US Air Force prepares to add unmanned drones to surge Michael Roston

Published: Sunday July 15, 2007 Print This Email This President George W. Bush's troop escalation in Iraq is about to get some robotic help, according to Charles Hanley, the Associated Press's Pulitzer Prize winning Special Correspondent. "The arrival of these outsized U.S. 'hunter-killer' drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill," Hanley writes in his Sunday report for AP. The Air Force will be deploying the 'Reaper' unmanned aerial vehicle squadron in Iraq sometime "between this fall and next spring." The operators or pilots of the drones will continue to be based far away in Nevada. While drone missions in Iraq are not new, Hanley reveals the long-term planning that is being carried out to possibly make the robotic surge more permanent than the group troop escalation. "The Associated Press has learned that 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," he writes. "It's another sign that 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." An excerpt of Hanley's story is provided below. The full article can be read at this link. # The Air Force's 432nd Wing, a UAV unit formally established on May 1, is to eventually fly 60 Reapers and 160 Predators. The numbers to be assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan will be classified. The Reaper is expected to be flown as the Predator is - by a two-member team of pilot and sensor operator who work at computer control stations and video screens that display what the UAV "sees." Teams at Balad, housed in a hangar beside the runways, perform the takeoffs and landings, and similar teams at Nevada's Creech Air Force Base, linked to the aircraft via satellite, take over for the long hours of overflying the Iraqi landscape. American ground troops, equipped with laptops that can download real-time video from UAVs overhead, "want more and more of it," said Maj. Chris Snodgrass, the Predator squadron commander here. The Reaper's speed will help. "Our problem is speed," Snodgrass said of the 140-mph Predator. "If there are troops in contact, we may not get there fast enough. The Reaper will be faster and fly farther."



