FR WAR NEWS!WAR News at Home and Abroad You'll Hear Nowhere Else!
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Or if they do report it, without the anti-War Agenda Spin!
Posted on 06/14/2007 5:04:40 PM PDT by SandRat
FORWARD OPERATING BASE LOYALTY, Iraq, June 14, 2007 — The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police receive a lot of attention in the news, but little is known about the Iraqi Air Force. Lately, the Air Force has made great strides and recently flew an UH-1 Huey helicopter carrying the Iraqi Minister of Defense and landed at a Combat Outpost.
“Hopefully, we’ll see more Iraqi aircraft flying over the capital doing patrols"
— Sgt. 1st Class Eric D. Radecki
The Huey was flown by members of the Iraqi Air Force Military Transition Team (MiTT), which consisted of one Iraqi pilot, one American pilot and an Iraqi and American gunner, said Sgt. 1st Class Eric D. Radecki, the operations noncommissioned officer in charge for the 1st Brigade, 11th Iraqi Army Division’s MiTT, which is comprised of members of 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.
“Prior to this, you’d see a lot of the higher ranking Iraqi’s flying on American birds,” Radecki, of Colorado Springs, Colo., said. “Now, that they’re flying on Iraqi aircraft. It’s one more step to doing things on their own, without our support.”
The Iraqi Minister of Defense was making a scheduled stop to inspect members of the 11th Iraqi Army Division and see how things were running, Radecki said.
When the Huey landed, it marked the first time the Iraqi
Minister of Defense had come to Combat Outpost “Old Mod,” which got its moniker since it was once the former Iraqi Ministry of Defense building. It was also the first time an Iraqi aircraft had landed there, Radecki said.
“The Air Force MiTT team briefed the (2nd IBCT) MiTT team on the Iraqi Air Force’s step in learning anti-terrorism tactics,” Radecki said. “They will soon gain that air-mobile activity.”
Gaining air mobility will be a huge step for the Iraqi’s as it will allow them to put troops out in sector at a moment’s notice, Radecki said. It will also enable them to conduct targeting raids and reduces the danger for their soldiers because they’ll be using less convoys.
“It makes their abilities a lot greater,” he said. The kinks are still being worked out and Radecki said the Hueys have some maintenance issues. Radecki said maintenance issues are being addressed.
“Hopefully,” he said, “we’ll see more Iraqi aircraft flying over the capital doing patrols.”
FR WAR NEWS!Bump!
I thought they all wisked around on flying carpets or materialized out of old wine bottles.
Cool. I have a couple of pilot friends over there training them.
Good to see it’s being reported.
I think what the glibs don’t want to understand is that the interaction between professional Iraqis and professional Americans will have repercussions decades from now.
Every Iraqi pilot, soldier, officer who has been trained by an American, every Iraqi kid who has been treated right by an American will grow up to think entirely differently about the US.
It won’t be tomorrow, but Bush did say that this was a generational war.
The US has to be very careful in training Iraqi AF, as the Iranians do not want Iraq to have a combat AF at all, and systematically assassinated all the old Baathist pilots.
Therefore, we have been discreetly training many of their personnel in the US, in Alabama that I know of, but I suspect also in Texas, which is where we train most foreign AF. This means that we can suddenly return them and their aircraft to fully operational and secure airbases in Iraq as an “instant AF”.
And Iran won’t be able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Good news. I wonder what the total squadron strength, number of aircraft, etc... the Iraqi AF has right now?
That number has been put out yet but, I’m led to believe it is growing.
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