Israel asks to buy US jet fuel for military aircraft

The Pentagon notified Congress of an Israeli request to purchase up to 210 million dollars in JP-8 aviation jet fuel for its military aircraft.

"The jet fuel will be consumed while the aircraft is in use to keep peace and security in the region," the Pentagon's Defense Security and Cooperation Agency said.

The notice to Congress came two days after Israeli fighter jets attacked targets in Lebanon, including the international airport in Beirut, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas.

The Pentagon said the sale would help "improve the security of a friendly country which has been, and continues to be, an important force for stability and economic progress in the Middle East."

The US Congress has 30 days to act to block the sale; otherwise, it is automatically approved.

Bush is a raging tiger compared to most of our Presidents. He has liberated 52 million people and nearly destroyed Al Qaeda. There have been few Presidents who can claim these successes.

All salutory, but apparently he has decided arbitrarily that he's had enough of being pissed on by the MSM. He's throwing in the towel politically. Listen to his own speeches and rhetoric. Defensive. Always. Never pointedly looking at finishing the job in the rest of the Axis of Evil. Never looking squarely at the actual hub of that axis: The Shanghai Pact. China and Russia.

Even now he has shown that he won't do anything about Iran. He only has two and a half years left. It is clear that both North Korea and Iran is thumbing its nose at us...if the administration was ever going to pre-empt them, and push for regime change, a'hem...now would be a good time...

I would be pleasantly surprised if he does. But I am not holding my breath. I believe he has caved in to the Foggy Bottom crowd. Hence Venezuela, North Korea, China, Russia and Iran all eagerly abetting a new Nazi regime right under the noses of the U.S. And essentially nothing but jaw-jaw is being done.

Oh, please. He's done nothing but encourage the Israelis, and you're trotting out this nonsense?

So now you know better than Rush Limbaugh too?

Just monday, Limbaugh noted the historical fact of the administration losing its nerve, although he couched it as "the State Dept.":

Everybody wants to know who's at fault here. Well, the American left and the Arab bloc, of course, blame Israel. Our realists blame Hezbollah, Syria and IRAN -- and put IRAN in capital letters -- and then of course the American left says, "Well, Israel shouldn't overreact. Hezbollah didn't fire rockets, and we'll have peace and flowers and happiness, wouldn't that be nice? Can we just have a cease-fire?" Well, just who is at fault here, who is to blame? It's not Israel, and it's not really Hezbollah. It's not even Syria.
Well, it has to be Iran, but what is it that's enabling Hezbollah and Syria and Iran to act as they are? Folks, this is terribly important here, because if a strong show of response is not demonstrated to these people, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, they are going to be emboldened. If you want to know who I think is at fault here, the United Nations for one, our state department number two, and perhaps Colin Powell number three. We have political opportunists in this country always putting ambition over country, and we have the Bush hating Drive-By Media that refuses to criticize UN failures while continuing to hold out hope that the only body on the planet that can ever solve any problem when it hasn't ever solved one is the United Nations.
Now, six years ago, folks, Israel and Lebanon and the United Nations agreed that Israel would withdraw from southern Lebanon. Lebanon would disarm the terrorist militia Hezbollah, and the UN would supervise. Oh, let's all sing kumbaya. Let's have a party. Six years later, what's happening? Hezbollah rocket launchers are launching alongside UN flags at the border, and now, after all of this, God help us: Kofi Annan wants to supervise a cease-fire after a policy which guaranteed us all that this that's happening right now could not and would not happen if Israel would just withdraw from southern Lebanon. So much for John Kerry's United Nations. Now, for the State Department. President Bush showed the Middle East that the fun's over, did so in Iraq.
The next domino was to be Syria. This Iraq war was never meant to stop in Iraq. Remember the original Axis of Evil. This was to root out that whole region over there, either through diplomacy or through military action. Syria should have blinked at all this, but it was our state department that blinked first, and Syria learned that they could withdraw from Lebanon without withdrawing. They could pull out without actually pulling out because nobody was going to do anything about it once they didn't pull out, and Iran now enters the fray with a brand-new strategery, and it's called war by militias. We've got the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. We have the Hamas militia in Gaza, and the Muqi al-Sadr militia in southern Iraq.
As for our allies, the old reliable Jacques Chirac (nobody surprised here), accuses Israel of overreacting. I think to the French, if Israel said "ouch" after one of these bombs struck or one of these missiles struck, the French would accuse them of having an overreaction. Wonder how many rockets France would have suffered without overreacting if somebody lobbed some missiles into them. France gets upset over penalties in the World Cup but they don't get upset over anything else. So here we are today, this very moment, the media template is Israel overreacting. Bush was distracted. Bush caused all of this by going into Iraq rather than the appropriate template, after England, France, and Germany -- what was it? Two years negotiating with Iran, Iran still is doing their nuke buildup.
Iran is still engaged in influencing events throughout that region. Any wonder why Iran unleashed the militia strategy on the Middle East? Because nobody cares. Nobody cares what Iran's doing. Nobody wants to do anything to stop Iran from what they're doing except Israel. Now, if America is the cradle of democracy, Israel is the cradle of reality in that region. That's why the rest of the world doesn't support us. All of this restraint and cessation of hostilities is just a bunch of garbage, folks. They gave them Gaza. They pulled out of south Lebanon. Now they want to destroy Israel, so what is this restraint business? Israel is just supposed to sit back?

