Slashdot Mirror
Iran Reverse Engineers Cobra Attack Helicopter
Hugh Pickens writes "Continuing its tradition of reverse engineering and fabricating its stockpile of 40-year old American weaponry, Iran announced that it is about to unveil its first ever domestically produced Cobra attack choppers. Nearly 50 years after the U.S. introduced the legendary Bell AH-1 Cobra, once the backbone of the U.S. Army's attack helicopter fleet, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country, reports the FARS news release. More photos available here."
...came on... make it open source. !!!
Some people have the weirdest fetishes.
, Iran's locally-grown Cobras will be armed with 'different types of home-made caliber guns, rockets and missiles,' according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. 'All the phases of designing and manufacturing of the chopper have been done inside the country and the helicopter enjoys some capabilities which make it preferable to Apache Choppers,' says Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari. Iranian officials stress that Iran's military and arms programs serve defensive purposes and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country,
So, basically, you're copying 40 year old tech from your enemies, but because you can't buy the bullets or missiles to shoot, you're going to arm them with whatever you can cobble together. It's like Junkyard Wars, only with dictators instead of teams. Yeah... I can see why they say we shouldn't perceive it as a threat... but it's not because they're dangerous or anything. They'll probably kill more of their pilots in training flights than we would with a bombing run or twenty.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Blast them with patent infringement suits. The mullas are screwed now.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I can see them off-shoring production to China and getting 100's a month. Their big problem is going to be training pilots fast enough.
As far as the "age" - it was a good design then and is still a good design. Upgrade the weapons to something more modern and they are going to be very dangerous on a battlefield.
We could debate the situation between Israel, palestina, and Iran all we want, but we have no idea what the facts are here. Journalism isn't what it used to be, and every single story about those three are biased beyond all reconing. Not in outright lies, but in leaving out "details" and drawing lots of attention to others.
How can we give judgement if we have no idea of the conditions these people live in?
Give me facts, and I will give you arguments.
One thing we can say for sure is that Nuclear bombs (fission or fusion), will always be beyond a last resort. The backlash of using one is so tremendous, that countries rather go to war in the traditional means (tanks, generals, the occasional trumpeteer) than anything involving massive genocide.
It's the reason people are terrified of terrorists getting nuclear arms. Because they simply don't care about the backlash.
I'm also curious why they are producing a 40 year old variant instead of targeting a newer one -
Its a wee bit difficult to reverse engineer a helicopter that you dont own.
I just figured out that the "more photos" link actually points to a forum thread from 2010.
Would Iran really kill countless innocent Muslim civilians, including women and children?
Yes. You may not be aware of the brutal suppression of the Green Movement.
Any regime that suppresses free speech is an oppressive government.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you want to bring them to their knees accidentally loose some F-22s over Iran. If they tried to reverse engineer then deploy them it'd bankrupt the country. Even better yet would be a 30 year old Osprey prototype. The point is we're the only country that spends enough on their military to maintain such cutting edge aircraft. They can mimic 40 year old aircraft but the modern ones are too expensive to build and are drastically more expensive to maintain. It's not just that all they have access to is 40 year old aircraft it's that they were far more practical than modern aircraft. Look at the A-10s they are phasing out. They were wildly successful and the basic technology wasn't all that different than was used in the 50s. The joke is the technology has both gotten so good and so delicate as in the breakdown rate that far more planes are lost due to mechanical failure than enemy gunfire.
In related news, Adobe announced that the Iranian government has purchased several licenses of Photoshop CS6.
No, I don't really believe you would.
I think you'd like to see everyone agree with you that Iran would not kill "countless innocent Muslim civilians" and that we should somehow take comfort in the fact that Ahmadinejad "is no Hitler and no Stalin". I'm sure that late neighboring buffoon, Saddam Hussein, was "no Hitler and no Stalin" but he had no compunctions about killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians". In fact, just about every time I look at the news I see muslims killing "countless innocent Muslim civilians", and more often than not, it's thanks to some "buffoon" who's "no Hitler and no Stalin". So pardon me if your assurances about Ahmadinejad do not really convince.
We have seen this news since about 2002. Every six months or so, a parade of neoconservatives who have failed at foreign policy (Ledeen, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Podhoretz, etc) shows up at the right-wing talk shows with breaking news that Israel is going to launch a strike against Iran "within 60 days". No joke, this is as regular as Autumn follows Summer. If you tune into any of the Salem Radio talkers, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, you will hear these predictions at least once a week. The funny thing is that not one of them has ever mentioned their own long string of failed predictions.
I don't know if Israel is going to launch a strike on Iran, and I don't know if Israel wants to launch a strike on Iran, but I know for sure that Israel doesn't want to launch a strike anywhere near as badly as this string of former foreign policy advisers to Republican administrations. And this act has been going on since at least the 1970s.
