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64 Drone Bases Located On American Soil
MikeatWired writes "We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it's closer than we thought, writes Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Danger Room. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) — it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon's unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots."
If someone overlaid a map of UFO sightings over the top of this...
Thankfully, the weapons are inaccessible until someone obtains at least a 5 point streak.
... Really?
There are also more US Army, Air Force, and Navy bases in the US than in the rest of the world combined. Many of them have tanks, warplanes, aircraft carriers, howitzers, and many other weapons that can be loaded and armed with live ammunition and dangerous explosives. I mean, who knew right? Oh wait... Everybody knew. Of course we have drone bases in the US. They have to train people, provide headquarters and on going operational training for units not deployed, stored undeployed hardware... this is the stupidest thing I've ever read.
What did these guys think? They send untested multimillion dollar drones over to Yemen where they hand them to an untrained unit and expect them to just figure out how they work in the field? It's just like any other military operation: for every deployed unit there are probably five waiting in reserve, getting readiness training, refitting, etc. Most of that happens in the US.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The drones are staying in people's houses?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And the USAF has many of them in the USA. Why do they suddenly become especially evil because some of the aircraft are unmanned?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yeah! Totally right! We need to end that freaking military occupation of land which rightfully belongs to the Native Americans!
Strictly speaking, the Continental Army was ordered to disband in 1783 by Congress and never was actually a US force under the Constitution.
That said, the example you are probably looking for is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_American_Regiment
The First American Regiment, later called the the 1st Infantry Regiment, now called the 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), was founded in 1784 and obviously lasted through the Confederation and then the United States under the Constitution.
Still it must be pointed out that even though we always had at least some standing Federal force, it is historical that there was great distrust of standing armies at the time of the founding of the US, and that same distrust has had an effect on all sorts of decisions, from heavy use of the National Guard, to the fact that we refused to use naval ranks like Admiral or army ranks above Major General. (Even today, Major General is the highest permanent rank in the US Army, three and four star ranks are only granted while in positions requiring them. Unless you retire in such a position, you revert to your two star rank for retirement purposes.)
that black people could be bought and sold as property and counted as 3/5 of a human being
Just for the sake of accuracy -- Slaves were whole "persons" according to the Constitution, but it was only 3/5ths of their number that counted for determining a state's representation in the House.
The slave states wanted the full number of their slaves to count, because it would increase their influence in the federal government. It was non-slave states and abolitionists who argued against this, and reducing it to 3/5ths was the compromise.
So you see, it's not counting slaves as less than a full human being (which wasn't what they were doing) that is the problem with the 3/5ths clause. It's that people who were slaves and thus not represented by their government were being counted towards representation at all. It's not that it's less than 1, it's that it's greater than 0!
Just wanted to put that into perspective. It's kinda messed up that we had to make compromises like that just to form our nation. But you know, the Founder's reasoning about freedom and liberty were quite good. The only problem was that they didn't extend the concepts to everyone, which is a problem easily fixed -- logically, anyway.
The enemies of Democracy are