Bob Mullen: Model rockets
The Facts
Since the late 1970s, Afghanistan has experienced a continuous state of war, including major foreign occupations in the forms of the 1979 Soviet invasion, Pakistani military interference in favor of the Taliban in the late 1990s, and the October 2001 US-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban government. In December 2001, the United Nations Security Council authorized the creation of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to help maintain security and assist the Karzai administration. The country is being rebuilt slowly with support from the international community while dealing with the Taliban insurgency and widespread political corruption.
Personal Experience/Opinions/History
In the early 1980s, we used to have Sunday brunches at my house on Wyandotte when the topic of the Afghanistan/Russian war came up.
Afghani Rebels were being supported by the United States government to help win the war against Russia. The US was providing Stinger air-to-air missiles at the cost of $1 million each to help bring down Russian helicopters.
Bob Mullen and I decided we should contact the Estes Model Rocket Company in Colorado and buy several million "one dollar model rockets" and send them to Afghanistan. These rockets would be placed in fields of several thousand each. Their launch circuits would be connected to an audio discriminator that would listen for the distinctive "wop-wop" sound of approaching helicopter blades flying overhead. The electronics circuits would launch several hundred (a small portion of the total) of these rockets at a time, each trailing 500 feet of fluorescent green piano wire behind them. If we were lucky, several of the model rocket-piano wire combinations would get tangled into the blades of an approaching helicopter and bring it down.
On the other hand, if engagement/entanglement were not successful, the pilot (seeing several hundred approaching rockets) would develop, as they say in the Military, "instantaneous, loose bowel syndrome". The helicopters would be out of commission for several days because, well, it takes time to decontaminate the cockpit of a helicopter.
Another of our another of our ideas was to go down to major military airports and paint black "Silhouettes" on the ground as if aircraft were parked on the runways. Russian satellites flying over would see the black paint spots and conclude that we had aircraft with full stealth capability or that we had moved the aircraft into hangers so they could not be seen from space.
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