More recently, UAVs had been a significant drain on Big Safari’s budget. Defense Department officials had taken badly needed RC-135 re-engining money to help fund Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations of two high-altitude drones, the so-called Tier II Plus Global Hawk and the Tier III Minus DarkStar. No one at Big Safari liked this shift in focus, especially after the DarkStar crashed and was destroyed during its second flight on April 22, 1996. But Grimes had been impressed with the Predator, and he thought its ability to fly into far more dangerous airspace and stay there far longer than a manned plane could offer enormous potential for the military. He was also sure Big Safari could exploit the Predator’s possibilities—and he didn’t think the regular Air Force would appreciate, much less fully develop, the drone’s potential.
Neither did Mike Meermans, a retired chief master sergeant who joined the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1995 after a twenty-two-year career in Air Force intelligence. Meermans had come to know Big Safari’s work well during his tenure in the Air Force, and he was a big fan of Bill Grimes, whom he deemed a “national treasure.” Meermans had flown during his Air Force career as a crew member on Big Safari aircraft from Rivet Joint to Compass Call, a communications-jamming version of the C-130. He later became an Air Force Compass Call program officer, then finished his career as chief of airborne reconnaissance operations at Air Force headquarters in the Pentagon from 1990 to 1995. When Meermans went to work for the House Intelligence Committee, its vice chairman was Representative Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who was emerging as the nascent Predator’s chief promoter in Congress. In June 1996, Lewis sent Meermans to observe an exercise at Key West, Florida, that included the Predator. Meermans came back infatuated.
“Mr. Lewis, this little guy is going to be a winner!” Meermans assured his boss.
Lewis and his aide Letitia White, who had worked closely with Tom Cassidy of General Atomics and Navy Captain Allan Rutherford to get the Predator off the ground, feared the Air Force didn’t share Meermans’s view of the Predator. Rutherford’s rough reception at Air Combat Command the previous year had made clear what most Air Force pilots thought about the slow little drone, and there was little reason to think the service’s acquisition arm would feel differently. The Air Force’s top priority was the fantastically capable but also fantastically costly F-22 Raptor, a supersonic stealth fighter plane then expected to cost an average $166 million per aircraft. Pentagon officials and defense experts in Congress, meanwhile, were arguing over reconnaissance aircraft far more exotic and expensive than the Predator, from the manned SR-71—cancelled for cost by the Air Force in 1989 but revived by Congress in 1994—to the DarkStar and Global Hawk high-altitude drone projects. When Lewis asked Meermans what he thought they could do to help the far less sexy Predator not just survive but thrive, Meermans knew right away. In the course of his intelligence committee job, Meermans talked regularly with his old friend Bill Grimes, and he knew the Big Safari director was itching to take the Predator under his wing.
In the spring of 1997, Meermans brought Grimes to one of the most secure locations in Washington, the House Intelligence Committee hearing room, a curved, wood-paneled chamber tucked into the dome of the Capitol that was both soundproof and regularly swept for listening devices. Soon Meermans and Grimes were joined by Congressman Lewis, Letitia White, and recently elected Representative James A. Gibbons, a Nevada Republican who was both a new intelligence committee member and an old Air Force RF-4C pilot. Neither Grimes nor Meermans had let the Air Force legislative liaison office know that the Big Safari director was in town to meet Lewis—a breach of protocol that might provoke a flap if discovered. If they were found out, Meermans told Grimes, they could just explain that he had asked Grimes to educate Lewis and Gibbons about Big Safari. But everyone present knew the real agenda.
After introductions, the members and aides took seats on the bottom row of the room’s two-tiered, twenty-seat dais and Grimes launched into what he called the “dollar version” of his Big Safari 101 briefing: What is Big Safari? How does it function? What programs come under it? The briefing was illustrated with viewgraphs—PowerPoint wasn’t yet ubiquitous in 1997—shown with a projector Grimes set up on the faux-leather surface of the room’s six-foot-long wooden witness table. There was nothing in the briefing about the Predator. But after the briefing ended, Grimes gladly answered questions posed by the congressmen and their aides about what he saw as the drone’s potential and how Big Safari would develop the Predator if given the chance.
