Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare
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With the aid of mapping programs, the precise coordinates of the target were relayed to the plane’s central computer, and the pilots jetted to the area, surveilling the surroundings, checking their magnified visual image taken with Litening’s sensors against other imagery already linked into the fighter’s brain. The soldiers on the ground, a Predator drone flying above, and the listening planes and satellites even farther afield were all focused and contributing, duty officers and commanders now on the phones and in chat windows talking to additional players in Washington and Florida. At 6:15 p.m., ninety minutes after the call came in, having locked in on the correct house and with all permissions granted and precautions taken to protect the American operators in a hide site not far away from the house, the pilots received their “GO” order to attack. The explosive would be fused to punch the bomb inside the structure before it detonated, a matter of milliseconds’ difference. The lead plane lased the target—that is, pointed its laser marker on the intended aimpoint on the house’s roof—and dropped one 500-pound laser-guided bomb. In less than two seconds, the bomb scored what appeared to be a direct hit, at least as much as the pod sensors could tell from the explosion and the washed-out sparkle on the infrared viewer.
The Predator watching from above, which belonged and reported to a higher-level special operations commander far away, saw things just a little differently. Or someone on the ground did. It didn’t matter; someone else made the call. Within minutes, an order came back to hit the target again, and the F-16s circled back around, this time delivering an even newer 500-pound GBU-38 JDAM, steered solely by precisely matched coordinates, now a dust-and-debris-muddled place that might defy visual observation and laser designation.2
The high-value target, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, murderer, beheader, archterrorist, and leader of an organization loosely called al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed.3 It was the culmination of a four-year search, but in a world that loves its perpetual firsts, this was another one: the headlines screamed terror mastermind killed, and story time at the air force became simply how a Predator overhead cued expert pilots to perform their professional craft, just a little bit ignoring the men below. But even the special operations world did the same; the dogged investigators and true leads in the effort feathered their own caps with a narrative that stressed the success of human cunning and derring-do where the conventional army bumbled or the remote fly-boys were just too far away. But everyone was a little bit right. Except that the true achievement in the slaying of Zarqawi was the triumph of the Data Machine in finally making its way through its rigorous murder boards. The capacity had been growing for years, but now there was no denying anywhere that minute geolocation, the finding of an individual almost no matter where, had finally found its place. The final chapter of killing the target was a meticulous and automated piece of cake.
Geolocation became a massive issue from the moment the Afghanistan war began in 2001. Accuracy was measured in yards, a distance still too great to target an individual and ensure minimal harm to the surroundings when using precision guided munitions. With black boxes playing a larger role in the process, the NSA created a separate geolocation unit to advance the craft. Drone or not, it proved itself in the killing of Mohammed Atef in November 2001 when it locked into telephone calls; and it proved itself months later when 9/11 chiefs Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were captured in Pakistan.4 After the death of Zarqawi, with Iraq at the apogee of unscripted chaos and Afghanistan increasingly unraveling, and with the tricks of black box eyeballing and eavesdropping starting to consistently work, the former CIA and NSA director, retired air force general Michael Hayden, told a military audience that the capacity to physically destroy the target had indeed reached its apogee: “Whether it’s some idiot in a cave in Waziristan or rather some small WMD production facility,” the target is easy to finish, he said. “They’re just damn hard to find.”5
The find. The task of precisely locating and identifying a target parallels the development of longer-and longer-range weapons and the maturation of the Machine. In the late 1990s, finding became a discipline all its own when sophisticated sensors and intercept devices were first enlisted as the means to provide geolocation sufficiently accurate for emerging satellite-guided JDAM bombs. Each development in this discipline, like all of the others, followed the same path, not just of technological advance and miniaturization, but also of the reduction in the number of people demanded to do the job. That is the essence of unmanned.
“Find ’em, fix ’em, and fuck ’em over!” was a motto used in Vietnam by radio intercept and direction finding units, the mission wretchedly similar to that performed forty years later. Armed with the PRD-1 black box affectionately known as the Purd, “radio research” operators would wade out into the swamp and seek out Communist guerrilla infiltrators, the still-physical act with earphones rather than keyboard, three sites working in unison to triangulate enemy transmissions, the interactions spotty, the probabilities low.6 For the non–mathematically inclined, it is a simple task—except that the art has been supplemented over decades by larger receivers with more sophisticated techniques. Miniaturization meant that the black box material could increasingly be fit on a tripod or attached to a drone or even a networked pod like Litening flying overhead. Triangulation wasn’t just the intersection of three lines but also became a function of movement and synchronization with other networked interceptors, the ear ubiquitous and the sound no longer just produced by radio waves.
