Predator

by Richard Whittle

  “Find out if it’s armed,” Self told Brown.

  “What do you mean?” Brown said.

  “Just find out if it’s armed,” Self replied. “Some of the Predators have Hellfires.” Self had picked up this bit of highly classified information during planning sessions for Operation Anaconda.

  A couple of minutes later, after learning that the Predator circling nearby was indeed armed, Self told Brown to have the drone put a Hellfire in the bunker beneath the bonsai tree. The first missile launched by Big and a sensor operator named Will landed well short of the bunker; years later, participants disagreed on why. But the second Hellfire shot was perfect. As war correspondent Sean Naylor wrote in Not a Good Day to Die, a book about Operation Anaconda, “Rocks, dirt and branches flew over the Rangers’ heads. They cheered. When the smoke had cleared from the top of Takur Ghar, the bunker had collapsed and part of the tree was missing. They took no more fire from there.”

  As the day went on, the Rangers continued to take mortar fire and fight off assaults by groups of Al Qaeda fighting from a second bunker beyond the bonsai tree. The crews flying Predator 3037, now out of Hellfires, used the drone’s cameras to help spot enemy movements and warn the ground troops. At one point the enemy began a major assault from the second bunker, and the Predator team buddy-lased two bomb strikes by two French Mirage 2000D fighter planes dispatched by the AWACS. The first bomb hit the bunker, but some of the Al Qaeda fighters survived and scrambled down the mountainside, taking cover under a tree. The Predator spotted them, and in short order buddy-lased another strike by the Mirages that apparently killed all the enemy hiding beneath the tree.

  Late that afternoon, Self and his men—several wounded, one dying—waited anxiously for rescuers, but commanders refused to send help until after dark. By now, Scott Swanson was flying the Predator and Jeff Guay was operating its sensors; both were listening over the radio as the Rangers repeatedly asked to be picked up before more of their comrades died. Years later, Swanson was still haunted by the memory of the Rangers’ pleas over the radio.

  As darkness fell in Afghanistan, Guay began using a new Predator feature to help calm the desperate Rangers. The drone’s MTS ball now included not only a laser designator but a laser illuminator—an infrared flashlight, in essence—whose beam expanded into an ever-larger cone as it traveled, and whose light could be seen through night vision goggles worn by the Rangers and by Air Force air controller Brown.

  “Every time he’d get a little nervous, I’d illuminate the ground in front of him,” Guay told a Big Safari reunion later that year, describing how he used the laser light to reassure the trapped Rangers that he was watching out for them. Even more important, Guay said, he later shined the laser illuminator on a spot designated by the troops on the ground and thus helped guide two Chinooks to a safe landing when they finally flew onto the ridge after dark. The helicopters picked up all the Americans on the mountain, including Roberts and the six others killed.

  Within military circles, word of what the Predator had done that day spread like wildfire.

  “Roberts Ridge was our coming-out party,” Ed Boyle proudly recalled some years later. “That night, it was more than an experiment; it was saving American lives. We were a sideshow up until that point in time. People were talking about us, but not as something that was going to be a long-lasting thing. After that, Predator became what it is today. Nobody ever doubted us again.”

  * * *

  After genesis came the flood.

  The arming of the Predator and its rigging for global remote control transformed a slow evolution toward wider military use of unmanned aerial vehicles into an outright revolution. In less than a decade, military drone technology proliferated to an extent that even its most ardent advocates never imagined, and an explosion in civilian drone technology followed. Given advances in the underlying technologies—lightweight composite material, smaller and more sophisticated cameras, digital communications, GPS, laser-guided weapons—UAVs would almost certainly have become more than a niche technology in time. But by radically changing the way people thought about drones, the Predator changed the military overnight.

  As 2001 began, the U.S. military owned just 82 unmanned aerial vehicles and had three types in use: the Predator and two small reconnaissance drones, the Navy/Marine Corps Pioneer and the Army’s Hunter. An April 2001 Defense Department study—after noting that the U.S. military had “a long and continuous history of involvement with UAVs” going back to 1917—estimated that by 2010 the armed services might own 290 in all, but the study predicted that there would still be only three types.

  In fact, when 2010 arrived, the military owned nearly 8,000 UAVs of fourteen different types. Six thousand of these were camera-carrying drones the size of model airplanes, but the Air Force had 165 armed Predators, more than three times the 48 unarmed RQ-1s the service had planned to buy before 9/11. And the Air Force owned 73 armed MQ-9 Reapers (the official name for the Predator B introduced by General Atomics nine years earlier). Each Reaper could carry four instead of the Predator’s two Hellfires, plus two laser-guided five-hundred-pound bombs. And as was suggested by the crash in Iran in 2011 of a previously secret unarmed drone designated the RQ-170 Sentinel, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies were surely using or developing other unmanned aircraft covertly.

