Posted on 10/20/2015 11:03:14 AM PDT by mojito
...Anne, an Air Force staff sergeant, was—and still is—a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) sensor operator or “sensor.” At Creech, she is assigned to a reconnaissance squadron flying missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. Few weapons in the American arsenal are more relentless than the RPA fleet, often called drones. For more than a decade, the United States has flown RPAs over Afghanistan and Iraq, providing forces on the ground with an eye in the sky to spot terrorists and insurgents, and in most cases the firepower to destroy them.
As she rode to work, Anne—or “Sparkle” as she’s known to her fellow drone operators—wasn’t focused on the desert outside her window. It was 2009 and President Obama was sending troops in a surge to Afghanistan. Sparkle’s mind was on a desert 7,000 miles away. Over the next 24 hours she would track an insurgent, watch as he was killed by a Hellfire missile, and spy on his funeral before ending her night with a breakfast beer and a trip to the dog park.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Sparkle sounds like my kinda gal.
Way too much information given out here though, IMHO.
h/t Vanderluen.
To be accurate, she is a senor operator not a trigger-puller.
The RPV pilot is the trigger-puller and the kill-chain does not include her.
I knew that there would be some FReepers who know more about this than the guy from Daily Beast.
I don’t know why drone operators and officers who work in the Pentagon wear flight suits.
But I guess my title wouldn't sell enough newspapers, so to speak.
The RPAs are why I believe that modern warfare has entered a new realm of lethality. In a “total war” situation, RPAs will be mass produced in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Programmed with the proper algorithms, they can go seek out and kill human beings without the need of direct human control. Presumably, friendly forces could be equipped with coded transponders that would cause them to not be targeted by friendly RPAs, but any other technologically advanced country (China) would have their own fleet of RPAs.
It might become impossible for any human, soldier or civilian, to live very long above ground in an area covered by a swarm of these things.
Same reason why Dr. Oz always shows up on those TV shows wearing scrubs. You never know when you'll be called for front-line duty!
Let’s just say that it sucks to be the enemy if a one of these is hunting you.
Patton would frown upon drones.
Still, either looks like a good job to me. Sending jihadi’s to hell without personal risk would be good duty and I’d have no problem sleeping quite well afterward.
Whoever the trigger-puller might be, it is definitely directed at people who most desperately need killing.
Kind of a high, long-range A-10.
Except the A-10 Warthogs can get right down at treetop level and strafe the troops at 200 miles an hour.
Yes, way to much.
I gleaned enough to track down Sparkle.
It's a flight uniform regulation thing, I'm sure. But it would be enlightning to know if they also had life vests and parachutes. G-Suit? If the drone is shot down, do they "bail out" of the room?
I agree with the previous FReeper, however. How was this interview and information allowed to be reported. I had no idea that drones loitered over targets for days, weeks or months. Soon enough ISIS and others will have radar that makes this kind of operation useless.
Either way, it’s a cowardly and dishonorable way to wage war. At least with a manned aircraft, the pilot is in a certain amount of danger. Having the equivalent of Homer Simpson sitting at a control panel, donut in one hand, other hand on a joystick is hardly an honorable form of combat. Plus, we zap so many innocents with those things (it’s hard to be precise from so many thousands of miles away) that we only aid terrorist recruitment. Karma, I guess.
Liberal writers and their agenda. Sparkle works with Spade, so named because he has a vasectomy. So she’s hyper masculine, and he’s literally neutered.
F*** liberals.
I don’t know if Patton said this in real life...but I think of this quote from the movie:
“Wonder weapons... my God, I don’t see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics, nothing is glorified... nothing is reaffirmed? No heroes, no cowards, no troops, no generals? Only those who are left alive... and those who are left dead. I’m glad I won’t live to see it.”
That thought crossed my mind too. And in the not too distant future, you won't have to be that advanced to command a fleet of these things. All I can say is that Washington DC would be considered a "target rich environment."
200mph. . .nope. . .way too slow.
350kts or more.
Claims like that have been made since the bow and arrow.
And then there's this buried piece of news:
“Authorities have arrested a Malaysia-based hacker who they accuse of stealing personal information of U.S. military members and giving it to ISIS.
Ardit Ferizi, a Kosovo citizen, was detained in Malaysia on a provisional U.S. arrest warrant alleging he provided material support to ISIS and committed computer hacking and identity theft, the U.S. Justice Department said.
According to a criminal complaint, Ferizi hacked into the computer system of a company in the United States and stole personally identifiable information of more than 1,000 U.S. service members and federal employees. Then, he allegedly gave that information to several ISIS figures, including a prominent propagandist for the group, the complaint says.
U.S. Assistant Attorney General John Carlin called the case against Ferizi — which combines cybercrime and terror charges as U.S. authorities aim to step up their crackdown on ISIS — “a first of its kind.””
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/politics/malaysian-hacker-isis-military-data/
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