Space4Peace
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
December 6, 2013
First NATO Global Hawk Drone
Bruce Gagnon
Chicago-based activist Rick Rozoff is a gold mine of information about NATO. He sends out daily reports sharing how the military industrial complex, working through a cancerous NATO, is pushing their military madness up to the doorway of Russia and China. You can see his Stop NATO site hereI would venture a guess that most people who work in the military industrial complex, and their associated sticky web of weapons production facilities, have no real clue how the systems they build fit into this high-tech space directed first-strike attack program now under development.The meeting pictured above comes from Moss Point, Mississippi where Northrup Grumman announced:
NATO representatives, state dignitaries, community leaders and Northrop Grumman employees gathered to celebrate the start of production for the first of five [Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) Block 40 Global Hawk drones] aircraft. The system will provide NATO with unprecedented near real-time terrestrial and maritime situational awareness information throughout the full range of NATO military and civil-military missions, including peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations. The NATO AGS system will be a major contribution to NATO’s joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability.
Notice how they deftly include the ‘peacekeeping’ lingo just to take the edge off things. It helps keeps the liberals in Europe and the US onboard. But make no mistake – this program of NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) is all about war fighting and preemptive attack.
Also important to note is the phrase in the accompanying article that AGS will ‘support NATO missions worldwide’. In addition to the public relations about humanitarian missions, NATO is working overtime to sell the concept of NATO as a global military alliance. (Remember that NATO is a cold war relic that was used by the capitalist forces in Europe to stand against the communist forces of the former Soviet led Warsaw Pact bloc. Those days are long gone but NATO still continues to expand.) I remain convinced that an expanding NATO gives the corporate oligarchy a military tool to do global intervention (aka Libya) without the political constraints of the United Nations Security Council.
NATO is acquiring the AGS system with 15 nations participating including Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States.
The NATO AGS system is a variant of the Global Hawk, which has logged more than 100,000 flight hours and has supported military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
Just below (here) you will find a NATO video about the AGS system showing how it is also being used on the African continent.