Canadian Drone Team To Be Stood Down

Enduring Freedom From 6,000 Feet

The military will ground Canada's spy plane program after the Afghan combat mission ends this summer. The commander of the prop-driven CU-170 Herons, which operate out of Kandahar Airfield, said the Canadian Forces will disband his squadron once troops pull out of Kandahar.
Maj. Dave Bolton, the new and final commander of Task Force Erebus, said his team will then go on to other jobs within the military.
“There's a lot of very young people that were involved with this program,” he said in an interview.
“There's probably going to be a hiatus of somewhere between two and five years. But those people will still be in the military, and those people will have this experience, and they'll be able to move forward with the yardstick when the time comes.”
The Herons were leased as part of the independent Manley commission report to extend Canada's military mission in Afghanistan until 2011.
The vehicles, which are flown by controllers on the ground, help Canada and other members of the U.S.-led coalition keep watch over roads.
The Canadian drones fly without any weapons, primarily to conduct surveillance.
The United States and other NATO occupiers employ armed drones. The MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers are used for so-called 'surgical' strikes. These strikes as often as not cause civilian casualties including in Pakistan where there have been many strikes with the collusion of the fragile Pakistan government.

Canada leased the Herons from MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates of Richmond, B.C. in a deal worth roughly $95-million. The agreement is set to run until July of this year, when Parliament has mandated the withdrawal of the Canadian military from combat operations in southern Afghanistan. Karzai has run out of phraseologies for condemning the almost daily cock-ups and massacres by the droneheads. ' A lot of very young people....'?? I wonder what their mental age is.