Dutch F-16 flies into its own bullets, scores self-inflicted hits | Ars Technica
▻https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/dutch-f-16-takes-cannon-fire-from-itself
military exercise in which a Dutch Air Force F-16 was damaged by live fire from a 20-millimeter cannon—its own 20-millimeter cannon.
#arf !
As Popular Mechanics’ Kyle Mizokami reported in 2017, this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. During flight testing in 1956, a Grumman F-11 Tiger flying from Grumman’s test facility in Riverhead, New York fired a burst from four 20mm cannons toward the Atlantic Ocean. The pilot then entered a steeper dive, kicked in the jet’s afterburners, and went supersonic—when suddenly the windshield blew in and the engine failed. The pilot had caught up with the shells and in the process shot himself down.
De toutes façons, ils vont bientôt les changer…
… et les remplacer par les superbes fers à repasser volants.
Meanwhile, the Dutch Air Force is in the process of replacing the F-16 with the Lockheed F-35A; eight are scheduled to be delivered in 2019. The F-35A carries the four-barrel General Dynamics GAU-22 Equalizer, a 25mm cannon that carries a mere 182 rounds in its magazine—so about two seconds worth of shells. That might make for fewer opportunities for a self-kill.
#Equalizer …
Why Is ‘The_New Republic’ Taking Money From an NSA Contractor to Run Defenses of the NSA? | The Nation
▻http://www.thenation.com/blog/177688/why-new-republic-taking-money-nsa-contractor-run-defenses-nsa
The National Security Agency has a friend at the Harvard Law School. And at the Brookings Institution. And at The New Republic. And at The Washington Post.
Benjamin Wittes, who is not a lawyer, is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is “Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security.” He also has a Web site, Lawfare, where he’s been blogging on the report on the abuses of the National Security Agency just out from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies, in terms highly favorable to the super-secretive and media-shy agency. He also enjoys extraordinary access to the NSA, for instance in this series of podcasts with its top officials. (“We Brought In a Recoding Device So You Don’t Have To,” the series is titled—cute!)
Why is Lawfare the NSA’s media portal of choice? Well, consider this. Lawfare, in turn, partners with The New Republic, where this post was republished in its entirety. The joint Lawfare/TNR project is titled “Security States,” and it is sponsored, Wittes proudly notes, by the Northrop Grumman Corporation. Grumman, in turn, is a major NSA contractor—see this $220 million deal it scored with the NSA “to develop an advanced information management and data storage system that will support efforts to modernize the nation’s electronic intelligence and broader signals intelligence capabilities,” a fact TNR does not disclose to its readers.
And the NSA is apparently well-pleased with the arrangement. “Check out Lawfare’s interview with NSA’s acting Deputy Director Fran Fleisch,” the agency enthused today, one of the NSA’s public affairs office’s six breathless tweets booming “Lawfare” over the past five days. Surely they also enjoy the laundering of the content of “the indispensable Lawfare blog” through The Washington Post, courtesy of its hack right-wing blogger Jennifer Rubin. (“The NSA will falter unless Obama does his job.”)
Meanwhile, Wittes’s Lawfare co-blogger Jack Goldsmith, late of George W. Bush’s Pentagon and Justice Department, is a professor at the Harvard Law School, but does not disclose any conflict of interest, as most Harvard Law professors do, for being part of such a project sponsored by a commercial entity.
Let’s hear from Professor Goldsmith as to whether he is paid by Northrop for his posts at Lawfare, and whether he thinks he has disclosed that to his Harvard employers, and whether he should make the arrangement public. Let’s hear from The New Republic. Why is it taking money from an NSA contractor to run defenses of the NSA? I’ll be sending this post straightaway to TNR editor Franklin Foer, an old friend. And I’ll e-mail it too Professor Goldsmith, too. I’ll let you know what they say.