Good News
Two pieces of good news in this news flash. The first of which is that we got a leader of Al Qaeda. Number 3? Sure. Honestly i don't know enough about the ranking structure of Al Qaeda to make any sort of intelligent assessment. Still, regardless, its a high level leader of the organization and losing his dude should shake up any operations. So thats good news. Even better is that we got him in the mountainous regions. It makes it more likely that there are more hiding up there. Why is that good? It shows that just because we havn't gotten a good number of the rest of the terrorists and Taliban officals, its pretty likely that they are still in that area or else they would have left if they could have. Also, since that is such a remote region, it shows that the leadership can't affect the rest of the world that much.
Second reason that its such a good piece of news is it further demonstrates the usefulness of the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). These drones are much cheaper to run on a long period of time than recon flights and are almost undetectable. Also, they are now shown to be an effective method of being an airborne weapons platform. This is a relatively new role for the UAV and shows its potential and the results it can do. Hopefully this will really spur the development of more predators and we can see even more uses for it and similar platforms.
Second reason that its such a good piece of news is it further demonstrates the usefulness of the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). These drones are much cheaper to run on a long period of time than recon flights and are almost undetectable. Also, they are now shown to be an effective method of being an airborne weapons platform. This is a relatively new role for the UAV and shows its potential and the results it can do. Hopefully this will really spur the development of more predators and we can see even more uses for it and similar platforms.
posted by Maddawg at 12/04/2005 07:08:00 PM
2 Comments:
You make a good argument and I would say yes to the first part, except for 2 points. The first is that given the amount of money that Al Qaeda has, and the amount of support they can hold in certain areas, if we let them slip away they can rebuild quickly and it will be seen as a PR victory for them. The US needs total stoppage of all terrorist activies with not a single innocent harmed and all Al Qaeda has to do is to stay alive or relevent. Sux huh. Second problem is that catching Bin Laden would be a huge boost for most people who don't keep up on the war or the progress (you know, people who don't read my blog)
As for the UAVs, i think that eventually, conventional scouting will be replaced almost entirely with UAVs. Most without any firepower but very cheap and effective. Foot soldiers, boots on the ground, will remain important to act on the surveilance but i think over the course of the next 5-10 years will be ineffectual for survailence in remote terrain. Urban recon obviously is a whole different ball of wax.
The Air Force's goal within the next few years is to phase-out most of our reconnaisance air craft in favor of the UAV's like the Global Hawk and the Predator.
One of the best parts about them is that they reduce the amount of man-power needed to run such missions. The Global Hawk doesn't even need someone directly flying it on the ground. Once its been programmed it can take off, preform its mission, and land autonomously.
Personally, I can't wait to be working with them. I think they'll be a great boon to those of us doing aerial surveillance. (Someone has to baby-sit the pilots)
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