Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare

by William M. Arkin

  Gilgamesh is an obscure cog in a bigger system of systems and a network that is the heart of what I call the Data Machine. I call Gilgamesh itself a black box, the term attached to a flight recorder on an aircraft but also, according to the dictionary definition, any complex piece of equipment, typically a unit in an electronic system, whose contents are mysterious to the user. Part eye, part ear, part balance and sensing, Gilgamesh is just one of thousands of pieces of what military command and control experts call the “sensors, actuators, and data layer” of the Global Information Grid (GIG), a military combination of all networks, mobile and landline, voice and data.5

  Just as “black box” is an imperfect representation because Gilgamesh needs to be conceived as more anthropomorphized than a mere box, the Machine that Gilgamesh attaches to has to be seen more like a living body made up of organs and bloodstream, each part cellular and complex and interconnected. This Data Machine—the national security complex, US intelligence, spying and killing, targeted death—grew and improved as needs presented themselves, as technologies emerged, and as computing power increased. But it has never been nurtured, or, to extend the analogy even further, it has been raised in the wild, magnificent and hairy but lacking in those attributes that make for a thoughtful human endeavor. Those in charge speak of the GIG’s “architecture” as if someone started with a blueprint, but as retired air force chief General John Jumper said more than a decade ago when describing the growing machine: “You wouldn’t dare buy a house that your architect couldn’t draw for you first.” And yet, as he says, “We’re buying parts and pieces of our military without having a picture of the house.”6

  Like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earthly world of Gilgamesh the black box comprises an expansive cast of characters—some with mythical names, some felicitous, some warlike and ominous. Each black box character plays a distinct role in each stratum of digital war-making. And in the way that Gilgamesh the actual king is recorded in Sumerian history as having ruled for 126 years, Gilgamesh the black box has to be thought of in a very contemporary time frame. The niche capability that this and other black boxes provide might last only 126 days, but that’s an eternity in our information age. Think of them as the latest smartphone or app in the form of specialized wiretaps or spy cameras. There’s a demand for a one-off to be fabricated and put in place to exploit some opportunity or fill some intelligence blind spot. But the hunted quarry is also ever-changing, adapting or making use of new methods to exist, communicate, travel, or hide within a bigger digital background that is itself constantly undergoing growth and change. So when the target or the technological or computational conditions change, the inventors go back to their shadowy caldrons, and another specialized Gilgamesh comes along to take the place of the outmoded one. Black box Gilgameshes that each play a specific role in intercepting and precisely geolocating a potential target thus emerge whenever and wherever there is a need. The type of data being collected constantly mutates as new sources and methods of collecting and deciphering are discovered. There are countless other secret sensors like Gilgamesh of the black box variety—ACES HY, Lynx, Dragonfly, Pennantrace, Silent Dagger, Star Sapphire, Airhandler, Viper Reach—each a platoon mate, each slightly different and able to “see” or “hear” or untangle some identifying characteristic of an electronic morsel to penetrate into the most unconventional of domains. Black boxes process imagery—photos in the visible spectrum, infrared images, synthetic aperture radar, light detection and ranging, or spectral renderings—scrutinizing each frame as it floods in, tagging and sending the take either for immediate use or for retrieval later. Other black boxes act as secret agents that can suck down the contents of a computer hard drive: more data to be sent off for processing and use. Sound waves, facial recognition, smells, infinitesimal changes in chemical makeup or landscape, the special and unique gait of an individual’s stride, can all be collected and measured in some form of digital indicator. Searchers seek even to capture and characterize innate emanations: a dormant cell phone, a computer keystroke in front of a screen, a microprocessor within an automobile, some oscillating or unintentionally revealing digit that might indicate a presence and an identity even when the mechanical and corporeal world is seemingly silent. Data is the prize, but the path to getting it is the task.

  The collectors would be nothing without the processors, the members of another black box tribe: Alaska, Association, Final e Curfew, Gargle8 and Garuda, Temptress, and Witchhunt. These tools characterize and analyze the collected data, peering into pixels and wavelengths and binaries, triaging and fusing information to discover or figure out an identity and then its place in a larger social network. Sharkfinn, Chalkfun, and Goldminer, part of the Real-time Regional Gateway (RTRG) family, push intercepted communications to battlefield users. Specialized brethren such as Thunderbunny and Metrics do specific tasks such as computing the connections between one electronic device and another: “call chaining.” Dishfire, Octave, Contraoctave, Broomstick, and Taperlay store the voluminous material. Stratus and Turretfire keep it in the cloud. As digits are logged, translated, parsed, sorted, and displayed, hundreds of additional specialized and secret applications arrange them by date, by location, by language, by voice, and by subject. Incompatible software and formats are threaded together through other sets of black boxes, software, and widgets.7

