Airwolf in Abbottabad

It may turn out that the raid in Abbottabad is a watershed moment in multiple ways. Possibly a crippling blow against al Qaeda, almost certainly a major dent in U.S.-Pakistani relations, definitely a major intelligence coup.

But on a more nuts-and-bolts level--literally--it may have revealed something remarkable: the first look at a new breed of helicopter.

It has been widely reported that one of the aircraft the SEAL team used to drop into the bin Laden compound was unable to take off after the raid and was destroyed. One picture, the first one released...

Pay no attention to the chopper behind the curtain.

... seemed to show debris that looked a lot like the tail boom of an MH-60 variant. (The "basic model" is the ubiquitous Blackhawk, a utility helicopter used by just about every branch of the U.S. military since the mid-70s.) But it definitely looked strange. I chalked it up to the damage suffered in the landing and the explosives that blew up the rest of the airframe.

But now a few more pictures are trickling out. Yes, the SEALs did a great job of blowing up most of the helicopter.

Er... what helicopter?

The tail boom, however, reveals some mighty interesting things. First of all, smarter people than I have discerned that the paint used is identical to the infrared-quenching stuff used on the V-22 Osprey. That's not standard issue for the MH-60. But looky here:

Anatomy of a stealthy tail rotor.

And compare that to this:

Your garden-variety tail rotor.

If nothing else, you can see that there is no rotor cap and the blades are on the opposite side. And here is another view, where the raked stabilizers are more clearly visible:

If nothing else, they look faster.

And finally, although it's a little more subtle to pick out, the lines and angles of the boom are much different than those of an off-the-shelf MH-60. In fact, they look a little more like this...

Like Blue Thunder, except non-fictional.

... the RAH-66 Comanche, a stealth helicopter developed, built and flown in the early 1990s. It was a successful program but, ultimately, mission planners realized they could do the same work more more cheaply with unmanned drones... a decision that has been borne out with the successes of the Predator, Reaper and brand-shiny-new RQ-170.

Now, "stealth helicopter" doesn't mean stealth in the now-classic sense, in which an aircraft's radar cross-section--the size it appears to be on a radar screen--is reduced to almost nothing. If nothing else, the rotor blades whirring above the fuselage are enough to give air-defense radars a nice, juicy return. But reducing the cross-section somewhat is often enough to make the aircraft effectively invisible, as helicopters are generally used for low-level flight, which obscures them in the "ground clutter": a haze of radar blips caused by objects on the ground like towers, hills, trees and buildings.

A bigger issue is noise, and the military already has quite a bit of experience in making helicopters quieter. Simple steps like adding more blades to the rotor (and you can see that the tail rotor of the bin Laden helicopter has more blades than that of a standard MH-60) make it quieter and less chop-chop-choppy. It is obviously impossible to make a gas-turbine powered aircraft completely silent, but measures such as those can make the noise at least indistinct until it is just a few hundred yards away from the listener.

So, given these facts, it's pretty obvious why they blowed it up so good. Not only was it carrying cutting-edge avionics, such as cameras that give the operators an image in every spectrum of light, but the airframe had never been seen before in public.

I realize that it is neither shocking nor surprising that the military has a few tricks up its camouflaged sleeves. But it's always interesting to see these tricks revealed, even inadvertently, for the first time... and it's always fun to speculate on what might still be out there.

He falls away into the dustbin of history

It has been a busy spring in the Middle East. Waves of revolution, civil war and regime change have reshaped the region in ways that few would have foreseen even five years ago.

And now there's this: Osama bin Laden is dead. Shot in the head by U.S. Special Forces and, according to some accounts, buried at sea to simultaneously measure up to Islamic traditions and avoid creating a terrorist shrine.

Aftermath.

I can't remember exactly how long it took to identify him as the mastermind of the attacks on September 11, 2001. I can remember how that day felt. Awakened by a phone call in the early hours of the day, I listened groggily as a good friend of mine described a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Then I watched in dismay as the second plane hit the other tower.

The rest of the day I spent on my couch, glued to the TV and wondering what would happen next.

I don't think it's fair to say that bin Laden's death has brought me--and perhaps anyone--real closure, to use an overused bit of psycho-jargon. Yes, he has been the face of global terrorism for the last decade-plus, but in the end, he's just a man. And more important, the ideology he represented has already taken a severe beating this year as mostly non-violent, mostly secular protests have toppled regimes against which al Qaeda has railed for years. Corny though it may sound, it has been a collective desire for freedom and fair representation that shoved longtime dictators from their pedestals, not bombs and extremism.

At the same time, though, I have some difficulty understanding the criticism of those celebrating in the streets of Washington and New York on Sunday night. One BBC viewer wrote:

One of my strongest memories from 9/11 is people celebrating around the world. I remember being disgusted. Now I have just seen Americans celebrating the death of Bin Laden outside the White House, I am again disgusted.

One of my strongest memories was the sense of shock and horror and loss as Manhattan was enveloped in a cloud of destruction. So I don't have much problem with people getting emotional at the death of the man who made that happen.

Here in the UAE, the reaction is that there is no reaction. Business, and life, have gone on as usual; my morning walk to work takes me through a muggy beehive of commerce and it was no different today than it is any other day. Furniture vendors and carpenters, most of them Pakistani, seemed unmoved by the news as they toted couches and ran planks through table saws. Even the government has, for the time being, remained silent.

