Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare
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All of this went down before Gates even became secretary, before he demanded anything. Air Force chief General T. Michael (“Buzz”) Moseley, who had been the air commander working with the army during the invasion, went public with a tone-deaf argument that the air force should become the overall “executive agent” for all medium-and high-altitude drones flying above 3,500 feet. “Demand for UAVs currently exceeds supply, and it will continue to do so even after all the Services have fielded all their programmed” capabilities, he wrote. “My proposal… is all about getting the most ‘joint’ combat capability out of these limited Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) resources, while promoting Service interdependence and ensuring the best stewardship of America’s tax dollars.” 22 On September 28, 2007, Gates called a meeting of senior department officials “to read them the riot act” and urged them to apply “a sense of urgency and a willingness ‘to break china’ to get more materiel to the field faster.”23 According to Gates, the problem was that the air force was only providing eight Predator “caps” (combat air patrols)—each cap twenty-four hours of coverage with three drones—and had no plans to increase that number. “I was determined that would change,” he said.24 He directed an increase in the number of caps to eighteen, demanding a plan by November 1.25 After Moseley directed a study on how this order could be implemented, Gates thought the air force was still moving far too slowly. And the secretary says he was further frustrated that all Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne could seem to talk about was a new bomber and more F-22 stealth fighter jets, neither of which, he said “were playing any part in the wars we were already in.”26
Standardization, deconfliction, elimination of duplication, avoiding friendly fire, all the more magic Washington arguments were put forward, but it was a conflict already reduced to the simplistic explanation that the air force was lacking in support for the troops. “I’m pursuing the UAV EA [executive agent] role to make the Joint Force—not the air force—more combat capable,” Moseley responded.27 Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace, US Marine Corps, agreed that it made sense to have all flights in common airspace under one authority as long as that did not “override the needs of the troops on the ground.”28 The Joint Requirements Oversight Council agreed, forwarding its recommendation that executive agency be assigned to the air force.29 But the army mounted a vigorous and effective rebuttal, arguing that its Shadow drone, organic to the division, already flew over 3,500 feet and that flying in accordance with a centrally controlled schedule would shortchange the troops. Deputy Secretary Gordon England, the man generally responsible for the business side of the Pentagon, sided with the army, and that was the end.30
But after visiting the Predator and Reaper home base in Nevada on January 8, 2008, Gates became even more convinced of a lack of enthusiasm and urgency in the air force.31 Drone personnel assignments were sluggish and seemingly second-tier; quality of life for his troops, even these video monitoring unlaborers, was shockingly subpar. A week later he wrote to Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he wanted any materiel requests from Iraq and Afghanistan ground commanders brought to his attention. The “immediate problem,” Gates said, “was the difficulty we were having in meeting our field commanders’ need for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities: a mix of unmanned drones, propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft, analysts, linguists, and data fusion capabilities that collected and fed critical battlefield information—including intercepted phone calls of terrorist leaders and live video transmission of insurgents planting IEDs—to military commanders, who could then act on it.”32
Even though the flock migrating to the battlefield was mind-boggling in numbers and diversity, that picture of want—not control or numbers—drove the crisis. “The true metric that gauges the power that these systems bring to our current fight is the insatiable demand by our commanders for these assets,” a top army general observed.33 Now that unmanned systems and the Data Machine had become the latest superweapon, there was no way of saying that enough might be enough. Or more pointedly, there was no way of challenging the trend of the army slowly turning itself into a self-contained killing machine, usurping centralized functions into the ground combat forces and transforming itself into an intelligence-dominated (and unmanned) Machine.
