RNC Surprises

Now that the RNC is over with, and I’ve caught up on both sleep and the coverage of it, there are a couple things that surprise me about the military support to the security efforts. For the most part, these are the absence of things I expected to see or hear about, but there were a few things I saw - or others saw - that I wouldn’t have expected.

First, I was really expecting a large USAF presence in the Twin Cities during the convention, particularly one or more SAM emplacements; I’d even worked out the - to me, at any rate - most logical places for them to be positioned. I didn’t really have a chance to go look for ‘em, but nobody anywhere seems to have noticed - or commented on - any, either. There were vehicle-mounted missiles at the RNC in 2004; why not this year? Did they just put people with MANPADS on a few building rooftops? Or did we go without?

Second, on a kind of related note, I’m a little surprised at the apparent lack of tactical air assets in use during the convention. Even at night, when I’d be getting off work, all I’d ever see in the sky - other than television helicopters - was the State Patrol’s Bell JetRanger, hovering a couple hundred feet above whatever disturbance was going on at the time. I know it has FLIR, and a powerful searchlight, and I know the helicopters operate out of Holman Field, right in downtown Saint Paul, but if they really were the only helicopter the government had to call on, that seems like one heck of a grueling operational tempo for the State Patrol flyboys. There were sightings the weekend before the convention of several USCG helicopters, probably HH-65s, so it’s not as if nobody else brought rotary-wing assets to the party. Strange…

Also strange, nobody seems to have reported seeing any of the really high-tech less-lethal gizmos the government has in its arsenal: The LRAD accoustic doohickey, or the microwave pain-ray deal, for instance. At least one LRAD was in New York in 2004, though most people agree it was never used. I mean, yeah, some of the tinfoil-hat brigade reported seeing “cellphone jammers”, but I’m pretty sure they were talking about the bomb squad disposal trailer (which was also reported to be a cauldron of “boiling oil”, after all).

Did anyone else expect to see something from the military at the convention that wasn’t there? Or get surprised by the appearance of something they weren’t expecting to see?

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