Unmanned Drone Debacle

There have been many failed programs spanning the years of your author’s military career and I’m sure some of you have seen your fair share of goat ropes but this latest one takes the cake. I may, or may not have been hanging out in a D.C. area gentleman’s club helping the girls work their way through college a buck at a time, when I overheard a conversation at the next table. There were a handful of people sitting there and I picked up that they were a mix of NCIS and AFOSI and as the alcohol flowed the conversation got looser and looser.

As the story goes these people had been involved in a rather secret drone program that was designed to be so innocent looking that nobody would ever suspect that they were under surveillance. Additionally it was so common that they would not be out of place anywhere in the world. DoD scientists designed a micro-miniature camera and microphone system that is able to transmit real time via satellite and is not much larger than the ball on a dog tag chain.

The search went out for ideas to deploy this system and the best minds of the DoD went to work on ideas. Dogs and rats were considered as carriers due to their easy trainability, as were pigeons, but all were eventually ruled out for various reasons. Millions of dollars were expended researching and eliminating various animals and insects until they settled on a large species of common housefly.      

Over ten thousand of these genetically engineered insects were raised in secret DoD labs in Maryland, the camera systems attached, and the drones were then deployed to various AFOSI, NCIS, CIA, and military combat units worldwide.

I listened intently on the edge of my seat, while Misty tried hard to earn another dollar, hoping to hear the results of this great intelligence (and dorm spying) tool. Would it be the capture of some high ranking ISIS leader? Would it be the breakup of a spy ring? Or perhaps the foiling of some government coup? But truthfully I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I heard next as the more senior person spoke.

“Well I’ll tell you what sort of feed we got from the drones. We got footage of cow shit. We got video of horse shit. Tons of pig shit, dog shit, cat shit, and people shit. We also got porn footage of flies doing it. We also got film of more garbage than we knew existed and plenty of dead bad guys. We also have hundreds of hours worth of various animal asses. Even some E-2 wiping his butt in a Cadillac toilet. But not one minute of anything useful. The whole thing went south when bats started eating the drones. Man, I gotta say that the digestive tract of a bat isn’t a pretty thing to see. The Pentagon brass shut the whole thing down and destroyed all the records. The whole thing was a giant pile of crap – figuratively and literally! I really just want to get drunk and never sober up again!”

The focus of their table returned to the drinks and the girls and I decided then and there that from now on I would kill any housefly that I saw.