Pentagon Seeks to Sell Drones to Iraq, Turkey

Fleets of military drones are proliferating in the Middle East, potentially adding to tensions in the region, under a renewed push by the US Defense Department to lift restrictions on arms sales and boost profits for US manufacturers.

The Obama administration is pressing to change the rules on weapons exports despite objections from Congress, which is concerned about the spread of drone technology across the Middle East, writes Richard Sisk. In May, Iraq agreed to buy at least six unarmed US surveillance drones and Turkey is currently haggling for new drones.

In May, Iraq agreed to buy at least six unarmed US surveillance drones despite the protests from Iran. Turkey currently is haggling with the US for the purchase of $4 million hunter-killer Predator or $30 million Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs for use against the guerrillas of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party).

Israel already has a thriving UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) industry and sells drones, some the size of a Boeing 737 airliner, around the world. Israeli drones keep a constant watch over the Gaza Strip, where residents sometime refer to the buzz of the drones as “zenana” — Arabic slang for a nagging wife.

Iraq’s drone buy is intended to shield its booming oil exports and oil platforms in the Gulf. It is part of a $15 billion deal with the US that includes 36 F-16 fighter-attack aircraft, M1 Abrams tanks and armored personnel carriers to be used for “defensive purposes.”

The drone sale showed that the Iraqis “understand the importance of the mission to protect its oil platforms,” Army Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, head of the U.S. Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq, told Al-Monitor.

Despite the close ties between Baghdad and Tehran, complaints from Iran over the drone sale were brushed off by Ali al-Moussawi, an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “Iraq should have the ability to protect itself against outside aggression,” al-Moussawi told the Associated Press. “Whether Iran has concerns or not, we’re okay with that. This is in our interest.”

The type of drone sold to the Iraqis was not specified, but both sides to the deal stressed that the UAVs flying over the Gulf would be unarmed and used only for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.

Turkey is demanding an entirely different type of UAV as part of any deal with the US, as made clear by Turkish President Abdullah Gul at the NATO summit in Chicago in May. Gul told a news conference that his private meetings with President Obama on the proposed sale of armed Predator or Reaper drones were “positive” but he expected the president and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to show a “stronger will” in overcoming objections from the US Congress.

“They are trying to convince Congress,” said Gul, who showed frustration at the holdup. He noted that Turkey already has plans to buy 100 new F-35 fighters.

“If drones are dangerous weapons, these [F-35s] are even more dangerous. We are buying these fighters and we are participating in the manufacturing process,” Gul said. “These things should be told to Congress members.”

As a NATO ally, Turkey expects the same consideration shown to another alliance member, Italy. The Obama administration has recently been pressing Congress to approve the sale of kits at $17 million a piece to Italy to arm its current fleet of Reaper surveillance drones with Hellfire missiles.

But Turkey’s experience with drones has given pro-Israel members of Congress pause. Turkey currently has several Helon drones bought from Israel, but their operational status is questionable. Israel withdrew technical support for the drones as relations worsened after the deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza in May 2010.

Turkey also designates routes and coordinates intelligence for four US Predator drones flown out of the US airbase at Incirlik in southeastern Turkey to monitor movements of the PKK militant group.  Last December, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denied media reports that intelligence provided by a US Predator led to a Turkish air strike that mistakenly killed 34 Kurdish villagers.

But last month, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party, brought up the air strike in the village of Uludere in condemning a PKK attack that killed eight soldiers in the Daglica district.

“In Uludere, they bombed civilians detected by UAVs. Now take a look at Daglıca,” Kilicdarogu said, according to the Hurriyet newspaper. “The militants travel with heavy weapons, get into position, surround the outpost and launch an attack. Are we not to ask: What happened to your UAVs?”

Turkish opposition leaders asked similar questions last month after a Turkish F-4 fighter was shot down by Syria over the Mediterranean, killing the two crew members: Why was an aging US-built jet sent on the mission instead of a UAV?

Turkey and other Middle Eastern states with security cooperation agreements with the US would have the UAVs if Defense Secretary Panetta could convince a Congress made wary by reports that President Obama keeps a “kill list” of alleged terrorists for targeting by US drones.

In a statement, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “There are some technologies that I believe should not be shared with countries, regardless of how close our partnership.”

But in a speech at the US Institute for Peace last month (June 28), Panetta said he would press for loosening the restrictions on arms sales, with or without the support of Congress.

“Our security cooperation programs still rely on a patchwork of different authorities, different funding [and] different rules governing defense exports” that were established during the Cold War, Panetta said.