On April 28, 2008, Gates appeared before the students and faculty at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and let loose on the service for not doing its part, for being “stuck in old ways of doing business.” With respect to drones, he said he insisted that more Predators needed to be deployed but that getting them has been akin to “pulling teeth.” He announced the creation of a high-level ISR Task Force above the services, one that would “find more innovative and bold ways to help those whose lives are on the line.”34
To refute Gates, the air force said it was already doing everything he complained it wasn’t: reprogramming over $2.3 billion for fiscal year 2007, opening the way to double its Predator coverage for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a move initiated before he became secretary. On May 1, the air force said, it would be providing twenty-four Predator caps, and it was working to expand to thirty-four caps by the end of 2008.35
But Gates was on a tear. He formed a new ISR Task Force, with a mandate of commonality and resolving the army–air force dispute, another ad hoc institution given rapid acquisition authority.36 And so while the air force was redoubling its efforts, while JIEDDO was still buying every new product coming its way, and while the army was already independently buying the outlines of its own Predator force, the task force became yet another offline slush fund. In August, Gates approved seventy-two new drone and black box initiatives at a cost of $2.6 billion, more off-the-books programs that he later bragged about, saying he was able to maneuver spending without congressional approval for three years.37 By 2012, the task force had spent over $10 billion.38
Despite the army’s continued scramble to get its own Predator no matter what, IGnat-ER cum Warrior cum Sky Warrior Block 0 cum Warrior Alpha cum Sky Warrior Block 1 moved forward.39 Block 0 was followed by Sky Warrior Alpha, one foot longer with engine, avionics, and data link enhancements, incorporating the automatic landing system, with a deicing capability. Weapons capable Block 1 became the next iteration.40 The objective model for the army, an improved Predator now renamed Gray Eagle, would be 100 percent soldier maintained instead of contractor operated. Gray Eagle was armed with four Hellfire missiles, not just the two on air force Predators, and had a complete point-and-click flight system, and high-definition TV—the very capability the army originally said it didn’t need. We’re just fulfilling the secretary’s desire to field “75 percent solutions” quickly rather than 100 percent solutions on some distant horizon, an army spokesperson said.41
In Iraq, it wasn’t really Predator-type drones per se that were needed or were making a difference. The very concept of “attack the network” connoted not just a shift from operations to intelligence, but also a lessening of the importance of the physical dimension of the battle. The army, like the air force, started to use the terms “effects based” and “strategic effects” to connote this shift. In the so-called Battle for Sadr City in April 2008, a Shia-dominated northeast slum of Baghdad, a variety of drones—army Ravens and Shadows, air force Predators and Global Hawks, special operations Predators and secret Green Darts—maintained overwatch and were sent forward to scout for Apache attack helicopters and other army ground-based precision guided weapons. No one thought for a moment that Predator or Global Hawk would be doing anything different than the army’s own drones. “Supporting this one brigade, 24/7,” General Petraeus later said, “were 2 [Air Force] Predators (armed with Hellfire missiles), Shadow and Raven UAVs, aerostat blimps with optics, RAID [surveillance] towers, three air weapons teams (of two AH64 Apache [attack helicopters] each), and two additional UAVs [drones] with special capabilities [the Green Darts and special operations drones].
” Also in support were air force close air support fighter jets, Petraeus said, “and the national, strategic intelligence platforms,” including satellites, the fleet of large manned intelligence aircraft and U-2s. “We gave the brigade more ISR than any unit in history,” the “we” being the joint military, though not necessarily, or not particularly, the air force.42 That battle included no army IGnats or Sky Warriors, either; they were actually unavailable to the joint commander because they belonged to the counter-IED tribe and were withheld.
When Gates became secretary, the air force was able to provide a total of eleven caps over the battlefield, split between two countries and carefully marshaled for maximum availability. By the Battle of Sadr City, the same month that Gates would let loose on the air force institution, they were on schedule to triple the number of caps to thirty-three.43 Even Gates admitted that by June 2008, the air force was able to report it was “dramatically” increasing the number of Predator patrols.44 And in fall 2007, the air force had also deployed the first of a new generation of Predator-like drones, the MQ-9 Reaper, which was a vast improvement in capabilities and combat power over the original Predator models.45
By the start of the Battle of Sadr City, the army was also bragging about its drone accomplishments: in less than a year in Iraq, the army’s Sky Warrior A was involved in 148 sensor-to-shooter target handoffs, resulting in hundreds of IED emplacers being killed, injured, or detained. In fact, now, with its flock of everything from Ravens to Sky Warriors, the army could even say that it outpaced the air force in drone hours flown at the height of the insurgency from 2005 through 2007.46
The air force valiantly fought back against the slur to its honor (and the facts). Officials pointed to the fact that although Predator’s first 100,000 hours took over ten years to attain, increased operations tempo meant that the next 100,000 hours would be reached within six months.47 The first 250,000 hours took twelve years; the second 250,000 took eighteen months and were completed in 2008.48 It had become some strange battle of the numbers, this disagreement. And then in the middle of it all, with the situation in Iraq so dire, the army assigned its version of Predator to the 82nd Airborne Division in September 2007, to fly in Afghanistan.49 It was inescapable: the army drones would act on behalf of the Machine as well.
On June 5, in an unprecedented move, the secretary of defense unexpectedly relieved both the secretary and chief of staff of the United States Air Force. Gates insisted that the sole reason was a failure to safeguard the nuclear arsenal, a Washington nightmare scenario that trumped all others and became blaring headlines after a bomber unit in the United States mistakenly transported real live nuclear weapons from one base to another.50 The seed for the June massacre, though, was Predator and the unshakable view that the flying service provided inadequate support to the army. The nuclear mishap, Admiral Mullen wrote to Gates, “is representative and symptomatic of a greater decline, for which I believe our Air Force leadership has to be held accountable.”51 At the field level, the final break with the notion of a centrally controlled intelligence capability was made. Everyone was now their own intelligence service, intelligence of course meaning data and targeting, and service of course meaning service to the Machine.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gilgamesh Calling
Shamash grew worried, and bending down,
he spoke to Gilgamesh:
“O Gilgamesh, where are you wandering?
The life that you seek you will never find.”
TABLET IX, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
At 4:45 p.m. on the afternoon of June 7, 2006, two air force F-16C fighter jets flying over Baghdad got a call to proceed to a safe house in a date palm grove outside the provincial capital of Baqubah, forty-five miles northeast. It wasn’t an IED event or troops in contact but a possible strike on a high-value target. No more needed to be said; they were there.
