Fairly Unbiased Report From NewsWEAK on Our Cool & Also Deadly Military UAV's

An actual informative piece on the successes the military is having with the deployment and use of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan, going from pipe dreams at the outset of these wars to 1500 a day in the skies wiping out terrorists with very little effort needed from the soldiers keeping them for the most part out of harms way in many cases but providing them with extraordinarily deadly weaponry.

the raven in action launched by hand

Some interesting segments of the lengthy but interesting piece are in some ways amusing, like this one:

Impressed, Lehman bypassed regulations to acquire Israeli drones called Pioneers to fly off ships and help them direct their guns. Noisy as a lawn mower, the Pioneer was scarily effective in the 1991 gulf war, when Iraqi soldiers learned to fear the barrage of missiles that would quickly follow its buzz.

the pioneer

One Pioneer shot footage of a squadron of Iraqi soldiers waving their shirts in the air, likely the first unit ever to surrender to a drone.

Here's a good quote from George Bush on their effectiveness:

"They hear some sort of air noise and they don't know exactly what it is, but they know it's associated with 'my buddy getting killed'," says Bush. "Anything that makes them uneasy makes me happy."

and this one is really funny:

In the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, village mothers have been known to use the threat of a Predator attack to get their children to behave: "Obey or the 'buzz' will come after you."

"The Buzzz" is on the job smacking down terrorists all over the Middle East, and that's a great development borne from this "War Against Terror" that is both allowing our soldiers to be more effective and deadly while stay more alive in the process, and that's a damn good thing.

Here's the entire piece that as I stated is actually a pro military article for a change in a usually biased MSM publication which is a nice change of pace.

This also is a great piece from the Air Force on their website on the UAV's and their roles in combat today

Military UAVs: Up in the Sky, an Unblinking Eye

| Newsweek International | Newsweek.com: "'The whole art of war consists of getting at what is on the other side of the hill,' said the Duke of Wellington, conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo. In the murky kind of fight that marks modern warfare against terrorists and guerrillas, knowing what's on the other side of the hill—or inside a building—takes on a whole new urgency and meaning. Lt. Col. Scott Williams, who leads a unit of Apache helicopters in Baghdad, is in the business of 'servicing' targets, by which he means anything from blowing up a building with a Hellfire missile to helping local police make arrests. He must know when to shoot—and when not to.

Williams recently spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter after leading an airborne foray into Sadr City, where a drone—a pilotless craft generically known as a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)—had found a rocket emplacement and transmitted images back to the ground commander. Insurgents had attacked the Green Zone with rockets from the site and retreated into a nearby apartment block. Williams and his fellow Apache pilots swooped in for the kill, but pulled back." The UAV—known as a Shadow—had spotted children going in and out of the building. "We knew the bad guys were there," Williams said. "We saw them walk in and out, we saw them place the [missiles] … We could have serviced that building and we probably could have killed four or five of the guys that were involved in it.

But the decision was made at the command level—because of the women and children who were potentially in that building—not to service the target." Instead, the Apaches took out the rocket-launch site and a few of the men around it.

In the kind of counterinsurgency struggle fought in Iraq and in troubled places around the globe, winning hearts and minds is more important than body counts. There is no technological silver bullet that will help America win these wars. But in the cat-and-mouse game played by insurgents who mix freely with civilians, the ability to loiter over a target, to watch closely with cameras before the bombs begin to fall, is crucial. American forces call this "persistent stare capability" or "the unblinking eye"—and only drones have it.

The UAV is the "smart bomb" of the Iraq War, the latest turn in the unending offense-defense spiral that characterizes the history of warfare. Army units searching and fighting house-to-house are using hundreds of drones, some of them as small as a model airplane (the Raven), to track enemy movements. Patrols regularly use them to scout out the route ahead. Commanders position them over well-traveled roads to keep an eye out for insurgents planting IEDs—a task once performed by soldiers sitting in their Humvees for hours on end. The Army is even working on drones that can detect IEDs by seeing where the earth has been recently disturbed. Army drones alone flew more than 46,450 hours in March. continued

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