Videos Fwd: The MQ 9 Reaper and Gates & Clinton on Afghanistan

From Bruce Gagnon blog on Dec. 7, 2009
SUNDAY FUNNIES

The MQ-9 Reaper

'Hancock Field in Syracuse, New York
“The training is really geared toward a younger generation that has experience operating video games,” said Lindsay Voss, a defense industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan. Unmanned drones are “basically operated with the kind of joystick you hook up with a PlayStation.”'


Secretary of War Gates: "We are not leaving Afghanistan"

Text Fwd: DRONE EXPLOSION

* Image source: same as below

Bruce Gagnon blog Nov. 16, 2009
DRONE EXPLOSION

Bob Anderson in Albuquerque, NM sent me a bunch of photos this morning from a protest they just held at Kirtland AFB. Kirtland is a key space warfare technology development base and the folks there who make up the group called Stop the War Machine hold regular protests at the base.

There was also a drone protest this past weekend in upstate New York were Reaper UAV's will be based.

Out near Las Vegas, Nevada a series of protests are being planned at Creech AFB where drones are flown via space satellites over Afghanistan and Pakistan. A CodePink bus will go from the San Francisco bay area to Creech on November 26 and folks will hold actions outside the base thru December 2.

Here in Maine the key advocate for a UAV flight test center at the closing Brunswick Naval Air Station, John Richardson, is declaring his candidacy for governor today. He is a Democrat, and former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. In the last couple years he has been serving as the Commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development. In that role he has been serving on the base redevelopment authority and well over a year ago I saw an article in the local paper where he was pushing drones.

The Democrats are happy to take any and all Pentagon largess....that's one reason why I will be voting for Maine's Green Party governor candidate Lynne Williams in the next election.

Tex Fwd: COLGAZETTE: AFA cadets learn to fly planes half a world away

* Text informed by Bill Sulzman, Citizens for Peace in Space, Colorado on Sept. 13, 2009

AFA cadets learn to fly planes half a world away
September 11, 2009 5:35 PM
TOM ROEDER
THE GAZETTE

Welcome to the 21st century of aerial combat. Cockpits have become cubicles and airborne robots controlled by airmen half a world away are doing the fighting.

It’s a future the Air Force Academy is preparing cadets for, even if a lot of them long for the good old days of supersonic aerobatics.

“You talk to a kid who has seen ‘Top Gun’ 25 times and tell them they’re going to fly an unmanned aircraft, they are not going to be happy,” said Lt. Col. Dean Bushey, who is leading a class of 12 cadets into the Air Force’s new robotic world.

Every other day, the cadets gather at a training area on the south side of Fort Carson to learn skills that weren’t high-profile until the 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted the invasion of Afghanistan and put satellite-controlled planes on front lines.

Now, the Air Force’s Predator and Reaper drones have been so stellar in spying on insurgents and killing them with missiles, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the F-35 fighter now in production may be the last fighter the Air Force buys that carries a pilot.

That doesn’t mean the remote planes are super stars at the Air Force Academy, where the cadet wing’s favorite acronym is IHTFP for “I’m here to fly planes.”

“There are some who are against the whole concept,” said drone flyer in training Rocco LiBrandi, a sophomore.

The history of unmanned American warplanes dates to World War II, when generals pushed the idea of using old bombers loaded with explosives to take out targets by remote control.

In the 1950s, the drones were used as targets for fighter pilots. In the 1960s and 1970s, drones were used for spying over China and Vietnam. The systems became more common in the 1980s, and one drone launched from a battleship in the 1991 Persian Gulf War became famous when Iraqis tried to surrender to it.

Advancements in electronics and communication gear allowed the drones to do more by 2001. Instead of shooting film for later review on the ground, the drones now send live video. They’re also armed with the Hellfire missile, which can vaporize a truck or send a tank turret airborne.

The key to the advancement has been satellite control, which allows airmen in Nevada and California to control the planes over the Middle East from computer terminals, where they use the drone’s cameras to watch the ground and on-board sensors to monitor speed, altitude and flight path.

