Civilian contractors playing key roles in U.S. drone operations

According to a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary George Little, on Mar. 12, an IRIAF (Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force) combat plane attempted to intercept a U.S. MQ-1 drone flying in international airspace.

The U.S. military command in Africa (AFRICOM) is planning to establish a drone base in northwest Africa to increase surveillance on radical Islamists in the region, Eric Schmidt of The New York Times reports.

The U.N. has launched an investigation into U.S., British, and Israeli airstrikes that allegedly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Pakistan alone.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Militants killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.

As we speculated from the very beginning, and as was reaffirmed in "Is Nigeria, And Its Light Sweet Crude, About To Be Drawn Into The Mali "Liberation" Campaign?", the "French" (with complete and fully-comped US support) Mali campaign is slowly but surely migrating to its intended target: Nigeria, and rather its holdings of light sweet crude.

The RCMP are planning to expand their fleet of remote-controlled “eyes in the sky,” and for the first time, they’re looking south of the border to a company that has been a major supplier of unmanned aerial vehicles for the U.S. military. Southern California-based AeroVironment Inc. builds tiny fixed-wing drones, which have been a staple of the U.S. Defense Department’s arsenal in the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of President Obama's former intelligence chiefs believes that the Pentagon — and not the CIA — should run the U.S. drone program so that it operates within the laws of war, Carlo Muñoz of The Hill reports.