The U.S. Northern Command and joint U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) Command said two Russian bombers violated U.S. airspace near Alaska during recent arctic war games. Disclosure by the command in charge of U.S. homeland defense followed a report in the Free Beacon quoting U.S. officials who said the Russian aircraft had threatened U.S. air space but did not cross into it and were met over the Pacific by U.S. F-15 interceptor jets.Just a couple of long range bombers; after all, how much damage could they do?
“There was a single out-of-area patrol by two Russian long range bombers which entered the Alaska ADIZ that were visually identified by NORAD fighters,” John Cornelio, chief spokesman for Northcom, said in an email response to questions about the recent war games. ADIZ is the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, a line of airspace surrounding Alaska used by the military to monitor aircraft threats.
Cornelio, the Northcom spokesman, identified the Russian aircraft were Tu-95MS bombers that “are capable of carrying a variety of payloads, including nuclear weapons.”
Alaska is pretty big and empty, a handful of nukes wouldn't do that much. Maybe melt a glacier and raise sea level. The arctic exercises by the Russians are raising concerns among European and North American governments regarding efforts by Moscow to seek control over the resource-rich arctic territory, a strategic transit point for international bombers since the Cold War.I'm sure President Obama will be more flexible in his response to such challenges in his second term.
Defense officials believe the Russian war games simulated strikes using long-range cruise missiles against the U.S. missile defense interceptor base at Fort Greely, Alaska, as well as strikes on strategic radar systems based on the Aleutian island chain.
The maneuvers also likely practiced targeting the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. A Russian military spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Vladimir Deryabin, was quoted in Russian press reports as saying the purpose of strategic exercise involved “practice destruction of enemy air defenses and strategic facilities.”
How does the US Army know if its less-than-lethal armaments are effective without being deadly? Live fire training exercises employing a mob of volunteers, of course.
That's right, if you are over 18 and live in the greater New Jersey area, you too can get $20/hour to be whacked with batons and shot with rubber balls! The testing takes place in a non-descript one-story building, known as the Target Behavioral Response Laboratory, located a few miles from Picatinny Arsenal, the Army's research and development center. Here, a nine-member team of engineers study how effective non-lethal technologies perform and, more importantly, the psychological reasons they do.
"I can't just shoot a laser or loud sound at a piece of wood and expect it to run away," John Riedener, the lab's technical director told NJ.com. "We need to know how well it chases someone away. It's all about data, controlled experiments. It's about the probabilities of what can happen." To that end, the Army actively recruits volunteers from local colleges and libraries to pretend to be part of an angry mob, paying them $20 an hour with the small chance of permanent injury (though all tests are supervised by the Picatinny's Institutional Review Board).
A huge unmanned aircraft operated by the Navy crashed Monday along Maryland’s eastern shore, the Navy confirmed, but no injuries or personnel damage has been reported.Fortunately, this landed in a relatively unpopulated area, unless you count Greenheads and Speckled Trout. I'm pretty sure this is one reason the areas is so heavily used by the Navy for it's experimental aircraft.
The crash, at about 12:11 eastern time, reportedly took place in a marshy area of the Nanticoke River, near Bloodsworth Island in Dorchester, Md., about 20 miles from the city of Salisbury.
The Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Demonstrator (BAMS-D) aircraft, a modified Air Force Global Hawk RQ-4, is operated from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., as part of the overall BAMS development program. The jet-powered plane, one of the largest unmanned vehicles operated by the U.S. military, has a wingspan of more than 130 feet, although it is only about 47 feet long. The Navy operates at least five BAMS demonstrators, some of which have been deployed to Afghanistan and the Middle East.
...On their trip through Iran, the men of the Polish 22nd Transport Artillery Supply Company came across a young Iranian boy wandering through the desert like Jim Morrison tripping balls, and carrying a large cloth sack. The men thought the boy looked tired and hungry, so they gave him some food and a Crunch bar or some shit. When the kid thanked them, the Poles asked what was in the bag. The boy opened it up and revealed a tiny, malnourished brown bear cub. Since the soldiers knew the little cub was in very poor health and needed attention quickly, they bought the bear from the kid for a few bucks (or whatever the hell they used for money in 1940’s Iran – I can’t be bothered to look it up), and fed it some condensed milk from a makeshift bottle. For the next several days, they nursed the bear back to health, giving it food, water, and a warm place to sleep.
Over the long journey from Iran to Palestine, the bear, now named Voytek (it’s spelled Wojtek in Polish but pronounced "Voytek” because Polish is a crazy fucking language) quickly became the unofficial mascot of the 22nd Company. The bear would sit around the campfire with the men, eating, drinking, and sleeping in tents with the rest of the soldiers. The bear loved smoking cigarettes, drank beer right out of the bottle like a regular infantryman, and got a kick out of wrestling and play-fighting with the other soldiers. Of course, he was the most badass asskicking wrester in the entire company, thanks in part to the fact that he grew to be six feet tall, weighed roughly five hundred pounds, and could knock small trees over with a single swing of his massive, clawed paw. He grew to be a part of the unit, improving the morale of men who had spent several years getting their asses kicked in slave labor camps, and was treated as though he were just another hard-drinkin’, hard-smoking’, hard-fightin’, hair-growin’ soldier in the Company. When the unit marched out on a mission, Voytek would stand up on his hind legs and march alongside them. When the motorized convoy was on the move, Voytek sat in the passenger seat of one of the jeeps, hanging his head out the window and shocking the shit out of people walking down the street...
The Poles’ Finest Hour of the war came in the incredibly bloody battle for Monte Cassino. By the time II Corps arrived, the Germans were deeply entrenched in the hilltop monastery, and three previous Allied assaults on the position had all proved more fruitless than a South Florida orange tree in the middle of a worldwide Nuclear Winter. The campaign was proving to be one of the bloodiest battles of the Western Front, and the Poles were brought in to make the final push to capture the fortress. During the fighting, Voytek the Hero Bear actually hand-carried boxes of ammunition, some weighing in at over 100 pounds, from supply trucks to artillery positions on the front lines. He worked tirelessly, day and night, bringing supplies to his friends who were bravely battling the Nazis. He never rested, never dropped a single artillery shell, and never showed any fear despite his position being under constant enemy fire and heavy shelling. His actions were so inspiring to his fellow soldiers that after the battle the official insignia of the 22nd Artillery was changed to a picture of Voytek carrying an armful of howitzer ammunition. In the same vein, you have to assume that it was pretty fucking demoralizing to the Germans to see that the Poles had a fucking GIANT GODDAMNED BROWN BEAR fighting on their side...
The idea of a fucking alcoholic Nazi-fighting bear is so awesome that you’d think it was something out of a bizarre cartoon or a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie. It’s the sort of shit that, even with all of the historical evidence, seems too totally awesome to be true. The bear was a hero of World War II, and there are statues of him and plaques memorializing his brave service in Poland, Edinburgh, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Canadian War Museum.Bears are notoriously bad pets, but maybe a diet of cigarettes and beer helps keep them docile.