“I strongly support efforts to achieve comprehensive reform in these areas through legislation. But I have also directed the Department of Defense’s senior leadership team to streamline and strengthen those security cooperation procedures that are under our control” to boost sales, Panetta said.

“Defense trade is a promising avenue for deepening security cooperation with our most capable partner nations,” he added. “Our on-going work in reforming our export control system is a critical part of fostering that cooperation. This is important for American jobs and for our ability to invest in new defense capabilities for the future.”

Raytheon awarded dismount detection radar for US Air Force

Innovative, pod-based radar for MQ-9 Reaper aircraft

Raytheon Company  has been awarded a contract to produce four radar pods with ground moving target indication and synthetic aperture radar technology for the U.S. Air Force. The radar will be mounted under the wings of MQ-9 Reaper aircraft.

The dismount detection radar will deliver accurate information in adverse weather, day and night, for U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Raytheon will also produce and deliver ground stations.

"Our dismount detection radar is an example of the innovative, scalable surveillance and targeting solutions we develop to meet our customers' most complex needs," said Mark Sims, director of Strategy and Business Development for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems at Raytheon's Space and Airborne Systems business. "Raytheon remains committed to providing quality products to support the surveillance mission of the men and women in the U.S. Air Force."

"The dismount detection radar will help soldiers, intelligence analysts and commanders in the field make critical decisions," said Col. David Hiltz, then Chief Aerial Ground Surveillance Systems Division for the U.S. Air Force. "This innovative radar represents a true team effort between government and industry."

With increased resolution, range and coverage capabilities, the dismount detection radar offers persistent radar detection to find and track potential threats to warfighters, including vehicles and individuals in near real-time, day and night.

Raytheon also develops the multispectral targeting electro-optical infrared system for use by the U.S. Air Force on the Predator unmanned aircraft.

U.S. plans more drone flights over Caribbean

WASHINGTON - After quietly testing Predator drones over the Bahamas for more than 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security plans to expand the unmanned surveillance flights into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to fight drug smuggling, according to U.S. officials.

The move would dramatically increase U.S. drone flights in the Western Hemisphere, more than doubling the number of square miles now covered by the department’s fleet of nine surveillance drones, which are used primarily on the northern and southwestern U.S. borders.

But the high-tech aircraft have had limited success spotting drug runners in the open ocean. The drones have largely failed to impress veteran military, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers charged with finding and boarding speedboats, fishing vessels and makeshift submarines ferrying tons of cocaine and marijuana to America’s coasts.

"The question is: Will they be effective? We have no systematic evidence on how effective they are," said Bruce Bagley, who studies U.S. counter-narcotics efforts at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

Despite that, a new control station will arrive this month in Corpus Christi, Texas, allowing Predators based there to cover more of the Gulf of Mexico. An additional drone will be delivered this year to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s base in Cocoa Beach, Fla., for operations in the Caribbean.

The Federal Aviation Administration already has approved a flight path for the drones to fly more than 1,000 miles to the Mona Passage, the strait between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

"There is a lot more going on in the deep Caribbean, and we would like to know more," said a law enforcement official familiar with the program who was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said drones may be based temporarily at airfields in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

The Predator B is best known as the drone used by the CIA to find and kill al-Qaida terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. An unarmed version patrols the U.S. borders searching known overland smuggling routes.

On the ocean, however, there are no rutted trails or roads to follow. And the Predator cannot cover as much open water as larger, higher-flying surveillance aircraft, such as the Global Hawk.

"I’m not sure just because it’s a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) that it will solve and fit in our problem set," the top military officer for the region, Air Force Gen. Douglas M. Fraser, said recently.

Fraser’s command contributes ships and manned surveillance airplanes to the Joint Interagency Task Force South. Last year, the task force worked with U.S. agencies and other countries to seize 119 metric tons of cocaine, valued at $2.35 billion.

For the recent counter-narcotics flights over the Bahamas, border agents deployed a maritime variant of the Predator B called a Guardian with a SeaVue radar system that can scan large sections of open ocean. Drug agents can check a ship’s unique radio pulse in databases to identify the boat and owner.

The planned drone flights are partly a response to demands from leaders in the western Caribbean to shift more drug agents, surveillance aircraft and ships into the area, as cartels have switched from the closely watched U.S.-Mexico border to seaborne routes. In the last four years, drug seizures in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico have increased 36 percent, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

"As we tighten the land borders, it squishes out to the seas," said the law enforcement official.

Over the last several years, however, drug-war personnel have been diverted from the Caribbean to the southwestern U.S. border. In Puerto Rico, for example, 1 out of 8 DEA positions is vacant.

