…Launched from a site near Baghdad, the Predator UAV carried a Hellfire missile. Its crew and its video feeds were back in California. A few weeks earlier, the Watchdogs had employed Predator to hit a moving pickup with a mounted machine gun—one robot leading another robot to the target. NFL games on television allow the viewer to see the same play from different angles. But the digital pipes for battlefield imagery weren’t large enough to permit the Watchdogs and the Predator crew in California to see each other’s video. Instead, the Predator and Pioneer crews used e-mail chat and GPS coordinates to align their platforms….
Now, this is what Rumsfeld, et al, have been talking about when trying to pound sense about military transformation and the strategy of technology to the MMPA and LLMB, although, of course, Rummy tries to avoid the big words when speaking to the mental half-packs in the LLMB and MMPA… (h.t. to Bill @ INDC Journal)
“The Watchdogs of Fallujah
From: Bing West
Subject: How the Pioneer Robot Plane Helped Win an Artillery Duel
Thursday, Nov. 11, 2004, at 11:37 AM PT
…The two-story cement house where the insurgents were hiding between rounds had a dome roof, a large courtyard with an outside wall, and an overhang at the front door, where a sentry was posted. The Watchdogs had counted five men outside, assuming it was the same sprinters making the round trip to the mortar each time…
…The courtyard door opened, and a man walked to the truck and slowly drove away.
“Boot muj sent out to get the Coke. Luckiest bastard on the planet.”
Both video screens suddenly flashed bright white, as if a fuse had blown. There was a collective Damn! from the watching Marines. The center of the roof was now a huge black hole…
Now, that’s a transformation I can get behind: Predator crew in California teaming up with the boots on the ground = smoking hole in Fallujah. Sounds good to me. Can’t do that with draftees. (Well, you could, perhaps, but by the time they are trained it’s time they got out… and they’d likely leave as fast as they could.) Need to have highly-trained specialists, and that means all-volunteer, there for the full ride kinda guys. Not unwilling mutts dragged in off the streets.