Friday morning, cadets were doing the same thing, although their battlefield was Fort Carson’s training area and their plane was the 15-foot-long Viking, an unarmed drone about half the size of the Air Force Predator.

The class is unlike any other at the academy. There are no textbooks. Instead of learning theory, cadets are flying the Viking and searching for targets, most often classmates acting as the enemy.

It’s even more exciting than jumping out of planes, one said.

“You have a totally different experience here,” said cadet Christina England.

The academy is pushing cadets into the world of drones from the rivets up.

Engineering laboratories are dedicated to building the aircraft, including a 10-foot-long jet-powered test plane that will take to the air next year.

Researchers are studying tiny drones, figuring out what it will take to make a sparrow-sized spy plane that can haunt its unknowing prey.

All drones can do things that planes carrying pilots cannot. Combat drones of the future will be able to endure maneuvers that would kill humans. The tiny drones envisioned at the academy can sneak places no other craft could enter.

And drones don’t get funerals, they get replaced.

Tom McLaughlin, who runs the academy’s aerodynamic research laboratory, said cadets are fascinated with the technology that will change warfare in the future.

“It is the sort of thing you can see in the Air Force 10-20 years from now,” McLaughlin said of the tiny drones.

But cadets who dream of being pilots are still warming up to the thought of a cubicle-bound career, said Steve Brandt, a professor whose students are working on the jet-powered drone.

“I think they’re generally not very enthusiastic about that future, though we all see advantages to it,” Brandt said.

Text Fwd: Pentagon Looks to Use Drones For Missile Defense

Bruce Gagnon blog, DRONING ON, July 17, 2009

Pentagon Looks to Use Drones For Missile Defense

The United States' top missile-defense official said Tuesday that within two years the military could deploy drone aircraft to monitor ballistic missiles shortly after launch, Aviation Week reported (see GSN, June 18, 2007).

By studying the missile in its early stage of flight, the drones could provide data that would allow the incoming weapon to be destroyed, said Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, head of the Missile Defense Agency.

The agency illustrated this advantage in April when it used a MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle to "observe" a target. Its sensor technology, which has drawn fire from some critics for being too narrowly focused, appears to be particularly effective for stalking launch sites and studying missiles as they begin their trajectories, so long as the drones are told where to look.

The Reaper's electro-optical/infrared sensor "has proven to be extremely accurate and extremely sensitive," O'Reilly said. "So, there is very little modification we see that will be necessary to the [drones] themselves."

He added: "It gives you a great capability from hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away to be able to view a missile launch and actually track it and provide data to our shooters to intercept."

The Reaper is one of several projects aimed at monitoring enemy missiles just after launch (Amy Butler, Aviation Week, July 15).

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Blog)

* Related

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2009/07/uav-test-base-in-maine.html
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
UAV TEST BASE IN MAINE?

Video & Text Fwd: CBS TV PROPAGANDA PIECE ON UAV'S

* Video & Text informed at Bruce Gagnon's blog
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
CBS TV PROPAGANDA PIECE ON UAV'S



'Here is the CBS TV's "60 Minutes" story on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle's (UAV). It is not a critical piece of journalism but is simply a piece of war promotional propaganda.

These systems (called Predator and Reaper) are the ones killing so many civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. The reason the Pentagon gave "access" to 60 Minutes to do this story is because of the growing numbers of innocent people they are killing. This propaganda piece is to reassure the American people. Designed to show us that the Pentagon is careful to ensure the sanctity of life.

These "stand-off" weapons, controlled from satellites, are flown by soldiers using remote controlled joy-sticks while sitting inside Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada. It's war from space on the cheap.

These space directed systems for modern warfare will be the theme of our Keep Space for Peace Week this coming October 3-10. See our new poster here. You can order the poster for $3 each or five for $12.'


* Related Site (Site informed by Bev Hannon and Frank Cordaro on May 13, 2009

Bev Hannon on May 11, 2009

America's New Air Force
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/08/60minutes/main5001439.shtml

Increasingly, the U.S. military is relying on un-manned, often armed
aircraft to track and destroy the enemy - sometimes controlled from
bases thousands of miles away from the battlefront. Lara Logan
reports.

Watch it now: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5004882n