will very simply have to learn how to man up and take care of themselves, won’t they?
(Seems to me that if the Taliban can use poison, why can’t the females in these countries reciprocate and start taking care of the woman-abusers in their society(s) in a sneakier way?)