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

by William M. Arkin

  “I have killed my American,” I remember the general whining repeatedly.

  As soon as we got to town, Zena called her father in Baghdad and told him to find plastic surgery thread and bring it down to Amarah, about a four-hour drive from the capital. They didn’t have those delicate supplies at this provincial civilian hospital, nor did they have antibiotics or much of anything else. But by midafternoon, the British-trained surgeon was sewing my lip back together and removing fragments from my arm.

  Stitched, bandaged, and in throbbing pain, I continued my mission the next day. And there in al Qurnah, though I wanted to see the al Hartha electrical power plant, newly built and destroyed by US bombing in another puzzling anomaly, my Iraqi host had a far more special treat for his American guest, the man now famous for hurling the stone. He would take us to see “the tree.”

  In the middle of a garbage-strewn and abandoned portico at the confluence of the two rivers south of town, there is a ten-foot-high bleached and shriveled skeleton of a shrub. The general referred to it as Adam’s tree and insisted that this very place was the cradle of civilization, the location where the Garden of Eden once was, and the source of all mankind. Feral dogs pacing the perimeter snarled; the midafternoon sun beat down, activating a putrid smell of urine and feces, all creating an overall ambiance that made it kind of hard to fully appreciate.

  Little did I know then that this tree was also a confluence and a path to this story: as I pieced together my own fragments, I learned why there was such a large number of unexploded bomblets clustered along the roads of Amarah. The answer wasn’t malfeasance, and though mistakes were made and technical problems revealed, focusing too much on them obscured more important lessons. There was a logical reason why cluster bombs had been used here and why they had such a high dud rate as a result of landing in water, but the why and the aftereffects were practically invisible to both Iraqi and American military men. And so I learned that the minute details really mattered, that secrecy and compartmentalization were as much a curse inside the system as they were outside, and that the lowly implementers (Iraqi missile men or American pilots) had a job to do and couldn’t see the big picture. But most important, to understand the evolution of the unmanned and the Data Machine, I learned that though politicians and people with axes to grind might scream bloody murder, the technologists always—always—seek to make killing ever more discriminate and precise.2

  From Amarah I learned as well that hardly anyone, no matter how high his or her rank, has a complete picture or really knows what is going on outside his or her specific organization. It was an experience that would shape much of my struggle to understand the secret world over the next two decades, in part because it taught me to scrutinize action and reaction not just to determine what went right and wrong, but also to look for the big picture in the small technological and operational details.

  During the 1991 war, Saddam’s forces shot Scud missiles from western and southeastern Iraq, and though army general Norman Schwarzkopf, the Desert Storm commander, dismissed them militarily as not being able to hit the broad side of a barn—and the US Air Force saw the missiles as a diversion from their choreographed bombing campaign of Baghdad—a top priority in Washington was keeping Israel out of the war. Aircraft were thus sent out to find Saddam’s missile launchers, but they kept coming. When Iraq shot missiles at Saudi Arabia, the missiles originated from hide sites west of Amarah and north of al Qurnah, setting up quickly, firing, and moving. Infrared sensors on faraway satellites recorded the launches, some nights transmitting the data quickly—but never quickly enough.

  The Scud “hunt” accelerated, but finding the launchers proved impossible, even after pilots observed a missile being fired 15,000 feet below.3 The hunt became a matter of pride for the air force; failure to find the Scuds would be such a contrast with its success in otherwise employing stealth and laser-guided bombs. Scud-hunting aircraft were kept airborne continuously to enhance response time. A sort of chess game pitted American technology against an unsophisticated yet wily opponent, Iraq exploiting American blind spots and willing to operate contrary to standard military doctrines to deliver the only kind of hurt it could.

  Fifteen percent of all air missions into the Iraqi interior ended up being diverted to counter the Scud—a huge demand for resources if nothing else—but no one particularly anticipated that the weather would have such an additional impact. Rain and fog, high winds, battlefield obscurations natural and man-made wreaked havoc. Hundreds of attack sorties and a significant number of entire mission packages were canceled because parts—aerial tankers or supporting reconnaissance—weren’t available to accompany the attackers. And since most aircraft were already operating at medium or high altitudes, outside the range of the bulk of Iraqi air defenses, poor visibility became a double problem. Low clouds, which were present about a third of the time, meant that pilots couldn’t see much on the ground.

  If air war strategists and targeters could not precisely locate the mobile Scud missile launchers but knew generally where they were firing from, they surmised that this knowledge could, at the very least, help them to limit the Scud movements. Consequently, they started dropping cluster bombs along the roads and embankments where launchers were suspected. With a dispersal area approaching the size of a football field, even a single cluster bomb was thought to have an impact.4 Targeters particularly sought road bridges in the areas to limit where these modern-day monsters could rampage.5 This ended up including the Amarah city bridge just a few hundred feet from Saddam General Hospital, a bridge that otherwise would have been on no target list. The bridge wasn’t completely destroyed in the attack, but it was damaged enough to stop a multi-ton transporter from crossing. The blast from the bombs also blew out windows, cracked walls, and showered the interior of the hospital with shards of glass and debris.