  In the decade following the development of the first armed drone, Predators and Reapers flew hundreds of missions during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in antiterrorist operations in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. By 2013 those two types of drones alone had logged more than two million flight hours. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, was flying unarmed Predators along U.S. borders to detect smugglers and other threats. And the FBI was using mini-drones to help agents track criminals and gather intelligence at crime scenes.

  The drone revolution was fueled in part by innovations Big Safari and others continued to devise for the Predator. In November 2001, Big Safari asked technoscientist Werner to devise a way for Air Force AC-130U Spooky gunship crews to receive video in flight from a Predator already over their target. This allowed the Spooky crews to line up their cannons before Al Qaeda and Taliban militants could hear the big plane coming, a new tactic that proved devastating to the enemy. A few weeks later, in early 2002, Werner designed and Big Safari built a device dubbed ROVER (for Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver) that made it possible for ground troops to view live Predator video on a shoe box–size device they could carry in the field.

  As the Predator evolved, so did the nature of warfare. In the decade following 9/11, the CIA and U.S. political leaders ordered an ever larger number of targeted killings of known or suspected terrorists. Before long, this new kind of intercontinental sniper rifle—and the nature of the conflict that helped spawn it—changed the character of America’s spy agency as well, turning its focus from espionage to paramilitary operations.

  The drone revolution also reshaped the military, whose UAVs were increasingly flown by a rapidly expanding force of “remotely piloted aircraft” operators specifically recruited and trained for the task. In August 2009 the Air Force stunned experts by announcing that over the coming year it would train more pilots to fly unmanned aerial vehicles than conventional aircraft. The same month, an Air Force study predicted that its fleet would one day include a wide range of unmanned aircraft, from moth-size nano-drones that would be able to flit through windows and spy inside buildings to largely autonomous bombers and fighters. This study—“Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan, 2009–2047”—even forecast that by the one hundredth anniversary of the independent Air Force in 2047, the service would have armed drones automated with artificial intelligence capable of deciding on their own when and whether to attack a target. The report admitted, however, that the development of such a capability would be “contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions” about such “lethal autonomy,” and the Air Force later backed
away from the concept.

  The other U.S. armed services also invested heavily in unmanned aircraft. By 2010 the Army was flying its own armed derivative of the Predator, the General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle; the Navy and Marine Corps, meanwhile, were flying drone helicopters. The Navy was also developing its own version of Northrop Grumman’s high-flying RQ-4 Global Hawk reconnaissance drone.

  The Predator’s success also changed the defense aviation industry, whose interest in drones largely reflected the attitudes of its military customers. Northrop and Boeing began investing heavily in drones and related technologies. In 2009 Boeing, one of the largest manufacturers of military and civilian aircraft in the world, created a new Unmanned Airborne Systems unit within the Unmanned Systems Division it had created in 2001 and began buying or teaming with smaller companies to make UAVs of all types and sizes. By 2014, major defense industry players Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Textron, and more than fifty other U.S. companies, universities, and government agencies were developing, selling, buying, or flying more than one hundred and fifty types of drones ranging in size from forty to forty thousand pounds. At least fifty other countries were also making or buying drones and, in some cases, arming them.

  But not all drones were being built for military purposes. If wars and antiterrorist operations had fomented the drone revolution, by a decade after the armed Predator’s debut something far larger was happening. Enabled by ever more accessible and affordable component technologies, a new generation of mini-drones quickly began gaining popularity. And just as it transformed the military and the CIA, the drone revolution also promises to reshape society, from the way our laws are enforced and how much privacy we enjoy, to the way our food is grown, our news is gathered, and our goods and services are bought, sold, and delivered. Law enforcement, wildfire management, precision agriculture, news and entertainment media, search and rescue, environmental research, disaster response—the list of potential uses for drones providing a bird’s-eye view of the world is nearly inexhaustible, the possibilities as boundless as the human imagination. For the moment, Federal Aviation Administration regulations limit the use of unmanned aircraft to hobbyists and government and academic entities granted a special certificate of authorization by the FAA. Commercial use of drones is banned. But in time those rules will surely change: a revolution in the civilian use of drones seems inevitable.

  * * *

  As with many revolutions, technological as well as political, the history of this one was written partly in blood, and targeted killings using drone strikes raised a set of profound moral, legal, political, and practical questions. About a year after such strikes began, the world beyond the military began waking up to the existence of the armed Predator and its capabilities. During the early months of the war in Afghanistan, Predator strikes went largely unnoticed, but when similar attacks were launched outside the war zone, the response changed. On November 3, 2002, a Hellfire strike on an SUV in Yemen made major news. Killed, along with five others, was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an Al Qaeda leader partly responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole. Over the years that followed, the CIA’s use of drones to kill people identified as terrorists would become one of the Agency’s least secret covert programs ever.

