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

by William M. Arkin

  Still the wars continued, and as the same enemy IED tactics migrated to Afghanistan and other parts of the world, crude detonating devices became more sophisticated and attacks turned into “complex events” of multiple explosions, with the enemy ranging from individual suicide bombers to sophisticated cells utilizing command-detonated roadside bombs triggered by cell phones and garage door openers.32 Pretty soon, no ground force commander, no matter what echelon, wanted to or would conduct an operation unless he was assured of the availability of airborne full-motion video overhead.33 Manned airstrike sorties, normally a twelve-to-one ratio over intelligence and surveillance flights, shifted to a ratio of two to one.34 These fighter jets were not only valuable for patrol or when troops were in contact; the imagery they provided with their NTISR pods and their contribution to the network were what was most important. In one year, dropping bombs went down precipitously (for example, in one F-16 wing in Iraq, in 2,500 sorties, only 45 of the flights resulted in munitions being dropped, a rate of less than 1.8 percent).35 The toll on the drones was also felt. From June 2004 to June 2005, the Predator fleet flew more than 27,000 hours over Iraq and Afghanistan—almost triple what it had flown just a year earlier.

  Money flowed and gadgets appeared; rapid-reaction and emergency systems of acquisition sent almost any black box or newfangled collector they could get their hands on to get more, master the data, and win the war. It is another indecipherable thicket of everything from specialized vehicles to microwave, laser, and sound weapons; from specialized robots to aerostats, even a pack of beloved tactical explosion detection dogs; thousands of jammers; and, of course, drones; a vast experimental whirlwind of over 70,000 black boxes.36 Everything was tried, but as the Rand Corporation later explained, “offensive ‘left of boom’ targeting measures… were employed too late and with little effect.”37 There was growing recognition that the task was identifying and targeting not just bomb-makers but the entire network of individuals involved in the production, transportation, and emplacement of IEDs; going right of boom, before the soldiers ever had the misfortune of coming upon the end product.

  Prepare the Force, Defeat the Device, Attack the Network: that became the multibillion-dollar creed and the three pillars of counter-IED. With IEDs accounting for up to 80 percent of soldier casualties in Iraq by 2007, $10 billion went into the lifesaving spree.38 Then the order came down from the Pentagon to shift from armored vehicles and jammers and drones to the new number one, “attack the network.” So in the middle of the biggest buying spree in the history of drones, in the middle of acquiring more and more platforms to reassure the industrial army that it too was armed for the information era, the order came down from the Pentagon to “Stop Buying Platforms.”39 It was a frustrated recognition that no one knew how many collection platforms were actually out there or whether the data being collected by them was being used adequately, or being used at all. The order wasn’t to stop buying platforms and solve the information glut problem. It wasn’t an order to stop relying on technology. No one made any move to halt the growth of the Data Machine. Stop buying platforms: it is itself an industrial cry, and though it might not have been mistaken in any way, it was a cry for help that just couldn’t recognize how much things had changed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mind-Set over Mind

  As the Bull of Heaven snorted a pit opened up,

  One hundred men of Uruk fell down it.

  The second time it snorted a pit opened up,

  Two hundred men of Uruk fell down it.

  TABLET VI, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  The epic battle between the army and the air force started as most fights do, with a big misunderstanding. Troops were dying and getting torn apart by IEDs daily—hourly—and the air force wouldn’t give more. It wasn’t aircraft or bombs that were most needed: it was intelligence. That was how the army saw it. And that was how the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, saw it, labeling the standoff between the two military branches an “unseemly turf fight” in which the air force wanted “absolute control of a [drone] capability for which it had little enthusiasm in the first place.”1

  In the first place goes back to an anecdote Gates loves to repeat, which is that, as CIA director in 1992, he had tried to enlist the air force in the Agency’s secret drone program, only to be rebuffed. People join the air force to fly airplanes, Gates later wrote, a “mind-set” he found still prevalent when he came to the Pentagon in December 2006.2 Further, Gates found life in the Pentagon to be “largely business as usual,” a “damnable peacetime mind-set” oblivious to two wars going on.3 He openly took the army’s side in an ongoing fight over Predator support, aligning himself with the troops on the ground. Gates loved being known as the Soldiers’ Secretary, the regular-Joe advocate, and the un-Rumsfeld, even if in truth he was every bit the Washington animal and still very much stuck in predigital turf. Part of that role for Gates was to actively align himself with everyone’s preconceptions of the enduring problem. He attacked government waste, dismissing gold-plated weapons and obstreperous bureaucrats. But his own understanding of the military was stale, oblivious to the new truth of the unmanned, which was that the flying service wasn’t stuck in the past and the army really yearned to be more like the air force, which ultimately meant less tethered to the ground and closer to the heart of the Data Machine.

