Army Sees 11,000% Increase in US Army Drone Arsenal Over Last 10 Years Since: New Legislation Paves Way for 30,000 More Above the USA
Brian Romanoff Nor Cal Truth Feb 20, 2012
Never let it be said that the military industrial complex does not heavily rely on 9/11 to continue and thrive.
In October of 2001 the US Army had about 54 drones in its arsenal, however that would change soon after the attacks of 9/11. Some numbers are noted by the Scientific American:
The U.S. Army’s drone armada alone has expanded from 54 drones in October 2001, when U.S. combat operations began in Afghanistan, to more than 4,000 drones performing surveillance, reconnaissance and attack missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan (pdf).
There are more than 6,000 of them throughout the U.S. military as a whole, and continued developments promise to make these controversial aircraft—blamed for the deaths of militants as well as citizens—far more intelligent and nimble.
From 54 drones in 2001 to the current 6,000 in-stock, within 10 years of 9/11 the US Army saw a net increase of their drone arsenal by 11,000%.
The legislation would order the FAA, before the end of the year, to expedite the process through which it authorizes the use of drones by federal, state and local police and other agencies.
Section 332 of the new FAA legislation also orders the agency to develop a system for licensing commercial drone flights as part of the nation’s air traffic control system by 2015.
The provision in the legislation is the fruit of “a huge push by lawmakers and the defense sector to expand the use of drones” in American airspace, she added.
The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020.
This new bill follows up the Army’s January directive to use drone fleets in the U.S. for training missions and “domestic operations.”
And both of these initiatives are mandated in the NDAA (section 1097) that calls for six drone test ranges to be operational within six months of that bills signing December 31.
The commercial drone market would be worth hundreds of millions more if the bill passes.
Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and many other ‘Corporate Partners‘ are poised to profit heavily from the legislation. They are the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International or AUVSI, a conglomerate of ‘defense’ companies that essentially lobbied for and drafted HR 658.
As of today, the war in Afghanistan is 10 years old. It pains me that I have that reality to write about – we have so much work ahead of ourselves. If we don’t do anything it will soon be 20 years in Afghanistan, let’s not go there. Brian @ Nor Cal Truth
America’s veterans are proud of their military service, but in a new report published Wednesday, they expressed ambivalence about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a new Pew Research Center report on war and sacrifice, half of post-9/11 veterans said the Afghanistan war has been worth fighting. Only 44% felt that way about Iraq, and one-third said both wars were worth the costs.
Some of those costs were outlined in the Pew study, which comes out as the United States marks the 10th anniversary Friday of the Afghanistan conflict, the longest-running war in the nation’s history.
Hummingbird drones fly at 11 mph and can perch on windowsills. The 3-foot-long Raven can be tossed into the air like a model airplane to spy over the next hill in Afghanistan. The Air Force’s new Gorgon Stare aerial drone sensor technology can capture live video of an entire city. From the RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-1 Predator to considerably smaller aerial drones in recent years, the Air Force has experienced an unmanned aircraft revolution in the decade since Sept. 11, 2001.
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Long before 9/11, former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper, then U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander, envisioned giving unmanned aerial vehicles offensive capability that would allow immediate action when their surveillance cameras spotted high-value targets. In 1999, RQ-1 Predators flew over Kosovo 24 hours per day in surveillance of hostile forces.
Almost seven months before 9/11, a Predator successfully fired a Hellfire missile in flight near Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. The same Predator was among the first three UAVs to deploy overseas on Sept. 12, 2001. By the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2005, Jumper told Congress he wanted to buy every Predator the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego could build, and the Air Force announced it would buy 144 Predators and increase the squadrons of robotic spy planes from three to 12 in the next five years.
Al-Qaeda’s number two Atiyah abd al-Rahman has been killed in Pakistan, the United States said, claiming another “tremendous” blow to the group following the death of Osama bin Laden.
News of Rahman’s demise comes as the US gears up to mark the 10th anniversary of Al-Qaeda’s most spectacular attack, on September 11, 2001 on landmarks in Washington and New York, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Rahman, a Libyan, was killed in the northwest tribal Waziristan area on August 22 after being heavily involved in directing operations for Al-Qaeda, a senior US official said, without divulging the circumstances of his death.
However, local officials in the region told AFP last week that a US drone strike on August 22 on a vehicle in North Waziristan killed at least four militants. It was not clear if the two incidents were connected.
For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.
For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.
For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?
We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities. We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:
Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.
The third in a series of U.S. Navy amphibious assault vessels named in honor of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks [was] christened Saturday, and a key responder at the Pentagon nearly a decade ago is bringing the heroics of his fellow emergency workers with him.
