Monday, November 1, 2010

Bringing the War Back Home (Firesign Theatre to sue The Future for copyright infringement.) "We don' need no steenkeeng posse comitatus!"

"The Future is fun!
The Future is Fair!
You may already have won!
You may already BE THERE!"
-- Firesign Theatre, "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus."



Coming soon to an unemployment office near you!

"We're bringing the war back home
Where it ought to have been before!" -- Firesign Theatre


Unemployment Offices To Add Armed Guards: 36 Offices Beefing Up Security Before Benefits Set To End

And in what I am sure is a COMPLETELY UNRELATED move, "We don' need no steenkeeng posse comitatus!":

"Disaster Relief" Helicopters.



Army Copters to Start ‘Flying Over Your Neighborhood’

Shortfalls with the Army’s Black Hawk helicopter has led Army aviation units in Iraq and Afghanistan to use the UH-72A Lakota, a light non-combat helicopter, to fill the gap. But at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington D.C., the Army’s project manager, Colonel Neil Thurgood, says that the vast majority of the Lakotas are going to go to the National Guard to aid in civilian disaster relief.

The Lakota, a “maneuverable, agile aircraft” that EADS has put in production since 2007, is increasingly able to talk with civilian law enforcement and homeland security, Thurgood said at a panel discussion. “You’ll be seeing more of those in your neighborhoods, flying over.”

Most importantly, new communications equipment gets the Lakota talking with the police patrol car below. The helicopter has P-25 public disaster band radio. Cameras on the nose flash aerial pictures of the aftermath of a disaster to “any of the agencies, state, national or federal, involved in process,” Thurgood said. A sensor operator in the rear of the copter can map and track the movements of cops, firefighters, ambulances and other disaster-relief officials on the ground.

That’s an improvement the Army learned the hard way. During Hurricane Katrina, the military discovered that it tracks locations using grid coordinates. Police and firefighters use street intersections. Neither knew immediately what the other meant.

These days, the Lakota is going to be in the toolkit of National Guardsmen who’ll be the frontline military points of contact with law enforcement and homeland security during the next hurricane or tornado. The Army’s going to buy 230 Lakotas; 210 of them are going to the National Guard.

But the helicopter isn’t just going to be used in disaster-relief missions. “We’ve used it along the southern border,” Thurgood said. If you live in a border town, expect to hear it flying overhead."


More on the UH-72A Lakota here, here, and here.

Militia trainers, add these pics to your recognition flash cards.

Just in case the subject comes up.

And if the Lakotas don't work out, this will be next:

9 comments:

Defender said...

My wife is at this moment taking our neighbor to the food stamp office because the card he received in the mail today for November is for LAST AUGUST. Expired. Invalid. Can you imagine if a couple of entire zip codes had the same thing happen at the same time?
.mil helicopters over our neighborhoods? We already didn't like the National Guard urban warfare training flights. Remember Vietnam? The U.S. Army was there first only as *observers and advisors*. Yep.

Radiowave said...

P-25; Project 25. The Governments standard and mandate for communications interoperability. Encryption is part of the mandate also. When fully implemented, all agencies must comply with the standard, and comms manufacturers will have to supply interface gear that makes it possible for its proprietary digital data format to be interpreted and used by competing manufacturers systems. This means all digital voice, and standard data. Practically speaking, it creates an enormous mutual aid potential for swarms of outside agencies to bring their own comms gear to any part of the country and begin talking with minimal effort with the locals. So, old MACOM (now Harris) and Motorola and the rest will all be compatible through regionally located interface installations. Usually these will be at the 911 call center, or fusion center. Helicopter and airplane installations will need only one regional tower to work within the 800 MHz trunked system. Locally, the tower sites containing a particular manufacturer’s radio electronics will also need to interface with formally incompatible radios.

Defender said...

I was lucky. When my unemployment benefits ended, I had a wife and her cousin who lives with us still working to support the household. I'm learning a trade that can't be done from overseas. I don't know what single people are going to do to make it, or households in which both people were laid off.
How 'bout that "recovery," huh? The government says the economy grew 2% last quarter.
Yeah, and Big Brother reports that boot production exceeded quotas last month, and chocolate rations will be increased from 25 grams to 15.

Anonymous said...

Last week I had numerous Blackhawk & Chinook flights on the Ft. Hood to Ft. Polk route. I live in the Lake Livingston Tx area.

Also had a B-52 on a bomb training run at an alt of 3000 AGL on a 130deg heading. Years ago they would do training runs on the dam but, there hasn't been a flight like that in 5-7 years. Bird was probably out of Barksdale AFB.

Anonymous said...

Fabulous...*face palm* I guarantee they've already got a weapon system planned for that chopper.

Anonymous said...

The thumb of Mich. gets the occasional Chinook from Selfridge. F-16 training is comin here,about a year ago the A-10's started to be a regular thing. The HOG's are ussually low and slow enough to get a salute up to the tail plane,got one back last fall as i was gettin out of the truck. Shane M. Ross IIIper

Mark Matis said...

For Anonymous at 1:38 PM:

B-52 low level routes are changed on a regular basis to ensure the crews retain the ability to navigate unfamiliar routes. Once in the route, I believe 500 AGL minimum was the standard for flat terrain, and 1000 AGL minimum was to be maintained for mountainous routes. If the BUFF was indeed at 3000 AGL, he would have been either ascending or descending to or from the route. Of course, if there was a mountain ahead, he may have been in the route and just pulling up to get over it. BUFFs don't climb that fast with a full load of fuel.

If the plane wasn't lost, you should expect to see more of them in the same area on the same heading on a regular basis for up to the next year. Unless they've changed how long they keep the individual routes...

Mark Matis said...

And does anyone know if they have any armor? Would be nice to know if, should one of these be following you with FLIR and be dumb enough to get in range, the canopy and such are vulnerable or if you have to go through an opening instead.

Anonymous said...

Well it isn't like we didn't know this was coming. Dual use for the non-existent war on terror and for "Other" purposes. I'd like to think that the "other" purpose, wasn't American citizens but I'm not that dumb. Fortunately, they are.

They always want to fight the last war over again. It's all about the stories they tell, only no body's reading their copy anymore.

They're gonna do it anyway. It's like trying to talk a bear out of eating a your newly caught salmon.