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No. 111239
ID: 8f0088
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We do not currently (acknowledged) have railgun launched Mach 6 ramjet drones or space lasers to fight on the battlefield, but what seems to be getting the job done (killing peasant morons in the Middle East with scant air defenses) on a budget is the Reaper drone. The F-35 was reported to replace CAS-smashers like the venerable A-10 Warthog, but this was a fantasy and the service life was further extended (even though many need lots of maintenance like new wings and fixing fuselage cracks) to around 2022. The A-10 may well be replaced by drones...
Reaper Drones: The New Close Air Support Weapon May 10, 2017 https://breakingdefense.com/2017/05/reaper-drones-the-new-close-air-support-weapon/
The Reaper has grown into a key Close Air Support (CAS) tool for the US military and should not be viewed primarily as an Intelligence, Surveillance, & Reconnaissance (ISR) asset. ...Another factor to take into account with so-called fast-mover aircraft like F-16s, F-18s, B-1s, B-2s and F-15s is that the enemy can hear them coming. The enemy often scatters when they hear the roar of an approaching fighter or bomber, which can be extremely useful. With an MQ-9, “they don’t know we’re there.” That can be useful if the goal of a mission is to kill particular personnel or to wipe out an enemy position — less so if the goal is to scare them off without striking, as was often the case in Afghanistan because of restrictive rules of engagement.
In Libya, more than 70 percent of the Reaper strikes were “danger-close” CAS missions, where exquisitely accurate targeting and the lowest amount of collateral damage possible were key. Hellfire missiles, originally designed to be used by attack helicopters, have smaller warheads than bombs and can be carefully guided during a strike to avoid destroying a building.
“We dropped 100s of Hellfires and handed that city back to the Libyans intact because we were using highly accurate weapons,” Col. Joe said. Most important, not a single civilian casualty caused by a Reaper strike was reported during the Sirte operations.
The larger lesson from that operation may be a new approach to working with local forces against terrorists and more organized groups. “We took an indigenous ground force we supported and we enabled them to take back land from our common enemy of ISIS,” the 432 commander says. “In many ways, it was the coming out party of the MQ-9 in urban CAS and our ability to go after an embedded enemy danger close.”
How close were the enemy and friendly forces? “We had shots as close as 25 meters,” Col. Joe says. One effect of the Reaper’s persistence — its ability to stay over one area for up to 20 hours — was the sense of protection it offered to friendly forces on the ground. “We took MQ-9s and we watched and protected the indigenous forces. If ISIS m
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