
Happy Friday. Killer Apps was just asked to check out "Seal Team Six," National Geographic's movie about last year's raid to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The rapper and former host of MTV's "Pimp My Ride," Xzibit plays one of the SEALs. We thought about titling this post "Pimp My Stealth Chopper," but Nat Geo didn't even try to make the UH-60 Black Hawks shown in the movie look like the stealthy ones that were revealed to have been used on the raid after one crashed at bin Laden's compound.
(In fact, the promo photo above reveals that at least some of the helicopter scenes were filmed in a UH-1 Huey variant.)
A few other quick notes about tech slips in the film that caught our eye.
First up, the U.S. Air Force's F-22 Raptor is constantly being shown in the opening credits. We're not sure why, given that it famously has never participated in combat.
Meanwhile, there was no mention of the RQ-170 sentinel stealth drone that is believed to have provided imagery of the raid and may have jammed Pakistani communications.
Speaking of jamming, the movie talks about the Air Force using the E-8 Joint STARS radar jet to jam Pakistani radars. This is the first we've heard of the JSTARS being used to jam enemy radars. The E-8 is a Boeing 707-based radar plane originally designed to scan large swaths of ground for Soviet tank columns. It has used its powerful radars in Afghanistan to spot insurgent vehicles and even fighters planting IEDs.
Oh, and the night vision devices and radios, while high-end, didn't seem quite as fancy as the ones that so-called tier one special operations teams like DEVGRU (aka, Seal Team Six) get to use. Click here and here for some examples of the toys we're talking about.
Finally, F-15E Strike Eagles came into radio contact with Pakistani F-16s scrambled in response to the raid? News to us!
We also couldn't help but note that the building used to depict CIA's Special Activities Division (SAD) offices in Reston reminds us of DEA's building in Pentagon City (or any other Northern Virginia office building, guess they got that one right). And one scene that is set outside SAD's northern Virginia facilities in April 2011 shows no leaves on the trees and snow on the ground. This is the DC area, not northern New England. Everything is green by April, or Cherry Blossom season as it's known.
John Reed reports on the frontiers of cyber war and the latest in military technology for Killer Apps.
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