  The army. A single archetype can represent that gigantic institution as well as “silk scarf” can accurately portray the air force. Fewer than .5 percent of the people in the air force actually fly fighter jets, even if they are a self-selected elite. The army has its own power elite—commanders of infantry and the other combat arms—and “boots on the ground” is a national purpose that seizes everyone even as the army has changed and the military has become a tangled mass of soldier, civilian, contractor, and technician. But for the army commanders, the direct supporting cast also includes the air force, the youthful invention of the twentieth century, the adolescent who broke away from military history, an institution that can be misread as only coveting the latest swoosh when in fact it wants whatever technology does the job—even if that means without the troops. Unbound by the constraints of distance and even geography, the airpower ethic is to use the information advantage—going above and beyond the territory of ground forces, going behind enemy lines, even penetrating into the mind of an enemy. When a quicksand-stuck army adopted “attack the network” as its counter-IED strategy, it was merely pursuing the air force aesthetic boiled down to its very essence. And this was the aesthetic not just of the air force but of the modern fighting force in general, dominated as it is by the Data Machine and its army of unlaborers and technicians, who vastly outnumber those flying fighter jets or actually doing combat in ground units.

  If “attack the network” was going to be the task, and counterinsurgency tactics were emerging that valued synchronized and heartfelt action over combat, not-killing over killing, winning hearts over stopping hearts, then what was really behind the army–air force tension was a result of years of history. As far back as late 2003, said Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez, the first postcombat commander in Iraq, the army admitted to itself that it was completely unprepared for the task beyond invasion and conventional war. We were “completely lost in a totally different operational environment,” Sanchez said.4 Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, then a brigade commander in Baghdad and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs, agreed, saying that the frustration in this new kind of nonwar was that “we’re either fighting for intelligence or we’re fighting based on that intelligence.”5

  Intelligence, specifically tactical intelligence—that which takes place at the company, battalion, and brigade level—had to shift from merely being a part of operations to leading operations—and creating actionable opportunities to kill the target. Everything from basic analysis, human intelligence, and network connections to the Data Machine was beefed up as the army scrambled to adjust.6

  And the army looked aroun
d: with Predators above and thousands of ROVERs peeping into someone else’s window, constantly reminding the GIs that they were the lowest on the totem pole, they coveted the big eye that would allow persistent surveillance and the entire targeting cycle all the way to their own kill. And they wanted the capability to see and kill at a distance. And there was this centralized air force operating completely at the beck and call of the ground commander and political masters, and yet seemingly unable to support the troops while the army was just trying to get through the day, dependent on others for its intelligence and airpower. Surveillance desperately shifted to the unmanned. And drones began to arrive in greater numbers. It wasn’t seamless; accident rates were high, as becoming more like the air force demanded different skills. The troops were also scared. “We don’t go out the gate without our drones,” the rule for today became. Said one army general: “We can send a UAS down an alley, use it to look around corners, or look on a roof to see what’s up there, dramatically increasing Soldier protection and preserving the force—a vital force multiplier in this era of persistent conflict.”7

  “Over time, as other commanders saw what these ISR capabilities were, the demand for more of them for regular combat operations and for force protection grew exponentially,” Gates later wrote.8

  And that was the point: looking outside the gates, the air force had its own set of eyes—but for what? Special operations forces had their own everything, with their own budgets, as did the counter-IED task forces, which weren’t focused on every individual combat outpost’s protection but on some bigger (almost air force–like) ephemeral network, while soldiers were dying. Even the marines were able to sustain wall-to-wall drone coverage of Fallujah for months on end in 2004, and they had their own full-spectrum aviation. And the CIA and the DEA had their own reconnaissance. The poor army guys at the bottom just had model airplanes.

  If all of these incongruities weren’t enough to appeal to the new secretary, he started in office with two troubled wars and a bad taste in his mouth regarding the basic health of his military. Though to many he was a godsend, especially after Rumsfeld, he just seemed oblivious to the true struggle and the resulting larger transition that was occurring as the Data Machine exerted greater influence. First, he should have understood that the dogfaces on the front lines are always bitching and that dealing with what they think they need at any moment is a sensitive and almost parental balancing act. Second, he should have fully understood that no amount of blaming bureaucrats was going to change the immediate circumstances on the ground. And third, he should have had an inkling that the true crisis wasn’t with machinery or data—which meant the corporeal side of ISR—in other words, there was now so much data and so many eyes, the true problem wasn’t even the size of the Machine but its appetite, an appetite that excreted an abundance of intelligence, none of it clearly pointing to a losing endeavor.

