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

by William M. Arkin

  It didn’t take long, but it also didn’t happen overnight. Within two years, the processing time of HSI collected data declined from eight hours to less than a minute.32 Sensors became so small, and processing so advanced, that even ground-based hyperspectral sensors were introduced that could be used by reconnaissance troops. The troops could use the new set of eyes to identify very small targets at a distance of a mile or to detect spectral signatures associated with programmed patterns of anomaly detection. The ground prototypes incorporated automated software that allowed for data to be automatically processed “without a human in the loop.”33 You don’t have to be a PhD optical scientist, one company official said. “You just push a button, algorithms are processed and you see the target on the screen.”34

  The military mission of finding people through spectral imaging did not start with terrorism or al Qaeda, but was part of a sacred task at the core of all organized and honorable fighting. Antiseptically labeled “personnel recovery,” it is the very emotional task—the promise—not to ignore a fallen comrade on the battlefield and never to leave anyone behind. The unique capacity of hyperspectral images to detect, locate, and identify materials associated with a downed pilot or a captured soldier made long-range search and rescue an early articulation of mission need, a capability made all the more practical with the development of specially formulated material (called taggants) with exact spectral features, material so small that it could be worn or carried by a pilot and yet also detected in real time by a hyperspectral sensor.35 As part of the HyCAS program in 2003, taggants that the human eye could not readily detect were tested and successfully identified in airborne surveillance.36

  From this use of hyperspectral imaging and identifying taggants came the next step: “noncooperative identification.” It too was initially applied to creating capabilities to identify and track friendly forces and to avoid friendly fire. The military called it combat identification37 until the Iraq war in 2003 introduced ubiquitous blue-force tracking, which entailed automatic satellite collection of the locations of select vehicles by pulsing the special tags they mounted. The noncooperative part comes in the ability of systems to interrogate without human action or knowledge. Complex coalition operations, working behind enemy lines, demanded black box devices that enabled war-fighters to identify friendly, enemy, and neutral forces for “shoot/don’t shoot” instant decisions.

  As counter-IED and counterinsurgency doctrines took over in Afghanistan and Iraq, noncooperative identification was looked to as another intelligence application of hyperspectral imaging, both in signature development and to directly enhance both targeted killing and the counter-IED “attack the network” strategies. Another INT emerged, biometrics-enabled intelligence, which is defined as the intelligence information “associated with and or derived from biometrics data that matches a specific person or unknown identity to a place, activity, device, component, or weapon that supports terrorist/insurgent network and related pattern analysis; facilitates high-value individual targeting, reveals movement patterns, and confirms claimed identity.”38 As the head of the Pentagon’s biometrics agency said: “The department has unique military requirements to collect biometrics from unknown individuals in all tactical environments, to transmit and store that collected data and to fuse intelligence, law enforcement, and administrative databases to provide the contextual data that will enable timely identification of unknown individuals on the battlefield.”39

  As the HyCAS experiments reached their conclusion in 2008 and as the next generation of hyperspectral sensors was preparing for deployment even as the Iraq war was coming to an end, the signature support specialists began putting more and more effort into what is called remote biometric feature extraction or soft biometrics. This is noncooperative identification to the extreme, the biometrics not of fingerprints but of gait, body markings, vein structure, heartbeat, and even odor—all things that might be detected and identified at a distance, all things detectable by hyperspectral means.40

  In 2006, the first hyperspectral camera experiments were conducted to detect human skin spectra. The methods are only hinted at in secret documents: nonobtrusive biometrics, multimodal biometrics fusion, biometrics-at-a-distance, iris-at-a-distance, stand-off/remote facial recognition and matching, remote biometric feature extraction, spectral facial recognition, Cognitive Counter-IED Integrated Signature System.41 As one biometrics briefing asked about processing intelligence from a terrorist attack site: How do you classify an anonymous individual? By something he’s wearing? By something he’s carrying? By who he is associated with? By where he’s been?42

  By “where he’s been.”

  That puts the entire Data Machine, not just drones, at the service of the new assassins. To find individuals and aid in the targeting, whole new fields of intelligence exploitation emerged at about the same time. It was referred to as Advanced Geospatial Intelligence, the quantitative analysis of data combining types of sensors, but also all types of information technically derived from the processing, exploitation, and nonliteral analysis of the data.43 One intelligence industry executive calls Advanced Geospatial Intelligence the “power of place.”44

  One could say in the end that it all goes back to killing the target, the mobile target, the fleeting target, the difficult target, approximating the capacity of the human brain while at the same time brushing aside all of the essential and crucial decisions in order to just push the button when the data lines up. Perfecting targeting to an individual level entails using all means necessary. And sometimes backtracking becomes the only way forward. It is a shift in the temporal promise—using where he’s been to predict where he’ll be—that requires connecting the dots at such hyperspeed and in so many dimensions as to replace the retrospective with the prospective, the estimative with the actually prophetic.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  X-Men

  The young men of Uruk he harries without warrant,

  Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father.…

  TABLET I, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  Ashipment of plastic men’s sandals stamped MADE IN CHINA and common in South Asia goes on sale in Peshawar. A wafer-thin tagging device no bigger than a business card has been embedded during manufacture, China being only a stamp. Some of the tags are passive and will register when they pass by special readers, with the location of the shoe transmitted to a central tracker. Others are active and will transmit a signal that can be picked up from tuned receivers, even in space. It’s a long shot, but the shoes will do the talking: when they cross the border or visit certain locations, the unknown wearer will be identified as a person of interest.

