Seal Team Six, the movie, from a tech perspective
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 ...
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.
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 is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He comes to FP after editing Military.com’s publication Defense Tech and working as the associate editor of DoDBuzz. Between 2007 and 2010, he covered major trends in military aviation and the defense industry around the world for Defense News and Inside the Air Force. Before moving to Washington in August 2007, Reed worked in corporate sales and business development for a Swedish IT firm, The Meltwater Group in Mountain View CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter at the Tracy Press and the Scotts Valley Press-Banner newspapers in California. His first story as a professional reporter involved chasing escaped emus around California’s central valley with Mexican cowboys armed with lassos and local police armed with shotguns. Luckily for the giant birds, the cowboys caught them first and the emus were ok. A New England native, Reed graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a dual degree in international affairs and history.
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