WASHINGTON -The military’s reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq, The Associated Press has learned. And new Defense Department figures obtained by The AP show that the Air Force more than doubled its monthly use of drones between January and October, forcing it to take pilots out of the air and shift them to remote flying duty to meet part of the demand.Air Force officials said that Predator flights steadily increased last year, from about 2,000 hours in January to more than 4,300 hours in October. They are expected to continue to escalate when hours are calculated for November and December, because the number of combat air patrols had increased from about 14 per day to 18.
So that can be added to the picture of the air war detailed by Lenin. And this year they will deploy more of the devastating Reaper drones-
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.
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.
1 January, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Remote death from the air. That should make HALs day!
3 January, 2008 at 5:18 pm
[...] in Iraq, though the “surge” and the concurrent intensification of bombing raids (the robotastic “secret air war”, also being fought in Afghanistan and even Pakistan) have put it in [...]