Monday, July 06, 2009

Tank Roundup for July 6   [Fred Schwarz]

An interesting overview of why making peace between Israel and Palestine won’t be as easy as Obama seems to think: 

The West Bank is thriving, while Gaza just scrapes along. The smuggling tunnels from Egypt to Gaza still operate, sustained by cash to bribe Egyptian police. Iran is the main source of cash, and the Egyptians are willing to tolerate that as long as Hamas does not provide a sanctuary for Sunni Arab terrorists (who are at war with Egypt.) Egypt still believes several terrorist cells in Gaza are plotting attacks in Egypt . . .

 

Bill Roggio reports on Uighur terrorists in China (and recently in Pakistan). In both conflicts, neither side is known for its exemplary conduct, but the situation goes to show that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement is an active terrorist organization, however much Obama may romanticize it as a national liberation group:

[July 6:]  More than 140 people were killed and 816 were wounded, and hundreds more were arrested after Uighurs staged protests in Urumqi, the capital of China's northwestern province of Xinjiang. The government claimed foreign extremists were behind the riots.

 

[April 20:]  The Pakistani government has deported nine Chinese Uighurs to China after detaining them in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The nine Uighurs conducted attacks on Pakistani security forces. Uighurs train and fight alongside al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan. . . .

 

In the Vietnam War, communist fighters used urine-soaked rags to confuse American “people sniffers.”  More recently, strips of foil dropped from planes have thrown off radar systems. And today the battle between high-tech weapons and low-tech countermeasures continues, this time with China trying to neutralize America’s information advantage:

. . . several thousand microtransmitters . . . broadcast signals — 10,000 of them — on the frequency of a SAM [surface-to-air missile] site. From the perspective of a HARM [high-speed anti-radiation missile] looking for a ‘lock’ on a SAM radar signal — this meant an air-to-ground picture that looked like 10,001 SAM signals, only one of which was real.

 

Tanker-transport plane to gunship in four hours:

This spring, the Marines decided to buy nine kits for their KC-130J tanker-transports, each kit comprising Hellfire and Viper Strike missiles and bolt-on sensors — with a door gun, optional. The result, code-named Harvest Hawk, turns a tanker into a gunship, in just four hours, on the cheap.

The report goes on to say that the Air Force is now borrowing the Marines’ idea.

07/06 03:02 PMShare