Muslim Spy Attempts Theft Of Aircraft Carrier Plans For Egypt

by JASmius



Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but there's something about Mostafa Ahmed Awwad's attempted espionage theft of the specifications for the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier that makes utterly and absolutely no sense to me:

Prosecutors said Awwad tried to steal technical data in the designs of the USS Gerald R. Ford in late October. Awwad provided computer drawings downloaded from the Navy to an undercover FBI agent posing as an Egyptian intelligence officer.

The Ford is the lead ship in a new class of carriers. It is scheduled for delivery to the Navy in 2016.

According to an FBI affidavit, Awwad began working for Navy last February in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s nuclear engineering and planning department.

An undercover agent speaking in Arabic contacted Awwad in September and the pair met the next day at a park in Hampton. At the meeting, Awwad asserted that was his intention to use his position of trust with the Navy to obtain military technology for use by the Egyptian government.

"Military technology," perhaps - ever since the Egyptian Army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohammed Morsi, the Obama Regime has pretty much cut them off out of spite, anyway - but....an aircraft carrier?  What the bloody hell would the Egyptians need with an aircraft carrier?  Do they even have a navy?  Cairo has no need to project power anywhere else in the world; their principle foe is right on their eastern border: Israel.  I can see them wanting to steal our specs on the M1A1 Abrams battle tank, or the F-22 Raptor fighter, or the F-35 Lightning fighter/bomber - although I can't believe they'd have the underlying technological infrastructure and resources to build their own versions - but how much less so for building an aircraft carrier?

The same thing applies orders of magnitude more to giving these specs to any jihadist group.  Maybe that might be in the context of how to most effectively and efficiently damage a Ford-class ship, but the only successful terrorist attack on a Navy vessel has been the USS Cole in 2000, and that was a destroyer, not a carrier.  I don't see how jihadists could even get near a carrier, or get their hands on the magnitude of ordnance that would be necessarily to seriously damage one.  Perhaps the Ford-class has a gapingly obvious weak spot where if you hit it just right it instantly explodes in a fiery conflagration, but if that's the case I'd be a lot more concerned with some animal in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard nuclear engineering and planning department deliberately sabotaging the Ford-class than some nitwit raghead bumblingly filching the blueprints.

As I said, I'm not grasping what the thought process was here.

But then, Mr. Awwad was doing what will now land him in the slammer for up to four decades for a grand total payday of.....three grand.  So perhaps he wasn't the sharpest scimitar in the scabbard.