  Each of these ingenious Gilgameshes represents tens or hundreds of millions in invested dollars and hours by some government laboratory or (more often) private company of IT geniuses unlaboring away in obscurity. But this is not a tale about industry or money. Gilgamesh and its kind are not only almost universally absent from the public debate about warfare and targeted killing, but no one is really privy to or can fully grasp the totality of the new indecipherable, not the users, not the managers, not the decision-makers, and certainly not the elected officials.8 This is a world beyond “death TV,” as it is sometimes referred to, the now-familiar black-and-white renderings of full-motion video that have become all too common in describing a singular eye in the sky as just “drones.” It is a world beyond voice transmissions or even the so-called metadata that is attached to every piece of digital communication and that most people just associate with the NSA. Struggling with its own definition, the military sometimes calls it intelligence mission data.9 “The speed of technical innovation and the complexity of modern weapons systems are creating ever-increasing demand for specialized intelligence mission data to feed sensors and automated processes,” a 2013 Pentagon report says.10

  Feed me! Is this the human condition of intelligence, of the Data Machine? That the Machine churns on because it serves no purpose except to ingest everything? Does it churn because in political terms, leaders are afraid they will be punished after the next spectacular terror attack if they have failed to detect that specific something that might have made the difference? Or is it just data, and are they merely sucking up everything simply because we can, “a growing amount of surveillance, communications, and intelligence work… being performed by unmanned aircraft and satellites”11 disconnected from a human endeavor, even one as repugnant and glorious as war?

  In the closed community of Gilgamesh the black box, in locked rooms inside barricaded and guarded compounds, the relentless Machine churns. The cameras and the sensors and the listening devices are carried aloft by another family—Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks, little Ravens, manned Liberties, Rivet Joints, Senior Scouts, and Dragon Ladies (U-2s). The unmanned “platforms” like Predator that have become so well known, however, are, as the label “platform” suggests, merely hosts—kind of like flying buses—carrying the army of passengers (certainly more often black boxes than bombs or missiles) that collect the digits.

  The essential finishers are the wizards of geolocation—ARTEMIS, Displayview, Foxmill, G-box, GEGS, Nemesis, Talonview, Toxicaire, Typhon, and Worldwind—more black boxes and software workers that—or is it who?—perform direction finding and triangulation, comparing the times
and frequencies from signals as received at different collectors, pinpointing the location of something even when an object is moving, even performing geolocation when only one vertex in a triangle is known.

  When Gilgamesh seamlessly meshes and everything is revealed, when digital markers can be calculated and timed and fused with change detection histories and “pattern of life” databases, it is relentless exactitude from the heavens. The end result is labeled High Value Target (HVT) assured pursuit, “assured pursuit” being an official buzzphrase used to describe a very specific and very secret achievement: the finding and killing of the enemies of the state. In this top secret world, “Assured Pursuit Certified (APC)” is even something one can actually put on one’s résumé; it is a kind of marksmanship badge meaning that one has mastered the use of all the modern-day black boxes and is privy to the secrets of the gods: how to conduct the meticulous work of human archeology that has come to be at the center of perpetual war.

  Gilgamesh the black box is at the center of our story, but it isn’t the hero. Given the totality of the Machine, there isn’t really a single hero in the world of black boxes. This is not to impugn some leader or general or commander or scientist or analyst or pilot or soldier, nor is it to question or doubt the human sacrifices of the killed and injured or the exceptional bravery of the actual fighters who indeed go out and take the greatest risks. But Gilgamesh is, in the end, just one of thousands of components; and though we have way too much of a tendency, in our struggle to grasp modern warfare, to reduce the world of drones to those Cessna-sized Predators that we imagine are guided by some joystick-wielding adolescent, the truth is that except for the few who actually hike and hide and sweat, the few who actually have to go outside the wire and beyond the barricades to the edge of the world in the quest, the vast majority of humans are a removed network of technicians—unlaborers—who outnumber old-fashioned fighters tens of thousands to one. Two parts machine, one part man: the fight is truly unmanned.

  “We should join together and do one thing, a deed such as has never (before) been done,” Gilgamesh says to Enkidu in Tablet IV of the Epic. It could be the motto for this extraordinary search party. It never has been done before, not on this scale, not with this ambition, a global network that seeks the most elusive morsel in an infinite information universe, searching deeper and deeper into every buried recess, processing all for the singular purpose of locating an enemy—the unanticipated and diabolical that forever eludes.

  The cold truth is that the endeavor is irreducible from the Machine and its network.12 Feeding the Machine, and the enormity of the mere task of integrating it all, overwhelms. The culmination is not some final battle per se, it is the distillation of the military’s efforts into some 3-D model or PowerPoint briefing or even video simulation to evoke a decision to kill, a process that has “crisp efficiency” and an inexorable quality, as one veteran of targeted killing decision-making said, that “left him feeling more like an observer than a participant.”13 It’s therefore hard not to see the Machine as kin to some kind of divine execution, hard not to label it all godlike, hard not to decry a robot takeover or some sanitized video game, warfare stripped of all the humanity.14

  Who other than Gilgamesh can say “I am king without equal”? the Epic asks.

