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Hail of Gunfire and Grenades Forces Apaches to Pull Back By JIM DWYER IN CENTRAL IRAQ, March 24 - With a hail of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, Iraqi forces downed two Apache helicopters today and forced 30 other helicopters in their brigade back to their base. One two-member crew was unaccounted for; the other was rescued. Iraqi state television broadcast images of one downed helicopter, which appeared largely intact, and jubilant men dancing around it. All 32 helicopters sustained some damage, occasionally slight, Army officials said, in what was a significant setback for the allies. Fighting continued today...

AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar, March 24 (Reuters) - U.S. General Tommy Franks said on Monday that the two crewmen of an Apache Longbow helicopter shot down south of Baghdad were missing. Baghdad aid earlier that Iraqi farmers had shot down two U.S. helicopters south of the capital and vowed to show the pilots on television, just as it did with other captured and killed soldiers on Sunday. "The fate of the crew is uncertain right now. We characterise that crew, two men, as missing in action," Franks told a news briefing at Central Command in Qatar. He said the helicopter...

Apaches ran into "hornet's nest" of Iraqi fire-CNN KUWAIT, March 24 (Reuters) - U.S. Apache attack helicopters ran into a major battle south of Baghdad on Monday in the closest fighting to the Iraqi capital in five days of war, a CNN reporter with the helicopter unit said. Iraqi television earlier showed gun-waving Iraqis dancing around a downed Apache. Iraq said local farmers had brought down two Apaches and said it would later show the second helicopter and the captured pilots on television. CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul accompanying the U.S. Army Fifth Corps 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment said a unit...

Iraq TV shows downed Apache helicopter BAGHDAD, March 24 (Reuters) - Iraqi television showed pictures on Monday of what it said was a downed "enemy" helicopter south of Baghdad. The black Apache helicopter, which appeared intact, was still armed with guided missiles with U.S. markings on them. Iraqis waving rifles surrounded the aircraft, which normally carries a crew of two. There were reports of helicopter strikes by U.S. forces south of Baghdad overnight.

In an address just over a year ago, President George W. Bush argued that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was, in some ways, a blessing in disguise. The surprise attack sunk or crippled eight battleships, the backbone of the US Pacific fleet, forcing the navy to rely on its flotilla of aircraft carriers to fight its way back across the ocean. The next 60 years saw the carrier battle group go from an afterthought to the centre of what would become the most powerful maritime force the world has ever seen. America's military is once again set to make...

Army's Readiness Soars as Better Weather Permits UnloadingKUWAIT CITY, March 8 -- The wind died, the skies cleared and, just before dawn today, the weather-delayed USNS Dahl berthed with the last critical U.S. Army weapons needed to attack Iraq. By noon the first of 72 helicopters belonging to the 101st Airborne Division had been hoisted from the hold and moved to a dockside parking lot. Army mechanics in white hard hats swarmed over the initial Apache attack helicopter, stripping away protective plastic and reattaching rotor blades that were removed two weeks ago, before the voyage from Jacksonville, Fla. The helicopters...

Live report from Karl Penhaul after Apache choppers attacked Republican Guards near Karbala (sp?). This is north of Najaf and WSW 70mi of Baghdad. He reports that our Apaches were shot up pretty bad. The IRG put up a "wall" of AAA. After returning to base, Apaches were "strewn around" instead of being parked neatly. He wouldn't confirm that all our Apaches made it back.

Olga Craig watches Iraqis surrender after a fierce battle to secure Umm Qasr They came staggering and stumbling across the desert - a bedraggled band of shoeless soldiers from Saddam Hussein's 51st Mechanical Infantry Division, waving any piece of white clothing they could find. The night before, they had fought a fierce battle with United States marines for the deep-water port of Umm Qasr in southern Iraq. Now, ravenous, begging for water and terrified, they were ready to surrender - to anyone they thought could feed and clothe them. Only a mile away in the desert, a few miles outside...

ABC NEWS TED KOPPEL WITH 3ID REPORTS APACHE LONGBOW SHOT DOWN. AIRCRAFT REPAIRED AND TOOK OFF AGAIN.

How Apache Helicopters Workby Tom Harris The Apache helicopter is a revolutionary development in the history of war. It is essentially a flying tank -- a helicopter designed to survive heavy attack and inflict massive damage. It can zero in on specific targets, day or night, even in terrible weather. As you might expect, it is a terrifying machine to ground forces. In this edition of HowStuffWorks, we'll look at the Apache's amazing flight systems, weapons systems, sensor systems and armor systems. Individually, these components are remarkable pieces of technology. Combined together, they make up an unbelievable fighting machine --...

