Mysterious US Helicopter Used in Bin Laden Raid
wired.com
wired.com
I wonder if the inadvertent tweeter might have been hearing the support copters coming in after the initial raid to pick up the prisoners/crew and that the explosions were also after the fact--the post-raid destruction of the downed helicopter.
I suspect that as the story is progressively refined, we'll learn that rather than being a flawless triumph, the actual reason for success was the depth of backup planning and redundant systems.
This will be ultimately be a story that becomes a lesson in how the military learns from its failures (Operation Eagle Claw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw and the Rattle of Mogadishu aka Black Hawk Down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)) rather than from its successes.
Do you really think that the US Navy Seals don't bother to think "Hey maybe we should have a backup plan for this hugely important and very risky mission" unless the President comes up with the idea?
The linked article does smell a bit like the President trying to insert himself into the story.
Mr Burns: You, Strawberry, hit a home run!
Daryl Strawberry: Okay skip! (hits a home run)
Mr Burns: I told him to do that.
Smithers: Brilliant strategy, sir.
* Perhaps Obama had intelligence that the incursion might provoke a group of Pakistani military officers to defy their government's orders and launch an armed response, possibly because of the location of the strike, or possibly as a prelude to a coup. He wouldn't necessarily have shared that with the SEAL team, he would have just told them to be prepared to "fight their way out" if necessary.*
The operation was under the direct control of the CIA, and I think we can assume the CIA has just as much intelligence knowledge as the White House does.
And now personally, if I had reason to believe that men under my command were likely to be entering into actual hostile contact with the military of the sixth largest country in the world (and a nuclear power to boot) then I'd probably actually have shared that information with them. They're big boys, they can handle it, and if they see the Pakistani Army showing up then they need to know whether they're allowed to shoot.
When he (purportedly) said "fight your way out," who else could he have been talking about fighting? I think it's safe to assume they got a lot more specific than speculating about fighting undefined hypothetical resistance that might happen to materialize outside this compound in the middle of Pakistan.
If the president knew such critical information and didn't share it up-front with the operators planning the mission, that's a big fail on his part. Given the sensitivity of this operation, if he didn't trust the people involved with all of the critical information about the situation, he shouldn't have trusted them to execute the mission, either. I can see how he might not want to share the details about which generals were in league with who, but that doesn't preclude the pre-planning intel brief from including a warning that the Pakistani military might interfere with the operation. There is absolutely no excuse for the operators to not have such critical information before they start planning their mission, rather than "Oops, we forgot to mention..." after they have already built a plan.
In practice, high-level leaders often get much less resolution in their intel than those below them: they need to know the big picture, not necessarily all of the little details. I somehow doubt that the President was micromanaging the planning process and intel dissemination in this way. I think that a far more likely scenario is that two or more plans were developed and presented to the President and his national security team, with the strengths and weaknesses of each plan. For example:
Plan A: Minimum number of helicopters. Reduces our exposure and the chances of detection, but sharply limits our options for dealing with contingencies.
Plan B: Back-up helicopters loiter a few miles from the target area. Increases our footprint and the chances of detection, but gives us far better options for dealing with contingencies.
I could easily see how the reality was that the President said, "Let's go with plan B: I want you guys to have the backup if you need it," which then went through the "telephone game" and ended up being reported as "President Saves the Day by Reminding SEALs to Bring Spare Helicopter."
The SEALs don't need to know the political details. They just need a heads-up: "Hey guys, you need to be aware that because of the political situation in Pakistan, you might end up fighting the Pakistani military as well Bin Laden's personal security. Let me lay out the nature of the resistance you might face."
Those concerns could easily have been raised so late (ten days before the raid) because the President himself didn't have it earlier.
As for the idea that such information would be late-breaking, I find that to be incredibly implausible for the CIA's analysis of the mood of a nation's leadership to swing wildly in such a short amount of time.
Ultimately, I don't think that such a decision would have been based on a single element like, "The Pakistani military might interfere." I think that hugh3 had it right: there is no way that the SEALs wouldn't have built significant redundancy into their plan from the very beginning. His Simpsons analogy is spot-on: the President telling the SEALs how to plan a military mission is like a spectator telling a pro athlete how to make the next play.
Look, neither of us can prove our claims, since we weren't there. But I have read several news reports along these lines, that Obama pushed for more redundancy.
One might ask: why didn't the SEALs think of it? The answer can be (and here again, this is pure speculation just like yours) that the SEALs wanted the smallest possible contingent, to avoid being detected (2 helis are less likely to be detected as 4) and risking the Pakistanis' ire. But at some level, diplomatic considerations creep in; and Obama could have said (or thought) "I'll take care of the fallout; but I want you guys to be double-extra safe".
