'Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution' by Richard Whittle details the
long and often-threatened creation of the armed drone that would revolutionize modern warfare.
Why I Wrote The Book About Predator « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary
Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution
Hardcover
– September 16, 2014
Hardcover
– September 16, 2014
 |
James G. (Snake) Clark helped me see that, in the Predator’s case, much of that transformation was accomplished by a secretive Air Force technology shop called Big Safari, officially the 645th Aeronautical Systems Group – an outfit built on innovation and iconoclasm. With some pivotal contributions from an inventive technoscientist Snake Clark calls “The Man With Two Brains,” and in my book I call by the alias “Werner,” Big Safari transformed the Predator from a novel way to watch a battlefield
into a wonder weapon able to strike targets on the other side of the planet. A largely secret war with Al Qaeda that unfolded after Big Safari began modifying the Predator in 1998 led to the Air Force being assigned two years later to fly the unarmed version over Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden for the CIA.
As my books reveals, that mission was accomplished by an Air Force team using a ground control station at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The necessity of moving that ground control station so that the trigger on the first armed Predator could be pulled on U.S. rather than German soil gave birth to “remote split operations,” the intercontinental data link the Air Force still uses to fly drones on the other side of the globe.
- takes the reader into the first ground control station used to fly such missions – a faux freight container parked at CIA headquarters – and describes firsthand the first lethal intercontinental drone strike in history, on Oct. 7, 2001.
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