Pakistani troops battled Taliban militants over downed drone

By Karin Brulliard and Haq Nawaz Khan
Sunday, Sep 18, 2011
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani troops battled Taliban militants Sunday morning to win control of the remnants of a CIA drone that crashed in the nation’s borderlands, according to Pakistani security officials.

The cause of the crash of the unmanned Predator aircraft, among the drones the CIA uses to fire missiles at Taliban and al-Qaeda hideouts in the rocky region bordering Afghanistan, remained in dispute hours after it was downed in Zangarha village in South Waziristan. A military intelligence official based in the nearest city, Wana, said the drone suffered a mechanical failure. The Pakistani Taliban, a domestic offshoot of the Afghan insurgent organization, said its fighters had shot down the aircraft.

Pakistan’s restive tribal belt is a no-go zone for journalists and outsiders, making it impossible to verify the accounts of the crash. U.S. officials do not publicly acknowledge or discuss the covert drone program, and the CIA declined to comment Sunday on the crash reports. The Pakistani security officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

But if the reports prove true, the crash would be among very few in the seven-year-long history of the drone campaign in Pakistan, and it could risk exposing extremely sensitive technology, including cameras and other sensors used to monitor insurgents. Although the Taliban might have little tactical use for the debris, some of Pakistan’s allies — including Iran and China — might be interested in it.

In May, a U.S. helicopter crashed during the American commando raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the northwestern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, and U.S. officials later said they suspected, but had not confirmed, that Pakistan gave the Chinese access to the largely destroyed helicopter. Pakistani officials denied doing so.

John Pike, a weapons expert at Globalsecurity.org, said that the drone crash Sunday could have exposed sensitive systems but that it would be difficult for adversaries to use the wreckage to replicate technology or adopt surveillance countermeasures. While the Chinese, for example, have sought to develop drone platforms and might gain insight from the downed U.S. aircraft, they already have a general understanding of drone capabilities. The downed copter, by contrast, used previously undisclosed stealth technologies.

“I don’t think the Chinese can do much more with it than the Taliban,” Pike said.

Drone strikes, which have skyrocketed during the Obama administration, are a growing source of tension between the United States and Pakistan, long-wary allies whose relationship has worsened this year. For years, the Pakistani government has allowed the program to continue while publicly protesting it and asking the United States to share its drone technology. But the Pakistani government’s tacit support for the drone campaign has waned as public outrage over it rises.

According to two Pakistani security officials, the drone crashed Sunday near a military base and Taliban militants quickly attempted to seize the debris. But the officials said Pakistani troops confronted the fighters and were able to collect the drone remnants after a clash lasting nearly four hours. Three militants were killed and two soldiers were injured in the fighting, an official from the paramilitary Frontier Corps said.

A Pakistani Taliban spokesman who identified himself as Saifullah Sayab said in a phone interview that 25 fighters used an antiaircraft gun to shoot down the drone. The Pakistani army deployed a gunship helicopter to repel the Taliban, he said.

brulliardk@washpost.com

Khan is a special correspondent. Staff writer Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

Chicken Little was right - NASA satellite coming home - could hit you!

WASHINGTON - (AP) -- U.S. space officials say they expect a dead satellite to fall to Earth in about a week.

NASA has been watching the 6-ton satellite closely. On Friday officials moved up their prediction for its arrival to Sept. 23, give or take a day.

NASA scientists have calculated the satellite will break into 26 pieces as it gets closer to Earth. The odds of it hitting someone anywhere on the planet are 1 in 3,200. The heaviest piece to hit the ground will be about 350 pounds, but no one has ever been hit by falling space junk in the past.

NASA expects to give the public more detailed information early next week. For now, all continents except Antarctica could be hit by satellite debris.

Davis Monthan AFB locked down - threat unclear.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona was placed under lockdown because of a "potential security situation" Friday.

T/Sgt. James Russell Martin of the base media relations office said, "There was an unconfirmed spotting of a man with a weapon" and the base went into "crisis action mode, locking down the base for the safety and security of the people on Davis-Monthan."

Martin said, "No shots have been fired and no one has been hurt."

He said the suspicious man reportedly had run into an engineering building on the base.

Just after 2 p.m. The Tucson Police Bomb Squad and Pima County Regional SWAT Team made their way on to the base.

The Arizona Republic reports an armed civilian has barricaded himself in a room. Authorities and a SWAT team is negotiating with the man.

No one was being allowed in or out of the sprawling base on the southeast corner of Tucson.

"Security is going to be in place until base leadership feels the situation is under control," Martin said. "We're just going to make sure we maintain heightened security until we feel everything is safe and secure."

Davis-Monthan is one of Tucson's largest employer and up to 8,500 people are on the base at any one time.

Several news media outlets quoted people on the base as saying a "shooter" had been found and contained. Those reports could not be confirmed.

Tucson Fire spokeswoman Trish Tracy said the agency sent two ambulances and two fire trucks to the base.