  A sensitive-site exploitation team moves to search suspect buildings, leaving behind tiny motion-activated surveillance cameras. A grid of clandestine unattended motion-detecting ground sensors—eyes on the ground—is also left behind, blanketing the neighborhood with visual, acoustic, and seismic informants.

  From more than one kilometer away, a close-access target reconnaissance team watches a suspect compound. A high-value individual on the target list has been followed off and on for weeks by Predator, and now a cell phone call locates an associate. Utilizing their long-range sensors, the team gets a decent biometrics profile of two individuals—height, estimated weight, 2-D facial, hyperspectral signature—and transmits the files to the tactical operations center, where it is relayed to the Biometrics Fusion Center in West Virginia for second-phase analysis and confirmation of identity.

  Predators flying high overhead establish pattern of life, identifying a truck never before connected with any known bomb-making network. Predator footage, together with archival satellite imagery, feeds into geolocating software that determines the truck’s coordinates with one-foot accuracy. A small drone is then launched, a very special drone with a classified name. It silently lands near the truck, dispensing its micro morphing air-land vehicle, which skitters to the truck and then crawls underneath. Its camera, which normally faces forward
during flight, flips up and gathers images of a bomb that has been placed on the truck’s underbelly.1

  “Going Hollywood,” military people call it, when politicians and bureaucrats, inspired by movie and television special effects, propose some harebrained mission, their own imagination creating the illusion that anything is possible. Army General Henry “Hugh” Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the late Clinton years and himself a lifelong special operator, says he was constantly baffled by the parade of counterterrorism schemes offered up from the safety of desks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, often by people who were seemingly indifferent to the life-threatening circumstances pursued on behalf of what he and others in the Pentagon felt were low-priority objectives.2 “You know,” Clinton is said to have told Shelton after one frustrating meeting, “it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.”3

  The decision-makers, for their part, have never really understood the military’s passive-aggressive resistance to their civilian masters, thinking it mere alpha male posturing—we don’t do windows—or even risk aversion. What’s the use of having a superb military if it goes unused? Madeleine Albright once asked.4 Various military officers expressed their distaste, though, for the prospect of being turned into mere assassins. So it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to the civilians when one officer, after being badgered as to why the military seemingly couldn’t come up with any plan for counterterrorism short of war, answered: “That’s what we do, sir. If you want covert, there’s the CIA.”5

  Unable to resolve the bigger question of whether terrorism was a form of warfare, gross criminal action, or some shadow confrontation meant for intelligence operatives and not the military, the clashing decision-makers lurched forward. Something had to be done, and the dynamics of endless briefings and proposals in secret echo chambers was that data ultimately determined the doing: thus the final arbiter of approval for any Hollywood-like mission invariably came down to the quality of the intelligence information needed to maximize success and minimize danger. It was a battle between Can you assure me that he’s there? versus “You fuckers won’t bust down the door unless we can tell you what color bin Laden’s socks are!”6 Then 9/11 came and, well, apropos our story line, everyone gained a greater appreciation for improving the means to confirm that he’s there and for the importance of knowing the color of his socks. A new class of warrior emerged, not quite military, not quite CIA, and certainly not lawmen. I call them the x-men.

  During the Clinton administration, one replete with these very battles, a whole new field labeled “special reconnaissance capabilities” emerged. When operations were required in what are called denied areas or politically sensitive territories, when everything from terrain to reality got in the way of conventional solutions, when socks were uncertain, special reconnaissance kicked in.7 Operations behind enemy lines, these missions always demanded the best of the best, but now just a little bit of Hollywood was adopted. Equipment played a larger and larger role, special reconnaissance being described as “employing military capabilities not normally found in conventional forces.”8 That meant black boxes.

