A senior Army official confirmed to ABC News that the Pentagon believes Iraqi insurgents used a Russian SA-7 surface-to-air missile to shoot down an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter on Jan. 16. Amid news of the three American helicopters that have crashed in the last two weeks, come reports that insurgents have engineered IEDs to specifically target low-flying helicopters. Army Secretary Francis Harvey told reporters earlier this week that “so-called jumping IEDs” are an “anticipated threat” for which the US military has “systems and tactics” that he could not discuss.
In the final few hours before the Senate adjourned for its Memorial Day recess on May 26, lawmakers approved a raft of some 3,400 pending military nominations, including a number of high-profile Air Force and Space Force generals to assignments that will significantly reshape some of the upper echelons of…