Rush is getting it.

They also really need J-Stars and the fixed version of the MTHEL laser system deployed...pronto.

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Beyond Bullets
BY JIM WILSON
Photo by U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense Command
Published on: April 15, 2003

The Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser has scored 3Array kills, including 26 Katyusha rockets.
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A fuzzy, green dot from a laser pointer drifts along the ground and comes to rest on an odd-looking piece of metal. For the next few seconds the light hangs motionless. Then, just as we realize the dot is focused on a hand grenade, the image on our viewing screen dissolves in white light. The really impressive sight comes into view when the screen clears. We see that the concrete pad beneath the blast is scorched, but otherwise perfectly intact. "We burn the least explosive part of the munition," explains Scott McPheeters, our guide for a visit to the Army's laser weapons testing center on the sprawling White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. You may have observed the same low-force blast when as a kid you stupidly tried using a match to light a firecracker that had lost its fuse.

Over the next few minutes we watch the Army's Humvee-mounted Zeus laser cast its glowing eye upon an assortment of unexploded ordnance. Seeing Zeus in action, we realize we are looking at more than a fast new tool for safely clearing unexploded ordnance. We are looking at the first major military breakthrough of the 21st century.

Chemical Lasers
The military began exploring the combat potential of lasers in the 1960s. At that time, researchers focused almost exclusively on chemically activated lasers. Tests at the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (HELSTF) here at White Sands have produced impressive results ever since. As early as 1978, a chemical laser blasted through a tethered helicopter. "MIRACL is a very capable laser," says HELSTF director Tom Hodge, referring to the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, the workhorse of military laser research. "It is also roughly the size of the power and light plant down the road. It isn't a combat system. It is a testbed." Thus far, the most compact chemical laser to score a kill is the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL), shown here. A few weeks before PM's visit to White Sands, MTHEL became the first laser weapon to track and destroy multiple artillery projectiles in flight at the missile range. The Air Force is using similar chemical laser technology for its Scud-killing airborne laser, which fits inside a modified Boeing 747-400 freighter ("Air Force Plans Fleet Of Laser Cannons," April 1997, page 16).

Portable Power
Zeus makes a sharp break with the past. Instead of using highly reactive chemicals to create a laser beam inside a plume of hot gas, Zeus performs its magic inside a special type of glass. Its operating principle is the same as that of all solid-state lasers, including those in CD drives and DVD players. Basically, light from a beefed-up flashbulb sends a stream of photons into nine neodymium-doped glass discs. Inside the discs, the light, which can be thought of as a rabble of raw recruits, becomes organized into a crack drill team--what physicists call a beam of coherent, monochromatic light. Gaining strength as more light is pumped in, the colorless laser beam bursts out one side of the crystal with enough power to heat steel at 200 yards. Add a control system to keep the beam on target and a database that tells the beam which part of the munition to focus upon, and you have the perfect tool for safely defusing unexploded ordnance.

Looking beyond ordnance removal, the Army envisions solid-state heat capacity (SSHC) lasers, such as that used in Zeus, as the ultimate defensive weapon. "Rockets, artillery and mortars cause half of the casualties," says Chip Hardy, SSHC laser project manager at HELSTF.

Senior military officials are more cautious in their assessment. "Our preference would be to walk away from chemicals," Brig. Gen. John Urias, the U.S. Army's point man on lasers, tells PM. He quickly points out that at their current stage of development, solid-state lasers are hardly troublefree. "If the laser overheats, the system shuts down."

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., which developed the 10-kilowatt SSHC laser for the Zeus system, believe the power can be increased to the 100 kilowatts needed to blast enemy rockets from roughly 5 miles away.

The difficulty in creating a stronger pulse is not in producing a more powerful laser beam, but keeping the laser itself cool. A 100-kilowatt laser will require 1 megawatt of input power. The heat produced when the laser is fired has to be removed to prevent damage. Livermore scientists have solved the problem by developing a way to rapidly cool the laser between firings without losing its structural integrity or lasing characteristics. A lab spokesman says the research team is on target for delivering a demonstration version by 2007.

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Katyusha rocket is shown being fired from a launcher as part of the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL) testbed live fire test program.
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MTHEL testbed beam director during laser firing. In this infrared photo, the MTHEL testbed high-energy laser beam can be seen as it is projected by the beam director at a Katyusha rocket in flight.
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Links referenced within this article

Air Force Plans Fleet Of Laser Cannons
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/technology_watch/1283906.html?page=1&c=y

Find this article at:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1281536.html

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