Word: droned
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...Today, new technologies - and leaders with new policies - have rescued Petrizzo's boyhood dream. The 28-year-old will soon be fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the skies, as one of the Air Force's first ground-based Predator drone pilots not to have started out in an Air Force cockpit. The change reflects a shift in Air Force thinking. Instead of carefully polishing and husbanding the service's costly F-22 fighters and their pilots for future wars, the Air Force increasingly is rolling up its sleeves and helping fight today's conflicts...
...first class of eight purely drone pilots graduated at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas Sept. 25, Schwartz hailed them as pioneers in a long-established tradition of military innovators. "When the steamship, the tank and, yes, the aircraft were introduced for military application, institutional disorder resulted," the Air Force's top commander explained, noting that the boosters of these new technologies had been derided as "zealots." Those piloting drones from electronic consoles on the ground, he conceded, have "encountered the same sort of resistance, even in our own Air Force...
...experimental and could be scrapped, don't bet on it. Schwartz told his new pilots the demand for their skills "is insatiable, and shows no sign of abating." And then there's the fact that the service just commissioned a new metal pin that Petrizzo and his fellow drone drivers will wear on their uniforms. While its central shield features a lightning bolt connoting the Predator's remote control, its wings will be identical to those worn by all other Air Force pilots...
...These flawed assumptions underlie the misguided argument that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. Some voices have begun to advocate a much smaller mission in Afghanistan, fewer troops and a decapitation strategy aimed at militant leaders carried out by special forces and drone attacks. Superficially, this sounds reasonable. But it has a back-to-the-future flavor because it is more or less the exact same policy that the Bush Administration followed in the first years of the occupation: a light footprint of several thousand U.S. soldiers who were confined to counterterrorism missions. That approach helped foster the resurgence...
...Pakistani Taliban was thought to have been weakened when the group's former commander, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a U.S. drone attack on Aug. 5. Pakistani military officials have told TIME that "conditions in South Waziristan" are now ripe for a ground offensive to eliminate what remains of the Mehsud network and their allies there. But they warn that it will be "very bloody," possibly leading to further revenge attacks in Pakistan. There are an estimated 10,000 well-trained fighters still in South Waziristan, and their new leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, has warned of fresh violence. He appeared...