Canada's last military presence in Europe since the end of WWII ends

Canada is withdrawing from the AWACS and UAV program run by NATO.

This is a money saving effort. Canada has been part of the NATO-AWACs program for 25 years.

The Canadian Forces hope to save $90 million a year by pulling out of NATO programs operating unmanned aerial vehicles as well as airborne early warning planes, according to documents obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.

Some retired air force officers have written Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office to protest the decision to withdrawal from the AWACS program. During the Libyan war the AWACS directed fighter aircraft, co-ordinating both attacks and airto-air refuelling operations.

Well, the Warsaw Pact did fall a very long time ago. There are no grand Fulda Gap scenarios. Libya? If they were so interested, Europe should have been able to do this op by themselves.

NATOs main mission these days is to desperately search for a reason to exist.

H/T- Naval Open Source INTelligence

Revolutionary…Or Routine?

Part 5 "Revolutionary…Or Routine?", the final installment of Winslow Wheeler's series this week that sheds some light on the hype of drone warfare has been posted.

In total, these writings show the true limits of these weapons systems.


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1. Revisiting the Reaper Revolution
2. The MQ-9′s Cost and Performance
3. Finding the Right Targets
4. Keeping Track of the Drones

Predator/Reaper program not so awesome as DOD would like us to think

Battleland blog in coordination with CDI's Winslow Wheeler have a great series about the challenges of the Predator/Reaper program.

For me, they do have a use, but besides being media darlings, they have some significant limitations. One wonders if Congress is up to speed with the realism factor for these platforms. The following should be required reading:

1. Revisiting the Reaper Revolution
2. The MQ-9′s Cost and Performance
3. Finding the Right Targets
4. Keeping Track of the Drones

Part 5 should show up Friday, U.S. time.

Defence red-faced over drones

Also from Stewart at The Australian; (subscription) a good idea before deploying somewhere is to make sure there are facilities able to take the capability.

Australia's next generation of drones has been sent to Afghanistan before they have a runway to operate from.

The embarrassing oversight is expected to delay the full-scale operation of the army's new Shadow 200 robotic spy planes in Oruzgan province until the second quarter of next year.

Poor computer security with U.S. drones

If this article is correct it is disturbing in that they seem to have no solid and tested disaster recovery process (DR).

They don't appear to know about how to reimage computers quickly to put them back in action (also part of a tested and documented DR process).

They don't seem to know process of how to deal with these kinds of threats properly. And still let the virus reside on the system even though they do not know what it does and including the fact that the feed that they use is not always encrypted?

I will save the best for last; it makes no sense to use Windows systems (no matter what a contractor says )for this kind of work when there are very good Unix and Linux systems that can be built from scratch including of course good security behaviour you want built into the kernel.

Unreal. I hope the article is an exaggeration.