H/T Neptune Lex -- rest of article behind subscription
Circling 3,000 feet above a heavily traveled convoy route north of Baghdad, U.S. Army Shadow and Warrior Alpha UAVs trained video cameras on four men planting a roadside bomb at a busy intersection. The images beamed to an Army ground station, whose operators radioed targeting data to a nearby Apache attack helicopter. The aircraft swooped in and killed the men with a 30mm automatic chain gun. Later, a bomb squad neutralized the explosive.
This March 2007 attack, depicted in an Army video that the service allowed a reporter to see but declined to release publicly, was one of hundreds of successful missions by a high-tech, once-classified Army unit called Task Force ODIN, for “observe-detect-identify-neutralize.” The 14-month-old unit uses a network of Army UAVs, 10 modified C-12 surveillance planes and ground stations to spot and destroy improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and people who plant them.
Now heading over to Afghanistan |