Scouts from 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), pull overwatch during Operation Destined Strike while 2nd Platoon, Able Company searches a village below the Chowkay Valley in Kunar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 22.From The Washington Post:
On Saturday at 9:45 p.m., an American unmanned aerial vehicle, complete with streaming-video equipment, circled over an area in Afghanistan's Khost province and transmitted photographs of three people, including one who was digging in a roadway, apparently to plant an improvised explosive device.
Information from computer data at a ground-based Counter-IED Operations Integration Center allowed intelligence specialists to "positively identify" the three as insurgents, and thereafter "coalition forces used a precision munition to eliminate the militants," according to a U.S. military news release. The drone aircraft saw one of the insurgents running from the explosion toward nearby trees and a second precision munition was used to kill him, the release said. The military's fuzzy video of the attack can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/usfora.
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My Comment: I can easily predict that once these tools are all in place, (over a period of six months) we will probably start to see a drop in roadside IEDs and attacks. Predators in the sky and the tech that they bring, followed with 24/7 operations .... are extremely effective in wiping out enemy cells. There are many dead Iraqi insurgents who can testify to this.