Thursday, May 05, 2011

Stealth Helicopter Used/Lost in OBL Raid

This morning I saw a picture of the tail and tail rotor of the helicopter that was crashed/blown up in the OBL raid. It's obviously not standard. I started poking around and found this. One of my first worries--echoed by the ABC piece--is that the Pakistanis would send it to the Chinese. Frankly, my view is that we should tell them that we want the copter parts back today or they'll never see another penny of U.S. aid. I'm willing to believe that OBL's location wasn't known at the highest levels of the Pakistani government and military...but not willing to excuse them selling our cutting-edge military technology to a radical authoritarian power.

Unfortunately, my uneducated guess is that blowing the thing up won't be much of an impediment to the Chinese reverse-engineering it. Which worry raises another thing I've sometimes thought about. Depending on how easy it is to obtain information about and reverse-engineer new military technology, might this not constitute a reason to throttle back on our attempts to always have the slickest new war toys? There a several crucial premises there that I don't know much about...

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