A precision mission like this just doesn’t happen: there is a supported commander somewhere with an objective, even if that commander is the commander in chief. There are decisions made as to who is high-value, with input from everyone from strategists to lawyers. There is intelligence information on each individual target, whether that is a person on some list to achieve a national objective or only a local bomb-maker or insurgent of importance to the smallest unit on the battlefield. There are a mix of forces available locally, regionally, and even globally, hopefully all trained and up to the task, and these forces demand countless decisions and preparations over years to produce tangible capabilities. There are commanders at all levels who survey their people and capabilities, gauging the whole, not just intuiting the bravest and the smartest but also assessing qualities of the heart and mind. All of this needs to be brought together at a place and at a point in time, with the capabilities and priorities all in order, so that when the call does come in, there is not only someone to answer—someone who has the smarts and skills—but also someone who can act, if necessary.
And then there’s an enemy. As General Norman Schwarzkopf once famously said: People may think of war as if it’s a ballet, “like it’s choreographed ahead of time, and when the orchestra strikes up and starts playing, everyone goes out there and goes through a set piece.” Well, he said, “It is choreographed, and what happens is the orchestra starts playing and some son of a bitch climbs out of the orchestra pit with a bayonet and starts chasing you around the stage. And the choreography goes right out the window.”1
On that day, at that time, in that place, the air force F-16 two-ship was merely flying a routine anti-insurgency mission, which meant that they were slotted into a designated orbit for a scheduled period, armed and ready to provide air support of ground forces if they were called. There was literally a schedule—a plan of the day—and based upon location and the availability of resources, and taking into consideration the projected needs of tomorrow and the day after, and considering the immediate priorities of commanders from the very top to the very bottom, as many of the available capabilities were allocated as possible. This thing we call war is a vast machine of which the Data Machine is but one element; it should also be noted, however, that the data is most ephemeral. For while those F-16s were available in exactly the same way Predator or other ISR would be, the F-16s were tangible and came without controversy. And as the capability to neutralize the target (and the objective isn’t always to kill) has become more and more exacting, the role that data plays not only grows as well, but also the speed of decision-making becomes superhuman.
On that day, those two F-16s flying their scheduled mission had no prior tip-off as to what lay ahead. Befitting a half-trillion-dollar machine, the jets were each fitted with a Litening targeting pod, a 400-pound black box with a rotating sensor similar to the bug-eyed device on Predator’s chin. Seven feet long, stuffed with computers and bristling with TV camera, infrared detector, laser range finder, and marker (or designator), it is one of those unheralded and little-known transformative nonweapons of networked warfare. Litening is but a minor outpost of the overall Machine, hardly noticed by people at the top, and yet this black box exponentially increases the sheer military capability of already capable airplanes.
Litening links the pilot and his jet to the larger network and transforms its host by giving pilots additional eyes beyond the visual. It acts at once as navigator, gunner, engineer, and weapons technician. This single man and his black box assistant are now driver, collector, scout, and shooter; intelligence and operations; air defense and attack; interdiction and close air support. What were once separate disciplines that all required hundreds of different platforms and human beings are now reduced to one. Litening is still hostage to the numbers: the probability of kill is determined by endless calculations that factor in everything from the airplane to the network to the fuse on the bomb itself, but it is a concentration of greater combat power in one platform that is constantly being increased.
With Litening, the pilot can examine objects and terrain below, the central brain pr
ojecting a map-enhanced picture to the heads-up display, a yellow-cast transparent scene floating above the instrument panel. With embedded intelligence information and symbology from stored geographic information systems and automatically receiving up-to-the-second updates via data links to a myriad other intelligence sources all feeding the same network, the F-16 can precisely attack with laser-guided bombs, with GPS satellite-guided JDAMs, or even with conventional “dumb” bombs (though that is more and more rare). By 2006, with weapons that were tested and tweaked to near perfection; with the black boxes on board serving as adjutant, intelligence officer, and IT department; and with a pilot cadre that was combat experienced, attacking that target was possible with a very high degree of probability under all weather conditions, day and night. Everyone took it for granted, and that’s a decade ago.
At the main command center in Qatar and at forward command centers at Balad Air Base to the north, where the F-16s originated, and at reachback stations in the United States and at other manned fusion nodes in the Data Machine worldwide, those responsible on that shift were completely focused on this one event, even as computers spoke to computers, with the supplemental imagery and signals coming in, some being fed automatically to the jets’ data links and to Litening, some moving via chat and e-mail and even radio, one giant confederation primed to support the same objective.
Speaking to the air operations coaches, the F-16s stayed at medium altitude, where they had a reduced sound signature, so as to not tip off the high-value target. The pilots soon discovered that there were special forces below with eyes on target, conveying 100 percent certainty not just that the target was in the house and hadn’t moved, but that the stealthiness of the fighter jets could be verified from the ground. More backroom workers calculated blast and explosive effects of the weapons on board; others busied themselves with target study: the house was a rebar-reinforced concrete structure, isolated, with zero civilian collateral damage concerns.