Conducting
“remote-controlled” wars
globinfo
freexchange
“The
Predator drone, though best known as the CIA's primary weapon in the
war against Al Qaeda, was merely an unarmed, remote-control
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft when the
Defense Department first bought it in 1994.”
“Many
pilots in the Air Force disdained unmanned aerial vehicles, but the
fighter pilot who was that service's chief of staff from 1994-97,
General Ronald Fogleman, set out to wrest control of the Predator
away from the Army and Navy and secure it for the Air Force.”
“On
September 2, 1996, the Air Force's 11th Reconnaissance Squadron took
over Predator operations from the Army, which had been flying the
drone over Bosnia by remote control from Taszar, Hungary, since March
14 of that year.”
“In
September 2000, an Air Force unit began flying an unarmed Predator
over Afghanistan for the CIA in an attempt to locate Osama bin Laden,
who had been in hiding since August 7, 1998, when Al Qaeda suicide
bombers attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The ad hoc
Air Force unit — officially the 32nd Expeditionary Air Intelligence
Squadron — controlled the Predator by satellite from a ground
control station parked at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany,
headquarters of United States Air Forces Europe (USAFE).”
“On
July 11, 2001, Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley sent a
memo, cited in the 9/11 Commission Report, telling CIA Deputy
Director John E. McLaughlin, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
and Air Force General Richard Myers, vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, that the White House wanted to deploy Predators
"capable of being armed" to Afghanistan by September 1.”
“As Al
Qaeda terrorists launched their attacks on New York and Washington
the morning of September 11, 2001, an Air Force team whose core cadre
and leadership were the same as the unit that had found Osama bin
Laden using an unarmed Predator the year before was reassembling at
CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Official orders forming Detachment
1, Air Combat Command, Pentagon, were issued on September 18, 2001,
with no explanation of the unit's mission. Also known as the Air
Combat Command Expeditionary Air Intelligence Squadron, the unit was
based in a double wide mobile home hidden by trees on the CIA campus
and flew armed Predators over Afghanistan and elsewhere from first
one and later two ground control stations parked next to the
trailer.”
Source:
... when the arms industry will
fully automate the new weapons, private armies will only serve as
assistance to fully automated war machines. We already see the
test fields of the weapons of future˙ the drones in Afghanistan,
Iraq and elsewhere.
It's not accidental that the arms
industries demonstrate new weapons designed to be used inside
urban areas for suppression of potential riots. There will be no
"outside enemy" in the future. The threat for the
dominant system will come from the interior, the big urban
centers. Soldier-robots will protect worker-robots and resources.
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