I think Obama's speech this morning (late Sunday, U.S. time) hit a lot of the right notes and adequately summed up what transpired today.

It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory - hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.

And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child's embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.

....

The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens. After nearly 10 years of service, struggle, and sacrifice, we know well the costs of war. These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief, have to sign a letter to a family that has lost a loved one, or look into the eyes of a service member who's been gravely wounded.

So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaeda's terror: Justice has been done.

And I think that's about right.

As I walk home today, through a city untroubled by the unrest that has gripped the rest of the region, I think it is safe to say that bin Laden's death has no direct impact on my life.

But it does feel like today's news was, if not justice, at least a just end for an incredibly malicious person, who twisted religion and snuffed out innocent life in its name.

The Aerosmith version, not the Gene Autry version

You know the song I'm talking about.*

Mrs. Blog and I returned to the UAE yesterday from the United States of Awesome yesterday. A country, I should add, that was true to its promises of delicious food and good company. For instance, I had barbecue in four states and margaritas in three. I even saw a bald eagle, soaring on the winds of freedom. And by freedom, I mean eastern Iowa.

Actual Arthur Bryant's sandwich consumed by actual blogger.

How great a visit was it? During an afternoon at my friend's bar I ran into this guy. That's a bonus vacation experience you can't put a price tag on.

It's always a difficult transition back to the Middle East, with the little differences driven home almost immediately. There is simply no way to soften the impact of arriving at an airport festooned with construction barriers and signs that lead nowhere.

Like this but with 150 percent more plaster dust.

The jet lag doesn't help either; I am writing this with the help of unhealthy amounts of caffeine and equally unhealthy amounts of sleep deprivation. On the bright side, though, the imbalances in my body chemistry might help me appreciate the royal wedding a little bit more.

Anyway, dissociative feelings aside, it is good, at least, to not have to consider another long plane ride in the immediate future. Now, if we could just find some way of staving off the onset of the oven-like summer....

*And if you don't, click here.

The story of my life

It's official. The Internet is now everywhere. On my desktop, my laptop, my phone and even, as it turns out, my childhood.

For the first time in history, every home I have ever lived in is now visible on Google Street View... with the exception of the Budget Building, whose Abu Dhabi locale a) doesn't have a searchable address and b) Google probably doesn't want to bother with anyway.

And I actually had a lengthy post planned out, as you can embed a pannable, zoomable Street View frame in the blog. Wouldn't it be neat to show people all these places, I thought to myself?

Yes, Smarter Self replied, but it would be a lot less neat for anyone with a keyboard to be able to see your entire residence history, steal your identity and use it to start an online brothel in Bangkok.

So never mind.

Suffice to say it was a roller-coaster journey from Midtown Kansas City to almost Abu Dhabi. As I said, Google, like good customer service and excellent club sandwiches, has not yet arrived in the UAE. Perhaps someday it will, and when you type "Muroor Road, after Delma Bridge, opposite Al Wadi Furniture... no, farther down. Yes, stop by grocery" it will pop right up on Street View.

For now, though, I think I'll just enjoy entertaining applications of technology and basking in the fact that I have lived in a lot of great places.

Tournament time

Yes, the most glorious time of year is upon us. Hordes of fans are huddled in front of their TVs for the days' worth of wall-to-wall basketball known as the NCAA tournament. Of course, in my case, this actually means sitting alone in front of a computer screen because of the obscene eight- to 11-hour time difference between here and the courts where the games are taking place.

Kansas' two games have started at 2:30 and 4:45 a.m. Abu Dhabi time and I, being a big fan of basketball in general and Kansas in particular, have watched both. It's fine at the time but hard not to regret the next day.

As Mrs. Blog can attest, I am not at my best after three hours' sleep. That meant most of Saturday was wasted, dissolved into a blur of recovery, and on Monday my brain cells were powered almost exclusively by caffeine.

A pre-dawn dunking against Illinois.

And I'm not out of the woods yet. Kansas has advanced to the Sweet Sixteen, and game time is... 3:30 a.m on Saturday. As long as they keep winning, though, I'll happily suffer a little grogginess--and I apologize in advance for inflicting Zombie Gerry on the rest of the world.

The Muppets have an answer for everything

Or at least a song. Whether you're talking about the Fourth of July or Christmas, they just have a gift for being able to express the pitch-perfect emotions of the moment.

And so I bring you--shamelessly cribbed from Friend of the Blog Craig--a Muppet St. Patrick's Day.

Animal and I know the lyrics about equally well.

Hope everyone is has a great day of eating corned beef and cabbage and dying things green!

For some reason, I thought this would be more secret

The Navy has been developing stealthy, unmanned combat aircraft for a while now. It seems like the kind of thing you would want to keep under wraps and then, you know, make a dramatic announcement like "we have invented the sound barrier" or "all your base are belong to us."

But no, here it is, right on YouTube, making its maiden test flight:

B-2 lite?

Besides being neat-looking and, apparently, quite deadly, I wonder whether this is part of a permanent shift toward robotic combat. Not in a Mechwarrior kind of way, but just in the sense that systems like this allow generals to bomb the enemy without putting their own people in the line of fire... will battles eventually be decided by who blows up the most drones? I guess that's not a bad idea. You could certainly come up with worse premises for a science-fiction novel.