do I really have to say it???
Posted on 01/23/2011 5:02:53 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Chinese officials recently unveiled a new, high-tech stealth fighter that could pose a significant threat to American air superiority - and some of its technology, it turns out, may well have come from the U.S. itself.
Balkan military officials and other experts have told The Associated Press that in all probability the Chinese gleaned some of their technological know-how from an American F-117 Nighthawk that was shot down over Serbia in 1999.
Nighthawks were the world's first stealth fighters, planes that were very hard for radar to detect. But on March 27, 1999, during NATO's aerial bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war, a Serbian anti-aircraft missile shot one of the Nighthawks down. The pilot ejected and was rescued.
It was the first time one of the much-touted "invisible" fighters had ever been hit. The Pentagon believed a combination of clever tactics and sheer luck had allowed a Soviet-built SA-3 missile to bring down the jet.
The wreckage was strewn over a wide area of flat farmlands, and civilians collected the parts - some the size of small cars - as souvenirs.
"At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers," says Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia's military chief of staff during the Kosovo war.
"We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies ... and to reverse-engineer them," Domazet-Loso said in a telephone interview.
A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up "in the hands of foreign military attaches."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Mark Steyn, in his excellent article on the looming decline of the Anglo-Saxon world entitled : DEPENDENCE DAY in the New Criterion, warns us thusly :
According to the CBO’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the U.S. government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest—whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have advanced from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers.
What does that mean? In 2009, the United States spent about $665 billion on its military, the Chinese about $99 billion. If Beijing continues to buy American debt at the rate it has in recent years, then within a half-decade or so U.S. interest payments on that debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. This year, the Pentagon issued an alarming report to Congress on Beijing’s massive military build-up, including new missiles, upgraded bombers, and an aircraft-carrier R&D program intended to challenge American dominance in the Pacific. What the report didn’t mention is who’s paying for China’s military -— Mr. and Mr. America.
If a SA-3 could see the 117, then a replica has guaranteed huge problems.... that we can see too.
40 year old tech.
I remember seeing pictures of the Serbians crawling all over the wreckage from that airplane. I hope they don't mind getting cancer. Those aircraft were made of a lot of funky materials you don't want to be around if it catches on fire.
The Chinese may have picked up some material tech, but I doubt there was anything else left. As I recall, we bombed the crash site, to destroy the wreckage.
I also recall they kept B-2's out of the fight, for this very reason.
As I said in an earlier post... Duuuh?!...
Interesting. There has to be a lot more to a Raptor than what could be gleaned from F117 wreckage. I think the Chinese have a monkey see monkey do copy whose main value is as a photo op.
do I really have to say it???
Bill Clinton is to blame.
It wasn't the SA-3 that saw the plane. The F-117 was spotted using the Soviet trick of bistatic radar: transmitter at one location; receiver at another. The F-117 achieves much of its stealth by reflecting radar away from the direction of the incoming pulse. With a receiver that's physically offset, though, it's possible to penetrate that kind of stealth.
Remember when the Chinesse embacy was bombed, by mistake. Think maybe there is a connection?
Wasn’t it also related to the waepons bay doors being open too long?
Also the Clintoon administration used the same ingress and egress routes OVER AND OVER.
The bad guys could watch take offs, and just wait until we were likley over them.
AND! I have read we had very little in the way of ECM assets there to jam the powerful ground-based radars.
You recall incorrectly.
I also recall they kept B-2's out of the fight, for this very reason.
Incorrect again.
Thank you! Wild stuff! Thank you for the insight that it was a little more complicated than at first glance.
My point is the Chinese really are not that much to be concerned with. They can copy, they can imitate but their system would not allow them to create. They have a huge history of this and that is why still today, they are over here stealing or buying ideas.
Worst part is , now we have mr “death to America” giving our “stuff” away which is another pill by itself to contend with.
F-117s, as well as B-2s and F-22s, can be detected by low band RADAR, regardless of the separation between the transmitter and receiver. That fact, which we in the EW community knew a long time ago, was made public following Desert Storm by the British who announced that they had been tracking the aircraft from ships in the Persian Gulf.
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