  The CIA itself refused to acknowledge the practice publicly, so exact numbers are impossible to come by, but the frequency of such strikes clearly grew after Al Qaeda leaders chased out of Afghanistan took refuge in lawless areas of Pakistan and Yemen. The New America Foundation, a think tank that began using open media and what it called “U.S. sources” to track drone strikes beginning in 2004, estimated that the CIA conducted about 50 strikes in Yemen and Pakistan under President George W. Bush and more than 400 during President Barack Obama’s first term, launching 122 in 2010 alone. As many as thirty-three hundred Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other militants were killed as a result, the foundation estimated, including more than fifty senior terrorist leaders.

  Initially, the CIA drone strikes raised little controversy in the United States, and public opinion polls showed that most Americans supported them. The reaction overseas was very different. Critics contended that drone strikes often killed innocent civilians, an allegation that U.S. officials denied. After a decade of tracking, the New America Foundation reported that unintended casualties from drone strikes had steadily declined over the years, but reliable numbers were unavailable. Pakistanis and Yemenis were angered by what they viewed as a violation of their national sovereignty, though their governments had agreed to many if not all the strikes, and had even requested some. The thought that unseen machines in the sky might rain down death at any moment clearly made many people in those countries anxious. Some argued that outrage over drone strikes was a source of recruitment for Al Qaeda.

  The Obama administration defended targeted killings as necessary to prevent further attacks by Al Qaeda and its allies. “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership,” CIA Director Leon Panetta said in May 2009. But over the next couple of years, the debate over the legality and morality of drone strikes heated up and came home.

  In 2010 the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions denounced U.S. drone strikes and the secrecy surrounding their conduct as an “ill-defined license to kill without accountability.” More Americans expressed misgivings the following year after a drone strike in Yemen killed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamic militant said to have aided and abetted Al Qaeda operations, including attempts to explode bombs in airliners in flight. Critics questioned whether it was legal to kill a U.S. citizen in places such as Yemen, which was not at war with the United States, and without affording the person his or her constitutional rights.

  When President Obama finally addressed the issue publicly, in a speech at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013, he acknowledged the legitimacy of the debate, saying, “This new technology raises profound questions—about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality.” But he also defended the tactic, saying drone strikes were legal under America’s “legitimate claim of self-defense” against Al Qaeda and other terrorists and were being conducted under “clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.” The new guidance on “Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations” stipulated, among other things, that “lethal force” (drones strikes) would be used only when there was no alternative means of preventing a terrorist posing a “continuing, imminent threat” to “U.S. persons” and when there was a “near certainty” that no “non-combatants” would be injured or killed. The process used to reach those conclusions, however, remains cloaked in government secrecy.

  In the same speech, Obama declared that lethal force was necessary against terrorists because capturing them was often impractical, risked casualties among U.S. forces, and posed a greater risk to innocent bystanders than drone strikes did. “Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage,” he noted. “By narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.”

  The debate is far from settled, but even CIA veterans are worried that the practice of conducting drone strikes to kill terrorists has helped transform the Agency from an intelligence service into a paramilitary organization—a concern that echoes former director George Tenet’s reluctance before 9/11 to use a military weapon such as the armed Predator. There is also growing sentiment in favor of returning all authority to “pull the trigger” back to where Tenet originally felt it belonged: at the Pentagon. The state of emergency that followed 9/11, after all, is over. Whether the CIA will return t
o its original purpose in the age of global terrorism, though, is another open question.

  Just over a decade into the drone revolution, many questions remain. One is how much this new technology will really change things in the end. Will armed drones play important roles in future wars, or were the Predator and Reaper so prominent in Afghanistan and Iraq because they were used against enemies who lacked air defenses? Clearly the answer will depend on the nature of the war, the strength of the opponent, and the capabilities of future drones.

  Will civilian drones someday crowd the skies, becoming reliable enough not just to deliver goods but also to carry passengers? Perhaps, though the limits of line-of-sight remote control and the expense of satellite data links seem to argue against the prospect of pizza and book delivery by quadcopter. Meanwhile, the fallibility of technology argues against the prospect of passengers entrusting their fate to an aircraft with no pilot on board.

  Only two things about the drone revolution seem certain. First, the new UAV technology is here to stay. Second, society needs to figure out how to cope with its implications. When automobiles replaced horses, traffic laws and stoplights and roads were needed. When powered flight was invented, new laws and rules and airports and agencies to govern aviation had to be created. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a technology developed for military purposes began proliferating rapidly, and its implications are still being recognized. Drone technology has already changed the way people die; one day it may change the way people live.