The “Predator”

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The war in Afghanistan started in October 7, 2001. The U.S. forces, with the support of the United Kingdom and the Afghan United Front, also known as the Northern United Front, launched what we know today as Operation Enduring Freedom. The U.S. would be fighting the first of two wars, the other in Iraq, but we would find that out later. The goal of the invasion was to find Osama bin Laden and other high ranking Al-Qaeda members. Then we were to take out the Taliban regime that was helping them. When the United States military started using the Predator in the War in Afghanistan, it greatly affected the outcome of the war on terrorism.

I believe that the war in Afghanistan had to be extremely tough to fight, especially in the beginning, without the help of the Predator. The Soviets would agree to this because just decades earlier they were fighting against Afghan fighters for a period of 10 years. With the mountainous landscape as their home field, the Taliban insurgents had a huge advantage over the U.S. and their Allied forces. Most of the Taliban combatants were trained by the same Freedom Fighters that were in conflict with the Soviets so they knew the region quite well. The same insurgents used the element of surprise, with the help of the caves, to elude the artillery shells and the borage of different bombs to flush out and destroy enemy targets. When enemy targets could not be reached by artillery and or bombs dropped by Allied bomber planes, Allied troops had to clear cave by cave to make sure the area they were patrolling was safe and secure. My wife had a close friend who was in the Army Airborne who came home from two tours in Afghanistan and later Iraq, who told all kinds of stories of going into the caves. He said...

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... Forces would go out on missions, they had more security knowing that the Predator was in front of them, behind them, and even on top of them.

The War on Terror is still not over; however, the United States has come a long way in weapons development. With the use of the Predator Drone, America made an impact on Afghanistan. We proved that we were a force to reckon with. War today is fought so differently than it was in the 1900’s or even the 1940’s. We are constantly coming up against newer technology, or in Afghanistan, new terrain, that we have not seen before. With the development of the Predator Drone, we proved that we could fight them effectively, and without a high civilian death counts. The Predator Drone was a definite turning point in Afghanistan for our troops; it is a great tool in the U.S. military arsenal of weapons that the troops benefited from.

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