The crash and burn of drone warfare

[xchrom]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NA26Df01.html

American fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly. What had begun as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn. In an instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over. The Predator, one of the US Air Force's workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.

An account of the spectacular end of that nearly US$4 million drone in November 2007 is contained in a collection of air force accident investigation documents recently examined by TomDispatch. They catalog more than 70 catastrophic air force



drone mishaps since 2000, each resulting in the loss of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or more.

These official reports, some obtained by TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act, offer new insights into a largely covert, yet highly touted war-fighting, assassination and spy program involving armed robots that are significantly less reliable than previously acknowledged.

These planes, the latest wonder weapons in the US military arsenal, are tested, launched and piloted from a shadowy network of more than 60 bases spread around the globe, often in support of elite teams of special operations forces. Collectively, the air force documents offer a remarkable portrait of modern drone warfare, one rarely found in a decade of generally triumphalist or awestruck press accounts that seldom mention the limitations of drones, much less their mission failures.

The aerial disasters described draw attention not only to the technical limitations of drone warfare, but to larger conceptual flaws inherent in such operations.

[bemildred]

1. The latest military fad, is what it is.

Something of obvious but moderate utility tarted up and portrayed as a game-changer.

[xchrom]

2. it galls me at how expensive these toys are -- and it highlights 2 things

that can really send me around the bend.

1) the money spent on this -- while TPBTB are Hell Bent on Austerity for the people.

2) incompetence. the continuing institutional incompetence to get a thing right.

[bemildred]

3. Waste is the essential prerequisite for corruption.

That is why.

[xchrom]

4. indeed. nt