Posted on 04/28/2022 8:56:47 AM PDT by rktman
It is a big step from a camel to a tank.
Pretty soon this is all gonna start adding up to some real money.
It depends on if we issued them as spares. If we did not send them spares then the night vision was actively being used in the field or for training. That stuff breaks easily especially in the hands of not so great troops who have poor habits of taking care of their equipment and doing preventative maintenance. The odds are pretty good that we would have sent them stuff we did not really use anymore. It is pretty unusual for us to send another allied country our latest and greatest technology. For instance all the helicopters left there were older versions we don’t even fly anymore and all the radios and electronics were older versions. Not saying this makes it ok but there is little risk that the Taliban or China is going to get any big military secrets out of that stuff.
Most of the helicopters were OH-58’s or outdated UH-60’s that we divested. We did not gift the Afghans any newer rotary wing equipment and they all had older radars and transponders.
The afgans are trying to sell a surveillance blimp that had latest radar to Iran. It was used for tracking low flying missiles.
That story is coming from the Taliban. I think when the whole story comes out it will be a damaged JLENS balloon we probably left there with the surveillance technology removed. We had about 60 JLENS in the region and at least two were damaged in collisions with aircraft. I don’t think the balloons themselves were brought back but the high tech on them was removed or destroyed. That is SOP for those types of assets. I seriously doubt the Afghans had a fully operating JLENS with all the bells and whistles. They did not have anyway to operate them or links for the signals coming from them.
Seems like it...only the Ukrainians are actually using the equipment.
Course, at the end of the day, will the Russians own what’s left of it ?
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