It’s not every day that the Defense Department goes out of its way to say publicly that a general is full of it. But that’s what appears to be going on now.
On Monday, Defense News ran a story by Greg Grant which said that “insurgents are attacking U.S. helicopters in Iraq with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that leap into the air and detonate when an aircraft passes nearby.“
The source: Brig. Gen. Edward Sinclair, commander of the Armys Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala.
Almost immediately, there was pushback to Grant’s piece. But not to the substance of what he — and, by extension, Gen. Sinclair — said. To the fact that such sensitive info was being disclosed. (That kind of thing tends to happen when you’re writing about IEDs. I was accused of being an agent of the Iraqi insurgency for this Wired News article on bomb-stopping technologies.)
Now, however, the military is saying those “aerial IEDs” don’t exist. That Grant and Gen. Sinclair were basically wrong.
At this time, we do not know of any incidences of insurgents employing aerial IEDs against U.S. helicopters. No aircraft have been lost to this type of device, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department task force working to defeat IEDs told Stars and Stripes.
But that attempt to clarify things was almost instantly muddied by Army Secretary Francis Harvey, in an interview with Voice of America.
To my knowledge we, we have not, I don’t know if we’ve seen, we may have seen one of those. But to my knowledge we have not seen a lot of those so far, jumping IEDs.
(Big ups: Haninah Levine)
To borrow a quote from a Star Trek movie:
“Mister President, I don’t know what to believe.“
The Army Secretary is pushing pap. First he says he’s not sure, then he says probably not, then he says maybe airborne IEDs have been used.
Oh well.
Well…why would he deny it? Certainly the enemy knows what kind of bombs he’s planted. It’s certainly not implausible. As other posters pointed out, the NVA used treetop mines against US helicopters and I heard of an even wilier one: a dud 500-pound bomb recovered and modified with a fuse that reacted to the magnetic field created by the rotor.
The use of anti-air mines wasn’t really widespread in Vietnam but they might have been if the war had gone on longer. Incidentally, I heard tell the Soviets were working on an anti-helicopter mine deployed by artillery into rear areas, but I never saw a second source and I don’t know if the project was continued after 1990.