  Where mechanical eyes and ears fail, where the Data Machine stumbles, or where the cloud fills to bursting, something akin to the dark arts begins. These are the most secret of all secrets: the how of how the United States and its allies find and confirm individuals, the individual, when satellites and drones overhead or intercepted digits just aren’t enough. The starting point of such a mission could be a tip-off from sensors demanding positive ID and greater precision, or it could be just a name leading to a link leading to a link, and on and on and on, as the global hunt proceeds to find the body. This is the cutting edge of what is both manned and unmanned. And not only that, but this is also where the seams are: these black ops—military operations—exist in a gap where things are neither strictly military nor strictly covert, nor in the realm of law enforcement. The lanes of the road separating those communities—soldiers, spies, cops—used to be clearly marked, and for good reason—military was military, civilian was civilian, war was war, and assassination was something that didn’t happen within war’s rules. Even if military special operations worked clandestinely, they weren’t covert, that is, operations where the United States sought to hide its involvement (and those operations were once solely the domain of the CIA). And the CIA wasn’t the military, that honor being reserved for those who operate in the open. Military special operators and CIA people might work together, and lawmen might even be brought into a hostage rescue or an individual takedown, but the basic distinction of each of their roles pretty much held up until 9/11. A conventional fighting force pursuing an unconventional foe just couldn’t do things in the old ways in the hopes of stopping terror (or later even just stopping IED attacks) before it occurred. Or more precisely, while conventional military forces fought in the light, another war went on in the dark.

  Dense government budget documents, obscure PowerPoint briefings, corporate job postings, and coded insider language hint of what lies on this other side. It is practically indecipherable terminology, a fragment of a tablet of a larger body that doesn’t exist in the light. I’ve learned over the years to sniff out the signs of these secret programs: like rare birds, they lurk deep in jungles behind euphemisms: sensitive activities, technical applications, technical support, signature support, special technical operations (or STO), special communications enterprise, special capabilities. More recently, euphemisms include tagging; tracking and locating (or TTL), including hostile forces TTL and clandestine TTL; and close-access target reconnaissance. This is the territory literally of the x-men, the intelligence and operations staff offices called G2X or G3X (or N2X/3X in the navy and J2X/3X in joint organizations). These x-divisions have been newly established within directorates and secreted behind the STO door or inside the SAPF, the special access program facility, an organizational component attached to almost every battlefield organization.

  Dispense for a moment with the jargon and the acronyms and just think special effects: an old house crackling in the night as humidity and temperature change. A wafting pheromone that imperceptibly stimulates on a meandering vapor that floats from neck to nose. We all know that dogs can hear what humans can’t, that flies or bats can see or sense in amazing ways, that animals and insects and plants have evolved to armored and camouflaged perfection. The digital world is no different, with its hidden messages and sixth-sense attributes: metadata, impulse, emanation, heat signature. The digital creak from integrated circuits or even in a carbon-based life-form can signal a dramatic presence; a scent can mystically identify a particular person, even a particular feeling. Electronic devices, even when not powered on, emit unintentional electromagnetic energy, a passive electromagnetic signature that can be used to characterize and eventually to detect and identify. If multi-and hyperspectral sensing is the height of computing and physics in the world of imagery, this is alchemy, part science and part divination. Everything reveals if one can get close enough, close enough to get a special tag onto a car or into the heel of a shoe, close enough to get between a cell phone call and its nearest cell tower to intercept the call, close enough to actually listen to the voices or take a picture.

  Tagging, tracking, and locating (or TTL) can be broadly defined as a set of unmanned technologies used to physically mark a target while providing a means of tracking it at the same time. This is the world of BORAT, Gecko, Perseus, Wolfhound, Orion, Talon Sabre, UniTrac, Shadow Wolf, Jabiru, Kestrel, Silent Partner, Pinpoint, Datong, and Q Electronics tracking systems; such a nice list of black boxes that hints of the diversity, effort, and secrecy in this multihundred-million-dollar program.9 The tag is attached to whatever item is to be located or tracked. But the tags are not always exactly tags, and they can be either active devices (radio-emitting) or passive, that is, readable through interrogation. Passive tags can also be chemical
(such as infrared fluorescent), dynamic optical, or biological in nature (“spy dust,” biochromophores).10 Passive tags are not unlike those now used to scan almost every postal shipment. The most complex tags can also be manufactured from phosphors, dyes, and nanomaterials, substances that show up when exposed to air or light or are viewed by special sensors or by multi-and hyperspectral imagers. Perhaps the most tantalizing advance of all is in the field of nanotechnology, where a class of nanomaterials is called quantum dots. By using quantum dot (QD) technology taggants, which can be aerosolized or dispensed in an inconspicuous powder, friendly and suspect individuals can be uniquely marked and covertly tracked. The tags are undetectable in the visible-light spectrum, and they dissolve, minimizing detection in the long term. A lightweight laser interrogator can simultaneously identify QD-tagged objects from as far away as two kilometers.

  Since the early 1900s, bird-banding programs have been used to keep track of winter migrations and territory. Scientists started using radio transmitters to track wildlife in the 1950s, a tactic that went worldwide in the 1970s when the Argos satellite was launched, then achieved high resolution with GPS in the 1990s.11 Aided by improved communications and vastly shrinking everything, tagging and tracking has become a common and fully networked scientific discipline.