As Meermans had anticipated, Lewis and Gibbons were impressed, and a few weeks later Lewis sent the Air Force a message the way members of Congress frequently do. The House Intelligence Committee’s report on its annual intelligence authorization act noted that the underlying bill would transfer to the Air Force all authority over the Predator still held by the Navy, as also directed by that year’s defense authorization bill. But the committee’s report added that the panel “has been keenly interested in the rapid, flexible, and innovative acquisition approaches that hallmark Big Safari, and it strongly urges” the Air Force to let Big Safari manage further development of the Predator.
On October 1, 1997, the Air Force assumed full control of the Predator, as required by the defense bill. As required by good political sense, the Air Force made Big Safari the Predator’s System Program Office, thus assigning it to work with General Atomics and other contractors to improve the Predator and increase its capabilities. One of the first things Grimes did was give a consulting contract to Werner, the imagery scientist who first figured out how to pipe the Predator’s video into the Pentagon, then how to get it from Albania to command posts around Europe. Grimes, too, wanted to turn this interesting technology into something important.
Eight months later, the Air Force version of Q Branch would start doing exactly that.
* * *
Air Force Captain Scott Swanson had thought that by 1998 he would be piloting the V-22 Osprey, a futuristic aircraft the Marine Corps and his service were developing that could take off and land like a helicopter but fly with the speed of a fixed-wing airplane. As an Air Force Special Operations Command helicopter pilot with a Gulf War combat tour and two years of dicey search-and-rescue missions over the stormy North Atlantic under his belt, Swanson was ready for a new challenge. The Osprey was supposed to be a revolution in aviation, and the Air Force was going to use it for special operations. But the Osprey wasn’t ready when Swanson was. By 1998, the V-22 was a decade late; a poster child for what was ailing Pentagon procurement, the new tiltrotor wasn’t slated to go into service until 2001. So as Swanson’s tour at the 56th Rescue Squadron in Iceland neared its end, he started looking for an assignment to tide him over until the Air Force needed Osprey pilots.
One day Swanson was perusing potential billets on an Air Force electronic bulletin board when an odd one caught his eye. The 11th Reconnaissance Squadron, a three-year-old unit at Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field near Las Vegas, was looking for pilots willing to fly a UAV called the Predator, though in this case “fly” wouldn’t mean actually leaving the ground. Not a seductive thought for most Air Force aviators, who generally sign up to experience the thrill of defying the law of gravity. In fact, the 11th RS announcement made it clear that the Air Force was having trouble filling the squadron’s pilot billets; the offer promised that after a two-year Predator tour volunteers would be guaranteed the assignment of their choice.
Ordinarily, flying UAVs wouldn’t have interested Swanson. The red-haired, freckle-faced Minnesota native suffered from none of the preening egotism common among fighter pilots, but even as a kid in the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka, Scott Swanson knew that when he grew up he wanted to join the Air Force and fly. A subscriber to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine at age thirteen, he got his private pilot’s license the same week the aptly named Lindbergh High School gave him his diploma. Swanson went to the University of Minnesota o
n an Air Force ROTC scholarship and left in 1986 with a degree in aviation management. For him, being a pilot was a calling, and he was good at it. His aerospace studies professor at U Minn was so impressed with Swanson’s skills that he planned to recommend him for the prestigious Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program, which turns out fighter pilots for the United States and its European allies. The professor was stunned when Swanson said thanks but no thanks; he only wanted to fly search-and-rescue helicopters, an idea he had been fixated on since he was a boy.
“Are you crazy?” his professor sputtered. In the Air Force, he warned, being a helicopter pilot was a career killer.
