strike with a Predator drone. The Predator was loitering over Mullah Omar's house and followed several men who left the house. CIA analysts believed that Omar was in the group, which drove first to the house of Omar's mother and then to a school west of Kandahar. The men stayed in the school for several hours and the CIA requested that the Air Force strike the school with a conventional bomb, but Franks denied the request, citing the risk of collateral damage and uncertainty over whether Omar was really there. The CIA fired the Predator's Hellfire missile at a truck outside to draw the men out; the men left the school, and Omar escaped. Predator drones had been in development since the early 1990s, had been used to search for bin Laden since 2000, and had even been proposed as a means of assassinating bin Laden before 9/11. The employment of armed Predators in Afghanistan marked the start of a new era of drone warfare. US aircraft bombed Taliban training camps and air defenses over the next several days, employing Apache helicopter gunships from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade. US Navy cruisers, destroyers and Royal Navy submarines launched several Tomahawk cruise missiles. Within a few days, most Taliban training sites were severely damaged and air defenses destroyed. The campaign focused on command, control, and communications targets. The front facing the Northern Alliance held, and no battlefield successes were achieved there. The United States dropped 1500 munitions in the first week of bombing. They also began airdropping food and medical supplies to civilians in Northern Alliance-controlled territory. By the second week of the campaign most of the preplanned targets had been destroyed. On October 19, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) teams 555 and 595, both 12-man Green Beret teams from the 5th Special Forces Group, plus Air Force Combat Controllers, were airlifted by helicopter from the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan more than across the Hindu Kush mountains in zero-visibility conditions by MH-47E Chinook helicopters from 2nd Battalion 160th SOAR. ODA 555 went to the Panjshir Valley to link up with the NALT and Fahim, and ODA 595 went to the Darya Suf Valley, just south of Mazar-i-Sharif, to work with Dostum. In mid-October, A and G squadron of the British 22nd SAS Regiment, reinforced by members of the Territorial SAS regiments, deployed to northwest Afghanistan in support of Enduring Freedom. They