Latest news with #specialoperations
News.com.au
26-05-2025
- News.com.au
Brave cop's ‘impressive' act in Bondi massacre
EXCLUSIVE When Amy Scott came face to face with knife-wielding Joel Cauchi, it was the first time she'd ever had to pull the trigger on a 'live threat' let alone a mass murderer. Like all general duties officers, the inspector had completed her annual day-long firearm training at shooting ranges every 12 months and in her 19 years in the force has faced her share of violent, tense, situations. But nothing compared to the stand-off with a man she knew had already killed innocent civilians. And she had every reason to believe he would strike again. 'What she did was pretty impressive,' said a special operations officer superiorly trained and ever ready for such a mass emergency with a 'live threat' and mass casualties. 'We train for this kind of thing every shift, but general duty cops don't,' said the officer whose name can't be revealed. 'They have their yearly training and a one-off four-day course but I think it's pretty safe to say we were lucky that day that it was her. 'She's someone who clearly had the nous, the calm under pressure, the control and the guts to tackle him head-on and make sure civilians were out of harm's way. Other general duties officers might wait for back-up or fight feelings of wanting to run the other way. 'We can do the training, but you never know how you are going to react until you are put in that situation. Yep she did good.' Another special ops officer said Inspector Scott's ability to 'hit the target's centre of body mass' was proof of her proficiency and character under the most immense pressure. 'She shot three times and hit him twice, right where he needed to be shot. It's pretty impressive.' Inspector Scott insists she's no more of a hero than any of the other officers, paramedics, security staff, hospital emergency crews and regular shoppers faced with such unimaginable terror in Westfield Bondi Junction on Saturday April 13, 2024. She says any of the police officers would have, and did, rush into the building just like she had - she just got there first. 'I actually felt nauseous as I ran in because in my head, I'd resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to die,' Inspector Scott told the inquest into the massacre. 'So when you do your active armed offender training, originally they would talk about your percentages and chance of survival, and you're looking at a 60 to 70 per cent chance of non-survival, and that's if you're partnered up and vested up, and I was neither of those.' Inspector Scott was referring to the training introduced in the wake of the Lindt siege on December 14, 2014, when gunman Man Haron Monis held 18 people hostage until police stormed the building 17 hours later. Ironically Inspector Scott was one of the dozens of first responders who rushed to Martin Place all those years ago when the emergency call came across the police radio. A coroner ruled it was a 'terrorist incident' for which Monis was solely responsible but found authorities had made major errors, including by delaying entry, during which time a hostage was killed. In response the new police training focused on ending 'active shooter' situations more quickly, in a divergence from their policies around other hostage scenarios. Inspector Scott told the Bondi Junction inquest she completed the four-day intensive course in 2016. 'It was very intense. It was over a four day period. I remember it was out at Castle Hill, and the big change and shift in that it was a set of circumstances around shifting away from that contain, negotiate,' she said. 'So, the rapidity of what an offender might be doing … if they're actively using a weapon of some form to take lives quickly, contain, negotiate, the traditional method is not suitable in responding to that. 'It was about training us on methods to use in that active armed offender situation and how to respond. It's, 'Don't wait. Go. Stop the killing. Stop the dying'.' Those words, 'Don't wait, stop the dying' were ringing in the ears of Inspector Scott - a former Cessnock High school captain, soccer lover turned no-nonsense cop with a wife and two children waiting for her at home - as she stood in front of her own 'live treat' that day. He was a man who had already stabbed and killed six people and injured a further 12, including a nine-month-old girl. 'It might seem like an obvious question, but what was going through your mind when you fired the first shot?' Counsel assisting the coroner Peggy Dwyer SC asked Inspector Scott at the inquest. 'That he was going to kill me,' she said matter-of-factly. 'After you fired the first shot, are you conscious of what happened next?' she was asked. 'It's a peculiar thing. It's very fast, but in my mind it was extremely slow. I knew my first shot had hit him, but - that was because of the jolt of his body, but he continued to come towards me. 'And I also simultaneously was saying, 'Stop, drop it', and fired two further shots because I had not been able to stop the threat with the first one. 'He just turned and started running at me … I know that one hit him, because it sort of made his chest - it sort of slowed him a bit, but I continued to back up because he was advancing really quickly. 'I shot two more times because I didn't stop him straight away and I was trying to stop him, and then he fell to the ground. I actually fell to the ground as well, because I was trying to back up so quickly. 'He actually fell at that point, at the point that I had first told him to stop and drop it. So he actually advanced that far on me at that time'. Inspector Scott said if she hadn't backed up Cauchi would have landed on top of her. 'The way he'd fallen, the knife was actually underneath him, so I couldn't see it, and I knew I needed to secure it. 'I wasn't sure if I had completely incapacitated him enough, but I knew I just had to bite the bullet and essentially make sure that that weapon was secure.' Inspector Scott's third bullet made contact with a large pot plant behind which a woman with a pram had been hiding. Before shooting Cauchi, Inspector Scott had signalled with her hand and 'mouthed to her to run'. Dr Dwyer observed: 'I know you've been commended previously for this, and you don't have to commend yourself, but you effectively directed away the civilian that was standing there with the pram, and if you hadn't done that, she may well have been injured, or a child, by the ricochet?' In keeping with her modest assessment of her own heroics that day, Inspector Scott answered: 'Maybe'. What she was more focused on getting across was her appreciation and admiration for everyone else. 