Seven people were injured Wednesday when a U.S. Army helicopter crashed on the deck of a Military Sealift Command (MSC) ship during a training exercise off Okinawa, Japan.

According to U.S. Forces Japan, the U.S. Army H-60 helicopter made a “hard deck landing” aboard the USNS Red Cloud (T-AKR-313) at 1:46 p.m. local time Wednesday while the ship was underway approximately 20 miles east of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost island. The helicopter was conducting a local training mission when the incident occurred.

via Seven Injured After U.S. Army Helicopter Crashes on Deck of MSC Cargo Ship – PHOTOS and VIDEO – gCaptain.

This could have been a whole lot worse.

It looks like a vanilla UH-60, not a special operations bird. One wonders though, if the troops aboard were from the forward deployed battalion of the 1st Special Forces Group stationed on Okinawa.

A federal judge has denied the Citizens of Ebey’s Reserve’s request to compel the Navy to temporarily stop touch-and-go operations at Outlying Field Coupeville.

In a lawsuit filed by COER in 2013, the group demanded that the courts force the Navy to stop the training for the EA-18G Growler until an ongoing Environmental Impact Statement could be completed. The EIS is scheduled for completion in 2017.

For the last few years, COER has advocated against the Navy’s flight of the Growler over residential areas, arguing that the electronic attack aircraft is too loud and causes mental and physical health issues.

via Federal judge throws out COER jet noise lawsuit on Whidbey Island.

It was a weak case from the start. That won’t stop COER from finding some other way to be a pain in the ass.

WASHINGTON — As the US Air Force gears up to modernize its legacy UH-1N Huey helicopter fleet, the service is planning an industry day later this month to explore the path ahead for the 40-year-old platform.

The upcoming sessions are meant to educate potential vendors about improvements the Air Force is looking to make to the existing fleet to reduce long-running capability gaps. Unlike modern aircraft, the Huey is analog, which means it lacks the digital displays most current platforms take for granted. The Huey has also been criticized for its lack of modern technology, such as navigational tools needed for flight during adverse weather conditions.

via US Air Force Plans Industry Day for Huey Replacement.

When I rail at the insanity that rules the DoD acquisition process, it’s because of news like this.

You, me, the guy down at the bar, and everyone with a lick of common sense could address this in 30 seconds. Just tack on a multi-year buy of current production UH-60M Blackhawks.

Instead, the Air Force is forced to spend a year sifting through the ashes of a previous study, and then stand up a program office next year, not to buy the aircraft, but to come up with an acquisition strategy. That will take at least a year.

But no, the DoD acquisition process is designed to be fair and thrifty. So we’ll instead waste time and money (and indeed, in procurement, time IS money) and manpower studying a problem that an Airman 1c could answer in less than a minute.

In the year 2000, the United States military used Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) strictly for surveillance purposes and the global commercial UAS market was nascent. Today, the combination of countries exporting complex UAS technologies and an expanding commercial UAS market advances the spread of UAS technologies outside of U.S. government control. The propagation of this technology from both the commercial and military sectors will increase the risk of sophisticated UASs becoming available to any individual or group, regardless of their intent or financial resources. Current and future adversaries, including non-state actors, are likely to acquire and integrate UASs into their operations against U.S. forces. However, U.S. forces can reduce the advantages of abundant UAS capability by limiting the massing of resources and by conducting distributed operations with smaller maneuver elements.

via Operating in an Era of Persistent Unmanned Aerial Surveillance.

One of the points made in that paper we posted on the Russo-Ukraine war was that now days, everything is under constant UAV surveillance. It’s virtually a given that future operations will follow this trend.

Looks to be sometime in the mid-1990s.

The SuperFox was an A-4F with its production J52-P8 engine replaced with the J-52-P408 of the EA-6B. That gave it a boost in thrust from 9,300lbs to about 11,200 pounds. That gave it very nearly a 1:1 thrust to weight ratio.

China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of “many” top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.

The email grab — first codenamed “Dancing Panda” by U.S. officials, and then “Legion Amethyst” — was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.

In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.

via China Read Emails of Top U.S. Officials – NBC News.

This is their private accounts, google, yahoo, whatnot. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a huge matter for concern. Except we’ve seen several instances in this administration where officials have deliberately sidestepped the secure government network and use private email to conduct official business, likely in an attempt to avoid Congressional oversight.

It’s a damn shame our own government is more afraid of letting information reach Congress than it is about leaking it to a foreign power.