Oh, and the good news? Mitt Romney has already stated that he's going to hire all these same psychopaths to advise his administration on foreign policy. He's putting the pro-war band back together, and this time with an extra helping of St John's Revelations, LDS-style.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They are great helicopters, and their size and simplicity are reasons the US Marine Corps still use both UH-1 and AH-1 variants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_AH-1_Cobra
SuperCobra are up to a Z variant.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Decades later....doh....
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's something many people don't know about. The one place where Nazism, and it's blend of socialism and ethnic genocide is popular, is the middle east. The entire middle east, that is, including Turkey. It is very popular in Iran.
I don't recall there being any backlash when the U.S. used nukes on Japan, they became one of Americas closest allies soon after.
The devestation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't really much different than the firebombings of Tokyo by the U.S. or Dresden by the British, excepting for radiation sickness and long term cancers, but fire bombing led to burns that were pretty much as bad. The nukes just required fewer air planes to do the damage, but they were still massively expensive to make.
Needless to say a fusion bomb on a large city would be horrific but very few nations have those. A fission bomb would certainly be worse than 9/11 if an Al Qaeda like group managed to set one off in a Western city so its obviously something to be avoided.
But the U.S., Britain and Russia have been killing large numbers of civilians since World War II with little repercussion so I think your statement "will always be beyond a last resort" is a little overly breathless.
@de_machina
To fire the weapons, you must think in American
Oh, and the good news? Mitt Romney has already stated that he's going to hire all these same psychopaths to advise his administration on foreign policy. He's putting the pro-war band back together, and this time with an extra helping of St John's Revelations, LDS-style.
He's already started it. The entire board of the Foreign Policy Initiative all except for William Kristol himself are part of his foreign policy team.
And the only reason why WK isn't on the team is that it would be too obvious.
There is *nobody* in the Press talking about it. The silence and tacit approval from the Fourth Estate is fucking disgusting.
You know what I see? I see rampant electoral fraud this November geared to get Romney elected and we're all just fucked. The fix is in. The fix was in two years ago. The loony-tunes unelectable candidates were picked by the GOP leadership to ensure that Romney, their patsy, would get the nomination. There is no other logical explanation for the disgusting crew of unlikeable and shit-for-brains candidates like Crazy Bitch, Mr. Hairpiece, Pizza Guy, etc.
Yeah, I know, tighten the tinfoil, bmo, but the more you watch what's going on, the more it seems like tinfoil is required.
And so we head toward Permanent War.
--
BMO
I find it amusing that you think that the Persians living in Iran have any kind of ethnic kinship with Arabs; they are more likely to feel that the very presence of Jews in the Holy Land is an affront to Islam, resent the Arabs for losing Palestine, and see the Palestinians as the physical embodiment of the Arabs dereliction of their religious duty to wipe the Israel off the face of the Earth. I easily see Iran as capable of sending every Palestinian on the earth to paradise as Martyrs in order to destroy Israel.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I was alive when US nuked Japan. Parent statement sounds right to me.
I just happened to be reading the U.S. military's strategic bombing report of the atomic bombing of Japan. I also read a recent hospital report on a severe burn victim.
I don't see any difference between being burned to death (or killed when a building collapses) in a nuclear blast or in a conventional firebombing. It's a long painful process in either case. The best you could hope for would be enough morphine to put you out, and they didn't have much morphine after those attacks.
The AC's comment is part of a bad Internet practice of calling everything that you disagree with "inane drivel", as a substitute for thinking about it and making an intelligent comment.
The use of nuclear weapons against Israel presumably has to potentially include Jerusalem as a target. Nuking 'just' one location, such as Tel Aviv, means starting a war of total distruction with the surviving elements of the Israeli military, so it makes no more sense than, say, nukeing just New York and expecting the US to say "Oh, if it's only NY, we won't use nukes back." Ergo, use nukes at all and it's necessary to hit the Jerusalem area to kill Israeli military assets that will otherwise be nukeing you back. That means one of your hypothetical Iranian bombs takes out one of the most major Muslim holy sites (The Dome of the Rock). It also opens the door to retaliation against Islamic sites in general, presumably including even Mecca itself, as a risk. The question becomes, how far would Israel go with a 50% population loss? The real answer is, there's a reasonable likelyhood of a nuclear power using its weapons in response to just fallout from being downwind of a target nation, or similar possible triggers, let alone being faced with genocide and the possible total distruction of their nation. Asking what people would rationally do in such cases is starting from a false assumption that people in such cases remain rational if they started out that way .
