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Use of Unmanned Air Vehicle in Iraq war highlighted

DUBAI - It was final days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the target was an antenna dish spewing out Iraqi Ministry of Defence transmissions located in the middle of a parking lot, crowded with media persons and their vehicles. The explosion came suddenly and the dish was destroyed. What few newsmen knew then was that the missile that destroyed the target was launched from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) controlled remotely from Langley, Virginia.

General T. Michael Moseley, Vice-Chief of Staff, United States Air Force (USAF), showed black and white film footage of the strike, carried out by the Predator B UAV which fired a Hellfire missile at the dish. The film also showed people rushing to the crater created by the explosion. Surrounding structures were left unscathed.

Gen. Moseley was in Dubai and delivered a presentation on the targeting cycle and the lessons learned from the last Gulf war, at the Middle East Air Chiefs Conference held yesterday at the Le Meridien Hotel, Airport Road.

In his presentation, he discussed the division of tasks inside the air operations centre and the coordination at all levels with coalition partners. He said that control of the medium, in the case of air combat, the sky, is vital for a successful military campaign. He stressed the need to employ and enhance machine-to-machine interface to allow different systems and components of the armed forces to communicate with each other in real time.

Technology now allows air forces to use appropriate precision munitions for different targets, based on size and location of the target, thus avoiding unnecessary loss of non-combatant lives and collateral damage.

"An example of time sensitive targets is the attack we carried out on the Al Mansoor district of Baghdad, the bomb was dropped 12 minutes after human intelligence assets reported the target was in the location, but even that quick response was too late as the target had walked out the back door just before our bomb detonated," Gen. Moseley said.

The future of air combat will be defined by the ever-widening combat role of UAVs, now no longer limited to reconnaissance and surveillance. Earlier this year, the Global Hawk and the Predator were two UAVs that were deployed and put through their paces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Gen. Moseley said.

The latest issue of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Journal pegs the price of the Predator B without sensors at about $3 million, while the USAF go-to-war configuration of the Predator would cost $8 million.