New Bird of Prey Hunts Somali Terrorists: Raven Drones

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. They must not be the only ones. Under a proposed $45 million counterterrorism package, Uganda and Burundi, two major contributors to the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia will get four small unarmed Raven drones.

But neither the U.S. military nor the CIA will be flying the four-pound, hand-launched Raven. Instead, some of the 1200 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. (No missile strikes from the small drones, in other words.)

That’s consistent with the “outsourced” approach the U.S. has adopted to confront al-Shabaab. Although outsourcing has its limits, as when an occasional mystery airstrike slams a convoy of militants.


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. Could be a prologue for Mogadishu.

But the drones are only a portion of the $45 million package. Also included, reports the Associated Press, are “body armor, night-vision gear, communications and heavy construction equipment, generators and surveillance systems.”

And a big portion of that aid will be to purchase an unspecified $17.7 million aircraft for the U.S.’ base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. Maybe the U.S. is looking to add an insurance policy to its outsourced shadow war in Somalia — or add a staging ground to the drone war in nearby Yemen.

Source: www.wired.com