Be careful. This is the baloney the Democrats are throwing out to confuse the issue. FOX News is reporting that there was GLD in Benghazi. These machine gun lasers are just being thrown out so the Democrats can say,”Well, you can’t guide bombs in with those lasers.” But you can with a GLD. The GLD shows Panetta is telling a lie when he says they couldn’t send aircraft to bomb the attackers because they were afraid of “collateral damage” (bombs killing innocent civilians or damaging their property). With a GLD they could have dropped laser-guided bombs within a few feet of the attackers that the GLD was pointed at. They could have sent jets to help save the 30 Americans under attack in Benghazi. There is no other excuse but that our President Obama didn’t want to send military rescue. Why?
Watch that nine minute video on the Predator drone. Laser sighting on the ground is unnecessary. It is designed for urban strikes with the capability of hitting a target as small as a truck. It has optical capabilities that allow it to see individual people from five miles up. It can see if they have rifles or rocket tubes in their hands. It sees at night with infrared.
All of those same sighting and munitions capabilities are used on AC-130 gunships and Apache attack helicopters. All of those vehicles are able to lay down precision fire without anyone on the ground lazing targets. All of those excuses are utter BS!
Even if the laser was a “dumb” laser it could be used for targeting a Predator.
The GLD is a designator and would guide a missile/bomb to a target. The Predator has enough sensors on it -
http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=122
- that it could pick up where the dumb laser was pointing and use it to target it's weapons. When a target is identified, the Predator can use it's own designator to guide the Hellfire missiles.
A GLD would be nice, but probably not essential, to getting a pinpoint attack.