The unit will include several air vehicles, a ground control station, satellite datalinks and various other subsystems essential to combat operations.

FORBES: The Revolution In Unmanned Aircraft Is Overrated

In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a "ground control station, " or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens.

CNN: Computer virus hits U.S. drone fleet

The ground control stations send their commands to Reaper via a fibre-optic link to a satellite relay station in Europe, which bounces them into space and back down to the aircraft.

BBC: Military's crucial 'eye in the sky'