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| Iraq |
| Robot Attack Squadron Bound For Iraq |
| 2007-07-15 |
| The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It's outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles. The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada. The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill. That moment, one the Air Force will likely low-key, is expected "soon," says the regional U.S. air commander. How soon? "We're still working that," Lt. Gen. Gary North said in an interview. The Reaper's first combat deployment is expected in Afghanistan, and senior Air Force officers estimate it will land in Iraq sometime between this fall and next spring. They look forward to it. "With more Reapers, I could send manned airplanes home," North said. The Associated Press has learned that the Air Force is building a 400,000-square-foot expansion of the concrete ramp area now used for Predator drones here at Balad, the biggest U.S. air base in Iraq, 50 miles north of Baghdad. That new staging area could be turned over to Reapers. It's another sign that the Air Force is planning for an extended stay in Iraq, supporting Iraqi government forces in any continuing conflict, even if U.S. ground troops are drawn down in the coming years. The estimated two dozen or more unmanned MQ-1 Predators now doing surveillance over Iraq, as the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, have become mainstays of the U.S. war effort, offering round-the-clock airborne "eyes" watching over road convoys, tracking nighttime insurgent movements via infrared sensors, and occasionally unleashing one of their two Hellfire missiles on a target. From about 36,000 flying hours in 2005, the Predators are expected to log 66,000 hours this year over Iraq and Afghanistan. The MQ-9 Reaper, when compared with the 1995-vintage Predator, represents a major evolution of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. At five tons gross weight, the Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator. Its size - 36 feet long, with a 66-foot wingspan - is comparable to the profile of the Air Force's workhorse A-10 attack plane. It can fly twice as fast and twice as high as the Predator. Most significantly, it carries many more weapons. While the Predator is armed with two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper can carry 14 of the air-to-ground weapons - or four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs. "It's not a recon squadron," Col. Joe Guasella, operations chief for the Central Command's air component, said of the Reapers. "It's an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability." "Kinetic" - Pentagon argot for destructive power - is what the Air Force had in mind when it christened its newest robot plane with a name associated with death. "The name Reaper captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system," Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff, said in announcing the name last September. General Atomics of San Diego has built at least nine of the MQ-9s thus far, at a cost of $69 million per set of four aircraft, with ground equipment. The Air Force's 432nd Wing, a UAV unit formally established on May 1, is to eventually fly 60 Reapers and 160 Predators. The numbers to be assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan will be classified. The Reaper is expected to be flown as the Predator is - by a two-member team of pilot and sensor operator who work at computer control stations and video screens that display what the UAV "sees." Teams at Balad, housed in a hangar beside the runways, perform the takeoffs and landings, and similar teams at Nevada's Creech Air Force Base, linked to the aircraft via satellite, take over for the long hours of overflying the Iraqi landscape. American ground troops, equipped with laptops that can download real-time video from UAVs overhead, "want more and more of it," said Maj. Chris Snodgrass, the Predator squadron commander here. The Reaper's speed will help. "Our problem is speed," Snodgrass said of the 140-mph Predator. "If there are troops in contact, we may not get there fast enough. The Reaper will be faster and fly farther." The new robot plane is expected to be able to stay aloft for 14 hours fully armed, watching an area and waiting for targets to emerge. "It's going to bring us flexibility, range, speed and persistence," said regional commander North, "such that I will be able to work lots of areas for a long, long time." The British also are impressed with the Reaper, and are buying three for deployment in Afghanistan later this year. The Royal Air Force version will stick to the "recon" mission, however - no weapons on board. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #8 The British also are impressed with the Reaper, and are buying three for deployment in |
| Posted by: Sigmund Freud 2007-07-15 23:55 |
| #7 The Reaper? Only the Reaper? Somewhere someone is tapping their pencil and wondering why the Air Force didn't accept his initial proposed name for the UAV: The Grim Reaper. |
| Posted by: Sigmund Freud 2007-07-15 23:45 |
| #6 this is cool. anything that will exterminat the cockroaches without putting troops at risk or making new targets of the operators is a major plus |
| Posted by: Abu do you love 2007-07-15 22:20 |
| #5 GLOBAL STRIKE, PROMPT STRIKE, SPACE STRIKE, SEA BASING = MOBILE OFFSHORE BASING, .....etal > why Moud-Mullahs and Radical Islam can't wait too long for the USA to voluntarily/unilater leave the ME-Muslim World after Dubya leaves in January 2009, as for one US tech dominance is getting stronger whilst theirs stays static = or gets weaker. TRUTHOUT.ORG + other bloggs > FOR THE DURATION OF THE WOT, AND AT LEAST THRU DUBYA'S SECOND TERM [Dec 2008-Jan 2009] , DUBYA ISN'T GONNA WITHDRAW OR PULLOUT, NOR IS LIKELY ANY POST-DUBYA SUCCESSOR. All the hoopla in Congress is about minor, budgeted=appropriated force-troop adjustments + limited small-scale redux. The only true thingy to the DemoLeft's or anti-Dubya critics' so-called demands for complete US withdrawal or pullout is that the Dems wanna win the WH in 2008 at all costs, even iff it means letting mainstream Amer falsely believe the Dems Party stands for getting the USA immed out of the ME. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-07-15 20:57 |
| #4 ..." too many innovative ways to hunt and kill." This guy would no doubt feel better if we tagged and released...... |
| Posted by: Ebbaish Fillmore2732 2007-07-15 20:34 |
| #3 *sigh* If it has a human involved, it's not a robot. It's an RPV or UAV. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2007-07-15 19:58 |
| #2 Resistance is futile... |
| Posted by: Raj 2007-07-15 17:43 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-07-15 16:54 |