 Note DHS Logo on this thing. Welcome to America!
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CBP Launches New Maritime Unmanned Aircraft System – CBP.gov — This news broke on Wednesday and was under-reported by the media. They keep saying it is unmanned, but never say anything about it being unarmed.
“The Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System has proven its value to homeland security over the nation’s land borders, the Great Lakes region, and in support of DHS hurricane and flood response operations,” said Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine. “With the introduction of the Guardian, maritime variant of the Predator B, DHS now has a powerful tool and force multiplier to increase maritime domain awareness and confront threats to our borders.”
The Guardian has been modified from a standard Predator B with structural, avionics, and communications enhancements, as well as the addition of a Raytheon SeaVue Marine Search Radar and an Electro-optical/Infrared Sensor that is optimized for maritime operations.
The Guardian is expected to be ready for Operational Test and Evaluation in early 2010. This OT&E will be conducted jointly by CBP and USCG from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. After the Guardian completes operational testing this spring, it will be deployed to the drug source and transit zones to support joint counter-narcotics operations.
And this is going to do what exactly?
Would be nice if they mapped out potholes for repair. psssssh as if.
Having someone in a plane fly around observing our borders is old hat. Doing it with a drone is cheaper. The things can stay up much longer and the fuel bill is much lower because you don’t have to haul around a lot of unneeded meat and the drone is normally much more streamlined.
Choppers drank fuel like crazy and have very limited fly time.
My vote is for the drone when it comes to recon.
So let’s say we use drones to catch mexicans sneaking across the border, how do we dispatch enough agents to catch them?
We all know the perpetrators of illegal immigration are the big businesses, who don’t want to pay proper wages for american workers.
Eat at a Golden Corral sometime, and all you will hear in the kitchen and behind the line is spoken spanish.
I hope it has a few missiles on it and that they go ahead and blow all those drug running “submarines” out of the water the minute they cross into our territorial waters. I also would love for it to fly over our national forests and locate all those pot farms that the Mexican drug cartels have planted here in the US. The same operations that were responsible for setting some of our massive, out of control brush fires in California this year, and causing millions upon millions of dollars in damage and putting lives at risk. And for what – to pad the bank accounts of a bunch of Mexican drug lords?
All you people who are complaining about it and whining about your “freedoms” are probably mostly pot heads who would prefer to have the freedom to score mexican dope freely in the open on the streets. I have no problem with the government using these drones to help dry up the supply.
And besides, here in California, the government has given all you pot heads a “legal” way to score your dope by letting you pay some unscrupulous “doctor” 50 bucks for a “prescription” that allows you to go to a government sanctioned “medical” marijuana “dispensary” and score all the pot you want. It’s the biggest scam since Bernie Madoff.
In Los Angeles, medical marijuana dispensaries outnumber Starbucks locations.
#24 ArchtMig : As far as I know, UAVs have been in use in the Pacific Northwest since early 2007 looking for pot plantations.
“And this is going to do what exactly?”
1. Spot those horribly dangerous plots of marijuana, the assassin of youth.
2. Train to hunt down and destroy Muslim wedding parties within the US as is done in Afghanistan.
3. Provide even more taxpayer money to one of our few remaining domestic manufacturing industries.
4. Patrol our thousands of miles of rugged, treed borders while 11 Saudi “turrists” (as former dipshit in chief called them) train at AAA Flight School right next to a regional FBI station.
5. Track all of the undocumented aliens home after they complete their purchases of Red Chinese merchandise at Harbor Freight so that they may be offered low-paying jobs with domestic businesses.
6. Find within the many thousands of square miles of heavily wooded western US mountainous areas the “turrists” who would burn down the entire western US some dry summer with little effort (if they actually existed).
7. Follow me and take video of me flipping them the bird. Of course, since I’ll never know when they’re overhead, I’m going to have to go around flipping the bird upward all of the time which will eventually get me arrested. See, it worked.
Ha! Thanks guys! Until reading some of your posts I was thinking my paranoia was exceeding the norm. I hope some of you were just trying to be funny or things are actually worse than I thought. OK I admit that the powers given to DHS or FEMA are scary, but in the end they’re probably just government bureaucracies, and I got news for those of you who think the government needs predators to watch the citizens – they’ve always been watching, and have much better tools than the predator for doing it. I doubt it will be armed while in domestic use to avoid making it more dangerous if it malfunctions or is hijacked. These are very light and if you have a motorcycle it’s motor is probably larger than the one that propels this craft. So of course it’s many hundreds of times more fuel efficient than a small helicopter perhaps thousands of times more efficient than a USCG CH-53 sea stallion.
lets see..
DHS?
National guard??
AIR national guard?
Coast guard?
Umm, dont/didnt we already have Individual protection to each state??
Why do we hire a PRIVATE company to do WHAT is already ABLE to protect us??
It will do NOTHING IMPORTANT – EXCEPT MAKE MONEY FOR THE MILITARY/INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX !!! Their motto: “If America doesn’t have a MONEY-MAKING WAR, WE’LL MAKE ONE” !!!
Just wondering if a blimp might work for border control?
The Patriot Law is very disturbing to me. I mean giving the local governance that much power. I’m sure it will be abused. At least by this bunch of tokens in my little paganville. Scary!
Time to buy a camouflage umbrella!
…nose in the tent, under the guise of keeping us safe…..