Revealed: 64 Drone Bases on American Soil

Originally posted by deltaalphanovember
reply to post by Zaphod58

 

There is a link to an Air Force pdf in the article. What it states as an airforce objective does not tally with a deployment/training/testing role as you stated:

Expand collaborative/engagement roles with:
 RPA Task Force, Air Staff, Major Commands
 DoD government services, NTSB, FAA, Department of
Homeland Security, Industry, etc.
 Apply cross-service lessons learned
 Support standardizing operational procedures.
 National Airspace System

Industry? What do they mean by industry? Private spying? Private airstrikes?

Actually, that EXACTLY tallies with what Zaphod said. The job appears to be a project level manager for drones, maybe higher. The applicant will be expected to be able to meet and interact with the military side (1), the civilian side (2), actually put together the information he gets into some sort of coherent picture (3), write and test operating procedure (4) and keep them out of the way of airplanes (5).

"industry" in this case means the aerospace industry, the guys designing and building the drones. You would sort of have to interact with these guys if you're managing a project or group of projects.

Originally posted by deltaalphanovember
reply to post by Zaphod58

 

In the case that you are right, here is a question: I thought your military was scaling back activities in the Middle East (withdrawing from Iraq?)? What, then, is with the large-scale upramping of production/training/deployment facilities. The cost must be enormous. What is the perceived threat?

China. Specifically, China's expected to start being a problem in Africa. If you can imagine. Lots of territory to cover, thus, drones.

Originally posted by deltaalphanovember
Doesn't this worry you?:

The Air Force guidelines permit using drones domestically to assist law enforcement in “investigating or preventing clandestine intelligence activities by foreign powers, international narcotics activities , or international terrorist activities.” More vague is language that also allows military cooperation with local law enforcement for the purposes of “preventing, detecting, or investigating other violations of law.”

That's always been around. More to the point, the military is allowed to train LEOs for strictly domestic law enforcement, no furriners necessary. That's been true for as long as I can remember. The kicker, of course, is that such instruction can take place during the op.

reply to post by CIAGypsy


The Gadsden police department has two UAVs (Wasp microUAVs) that they didn't know about, and have had them since 2010. They cost about $150,000 and were bought through a law enforcement grant.

Redstone Arsenal operates the Tactical UAV Project Office.

They are operating here in Alabama at existing military bases, developing new systems, and new technologies for them.