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

by William M. Arkin

  Second-and third-generation black box pods emerged that had imagers with higher resolution, greater magnification, and multispectral capabilities; automatic target recognition software; GPS capability (eliminating the need for a separate navigation module); and two-way data links. Many automatic functions were introduced, decreasing human workload, particularly for single-pilot aircraft, “allowing attack of targets with precision-guided weapons with only a single pass.”6 The Nite Hawk laser designator/ranger and thermal imaging FLIR was introduced to marine corps aviation in 1993.7 Litening added an optical imager (allowing daylight operations) and was introduced on F-16s in 1999.

  Even before 9/11, most of these capabilities had been extensively used in Iraq. In a decade of supposed military stagnation and neglect, aircraft evolved from dumb to versatile precision platforms through black box modifications. Multimission strike assets developed capabilities and tactics to image, pass video, and send secure e-mail, as well as to transfer data between fighters, command planes, other intelligence assets, to their home bases and even back to the command centers.8 They even became reconnaissance platforms similar to Predator with their own motion imagery cameras.9 Thus, without the introduction of a single new major weapons system, a combination of one new satellite-guided weapon (JDAM), ubiquitous GPS, improved sensor performance, and processing bandwidth resulted in an exponential increase in military capability.

  As aircraft were flying regular patrols over the Balkans and Iraq, hardly ever dropping a bomb or engaging in an air battle, the new black boxes were called upon more and more to report intelligence. Aircraft up in the air, just flying, were collecting data, data that could be turned into intelligence that was of potential use to others. These new capabilities came to be known as nontraditional intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (NTISR), an advance barely recognized outside the air forces and one that generated initial disapproval from the fighter pilot community.10 But NTISR compensated for shortages of traditional intelligence collection assets (whether they were satellites, aircraft, or Predators), while also directly integrating with the strike function. “Before NTISR, we had fighter aircraft with surveillance capabilities burning holes in the sky, just waiting to be tasked by ground commanders,” an intelligence officer said. “Instead of wasting these resources, we’ve begun to use them to fill some of the gaps in our traditional ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] operations.”11 By 2001, roughly 400 air force manned aircraft had data links that fully allowed them to carry pods and other emerging black boxes.12 It would be years before anyone even uttered the dream of every platform (human, drone, or airplane) a sensor, which would later become the central pretense of the Data Machine.

  Before devices like ROVER appeared on the scene, Predator video was downlinked to the ground control station, which was collocated with its own satellite transmitter. At the station, analysts annotated the video with a classified voice overlay in near–real time to describe what they saw. The encrypted classified video and audio were then uplinked via a commercial satellite to an intelligence base in the United Kingdom. From there, the data was sent back to a broadcast management center in the Pentagon through ground lines and fiberoptic submarine cables that went across the Atlantic Ocean. Then the video and audio were uplinked to satellite using a dedicated three-million-bits-per-second (3 Mbps) channel. It was initially called the Joint Broadcast Service, and it was awfully similar to the commercial Direct Broadcast Satellite service introduced in 1994. In fact, it was DBS with the same kind of dedicated video channels and military encryption added. In April 1996, the Bosnia Command and Control Augmentation was turned on, a one-way broadcast network capable of sending imagery products and large amounts of data and video to two dozen Europe-based receiving sites that could pick up the secret channels.

  All that information was now freely flowing, but it was too much for an individual pilot or even a pool of analysts in some forward unit to fully exploit. And so before anyone had ever heard the word “enterprise” or understood how the cloud worked or how common processing, storage, and retrieval gave everyone the same service, the ISR community activated a very necessary $760-million machine. Deployable Ground Station-1 was a 250-man processing and analysis unit established in July 1994, capable of receiving multiple imagery and data streams in real time and spitting usable intelligence back in minutes.13 In October 1994, the Virginia-based unit moved to Saudi Arabia to take the feed from U-2s and the new NTISR assets for the Iraq mission.

  The shift in doing that work back in the United States rather than in the combat zone was precipitated on June 25, 1996, when a US Air Force housing area in Saudi Arabia was bombed, killing 19 and injuring 500 others: 24 intelligence analysts and officers from DGS-1 were killed or injured.14 DGS-1 moved back to Virginia but continued doing the same job from there, connected back to the air command center not just via satellite but also via computer chat and a common operating picture—that is, everyone was looking at a similar map on the same network at the same time. DGS-2 was activated in California, picking up the full-motion video (FMV) exploitation function for Predator. By 1999, a “comprehensive intelligence capability” was declared operational with DGS, allowing the processing of multi-INT: multiple forms of intelligence. The air force could now deploy a relatively small number of people forward and relay much of the analytic effort to a global federated enterprise, the lion’s share of the work being done as part of what became known as the Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS.

