Faked Chinese chopper prototype. Art via China Defense Blog.

by DAVID AXE

The good folks at China Defense Blog were excited when they discovered last week what appeared to be the first image of a new prototype Chinese heavy helicopter.

Turns out, it was a Photoshop fake. “Welcome to the sucker club,” CDB mused.

It’s a popular avocation, faking war & weaponry for Internet consumption. You might recall the image from eight years ago of the mythical U.S. Air Force “Aurora” spy plane. Look closely for the clothesline from which the model is dangling.

And remember the faked smoke from the Israeli attacks on Lebanon?

Or the Photoshopped barrage of Iranian missiles?

Sometimes the image is real, but the weapon depicted is not what it appears to be. Many of the Pentagon’s early F-35 test planes were slapped together by Lockheed Martin, thrown into the air, quickly photographed then promptly grounded for months of modifications to make them flyable in testing.

Photoshop would have been cheaper.

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by DAVID AXE

Did you see the new movie The Men Who Stare at Goats? Remember Stephen Lang’s character General Dean Hopgood — the grinning, white-haired officer who championed Jeff Bridges’ character’s notion of psychic warriors? Well, Hopgood’s based on a real guy, an Army Major General Albert Stubblebine, now retired. Stubblebine was a big proponent of the real-life psychic-soldier programs that inspired the fictional Goats. He’s also a 9/11 skeptic.

The movie connection has gotten Stubblebine’s supporters all excited. And trust me, you don’t want to get these guys riled up. David Leffler, an advocate for a military meditation strategy called “Invincible Defense Technology,” defends Stubblebine on the IDT Website. Stubblebine “is satirically portrayed as attempting to walk through walls without success,” the site reads. “While there may be some truth to this, in reality, [Major General] Stubblebine was an intelligent pioneer in the development of human resource technologies. He understood the latent potential of the human mind that warriors would eventually be trained to harness.”

And what, according to Leffler, does this potential represent? To recap, Invincible Defense Technology practitioners access, via meditation, what they describe as an invisible “Unified Field” that connects all people.

Like energetic radio waves, accessing the Unified Field through techniques of consciousness causes “field effects” in the surrounding social environments. Therefore, the field effects of the Unified Field enhance the orderliness of social relations. Orderliness reduces friction and its social equivalent: enmity. With no enmity between them, former enemies become allies, and the nations become invincible because there are no enemies to fight.

Uh huh. For the record, this military meditation emerged from the same Iowa-based Maharishi School of Management, which teaches a lot of things, but certainly not management. Among the school’s practices: Yogic Flying, a supposed form of brain-powered levitation. Check out the video to see some Yogic Fliers in action.

Looks a lot like bouncing to me.

(Video: National Geographic)

by DAVID AXE

The Sun tabloid pointed to a video of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 tailing a strange-looking object. “UFO watchers reckon it could be proof of a government cover-up,” the paper declared.

Jeebus, people, it’s the Boeing X-45 killer drone. See?

by DAVID AXE

What’s the “ultimate ‘left-of-the-boom’” counter-measure for defeating the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are the biggest killer of U.S. and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it aerial surveillance combined with thorough, neighborhood patrolling, to find and capture bomb teams? Is it counter-finance efforts aimed at locking down bomb-makers’ bank accounts? Is it winning the support of the local population, to create a hostile home environment for bombers?

No, according to Dr. David R. Leffler, Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Military Science, a project of the Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy, located in Fairfield, Iowa. Leffler wrote me last week to plug what he calls the “Invincible Defense Technology,” capable of rendering nations invincible.

That’s right. Invincible. Here’s Leffler:

The root cause of terrorism lies in the human mind and there it must be eliminated. Therefore, the root of the problem is not the IEDs or other weapons as technical devices, but the terrorist as a deranged human being who wants to make use of the IEDs to pursue his goals. Ultimately, what is needed is a technology that prevents not just IEDs, but any terrorism threat by preventing the enemy from arising.

And how do we do that? By accessing, via meditation, the “Unified Field” that connects all human beings.

Like energetic radio waves, accessing the Unified Field through techniques of consciousness causes “field effects” in the surrounding social environments. Therefore, the field effects of the Unified Field enhance the orderliness of social relations. Orderliness reduces friction and its social equivalent: enmity. With no enmity between them, former enemies become allies, and the nations become invincible because there are no enemies to fight. 

