DTN News: Russia Displays Helicopters In The USA
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Source: DTN News / Russian Helicopters
(NSI News Source Info) Houston, TX - February 22, 2010: Russian Helicopters will showcase a lineup of rotorcraft built for the North American market and Latin America at Heli-Expo 2010, starting 21 February. Russian Helicopters is the holding company of the Russian rotorcraft industry. Consolidation of industry enterprises was completed in 2009, and helicopters are now offered under a unified brand in all segments: light, medium, and heavy.
Russian rotorcraft are currently operated in 100 countries worldwide, including the USA and Canada, and also Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, and other countries in Latin America. Russian Helicopters offers a diversified Russian rotorcraft lineup to partners in the Americas capable of performing any missions, from carrying people and commercial operations to special operations in natural disaster areas. Light helicopters feature the Mi-34C1, Ka-226T, and Ansat. The Mi-17, Ka-32A11BC, and Mi-38 are in the medium segment, while the Mi-26T is a heavy helicopter. These rotorcraft may be employed in corporate, passenger, cargo, search and rescue, construction, patrol, and firefighting missions. The Mi-34C1, capable of the most complex aerobatics, is the helicopter of choice for amateur pilots and professional sports pilots.
The combination of ease of operation and maintenance, reliability, low cost, and unique payload and altitude capabilities make Russian rotorcraft one of the most rational options on the global market.
Russian Helicopters is creating a global support network based on certified MROs and joint service enterprises. This will allow the company to support Russian rotorcraft throughout their entire lifecycle, from delivery to scrapping. New MROs are being opened and existing ones are being certified in line with this initiative.
The existing MRO infrastructure coincides with the Russian Helicopters sales geography. For instance, several service and repair centers are undergoing certification in Europe, ultimately leading to the creation of a legitimate system of integrated logistics support in that region. Russian Helicopters MRO centers exist in virtually all countries of the CIS. In 2009—2010 such centers will be built in South-East Asia, Central and South Africa, and in Latin America.
“Our American partners are already well acquainted with the Mi-8/17 type and Ka-32A11BC helicopters that are among the most reliable and popular rotorcraft in the world. They are effectively operated in 100 countries worldwide. We are openly cooperating with our existing partners and will be happy to establish new partnerships on both American continents,”
Russian Helicopters COO Andrei Shibitov.
Russian Helicopters showcased its light helicopters. The Mi-34C1 fitted with the piston engine was custom-built for the Russian helicopter sports team. The sports version of the Mi-34C1 is capable of performing the entire aerobatics program of the ultra-maneuverable MiG-29M2 fighter with vectored thrust.
The light multi-role Turbomeca Arrius 2G2-equipped
Ka-226T can be employed in urban high-rise construction, surface surveillance, and police operations, including drug interdiction. According to Russian Helicopters experts, this can be particularly useful on the Latin American market. The coaxial (dual rotor) configuration gives the Ka-226T an advantage in payload and altitude (up to 23000 ft).
The light
Ansat is a comfortable Russian-made corporate helicopter with a spacious cabin that can accommodate any additional equipment. For other missions the Ansat can be fitted with an emergency system for landing on water, searchlight, hoist, firefighting or crop spraying equipment. Additional fuel tanks may be installed to increase maximum range.
The medium multi-role
Mi-17 (and modifications) is used in passenger and cargo transportation. They are very popular in the world with 12 thousand delivered to date. The helicopter can perform a number of tasks both day and night in any weather and climatic conditions at any spot on the globe, including Iraq and Afghanistan. The Mi-17 is the helicopter of choice for oil development companies with offshore sites. It can land on ships and oil platforms. The Mi-171 can stay up in the air for 8 hours and cover up to 746 miles. Such helicopters were employed in rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.