An ambulance was seen leaving the base about 12:35 p.m., but officials said that had "nothing to do with the security situation."

"A member of our community is pregnant and she is being taken to the hospital," the base said.

Ron Barber, a member of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' staff, told KPNX Channel 12 in Phoenix that he became aware of the lockdown as he left the base about 10 a.m. after a function for Giffords, who is recovering from an assassination attempt in January.

Barber said, "We were all lined up to get out of the base. I just got there as they were closing the gates. Everything was really calm. Air Force personnel were going about their business in a very professional manner."

Barber said he was not told what was going on, but was allowed to leave.

Davis-Monthan is adjacent to the Pima Air and Space Museum and the "boneyard" for old military and government airplanes that is a popular destination for aviation enthusiasts.

Navy christening Speahead - fast - stealthy - agile ship

By John Roach, contributing writer at msnbc.com.

The U.S. Navy will christen on Saturday a catamaran-style cargo ship that can zip through shallow waters at speeds up to 40 miles per hour, loaded down with 1.2 million pounds worth of gear.

The joint high speed vessel, named Spearhead, is the first of ten 338-foot-long aluminum dual-hull boats that are being constructed by Austral USA in Mobile, Ala., as part of a contract worth a reported $1.6 billion.

The company is also under a $3.5 billion contract to build ten trimaran Littoral Combat Ships, which can cruise at more than 45 miles per hour.

This need for speed stems from a desire for ships to operate in near-shore environments in the post Cold-War era, explained Loren Thompson, a defense analyst and chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

"The Navy decided that its future was going to be mainly about influencing
developments ashore," he told me Thursday. "It therefore started thinking about what sorts of vessels could survive close to shore and the conclusion it came to was speed mattered a lot."

Fast ships, for example, can outrun enemy warships and torpedoes, and the nimble agility of these new boats also allow quick maneuvers to dodge other types of dangers, Thompson added.

The JHSV being christened on Saturday in Mobile can berth 146 passengers and carry an additional 312 in airline-style seating. A flight deck allows helicopters and rotary air vehicles to take off and land. It has a range of more than 1,380 miles.

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Navy interested in stealth boat for special teams ...

By Jesse Emspak


A new kind of boat is designed to move quickly and stealthily through water by generating a layer of gas around its underwater surfaces.
The design reduces friction by a factor of 900, according to the New Hampshire company that produced the boat. Its smooth speed makes it ideal for special operations. It could also revolutionize shipping.

Juliet Marine recently unveiled the Ghost, a ship it says can reach speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. The shape of the craft is similar to earlier attempts at making watercraft less visible to radar — notably the Navy's "Sea Shadow" project of the 1980s.

Gregory Sancoff, president and chief executive officer of Juliet Marine, says this boat is a quantum leap beyond those early designs. "The Sea Shadow was an 11-knot craft," he said. "This is much faster."

Sancoff isn't willing to go into too much technical detail, partly because the U.S. government is interested and the company is working with a defense contractor to build a 150-foot model. He can say that the double-hulled boat generates and surrounds itself with a layer of gas, reducing friction and boosting its speed.

The phenomenon is called supercavitation. Supercavitation occurs when a projectile moving through water generates a low-pressure zone around its surface. Go fast enough and the low-pressure zone becomes a layer of gas. In that respect the Ghost is similar to a Russian-made torpedo (called the "Shkval," or squall), though the underwater portion of the boat's twin hulls are a new design.

The task of making a ship less visible to radar is physically the same as what is done with an airplane — the idea is to make the radar waves bounce off, just not back toward the sender. Jan Brink, an electromagnetic compatibility specialist at Kockums, a Swedish company that designed and built the Visby-class stealth ships for that country's navy, says the shape of a ship has to account for radar coming from above, whereas an airplane has to deal with radar from below.

"For us on a ship looking to reduce radar cross section, it's a radar beam from another ship or radar from a missile," he said.

The Ghost is designed for missions close to coasts, such as getting special operations teams into and out of areas quickly. Another possible mission would be dealing with pirates and "swarm" attacks on aircraft carriers and destroyers. Sancoff says the speed of the Ghost makes it useful against smaller boats that can outrun and outmaneuver larger ones. Contrary to popular belief, aircraft carriers and destroyers carry little in the way of defensive guns.

The 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen was accomplished with a small boat that simply ran into its side.

"Right now we have thousands of sailors whose only defense against high-speed craft is a .50 caliber machine gun from World War II," Sancoff said.
Eric Wertheim, analyst at the U.S. Naval Institute, says the big issue for a boat like the Ghost will be identifying its niche within the military.

"This is a tough budget time to be introducing any technology that isn't being specifically called for by the Navy," he said. "For the last 100 years the stealth boat has been the submarine," he said. Submarines can do special ops missions too, as demonstrated by the fact that smugglers have recently made good use of them. "You have to answer the question of what is the need not being met," he said.

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