On Sept. 30, 2011, a Hellfire missile rained down from the sky over southern Yemen and obliterated its target—U.S.-born Muslim cleric and al-Qaeda associate Anwar al-Awlaki. According to retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley in his book, Hunter Killer, the missile was fired from a remotely piloted MQ-9 Reaper drone.
Vandenberg Air Force Base is currently being considered as a possible location to host a MQ-9 detachment. The information was made public by the U.S. Air Force in September 2016, and confirmed by the base’s commander, Col. Chris Moss, who made the announcement at a March 8 luncheon organized by the Lompoc and Santa Maria Valley chambers of commerce.
Just a week prior, Moss said, site survey teams came to the base to make an evaluation. Vandenberg is one of six bases being considered, including Shaw and Eglin air force bases in South Carolina and Florida, respectively.
If selected, Vandenberg would host an additional 24 aircraft and approximately 1,600 support personnel at the base. Moss called it a “very exciting mission opportunity for Vandenberg.”
“These are exciting times,” Moss added.
Developed by U.S. defense contractor General Atomics, the MQ-9s are an upgrade from their predecessor, the MQ-1 Predator. At 36 feet in length and with a wingspan of 12 feet, a pack of four MQ-9 drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles, technically) costs $64.2 million. The Air Force has 93 such drones, according to Air Force figures as recent as September 2015.
The drones aren’t just used by the Air Force. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol operated nine MQ-9s until January 2014, after one crashed into the Pacific Ocean, according to bloomberg.com. The drones had various missions, including patrolling the border.
If the Air Force chooses Vandenberg, the MQ-9s might not be the only drones at the base—which could already be home to at least one. Moss’ comments came a week after a photographer captured a picture of what appears to be a super-secret RQ-170 Sentinel drone flying over the base on the same day an Atlas V rocket was launched.
Matt Hartman of Southern California’s Shorealone Films photographed the drone. The pictures were exclusively published by reporter Tyler Rogoway—a defense journalist and editor of The War Zone blog—who’s covered the RQ-170 extensively. He described Hartman’s picture as a rare find.
According to warisboring.com, pictures of the RQ-170 first emerged after journalists photographed the drone parked on a runway at an Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2007. The military acknowledged its existence two years later, but hasn’t said much about it since.
The drone has been in use since 2007, Rogoway said.* Not much is publicly known about the RQ-170’s capabilities—Air Force officials are mum on the details—but Rogoway believes that it’s a stealth drone. The Sun obtained from the Air Force a small fact sheet regarding the RQ-170 that gave no technical specifications other than it’s used for “reconnaissance and surveillance” purposes.
The drone has been instrumental in some high-profile military operations, Rogoway said. One of those was Operation Neptune Spear, a CIA-led operation carried out by members of the elite Navy SEAL Team 6 that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“It was literally watching Bin Laden in his backyard,” Rogoway told the Sun, adding that he speculates the drone may have provided a live video stream of the operation to the Situation Room where the president and his staff watched.
“It’s not a normal system,” Rogoway said. “It’s what they call a ‘high demand, low-density asset,’ usually meaning extremely in high demand, penetrating reconnaissance asset, which means it can penetrate into hostile territory.”
Later that year, Iran reported that a Sentinel drone crash-landed near its border with Afghanistan. According to footage released by state media, the Iranian government had begun producing its own version after announcing that it had successfully reverse-engineered the drone.
Rogoway said he believes that the drone may have been equipped with sensors to detect whether Iran was building nuclear weapons and could possibly be used to perform electronic attacks, like radar jamming. In response to the incident, a reporter from The War Zone blog filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Air Force and received documents that showed Vandenberg has been used as a temporary base for a RQ-170 detachment since 2011.
The big question, Rogoway said, is what is the drone doing at Vandenberg? The base isn’t usually known for hosting detachments of fixed-wing aircraft, Rogoway said, although the base has been used as a staging ground to launch the top secret X-37B unmanned spacecraft in the past.
He speculates the drone was moved from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada to Vandenberg because of the remoteness of the base and its contiguity with other military test ranges that contain areas of the ocean.
The Sun obtained a digital copy of the photograph of the suspected RQ-170 at Vandenberg (shown above left). Judging by the boom sticking out of the nose of the aircraft, Rogoway said, the picture Hartman took appears to be a test aircraft.
“We knew that this detachment was there, but what does that mean?” Rogoway asked. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s aircraft deployed.”
Staff Writer David Minsky can be reached at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
*Editors note: The text has been edited to clarify how long Rogoway said the RQ-170 drone has been in use.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 6, 2017.
