Afghanistan - 20 years on

Even if the Taliban had pilots, you’re average goat herder/opium farmer isn’t going to maintain a Blackhawk. Frankly, the US struggle to keep enough UH-60s ready to use and the aircraft has never met its in-service readiness goals once.

“The preventative maintenance services (PMS) checks are required every 40 flight hours; they take 15 to 20 man-hours and can generally be accomplished in one day with two technicians. There’s a host of other hourly and calendar driven service and inspections tasks, such as gearbox oil samples, battery checks, 30-day engine wash programs, 90-day corrosions checks, and the 120-hour inspection which takes two to three days and includes critical vibration checks of the engine high-speed shafts, tail rotor, and oil cooler fan.”
 
It's not really 85bn worth of stuff, they would only be able to sell it on for a small fraction of that. Right now the Taliban is probably trying to flog it but no one will pay much for it. This equipment needs a supply chain from the US and on the black market it will be worth peanuts.

It's likely stuff they were otherwise scrapping and the Afghan government would have paid for a lot of it.
 
lemonkettaz said:
montymint, with all due respect the Afghan situation is absolutely linked to Biden, Trump etc... so to say you can't discuss those with regards to Afghan is pretty daft.
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Please tag me so I can respond quicker. But yes, the bickering about Kamala Harris' laugh etc has nothing to do with Afghanistan.

Feel free to discuss what Biden is doing, but keep it to the context of his specific actions here and not back and forth about his age , health etc . The same with Trump, feel free to discuss what he did in the lead up to this, but keep it to that.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Even if the Taliban had pilots, you’re average goat herder/opium farmer isn’t going to maintain a Blackhawk. Frankly, the US struggle to keep enough UH-60s ready to use and the aircraft has never met its in-service readiness goals once.

“The preventative maintenance services (PMS) checks are required every 40 flight hours; they take 15 to 20 man-hours and can generally be accomplished in one day with two technicians. There’s a host of other hourly and calendar driven service and inspections tasks, such as gearbox oil samples, battery checks, 30-day engine wash programs, 90-day corrosions checks, and the 120-hour inspection which takes two to three days and includes critical vibration checks of the engine high-speed shafts, tail rotor, and oil cooler fan.”
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Probably not, but they could sell them. You would assume the Afgans were trained to operate them, that's if they're still alive.
 
jpaul said:
listen to the radio 4 interview with the times journalist - trying to get maximum publicity for his story, and (protesteth too much) had tried to commnicate with all the people who were identified, he has probably caused taliban to go over these embassies with a fine tooth comb - seemed similar to Boris's gaff on imprisoned lady in Iran.
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That's a fair point too, I hope he took away some of these papers discretely and made sure the individuals were safe before mentioning them etc..
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Even if the Taliban had pilots, you’re average goat herder/opium farmer isn’t going to maintain a Blackhawk. Frankly, the US struggle to keep enough UH-60s ready to use and the aircraft has never met its in-service readiness goals once.

“The preventative maintenance services (PMS) checks are required every 40 flight hours; they take 15 to 20 man-hours and can generally be accomplished in one day with two technicians. There’s a host of other hourly and calendar driven service and inspections tasks, such as gearbox oil samples, battery checks, 30-day engine wash programs, 90-day corrosions checks, and the 120-hour inspection which takes two to three days and includes critical vibration checks of the engine high-speed shafts, tail rotor, and oil cooler fan.”
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im sure iran/russia/china can soon help with that
 
ebilcake said:
Probably not, but they could sell them. You would assume the Afgans were trained to operate them, that's if they're still alive.
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Needs the supply chain. Also if you randomly kill your own people kinda hard to maintain skill sets going forward. You need the whole infrastructure to maintain US gear.
 
OspreyO said:
I'm curious who these people are. Why they left it till to the twelfth hour to decide to leave.
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Because they probably didn't expect the country to fall so quickly, and once it did they had to get through Taliban checkpoints, and then try to get to the front of a queue of literally 1000's of other people doing the same thing - attempting to get in to the airport.
 
VincentHanna said:
Because they probably didn't expect the country to fall so quickly, and once it did they had to get through Taliban checkpoints, and then try to get to the front of a queue of literally 1000's of other people doing the same thing - attempting to get in to the airport.
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Sorry the UK pulled out in 2014.
They've been losing ground to the Taliban for Years.
The US has been pulling out for the past year. It's over a month since they abandoned Bagram.

How much of a hint do people need.
 
Puzzled said:
Wasn't there a hoohah a few years ago about the US having a backdoor to the software in some helicopters they sold to us?

Can't they just disable the high tech stuff or just blow it up with a drone.
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I have no doubt that will happen in just over a weeks time, they wouldn’t risk it currently with them still trying to evacuate civilians and the rest of their military personnel
 
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