“I don’t care,” Swanson told him. “I’m just looking forward to flying and having a good time.”
That was what Swanson had done ever since, pretty much, and his professor had been right about the effect that flying helicopters would have on his career. After twelve years in the Air Force, Swanson should have been a major. Instead, he was still just a captain; worse yet, he had been passed over for promotion, a sign he might never make higher rank. Even so, Swanson was happy in the Air Force, and he knew he would be happy with another assignment flying helicopters, if he could find one. But he also had another keen interest, one that even predated his fascination with flight and made the idea of operating the Predator more appealing to him than it would be to most pilots: Swanson was a computer geek.
Thanks to an innovative program created in 1968 by suburban Minneapolis school districts and the University of Minnesota College of Education, with help from IBM and other big information technology companies, Swanson had been fascinated by computers since first grade. Under what became the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, students at his elementary school were among those allowed to use teleprinters and phone modems to do dial-up time-sharing on a Hewlett Packard computer so they could learn the rudiments of programming. They could also play primitive computer games. Scott’s favorite was Lunar Lander, in which he had to fly a spacecraft he couldn’t see—computer display screens were still in the future—and land the vehicle on the moon. A player flew the Lunar Lander by reading its altitude and speed on a teleprinter and changing the space vehicle’s position by typing commands on a keyboard, which sent code to the computer. Scott also liked a game called The Oregon Trail, which required a player to drive a Conestoga wagon across the frontier by typing in commands such as “cross the river.” As they traversed the frontier, players had to “hunt” and “kill” wild game for food, in an early version of the game, by typing in words such as “Bang” or “Pow,” and in a later edition by using a mouse to put crosshairs on images of wild animals.
Steering a craft he wasn’t inside, therefore, was not a novel concept to Swanson; he was always interested in innovative technologies. Besides, after two years of flying helicopters in rough weather out of Reykjavík, including in two frigid Iceland winters, and with the promise that he could choose his own assignment after a tour with the 11th RS, the Predator job sounded appealing on a lot of levels.
Single guy living in Vegas? New and interesting technology? Yeah, Swanson thought, I could go do this. So he volunteered.
* * *
Three weeks into April 1999, Swanson was chatting with Major Bob Monroe in the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron operations director’s Indian Springs airfield office when the telephone rang. Monroe didn’t ask Swanson to leave; since joining the Predator squadron nine months earlier, the former helicopter pilot had earned Monroe’s trust.
Swanson had transferred in from Iceland the previous June and, after twelve weeks of Predator training, deployed with a small 11th RS detachment to Taszár, Hungary, to fly surveillance missions over Bosnia. The unit was getting ready to come home for the winter in October 1998 when the Serb military and rebellious ethnic Albanians in Kosovo started a new round in what had become a chronic series of clashes between the two. The fighting stopped after the UN Security Council called for a cease-fire and threatened military action to make both sides comply, but the Predator deployment was extended to monitor what was happening in Kosovo and to help NATO prepare for another possible air campaign against the Serbs. U.S. commanders also began discussing whether to move the Predator’s base south to Tuzla, Bosnia, to be closer to Kosovo.
From Hungary, the Predator needed eight hours of flight time just to get to Kosovo, flying south over Croatia, down the Adriatic, and across Albania to reach the Serb province. Swanson found that both his years in cockpits and his old Lunar Lander skills came in handy during such missions. A Predator pilot could see where his aircraft was going only by looking at a video screen, and even then his view was limited to a nose camera that peered straight out the drone’s nose, supplemented by the view provided by sweeping the sky with its surveillance camera. Predator pilots couldn’t feel the aircraft’s motion, hear its engine, smell a fuel leak, or see what was in the air around their machine. Many of their commands to the aircraft, moreover, weren’t made by moving the control stick and throttle on their console or the rudder pedals at their feet, but by typing on a keyboard.
