The drone war in Pakistan may be on a temporary hiatus, that hasn’t stopped the Army from moving to send three of its newest drones to neighboring Afghanistan this Spring. The service is sending three of Boeing’s A160 Hummingbird drone choppers downrange for up to one year to feed the military’s insatiable hunger for more airborne ISR.
The helos will be equipped with the ARGUS wide area surveillance cameras, allowing the birds to hover and watch over massive swaths of land. Think of the typical UAV camera as looking at a region through a soda straw; operators and intel analysts only see the immediate area where the camera is focused. WAS systems like ARGUS are being developed to provide up to 65 video streams via one sensor package. This obviously gives a much broader picture of a region.
This deployment is meant to field test the concept of unmanned ISR choppers capable of performing serious recon missions from bases with no runways. If all goes well, the Army will launch a competition for this type of bird to enter large-scale production. We first reported on this effort last May. The service eventually wants a drone helo that can carry a variety of sensors at 6,000 feet in 95-degree temperatures and a flying duration of 12 to 24-hours.
Read more on the deployment here.
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Engrish!
I guess they done sent 'em already.
To the author, could you change the title to say send rather than sent? Also, We are sending these 3 UAVs, the Marine Corps just sent their bird to do supply runs, and the Pred C is "not" going to A-stan. No telling where the MQ-9s in Pakistan were sent to, but I am guessing that we are massing UAVs in A-stan to protect the border better.
Would be nice if we had the resources to mass some UAVs to protect our own borders too. We have the hardware last I heard, just not enough people to operate and analysis the data collected.
Homeland Security got approval to fly MQ-9s along the border by the FAA. They already have Aerostats too. These would just add to those assets.
Actually, it wouldn't be nice. There's some great reasons NOT to create a large, national paramilitary police force.
Also, a little strange that a nation composed almost entirely of immigrants has such an urgent need to "protect our own borders."
I'm glad my grandparents got here when it didn't take 10 years and two trips back to Poland to become a U.S. citizen. But that's sort of a separate issue.
All you foregners need to go home :)
Your grandparents didn't collect benefits like the new ones do.
Very true, and a much more well-reasoned response than "Mexicans commit crimes" or "Mexicans steal jobs" or the typical xenophobic tripe. But I think your argument points to the need to rationalize Social Security and Medicare rather than the need to close our borders.
Without massive transfers of wealth from young people to old people, our current crop of entitlement programs will fail as baby boomers retire. And any change would be political suicide — who wants to tell retired Americans that they didn't actually pay for the Social Security/Medicare benefits they thought they earned?
And we just got super off-topic; apologies.
As an immigrant myself I have no problem with people who want to come in, make an honest living and generally work for a better life. I do however have a problem with people running drugs across the border with near impunity. It’s gotten to the point that these people are camping out in our own national forests, growing pot in there and killing tourists who happen to stumble upon them. ***!?
http://www.livescience.com/17417-marijuana-growers-national-forests.html
Park 'em along the border and use them to knock out people straying into A-stan. Once we funnel them into the checkpoints, crank out the biometrics stuff and profile repeat crossers. Pass off names of Taliban symphatisers to the Baluchis or their ethic rivals, and let the locals sort this out (without handing names to the ISI who will tip off their clients).
It's the D in Dirty War, but sending in kill-teams is out of the question.
Wonder if the sensor package could be reversed engineered ?
That has to be the cutest little UAV around.
it's actually pretty big. Bigger than a OH-6, similar in size to an OH-58A. About 50% lager than a MQ-8 Fire Scout, with significantly more lift capacity, and operational speed & duration.
I'm more of an airship guy myself (chin up)
These might be interesting if used offensively by the army. UAVs that can be operated by division or brigade (with ground control stations) to supplement aviation reconaissance units.
Then of course, comes obligatory weaponization.
As long as they don’t end up on Iranian TV surrounded by Iranian Republican Guard.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but for a blog that is read quite frequently by lots of people, the grammar and spelling is atrocious. Maybe the articles should be written in Microsoft Word, spell checked, and then pasted into the blog.
American Education dollars at work.
Maybe they should of had an American write it instead of a Mexican. . .
They "should have" had a Canadian write it.
Word wouldn't have caught the headline gram-tastrophy, but I would have. I will edit the entries before they post, spelling, grammar, wit. Make your readers happy, you have my email.
However, an add-in context editor, such as Grammatique, would have.
I think we should review our goals in Afghanistan. First we should define who the terrorist was, who we are fighting, who are involve in 9/11 and what bring us in Afghanistan. Even we are fighting the Taliban,The Taliban are not involve in 9/11. I think they are just fighting for their territory and a place to live. We should not waist anymore lives and money for people who becomes our enemy because of our presence and their alliance with Al-Quida. We should begin to bring our troops home, train the Afghans and let the Afghans take care of their insurgency problems.
It's interesting, isn't it, that a country with porous borders with the accompanying political and economic fallout and is expending more resources to contain insurgents on Afghan borders than on our own? I agree with RCDC relative to a review of goals and objectives. We've let this genie out of the bottle – stuffing him back in may be problematic.
No need to flyguys make it a bill to database all home and b2b on a global network.
The immigrants before also were dealing with a nation that had more wealth than it knew how to deal with it, plus an abundance of jobs. Simply stated, not everyone can have the American dream because there aren't enough resources to go around.
There's also a difference between your grandparents who came into this country legitimately, through the proper channels, and filing the proper paperwork. When the press talks about anti-immigration they like to leave out the word illegal, as in these immigrants are coming across the border without any documentation, without waiting in line, and without any sort of background checks either.