home Security Military The MQ- 9 users’ fraternity

The MQ- 9 users’ fraternity

Mar 15, 2015

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. are forming RUG, Reapers Users Group. This is an international forum of countries which deploy MQ-9 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), aka, Reaper.

The users group wants to make it easier for all users (soon to expand to the Netherlands and a few more countries) of the MQ-9 to quickly share information on maintenance, tactics and operations in general. This would allow new ideas that work to quickly become known to all MQ-9 users.

Since it was first unveiled a little over a decade ago, General Atomics, the developer and manufacturer, supplied over 104 units of its MQ-9 Reaper UAVs. It is development of the company’s MQ-1 Predator, first unveiled in the mid 1990’s. The company’s latest model to date, as far as unclassified reports go, is the stealthy Avenger, aka Predator C.

According to Strategy Page, training is a particular problem plaguing the unfolding users’ forum. For example, the MQ-9 is not yet cleared by the different governments’ aviation authorities to operate in British air space. So the ten British Reapers recently withdrawn from Afghanistan are grounded until they can find some hospitable air space to operate in. The British Reapers might end up in a Middle Eastern base, for actual recon work as well as training for operator and maintenance crews.

The new user group spreads information on UAV operation and so on immediately via a secure form of communication (like an encrypted version of the Internet the U.S. Department of Defense has been using for over a decade).

The RUG (Reapers Users Group) would work mainly because all the current users and the most likely future ones are NATO members. That means the RUG members already have arrangements for sharing classified information and technical data in general. The U.S. recently eased the export restrictions on where Reaper could be exported to, so future Reaper users won’t automatically be invited to join.

One intelligence and UAS expert told i-HLS “no problem there, because many other complex American military systems that were widely exported have formal and/or informal users groups.” The expert also said that with the advent of the Internet, this was unavoidable. A formal group, a users’ forum, enables the members to freely exchange everything. When it comes to useful tip from those with combat experience, this can be a matter of life or death.