The
Ka-32A11BC can be employed in a wide number of missions. It can carry passengers and cargo, perform construction and engineering, firefighting, search and rescue, emergency, and patrol tasks. The helicopter may be fitted with any necessary additional equipment according to mission. October 2009 saw EU certification of the
Ka-32A11BC. The Russian-made helicopter was granted type certificate EASA.IM.R.133 allowing any company to operate it commercially on the international markets.
The new cargo and passenger
Mi-38 is designed for transportation, forestry, construction, loading/unloading, search and rescue, emergency, medevac, and geologic exploration operations and may also be used as a comfortable corporate shuttle for 20—30 passengers.
The
Mi-26T is the world’s heaviest-lifting helicopter to go into production, boasting unrivalled performance and economy. These helicopters are employed by the ISAF in Afghanistan in a wide range of missions, including the evacuation of US troops and recovery of damaged ISAF helicopters. US President Barack Obama officially thanked the crew of the Mi-26T belonging to the Russian company Vertikal-T for successfully recovering a CH-47 Chinook from the Kandahar region in October 2009. In China, the Mi-26T took part in rescue operations after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Its unique performance allowed it to transport rescue teams and heavy equipment, and to evacuate people in significant numbers at a time. The Mi-26T is capable of carrying up to 20 tons internally or externally.
Russian Helicopters, JSC is an affiliated company of UIC Oboronprom. It is the managing body of the following helicopter industry enterprises: Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant, Kamov, Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant, Kazan Helicopters, Rostvertol, Progress Arsenyev Aviation Company, Kumertau Aviation Production Enterprise, Vpered Moscow Machine-Building Plant, Stupino Machine Production Plant, Reductor-PM, Helicopter Service Company (VSK), Novosibirsk Aircraft Repairing Plant and Ural Works of Civil Aviation.
UIC Oboronprom, JSC is a multi-profile industrial and investment group established in 2002. Its main tasks include helicopter engineering (Russian Helicopters managing company), engine-building (United Engine Industry Corporation managing company), air defense systems and complex electronic systems (Defense Systems holding company), and other machine-building activities. The companies of the group reported revenues of over 130 billion roubles in 2009.
Source: By George Friedman STRATFOR
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - February 23, 2010: The apparent Israeli assassination of a Hamas operative in the United Arab Emirates turned into a bizarre event replete 
with numerous fraudulent passports, alleged Israeli operatives caught on videotape and international outrage (much of it feigned), more over the use of fraudulent passports than over the operative’s death. If we are to believe the media, it took nearly 20 people and an international incident to kill him.
STRATFOR has written on the details of the killing as we have learned of them, but we see this as an occasion to address a broader question: the role of assassination in international politics.
Defining Assassination
We should begin by defining what we mean by assassination. It is the killing of a particular individual for political purposes. It differs from the killing of a spouse’s lover because it is political. It differs from the killing of a soldier on the battlefield in that the soldier is anonymous and is not killed because of who he is but because of the army he is serving in.
The question of assassination, in the current jargon “targeted killing,” raises the issue of its purpose. Apart from malice and revenge, as in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of assassination is to achieve a particular political end by weakening an enemy in some way. Thus, the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by the Americans in World War II was a targeted killing, an assassination. His movements were known, and the Americans had the opportunity to kill him. Killing an incompetent commander would be counterproductive, but Yamamoto was a superb strategist, without peer in the Japanese navy. Killing him would weaken Japan’s war effort, or at least have a reasonable chance of doing so. With all the others dying around him in the midst of war, the moral choice did not seem complex then, nor does it seem complex now.
Such occasions rarely occur on the battlefield. There are few commanders who could not readily be replaced, and perhaps even replaced by someone more able. In any event, it is difficult to locate enemy commanders, meaning the opportunity to kill them rarely arises. And as commanders ask their troops to risk their lives, they have no moral claim to immunity from danger.
