Word: reapers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most sophisticated killing machines ever created, against an enemy that has survived or evaded all other weaponry. If al-Qaeda and the Taliban could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, then perhaps they can be stamped out by CIA-operated unmanned drone aircraft, the Predator and the Reaper. (See a diagram of a Reaper here...
...Predator and the Reaper are both made by General Atomics, a San Diego defense contractor. The Predator is the older of the two; the first one was delivered to the Air Force in 1994. By the end of the 1990s, the CIA was using it to track bin Laden. Capable of flying for up to 40 hours without refueling, the drone was a "brilliant intelligence tool," recalls Hank Crumpton, then the CIA's top covert-operations man in Afghanistan. Although the CIA was keen to weaponize the drone early on, the Air Force resisted the idea until 2000. Even then...
...Predator's firepower is limited, but the Reaper can deliver laser-guided 500-lb. bombs like those commonly found on the F-16 jet, together with Hellfire missiles. And the hardware comes relatively cheap. The Reaper costs $10 million--chump change compared with manned fighter aircraft; the cutting-edge F-22 Raptor, for instance, costs nearly $350 million. The drones' relatively low cost is due mainly to the fact that they don't have a pilot--which may also contribute to the Pakistani leadership's tacit acceptance of the CIA campaign. "If we were sending F-16s into FATA--American...
...kidding myself. He says that, like the rest of the people in my industry, I'm moving through the classic Kubler-Ross cycle of dealing with a terminal diagnosis. Old media has already gone through Denial and Anger, and are now Bargaining, looking for ways to beat the Grim Reaper. "Most of the product ideas that you all are coming up with in this bargaining phase don't make any sense from the customer viewpoint," he told me recently. "Anything that falls into the category of 'the web doesn't pay well enough and so we need...
...after arriving at the Pentagon in late 2006, he pushed to boost production of unmanned aircraft for use in intelligence work, only to run into the Air Force's long-standing love of manned fighters. But Gates' hunch was vindicated in Afghanistan and Iraq, where cheaper, unmanned Predator and Reaper drones have been flying around the clock but expensive F-22s have yet to appear. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. has written that drones are "game-changing" because of their unprecedented ability to loiter for hours, waiting for the enemy to reveal himself--and then kill him with...