  Conceived as a centralized way of tasking sensors, conducting analysis, and disseminating intelligence, mapping, and weather data, the two initial DCGS sites grew to nine by the time of the 2003 Iraq war, all interconnected.15 By then, data taken from drones, from U-2s, from Global Hawks, and from imagery collected by purchased commercial satellites was all interlinked.16

  Like Predator, like DCGS, like the aircraft pods themselves and almost all of the black boxes that would follow, the ROVER viewer evolved in generations of new models as well, never with a fixed blueprint or a final design.17 In fact, ROVER never became a “Program of Record” belonging to any one of the military services, nor did it occupy a special line item in the budget, as might have happened with a normal piece of equipment of the past. It never went through the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Defense Department requirements process to determine whether it was needed. It has never been formally tested or certified for military or joint use, and it has not been officially standardized by NATO.18 Think of it, then, as more akin to a new smartphone with its cascading and overlapping generations of hardware and software, except that ROVER is applied to matters of life and death, with the “testing” taking place in the field. And yet, without formal requirement and largely without bureaucratic involvement, in less than a decade from the first desert experiment, over 15,000 ROVERs were delivered to the US military, and the militaries of at least fourteen other countries fighting alongside the United States adopted it as well.19

  At nearly fifty pounds, ROVER II, as Chris Manuel’s component was called, needed some work. Only 147 were delivered to special operations ground controllers. A backpack-portable and more rugged ROVER III followed in 2004. It was capable of receiving on multiple bands and could be powered from a vehicle battery, processing video through Windows media commercial software, displaying the picture to a laptop or other viewing device: 2,331 units were delivered. ROVER IV came the next year, even smaller than ROVER III, with two-way communications and a point-and-click feature that allowed a ground spotter to designate a target on the integrated display, the very same map displayed in a fighter or bomber cockpit overhead—another 1,169 units were delivered. In 2008, the One System Remote Video Terminal (OSRVT), a modified and improved ROVER III, was also introduced for the army, capable of receiving full-motion video with metadata, something the ROVER III couldn’t do.20 Then ROVER 5 began production in November 2008: this was the so-called John Madden version, with a menu-driven touch screen and telestrator-like
interface that allowed annotations, enabling ground controllers to “drop” points on the screen and draw lines to make notes or communicate with other operators. Now the ubiquitous device had a look and feel familiar to any video gamer, weighing in at just four pounds. It was followed by Rover 7 and even smaller and more specialized VORTEX receivers for special operations.21

  By 2008, the various ROVERs were receiving real-time video not just from Predator, but also from five other unmanned systems—Hunter, Fire Scout, Pointer, Raven, and Shadow—as well as from AC-130 gunships and navy P-3 Orion aircraft, and from specially equipped Scathe View collectors on C-130 transports. ROVER receivers appeared on laptops, in aircraft and helicopter cockpits, on ships, in vehicles, and in command posts—video and imagery and the magic data stream delivered from over forty different platforms, all fused together, one image under God.

  Between split base operations controlling Predator flights and the increasing real-time dissemination of intelligence information through ROVER and its cousins, through the movement of all of that data around the battlefield and around the world, the capacity of the Data Machine’s hidden back end (today called PED, for processing, exploitation, and dissemination, and involving the conversion of raw data into usable intelligence) began to be both the limiting and the leading factor.22 Of course, there is never enough of the right intelligence at the right time to satisfy any commander or soldier on the battlefield, but now the full effect of the shift from the industrial era, from the paper world to the world of digits, began to exert additional power and effects. Massive numbers of secure and reliable communications pipelines going to obscure areas of the world were needed; Predator and its various intelligence-collecting brethren were voracious users of bandwidth for piloting and control, as well as for transmission of their product.

  It is an exaggeration to say that Predator changed everything, but the loitering platform—and the introduction of the personal intelligence video screen—emerged at a moment when it became technologically possible not just to link the inputs of all sensors for immediate consumption but also when there were sufficient collection assets to allow smaller and smaller organizations, even individual operators in the field, to possess almost everything they needed. ROVER enabled the “elusive goal of instantaneous attack by finding a target, matching it with a weapon, shooting the weapon, and observing the resultant effects,” an unofficial air force history said.23 And when the immediate needs weren’t met, more black boxes were brought in and connected to the Data Machine.

  Real-time access to a view from above, the air force wrote in 2006, allows commanders to see and react “with a level of speed and accuracy unheard of five years ago.”24 By 2010, they were even calling some smaller drones and obscure black boxes “personal ISR,” too numerous to count in the bookkeeping of the central Machine. “In the past, we have always relied on something associated with a time delay,” says one air force general. “A third party was always involved in distribution.” That was an enormous frustration during Desert Storm, when it often took days for intelligence experts to complete their analysis and obtain the clearances to deliver targeting information back to the pilots who needed it. “Now,” says the general, “there’s no intel geek involved in the processing.”25 “Customers” of the new Machine started at the top, at the president and his decision-makers, and extended downward to commanders, pilots, and the digital natives all the way at the bottom, even to the last soldiers at the edge.