So yes, you are drawing a reasonable inference when you question how much Ahmadinejad is like Hitler or Stalin, as one of the major questions is "Is he crazier than either of those two?". Probably not, but he does what the Grand Ayatollahs direct, maybe with some other influences, but just who those might be is terribly unsure from outside Iran. The real question may be how crazy a bunch of mostly 70 yeal old + spiritual leaders are.
However, you should keep in mind that most Iranians are not Arabs, although most are Muslims. Actual Arabs are only about 2% of the Iranian population according to the CIA world factbook. People who even speak fluent Arabic in the region total only about 3%, from the same source. Add to this that the version of Islam endorsed in Iran is Shia, while the majority of Palestinian Islamic practitioners are Sunni, and there are not as many ties between these peoples as most assume. There may well be Iranian hardliners who regard the Sunni as damnable heretics anyway, or, more secularly, strongly resent the occasional Sunni tendency (as seen particularly in Wahhabism, which is a Sunni/Saudi based half religion/half nationalism splinter), to treat all non-arab Muslims as second class Muslims.
Who is John Cabal?
I agree with most of that, but the Mongols had the biggest and most genocides. And while the crusaders and the Spanish were big on killing Arabs, virtually all the enslaving was done by the Moslems.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The Chinese don't exactly subscribe to Nazism but there was a counter revolution when Mao died and they did swing hard to state Capitalism and something closely resembling Fascism. Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
The two regimes in the Middle East that were closely aligned to Fascism recently were the Ba'ath regimes, Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. It is a real stretch to claim Turkey is anywhere close to being in the same class.
If you want to name another regime in the Middle East with issues with ethnic cleansing and far right leaning its probably Israel. Its ironic how similar they've become to their bitterest nemesis.
@de_machina
The proper way to get yourself in bad with the head of the communist party at a university is to ask if he owns the Audi he drove up in, but the 30 seconds or so of blank stare as he goes through all the possible reasons why you might be asking that question is freaking hilarious.
"It means you are able to criticize the government, and people who want to hear you can find a way to hear you."
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
The occupy movement was criticizing the U.S. government and just trying to be heard. As soon as they started being heard, and they started to cause discomfort to Wall Street and the government, they were systematically crushed in every place they had critical mess, New York, Oakland, UC Davis, Denver, Boston, LA etc.
The Federal government was actively aiding and coordinating the cities as they used riot police to break up the entire movement. How often have you heard anything about it since the last encampments were broken up by riot police.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal, but in terms of intent, goals and effect what the U.S. government did to the Occupy movement was exactly the same kind of oppression Iran's government did to the Green movement. The Green movement was actually trying to topple the regime in Iran. Occupy was just saying the current regime in the U.S. sucks (i.e. Wall Street seizing control of our government and using that control to loot America).
@de_machina
They're Iranian Air Force roundels: the outer ring is green instead of the blue used by the Royal Air Force. Although the Iranian Air Force's officer corps was purged after the Islamic revolution, its markings are only slightly modified from those of the old Imperial Iranian Air Force, which dates back to 1920, two decades before the occupation by the British during World War II. So it's not surprising that they were modeled after the British ones--or perhaps the French ones, since the French were actually the first to use the roundel. The French one is almost identical to the British, except that it has red on the outside and blue in the center. Anyway, the three-ring roundel is a very popular insignia for military aircraft, and lots of countries use it.
IIRC, there was a great deal of debate on whether to drop the bomb. It was decided to because of the way the Japanese fought throughout the Pacific, ceding island by island fighting to the last man. So instead of risking 100s of thousand of US troops, they asked Japan to surrender. They refused and it was decided to drop 1 bomb. The US then requested Japan to surrender again. Japan still refused. They dropped #2 and promised more unless there was a surrender. A bit of a bluff since there were only 3 in existence at the time. Japan surrendered. The net effect - probably less Japanese dead, and a whole lot less US dead, and Japan surrendered instead of being wholly defeated and possibly wiped from history. Conventional war was not pretty with the Japanese fight to the last man ethics, it makes for great movies but horrible wars, as all sorts of atrocities start being carried out by the ever more desperate losing side. And Japan was losing, and would lose. There was little doubt as at that time civilians were just considered collateral damage - unfortunate that they were caught between two warring parties even though both sides would claim they tried to avoid hitting civilians but, weapons just weren't that accurate.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
So you are seriously trying to grade how people die with nukes versus a fire storm and you think somehow dying in either one doesn't completely suck? If anything the nuke tends to be somewhat more merciful, at least for all the people near ground zero since the death is instantaneous, slow roasting or searing suffocation in a fire storm has to be one of the more brutal ways to kill someone.
Their are monuments in Tokyo and Dresden too. The Tokyo monument is a statue of a group of children.
The Dresden monument reads,
""How many died? Who knows the number? In your wounds one sees the agony of the nameless ones who burned here in the hellfire made by human hands.""
Once you start killing large numbers of civilians the details of how you go about it don't actually matter.
