You misread. There are no weapons of any kind at Pine Gap. There is no reason for any weapons of any kind at Pine Gap. There is no strategic importance to Pine Gap.

Pine Gap is a relay station. It's where it is because it has line-of-sight to sky that the US doesn't have line-of-sight to anywhere else, and because it's in an area with little-to-no radio frequency interference. Note that Green Bank, West Virginia has similar advantages. The sole purpose of Pine Gap is to communicate with satellites and to eavesdrop on satellites. As tightbeam communications became common and as the communications network came to rely more on satellite relays than ground relays, Pine Gap became more of a backup than a frontline base.

Your title is not the article's title. Pine Gap is unrelated to drone strikes. Drone strikes are carried out from FOBs in and around the Persian Gulf and controlled from Creech AFB in Nevada. Check it out - no Pine Gap. Nobody goes there because it's a pain in the ass to get to and is distant from US telecommunications networks - that's the whole reason it exists. I see where you got your title from:

What that actually means, Professor Tanter said, is that the station is involved in real-time contributions to the United States’ global military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap, he added, also “contributes data for C.I.A. drone operations in countries in which the United States is not at war — Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and so forth. It is also critically important in whatever the United States is going to do on the Korean Peninsula.”

"Contributes" is one way of putting it. I mean, sure. They provide telemetry to the SDS so that the SDS can provide data links between UAVs and the ground. But Pine Gap is a piece of ECHELON and ECHELON has never been about warfighting. It's always been about spying.

I posted because I'm interested in the people who are doing direct action.

And three people playing viola in the middle of the desert because they don't understand what they're looking at is somehow more interesting than the thousands protesting the really shitty policies Australia has about refugees and immigration?

I was doing work at Evergreen when Rachel Corrie died. From 1967 to 2004, Israel demolished 14,000 Palestinian homes. Rachel Corrie died in 2003. In 2014 alone, Israel demolished 7,000 homes and damaged 89,000. But hey, she's a white girl so she's got a boat named after her, a tombstone in Tehran and an avenue in Gaza.

Let's hear it for "direct action."