SF doing "airfield takedown"?
It's been 10+ years, but in my eyes, these guys appear to be Pathfinders. SF jumping into an airport? Rangers and Pathfinders yes, not SF...
It's still funny! Those guys had to be cursing their ass's off!
Airborne visitors part of special operations
By TOM ROEDER
THE GAZETTE
July 17, 2007 - 5:05PM
Those weren’t just unidentified, heavily armed parachutists who accidentally invaded a state prison in Cañon City last week.
Those were unidentified, heavily armed parachutists from U.S. Special Operations Command, or maybe foreigners working with the command, the Defense Department said Monday.
The command took responsibility for the training exercise gone awry that culminated with 25 men dropping from the sky into a cornfield on the grounds of the Fremont Correctional Facility, a 1,400-inmate medium-security prison.
But the command wouldn’t reveal exactly who made the jump Thursday or why the parachutists wound up three miles from their intended landing zone at the Fremont County Airport.
Here’s the best answer the military will give:
“Those were Special Operations Command forces conducting routine training,” said Army Col. Hans Bush, a spokesman for the command at Mac-Dill Air Force Base, Fla.
“Special Operations Command forces” is a term broad enough to cover most of the U.S. military. It means any unit under orders from the command.
But Bush’s hesitance to name the unit likely points to the Navy SEALs or the Army’s Green Berets or Delta Force.
Local units are off the hook.
The 10th Special Forces Group, which often conducts training out of the Fremont County Airport, is mostly deployed. Its Green Berets are working with Iraqi special forces in Baghdad to nab insurgents in lightning raids, and they have recently reported success in capturing or killing enemy leaders.
Other Army units in Colorado Springs don’t have parachutes. Their 72-ton M-1 Abrams tanks just weren’t built for airborne assaults.
The Air Force Academy does run cadets through parachute training, but they don’t go near Fremont County and don’t carry weapons when they jump.
“We try to stay out of prison,” one wise-cracking academy spokesman said.
It’s also possible that some of the forces involved were not American. Parachute-dropping aircraft with British markings were at Peterson Air Force Base on Monday, and Bush acknowledged that it’s common for his forces to drill with allied troops.
Units at Peterson said Monday they didn’t know anything about a foreign plane.
Bush said he’s happy the foul-up didn’t end with gunfire.
“The good news is everyone was able to quickly assess the situation,” he said.
Good news especially for the paratroops, who were armed with rubber training bullets and would have been seriously outgunned in a battle with prison guards in towers, who are armed with highpowered rifles.
“We train and practice here in the U.S. so we can work through things like this,” Bush said.
The prison system was still in the dark as to the identity of the men who drifted in.
“We don’t know who they were, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know who they were,” said Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti.
The special operations troops hit the prison grounds at 4:50 a.m. Guards on duty, trained to watch the skies since 1989 when a helicopter set down in a prison yard and took off with two prisoners, saw the troops but didn’t fire because the jumpers were obviously military, she said.
“Everyone acted appropriately,” she said.
Guards did stop the men and asked for identification and were presented with documents that identified them only as Defense Department employees, she said.
