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Originally posted by nighthawk1954
Just like Bengazi! The US observes a IED being planted and do nothing to warn our troops.
More unessasery deaths of our troops that could have been provented!
www.youtube.com...
Originally posted by FurvusRexCaeli
reply to post by inverslyproportional
00:40
"It's either Afghanistan or Iraq." Look at the time zone. Google is your friend. Look at the grid. Maps are your friends.
00:53
"Constant feed off a drone." It's stationary, and altitude is somewhere around ground level for Afghanistan. This sensor is attached to a manned vehicle. No way to tell if anyone was receiving this as a feed, or if the guy in the vehicle was the only one watching it.
The second form of ATN involves trying to understand your enemy. Where does he live? Where does he get his materiel? Anyone with at least one trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, or a Combined Training Center knows the basics. While aerostats, aloft over their FOBs, are incredible leverage in attacking the network simply focusing on attacking the device and killing the insurgent emplacing it is a very narrow way to utilize aerostats and can easily become the default practice. A PGSS operator, or any ISR for that matter, sees an IED emplacer on a known IED-plagued route. Do you strike him with a Hellfire rocket from a Predator? Do you call close combat attack (CCA) helicopters on-station to do a strafing run? Maybe, instead you watch him. Unlike the Predators or other flying ISR assets, the aerostat is persistent and instantly reactive to the battle captain in the TOC. Insurgents are predictable for all the same reasons we, the counter-insurgents, are predictable. We have infrastructure and bases we need to protect, and supplies that we need to get in order to do our missions. Furthermore, we may not necessarily have complete freedom of movement throughout our OE and so we use the same roads and trails consistently. These factors also affect the insurgent. The aerostat provides the opportunity to watch and learn, and ultimately figure out an insurgent’s pattern of life. The same Company mentioned above with the phenomenal kill rate in just one month after putting an aerostat over their FOB also had remarkable success patterning the enemy. Through careful observation and over the course of some weeks they mapped insurgents’ patterns and then conducted a mission through known IED belts. This mission resulted in more than two dozen IEDs found and cleared within a 2 km stretch – a staggering number. Such a feat is important because heretofore many of our operations required lift assets to get behind IED belts and into compounds of interest. Demonstrating the ability to attack forward through the teeth of their defense for the first time in six months and without a casualty has a significant psychological impact on the enemy, an effect we captured through intelligence collected during and after the operation.