According to statistics provided by the US Army, Navy and Air Force, remotely piloted aircraft have logged around 2.7 million flight hours during the current era of drone warfare. More than 87 percent of the time, these aircraft have been involved in combat.
For the last decade, the United States has aggressively ramped up its drone operations in and outside traditional war zones. A recent in-depth analysis by AlterNet, using military documents, press accounts, and other open-source information, identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations spread across the globe. While Scientific American reported last month that the “U.S. Army’s drone armada alone has expanded from 54 drones in October 2001, when U.S. combat operations began in Afghanistan, to more than 4,000.” These include 1,300 Ravens – essentially 4-pound model airplanes that fit in a rucksack and are thrown into the air like toy gliders – that it purchased last year according to the Economist. Meanwhile, the Air Force’s inventory of MQ-9 Reapers, the heavily armed drones that can carry almost 3,800 pounds of bombs and missiles, has jumped from four aircraft in 2007 to nearly 90, according to statistics provided to AlterNet by the Air Force.
The Washington Post reported that, in 2006, “the nation’s fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours.” Air Force statistics indicate that Reapers, alone, have now flown more hours this. Their progenitors, the less heavily armed MQ-1 Predators, have logged an astounding 1 million hours in the air, some 920,000 of them in combat, through the beginning of August, while the RQ-4 Global Hawk, used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, flew 54,000 hours – most of them in combat. When asked how many hours have been flown by the RQ-170 Sentinel, an advanced drone (nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar”) that was used to spy on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, Air Force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Haynes refused to provide figures. “We do not release that information,” he told AlterNet.
For their part, Navy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have flown more than 21,800 hours this year. More than 10,000 of those hours were logged by the model known as the Scan Eagle, followed by the Shadow, the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance or BAMS-D unmanned aerial system and the Fire Scout pilotless helicopter. This year, almost all the Navy’s flight time for remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), some 21,356 hours according to data provided to AlterNet, was carried out in combat.
Since their inception, the Navy’s Shadow UAVs have flown 27,251 hours, while its Scan Eagles, BAMS-Ds and Fire Scouts have logged 18,163, 6,567 and 3,600 hours, respectively.
Source: AlterNet