Precision improved over the years as the errors involved in measurement and interference (noise) declined. Geolocation and direction finding are old cousins, but geolocation is more realistic and distinguished from DF by determining a meaningful location rather than just a bearing or a set of geographic coordinates. That means geolocation is always tied to a road, a house, or some scrutinized place. The techniques rely on space, time, and frequency, or a combination. The radio transmission, use angle of arrival, time of arrival, time difference of arrival, and differential Doppler (also called frequency difference of arrival) are calculated from movement or change in the radiated electromagnetic energy (the transmitter) and the receiver (or receivers).7 Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages. Computers and advanced mathematics are used to create exact coordination of the signals between the receivers and the fusion node that is computing the position, as well as precise synchronization among the receivers, thus increasing emitter position estimation.8
Whether in Vietnam fifty years ago or in the modern-day Middle East, the collectors have to be close enough (or strong enough) to detect the signal. These days, low-power devices (emitters) such as cell phones, cordless phones, wireless routers, walkie-talkies, and even garage door openers can be detected, demonstrating the huge advances that have been made in characterizing and locating even the faintest of clues. This task is made even more difficult in urban environments, where buildings can cause interference, though everywhere these days there can be an abundance of emitting devices (and thus interference). From Desert Storm through Kosovo to Iraq 2006 and into the current day, whether the task is synchronizing or searching deeper, the black box has grown smaller and smaller as the individual and minute target has also shrunk, all while operating on a larger and larger battlefield.
As General Stanley McChrystal, the overall Zarqawi attack commander, describes it, after the Battle of Fallujah in 2005, a major effort was undertaken to refine the ability to map and geolocate targets of all kinds. At the Machine level, a mosaic was built: a “patchwork of movement from our eyes in the clouds,” the picture given even greater fidelity when combined with “signals, human, and other intelligence disciplines” all melded into a common picture. Pattern of life analysis and positive identification needed to target an individual that just a year earlier took weeks was compressed into days or even hours. A months-long campaign stripped Zarqawi of his cadre of mid-and senior-level lieutenants, causing a slow erosion of his network and thus closer and closer geolo
cation of an increasingly nervous center.9
The CIA and McChrystal’s national counterterrorism task force loosely under the Joint Special Operations Command10 had been working at a higher level than either the air force or the regular army or other special commands in tracking the Jordanian national since even before the invasion of Iraq. And it was not just a technological effort. Along the way, there were many successes in collection, in analysis, and in breakthroughs that came from exploiting each new piece of information that came in. And in the end, US and Jordanian intelligence officials tracked the movements of Abdul-Rahman, one of Zarqawi’s advisors, just as they tracked bin Laden’s couriers later, locating the safe house and waiting patiently until the two met there.
That day on the ground, McChrystal’s army Delta Force commandos were lying in wait. Once the house was bombed, they swarmed the target, picking through the rubble, confirming Zarqawi’s death and retrieving the body. There had been days, weeks, and even months of effort on the part of the so-called black special operators, the hero hunter-killers of a growing enterprise and the very human and heroic embodiment of millennia-old warfare. Yet in this new war no names were divulged, not even of the pilots. The general narrative isn’t erroneous—it was indeed one team doggedly and bravely risking it all, vanguards of an entire nation even if they were all made into invisible and masked ninja warriors. In a world full of terrorists, the good guys have been made faceless, further enhancing the preeminence of the Machine. I know the justification: that the military is merely protecting the fighters and their families from the repercussions of a globally transparent world that could place them at risk from terrorists even while at home. In this era of global targeting and surgical geolocation, the importance of the “sanctity of the home” has diminished. There is an erosion of the distinction for both sides as to what is military and what is civilian, and one can now be targeted while in the “safety” of one’s own home.
Stanley McChrystal was the closest one could label as the first chief American home wrecker. When the general took command of the Joint Special Operations Command (or JSOC, pronounced “jay-sock”), he knew he wanted to turn his hunter-killer operation into a little bit of a machine. “We needed to become networked together,” he noted about his command. And so he moved himself and the fighting headquarters to Balad Air Base, naming the forward command Task Force 714, seeding liaison officers everywhere, connecting with every possible organization, and inviting outside fighters and intelligence specialists into his previously closed-off command post.11 Chat room connections among the command centers, liaisons, reachback centers, platform crew, and even soldiers on the ground were made.12 Frustrated with the lack of Arab linguists, McChrystal connected directly to Washington and turned his headquarters into a mere operating node of an enormous exploitation community, “a powerhouse of capabilities we could never have created ourselves,” he says. Soon linguists in the United States were translating documents, and technicians were examining the insides of other materials collected in raids.13 And the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) was modified as well—collection at that point was really limited by exploitation capacity. A special operations forces unique enclave was established, with new ground stations activated, and with imagery analysis shifted to stateside reserve and National Guard units to relieve the burden and spread around the network. The NSA hub at Fort Gordon in Georgia was fully given over to constant detection and translation on behalf of Middle East missions.14 McChrystal also wanted his men to see raw intercepts the moment they were collected, even from satellites, a chain of custody that the NSA initially resisted until it began to “believe in the network premise itself.”15 The frustrated McChrystal “resorted to buying, borrowing, leasing, and modifying an odd array of substitutes” for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, what the black operators amusingly called their Confederate Air Force to describe its otherwise motley array of manned aircraft and unmanned drones.16 The end result, McChrystal says, was “turning a hierarchical force with stubborn habits of insularity into one whose success relied on reflexive sharing of information and a pace of operations that could feel more frenetic than deliberate.”17
