Wilfred Jackson: United States Navy - SEABEES
World War II - "The Pacific"
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The Warriors That HBO Forgot
It took me less than 5 minutes to find these photographs and
accompanying information online. So why were blacks almost
(if not completely) absent from HBO's World War II series "The Pacific" (produced by Steven Spielberg & Tom Hanks)
and almost every other Hollywood movie
about WW II in "The Pacific?"
This video is dedicated to the black men and women who served and died in The Pacific during WW II.
During the recent crisis in Crimea the US sent a guided missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, into the Black Sea. A single Russian SU-24 fighter bomber conducted simulated bombing runs on the destroyer. The SU-24 was reported to have frozen the destroyer's defense systems with an electronic warfare device and simulated shooting 12 missiles at the destroyer. "After this incident, the USS Donald Cook chose to immediately and
at full speed move towards a port in Romania, where 27 shocked crew
members asked for dismissal from the service."
The guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook: It looks lethal - Maybe against a "third world" navy or civilian airliners.. But against modern weaponry it's little more than a floating coffin. The $2 billion dollar ship was
"destroyed" during simulated bombing runs by a $25 million dollar Russian SU-24.
.
How Long Would the US Navy Survive in a Shooting War?
By Marc Hopf
America sees itself as a ruler of the world’s oceans. After all, the country — which spends 10 times more on its military forces than the following nine countries — has by far the biggest naval force. And as since the Vietnam War they have dealt only with militarily inferior opponents, they are extremely self-confident in their belief that they can defeat everything and everyone. It is not surprising that some young Americans even wear T-shirts with the logo: “United States Navy: The Sea is Ours.”
Perhaps we need to meet this pride and arrogance with some understanding in view of the numerical superiority of the U.S. Navy. In total, it currently has 10 operational aircraft carriers (two in reserve), while Russia and China have only one each.
Aircraft carriers are the great pride of the U.S. Navy and are also perfect to underline visually the claim of the ruler of the seas. They are therefore well liked by U.S. presidents as stages for delivering speeches when the time comes to tell the people that this unique nation has once again won a heroic victory.
What thrilling moments these were (at least for Americans) when George W. Bush landed in a fighter jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln (no, not as a pilot) and then, with the words “mission accomplished” and “a job well done,” proclaimed the end of the Iraq war to the people. As we know, the destruction of Iraq was carried out by the Americans under the label of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We may still ask ourselves what it had to do with freedom, but that’s a different story.
In addition to their suitability as impressive orator stages, the aircraft carriers also fulfill, of course, a military purpose. They can be considered as small floating airports, which ship up to 100 fighter jets to the scene of the action. Since they are equipped with the best weapons, radar, and defense systems, until now they have experienced almost no threat, especially since in the past the U.S. Navy parked them preferably off the coasts of defenseless desert states.
But what would it look like if the power of the U.S. Navy met its peer? The title of this article already implies the answer: not so good, and it could be that the patriotic U.S. Navy fans would hide their T-shirts quickly in the closet.
Back in the 70s, Admiral Rickover, the “father of nuclear navy,” had to answer the question before the U.S. Senate: “How long would our aircraft carriers survive in a battle against the Russian Navy?” His response caused disillusionment: “Two or three days before they sink, maybe a week if they stay in the harbor.”
The reason for the greatly reduced lifetime of the aircraft carrier in a battle against the Russians is a deadly danger below the water: modern submarines — especially Russian ones — are so powerful and difficult to locate that they can send large battleships and aircraft carriers to the bottom of the sea in the blink of an eye. The weakness of the U.S. Navy, therefore, is their vulnerability when they compete with an enemy that — using the language of the Americans — dominates the seas below the water surface. Of course, the U.S. military analysts are aware of this weakness, so one wonders why the U.S. Navy still adheres to the doctrine “the bigger the better” and continues to rely on an armada of aircraft carriers and large battleships.
Colonel Douglas McGregor, a decorated combat veteran, author of four books, a PhD and military analyst, gives the answer: “Strategically, it makes no sense, but the construction of large ships, of course, creates a lot of jobs.”
By Voltaire Network
The State Department acknowledged that the crew of the destroyer USS Donald Cook has been gravely demoralized ever since their vessel was flown over in the Black Sea by a Russian Sukhoi-24 (Su-24) fighter jet which carried neither bombs nor missiles but only an electronic warfare device.
On 10 April 2014, the USS Donald Cook entered the waters of the Black Sea
and on 12 April a Russian Su-24 tactical bomber flew over the vessel
triggering an incident that, according to several media reports,
completely demoralized its crew, so much so that the Pentagon issued a
protest [1].
The
USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) is a 4th generation guided missile destroyer
whose key weapons are Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to
2,500 kilometers, and capable of carrying nuclear explosives. This ship
carries 56 Tomahawk missiles in standard mode, and 96 missiles in attack
mode.
