Donatello
RETIRED TTA
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2009
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No, never got involved with those guys, but I do know of them before they were declass-ed. Every branch of the military have its own version of 'foreign technology exploitation' office or division or whatever they want to call it.
United States Army Foreign Science and Technology Center - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Each office/division often times 'outsource' how they acquire foreign technology equipment. For example...When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the former soviet states became owners of many high value hardware. So the CIA became the buyer and the USAF became the shopping cart via the C-5 Galaxy fleet. Many C-5s and C-141s were repainted to remove insignias and flown mostly at night to ferry every components of tanks, ships, aircrafts, and even ICBMs. Nuclear fission materials were purchased as well. Then those components were sent to the appropriate branch of service.
I was active duty when the USSR was still intact so a lot of Soviet Air Force parts were acquired through former Soviet customers such as Egypt. The Red Eagles were tasked primarily to operate and do some maintenance of Soviet gear to support their MIGs, but they were never tasked with the exploratory and exploitation mission, meaning how each component works; how to replicate its performance, meaning using US gear to replicate certain behaviors; and finally how to put an entire system together literally from a pallet full of 'stuff' and get it to work.
Adapting US gear to replicate Soviet hardware behaviors was my specialty. I worked in close relationships with many US company 'tech-reps', some of them recalled from retirement because many 'black boxes' were no longer in manufacture and the sub-contracting companies no longer exist, so we had to rely on these old guys to help us figure out how to modify their products. Most of the time, we had to use '50s and '60s technology because the '70s and later hardware were too finely manufactured and contained too much higher quality solid state components to allow modifications. Knowing how Soviet components behaves allowed US to reasonably accurately predict the limitations of their fighters under real world conditions. We could be wrong but back then, we were confident that if an air war were to break out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, we would win with a slaughter.
How much of that know how went into modifying the F-16s/F-15s....and their later blocks?