  Intelligence for the “commander,” and yet each user in possession of data became their own decision-maker. The first taste of live video, followed by the broadcast system that allowed anyone to watch, and then ROVER with its personal eye’s view, changed everything. Given how much more lethal and exacting every weapon was also becoming, the numbers were turned upside down—that is, one bomber became equal to ten or fifty or a hundred of a half-century earlier; one Hellfire-type missile could do what thousands of bombs couldn’t even do in the past: kill the target. The equation of how many people are needed to make war shifted from warriors to data processors and unlaborers. The changing of the doing itself thus also changed the very nature of war.

  There was a transition period between the Cold War and merely war, to an era of wars of policy rather than wars of necessity. And there were changes in society, coincident or as a consequence, whereby the assumption of universal military service was abandoned for a volunteer and professional military (though I would argue, and I have, that society overall has become much more militarized).26 And, of course, there was just the reality of societies’ movement to the information era and the age of the digital self. The shift to the unmanned is therefore not merely some post-9/11 phenomenon. The Data Machine wasn’t the product of any diabolical mind or plans of the Bush administration. Predator was not some invention intended for al Qaeda. Targeted killing is not just some macabre Obama pastime. Unmanned is warfare changed with society and then accelerated in more than a decade of warfare that was hardly ever industrial in nature.

  After Desert Storm, two worlds emerged. One marched down Fifth Avenue and celebrated; the other quietly moved into the geography of permanent war. America took down its yellow ribbons, but the Machine stayed in the Middle East and enforced a no-fly zone over Saddam’s Iraq and supported the endless United Nations search for WMD. But the imposition of a no-fly zone over Iraq wasn’t merely a policy. People stayed in Kuwait and the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia to oversee and fly, but more and more of the work of war started to shift geographically far away. When the Khobar Towers bombing occurred, it was only natural that in the shrapnel that flew was also the question: Did anyone really need to be forward and present at all?27 The Machine was starting to answer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Explosion

  Enkidu began to speak to Gilgamesh:

  “My brother, this night what a dream [I dreamed!]

  The gods… [held assembly],

  and Anu spoke unto Enlil: ‘These, because they slew

  the Bull of Heaven, and slew Humbaba… between these two [let one of them die!]’”

  TABLET VII, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  It was almost biblical, and looked that way—the massive sandstorm that engulfed southern Iraq starting on March 26, 2003, seven days into the second Gulf war. For three days, daylight turned an opaque orange, and the epic storm—some said the worst in 100 years—seemingly halted army and marine forces, their visibility reduced to less than ten feet. Units on the ground lost their ability to communicate. The news media reported that the storm prevented troops from calling in artillery and even forced a halt to airstrikes. Ground assaults were canceled. The anxiety of war, already at a fever pitch, provoked imaginings of native Iraqi advantages seized and another quagmire: speculation mounted that as soon as US forces crossed some imagined red line, Saddam would unleash chemical weapons, a gas in a cloud in a fog in a storm that would upend everything.

  But no one had yet heard about Grumpy. That was the nickname for Air Vehicle-3, the third Global Hawk ever built. The drone was given the nickname because it displayed all of the crankiness of a prototype, demanding loving care and constant tinkering. It was the same airframe that had gone on a world tour before 9/11, the same that had first flown over Afghanistan, and now it was back over Iraq, souped up with better black boxes, flying overhead and sweeping aside all that Mother Nature could throw at it.

  Though some might imagine that during the second Gulf war, US forces were backed up by an army of drones now doing much of the work, in early 2003, the US military was still pretty much where it had been with unmanned systems after 9/11: lots of promise but an inventory that didn’t match the hype. Only eight Predators flew, and the ground forces deployed only about 100 other drones—Hunter, Pointer, Shadow, and Raven with the army, Desert Hawk with the air force, Pioneer and Dragon Eye with the marine corps, Phoenix with the British army, and Silver Fox with special operations forces.1 And there was only one fully equipped Global Hawk: Grump
y.

  But Grumpy was such an asset. Grumpy flew day and night, regardless of weather, a single eye in the sky, high above everything else. It flew fifteen days in a row over Iraq, a quiet and unexpected member of the team, doing things it really was never intended to do. But it couldn’t do anything without what was now a truly global network. The launch and recovery team was at Al Dhafra Air Base, about an hour outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The mission controllers, “flying” the Global Hawk with keyboard and mouse and operating the sensors, were at Beale Air Force Base in the California desert, halfway around the world. Imagery from Global Hawk was transmitted via satellite to California and then relayed to another base, in Reno, Nevada. There analysts from the 152nd Intelligence Squadron of the Nevada Air National Guard scrolled through the incoming data and sent on-the-spot analysis to the Global Hawk desk in the air command center back in Saudi Arabia (which was also receiving and could consult a simultaneous secondary feed). If a particularly time-sensitive target was observed, the Global Hawk liaison would tip off the interdiction desk on the command center watch floor, which would then transmit the information to an E-3 AWACS command and control airplane flying over Iraq and directing traffic. If a fighter or bomber on station was already in the loop, the command center in Saudi Arabia could speak directly to the pilot. A chat line was always open between all of the players on the ground, the phones were sometimes used, and secure e-mail over the Internet transmitted actual photos, even to the cockpit.2