DEATH TO ZIONISM

Unmanned aerial vehicles and the warfare of inequality management


Jimmy Johnson, The Electronic Intifada, 17 February 2009

Aeronautics Defense Systems, based in the Israeli city of Yavne, was recently awarded a contract by the Dutch Ministry of Defense "to supply unmanned air vehicle capacity to Dutch troops serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan." [1] The Netherlands is not the only nation to employ Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in foreign occupation. They are also utilized by Canadian, US, UK and Australian forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their foreign sale has developed largely because of significant use in the wars against and occupations of Lebanon and Palestine. A variety of Israeli firms are developing new unmanned aerial, terrestrial and nautical vehicles. As these are proven in combat, here it can be expected that they too will be exported to foreign forces.Israel was the first country to widely adopt and integrate UAVs into its armed forces beyond their use as gunnery targets for anti-aircraft training. The US made somewhat sporadic use of the machines for intelligence gathering in south China and Vietnam during the Vietnam war but it wasn't until Israel led the way that Washington started to recognize and exploit their potential value. "The Israeli Air Force pioneered several UAVs in the late 1970s and 1980s that were eventually integrated into the United States' UAV inventory. US observers noticed Israel's successful use of UAVs during operations in Lebanon in 1982, encouraging then-Navy Secretary John Lehman to acquire a UAV capability for the Navy." Military esteem of Israeli UAVs further grew after the first Gulf War when Israel Aircraft Industries' Pioneer "emerged as a useful source of intelligence at the tactical level during Desert Storm. Pioneer was used by Navy battleships to locate Iraqi targets for its 16-inch guns." [2] Earlier restrictions on UAV operational capacity have fallen away with the dramatic increases in computer processing power and sensor technologies that allow for higher resolution photo and video transmissions and improved communications. The speed of technological advance in the field has led to constant reassessment of unmanned vehicles' battlefield potential and the dedication of increasing resources to development and procurement by armed forces worldwide. The US's National Defense Authorization Fiscal Year 2001 legislation declared "It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2010, one-third of the aircraft in the operational deep strike force aircraft fleet are unmanned." [3] Just five years later, the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review increased that to 45 percent. [4]

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