'I wanted to mention my colleagues and my team on the day,' she told the courtroom packed with journalists. I said earlier we ask a lot of young police, and I think we as a society think that police don't feel fear, don't feel the burden and pressures of what everyday humans do, and I can assure you that they do. 'I can assure you on that day that they were fearful running in, and while I was the person that faced Joel, those young officers ran in with the exact same intentions.' Inspector Scott, who returned to work in a matter of weeks, said she wanted to acknowledge the courage and bravery of her colleagues, some who haven't been able to return to work. 'They have my wholehearted support, love and care, and … I hope that the public does understand that they were absolutely extraordinary.' 'They saved lives on that day. We did unfortunately lose the lives of six beautiful people but they saved lives and they put themselves at risk. 'And contrary to how well people think we are trained, we still feel fear, but they still went in there, so I want to acknowledge them in that space.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Yahoo
Army's Future Tiltrotor Gets Heavier So It Can Rapidly Convert Into Special Ops Variant
The U.S. Army has incorporated special operations-specific requirements into the design of its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) tiltrotor, which has led to an unspecified increase in gross weight. The changes are intended to make it cheaper and easier to convert baseline FLRAAs into special operations versions for the Army's elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). The current process for turning standard UH-60M Black Hawks into special operations MH-60Ms is very complex and resource-intensive. Lt. Col. Cameron Keogh, the Program Manager for both Future Vertical Lift and the MH-60 within U.S. Special Operations Command's (SOCOM) Program Executive Office-Rotary Wing (PEO-RW), provided an update on the special operations end of the FLRAA effort at the annual SOF Week conference today. The Army announced it had selected a design based on Bell's V-280 Valor tiltrotor as the winner of its FLRAA competition in 2022. FLRAAs are expected to replace a significant portion of H-60 Black Hawk variants across the entire Army, including around half of the 160th's special operations MH-60Ms. When it comes to FLRAA, 'we are very tightly nested with Big Army on this one. We, again, are about half a step behind. They put in their base contract some CLINs [Contract Line Item Numbers] for us to use for development,' Keogh explained. 'We started with some engineering analysis.' 'We're going to have to hang all the mission equipment that we currently have on the ramp, or that we're gonna have on the ramp at that point in time when this is fielded,' he continued. 'Do we have the structural provisions to do that? Do we have space reserve to [sic] where we could put this stuff?' The MH-60Ms that special operations FLRAAs are set to replace are absolutely jam-packed with systems not found on standard UH-60Ms, including a nose-mounted radar, additional sensors, defensive systems, and communications gear. They also have an inflight refueling probe not found on regular Army Black Hawks. You can read more about what goes into the last special operations Black Hawks here. 'So we did an engineering analysis, which is now turned into the detailed design on that,' Keogh added. The Army's FLRAA program manager and the service's Program Executive Office for Aviation (PEO-Aviation) 'took our engineering analysis with the initial cuts at the detailed design. They looked at it, they looked at the weight trades – it did add a little bit of weight to the baseline of that aircraft – but they said, 'Hey, this buys us future growth capability for mission equipment, as well,' and they inserted those into the baseline aircraft.' The Army has already made clear that the production FLRAA design will differ substantially from Bell's V-280 demonstrator, which has been flying since 2017. The service has also talked about pushing to lay the groundwork now to make the integration of new and improved capabilities down the line easier. Now, 'every FLRAA that gets built for fielding is going to have the provisions for us to put our things on the aircraft, which is a huge cost reduction for us when it comes time to field the [160th Special Operations Aviation] Regiment. So that was a huge win,' Keogh said. 'Again, we're in lockstep with the Army on that one. We're not – we can't move ahead of them. There's no way for us to accelerate that program. They're doing a great job with it.' Keogh added that his office is also working now to take special operations-unique software in use now on 160th helicopters and see what of it might be adaptable to work with FLRAA's mission systems. A key area of focus for the Army with FLRAA has already been modular and open-architecture systems to help speed up the introduction of new functionality in the future. 'We have a unique avionics suite to the [160th Special Operations Aviation] Regiment. It's common between the big aircraft [the MH-60M and MH-47G Chinook]. The user is very happy with it. It's got great functionality. They've been developing it for 20-plus years now,' he explained. 'We're working to pull some of those software bits out, turn them into applications that we can then put into the FLRAA computing environment, so we can still have the same stuff that we use in CAS, the common avionics architecture' without having to 'pull all those boxes out [and] put our own cockpit in there.' The process Keogh outlined for converting baseline FLRAAs into special operations versions is fundamentally different from how MH-60Ms are converted from UH-60Ms today, not to mention simpler. The resulting helicopter is also substantially different, right down to its core structure, from the standard M variant of the Black Hawk. 'You fly a good Black Hawk, a good Army UH-60M Black Hawk, up to SOFSA [the Special Operations Forces Support Activity in Lexington, Kentucky], and then we take it completely apart,' he explained. 