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It was first deployed in the 1990s in the Balkans, but made its bones in November 2002 in Yemen, when a Predator-fired AGM-114P armor-piercing Hellfire missile incinerated a car in which an al-Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, was traveling with five others through the desert. The Predator is the most famous of several dozen UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) that the military operates. Local airfields get them into the air, then Las Vegas takes over. Underground and underwater fiber-optic cables link these trailers-ground-control stations, really-to Europe, where a satellite dish makes the connection directly to every Predator in the air over Baghdad, and along the Afghan-Pakistani border, and wherever else they are needed. The MQ-1B Predator drone, or the “Pred,” as its crews call it, is flown from here. That is, inside those trailers you leave North America, which falls under Northern Command, and enter the Middle East, the domain of Central Command. “Either way, you go in there and you enter the CENTCOM AOR. “Inside that trailer is Iraq inside the other, Afghanistan,” explained Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Plamp, of Louisville, Kentucky. Ten minutes away, at Nellis Air Force Base, I found a cluster of camouflaged trailers. It was crowded with obese people in sweat suits and seniors driving motorized wheelchairs, yanking one-armed bandits in a masturbatory frenzy, and smelling of whiskey, cigarettes, and popcorn. I drove out of town past the MGM Grand, the Bellagio, and Caesar’s Palace and checked in at a low-end hotel-casino complex in Las Vegas for $59 a night. To embed on some of the niftiest air missions over Iraq and Afghanistan, I had to fly to Las Vegas.