

Wave a tear-stained handkerchief for the drone that changed the face of air war: The Air Force won't buy any more Predators. The Reaper drone is about to be in full effect.

This year, the Air Force completed its scheduled purchase of 268 Predators from manufacturer General Atomics, somewhat behind a schedule the service announced in 2008. By "early 2011," says Lt. Col. Richard Johnson, an Air Force spokesman, "we're taking delivery of our last Predator."

February, to be exact, according to Kimberly Kasitz, a General Atomics spokeswoman. "We’ve actually had a couple of internal celebrations," she says.

That doesn't mean the end for the Predator, exactly, since the Air Force will continue to fly the planes it's bought. But it does mean the beginning of the end. "We're not replacing the Predator with the Reaper," Johnson says, "but as the [Predator] fleet diminishes by attrition, we'll phase in the Reaper."

Ah, the Predator: Flying at up to 25,000 feet for around 20 hours at a time, the drone was supposed to be a pure surveillance aircraft. But starting in late 2000, the Clinton and Bush administrations decided to outfit the Predator with Hellfire missiles to reduce the lag time between identifying Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and attempting to take him out. Bureaucratic wrangling delayed the armament, but in November 2002, a CIA-operated armed Predator blew up a Jeep carrying some of bin Laden's acolytes. The age of the Predator – an age of remotely piloted air war – had begun.

Unlike the Predator, the Reaper is no accidental warrior. Also built by General Atomics, it flies twice as fast (150-170 knots cruising, 260 max), at higher altitudes (around 50,000 feet), and carries ten times the payload (over 2 tons) as the Predator. That allows it to strap on the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, as well as GBU-12 and GBU-38 precision bombs. And as a surveillance aircraft, it's got more electrical power than the Predator, which means "we can integrate new or improved sensors on the aircraft," Johnson says.

The Reaper came into use in 2007. So far, the Air Force owns 57 of the drones and plans to buy another 272, for a total buy of 329 planes – the pace of which will be determined by congressional moneymen. Many of the drones are already in Afghanistan. Air Force officers pilot them from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

Of course, the Air Force isn't the only U.S. operation that flies armed drones. The CIA operates an unacknowledged drone program over the Pakistani tribal areas (and, possibly, in Yemen soon). The Air Force is widely believed to supply the CIA with its drones. If so – the CIA declined comment for this post – a phase-out of the Predator and phase-in of the Reaper will mean an eventual upgrade for a drone program that'salready fired off 108 strikes in the last year.

And it's the lethality of that program that's gotten other countries wanting the same weapons. WikiLeaks exposed U.S. allies like the United Arab Emirates and Turkey champing at the bit to buy armed Reapers from the U.S. almost as soon as the Predator upgrade came online. Armed drone sales to non-NATO allies are probably still years off, but in July, General Atomics got State Department approval to sell the unarmed version of the Predator as surveillance aircraft to non-NATO countries like Pakistan, Egypt and the UAE.

And that's just the beginning.China, Iran and Israel are just some of the countries that have their own indigenous drone programs. The Reaper is already getting an upgrade: in July, General Atomics rolled out its post-Reaper drone, the faster, stealthier Avenger. Even as the Reaper takes over for the Predator in the U.S., the global proliferation of drone technology is the pathbreaking plane's real legacy.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

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