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Excerpt from ‘Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves’ Alec Bierbauer, Mark Cooter and Michael Marks February 3 Never Mind, We ll Do It Ourselves by Alec Bierbauer, Mark Cooter and Michael Marks.
“Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves” is the character-driven story behind the origins of the Predator drone program and the dawn of unmanned warfare. A firsthand account told by an Air Force team leader and a CIA team leader, “Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves” takes the reader into the back offices and secret government hangars where the robotic revolution went from a mad scientist idea to a pivotal part of global air power.
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Strap in for a doozy, folks. This week on
SOFREP Radio we welcome Alec Bierbauer and Colonel Mark Cooter (Ret.), the men behind the secret CIA mission to hunt down Usama bin Laden using the never-before-seen Predator drone.
In this exclusive interview, Alec and Mark alongside Michael Marks, who captured their story pull back the cloak on the origins of the operation to build, test and field the first Predator drone and recall what it was like to view, for the first time, a live feed of a target area through the eyes of a UAV.
And it has a strong tie to Elizabethton.
Mark Cooter, a retired Air Force colonel, is a 1981 graduate of Elizabethton High School and a 1985 graduate of East Tennessee State University. He is co-author of âNever Mind, Weâll Do It Ourselves, The Inside Story of How a Team of Renegades Broke Rules, Shattered Barriers, and Launched a Drone Warfare Revolution,â by Skyhorse Publishers.
As the book explains, the Predator program was a joint project of the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. Cooter, an intelligence officer, led the Air Force team while co-author Alec Bierbauer headed the CIA team. Michael Marks is the third author.