Swanson proved adept at flying with only one of his five senses able to help. Beyond that, his ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute intricate missions—skills he had learned flying helicopters for Air Force Special Operations Command—gave him a leg up on many of his fellow Predator pilots. He excelled at flying missions out of Taszár, and when winter weather forced the detachment to return to Indian Springs around Christmas 1998, Swanson’s superiors at the 11th RS immediately made him both a pilot instructor and the squadron’s weapons and tactics officer—which was why Swanson was sitting in Monroe’s office in April 1999 when the operations director’s telephone rang.
“Wow,” Monroe said quietly as he hung up. “They’re gonna throw a laser designator on the Predator.”
“Do you know what they’re going to use?” Swanson asked.
“An AN/AAS-44(V),” Monroe replied, reciting the first five letters individually but finishing up with “forty-four Victor.”
Swanson wasn’t familiar with that particular laser designator, a device that pulses a laser beam at a target to mark it for bombs or missiles, which then home in on the reflected light, or “sparkle,” bouncing off the target. As a special operations pilot, though, he had learned to use a different laser designator.
As Monroe explained, the phone call was from Big Safari, which on April 14 had been directed to install laser designators on four Predators, the number of drones that usually accompanied a ground control station. Equipped with such a device, the Predator should be able to “buddy-lase”—that is, shine its laser beam on targets that higher-flying fighter planes couldn’t see and thus guide their bombs or missiles to those targets. The order to install the laser designator, approved by the Air Force chief of staff, gave Big Safari a tight deadline: three weeks. Monroe had been called, he told Swanson, because Big Safari would need a pilot to fly the Predator in tests of the device once it was installed, and perhaps in combat missions.
Swanson’s inner geek was aroused. After his conversation with Monroe, he went straight to the 11th RS’s “vault,” a room where classified information could be stored or accessed by computer, and downloaded and printed the manual for what insiders called the Forty-Four ball. The device, he learned, was actually a turret containing both a laser designator and an infrared camera to find targets. Raytheon Corporation had developed it for the Navy’s Sikorsky SH-60 and HH-60 Seahawk helicopters—birds of a feather with the Sikorsky MH-60 that Swanson had flown as a special operations pilot.
“Whoever’s going will need to read this,” Swanson told Monroe, plopping the manual for the Forty-Four ball down on the major’s desk.
Monroe looked up and grinned. “You just volunteered,” he said.
A few days later, Swanson was working for Big Safari. At the time, he thought it was a temporary assignment.
* * *
Swanson and Monroe knew exactly what combat need had generated
the laser designator order. A month earlier, the United States and its NATO allies had launched a new air campaign against Serbia’s military; the seething conflict in Kosovo had boiled over again that winter despite the UN ceasefire imposed the previous fall. So far, Operation Allied Force had been less effective than hoped. When Serb troops perpetrated further atrocities against ethnic Albanians, NATO was willing to respond, but only with air strikes, for no member nation wanted to send troops and risk casualties in a quasi-civil war. The desire to avoid casualties extended to aircraft and their crews as well, and Air Force leaders were wary of Serbia’s formidable, mostly Soviet-made antiaircraft defenses. “These guys are very good,” Chief of Staff General Michael E. Ryan testified to Congress before the operation began, warning that Allied air losses were “a distinct possibility.” The risk was confirmed on March 27, the fourth day of the air strikes, when a Serbian surface-to-air missile battery brought down a U.S. F-117 stealth fighter, whose pilot safely ejected and was rescued. Even before that, the NATO air commander, Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Short, imposed a fifteen-thousand-foot “hard deck” on how low Alliance planes could fly over Yugoslavia, a floor designed to keep crews out of antiaircraft gun and shoulder-fired SAM range. But from fifteen thousand feet or higher, and with mountainous Kosovo frequently blanketed by fog and clouds, pilots were soon having trouble finding mobile military targets or verifying that they could hit them without harming civilians. U.S. commanders were still groping for ways to adapt.
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