While it is easy to dismiss this news report as you did, I don't think that is the case here.
For example: in the photograph released by the WH (where everyone is huddled, watching the monitor), Obama is in a corner, and the military guy is centre stage. Don't you think if Obama was so self-promoting as you claim he is, that he would have maneuvered into a better shot? Maybe placed himself front-and-center, to show he's "in command" ??
In comparison: do you remember how Bush flew a jet onto the carrier, "Mission Accomplished" ? That is self-promotion.
Part of the reason other attack helicopters don't have them is that ejection seats in helicopters add complexity and weight for not that much of an increase in survivability, considering the usual flight profiles that these helicopters fly.
It makes more sense to focus on improving the survivability of crashes through measures such as collapsing seats and landing gear designed to absorb impact forces. With these types of improvements the crew of modern helicopters can survive even severe accidents without serious injury.
Helicopters can quite easily land if they lose power, etc., through a process called autorotation.
It was the explosive charges that were set and detonated before the team left that did the vast majority of the damage.
http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/series/black_shark/
(Also, check out the A-10 sim too - it's from work they did with the US National Guard Air wing as a training simulator).
"On 21 June 1972 a Lama with a single pilot (Jean Boulet) aboard established a helicopter absolute altitude record of 12,442 m (40,814 ft), immediately followed by an inadvertent record for the longest ever autorotation when the engine flamed out at the peak altitude of the flight."
(from wikipedia)
Always reminds me of the saying: "there are no good helicopter pilots, there are only old helicopter pilots".
Chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height-velocity_diagram
http://www.helicopterschoollist.com/autorotation_helicopter....
Given the number of remains, it appears to be trivial. If it wasn't they'd clean them up not just blow them up.
They'd blow it up in a hostile country such as Serbia where the remains of F-117 were transported to China afterward and the present Chinese stealth technology is a result of reverse engineering of those remains. F-117 was 20 years old in 1999 - and if this helicopter was so new and so secret that nobody has seen it before, they'd go pick it up as Pakistan is a "friendly" state.
It's just a standard transport helicopter (like MH-60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_UH-60_Black_Hawk) modified for special forces to have less of a radar cross-section. For example, they put rotor screws under a plate.
It's not so important for a helicopter to be stealth - if the pilot has NVG, it can fly during the day right over the trees, and few radars can pick it up, unless it accidentally flies over (in the radius of about 8km) of a mobile surface-to-air missile launcher. And they know where these are: JSTARS tells them where the sources of radiation are, and they set their path around those. They also avoided all towns where someone would detect them based on noise and make a phone call, or, god forbid, tweet.
you mean like this? -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505610
edit: changed link. did not realise i was linking to a fake hacker news site.
Yeah, part of the back, maybe ECM detail, looks like it should be the front, and it crossed my mind it might be a drone.
But yeah, just the back part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing/Sikorsky_RAH-66_Comanche
Do a google images search, the thing looks [relatively] identical.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/attachment.php?attachme...
via:
http://www.pprune.org/military-aircrew/450526-stealth-uh60-u...
Potential forward sweep of stabilizer, "coolie hat" on the rotor.
It could be too late to prevent the strike, but it wouldn't be too late to shot down the surviving choppers.
Of course, in that situation, the F-22s would have protected them.
Could they even make it to Afghanistan? I was under the impression that helicopters don't exactly have a whole lot of range
For example, if a normal Blackhawk can be heard approaching from a distance of x miles, while one of these modified helicopters can only be heard from a distance of x-c miles, then the enemy has that much less warning to respond to your approach.
It's eerie how quietly a stealth jet can creep up, and crazy how loud they are when going away, an effect obvious at air-shows with stealth-modified aircraft.
Few hours later the answer came via Hacker News.
That crash landing might have been caused by a phenomenon known as “settling with power,” which occurs when a helicopter descends too quickly because its rotors cannot get the lift required from the turbulent air of their own downwash. “It’s hard to settle with power in a Black Hawk, but then again, if they were using one of these [low-observable helicopters], working at max gross weight, it’s certainly plausible that they could have because they would have been flying so heavy,” the retired special operations aviator said, noting that low-observable modifications added “several hundred pounds” to the weight of the MH-60, which already weighs about 500 to 1000 pounds more than a regular UH-60 Black Hawk.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/05/army-mission-helocopte...
The position of the wreck, with the tail broken over a wall, makes me think there might have been a yaw problem. Or they might have been in a high hover, had a problem, and hit the wall on the way down.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_tail-rotor_effectivenes...
