Reflexive Fire

The hunt continues for the remaining suspect involved in the Boston marathon bombing, their trail of destruction leaving almost 200 wounded and four dead.  The brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are the alleged perpetrators behind the bombing and their motives are still being debated.

Something we’ve been thinking of since they released the background information on the two brothers was re-iterated perfectly by Peter Bergen – if they were radicalized Chechen extremists, then they should be out blowing up people in Moscow, not in the United States. Russia is the number one enemy of Chechnya, not the “far Satan” AKA the United States in al-Qaeda lingo.

It seems likely that the brothers will turn out to have personalities that are inconsistent with our preconceptions about radical Islam.  Like the 9/11 hijackers who drank alcohol and hung out at strip clubs, the Chechen brothers listened to secular non-Islamic music and even smoked marijuana.  Human beings are terribly inconsistent when it comes to ideology so this shouldn’t surprise us in the least.

While on the run last night, the brothers car jacked a vehicle and apparently forced the driver to take them around town and make ATM withdrawals in order to build up a war chest for their escape.  The circumstances are unclear but at some point in the night they made contact with law enforcement and a firefight broke out, killing Officer Sean Collier.

Get the run down here.

While underway, pirates are known to begin probing commercial ships as they pass around the Horn of Africa. The vast majority of probes and attacks are at night, although pirates are also known to hide in the fog during they day. The maritime security contractor on shift at night monitors the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, radar on the ship, and when he gets a blip on the screen he begins looking for pirates, usually in stolen fishing vessels, with his binoculars. In high winds, the older AIS systems will get feedback as they may read whitecaps out in the ocean, giving off false signatures and making it difficult for contractors to discern real threats.

AIS was originally developed for aircraft flying in and out of San Diego to help them avoid mid-air collisions during thick cloud cover. The system worked well enough with airplanes that the harbor started making use of it as well, and then the International Maritime Organization was lobbied to make it mandatory for all vessels over a certain size.

The AIS is essentially a line-of-site VHS receiver and transmitter that has an electronic display chart, about the size of an iPad, mounted in the bridge, which shows ships in the area and lists their heading, speed, and callsign. It will display this information to other vessels even when turned off, so the bad guys have to completely disable their AIS to remain undetected.

Read the rest at SOFREP!