Osprey learning sea borne deployment

The crew of the US Bataan and its Marine air wing have become the Navy’s premier experts at operating the MV-22 Osprey aboard ships, mostly by making it up as they go along.

“It’s always something new, different and unexpected,” said Cmdr. Dan Olson, the ship’s air boss. “We are constantly trying to figure out stuff we don’t have published guidance for, and we’re always writing notes, e-mails off to spread what we know.”

When the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed in May, they became the first ARG and MEU to deploy with Ospreys only — and none of the Corps’ old-standby CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and his entourage climbed aboard one of Bataan’s 10 Ospreys on Aug. 7 in Kuwait to experience the rocket-ship liftoff and silky fixed-wing flight out to the underway Bataan.

Olson said the ships in the ARG have become good at working the Ospreys into air operations, but unexpected things still crop up. “It can slow down operations, it’s cumbersome, it takes up more space on the flight deck than other aircraft,” he said.

Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 and the crew of the Bataan have added more safety observers to keep an eye on the Ospreys and the flight deck crew members who work under the cyclonic downwash from their massive rotors.

Managing Ospreys on Bataan is just one part of the challenge. The tiltrotors also must take off and land from the other ships in the ARG, both of which have much smaller flight decks than Bataan. Capt. Sara Faibisoff, an Osprey pilot with VMM-263, said the small-deck gators could accommodate two Ospreys comfortably.

“It’s not that bad at all,” she said. “You make a slow approach, put it down and there’s plenty of space.”

The main difference with landing on small-deck gators is the damage its engine exhaust does to flight decks. An Osprey’s twin nacelles blast heat downward when a V-22 is in helicopter mode. Crew members aboard the small-deck amphibs have taken to setting up metal pads, known as “hot plates,” underneath the nacelles while an Osprey’s engines are running on the flight deck.

“We touch down, they run them in, and then they take them away before we launch,” Faibisoff said.

The Osprey had many skeptics aboard this ship and in Iraq’s western Anbar province, where it deployed last year, because of the controversy surrounding the aircraft’s quarter-century of development, its high cost, and crashes that killed more than two dozen Marines.

“When we were first flying up there, people didn’t want to fly in them — they were scared,” Faibisoff said. “It takes getting used to.”

 

Crowd Subduing Drugs in your future

In August 2009, a leading expert on chemical and biological arms control called  for urgent efforts to stop new mind-altering drugs developed for medical purposes from being adopted by the military for use in warfare.

In an article in the U.S. journal Nature, British academic Malcolm Dando said civilian researchers in many countries seemed largely unaware of the danger and urged quick action to adapt a key arms pact to head it off.

“In the past 20 years, modern warfare has changed from predominantly large-scale clashes of armies to messy civil strife,” wrote Dando, citing the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s and current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chemical agents and even gene therapy being developed in civilian life science laboratories “are particularly suited to this style of warfare; it is not hard to find people in the military world who think they would be useful,” he declared.

Dando, Professor of International Security at Britain’s Bradford University, is a regular participant in U.N.-sponsored arms conferences and in Nature, he said attention should be focused on changing the 1993 global Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

Currently the CWC, which went into effect in 1997 and to which 188 countries are signatories, bans all chemical weapons but excludes those used for law enforcement and riot control.

“‘Law enforcement’ could be taken by some to cover more than domestic riot control, which in certain circumstances would make it legal for the military to use agents such as fentanyl,” said Dando, referring to a powerful painkilling drug.

Fentanyl, a strong painkiller, Dando said, was deployed in a still unrevealed mixture by Russian special forces in 2002 to subdue Chechen militants who had seized a Moscow theater.

But its use led to the deaths of over 120 hostages among the theater-goers and Russian commandos who went into the theater with protective gear shot dead the incapacitated hostage-takers.

The Russian government will not reveal the type of gas because it may face similar attacks in the future, “

A former Russian defence ministry official, Viktor Baranets said: “Most likely the agent they chose was the gas known as Kolokol-1, the most promising of all psycho-chemical agents developed by the Soviet special services.”

He said the gas, known within Russia’s security community for some time, “spreads rapidly across broad areas, and can render a healthy person completely unconscious in 1 to 3 seconds”, but people with weak hearts or prone to vomiting could die from inhaling it.

Other agents being developed, said Dando, include oxytocin, dubbed the “love and cuddle” chemical which induces trust and whose emergence “opens up the possibility of a drug that could be used to manipulate people’s emotions in a military context.”

In a paper to be published soon in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the professor focuses on recent US actions that have served to undermine the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. In a move that stunned the international community last July, the US blocked an attempt to give the convention some teeth with inspections, so that member countries could check if others were keeping the agreement.

Mr Dando believes Washington’s motive for torpedoing the deal, which had the support of its allies, was to maintain secrecy over US research work on biological weapons. He said that work includes:

• CIA efforts to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons
• A project by the Pentagon to build a bio-weapon plant from commercially available materials to prove that terrorists could do the same thing
• Research by the Defense Intelligence Agency into the possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

Jonathan Tucker, a chemical weapons expert at the US Institute for Peace in Washington, said much of the work on non-lethal weapons was being carried out by an institute under the US justice department but was funded by the Pentagon.

For the full story see Reuters coverage