African peacekeepers fighting al-Qaida’s allies in Somalia are about to get their first UAS, courtesy of the Pentagon. Under a proposed $45 million counter-terrorism package, Uganda and Burundi, two major contributors to the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia will get four small unarmed Raven UAS.
But neither the U.S. military nor the CIA will be flying the four-pound, hand-launched Raven. Instead, some of the 1,200 peacekeepers from both nations manning checkpoints and patrolling the streets of Mogadishu will be its operators. They’ll likely be using it in the same way U.S. soldiers and Marines flew the Raven in Afghanistan and Iraq: for aerial recon over the city, to trace al-Shabaab’s movement of fighters and weapons through the Somali capitol. That’s consistent with the “outsourced” approach the U.S. has adopted to confront al-Shabaab.
Both arriving Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and future CIA director David Petraeus expressed worry about the potency of Somali terror group al-Shabaab during their confirmation hearings earlier this month.
The whole idea behind the Ravens is to allow small units to rapidly acquire and act on their own overhead intelligence without going through the cumbersome military bureaucracy necessary to fly larger, more expensive spy aircraft. But neither nation’s forces have used small drones before. And the first Marine battalions to use Ravens in Iraq found them underwhelming. Urban environments, with their densely packed buildings and “various electromagnetic signals,” vexed Raven operators in Iraq.
Source: Wired:Danger Room