A member of TF ODIN-Afghanistan signs a Hellfire missile attached to a Warrior UAV at Begram. (Photo: US Army)
The November issue of DTI has more from my September embed with Task Force ODIN-Afganistan. The issue also features the write-up of my embed with the 48th BCT of the Georgia National Guard in Khost. As far as the ODIN story goes, you can read the whole thing here.
The camera didn’t catch the helicopters landing, or see the soldiers piling out and securing the landing zone. The unblinking eye attached to a U.S. Army Warrior Alpha unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) circling thousands of feet above the Afghan countryside was too busy keeping watch over the high mud walls of a compound the soldiers were preparing to assault.
The soldiers only began to appear as tiny black smudges in the real-time images that flashed back to the ground control station when they converged on the compound. It was at this point that 22-year-old Army Pfc. Joshua Carter and a civilian contractor monitoring the action miles away at Bagram Air Base, charged with guiding the UAV and manipulating its camera, heard the first static-filled instruction from the commander on the ground: “Sparkle the corner of the northeast wall.” Carter grabbed the joystick on his console and pressed the button to laser the corner so it would show up in the team’s night-vision sights. “Good sparkle,” crackled the reply.
You can read the rest of the story here.
Is there any public info on whether USMC operates such a 'manned and unmanned Task-force to spread an intelligence and surveillance blanket over everything they overfly'??