Monday, October 15, 2007

I thought this would not post at Huffington Post. Wrong!

US Military Technology Increasingly Being Exported Illegally

Comment: Thanks for the info here in the comments. For a number of years I thought Grumman had 100 F-14As on order for the Shah of Iran and had only 80 delivered which was what the F-14 test pilot Tom Gwynne of the "Cradle of Aviation" museum on Long Island, NY also said in the press recently, that is 80 (reported now 77). Years ago, I was sitting with him on a belated birthday, watching "Ishi - the Last of His Tribe" with his wife, an anthropologist, whom I thought had been in the Grumman compound of about 4000 Americans outside of Tehran, teaching the various tasks required to keep a fighter-bomber in the air, i.e., almost 200 for every pilot, when it was announced on the TV that we would blow-up all of them if the USSR crossed Iran's border, a crisis also echoed here in the US where Iranian exchange students once queried former SOS Henry Kissinger, what he could do about the Shah's Savak (secret police) spying on them here on US campuses, which he said he could do nothing about.

Apparently, Mr. Gwynne I recall, said that the technology of the F-14 was not the problem, the air-to-air missile tech could upset the balance of air defense, the F-14A (with rumored radar "knockdown" countermeasures) had the ability to acquire and track up to six targets at a time. I am glad we did not have to find out, on the other hand, what our fleet F-14s and their recently trained pilots ("Anytime, baby" patches) never faced off though tragically, a desert storm did result in the loss of American servicemen in an ill-fated rescue attempt by helicopters. At the time, "Nuke Iran" bumper stickers started appearing on where I had had some contact with them in work-study and as a taxi driver while a grad student at Stony Brook University on Long Island, NY. One would hope we could have better diplomacy than that. Huffington Post comments on U.S. war tech sales

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