Pentagon Outsourcing Spy Missions to Drone Maker
by Noel Brinkerhoff
AllGov.com, Aug. 23, 2015
The Department of Defense wants to increase its drone operations, which is difficult when military drone pilots burn out of their jobs at a faster rate than they can be trained. So the Pentagon is turning to drone manufacturers for help.
General Atomics, the company that makes the Predator and Reaper drones, has contracted with the Defense Department to conduct surveillance missions for the military. The contractor started flying drones on spy missions this month.
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The Wall Street Journal reported that government contractors would be used to fly “older Predator drones on as many as 10 flights a day, none of them strike missions.”
The Pentagon turned to General Atomics because it wants to “boost its drone presence by 50 percent in four years,” Tucker wrote. The Air Force says it needs help from contractors because although it brings in 180 new pilots every year, it needs about 300 of them and loses about 240 because of attrition, according to Military.com.
Predator drones have been used to kill about 3,000 people, according to some estimates.
SOURCE: http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/pentagon-outsourcing-spy-missions-to-drone-maker-150823?news=857259
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What was it Mussolini said?
...Hitler’s Italian ally Benito Mussolini once observed, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” The deference of U.S. Internet servers to the National Security Agency, in the latter’s surveillance of all of our lives, can perhaps be seen as one contemporary example of state-corporate merger. So is the marriage of the State Department and the news industry, which is essentially controlled by only six corporations. Every report on “the crisis in Ukraine,” for example, employs State Department talking points without question. Thus a coup spearheaded by neo-fascists toppling a democratically elected president becomes a popular movement toppling a corrupt dictator..." -- Gary Leupp
George Orwell may never had heard the name Vannevar Bush.