  In the ways of Washington, on June 28, 2007, Gates received a bracing letter from two powerful senators, Joe Biden and Republican Kit Bond, a communication from outside the family that forced him to take some kind of action. “We are concerned that the Department is failing to respond to urgent warfighter requirements because of unconscionable bureaucratic delays in Washington,” the two said.9 From commercial radios and GPS units to homemade armor needed for army vehicles, soldiers were still scrounging around and going outside normal channels to get what they needed. The battle against IEDs consumed all—the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization was reaching $10 billion annually in emergency expenditures. But now that “attack the network” was the strategy, along with the surge of troops and the new charismatic commander in Iraq practicing something called counterinsurgency, what they needed more than anything else was intelligence. Or so it seemed. And that meant drones.

  Maybe it was the army’s still-simmering resentment that it had lost Predator control a decade earlier,10 maybe it was its attitude that the air force existed solely to support it, but the whispering campaign began: the air force wasn’t providing the troops with sufficient Predator sorties or hours. And now the cerebral general David Petraeus, the field commander and matinee idol, was raising the need for more ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, in every conversation with the new secretary.11 “While investments had been made in remotely piloted vehicles (drones),” Gates observed, “there were no crash programs to increase their numbers or the diversity of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities for commanders.”12

  It was a ridiculous statement given the clattering flock that was emerging, given the directions that the air force was already heading in.13 But unbeknownst to Gates, the army was already flying its own version of Predator, having established Task Force Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize (Task Force ODIN) in Iraq, an organization that would use manned and unmanned platforms together to provide persistent surveillance and what the army was now calling manned-unmanned teaming (or MUMT). An army aviation commander described MUMT as the “preferred method for supporting dangerous missions in today’s conflicts.”14 The misunderstanders wrote that ODIN existed precisely because of “the limited numbers of USAF Predator UAVs in Iraq, and consequent refusal of many Army requests” for support.15 Many in Congress and the Pentagon became convinced of some intentional slight in not supporting the troops. More surveillance, the attitude was, would mean “more lives would be saved and the fight against insurgent led IEDs could be defeated.”16

  Did Gates not know that the army was completely focused on building the flock of smaller drones like Raven to issue them to every company?17 Did he not see the army’s own compartmented developments, or the way the counter-IED and special operations worlds were just going in their own directions? Did he not know that by the time he became secretary, there were still only 150 various drones, including Predators, deployed forward, a decision made not by the air force but by higher-ups in the operational chains and a decision driven by the capacities of the Machine? And as for the air force, did he not see that when US forces invaded Iraq in 2003, the air force flew Predators as much as it could out of Kuwait and that a single Global Hawk named Grumpy had worked tirelessly on behalf of the troops? Did he not know that overall, over 90 percent of all air force intelligence collection worldwide was being thrown into the fight?18 This is the ultimate scourge of black box policies and technologies: that no one really knows the totality of the system. Gates came into office with his own history and biases, and responded to the squeakiest political wheel. The troops and their sense of neglect in the new world of the Data Machine were the squeakiest, and the most politic to go the extra mile for.

  The army’s move to acquire its own Predator started in 2001, before 9/11 and before “IED” was even a term. The service was defining requirements for a replacement for Hunter, which then was less than a decade old but was considered to be an intelligence asset of limited usefulness in network-centric warfare. Various alternatives flocked about, but in March 2003, the same month the second Iraq war started, the army purchased three Improved-Gnat Extended Range (IGnat-ER) drones from General Atomics, an upgrade of the CIA Gnat-750 flown over Bosnia a decade earlier. It did so not because it anticipated deadly roadside bombs or the fight ahead; on the contrary, the army was doing what Gates said he abhorred about the air force—it was planning for the future. That meant the Future Combat System, a digital-network-centric force still of boots, but in which the ground was more ephemeral and expansive. IGnat-ER began flying in Iraq in early 2004.19

  Extended Range/Multi-Purpose (ER/MP), the army’s formal name for its generic and formal requirement to replace Hunter, emerged the next year. Again, this was just the normal flow of modernization, but amidst a declining situation on the ground in Iraq, everyone outside the army thought it might be seeking to duplicate existing capabilities, and though the army argued it was entitled to replace an aging and obsolete system, it actually rebuffed a formal “analysis of alternatives,” happy to use magic adjectives t
o tug at the heartstrings of troop-loving Washington—urgent requirement, quick reaction—that would push their way through the bureaucracy and Congress.20

  ER/MP continued forward to fill the operational requirements and specifications set down on paper for the far future, but in August 2005, General Atomics won an army contract and seventeen Warriors were purchased. Warrior was a green version of Predator and was more capable than IGnat-ER and in many ways more capable than even early air force Predator models. Again, the army and the air force argued over the new model—its capabilities, its controllers, how fancy all of the black boxes needed to be. And by early 2007, the disagreement over these big drones and central control had reached a boiling point. At an April 19 hearing, Representative Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, chairman of the armed services subcommittee dealing with airpower, complained that no one was in charge, that no one in the Pentagon was exercising control over competing programs.21 Sky Warrior Block 0 emerged during this interservice battle, with the army flying a dozen of them in Iraq.