  The failure to find Scuds became legend in the antiairpower annals and among military historians schooled to believe real wars only happen on the ground. Airpower advocates had answers and rationalizations galore: after overstating how many Scud launchers they had succeeded in destroying, they argued that they had kept Israel out of the war and reduced Iraq’s ability to fire missiles. Mission accomplished. They had similar arguments about Saddam’s survival, about his massive stockpile of weapons of mass destruction discovered after the war, and about civilian casualties and so-called collateral damage. They argued that they hadn’t killed Saddam because they hadn’t really been trying to, and that they hadn’t destroyed WMDs because the intelligence people hadn’t known about them. In both cases, it was someone else’s fault. “Pictures of bombs threading their way down ventilator ports, elevator shafts, and bunker doors demonstrated more eloquently than any amount of written analysis how effectively and devastatingly air warfare could strike,” an official air force report bragged later,6 ignoring all the Scudiness. If their method of bombing hadn’t completely eliminated civilian casualties or damage, it had, airpower advocates argued, at least produced historically low levels. These advocates couldn’t necessarily substantiate or convince anyone of the veracity of these claims, but they formed the basis for weapons improvements and technological advances over the following two decades to overcome weather constraints and improve accuracy and timeliness of attacks.

  Many would focus on the war’s role in exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam—clear mission, superb army leadership, no micromanagement from the top, and absolute victory. Many of the same guardians of the senior service and the sanctity of military history also looked up at airpower and sensed an appropriation. They disparaged the remote instrument, the pretense of spotless surgery, the video-game war, even the moral flaw of an unfair fight. Whether it was in the space-age Patriot antimissile missiles or the stealth fighter, critics felt comfortable in the realm of arguing that things didn’t work or did not go as planned, as if somehow things going wrong in warfare were an attribute unique to airpower.7

  Iraqis also shared this disparaging
view, which slowly took hold in the Arab and Muslim world. Airpower—the instrument that was indifferent to geography, the new mode of warfare that could compress distance and reach out practically impervious to countermeasure—came to symbolize American arrogance and subjugation. Historians used to telling the war story through War 1.0 heroics and chivalry on the ground were flummoxed by airpower and the emerging unmanned system, which had neither a Gilgamesh-like hero nor a human story line.

  Adam’s tree thus wasn’t just some kitsch fascist monument invented by Saddam, or, as the army Strategic Studies Institute would interpret it even a decade later, Baathist propaganda falsely trying to connect Iraq to “some of the greatest civilizations in ancient history beginning with Sumer and Akkad, then Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea, and the Abbasid caliphate.”8 Adam’s tree was an essential window into why Iraqis thought of themselves as different and special, and how they also measured the flow of history and their place in it on a very different scale from the moment-by-moment American ethos. I saw this on the ground but also learned that it is the very kind of insight that isn’t attainable from the air, the very understanding that we think of as “intelligence,” which has increasingly become impossible to pick up in our era of drones and data.

  “Mesopotamia has been the venue for many onslaughts and wars,” Saddam later told the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. “Nevertheless, a new civilization emerged after each onslaught and war, and God willing we will establish a new Iraq.”9 Everywhere I went in Iraq, I heard people echo a similar narrative, a kind of defense of Iraq’s behavior, even those who vociferously opposed Saddam himself. I heard rationalizations for the invasion and for the destruction of Kuwait’s oil wells, and justifications for Iraqi intransigence in not cooperating with the international community now that the shooting was over.

  Who would expect little Iraq to prevail against the onslaught of the entire world’s military machine and its superior arms? Saddam said, and normal Iraqis echoed him. Of course the tiny country would lose in a battle against a country both larger and technologically superior. That was just a matter of physics. But if Iraq had withdrawn from Kuwait under threat of war from the United States and the United Nations, that would have spelled a great moral defeat, would have compromised Iraq to political calculations rather than to its historic destiny. The United States—the West—with its superior technology could destroy the modern infrastructure of Iraq—wasn’t that even the intention behind goading Iraq into Kuwait in the first place? they’d ask, with a nod and a wink—but the land of the great rivers would still be there when the nations we were currently familiar with were long gone. In this land inextricably tied to civilizations going back before Gilgamesh all the way to Adam, defeat was transitory, a mere moment in the great sweep of mankind.

  The Institute for Defense Analyses later analyzed the Scud hunt with a strictly technological focus. High flying in itself didn’t reduce the effectiveness (or accuracy) of smart weapons, but laser-guided or remote-controlled (say, from a television camera) precision relied on continued visual contact with the target.10 Slow response times, limitations in sensors, problems with distinguishing targets from decoys, and precise geolocation also proved wanting. It all came down to mastering the holy grail of time-dependent targeting: “Airborne sensors stayed out of Iraqi airspace, marginalizing their coverage, and strike aircraft received inadequate cueing from satellites due to sensor limitations.” An average of sixty minutes was needed to collect and disseminate information on located Scud missiles. But by then, the Scuds were gone.11

  Over the next decade, while Iraq decayed under sanctions and military pressure, the technologists sought to perfect the ability to dispense with pulsating air defenses and the hoary Humbaba launchers of the industrial era, or, for that matter, with any other mechanized army like Iraq’s. That desert of frustration outside Amarah spurred on new weapons, better sensors, more robust communications capabilities, all with the goal of improving the methods and compressing the time needed to find a target, to more precisely locate it, and to kill it in any weather. These became the elements of advanced precision warfare in Afghanistan and the next Iraq war more than twenty years later; what today has an initialism of F3EAD—Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate—but in those days could barely be spelled out.12 Technologies just then emerging—computing power, digital optics, satellite navigation, ubiquitous (and cheap) long-range control, a worldwide and robust network of communications—would form the back end of every military and civilian development to follow.

