The name Operation Odyssey Dawn might connote images of a years-long military adventure. But the callsigns of the U.S. pilots in the skies above Libya spur far more apocalyptic imagery: robots rebelling from their human overlords and raining bloody vengeance upon us.
“Huub,” our favorite Dutch radio-communications enthusiast monitoring transmissions above Libya, has an inspired catch. One of the Air Force’s giant E-8C Joint Stars surveillance and command aircraft has the call sign CYLON 41. Another JSTARS plane is CYLON 36. What the frak?
If you’re not enough of a nerd to understand the reference, the Cylons are fanatically religious robots, some disguised as humans, that nearly wipe out mankind in the fertile imagination of Battlestar: Galactica. Any old airman could take the callsign of Apollo or Starbuck, after the Galactica’s own hotshot pilots. It takes a special badass to don the mantle of man’s morally-conflicted adversaries.
This also means Boeing hasn’t let us in on its latest upgrade to the JSTARS. If those are really Cylons above Libya, then the plane is a metallic frame specially bred with living tissue to form a servile, “animal” plane determined to hunt the humans. It makes sense: the purpose of the JSTARS is to locate enemy positions over a wide area. Still, @notscrod tweets that it would be more apropos for a drone to adopt the mantle of the Cylon. Perhaps.
Alas, Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn would not confirm for us the existence of the Cylons within the air fleet, which means it’s full of Cylon sympathizers — or, worse, infiltrators. “If I personally had a callsign, I would want it to be that cool,” says Marine Captain Clint Gedke, a spokesman for the task force on theU.S.S. Mount Whitney and an alleged human being.
One reason to hope the Cylons really are involved in Libya: the war might finally have a Plan.
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