bobdina
09-09-2009, 02:26 PM
The US military’s day-to-day hunt for Osama bin Laden goes well beyond the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan: 7,500 miles, in fact, to Creech Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas.
Every day 2,500 young servicemen and women make their way to this compound — located next to a trailer park on the dusty Route 96 freeway — to operate remote-controlled aircraft over the hostile, often impassable terrain where the al-Qaeda leader is thought to be in hiding.
When bin Laden attacked the US on September 11, 2001, the prospect of America being able to hunt and kill targets using unmanned aircraft piloted from another continent was still largely a fantasy. Advances in technology and pilot training over the past eight years have been extraordinary.
According to Captain Brooke Brander, a public affairs officer at Creech, there are now 36 lethally armed Predators or Reapers (the newer, more sophisticated generation of remote-controlled aircraft) on duty over the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan at any given time.
Related Links
* CIA brings back 1980s veterans in bin Laden hunt
* Double game that let bin Laden slip through net
They are so effective that senior commanders at the Pentagon are expected to buy 300 Reapers, at a cost of up to $6 billion, to complement an eventual fleet of 300 Predators.
Unlike the Predator the Reaper was designed from day-one as the world’s most sophisticated assassination tool. Each one can cost as much as $20 million, including the price of its giant, electronic eyeball, which sends a live video feed from the battlefield to its pilots 7,500 miles away.
Reapers can be loaded with Hellfire and Sidewinder missiles and laser-guided bombs, which can be highly accurate.
Judging from footage of a Hellfire strike shown to The Times by officials at Creech, these 21st Century weapons can be extremely accurate, taking out a single room in an apartment block while leaving the rest of the building largely intact.
As for the price—the US military hasn’t flinched, trillion-dollar deficit or no trillion-dollar deficit. In fact, senior commanders at the Pentagon have been so impressed with the Reaper’s performance, they’re expected to buy 300 in total, at a cost of up to $6 billion. That’s on top of the fleet of 300 Predators that they’re already close to completing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6826729.ece
Every day 2,500 young servicemen and women make their way to this compound — located next to a trailer park on the dusty Route 96 freeway — to operate remote-controlled aircraft over the hostile, often impassable terrain where the al-Qaeda leader is thought to be in hiding.
When bin Laden attacked the US on September 11, 2001, the prospect of America being able to hunt and kill targets using unmanned aircraft piloted from another continent was still largely a fantasy. Advances in technology and pilot training over the past eight years have been extraordinary.
According to Captain Brooke Brander, a public affairs officer at Creech, there are now 36 lethally armed Predators or Reapers (the newer, more sophisticated generation of remote-controlled aircraft) on duty over the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan at any given time.
Related Links
* CIA brings back 1980s veterans in bin Laden hunt
* Double game that let bin Laden slip through net
They are so effective that senior commanders at the Pentagon are expected to buy 300 Reapers, at a cost of up to $6 billion, to complement an eventual fleet of 300 Predators.
Unlike the Predator the Reaper was designed from day-one as the world’s most sophisticated assassination tool. Each one can cost as much as $20 million, including the price of its giant, electronic eyeball, which sends a live video feed from the battlefield to its pilots 7,500 miles away.
Reapers can be loaded with Hellfire and Sidewinder missiles and laser-guided bombs, which can be highly accurate.
Judging from footage of a Hellfire strike shown to The Times by officials at Creech, these 21st Century weapons can be extremely accurate, taking out a single room in an apartment block while leaving the rest of the building largely intact.
As for the price—the US military hasn’t flinched, trillion-dollar deficit or no trillion-dollar deficit. In fact, senior commanders at the Pentagon have been so impressed with the Reaper’s performance, they’re expected to buy 300 in total, at a cost of up to $6 billion. That’s on top of the fleet of 300 Predators that they’re already close to completing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6826729.ece