How a secretive special ops unit of killer drones decimated ISIS by SeanDNaylor
As the Islamic State’s physical caliphate shrinks to nothing after an almost five-year campaign led by U.S. special operations forces, military insiders say one small unit has killed more of the extremists than any other: the company of Gray Eagle drones in the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Echo Company’s achievements are remarkable, in part, because unlike the Air Force, whose drones are operated from air-conditioned trailers in Nevada and flown by officers, the pilots in this Army aviation company are mainly enlisted soldiers who are deployed in combat theaters. Citing the classified nature of Echo Company’s missions, U.S. Special Operations Command declined to provide any information about the unit, which, like its parent battalion and regiment, is based at Fort Campbell, Ky. But insights into the unit’s history can be found on the website of the Army Aviation Association of America, a nonprofit organization that supports the Army’s aviation branch.
When it was created in 2009, Echo Company represented something new for the 160th, an elite special operations helicopter unit established in the wake of the failed effort in 1980 to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. The regiment’s distinctive black helicopters have featured in virtually every high-profile special operations mission since then, including the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.
For its first deployments to Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, the unit consisted of little more than a platoon of four Gray Eagles manned by 17 soldiers and 35 contractors . Still others, flying from the East African nation of Djibouti, were used periodically to search for the Lord’s Resistance Army. But only the Gray Eagles hunting high-value targets for JSOC were armed. In the other missions, U.S. special operations forces just used the Gray Eagles for surveillance and signals intelligence. “They never pulled the trigger,” said a special operations officer with recent experience in the Middle East.
First, while the Air Force’s Predators and Reapers — and even the conventional Army divisions’ Gray Eagle companies — are used mostly for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and more occasionally for striking targets, Echo Company’s Gray Eagles are primarily used in either close air support or “hunter-killer” missions, according to sources familiar with Echo Company’s role.
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