Word: pentagonal
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...Brown is set to meet U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Downing Street sources insist that Washington is in agreement with the rapid draw down, but some U.S. critics have questioned Britain's record in Iraq. General Jack Keane, a Pentagon envoy to Iraq, told the BBC in August that "the Brits have never had enough troops to truly protect the population...
...flight manual lists a variety of things that can cause both engines to fail, including "contaminated fuel ... software malfunctions or battle damage." The lone attempted V-22 autorotation "failed miserably," according to an internal 2003 report, obtained by TIME, written by the Institute for Defense Analyses, an in-house Pentagon think tank. "The test data indicate that the aircraft would have impacted the ground at a ... fatal rate of descent...
Helicopter expert Rex Rivolo, who called the decision to deploy the V-22 without proven autorotation capability "unconscionable" in that confidential 2003 Pentagon study, declined to be interviewed. But in his report, Rivolo noted that up to 90% of the helicopters lost in the Vietnam War were in their final approach to landing when they were hit by enemy ground fire. About half of those were able to autorotate safely to the ground, "thereby saving the crews," Rivolo wrote. "Such events in V-22 would all be fatal...
...practiced the maneuver outside the simulator - the flight manual forbids it - and even in simulators the results have been less than reassuring. "In simulations," the flight manual warns, "the outcome of the landings varied widely due to the extreme sensitivity to pilot technique and timing." The director of the Pentagon's testing office, in a 2005 report, put it more bluntly. If power is lost when a V-22 is flying like a helicopter below 1,600 ft. (490 m), he said, emergency landings "are not likely to be survivable...
While the aerodynamics of autorotation may be challenging for outsiders to grasp, a second decision - sending the V-22 into combat armed with only a tiny gun, pointing backward - is something anyone can understand. The Pentagon boasts on its V-22 website that the aircraft "will be the weapon of choice for the full spectrum of combat." That's plainly false - and by a long shot. Retired General James Jones, who recently led a study into the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces, is a V-22 supporter. But when he ran the Marines from 1999 to 2003, he insisted...