The United States Department of Defence has awarded Cessna a $24 million contract to supply six Caravan aircraft for Cameroon, Chad and the Philippines. They will be configured for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). This follows two contracts in May this year covering the modification of Caravans to ISR configuration for Cameroon, Chad, Niger and the Philippines.

The US Department of Defence on 21 September said Cessna will provide six Cessna 208B Grand Caravan EX aircraft, three spare Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140 engines, and aircraft spares and ground handling equipment to the US Africa Command and Pacific Command areas of responsibility in support of counterterrorism measures in Chad, Cameroon, and the Philippines.

Work is expected to be complete by 30 September 2017. Under the May 2016 contracts, L-3 Communications Corporation – Communication Systems West was awarded a $14 185 927 contract for ISR equipment and spares. North American Surveillance Systems of Titusville, Florida, was awarded $39 983 647 for the modification of the aircraft and integration of ISR capabilities, together with training and field support. Financing for both contracts came from Fiscal Year 2016 counter-terrorism partnership funds.

The contract announcements did not indicate how many aircraft each country would be getting, but it now appears Cameroon and Chad will each receive two. The US military in September 2014 awarded Cessna a $13.67 million contract to provide three Grand Caravan EX aircraft to Niger, Kenya and Mauritania in support of counter-terrorism operations, but it is believed this contract is unrelated to the most recent ones. L-3 Communications Systems West also received a $31.2 million contract in 2014 to add intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to the three Cessna 208Bs.

The United States has donated a number of Caravans to African countries in support of peacekeeping and counter-terror operations. The Niger Air Force received two donated Cessna 208Bs in July 2013, but configured for transport tasks. In June 2014 the US government donated two new Caravans to the Mauritania Islamic Air Force to boost its capacity to conduct patrols to counter maritime crimes and regional terrorist groups.

Another recipient of Caravans from the United States is Uganda, which received two aircraft on 16 March 2015, to support the Ugandan contingent battling al Shabaab militants in Somalia. The aircraft, worth $15 million including spare parts and training, were donated by the US Department of Defence.

Culled from Defenseweb

Over the next year, Russian Helicopters will deliver Mi-8/17 transport and Mi-24/35 attack helicopters to Nigeria, Mali, Angola and Sudan. This is according to Yury Demchenko, Rosoboronexport delegation head for the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) exhibition, which took place at Air Force Base Waterkloof between 14 and 18 September. He said that Russia exported helicopters to Angola, Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda over the last five years. “In 2016-2017, we plan to continue exporting these helicopters to Angola, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria. Our position in the African helicopter market is solid, so we are optimistic about the prospects of cultivating it further.”

Nigeria is set to receive 12 Mi-35M helicopters by 2018, according to Anatoly Punchuk, deputy head of Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation. He told RIA Novosti that the helicopters were ordered in October 2015. Demchenko said during AAD that he predicts further business from Africa, especially with regard to peacekeeping missions on the continent. He also sees the defence and security market growing due to terrorism, piracy, smuggling and trafficking.

“The share of Africa in the world export of weapons is relatively small. For instance sub-Saharan Africa accounts for about 2%, but the statistics of Russian weapons sales by Rosoboronexport in Africa showed steady growth for several years. A similar situation can be observed in northern Africa, where a number of countries in recent years considerably built up purchases of Russian weapons to have entered the list of our main partners in the sphere of military-technical cooperation.

“Besides, African states have been building up their participation in regional and international peacekeeping missions,” he said. Rosoboronexport has an order backlog of more than $21 billion, Demchenko told IHS Jane’s during AAD. He added that the drop in oil prices has not affected exports to oil producing African nations.  The day before AAD, Russia and South Africa held the first bilateral seminar on defence industrial cooperation. Punchuk told TASS that “South Africa has a major industrial potential while Russia can offer a lot in the sphere of defence, security and law enforcement. We proposed long-term hi-tech cooperation.”

“We discussed what to begin with, i.e. various models of industrial cooperation, including financial aspects. We have high-tech platforms which can be integrated with existing South African systems or maybe even with future jointly created new technologies,” Punchuk said. South Africa’s Secretary for Defence, Dr Sam Gulube, said he was enthusiastic and interested in defence industrial cooperation but cautioned that contracts would only come with time.

Defenseweb

A white Memphis police officer, who fatally shot an African-American man, will not face federal civil rights criminal charges, a prosecutor says. On July 17, 2015, Officer Connor Schilling shot and killed 19-year-old Darrius Stewart after he engaged in a confrontation with the officer.

Schilling stopped a car for a broken headlight, issued a ticket and let the driver go, but the officer had arrest warrants for Stewart, who was sitting in the car.

Stewart was then placed in the police car and, according to prosecutors, when Schilling wanted to open the door to his car to handcuff Stewart, he kicked the door and snatched the officer’s handcuffs. The officer grabbed his own gun and shot the black man two times.

On Tuesday, US Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee Edward Stanton told reporters that a federal review found no sufficient evidence to prove the officer was guilty.

“We found insufficient evidence to support federal, criminal civil rights charges against Connor Schilling,” Stanton said, adding, “To establish willfulness, federal authorities must show that the officer acted with a deliberate and specific intent to do something the law forbids.”

Presstv

US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton have both performed predictably at their first presidential debate, an American political analyst and activist says. “Trump was Trump. Clinton was Clinton. He bragged. He lied. He bullied,” Myles Hoenig, a Green Party candidate for Congress, told Press TV on Tuesday.

The analyst said former secretary of state Clinton was prepared. “She evaded questions regarding the emails. She hid her own history as she claimed she cared for workers, families, others.” “In the end, she stole Green Party’s Jill Stein’s usual closing line, ‘…like your life depends on it, because it does,” he stated.

During the debate at Hofstra University in Hampstead, New York, Trump attacked Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of state and she criticized him for not releasing his tax history. “I’m not going to make any excuses, it was a mistake,” Clinton said referring to her use of private email.
She also said Trump is “trying to hide” his tax history, adding, “it must be something really important, even terrible.” Trump reacted by saying, “I will release my tax returns against my lawyer’s wishes when she releases her 33,000 emails that have been deleted.”

Green Party presidential nominee Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson were not invited to participate in the debate by the Commission on Presidential Debates. The commission said the two candidates had failed to garner the 15 percent support in five polls required to qualify for the debate. But Stein rejected the standards set by the commission and staged her own live stream Q&A session on social media on Monday evening from outside the presidential debate venue in New York.

Presstv