Briefs
Advertiser Staff
ARMY
Crews train with radar-evading chaff
Schofield Barracks helicopter crews recently got an opportunity to deploy radar-evading chaff at Barking Sands, Kaua'i.
"This is the only place in the western Pacific where we can deploy chaff," Chief Warrant Officer Keith Bean said. "In fact, it's one of only three places in the world where we can deploy it for training purposes."
Chaff forms a "cloud" of metal strips that confuses radar. Bean, a 2nd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment electronic warfare officer, said chaff is also used for training in Alaska and North Carolina.
As UH-60 Black Hawks passed by a radar center, lasers locked on, simulating a missile threat.
The pilots then deployed chaff and attempted to move away from the laser tracking.
Divers run into complications
Soldiers with the 7th Dive Detachment were forced to halt a harbor-clearing exercise in Alaska to avoid contaminating a busy shipping lane with diesel fuel from a sunken vessel.
The detachment, the only U.S. Army dive unit in the Pacific, deployed from Fort Shafter to Ketchikan several months ago for the exercise. The mission consisted of patching a sunken 330-foot World War II-era tank landing ship, or LST, that went down in 60 feet of water during a storm in 1957.
The divers planned to refloat the barge by pumping air into repaired sections, and then sink it in deeper water.
The team made progress using wood and metal patches and underwater hydraulic and welding cutting systems. But the mission was halted after divers discovered diesel fuel in two chambers needed to float the wreck.
ALL SERVICES
Groundbreaking C-17 jump made
Representing the new joint nature of military training and operations, 50 service members, including Army soldiers, Marines, Air Force HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachutists and Navy SEALs recently participated in the first-ever C-17 aircraft jump over Schofield Barracks' East Range.
It will be a sight more common in coming years: Eight of the latest-generation troop and cargo carriers are slated to be based at Hickam Air Force Base in 2005.
After jumping from the four-engine jet, Sgt. Jonathan R. Peifer, a parachute rigger with the 87th Quartermaster Detachment, said "it was fast. The opening shock was less than what I expected."
NAVY
New strike group Pearl Harbor-bound
A type of warship flotilla never seen before — but representative of a new flexibility in the Navy — is heading to Pearl Harbor on its first deployment.
Five ships in the San Diego-based Expeditionary Strike Group One will join up with the Pearl Harbor-based cruiser Port Royal and attack submarine Greeneville for an eight-month deployment to an unspecified location.
About 5,000 Marines and sailors left San Diego Friday with the new strike group, which takes the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit and traditional amphibious ready group of three amphibious vessels and bulks up the force with a destroyer, cruiser, frigate and submarine.
The strike group is based around the amphibious assault ship Peleliu.