'We fly at higher gross weights, because we have a ton of mission equipment to do the things – to give the operators the capability to do the things they need to do.' 'All that mission equipment adds weight to the airframe. So we had to do a lot of structural modifications to increase our gross weight, so we can still offer a suitable payload to carry the operators where they need to go,' he continued. 'And then we ran into the problem, now we've got this really heavy aircraft, the engines only make so much power, so we've got bigger engines. We run the YT-706. YT because it's not fully qualified, but it's a very qualified engine. … it's one of the things that we do here, is we are able to accept a higher level of risk in order to provide capability for our users. Highly trained users, the best pilots in the world, they can manage that risk.' 'So we do that, rip it apart, all the structural mods, we've got the engines, we put the SOF [special operations forces] peculiar' systems in, 'and then the last thing we do is paint it black.' It's not hard to see how making changes to FLRAA's basic design to streamline this process could pay serious dividends. As Keogh noted, 'Big Army' could also leverage the trade space now baked into the design to add in additional capabilities to meet its own needs. FLRAA is already set to completely change how the conventional Army conducts air assaults thanks to its substantially greater range and speed compared to the Black Hawk. The service has been targeting a top speed of at least 250 knots (285 miles per hour), and potentially up to 280 knots (320 miles per hour), and an unrefueled combat radius of between 200 and 300 nautical miles for its new tiltrotor. A typical current-generation Black Hawk flying under normal operating conditions can get up to a top speed of 163 knots (187.5 miles per hour) and fly 268 nautical miles without needing to refuel, according to Lockheed Martin, the parent company of the helicopter's manufacturer Sikorsky. The speed and range of the FLRAA would be particularly important in any future conflict in the Pacific region, where initial launch points – on land or at sea – and operating areas could easily be very far apart. Those capabilities could also be very valuable for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which is regularly called upon to conduct especially challenging long-duration missions in unforgiving environments, typically at night. A prime example of this in the Regiment's relatively recent history is the famous raid in Pakistan that led to the death of Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden. The Army had said in the past that its goal was to begin fielding the baseline FLRAA variant by 2030, but just this week the service disclosed it is now looking to accelerate that timeline to 2028. Army officials have also pushed back on the possibility of the program being canceled as part of a massive U.S. military-wide review of priorities. The service is looking to make major cuts to a host of programs, some of which it is now moving to axe entirely, as part of a larger force restructuring effort. With the work it has been doing with the Army on FLRAA in the meantime, SOCOM is laying the groundwork for getting special operations versions of the tiltrotor into service as quickly as possible once the baseline variants begin being fielded. Special thanks to FlightGlobal's Ryan Finnerty for providing audio of the PEO-RW session from the SOF Week conference. Contact the author: joe@
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
New Joint Chiefs Chairman Picks a Friendly Crowd for His Debut
For Gen. Dan Caine, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Thursday was a homecoming of sorts. An F-16 pilot with 150 combat flight hours, General Caine has also served in several highly secretive intelligence and special operations assignments, some in the United States and some overseas. So it came as no surprise that he picked a friendly audience — the sprawling annual special operations conference, or SOF Week — to make his first public remarks as chairman. 'I'm most at home with this tribe,' General Caine told hundreds of American and allied military and civilian personnel, as well as industry contractors, who gave him a standing ovation at the beginning and end of his 15-minute remarks. General Caine — who was sworn in last month after President Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a four-star fighter pilot known as C.Q. — played it safe in his prepared comments. He emphasized combat readiness, working closely with allies and arming U.S. troops with the most advanced weaponry and equipment. The general takes charge of the American military at a time when the world is in 'a dynamic and dangerous place,' he said. And his role, he added, will be to help weave together the combat capabilities of U.S. and allied forces to 'create dilemmas' for 'the Chinese and others.' General Caine did not mention the U.S. air war in Yemen, whether the Pentagon would deliver additional aid to Ukraine beyond what President Joseph R. Biden Jr. approved or any other specific challenges facing the United States. He played it safe. He took no questions Indeed, he has kept a low profile since assuming the military's top job. Last month, General Caine made an unannounced visit to the southwestern border to get a firsthand look at the military's growing role in helping to stem migrant crossings, a top priority for Mr. Trump. That General Caine made his first official trip to the border as chairman underscores the importance of the mission to the White House, and the Pentagon, even as crossings have dropped precipitously during the Trump administration. Being chosen by Mr. Trump caught him off guard. General Caine had retired at the end of December after completing the final job in his military career — as the Pentagon's liaison to the C.I.A. — and joined Shield Capital, a firm in Burlingame, Calif., specializing in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. But then came the call from the White House, the Senate confirmation process, his swearing in on April 14, and now his grappling with myriad challenges the world is hurling at him. 'I am, you know, still trying to find my way around the Pentagon and learning my job,' he told the audience.