I always thought war was the result of conflict over politics, resources and religion. Turns out, it’s just bad people being grumpy, on a global scale. And we can make them less grumpy, by simply willing it. The most vexing problems in human history, solved, by partying with your hippie pals (pictured)!

On second thought, don’t sell your Raytheon stock. And let’s keep patrolling those Afghan villages, just in case the meditation doesn’t pan out.

(Photo: via Leffler)

While springing from a kernel of truth — the U.S. did and does support Ethiopia’s war — Somalis’ attitudes now enable misconceptions that in turn only exacerbate their attitudes. It’s a feedback loop of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, and it’s the kind of thing that turns ambivalent developing nations into hotbeds of extremism, piracy and terrorism.

Case in point: a Somali news site is reporting “Western” fighter jets apparently threatening rural villages while “Western” naval vessels pillage Somali fisheries:

“We really don’t know where these planes are from, but all that we know is that they are from the Indian Ocean side and have caused no damages to the district,” said the district commissioner of Warshiq Abdurahman Moalim Ahmed. …

Likewise the district commissioner disclosed that there is severe drought in the district and added that there was poor harvesting in the district.

“Up to now there is no single syndicate, which stood for the help of these [local] population[s] and there is mass resources pilfer[ing] in the in the Somali waters by Western ferries,” added the commissioner Abdurahman.

While U.S. Predator drones and AC-130 gunships flying from nearby Djibouti are indeed regular (and occasionally lethal) visitors to Somali airspace, the sea “pilfering” is pure fiction. The Western naval presence off the Somali coast is dedicated solely to escorting World Food Program shipments (pictured) and, more recently, tailing a hijacked French yacht. But it’s easy to connect all these dots: orbiting airplanes, starving people, foreign warships. If you’re already mad at Americans for helping Ethiopia invade your country, it’s not not hard to read the worst in everything you observe that appears even remotely Western.

His leg shackled and padlocked to a tree, Mohammad Tahir rocks relentlessly back and forth. He has been like this, day and night, lying in the open with nothing but a blanket for cover for 21 days. Each day he is fed only a scrap of bread, a raw chilli and two glasses of water, a verse from the Koran placed in each one.

Is this torture? Or some bizarre religious ritual? No, this is the traditional Afghan treatment for mental illness, according to Tim Albone writing in the May issue of Afghan Scene. Albone reports that there were five “patients” at the Sayed Mohammad Ali Shah shrine in eastern Afghanistan. Their families brought them, or they came on their own seeking “treatment.”

“I swear that if they do what I say, they will be cured,” Mir Subadar, shrine caretaker, told Albone. “First they come and we speak to them and then we tie them to a tree.” The cost? $40 for up to 40 days of, um, hospitality. That’s two weeks’ wages. 

Afghanistan will make you crazy – and keep you that way. Just ask Artyom Borovik, the famed Russian journalist whose book The Hidden War should be required reading. The Afghanistanica blog quotes Borovik:

During my last trip to Afghanistan I’d met a guy in the hospital’s psychiatric ward who was concerned that he had no shadow. He proved to me, by means of excellent logic, that a man without a shadow cannot — and must not — live. He tried to commit suicide several times. I was reminded of this incident in Moscow when Zhenya Raevsky, an afghantsi [Afghan War veteran] and student at Moscow State University, shared with me his idea for a screenplay; his main characters were going to be Afghanistan veterans who’d returned home from the war. What makes them different from all other people, Raevsky told me, was that they had no shadows. Some hideous meaning was buried there, inaccessible to the sober mind.

Related:
Afghan women burn themselves
Afghans bemoan corruption
Afghanistan photo album

I profiled counter-IED operations for National Defense last year. (Man, did that story ever get me into trouble!) Here’s an excerpt:

Details about Warlock’s capabilities — and precise tactics for its use — are classified. But 1st Lt. Derek Austin confirms that the system works. “We think it works,” he corrected himself. After all, he said, the only evidence he has is that his patrols haven’t been blown up. He describes IEDs exploding just as they passed outside the range of the unit’s Warlocks, perhaps indicating that insurgents were trying to detonate the devices as patrols passed — and that Warlock temporarily blocked the signals.

Now, Warlock ain’t perfect. Like any jammer, it targets specific frequencies, so you can dodge Warlock by switching your transmitter, as some insurgents did back in ’04, one trade magazine reported: “Last winter some insurgents discovered which signals the U.S. military equipment could block and which it couldn’t, and could therefore thwart the jammers.” 

And Warlock has a nasty habit of jamming the command signals for small drones like Raven, effectively shooting them down.