The future USS Arlington is being built at the Northrop Grumman Corp. shipyard in Pascagoula. It’s named in honor of Arlington County, Va., where American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, killing 184 people, after being hijacked en route from Washington-Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles.
The ship’s sponsor is Joyce Rumsfeld, wife of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was in the Pentagon on the day of the attack.
Yes it is the third ship in “honor” of 9/11, not the first, not the second. The USS Arlington used a small amount of steel from the Paentagon crash site.
The Arlington is the U.S Navy’s eighth and latest San Antonio class amphibious transport ship, and the third to bear the name. The ship’s overall length is 684 feet and can reach speeds in excess of 22 knots. Arlington’s armament includes two Bushmaster II 30 mm close in guns; two rolling airframe missile launchers and 10 .50-caliber machine guns.
I can hardly contain my frustration right now reading the breaking headline:
The U.S. military has launched a missile attack against Libya’s air defenses.
A senior U.S. military official says the strike was aimed at sites along the Libyan coast. The missiles were launched from U.S. Navy vessels in the Mediterranean.
The Pentagon said it fired 110 cruise missiles at 20 targets.
8 years ago today, Bush announced the expansion of the mis-directed war of terror:
This should be seens as quite a slap in the face to all of those who voted for Obama in hopes of stopping or slowing the war expansion; many of those people are marching in the streets today.
I sure do HOPE that people have taken the Obama stickers of their cars by now.
“The attacks of September the 11th were appropriated by a clique within the United States establishment in order to further its aims around the world.” – John Pilger (see here at 2:10)
A powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of ‘embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an ‘electronic battlefield’ in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?
John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”
Peace talks conducted with an impostor who posed as a Taliban leader, and which led to a meeting with Hamid Karzai in Kabul and thousands of dollars in “goodwill payments”, were started by the Afghan government and approved by the former American commander, Stanley McChrystal, the Guardian has learned.
This account sharply contradicts claims made by the Afghan presidency, which has put the entire blame on Britain, apparently supported privately by US officials.
In fact, the overriding desire to find a negotiated end to the conflict, particularly on the part of David Cameron, appears to have generated credulity on all sides, and led to an embarrassing debacle that has lessened trust and set back hopes of meaningful negotiations in the near future.
The statement from Colleen Kelley also included a few words about Wikileaks - I have not included those words in my re-posting below. Please visit the source for the statement in its entirety.
Statement by Colleen Kelley, a founding member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was formed around the core issue of civilian casualties: We did then and we do not now condone the killing of civilians in other lands. Our organization was founded to oppose any action that would necessitate the deaths of civilians. Worse, still, is the denial of any value of these Iraqi lives, through the concealment of their very existence.
For 9/11 families, the rough number 2,996 was rounded up to 3000 through addition. For the Iraqi people, their numbers were alluded to as a subtraction vastly different from any attempt at reality.
As people who are well aware of the suffering, we say stop killing civilians now and take responsibility for those whose lives are already lost.
Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero.
Peace activist Cindy Sheehan has given support to the cause of 9/11 truth many times over the past few years but on the eve of the ninth anniversary, she made her position clearer than ever before. To an enthusiastic packed house at All Souls Church in New York City, Sheehan declared “I am a 9/11 truther. I do think it was an inside job.”
Sheehan lost her son Casey in the Iraq invasion and has since dedicated her life to ending war and injustice. She is most widely known for setting up camp on the edge of George W. Bush’s Texas property in 2005, demanding that the president answer one single question from a mother whose son died in the war.
Since that time, Sheehan has continued her activism. She is a fierce critic of the Obama administration’s continued occupations and drone attacks, and recently founded Peace of the Action to further her anti-war activities.
On Friday, in the crowded All Souls Church on the upper East Side of Manhattan, Sheehan spoke of many injustices related to the war, both at home and abroad. She spoke of being tear gassed and shot at with rubber bullets while protesting. She spoke of the recently reported “Kill Squad” in Afghanistan, where members of the US military collected the fingers of slaughtered civilians for souvenirs. “That’s not something new,” Sheehan said.
In only eight months, 2010 has become the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, according to a CNN count of Pentagon and NATO figures.
At least 321 troops have died so far in 2010, the highest yearly toll since the conflict began nearly nine years ago. The previous high was last year’s 313 American deaths.
A major legal challenge to one of the Obama administration’s most radical assertions of executive power began this morning in a federal courthouse in Washington, DC. Early last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki, to seek a federal court order restraining the Obama administration from killing his son without due process of law. But then, a significant and extraordinary problem arose: regulations promulgated several years ago by the Treasury Department prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with individuals labeled by the Government as a ”Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” and those regulations specifically bar lawyers from providing legal services to such individuals without a special “license” from the Treasury Department specifically allowing such representation.
Posted by Brian 