I made no claim whatsoever, I divulged my first guess/naive speculation and said at first glance from my uninformed perspective I did not know exactly what the intentions were behind the architecture, but that I thought maybe it had to do with religion--him being a religious extremist.
I replied to the parent comment because I thought maybe the architecture was designed with the goal of producing vortex rings--making it harder for a helicopter to allow to allow people to repel.
You're also a hypocrite considering the comment you made previous to the one I'm replying "This is kind of off-topic, but I've always wondered...:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515028
How is that any different than what I did, if not worse?
Sometimes HN is just looking to be overly critical and point out flaws that only exist if you obsess over being pedantic.
So you have never speculated on something which there is no definitive answer for?
I said yes there was some purpose behind the shape, look at it, and like you said, it could be just the plot that was available, but... like I said the very first comment it was a "guess" so it's really not a leap of logic and my point was he had a hard to breach compound located conveniently near a military base--a highly suspicious coincidence."Those are far more likely reasons for the design than thinking Osama fired up some CFD program and designed his stone walls to mess with the rotors of a helicopter" Strawman much? Did Osama fly the planes into the World Trade Center? No. My point was the Pakistan military could have provided the safe-house. I never said I knew whether the walls were designed to make vortex rings, or conceal OBL, or make it harder to breach by a commando team, or if it was religious--but clearly it's not a randomly designed shape.
My point is people, like yourself and prewett, get off on down-voting people, arguing over some minutia in an attempt to achieve a superiority high, and wasting everyone's time arguing about some inconsequential aspect of their comment. I never said all along I was certain I said it was a "guess" so please spare me your smug high and mightiness about "making a couple leaps of logic."
Why don't you try reading a comment in its entirety next time?
1) Keep it civil.
2) If you are going to make large jumps of logic like the one you've made, then that's fine. Just spell out what you are saying and why you are saying it because as it stands, I agree that your original comment seems very offtopic.
2. I made no "large jumps of logic" like I said, it was open speculation. Now please get off your high horse and quit repeating things that have already been said--everything you assert in your second point is proving wrong in my previous comment.
Do you not realize you're just discouraging people asking questions? That's essentially what you're advocating.
2) You asked for an explanation, so I gave you an honest one. If you don't want to hear it, don't ask next time.
Even doing a PPL you learn about the effects of vortexes, wind shear, turbine wash etc. And these guys have many, many, many orders of magnitude more training than that.
More likely some combination of weight, altitude, excess speed... but I guess we'll never know.
Flying deep into Pakistan undetected and landing in Bin Ladin's backyard is a hell of a trick, no ordinary pilot could do that.
I heard it was hot and high conditions that forced it to go down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_and_high
Remember that we have no idea what was in those helos, they could've held more SEALs, or sophisticated medical equipment, or even heavy weapons (although if they were also blackhawks that's less likely.)
It looks like an oversized UAV more than a helicopter.
I also like how computer geeks ignore the politics of the situation and get distracted by shiny things ;p
Pieczenik is on the Council on Foreign Relations and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. He is a former US Navy Captain, and he went through Harvard Medical School while he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT.
Sometimes it's not good to dismiss "unpopular" ideas, but it usually is a good idea to (provisionally) dismiss dumbass ideas which don't appear to make sense and for which there isn't any damn evidence.
The date of bin Laden's death (if indeed he is dead, if indeed he ever existed) is a fact-of-the-matter thing; it's either one way or it's another way, and there shouldn't be much room for reasonable people to disagree at all. Reasonable people may be uncertain on such matters, but they should all share similar degrees of uncertainty.
Dismiss because everybody says so without giving any thought = Bad. Dismiss after thinking about it and looking into it = Good.
Ironically, I should dismiss your response because you’re repeatedly beating the same dead horse. ;)
So whom, exactly, are you accusing of dismissing it without giving it any thought?
If you gave equal time to every theory, no matter how basicly logically flawed, you would end up spending all your time just watching poorly edited videos on youtube. Dismissing something as a conspiracy theory isn't closeminded, it's a basic defensive mechanism.
Curious to know about your username "burgerbrain"? ;)
I have avoided wasting countless hours of my life like this.
I remember one specifically which was released to rebut claims of his death several years ago, in which he mentioned recent news to prove that he was, in fact, alive.
I'm not unwilling to believe that the government would lie to us or whatever, but I do require both proof and convincing explanations of any available data to the contrary. Right now, we have lots of confirming evidence and no good explanations of why it was all wrong.
That said, I expect the conspiracy theories to go on for decades. I'm sure there will be TV specials discussing it, just like there are for JFK, the moon landings, Roswell, etc.