Security

Deadly 'Drone Shortage' in Iraq?

There’s a "drone shortage" in Iraq. And the insurgents are benefitting from it, according to a front-page story in USA Today. Which is true — pretty much every American commander on the ground would like more robot plane footage of his area. But the article glosses over some fairly important subtleties. Like the fact that […]

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There's a "drone shortage" in Iraq. And the insurgents are benefitting from it, according to a front-page story in USA Today. Which is true -- pretty much every American commander on the ground would like more robot plane footage of his area. But the article glosses over some fairly important subtleties. Like the fact that there are plenty of drones sitting on the shelves in Iraq, unused.

For the past several years, there has been a "300% annual increase in requests" for unmanned aircrafts' full-motion video, the paper notes. And while the "military's fleet of drones has increased from 167 unmanned planes to 5,331 in the past five years," it's still not enough. "Demand for video is more than four times the supply."

Part of the problem is that many of those 5,331 unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, aren't actually being used in the fight. The lion's share of the military's robotic air force are small, hand-launched
UAVs. Theoretically, they can be thrown in the air any time, to give an officer a view of the area immediately around him. But cutting through the red tape, to clear air space for the drones, takes so long -- as much as 24 to 48 hours -- that many commanders have stopped bothering with the small UAVs. Either way, military bureaucrats are holding frontline troops back. It's just important to properly point out which paper-pushers (or combination of paper-pushers) are really at fault here.

There's also the matter of bandwidth. UAV video, like all digital video, gobbles up network space. Which isn't that big of a deal -- back at a big headquarters. But, in the field, bandwidth is at a premium.

*USA Today *also quotes from "an internal Marine report" from January, which says that insurgents have "prepared and executed …
attacks with relative impunity," because they're free to run around, without robot planes looking down on them.

That's one of a number of reports, requests, and case studies filed by Marine Corps whistleblower Franz Gayl, who's been waging a one-man war over the last few years against the military's gear-buying bureaucracy. For example, in his "personal" January report, Gayl not only repeated his long-standing concerns about the lack of drones. He also said that the improvised bomb crisis in Iraq was "avoidable" -- if only the Marines hadn't been so sluggish in buying heavily-armored vehicles. Previously, Gayl complained that problems in buying laser dazzlers resulted in civilian deaths. And, in his capacity as science advisor to the First Marine Expeditionary
Force, Gayl requested that a number of exotic weapons be brought to the battlefield. Self-aware robots, super-strength exoskeletons, and an energy weapon that could roast foes alive were all on Gayl's wish-list.

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(Photo: Navy)