Now, take another case. Assume that the leader of a country were singular and irreplaceable, something very few are. But think of Fidel Castro, whose central role in the Cuban government was undeniable. Assume that he is the enemy of another country like the United States. It is an unofficial hostility — no war has been declared — but a very real one nonetheless. Is it illegitimate to try to kill such a leader in a bid to destroy his regime? Let’s move that question to Adolph Hitler, the gold standard of evil. Would it be inappropriate to have sought to kill him in 1938 based on the type of regime he had created and what he said that he would do with it?
If the position is that killing Hitler would have been immoral, then we have a serious question about the moral standards being used. The more complex case is Castro. He is certainly no Hitler, but neither is he the romantic democratic revolutionary some have painted him as being. But if it is legitimate to kill Castro, then where is the line drawn? Who is it not legitimate to kill?
As with Yamamoto, the number of instances in which killing a political leader would make a difference in policy or in the regime’s strength is extremely limited. In most cases, the argument against assassination is not moral but practical: It would make no difference if the target in question lives or dies. But where it would make a difference, the moral argument becomes difficult. If we establish that Hitler was a legitimate target, than we have established that there is not an absolute ban on political assassination. The question is what the threshold must be.
All of this is a preface to the killing in the United Arab Emirates, because that represents a third case. Since the rise of the modern intelligence apparatus, covert arms have frequently been attached to them. The nation-states of the 20th century all had intelligence organizations. These organizations carried out a range of clandestine operations beyond collecting intelligence, from supplying weapons to friendly political groups in foreign countries to overthrowing regimes to underwriting terrorist operations.
During the latter half of the century, nonstate-based covert organizations were developed. As European empires collapsed, political movements wishing to take control created covert warfare apparatuses to force the Europeans out or defeat political competitors. Israel’s state-based intelligence system emerged from one created before the Jewish state’s independence. The various Palestinian factions created their own. Beyond this, of course, groups like al Qaeda created their own covert capabilities, against which the United States has arrayed its own massive covert capability.
Assassinations Today
The contemporary reality is not a battlefield on which a Yamamoto might be singled out or a charismatic political leader whose death might destroy his regime. Rather, a great deal of contemporary international politics and warfare is built around these covert capabilities. In the case of Hamas, the mission of these covert operations is to secure the resources necessary for Hamas to engage Israeli forces on terms favorable to them, from terror to rocket attacks. For Israel, covert operations exist to shut off resources to Hamas (and other groups), leaving them unable to engage or resist Israel.
Expressed this way, covert warfare makes sense, particularly for the Israelis when they engage the clandestine efforts of Hamas. Hamas is moving covertly to secure resources. Its game is to evade the Israelis. The Israeli goal is to identify and eliminate the covert capability. Hamas is the hunted, Israel the hunter here. Apparently the hunter and hunted met in the United Arab Emirates, and the hunted was killed.
But there are complexities here. First, in warfare, the goal is to render the enemy incapable of resisting. Killing just any group of enemy soldiers is not the point. Indeed, diverting resources to engage the enemy on the margins, leaving the center of gravity of the enemy force untouched, harms far more than it helps. Covert warfare is different from conventional warfare, but the essential question stands: Is the target you are destroying essential to the enemy’s ability to fight? And even more important, as the end of all war is political, does defeating this enemy bring you closer to your political goals?
Covert organizations, like armies, are designed to survive attrition. It is expected that operatives will be detected and killed; the system is designed to survive that. The goal of covert warfare is either to penetrate the enemy so deeply, or destroy one or more people so essential to the operation of the group, that the covert organization stops functioning. All covert organizations are designed to stop this from happening.
They achieve this through redundancy and regeneration. After the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Israelis mounted an intense covert operation to identify, penetrate and destroy the movement — called Black September — that mounted the attack. Black September was not simply a separate movement but a front for various Palestinian factions. Killing those involved with Munich would not paralyze Black September, and destroying Black September did not destroy the Palestinian movement. That movement had redundancy — the ability to shift new capable people into the roles of those killed — and therefore could regenerate, training and deploying fresh operatives.