The increase in drug traffic has contributed to an unprecedented rise in homicides in Puerto Rico, a major transit point for cocaine moving from Central America to northeastern U.S. cities. In 2011, the homicide rate hit a historic high of 1,136, with 8 out of 10 killings related to drug trafficking.

"We need help fighting this battle along the Caribbean border to protect U.S. citizens there being buffeted by violence," Puerto Rico’s Gov. Luis Fortuno told a congressional panel this week.

Despite budget cuts in other areas, Customs and Border Protection has requested $5.8 million to push its drone operations farther into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

But test flights for the Guardian showed disappointing results in the Bahamas, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the program who were not authorized to speak publicly.

During more than 1,260 hours in the air off the southeastern coast of Florida, the Guardian assisted in only a handful of large-scale busts, the officials said.

One of the most recent occurred early Dec. 22, when a Guardian trained its infrared eye on a sailboat heading toward the south shoreline of New Providence island in the Bahamas. Photographs of the sloop and grid coordinates were relayed by the U.S. embassy in Nassau. The Royal Bahamas Defense Forces found no drugs, but arrested 23 men, five women and a boy. The passengers were believed to be migrants from Haiti.

The head of an interagency drug task force based in the Bahamas called the mission a "great case" in an internal e-mail obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The mission proved "what we all suspect to be the case with a piece of equipment that has such promising capabilities and potential," wrote U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Louie C. Parks Jr.

But federal officials who received the laudatory message said it only underscored that such success stories have been extremely rare.

Global Hawk Stalked By Reaper

Despite the U.S. Navy selecting the RQ-4 Global Hawk as its robotic maritime patrol aircraft, rival UAV manufacturer Global Atomics has gone ahead and developed a maritime patrol version of its MQ-9 Reaper UAV. Called the Reaper ER (for Extended Range), this model can stay in the air 40 hours at a time and carry about a ton of cameras, radars and communications gear. Given the rapid development of smaller, lighter, and more rugged sensor technology in the last two decades, a Reaper ER can be very competitive with the naval version of the navalized RQ-4, known as BAMS (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance).

Earlier this year BAMS began operating with the fleet. Circling above the task force at 22,500 meters (70,000 feet), BAMS monitored sea traffic off the Iranian coast and the Straits of Hormuz. Anything suspicious was checked out by carrier or land based aircraft, or nearby warships. The BAMS aircraft fly a 24 hour sortie every three days. The first production BAMS will be available in a few months, and these models will begin entering service in three years.

The navy plans to buy 20 BAMS and 117 P-8As to replace 250 P-3Cs. This replacement process is supposed to be complete in about a decade. The new surveillance aircraft provide more information over a wider area.

The U.S. Air Force recently stopped buying RQ-4s and is planning on selling some of those it already has. The RQ-4 has a range of over 22,000 kilometers and a cruising speed of 650 kilometers an hour. The first three RQ-4Bs entered service in 2006. At 13 tons, the Global Hawk is the size of a commuter airliner (like the Embraer ERJ 145), but costs nearly twice as much. Global Hawk can be equipped with much more powerful and expensive sensors, which more than double the cost of the aircraft. These "spy satellite quality" sensors (especially AESA radar) are usually worth the expense because they enable the UAV, flying at over 20,000 meters (62,000 feet), to get a sharp picture of all the territory it can see from that altitude. The B version is supposed to be a lot more reliable. Early A models tended to fail and crash at the rate of once every thousand flight hours.

The U.S. Air Force found the B model was not enough of an improvement in reliability, and was increasingly unhappy with a lack of cooperation from the manufacturer. General Atomics has a much better relationship with its users, and noted that nations like Israel and India were having success using smaller UAVs (more like the 1.2 ton Predator than the 4.6 ton Reaper) for maritime reconnaissance. So General Atomics is going after the naval reconnaissance market, including the one Northrup Grumman has with BAMS.

The maritime UAV is seen as the ultimate replacement for all manned maritime patrol aircraft. The P-8A will probably be the last manned naval search aircraft. Some countries are using satellite communications to put the sensor operators who staff manned patrol aircraft on the ground. Some nations propose sending aircraft like the P-3 or P-8 aloft with just their flight crews, having all the other gear operated from the ground. This enables the aircraft to stay in the air longer and carry more gear. The major remaining issue is reliability. UAVs are becoming more reliable, but the crashes drive up the cost of operating a UAV fleet. A BAMS crashed on June 11th, during a test flight. Last December a Reaper crashed in the Seychelles Islands, while returning from a maritime surveillance mission (looking for Somali pirates).