The US destroyer is equipped with the most
recent Aegis Combat System. It is an integrated naval weapons systems
which can link together the missile defense systems of all vessels
embedded within the same network, so as to ensure the detection,
tracking and destruction of hundreds of targets at the same time. In
addition, the USS Donald Cook is equipped with 4 large radars, whose
power is comparable to that of several stations. For protection, it
carries more than fifty anti-aircraft missiles of various types.
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A video presentation of the US Aegis system. Currently installed on the most sophisticated US Navy warships and in the process of being set up throughout the entire range of NATO naval forces, this missile defense system was completely knocked out in the Black Sea by a Russian electronic warfare device.
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Meanwhile, the Russian Su-24 that buzzed the USS Donald Cook carried neither bombs nor missiles but only a basket mounted under the fuselage, which, according to the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta [2], contained a Russian electronic warfare device called Khibiny.
As the Russian jet approached the US vessel, the electronic device disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, information transmission, etc. on board the US destroyer. In other words, the all-powerful Aegis system, now hooked up - or about to be - with the defense systems installed on NATO’s most modern ships was shut down, as turning off the TV set with the remote control.
The Russian Su-24 then simulated a missile attack against the USS Donald Cook, which was left literally deaf and blind. As if carrying out a training exercise, the Russian aircraft - unarmed - repeated the same maneuver 12 times before flying away.
After that, the 4th generation destroyer immediately set sail towards a port in Romania.
Since that incident, which the Atlanticist media have carefully covered up despite the widespread reactions sparked among defense industry experts, no US ship has ever approached Russian territorial waters again.
According to some specialized media, 27 sailors from the USS Donald Cook requested to be relieved from active service.
Vladimir Balybine - director of the research center on electronic warfare and the evaluation of so-called "visibility reduction" techniques attached to the Russian Air Force Academy - made the following comment:
"The more a radio-electronic system is complex, the easier it is to disable it through the use of electronic warfare."
Air Traffic Controller - USS Iwo Jima. (Photo by US Navy)
By Georgina Prodhan, Michael Shields, Tim Hepher,Ludwig Burger, Adrian Croft, Jason Hovet
Dozens of aircraft briefly vanished from air-traffic control radars in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia this week and last in separate incidents that Slovak authorities blamed on military electronic warfare exercises.
Air-traffic controllers in Austria and Germany said data about the planes' position, direction, height or speed went missing on June 5 and June 10, but the outages posed no serious danger to people on the aircraft travelling at high altitude.
Their Czech and Slovak counterparts also encountered cases of vanishing aircraft on the same days.
"The disappearance of objects on radar screens was connected with a planned military exercise which took place in various parts of Europe on June 5 and 10 and whose goal was the interruption of radiocommunication frequencies," the Slovak state Air Traffic Services company said in a statement.
"This activity also caused the temporary disappearance of several targets on the radar display, while in the meantime the planes were in radio contact with air traffic controllers and continued in their flight normally.
"Immediately after the identification of the problem with the displays, the side organising the exercises was contacted and the exercise was stopped."
It did not identify the military force, which Austrian media said was the NATO western military alliance. NATO had no immediate comment.
$3 Billion Dollar Killing Machine: The Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer DDG 1000 is floated out of dry dock at the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard.
By Antonia Molloy
The US Navy on Saturday christened the first of its newest class of destroyers – the more than $3 billion (£1.8 billion), 610-foot (186-metre)-long USS Zumwalt.
Named after the late Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt, the warship sports advanced technology and a stealthy shape designed to minimise its visibility on enemy radar and reduce the size of its crew.
Among the 15,000-tonne destroyer's cutting-edge features are a composite deckhouse with hidden radar and sensors and an angular shape that officials say will allow it to be confused for a small fishing boat on radars. It also has a wave-piercing hull designed to reduce the ship's wake.
It's the first US ship to use electric propulsion and produces enough power to one day support the futuristic electromagnetic rail gun, which will be tested at sea in 2016.
Rail guns fire a projectile at six or seven times the speed of sound – enough velocity to cause severe damage. The Navy sees them as replacing or supplementing old-school guns.
By Harvey Wasserman
The roll call of US sailors irradiated while
delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke who say
their health has been devastated continues to grow.
So many have come forward that the progress of their federal class action lawsuit has been delayed.
Bay area lawyer Charles Bonner says a re-filing will wait until early
February to accommodate a constant influx of sailors from the aircraft
carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American ships.
Within a day of Fukushima One’s 3/11/2011 melt-down, American “first
responders” were drenched in radioactive fallout. In the midst of a
driving snow storm, sailors reported a cloud of warm air with a metallic
taste that poured over the Reagan.
