Re: In addition


Message posted by casper_n on March 18, 2021 at 10:23:40 PST:

If you haven't read Sean Naylor's "Relentless Strike" I recommend it. It's a dense (reads like a history textbook) review of SOCOM from inception through the war on terror (up to about 2014).

It has a chapter on Neptune Spear and then spends a couple of pages talking about the Stealth Blackhawks. They were relatively experimental at the time of the UBL raid and the Night Stalkers only got a few weeks of stick time to spin them up in the desert. They have very different flight characteristics from the non-modified birds, especially close to the ground, hence the mishap.

According to Naylor's sources, the newer generation work better down low, and 160th SOAR now has a small contingent based in the Nellis ranges specifically to operate/train on/develop tactics for these airframes.

As of his publication (2015), he knew that they had been deployed at least once more for an operation deep into Syria.

On a personal note, I have it on good authority that even as of the time of the Bin Laden raid, the models they used were not the best-of-the-best. A friend who worked uprange made an aside when we were talking about the random guy on Twitter who heard the helicopters overhead. He said, "You can't hear those things when they're hovering 25 feet away from you. There's no way he heard it -- unless they were using an old one."


In Reply to: Re: In addition posted by Q-nimbus on March 18, 2021 at 9:45:05 PST:

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