  As I visited Iraq again later in the 1990s, it was plainly evident that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi young men who had experienced and survived Desert Storm had gone home with a reluctant but healthy respect for the awesomeness of the American military and its technology. Sure, there was anger as well as a continuing sense of dogged resignation that Iraq’s greatness was more tied to its past than to its future. Iraq’s army had been soundly defeated in battle, defeated by an opponent that it could not reach or equal. And it was equally clear that although the country had once been modern (or at least modernizing), with hospitals and superhighways and a communications and electrical grid that the US military had considered worth bombing in the first place, it was now disintegrating, a fact that highlighted Iraq’s defeat while everyone else seemed to be marching forward.

  The terrorists who would emerge in the next decade didn’t have much affinity for Saddam Hussein’s plight, nor did the Iraqi experience of utter defeat inculcate much respect on their part for the United States. They saw the new world order and the West as the new rapacious rulers of planet Earth, cravenly hiding behind a shield of superior technology. The significance of Scud missiles, those clumsy and inaccurate terror weapons of an earlier era, was that they inspired those who wished to fight the magnificent King, whether in the development of suicide bombers, airliners as weapons, or later improvised explosive devices. None of these weapons would ever really threaten the West or directly defeat the modern military, but they would force those operating out of reach to come down to the human level of carnage and feel its effect.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fire and Forget

  I examined the look of the weather.

  The weather to look at was full of foreboding,

  I went into the boat and sealed my hatch.

  To the one who sealed the boat, Puzur-Enlil the boatman,

  I gave my palace with all its goods.

  TABLET XI, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  One can almost hear the adolescent guffaws in the American telling of the first Gulf war, locker-room swagger that glosses over all the difficulties involved in preparing to fight the fourth-largest army in the world. Gone and forgotten are the many drills in anticipation of chemical weapons or worse, the thousands of body bags shipped to Saudi Arabia for the expected corpses, the fear that the new smart weapons would not work, and the many frustrations when the likes of Scud missiles stymied the best of plans. All was miraculously expunged at the end of forty-three days, and making fun of the hapless opponents, with their mismatched uniforms and meager supplies, became the new narrative, the impetuous and thoughtless heaving of the severed flank of the Bull of Heaven at the gods was the taunting of the enemy.

  Perhaps one of the saddest pretenses is in the urban legend of Iraqi soldiers being so stupid that they tried to surrender to a drone. It was on one of the last days of the conflict. An unmanned Pioneer, its snowmobile engine screeching away at about 2,000 feet, overflew Kuwait’s Faylakah Island, taking video that included footage of Iraqi soldiers waving white flags in the air.

  The footage was beamed back to a US Navy battleship and went viral in military channels. The story, which was quickly embellished, became lore not just of Iraq’s easy dispatch but also of the magic of the unmanned.1 Remote images of the enemy surrendering!

  In 1991, live video was virtually unheard of outside highly classified intelligence circles, and now the hierarchical bottom-dwellers had their own e
yes in the sky. No longer did they have to wait for information to come in from distant agencies—agencies that would package this information without regard for the consumers.2 It wasn’t quite real-time surveillance in the way we think of that today, but it was a taste. Users fell in love with the pictures. General Walter Boomer, the top marine commander, labeled the Pioneer drone “the single most valuable intelligence collector” of Desert Storm.3

  But this wasn’t really the case. On the contrary, drones were actually a scant footnote in the war, deployed in limited numbers and of marginal utility. One-way kamikaze-like electronic fakers were used by air warriors to deceive Baghdad air defense systems on the opening night of the war.4 But other than that, the only notable contribution was made by three dozen 400-pound Pioneers, which flew a total of 330 missions, spending about 1,000 hours in the air.5 Working for the army and the marines, these short-range drones went in close where it was thought too dangerous for man to venture, and in a couple of instances scored some tactical success, perhaps auguring what was to come with greater reliability and integration in the future.6 But in actuality, the majority of Pioneers belonged to the navy and spent most of their time out of harm’s way and supporting a sideshow, lurking over a Kuwaiti mudflat jutting into the gulf. There the most forsaken of Iraqi infantry remained trapped and cut off from communications and supply, bit players in an American pretense of pinning down coastal forces by deceiving them into thinking an amphibious invasion was coming. In reality, those soldiers were Saddam’s cannon fodder, pins on some craven general’s map.