@de_machina
Sorry, Muslim genocides - starting from the time of Mohammed and going on to this day, far dwarfed anything done by the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Conquestadoras, the Nazis and the Communists - all of them put together. In India alone, some 100 million non-Muslims died at the hands of Muslim conquerors over 700 years (1000AD to 1761AD). The GP AC is correct - overall, some 270 million people people died in the Muslim jihads - and that was before 9/11.
Luckyo is also full of shit regarding 'Arabic numbers'. They were called Hindu numerals, and originated in India. In fact, almost everything the Muslims claim to have invented was already invented elsewhere, like China, India, (pre-Islamic) Persia and Egypt, and so on. The Arab 'contribution' to this was taking some of it and spreading it around. This meme about a golden age of Islamic civilization is a complete myth, and what's more, it flies in the face of the logic of apologists who claim these as being Muslim/Islamic achievements, while claiming that Islam is not a monolyth when it comes to exhibits of their savagery. Never mind that that savagery is common to Arabs, Turks, Farsis and Afghans, and driven by exhortations to jihad in both the Qur'an and Sun'nah.
Actually the speed with which you kill people doesn't matter at all. Slow death in Hitler's concentration camps or Stalin's gulags are, if anything much worse, because they caused massive and prolonged suffering. At least nukes are quick except for the people who get high doses of radiation and burns and aren't killed instantly.
As for the collective guilt of Americans, I am relatively sure its non existent. All the interviews I've seen with the crews who dropped the bombs they were of the opinion the Japanese deserved it, and it was better than the carnage, and mass casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of the main Japanese islands. They'd also been pretty well propagandized in to hating the Japanese at that point. Obviously some American's were torn up over it, Oppenheimer included, but people were torn up by concentration camps, the Bataan death march, Dresden and Tokyo too.
You seem pretty confused about the position I'm advocating. I am not in the least advocating the use of nuclear weapons anywhere. I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the people who somehow think they are exceptional. I'm mostly pointing out it doesn't matter how you do it, once you start killing civilians, and rationalizing it, you are pretty seriously fucked up and you don't deserve a free pass no matter who you are or how righteous you think you are.
@de_machina
Look! My anti-Muslim views are completely supported by all there anti-Muslim blogs! I MUST be right!
Which numbnuts modded this drivel up?
using depleted uranium munitions is actually a great cost saver for US taxpayers. It's a cheap way to dispose of nuclear waste while irradiating a foreign civilian population
Um. No. DU has all the nice and very slightly radioactive U235 removed. It isn't nuclear waste.
U-238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years. If you ate it, the problems from heavy metal poisioning would be much worse than the radioactivity.
It's not like they're firing shells filled with Cs-137 which is what the parent is blatantly trying to imply.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This meme about a golden age of Islamic civilization is a complete myth
The Romans of antiquity were similar borrowers. And yet they had a golden age as well. Creating a common culture and political system and a huge trade network has vast value in itself. Among other things, it permits borrowing of technologies and ideas between otherwise disparate groups and creates a mixing pot of such things.
So the very borrowing of stuff which you decry is a huge part of the Muslim contribution to human development in that time.
What really has changed isn't that Muslim society has gotten worse, but that the rest of the world has found something better.
Erm, talk about half the story?
"Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically."
Have you never heard of the rape of nanking? Japan was war mongering well before even the war in Europe had gotten underway, it was an imperialist nation no different to the Western nations you criticise for provoking them, it's whole purpose for war against China starting primarily in 1937 was because it wanted to take it over.
That's why Japan was under embargo - because it had rolled into China, before Hitler had even rolled into Poland.
Christ, I'm probably one of the least pro-American people you'll meet but Pearl Harbour WAS rational for doing something to Japan, because it was a further extension of Japan's military aggression in the Pacific.
They weren't some innocent country who we just embargoed because we thought it'd be a bit of a laugh, we did so because they were a major destabilising force in the region, we attempted political pressure through embargos and it didn't work. From that point on the only option was full out war against Japan - they started the war in the Pacific long before the west really got involved. The West gave them 4 years to give up their imperialist ambitions and during that time they committed countless massacres, mass-rapes, and general destruction of Chinese cities and infrastructure, when they finally hit Pearl Harbour it was no fucking wonder the West decided enough was enough. No rationale? seriously? You think Japan should've just been allowed to go on destroying, raping, and pillaging the whole Pacific, extending it's war it started in 1937?
Intriguing how the slaves shipped to Europe are completely ignored. Also intriguing how the fact that much of Africa was in fact forcibly converted to Christianity at that point and the fact that you're trying to pretend that current population split on religion and one that existed before the major islamic push in the last two centuries are actually the same.
Citation needed? Where the fuck did you got that numbers?