A number of key capability shortfalls must be addressed if the UK's Apache AH Mk 1 attack helicopter is to achieve its planned initial operating capability (IOC) in August 2004, according to a report published by the UK's National Audit Office (NAO). Failure to remedy these issues will cause further delays to the £4.1 billion ($6.3 billion) project, and result in a "significant capability gap" during the development of an air manoeuvre force, the document warns. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) awarded Westland Helicopters - now part of AgustaWestland - a £2 billion prime contract in April 1996 to...

GOTTA SEE THIS - War for Enduring Freedom 10/26/02 - Bagram, Bamiyan, Gholghola, Hamburg, Dahuk, Aziz taken BREAKING: Dr. Germ taken, Lahore, Pakistan, Dr Amir Aziz, Bagram, live-fire exercise, Apache Hellfire, heroes return from a sortie, Harrier jets, Bamiyan, Afghanistan, Gholghola School, Kabul cricket game, 772nd MP Company, Massachusetts Army National Guard, Kandahar, 82nd Airborne, Gaza,Akram al-Zatma, Hamburg, Germany, Terrorist Mounir el Motassadeq at trial, Arad, Israel, at the funerals caused by Palestinian terrorists, Khan Younis, terrorists practice, Dahuk, Turkey =========== Bagram =========== In Bagram, live-fire exercise with Apache Hellfire missile. In Bagram, heroes return from a sortie. In Bagram,...

Wednesday, October 16, 2002 Illesheim-based Apache helicopter unit arrives in Kuwait By Jon R. Anderson, Stars and Stripes European edition, Wednesday, October 16, 2002 More forces from Europe are on their way to the Middle East as the United States continues to marshal combat units for a possible war with Iraq. The 6th Aviation Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment — part of the Illesheim, Germany-based V Corps — arrived in Kuwait on Tuesday, according to Capt. Darrell Wright, an Army spokesman for U.S. forces in the region. The tank-killing AH-64 Apache unit is among a growing number of forces being dispatched...

Virus writers get Slapper happy Internet vandals have continued to modify the recent Slapper worm and have sent at least four new variants of the hostile Linux program into the electronic wilds. The newest variant, dubbed "Mighty," exploits the same Linux Web server flaw that other versions of the Slapper worm have used to slice through the security on vulnerable servers. Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Labs said in a release Friday that more than 1,600 servers had been infected by this latest variant as of Friday morning and are now controlled by the worm via special channels on the Internet...

SummaryMicrosoft’s XML extensions form the basis for the Passport single sign-on service but are fundamentally inconsistent with SGML principles. In contrast, Plan 9’s factotum authentication management offers an elegant and effective open source alternative. (6,000 words)

A virulent Linux worm is creating an attack network on the Internet, security clearing house CERT warned this weekend. Slapper exploits a previously-disclosed OpenSSL vulnerability, to create an attack platform for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against other sites. The worm also has backdoor functionality, according to, security tools vendor ISS. It describes the malicious code as a variation of the much less virulent Apache "Scalper" BSD worm. The OpenSSL server vulnerability exploit exists on a wide variety of platforms, but Slapper appears to work only on Linux systems running Apache with the OpenSSL module (mod_ssl) on Intel architectures. The...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates- Kuwait will buy 16 attack helicopters from Boeing in a deal worth $886 million, the official Kuwaiti News Agency reported Saturday. The deal was signed in Kuwait on Saturday by Defense Minister Sheik Jaber Mubarak Al Hamad and U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones, the agency said in a report posted on its Web site. In April, the Pentagon announced plans to sell 16 AH-64D Apache attack helicopters to Kuwait. It said that dealt was valued at $2.1 billion, and was to include four spare engines, four Hellfire missile launchers, 288 Hellfire missiles and other missiles and equipment.

SEOUL: An American attack helicopter crashed in a rural area east of the northeastern town of Unchon but there were no casualties, US forces stationed in South Korea said Friday. The AH-64D helicopter, assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division, was on a routine training flight when it crashed in an unpopulated area about 15 km east of Unchon. Unchon is 40 km northeast of Seoul. "Neither the pilot nor copilot were injured. There were no reports of injuries or damage on the ground," the US forces said in a press release. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Apache worm starts to spread Security experts are rushing to decode a worm program that exploits a 2-week-old flaw to infect computers running vulnerable versions of the popular open-source Apache Web server application. The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few people have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide. "It is spreading," said Domas Mituzas, a systems developer for Baltic information-technology firm Microlink Systems and the...

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