UAVs making a difference in Marjah

NY Times:

When American and allied forces pushed into the Taliban stronghold of Marja, in southern Afghanistan, last week, they had the advantage of knowing where dozens of roadside bombs had already been planted. And when some troops came under fire, they called in help from a weapon that has quietly become one of the military’s most versatile tools on the Afghan battlefield: the drone.

The use of the drones has expanded quickly and virtually unnoticed in Afghanistan. The Air Force now flies at least 20 Predator drones — twice as many as a year ago — over vast stretches of hostile Afghan territory each day.

They are mostly used for surveillance, but have also carried out more than 200 missile and bomb strikes over the last year, including 14 strikes near Marja in the last few days, newly released military records show. That is three times as many strikes in the past year as in Pakistan, where the drones have gotten far more attention and proved more controversial for their use in a country where the United States does not have combat forces.

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But in Afghanistan, a country with nearly 70,000 American troops, the drones have stealthily settled into an everyday role, and military commanders say they are a growing part of a counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to reduce civilian casualties. They expect to field more of them as 30,000 more American troops enter Afghanistan this year.

Trying to bring down civilian deaths, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of the American-led forces in Afghanistan, has tightened the rules for airstrikes, especially by military jets, which usually drop larger bombs than the drones and have less time to follow the targets.

The drones can linger over an area with their video cameras gathering intelligence for as long as 20 hours, and then strike without warning. The United Nations says it recorded no civilian deaths from drone strikes in Afghanistan last year. But because the drones have mainly been used to attack low-level Taliban fighters in remote places, it may be hard to tell.

Since the start of 2009, the Predators and their larger cousins, the Reapers, have fired at least 184 missiles and 66 laser-guided bombs at militant suspects in Afghanistan, according to the records.

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What the UAVs give is persistence and they act as a force multiplier to make up for an inadequate force to space ratio that is still a problem even with the surge of 30,000 troops. It would take substantially more troops to get the same coverage as the drones. They give our force an advantage in situational awareness taht makes up for the enemy's familiarity with the terrain.

We are still in a very primitive stage in the use of drones. In the future we will have more in all sizes and several different forms of lethality.