  And thus our story begins, an effort to fathom our descent into the world of the unmanned and our servitude to the Machine. Our modern-day Gilgamesh travels leagues, and journeys to unknown places in the beyond. It exists in a world of warfare, but also a world inextricable from our society and its struggles with the information age. It is a world where human interventions in the decisions of life and death are essential and where the entire enterprise is indeed man-made, but where the Machine’s purpose is to eliminate the weaknesses and errors of human input.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dead Reckoning

  Shamash roused against Humbaba the mighty galewinds:

  South Wind, North Wind, East Wind and West Wind,

  Blast, Counterblast, Typhoon, Hurricane and Tempest,

  Devil-Wind, Frost-Wind, Gale and Tornado.

  TABLET V, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  He will take you to the Garden of Eden,” the Iraqi general said.

  Word preceded my arrival in the small southern backwater, a decrepit village located at the point where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet to form the Shatt al-Arab.

  Two days earlier, I had been farther north, in Amarah, listening to a diatribe by a Saddam crony who said the United States had dropped colorful “mines” intended to attract the attention of children and animals and then to automatically explode when they got near. I was in Iraq just months after the 1991 Gulf War ended, working as the sole military advisor to the so-called Harvard Study Team of medical professionals and lawyers, the first team inside Iraq to survey the civilian effects.

  “You’ll have to prove that,” I said, and the Saddam henchman turned to one of his aides and issued some order in Arabic. The next morning, my team and I accompanied an Iraqi general and his gun-toting entourage into the barren desert west of town. Scattered about on the scrub-covered and clay-cracked expanse as far as the eye could see were hundreds of bright-yellow soda-can-sized objects, surely an odd sight to behold in the expanse of brownness. I could tell from the size and shape of the objects that this was a graveyard of BLU-97 bomblets, the unexploded remnants of larger cluster bombs. Since the bomblets are designed to explode right above the ground or on contact, there were many questions: Was it a weapons malfunction? Was it a dumping ground for leftovers jettisoned after missions farther north? And what about the Iraqi claim that the bomblets were still going off and killing civilians? How volatile were these devices now, after having sat and baked in the sun in the months since they had first been dropped?

  The ground reminded me a little of northern New Mexico, where wide expanses on both sides of trickling streams can instantly turn into raging rivers and then recede, leaving behind a parched arroyo to be baked, curling clay a couple of inches thick, rock-hard on the sun side, still moist underneath. And that’s sort of what happened in Iraq in January and February 1991, a particularly rainy season. Months of standoff starting with Iraq’s August invasion of Kuwait took place over a line in the sand in a parched and largely featureless geography called the Syrian Desert, a lifeless quarter that occupies parts of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, ancient lava fields covering 125,000 square miles, the size of Great Britain, or New Mexico. For five months, Iraqi forces dug in. But by the time the war started in mid-January, Desert Storm only partially lived up to its first name. Rains swept over the Mesopotamian interior, the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, north and east of the Syrian Desert. And not only that, but 1991 was a particularly harsh and wet winter.

  Since the time of Gilgamesh, the coming of the rains and the flooding that often resulted changed the fortunes of civilizations that occupied this Fertile Crescent. Old Assyrian texts mention that trade resumes in the spring after the “opening of roads,” a process necessary after winter rains covered everything with water.1 The courses of the great rivers themselves changed many times. Ancient Uruk—Gilgamesh’s kingdom—was once on the bank of the Euphrates and is now just an archeological ruin deep in the desert. As civilization came, so to speak, roads were built up on high embankments, with bridges and culverts crossing rivers and their tributaries, but also over dry riverbeds (wadis), allowing the flooding to pass. Hence these low-lying areas adjacent to the roads that filled with water in the winter months. Now, six months after Desert Storm bombing, the waters around Amarah had long ago seeped into the ground and evaporated, exposing thousands of unexploded bomblets. Were they duds simply lying there because they had failed to detonate when they landed in the water?

  Randomly—and, in hindsight, stupidly—I approached one near the road where our convoy parked, took pictures, got down on the ground and wrote down the serial numbers, inexpertly thought about the amount of explosive containe
d inside, imagined the scored and crenelated steel canister designed to break up into thousands of tiny pieces of killing metal, and figured that the bomblet, if it exploded, would form a conical shape dispersing upward. I backed up about twenty-five feet, which was how far away I thought we would have to be to escape any shrapnel that would fly overhead. I shooed everyone else behind me, including the general and the soldiers, who obediently scattered, and then I threw a rock.

  The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, blood gushing from my mouth, painful shrapnel and bits of incendiary zirconium wafer embedded in my lip and right arm. By the luck of the gods, I wasn’t so short as to have shrapnel hit me in the eye. My translator, Zena, also was a dentist by training, and, by sheer coincidence, we had dined the previous day with an English-speaking surgeon at Saddam General Hospital in Amarah, which was where we headed. I don’t remember much from that moment on, but Zena rendered immediate first aid, washing the wound with our stockpile of bottled water, and held my lip together as we careened east to the hospital.