The mission was successfully carried out, but the mission was poorly designed. Like a general using overwhelming force to destroy a marginal element of the enemy army, the Israelis focused their covert capability to destroy elements whose destruction would not give the Israelis what they wanted — the destruction of the various Palestinian covert capabilities. It might have been politically necessary for the Israeli public, it might have been emotionally satisfying, but the Israeli’s enemies weren’t broken. Consider that Entebbe occurred in 1976. If Israel’s goal in targeting Black September was the suppression of terrorism by Palestinian groups, the assault on one group did not end the threat from other groups.
Therefore, the political ends the Israelis sought were not achieved. The Palestinians did not become weaker. The year 1972 was not the high point of the Palestinian movement politically. It became stronger over time, gaining substantial international legitimacy. If the mission was to break the Palestinian covert apparatus to weaken the Palestinian capability and weaken its political power, the covert war of eliminating specific individuals identified as enemy operatives failed. The operatives very often were killed, but the operation did not yield the desired outcome.
And here lies the real dilemma of assassination. It is extraordinarily rare to identify a person whose death would materially weaken a substantial political movement in some definitive sense — i.e., where if the person died, then the movement would be finished. This is particularly true for nationalist movements that can draw on a very large pool of people and talent. It is equally hard to reduce a movement quickly enough to destroy the organization’s redundancy and regenerative capability. Doing so requires extraordinary intelligence penetration as well as a massive covert effort, so such an effort quickly reveals the penetration and identifies your own operatives.
A single swift, global blow is what is dreamt of. Covert war actually works as a battle of attrition, involving the slow accumulation of intelligence, the organization of the strike, the assassination. At that point, one man is dead, a man whose replacement is undoubtedly already trained. Others are killed, but the critical mass is never reached, and there is no one target who if killed would cause everything to change.
In war there is a terrible tension between the emotions of the public and the cold logic that must drive the general. In covert warfare, there is tremendous emotional satisfaction to the country when it is revealed that someone it regards as not only an enemy, but someone responsible for the deaths of their countryman, has been killed. But the generals or directors of intelligence can’t afford this satisfaction. They have limited resources, which must be devoted to achieving their country’s political goals and assuring its safety. Those resources have to be used effectively.
There are few Hitlers whose death is morally demanded and might have a practical effect. Most such killings are both morally and practically ambiguous. In covert warfare, even if you concede every moral point about the wickedness of your enemy, you must raise the question as to whether all of your efforts are having any real effect on the enemy in the long run. If they can simply replace the man you killed, while training ten more operatives in the meantime, you have achieved little. If the enemy keeps becoming politically more successful, then the strategy must be re-examined.
We are not writing this as pacifists; we do not believe the killing of enemies is to be avoided. And we certainly do not believe that the morally incoherent strictures of what is called international law should guide any country in protecting itself. What we are addressing here is the effectiveness of assassination in waging covert warfare. Too frequently, it does not, in our mind, represent a successful solution to the military and political threat posed by covert organizations. It might bring an enemy to justice, and it might well disrupt an organization for a while or even render a specific organization untenable. But in the covert wars of the 20th century, the occasions when covert operations — including assassinations — achieved the political ends being pursued were rare. That does not mean they never did. It does mean that the utility of assassination as a main part of covert warfare needs to be considered carefully. Assassination is not without cost, and in war, all actions must be evaluated rigorously in terms of cost versus benefit.
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"The national defense sector will shoulder [the production of] most arms. The purchase of military equipment abroad will be made only in those fields where there are flaws," Vladimir Popovkin said.
He said "flaws" were reported in the production of sophisticated arms, including unmanned aircraft.
"Work is underway to develop drones and train people," the deputy defense minister said.
He confirmed Russia's Defense Ministry would import drones in 2010.
Popovkin admitted that the Army had bought little over the past 15 years and that the Defense Ministry had funds to maintain 
