RSSWar by remote control
Jul 16
The US military is in the process of deploying a new version of that unmanned surveillance airplane “the Predator,” and this one is called “the Reaper.” As you can guess by the name, this one isn’t just for surveillance – it carries bombs. The plane is controlled remotely by an operator, many thousands of kilometers away.
Story on DailyKos: Grimmer Reapers.
This progression was obvious after seeing the Predator but its ramifications are enormous. The US can much more easily wage war without risking the lives of their own people. They’ve had precision cruise missiles for a while but I don’t believe they’re as accurate and I think they’re much more expensive.
I think this makes the US an even larger threat to global peace and security, when it chooses to be. In a democracy, war-fatigue is the only real force limiting the government militarily. Just think how detached Americans are from their wars right now. It’s an abstraction seen on TV, consumed the same way as blockbuster Hollywood movies and reality TV shows. Americans don’t even have to sacrifice directly for their wars – they even get tax cuts at the same time! (I say direct sacrifice because they will suffer in the long term for their aggressiveness, they’re just looking too short term.)
Just think how detached they will be when they don’t even have to put their own people in harms way. It will be like their military is playing a big video game, except the “things” on the screen being blown up are actually real people from other countries, not just a computer creation.
Jul 16, 2007 @ 11:34:37
Just for clarification, I don’t think the new Reapers really fundamentally change anything. In that the Reapers were built from the ground up to be “hunter-killers”, rather than being modified from an original recon roll, that makes them (one would assume) better at this job than the original Predators, but it’s nothing at all new really. Basically, the Reapers are just bigger and faster Predators. They don’t really change the playing field much at all.
Now, the introduction of armed UAVs was somewhat “revolutionary” but they’re still only used, I think, for very special and high priority targets, but anyway, the Reaper’s are several years too late to fall into the vanguard of that category. They started putting Hellfire missles on the Predators back in 2001, and you can bet the addition of missle systems to this kind of UAV was on the drawing board at General Atomics (and a dozen other contractors) years before they even did that.
The first I know of a Predator actually being used in an attack was in February 2002 when a Predator attacked a column of SUVs transporting a suspected al Qaeda leader. CIA predator drones are credited with killing Qaed Senyan al-Harthi (the main mastermind of the USS Cole bombing) and Al Qaeda’s number 3 Hamza Rabia, in separate attacks in 2005. And there was a very famous attack on Damadola, Pakistan in 2006 in an attempt to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s number one, who was not there it turns out, although several other senior al Qaeda figures are believed to have been killed). That attack apparently involved the firing of ten or more missles from a number of Predator drones.
Anyway, who knows how all this may change warfare 10 years from now. I just wanted to point out that the introduction of the Reapers isn’t going to immediately change much of anythoing in the short term. They’re faster, and bigger, but they can’t really give the U.S. military any capability they haven’t already had, and been using, for over 6 years.
Jul 16, 2007 @ 12:59:06
Good points. The context here seemed different though. Previously it seemed like they were taking the Predator and making “after-market” modifications to an existing production model. Here they have a production-ready UAV designed to carry a decent cargo of bombs.
Perhaps that’s a minor point, but in the end it’ll depend how far they take it. If they manufacture hundreds of them and create dedicated teams (squadrons?), that’s a bit of a new mindset. If they stay as a limited-use, niche technology then I agree this is a minor development.