Jefferson Morley looks into “Israel’s drone dominance” for Salon:
Stark Aerospace of Mississippi is perhaps the only foreign-owned company with FAA permission to fly a drone in U.S. airspace. Based in the town of Columbus, the home of Mississippi State University, Stark is a subsidiary of the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries — not that you could tell from looking at the company’s website, executive leadership or affiliations. You have to go to the Mississippi secretary of state website to learn that two of Stark’s three directors are Israelis.
So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”
“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”
Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.
Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip. (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.
Israel markets its expertise in defense to the rest of the world. Israeli academic Neve Gordon cites a glossy government brochure on drones titled “Israel Homeland Security: Opportunities for Industrial Cooperation,” which boasts, “no other advanced technology country has such a large proportion of citizens with real time experience in the army, security and police forces.” The chapter called “Learning from Israel’s Experience” notes that “many of these professionals continue to work as international consultants and experts after leaving the Israel Defense Forces, police or other defense and security organizations.”
The work has paid off when it comes to drones: The Jewish state is the single largest exporter of drones in the world, responsible for 41 percent of all UAVs exported between 2001 and 2011, according to a database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israeli companies export drone technology to at least 24 countries, including the United States.
Read the whole article here.
To whom is Israel exporting drones?
Since almost the entire world supports the Palestinians (apart from the US and Israel), Israel is likely exporting drones to someone who will sell them to someone else who…(etc). eventually sells them to God only knows who.
I expect that it won’t be too long before US troops are attacked by drones.
Why not? Nobody has a monopoly on technology these days.
The Iranians captured a US drone. Here’s a cartoon showing Iran cloning the drone
Seafoid, just done my bit for shop a fada went to my local supermarket and before buying some Israeli fruit, tested them for freshness I think they were over ripe because my thumbs went clean through them, no sale, sorry.
The Israeli bashes are responsible for this. When Israel used F15’s and F16’s to bomb terrorists in Gaza, all we heard about from the Palestinians and their supporters was how American money was being used against “innocent civilians”. So now Israel changed its tactics and does not use, or very seldom uses the US planes. The Palestinians were allowed to send rockets into Israel (no consequences from the so called enlightened world), so the Iron Dome was developed.
When a nations back is against the wall, and is unjustly and one sidedly criticized, it will look for and quite often find solutions to its problems, and sometimes those solutions are world beaters. And the Israeli bashing continues, day in and day out. This website is a testimony to that.
Leave us alone already otherwise we might have to develop some other new and exciting product.
Israel’s adopted business model of manufacturing weapons and death machinery is only going to give fodder to people like Mel Gibson – remember his comment about the jews starting wars?
So obviously his statement is rubbish but Israel, rather than ‘the jews’, really is unhealthily fond of war. And war is not a renewable resource – not even the bogus Global War On Terror.