In late 2004, McChrystal’s command got its hands on what he called a “game-changing” technology—NSA’s latest—one that would capitalize on Zarqawi and his lieutenants’ own use of technology, specifically the cell phone. In Iraq, public cell phones hadn’t even existed five years earlier, but they were now a key tool not just for terrorist command and control but also for communicating propaganda and even threats from Zarqawi to the now fully connected Iraqi people.18 The NSA itself called the development the Little Boy of signals intelligence, equivalent to the world-changing impact of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima for what it did to targeting.19 Simply, though by now we know that nothing is simple, the intelligence people in the field working with the NSA figured out a way to find individual cell phones down to the most minute of corner locations, by figuring out how to geolocate devices even when they weren’t in use or the caller didn’t answer.20
Dana Priest and I described the development of the hunter-killer capability of the US military and dissected it in Top Secret America, but still some insist that a single drone-based black box capability called Distantfocus enabled geolocation and that somehow this new capability was so promiscuous and so much lower in accuracy or even chivalry because human beings weren’t directly involved in the find.21 The truth is that it was a set of black boxes, on Predator and Reaper and on newly deployed manned aircraft, confederate and union alike—Airhandler, Gilgamesh, Pennantrace, Nebula, Windjammer—all working in unison and melded together as part of the network, with McChrystal’s command certainly showing the way, but ultimately providing neither the inventors nor the dominant operators.22 In fact, in the fall of 2006, JIEDDO, the counter-IED off-the-books organization, began fusing data from everywhere—Multi-INT—to attack the network at the lowest level.23
For national assassinations, Gilgamesh the black box would make the call by performing active geolocation like a radar pulsing an emitter, in this case a device with a unique identifier, not its telephone number but its underlying identity of hardware and software, an identity that allows the cell phone system to find the phone and call it whether the owner answers or not. Flying overhead, just like the overhead fabric of invisible digits that has become a ubiquitous part of our modern-day lives, Gilgamesh would mimic another phone, and in the way of black boxes, it would extract just the information it needed to secure positive identification and precise locating.
Though the relationship between intelligence and operations was already being turned on its head, after the successful full court press against Zarqawi everyone was saying operations was intelligence.24 “We found ourselves largely focused on the fix and the finish—the tactical strikes—even though the exploit-analyze portion of the cycle would determine our success or failure,” said McChrystal.25 The success in getting Zarqawi, McChrystal’s intelligence chief and the future head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said, showed that “successful counter-network operations that used the new combined arms team of operations and intelligence” were the only way forward.26 Air force secretary Michael Wynne congratulated the “ground commander” for thinking “spherically,” with Zarqawi’s death standing as proof that the military depended as much on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance as on strike.27
Addressing the specific tracking and killing of Zarqawi, Major General Bradley Heithold, commander of the air force ISR Agency, said that Predator flew twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to pinpoint the terrorist’s location. “It’s a huge effort to find where they are,” he said.28 It was, in fact, 6,000 hours of Predator time, said Lieutenant General David Deptula, Heithold’s boss and head of air force intelligence.29 That’s approximately three Predators operating 24/7 for about thirty total days. Of course it wasn’t just Predator, though the air force found itself both promoting and defending its still
-limited asset. And the case for drones wasn’t difficult to make. An F-16 can loiter over a target for about an hour, burning about 1,000 gallons of jet fuel before needing refueling. An unmanned Predator can loiter for twenty-four hours, burning only 100 gallons of fuel. Keeping two F-16 fighters in the air that long would have required about 120 tanker trucks’ worth of fuel and cost ten times as much as a drone.30 And it wasn’t just jets versus drones.
“We still rely too much on outdated industrial processes,” says Lieutenant General John F. Kimmons, the head of army intelligence. “Our computers don’t do enough work for us.” Kimmons called for “intelligence access for all, including the Soldier,” to make great quantities of information available faster, with computer-to-computer communications similar to that facilitated by Litening and with similar data link black boxes becoming the norm not just for special forces but for the nonspecial as well. “If it takes too long to create an assessment of a problem, then the technology is not relevant or applicable,” Kimmons said.31 It wasn’t some Luddite statement: all of the Gilgameshes would have to be enlisted in the singular task.
And by the time Gilgamesh the black box emerged—to find and exterminate the designated targets with minimum human risk—it wasn’t alone. The network had grown from megabits to gigabits and then even terabits of calculated righteousness, the Data Machine only one part human, if that. Gilgamesh was at the center, fighting in unison not just with its signals intelligence brethren but also drawing on a family of models—each focused on some different digit for support—Airhammer, Amberjack, Chrysalis, Growler, Hybrid, Kingfish, Nightglow, Temptress, Whami, Salem, Witchhunt, and Smite.
The killing of Zarqawi, McChrystal said, laid the foundation “for a machine that would become larger, better synchronized, and smarter in the years ahead.”32 For the task in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, demanded “radically faster and often very precise execution.”33