First Robotic Drone Squadron Deployed

coondoggie writes with a link to a Network World blog post on the world's first unmanned attack squadron. The US is deploying a full squadron of combat drones to Iraq this week. These armed and remotely controlled robots can be manipulated from on the ground in the field, or via satellite from thousands of miles away. "The MQ-9 Reaper is the Air Force's first hunter-killer unmanned aircraft. It is the big brother to the highly successful and sometimes controversial Predator aircraft, which General Atomics said this week had flown over 300,000 flight hours, with over 80% of that time spent in combat. The company said Predator series aircraft have flown an average of 8,200 hours per month over the past six months while maintaining the highest operational readiness rates in the U.S. military aircraft inventory. The MQ-9 Reaper is twice as fast as the Predator - it has a 900-horsepower turbo-prop engine, compared to the 119-horsepower Predator engine - and can carry far more ordnance - 14 Hellfire missiles as opposed to two."

Comments

Is that really a good thing??

[oni]

War might never be 'humane' but it certainly has the capacity to be a lot more humane then it is. The easiest way to make war safer, besides spewing some idealistic crap about 'lets never fight wars!'

Just playing devil's advocate, is it really a good thing for wars to be more humane? Look at the difference between Iraq and (Germany || Japan). Both Germany and Japan were absolutely fucking destroyed during WWII. As a result, the civilians quit. They threw up their hands and said, "screw this, we quit."

A few years later, Germany and Japan are two of the richest, most prosperous nations on Earth.

Contrast with Iraq. We try *really* hard not to hurt anyone, to avoid casualties, we apologize if we destroy a building. Result: civilians kind of shrug and do their best to live their lives and avoid the fighting. A group of foreign insurgents can move into a town and the civilians will say, "eh, they're not here to kill me so I don't care - it's none of my business."

At this rate, Iraq will continue to be a war zone indefinitely.

So all I'm saying, again as the devil's advocate - what if the people of Iraq had to suffer as much as the people of Germany or Japan suffered? Maybe they would say, "screw this - you foreign insurgents get the fuck out - we want the Americans to rebuild."

Maybe.